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OK, this happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this. That weird, desolate area at the far end of town. We're a half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're a half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn. Just south of the auto junkyard. Just east of the site of the old city dump, where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction. Everybody down here called it Mount Pacini, for the alderman who let the city put it here. You will notice all these-- what would you call it-- tire marks. This street is used for drag racing year-round. Really? Yeah, because it's basically far enough away from the police that they don't do anything about it. My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here. He shows me where a lake, Lake Calumet, used to be back in the '40s when he was a kid. He'd go fishing on a rowboat with his dad. Then the city started filling in huge sections of the lake with garbage and incinerator ash. He'd come here in the '70s and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings which had been recently demolished. Louis Sullivan masterpieces like the Stock Exchange Building and the Garrick Theater-- this is where they ended up. Now show me-- we're standing here-- where were all the buildings being dumped? And what did that look like? Right here at what was the north end of the dump. I actually picked up a few pieces of the Stock Exchange ornament right out of the lake. But, of course, most of it had been ground right into the dirt, because they had bulldozers that would just dump the stuff in piles, and the bulldozer would just flatten them all out. And so there would be this Louis Sullivan terra cotta ornament just sticking out? Just laying out there, yeah. And so walking around when there's these pieces of buildings sticking up. It just seems like it must have been such a strange scene. Like this apocalyptic death of a city. Oh, yeah. I remember seeing one of these big phoenix columns-- that I knew had come out of the Garrick Theater-- was just sticking out of the ground. Two of those in the Garrick Theater distributed the weight of the upper floors that were over the stage. One of those was just sticking out at about a 45 degree angle out of the ground. And at that point, the Garrick had been gone for almost 10 years. There were once big plans for this area-- for canals and waterways, a harbor that never really worked out. There are zoning maps of the city that show streets and complete neighborhoods, a whole grid of them, that nobody ever got around to building. Instead, now, on top of all the trash, stands a golf course. Charlie says that from the clubhouse he gets exactly the same view that he used to get back when he and his dad took out the rowboat. It's the same spot. That's where the lake once was. You can see clear to downtown. So far away, it might as well be another city. Well, today on our program we have stories from several places like this. In the shadow the city, that weird no-man's land where it always feels like secret stuff is happening just out of sight. 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, Brooklyn Archipelago. In that act, some passengers set sail one day on a three hour tour, a three hour tour, and end up getting lost in the wilderness. One fears for his life on a string of islands that is just outside a very, very big city. Act Two, The Thin Gray Line. In that act, a tour bus takes out-of-towners into areas where tourists never tread. To see destruction, tragedy, Act Three. Please, In My Backyard. A controversy over industrial odors coming from a factory. Odors that people actually want to keep. Stay with us. Listen, it happens. You go out for a night with your friends, and you wind up drunk, in your underwear, soaking wet, covered with blood, and shipwrecked on a desert island, all within sight of the Empire State Building. These things happen. Or at least, they did happen to Alex Zharov. Alex is 17-years-old. He moved to the US from a small town in the Ukraine when he was nine. He's skinny and wears tie dyed t-shirts, an unmanageable spray of frizzy blonde hair, and a valiant, if not altogether successful, starter mustache. And, well, he can probably introduce himself better than I can. Here's how he responds when I ask him to state his name for the record. My name is Alex Zharov, and I love to have very radical experiences in life. And I consider myself to be a psychedelic artistically productive person. Here are a few other things about Alex. He lives with his cute, older girlfriend and his exceptionally patient parents in a small apartment in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Instead of going to high school, he's enrolled in an internet home schooling program. He's at work on a science fiction novel and has logged several hundred in-flight hours as a student pilot. But most of Alex's time is spent as the guitarist, singer, and songwriter for his band, Ebuffalo. When I went to see them play at a two-day Russian rock festival last fall, I learned several things. First, there are many, many ex-Soviet immigrants living in Brooklyn. Second, they all very earnestly want to rock. And third, Alex Zharov, whether he's writhing on his back on stage or reclining in the dressing room with a beer and a cigarette, he's kind of a superstar. Before we get to our story, the other key person you'll need to meet is someone who entered Alex's life at a crucial moment years ago, when Alex first came to the States. Alex had an awkward adjustment. He fought in school and was kind of depressed. He was bored. Then one day, Alex was walking along the Brighton Beach Boardwalk and saw a group of older guys collecting money for something called the Russian Punk Rock Club of America. Older guys like 25 and 30-years-old-- Alex was 12. One of the musicians he met that day was Roman Gadzhilov, who immediately took to the young Alex. Well, he had this blink in his eyes. And sometimes you see extraordinary person, and you kind of know this. He wasn't appear to us as 12-year-old at that moment. At 12-years-old, he was writing songs that I was writing at 18. And after this, we've been together all the time. We call him [? Krusha. And what does that mean? Krusha ?] means "little piglet." Under his new friends' tutelage, Alex began walking around in an old Bolshevik style hat and trench coat. And his friends gave him books-- Dostoevsky, Tolkien, guides to Slavic paganism, the Beats, and also Robinson Crusoe & Treasure Island. Alex was particularly fond of those. And our story today, our own seafaring tale, happens on a boat that Roman owns. A 25-foot white sailboat which Alex likes to refer to as "the yacht." One cool evening last May, Alex, Roman and another friend named Alex, Alex Glubochansky, decided to take a nice little boat trip in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that wraps around the southern end of Brooklyn. Here's Alex. The three of us decided to just get 10 gallons of gas. And my friend Roman, he got a bottle of rum. And we got two cans of food, and we just decided to have a cool trip on the yacht. And I started saying, oh, our goal is the open ocean. Let's sail to Poland, I told them. Roman had a slightly less ambitious agenda. The plan was just to go under the Rockaway Bridge, then turn around and then come back. It should have taken about 40 minutes. Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Before they even left the marina, Roman, who'd been making headway through the bottle of rum, fell into the water, and they had to haul him back in. He was clearly in no shape to drive. This is Alex. He got drunk, and he just was babbling something, laughing. Like he said, don't go there, don't go there. And he was constantly saying, don't hit the shallows. He already didn't control the situation by that time. As a responsible journalist, I should say for the record that Roman does have one objection to Alex's version of events. It wasn't rum, by the way, it was cognac. I don't know why everybody puts rum. So it was a cognac. You're sure? It was a Lautrec. Yes, it was Lautrec cognac. I don't know how come it's become rum. Alex told it was rum, but it was cognac. Not a little bit, it was a lot. I was out of commission. Alex and Alex had had a few drinks themselves. But we were perfectly sober and everything. We might have had a few drinks, but we were perfectly sober. But neither of you knows how to drive a boat? No. But we got a hold of it. It wasn't that hard. So we knew how to drive it, so it didn't seem pretty hard. You turn on the motor. You turn the boat. It turns, cool. Somehow they managed to get out of the marina, gun the engine, and take off across the water toward the Marine Park Bridge in the distance. Once there, they decided to try to sail to Brighton Beach and headed toward a land mass. But they got confused and turned back to open water. They drank some rum, or maybe cognac. One way or another, they drank a lot of it. At one point, they almost crashed into a small island. Gas was running low, but they figured that if worse came to worse, they could always put up the sails and still make it home. Then they got caught in a strong current that turned the boat in circles. The perfect time, you would think, to begin to panic. Or, if you're the kind of person who forgets trouble the moment you're out of it, or even while you're in it, the perfect time to shoot off all the boat's flares-- into the water, just for fun. Finally, the series of mistakes reached a critical mass. They had no cell phone-- Roman's had died when he fell in the water-- no flares, no captain, and almost no gas. Even Alex had to admit they were in trouble. We didn't know where we were. And then we realized that we weren't going to make it anywhere. And we were like, in the morning we'll figure out what to do. So we went to sleep. It was a glorious spring morning on Jamaica Bay. Sun glinting off the water, gulls calling overhead as our young pleasure cruisers slumbered. The light filtering into the boat's cabin woke Roman and Alex Glubochansky first, and they came up on deck. What they saw was not good. After drifting through the night, the boat had come to rest in the shallows of a small bay alongside an uninhabited land mass. Stretching out behind them, they could see a long furrow where the tide had dragged them deep into thick mud. And as they stood there, blinking and wondering how this might have happened, the wind carried them another 10 feet inland. They could see the skyline of Manhattan on the horizon, the runways of JFK Airport a little closer, and signs of civilization in every direction. They could even see boats passing by in the distance, but these were too far away to take any notice. It was obvious that they were, in a word, shipwrecked. The hungover sailors sat down to decide what to do. Roman and Glubochansky were in favor of waiting to be rescued or for the tide to rise and pull them out again. Meanwhile, Alex was formulating his own plan. Beyond the island they were closest to lay another land mass which Alex was sure led somewhere. His idea was to swim to it, walk to civilization, catch a bus somewhere, and bring back help for his friends, who, as Alex remembers it, thought the plan was, frankly, idiotic. These are islands, said Roman, who in truth had actually been out on the Bay before and was in a position to know. But Alex was sure that Roman was wrong. So Alex stripped to his underwear. He put what he thought he might need in a waterproof plastic mayonnaise jar. He brought his Metro card for the bus he was going to swim to, an expired passport for ID, and his favorite Buddhist medallion for luck. He wrapped his clothes in a cellophane blanket and bid his friends farewell. Roman watched him disappear into the surf. Of course. I tried to stop him. I tried to give him reasonable things, but he get a little bit too much excited. So I decided to give him a challenge in life. What? Should I just knock him down and say stop it? He wanted to swim, and he swam. I swam really violently to get myself warmed up. And by the middle, I got really tired, and I was really cold. And I'm like, oh, this is much worse than I thought. And there's birds flying, like peeking on me. I'm like, these crazy strange [INAUDIBLE] birds are going to bite me or something. And I got really lucky, because my legs suddenly hit the bottom. And I was so happy when I came out of there. I was so cold, but I was happy. And I was definitely sure there was civilization, because tall buildings were right behind the trees. And the bridge was right over there. And I'm like, oh, finally. And I was even singing a song walking, and the birds were screaming something to me. And I'm like, yeah, I made it. I'm still not sure I understand why you left your friends though. Because I thought we were going to be stuck there for a really long time, maybe for the whole day. The only thing I could do is just try to get to civilization. And especially these islands-- they were pressuring me to go there. They were so close. And I got really bored. You know, I wake up in the morning, I don't want to stay in one spot on the yacht and think about how we're going to get saved. I really want to do something. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to have this little adventure. I'm going to go out and try to make it somewhere, and I did. Except he didn't. Soon he realized that he was, indeed, on another island, with no way off except to swim back through the freezing water to rejoin his friends. And he wasn't about to do that. He was alone. So Alex set about doing all the things a good castaway should do. He wrote a giant "help" in the sand for the benefit of the planes landing at JFK. He circumnavigated the island looking for supplies. He found a stick and a piece of red cloth, and made a flag to signal passing ships. Then he found several big pieces of Styrofoam and some wood and spent an hour or two fashioning a raft, but it collapsed when he sat down on it. Undeterred, he went back to searching for something that would be his ticket off the island. And then he found it. It was the hollowed out carcass of a jet ski, or, as he calls it, a scooter. I 100% knew that it was going to float, although it was pretty badly dug into the sand. And as I was digging out the scooter, something really bad happened. There was pieces of glass under it. I didn't see. I was just digging and digging, and I didn't have any shovel or anything. And I cut my finger really bad. I started getting huge amounts of blood was coming out. And I had this white t-shirt that was eventually all in blood. Now there was really no way off the island, even by swimming. Because-- well, you know-- sharks. It was a galling situation, and it was made even more maddening because the city was right there. I was thinking, how in the hell did I get myself into this situation? I never believed that something like this could happen in New York City, you know? It's such a huge city that you could see skyscrapers like 10 miles away, and on the other side you can die looking at them. And also, I got a little mad at the city of New York. Like, I could understand if they had just one payphone there. Or at least, I don't know, a button to press to know that you're there. By probably 6 o'clock in the evening it was getting a little dark. All my excitement has fled away, and I got very cold. I was shaking, shivering, and no help at all. So I'm like, wow, this is going to get really bad. Were you hungry at this point also? I was very hungry, and I was very thirsty. And I found limes. I tried to open them up, but they tasted so nasty. I didn't even think about eating them. There was no source of food other than the ducks. Ah yes, the ducks. You'll want to hear about the ducks. If I wasn't going to get rescued in the next hour or two, I had a plan to kill a bunch of ducks to get some warm blood to warm myself. So to drink some blood and to cut them open and use them to warm myself. I had this strange idea about use them as slippers. After that, I even had this psychedelic idea of floating on the ducks. Making a raft out of the ducks. Imagine a man with strings attached to the ducks, floating on the water. So it's like this duck rider. It's totally normal for a Russian hiker to go and pick up a duck, not just to kill it, but to eat it. Like, you could just go over and pick up a duck? How did you catch the duck? You just go after it with a stick. I mean, you're a human being. You got more brains than a duck. You can catch it. But I wasn't really thinking about doing it. I wasn't fantasizing about killing ducks or anything like that. I was just thinking that if it comes to that, I'll have to. I'll have to get some blood to drink. I know it sounds very violent, but I was fighting for my life. People might laugh when they hear about being trapped on an island that's so close to civilization, and the sharks and the ducks. I knew it was a funny situation, but I really got the feeling of what is it like being on a desert island. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, you know? I knew what it was like to be by yourself away from civilization with no help, and you're facing this huge problem. And the only person that's near you is you and the ghost of your death close by. So I could smell my death in the air. It turns out that the island where Alex was stranded is called Ruffle Bar. And it lies only a 20-minute boat ride away from the coast of Brooklyn. Far from being traumatized or ashamed of his exploits, Alex wanted nothing more than to go back out there. And from the vantage of my overpriced, undersized apartment, I wanted to see a place where you could be totally alone in the wilderness, smelling your own death in the air, while in at least theoretical commuting distance to midtown Manhattan. So we hired a boat to take us to Ruffle Bar. In truth, I wasn't as completely surprised as some might be to learn that such a place exists. I grew up near the islands of Jamaica Bay, in a neighborhood called Canarsie. And when I was little, my friends and I would cut through the empty lots near my house to explore the mix of trash and nature on the shoreline. It was a place totally apart from the rest of my mostly urban childhood. A secret place that my friends who lived even 10 or 15 blocks away were unaware existed. But then, the smaller islands around New York have always occupied a weird place on the edge of the city. Home to all sorts of enterprise that the citizenry either doesn't know about or prefers not to see. Sanitariums and prisons, potter's fields and grand failed schemes. Ruffle Bar itself had been the site of several of the latter. Since the Civil War, it has housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a short-lived, doomed community of some 40 buildings. We stop in front of a concrete foundation. A what? A building of some kind was here. Oh look, this is a cool thing. This is one of the World War II things that's here. You open them up, and you can go inside. There's a room in there. It might be something like a bunker or something. You see the rope here? And the rope is really old, I think. Let me take a picture of this. There are no buildings left here. The island is returned to a deeply wild state. There's a wall of dense brush and a few trees around which sinister gulls are circling. We pass a flock of ducks who take one look of Alex and wisely move away. I'm really thinking about where the heck is the scooter. Because it seems like as we're turning, there should be more shoreline here. Dude, is that it? Yep, that's exactly it. Oh, wow. This is the scooter I tried to dig out. Let me show you. Maybe you'll see the glass and stuff. As we search for Alex's Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plain of thick, dry grass, matted down like a carpet. Underneath, you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying around. Still, reminders that we are in fact in a major metropolis are always close at hand. For one thing, there's the garbage-- piles of plastic and driftwood, but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer/dryer, several refrigerators. And, oddly, boats-- three perfectly intact ones, complete with oars. I hesitate to point these out to Alex. Though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for him to have dragged to the water. And then there's this reminder of civilization. Hold on. He was always close enough to the city that simply having a cellphone would have had him tucked safely into bed within half an hour. Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubochansky. Back on the boat, they were having a fine old time. A police helicopter was performing drills nearby. And apparently no slouches in the cliched castaway department themselves, they had figured out that they could signal it with a mirror-- but why rush? We really enjoyed the time staying there. We were just sitting on the boat and smoking the last tobacco that we had left. And we make a deal that we're not going to eat each other if you're really going to get hungry. So basically we were having fun. Just a little bit, no hassle, no nothing, very quiet, nice weather. Oh, so you were actually holding off signaling the helicopters while you had a nice day? Yeah, of course. It was a nice day. Still, as it began to get dark and the cigarettes ran out, the friends thought it was probably time to get a move on. A helicopter soon arrived and airlifted them off the boat. It wasn't until they were safely ashore, wrapped in blankets and being fed complimentary cookies, that either of them happened to mention that there'd been a third passenger. When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion and dehydration had left him in a trance-like, almost wild state. And for him, this island will always be a place where maybe there be monsters. And when I was here, I was wondering if it's a totally wild place. Are there any animals here other than birds? I was maybe hoping to see some cool animal like a badger or something. I like badgers a lot, actually. Is that right? Yeah, it's one of my favorite animals. You know, I like badgers for the same reason probably I like the state of Utah, where I never was. It's like something that has some kind of-- what's it called? Like a secret it's hiding? Or it's like they attract me in the way that they might be hiding something cool from me. And that's what, after many hours spent with Alex, I find myself liking about him the most. His insistence on finding mystery and adventure everywhere he looks. It's easy to laugh at that, to write it all off as adolescent stupidity. But what if it's more than that? What if it's also a kind of adolescent magic? Actually, I'm thinking that this needed to happen. I think if I was a boring person, and I would just stay at home all the time and be like a nerd, I would never get into this situation. So I think this happened strictly because I was with the right people, at the right time in the right situation. Think about that. Every step of the way, by almost any measure, Alex could not have been more wrong. It takes a special kind of grace to turn that into right time, right place. And how can you help but envy that? Who wouldn't rather live in a world where if you believe you should have an adventure, you do? In which each of your mistakes doesn't narrow your life, but expands it. In which the worst thing that could possibly happen is being bored. And you can go to sleep on stormy seas and trust that when you wake up, if you're very lucky, you'll be in Utah. What I'm trying to say is this-- Alex does something I never in a million years would have thought possible. He makes me think it might be cool to be a teenager again. There's a story that back in the 1830s, a ship carrying $54,000 in Mexican gold was hijacked by pirates outside Jamaica Bay and that the treasure was buried somewhere near Ruffle Bar. On our way back from the island I tell Alex this, and he listens with great interest. If he found the treasure, he wants to know, could he keep it? Maybe, I say, if he didn't tell anybody. To which Alex answers precisely as I know he will, the only way he possibly can. He says, but what if I told everybody? Brett Martin, in New York. Coming up, the thing about Chicago that nobody outside Chicago believes about Chicago, but that actually is completely and totally true. 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 show, in the shadow of the city. Stories of things happening out of sight from most of us, but very close to us. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Thin Gray Line. Sometimes things in the shadow of the city should just stay in the shadow and sometimes not. Right after Hurricane Katrina, a bus tour in New Orleans started called Hurricane Katrina-- America's Greatest Catastrophe. It has since been named America's Worst Catastrophe, but same kind of idea. It is designed for out-of-towners who have come to New Orleans, so they can see for themselves, among other things, the wreckage and the devastation. And we thought, you know what would be really interesting? What would be really interesting for this tour is if we could send a local. If we could ask a local to take the tour and give us their impressions. Well, Cheryl Wagner's house was ruined by the levee breach. Seven feet of water on the first floor, her roof got blown off-- she seemed perfect for the job. And so one year ago, when we first heard about this, she agreed to get on the bus. And she put together this story, which we first broadcast a year ago. By the time Gray Line starting running its Hurricane Katrina-- America's Greatest Catastrophe tour, I was already sick of disaster tourism. I had flipped off hippie photographers who mountain biked through the garbage of my flooded street to take close ups of my neighbor's Virgin Mary lawn grotto, ardently speckled with muck and debris. I had endured holy rollers stepping onto my porch when it was blazing hot, and I was trying to bleach what I could of my belongings, offering me a gallon of water and a mold mask, a good one, an N95, if I would sit and listen to a scripture. And at a time when some New Orleanians were still coming home to find their mother's bodies, I watched white families thoroughly enjoy a morning outing in the ruins of a black neighborhood. I saw them lift their children onto the back bumper of a small yellow school bus that had floated into the barge that crashed through the levee. I saw these children smile and say cheese. But even though I'm sick of disasters and their hangers-on, I'm also not immune from touring. I didn't spend Thanksgiving morning watching the Macy's Day Parade or making oyster dressing. I went over to the breach in the 17th Street Canal to see the hole that flooded my house. I was surprised to see lots of other people spending their holiday doing the same thing. Even my mother, who now, oftentimes as not, cries when she comes to see me in the city, for some reason recently crossed the state line for a Saturday morning jaunt through the wreckage in Mississippi. She came back saying, you really should go see Biloxi. So I haven't made it to Biloxi yet, but with mixed feelings I decided to fork over my $35 to the professionals at Gray Line and check out the official tour of my own city. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Pat [? Dupuis. ?] I'm going to be your guide for this Katrina tour. The tour is going to mainly be based on three things, and that is the vastness of the devastation that occurred here, the importance of the city of New Orleans, and its rebirth. We're on a Gray Line mini bus, pulling off from the fake lighthouse where we all met in the French Quarter. The brochure made big promises to "drive past an actual levy that breached, and see the resulting devastation." But the tour gets off to a dullish, field trip-like start. On your right is an earthen levy. A levy comes from a French word meaning to raise. There's maybe 20 of us on this tour-- relatives of disaster workers, some retirees, a couple from Denver in town for a wedding. Even a few unlucky folks who got bumped to our bus because their first choice, the cemetery and gris-gris tour, sold out. This is the Ernest N Morial Convention Center. This was another thing that you saw on the TV. In the short time it takes us to get to the convention center, some people already seem bored. A few are busy flipping through the photo album the tour guide passed of flooded houses, but that's because the outside of the cleaned-up convention center with just a few workers shining windows is boring. It would never be part of any normal city tour. After a perfunctory drive past the now spit-shined exterior of the Superdome, we get on the interstate and head out towards Lakeview where the tourists are promised more current and less historical misery. Now I want to prepare you a little bit. If you've haven't been back here, if you haven't ridden around the city, we're going to start going through some of the more devastated parts that we're allowed to go in. Like I said, we can't go into the Lower Ninth Ward, which is really bad. But you'll see enough devastation here, I think, so you'll get the whole idea of what it might have been like. You'll see some of the houses. Like this one right here-- you see it's got that red thing on it? That's tagged for demolition. We drive past ruined houses and askew cars, and some of my fellow passengers snap photos. A few expressed surprise that anyone in New Orleans has middle class-looking homes. These were nice houses, I hear one woman say to her husband, as if this makes a family's suffering worse. No one I talked to tells me that they're particularly surprised by what they see. Maybe it's the remove of looking out the windows, or the months of pictures they've already seen on TV. All in all, despite the lurid promises made in the brochure, the Gray Line tour is a lot of driving around and wishing you could get out and take a close up look at that hole where someone hacked their way through their attic and onto their roof. But you can't, you just sit there gazing through a glass barrier, trying to absorb factoids. This is where they perfected perma press fabric, orange juice concentrate, low-fat peanut butter. After a while I start to feel bad for our tour guide. Pat has already informed us that she and her bus driver, Sly, were out of work and tips for four months. That her house flooded, and Sly is stuck living on a cruise ship he is about to get put off of. I realize she's in a no-win situation. Gray Line has promised an all-out grisly disaster tour, but expects its tour guides to focus on rebirth as well and be a civic booster at the same time. That's why every house that's off its foundation needs to be countered with a FEMA trailer of hope nearby. But, here you have some hope. There's a FEMA trailer. There's somebody that's getting ready to work on their house. They want to move back. So it's a little ray of hope when you see these trailers. Never mind that the FEMA trailer won't have any electricity for months. This tour is not about accuracy, it's about getting to the rebirth that was promised when we first got on the mini bus. It's about presenting a grand narrative that takes all the terrible stuff that has happened and makes it OK. A bad thing happened, and then it kept happening, and then it kept happening, and then it kept happening. But now it's getting fixed, so you can go eat your beignet. But despite all the talk of hope, what comes through is a palpable feeling of desperation. You are our best ambassadors. You can go home. You can tell people that yes, you can come to New Orleans. You can breathe the air. You can drink the water. You can eat the food. You can take a tour and see the tomb of Marie Laveau. On what tour in the history of this city did any tour guide have to beg people to come to New Orleans? You can stroll through the Garden District and see the beautiful home of Nicolas Cage and John Goodman. You can go to the plantations, plantations were high and dry. I understand what Gray Line is trying to do. It's just depressing that they have to do it and that they're choosing to do it that particular way-- trying to get help by sugarcoating the problem. If you really wanted people to understand Hurricane Katrina-- America's Greatest Catastrophe, you'd have to give a completely different disaster tour. And with that in mind, as a public service I'm about to save you $35 and take you on my own tour. It won't go near the French Quarter, it won't be on a bus, and it starts here. I want you to know that we talked [INAUDIBLE] about FEMA this and Federal this, and I'm sick and tired of Federal anything! I'm sick of it. Our first stop, the perpetual public meeting. The one I've been attending nonstop since I got back in September. This was recorded at the public comment portion of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission's Urban Planning Committee final report presentation held at a downtown hotel a few weeks ago. But it could be from any number of official and unofficial state, local and neighborhood meetings that go on in New Orleans now almost every day of the week. I am a working person. I pay Federal taxes. Because I want everybody to hear what I'm saying-- FEMA comes out of my damn paycheck. There are economic planning meetings, arts planning meetings, education planning meetings, government effectiveness meetings, city council meetings, neighborhood meetings, SBA information seminars. Since the storm, there's even a new section in the Times Picayune that lists the locations and times of that week's meetings. These meetings are overwhelming-- not only because of their frequency, but also because of their intensity. At some of the early public meetings back in October, old women would step up to the mic and cry. Old men would address the mayor as if he were a young man, saying things like, I don't believe we've had the opportunity to meet. Countless New Orleanians drive hours from other towns and other states to come to the meetings with the same message. My grandmother, my auntie, is in Texas getting sick from this stress, and I'm here today to find out what you're going to do about it. The people on this commission, I thank you very much for your time. If you can't give us direction, get the hell out of the way. That's all we're asking for. Now that some of these meetings seem to be lurching toward a final decision phase, people listen to them on the radio, watch them on the news, read about them in the paper, or see them whole on public access. Weeks ahead of time, rumors fly about whether or not the city is going to declare your neighborhood viable or not. Whether or not you'll be allowed to fix your house. And if you do fix your house, whether the government will try to acquire it by eminent domain anyway and wipe your neighborhood from the face of the Earth. After certain meetings, people go around saying things like that Joe Canizaro wants to put a big green dot on my house. Over my dead body. This perpetual public meeting spills out into everyday life. In line at the grocery store, strangers tell me the exact dollar figure they owe on their ruined homes. Grown men wander into my backyard and tell me how much they miss their pet parrot they had to let go the night before the storm. Once a week, a stranger starts crying in front of me. Sometimes the perpetual public meeting turns surreal. The other day I was taking a walk along Bayou St. John and the police scuba divers were out there dragging the water for another suspected suicide. A man stopped his car, got out and walked over to me. His first question was quick, what are they looking for? But his second question, the real reason he stopped, was pure public meeting. Did you get any water? Meaning, was I flooded? Good, him, too. Then you've been down to City Hall to deal with that permitting? Can you believe that crap? I live in the East, those guys were talking about making a park out of my house. I'm been staying out in River Ridge now, but we're getting it together. Next stop, City Park, near the police department horse stables. One of the many places that has been transformed by the levy break. Not just ruined, but fundamentally altered. Lots of different people used to use this area. Near the back, hikers, bird watchers, dog walkers and gay cruisers used to share a shady wooded trail. Nearby, a soccer field sometimes filled with the battle cries of military reenactors. My boyfriend and I went to City Park one day recently and stumbled into a Hooverville, complete with guys who look like carnies rubbing their hands over trash can fires. Streets next to the soccer field are now clogged with flood scum encrusted cars and limousines that someone towed there to strip before bringing them to the crusher. Nearby, there are sad sack teepees fashioned of blue roofs tarps. Teepees with people living in them. Some asking around turned up that these were a bunch of Apache Indians who'd been promised work and then abandoned by their contractor. The back of City Park has turned to a place of chaos and filth that doesn't give you the Saturday barbecue feeling it did before the flood. It gives me the feeling I got right after the storm. After we first got back to the city and we saw an old man riding a bicycle, pulling a laughing old woman on a hospital gurney behind him. There were not many people around. The old gurney couple did not seem like a good sign. Next stop on my tour, my house. Outside, the picket fence is gone, and there's a water line. Inside, it's gutted to the frame and studs. Since I've had to sleep upstairs in a room with the walls cut open and siding blown off, when I open my eyes in the morning, like the Apache Indians, I see blue tarp. I brush my teeth at a spigot in the backyard with a Dixie cup. Friends come to see me and accidentally drive past our house, say the place unrecognizable now. My boyfriend Jake and I are getting a little unrecognizable, too. There are ways in which we have grown strange to ourselves. Gone a little south, like City Park and the gurney couple. One afternoon, after a long day a prying lath off walls and carting wheelbarrows of plaster and rubble to the curb, I heard laughter and breaking glass from what used to be my backyard garden. Jake and his friend, the carpenter, were swinging their legs off the back balcony. They had found a BB gun and were shooting out the few windows that were left on our shed. Check this out, they said, and shattered another window. Don't do that, the old me, the pre-gurney me said. Why not? I looked around, the tin roof of our shed was peeled up. The gardenia, angel trumpet and sweet olive that I had planted almost a decade ago were all dead. The fence was down. And behind us, the neighbor's wall had fallen off of his second story leaving their upstairs kitchen exposed like a dollhouse. With the kitchen clock still on the wall, open to the sky. At night now, we can see downtown hotels shimmering across the dark and flooded blocks, like Emerald City in the distance. Why not shoot our shed windows out? OK, said the post-gurney me, but don't miss and hit the neighbor's China cabinet. They might want those plates. You have reached the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Next stop, 1-800-621-FEMA. Welcome to the utterly exhausting soul crushing grind that is having to juggle city, state, government and insurance bureaucracies for five months straight with no likely end in sight. Our first FEMA battle was over our roof. It blew off, and so we needed a tarp. FEMA wouldn't tarp it, so we climbed up a few stories and tarped it ourselves. A month or so later, FEMA sent someone over who untarped our tarping, but only retarped half of it. So we had to call and fight and explain and call, then give up and reclimb and retarp a, by then, even slicker roof. Everyone has stories like this. People accidentally bumped from FEMA's trailer list. People with keys and no trailer. People with trailers and no keys. Trailers blocking doors of houses people are trying to renovate. Meanwhile, teams of contractors come and go. Recently, an article in the paper confirmed what everyone suspected-- that the government pays at minimum almost $60,000 a trailer. The same amount it would likely cost to rewire and re-sheetrock many someones' house. Add to this phone books that no longer work, since half the people and businesses in them are now gone. The constant stream of misinformation, correction and re-misinformation. And the garbage piles which get shuffled back and forth as dozens of crews argue about whose job it is to pick up shingles, and whose job it is to pick up the fridges, and whose job it is to pick up that dead dog still in the pink toy box. But like Pat at Gray Line, I feel compelled to throw in that FEMA trailer of hope, because there is some hope. I catch glimpses of it in the new-found engineering wonkiness among Louisianans who now speak of sheet piling ratios and Dutch hydraulic engineering over coffee. And the blond Southern women strapping on work gloves over their manicures and donning orange vests to pick up garbage in neighborhoods that they never set their SUVs in before. And then the folks who drive by and honk and cheer these ladies of garbage on, who sometimes pull over, get out and help. It's in the growing number of "apolitical" rallies. A strange new Southern phenomenon where moms strap their schoolgirl daughters into life vests whenever Bush comes to town to run his mouth. The trailer of hope is also where you least expect to find it-- right on my own wrecked street, in the gutted house on the corner where a man lives upstairs with a lantern. And the moment the other night when Jake and I walked our dogs by and he invited us to lay our hands on the side of his home. He said that two roofers had just fallen 40 feet off the top of it, bounced on the flood-wrecked grass and survived. That we should touch his ruined house because it was blessed. And last month, while Americans flew into one of the most ludicrous nationwide fits of reverse-racism hysteria I've witnessed in my lifetime over our mayor's hapless deployment of a parliament lyric, over Chocolate City, people who live here were working things out. A conversation I overheard between a Middle Eastern store clerk and his black customer about some shootings at a second line parade made me glad to be, however imperfectly, home. That cutting up at the second line Sunday, the customer said, get that out of here. That's nothing but foolishness. Yes, the store clerk nodded, it is foolish. It is not very chocolate. Cheryl Wagner, she lives in mid-city in New Orleans. She did that story for us a year ago. She says these days her house does have walls. And the main difference with New Orleans now, she says, is that it's so violent. She says she still believes in a trailer called hope, except now she says she's scared she might get shot in it. Act Three, Yes, in My Backyard. Now this story about some of the mysterious things happening on the edges of the city, in the shadow of city, right under our noses. And to put this story in some context, we're going to turn now to Jorge Just. You may remember Jorge. He's done some stories for our program. He says that when you move to a new city, you cannot get into the regular conversations that everybody else gets into. He found this out a little while back when he did the one thing that everyone in Chicago agrees is the very worst thing that anybody can do. He moved to New York. All New Yorkers want to talk about is what subway train to take to get from point A to point B. And it goes on and on, and you can't say anything. You can't be like, you know they discovered a 10th planet? And they'll be like, well, you would take the DMZ. Take it to the 10th planet. It's inescapable. And when that conversation finally peters out, it somehow-- and it doesn't fail-- turns into a conversation about cell phone reception. You can't get into the conversation. You don't know where the dead spots are. So you can't do any small talk. So what happens is the small talk becomes, oh, you just moved to New York? Where are you from? Oh, you're from Chicago? How do you like New York? How do you like New York? Everybody wants to know how you like New York, because they want you to say, New York's the greatest place that I've ever been to. And I've burned all of my connections to anywhere that I've ever been before because I love it so much here. When in fact, people would say so how do you like New York? You're like, well, you know, I like it. It's big and stuff, but I really like Chicago. Oh really? What's Chicago like? Chicago's this wonderful dreamland where there's a bar on every corner and the bridges smell like chocolate. And then you pretty much have a silence, and the ice in your glass would clink a couple of times. And then they'd say the bridges smell like chocolate? And then I'd describe how wonderful it is that the bridges smelled like chocolate. And this is something that people in New York have never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever believed. But, if you get up early in the morning, and it's sort of quiet out, and you go to the right bridge. And it's just that sort of magic twinkling hour where the sun's coming up, and you're in a big city but nobody's around. Every now and again they smell like brownies. Yeah, that's actually true. And the reason why is because there's a chocolate plant on the West side that spews the smell of chocolate. Yeah, the smell of magic. To say the bridge smells like chocolate doesn't convey what actually happens. What actually happens is that when you're walking across a bridge and you're dodging cars. And it's a bridge over a dead river in the middle of a part of town that is industrial and totally unnatural. You just sort of walk into this cloud of the sweetest memory you have of cookies being made as a child. Your sweetest childhood memory. You can walk into that, and you can walk into it by surprise, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city. Now you know that all this is ending, right? I know. It's like 1,000 little stabs in the heart. Thanks to the federal government. It's like a million little stabs in the heart. What happened is this-- somebody complained about the chocolate smell. They complained to the Environmental Protection Agency. And the federal government, ever responsive to even a single complaint from any of its citizens anywhere in the country, leapt into action. They sent inspectors to the Blommer Chocolate Company, which has been making chocolate bars and other goodies on Chicago's West Side since 1939. Inspectors found that too much cocoa dust was going into the air, more than is legal under federal standards. The plant installed filtering equipment. In fact, they say they've been planning to get that equipment in place even before the EPA dropped by. In any case, fewer cocoa particles in the air means less delicious chocolatey aroma. It's kind of curious to think of one small chocolate factory. Somebody complained and they went out there and looked. And yes, there's a problem, and we're going to fix it. But yet you have thousands of times where it's happened at the power plants, and nothing's happened. That's Brian Urbaszewski, Director of Environmental Health Programs for the American Lung Association in Chicago. And as he points out-- it has been widely reported here-- the Illinois Attorney General's office has documented over 7,600 violations, similar to the chocolate company violation, at six coal plants in Illinois in the last six years. And the EPA has never gone after any of those coal plants. OK, let's step back a minute. Because chocolate factories are not a major source of this fine particle pollution. When you look at power plants, they're responsible for about a quarter of the problem. And chocolate-- is chocolate a quarter of the problem as well? No. It's probably far, far, far less than 1%. Oh. Now, there's a quote that you gave, where you used an animal metaphor that I've seen quoted widely in a million articles that I just would like you to repeat here for our listeners. Oh, I don't know if I can. Actually, if this is the wolves-- Mmm-hmm. --and the ant thing? I'm afraid so. I've actually got San Francisco animal activists after me for that thing, saying that wolves are not dangerous to humans. That being said-- well, I'll say it if you don't feel like you can. You said that what the EPA was doing with this chocolate factory and ignoring the coal plants, you said, "it's like crushing an ant when there's a pack of wolves around, then claiming you have saved people from harm." How about if we say it's like crushing an ant-- Don't be scared of those animal rights people. No, I'm just trying to think-- I'll use sharks instead. Nobody likes sharks. I just feel like my entire relationship to government right now can be summed up by this story. There's all these things that are throwing particles in the air, and the only one I like is the one they're getting rid of. Yeah, and that's my frustration as well. The federal EPA hasn't been talking to the press about the chocolate factory. When I called the Illinois State EPA, the manager of compliance and enforcement for the Bureau of Air, a cheerful public servant named Julie Armitage, informed me that there has been a misunderstanding. Yes, she said, the coal plants had belched out too many particles 7,600 times. But you see, these times was very, very short. At the least, a momentary spike, at the most, six minutes long. Each one was a blip, she said. Automatic monitoring equipment is going 24-hours a day taking readings. Add up all the blips per year, and you get 211 blips, per plant, per year. Meaning that well over 99% of the time, the plants are in compliance with the law. Yes, taken out of context, it appears to be a very bad situation. Put into context, it's virtually a non-issue. And as to the fact that there's still chocolate smell in Chicago, but now it is less chocolate smell. You know, I'm not really in a position. Would I prefer to not have had the hullabaloo that broke loose? Yes. And you don't feel any sort of twinge as an environmental regulator who's here to make our world a better place, as you are, that that could be the upshot of the whole thing? That the chocolate aroma disappears? Yeah. You don't feel any sort of twinge if that were to happen? Well, unfortunately, my job here is to ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations, and-- Wherever this sentence is going, this is exactly not the answer we see the people of Illinois want to hear. We don't want to hear about laws and regulations. Well, but you know, they're there for a reason. And for the most part-- Everybody was following the rules, she says. The feds inspected, just like they're supposed to. Blommers was, in fact, emitting too much chocolate, end of story. She said the fact that the coal plants emit more pollution than Blommers, well, it's like when you're driving 68 in a 65 zone, and the cop pulls you over. You broke the law. It doesn't matter that other people might be doing 70, or 80, or 90, or dare I say 7,600. Well, the 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's Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Thea Chaloner, Seth Lind and Tommy Andreas. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website where you where can get our free, absolutely free podcast, or listen to our old shows by audio streaming, www.thisamericanlife.org. Also there this week, details about our live tour. Tickets available in some cities, but they're going fast. We're there this week. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life is brought to you by Volkswagen, safe happens. WBEZ management oversight for our program provided by Torey Malatia, who asked me to tell you that he can kick the ass of anybody in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. And this is something that people in New York have never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever believed. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, so let me just ask you this straight off. We're doing a show this week about doomed love. Oh. What was that "Oh"? What did that "Oh" mean? Well, I feel like that's the most frequent situation I get. So frequently, they're hopeful and I am really pessimistic. Right. So we thought to ourselves, me and the people who work on this radio show, OK, Valentine's Day. Let's do a show of incredibly romantic stories. And of course, some of the most romantic stories are stories of doomed love, your Romeo and Juliet kinds of stories. Star-crossed lovers. Somehow the fact that they can never be makes their love seem all the more intense. But when we turned to somebody who you'd think would be seeing lots of these kinds of stories in real life, Amy Dickinson, who writes the "Ask Amy" advice column in about 150 newspapers, she said, yes, she sees stories of doomed love all the time. All the time. It's the most frequent thing that she sees, but usually it is not so romantic. OK. Here's one. "Dear Amy. I'm in love with a very charming older man. He's always there for me when something arises, and I have some doozies arise. We get along well, enjoy each other's company. We hardly ever fight except over the following six things. One, he cheated on me, then when caught, said he stopped. Two, he has female friends he sees and purposely doesn't share those visits with me, and has never introduced me to any of them. Three, I've never met any of his male friends. Four, he's never taken me to work functions, as he has attended several of mine. Five, except for when talking to family, he doesn't acknowledge my presence to callers on the phone. And six, when I catch him lying, hiding something, or disrespecting my feelings, he withdraws, blames me, never apologizes, and says he's in pain over my questioning of his behavior. At one time, these things hurt me and that hurt turned into insecurity and rage when I wasn't heard and my feelings weren't accepted. Now I think something is fundamentally wrong with this picture. I'm getting mixed signals. What do you think?" OK, so he's still seeing other women. He's keeping her a secret. Maybe he's married to somebody else. But that's the only thing that's wrong. Otherwise it's great. So they are totally doomed. Yeah, totally. What are you going to say to her? What did you say to her? You are, one, totally doomed. Two, absolutely doomed. Three- you know, I'll give her a list. Let me read another one to you. This came in. "Dear Amy. I've been dating a man on and off for at least 15 years. He let me know on the first date that he's a confirmed bachelor. I'm single, too. Sometimes I don't hear from him for more than a year." Just a second. Doesn't confirmed bachelor mean gay? I think so, as we'll see. Yeah. "I'm single, too. Sometimes I don't hear from him for more than a year, and then he'll call to go out. Do you think I should always go out with him when he calls? I don't want to seem desperate. Also, do you think I should call him when I don't hear from him? I don't want him to think I'm a chaser. I like him very much and I find him very interesting to talk to. He's also very smart and I like smart men. So far, we've had a very platonic relationship." He's extremely well-groomed. Right. Wow. Yeah. If you put her in the column, are you going to say, "Will and Grace." Yeah, I do. Oh, yeah. I have done that. I will say, "This man is definitely gay. Just so you know that. That's what's behind the platonic, 15 years, a year between phone calls. He's definitely gay." Yeah, I've done that. "Just FYI." As for the kind of old-fashioned star-crossed love, the romantic kind, where two people are destined for each other and they struggle against great odds and love triumphs-- I should not have asked Amy. She just had a few letters like that. These situations are rare, she says. She had a Jewish woman and a Hindu Sikh man, very much in love, both afraid of how their families were going to react and how they were going to make a life together. She had first cousins, first cousins in love, and though it's legal for them to marry in a dozen states, she says they would face real hurdles with their family. Or there was this letter she got, for her very first column. This woman was stopping at a gas station every day on her way home from work. And the guy who worked at the gas station had a huge crush on her. And he wrote to me, wondering if he-- even though he's a gas station attendant and she was, he thought, a busy executive, what should he do? And in that case I felt really-- I was young. What did I know? I said, "Go for it. Look for signs that she's interested in you. She seems to be coming to the gas station every single day and buying gas in very small amounts. I think she's interested." Right, she's coming there for you. "If she's finding a reason to talk to you--" because they were chit-chatting. So, about a week after it ran, I got a letter from her. She said, "I think I'm the woman in the letter. I think I'm the woman who's stopping in. And you know what, I'm interested. What should I do?" And I said, "OK. Now I'm out of it. Now I'm getting out of this [UNINTELLIGIBLE]-- Now you take your letter, he'll take his letter, and now you have something real to talk about." So there's a happy story for Valentine's Day. Oh. Yeah, well, you could seize on that. A story where you don't know the ending is a happy story. Listen to the words that you are saying. "Yeah, you can seize on that," meaning that straw, that tiny little straw. Yes, you grab that, baby. You hang on. You know what you are? You know what you are? You're like a cop. You know what I mean? All you see is the worst cases. All I see is crooks and scowls. I know. Exactly. All you see is the bad. So you have no idea that it can be something else. Yeah. That's right. I've been walking the streets of Hell's Kitchen. Where is the romance, my friends? Where is the romance these days? Well, today in our program, for Valentine's Day, we head out into the world looking for stories of true love, love that fate is against in every way. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. We bring you three stories of star-crossed love today. Act One, Prisoner of Love. In that act, two people overcome incredible barriers to their love. Their countries are at war. He's Iraqi. She's American. He is a prisoner. She is his guard. Act Two, The Diary of Mrs. Sam Horrigan. A high-school girl tells the story of one doomed love that improbably and accidentally and against her will became a second doomed love story. Act Three, So a Chipmunk and a Squirrel Walk Into a Bar. In that act, a brand-new story by David Sedaris, a look inside what it is really like, really truly like, when families disapprove, when society looks down its nose, where there's a love and one of you is a chipmunk and the other is a squirrel. Stay with us. Act One, Prisoner of Love. This is a kind of unlikely love story, and the only reason that it could happen at all is a series of very unlikely events that precede it. And, I've got to say, we're going to dwell on those events here for a minute or two, because they really are kind of incredible. It starts with a kid, this kid, Shant Kenderian, who's Armenian, born and raised in Baghdad. When he's 13, his parents divorce. He goes to live with his mom in suburban Illinois, outside Chicago. Basically, he becomes an American kid, fluent in English. The summer before his senior year, he goes to visit his dad in Iraq. He's there for a few days. The Iran-Iraq war starts. Borders are closed. He's stuck. Soon enough, he's drafted into the Iran-Iraq war. He spends three and a half years fighting the Iranians. He's at the front lines. He's near Basra. The war ends. After the war, borders are reopened. He begins applying again to renew his US green card and join his mother, who's now moved to LA. Then, before that process is completed, Iraq invades Kuwait. Again, borders close. All the men under 55 are drafted. Shant ends up in the Iraqi navy. Who even knew they had a navy, right? So in a tiny boat-- it's like a landing craft. Only two of the 30 guys on the boat actually have guns. Very little food, very little water. Their job is-- here's their mission. Are you ready? They're supposed to sail into the Persian Gulf, tossing 400-pound floating mines into the water. Now, normally, these kinds of mines, you anchor them down to the bottom, and you keep track of where they are on a map, so you know where they are. Their mission? They're just supposed to toss them off the side of the boat and then gun the engine to get away before the mines float back up and explode. So then they drop the mines. And what they're supposed to do is drop the mines, pass through these waters, and then drive back through the same water that they've just littered with mines. That's their job. OK. So, for Shant and the other guys in the boat, the way that they saw it is that their greatest hope of getting out of all this alive is that they would be captured, captured and captured quickly by the Americans. And in fact, after boat fires and air attacks, the Americans see them. They attack. They abandon ship. They're floating in this little life raft, waiting to be taken prisoner, not sure what's going to happen to them next. All right. Here's Shant. He's going to read from a memoir that he wrote. While the helicopter orbited around the life raft and boat, it passed by the raft once every few minutes. Ahmed was excited, like a little puppy. He followed the helicopter with his eyes and whole body, making it very uncomfortable in the crowded raft. When the helicopter made a sudden turn, Ahmed too swung around, and elbowed Riyadh in his already-injured face, giving him a nosebleed. Whenever the helicopter came close to the raft, we cheered and waved at the pilot in an overly friendly gesture. After doing this a dozen times, I explained to my Iraqi friends that the pilot understood the message. We didn't need to cheer anymore. Two more helicopters came, followed by a large missile frigate. "They're going to kill us," cried Ahmed. "Don't be ridiculous. We surrendered," I told him. "They're here to pick us up." "Do you think they will beat us up or torture us?" Munther asked this time. "I don't think so," I said. "But weren't they the ones who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan? And what about the war they fought in Vietnam? I read that many Americans married Vietnamese women, and when the war was over, they left them behind with their children." Apparently, Munther had been reading some Iraqi propaganda. "They didn't do this to torture the Vietnamese women," I said. "I really don't think anyone's going to marry you and leave you behind." A wave of laughter shook the raft. There were approximately 100 Americans out on the deck of the missile frigate. We saw smiling faces, cameras flashing, and video cameras. For each Iraqi on the life raft, there were at least two or three guns and one camera pointed at us, ready to go off. The contrast between the American and Iraqi soldiers was astounding. They looked like athletes, like swimmers and boxers and football players. We stood with our wasted bodies, malnourished and plagued. We felt like an inferior species. We had, between 15 of us, two guns, one helmet, and 15 old gas masks. Each American soldier had his own gun, helmet, gas mask, bulletproof vest, eye protection goggles, flashlights, and ear plugs. Ear plugs. The luxury of that amazed me. Here was a country that respected its soldiers so much it would even take care of their ears. I must have stared too long, because the guard became uncomfortable and told me to look away. I was the 11th prisoner aboard the USS Curts, and the 23rd POW of Desert Storm. It was noon of January 24, 1991, eight days into the war. So the Americans figure out right away that Shant is different from all these other prisoners. For one thing, he's fluent in English. Because of that, they assume that either he is a high-ranking Iraqi officer or he's a spy. He is put through many, many interrogations with a revolving cast of American interrogators. He writes that actually his treatment is not so bad, but it is harrowing. He is constantly blindfolded and handcuffed and forced to spend several days with real Iraqi officers in an outdoor pit dug in the sand at a base in Saudi Arabia. After about six weeks of this, he says, he's sent to another POW camp, the 403rd, where he's supposed to wait to be transferred to Saudi custody. He of course does not want Saudi custody. He wants to go to America. And it's at the 403rd that the Americans start to believe his story. And they can use his translation skills, so they make him a trustee, meaning that he acts as kind of an employee, and has more freedom and he isn't subject to interrogations anymore. And it's while working at the 403rd that he meets Monica. It was perhaps the second day at the 403rd when the Americans asked if I could help unload some boxes of MREs. The truck driver happened to be an attractive young female soldier. She handed down the boxes from the truck bed while we stacked them in the supply tent nearby. The two Iraqi POWs who were helping me found it highly strange to interact with a woman in this way. "Do they do the same work as men?" asked one of them. "It looks like it. See? This one is driving a truck," answered the other. Women drove cars in Iraq, but it was unheard of to see one driving a truck. "American guys don't seem to care if there are females among them," said the first. The second one smiled. "I'm sure it's a different story at night." The guys seemed baffled at how the male American soldiers interacted with the woman in such a matter-of-fact way. As for me, I had lived in the US. In Iraq, we were Christians, not Muslims, so I had enjoyed plenty of social interaction with women. I wasn't inclined to fall in love just because a female soldier handed me a box of MREs. Still, I was hardly desensitized to her presence either. She was beautiful. She had red hair. She smiled. While we were working to unload the truck, I was aware that she had noticed me too, but more in a way where she actually seemed to be looking away from me a little more than one normally would in a work-together situation. I continued unloading the truck, reminding myself that I wasn't there to find a girlfriend in a POW camp. When we'd finally finished unloading the MREs, she came over to talk. We introduced ourselves. Monica was her name. It turned out she had heard about me, and was curious to learn about my journey from high school in the Chicago suburbs to prisoner of war in Saudi Arabia. I told her about myself. I couldn't tell what she was thinking, but she listened intently, and only interrupted to ask more questions. I was surprised by how good it felt to have this woman show a genuine interest in me as an individual human being and not just some enemy soldier. It wasn't really anything specific she said. She asked me the same questions I was asked every day during interrogation. The difference was in her body language, the way she leaned on her truck beside me, and the sound of her voice. Over the next few days, I watched Monica a lot. She had this breezy, warm, gentle air about her that seemed so California to me. It was just her smile and laugh, the way she brought a playful atmosphere into the processing tent, something I never would have expected in the military during wartime. She totally contrasted with this harsh and deadly place. For the next several days, the words "good morning" and "good night" were all that we said to one another. In the beginning, I was careful never to greet her first, since I had this little problem of being an enemy POW. And when I returned her greeting, I was careful to use the American custom of meeting a woman's gaze directly but not staring at her. Things began to change when Wik, an American soldier who I translated for, brought me up as a topic of conversation with Monica. "Do you know him already?" he asked Monica, gesturing with his head at me. "Yes, he's my friend," she answered simply. Then she offered her hand to shake mine. "You are my friend, aren't you?" I was just so self-conscious about the odd situation. Then when Wik learned that Monica and her truck were free, he asked Lieutenant Cunningham's permission for all three of us to go to the 401st, where I was previously held, and retrieve my money and other belongings which were still there. With permission granted, Wik grabbed his M-16 and sat with me in the truck bed while Monica drove a winding and bumpy dirt road. When we got to the 401st, I wanted to go with Wik, but he suggested that it might be better if I stayed in the truck. I was nervous about being left alone with Monica, especially when she stepped out and sat next to me on the truck bed. But then she began talking, openly and with no apparent awkwardness. It felt intoxicating. Here I was, alone with this lovely woman in this improbable place. Normally, this would have been a perfect opportunity to ask her out, which I know seems ridiculous. It was only Monica's matter-of-fact friendliness that kept the closeness from being overwhelming. It was there that I first began to realize that I was carrying feelings for this woman, for this soldier. Monica's work as a truck driver kept her away from the compound most of the time. When she came, she would only be in the processing tent for a short time, but she always made sure to say hello. Sometimes, she would ask for more details about all that happened to me, the treatment I received at the Marines camp and joint interrogation facility. To me, the treatment didn't seem as atrocious as she felt it was. After all, I had been hoping to get captured by the Americans. It seemed the only alternative to certain death. My extended stay in the interrogation camp didn't bother me, so long as I remained in American custody. I also told her about my flashbacks and nightmares. In my dreams, I would often see myself trapped again in Iraq, or that Saddam likes me and wants me to always be near him. So I had to pretend that I liked him too, or else face death. While Monica listened to my stories, at one point I felt her hand gently rub my back. I was afraid to comment on it, so I just kept on going. "I don't know if I will ever be able to forget these things," I said. "You probably never will forget them, but eventually they won't be so painful anymore." She paused for a moment, then changed the subject. "Do you have a girlfriend in Iraq?" I was afraid to even hope that this might mean that she felt some special interest in me, so I give her an answer that stuck to the facts. The Iraqi society is more westernized than many Arab countries, but still most marriages are arranged. Couples have to date in secret with the intent to marry. I was attracted to a few girls, but I never made any advances. "Why not?" she asked. "I don't want to have a family. I never expected to survive the Iran-Iraq war, and if I did, I didn't want any ties to hinder my attempts in escaping Iraq and returning to America." "Do you like children?" she asked. "To tell you the truth, I usually don't give them any special attention, but they seem to like to play with me anyway. The same thing is true with dogs." Monica smiled. "Children and dogs know a nice person when they see one." On the surface, we appeared to have little in common. Monica was a waitress from the Midwest, a people person who joined the Army Reserve to help make ends meet. Her life was tough in many ways, with family crises and financial difficulty, yet simple in so many others, such as one would expect from a small-town life in a free country. The stakes were very high, though. If we allowed our friendship to go any deeper and we were caught, Monica could be reprimanded. There was no telling how seriously. I could have easily been stripped from my special trustee status and transferred to the general population of Iraqi POWs. My interaction with the Americans would then diminish, and with it, all my hopes of returning to the United States would vanish. But the more we tried to stay away from each other, the more our feelings grew. Up to now, I had always thought that love should start from the head and only later be allowed into the heart. I thought that logic had to prevail over irrational emotional impulses, or forces that might attract us into relationships too difficult to maintain. Romeo and Juliet, for example, should have known never to fall in love. But my theories were of little help when it came to Monica. Although no one else had made any comments yet about our association together, I was sure that back at their camp, the guys had plenty to say. It was clear that people were noticing the attraction between us. Soon, I decided that I needed to use my head and limit this budding relationship with Monica. After all, she was one of my American captors. So I convinced myself that whatever time I spent with her should be no different than with the other female soldiers around the admin compound. On the following day, Monica was mostly running errands somewhere outside the admin compound. During the few times that she was briefly present, I made it a point to walk away from the processing tent and not to return until her truck was gone. Later in the afternoon I was sitting on a bench inside the processing tent, drawing on a sketchpad while waiting for another translation assignment. I was so intent on my drawing that I didn't notice that she had entered the processing tent until she sat next to me and simply asked, "What are you doing?" "I'm trying to draw," I said. I didn't lift my eyes from the paper. Monica stood up and walked away. For the rest of the day, she didn't come near me or even look my way. From that moment on, I didn't have to avoid her or pretend to go to the bathroom every time she entered the compound. She had taken the hint and was staying away from me. So much for what my head wanted. But Monica was not the type who would leave things unsettled. Before she went home for the night, she asked me to sit with her in the truck. "Why were you avoiding me all day?" she asked. The directness of her question stabbed at me. All I could say was, "Monica, you've been very kind to me. I just don't want to cause you any trouble. Your commanders could get all sorts of terrible ideas about this. They might think I'm trying to use you. I think, Monica, I think we should stop being friends." She was quiet for a moment. "Listen, Shant. I know how to keep myself out of trouble. It's true that the guys have been talking about our friendship, but I also heard Sergeant Shepherd tell them that it was nobody's business what I do." She waited for me to respond. I was lost for words. I could barely look at her. My throat tightened. "The guys can talk all they want," she continued. "But I want to be your friend, Shant. I love you." I held her hand and said, "I love you too, Monica." She kissed my hand and I kissed hers. And that simple gesture of affection was one of the most powerful emotional experiences that I had ever had. She smiled and said, "You didn't expect to go to war and find yourself a girl, did you?" "This is crazy," I said, and I don't doubt that she felt the same way. "It's funny how everyone preaches that we should love our enemy," she replied. Then she changed the subject. We talked for nearly an hour. I kept telling myself to leave, without success. A few days later, Monica asked me to help her carry some containers of liquid detergent into the supply tent. Once we were alone, she opened her arms and gave me a very long hug. I let my guard down and forgot that I was a POW for a moment. We didn't kiss. We just hugged. But the next day, she asked me into the supply tent again. She kissed me on the cheek, and I kissed her back. It was not a passionate kiss. It couldn't have been. The processing tent, with everybody in it, was less than 15 feet away. Anyone could have walked in on us at any time. We decided that the risk was too great. Before anyone could notice that we were gone too long, we stepped back out. "I wish that we were together," Monica said, "in civilian clothing, holding hands and walking down the streets of my hometown. People would see us but no one would care at all." Monica was wistful. She seemed a million miles away. After I spent a month with the 403rd, the US army was beginning the transfer of POWs to Saudi camps. They were preparing to go back to America without me. At least, with fewer POWs in the camp, the workload was relaxed, and I found myself spending more time with Monica. By now, our friendship was widely known, but no one seemed to mind. We sat on the bench and played cards in the processing tent. I won, she cheated, I stopped her from cheating, and she called out to a nearby officer, "Sir. He cheats, sir." The officer shook his head and muttered, "Just like my kids. Just like my kids." Monica giggled and whispered in my ear, "He says everything twice." "That's very unusual. That's very unusual," I replied. Enclosure One closed down, and I was transferred to Enclosure Two, which was scheduled to close down 10 days later. On my second day there, Monica stopped visiting. When I saw her truck, a man was driving it. My heart was crushed. Monica's truck had been taken away, and she had no way to come and visit me again. Without her, my days were longer, and my POW wristband was heavier. I stood at the barbed wire boundaries of the admin compound. I stood watching for a long time, until I finally recognized Monica. She was too far away to notice me or hear my voice if I screamed. Although she had somehow lost possession of her truck, I was still hoping to be with her one more time. I stood like an animal in a cage, longing for his master. I waited for her every day behind the barbed wire, until I gave up hope that I would ever see her again. I had four more days before my transfer, 100 miles north, deep into the Saudi desert. I was particularly anxious to see Monica, because she'd asked for my mother's phone number in Los Angeles and volunteered to call her for me. After three days of waiting miserably, I was sitting beside one of the lieutenants in the kitchen tent when Monica suddenly appeared and blurted, "I want to talk to Shant, sir. I called his mom in the United States, and I need to talk to him." The lieutenant gave us permission to go and talk. Monica looked like she'd been crying for hours. She told me they took her truck to stop her from visiting me. "I feel helpless," she said. "I can't protect you anymore. They're going to transfer you to the Saudis in three days." She stopped talking and bowed her head, hiding her face from me. I felt horrible, but all I wanted to do was reassure her. "Don't worry about me, Monica. I'll be fine." I took out three letters, handed them over to her, and said, "Here. I wrote you a letter for each day you didn't come." She put the letters in her pocket, wiped her tears away, and started to tell me about my mother. She had given my mother the number to fax my proof of [? permanent ?] residency and other supporting documents I would need to be released. Monica and I talked for a long time. Seeing how upset she was, I tried not to talk about my imminent transfer to the Saudis and concentrate on the glimmer of hope that my documents would arrive and somehow save me. Monica looked up at me. "Whenever you make it to the States, make sure you call me." And with that, we both said our goodbyes for the night. I wonder now if we both knew we were lying a little. Thanks to her help, and the help of a few other soldiers, I made it from Saudi Arabia to the United States just two weeks later. Monica came back from the Army two or three months after that. When I called her, she was cold. Then she said she was engaged. The guys from her unit told me later that after I left, she cried all the time. Then she met someone else. In a way, we were doomed from the start. But all the hardest things in a relationship-- the fact that I was Iraqi and she was an American, the fact that our countries were at war and I was her enemy, that I was a prisoner and she was one of my guards-- we were able to overcome. What ended up dooming it in the end was the most ordinary thing of all. She couldn't wait for me. We didn't have control over the war or the politics of our countries. We didn't have control over where we were born, where we came from or were going to. But the one thing that we had control over, being able to wait for each other, being patient, that's the thing that broke us up. She didn't love me enough for that. Shant Kenderian, reading an excerpt from his book, 1001 Nights in Iraq: The Shocking Story of an American Forced to Fight for Saddam Against the Country That He Loves. The book will be out in June from Atria Books. Shant is happily married. When he tried to describe his wife in an email, he said that she is truly a gift from God. They have two daughters. Coming up, what if fate makes it so that you and your love don't have much to talk about? Are you doomed? Is that enough to doom you? David Sedaris weighs in. 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, for Valentine's Day, Star-crossed Love. And we've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Diary of Mrs. Sam Horrigan. Of course, there is no doomed love that ever seems quite as doomed as the doomed love that happens when you're in high school, Catalina Puente put together an account of doomed love in high school. She is a Radio Rookie at WNYC Radio in New York City. It's a program that trains teenagers how to make radio stories about their lives. A warning to listeners that although Catalina is a teenager, not everything in here might be appropriate for younger kids. I've loved Sam Horrigan since I was 13. I'm 16 now. He's an actor. You probably don't know him. He pops up in sitcoms once in a while. He always plays some type of bully. Hey, Betty Crockers. But he's my favorite actor. He was in this movie, Brink. I watched it over and over and over. I could spend up to a whole day thinking about him, but normally it's about four hours or so. Every time I go to the internet, I look up things about him and go onto websites to see what girls have to say about Sam. I'm writing back to a few stupid girls that write about Sam. I wrote to this girl, and she wrote, "When I was 14, I got really drunk at Sam Horrigan's apartment and made out with him. Whoa." And then I wrote, "That is the most stupidest lie I have heard since the lie about, the world's going to end. And if it's true, I hope your tongue boils and burns into ashes. I am Sam's numero uno fan, OK? Now if I have to go all the way where you live to cut your head off for making such a big lie like that, I would." Then some other girl wrote after me. And she wrote, "Dude, chill. No need to threaten anybody. Sam is cool but no need to get all freaky." My schools are always crowded and loud. When I go up and down the stairs, I always bump into someone I know and say hi and bye. When I arrived at my high school as a freshman, a year and a half ago, I had no idea what was waiting for me there. I was going down the stairs when someone was coming up, and I got such a surprise because that person looked just like Sam. The eyebrows, white skin, black hair, same nose, eyes, lips, and the same strong jaw. That was what scared me the most. I went, "Oh, my God." But it wasn't Sam. It was just a regular student. It wasn't even a boy. At the beginning, it just started with the feeling of how shocked I was that she looked like Sam. I guess I was too shocked to think I liked her. Before I knew her name, I'd think about her at home, calling her the Sam Girl. Later on, I found out her real name, but I'm only going to use the nickname that I gave her, which is K-licious, like the gum, Bubblicious. Now I have the letter K on my right thigh. I made it by rubbing my skin off with a toothpick. My older sister Maria thought what I did was crazy. My sister's 23, like Sam. The three most important people in my life are my sister, Sam, and God. My sister was the main witness to my obsession. It's plain to me how I used to be obsessed with this girl. Oh, my God. Everything would remind you of her. Even if it had nothing to do with her, you would find something, and then say, "Oh, look. She wears this color. Or look, she was wearing these boots." It's ridiculous, ha ha, your friend gave you a gum. She gave you a gum that belonged to her, and you still have it. You have it there. And, "Oh, my God. What's that smell? What was that smell? That was her perfume. I know it. I know. I'm going to buy it. I'm going to buy it." She was the first girl I had different feelings for. Like, strong love feelings. When I heard any love song, especially "My Immortal" by Evanescence, I'd think about her. That song makes me so sad. It reminds me of the things we could have done if we were together. I'd just imagine the lights off, us in the bed, nose to nose, fingertips to fingertips, not saying a word except some "I love you's," playing with each other's hair, breathing each other's body scent. We're both happy. I wanted to marry the darn girl. I wanted to live with her. I wanted to spend the rest of my sorry life with her. I wanted to die with her. I wanted to be in heaven with her. Until K-licious, the only crushes I had for women were women on TV. I came out to my parents over her. My mom said she didn't care, that she still loved me. I only told my dad when I was asking my family about my obsession. I was scared that'd he'd see me differently, be disgusted or end the conversation. The day after I told him, we talked about it again. Something that I told you, that was important. What was that? Yes. That you used to like boys and girls. Yeah, and now. And now, too. And you asked me how I felt about it. And I said that it happens to a lot of people. And how do you feel, that I told you that? Do you feel different than last night? I feel good, happy because you have trust in me, to tell your dad everything. And I am happy with you. It's easier to show your feelings to a boy, because that's how society is, for a guy and a girl to be together. I mean, a guy can't freak out when a girl tells you she likes you. I heard a rumor that some girl found out that I liked her and was going to curse me out in front of the whole school. I assumed K-licious saw the desk that I wrote her name on. I wrote that she was hot, and I thought she figured out about me crushing on her. I was scared and talked to a school counselor, who arranged a meeting with the two of us. I was so terrified, I thought I was going to pee in my pants. She came in, and I asked her if she heard anything bad about me. She looked clueless, and also beautiful. After a few seconds, she said, "No, but if I did, I wouldn't remember. I don't believe in 'he-said, she-said' rumors." Then I said, "Good, but if you hear anything bad about me, it's not true." When I talked to her, my heart beat fast, like, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. The obsession was like a second person. It felt like I was responsible for two people, my regular self and my obsessive self. In my house, I was unhappy most of the time. The depression was a new feeling. I was sad for myself that I felt this way over a girl who didn't even notice me. I would pray to God almost every night, telling him to send me a sign, that if I wasn't going to get with her, to make me stop liking her, but if I was, to let me keep going. My sister was getting annoyed. After I figured out that y'all were never going to get together, and this was going nowhere, I just wanted you to shut up about her, and to move on and leave her alone, because you guys were never going to be together. I started losing concentration in school, even though K-licious and I had no classes together. My report cards were disgusting. The feelings were so strong, they started to hurt. I used to cry in the bathroom because it was the only door with a lock. I remember those mean days. I wrote poems and haikus to clear out my mind. I feel like I'm trapped. Trapped as the walls surround me. I want to get out. Maria told me, "Don't tell me anything if you don't got her number or have not done anything with her." So what I used to do was, while I was in school, I used to think of a good lie to tell my sister, so that she could be interested in my talking about K-licious, because I had no one else to express myself to. Almost every day, I would come home with a story. I felt scared to tell Maria about the lies, because she might lose trust in me. I decided to confess. Do you remember when I used to come from school and I used to tell you stuff, like what happened to me today? Yeah. Can you tell me one of the stories that you remember? "Oh, today, guess what happened to me? I don't have my ID." I told Maria that K-licious stole my high school ID. "And she said, oh, if you want it back, you'd better come to school, because you never come to school, so I can't wait to go back tomorrow. She's going to give me back my ID. Oh, my God, she's holding it. She put it in her back butt pocket. Oh, my God. When she gives it back to me, it's going to be from her pocket. Oh, my God." We're the stupidest sisters in the world. Are you in a good mood? Why? I just want to know. I'm always in a good mood. I need to tell you something. What you did? Something I need to confess to you. You have another story. No. Like half of them that I said-- --were fake. How you came up with that? I don't know. Yeah. Why? Because you started saying, "I don't want to hear if it's nothing good." So that's why. I had nobody else to express myself to. So I used to lie, if I could talk to you. You're an idiot. Oh, that's sick, girl. I know. Why would you do something like that? I'm not mad, but I'm just saying, that's so weird. Why you did that? You didn't have to. I was surprised Maria didn't think it was such a big deal. I think why she didn't get mad with my confession was because she probably thought it was more stupid. Every time we had a school break, I'd think about how to slow down my obsession. Winter break was so depressing because I didn't see her, but then I started thinking about her less. But when I got back to school, it all fell on top of me again. Finally, the summer came, and there was a rumor that she might move, so I might never see her again. I decided to end the obsession. I felt like an old lady whose husband just died after 50 years together. I tried not thinking about her, and I punished myself a little by not giving myself pleasure, like listening to songs and reading things that would remind me of her. Sam helped me a lot, too. I would watch Sam all the time. I kept watching the episode of the sitcom, Still Standing, that Sam starred in. "Because he's a butler, dude. He does anything we tell him to. He's our designated driver, he goes on burger runs, he does our homework." Babysits my son. Wow, buddy. Even though K-licious looks like him, it was a whole different kind of love than what I had for Sam. Plus, it started with her because I know I'm not going to get with Sam. I miss K-licious, but by the end of the summer, my obsession was leaving. On the bus on the first day back, I was nervous that if she was there, I might fall in love with her again. When I got to school, I saw her, but I didn't react like I thought I would. I have classes with her now, unlike before when I just wished I did. I'd get uptight for the first 10 minutes, but then I'd just relax and forget that she's in the class. If that was me last year, I don't know what I would do. I know I wouldn't be relaxed. Maria asked me if I was completely over K-licious. I stood speechless for a while. I wanted to say that the obsession was gone, but decided to answer as honest as I could, because I didn't want Maria to doubt what I was saying. I have to admit that I am 99% over her. But there's 1% that I still, I don't know. It's scary, because I don't want to think about her, but sometimes I just do. I still like K-licious, but not so, so in love. I have a piece of love in my heart, that my heart won't let me erase. Until I have a real relationship, maybe I'm not going to be completely over her. For This American Life, this is Catalina Puente, aka Mrs. Sam Horrigan. Catalina Puente in New York with WNYC's Radio Rookies, whose story was produced by Serena Patel with assistance from Miguel Macias, Wayne Schulmister, and Karen Michel. Other stories by Radio Rookies at www.radiorookies.org. Catalina's story was supported by Con Edison, the Fred L. Emerson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Open Society Institute's Youth Initiatives program, the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the New York Times Company Foundation, and Time Warner. Act Three. So a Squirrel and a Chipmunk Walk Into a Bar. We end our program today with this fable of doomed love from David Sedaris. The squirrel and the chipmunk had been dating for two weeks when they ran out of things to talk about. Acorns, parasites, the inevitable approach of autumn, these subjects had been covered within their first hour. And so, breathlessly, their faces had flushed. Twice they had held long conversations about dogs, each declaring their across-the-board hatred of them, and speculating on what life might be like were someone to put a bowl of food in front of them two times a day. "They're spoiled rotten, is what it comes down to," the chipmunk had said. And the squirrel had placed his paw over hers, saying, "That's it, exactly. Finally, someone who really gets it." Friends had warned them that their romance could not possibly work out. And such moments convinced them that these naysayers were not just wrong, but jealous. "They'll never have what we do," the squirrel would say. And then the two of them would sit quietly, hoping for a flash flood or a rifle report, something, anything that might generate a conversation. They were out one night at a little bar run by a couple of owls when, following a long silence, the squirrel slapped his palm against the table top. "You know what I like?" he said. "I like jazz." "I didn't know that," the chipmunk said. "My goodness. Jazz." She had no idea what jazz was, but worried that asking would make her sound stupid and unworthy of his affections. "What kind, exactly?" she asked, hoping his answer might narrow things down a bit. "Well, all kinds really," he told her, "especially the earlier stuff." "Me too," she said. And when he asked her why, she told him that the later stuff was just a little too late for her tastes, almost like it was overripe or something, you know what I mean? And for the third time since she had known him, the squirrel reached across the table and took her paw. On returning home that evening, the chipmunk woke her older sister, with whom she shared a room. "Listen," she whispered. "I need you to explain something. What's jazz?" "Why are you asking me?" the sister said. "So you don't know either?" the chipmunk asked. "I didn't say I didn't know," the sister said. "I asked you why you're asking. Does this have anything to do with that squirrel?" "Maybe," the chipmunk said. "Well, I'm telling," the sister announced. "First thing tomorrow morning, because this has gone on long enough." She punched at her pillow of moss, then repositioned it beneath their head. "I warned you weeks ago that this wouldn't work out. And now you've got the whole house in an uproar, waltzing home in the middle of the night, waking me up with your dirty little secrets. Jazz indeed. You just wait until Mother hears about this." The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? "Oh, I like it too," she'd said, and so eagerly. Then again, it could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she'd calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more terrible than the last. Jazz was a maggot-infested flesh of a dead body. The ochre crust on an infected eye. Another word for ritual suicide. And she had claimed to like it. Years later, when she could put it all in perspective, she'd realized that she'd never really trusted the squirrel. How else to explain all those terrible possibilities? Had he been another chipmunk, even a tough one, she'd have assumed that jazz was something familiar, a kind of root, say, or maybe a hairstyle. Of course, her sister hadn't helped any. None of her family had. "It's not that I have anything against squirrels, per se," her mother had said. "It's just that this one-- well, I don't like him." When pressed for details, she'd mentioned his fingernails, which were a little too long for her tastes. "A sure sign of vanity," she warned. "And then there's this jazz business." That was what did it. Following a sleepless night, the chipmunk's mother had forced her to break it off. "Well, the squirrel had sighed. "I guess that's that." "I guess it is," the chipmunk said. He headed downriver a few days later, and she never saw him or spoke to him again. "It's no great loss," her sister said. "No girl should be subjected to language like that, especially from the likes of him." "Amen," her mother added. Eventually, the chipmunk met someone else, and after she had safely married, her mother speculated that perhaps Jazz was a branch of medicine, something like chiropractic therapy that wasn't quite legitimate. Her sister said, no. It was more likely a jig. And then she pushed herself back from the table and kicked her chubby legs into the air. "Oh, you," her mother said. "That's a can-can." And then she joined in and gave a few kicks of her own. This stuck in the squirrel's mind, for she never knew her mother could identify a dance step, or anything associated with fun. It was the way her own children would eventually think of her: dull, strict, chained to the past. She had boys, all of them healthy and only one prone to trouble. He had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but his heart was good, and the chipmunk knew he would eventually straighten himself out. Her husband thought so too, and died knowing that he had been correct. A month or two after he'd passed on, she asked this son what Jazz was, and when he told her it was a kind of music, she knew immediately that he was telling the truth. "Is it bad music?" she asked. "Well, if it's played badly," he said. "Otherwise, it's really quite pleasant." "Did squirrels invent it?" "God, no," he said. "Whoever gave you that idea?" The chipmunk stroked her brown and white muzzle. "Nobody," she said. "I was just guessing." When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of Jazz as well, and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain, the smell of a baby, the din of a swollen river rushing past her tree and onward to infinity. David Sedaris' most recent book is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. He's also the editor of an anthology of favorite short stories called Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, 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 Sam Hallgren, Thea Chaloner, Seth Lind, and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, where you can sign up for our free, our absolutely free weekly podcast, or listen to all of our old shows by audio streaming, www.thisamericanlife.org. Or for the podcast, you can go to the iTunes store. This week on the website, there's information about our upcoming six-city national tour. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program provided by Mr. Torey Malatia, who does not understand why we have so many women on our staff. Do they do the same work as men? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories on This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, one sign that you and your high school nerd friends are pulling a lot of pranks, you give yourselves a name. And it's an acronym. We were called the SCUM club. SCUM was an acronym for the Society for the Corruption and Undoing of Morals. Another sign your prank-life is rather rich? You have a nemesis, and not only does he have the perfect job to be your nemesis-- assistant principal-- he has the perfect name, in this case-- Merle Power. Mr. Power. He reminded me a lot of that principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I don't know if you know that character. But it was the same kind of thing, I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you, Mr. Stein. One of these days, I'm going to get you. Would he literally say to you-- Oh yeah. Yeah. There was a cast of usual suspects. And we would get called into the office. Mr. Power's office? Mr. Power's office. And he would say, this happened over the weekend. And we'd go, yeah, wasn't it great? And he'd say, well, what did you have to do with it? And I'd say, well, nothing. I was at home studying my mathematics. As the head of the SCUM club, Adam Stein says Mr. Power never had any evidence. And nobody ever squealed. But he set himself up to be tortured. A perfect example is, the prank was to stack lunch benches. And they stacked them 18 benches high in the middle of the center quad. He gets on the intercom the next morning and says, this is a bad prank. You know, blah, blah, blah, had you stacked it two more, we would have had to get a crane to come in and it would have cost blah, blah, blah. So guess what's happened the next day? We come into school and it's stacked 20 benches high. So they have to bring a crane in. And this is the sort of thing that happened all the time. He would set us up for the next step. So one next step leads to another, and that leads to another. And finally, it is the last month of senior year. There's time for one last caper. The SCUM club gathered a wheelbarrow, concrete, shovels, pick axes, maybe 15 people in all. And then, in the dead of night-- 1:00 AM-- they go to school, spread out to their pre-assigned spots, lookouts on the perimeter of the school grounds, and they got to work planting a toilet in the middle of the school grounds, right in the middle of the yard, cementing it in place and then writing on the seat, the seat of power-- for, you know, their nemesis. And everything's going great-- When we hear this, "Stop, freeze, police." We took off running in all directions. And almost within a minute, a police helicopter was over us with the lights on. And the beams were following us and the helicopter was yelling, "Stop, this is the L.A. Police. Stop." Everybody scatters. From afar, they watch the helicopter land. They watch the police disembark. They watch the police examine the toilet. And then the police go. The next day, they deduce that the helicopter just happened to be on another call in the neighborhood. This is L.A., there was a suspect at large. None of Adam's friends were caught. In other words, best possible scenario. They got scared. They got chased. They got adventure. Nothing bad happened. And the next day, of course, was the greatest day of their lives-- hundreds of kids milling around this toilet. And early in the morning, Adam is called into Mr. Power's office. And I was in there and he said, I know you did this. The usual thing. I know you had something to do with this. It's two weeks before graduation. You're not going to graduate. And of course, like every single time, he had no proof. And he basically said, but I will prove this before you graduate. When we got to graduation, which was a couple weeks later-- and it was southern California, sitting out on the lawn of our football field, 800 kids in my graduating class. So I go up, cross the stage, shake the principal's hand, get the diploma folder. And I go back to my seat and, sitting with my friends, open up to see what's inside and there are two sheets of toilet paper slid into the little plastic holder for the certificate. It's like he was winking at you. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. It was like a wink. And it completely, completely changed who he was for me at that moment. Like suddenly you liked him? I don't know if I'd go that far. Suddenly he seemed like a person. Yeah, he seemed like a person. Did it feel like you were in a cat and mouse game with him for that year? Absolutely. You needed a nemesis. Had he been kind of a gentle, understanding sort of guy, it would have taken the wind out of our sails, I think. It's fun to do those sort of things. It's fun to do the cat and mouse. It's fun to tease that cat and see if he can get you, while staying within reach of the hole so you can escape into it. Well, today on our radio program, Cat and Mouse, stories of people caught in a perpetual chase, doomed to it, or sometimes-- like with Adam and his high school friends-- the chase just makes their lives more interesting. From WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today, El Gato Y El Ratoncito. A guy embeds with an armed, quasi-vigilante group for a cat and mouse game on the Mexican border. Act Two, Hello Kitty. David Sedaris explains how it really goes between mouse and cat when both are locked up in prison together. Act Three, Lookings for Loveseats in All the Wrong Places, what happens when a cat is confronted with hundreds, actually thousands of possible mice and can't choose one. Act Four, Spray My Name, Spray My Name, the story of cops, graffiti writers and the graffiti writer that we believe possibly evaded the police longer than any other. Stay with us. Act One. El Gato y el Ratoncito. Well, at this point, most of us have heard of these guys who call themselves the Minutemen. They're a volunteer militia. They station themselves at the US-Mexican border and they try to intercept illegal migrants. The founder of the California Minutemen put out a call for, quote, "All those who do not want their family murdered by Al Qaeda, illegal migrants, colonizing illegal aliens, illegal alien felons, alien barbarians, ninja-dressed drug smugglers." Well, this guy who's not a professional radio reporter or anything-- in fact, in his real life he works for a pest control company-- decided to buy himself a tape recorder and just hang out with the California Minutemen for a few days on their missions to the border. The guy's name is James Spring. And what he found was completely surprising. He found a cat and mouse game at the border that happens night after night after night, but not between the minutemen and the illegal immigrants. No, no. The minutemen have another nemesis, protesters, groups like Angels of the Desert and Border Angels, who drop food and water for the migrants trying to help them. Hundreds of people die trying to cross the border each year, from heat, from cold, some starve. And in fact, in this nightly cat and mouse game, the Minutemen really see themselves as the mice. Here's James' story. My gear? A RadioShack walkie talkie that a minuteman named Larry handed me before we left the VFW. My companions? Almost all in their 50s or 60s, dressed in cammies or khaki. They have Top Gun styled call signs: Big Bob, Little Dog, Big Bird. Big Bob. You got Big Bob. I drive my own truck in the middle of a convoy of a dozen SUVs and one Toyota Corolla. As we pass a shack, somebody identifies it as a drug house. Somebody else calls it a signal house, an observatory that alerts smugglers when the coast is clear. Every vehicle on the road is suspect, too. A Chevy with sagging leaf springs surely belongs to a drug trafficker. So does the empty flatbed that reeks of dung. It's probably got about 50 kilos in it. No doubt. Tonight, our objective is to spot illegal immigrants and drug traffickers and to radio Big Bob, who will be at the top of a hill where he can get reception with his cell phone to call the Border Patrol. The convoy's main concern is that we're going to be followed by the goons, the protesters. The goons, in fact, are the number one topic of the radio chatter. The goons are not do-gooders, they say, not humanitarians. They're in league with the bad guys, on the take from the drug lords and coyotes. And then, as if summoned by fears, the goons appear. A red Suzuki Sidekick with a white cross on the door and a ratty sign that says, Rescate-- Rescue-- passes us going in the other direction and flips a quick U-turn. We're being tailed. I see them right there. They made us as soon as we drove by. They know where we are now. Vehicle, drop your tacks. Going down. Wow. That seemed a little harsh, telling the rear vehicle to drop their tacks so that the search and rescue vehicle which spun around to follow us is now apparently going to run over tacks and have a flat tire. That can't be legal. The Sidekick keeps coming. The command about dropping the tacks-- it turns out-- was only a ruse in the hopes that the enemy was listening in on our frequency. It's only when the Suzuki gets stopped by a random US Border Patrol checkpoint that we're able to lose 'em. We leave the main road and race down a bumpy dirt track that cuts south toward Mexico. 10 minutes later, we arrive at a wide desert valley with a two-foot-high rail fence marking the border. OK, Roger. We're out of here. Let's go, guys. Each vehicle is directed by radio to park 100 yards apart, creating a half-mile line of SUV sentry posts. I park beside Larry Morgan, the guy who loaned me the walkie talkie, not just because he loaned me the walkie talkie, and not just because I want to find out where I can get a T-shirt like his that says, "Undocumented Border Patrol Agent." I park next to Larry because he wears a big, floppy hat and he's the spitting image of my grandfather. Larry tells me that he's a retired longshoremen from Los Angeles, an ex-marine, just like my grandfather was. I ask him what the deal is out here. How do we do this thing? Larry explains that different minutemen have different styles. Some guys flood their posts with light. But not him. Larry prefers stealth. I go completely black. I go dark. And I just go quiet. I don't talk. Sometimes I turn my radio off. That way you can hear anything within-- your voice travels about a half a mile, maybe a mile, out here. People can hear us talking, OK? And at night, this would be a dead giveaway. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [? Bird, ?] Rescate Angels are back on the road behind us. They've found us. Damn. We see a car approach from about a mile away with its horn honking. It's the Suzuki sidekick. Larry is walking in tight circles with his hands on his head. So what are they going to do? Are they just going to go up and down-- I thought this was a [UNINTELLIGIBLE]-- They're going to get on the radio and call all their goons. And they'll probably-- They're coming up on the east end. They just found the whole line, guys. This is down at my end. Probably get four or five car loads up. I don't think they have anybody to speak of. If they've got a cell phone, they've got friends. Roger. It just makes it harder for our mission. Jesus, what a bunch of numbskulls, knuckleheads. If they can't see that we're out here trying to help the Border Patrol-- which is a government agency-- why would they want to interfere? They're yelling warnings across the border. Yup. So any chance that we had of being stealth just went out the window. You can see how they'll just get on their bullhorns and yell and make noise all night, so everybody here won't even attempt to cross and we might as well just go home. The Sidekick makes its way down the line. When it reaches our post, Larry flags it to stop. He introduces himself very pleasantly. And the driver smiles and tells Larry that his name is Rafael. He explains, in fractured English, that he is a volunteer with Border Search and Rescue. Larry crouches down so that he's eye to eye with Rafael, and tells him that they both believe in helping people. I don't want to see anybody get hurt either, Larry says. And then he tells Rafael to follow his heart. You just do what you have to do. And Rafael says, I believe we are both on the same side, because you love this country and I love this country. The one difference is, I've got two countries. I watch Larry nod again, interesting way to look at it. Larry pats the hood of the Sidekick and says, nice to talk to you. Rafael continues down the line. After this exchange I'm thinking, the cold war is over. The wall has come down. But instead, Larry offers this analysis. You talk to this fellow and he appeared to be reasonable, rational. It turns out that he's a suspected drug dealer and human smuggler. That's what he does and he doesn't like us here. That's the reason he's down here with his goons and they're trying to run us out of here. Amazing. And here he comes. I almost shook his hand. I ask Larry how he knows the protesters are working for drug dealers. He says the Minutemen's founder, Jim Chase, says so. And Big Bob said exactly the same thing. That's two sources, he says. Without the headlights of the Sidekick, it's really dark now. Larry settles into a lawn chair for the night. See, there's the Big Dipper. Isn't that the bottom of the Big Dipper? And then you follow that over to the North Star. You know, I don't think that's the Big Dipper. I think that's our problem. That's our problem. Well, OK, Magellan. I think that's the one they call Cassiopeia. I walk back to my truck for a pair of binoculars, not that they'll do any good. There's no moon. And the entire desert is now as black and flat as a tar pit. When I get back to Larry's truck, he's pretty much abandoned the idea of stealth. I hear perhaps the strangest sound I could have ever imagined at this moment. What do you think of that? Isn't that pretty? You probably never heard of them. Luis Miguel. Romantico Musico. You have Mexican romantic music in your truck? I have six CD's that I have-- oh, I have another one, too. I can't think of his name. You'd love this stuff. It's really neat. I fell in love with this little Mexican girl about five years ago. And she introduced me to the culture. And it got me interested in it. I'd never dated a cute, little 100-pound Mexican girl. She was like a Hollywood movie star. I met her walking her dog in the park across from my home, back just before 2000. And we started seeing each other. And I was 57 and she was 28. And it was fun. I really enjoyed it. Was she a Mexican from Mexico, Mexican? She was a Mexico Mexican, illegal, no green card. Do any of your pals out here on the line know? Do they know this story? Yeah, I've shown them pictures of Christina. She's a really cutie. Anyway, I haven't met anyone quite like her. And now, I don't know what I'm doing here today. She broke my heart and dumped on me. So this is my way of getting even. Just joking. Truthfully, his heart doesn't seem to be in this game. Here he is, an hour before midnight and a couple hundred miles from home and he's barely paying attention. When the Sidekick rattles by again slowly, Larry misses it. He asks if I've seen the Border Angels even as they're passing us, not three car lengths away. He sees lights that don't exist and misinterprets the ones that do. I wind up pointing things out to Larry. I just saw, up on the hill there-- see that bright light? Oh yeah. Yeah, you know what? Look at that. Yeah, he was signaling, wasn't he? You'd be surprised how many people might be out here looking down at us. There, he's signaling again. I wouldn't know how to guess, but I'll bet there might be 20 people out there looking at us right now. In April, we stopped groups of 16, 14. I caught eight myself one morning, a family. This was last spring when he was volunteering with the Arizona Minutemen. Larry helped a Border Patrol agent catch a Mexican family. They sat down on the side of the road behind the truck while he did the paperwork. They'd bring out a clipboard-- the border patrolman-- gather information from these people. Little children, a couple of them were six or seven years old, girls. And they were frightened. They were afraid of either me or the border patrolman or both of us. But I went to my truck and brought out a case of water, small bottles of water, and shared it with them. And after a few minutes, the girls started to relax. The little ones were giggling. And he was working his way down the group. And then finally, he handed a clipboard to this one little girl and she looked at me for some reason. And I just motioned an x in the air, because she didn't know how to sign her name. And she just thought that was the funniest thing. And then her mother laughed and her father giggled. And it became a light moment there. But I'll never forget that. Anyway, they loaded them in the back-- in the cage part-- of the Border Patrol vehicle. And I just turned and left. I never saw them again. And I assume that they were taken back to the border and released. And maybe they came back the next day. Who knows? Was there any-- when they were taken off-- they're loaded into a cage and you're watching a couple kids. I mean, that must have grabbed your heart a little bit. Of course it did. I was responsible to a large extent for that, and it was sad. I was touched by it. I thought, what am I doing this for? Because it just was sad to see these people. It did dawn on me that, if I'm going to do this, I have to be a little stronger. When Larry talks about why he's doing this, he gives the standard pitch that all these guys give. Illegal immigration has ruined the public schools, hospitals have closed because they were forced to provide free emergency care to Mexicans, then there are all the Mexican drugs that have destroyed America's children. He says he just felt like he could make a difference. "You'd be surprised," he says, "When you find something you really believe in. We just can't let any more of these people into our country." It's like going to the dog pound, or the pound. And you go in and you look at the little puppies and you look at the little kittens, and you just want to load your car and take them all home. Well, I don't go to the pound because I don't want to put myself through that. And in a way, it's the same thing here. These people, they're wonderful people, they're hardworking, but we just can't absorb them anymore. I think we've reached the point now where there's just a limit to what we can allow. Suddenly, we see a stream of headlights descend into the valley behind us. The rest of the goons have arrived. It's five compact cars. A dozen or more people pile out. And one of them shouts into a bullhorn in Spanish, "Poor people of Mexico, please do not attempt to cross here tonight. There are armed men waiting for you." One guy makes fun of the Minutemen by humming the theme to Mission Impossible into a bullhorn as they pass. The protesters park their cars in kind of an arc and the battle begins. We're in the middle of the High Desert and ideological enemies are facing off over one of the most contentious issues in the country, in two countries. And the weapons they use are about the same as you'd find in a disco, loud music, big lights. The protesters blast Mexico's national anthem and then a mix of enthusiastic Latin music. The goons, it turns out, look like college kids, boys and girls, and they're dancing and laughing in a triangle of light created by their head lamps. A couple of the protesters wave high-powered flashlights. When I reach Big Bob's truck, I find him ducking behind the cab for cover. Somebody hisses at me to get down. Big Bob is getting steamed. The scene escalates into a battle of flashlights, a kind of flash off. When one hits you in the eyes, it's blinding. Should we refrain or not from hitting them with the light first, or wait till they do it? We're going to refrain until they hit us and then we're going to knock the hell of out them with it. The protesters flash us and Big Bob slams them with his zillion candlepower flashlight. But the protesters hold their ground. Most of them just mug it up for the spotlight, pumping their fists in the air. Some are doubled over with laughter. They turn up their music. We turn up our music. Our patriotic assault has no effect, which leads another of the minutemen to the conclusion that we have only one choice. Our version of shock and awe. I could play the minuteman theme song. How loud? Huh? How loud? Real loud. OK, turn it on. Crank it on. He cranks the minuteman theme to full volume on the stereo of his Toyota Corolla. The words go, "We're the minutemen. We're going to stand for our country. We'll fight 'til the end." It's pathetic. The protesters have to turn down their own music in order to hear our fight song. Then they get on their bullhorns and pretend to be rednecks drawling, "Yeehaw," and "Giddy up." I'm just embarrassed for us. But next to me, a minuteman clutching a rifle is seeing the scene very differently. He's crouched against the wheel well of the truck and looks ready to radio for air support. I try to remember his name. You go by Big Dog, is that correct? Little Dog. Little Dog. Big Dog's on his way down from Phoenix with more [BLEEP.] The party's just getting ready to start. Little Dog's real name is Robert Crooks. He's a retired commercial fishermen from Santa Barbara. The reason he's expecting sniper fire any minute, he tells me, is that L.A.'s 18th Street gang has put a bounty on their heads, because minutemen patrols have virtually stopped the flow of drugs, shutting down the gang's business. The bounty on our badges is $25,000 cash. And they don't even have to present the badge or the carcass because the media will cover it. They'll get their reward. And one sniper shot, that's $25,000. That's a brand-new Harley for one of these guys. You know what I'm saying? Scary, huh? In America. Man. Reportedly, no one's ever been hurt during these rallies on the border. The only news story of protester violence was a single incident in which one protester allegedly kicked the shin of a minuteman. No charges were filed. The two sides square off for more than an hour. Then a car load of protesters makes its way down the minuteman line to deliver a message, which is interrupted every few seconds by minutemen air horns. Buenas noches, senores y senoras. Gracias para the show. We'll be back again tomorrow night. It would be better if you just left, then we wouldn't have to do this every single night. You are not stopping immigration. You are not stopping drugs. You are furthering this. You are furthering everything you are against. Please go home and rethink all your-- Have a nice day and this is for you. Please go home and rethink all your values, the protesters tell us. And then they all line up their cars and leave. I wonder if this isn't exactly what the Minutemen had hoped for, a good five hours until sun up to bust some Mexicans or drug smugglers. But a few minutes later, Jim Chase crackles through on the radio and says that we're to pick up stakes, too. We're needed in a town called Jacumba. Listening to the walkie talkie on the way down, I gather that Jacumba is considered a hostile village, and that intelligence indicates that something big is going down tonight, involving a drug smuggling cartel based in the town. By now, it's after 2:00 in the morning, and I don't know how much longer I can stay awake. When we get to Jacumba, each vehicle stops at a different street corner along the main drag, which seems to be the only paved road in town. Larry and I park by the sign that says, "Welcome to Jacumba, Population 654." We're supposed to write down the license plate numbers of all cars that pull onto the main road. Big Bob will call them into the Border Patrol. Larry and I stand on the corner and watch a lot of nothing. I think about how most of these guys are Vietnam vets. I think of a friend of mine who was a corpsman, how hard it was for him to return to normal life after the war. What experience has ever been as intense for them? Besides this. This is like Tikrit, Tikrit in Iraq. We could be taking incoming at any moment. I haven't seen a roadside bomb yet, but that's not to say they don't have that set up. This is a drug town. What you see is very dangerous. I'm not sure what to expect next. Now all we need is a car to pass. All we need is for some drug dealer dumb enough to drive out onto this highway and try to do a drug deal in front of some of my eager friends. Eventually, the sheriff shows up. He tells Larry that it's great that we're here and asks if we wouldn't mind doing him a little favor. Some kid's been stealing bicycles in Jacumba, taking them right off porches. The sheriff asks if we could keep an eye out, and hands Larry a card with a phone number. Soon, the border has been forgotten. The drug dealers are forgotten. Larry radios Big Bob, and within 30 seconds, all the minutemen have abandoned their posts and converged at our corner to offer the cop their support. Big Bob and another minuteman devise a plan to set out a decoy bicycle to entice the thief. They're on the case. They're watching. They're waiting. To protect us from the bad guys, they're drawing a line in the sand. James Spring lives in San Diego and is looking for a publisher for his first book, a true life adventure story in the jungles of Panama and Colombia, in which among other things-- and I know how this is going to sound-- he's captured by Indians. Act Two, Hello Kitty. Well, as we've already seen today, sometimes it is hard to predict who's going to chase whom when it comes to cat and mice. David Sedaris has this story. It was the stupidest thing the cat had ever heard of, an A.A. program in prison, like you could find anything decent in here anyway. But if it would get his sentence reduced, well, all right. He'd sign up, dance the 12 step, do whatever it took to cut out early. Once he was free, he'd break into the nearest liquor store and start making up for lost time. But between now and then, he'd sit with the sad sacks and get by with a little after-shave. The only thing he wouldn't do was speak at one of the meetings. As a rule, they were pretty boring. Yammer, yammer, yammer. But every now and then, someone would tell a decent story, this mink, for example, who'd swapped his own pelt for a bottle of Kahlua. The cat didn't know you could live without a pelt, but it was possible. Not pretty, that was for damn sure, but it could be done. And this mink was living proof. It helped that he had a sense of humor about it and told the story with a little pizazz, complete with sound effects and different voices. When he came to the bit about his wife mistaking him for a beef tongue, the cat laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. "Thank you," the mink said at the end of his little speech, "You've been a great audience." After the meeting, the alcoholics congregated for treats washed down with burnt coffee. The cat was just going back for a second cup when he overheard a mouse talking in a low voice to the bull frog who served as the prison chaplain. "He might be amusing, but I don't give that mink a snowball's chance in hell. In here all right, but out in the real world he's a ticking time bomb." The cat didn't know what this mouse was in for, but he was willing to bet it was something boring, fiddling with his taxes maybe, or telling some lie about some junk nobody cared about in the first place. He wouldn't know a good time if it came up and slapped him between the ears. But here he was, ragging on this hairless mink. "Refuses to take his recovery seriously. A classic example of a dry drunk." Give the guy a break, the cat thought. The poor bastard is permanently naked. His wife left him, his chop shop was confiscated. So who the hell cares if he starts drinking again? It beats sitting around and listening to the likes of you for the rest of his miserable life. The cat didn't say any of this stuff, but he thought it. And it must have shown on his face. "Do you have a problem?" the mouse asked. And the cat said, "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do." Sensing trouble, the chaplain moved between them and held out his webbed hands. "All right, gentlemen" he said, "Let's just take this down a notch." "I got a problem with certain rodents," the cat continued, "The kind who think that unless you're as pompous as they are, you're going to wind up on the trash heap." "Yeah?" The mouse said, "Well, I got a problem with cats who try to take someone else's inventory before they've taken their own." He was a spunky little thing. You had to give him that. Here he was, no bigger than a hair ball, yet he was more than willing to mix it up, and with a cat no less. "Don't think I'm going to forget this," he said as the chaplain pulled him back. And the cat said, "Oh, I'm so scared." When dinner time came, the cat joined the mink for burgers and fries in the prison cafeteria. The mouse was on the opposite side of the room, sitting between a rabbit and a box turtle at the vegetarian table. And every few seconds, he'd look up from his plate and glare in the cat's direction. "I don't know what's going on between you two," the mink said. "But you'd better find some friendly way to straighten it out. I'm telling you brother, you do not want that mouse as an enemy." "What's he going to do?" the cat said, "Steal the cheese off my hamburger?" "I don't know what he's going to do, but I know what he did do," the mink said. And he leaned his raw, seeping head across the table. "They say it was arson, chewed through some wires and set a police building on fire. Four German Shepherds killed on the spot, and two more so burnt their own mothers wouldn't recognize them. Now I don't know what all you think, but in my book, brother, that's cold." The cat dragged a fry through a puddle of ketchup. "Dogs?" you say. The mink nodded. "One of the burnt ones was two weeks from retirement, had a party lined up and everything." "You're breaking my heart," the cat said. The next A.A. meeting was par for the course, not a decent story to be had. Someone said he was dying for a drink and then someone else said the same thing. When that got repetitive, a member told the group why he wanted to drink. "Anyone else like to share?" the chaplain asked. "Any new voices we haven't heard from?" And the cat closed his eyes. He usually drifted off to sleep and came to during the serenity prayer. But today he stayed awake, waiting for the mouse to pipe up and say something stupid like "easy does it" or "fake it 'til you make it," aphorisms he couldn't go 10 minutes without repeating. "Boys," he'd say, "When things get tough, I just have to remind myself to let go and let God." Then everyone would act as if they hadn't heard this 5,000 times already, as if it wasn't printed on flea collars, for Christ's sake. Today though, the mouse skipped the slogans and talked about a recent encounter that had tested his resolve. "I won't name names. But this was between myself and the sort of individual I call a pustule, the kind who likes to creep around and listen to conversations that are none of his business. That's how he gets his kicks, see. The cat said, "Why I oughtta--" And the chaplain pointed to a sign reading, no cross talk. Of all the rules, this was the lousiest, because it meant you couldn't respond directly to someone, even if he was obviously trashing you. "Now, I didn't know this individual from Adam," the mouse continued. "I'd seen him around, sure. But aside from being ugly, there was no reason to notice him. He was obviously no smarter than this chair I'm sitting on. But that didn't keep him from running his mouth. In fact, it was just the opposite. This pustule pushed every button I have. And just as I was about to rearrange his face, I remembered my fourth step and let it slide." There was a general murmur of congratulation and the mouse acknowledged it. "I can't say I'll be so forgiving the next time. But I guess I'll just cross that bridge when I come to it." Then a goat raised his hand and recalled getting drunk at his nephew's bar mitzvah. The animals shook their head in sympathy. And the cat joined in, biding his time until a couple more had spoken. Then he could call the mouse a few names of his own. Next, a guinea pig said some crap about insecurity. A leech wondered if the Big Book came in an audio version. Then just as he had finished, the cat stuck his paw into the air saying, "Hey everybody, I got a little story to tell." "That's not the way we do things here," the chaplain said. "Before you speak, you have to introduce yourself." "OK," the cat said. "I'm a cat and I got a little story to tell." "You know what I'm talking about," the chaplain said. "Come on now, it's not going to kill you." The cat stared across the table at the mouse and saw the same expression he'd observed the night before in the cafeteria. Smirky, defiant, the look of someone convinced that he had already won. "All right," the cat said, "I'm a cat and-- aw, to hell with all of you." The mouse put his little hand over his heart as if to say, oh you're killing me. And the cat pounded his paw on the tabletop. "I'm a cat, all right? I'm a cat and I'm a-- and I'm an alcoholic. You happy now?" Then everyone said, "Hello, cat," and waited, their eyes politely downcast as he began the long business of recovering himself. "So that's how I met my first sponsor," the cat would later say. This at meetings in damp church basements and low-slung community centers, years after he was released from prison. "That little SOB saved my life. Can you beat that? A murderer, an arsonist, and not a day goes by when I don't think about him." It maybe wasn't the best story in the world. But as the mouse had told him on more than one occasion, it wasn't the worst either. David Sedaris is the author of several books, most recently Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. He also has edited a collection of favorite short fiction called Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Coming up, cat and mouse with a mouse that cannot even move. Why, oh why would it take 10 decades to catch? 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. We bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Cat and Mouse. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three. In most games of cat and mouse, you've got the chaser and you got the chased, right? And both of them are pretty much in constant motion. But here's a story where the mouse is not moving at all. In fact, the mouse is an inanimate object. And yet, somehow it cannot be caught. David Segal reports. I've known Eric for just about 20 years. And for nearly the entire length of our friendship, he's been hunting quarry that everyone else cornered a long time ago, something nobody really thinks of as the sort of thing you hunt. I've been looking for the right sofa for about 18 years. Yes, he said 18 years. And yes, he said sofa. All of this started after Eric left graduate school. And briefly, it looked like it would be a fairly conventional shopping experience. He spotted a sofa he liked at Pottery Barn, an off-white number with a slip cover. And he had a matching pair delivered. But once they arrived, he knew he'd made a big mistake. The lines were all wrong. The fabric wasn't right. He returned the goods within a week. And after that, the shopping experience was never conventional again. His quest moved into what I call its "Ahab/Moby Dick" phase. He began to stalk his couch. For years he'd subscribe to these high-end furniture magazines. And slowly, he started to build a clip file of advertisements and photographs. He learned the ins and outs of couch construction, the proper materials for the frame-- What they call kiln-dried hardwood. Invisible stitching. Cushion filling. There's a firmness but a softness, which is actually not all that easy to achieve. The fabric for the covering-- The kind of the boucle that they do, which is the fabric that I was keen on. And of course, all important, the springs. What's called eight-way hand-tied, I think, which is, they do eight-way hand tying of the coils. I should say, Eric's not this way when he's buying clothes. He's not this way when he's ordering dinner. He's not this way with a lot of things. But when it's something he cares about, he's methodical and he's relentless. But with the sofa, he went further than he ever had before. By the time his search entered its 10th year-- that's more than twice as long as it took scientists at the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb-- Eric was honing in. He'd started shopping in these swanky boutiques, places that don't even have storefronts, places where someone has to tell you the address and then buzz you in. He had his eyes on the work of a sofa superstar named Jean-Michel Frank. And there was one piece in particular that he decided was the couch of his dreams. It was a $12,000 three-seater of Italian nutwood in a beeswax finish. Eric found the one place in the country where it was for sale. A place called Ralph Pucci. So you walked around this place, and did you fall in love with any of the sofas? Did you hear the church music you were looking for? Yeah, well, it's interesting. The short answer is, I didn't, which was kind of dismaying. When I saw it in person, I was actually a little underwhelmed. So you ultimately passed on all of the sofas that you came across during your 15- to 18-year search for the perfect sofa. Right. Could you describe your current sofa? That's just plain mean. Where did you get your current sofa? So I got my current sofa for free. It was a donation from a friend that I was helping move out of his apartment. The polyester fill cushions have gotten flattened to the point where if you plop down, if you just kind of collapse into my sofa, you will actually hurt yourself. More than a few times in these past 18 years, Eric and I have tried to figure out what this sofa thing is really about. Perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Eric is single. He's had a fair number of girlfriends. With some he's even shared the story of his never-ending couch adventure. And guess what, they don't seem very amused. Yeah. I mean, it kind of drives them crazy. To review. Just after college, he found something he liked, lived with it briefly, and then decided it wasn't good enough and sent it packing. He started pursuing exotic specimens that conformed to a narrower and more unattainable ideal. He subscribed to glossy, photo-rich magazines, which only reinforced his yearning for this unattainable ideal. And then, after years of searching, he finally came face-to-face with that ideal. He found it lacking. Do you see where I'm going here? Often, when I talk to him about his quest, I want to say, wait, are we still talking about a couch? Do I hold out for one that really knocks me out or do I just settle for something that is-- that I can live with, but really doesn't knock me out? But does it not worry you that you might live a sofa-less, single life? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. This is probably the thing that causes me more concern and dismay and questions as anything in my life. I really, really like being together. And I'm not all that crazy about being alone. One thing that's interesting about the tale of Eric's nonstop sofa safari-- which I've heard him tell more than a few times-- is that it ticks off nearly as many people as it amuses. Some are actually angry when he's done with the story. And I think I know why. Two radically different world views are clashing here, one in which life is all about seeking perfection, and the other in which you make normal compromises and settle for good instead of great. The settlers consider the perfection people to be babies and whiners. The perfection people see the settlers as strangely hostile milquetoasts who've given up, who aren't striving for greatness, who've been cowed into lowering their standards. Personally, I know that part of me wants to tell Eric, don't yield. Do not surrender. Hold fast. Wait for that transformative moment, even if it means you're alone and drooling on a frat house futon for the rest of your life. And another part of me wants to tell him exactly what a former girlfriend once told him, and I quote, "Just buy a [BLEEP] couch." David Segal is a reporter for the Washington Post. Act Four, Spray My Name, Spray My Name. Over the years, Brian Thomas Gallagher has followed the cat-and-mouse struggle between graffiti writers and the people who notice their work more than anybody else, the cops who are trying to bust them. So this is how it works. Some teenager decides he's going to start writing his name on things-- buildings, vans, windows-- and then 75 NYPD officers have full-time jobs trying to hunt him down and arrest him. They can get downright obsessive. A lot of the officers in the unit will say, I want this guy. This is Lt. Steve Mona. He's been with the Vandal Squad for 19 years. He knows the feeling. It becomes like a disease. You hear it when the cops come into work at night. They don't just drive down the parkway to get to work. They drive down the parkway and looking at the bridge abutments and everything. And the minute they come into work-- it's not even roll call time yet-- and you hear one cop saying to the other one, hey, did you drive down the Bronx River today? No, I didn't, why? It was clean yesterday and so-and-so and so-and-so hit it last night. They must have been out there. Damn, I was there. We passed there around 2 o'clock in the morning. I don't remember the graffiti. As cat and mouse games go, this is classic. You have the writers, more nimble but less powerful, dashing out, doing their work, almost taunting. And then you have the cops, watching and waiting, and occasionally catching them. The 75 Vandal Squad cops call themselves the vandals. Some cops will get fixated on a certain writer. Officers have been known to keep snapshots of graffiti taped to their computer monitors. And for a while, Lt. Mona's screensaver was a piece by a notorious writer named Lee. They study a writer's work, learn his style and habits. They follow them to and from their houses. They know where they work. They keep thick dossiers full of photos of different tags. Tags are what a graffiti writer writes, their graffiti alias. To most people, they barely look like English. Vandal Squad cops are pretty much the only people in the city besides the writers who can read them. In an odd way, a Vandal Squad cop can become a writer's biggest fan. But the writers know the cops, too. Steve Mona is famous. Although they don't keep files on him. They actually took my I.D. card photo, which was on the NYPD website and made a stencil out of it. And that was getting stenciled all over the place. I've had stuff written about me, about my sexual orientation and things like that. The first time it happened, I was offended by it. And then a chief who I worked for at the time said, if they're writing your name instead of their own, you're doing a good job. And that's not all. I was talking about Mona with a graffiti writer that goes by the appetizing tag of Earsnot when this came up-- I've seen his Friendster thing. I know somebody else did that. I'm sorry. He has a Friendster page? There was a Friendster page of this cop with a mustache that looked-- and it said Mona. Somebody was putting up stencils of that. It was obviously a character that somebody else created about him. After he told me about the Friendster page, I looked it up. It is actually a photo of Mona lifted from the Vandal Squad website. Among his listed hobbies are spray paint, markers, Rikers Island, and ruining a kid's life who just wants to have some fun. Graffiti writers actually give specific cops nicknames, like Bongos, whose name is a play on his actual name, Bogliole. Or Iceman, who looked like the character from Top Gun. And then there were Tom and Jerry, because their names were, in fact, Tom and Jerry like the cat and the mouse. First of all, let me just say, every time I've gotten chased, I've gotten away. So I have a 100% record of running and getting away. Is there an enjoyable aspect to the fact that the cops are looking for you and after you? It feels good to be wanted. No matter what anybody says, no matter how-- what kind of want it is. It's dope. They want to get me. It's Bonnie and Clyde, it's Wilt Chamberlain. They just want you. One strange thing about this game is that it's actually really hard to convict anyone for writing graffiti. The police can't just know who you are. They have to catch you in the act. And if they do, they can only charge you with that one offense, even if they know you've blanketed all of Brooklyn with that exact same tag. Once you're in court, most judges don't take graffiti very seriously. Even the biggest cases tend to end in community service or probation. Still, every major graffiti writer has been arrested multiple times. Not long ago, Earsnot gave the cops a little gift by giving an interview in a graffiti documentary called Infamy. It hasn't been released. And even the director doesn't know how it ended up in the Vandal Squad's hands. Here's the clip that got him in trouble. Do it in day time, midtown, easy. People in suits are like, mmh, I didn't see that. He's walking down the street in broad daylight, tagging mailboxes, windows and doors with a fat silver marker. I like it, especially when I can see the cop and I'm like, catching my tag and then, uh-huh, and done. Circle. Underline. Star. We knew who he was. He's doing his tag in the video. That's Lt. Mona. We have him doing the graffiti on video. This is the nature of me and most of the [? freedom ?] writers. You don't want anybody telling you what to do. You want to [BLEEP] break the law. You want to take that chance of getting caught and you love it. And you love [BLEEP] with them and being like, I'm going to do it again and again. The officers watched and then they stopped the video. OK, we got a street sign. OK, I know the neighborhood. And then just let me drive. I drive up one street then down the next street and up the one street until they found those particular locations. And they did. And they did. And you arrested him at work? And he was arrested. The case is still open, though, and Snot's holding out. I talk to him in the same exact store that he walks into on the video, the same exact store where he was arrested. And he explained it all this way. They saw someone who looked like me doing something in a movie and they just assumed that they were going to arrest me and everything was going to be all right. I can see where you are. So I know that I'm not getting caught. You know what I'm saying? The person in the video is either Earsnot or someone wearing a meticulously well-realized Earsnot costume. Then there's a graffiti writer who managed to evade the police longer than anyone else. The guy whose tag was Revs. Revs accomplished one of the most extensive and sustained graffiti projects of all time. He didn't just bomb as many walls as he could. He didn't just write his name. He wrote his entire autobiography on New York City itself, on the walls of the subway tunnels. Down there, between the stations, he would paint a swath of wall white, say 4 feet by 10. And then on the white patch, he would write in black spray paint-- page after page-- telling his life story in the dark, in a place where no one would read it. The pages are signed, numbered and dated. There are 235 of them, one between almost any two stations in the city. I've seen a few dozen and they are quite moving and impressive. Even Lt. Mona thought they were interesting. Little poems, he called them. For years, it was a mystery, even to the cops, how he did it and who he was, how he got a roller, a ladder, and a bucket of paint into the tunnels at night, all while dodging trains and cops and track workers. Cops would read the pages for biographical details, like page two, where Revs gives the date of his birth and the name of the Brooklyn hospital where he was delivered, Victory Memorial in Bay Ridge. He was 8 pounds, 13 ounces. A C-section. This went on for years, the Vandal Squad chasing him the whole time. Finally, he was caught in the act, arrested, charged, and convicted, not only with graffiti and trespassing, but also possession of stolen property, which he was wearing. A stolen subway worker's uniform, that's how he was able to evade the police all those years. Everybody who saw him with the buckets of paint just thought he belonged down there. The officer who caught and interrogated him, James Bogliole-- the one graffiti writers call Bongos-- has probably read more of his pages than any non-writer. He told me he'd spent so long chasing Revs, piecing him together, sort of forming him in his mind, that it came to be that he understood him a little. Revs turned out to be a 33-year-old ironworker from a working class neighborhood, not so different, really, from any of the cops pursuing him. Brian Thomas Gallagher is a senior editor at Topic magazine. Well, our program today was produced by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder, Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Thea Chaloner, Seth Lind, Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Hey, everybody, I got a little story to tell. Oh, WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia who, I guess, has something he wants to share with everybody. I'm a cat, all right? I'm a cat and I'm a-- and I'm an alcoholic. You happy now? Hello, Torey. 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. And each week on our show we choose a theme, invite writers and performers of all kinds to do stories on that theme. And, usually, somewhere near the top of the show, I tell you what the theme is and give you a little road map of what's coming up in the hour. But I think that today, it's going to be more interesting if we just start right in on the first act and let things unfold for a while before I give it a name, before I tell you what the theme is. So our first story is by Dael Orlandersmith. It's originally from her Obie-award winning show, Beauty's Daughters, and was recorded at a variety show here in Chicago, called Millie's Orchid Show. Before we begin this story, two quick caveats. Number one, some of the language might not be suitable for younger listeners. Though, as you'll hear, we've beeped out the nastiest words. And, number two-- and usually I would never point something like this out-- you need to know that Dael is a woman, an African-American woman. And I point this out because, If I didn't, you wouldn't be able to enjoy what the audience in the theater with her gets to enjoy, which is the pleasure of watching her complete transformation into this loudmouthed, white guy. So here's Dael Orlandersmith. Hey! Ah! Jerry! How you doin', buddy? How you doin'? Lorraine, you lookin' good honey. You lookin' so fine. Lenny! How's it going? All right. Johnny Black, nectar of the gods. Oh, man. I tell you, Len, today was [BLEEP]. Yeah, yeah. I know every day is [BLEEP]. But today was really [BLEEP], you know? So [BLEEP] busy. See, everybody I know who works in the fish market-- because my clothes are gettin' [BLEEP] ruined here-- everybody I know who works in the fish market, their clothes are [BLEEP] up. And I tell you, Len, I can't stand the thought of goin' home right now. I just can't. Theresa's gettin' fatter and fatter. It ain't 'cause she's pregnant because I don't touch this bitch. Well, what? What? I'm cold for saying that? Why am I cold? Lenny, let me explain something. No, please wait. No, please, please listen to me. Lenny, I'm 31 years old. I'm married 12 years. I got seven kids. I'm a young man. I'm [BLEEP] trapped. And TT's the laziest bitch in the world. No, no, hear me out. Here she is, 28 years old, looking 50. The problem is? The problem is I married too quick. My cousin, Jimmy, says to me, he says, "Anthony, don't get married so quick. You's two are young. Go out and get laid. Have a pisser." But, of course, I don't listen, right? I don't listen. So this is what I am today. Come here. I wanna tell you something. Come here. I wanna tell you something. Come here [BLEEP]. Don't [BLEEP] with me. Come over here. Come over here. I met this chick at my friend Manno's wedding. Yeah, it's a black chick. Yeah, right. Anthony Mancuso. Right. Same [BLEEP] guy from Red Hook. Right. Same guy. Right. He's been in here with me a few times. Right. He lives on 36th Avenue now, in Bensonhurst. Right. It's the same guy. Yeah. Yeah! It's the same [BLEEP] guy. Yeah, it's the same guy. So, anyway, you know, we're at the reception, right? And TT's talking to Manno's wife, Gail, with the rest of the Cusonettes, right? They're sitting there. They're talkin', "Nah, nah, nah, nah nah." And Manno's wife, Gail, is no prize either, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. So anyway, this black chick-- Diane, her name is, right-- is sittin' over to the side, right? So I look over at her, smile. She smiles back. Then I notice that she's big, not fat, big. In proportion, the way TT used to be, right? So I go over to her and I say, "You know, I really think you're good-lookin'. And they really need to get rid of words like Nigger and Guinea. Do you know why? Because I wanna put my tongue in your mouth." She gets mad. She says, "Let me tell you something. The only reason why you came over here is because I'm the only black person at this wedding. Well, guess what? I don't have a problem with that. You do. So do yourself a favor. Get out of my face before I hurt you." Now I'm standing there [BLEEP] slammed, right? So I say, "Listen. Listen. Come here. Listen. I don't care how big you are. Woman or not, you hit me, you're dead," right? Then she says, "First of all, my being a woman is not the issue because I'm more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever know." "Second of all, technically, I know I can't whip you because you're still a man. But, if you lay one finger on me, I'll give you such a fight you'll wish to God you stayed home today. In other words, my name is pain. I will inflict. Now, do you really wanna [BLEEP] with me?" So now, you know, like, I'm quiet, right? And I'm also scared outta my mind. Now, part of me wants to give her a smack, and another part of me's in love, Lenny, she's so [BLEEP] tough, right? So I say, "Rocky! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey, Rocky. I'm sorry, baby. I apologize. Come with me to the bar to get a drink," right? So we go to the bar. We go to the bar, right? So I say, "Diane, let me order you a rum and Coke, because I know that blacks and Ricas like that, right?" She gets mad again, right? And she says, "Order me Stoli, rocks, lime garnish, and stop being an asshole." So now I know I'm in love, right? Right. So we go to the bar. We're hangin' out. We're talkin', "Yadda, yadda yadda." And the DJ starts playing. I give you one [BLEEP] guess, man. One guess. There you go, baby, Sinatra, Jerry Vale. I swear on my mother, every Guinea wedding, Sinatra, Jerry Vale, right? So then, since all of us are in our '30s, the DJ started playing disco because that's what we danced to when we were kids, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And I asked Diane would she like to dance. And she says, "No." She hates disco, likes rock, old R&B and jazz. I said, "Oh, my God." I said, "What? You like jazz?" So she said, "Yeah." Lenny, I swear on my [BLEEP] mother, for the next three hours we're talkin' jazz. You see, I don't know whether you know this, but I was a major jazz fan, man. I used play. I used to play horn. I was playing both sax and trumpet. And my [BLEEP] record collection, man, I had Cannonball Adderley. I had Miles and Prez, you know? See, jazz, at that time, man, was like so a part of me, you know? But I can't touch it any more. You know what I'm saying? So Diane is a poet, you know? And I never knew a poet before. And she was talkin' about, maybe, that I could pick up my horn again, and maybe she could write lyrics. And God, I swear to God, Lenny. This woman is so [BLEEP] beautiful to me now, right? And I'm thinking well, yeah. Maybe, yeah, you know? I could pick up the horn again. You know? And she's just talkin' and talkin'. And I swear she's the most beautiful thing I ever seen, right? And she tells me, she says-- I'm gonna sound [BLEEP] queer saying this to you, all right-- but she says, "Anthony, when you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful." Yeah, she said that to me, Lenny. She also called me a pain in the ass. But she said, when I talk music, I become beautiful. So, Lenny, all of a sudden-- wait a minute. Wait. I don't want nobody to hear this, right? All of a sudden, Lenny, sittin' there, talking about all these people that I liked in jazz, I felt like crying because I'm not going to be able to touch it again. And nobody ever saw that in me before, you know? Nobody. So, anyway, we're talking. And she's really hot, you know? And I wanted to get outside because I was dying to ask for her phone number, right? Seconds later, TT walks out with the kids. "Anthony, me and the kids are ready to go home. Now!" Diane looks at me like I'm [BLEEP] crazy, right? TT's standin' there looking like a [BLEEP] whale. What the [BLEEP] can I do? Bada bing. Bada bang. I introduce them to each other. Diane says, "Pleased to meet you. I'm outta here. I'm doing the slide." That night, I take TT home, right? And dig this. Dig this. I go down in my basement, right? And, for the first time in five years, I pick up my sax. And it feels so [BLEEP] good to hold it, you know? Then I put it to my mouth, and with every note I can taste, feel, Diane. See, she's all over this [BLEEP] horn. Then I put the sax down, open my eyes, and it dawns on me I ain't going nowhere. I ain't going nowhere. But I could always do another shot of Johnny Black, right, babe? Well, wah, don't worry about me. I won't get junked. I can't. I gotta go to work tomorrow. But, you know, this is my time now, right? Just let me sit here for a few minutes, all right? I tell you what, my time. I'll go in a little while. I'll go in a little while. Ken Vandermark on the sax. This story was by Dael Orlandersmith. And this brings us to today's theme, which is people who come alive for music, people who live for music, even though, for most of them, they'll never get very far with music. All our stories today, on today's show, are people about whom you could say-- When you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful. That's right. In our program today Act Two-- we just heard Act One-- Act Two will be a brother who struggles to be a star. Act Three, Choosing Fandom. Act Four, a life in music without fame or fortune. So we are now at Act Two, for those of you who are keeping careful, careful score. I know there's so many of you who are. Act Two is a story about somebody who decided to follow his dream, about being a musician. And, you know, usually, when you hear stories about somebody chasing a dream like this, stories about rock stars or Olympic athletes, or writers, or painters, or basically anybody who had to get out there and follow that star, follow that dream, we don't hear how crushingly hard it is for the overwhelming majority of them. And in the middle of the story, usually, you don't wonder is this worth it? Well, the story you're about to hear does not have that shortcoming. You definitely wonder. The story you're about to hear was produced by Jay Allison with Dan Gediman. Dan is the one who narrates the story. That's not Tom Jones. It's my brother, Alex Jones. And that's not his real name. His real name is Mark Gediman. You know, my real last name is Gediman, G- E- D, as in David, I- M- A- N. You know, I'm proud of the name. But, as far as show biz is concerned, it can't be spelled. My brother's middle name is Alex. He bumped it up to the front. But I like Alex. Alexes work. There aren't too many Alexes that are big these days, so I'm sticking with that name. It's very catchy because people always remember Alex. For a while, when he was in this rock band in the late '70s, he called himself Alex Space. But that's another story. For the past five years it's been Jones, Alex Jones. I had a jones for singing. I had an addiction. That's pretty much the truth. My brother has had a jones for singing for just about as long as he's been alive. All he ever wanted to do is make music, to sing for people. The Kiwanis group, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, the Elks, the Sons of Italy, you name it, if there's one of those, I've been there. My brother sang constantly in our house when we were growing up. He always wanted to be a rock star or the next great soul singer. Once he was out on his own, he sang everywhere he could. And he still does, anywhere he can find an audience to appreciate him. --the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I've done schools. I've done colleges. I've done arts exhibition and whatever-- they also have cows and things like that, you know, one of those-- and, basically, anybody that'll have me, you know? Yeah, Tom gets around. My brother's been in countless rock, blues, and R&B bands over the years. But, these days, he's mostly hired as a Tom Jones impersonator. He does that by night, though. During the day, he holds down a straight job. You know, it's tough to tell people, your co-workers, I'm going to be Tom Jones, particularly when I've been trying for the last few years to develop an image of this-- I've been working as a computer analyst-- and developing this image as this kind of conservative nerd-type. And I've totally, totally blown it. My brother performs with a revue called The Hall of Fame Superstars. There's a Patsy Cline, an Elton John, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison. And then my brother closes the show as Tom Jones. Singing as Tom Jones is very similar to the way that I naturally sing. We have a lot in common. But I've gotten to the point where I'm hitting notes and doing things that are beyond the scope of what he did. My brother is nothing, if not confident, at least on the surface. He thinks positive and has an uncanny, almost, overconfidence. It's an amazing quality, really, even unsettling. My brother's 43, not married, doesn't have kids. He's had a lot of girlfriends, but he doesn't have a steady one now. These days, he's living at home with my parents in Massachusetts. Why don't we go to the music room? All right. --for a little bit to get out of the way. Growing up, we had a room in the house we called the music room. Now it looks a whole lot different. That's where my brother and I talked the last time I was home visiting. There was a Scott amplifier. Right. Right in the corner here. Yeah, and in the corner here was a very large, professional turntable, which had come right from a radio station. And I forget what the brand of that one was. Rek-O-Kut. Rek-O-Kut, yeah. But it was a top-of-the-line. But, yeah, this was a great room, great atmosphere. And you walked in this room and there were little musical notes bouncing all around it. And it was a place where we could just go in and play around and make believe you're the star. [SINGING] Come on, baby. Oh, let's loop-a-loo. She's a ha-hum, baby. Nothin' she can do. She's my little baby. Little Latin Lupe Loo. This is a tape of my brother pretending to be a star, recorded on my family's old Grundig tape recorder back around 1966. My parents put a lot of insulation in the walls of the music room, so my brother could really scream. The entertainers who really are memorable and who've stand the test of time, a great deal of them have tremendous screams. So I've always thought that screaming was essential to someone who-- not necessarily in the popular music idiom. But, in anything that had any kind of edge or soul to it, there's got to be a scream there, somewhere. And the whole reason is the same reason. It's a expression of the most inner, primal feelings. Wow! Hey! Oh! This is the room where my brother began studying the great rhythm and blues singers, people like Al Green, Little Richard, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Tom Jones, who my brother thinks brings them all together. Just at the beginning of What's New Pussycat, he goes, "What's!" Right. See? Now, you're getting, now, right there with the what;s, you've got James Brown, "Wow!" You know? Right. And then you got Wilson Pickett, "Ah-Ow!" And then you got Ray Charles, "Mm, Oh!" You know? And then you've got like, "Yeah!" Then you get, "Uh!" and, "Ah!" and, "Hey! Hoy! Ah! Ah-oh! Ew-oh! Oh! Mm! Mm! What's!" See? So that's there, you know? I remember the first time I ever saw my brother perform. My parents took me to see him at a high school variety show when I was still in elementary school. Now, nobody knew that I could sing. But there was a band, the Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the first version of them with Al Cooper. And there was a song on there called, "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know", which is a real bluesy ballad. And I used to sing that over, and over, and over again in this music room. And so I ended up singing it. It was my first real performance, as me, in front of a stage, being the performer, like the Elvis or something. And I can remember having this silky shirt on. And I probably had my ID bracelet hanging. And I opened up my collar a little. And it was quite an experience, as I recall. And I think I did fairly well. I still do. I really sold it out, you know? I really started screaming there at the end. I remember, by the end of the number, your shirt was virtually half off or something. That was my recollection. I was very impressed. I'm sure it was the first time I ever saw you perform. I don't even remember that you were there. Oh, I was absolutely there. Yeah? Yeah, absolutely there. And I remember that very well. And mostly, of course, I remember you. I have a vivid memory of being on the playground behind my elementary school, trying to explain to the other kids that, the night before, my brother was this big star. And I imitated you, singing the same song, which, of course, I had heard endlessly with you rehearsing it. And I still know the song. And I went out and bought the record, by the way, about five years ago. And I have it. And the only reason I know that album is because of you. But, I remember, I was imitating you complete with undoing my shirt. I felt like a celebrity, even though the other kids didn't know it, because, god, my brother, he just did this thing. And so I was pretty impressed. If it's not clear by now, I idolized my brother. I used to sneak into his room when he wasn't home and look through his things, put on his clothes, smell his cologne. As a matter of fact, I still have a YMCA T-shirt that he used to wear when he was a counselor at Camp Beaver. It's full of holes, almost a rag, but I'd never let it go. And I've always followed his career in music because I was sure, especially after high school, that he was going to make the big-time. And he almost did. His close calls with fame were many. They proceeded to tell us that they were going to put something like a half a million dollars behind The Super Group. And we were going to be the next Beatles or Monkeys. And I think, at the time, I was 21, I believe. And I'm just sitting there going, "Wow. I made the big-time." And he actually said to me that, "I think you're the next Bruce Springsteen." He, at the time, was an A&R representative for Atlantic Records. Joining this band called, Easy Action. They said, "Listen, we want 50% of you." And I said, "Forget it." I started a band right after that called Alex Space and the Orbits. "We're going to take you to the top." I moved to another band now, called Flyer. And we had a band called Future City. That band was called Zippers Polite and the Ambassadors of Love. It came to the point where every record company thought that the other record company was going to sign me. And, in effect, that I was going to be the next big thing. There were articles written saying that I was going to be the next Kiss, and this, and that. And Warner Brothers, they were going to have cartoons. And even where they were talking about designing some sort of video pinball game, a real total marketing thing. And I was so excited. And we were a couple of weeks away from signing the contract when OPEC had a oil embargo in 1979. The price of plastic went up 400%. And that was the end of my shot right there. It just vanished before my eyes. We ended up getting them to sign us up for a booking contract. And then, one night, they came up to us. And neither of these guys drank. They had ulcers. And they both walked around drinking a glass of milk. I remember, one day, they both walked up to me with a glass of milk, and they said, "Would you mind wearing an Elvis mask?" To make a long story short, the thing really kind of fell apart. And, at this point, I really got just totally discouraged with the whole scene. And, in fact, I remember just feeling like that what I really had inside me wasn't coming out. And I took this microphone-- I still have it to this day-- and I threw it up against the wall. I don't know. It's all smashed in. I just left and never went back. I left everything I had that was related to music in that room, and just, basically, quit. My brother left music completely for many years after this time, around 1984. For a while he dabbled with a little home recording setup trying to write some songs, but his heart wasn't in it. He stopped going out to clubs, lost touch with most of his musician friends, didn't play, didn't perform, just left. Then, in 1991, seven years later, he discovered karaoke. I was sitting having dinner. And I heard this music in the lounge. And this chorus of women singing was beautiful. I said, "I have to go in and hear this group." And I went in there, and there's no group. There's a guy who looks like he's sitting behind a keyboard. And he's got this big thing saying, "You are the star. "Sing the hits", or something like that. And I'm looking up. And there's a video playing of follow the bouncing ball. I didn't know anything about karaoke. And it just sounds fantastic. And I'm saying, "Jeez, all these years I've been sitting around trying to wait for the drummer to show up, or the bass player's having a nervous breakdown. And here there's no band, they just have these laser disks. They play the music and you just go up and sing. Not only that, you don't even have to remember the words because they're showing you the words. They had a little monitor that faces up to you. I mean, this was a singer's delight. It was heaven. After that, he was hooked. At the height of my interest in karaoke, easily, I was going out all seven nights. People loved him. He'd steal the show, knocking out the audience at bars all over the Boston area. And he began winning contests. All right, just take it. All right, just leave it right there. We have our five finalists standing over by the video monitor. And, Billy Costa, all four judges have assembled and decided who the winner is going to be. Why don't you tell us who that is. Wait a minute. OK, I'll just do it through this. I think it was unanimous. The guy was spectacular, Alex Jones. Alex Jones! How about a hand for our talented and fabulous Alex Jones, folks! My brother had found his way back to music. But, this time, he was Tom Jones. I feel authentic. I feel real. This is real. So where are you at in your process here? I like to put the leather pants on because it just feels good. But I forgot one thing. I've got to put something in my pouch. The ladies love this. You've got to roll it up so it's just about that thick, and then you fold it over, OK? Uh-huh. And what you got there is a real peach. So now you're going to stuff this down the front of your leather pants? Absolutely. And this is for the? Authenticity's sake. The next thing I do is I put a couple of belts with lots of metal on them because it just feels good. [LAUGHS] It also keeps my pants up. OK, now I have to get the makeup on. OK. Can I follow you? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't have the ruffled shirts. They're all at the cleaners. Yeah, I don't have time to pick up another, so that's the best I can do. It's kind of got that look a bit. See? That's what I have under. But over, as I'll show you later, I have a nice sequined tux that I put over all of this. And I kind of take a couple of things off. I see, OK. Because I get real hot, you know what I mean? OK, got to have rings and bangles and bongles. I got the big cross because he always had the big cross. So now what I have to do first is tie up me own hair. Oh, I forgot. Also got to put the mascara on the chest hair. When he was done, my brother was transformed. Not exactly Tom Jones, but close enough and ready to go. Five minutes late ain't no problem when Tom Jones is in the house. [APPLAUSE] Yeah! [WHOOPS] Thank you. My brother and I go to a gig outside Boston where some company's holding its employee appreciation party. Any pussycats out there? Do I hear any meows? It's in a function room next to a hotel restaurant, Bumbershoot's, Rockingham's, or something like that. Oh, yeah. Meow. Yes. The night before this, my brother told me, he'd performed at a Chinese restaurant. And after his finale, the whole place, all the guests and the waiters, even the stagehands, they all stood up and gave him a standing ovation. He said it was like being in a movie. A few months after I interviewed him, my brother got laid off from his computer job. My parents told me they were pretty worried about him. Now he's playing the stock market, trying to parlay his retirement money into a nest egg that will carry him for a while until he makes it big with his Tom Jones act. While my brother performed, I circulated through the room talking to people. Yeah, this guy is just very good. He's very good. He's pretty close? I thought he was very close. If I didn't meet him in the hallway and know otherwise, I would have questioned was this really the Tom Jones? I didn't tell anyone that Alex Jones was my brother. I just asked them what they thought of him. He's got a great voice, a really great voice. He does. He's good. So how do you get him, anyway? I can make sure that he gives you his card. Yeah, I would. I'd like to have his card. I wanted to hear that he was making them happy. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted to help him get more work. I wanted to hear that they loved him. Dan Gediman's story about his brother was produced by Jay Allison with consulting producer Christina Eckhoff. And it comes from Jay's series, Life Stories, which was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Dan and Jay are currently working on an upcoming series for NPR called, This I Believe. Their website for that, thisibelieve.org. Alex Jones can be hired to work as Tom Jones at private parties and corporate events, but he's working on a CD of his own music under the name Alex Space Jones. Coming up, other strategies to keep music in your life, if traditional music careers don't fly, 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 we choose a theme and bring you a wide variety of stories, documentaries, radio monologues, reportage, found tapes and found documents, which is what I have right here in front of me. Our theme today, stories about people who you could say this about. When you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful. Aha. And, of course, not everybody agrees about this beauty. Some people do not find it touching or inspiring to see people who love music. In fact, there are people who believe that loving music is a crisis of global proportions. And the document I hold in my hands is an advertisement, a call to arms really, from Motorbooty, a zine, a pretty great zine. And it's an advertisement for the First Annual Conference on World Band Population, on stopping the crisis of world band overpopulation, specifically. Says this ad, "According to recent studies, by the year 2001 there will be more people in bands than the global economy can ever hope to support. The US Census Bureau puts the current number of audience members to band members at a ratio of 2:1. The present trends threatened to reverse this relationship, disrupting the delicate balance between performers and normal people. Soon, not only will virtually everyone be in a band, but everyone in a band will be involved in several side projects, creating a glut of virtually indistinguishable groups of guitar-wielding miscreants who, when not performing their so-called music, will be endlessly talking about it to anyone unable to flee." And then the ad explains what's going to happen at the conference. The seminars dealing with the imminent dangers of band overpopulation, Legal Strategies for Achieving Zero Band Population Growth, Private Sector Initiatives for Ending Band Growth, Strategies for Ending Multiple Band Membership. Here's some of the things that they suggest can be done to combat this global crisis, let's see, three-strikes-and-you're-out rules; creating stiff criminal penalties for artists who release more than three full-length albums per career; waiting periods for instrument purchasers to allow for mandatory background checks for prior infractions, and a cooling-off period to discourage thoughtless and impulsive band formation; stiff fines for bands that imitate other bands; civil infractions for air bands, and an all-out ban on cover bands. They also suggest-- let's see-- boycotting labels that refuse to stop signing additional bands as well as cracking down on pointless, local, so-called, indie labels; finally, supporting random band testing by employers, especially in high-risk businesses like coffee shops, copy shops, cafes, bars, and record stores. Well, given the crisis of global band population explosion, perhaps the only honorable course for all of us is to forget about performing and just put that energy into being members of the audience. And what we present next on our program, as Act Three, is a case example of how to do exactly that. This is the Fastbacks, a pop, punk band from Seattle that's been around for years, actually. And the story you're about to hear is not about being in a semi-obscure but well-respected band, it's about being a fan of a semi-obscure but well-respected band. Sarah Vowell is a writer and a music columnist for the San Francisco Weekly, and she tells the story. Sometimes, opening your mail can be a little like listening to the radio. You're not paying attention, just absent-mindedly flipping through the letters and bills, and then, wham, some little surprise comes out of nowhere and changes your day. I got this package. Inside was a letter, thanking me for mentioning the Fastbacks in a book review I had written, not from one of the Fastbacks themselves, mind you, just some guy in Chicago. His name was Scott Lee, and he'd enclosed this xerox booklet about the band. Flipping through it, I stopped cold at something called, "The Fastback's Drummers Pie Chart". Since they formed in 1979, the Fastbacks have gone through about a dozen drummers. And this pie chart identifies the drummers by name, listing the percentage of songs which each one has contributed to. But, at the bottom of the page, small print warns, "Note, Rusty and Nate's shares may not be totally accurate. Their percentages may be approximately 0.68% off." And I don't think a decimal point had ever struck me as endearing before. The drastic exactitude of 0.68% sort of captured my heart, and I had to meet this person. Basically, it has your standard discography. And then there's just some facts here that I dug out, 139 total songs, eight hours, 25 minutes, 43 seconds worth of songs. So he showed me other stats, like total recorded versions of songs, total number of seconds of songs, which is 30,343, in case you were wondering. --shortest song, shortest instrumental song, shortest song with vocals, the longest song, and the longest song without a drum solo. That's only because-- I was stunned. I mean, I thought I liked the band. And, normally, as a music lover and as a woman, I rail against the mostly-male, record-collector geek habit of reducing rock and roll to baseball card collecting. They flatten out this complex, thrilling thing down to manageable lists of names and titles and dates. But Scott Lee's Fastbacks tribute has the devotional fervour of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The list of facts and figures is so relentless and exact and painstaking that it takes on this liturgical glow, as if the Fastbacks were a religion and Scott Lee its prophet. But some of the new additions to this-- as I ramble here-- listed out the songs A through Z and did the percentages of songs starting with each letter. And the letter that won was I. There were 19 Fastback songs that started with I, representing about 14% of the songs. With every album, they seem to have a song that starts with, "In", like, "In America", "In The Summer", "In The Winter", "In The Observatory". I soon found out that the band has befriended Scott Lee and that they've sort of informally appointed him their de-facto archivist. Singer Kim Warnick corresponds with Scott via email, sometimes, like four times a day. Guitarist and songwriter, Kurt Bloch, graciously calls him "A good person to have on our team." Though, when he first saw Scott Lee's packet, he had some understandable worries. Ah! I mean, it was like, boy. The first thing that would come to my mind is, is this guy really scary? Is he the kind of person I would run away from, if he was ever in the same room? Is this the kind of person that I would stop answering my telephone if he called? And, no, it's not. Not to make you think that we don't think Scott Lee is actually fairly crazy of a person, but he's not the annoying kind of crazy person that you read about. And I think he appreciates his own over-the-top-ness. If anything, the Fastbacks are a little protective of Scott Lee. When I was talking to Kurt, I jokingly called Scott his stalker. But he set me straight. No, he's not a stalker. He's a super-fan. Oh, a super-fan? Yeah. Stalker, that has negative connotations. Yeah, that's something we don't need. Super-fan is fine. Like the super-fan, the members of the Fastbacks all have day jobs. So, on any given day, it's possible that Scott is devoting more energy to being a fan than the Fastbacks devote to being in the band. When I interviewed Kim, the gaping differences between being a band member and being a super-fan were never clearer. OK, so I have a pop-quiz for you. How many total songs, before the new album, New Mansions in Sound, have the Fastbacks recorded? What is it, now? How many total songs have the Fastbacks recorded? Well, you know, unfortunately, I don't have something in front of me that could answer that question. Really? OK. I have to say it is 127. And I was wondering also if you knew the median song length? The what? Well, let's start with an easier one. What do you think is the average length of a Fastbacks song? She doesn't know. But, according to Scott, it's two minutes, 51 seconds. When I visit Scott Lee's house on Chicago's north side, his roommate lets me in. Scott's playing his guitar along with the new Fastbacks album. His room is decorated with Fastbacks posters. And Scott himself wears a Fastbacks T-shirt. He shows me this incredibly complex chart he's working on, a sort of family tree to the Seattle music scene, a town, by the way, which he has only visited once. The producers of This American Life would like me to say here that, when Scott talks about the Fastbacks, he becomes beautiful because that would go along with the first piece in the show today. But I would never say something so corny. When do you think you made the switch between just being a listener and being, as Kurt Bloch called you today, a super-fan? I think the transition really happened when I was in law school, and I had made this tape of my favorite Fastbacks songs. And I was walking across a very icy, cold midway in Buffalo. And, despite how cold it was, when I listened to this music, it really just pumped all this life into me. It was really a life-affirming experience, as corny as that might sound. But, I don't know, I was just really happy at that point. And it was just a light on me that shown. And I hadn't seen it before. And now everything seemed better. When you show this info packet to people, what is usually their reaction? I think the first question I always hear is, "Do you have a lot of spare time?" In fact, Scott's spare time is limited. He holds down a full-time job at a Chicago advertising agency, and he writes his own songs. And, truthfully, he flirts with the idea of not staying a fan. He's moving to Seattle, partly to be closer to the Fastbacks. He's actually in their circle of friends now. And he's tried a couple of times to start his own band. Once, he was invited on-stage with Kurt to play along with the song. It was exciting. But he's left-handed. And they didn't have a left-handed guitar for him. So it was sort of a disaster, not the moment a super-fan dreams of. So, in this show, what happens is someone tells their little story and then we play a song. So you get to pick which Fastbacks song gets to play at the end of your story. At the end of my story? Whew. [LAUGHS] I'd probably say, "Save Room For Me", then. Because I've definitely saved room for the Fastbacks, so, "Save Room For Me". Sarah Vowell, our contributing editor and the voice of teenage superhero, Violet Parr, in Pixar's new movie, The Incredibles. Act Four, A Life in Music. Sam Franco's 72 and has spent his life playing and teaching the accordion. And the thing to know about him is he hates accordion music, most of it, anyway. The sound of the accordion, we don't associate ourselves with too much, is like this. See? I haven't done that for years. It's hard for me to even play a regular style. I see why you like it the other way. Well, the other way it swings. [LAUGHS] It swings with the one finger. And I get a jazz sound, like this. Watch. Sam Franco hates that accordion oom-pah beat. He doesn't like the normal Lawrence Welk chord progressions. In his music, he changes them into jazz chord progressions. And, where normal accordion players use lots of chords all over the place, he prefers to play single notes. In his head, when he plays, Sam hears Coleman Hawkins and other jazz greats. He invented this style. And, if you check the Chicago Yellow Pages for jazz accordion, Sam is the only listing. All this hour we've heard from people who want to make their living, full-time, from their music. They dream and strive for that. Sam's done it all his life, playing gigs, working, never getting famous, though. You know what saved me? That I had the knack for teaching. You understand? That was my ace-in-the-hole, would be the teaching part. If I didn't have that, I would be out of the music business completely. He's watched players who weren't any better than him get a lot of attention, get notoriety, get more gigs. And, in the end, he decided he doesn't care. That life doesn't suit him. You couldn't pay mortgages, buy a house, on playing because you played one night. That's it. How would you like to go look for a job every week? And that's what it amounted to. I never did have that kind of energy. Most of the people who Sam started playing with back when he was a kid did not stay with music. Back when Sam began, accordion was huge, huge. Every band in Chicago had an accordionist doing their keyboards because pianos, in those days, were so impractical, you know? You can't carry them around. The one that you find at the hall is always out of tune. But that era did not last. When Elvis hit in the late '50s and rock and roll followed, accordion business died. Nobody hired them. Nobody wanted to take lessons. And lots of guys who Sam played and taught with quit the music business. Sam had always played guitar too. And he was actually one of the few people in his crowd who made the jump from the swing era to the rock era. These days, he jokes that every brick of his house was paid for by rock and roll. A big poster of electric guitarist, Randy Rhoads, is the biggest thing in his music room. He taught lessons for years on the guitar. But Sam still views the guitar as an inferior instrument. He can lecture you for a long time on how it's not in the symphony orchestra. Basically, in his view, America's 40-year love affair with the guitar is a concerted effort to slap back at the accordion. Because everybody's mother and father played the accordion. And they said, we're not going to play it, you know? We're going to play something different. And there it was. It just came out as a rebel cause, I think. It only has five notes, a set of six strings. Two are the same, so it brings it down to five notes, you know? You have to hit it with a pick. You've got to use two hands to make one note. Does that make sense? Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to use two hands to make one note? I met Sam through one of his students, Catherine Boyd, who totally adores Sam, has known him for years and says that, whatever goes on in Sam's life, he's always happy when he's talking about music. And the most surprising thing Sam told me when we talked is that it took him a long time before he was completely at peace with the way he plays. He started playing accordion when he was 10. He's 72 now. He played accordions back in the old neighborhood on Taylor Street as a kid. He found his way to the jazz sound that he loves by high school. He played in USO shows during World War II. He taught and gigged for the next half century. But he says he never felt good about his playing until he was in his '50s. Up until that point, the sound that he heard in his head wasn't what was coming out of the instrument. In his '50s, he said, he just stopped worrying about what people would say about his playing. He just played. I'd like to say this, is that I never enjoyed playing as much as I do today. In all my days, I never enjoyed playing as much as I do now. So, why is that? Ask me why. Why is that? Yeah, why is that? Because, today, I know what I can do. I know my limitations, and I know my abilities. Like, if I can't do it, I say who cares, you know? I can do something else. But, when I was younger, I knew my limitations. Of course, we all know our limitations, and that bothers you. But, today, it doesn't bother me. Today, in his music room, surrounded by his instruments, with one of his favorite students, Catherine, egging him on during our interview, Sam couldn't seem happier, really. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Peter Clowney and Alix Spiegel. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or buy CDs of them. Or you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even The New York Times all at audible.com This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is staring in your eyes right this second when he says-- When you talk about music, your face becomes beautiful. Yes, it does. And we'll be back in your face next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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He's brought out of the box and shackled to an eye bolt in the floor, with his back to the door. He's forbidden to face the natural light. Joe Margulies at the University of Chicago represents a few detainees at Guantanamo. And he says that to understand that thing about the natural light, you have to understand that the detention facilities at Guantanamo were designed to be the perfect interrogation chambers. And so anything the prisoner wants, including sunlight, he's only going to get with the permission of his interrogators as a reward for cooperating. And anything can be used that way. Mail. Another lawyer discovered when he first got there that his client, a middle-aged gentlemen with five children who is a London businessman who was picked up in the Gambia, and he wasn't getting any mail from his family. And he couldn't understand it, because he felt abandoned and alone from his five children. And the lawyer had the presence of mind to make inquiries to see what was the matter. And discovered that 16 letters were in the military's possession that they had refused to deliver. And when they did finally deliver them, someone had actually taken the time to redact out the words from the children, "we miss you daddy, we love you daddy, we're thinking of you." That is apparently not right because it disrupts the sense of isolation and despair that they are trying to cultivate. When prisoners feel despair, they'll cooperate, they'll talk, they'll tell us all the dangerous things they know. That's the idea. Let's make them feel hopeless. Ever since President Bush announced the global war on terror, we've been told this is a different kind of war, with different rules. The battlefield isn't a jungle in Asia, or a beach in France. It's everywhere. Soldiers aren't guys in uniform. They could be anybody. And prisoners of war are different, too, so dangerous, we're told, that we keep them in an offshore facility, in as close to total secrecy as possible, to interrogate whenever we want, however long we want, using methods we have never approved for other wars. And one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that, in all of these years that it has been going, why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio and TV? Over 200 of them have been released, right? At our radio show, we were talking about this this week and we realized that none of us had ever heard or read an interview with any of those guys. And so, today, you're going to hear from two of those Guantanamo detainees who have been released. And I believe you're going to be surprised at what they're like. And we're also going to explain, once and for all, how it is that, under these brand-new government rules and procedures in this new war, somebody can be locked away, basically forever, even when the government's own classified files say he is not a threat to America. As best as they can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan to poke fun at corrupt clerics, sort of the Pashto edition of The Onion. The first joke that got them into trouble is when they published a poem about a politician called, "I Am Glad To Be A Leader." Here's Badr. Let me translate a few lines for you. Sure. Before I was so thin and weak, and now I have big stomach. Uh, stuff like that. Yeah. So the guy with the big stomach called up Badr and his brother. He threatened them, and, as best as they can tell, told authorities that they were linked to Al Qaeda, which landed them in Guantanamo, and which leads us to the second joke. This one was in an issue of Badr's magazine that came out in the '90s, after our government set a $5 million reward for Osama bin Laden. Badr's magazine issued its own bounty for the capture of an American leader. President Bill Clinton. Giving the details how to identify, that he has blue eyes and he's clean-shaven. And the most important thing is that a recent scandal is going on between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. If someone finds that man, he will be awarded 5 million Afghani, Afghan currency, which was equal to $113 at that time. It's impossible to figure out, yeah. In Guantanamo, were you interrogated about your Clinton satire? Exactly. They were serious, if you really want to kill President Clinton? And we said, no, that's not. That was only satire, and only a way of expression. It is allowed. It is protected in your country, in American law. How many times were you interrogated, do you think, about the Clinton article? Oh, many times, many times. Me and my brother, each one of us, have been interrogated more than a 150 times. So after hearing the punchline explained 150 times, we finally got the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home. It had been three years since the Pakistani army surrounded their house in Peshawar, came into their living room, which is lined with wall-to-wall bookcases, and arrested them. That's Badr's version of why we jailed them. Here's President Bush's. These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill US troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again. The administration has never wavered on this point. Here's Dick Cheney on Guantanamo. The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban. We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an offshore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Badr. And every day, more stories like his are coming out. And they raise the question, is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes? In a new study from Seton Hall's law school, researchers simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here is what they found. Only 5% of our detainees in Guantanamo were scooped up by American troops on the battlefield or anywhere else, 5%. The rest, we never saw them fighting. And here's something else. only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as Al Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Dunleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many, quote, "Mickey Mouse prisoners." In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation interviewing dozens of high level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus that, out of nearly 600 men at Guantanamo, the number who could give us useful information about Al Qaeda was, quote, "only a relative handful." Some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen. The Seton Hall study might help explain that. It revealed that 86% of the detainees were handed over to us by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance. And some were handed over to us by a new method. Here's Badr. Actually, in our interrogation, the American interrogators have been telling us that they have paid a lot of money to those who handed over us to Americans. The problem was, we were offering bounties. You know, $5,000 or $10,000. Al Qaeda brought more than Taliban did. And so, OK, fine, here's your money. Take them to Gitmo. That's Rear Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyer. He was the Judge Advocate General until 2000. He says, essentially, we bought Badr, and a whole lot of other prisoners. And when you look at the economy in that part of the world, you know, that really is kind of a king's ransom. We all know this is a new war with new rules. But what were the old rules? Well, one had to do with POWs. The military has always known that all kinds of prisoners get picked up in the fog of war. So it was important to get those numbers down to just the real POWs, since troops on the move didn't want to be burdened with looking after lots and lots of captives. This problem had been more or less solved by the old Geneva Conventions, which required a, quote, "competent tribunal." It sounds crazy, a kind of impromptu court hearing, right after a battle. But that is exactly what used to happen. And typically, some 75% to 90% of the people scooped up would be sent home. In the Gulf War of 1991, we captured 982 people, released 750 of them right away, and the remainder were POWs. Like in the old war movies, they gave name, rank, and serial number, and they got certain things, everything from a pledge that they wouldn't be tortured, to a promise that they be released once the war ended, and even the right to send letters home. But this is a new kind of war, after all. And the administration made the argument that the Geneva Conventions apply only when you're fighting another country, a country with a uniformed army, not when you're fighting terrorists. They do not apply where the individuals captured haven't shown that they deserve those protections. That's Brian Boyle. He was Associate Attorney General for President Bush when these decisions were made. They did not legally qualify as Prisoners of War, because they are not fighting in uniform, because they try to blend in with the civilian population, because they try to take cover in civilian areas. Hasn't that been a problem for war for most of the 20th century, or at least in the last couple of conflicts we've been in? I mean, is rooting out Al Qaeda any harder, or how is it harder than rooting out Viet Cong in a local village? I take the point. I guess the point I was making earlier is that I don't think you can conclude, given the nature of the enemy we're facing, that how we treat Al Qaeda operatives that we're able to capture is going to make any difference at all in how they would treat American personnel in their custody, wouldn't make a difference at all. You know, that argument can really take you to some dark places, I think. Here's Real Admiral Hutson. If we pick and choose, then other countries can pick and choose whether they're going to apply the Geneva Conventions. And you know, that is a slippery slope that Secretary Powell and others did not want us to go down, because they're looking over the horizon. They know that this isn't the last war we're going to fight. It's not even the next-to-last war we're going to fight. This quarrel about the Geneva Conventions continued for three years, and eventually got down to one very practical question. If you're a prisoner, and you're not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and you might be held indefinitely, could you at least make an appeal in a US court? Here's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. We really are, for all intents and purposes, at war. And so you need not provide access to counsel. You need not provide the ability to challenge their detention in a criminal court. It would be like saying that Germans who were captured in World War II would have to be provided lawyers. The truth of the matter is the rules and procedures of our criminal justice system simply do not apply in this case. And he's absolutely right, about the Germans, except the Germans were covered by the Geneva Conventions. Finally, in 2004, the United States Supreme Court stepped in. It said, if prisoners aren't going to be covered by the Geneva Conventions, that's fine, but they couldn't be permitted to fall into a legal black hole, not protected by any law at all. They had to be given some way to challenge their detainment. It's one of the oldest rights in Western Civilization, known as habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, it's a phrase we all know, but, let's be honest, can't ever really remember what it means. It's not a trial, or anything like one. Its more, well, primal. It's a hearing that commands the executive, in this case, the President, to explain why he has jailed somebody. The idea dates back to 1215, England, when the nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta and agree to the great writ, later known as habeas corpus. In Latin, it means, show me the body. In other words, a neutral judge got to see the prisoner in person to check if he'd been tortured, and then the judge had the power to require the king to explain, why is this guy jailed. All the executive had to do was answer with a convincing story, and then the guy went back to the dungeon. It's a right so elemental that it's in Article One of the United States Constitution. It's one of the reasons we fought the Revolutionary War. And after the Supreme Court granted the detainees access to the courts, right away President Bush started talking like a habeas-loving King John. Yeah, look, we are a nation of laws. And to the extent that people say, well, America is no longer a nation of laws, that does hurt our reputation. But I think it's an unfair criticism. As you might remember, our courts have made a ruling. They looked at the jurisdiction, the right of the people in Guantanamo to have habeas review, and so we're now complying with the court's decisions. The administration quickly put together a kind of hearing based in part on the old Geneva Conventions hearing they had abandoned. They called this hearing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or in the elegant shorthand of the Pentagon, a CSRT. These new hearings have one oddity to them. The tribunal assumes all the evidence against the detainee is correct. If the detainee wants to prove them wrong, it will be difficult, because he's not allowed to see the evidence. It's classified. As a result, these hearings makes strange reading. In many of them, there comes a moment in the dialogue like this one between detainee Abdul Malik and the judging panel. They were each appointed a personal representative who is a military officer, who, in my case, met with my client the day before for 15 minutes, sat silent and failed to present all of the exculpatory evidence in his file, which, of course, any lawyer would have done, not the personal representative. And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file, with all the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing. The classified file contains-- The Washington Post wrote about it-- six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is. You know, memos saying this person was here, so and so witnessed him. In Kurnaz's case, there are five or six statements saying there's no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he's got no connection to Al Qaeda, there's no evidence linking him to the Taliban. Over and over and over again. But here's the thing. At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it. And Kurnaz himself doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant. He's still at Guantanamo today. But wait, there's more. The reason they give for holding him: a friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's two years after Kurnaz got picked up. So setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one's friend does, it's factually preposterous. And a simple Google search or call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well in Bremen and under no suspicion of any such thing. You heard that right. Kurnaz is in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber, except that he didn't become a suicide bomber, and is currently living in Germany. Yeah, he's walking around in Germany. I've met him. Then there's a bunch of Chinese Muslims we accidentally picked up during our sweep in Afghanistan. They are an ethnic minority known as the Uighurs. And they've been battling the communist Chinese since World War II. Conservatives love the Uighurs, which is why they've been passionately defended by the National Review and the Weekly Standard. After a corporate lawyer named Sabin Willett heard about them, he volunteered to represent a Uighur named Adel Abdul al-Hakim and some others. And he flew to Guantanamo to meet them. The main thing they wanted to talk about and that was so puzzling to them was that the previous May, the military had told them that they were, in their words, innocent. And why were they still here if they were innocent? So wait, what you're saying is, is that Adel and the other Uighurs are, in your opinion, have never been members of any kind of Al Qaeda or jihad, or anything like that. Yeah. It's not just my opinion. The defense department has determined that. That means they were never Al Qaeda, never Taliban, never any of that. The government says it would release Adel and the other Uighurs if only it could find a country to send them to. I have an idea. Adel could sail 90 miles north to Miami, where there's an entire city of anti-communists. Or he could be sent to one of the largest Uighur expat communities in Washington, DC. So why aren't we going to be seeing Adel any time soon? Here's Willett. I'll tell you what I think the answer is, although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that, if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them and took their pictures, and you know had them on TV shows or the radio, they'd be shocked. Because they've been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, and that they're the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel, you're going to suddenly realize you've been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first met him like the kind of kid your college-age son would bring home, you know, his roommate, his buddy from college, home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting, and their jaw is a little bit unsprung. And they don't say much, because it's hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know, this guy is in Guantanamo? If Willett is right, this gets to the heart of habeas. The whole point is that the king shouldn't have the right to just detain somebody because it'd be an embarrassment to have the guy free. The Pentagon has an acronym for people like the Uighurs. It's pronounced "enlec." It means No Longer Enemy Combatant. But as Willett notes, it should be Never Was Enemy Combatant. The problem with creating an offshore legal limbo, where there's no habeas proceeding to separate the Al Qaeda fighter from the comedy writer, comes during interrogation. If we've labeled them as terrorists, then that's how they get treated. Josh Colangelo-Bryan is a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York who volunteered at Guantanamo. He represents Juma al-Dossary. For a while, the government thought al-Dossary was a recruiter in America for Al Qaeda, possibly involved in the case known as the Lackawanna Seven. But this is never brought up at his CSRT hearing. Instead, the government simply states that he's Al Qaeda, and as proof lists the various places he's been. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan, the Pakistan border. Supposedly, he was fighting in some of those places, but the government provides no evidence that. They don't quote witnesses. Nobody is on record saying he's Al Qaeda. Here's Colangelo-Bryan. What's interesting to me, when we talk about what he was behind in that part of the world, is the allegation that the US military makes against him, that he was, quote, "present at Tora Bora," close quote. The military offers no allegations as to when Juma was supposedly in Tora Bora. It says nothing about what, supposedly, he was doing. Simply that, at some point in history, he was present in that place. Now, Juma says that he's never been to Tora Bora. And again, even if that allegation is true, frankly it doesn't prove anything. Absent some evidence of some involvement in terrorist activity, I simply don't know how you can call someone a terrorist. We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Juma al-Dossary. Colangelo-Bryan met with him many times and catalogued what was done with him. Al-Dossary said that Americans forced him to the ground and urinated on him. We put out our cigarettes on him. We shocked him with an electric device. We spat on him. We poured a hot cup of tea on his head. We told him that, quote, "we brought you here to kill you." We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left him in a frigid, air-conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold him forever, and we told him that we would send him to Egypt to be tortured. On a different day, we chained him to the floor, and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual blood on his body. When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face. We kissed the cross around our neck and said, "this is a gift from Christ for you Muslims." We videotaped the entire episode. There's no way to confirm that all this happened to al-Dossary. But other prisoners and officials at Guantanamo have described variations of every technique on the list, including the menstrual blood, the Israeli flag, the references to Christianity, the beatings, the sexual humiliation. Al-Dossary is interrogated still, about once a month. During one visit last winter, he asked Colangelo-Bryan, what can I do to keep myself from going crazy? A few months later during a meeting, al-Dossary asked to go to the bathroom. Colangelo-Bryan and the MP stepped outside the hut and waited. After five minutes Colangelo-Bryan got concerned. He cracked the door open. When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor in front of me. I then looked up and saw a figure hanging. I yelled to the MPs for help. They then began to cut down the noose around Juma's neck. It wasn't al-Dossary's first suicide attempt. About three weeks later, I was back in Guantanamo. Juma said to me that he didn't want to kill himself without an outside witness. His fear was that if he died and only the military knew, nobody would have known what happened. Of course, as we're often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one that let somebody go who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker? So for the military, there is also this other new thing, a terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees and has been trying to make sense of what's happened at Guantanamo. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible-- and there's a lot of evidence to support this-- they had no idea who they were going to be capturing, and they thought they might get more serious people, people who are more seriously involved. The reality is those people never came to Guantanamo. The most serious folks are the ones in CIA custody, of which there are approximately 30, 27, 30, something like that. Those are the people in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The people of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo. But they didn't know that when the base opened. And they said at the time that these were the worst of the worst. They were trained killers. They would gnaw through hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo. I mean, they used the most inflammatory rhetoric. And it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken. And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. And at the same time, there was this sense, this nagging sense, that, well, maybe they are really bad but we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers, as all appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to find out. So they kept turning up the heat, and using more and more coercive techniques on people who were less and less significant. In this new war, the plan was to build a prison so bleak that the detainees would give up hope and talk. The military was given a mission, and they did a good job. But many prisoners are now moving into year five. If they're Al Qaeda, detainment is perfectly justified. No one argues that. But think about what these incarcerations are for men wrongfully and indefinitely detained. It's like being buried alive in a coffin. Nobody knows how many of the prisoners are, in fact, the worst of the worst and how many are innocent, but we have a way to find out. It's called habeas corpus. Jack Hitt. Coming up, the most popular poem among prisoners at Guantanamo, or if not the most popular, at least it is very, very popular, we're told. 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. Our program today, Habeas Schmabeas, stories from Guantanamo. So where do things stand now? Well, in 2005, the President signed into law a bill that had solid bipartisan support that would end habeas rights forever for Guantanamo detainees. Whether that law is going to stand and whether detainees are going to get fairer hearings than the military CSRTs is actually still up in the air and is going to be resolved by the courts in the coming months and years. This actually brings us to Act Two of our show. Act Two, September 11, 1660. Habeas rights were originally created in England. And in one of the Supreme Court cases on this issue, 175 members of the British Parliament filed a friend of the court brief, an amicus brief, the first time in Supreme Court history that this has happened. And they argued, first of all, that British citizens being held at Guantanamo deserved better than when they were getting in terms of these rights. And they also said, essentially, are you guys nuts? This is from their brief, "as members of Parliament of Westminster, amici have a duty to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms against the misuse of public power, the due process of law deeply rooted in Anglo-American legal and political heritage. The exercise of executive power without possibility of judicial review jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations, namely the rule of law, as well as the effective protection of human rights. They also pointed out the history of habeas, how, after World War II, Winston Churchill wanted to suspend habeas rights for Nazi leaders and just shoot them. And it was the United States which argued for habeas and for trials, which led to the Nuremberg Trials. They also, finally, pointed out how badly it had gone the last time that they, in England, tried to suspend habeas like this in the 1600s, they write. During the British civil war, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief. The guy who did that was named Lord Clarendon. And in England, one of our regular contributors, Jon Ronson, decided to look into it. So it turns out that the last person to come up with this exact same way to sidestep habeas corpus is a lord I have never heard of, a not-household-name lord called Clarendon. Who was he? I went to a professional, Tony McDonnell, who said he'd take me to Clarendon's grave in Westminster Abbey. Yes, we're here in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. Notice we just passed Charles Darwin's grave. Yes, Charles Darwin is buried here. You said you were showing an American party around and somebody spat-- Spat on it. --spat at Charles Darwin's grave. On Darwin's grave, yes. And wanted to know why he was buried here. And we just passed the spot where Elton John sang "Candle In The Wind" at Princess Diana's funeral. Yes, that was in front of Lord Stanhope's memorial in the nave. You have to be famous, or a great royalist, or at least someone who worked here, like an organist, to be buried here. Tony is a historian and a blue badge guide, an official Westminster tour guide. He took me down corridors and through chambers until we came to a flagstone on the floor. Lord Clarendon's grave. He's in vaulted company. Henry V is buried just to his left. And Elizabeth I lies a couple of yards in front of him. Tony explains who Lord Clarendon was. He was, for want a better word, nowadays he'd probably be called the prime minister, and he was the main adviser to the king. So Clarendon had this job. He was the king's advisor, in the middle of a civil war, in which the king was killed. There were two sides. You've got the Monarchists, and then you've got the Puritans, who murdered the king because they saw the kingdom as debauched and decadent. Now, I know you Americans see Puritans as kindly settlers, constantly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. We see them as bastards. They were religious fundamentalists. In other words they were-- Men who believed that all they had to do was to overthrow the government, and the reign of Jesus Christ would come once more among them. So this was a battle of civilization. It was a battle of religious ideologies. It was most definitely a battle of religious ideology. So as Puritans, were they seen to be kind of crazy religious fundamentalists. Some of the people were, and they were among the most persecuted after The Restoration. The Restoration, this is when the whole sending people away to offshore islands with dubious sovereignty business took place. It was the period after the war. The Puritans had been defeated. The king, Charles II, was restored to power along with his main adviser, Lord Clarendon. Consider what it was like for Clarendon and the Monarchists. They'd been in exile for years. Many of their friends and supporters had been locked up or killed. The Puritans had been vicious. They had killed the king, and many of the men who had done it were still at large, plotting out there. It was a 9/11-style trauma, and Clarendon behaved in a traumatized way. He probably was paranoid to some extent. The whole of the new establishment were paranoid. They saw plots everywhere. And there was a theme of retribution in the air. Some people say they had good reason to be paranoid. Well, these people had done the most unimaginable horrific act. They had killed the king. They had killed the king. They had views that would have led to anarchy. And they were capable of anything is what would have been said. That's why they were put where they were. And it was for the safety of all of us, and we're doing you all a favor. Heaven knows what would have happened. They were wicked people, and those were the people who were then shipped off by Clarendon. The exact location of Lord Clarendon's Guantanamo is lost to history. It was probably in Jersey, or Guernsey, which today are rather nice seaside tax havens for the rich. But suspending habeas corpus didn't work out well for Lord Clarendon. He was impeached. At his impeachment trial, he was accused of sending people away to, quote, "remote islands, garrisons, and other places, thereby to prevent them from the benefit of the law, and to produce precedents for the imprisoning of any other of His Majesty's subjects in like manner." And remember, democracy as we know it is still centuries away. Innocent until proven guilty. One man, one vote. Only the most extreme radicals held these views. These were dark times. There were heads on spikes all over London. And still, the people were shocked by Clarendon's disregard for habeas corpus. People took it seriously. And they would have bandied it about with each other, this idea that you had to produce somebody and accuse them in law, in front of their own peers. And the parallels are so obvious when you read the history of habeas corpus and the amount of times it's just been suspended. That is what they all always do. They say that these people are capable of anything. These people do not hold the same values as we do. They're out to destroy our way of life. It's more or less the same situation. The one outcome of all of this was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which specifically forbade what Clarendon had done and made it illegal to send a prisoner, quote, "into Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, Tangier, or into parts, garrisons, islands, or places beyond the seas, which are, or at any time hereafter shall be within or without the dominions of His Majesty." And forbade at his remains for 330 years. In England, anyway. Jon Ronson. He does documentaries for the BBC and is the author of the book, Them. Act Three, We interrogate the Detainees. Yes, the US military had their chance with them. In this act, Jack Hitt talks to two former detainees from Guantanamo. One of these guys, you've heard a little bit from earlier in our show, Badr Zaman Badr, the guy who ran the satirical magazine, in Pashto, with his brother in Pakistan. The other guy was 19 when he was picked up. Abdullah al Noaimi, a kid from well to do family in Bahrain. Here's Jack. Abdullah wound up in American custody the way a lot of the men at Guantanamo did. He was a foreigner in Pakistan, and we were offering bounties for guys like that. Remember Murat Kurnaz, the guy whose friend was supposedly a suicide bomber? And Juma al-Dossary? The same thing happened to them. In Abdullah's case, he was first taken to Kandahar, to a makeshift prison the US set up at an air base with about 20 men to a tent. When we first go in Kandahar, I was surprised. I had never seen those pictures, or those views, only in ancient movies, like dark ages. We were chained by the legs, like shackled. And they ordered us to pick up rocks. Can you imagine this? They said you should pick up the rocks on the ground, like, put it all together in a pile. There was no water to make ablution or to take a shower. Badr, the satirist, was taken to that same air base at Kandahar. The MPs were treating us very harshly. We had to be on our knees for long hours and to put our hands on our head. And mostly they used the word [BLEEP], and they used to tell us to put our [BLEEP] hand on our [BLEEP] heads. And we didn't like that. in the camps, Badr got separated from his brother, the poet. So he devised a way to find him. The detainees didn't have toilets. Instead, they got a bucket, which got filled up with what Badr modestly calls "dirt." Every day, some detainee got chosen to empty the buckets. Badr volunteered. Because I wanted to meet my brother, to go from tent to tent. I saw my brother when he was giving me his bucket to empty. That was spring time. He said, "what a spring it is, when there are no flowers, and instead of the smell of the flowers, we have this dirt smell." I can't translate it actually. When it is in Pashto, these are really good beautiful lines. The sanitary conditions were just as bad, if not worse, for Abdullah. The tent he shared with other detainees was open on all sides and located at the end of the military airstrip. Every takeoff and landing meant a tornado of dirt, the literal kind, blasted through. In the first few days, he heard the other prisoners in the tent talking about their interrogations. They told me that they had electric shocks on them. And one of them was threatened to be raped. And they took off his pants. And it was like, I was thinking, well, what am I going to do? They took me at night. There was two interrogators. They wanted me to say that I was a terrorist. I told them, "no, I'm not," and everything. Then, they started pushing me and everything. And then they brought a cigarette that the interrogator was smoking. He blew the smoke on my face. Then he came very close, very, very close to my face, and brought the cigarette between my eyes, and he said, "I swear to God, I'm going to put it on your forehead if you don't tell me what I want to hear." I thought about it. I thought that, I felt like this is a jungle, and only the strong lives in it. But still, there is a small creature that can live, but not by facing the lions, or facing big animals. No. But by maybe hiding, or changing their colors as the trees. So I just told him, "whatever you want to hear from me I'm going to tell you. What do you want me to say?" He says, "say that you are a terrorist." "You want me to say I'm a terrorist? Are you going to let me go? Are you going to let me go to sleep?" Because they always torture, like, not keeping me asleep, by keeping me awake all the time. So, I tell them, "OK, I'm going to tell you whatever you want. Yeah, I'm a terrorist, and go tell your bosses." And they left me. This is not how he thought things would go with the Americans. In fact, back when he was being held in a Pakistan jail, when he found out that Americans would be taking them, he was relieved. He told the other prisoners it was good news. He knew America. He knew how the people were. I lived so many places like Europe, and England, and Germany, and France. But the difference was that, in the States, everywhere you go they welcome you. Like, when you go in the supermarket, everybody goes, like, how you doing, and everything. That's the thing that was in my mind. I was pleased. Oh, everything's going to be fine. They can understand. So how did he know so much about American supermarkets? Well, in 1994, he came to America for the World Cup finals. In fact, Abdullah has been here a lot. He's been downhill skiing in the Midwest. He attended Old Dominion University in Virginia for a while, and has taken other trips, too. And in '96, I was in Disneyland. We were in Orlando. For spring break, I was in Daytona Beach with some of my friends. [LAUGHING] You were in Daytona Beach for spring break? Yeah, it was year 2000. Biker's Week. I remember the guys, young guys, standing by that sidewalk, having the signs for the cars passing. Some expression written on it, "show us--" Show us, oh right. [LAUGHING] Ah, yes. That expression. The show us your-- Yeah, that expression. That's the most I remember about Daytona. So a year after seeing the sights at Daytona Beach, Abdullah found himself facing an American interrogator in Kandahar. I got shocked. I got shocked when the first interview guy kept cursing me, up and down, cursing my father, cursing my family, cursing my country, cursing my government, everything. Why? That was the question I wanted to know. Like, what was going on? Like, do I know you? What do you have against me? What did I do to you? Badr had learned of the West from more scholarly sources. He's a big fan of the Canterbury Tales and Gulliver's Travels. And he also knew about the Geneva Conventions, and spoke up when he realised they weren't going to apply. Actually, our complaint was that they were not accepting us as prisoners of war, they're not giving us those rights. And actually, they were just running away from American legal system. I mean, I have told my interrogators many times, if we are really guilty, why won't they put us on trial in American courts? Finally Badr and Adbullah were each taken out of the camps at Kandahar and put on a plane to Guantanamo. Remember, this is an international flight from Afghanistan to Cuba, over 20 hours long. We were handcuffed. And the handcuffs were tied to our stomachs. And there's a chain connected to our legs. Other detainees next to you, like, stuck to you. They used to put goggles on our head. And we had masks, through which we can hardly breath. We could not hear, we could not see. We can even not touch. So they had to stop all senses completely. To have hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, those things only a human can have. Once they got to Guantanamo, both Badr and Abdullah described being stripped naked, medically examined, and then put into cages until a new round of interrogations began. Mostly they used to ask questions about the relief organizations and how they get money, and why people hate Americans. And so. And there have been even stupid questions. Like? There have been stupid questions that if you have seen Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, if you intend to attack Americans? As if I know Osama bin Laden. I was like shocked, I'm 19 years old. Abdullah and Badr, by the way, arrived at different times at the base and never knew each other. But they both described meeting lots of ordinary people, farmers, teachers, cab drivers, who were also sold to the Americans. Abdullah talked to one guy who has sold by his own father-in-law. Badr met men who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden. After a while, some of them couldn't help but showcase the absurdity of the situation. Like, for example, one guy, he's a very funny guy, they took him to interrogation. Every day, they took him there for more than 20 hours, keep him awake and have very loud disco music. The lights, like, circling all over his eyes and all over the place. And then, after so many days, under those circumstances, that person just stood up, held the interrogator's hands, and kept dancing with him. Yeah, seriously, he kept shaking his body. And the interrogator was going to have a nervous breakdown. Abdullah was originally arrested while traveling in Pakistan. A man offered him a meal and a place to rest and later turned him over to the Army for the bounty. Abdullah says he saw the money change hands at the jail. Once in American custody, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan and proclaiming his desire to carry out Jihad. Sometimes, to get to us, or to put the stress on us, they come and ask, like "do you want to go home?" They don't want to take me home, but they are just asking to make you angry and nervous that you'll never go home, and keep telling you those things. But to respond, I tell them the same thing, "No, thanks. I don't want to go home. I'm OK here. I like you so much and I don't want to leave you." [LAUGHING] Now, did they just, did they think you're a smart ass? I mean, how did they react to that? They got surprised the first time. But then they got used to it, because everybody was saying it. Even if they, for example, stop you from food, stop you from sleeping, stop you from talking, I don't know why, you just keep smiling. So much of what we hear about Guantanamo is about the harsh treatment there, but of course, like any place, the days mostly pass in boredom. The interrogators might be rough, but the MPs and guards who had to spend time with the detainees sometimes would get comfortable and start talking to the prisoners. They asked me, tell me the truth, are you a terrorist or not? They were told that I am a terrorist, but they still ask me. Why? Because of doubts in their heart. They still have doubt those people are not, they don't seem like as we've heard. And then we start talking and talking and talking. Most of the guards, they told me that, when I first came here, I was trained that everybody over here is like monsters. They're going to jump from the cages, and they're gonna tear you up and everything. They said, we thought different. We thought that the American forces captured you in a battle or something. So some of the people, they are forced to treat us bad. But you can see, you can tell from their eyes. And some, they feel like, this is not the right thing to do. They feel this is wrong. They told me themselves. Some of them told me, like, if I don't follow orders, I'm going to be in your place. I really miss them now. To pass the time, the prisoners would sing together, or try out new poems they'd written. They developed a secret postal system for passing notes and photos, and figured out how to talk to each other through the air conditioning vents. Sometimes, the guards and prisoners would hold little competitions, like the Styrofoam cup challenge. The object was to turn the cup inside out, without cracking it. The guards went first. They spent hours and hours and hours, and they came back with, uh, they couldn't do it. They said, OK, let's try to flip the cup underwater. They tried and it didn't work. Then the detainees said, OK, we're going to do it for you. The detainees did it. They flipped the cup inside out. Like, totally inside out. You could read the brand of the cup inside the cup instead of outside. What was the brand? It was Dart. Dart? Yeah, one was Dart, and the other was Oklahoma. Yeah, the community of Oklahoma for blinds. Since pen and paper were forbidden, Badr's brother wrote his poetry by scratching the words into Styrofoam cups with his fingernails. After a year, they were allowed to use pens and to read books. Abdullah read David Copperfield. Badr and his brother composed some 25,000 lines of verse. The other inmates memorized the best of them. The most popular couplet went like this. It says, [PASHTO VERSE] These are the Pashto lines. It means "They bring good and bad people to the same jail, and there is no oil or salt in the rice." Get that? There's no oil or salt in the rice. It's really funny in Pashto. If you just say this to any Pashto speaker in your country, he would really like that. [REPEATS PASHTO VERSE] Finally, one day, four years after he left Pakistan, Abdullah was pulled aside by a military officer who had news. Abdullah was going home. Abdullah says he was asked by a government lawyer, a major, to sign a contract promising not to join a terrorist group and giving the US permission to rearrest him at any time. He refused to sign. Other detainees say they were shown similar letters and also refused to sign, believing this was just another trick. Did they ever explain why they were letting you go? No. So, but they told you they had made a mistake in the end. The government lawyer, he didn't say a mistake by the vocabulary of "mistake." He didn't say, "mistake." But he said, "we picked you up as an enemy combatant, but it turned out that you were not one. We don't say that you are an enemy combatant." He gave me an example of a mistake, but he didn't say, "we made a mistake." And just as suddenly, Abdullah was on an airplane and back in Bahrain. He was quickly ushered past the news media and into a room where he saw his family. They greeted me, they welcomed me, they hugged me and everything. Then they took me home. I didn't tell them anything. Everybody's crying. I left my sister, she was very, very young, about five, six years. I didn't know her when I saw her. She was like a lady. When you saw your brothers and your father, what was that like? Have you ever heard the expression "home sweet home"? [LAUGHING] Yes, I have actually. Yeah, of course. That's exactly. That's the best time to say "home sweet home." Americans are going to think that, because you were at Guantanamo Bay, that you were a terrorist, and that everybody there was. What would you say to them? I would say, even if I were an angel, I would still be a terrorist to them, because that is the thing that they want. People don't want to take the responsibilities of their mistakes. And they want to put it on others. It's like slaughtering a sheep, for example. And when the sheep keeps shaking, and the blood's spilling all over the place, they would scream at it, at the sheep, and say, you are a bad sheep, bad sheep, because your blood came on my clothes or my dress. You know what I'm saying? They would take you, maybe torture you, or maybe kill you, or put you under so much stress and circumstances. And then they would say, you are a bad person because you've been through those things. Why did you put me through those things in the first place? In the years Abdullah was gone, his parents moved to a new house, a big house with lots of rooms. But there was no bedroom for him. His old clothes were gone. They thought he would never come home. He says, it's like he's come back from the dead. Jack Hitt, in New Haven. 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 web site. Production help from Sam Hallgren and Thea Chaloner. And our music help from Jessica Hopper. Our web site www.thisamericanlife.org. And 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. You know what he always says about us. If anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, you know, had them on TV shows, they'd be shocked. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories this of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Andy's grandfather ran the business. Then his father ran the business. They make mousetraps, Victor brand mousetraps with the big red V on them. But also glue traps, and electric traps, and those humane catch and release things. And traps that only professionals use. Andy's in charge of the part of the company that develops the new products and the job suits him. I called him in his office. I remember coming out here on Saturdays when I was very young and seeing the mousetraps being made and just being intrigued by the business. So I understand that because you guys are the number one mousetrap company in the world, people pitch you ideas on how to make a better mousetrap, right? All the time. Can I ask you to just talk about some ones that were especially bad? Oh my. One that we rejected was one that is basically a pail that, in essence, the mouse can run up the side of. Up a stairway, and then between one side of the bucket and the other, there's a dowel. And in the middle of it, a little cup of bait. So they run across the dowel, and once they get to the cup, it turns over and spills them-- Into the bucket. Into a pail of-- and since they wanted to be environmentally friendly, a pail of antifreeze that was environmentally friendly. Wait, wait. Right, and I believe that the antifreeze would also keep the scent problem down of a dead rodent. You might have a whole 20 drowned mice in this thing. And so it's incredibly ingenious and very clever. So do you think that actually could work? Oh it does work. It does work, but it's not the sort of thing that you think many people are going to want to buy? Right, people really don't want a pail, to end up with a-- I mean having a dead mouse for a lot of people is a problem. Having a dead mouse in a pail of antifreeze and dumping it out, or in this case having maybe six or seven, just is not commercially, in our opinion, a great opportunity. I mean people are incredibly creative. I mean I've got a book of patents that were just from the late 80's to 1950. And there are thousands and thousands of tanks and cages, all sorts of weird looking shaped boxes and things that look like medieval torture chambers. Can you tell me one where you totally admired the ingenuity, but you just thought, no way. Well, yeah I sure will. This one is alarming in its ingenuity. A mouse went into a little box area, and when it nibbled at the bait, the door shut behind it. OK, nothing too abnormal about that. But it dropped a pill into a little bit of water. And the pellet dropped into water and it gave off a gas the killed them. And it would die of carbon monoxide poisoning. In other words, it went into a gas chamber. And was this ever sold anywhere? In Germany. Oh come on. I am not kidding. I'm sitting here literally stunned. As as a Jewish person, I actually am stunned. I was horrified. We didn't think that had very good commercial liability in the United States. And we were surprised that it was available, that people were trying to market it in Germany. So with all of these people trying to invent a better mousetrap, the dirty secret of trapping mice is, mice are really easy to catch. That's why every inventor thinks that he can do it. Catching a mouse is basically playing against a casino where you always win. The regular, old-fashioned, cheap little mousetrap, Andy says, will usually catch the mouse in 24 to 48 hours. It will kill it 88% of the time. Other traps that aren't much more expensive have 100% lethality. Mice are easy to kill because mice, unlike rats, are incredibly inquisitive animals. They investigate anything that's new. Anything that's in their normal territory for the evening, and that's typically-- most people don't know this but most mice only stay within 10 feet of where they are, max. And oftentimes it's less than that. And they may investigate that area 30 times during the night. They're not just going out once. Well in a way what you're describing is almost the ideal animal to be caught. Exactly. And so the problem for the mousetrap inventor is the world actually does not need a better mousetrap. The world will not beat its way to that person's door. Andy sells two mousetraps for $0.99 that do the job just great, 88% lethality. That is the reality of what a mousetrap inventor is competing with. Whereas the inventors almost never understand. Well they are always persistent, whether it's letters, or phone calls, or stopping here. They are passionate about their idea and are so disappointed when we turn them down. Like they can't believe it. They can't believe it. Because for them, there is the magic of the moment of invention, right? They actually came up with a new idea. That's right. And it turns out that's just not enough in this cold, cold world. It's very hard. It's their baby. Again, they have nurtured this thing. Well today on our program, we have four stories of inventions in a world that does not always need or want new ideas. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. We have four stories for you of ingenuity and heartbreak. Stay with us. Act One, Mother of Invention. So we start with somebody inventing a new way to do something and in an area of life where you might not think there could be any new ways to do anything left. Karen Sosnoski tells the story. Her son Anton was born with Mosaic Down syndrome, which is this very rare form of Down Syndrome. Essentially some of his cells have the extra chromosome that causes Down Syndrome and the other cells don't. So as he grows, he could actually end up having all the health risks and challenges of Down Syndrome or very few of them. There's no way to know. Some kids with MDS look totally normal but then have all kinds of learning disabilities. Others have all the physical features of a person with Down Syndrome but then have a high IQ. It's a diagnosis that's so vague it can drive a parent crazy. And Karen had no idea what the diagnosis would mean for her son's future. So she started doing some research. She found a Mosaic Down Syndrome website. And on that website, she started reading about a boy named Tim. A boy who, in a bunch of different ways, was not what she was expecting, and whose mom had invented a radical way of dealing with the diagnosis, something Karen had never heard of. Here she is. Tim was 13 when I first saw his picture on the internet. He had geeky, blunt-cut bangs and a wide, innocent smile. He had the same diagnosis as my son Anton, but he had the happy face of an ordinary boy. And when I looked at this photo, my heart raced with hope. Here was a kid I could imagine as my own. "A late bloomer," his mom wrote, but so what? He had hobbies and friends. He was a bookworm like I am. To be honest, Tim's bio made me feel less guilty about Anton. Part of me blamed myself for what had happened. Everyone knew advanced maternal age was a major risk factor for having a baby with Down Syndrome. And here I'd waited until 40 to have him. But maybe if I played my cards absolutely right from here on in, he could still turn out just fine. Tim's mother, Kristy, was like a role model for me. She founded an international support group for parents of kids with Mosaic Down Syndrome. She wanted us to be sure the world gave them a fair shake, and I like this. But to make this happen for her own son, she did something I could never have imagined, something that shocks people every time I tell them. For years, she kept her son's diagnosis a secret. She didn't tell his teachers. She didn't tell her neighbors. And most incredibly, for the first 14 years of his life, she didn't tell Tim. I first heard Kristy talk about her secret at a conference. Then, a couple months ago, I left my one year old son Anton for the first time and travelled down to Texas to find out more from Kristy and Tim. How had Tim turned out so well? How much of it was because she had kept his diagnosis a secret? She told me she didn't start off planning to deceive anyone. When Tim started kindergarten, Kristy did what most parents do. She didn't keep his disability a secret. She explained to the teachers that he had Mosaic Down Syndrome. She asked the teachers to treat him like any other kid, and she crossed her fingers. But it didn't work out as she had planned. This is Kristy. I know one time I went in there to visit the classroom, and all the little children are sitting up in their nice little story time circle. And he's lying in the middle of the carpet, rolling around and lying around. And I asked the teacher, why is he laying when everyone else is sitting down? And she said, well he likes to do that. And we just want to make him happy. And so it was because he had Mosaic Down Syndrome. And so I knew then, maybe it's not a good idea for everybody to know because they are going to make excuses for him. And I wanted him more than anything to just be as normal as normal is, to have the same opportunities that everyone else had. So the next year when school began, I didn't tell his teacher. And then we thought, if he knows that he has Mosaic Down Syndrome, he's going to use that for a crutch, big time. So we decided, we're just not going to tell him until he gets a little bit older. Which could get kind of complicated. She had to talk behind Tim's back and over his head. She had to tell family members never to mention Tim's condition in front of him. And it's OK if you people know it, but I don't want him to know it. I turned into a tricky person. Were there times when you were tempted to tell him? One time stands out really, really deeply in my mind. He was around 10 years old, and he had a little treehouse. And all the kids would come over to be in his treehouse with him. And this one little boy in our neighborhood had Down Syndrome. And I looked outside. All the kids are playing. And Tim pushed this little boy down. And I was like, "No, you don't push him down. That's not nice." And I made him come inside and I said, "Why did you push this little boy down?" And he goes, "I don't like him. He looks different." That crushed me. That crushed me. And I said, "Well, why don't you like him? Just because he looks different? Everybody looks different." And he said, "No, he talks funny. I don't like him." And I wanted so much at that point to say don't you know that you have the same chromosomes as him? When I was a lot younger I used to think that because I was different I thought maybe I was from another world, that I was an alien or something. This is Tim. He's almost 20 now but he doesn't look much older than his picture at 13. It's not super obvious that he has a medical condition, but if you're at all tuned into Down Syndrome, you can probably guess. His eyes have those extra folds, and he talks in a slow careful way like he's having to work to shape his words. Academically though, Tim blows any stereotypes about Down Syndrome out of the water. His IQ is 110, higher than the national average. He got A's and B's with no special help at a mainstream school. But by junior high, Tim was starting to have a hard time fitting in with other kids. He would do weird things like burp or rock on his heels in class. He'd say inappropriate things, like the time he got so excited about a slasher movie that he confused himself with the main character. "I started shooting people," he told the kids at his lunch table. As you can imagine, he didn't make a lot of friends this way. All I knew is that I was different because people were bothering me all the time. Can you give an example? Insults, being picked on, teased, hazing-- if you know what that is. Tim started realizing that there was something different about him. And when Tim was around 12 years old, we were on our way to the grocery store. And I was driving and Tim was sitting in the front seat next to me. And we hadn't been talking at all. I mean the radio is going. We're not listening to-- talking to each other. And all of a sudden-- I asked my mom, "Do I have a medical problem that you don't want to tell me about because you think I'm not mature enough to handle it?" We pulled over at the park. And I stopped the car. And I looked at him and I said, "Why do you want to know this?" And he said, "You know, I just know that I'm different." But she couldn't bring herself to tell him the truth. She didn't know if Tim was ready, and she didn't feel ready. She said nothing. I was really-- probably lost sleep over it because I kept going back and forth with, have I done the right thing keeping this from him? But at that time I wasn't sure. No matter how hard I tried to make his world so great, still kids picked on him. And so as years progressed, one day he came home and he was about 14. And he came home and he said, "Mom, I feel like I'm the only person in the whole world who has the same problems as me." And it just broke my heart. My husband came home from work that night. And I said, "We're going to have to probably pretty soon tell him." But they didn't. For another six whole months. It seemed so difficult. Here Kristy had to tell Tim that she had kept the fundamental truth about his identity from him for most of his life. What's more, it seemed that her efforts to protect him might have actually made things worse. I think that we just worried how he was going to react. We didn't know how he was going to. We didn't know what to expect at all whatsoever. We didn't know if he would be happy or mad or sad or what. We just didn't know what to expect at all. And so I think that was our main worry. So we sat down on the couch. My husband tried to leave. And so Tim comes in from his bedroom and sits down. And I said, "We've got something to tell you." And he said, "What?" I said, "Remember how a while back you asked me if you had a medical problem that I didn't want you to know about?" And he said yes. And I said, "Do you remember when you said you felt like you're the only person in the whole world who had the problems that you had?" And he said yes. She told me I had Mosaic Down Syndrome. I don't know her exact words, but that's what she said. What came into your mind when she told you that? Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, X-Men. Why did X-Men come into your mind? Because the X-Men are mutants, genetic. They gain those genetic problems. And that's what I felt like. I felt like an X-Men. I thought that was kind of cool. And just like that, the truth was out. Ironically, what happened next was exactly the opposite of what Kristy had feared. Tim didn't seem angry. He didn't stop trying in school. The diagnosis actually made him more conscious of his strange behaviors, like the rocking on his heels, so he could work harder at controlling them. Mostly he was relieved. He had spent so many years feeling like there was something wrong with him that finding out there was wasn't so bad. In his junior year, Tim came out to his classmates during a presentation on genetics. After that, the kids started cutting him some slack. He wasn't the weird kid anymore. He was a kid with that Mosaic Down thing. And you couldn't blame him for that. So that was a real big turning point. He got a bunch of friends, real friends. And it was our first time to have real friends. And then all these three big teenage boys came back to our house to spend the night. Never had such a thing, I mean never. And so they're going to spend the night. And so we've got all these boys and I'm going, we have to make popcorn. We have to watch movies. And after I got them settled, I came in the bedroom and I bawled my head off because it was just so wonderful. In fact it was 10:30 at night and I'm calling my mother, "I have teenage boys in the house." You would think, given how things turned out, Kristy might have had some regrets about waiting so long to tell Tim the truth. I kept waiting for her to crack or something during our interview, to admit she had made a mistake. But she didn't. And frankly, I was relieved. I don't want to cast judgment on Kristy. Tim's a great kid. Whether that's because of what Kristy did or in spite of it, I don't think anyone can say. And anyway, Kristy and Tim have moved on to other issues like teaching Tim how to balance a checkbook, how to drive, how to get ready to live on his own. And from Tim's point of view, Kristy has her own learning to do. My mom is being a control freak right now. I'm going to be 20 this May. It's time I started to be a bit more independent. How will you have to change to be more independent? When I leave this house, I plan to never wash the dishes again. Who's going to wash them? My wife. I'm kidding. I'll have the kids do it. It's funny, or maybe just typical. Tim's critical of his mom, but when I ask him how he thinks I should raise Anton, his advice to me is to do just what she did. "Let people get to know Anton first before you tell them anything," Tim says to me. "Tell Anton when he's a teenager, when he's old enough to handle it." I know I probably won't do this. After all, Kristy's secrecy didn't protect Tim from pain, which is what I want for my son. So I'm back to square one with no trick to give Anton the perfect future, any more than I could give him those perfect chromosomes. I'm like any other parent, waiting to see who my son becomes. Karen Sosnoski in Alexandria, Virginia. Act Two, Everything Must Go. In the early 1990's, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh was researching the underground economies in the city of Chicago. He was a grad student back then. He wanted to know how people made money off the books, and he spent a lot of time in the poorer areas of the city where people had to invent ways to make their own livings. He hung out with women selling food from their homes, car mechanics who ran their business from an alleyway, store owners who hosted late night gambling and dice games. None of them was reporting their income to the government. Then there was Nellie, who had a problem that not many people faced. Here's Sudhir. Nellie Thomas was a hustler who worked in and around his South Side neighborhood. And over the course of his life, he was a pimp, drug dealer, car thief, extorter, jack roller, prostitute and burglar. I met Nellie because I wanted to know how people bought guns in Chicago. By the time I met him, Nellie had made a name for himself, not because he sold guns but because he sold ammunition. It's illegal to buy handguns in the city of Chicago. For guns and ammo, people usually have to trek out to the suburbs, which isn't so easy. Most gun stores are in white suburbs, and the black people in Nellie's community don't like to go there. So they buy guns in their own neighborhood for the most part. Now, in the South Side where Nellie lived, if you have money and a little patience, you can probably find a gun within a few days. But it's a lot harder to find ammo. Nellie understood this, and he capitalized on the demand by becoming an ammunitions trader. Nellie would drive to the suburbs or he would hire people to go there and buy boxes of ammo for a few dollars each. Back in his own neighborhood, it might cost you a $100 for a box. He sold bullets to gang members, robbers, drug dealers, prostitutes and just regular people who liked to have a weapon around. And when the gang wars heated up in the mid to late 90's, people bought several boxes at a time and Nellie was flush with cash. "Good money, no hassle," he liked to say. "Cops don't care much about me." When I started hanging out with Nellie, he was becoming bothered by his success. He was making so much money that he didn't know what to do with it. His needs were pretty minimal. He had a beat-up old truck that he fixed himself, and his parents had long ago paid off the mortgage on the bungalow where he was born and where he still lived. The house was a modest, two-story and basement and backyard design that you could see all over Chicago. Nellie was hardly a big consumer. He liked to listen to a pocket-size radio, and although he had a fancy TV, he usually watched a little black and white in his bedroom. And he never traveled. For 20 years, he'd been eating at the same soul food restaurant every day. He wore the same three or four pairs of clothes. And almost every day you could see him walking or playing golf-- very badly he said-- in the park next to his house. Nellie also lived in a world of cash. Like most underground traders, he couldn't take large sums of money to the bank. And for small sums, he simply didn't trust banks. So he put his cash in mattresses and in large, black trash bags that he hid inside his house or that he buried outside in the backyard. But Nellie was losing sleep because he was running out of places to keep his cash. He worried because there were other people living in his home, a girlfriend and her two children, a niece, his grandmother, an aunt and a brother with his girlfriend and two kids. Nellie was scared he'd be robbed. And so he began staying up all night with a big shotgun next to his window. His anxiety grew so bad that he started taking medication and drinking more. He was restless and fidgety, and he said he was yelling at his family for no good reason. Sometimes he would call me early in the morning. We both knew many of the local gang leaders, and he wanted me to tell him whether they were planning to raid his house. He also asked me strange questions, like whether squirrels could smell paper money and whether they would dig in his backyard and eat his holdings. He admitted he was going to the hospital nearly every two weeks due to panic attacks. At first I wondered why Nellie didn't just give his money away to his family or to a charity. But it wasn't so simple for him. He said he was ashamed of how he had earned it. He didn't want to tell people that he sold ammo to gang members for a living. I suppose Nellie could have bought some property or found a way to launder his money, but that really wasn't in his character. Nellie didn't think in terms of the future, at least not in that way. And because he was very depressed and his job was so dangerous, Nellie didn't think he'd live long enough to spend his money on anything worthwhile. One morning I went to Nellie's house and found him in tears. No one was home, and he was lying on his bed with his money all over the room. He kept saying he couldn't take it anymore and he wanted a way out. I noticed a few large bills, but there were mostly piles and piles of $1 and $5 bills crumpled up like waste paper. He was pleading with me to help him to do something with all of his money, which he estimated was about $15,000 or $20,000. He asked me, "What do your people do when they have all this stuff that they can't use?" I'm Indian, but I assumed he meant middle class folks. "Well," I said, "when my family has a lot of stuff, we give it away or we have a garage sale." His eyes lit up. "That's it. I'm going to have a garage sale." I wasn't sure I understood what he meant. "Let me get this straight. You're going to sell your money?" He grinned, stood up, hugged me and said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you for getting me out of this mess." So I made myself a cup of coffee, sat on the couch and watched as Nellie put some of the money inside a television. Then he dumped a handful of bills inside a vacuum cleaner. Then he shoved bags full of cash inside his couch cushions and in a mattress. He picked up a basketball, examined it, looked over to me and agreed when I shook my head no. And then with my help he dragged everything out to the front lawn. He ran into the garage and came back with a hammer, nails and cardboard. He made several For Sale signs and tacked them onto the trees and on the windshield of his car. He was so happy. He was running around like a child building a treehouse. For his final gesture, Nellie ran back inside the house, grabbed two chairs and a six-pack of beer and brought them outside. He told me that I couldn't tell anyone what he just did. I exchanged my coffee for a beer and sat on Nellie's well manicured front lawn, unsure of exactly what was supposed to transpire. We sat on the lawn for about 10 minutes. I was getting a little agitated. My cell phone rang. Nellie looked at me and said, "Remember, you can't say what's in them things. You can't mention the money." It was a friend of mine, Autry. He had three children, and he had been looking for a job for about a year. And now he was living off food stamps and was about three months late on his car and rent payments. Autry could definitely have used the money, not to mention the nice TV set sitting in front of my feet. "I'm at a garage sale," I told Autry, checking with Nellie to see if that was OK. Nellie nodded approval. "You should come over," I said, checking with Nellie again, who didn't nod. "Autry, listen, you should really come over and see if anything interests you." Autry asked me why the hell would I want him to come to a garage sale when I knew he didn't have any money. I kept telling him to come anyway. Nellie began shaking his head. I sank in my chair, lowered my voice and told Autry to call me if he found some cash and wanted to buy some appliances. And then I hung up. Nellie and I waited for what seemed like hours, though my watch said only 20 minutes had passed. Every so often I asked him again whether he really wanted to do this. He would just stare out and tell me that he'd never been more sure about anything in his life. "I feel like the Lord gave me a sign," he said. Just then a woman came by and looked at the couch. I leaned forward as if to pounce out of my chair. And I could see that Nellie was doing the same. "Nice couch," she said. "Yes," said Nellie, "you ain't never gonna find another one like it." "That's right ma'am," I chimed in. "This is certainly a one of a kind couch. You can take my word for it." "$20," she said. "For a couch?" said Nellie. "Ma'am, I need to make a little more than that." "But sir," she said, trying to be polite, "it ain't worth more than that." "Ma'am," I said, "I think on that count you are mistaken. It is certainly worth more." "Hey, shut up," Nellie yelled at me. The woman watched as Nellie and I began bickering. "You two need help," she said and walked away. As the morning turned to afternoon, more people came. The first successful sale was to a man pushing a shopping cart. He eyed the vacuum cleaner. "What do you want for it?" he asked. "Give me 15," said Nellie. "15, are you nuts?" I said. I couldn't believe Nellie would charge so little. Nellie shot me a glance and I put my head in my hands. "15 my man and it's all yours," Nellie said calmly. "All right, that'll work," the mad said. He paid Nellie with some bills and a lot of loose change. The he grinned and said within an hour he could sell the vacuum cleaner down at the thrift store for $30, double his take just like that. "You might want to take it home first," I told the man as he started walking away. Just clean it out. Put a fresh bag in. Try it out. Take it apart maybe." "Home," the man said looking at me. "Boy, are you blind or something? I live out of this cart. I live under the L tracks. Home? [BLEEP] I ain't got no home. What the [BLEEP] am I going to do with a vacuum cleaner?" A Saturday morning church service must have ended because a line of black women wearing beautiful dresses and hats was coming our way. They looked at the items on the lawn and liked what they saw. One played with the television set, hitting it every so often while a few other sat on the couch. "A little soft, and well, not so even," one said to me and Nellie. "These cushions are a little old, aren't they? How old are they?" "Oh, they're fairly new," I said. "Made fresh this morning actually." "Boy," Nellie yelled at me. This time he threw some beer on me. "Don't mind him, ma'am. He's not the God fearing sort. You understand." The woman cast a disparaging look my way and said, "Mm-hmm. I understand. And Jesus do too. OK, I'll take this couch. Probably throw these cushions away. The other parts are fine, but I can't have people sitting on these raggedy things all day." "I would rethink that strategy," I shouted. My voice crackled and beer spilled down my shirt. "I would probably not throw them away just yet." "What he means to say," Nellie interrupted, "is that you may want to take it home first. Don't do anything so quick. You know, take your time." "Not sure there's really anything to think about," a second woman said, feeling the cushions stuffed with America's legal tender. "Eunella, you could replace these for $5. Ain't no need wasting your time with these cushions. Smell like cat piss anyway. Just throw them out." "Oh Lord, I would really think twice about that," I said bending over in frustration. I was starting to feel delirious. "Why don't you go inside for a while?" Nellie said, pushing me over and making me fall on the ground. I got up and walked toward the house. "What is wrong with that young man?" I could hear the woman ask Nellie. "Oh, nothing that a little religion couldn't fix," Nellie said. Then he told them, "Listen, the truth is ma'am that I'm trying to buy my family all new furniture before they get home. And I really need to sell this stuff and get rid of it so that I can surprise my wife." "Oh, isn't that sweet?" one of the women said. "Well, I'll take the television." "Yes," another one chimed in. "And I could use an extra bed." "I would keep that mattress," I shouted from inside the house. "Don't throw away the mattress, please." "That is the strangest young man I have ever seen," one of the women said. "Yes, said Nellie. He twirled his finger in little circles next to his head. "He has a little bit of trouble, you know." The woman then turned to me and spoke very slowly. "You be careful now young man. And beer probably isn't very good for your health." "Neither is throwing away that mattress ma'am." Nellie asked the women for their address and he loaded the bed into the truck and drove off. I drank the rest of the beers and stared out into a warm blue sky. Nellie sold almost everything on the lawn that afternoon. The only thing that was left was a torn up pillow that couldn't attract anyone's interest. I tried for a while to find the people who had bought some of Nellie's furniture and appliances. But I didn't have any luck so I'm not really sure if any of them found the cash. Nellie didn't have any more garage sales. He was still making money by selling ammo. And he still kept the money in those big, black garbage bags. He just stored them all in the attic where nobody ever went. And Nellie's depression didn't end. For most people, all that money would have been a sign of success. But for Nellie, it was just a bunch of paper that he couldn't get rid of. His problem was that he liked his job. He liked the fact that he worked and that he earned a living. The part he didn't like was the actual profits. They made him feel ashamed and he had to hide them from almost everyone he knew and loved. A few years later, Nellie's girlfriend left him. His kids married and moved out, and there was no one else living in his house. He started going to church to ease his depression. It wasn't really helping, he said. But he did start talking a lot about charity and how he wanted to do something good for people. And he did it in his own peculiar way. Nellie would leave a bag of money on a street corner, or late at night, he would quietly put some cash in front of a homeless person sleeping outside in the park. He would tell me that it was the only pure thing you can do on this earth. Help people without taking credit for it. I know of only one person who actually found Nellie's money, my friend Darrell. Nellie had stuffed $800 into the bottom part of a toaster oven. And he left it near a dumpster where Darrell picked it up. Darrell figured some drug dealer had hidden the money there so his wife wouldn't find it, and she accidentally threw the toaster out. A day before his 45th birthday, Nellie was found dead inside his house. He'd had a massive stroke. No one was quite sure exactly how long he'd been lying there. I went to his funeral. Not many people were there and I felt sad for Nellie. I hoped that maybe the homeless man who had bought the vacuum cleaner would come pay his respects. But he didn't show up. In the middle of the room there was a casket, but it was closed. Nellie's body was too decomposed for us to view. In the end, Nellie's family got all his money when they cleaned out his house. That's when I finally met them. They told me that they had known all along the thing that Nellie was ashamed for them to find out, how he made his money. But they could never figure out a way to tell him that it didn't matter. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. This story is from his newest book, which comes out later this year and tells the story of the neighborhood in and around the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. He is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Coming up, the celebrity who most reminds us of God and the music that we really want to hear in church as determined by scientific research. 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, Make a Better Mousetrap, we have stories of people trying to make inventions in the face of a world that does not care, does not want what they are making. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act Three, What Would Fill-in-the-Blank Do? Among other things, America is a place where people invent religions, the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Church of Scientology. And then of course all kinds of very American brands of Protestantism. But despite all that, a lot of Americans still are not part of any organized religion. A 2002 USA Today Gallup poll found that 33% of Americans consider themselves quote, "spiritual, but not religious," while 10% consider themselves neither of those. That is nearly half the country. What would a church have to be to be appealing to those people? What do those people want? Well Brett Martin got the idea that somebody could actually create a religion to meet the needs of those people, a modern religion invented using the principles of modern marketing. It used to be so easy. Back in the good old days, who cared what people wanted? If you had a new religion, you just sacked some villages, burned one or two folks for heresy and that was that. But nowadays, what with a saturated marketplace, media fragmentation and so few budgets allowing for sacking, a new faith would need much more than mere truth. It would need a clear sense of what the market demanded. It would need guidance on the most minute details, from what God looked like to what color robes the clergy would wear. In short, it would need to be focus-grouped. So that's what I set out to do. To guide me through the process, I turned to Paul Parton, the head of planning for the Brooklyn Brothers, a small advertising collective that's created witty campaigns for clients as diverse as CNN, Bath and Body Works and the United Nations Anti-Landmine task force. At 5:00 PM on a weekday night, we gather at a facility called Focus Plus in downtown Manhattan. The offices contain three focus group rooms, each equipped with wraparound, one-way mirrors, plasma TVs and high tech audio and video recording equipment. The scene is so much like a movie version of a focus group that, watching from behind the mirror like the great and powerful Oz, I fully expect the group to burst out laughing as they file in. But these are old hands. All but one have participated in focus groups before, and Parton asks them to tick off what they discussed. "Makeup," says one. "Beer," says another. Toothpaste. IBM. Lung cancer. Parton assures the group that there will be no cult recruitment following the session, that Tom Cruise is not lurking behind the mirror. Then he asks them to start talking about what they believe, 24 citizens who identified themselves as either dissatisfied with their current religion or unattached to any religion at all. Michael, a 29 year old bartender wearing a Mets jersey says, "I have this funny little thing called the tip god, where when I'm out, I tip a lot because things always come back to you." Everyone nods their heads and seems to agree that the tip god is a sound principle. Aside from this basic notion of karma though, it seems that it's hard for our panel to describe what they believe in. It's much easier to rail against what they don't believe. Derek, a thin, black lapsed Catholic who clearly has one or two mean nuns lurking in his past, begins to talk about the inconsistencies in the Bible. "Like, it will contradict itself one phrase after another," he says. "Yeah," chimes in Lynn, who identifies herself as a Mennonite turned Taoist. "And if you ask questions--" "--then you're going to hell," someone else finishes. Clearly, a nerve has been touched. Speaking of hell, the focus group tends to agree that it's a little harsh. "Burning is cruel," someone else says. They want a religion to take into account the sliding scale of sin, the fact that some transgressions are worse than others. Killing and stealing, it's generally agreed, should probably be banned. Not mixing meat and milk, avoiding meat on Fridays, facing Mecca to pray, these rules and dozens more, they say, are just too onerous and arbitrary for today's world. "The Bible says that you're not allowed to spill your seed, except for reproduction," says Micheal. "That's what it says." "And in today's modern society--" he trails off. "That's just not going to fly," finishes a woman. After a while, the discussion has devolved into such a dorm room bull session that I'm looking around for the bong and the Georgia O'Keefe print. But Parton definitely steers the group back toward the concrete. And the consensus is simple. Just do good. Stick to the basic moral principles but streamline them. Cut out the fat. But as Parton leads the discussion, I can't help but notice that just do good is subtly shifting to just do what feels good. As the group keeps talking, it becomes clear that any new religion would have to avoid any recognizably religious traits. For instance, at one point Parton plays a selection of religious music that could be played in our new, hypothetical church. The group loves the opening bars of this-- --but when it gets to this part-- --they nearly recoil in horror. I'm sad to report that they hate this-- --but like this. Likewise the church itself. If feeling good and doing good are one and the same in this new religion, the place of worship will have to be designed to make one feel as good as possible. They imagine an open, airy space with plenty of natural light and flowing water. There would be individual napping pods equipped with customizable music and plasma TVs showing scenes of natural beauty, like a spa. The space would be filled with warm, inviting smells. The focus group likes fabric softener and freshly baked pies. And there would also be puppies. Priests and priestesses in simple, modern robes would mingle with parishioners, look after their needs and then move on. Imagine the sales staff at Banana Republic. "Now, is there anything else you need to know about this new faith?" Parton asks carefully. I find myself holding my breath. This is our Emperor's New Clothes moment. I wait for the lone voice to pipe up, but what are the rituals? The rules? What do I have to do? What do you people believe? But for the first time in two hours, there was silence around the table. When asked to essentially create any theology they wanted, the universe carried on the back of a chihuahua perhaps, a female god, a turtle god, multiple robot gods, they weren't exactly interested in breaking any new ground. In the end, it seemed they wanted the new church to do more or less exactly what the old church is supposed to do, encourage good behavior, provide a sense of community and ceremony, be a place of refuge. They just wanted to be less churchy. Now that we had the makings of our new religion, the next equally important step was how we were going to market it. Obviously, you start with a celebrity. So Parton throws the question out to the group. "Is there anybody," he asks, "who you can see endorsing a religion that you would respect?" "Bill Maher," says one man emphatically. "He doesn't believe in anything, so you know that if he's endorsing something, it's not BS." Parton shows the panel a selection of head shots. Among the rejects are Scarlett Johansson, too young. Charlton Heston, too angry. James Gandolfini, "though there's a certain roundness that I like," one woman allows. The rock, too Mayan. Brian Dennehy, blank stares. But the overwhelming choice for the public face of our religion is someone altogether different, a man whose voice we've heard proclaiming calmly from on high so often in the movies that it's almost hard to believe that he's not up there somewhere narrating the action as we go through our daily lives. The man who reminded our group most of God himself was none other than Morgan Freeman. Wise, kindly supportive and perhaps not coincidentally, invariably a secondary character. Next up was developing an ad campaign. Armed with our focus group data, Parton and Brooklyn Brothers creative director Guy Barnett went to work focusing in on the anachronisms our group found in the Bible. I called it the seed spillers campaign. Here's how these ads would sound in drive time. Think about it for a second. Does God really care which way you face when you're praying? Is he really offended by the thought of a ham and cheese sandwich? Some beliefs don't make sense anymore. Some remain universal and true. Live well. Be kind. Don't kill anyone. Think about it for a second. A modern society needs a modern religion. By the way, that's not actually Morgan Freeman. It's actor John Viener from The Family Guy doing an impression. Freeman, a very busy man, is off working on other projects including the sequel to Bruce Almighty, in which he plays, well, God. The focus group really comes alive at these ads. "Anything that takes potshots at organized religions, I'm going to like it," one man says approvingly. Above all, it seems they're reassured by the form of these ads, by their recognizable ad-ness, that winking tone that says, you and I both know the deal here. And this makes sense. Conversion is a radical, subversive act. It helps if the evangelizing assumes a familiar form. And what could be more familiar and comforting than a man trying to sell a product? By the end of Parton's presentation, a woman named Lee says the six sweetest words a founder of a religion could ever hear, "I would totally visit that website." At first the focus group results bothered me. These people wanted all the benefits of a faith without any of the suffering, any of the sacrifice, without believing anything. On the other hand, they invented a vision of religion that, I have absolutely no doubt, would sell. And a few weeks later I have my burning bush moment. I find myself, improbably, in a room with none other than Morgan Freeman himself. He's sitting across the room sagely consulting a copy of The New York Times through half-glasses. We're in a space filled with comfy chairs and soft couches. Relaxing music is playing. There is wifi access, and the aroma of warm snacks and a cool, authoritative and solicitous staff. Sunlight streams through huge windows and I can see that it is good. Here it is, I think, the scales falling from my eyes. The man in his church. We're in the first class waiting lounge at Newark Airport. Brett Martin in New York. Act Four, Squashing the Creative Spirit. We end our program today with a tale of creativity, ingenuity, the internal striving for something better and the forces that want to stop it all at the dinner table. Andy Raskin has this story, which begins at his family's last Thanksgiving. I'm serving the soup. What story is this? Michelle, everybody sit down please. Everybody sit down please. The soup story. Everyody, OK pay attention. Those that don't know the soup story have to pay attention. That's my mom, last Thanksgiving, just before she was going to tell everyone at the table, our entire family, the story about the soup that Richard, my dad, made for the meal. We decided that we were going to make butternut squash soup for this meal. We had made it before from a recipe in the Silver Palate Cookbook and it was very good. So I told Richard to make it. He decides that he's going to create his own version of the recipe, which I told him not to do, by the way. And I'm not going to tell you what he put in it yet, but we'll get to that as you eat it and see what's there. I guess I'll tell you. He also decided to put in candied ginger. Out of nowhere. How do you think that that belongs in curried soup? Actually, a cursory internet search yields plenty of curry recipes that call for candied ginger. But because it's so concentrated, it's usually used sparingly. My dad threw in six huge cubes. What also made my mom mad was that he substituted hot curry for mild curry, and that when he pronounced the soup done, he hadn't even tasted it. The soup was a big deal to her because they were planning to serve it in these special soup bowls. They had actually bought little pumpkin squashes and hollowed them out, one for each guest. Each one probably cost $1 or $2, but the way my mom was carrying on about them, you would think she'd she had ordered a new set of fine china to be shipped in for the occasion. I interviewed them about it. He totally messed up the soup because he didn't listen to me. And that was a shame because now we have all these elaborate, I would say or interesting soup bowls to fill with what should be a soup commensurate with its bowl. But it's not. It sounds to me that you are upset about the investment you made in the soup bowls-- That's my dad. --and you're not even concerned about my investment of time, money and effort in creating this soup. I thought about that. But then I thought, you're the one who messed up. That's your problem. I told you to start all over again. And I thought that that would be apt punishment and maybe stop you from doing this kind of thing in the future. You see, it is salvageable to be OK, but it can never be the original recipe, which was excellent the last time we made it. So it is not going to be excellent. It may be OK. It may even be between OK and good. But it will never be excellent. This discussion is reminiscent of the inflexibility and rigidity of your mother, which is a historical issue in this family. End of story. When I was growing up, my parents had this fight a million times. My dad would do something mildly inventive and then my mom would get on him for it as if he had exposed the family to life or death peril. We had a little boat and he liked to maneuver it really close into beaches so that my sister and I could go swimming and clamming. But sometimes he would run aground. And then my mom would yell at him. And her eyes would squint, and her muscles would tense up. Or when my dad was driving us all in the car, he would sometimes take what he called shortcuts, which typically involved minor traffic violations. My mom would yell at him and get all squinty again, but I could see how afraid she was. Watch this. Watch this. Wait. First taste it without the sherry because you have to compare. This Thanksgiving, in the late morning, my mom demanded that my dad throw away his soup and start over. He refused. So my mom proposed making a small batch of the original recipe and mixing that in with his version. For some reason he agreed to that, but it was still too spicy. So my dad doctored it up with even more improvised ingredients, which included apple juice, half and half, pumpkin seeds and Harvey's Bristol Cream. Watch the soup come alive. Too much. I'll tell you something else. If he had followed the pure recipe in the book that I gave him, this would have all been unnecessary. Finally it was dinner time and time to test the soup. OK so now we've heated up the squash bowls and we're going to fill them with the quote, unquote, soup. OK, soup is on, let's go. My relatives, fully briefed about the controversy over the soup, had their personal squash bowls put in front of them. What were they going to say? Nobody wanted to take sides. Finally, Aunt Andrea said she liked the soup, which my dad took as a vote for him. But then she remarked that it was so spicy that he could probably sell the leftovers to an Indian restaurant. Point for mom. Uncle Robert said he liked the soup, but then we noticed the beads of sweat dripping down his forehead. All my brother-in-law would say was that the soup exceeded his expectations, which was his way of staying on good terms with both his in-laws. And me, I thought the soup had been muddied by too much compromise. But then, a few weeks after I got home, I got an email from my mom. It was one of those lists that gets forwarded around with rules for good living, like be gentle with the earth and spend time alone every day. My mom had received it from a friend. And when she forwarded it to me, she had written on the top, "Look at number 17." It was odd because my mom doesn't usually open those kind of emails. But I skimmed down and read number 17. It said exactly, "Make love and cook with abandon." When I saw that, number 17, it just flashed in my mind, oh my god this is so right. And let him be. And right then I said, you know what, why should I restrict your father's artistic pleasure in creating whatever he's creating when he cooks? It was nice. That's about all. It was nice. It was nice that she got the message. I don't have to-- this is friends and family. I can give them a soup. If they don't eat the soup, we throw away the soup. It's not the end of the world. For her I guess it was. I guess it was for her, but for me it wasn't. For the record, number 17 in the email my mom sent me said exactly, "Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon." How she got "make love" I'm not sure. And let's not go there. I don't know if she's really changed, if a single cheesy email could alter the way my parents relate to each other after 42 years of marriage. And my dad says that her first reflex is still to criticize him for things. But now, sometimes, he sees her catch herself and stop. Andy Raskin in San Francisco. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help form Thea Chaloner, Sam Hallgren and Seth Lind. Our website, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or buy CDs of them, www.thisamericanlife.org. Or 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 I walked in on this week in his office. And he's laying in the middle of the carpet, rolling around and laying around. 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. Long ago, when our radio show was first on the air, we tried an experiment, two experiments, actually. We did two of our shows onstage in Chicago within six months of each other. In the first, at this small club called the Lunar Cabaret, we had a kind of open mic, where people came onstage and they read letters, letters that they'd received, letters that they'd written, letters that they'd found. The second show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, was all about this new phenomenon called the internet. This was 1997, and most people were still just discovering the internet. And we invited our listeners to come on and tell us stories about things that were happening on the web that never would have happened anywhere else. Today on our radio show, we're going to go back to those two shows. They're like little time capsules, those shows. The internet stuff, which is going to be the second half of today's program, it just seems so quaint that we were asking ourselves, how big is this internet thing going to be? Is it really going to change things? And the letters that people read onstage that we're going to play in the first half of the show, even that feels like it's from a completely other time. Like, today, who writes letters? When do you write a letter except for a thank you note or a letter to get a job? Even soldiers in Iraq, when they write home to their families, they use email. My co-host for both of these old shows was a Chicago playwright named David Hauptschein. David had been hosting and organizing events like this around Chicago where he would have people come onstage and read letters. So let's go back in time to 1996 and 1997. All right, you see this egg timer here? This egg timer will get you off the stage after five minutes. When you hear [BELL RING] that, you must stop. If you're really nervous, I have this little elephant for people to hold, in case they're really-- He's holding up a-- Oh, it's a rhino. Sorry, sorry, sorry. You're holding up about a six-inch long, gray rhinoceros, fluffy rhinoceros. So I will leave this up here on the podium. So if anyone gets really tense, just hang on to this. I hold in my hand a bowl, a silver bowl full of pieces of paper on which members of our audience here have written their names. Please pick the first name, Ira. John Beaderman, come on up. OK, I'll read you a couple things from Carolyn. Hiya, hun. What are you up to? I'm listening to Motley Crue, Shout at the Devil. That's a pretty kick-ass tape. It's Joe's, but it's still a kick-ass tape, and Vince Neil is such a fox. I'd love to go backstage at a Crue concert. I'd be in total heaven, because I know what I'd do, and I'll bet you do too. Like my green marker? I think it's cool. Explain this to me. Something fishy's going on. What? I don't know. But you're acting fishy, so don't lie, and it's nothing I did. I don't act any different than before we did it. Are you trying to say that I'm acting different, or I'm slightly more insane than unusual? Is that what you mean? I'm acting differently? If that's what you mean, how? I just heard Judas Priest [? talking to ?] Dio. That's pretty kick-ass. Why did Chris ask for me today? And why did you guys hang up on me? That's pretty ignorant, not to mention immature and rude. I'm listening to Motley Crue, "Bastard" again, so they are so cool. I haven't decided if I like Crue or Maiden better yet, but they're both totally kick-ass. God, is this note [BLEEP] dumb. It's 7:30 and I want it to be 8:30 because then I can listen to RPM, Real Precious Metal 103.1. 831-1031. Kick ass! "Helter skelter, you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer, helter skelter." OK, Ira. Next reader, Neal Pollack. Hi. I wrote-- can I hold this? Please do. Neal is holding the rhinoceros. I wrote these letters soon after I graduated from college. And I like to turn back to them every now and then to remind myself what an idiot I was. I believed at the time that I could get any job I wanted anywhere at any point. And these letters, I think, are indicative. Here's one I wrote to Tina Brown, who was then the editor of Vanity Fair magazine. Dear Ms. Brown, I'll cut to the quick. [LAUGHTER] I would like to work for The New Yorker, and I imagine, with the big changeover, you may need lots of editorial help. So I'm throwing my hat into the ring and asking you to consider hiring me as an editorial assistant for your new project. I've been precociously reading The New Yorker for some time now. Most of the writers I respect most, living and dead, have written for your magazine at some time. I'm willing to cut my journalistic and literary teeth elsewhere if I can't get a job at The New Yorker, but I am determined not to end up anywhere else. The resume I've enclosed doesn't indicate this, but I've been working as a freelance writer since graduating two months ago. [LAUGHTER] I've been doing pretty well, but I'm still waiting for the big score. Maybe you could help. I strongly encourage you to take a chance on me, but if I don't suit your needs at this time, thank you for reviewing my application. I look forward to hearing from you. [APPLAUSE] About six months later, I hadn't yet heard from Tina Brown. So I turned my gaze elsewhere. Here's one I wrote to Strobe Talbott, who at the time was an editor-at-large at Time Magazine, and now, as you may or may not know, is a Deputy to the Secretary of State in the Clinton administration. So here's what I wrote to Strobe. Dear Mr. Talbott, I'm a damn good editor. I'm young and gutsy as a marine in combat. My terse, tough prose style would make Raymond Chandler weep. Somewhere, somehow, the grapevine told me that you're starting a magazine called Globe Review. Said vine also let me know that the staff will be small, which means you're not hiring too many people. [LAUGHTER] Being low man on the totem pole is fine with me. Your magazine sounds original, smart, and progressive, sophisticated but not shallow. Of course, I'm just guessing. Can you go global without me? I think so. Should you? I think not. Or at least hope not. I'll do good work as an assistant editor, copy editor, or researcher. I'll be in New York City from November 11 through 17. If you'd like to interview me, you can contact me at the Chicago address on my resume until then. Thank you for reviewing my application, and I look forward to seeing the magazine, whether I'm part of it or not. [APPLAUSE] Next reader, Jenny Magnus. All right, this is a letter that I received. It's addressed to me. So my name is Jenny Magnus. And on the envelope it says, "Lessons for Advanced Beginners." And then on the back, it says, "burn after reading." Dear Ms. Magnus, I almost fell off my chair when, during one of your pieces, you implied that you are, quote, "a really good artist." After sitting there listening to you chant "mama, mama, mama, mama, mama," which you got from Janov's book Primal Scream-- I shop through paperbacks at thrift stores, too-- then hearing you chant "give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me," I sat there wondering just how conventional some pretentious chick dressed in black can be. I, by the way, use "chick" lightly, since you are not very feminine. In fact, you are nothing but a contrived, self-deceiving, selfish, not overly bright, mediocre joke. You might be able to fool the poseurs who hang around Urbis Orbis flattering your brother pretending to know, but not me, babe. Not me, babe. I use "babe" lightly. You are not a babe. You have-- [LAUGHTER] You have no sensuality, no charm, no looks, et cetera. Without affectation, without deliberately taking steps to appear avant, where would you be? Nothing comes naturally to you, does it? You really have to steal and grub and labor. In fact, you are perusing this letter for material right now, I bet. [LAUGHTER] I realized how repressed and affected you are during "Loser's Alias." And thank God for the fire which started, or you'd probably still be on the floor reciting your brother's tripe. You are just too, too uptight, baby. You think you can act uninhibited, but why do you want to? Is it that important to you that you seem to yourself and others as if you are special? You are quite interesting, the only person with absolutely no substance I've ever met. How did you get so [BLEEP]? Give up art. You're no good at it, anyway. And save your [BLEEP] ass. Sincerely, Mason 32 Degrees. PS, well, I've done my good deed for tonight. [APPLAUSE] Our next reader, pulled from our bowl of readers, Adam Davidson. [APPLAUSE] OK. This is age 16. Dear Adam, I can lose my guard best when I write. No wonder I scared off S with my letter. Speaking of which, I didn't hear from him. You see, how can I ever think of hurting you like that? Let's say something starts between us. What about S? I may not like him, but maybe I do. Also, what if I'm just on the rebound from Dave? Not that I didn't like you before-- maybe I'm just free to say it now-- but I might be exaggerating it because I'm feeling a loss. Maybe we're confusing a really good friendship for love, et cetera. You know the deal. Also, let's say we do have sex. It'll be a bigger deal for you. Not that I won't take it seriously. I have seriously thought about it. But it's a big responsibility to put on me, your first time, et cetera. Now who's babbling? Anyway, [LAUGHTER] I think you're a wonderful person and friend, and the last thing I want to do is screw that up. Maybe we should just see, trial-run, if making out agrees with us. You never know, we might decide it doesn't feel right and keep things status quo. But we might end up getting it on every day. Excuse the vulgar language. As that guy in English class would say, "there is no pretty way to look at sex." Anyway, I love you, but I'm not sure what kind of love. Love, K. Geez, I don't even know what attracts me to you. You're so [BLEEP] perfect I guess. Then supplemental letter-- supplementary letter. Will things be the same once the sexual tension is gone? I think that's half the fun. It's what has kept Moonlighting on the air. Will we still be able to joke about getting married, et cetera, without feeling uncomfortable? Confusion, is there an S in confusion? I'm even mixed up about that. We went out after that for a year. [APPLAUSE] Andrew Fenchel? OK, I found this letter in the street in my neighborhood. I think it won't really need any other introduction, except that where the letter-writer refers to Vienna, I think it's safe to assume that that's not Austria. OK. Time, 10:00 PM. June 10, '96. Dear Carla, what's up, babe? How are you doing? Fine, I hope. Well, I'm in Vienna. But I didn't forget to write. Baby, I miss you. I can't wait to see you. I've been thinking about you all the time, and I can't stop. I got into a fight in here with a king, and for that I got two weeks in the hole. Baby, I hope you're not talking to someone else. I've been waiting for your letters, but I haven't received any yet. What's up with that? Carla, I feel that you don't love me anymore. Baby, I love you more than what you could ever know. I miss making love to you, kissing you. Please send me some pictures of you. When I get out of here, I'm going to get a job. I'll even quit gang-banging if you show me you love me. Carla, what do you mean when you say you went from 100% to 50%? I don't understand. I haven't been cheating on you, and I'll be with you all the time when I get out. Carla, I care about you a lot. You just don't know. Why is your mom going to kick you out? What have you done? Please don't lie to me. Are you [BLEEP] around with someone else, staying out late? What is it? I've got the feeling you are seeing someone else, but I guess I can't trip, so long as when I get out, you come back to me. What do you mean that you love me and good luck in life? [LAUGHTER] I get the first part but not the second. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Are you breaking up with me? Are you going away from me? Whatever you do, wherever you go, you'll always be in my heart, Carla. Believe that. I know you think I don't love you anymore, but you're wrong, babe. I said it before and I'll say it again, I love you Carla. [APPLAUSE] Coming up, a guy offers a girl a late night tour of Microsoft, and this actually makes him seem hot. That, and other hard-to-believe tales from the early days of the internet, 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, we're revisiting two live shows that we did in 1996 and '97, onstage in Chicago. In one show, listeners brought letters and read them onstage. And now we turn to the other show from back then. Back then, the internet was still new to most of us. And so we decided we were going to do a show where we would try to figure out what was happening on the internet, especially if things were happening on the internet that would never happen anyplace else. And to answer that question, we advertised in cities around the country, inviting people to send us their stories about life on the internet. Some of these people I interviewed, and then others just showed up at the theater, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the night we did the show. And they came up to the mic, and they read from emails or web pages. And I have to say, listening to this show, it's almost adorably quaint, the entire mission of this show. It's almost embarrassing, actually, to hear me and other people trying to think through this question, like, what is this internet? What is new about the internet? You'll hear there is a point where I'm talking to a woman who's looking through the websites of complete strangers. And it's like, can you believe it? She's looking through the websites of complete strangers. And then she has this experience, which now is incredibly common, where she meets in person somebody who she first met on the internet. And we're all talking about it like, can you believe that such a thing can happen in this world that we live in? You'll hear. It's really interesting. It's like a historic document. So without further ado, let us turn on the time machine and go back to 1997. [APPLAUSE] So Mary is 19 years old, an English major at the University of Washington. And one day, she's cruising the net, visiting the home pages of complete strangers. And I came across this site that I thought was amazing. It was the most cutting-edge, thought-provoking site I had ever seen. And so I was examining it, checking it out, and I realized that this guy was my age, and he worked at Microsoft. And that just blew me away. Because I'm a student, I can barely afford coffee in the morning. And here, this guy worked at Microsoft. I ended up emailing him just to tell him how much I liked his site and how amazing I thought it was. And he wrote back. And that went on for about four or five days. We just kept writing back and forth. Really personal stuff, too, not just computer geek stuff. What is the brave new world of the internet? You can meet a stranger and get to know them intimately, much faster on the net than you can anywhere else. But for a week, Mary and this guy wrote each other several times a day, long, personal emails. Then they agreed to meet in person at a coffee shop on Valentine's Day. I was nervous before we met, because I was worried that he wouldn't find me as interesting in real life. So we met for coffee. We ended up spending the next 12 hours together. There wasn't really a turning point until a few days later. We had continued to see each other. And one night, we ended up going out to his office at Microsoft. It was about midnight and nobody was there. And we were hanging out, and one thing led to another. And all of a sudden, we were making out. And? It was crazy. And you were glad, though, because you were liking him. Oh yeah, yeah. It wasn't a bad thing. But it was awkward because it was my first time. I had never really done that with anybody before. It was your very first time actually having sex with somebody? Right, well, no. It was my first time kissing anybody. Kissing anybody at all? Yeah. Because you hadn't had a high school boyfriend who you would do that with? No. No. I was a real big loner in high school. I didn't get out much. So it was your first time just making out with somebody and it was at Microsoft. Yeah. And so it made it all the more surreal, I think. It was just weird for me to think that, here's this guy I met a little over a week ago by chance on the internet. And here we are at his office doing this. And then after that, I barely heard from him. He told me that he didn't want a relationship right now, that he wanted to wait. He kept using the term, he wanted to make his first million before he had a relationship with somebody. His first million? Yes. After the fact, after the night at his office down there at Microsoft, I noticed, boy, he really was feeding me some lines there. Really? Yeah. Like what else? He actually was going to set me up with a copy of Office 97. He never did. The cad! At what point in the whole interaction did he promise you the Office 97, the free software? Actually, the first night we met. Did you just think, he's feeding me a lot of soup? No. I thought it was cool, because I had heard some things about Office 97. Wow, I'd like to have that. Now I'm sure you can only look back on the incredible naivety. Some young man is prowling the streets of Seattle, walking through the U District, telling women-- Got your free software. People came to the Museum of Contemporary Art with their own stories about the internet. My co-host is David Hauptschein. We're going to begin with Joe Fosco. In preparation for this show, we spent many hours surfing the net together and finding files that we thought were interesting. And Joe's going to come up and read some. [APPLAUSE] Wait a minute, Joe. Let me get this timer going here. I've got to put these other ones in different places. This one I'm going to read now is a website of this guy who's building an aluminum ball, a ball of aluminum foil. And he went into quite a bit of detail about this ball. He says, "I don't remember exactly how the ball began, but it is a sphere, composed entirely of aluminum foil of various varieties. It is mostly candy wrappers with a few bits of foil and other food items mixed in. So far the best finish coat is York Peppermint Patty wrappers. Other foil is fine, but a coat of Peppermint Patty wrappers is necessary to keep it on. Gum wrappers also tend to have that quality, but they are far too difficult to peel, considering the minimal bulk they have. Gum wrappers do make a good finish coat on top of Peppermint Patty wrappers for show. Some items, such as Hershey's Miniatures, which look like they might be good candidates for foil, aren't. The ball is more impressive in person than this page can hope to depict." There's a picture of the ball. Oh, there is. I don't know if you can see it. [LAUGHTER] And then he has this diary of its growth. And it starts back in January. And he says, "we've gotten an electric postage scale in the office. It reads one more digit of precision, so we now have a weight of 3.9 ounces. I have done the math to compute the density of the ball. Curiously, it is much lower than that of solid aluminum. I have a hard time believing that the ball is less than half aluminum by mass, so I invite you to let me know if there are any errors in my computations. I expected that the density would be less than that of solid aluminum because of a small amount of air between layers of the foil, the adhesive coatings, inks, and small quantities of chocolate grease and other leftovers from the food items that the wrappers were originally used to package. I wouldn't have been too surprised by a 5% or even 10% difference, but I find the actual results obtained a little difficult to believe." The other interesting thing is that on this, he has links to other sites that are making aluminum foil balls. [LAUGHTER] And someone else who is making a rubber band ball. [APPLAUSE] Our next presenter, our next reader, Noel. My name is Noel, and I'm diastematic. Anybody here know what that means? It means that I have a gap between my front two teeth. For those of you unfamiliar with this whole website gap-tooth thing, I built a website for gap-tooth people. So yeah, idiotic. You want it? You've got it. But I'm in good company. 10% of America, including David Letterman, Lauren Hutton, Noam Chomsky, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Itzhak Perlman, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Vince Lombardi, blah, blah, blah, all with the tooth cleavage. I must admit, for better or for worse, yes, I'm the one who built this website. But the emphasis is humor. In early November last year-- Wait, humor versus what? Like, attacks at people without gaps in their teeth? What would be the other thing that you would do? You would proselytize on behalf-- try to bring people over, encourage people to create gaps in their teeth? Absolutely. This is very, this will hit on a lot of those themes. In early November last year, I was watching a Bears-Packers game. And during the pregame ceremonies, the USPS, the post office, unveiled art for a new stamp, due this summer, featuring the late, great Vince Lombardi, who was one of the greatest gappers ever to live. He was on a stamp, riding high atop the team in the throes of victory, smiling huge. But something was missing, Coach Lombardi's trademark gap-toothed grin. He had near-perfect pearly whites and the gap was gone. The next day, as a joke, I added a page to the gap-tooth website, protesting the post office's depiction of Lombardi as a cosmetically-altered hero. Who would Don King be if he were bald? Or Gorbachev without the Kool-Aid stain? Or Jimmy Durante without that nose? So knowing that this was the web, the oddball media that gets no real merit for its content, I expected little to no attention. But then came Yahoo, which featured it as a weekly pick. The Washington Post had me on the phone and ran a half-page story with my before and after pics. Chicago's Channel 7 came to my apartment and ran a story on its 6:00 News, just before the Super Bowl. Getting out of hand? Yeah, timeout! If you're thinking this pathetic web-based protest should never have received any attention, I'm in agreement with you. What was ironic about this story is that they painted me as a freak-- imagine that-- a super fan ready to strap myself with bombs and blow up my teeth and Washington, DC if they didn't change the art. And I thought, I'm just running a website for gap-toothed people. You can't take me that seriously. So I called up Bob, the artist of the postage stamp, and we talked about the stamp. We discussed angles and art representation. He was a really nice guy. I was thinking about dropping the protest already when he told me his three-year-old daughter was gap-toothed. And that was it. Protest over. But what still gets me today is that the web has the power to make insignificant things seem real, that email can really serve as a powerful form of protest, which it did in this case, and that people, including myself, really do have too much time on their hands. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Well, for our next one, I thought we'd do one that people contacted us when we advertised around the country for things going on on the net. And somebody notified us about this one web page. We were searching for people who were having experiences on the net that they would never have otherwise. And this particular page was made by a woman named Jenni Ringley, a senior at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. And like a lot of people, she created her own little home page on the world wide web. There's the regular part of my page, I guess you would say, with information about me, the music I like, things like that, like everybody has on their page. The one item that has become extremely popular, though, is the JenniCam. And it's just a camera that sits in my room and takes a picture every three minutes and uploads it. So every three minutes, you can find out what fascinating thing I'm doing in my room. The JenniCam is on seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and the number of people who want to see what fascinating thing is going on in a college girl's dorm room each day? People, I'm not sure. But as far as number of hits go, we get over 500,000 hits a day. A half million hits every single day. OK, I'm just going to stop the recording right there. This is Ira. This is me in the present. This number right here, this number, a half million hits, we had no way to confirm that at the time. And not only that, we had no idea how to interpret that number. Like, it just seemed absurdly high, the idea that each page hit didn't necessarily represent a distinct person, that thought had not totally penetrated the culture. And if you think about a photo every three minutes on this website, somebody staying on that site an hour might be counted as 20 separate hits. You'd only need 25,000 people to get to a half million. OK, anyway, let's get back. A half million hits every single day. And what do people see? Nothing, really. I write email. I sleep. I have friends over. You can watch my hedgehog when I'm not in the room. Things like that. Pretty much, just regular college life as far as I know. Our associate producer tuned in to your page just to see what was going on. And for about a half an hour, she witnessed you on the phone. Every three minutes, there'd be another picture of you in a different position on the telephone. I talk on the phone a lot. In a way, it's hard to think of anything more banal than seeing a college student's dorm room. I would have to agree. I would absolutely agree. I don't do anything that's that interesting. I don't have company very often. I don't do anything more interesting really than talk on the phone, watch TV, and sleep. Let me ask you to talk about the nudity. Well, whenever I'm nude in my room, I'm nude on the JenniCam. But when I think about how often somebody is nude in the course of a day, it's really not very long. Well, maybe I'm not an average person. But I figure when I'm alone, who really cares? I sleep naked, and I get changed. And when I get out of the shower, I'm all wet. There's no hurry to put on clothes. Explain what the thrill is about being naked in front of a computer camera. Actually, with the camera there, I don't think about it much. So whenever I'm normally naked in my room, that's when I would be on the camera. It really doesn't affect me in much of a big way, I would say. But wait, you're saying it means nothing to you? I think the camera would be a lot less interesting if I paid that much attention to it. It would be more of a staged show, and you can go see a staged show anywhere. I think the whole appeal of the camera is that it is whatever is normally going on in my room. And with it having been up for a year and a half now, I'm pretty accustomed to it being there. It really doesn't affect me much, I would say. Have there been any moments over the last two years where you were sort of sorry that the camera was in the dorm room? Actually, it goes sort of the opposite way. Whenever I go home for breaks, for spring break or something like that, I'm always sad to be away from the camera. It's really a different feeling, whenever I'm in the room and the camera is broken, or for some reason, my room feels totally different. It's like I'm completely alone. So I usually prefer the camera be there, and I'm sad when it's off as opposed to wishing it weren't there. Because you don't feel alone when it's on. Right. Even though there's nobody actually there with me, even though I'm still alone, even if there's nobody watching the camera from the other end, it's just comforting to know that there is somebody metaphorically out there. In your view, why are so many people checking out the site each day? A lot of the people, it's totally hoping to find me getting out of the shower, getting dressed for bed, things like that. It's hoping to find the nudity. But I get lots of email from people who say that it's just nice when they're alone in their office to know that there's somebody else out there, somebody else that is doing nothing more interesting than what they're doing at the same time. It's like having a little virtual friend. Now, at some point in the two years, you've probably had somebody over in the dorm room to mess around. Sure. And? At that point, it goes on the other person's comfortability. I have no problem doing that. And that's the whole point of the camera is that it's whatever I'm doing. When I went into this, I understood that, in order to make it really work, it would have to be no matter what I was doing. But I can't really enforce that on people who are visiting me. So if the other person is uncomfortable, then the camera is turned off, or it points to a different part of the room. And generally, has the other person been uncomfortable? Yes. Yes. Was there ever a time that you actually had somebody over where you actually kept the camera on the two of you? Yes, in fact. And the funny thing is that it never actually was broadcast because the number of people suddenly reloading on the server ended up crashing the computer that posted the JenniCam at the time. Wow. So even though we were there and the camera was on, the server was crashed by the number of people wanting to see. What's your impression of who these people are? Oh, I don't know. Mostly men, it's almost exclusively men. I get about 700 emails a day. And of that number, maybe 10 are from women. You get 700 emails a day? Right. What are people saying to you? Well, a lot of those are entries to a contest on my web page called "Name that Curve" where once a week I put up a new picture of some close-up shot of a part of my body and people guess what it is. So I would say 300 or so of that number are "Name that Curve" entries. The rest of them are people saying either I saw your web page, I like your page, or can I call you, or can you send me private, special pictures? It really, really, ranges. Jenny says she spends five to six hours a day answering email. And when I talked to her, on the one hand, there seemed to be something completely innocent in what she was doing, putting herself out there and not really caring who sees. And if you press her about her on exhibitionism, she'll tell you over and over, oh, no, no, it's not about exhibitionism. It's an experiment at letting people view a person's entire life without editing. Though, one thing that she's gotten on the internet that she could never have gotten so easily any other way is she's famous within a small circle. It's a small, particular kind of thing. I do get a fair number, at this point, of requests for autographed pictures and people wanting to buy my hair and my clothing, things like that. What? It's pretty scary. Well, one time, I was caught on camera actually trimming my bangs, because if you only have to do that, it's cheaper. And all of a sudden, I got 40 emails from people saying, are you going to do anything with that hair? Can I buy it from you? And what did you make of that? Well, it's kind of scary. I mean, I do meet people from time to time. Somebody will say, I'm passing through the area, do you think I could meet you? And you say? I actually have a pretty good knack for getting a good feeling about people right off the bat. So sometimes I say no, sometimes I say yes. I've had dinner with probably a dozen people from the JenniCam. And has that been nice? I had one person who had a hard time taking no for an answer, even after I made it abundantly clear I wasn't interested. Really? That's kind of creepy. It is, kind of. I've had a fair number of improper passes at the end of the evening. But it stays at a pass. If there were a cable channel that would just have a camera on in your room, with no sound, 24 hours a day, do you think you'd get a half million viewers? I don't think so. I don't think I would, because if you have the TV, you have other things you can watch. I think it would still be popular, but I think at that point, it would be a lot less interesting. Because people can do this from their offices, at work, if they have internet usage that's not monitored. From work, you can just put it on and leave it on in the background while you're doing whatever else on your computer. Jenni Ringley has just graduated from college. She's moved to another city, where she has gotten a job designing web pages for a big national magazine. [APPLAUSE] OK. It's me again in the present. Jenni Ringley and the JenniCam were internet celebrities for seven years, written about all the time. There were parody websites, JenniCam-ing people's pets and stuff like that. She was invited on the Letterman show. She was included in a 2001 exhibit done by the Museum of Modern Art. The word JenniCam was reportedly, for a while, one of the most popular search terms on Slashdot. Until finally, at the end of 2003, Jenni Ringley shut down the site. According to Wikipedia, fans started to turn on her in part because they were annoyed that she just would loaf around the apartment. There was a feeling of, like, get a job. By the end, people had to pay to log on to the site, and she actually was making decent money from it, or seemed to. And this annoyed fans as well. To the very end, she continued to describe the site as a kind of art project. "I keep JenniCam alive not because I want or need to be watched, but because I simply don't mind being watched," she wrote. "What you see is my life, exactly as it would be, whether or not there were cameras watching, as a chronicle, a long-term experiment." Well, now, this example of people's lives changed by the internet, Eileen and Fred Kiefer live outside Columbus, Ohio. They are septuagenarians with seven kids and 13 grandkids. OK, well, when we first got our email going on our computer, I sent a message to our son in Milwaukee whose address was K-I-E-F-F. Yeah. It was my first time to use it, and I left one of the F's off. Her email was a chatty email about everything going on in the family, signed "love, Mom." So I got back a letter from someone whose address was K-I-E-F. And he said, I enjoyed this letter, but I don't think you meant it for me. And so then I wrote back and said, thanks and explained how I'd made the mistake. And he wrote back. And we've been writing now for, it'll be two years this month. The man, the couple actually, who got her email were Kiefer and Galen Mitchell in Portland, Oregon. He works at Tandy and does a radio show out there. And when he got Mrs. Kiefer's email in his account, the thing that actually got to him was that she signed it "love, Mom." His own mother had just died two months before. His father had been dead for years. Mrs. Kiefer said she never intended or wanted to have a long-term email friendship. It seems like we had nothing in common going in. The age difference, and they had no children, and they're Mormons and we're Catholics. So it seemed like there wasn't a whole lot that we had to talk about. But we never have any trouble. At first, we were writing every day. We were both so excited about this. And now, we're usually in touch at least once a week. And we've visited, and he's in Oregon. We're in Ohio. We visited in Portland last year and spent a couple days with him and had a wonderful time. And they're like 30 years younger than we are. So we've become mom and dad, and we've adopted them. We call them our legally adopted children. And in December, when I had a serious operation, he was on the phone every night, just like the rest of our kids. So he's really become one of our kids. So what in the world was it in those first emails they sent two years ago? What could people possibly say to create a bond like that? Oh, I don't remember. I just remember indicating that I was 70. So there was-- I didn't want anybody to think that we were going to have this big romance or anything. And then-- Because you read these stories about people doing weird things with people on the internet. We never had that problem. We have seven children. And all of them have email except one. And the ones out of town, we hear from a couple times a week. One of our daughters, we hear from almost daily. Now, did you have as much contact with them before email? Oh, no. No. We would talk on the phone maybe once a month. And it was always, how are you? And you never really were part of their lives that way. And two of our children live in Boston. And we just weren't-- well, we were always close. We weren't communicating very often. So email has really brought you all closer together. Oh, it's wonderful. I keep trying to talk everybody I know into it, if their children have access to a computer. It's changed our life a lot. It's just changed our lives. I wouldn't think of not checking the computer first thing in the morning to see who's writing. Eileen Kiefer in Dublin, Ohio. Well, as we looked for stories from the net for this show, especially stories of things happened on the net that might not happen anywhere else, we found Earl Jackson. He's an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and he spends a lot of time on the net. He writes about the net, has seven websites himself. And he tells this story, which begins on America Online. I was on AOL and other services in San Francisco a lot. And there are these chat rooms where gay men can meet and talk. And in San Francisco, it's fairly wild. There's a 24-hour bulletin board that I was observing for this study I was doing, where you could almost be guaranteed that if you lived in San Francisco and you had a modem, you could have sex any time of the day or night. This was a very goal-directed bulletin board. Right. People would meet, go have sex. Right. And you would know exactly what they wanted to do, and you would probably have nude pictures of them before that. What I also thought was really interesting-- and this was more true of AOL-- that there was a new metaphysics of sexuality. Because people would talk about, cyber-sex or real sex? And it occurred to me after I listened to enough, by real sex they meant phone sex. Oh, really? Yeah, so it became, instead of a two-tier system, it's a three-tier system. And you have real sex, ultra-real sex, and cyber-sex. Wait, ultra-real sex, you said? That would mean what I call a slow-time interface, which means actual physical contact. God, do people still do that? Um, yes. Earl Jackson says that he meets more and more people who have hooked up what amounts to video cameras on their computers with a technology called CU-SeeMe, they can look at the person they're interacting with over the net. I know people that actually leave physical dates to go home and have sex over the net with the quick cam. Come It's true. There's an entire culture that's entirely video transmission sexuality now. Talk a little more about that. You actually know somebody who actually left an actual date-- Yeah, me, in fact. Oh, they left you? Yeah, they left me. But he said that that is what he does lately. And I understood that, because a lot of men are afraid of sexual contact because of AIDS. So the perfect thing to eroticize is distance. And so he says to you-- at what point in the evening did he say, I'm going to go home now? Pretty soon. He said that he really needed to do the CU-SeeMe stuff. Back in December of 1993, Earl Jackson met a guy over the net in one of these gay chat rooms. The guy's name was Ken, who lived nearby, but he had a boyfriend so the two never met in person. But almost every day for a year, they got online together and created these elaborate fantasies together online, using that kind of software where you can see what the other person types as they type it, and they can see what you type as you type it. We would have a fantasy about what if he came to my classroom and then I took him back into my office. But it was really sort of a game. But these narratives became so intense that we would set times of the day, or he would just check in. And he said, do you have time for a story now? And he would start it, and then I would continue it. And we have all of these stories. But as we kept doing this, then a little part of his life would come in. And then there would be a story that would take us somewhere else. And then I'd know a little bit more. And soon the sex part was really an excuse to tell the other stories. And sometimes he would be telling this story about his childhood in Missouri. And then it would remind him of a sexual fantasy. And then he'd put me in it. And you couldn't plan to do these things. We became sort of like jazz pianists or something. We'd have these riffs together. Then one day, he was asking me if I had time to talk to him. And I was just leaving, but I could tell that even the way he was typing was different. You could tell even the way he was typing was different? Yes, yes. What do you mean? People have different habits in their speed, or the way he would respond, or if he didn't put a smiley face after a certain number of words. I just knew there was something really wrong with the way he asked me if I had time. And he said, bad news, son. And I think I knew it instantly, what that was. He had tested positive. And he didn't know how to break it to me. And our messages to each other then became a lot more about that and about what happened to him as a child and other things that were fairly tragic and amazing that he was telling anybody, because he was really one of those strong, silent types. Then-- this is when I should have gotten more nervous-- he started saying that he didn't want any of his porn tapes anymore because he associated the porn with him being positive. So he wanted to mail them to me, and he mailed me a box of them. I didn't really want them, but he wanted to do this for me. So there was suddenly a box of porn tapes in my house. And then the following week, there was one too. And then just before I got back to San Francisco, I got a message from him, hoping that I was well and hoping I got the tapes. And he said that I'd get another message very soon. Now, he was writing to me almost entirely in capital letters, which scared me. And I didn't know why. But here's the last one. "I have it all boxed up now. I will give it my friend. He will mail it for me like he did before. And it will arrive either Thursday or Friday, via two-day express. I have a letter coming to you to help explain a few things. Thank you for being a friend when I really needed it. Kenneth." And then three days, nothing. And then there's just one line. "A package should arrive today. 1/19/95. Email me. Cruiser3. Bye. Love, Ken." And then on the 25th, there was one that looked like it was from Ken. It was his screen name. But then, when I opened it up, it said, "this is a hard note for me to write. Ken left a note to ask me to let you know Ken took his own life on Friday, January 20. He was cremated yesterday, and his ashes will be dropped into the ocean off of San Francisco today. Ken's mental attitude over the last four to six weeks is very hard to describe. He was a basket case to say the least. I will keep his account open for the next day if you have any questions or response, and I will try to answer them for you. Ken's friend, Dave." Did he send you a final note in the last package he sent you? Yeah. It was the only time I ever saw his handwriting. And that said similar things. He said, thank you for being a friend when I needed it. And I would always love you. It must have been so strange to see a physical manifestation of him after the email. It was. And what was really odd was that, when he first sent the first box of tapes, he told me which tape had a scene where the two people are the ones that he imagined us to be. Now, that doesn't mean that he looked like either one of them, but he knew the fantasies that would resonate with us. So even at that point, our fantasies were constantly mediated by some other technology, which is probably hard for you to imagine. But none of this was cold. There was something so tender about this that I was very moved by this experience. After he died, did you go through a period of mourning for him? Yes, I did. Yes. What a strange thing to be mourning somebody who you never actually saw. Yeah. Although, it's real. You know, when people say, oh, the computers are making us all isolated and it's such a cold world, I've had emotional experiences and long-term friendships that would have never possible otherwise. It's funny because it's almost like the whole thing, it could be a con, an elaborate con. He would be such a creep that-- I thought of that, actually. Because it seemed almost like a melodrama from a long time ago. It was really tawdry. And if I wrote a short story, I wouldn't end it this way because it was too hokey. After he died, you know how after somebody you're close to is gone, how when you go back to the places where you used to go with them, you'll think of them inevitably and miss them. After he was gone, when you would get back on your computer, would you sense his loss? Yes. He really felt gone. He really felt gone. When I saw somebody else using his screen name, I mean, to get a stranger with his screen name, that was really, really chilling. Earl Jackson in Santa Cruz. Well, our program was produced today by Dolores Wilbur, Julie Snyder, and me, with Paul Tough, David Hauptschein, Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Laura Doggett, Seth Lind, Thea Chaloner, and Sativa January. The internet part of today's program was a co-production with Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, Peter Taub, curator. David Hauptschein's most recent play, The Ballad of Johnny 5 Star, premiered at the Edinburgh Theater Fringe Festival. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our show for absolutely free, or buy CDs of them, or you know you can download today's program at our archives on that famous internet at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed bu Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Torey Malatia, who insists he doesn't even know what Office 97 is. No matter what anybody says-- He actually was going to set me up with a copy of Office 97. He never did. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Sitting in the chair operating a video camera, her feet do not even touch the ground. Her hair is braided in pigtails, Jasmine is just nine years old. On her video, first she interviews her mom, and then her mom interviews her. Do you know how much I love you? Yes. Do you know how proud I am of you? Yes. What do you want to be when you grow up? A medical professor. This is all taking place in a Texas prison. Jasmine's mom is in for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Jasmine's here with her Girl Scout troop. Everybody in the troop has a mom in prison. There are dozens of Girl Scout troops like this all across the country. A couple of filmmakers, Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein, put together a film about this troop called Troop 1500. And as part of it, they were there as the girls and their moms interviewed each other. How are you doing in school? Great. What do you went us to do when I come home? Go to the zoo. What's your favorite color? Blue. I thought it was purple. I like a whole lot of colors. I like maroon and blue and purple. There are so many moments like this when the girls talk with their moms. Some of the girls do not want to disagree with their moms about anything, even when their mom gets their favorite color wrong. Other girls, it's hard to imagine how they're ever going to work it out with their moms. What's going on between them is like this thick web of cable that nobody is ever going to be able to untangle. Jessica is nine. She wears big, silver headphones that are plugged into the camera. When her mom talks, Jessica hugs the big legal pad with her questions tightly to her chest. OK, let's see. I don't remember what I asked first. (SUBJECT) JESSICA It doesn't matter. Start from number one. OK, don't be acting silly now. Let's not act retarded, OK? Move your hair out of your eyes first. What do you say when people ask you where your mom is? (SUBJECT) JESSICA I don't know. Re you embarrassed that I'm in prison? (SUBJECT) JESSICA Yes. Does it embarrass you? (SUBJECT) JESSICA No, you ask me, are you mad at me. I'll ask you that in a minute. Jessica, come on baby. (SUBJECT) JESSICA OK, just go. Put your legs together. Thank you. Do you like coming here with the Girl Scouts to see me? (SUBJECT) JESSICA Duh. Yeah. That's good. Have you learned any tricks on your new bike? (SUBJECT) JESSICA Yeah. Falling off. Yeah, that'd be a good one. Let me see--. (SUBJECT) JESSICA Mom, I need to go to the restroom. Well, let us finish this up--. (SUBJECT) JESSICA I need to go very bad. Jessica, can't you just hold on just another minute? Do you know how much I love you? (SUBJECT) JESSICA To the stars and to the world and back. Say it right. (SUBJECT) JESSICA To the stars and to the world and back. Other moms sound like really good mothers, doing everything possible under the circumstances to be close to their girls. And you just kind of cross your fingers for them that it's going to be enough. Kenya is a neatly put together inmate in a white prison jumpsuit. She's in for possession with intent to distribute, and gives heartfelt answers when her 14 year old, Caitlin, asks a series of astonishingly direct questions. When you get out of prison, will you still have a boyfriend who does drugs? Why did you start selling drugs again after you'd already been in prison for it once before? I worked. You know I had a job, but it wasn't enough money. It was just a decision I made, which was a wrong decision. I wanted things, and I went about it the wrong way to get it. OK. Were you around drugs when you were little? Yes. With who? My mother. My mother always sold marijuana. And when I was 12, my mother started doing crack. I didn't even know grandma did that. Well, she's been clean for about 16 years. My mom didn't go to prison, but she was gone from me all the time, and I know how it feels. And I felt like she didn't love me. I felt like she didn't care about me, because she'd just leave. And I don't want y'all to feel like that. How is it like living with grandma? It's fun. I mean besides the fun. Like, what do you mean? You know how she's dramatic and stuff. You know how she cries or she gets upset or she's really emotional? Yeah, and Alex does not help at all. That's grown up stuff she's going through. Don't concern yourself with that, because your job is to go to school, stay out of trouble, be a kid. Like you told me the other day that grandma is stressed out about money. Well, that's not your concern, because you're not even old enough to get a job yet. You know what I mean? What could you do? I'm almost there. Just be a kid. Of course it's hard just being a kid when your mom is in prison. What can your mom really say to you that's going to help? She can't make you a nice meal, or give you a nice place to live. She can't read to you at night or tuck you into bed. She can't be there to hear about your day. All she can do is hug you, show you that she loves you, give a little advice maybe, and just hope that's going to hold you, and you'll be OK until the next visit. Well, today on our radio show, Parental Guidance Suggested. We have a bunch of stories where kids are not allowed to be kids, where they want somebody to look out for them and be the parent, and where parents get into impossible situations where it's hard to be a parent, which, I got to say, sometimes makes for really sad stories, and sometimes makes for really, really funny stories. 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, Two Possibilities, Both of Them Bad. In that act, a kid and a parent face an impossible choice together. Act two, The Grandma Letters, a miserable teenager and his miserable grandma correspond. Act three, My Angels in the Centerfolds. In that act, a 10 year old girl starts her own business with a phone, a collection of index cards, and her dad's old Playboy magazines. Stay with us. Act one, Two Possibilities, Both Bad. What's amazing about this story is that the people in it make one reasonable choice after another. But they're living in such an unreasonable time and place that eventually, they're forced into a position that no family should ever really be in at all. It all happened to Gene Cheek. And when the story begins, he's 10 years old, growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It's 1961. His parents split up long ago. He lives with his mom. And partly because it's just the two of them, they're really, really close. She spends a lot of time with him. And one day, he comes in from playing outside. And Mama was on the phone crying. And I thought somebody had died or something was wrong. So I stood at her door for a minute. And she eventually, after much pressure from me, eventually told me that that was her boyfriend on the phone, or a man that she had been seeing, is the way she put it. And I didn't even know. All she did was work and come home. I didn't know when she had time to have a boyfriend. Tuck was what everybody called him. His name was Cornelius Tucker. And my mom and Tuck worked together, and we talked about it. And I said, why are you crying? What'd he do to make you cry? And she said, nothing. He thinks we should stop seeing each other for your sake. And I said, well, why does he think I will have a problem with him seeing you? And she said, because he's black. Was there any part of you at that point which flinched a little when she said that? You're a little kid growing up in the south. You probably didn't have much contact, or were close to any black people. I did flinch a little. We didn't live too far from the African American community, a couple of streets over. So you would see them in your daily lives, going through their neighborhoods, or going through yours to get to theirs. But that was it, really. Jim Crow civil rights was at its beginning. Blacks were being killed, lynched, beaten. I was aware that this was not going to be a very popular thing. And so how soon after that did you finally meet Tuck? A couple of days later. He wanted to give me a birthday present, even though it wasn't my birthday. So he drove by at night and circled our block. I walked outside our apartment and walked around the corner. And he went by to make sure he wasn't being followed, circled back, and the second time around, he slowed down, rolled down his window, and said catch, and threw out a football. And could you even see him? Or was it just this mysterious voice and then a football? Yeah, it was night, and I couldn't see him, really. You could see a figure inside the car. I assumed it was him. Mama told me what kind of car he would be driving. That is so secret agent. Was this pretty much the coolest thing that had ever happened to you? Oh yeah, definitely. And it was exactly that, secret agent man. Now this is 1961, so it's six years before the Supreme Court rules that interracial marriage is legal nationwide. Was it legal for her to see him? It was not legal. Well, it was illegal for them to be boyfriend- girlfriend, or any other kind of relationship, as far as that goes. And so would you start to see him? Were you in situations where it would be the three of you and you would hang out? Absolutely. Mom and I would leave our house after dark and we would walk around the corner. Normally we would cover our faces as much as possible. Mama wore a scarf, and I had a coat that I would pull up the collar on, and a baseball cap, and that kind of thing. And again, Tuck would circle by and keep going, to make sure he wasn't followed. And he would turn around and come back from the other direction, pull up to the curb and we would jump in. And when you were in the car, would you have to duck down so people couldn't see you? Yeah. I would be scrunched down in the seat, so that I wasn't as visible. Normally, we would pull up in his driveway and sit in the car for a minute or two just to make sure that we hadn't been followed. We would get out, and it would be dark, of course, and the porch light would not be on. And we would go into the house and do what normal people did-- talk, play games, Monopoly, card games, watch TV, listened to the radio, listened to the stereo, played marbles on his floor. He had a carpet and he would take a piece of chalk and draw a circle on the carpet, and we would shoot marbles. Tuck was an amazing human being, and he had a way of just immediately putting you at ease. After the first night that I met him and spent time at his house, it was easy for me to see how mama had fallen in love with him. He was just that kind of a man. And then would you stay over there, and then go to school from there in the morning? No. No, we never spent the night. And Tuck had made it plain that we had to be very careful. I was oblivious. I was just caught up in the espionage of it all-- that I had a secret that nobody else knew. Oh right, you couldn't even tell kids at school. Oh, heck no. God no. I couldn't tell anybody. I couldn't tell my best friend. Couldn't tell anyone. And how far did it go? Like how often was there something where there was trouble? Well, we got chased. The police would come by and they would knock on the door, or just open the door sometimes, and just walk right in. And we would be sitting in the living room talking, or sitting at the kitchen table playing games, and they would say, nigger, what are you doing with this white woman? And he would say, we're just friends. We're just visiting. And then they would say something to my mom, don't you know better? What's your son doing here? And she said, well, what's wrong with my son being here? Well, you can't stay here. Don't you know it's illegal for you and that nigger to be sleeping together? But they would always say, you and your boy are going to have to leave. And Tuck would say, OK, they were just leaving. I'll take them home. And they would say, oh, hell no, nigger, we'll take them home. You're lucky we don't arrest you. So that's usually the way it went. That happened how many times? It would happen once a month probably, or once every six weeks. Once it was known that mama was seeing Tuck--. How did it get to be known? Well, my dad followed my mom-- my biological father had followed my mom. Him and his brother followed my mom to Tuck's house. There was one time when the cops came and as we walked outside Tuck's house, I could see my dad and his brother parked down the street. So I knew who had brought the cops with them. So your dad called the cops on your mom. Why? Well, because he was full of hate. It was bad enough that his wife had left him, but she was now seeing a black man. My dad was a stone cold racist, and that was more than he could stand. Would he lecture you about it? Oh yeah. Oh God yeah. What would he say? He would say it was unnatural, and it was against God's law, and those kinds of things. He would use the analogy, you don't see a black bird and a red bird together. And I always wanted to say, well yeah those are different species there, Dad, not just different colors. And so Tuck and your mom, they also got fired from their jobs, right? They did. My little brother was born. That kind of changed things. It's pretty difficult to hide that. They got fired from their jobs at the mill. My mom's family, my dad's family, our friends, everybody disowned us, walked out of our lives, didn't have anything to do with us after Randy was born. My aunt-- her sister-- came to visit her in the hospital. She had checked into the hospital under an assumed name. But Aunt Goldie went to see her, and when she saw Randy, she said, Sally, this baby ain't white. And Mama said, I know Goldie, but he's still my son. And Aunt Goldie handed Randy back to Mama, and walked out of our lives. And it was 30 years later before they ever spoke again. And about eight months after Randy was born, we had gone to bed one night during the week, and I was awakened at 2 o'clock in the morning by sounds outside. And I could see through the curtain that there was something burning, and I didn't really know what it was. And when I pulled back the curtain, I could see three Klansmen. One of them had a shotgun, and was shooting it into the air, which is what had woke me up. And they had put a cross on the yard and were shouting racial slurs-- death to nigger lovers, and those kinds of things. And Mama woke up. And when she came in, she said, get away from the window. It's the Klan. And of course, I know what the Klan was. And I said, what are they doing here? And she said, they're here because of your brother. And I was just infuriated. We spent the night sitting in the living room. And I had gone to the kitchen and got a butcher knife, and I'd taken a chair and set it facing the front door, and sat there thinking they were going to bust in at any minute. And we didn't have a phone, so we couldn't call anybody. If she could have called somebody, was there actually somebody who she could have called, who could have come over? She could have called Tuck. The police probably would not have done anything at that time. Could she have called her family? Wouldn't they have stepped in to rescue you, even if they were having this fight? No, not at this point. No. Her family had turned their backs on her and her family would not have lifted a finger. Her \ probably sent the Klan in the first place, if you want to know the truth about it. She had nobody. Why not just move north? Well, we had talked about it. Tuck asked me. He said that we could move up north and be more like a family. He said, your mom and I could even get married. But you got to understand that we didn't have any money. Tuck didn't have any money. It was not like we could just gather up what we owned and off we went. I know. But so many poor people move north. I mean, the whole city of Chicago is like people who had nothing, who just picked up and moved. I know. And the only thing I can look back on now and say is that things happened so fast. From the time Randy was born, things just spiraled out of control before they could get a handle on it. They didn't expect things to turn out like they did. Things turned out like they did because of what happened next. And what happened next is that his mom told him that they had to go to court for child support. They'd been fighting with his father over child support payments for years, so Gene wasn't especially worried about this. Mom and I rode the bus downtown, and then walked into the courtroom by ourselves. And we sat on the right side of the courtroom, and on the left side was my dad, his brother, my grandmother, Mom's brother, Uncle Bill, our next door neighbors. And on our side of the courtroom was me and Mom. And when the judge walked in, he said, in the matter of the custody of Jesse Eugene Cheek. And I knew immediately what that meant; that we were not here for child support. And Mom's lawyer didn't show up, he never did show up. So it was all downhill after that. She had told her sister the day before this trial that there's no way they'll take Gene away from me, I'm a good mother. And she believed that. She was convinced that they would not take me away from her, because she was a good mother. And I'm here to tell you that she was. There was nobody in that courtroom that day that could testify that she was not a good mother. And nobody did. What they did testify was that she had a mixed race baby by an African American man and was therefore unfit. Now one strange thing about this case is that your dad wasn't actually trying to get you back himself, right? No. Explain what your dad was arguing in court. He was arguing that Mama was unfit. But he told the judge that he, himself was an alcoholic and an epileptic, and could not raise me. His brother-- my uncle-- testified that he could not provide me with a home either, because he had his own family to raise. My grandmother-- my dad's mom-- testified that she could not offer me a home either, because her doctor had advised her that having a teenage boy in the house would be bad for her health. And so they all testified that mama was unfit, but they couldn't take me for this reason or that reason. It's just so crazy, the notion of a parent going in and saying, well, she's unfit, but I'm unfit too, so I can't take the kid. I've never heard of a custody hearing that works like that. Well, that's exactly what he said. I mean, that's honest to God exactly what he said. My dad was a rare bird. And then when the judge asked your mom, is the father Tuck-- because I know as part of the court proceeding, he actually asked her flat out, is this guy the father of this baby? What did she say? No. She denied it. She said that the father was a truck driver, who is now deceased. And that's all she said about the matter. And didn't they ask, who is this guy? What's his name? No, they didn't. Because they just could see that this is a lie? Sure. Well, they knew she was lying. But it was a felony for her to admit in a court of law that she had a baby by Cornelius Tucker. So she had to lie about it. She had to say, no, it's not Cornelius Tucker's baby. The father's dead, I don't remember his name. It didn't take long for Gene and his mother to figure out this hearing was not going very well for them. Gene's mom started crying. He started crying. Gene says he simply had no idea the world could work the way it was working in the courtroom that day. It was incomprehensible. It was shocking. I didn't believe it. Mama didn't believe it. We believed right won out. When the judge made his ruling, that it's the ruling of this court that your son be-- actually, he gave my mom a choice. He said give up this baby, is the way he put it, I believe, or give up your son. Let me just be sure I'm totally understanding the logic. The logic of that is, OK, what makes her an unfit mother is that she's got this mixed race baby. Right, and I'm around him. And you're around him, and you'll be exposed to this mixed race baby. That's right. Yeah, it'll rub off on me, I guess. Whatever. And so basically, if you get the baby out of this picture, then she's suddenly a fit mother again by abandoning her baby? With the choice he gave her, that's exactly what he was saying, yeah. Somehow this will all be better, if they're not around each other. It'll all be better. How does that make sense? Yeah, I don't know. It don't make sense. It wasn't meant to make sense. It was just more punishment, as far as I was concerned. And so does a judge actually say to her, OK, here you are, just choose which kid are you going to give up? Not in those exact words. But his words were-- I'm going to paraphrase-- but he said, Mrs. Cheek, you can give up your illegitimate son, or we're going to take Gene away from you. One or the other. I just looked at Mama and I leaned over and I whispered and said, Mama, if they take Randy, we'll never see him again. He's just a baby. And I said, I know where home is, let them take me. And before she could say anything, I just turned to the judge and said, take me. And so that was enough. He did. He pounded the gavel and said, it's the ruling of this court that Jesse Eugene Cheek will be removed and placed in the custody of Forsythe County Child Services. And at that time, two policemen, who had been standing in the back of the courtroom, came down. And Mama and I were clinging to each other. I was holding onto her and she was holding onto me. And she was screaming, don't do this, don't do this. And I was cussing, screaming at my dad, I'll kill you for this. And so the cops took me by the arms and literally pulled me away, tore me away from my mom, and just drug me out of the courtroom. They put me in a police car, drove me to a detention center that was a couple of blocks from the courthouse, for juvenile delinquents. A lady got up from behind a desk, went to the end of the hall and unlocked a door. The two policemen pushed me into the room, the door was pulled shut behind me and locked. And I spent three days in that room. They fed me by slipping trays of food under the door. Those three days, two and a half days, that I spent locked in that room, all I did was cry and sleep, really. I was devastated. My life had ended as I knew it. When I came out of that room, I was an angry kid, and I stayed angry until a few years ago, to be honest with you. Gene was sent to a foster home on the other side of town, but he was like a different kid. He was not the well-behaved boy that he'd been. He was in the crazy position that he had done the right thing. He'd volunteered to leave his own family, for the sake of everybody. It was better for his baby brother. It was better for his mom. The main person it wasn't better for was him. And though he knew he did the right thing, he had other feelings about it too. Somewhere along the line, that little 12 year old boy that got taken away from his mama expected-- as all 12 year old boys do-- that his mama would make things all right. And I was mad at her because she didn't make things all better. Right, that she didn't sweep in and move you all north? Yeah. And that everything was just all better all of a sudden. And I guess for the first two or three months in that foster home, I held onto the possibility that things would be all right. But you lose hope of that pretty quick. And I did. I was a terrible foster kid. I beat the heck out of her own son the first day I was there because he was standing on the back porch-- I had just come back from a walk-- and he said, you're the one with the nigger loving mama. And it was the wrong time for him to say that. So I was a pretty bad kid. I would skip school and go see my mom, and ride the bus, hitchhike, walk across town, ride a bike. I would go see her anytime I wanted to. It's a funny kind of juvenile delinquent who's evading a social worker and his foster parents, and nobody knows where he is. And where he is, the bad thing he's doing, is going to visit his mom. Eventually Gene got in so much trouble for this he was sent away to a facility called Boys Home, 200 miles from Winston-Salem. He could come home 20 days a year, that was it. But at Boys Home, he finally got a more or less normal life. He made decent grades, got a girlfriend. I played sports. I was popular on campus. I fit in. My anger subsided some, mostly because of sports and those kind of things. And Boys Home was probably the best thing that happened to me. Because at this point in time, you're 200 miles away, and you know that you can't just walk across town and see your mom. So you resolve yourself to this fact, I'm not going home again. The first time that you heard about Tuck, Tuck was saying to your mom, maybe the two of them should split up for your sake. Yeah. Do you think he might have been right? Well, in hindsight, absolutely. And in hindsight, yeah, they probably should have-- but I can tell you one thing. I wouldn't change one minute of my life. I have two wonderful brothers. Had that happened, I wouldn't have known Tuck. So I'm glad they didn't end it. To be honest with you, I'm glad. I'm happy. I wouldn't have it any other way. Randy's grown up by now. Does he ever talk to you about the choice that you made then? Yeah, we've talked about it. Randy grew up thinking I was one of the knights of King Arthur's court. Because his parents had told him? Absolutely. My mom and Tuck would tell him. So he worshipped-- like any little brother would, he worshiped me, but even more so, because in his mind, I had made this sacrifice for him. Well not even in his mind. You did make this sacrifice for him. He got to stay with his parents because of you. I know. Years later, you must have talked to your mom about that decision, about how Tuck raised very early the thought that maybe we should split up, because look at all the bad things that can happen. Did she have regrets about the choices that she made? Or mixed feelings about the choices she made? Oh, definitely. There's no question about it. She came to my graduation at Boys Home, and I'd been there five years by this time. And it was the first time that she had ever been to Boys Home. She rode the bus down and I picked her up at the bus station in one of Boys Home's cars. And we were going by campus and I said, Mom, do you want me to show you around? And she started crying, and she said, no, I can't do that honey. And I said, oh, it's OK, I understand. It was like we were living separate lives, and I was growing up without her. And so she continued to cry, and I parked the car and stopped. And she just looked at me. And by this time we were both crying. And she just looked at me and she said, I'm so sorry. Sorry that you had to be there at all? Yeah. Sorry that things had happened the way they had. Well, I just looked at her and I told her, I said, sorry for what, mama? For loving me? For loving Randy? For loving Tuck? What do you have to be sorry for? That's when I told her that I had just spent five years with 104 boys who knew for a fact that no one in the world gave a hooting hell about them. The difference between me and them was that in my lifetime I had been loved. There was never a moment, never a moment, in my life when I did not know for a fact that I was loved. And I said, you don't have anything to be sorry for and you don't have to tell me you're sorry. You never have to say that to me. There's no question that it shortened her life and that it was something she carried with her. Guilt she carried with her every day of her life. And Tuck too. She used to ask my ex-wife how I felt about it and did I blame her? Even though we were close, very close, that's just something that can't be removed from a mother. And she was a loving mother so it was devastating for her. Gene Cheek. He's written a book about his family's story called The Color Of Love: A Mother's Choice In the Jim Crow South. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that state laws that prevented interracial marriage were unconstitutional. But North Carolina only got around to following the Supreme Court's orders on this matter in 1974. It was after that finally that Gene's mom was able to marry Tuck. They had another son, and lived out their days together. Tuck died in 1982. Gene's mom died in 1995. Coming up, grandmas rush in where wise men never go. 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, Parental Guidance Suggested, stories of kids who need parents to step in and fix things, and what those kids end up doing when the parents fail to act. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, The Grandma Letters. In this act, as in our first act, a boy finds himself far from the home he knows and the world he knows. But in this case, the adults in his life seem to stop guiding him effectively, even once he gets to high school. So instead, he turns to the postal system. Will Seymour told this story on stage as part of The Mortified Stage Show, where people read from embarrassing old diaries and letters. In 1981, I was fine. I had pets, and my parents were married, and my grandparents lived next door. All was well. And then my parents divorced. I had to give up my pets and I had to move. We moved far away. And so my best friend, of course, was my grandmother, and she lived far, far away. And back in the '80s, there was long distance phone, very expensive. So I had no one. I started a new school, and I had no friends, except my grandmother. So I wrote my grandmother letters, a lot of letters. And I'm not going to read all of them. And she wrote me back. She was probably pretty worried about us and I shared nothing but terrible information. [LAUGHTER] And then just so you know, she was kind of dying of emphysema, so she had really terrible information too. She actually wrote me back and treated me like an adult and we actually became really good friends. So here's a couple of our little exchanges. This is like 1981, freshman in high school. Dear Grandma, I hate it here. I'm faking sick today and I'm staying home, just like yesterday. [LAUGHTER] I'm so afraid of school. Hopefully I can change my schedule out of PE and maybe like a library aide or something. I lost more weight. I just don't get hungry. I get worried when I lose my hunger. And when I worry, I don't get hungry. [LAUGHTER] Grandma, don't feel bad if you're too sick to write back. Feel terrible. Just kidding. Well, it was wonderful talking to you. [LAUGHTER] I love you, and I miss you, Bill Seymour, your grandson. [LAUGHTER] Bill dear, I guess our wonderful chats on the phone are a thing of the past, since neither of us can afford them. Well, we can still write. We miss all of you something fierce. I'm sorry my writing is terrible, I've become so messy. But it's not me. I'm back on triple strength antibiotics. My medication speeds up my metabolism and causes these trembly hands. [LAUGHTER] Well, enough of this [BLEEP], here's a joke. Do you know what they call 10 rabbits walking backwards? A receding hare line. Ask your mother to explain it. Well honey, I guess I'll close for this one. Keep the letters coming. They really help, Bill. Love, Grandma. Hello, Grandma. School's not great. It's just OK. I'm kind of worried about algebra and French. Actually, my grades are OK, considering I don't go to school for very much. [LAUGHTER] I am writing you right now from class. Love, Bill Seymour, your grandson. PS, I put my last name, just in case you forgot. [LAUGHTER] What the hell? Hi, Grandma. It's special Thursday. Want to know why? Today I went to school and I found out I'm behind in my French class. Just kidding, it's no big. But seriously, I'm failing my French class. [LAUGHTER] How are you? I'm OK, not great. I didn't take the bus today. I cut my last class and I walked home instead. They were throwing pee balloons, because the water was shut off at school. It was a long walk but at least I don't have pee on me. [LAUGHTER] Love Bill, your bored grandson. [LAUGHTER] Bill dear, I'm getting a mask. It sterilizes the air that I breathe in, but I hope they come in colors. I'd like to get one that matches my eyes, but gramps says they don't come in bloodshot, [BLEEP] brindle brown. [LAUGHTER] Bill, [LAUGHTER] you said you were bored. I'll show you bored. Things are so bad here I squeezed the Charmin twice this morning, just for the hell of it. [LAUGHTER] I know I shouldn't say hell, but who cares? I'm pretty sure God understands. Write soon, and keep smiling. All our love, Grandma and Grandpa. Hello, Grandma. How are you? Hello Gram. Yesterday and today were snow days, no school. I'm fine with that. Too many people said they were going to beat me up this week. I miss you both. Update: I'm now going to give you my opinion of mom's current boyfriend, soon to be husband, Phil. Well, he's super. Super terrible, super spectacularly fake, and full of super creepy personality. [LAUGHTER] Now for a few jokes. Have you heard the joke about the two girls playing jump rope? Oh, just skip it. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Love, Bill. Dear Bill, so nice to get your long letter, honey. Still flat on my back, so writing is really difficult. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to try to use my walker today. Perhaps I'll be strong enough. How is school going? I imagine it's not the happy place it should be, but honey, hang tough. Keep at it. Time will pass quickly. And as for your impression of Phil, your mom has never really mentioned him in detail, or for that matter, de-head or de-mind either. [LAUGHTER] Your jokes are funny. Have you heard of these? What would you give a pig with a sore throat? Oinkment. What lies on the ocean floor and twitches? A nervous wreck. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Well love, coughing, no time for me. I've got to get on my breathing machine. I never coughed so good when I was smoking. We love you, Grandma. Dear Grandma, this fun kit has been made especially by me to get you well. And it's basically, I made about seven of them. And they're about 14 pages long, each of them. And this particular one had a quiz in it. Hey you, do you think you're smart? You think you've got the know how in the noggin? OK, just to be perfectly sure, take today's quiz to find out how smart you really are. Number one, Babe Ruth was famous for hitting A, the bottle; B, his mother in law; or C, small children with a baseball bat? [LAUGHTER] Number two, Typhoid Mary was infamous for spreading A, rumors; B, dirty mouse breath; or C, a feverishly hot stew? Number three, Beethoven played A, the field; B, shuffleboard; or C, because he was an artist, damn it. He was an artist. And then the last letter. Bill dear, it always gives me such a warm feeling to write those words. We've always had such a special relationship, haven't we? You're not only a loving grandson, you've been a friend, and that's a real treasure. I've needed to tell you of my love for you, so you will be able to wear it like a warm jacket for as long as you want, something that no one or nothing can take away from you. You've always made me happy. I love you, Grandma. Over. PS, when I hear this song, I think of you. It's the theme of the TV show Love, Sydney with Tony Randall. [LAUGHTER] Please believe me, lately my whole world is changing. Suddenly you're here, and life is better than before. We're like friends forever. And when the rest are gone, it's you who will be there for me, my friend. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] Will Seymour lives in Los Angeles, where he is still avoiding French class. He read at The Mortified Stage Show. You can find them on the web at getmortified.com. Act three, My Angel's in the Centerfold. There's a story that my mom used to tell about when my sisters and I were little. The Gosgoth's cat next door to us had kittens. My sister Randi was six or seven at the time, and she asked my mom, OK, so how exactly did that happen? Like what happened to make the cat pregnant? And my mom, she just thought like, oh, this is really great. She's asking me these questions. We can get this out of the way. She's so young. And so she tells Randi the whole story and reproduction, and the mommy and the daddy cat, the whole thing. She gets to the end of this whole story. My mom is feeling great. And she turns to Randi and she says, do you have any questions, Randi? And Randi thinks for a second and she says, can birds really fly? I think the moral of the story is you can throw certain information at kids, but they're only going to absorb what they are able to absorb, and they're going to ignore everything else. And I bring this up here, because our next story is very much an example of that phenomenon. A warning to listeners, there's nothing explicit or graphic in this story, but it does acknowledge the existence of sex. Thea Chaloner tells the tale. My friend Emily had a rough time growing up with her dad. Part of the problem was his job. He taught human sexuality at Boston University, which is pretty impressive. But to a kid, it's your worst nightmare. Your dad is a sex professor. By the time she was 10, he was a local celebrity, famous for his knowledge about sex. He had a radio show on WHDH in Boston called Talking Sex with Doctor Joseph Helfgot. It was a call-in show. And it was a maverick show of its time because he would talk frankly about sex. Most of the people who called in were women talking about how-- I mean, I can clearly remember, I can hear a woman's voice calling in and asking if he could explain to her how she could achieve multiple orgasm. So at Rebecca Ritter's house, fifth grade, in my Care Bear nightgown, in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag, I swear to God, as like girly as it gets. And then we are in our sleeping bags about to go to sleep, and Rebecca sits up and says, let's listen to Em's dad's show. So they turn the radio on and we'd be like in the dark, listening to my father on the radio going, [EXHALES]-- because he also smoked-- Doris, I'm really glad you called in. Women so often think that it's something that's going on with them, that's the reason why they can't achieve multiple orgasm. And he was very flirtatious with the people on the air, too. And I knew that, I could sense the tenor of the flirtation, even when I was a little kid. And I was trying to pass it off and be giggly and like, oh, it's so funny, like all my friends were. But I was putting my nails into my thigh to get myself not to cry. And I also just felt, why couldn't my dad be normal? Emily's parents divorced when she was five, and she and her brother spent every other weekend at her dad's house. He enforced a lot of family time, which usually meant watching TV. Then he'd fall asleep and the kids were left to amuse themselves. Her brother occupied himself with Archie comics and GI Joes But Emily was on her own. It was weird being there, and boring, until she discovered the bookshelves. It was all books on the top three bookshelves, and then the bottom bookshelf was all Playboys. I mean, it was like a 64 Crayola box of Playboys. And my first mission, because I was always a very kind of organizationally oriented kid, was to chronologically organize them. So I had them going October '81, or whatever it was, all the way through to whatever the current one was. Somehow-- and I wish I could tell you how I figured this out-- I decided that I would use the magazines, and kind of use the centerfolds and the questionnaires that they would answer, as a portfolio for women who I would use in my dating service. The tools for her imaginary dating service were: a Smith Corona typewriter, a phone unplugged from the wall, a box of index cards, a Yellow Pages, and of course, a huge collection of Playboys. Take me through a couple of sample scenarios of what this would be. Can you do that? I can, but I should, as the disclaimer, first say that I would say my lines out loud, but I wouldn't say the lines of the quote unquote, "person on the other line of the phone." [PHONE RING] Miss Lana's Dating Service, how can I help you? Uh-huh. So you're looking for someone who's like 5'10", and weighs 125 pounds? Can you hold on for just a minute, sir? And then I would press-- actually, I don't believe there was a hold button, but in my imagination there was, and I would put the phone down. And I would go to my resource library of Playboy magazines, and I would go until I found someone that was around the range that I had just made up for myself. So really it's very twisted. And then I would open up to the centerfolds, and not really extend the whole picture of the centerfold, but really just looking at the questionnaire. And once I had that in front of me, I'd get back on the phone. Hi, Mr. Watkins? Yes, I think I have the perfect girl for you. Her name is Amber Rose. She is 5'9", 125 pounds, and she-- what? Yes, she does. She likes oysters, and she likes long walks on the beach at night. And oh, she loves shooting stars. Does that sound good? OK, Mr. Watkins, let me just get your information. And then I would put an index card in the typewriter, and roll it in. It was one of those old manual kind. And I would say, so it's Ron Watkins. And it would take me hunting and pecking on the typewriter, like Ron Watkins, spell it out, return, next line. And then I would type in the name of the centerfold. I've typed in the magazine she was from, like the month and the year so I'd have it for reference later. And then I would chat sometimes with him on the phone, like, so Mr. Watkins, how long have you been living in Washington? Uh-huh. Oh, you got a recommendation from-- oh, yeah, Bill comes to me all the time. And I was a facilitator of the woman and the man getting together. I wasn't playing out any kind of fantasy for myself. I was a businesswoman. Except for the fact that the women are totally naked, in very sexual positions all throughout these magazines. So did that factor into your brain? No, that's why I say that I really-- I mean, I would look at the actual pictures, really just so I could get a sense, because sometimes they were like, cowgirl. Like she would have no clothes on except for she'd have a bullwhip in her hand, and little spurs on her ankles, and she'd be lying on a bed of hay or something. So I would factor that into my conversation with the guy. I'd be like, and she loves to rodeo. So then I took it to this other level. This is where the Yellow Pages comes in. Where I would say, so Ron, what kind of cuisine do you like? And I would find a place, and then I would type up on the index card the name of the restaurant, the time the reservation was going to be, and I filed the card away, I'm sure alphabetically, by the guy's last name in the little plastic case. And then it was time for the next call. I could not have been more content. I always wanted to be a travel agent as a kid, you know the clicking, clicking of the nails on the keyboard, and the simultaneously talking to-- and this was before I think they even had headset phones. So the simultaneous talking to the person, I think I have a good deal for you, and then like referencing things in books, just using all those tools. And the resources available to me were Playboy magazines. It was also just a coping mechanism for being in an environment that I hated. I didn't like being there for so many reasons, and it was an escape. For Emily, the long term effects of looking at so many Playboys at such a young age weren't as damaging as you'd expect. When she was 10, she believed that she could choose the centerfold body she liked the best, and then she'd grow into it later on, like that was an option. What was damaging was that her dad just didn't seem to get that she was still a kid and that certain things were better left unsaid. Or in the case of the Playboys, certain things are better left stashed away on that top shelf of the closet. A 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old girl is not impressed by her father's call in radio sex show. She's not impressed by the fact that he can talk so openly about sex, because as far as she's concerned, that conversation doesn't exist between the father and the daughter. I think what you have to understand is that to cope as a kid, you read a situation when you walk into it, and you conform to the situation. And being able to enter into this-- especially from the world of my mother's house, that was like everything was in its right place, and we got tucked in. And I got my back rubbed in a very certain way. And the door left open just three inches, and then good night, sweet dreams, I love you, with the glass of water. And it's like, we're going to dad's, a different routine. I can fight it and be miserable or I can kind of make a game up with the Playboys until we get back to my mom's house. Well, it's like, I can fight it, or I can alphabetize. Yes, exactly. Emily lost her virginity when she was 17. She told both parents. Her mom's first response was sweet: do you love him? Were you safe? Her dad's? Was it good? Did you orgasm? And yes, at the time, her dad's question completely freaked her out. But now she thinks his intentions were the same as her mom's. His heart was in the right place. He just didn't understand how to talk to his daughter. It's the oldest dad problem in the world. Thea Chaloner. She was, until last week, our intern here at This American Life. She's moving back to Los Angeles to become a producer at public radio station KCRW. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Sativa January. Special thanks today to Jordana Gustufsson. 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 by Torey Malatia, who said to me just the other day--. When I hear this song, I think of you. It's the theme of the TV show Love, Sydney with Tony Randall. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When Rosie was a kid, they had a dog named Fu, a Shih Tzu. And Rosie's mom swears that she knows the exact day the dog went bad. It came when she heard about a discount way to get a dog grooming. It was this grooming school. Her friend said that it didn't cost much, and they were very good. But my mother believes that this experience sort of ruined Fu. That somehow they tortured him and did something wrong in his first grooming. What? He went to get his hair cut, basically, and they ruined him as a dog? Well, he got like shaved. And he got like full-on, summer shave. And he came back a different dog, according to my mother. After the grooming, he became a biter. Rosie got bit. Other people got bit. There were trips to the hospital, lots of drama. Fu hated people. And then the parrot arrived, Judy the parrot. The neighbors had actually bought this parrot without understanding what a lot of trouble that parrots can be. Parrots can be very anxious birds, especially when you leave them alone. They can pull out their feathers. They can screech like a smoke alarm. So they took the bird cage and put a note on it that said, take this bird or we're going to cook it, and left the cage in front of our door. We were like two doors down the hall. So we took her in. And we didn't know-- we'd had dogs and cats, but we'd never had a bird. And before you knew it, we all loved her. You know, my mother she'd let the bird perch on the edge of her coffee cup in the morning and drink her morning coffee with her. And Fu and Judy just quickly became best friends. I don't know what it was, but they just connected. And it was very cute, because you'd see this little, matted Shih Tzu and this like eight inch high parrot pacing the floor of the apartment together like they were walking down the hall having a chat. Dog and parrot kind of strolling. They would stroll together. And Fu would roll on his back. He hated it when any person came near his stomach. She could crawl all over him. And she did. She would crawl up his chest, up to his face, peck at his face like she was giving him kisses. This dog that would actually try to bite all of you? Yes, he loved it, loved the parrot. I mean, he'd had dog girlfriends before, and he got along fine with the cats. But we'd never seen him develop a friendship like that. Oh, this is like the big-- This was the big friendship, big romance. Of his life? I think so. So this went on for a long, long time. And then, one day, Fu came into the kitchen to eat, and the whole family was there including the parrot, Judy. And she flew down to the floor and went over to Fu's bowls and, as I remember it, drank a little bit of his water. But then, she went into his food dish. And I don't know how that hadn't happened before. She took some bit of dog food into her beak, and, in just like a split second, he went over and bit the top-feathers right out of her head. And she squawked, and squawked, and squawked. And sort of hyperventilated in this very alarming bird way, because they're so tiny, and you can hear them panting, and it sounds like they're going to just die from anxiety. It's interesting how the traumatic event in his life was a bad haircut, and then he, basically, turns around and gives that to her. Yeah, but the bird was just ready to pass-out, she was so terrified. But after that, she pretty much stayed in my room with the door closed. Fu would come to the bedroom door and scratch, and scratch, and cry, and cry. And it was just awful. And she would usually squawk, not in a friendly, hey buddy, I miss you way, but in a fearful way. It was his best friend, and he'd just sit there at the door sort of scratching and pining. And that was that, really. So he drove his best friend away. Because he just snapped. In one moment he was like a dog more than he was a parrot's pal. It was like suddenly he turned into a real dog, and then it's like she realized, oh, he's a dog. My friend is a dog. And then she became a parrot again. I don't know if she realized he was a dog, and she was a bird. Whatever their essential animal nature's, what we knew was that they had been best friends. And in some ridiculous, anthropomorphic way, it looked very romantic. And then it was totally betrayed. When he snapped at her. When he snapped at her. And then it was over. I think it was just betrayal. I know, but he made one, little mistake. I don't know why, but I'm identifying with the dog here, very strongly. Well, we did too. We did too. It was horrible to hear him pining at the bedroom door. I mean, it really was like this awful, tragic romance. And he pined, and pined, and pined. He pined for her, Rosie says, until the day he died. Judy never forgave him. We talked to anybody who knows about parrots, they'll tell you that people are constantly misunderstanding them and underestimating them. I was talking to this guy for this week's show who did research with parrots at MIT. And he was explaining to me how they're amazingly smart. For instance, he says that it's actually a myth that they only mimic words. They actually learn the words. They use them correctly. But it's one thing for people to misunderstand parrots, until I heard about Fu and Judy, I had no idea that other animals might make the same mistake. If only Fu knew how to treat a parrot. But today on our show, we have stories of people underestimating what certain animals are like. Not just parrots, no, no, no, how narrow would that be. How small minded, how limited the vision and scope. No, no, we will not just confine ourselves to parrots this hour. We will also be talking about pot-bellied pigs. It's the Parrot and the Pot-bellied Pig. By the end of this hour, people get thrown in jail, relationships end, love affairs start, all because of these two animals. For WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act one of our show today, Parrot. Act two-- Pig. Act three- Combo Platter, in which David Sedaris has a story with both the parrot and the pot-bellied pig. Stay with us. Act One, Parrot. Eric and Alex have been telling their parrot story since they were in school years ago. They've told this story many, many times to friends, to family, to strangers. In fact, the night before they came into the studio to tell this story, they went to a bar, and they practiced telling the story to random customers including, at one point, an actual movie star, who happen to be in town filming a big, blockbuster movie. They've told the story so many times that at this point they're not exactly sure they even have the facts right. Which means something to them, because they are reporters. Facts are their business. And, in fact, this story began as an assignment in journalism school. Alex turned in the story for a class, but, even after he did that, the two of them continued to run down leads and interview people for the story. They could not stop themselves, such is their crush on this story. The story begins in Central Park in New York City at some party thrown by some big company. Somehow, a young wannabe actor, aspiring actor of Puerto Rican descent from Brooklyn, named Johnny de Villa winds up at this party. You mean, just like wanders in? Yeah, maybe he's there with a girlfriend. I'm sure Eric recalls why he's there. I have no recollection whatsoever. But I think sometime we say, he crashed the party. And sometimes we say that he-- in any case, he got there early, very early, and he stayed late, very late. And he drank. And it may well be, as we recall it now, that he smoked a lot of pot. Smoked a marijuana cigarette. But it may not be. It may not be. That's the way we tell it now. That he's high? Yeah, but in any case he decides to wander out on his own at about 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. And he wanders through the park for a little while. And he wanders through these gates that are open. Well, yeah. In this section of the story, we should say is his recollection, what he later told police. So he wanders in and, before he knows it, there's sort of a distant splashing and sea lions. And he's just sort of walking and thinking. And he thinks that literally, they accidentally just left the gates open to the entire zoo. That's his story? And, of course, the zoo told us that that would be absolutely impossible. Maybe there's some plausibility, but it's unlikely that they left the aviary open. Which is where Johnny found himself after a little bit of wandering. And the door is wide open. He strolls right in, and, the way he tells it, there was a long line of cages. There was a mist. A mist, he says. A mist indoors? Well, he may have been high. Or he may not have. He definitely said, there was this mist. And the mist sort of cleared. and before him was a parrot with brilliant green plumage and a red tuft on its head. And they locked eyes. He looked at the parrot. The parrot looked at him. And they had an instant connection, he says. And so he says to the parrot, "you want to go?" And the parrot says to him, "yeah." And he says, "Let's go." The parrot says him, "yeah?" As he recalls. As he recalls. Which is unlikely, because this is not a talking parrot. This is a crucial plot point, actually, that it's not a talking parrot. What it is though, is it's an extremely endangered parrot, which Johnny does not know. And the third, and most important thing that he doesn't know, is that this bird is suffering from an acute respiratory illness which necessitates that it take antibiotics. And the zoo has been treating it with these antibiotics for several days or weeks. So it's endangered. It's valued at $20,000. And it's sick. And he walks out of the zoo with it on his shoulder and gets on the subway. And he takes this parrot all the way back to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But the parrot is not a domestic pet. It's a wild parrot. It's flying around. It's squawking. It's poorly behaved. So even though Johnny is a vegetarian and animal lover, he is starting to have a hard time dealing with this. Buyer's remorse. Yeah, buyer's remorse. Now you know, buyer's remorse is traditionally a phrase that is used for people who buy something. Traditionally, yes. So Johnny reads up on birds, Alex and Eric say. Tries to figure out what to feed it. Tries to do right by the bird. But the bird is wreaking such havoc, flying around his apartment and screaming, that unsure what else to do, Johnny tries something that he has only heard of, he clips the parrot's wings. He clips them with scissors-- scissors. This rare, endangered species, a $20,000 bird. Owning a parrot has turned out to be very different than Johnny expected, which actually seems to be what always happens to people who own a parrot. And after a month, he wants to unload it on somebody else. He has a friend named Ed Jupp. Another actor. They've met on the set somewhere. In fact, Ed's been in some movies. He was in a Ron Howard movie called The Paper. He was in Born on the 4th of July. He was in Born on the 4th of July. His full-time day-job or one of the ways he makes money, is that he puts together resumes for other actors. He's doing this for Johnny and expects to be paid about $500. The other thing is that it's hard for him to get this work done, because he has a girlfriend named Dawn. By the way, Ed happens to be confined to a wheelchair. He's a paraplegic. As is Dawn. As is Dawn. And while Ed's trying to work, Dawn rolls in every day. --15 or 20 times a day during his working hours. He has sort of a home office. She rolls in looking for kisses and attention. And it also happens that, I think, she's always wanted a parrot. So when Johnny comes to Ed and says, well you know, I don't have $500, but I've got this parrot. For Ed, it's just like it's solving a bunch of problems at once. Ed finds this to be a marvelous opportunity. Now Ed and Dawn don't know, certainly, that its been stolen from the Central Park Zoo. And, most importantly, they too do not realize that this bird has been suffering, now for a month untreated with a serious respiratory infection. Not knowing this, they're chain smokers. And their apartment was-- Inhospitable for an endangered sick parrot. So we picture the parrot sort of gasping and wheezing when it gets to Dawn and Ed's apartment, because we were. --When we went to their apartment to talk to them. So Johnny gives them the parrot as payment for resume services, Eric and Alex say. And immediately there are things that Dawn does not like about this bird. Well, first of all, it's not very lively. Well, it's had its wings clipped, and it's dying. And, most importantly, it doesn't talk. And that's all she wanted. She didn't want just a parrot. The only thing she wants in a parrot is that this parrot will speak with her. But they hatch a plan, they're going to barter this parrot. And so they start calling stores, pet shops, bird stores. Barter you mean for a better parrot? For a parrot that talks. So when they call up and describe this bird to the stores, they all say, yeah right. Oh, they understand the bird that it is. There is no possible way that you could have this bird. Now they get this reaction several times. But, finally, they put in a call to a shop called 33rd & Bird, which is located on 33rd Street right near the Empire State Building in Manhattan And the woman who picks up the phone there-- Her name is Barbara. Is that true? I believe so. I wouldn't swear to it. This is the one woman whose name we don't know, and she becomes central to this story. But we do know, she has sort of a volunteer night job at Beauty and the Beast, in addition to her pet store job. Beauty and the Beast, the Broadway show? The Broadway show, yeah. She's some kind of a stage grip. Where she works with-- --a fellow animal lover. Who works at-- --the Central Park Zoo. So this woman, Barbara, who works at 33rd & Bird, because of this other friendship, knew all about the theft of the thick-billed parrot. What are the odds? What are the odds? And the thing is, that she doesn't know, really, who she's talking to. Because, apparently, bird smuggling is a big, big deal. And there are people who will smuggle birds into this country, smuggle birds out of this country. There are people who are willing to buy birds on the black market. And she's aware of this, working in a pet store. Right, and, apparently, people who do it are ruthless criminals who will, she suspects, shoot you as soon as look at you. And so this is who she thinks is on the other end of the phone. Can I just say, and maybe the whole bird smuggling thing is totally legit, but, OK, you're a professional criminal, or you're somebody who wants to to into the criminal game, and you have a choice. You could smuggle a tiny amount of cocaine across the border into the United States and make a lot of money, or you can carry a talking bird. It might not be as big a problem as we think. Right, OK. It is a legitimate, underground-- Fear-- on her. And she's afraid. And she thinks she's dealing with serious, hardened criminals. So she calls the police, leaves a message about the stolen bird, very valuable bird smugglers, the whole thing. But this is New York City, nobody calls her back-- days pass. Meanwhile, Dawn keeps calling her-- remember, Barbara thinks that Dawn is a contraband bird smuggler up to no good-- Dawn keeps calling to ask just one thing-- "Do you have a bird that talks?" The police won't call her back. She's going to rescue that poor bird herself. Alex and Eric say that she calls the cops one last time. There's a message saying that she's going in, here's the address. If you never hear from me again, look for me here. Look for me at this apartment building on 10th Avenue. And she hangs up the phone. She picks up an empty cage, picks up a bird that talks. Gets in a cab. She strides right to the elevator of this building where Ed and Dawn live in their smoky apartment with their wheezy bird. And, meanwhile, the precinct has finally checked their voicemail. And they're in the next elevator over. As she's riding up-- They are about a minute in front of her. And they're armed to the teeth. They've got their SWAT gear on. They've got bulletproof vests-- Shotguns. Riot helmets. They to think that they're going to bust up an international bird smuggling ring. And so when she gets off the elevator, all she sees is this massive SWAT team with one of those battering rams yelling, police, open up. And they bang down the door. And they take Ed by the scruff of the neck-- They start screaming, where's the bird, where's the bird-- the cops do. They mace them. They-- OK, that's not true. In some tellings of the story, I have Dawn being yanked out of her chair and thrown to the ground, at the critical moment, when Barbara from 33rd & Bird walks in. Yeah, and carrying a birdcage-- Carrying a birdcage. And we do know that the following exchange took place. Dawn looks up, and she sees Barbara from 33rd & Bird, and she said, "did you bring me a bird that talks?" Is there any reason to believe that the part about the SWAT team in the story is true? No, not at all. There is no SWAT team? It was probably, what, six detectives or something? That's actually-- when we went back and consulted our notes, we realized that the SWAT team part of it, that we'd been telling with more and more vigor-- But in fact, it was in fact? Building security. With several police officers. Several police officers. Six detectives flashing their badges, I think, is what we said at the time. Johnny does get charged. Ed and Dawn-- Ed and Dawn are let off. But Johnny gets, not only charged, but perp-walked. So the cops call the media and say-- A routine happening in New York City, where the cops will alert the media to the fact that the guy they just arrested is going to be walking between the cop car and the police precinct. His head is spinning at this point. Yeah, and he's dragged out of the car. There's like a phalanx of reporters. There's flashbulbs going off. There's cameras in this face. Microphones being shoved right under his chin there. And keep in mind, he is an aspiring actor. This is his moment in the sun, really. He's got the whole city right there. The whole city is basically watching. Somebody yells, "Why did you do it, Johnny?" And Johnny, for absolutely no reason, yells back. He yells-- "I was going to make stew out of that bird." Which is not even remotely true, and it was the wrong thing to say if you're trying to engender sympathy somehow. Johnny went to jail. And Ed and Dawn were left mystified by this whole thing. But the parrot went back to the zoo and died within about three or four days, I think. It had been in bad shape, and they couldn't save it. So that was Eric and Alex's famous bird story. And after we talked they did something they'd been wanting to do for a long time. Now that they're experienced newspaper reporters, they went out and tried to contact all the people in the story to figure out, once and for all, what parts of the story are true, and what parts are just embellishments that they have been added over the years. Here's what they discovered. The lady from the bird store, who turns out to be named Michelle not Barbara, she was completely unfindable. Dawn, the woman in the wheelchair, she died in 2002. The guy who she lived with, Ed, he was happy to talk. But he did not remember much of the story. With some prodding, as best as he could, he confirmed a lot of the details of Eric and Alex's story. For example, the reason that he got the bird from Johnny, the smoking, the police raid-- which, by the way, he remembered as six policemen. He also talked very sweetly about how much he loved Dawn and missed her. And I just left one person to contact, Johnny. It was the Virgin Cola-- the release for Virgin Cola after party. And I was with a couple of buds, drinking and smoking weed. John Davilla, as he likes to be called these days, is now out of prison. For bird theft, he was actually only put on parole, but then he violated his parole by failing a urine test, and got sent to prison for 11 months. Now he is trying to get acting work out in Los Angeles. And when he talked to Eric and Alex he contradicted or threw into question nearly every fact they thought they had from years ago. John says that he did not take the bird home on the subway. He did not live in Bay Ridge. He did not barter the bird for a resume with Ed. He gave it as a gift, though Ed says otherwise. He did not cut the bird's wings with scissors, he says. He did not sneak into the zoo alone. And, finally, it was not him who stole the parrot. There was this cute little bird, and my homeboy snagged it, and put it in his jacket and walked out with it. And we all just like looked at each other and was like, let's go. You and your buddies, it's not you alone? No, there was five of us. Do you remember what you told us at the time? No, I don't remember. OK, so I'm going to read you some of this story, OK John? It was eerily quiet, save for some splashing from the sea lion pool. Quote, "It was like there was this [BLEEP] mist," Davilla said, speaking slowly and dramatically. "And the bird was there." You took the bird out of its cage, you said. The bird looked at you. Quote, "I said wow, what are you looking at man? Come on man, let's go. And we went." Yeah, that was a dream I had the day after the party. And I remember that dream. And I remember thinking that I gotta stop smoking pot, man. I'm awfully disappointed, John. What did you expect? I don't know. What did you expect? I thought there was a point. Eric is very disappointed here. I feel cheated, man. Well did you think he really had the conversation with the Bird? No, but I thought he thought he did. I think I did, actually, to be honest with you. No, come on Johnny, you're just telling us what we want to hear. You're making stuff up. No, it's a true story, man. And when they ask you, you say it's a true story. So the version of the story that they have always told, that they have wondered if it's true, that's the version of the story they're going to have live with. Because nobody, nobody in this world besides them has cared enough about this story to remember it. The facts will stay forever unconfirmable. And when I ask Eric and Alex why this story has stuck with them, and why they've been retelling this story for years, long after they went on to become real reporters for real newspapers, this story is still their favorite story? They truthfully do not have much of an answer. Mostly they say, they just liked everybody who they interviewed for this story. Everybody told them such amazing things. And yes, this is a story about a crime. And yes, the parrot dies. But nobody is really out to hurt anybody in this story or do any harm, including Johnny. There is a sort of innocence. He wasn't out to make money off the thing. He didn't want to kill it. He loved it. I think the parrot made everybody in this story take leave of their senses including the two of you. I think that that has never crossed my mind before today, but I think you might be absolutely right on that. Like look at this. Everybody's going out of their way for the parrot. He takes the parrot for no good reason. The next two people take the parrot really for reasons that make no sense at all. They take a parrot to distract a woman from talking to her husband, or boyfriend, whatever. And then the two of you, for no reason at all, you're never going to make money, you're never going to write a story. Just keep reporting this story for months for no one. It makes no sense, our behavior. And we wouldn't have done it if it had been a kitten. I don't know man, a kitten? When we tell the story over and over, by the way, a lot of people, they think there's a punch line at the end. And there's never a punch line. The story just sort of peters out. Well, not necessarily. Maybe you need a punchline. You need a punchline. We actually got some suggestions last night. From the movie star, he sort of suggested a punchline. Who was the movie star? Topher Grace, the guy from That '70s Show. Wait, and Topher Grace had the suggestion for the ending? He did, he had an excellent suggestion. The scene is the apartment, the police barge in-- Dawn is on the floor with a jackboot on her neck. And the cops haul everyone away-- There's one detective who's sort of-- --left alone in the apartment. He's the one charged with taking the bird, taking possession of the bird. So he opens the cage. And he looks at the parrot, and he says, "You want to go? " And the parrot says, "Yeah." And he says, "Let's go." And, scene. Alex Lane is a staff writer for the Star Ledger in Newark. Eric Holm just started at Bloomberg News. In those jobs, they both do factual reporting. Coming up, so two pigs, a parrot, a Jew, a Canadian, and David Sedaris walk into the second half of the show. And the first pig says to the second pig, is it me or do these coming-up-next announcements just keep getting longer? More in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. Well, 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, the parrot and the pot-bellied pig. Stories where these two humble animals are just trying to lead their animal lives and simply by being alive they create all kinds of havoc around them, without ever intending to. We've arrived at Act Two of our show, Act Two, Pig. Well, one of our regular contributors here on This American Life, Jonathan Goldstein has been hosting a new radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Wiretap. And he has this story of people and animals. The other day, my friend Tony called me up and told me he had the funniest story for the radio. All he'd say was that involved him, his ex-girlfriend, and a road trip they made with a pot-bellied pig. Before Tony would tell me anything further, he said he wanted me to be running a tape recorder. This way, he said, when it played on the radio there'd be my surprised laughter egging him on. But here's the thing. I hardly ever laugh. If there's one thing I could change about myself, it would be that. Working in radio, I wish I had the kind of free and easy laugh that felt like an arm around the shoulder. A laugh that said, speak on you darling clown, I am so with you. Instead, I produce silences that, rather than encourage, make a storyteller feel like they're being scrutinized. Or worse, like I just put the phone down to go out and put more change in the parking meter. So Tony started telling me the story, and, as usual, I wasn't laughing. But I started to realize that this time was different. For once, I wasn't laughing because the story wasn't funny. But any way, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll let Tony tell the story. I guess it kind of marked, pretty much, the end of my relationship with Susan, my last girlfriend. We'd been going out for about four years, and the relationship was on its last legs and had been for, pretty much, about a year. Susan is an animal enthusiast, lover. She is always trying to save something. She's always online looking for rescue animals that she obviously, she can't possibly rescue any of them, actually. Or maybe one or two, but she's obsessed with it. And there was a couple that we knew that about a year ago or a year and a half ago, they got a pot-bellied pig, a baby pot-bellied pig. Are they farmers? No. They're just like regular city folk. One of them had a head shop-- just like scenesters. And I guess, like my first reaction was that's kind of, I don't know, that's kind of stupid. You don't bring a pig home to the city, to a house. It just seemed like kind of a scenester thing to do like, hey, the guy got a pig. But, so they got a pig. And it was really cute. And they showed me pictures and convinced me that it was pretty smart and fun. And it was OK running around the house and in their yard, and stuff like that. What was the pig's name? Pig's name was Warren. Nothing was heard from the pig or the couple for a while. And then there were some rumblings. I started talking to them. And well, it's not going so well. You know he's ruining the place, and he's out of control and all this stuff. And before long, Susan was on the case to make sure that he found a good home and happy life. She called around and found a place, an animal sanctuary, outside of Montreal. And they were like, yes, of course bring the pig. And so Susan made arrangements to bring the pig there. I know what's about to happen, and I don't want to have anything to do with it. And, of course, I'm approached to do the job, to drive this pig to Montreal. In your car. In my car. And I know, I know at this point in my heart, in my gut, that I'm going to be doing this, because you can't get in Susan's way when she's trying to save an animal. She's unstoppable. And in my mind, it was very clear. Drive with pig to Montreal or deal with the repercussions of not doing that for about a week. Give me a sense of how big this pig is, like, how much does it weigh? 250 pounds? It's a pot-bellied pig. It's not like a big-ass, sort of, regular pork pig. He was just kind of like a children's book pig. And hairy-- pot-bellied pigs they have fur. Are they pink? No, they're kind of brown. So OK, let's put the pig in the cage and let's go do it. And within a couple of minutes realized the cage is not going to fit in my car. There's no way. So like OK, well, we'll just put the pig in. We'll cover the back seat with garbage bags and whatever, and it'll be fine. And at that point, I'm just not thinking. I want to just get this over with. Let's just get the pig in the car. Let's drive. Let's go. But we did. We covered the back seat and we started to drive. The first 20 minutes we're kind of all right. The pig was hanging out in the back. Susan was feeding him and petting him. And everything was fine. Then about-- probably about 45 minutes into it, the pig started to get more and more agitated. We ran out of food. We had to stop and get some more food. We got like a big bag of bird seed and just a couple of other varieties of dog biscuits and whatever. We stopped at places. They didn't have pig food per se, because people don't usually keep pigs. We're driving, and I'm starting to realize that, we're both starting to realize that Warren, the pig, is getting more and more agitated. Like he's not happy. He is getting really restless. He's becoming less and less interested in the food. He is getting more and more persistent about getting up to the front seat. At this point, I can sense the pig's head popping over my right shoulder, sort of snapping. And trying to get over to my left shoulder with the window, and then back over my right shoulder and snapping. And soon had a full body hold on it, trying to keep it away from me. And this sort of thing really started to turn into something else. I mean, you're in a situation like that with somebody, I suppose the kind of mature, adult, useful thing to do would be to accept the you're in a situation. But I was not happy. I let it be known. And most importantly, and most significantly for Susan, I was not laughing. Because after a certain point, she started to find it funny, like most people do. Most people start to find story funny around this point, even sooner. I didn't find it funny at all. The more she laughed, the more funny she found it, the more upset and angry I got. So she had the pig to deal with, and then, I guess, she had me to deal with. Finally, I came up with the idea that what we needed was a barricade to put between us and the pig, to keep it the pig in the backseat, to keep us from getting hurt. Whatever happened to the back of the car happened at this point because we're in survival mode. We're driving around behind strip malls looking for a big piece of cardboard. Finally, we found what looked like something that a refrigerator been in. And I grabbed it. It was soaked in garbage, and it was raining that day. And I opened the car door. Susan is holding the pig back with all her strength. And I jammed this big piece of cardboard, slid it in like when magicians-- when they cut people in half, just slid it into the car, with all my strength, as far as it could go. And I closed the door. And it worked. And the funny thing is, he didn't even fight. As soon as the barricade went up, he just gave up. We drove the rest of the way to the farm and cut him loose. And he joined his brothers and sisters, his new brothers and sisters, which were these gigantic, fat pot-bellied pigs. Which, I guess, in a short time he'd be like them. And was that, I mean was that like a beautiful moment? I wouldn't say it was beautiful. I felt relieved that the pig was out of my car. And we broke up within a month of this incident. Do you think that this was the straw that broke the camel's back for Susan? She actually said as much. She just said, I can't be with somebody who can't find the humor in the moment in something like that, no matter how dangerous it is, no matter how stupid or crazy, or wrong it is. That's not how I want to live my life. And when he told you that, did you feel like, I could change? I wanted to change, but I could not possibly enjoy life as much as she does. I think she had a point. And I think she was right about me getting too upset over that and not seeing the humor in it. The thing about me and Susan-- Susan loves it when things go wrong, because that's when the real fun begins. That's when the real wackiness and zaniness, and the hilarity ensues. And she just thrives on that. She just loves it. I don't. I don't. I like it when things go right. I like things to be relatively under control. And the thing I resented about Susan was that she was constantly trying to pull me into her sort of way of having fun. In a sense, Susan was trying to help me have some fun. There's no question in my mind that the way that I react to situations that I'm unhappy with, unhappy to be in, disapprove of, is really, really similar to the way my father used to react to me all the time. Like, how do you mean? Well, kind of stern, disapproving, punitive, making you feel stupid, making you feel like you're doing stuff wrong. I think the defining moment between me and my father was Halloween. I think I was nine. And I went to my friend Sunny's house, he lived down the street, and he had a makeup kit. And he made me up. I don't know. I guess it was some combo of drag and weird clown thing, and zombie. I don't know. We just made it up. He made me all up, and I put on a dress. And I ran out into the street and started knocking on everybody's door and just like, I don't know, just yelling and screaming and being an idiot. Just like I'm going to cross from blah, blah, blah running down the street, and, before I knew it, I was at my door. And knocked on the door, and I was so out of control at that point. I didn't give a [BLEEP]. I didn't care about anything. I didn't care that I was knocking on my door. My father answered the door. And like a moment of shock. And he grabbed me and pulled me in and started smacking me. Because I was embarrassing him. Because I was doing something completely stupid and embarrassing and having fun. If you try to control everything and OK, this is going to work like that. Well you break up with people. If a best friend is too much of a hassle, just crazy at text, and three hours on the phone every two days, blah, blah, blah. After a while, you cut everything out of your life. And then you get lonely and bored. And I have fewer and fewer stories to tell. And I mean, what do you do when you don't have enough stories to tell, is you go looking for trouble. How so? Well, I'm just like wandering around at night, walking by bars, looking for people to pick fights with, just somebody that will annoy me or irritate me. He looks good, I'm going to hang around and see what he's saying. It's a bringing to bear my frustration onto an outside thing that deserves to have my fury unleashed upon it. Do you miss Susan? I do. I miss her because I was close to her, and I love her, and I think she's a wonderful person. I love the way she dealt with people. And I loved the way she was. And I wanted to absorb some of that. I wanted some of that to rub off on me. I want some of that. And did you get it? I have some of that. What do you think that she saw in you that was alluring to her? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I was another animal for her to save. Jonathan Goldstein's CBC radio show Wiretap is at www.cdc.ca/Wiretap. Thanks also to his friend Tony Asimakopoulos and to Sarah Gilbert. Act Three, Combo Platter. Starting out today we have had a story about a parrot, and we've had a story about a pig. And to end today's show, we have this story from David Sedaris. When asked why she'd chosen to become a journalist, the parrot was known to cock her head a half an inch to the right, and pause for a moment before repeating the question. "Why did I choose to become a journalist? Well, I guess what really drives me is the money-- that and the free booze." It killed her to follow this with, "I was just joking about the money." The paper she worked at was called The Eagle. And she wrote for the Tempo section, which was later renamed Lifestyles, and was now titled, simply, Living. Most of her stories were little more than puff-pieces. Interview the wealthy tortoise who'd shelled out money for the new speedway. Cover the benefit gala for ringworm, or heartworm or the earthworm or anti-defamation league. She wanted an opportunity to show her chops and finally got her break when a pot-bellied pig took over as director of the local art museum. The Eagle wanted something simple, 300 words tops, but the parrot thought differently. It scheduled a long lunch. Her guest arrived on time, and after ordering they got down to business. "So," the parrot began, "it's a long way from Ho Chi Minh City to the much coveted director's chair of a noted museum. I'd like you to reminisce about the journey a little." "I'm sorry," the pig said. "But I've never been to Ho Chi Minh City." "But you are from that region are you not?" "No," the pig told her, not at all. The parrot ran her fat, black tongue over the ragged edge of her upper beak. "I don't mean to contradict you," she said, "but I have done a little leg work, and it seems that you're officially registered with your health care provider as a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. So let's turn our thoughts eastward, shall we, and talk about your past." "Technically, yes, I am a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig," the museum director said. "But that's just a silly formality. The fact is that I was born in this country, as were my parents and their parents before them." "I see," the parrot said. And she scratched the words self-hating onto her notepad. "So how will your ethnicity reflect itself in regards to our museum? Can we expect to see more Oriental art, a pricey new Ming wing, perhaps some big Treasures of The Emperor extravaganza?" "Nothing's planned," the pig said. "But you wouldn't rule it out?" "Well, no, not completely, but--" "That's all I wanted to know," the parrot said. And at that moment, their lunch all arrived. It was she who had made the reservation, and, in a moment of inspiration, she decided they'd go to Old Saigon. The fact that it was her idea would not be mentioned in the article. Nor would she add that the pig had never in his life used a pair of chopsticks, and that he gripped them, one in each hoof, as if they were screwdrivers. During the meal, a few blades of lemongrass for him, a Mekong platter for her. They talked about this and that, but she wasn't really engaged, busy as she was dreaming up a headline. Museum Takes on Asian a Slant was good, but she'd have to fight hard to get it past her editor who despised, what she called, word play. When their lunch was over, the pig trotted back to the museum, and the parrot headed down to the VFW Hall, where she hoped to round out her article. There she spoke to a red-shouldered hawk, who hadn't actually fought in Vietnam but might have had the war lasted just a few weeks longer. "I could have practically been killed over there, and now one of them is coming to my museum trying to tell me what art I should look at?" "I know it," the parrot said. The article was due the following morning, and she stayed up all night in order to finish it. Her editor scowled at the bulk of pages but softened after the first read through saying, " Good work, you," and, "Maybe we should send this over to the city desk." The eventual headline was no masterpiece, Pot-bellied Museum Director Stirs Controversy. But the parrot was so relieved to move out of the Living section that they could have called it Mud and she wouldn't have cared. As for the pig, he wasn't nearly as upset as she thought he would be. Rather than threatening a lawsuit or demanding a retraction, he phoned to say that he was disappointed. "Deeply disappointed," were his exact words. The parrot reached for a pen, hoping for quotes that might lead to a second article. "Is that all you have to say?" she asked. "Any response," he sighed. And gently hung up the phone. "Hello," the parrot said, "Hello." The pig would not have admitted it, but what really bothered him was the pot-belly business. He'd been plump all through his youth, and the years of name calling had not just shaped his adult life but deformed it, like some cell made crazy by radiation. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten without thinking. Popped a passing canape into his mouth, finished an entire potato chip or dry roasted peanut without calculating the damage. While others prepared for bed, he ran a treadmill. They tucked into their ample breakfasts, and he hung upside down from a bar in his living room, doubling at the waist until he saw stars. Then came the traditional sit-ups, and a half a slice of dry Ry-Vita before examining his silhouette in the hallway mirror and getting ready for work. He did not have a pot-belly. He would never again have a pot-belly. But now, here was this article, essentially, comparing him to Buddha. After hanging up on the reporter, the pig began a three-day fast. Lunchtime came, and as his colleagues shuffled to the museum cafeteria, he sat at his desk and looked out the window at that stupid hawk, marching back and forth with his picket sign. The veteran had hoped that others might join him, but none of his fellows seemed to care. "The war is over, and it's time to move on," they'd been quoted as saying. "Who cares if some," and there was that word again, "Who cares if some pot-bellied Charlie wants to hang a picture on the wall?" "Damn that parrot from the Eagle." The pig's anger felt vaguely nourishing, but he knew that it was misplaced. The reporter hadn't assigned the animals their names. That was someone else's doing, someone who sat back and ordained, wide-mouth bass, humpback whale, lesser wart-nosed horseshoe bat, not caring whose life was ruined. By the time he next ran into her, the pig had lost close to 10 pounds. They met at a museum benefit, a costume ball which he hosted, and which she hovered on the edges of, guzzling rum punch and gathering quote she'd heard a 1,000 times before. "Wonderful party and, of course, it's for such a good cause." The parrot was, she liked to joke, back with the living, by which I mean section, not the sensation of being alive. She'd assumed that the pig would be in disguise, and was surprised to see him in the same dark suit he worn at the restaurant. He was standing at the bar, nursing a glass of water. And she came from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. "Let me guess," she said, "you're Henry Bacon, right?" "Who's he?" the pig asked. The parrot rolled her eyes. "American architect, designed a little something called the Lincoln Memorial?" "Oh," the the pig said, "that Henry Bacon." He was going to admit that he was no one or, at least, no one special, when the parrot stepped back and examined him again over the rim of her punch class. "I've got it," she said, "you're Luther Ham, took the silver medal for 200 meter freestyle, Helsinki 1952. Little wisp of a thing, but, boy, did he have shoulders." "Right," the pig said. "So who are you supposed to be?" The parrot shrugged and held up her glass for a refill. "I thought I'd go all out and come as a two-bit journalist." For verification, she presented an ink stained claw. "So hey," she added, "I'm sorry about that article." "That's all right," the pig told her. "All right for you," the parrot said, "I'm the one with the god damn hawk calling me every 10 minutes. Now he wants to go after Middle Easterners. Heard of a Persian cat who runs a parking garage down by the civic center and is after me to write an expose." The pig laughed for the first time in months, and immediately thereafter, as was his habit, he began to analyze why. Was it the idea of this parrot bedeviled by a ridiculous hawk, or the image of a long-haired cat making change in one of those sweltering little booths? He pondered this for days but never reached a satisfying conclusion. "Earth to pig, Earth to pig," the parrot said. And he looked down to see her wing resting on his stomach. "Is it my imagination or have you lost some weight?" "No," he told her, "I mean, yes I did. It's not your imagination." He thought of how kind it was for her to mention it. And then he noticed how oddly satisfying it felt to be patted down by a wing. Meanwhile, the parrot was still talking. "Don't get me wrong," she said, "I have seen a cockatoo in my time, but I'm not dating anyone now if that's what you're wondering." She grabbed a passing appetizer, dumped the caviar back onto the tray and ate only the cracker. "A cliche, I know, parrot eats a cracker, but fish eggs make me bloat." "It's the salt," the pig told her . He'd hoped to say something more interesting, but, just then, the band started up. A wolf, in sheep's clothing, called out for a foxtrot. And as if a switch had been thrown, the party came to life. Here was the hare in cat's pajamas dancing with a chameleon whose costume changed with every turn. The Ugly Duckling cut in on a swan. A trio of mice lowered their sunglasses, and as they scouted the floor for partners, the parrot turned to the pig and held out her claw. He accepted it awkwardly in his hoof, this spindly pitchfork, this warm, mottled twig. And so began, what the reporter would later refer to, as her days of swine and roses. David Sedaris is the author of several books, most recently, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, and Steven January. Special thanks today to Ben Resner and Irene Pepperberg. Our web site, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free, www.ThisAmericanLife.org, or you know you can download today's program in our archives at audible.com/ThisAmericanLife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who says that he had a dream exactly like today's show, all three acts. The dream even included me reading these very credits. "Yeah, that was a dream I had, and I remember that dream, and I remember thinking that, you know, I got to stop smoking pot, man." 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. And to explain what we're doing on today's show, let's just begin with a little story. My parents said that we should have a dog. But didn't want to have a dog that was going to be all doggy. This is Alex Blumberg, one of the producers of our show. This is the irony. They did a lot of research to find the dog that would be the least hassle. And wait, what were the specific hassles that they were trying to avoid? The were trying to avoid loud, slobbery, sheddy. And they did avoid those sorts of hassles. But what they didn't know is that they were trading it in for a whole other set of hassles that were much larger and much worse than they ever could have imagined. What they got is they settled on a Basenji. Basenji? Yeah. I've never even heard of that breed. Yeah. They're sort of a rare breed of African hound. They're barkless. Our dog would howl occasionally. They can't bark, but they can howl? Yeah, they can't bark, but they can howl. That's like saying somebody, they can't talk, but they can scream. They're a mute, except for the ability to yell at you. Exactly. Trumpkin-- they named him Trumpkin-- howled all the time. And the howling was a lot louder and weirder than barking. And Basenjis, Alex says, they're just a strange breed. It's a weird line, and it hasn't been domesticated as much as other dogs. And so they're really, really wild-looking and feeling. Most dogs, they interact with you, and they wag their tails. And they come up and the pant. He wasn't like that at all. He was wily and disobedient. When they left him inside the house, he would rip apart the sofa cushions and the pillows, and destroy the furniture. When they put him out in the backyard, he would tunnel out in hours. He'd pick fights with cars. He was fast enough to catch squirrels, so there were always squirrel carcasses all over the block. He'd overturn trash cans. He'd disappear for days. The day Alex's family moved to Cincinnati, Trumpkin ran across the street and ate the bunnies, real bunnies, that the little girl across the street had just been given for Easter. And it was impossible to get him back in once he was out. Eventually, he would just come back in. You'd just let him roam his path of destruction through the neighborhood until he finally-- His killing spree. --until he finally tired himself out. And then he would eventually come back at night, exhausted. Covered in blood. Covered in blood, or beat up, or bitten through. That was the other thing. He didn't just pick on smaller animals. There was all these other neighborhood dogs, and he was constantly-- I think especially the Irish setter, I don't remember his name. But he was constantly pushing that Irish setter's buttons. The Irish setter was much bigger than him. And they were constantly getting in fights. He was constantly getting in fights that he lost. But on the bright side, to get back to the family's original desires for a dog, he didn't shed. He didn't slobber. It had been six months or a year of him destroying all our furniture and tipping over garbage cans and enraging our neighbors and running away and getting in fights. And so my parents decided that they'd had enough. So they gave him away. And they explained it to us that he just was not a city dog. And they gave him to this couple who owned a farm in Indiana. And he was going to be much happier than he would be cooped up in our house. So Indiana from Cincinnati, how far is that? Just over the border in Indiana. So he was maybe 40 miles away, 35, something like that. But of course, I was heartbroken. And I would come home from school every day. And I'd be just so depressed that he wasn't there. And I remember crying myself to sleep. It was horrible. We were all very sad. Alex's mom and dad say that shortly after the couple from Indiana took the dog, something started to happen. I don't know how long it was, but we began getting some phone calls, I would say they were two or three, from people saying that they thought they had our dog, but he got away. Or we had your dog in our backyard, and he escaped. Or we had your dog tied to a rope, and he chewed through it. He had a tag, of course, with our name on it, and our number. And every time the call came, it would be a little bit closer to us. And then my mother was driving home from work on her usual route. She was going down this highway called Columbia Parkway, which is four lanes. And I see, trotting along the road, Trumpkin. And he was trotting along in the direction of our house from the direction of Indiana. And it was rush hour. Cars are whizzing by. And before she even gets to him, he recognizes the sound of our Datsun station wagon. Come on. And, my mother told me this story, spun his head around and then started chasing the car. And she was like, the jig is up. He's coming back. So I might as well make it easy for him. I pulled over quickly and opened the door, and he jumped in and sat on my lap and yodeled. That's what Basenji's do when they're extremely happy. Oh, the word that Alex uses for that is "howl." Yeah, howl or yodeled. So he shows up back, and you take a breath and you say, OK, I guess I've got to deal with this. Were you happy, or were you resigned, or were you a little of each? I think I was more resigned than anything else. Yeah. You weren't happy. No. Trumpkin had always been so aloof, Alex says, and then he came all that way to be back with them. It was quite an amazing gesture. It was sort of touching. And I think that's sort of like, it did made us think differently, it made me think differently about him, a little bit, I think even then. That I was like, wow, he really-- we felt very loved by him and very special in his eyes. And it was hard not to feel the same way after that. You know that song, "The Cat Came Back," that old camp song? That's it. That's your dog, man. That's the dog, right. Trumpkin had a million lives. He definitely felt indestructible. I saw him. I saw his head get run over by a car. Come on. I did. It ran over his nose and front foot. And he popped up, and he came back, and he was all dazed. I saw it happen. And that happened over and over and over. Literally, I think he got hit five time by a car. After a while of all of this, did it seem like he had a supernatural power? Oh, yeah, definitely. It definitely did. Towards the end of his life, they took him to the vet for something or another, and they did an x-ray. And on the x-ray, there was all these glowing points all over his body where angry neighbors had shot him with a BB pellet. He was glowing with BB pellets. It's a supernatural quality, the whole thing that's like that song, "The Cat Came Back." You know the song I'm talking about? In each verse, the cat is drowned, or he's shot, or he's electrocuted or given away. And then in the chorus, the cat comes back the very next day, no matter how impossible that would be. They took him down to Cape Canaveral, put him into place. They shot him in a satellite up into outer space. They thought that the cat was beyond human reach, but then they got a phone call from Miami Beach. Then the cat came back, the very next day, blah blah blah, you know. OK, the song actually dates to 1893, written by a man named Harry Miller. And people have probably added hundreds of grisly verses of the song over the years. It is possibly, and I know that it's hard to generalize with this kind of thing, but it is possibly the most gruesome kids' song ever. They sneaked him in a shop with the butcher not around. They dropped him in the hopper where all the meat is ground. The cat screamed and screamed with a blood-curdling shriek. The burgers from that store tasted furry for a week. Sweet dreams, kids. The original lyrics include a train that's going west and an old-time riverboat. One of the great things about this song is that every generation adds new, contemporary ways for that cat to perish. The atom bomb fell just the other day. The H-bomb fell in the very same way. Russia went, England went, then the USA. The human race was finished, without a chance to pray. The cat came back the very next day. The cat came back. We thought he was a goner, but the cat came back. It just couldn't stay away. I've got to say, it's easy to understand why this song has lasted over a century-- catchy melody, and a story that anybody can understand, even a little kid. It is actually the simplest plot in the world, when you think about it. You want to get rid of something and it returns, mysteriously, and against all odds. And for this week's radio show, we thought, there have got to be other stories like this, true stories, real life stories, not about cats. And so, today, proudly, we bring you an hour of stories just like that, real life cat came back stories, of things in our lives that just won't go away. As I said, it's This American Life. Our show today in four acts. Act One, Promise Keeper Cat. Act Two, Political Cat. Act Three, Baby Cat. Act Four, Refugee Cat. Stay with us. Act One, Promise Keeper Cat. It's actually the story of a pledge that somebody made that he wondered if it had gone away. He wanted it to go away. And, well, you'll hear what happens. Dan Savage tells the story. In 1996, 16 years into the AIDS crisis, I made a promise to my boyfriend, or my ex-boyfriend, late at night, while he ate a pint of ice cream, lying on his deathbed. I broke that promise. And with each passing year, I feel worse about what I did, or didn't do. It happened like this. We got serious, fast-- too fast-- moving in with each other a few weeks after we met. Five months later, we decided we should go get tested for HIV, or I decided we should go get tested for HIV. It was the fall of 1995. My test came back negative. Joseph's did not. I was holding his hand when the counselor at the testing center told him he had HIV, something he had long suspected but was never sure he wanted to know. 29 and beautiful, he was tall, with broad shoulders, long, blond hair, and huge, blue eyes. He shared his fears with me. He didn't want people to think of him as ill. He didn't want to be pitied. He didn't want to lose his looks. He didn't want to die alone. Four months later, I dumped him. It wasn't the disease. There were other issues. Sometimes, when another guy talked to me on the street, in a restaurant, he would fly into a rage. I couldn't deal with his jealousy, and so I left him. Or maybe that's too convenient. Maybe it was his HIV, or his smoking, which always drove me crazy, or the jealousy, or all of it. The night we broke up, he wasn't sick. He had HIV, but not AIDS. But a week after we moved out of the apartment we shared, one of Joseph's lymph nodes became so swollen and painful, he couldn't avoid going to the doctor. The biopsy confirmed that Joseph had lymphoma, an AIDS-related cancer. He also had thrush and Kaposi's sarcoma. The doctors call these things opportunistic infections. We gay men called them the beginning of the end. I cried with him in the living room of his new apartment the night he told me. Joseph had to start chemo immediately. His doctor put his chances for survival at 30%. And even if he survived the cancer, the Kaposi's sarcoma would likely kill him, or some other opportunistic infection. Joseph joked, sort of, that it was too bad his lymph nodes didn't swell up a week earlier. "You couldn't have dumped me if I was dying," he said. "You got out just in time." After leaving Joseph's apartment that night, I thought to myself, "Here we go." At that point, in 1996, the AIDS caregiver role was well established. I'd read Paul Monette's On Borrowed Time and Last Watch of the Night. I'd seen Longtime Companion and Parting Glances. I knew my part. As Joseph slowly came undone, I would divide caretaking chores with Joseph's best friend and fellow ex-boyfriend, Marcus. I would accompany Joseph to the hospital, yell at doctors and nurses, pick up his meds, bring him groceries. At the end, I would lift him off his bed, help him dress, wipe [BLEEP] off his legs, carry him to the shower and the toilet and the couch. And when the time to die came, I would hold his hand and tell him to let go. Which brings me to the promise. Late at night, I was sitting with Joseph in his room at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. He was undergoing another round of chemo for the cancer, feeling nauseous. He had lost a dangerous amount of weight, so I brought him some ice cream. His long, thick hair had begun to fall out, so he shaved it all off, because he couldn't bear to watch it come out in clumps. He was very skinny. I told him he looked good bald, which wasn't a lie. Joseph was one of those guys who looked good in anything, even his deathbed. I sat for a long time in the chair next to his hospital bed. "I will always be here for you," I said. "You can count on me. I'm not going anywhere." But then everything about AIDS changed in the United States. The year Joseph got sick, a new class of AIDS drugs suddenly became available, protease inhibitors. Taken in certain combinations, dubbed cocktails by gay men, naturally, these drugs returned many very sick men to seemingly full health. Basically, the 16-year-old script that Joseph and I were reading from the night I made my promise had just been ripped up, only we didn't know it. When I told Joseph that I would always be there for him, neither of us expected him to be here much longer. By promising to be there always, I was committing to six months, a year, tops. Then came the drugs. And the cocktails worked a miracle on Joseph. The swelling in his lymph nodes went down. His hair began to grow back. He put on weight. He got out of the hospital. What we thought was a six-month death sentence stretched into a year, then two. I would drop by Joseph's work, which was near my office. He seemed to be doing fine. My visits started to come further and further apart, and further. Then one day, I realized I hadn't seen Joseph, the only guy I had ever promised to be there for always, in more than a year. I was gone, new boyfriend, an adopted child, other commitments. And over the years, I found myself wondering about that promise, wondering about the kind of person I was to turn my back on a promise like that, but wondering mostly if Joseph was angry with me. I had released myself from the solemn commitment I made without even having the decency to discuss it with him. To this day, I wonder, really, what you owe someone who is about to die, someone who has, in a sense, promised you that they're going to die, and then comes back. So I called Joseph up so we could speak, finally, about all of this. OK, so when you got sick, when you got lymphoma, when you were in the hospital, when you were getting chemo, I promised you that I would be there for you always, and that you could count on me. And then you lived. Was that disappointing? No, it wasn't disappointing. It was what we all wanted. It was what I wanted. It's what I wanted, too. Despite the fact that I haven't seen Joseph much, at all, really, over the last 10 years, we've maintained a sort of tenuous connection. Joseph cuts my boyfriend's hair, and our son's. After an appointment, my boyfriend always lets me know that Joseph looks fine, which is code for "Joseph's not dying." And a half a dozen times in the last decade, I've run into Joseph on the street. These meetings have always felt a little awkward. I know Joseph is doing fine. He's been with the same guy for seven years. But still, seeing him, I always felt somehow incriminated, guilty, caught out. What's always felt awkward for me about the promise, and we've never discussed the promise since it was made, and it sort of faded away, was that it was really premised on this idea that I will be there for you always, asterisk. Always means six months to a year. And here we are 12 years later, 11 years later. Was there ever any sense that I had failed you by drifting away, that I had broken my promise? As far as your promise to me, even though we lost contact for quite a long time, and didn't really maintain, except for "Hi," on the street, I never personally let that promise go. I have to say, that shocked me. I guess I expected him to say that he was angry, or used to be angry. But I never expected this. Well, you said that you would be there forever. So hell yeah, yes, absolutely. You're still on hold, baby. Hear my nervous laugh? I was so freaked out by this that I didn't know how to respond. I couldn't respond. In fact, I was so disoriented, that we spent the rest of the hour on tape gabbing about old times, old boyfriends. And when we left, things felt somehow messier and less resolved than even before we talked. I'd spent a decade feeling bad about a promise I broke, and now the promise was back? So a week later, I called Joseph up again. So when we talked before, and you said that the promise was still in force, and I was still on the hook, I was really shocked. And I couldn't really say anything. And I wanted to ask you if you were serious. Of course it's still in effect, Dan. Because, well, I look at it this way. I just know that you're around if I ever needed you. But it's an abstract sort of hook, Dan. It's not something that I'd probably ever hold you to. You want to be off the hook? [LAUGHTER] You do. It's OK. He was right. I wanted to be off the hook. Can you release me from the promise? Absolutely. I do release you from the promise. You're let out, Dan. And then, suddenly, it was like the air cleared between us, as if finally putting this promise to rest allowed a sweetness that had been missing back into our relationship. And Joseph actually ended up telling me how much the promise, such as it was, meant to him at the time. I didn't have anybody else make me any promises with that conviction. I meant it. I know that. And I appreciate it. And I know it for what it was-- what it is, and what it was. Sometimes, I wonder how many guys like me there are out there. Joseph wasn't the only gay man who got up off his deathbed in 1996. So I expect I'm not the only ex-boyfriend who made a solemn promise to be there always, but who ended up embarrassed, unsure of what to do or how to behave once the drugs transformed a six-month commitment into decades. In the days since Joseph and I talked, I kept wondering why I couldn't leave him believing that the promise, the one I made with such conviction, was still in force. Why not let him think that I'll be there? But I wanted us, after all this time, to return to normal, to be normal ex-boyfriends in the normal, sloppy way that people relate to their exes. We might be there for each other. We might not. We'll see. I guess what I really wanted was to start treating him like a man with his whole life ahead of him, a man who doesn't need me anymore, or deathbeds, or promises like the one I made him so many years ago. Dan Savage writes the syndicated column, "Savage Love," and has written several books, most recently, The. Commitment. Act Two, Political Cat. OK, speaking of creatures who you thought were gone who eerily return from oblivion to walk among us, the living, why won't John Kerry just go away? Why is he still out there, giving speeches and TV interviews, and acting like somebody who thinks that someday, he might still be President? Why do I keep seeing his gray, zombie-like face, intoning in that intonation he has, you know, that intoning where it's like he is almost human, but not quite human, sounding defensive, even when he's on the attack? Tim, that's not what I've suggested. And it's really important to look at what I've proposed. The first step is, you've got to have a government. On Meet the Press a few months ago, he was as impenetrable as ever. He was arguing for the US to withdraw from Iraq. And at some point, Tim Russert points out that this might lead to total chaos, an all-out civil war, an invasion by Iran. And Kerry, and maybe this is unfair, but Kerry gave the kind of response that pretty much, I would say, lost him the Presidential race. He said, and this is kind of a counter-intuitive thing to say when you first hear it, so I'm going to say this slowly. He said, "A US withdrawal plus diplomatic pressure might just finally force everybody in Iraq to figure out how to live together." But listen to how he says it, OK? This is classic Kerry, which means, and all due respect here, perhaps a tad long-winded. But that's not the way to do it, Tim. What you need, and what I've suggested, is that you have a Dayton Accords-like summit where you bring all the parties together. And I mean all the parties-- you need to bring Iraq's neighbors together. Khalilzad has now been authorized to talk to the Iranians. Bring the Iranians. Bring the Syrians. Bring the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians, and others. Now it may be that ultimately you can't find a resolution on the constitutional issues, and you have to embrace something like Les Gelb's original proposal, the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, you may have to divide it up into three parts. I don't know the answer to that today. Like I say, classic Kerry. He throws around a lot of names and a lot of references in a sort of shorthand that just doesn't shed a lot of light for most of us. So as a result, he's both stunningly boring and completely unconvincing at the same time. So even though he may well be right, you know, he may be right. A combination of withdrawal from Iraq and diplomacy at the same time, that might be our only hope right now in Iraq. When you hear him say it, you just don't believe it. There are a lot of different ways to understand why President Bush won the election in 2004: money, and organizing, and demographics, and the way they draw the lines in those congressional districts, and all that stuff, right, values, the religious right. I want to make the case here for a simple explanation. It's Kerry's fault. I want to emphasize, this is my personal view, not the view of NPR News, Public Radio International, this radio station. This is my view. My view of Kerry was set forever the night of the first 2004 presidential debate, which you may remember was a pretty big night for him. It's the first time he squared off against President Bush one on one. I watched this thing from the home of Dr. Gig Hackett in Cincinnati, in the swing state of Ohio. Hi, welcome. Hey. Come on in. There were seven people there, and all of their votes were up for grabs. Three leaned towards President Bush. Two leaned towards Kerry. Two were completely undecided the night of this first debate. And what was fascinating and kind of notable is that all seven were upset with President Bush. Even the supporters of President Bush were upset with them. All seven thought that he was doing a lousy job in Iraq, and with the economy in Ohio. Some of them found him outright alarming on abortion and social issues. Even his supporters in the group were not happy with the idea they were going to have to vote for him again. And so they all sat down in front of the TV with the feeling that all Kerry had to do was just give them a reason, give them a reason to vote for him. Yeah, they'd seen the ads. They'd seen the news. But they actually still did not get what it was that Kerry stood for. What 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. To make a long story short, they began the night unsure of what he stood for, and they ended the night the same way. Nationally, this debate helped Kerry's poll numbers. But here in this Ohio basement, they were unmoved. They were deeply skeptical. Kerry would lay out a four-point plan for what he was going to do in Iraq. And I would turn to the group and I would say, OK, what do you think? And they would all be like, but what's he going to do? How is that so different from what the President's going to do? And I would say, well, he just said his four points. And they'd say, yes, yes, yes, but what's the big picture? What's he stand for? To be fair, I think part of Kerry's problem was that months of Republican political ads had convinced all of these people that he was a waffler, a prevaricator, that he didn't stand for anything in particular. But Kerry's problem as a candidate was that he seemed incapable of doing or saying anything to overcome or counteract any of that, any of what his opponents were saying about him, which, these days, for better or worse, is an important political skill. Here's Dr. Hackett. 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. When he says something, I don't know if he really believes that or not. So even when John Kerry pointed out, truthfully, correctly, policy blunders and missteps his opponent had made, nobody in this room believed him. Even when he's in the right, he doesn't convince people. In the last few months, John Kerry's had a little wave of media attention, after he proposed setting a deadline to withdraw American forces from Iraq. He hasn't actually announced that he's running for president again, but he sure seems like he is keeping that possibility open. And I'm not proud of this, and I'm just saying this now as one voter to another. And is anybody else feeling this too? When I'm flipping channels, and I see him making a speech, or giving an interview, I feel this moment of rage, actually. Like why do you still walk the earth? Why do I still have to keep seeing your face? Don't you understand? We took a vote. We all took a vote in the most literal way possible. We took a vote. We don't like you. I see him, and it's like seeing some ex-girlfriend that you don't want to run into on the street. Why do I still have to think about you now, after everything? Stop running for president, John Kerry. You had your chance, John Kerry. If you couldn't win that election, when the deficit was ballooning, and job creation wasn't so great, and we were losing ground in a tough war, and almost half the country hated your opponent before you even opened your mouth-- it's not going to get any easier than that one. Do something else, John Kerry. Do something else with your many skills. You're a civic-minded man. Go run a charity. Go run Harvard. Go run Yale. They're smart enough to actually understand what you're trying to say when you open your mouth and talk. Coming up, a family that keeps losing one of its children, who keeps returning. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program comes back. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today 's show, The Cat Came Back, stories of animals, people, things that will not go away, that return to haunt you, even if you want them to go away. We've arrived at Act Three of our show, Baby Cat. This is a story of a person who goes away and comes back, from Michael Beaumier. My parents have been married for something like 750 years. And in all that time, they've only had one argument, one long, constant argument that never ends, an argument that they're each dead-set on winning: an unresolved disagreement over the number of children they actually have. To be fair, my parents did have a lot of children. And after the first four or five, it probably got hard to keep track. No one disputes that there are two girls, Anne and Katie. The trouble was, as it always is with the boys. My mother counts six. My dad says seven. We are, in order, Jack, Pat, Mike, Matt, Casey, Colin, and Paul. Mom is Irish. When the new baby arrived, we all knew the drill. Bets placed on gender and the date of birth would have to be paid, sleeping arrangements rearranged, a crib set up. Our grandmother would stay a night or two, 'til mom and baby came home. By the time mom was pregnant with her ninth child, this had become routine, no big deal. We were a well-oiled machine, until baby number nine. Dad didn't come home that night, nor the next day, nor for many days after. It was a shock when Dad reappeared, exhausted and unshaven. And when he spoke, it was with a tone we'd only ever heard him address to grownups. Mom was very sick, he told us. The baby was sick, too. Things looked bad. He was going to be at the hospital a lot. And grandma was going to take care of us. We needed to be extra well-behaved. No fighting, no complaining, no fires. Let the dog's fur grow back for once. Be good. There was no "or else," no threat of punishment, no offer of reward. He wasn't asking. Grandma morosely insisted that we comb our hair and keep our voices down. She declared that matches, scissors, knives, glue, duct tape, and the mallet used to tenderize meat were not toys, and that from here on out, we had to make our beds. But the worst part was no fighting. No fighting, was she serious? Not even sucker punches? Days turned to weeks, and weeks into months. No one knew exactly what had happened, and no one was brave enough to ask. But we figured out the basics. The baby had come. Something went wrong. And mom had nearly died. When we were finally allowed to visit her in the hospital, we could only go in small groups, two or three of us at most. We didn't need to be told to behave ourselves. Mom found this unnerving. "Why aren't you fighting?" she'd ask from her bed. "They aren't like this at home, I swear," she would assure the nurses. "Who are you people? Somebody hit someone already." But Dad would shake his head, no. And we'd cower by the door, afraid to do anything that might upset her. The baby was barely mentioned. None of us younger kids saw Paul, as they'd named him, until finally, very late that summer, he and mom were well enough to come home and got a decidedly low-key reception, especially compared to the raucous introductions new babies usually received. No one tried feeding Paul candy or introducing him to the dog by putting them both in the playpen. We weren't very clear on what Dad meant by "Paul is special needs." And when we gathered around the crib to finally get a look at him, he hardly seemed like the cause of so much trouble. He looked like any baby, except for the terrible shakes that would suddenly overwhelm him, and how his eyes would roll back in his head. The seizures were constant and brutal, overtaking his tiny body several times a minute. Had I been old enough to understand what was happening, I would not have been able to bear it. Being children, and being us, we immediately nicknamed him Shakes. We weren't allowed to hold him, but we tried to outdo one another impersonating him, convulsing on the floor, falling over each other, fluttering and rolling our eyes, as Paul did. But eventually, even we could see that this baby required a great deal of care. There was no set routine with Paul, as there is with most newborns. He didn't eat normally, didn't sleep according to any set schedule, couldn't be left to himself. The task of caring for him soon proved overwhelming. In hindsight, it was probably crazy to think that Mom could take care of eight children and a very sick newborn after nearly dying herself. He was with us for only a matter of weeks, really, before the decision was made. I don't remember the day they took him away, or saying goodbye, but we didn't see Paul again for almost two years. A gloom settled over us after Paul was gone-- not anxiety, not tragedy, either, but this odd, nagging feeling of incompleteness. Someone was supposed to be there, and he wasn't. Paul's absence was acute, a presence in itself. And it was especially hard on Mom. Occasionally, she and Dad would disappear without a word, telling us only later that they'd gone to the place where Paul was, an institution of some kind in a town nearby. Mom would just suddenly want to see him, sometimes on the spur of the moment, and Dad never said no. Afterwards, when we asked, Dad would tell us that Paul was fine, but there were never really any details. Mom would usually go upstairs after these journeys, shut her bedroom door, close the curtains, and crawl into bed. When Paul finally died, two days before his second birthday, it was like a bad spell had been broken. There would be a funeral, and sadness, and a terrible sense of loss, but there would also be an ending, finally, instead of the in-between place where he and all the rest of us had lived for so long. Because we hadn't seen him since he was an infant, Paul had become to us kids less a person than a situation. All that changed at his wake. The casket was a tiny thing. You could put your arm around it. I don't know why I expected to see a baby, but that wasn't what he was. His hair had grown in, dark and full. And his features had become more pronounced and solid, the nose, the shape of his mouth, his thick, bushy eyebrows-- a face so familiar, because it was mine, the face I shared with the boys gathered around me peering into the tiny coffin. My brother Collin, now the youngest brother again, only six years old, couldn't keep his hands off Paul, holding his tiny fingers and touching his face. I understood exactly what he was feeling, the shock and surprise of it. Suddenly, he seemed like our brother. Suddenly, he seemed like one of us. Personally, I thought he looked like Pat, though from certain angles, he seemed more like Casey. Matt said he was a dead ringer for Jack, and immediately regretted his choice of words. Pat said he looked like a combination of Colin crossed with me, except without braces, which I took to be an affront, and said so. Pat told me to stop being a jerk in church. And Matt pointed out that we were in a funeral home, not a church, and added the word "butthead" for good measure. Then Anne shoved Matt, and Matt shoved Anne back. And Katie, four years old and now armed with a brand new word, screamed "Stop it, you buttheads," at the top of her little lungs. Mom either laughed until she cried, or vice versa. Dad made us all go sit down. We buried Paul. And we cried. And Colin dug a little hole over the grave and put some of his tiny plastic dinosaurs in for Paul to have. And then we went home and fought our way into adulthood, breaking into food fights and putting firecrackers down each other's pants, pushing one another out of windows, and filling each other's socks with jelly. It was hard not to notice that these epic battles were, more often than not, instigated by our mother, who never seemed happier than when she was surveying the devastation, a gin and tonic in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a smirk of utter satisfaction on her lips. Mom would arm us with spray paint and fake IDs. She expected us to sneak out for midnight keggers and illicit cigarettes. She was actually quite adamant about such adventures, because she knew what the alternative was. She'd been raised in a house engulfed in grief. Her mother had been made an Irish widow at a very young age, and never stopped mourning. Mom refused to give herself or us up to it. Nobody talked about Paul. His birthday went uncelebrated. And his life and death, while never explicitly denied, was a forbidden topic. We'd visit his grave, of course. But we all knew not to bring up that time, or mention his name, because none of us could bear the look of pain that would appear in our parents' eyes. We knew that sometimes they would go to the cemetery by themselves to see him. And even years later, after all of us kids had grown up and moved out, and begun families of our own, after they'd sold the house and left town themselves, they would drive for hours, sometimes on the spur of the moment, still, just to be there. The living mean more than the dead. And the living go on and they forget. But sometimes the elements conspire to bring the past and the present together again, and the dead remind you of all they once were. There was a winter of extraordinary snow, followed by a spring of heavy, incessant rain. Rivers rose, the waters came, and a terrible flood engulfed our old, North Dakota hometown. Half the city was underwater, the bottom half. Unfortunately, the top half was still quite dry. No one knows how the fire started exactly, but it jumped from building to building, burning everything straight down until the fire met the water. When it was over, nearly everything was destroyed, except the cemetery. Maybe it was because they didn't like driving so far for so long, or maybe they just didn't want him to be there all alone, in the middle of nowhere, with no one to mow the grass or put flowers on his headstone, or remember who he was. But at some point, my parents hatched their little plan for Paul. They'd have him disinterred and moved to where they were in upper Michigan, where they'd gone to live, to be buried next to my grandmother. The casket was flown as far as Wisconsin, where for reasons that still remain somewhat murky, my parents decided they'd finish Paul's journey on their own. My father had gotten very specific measurements of Paul's casket, the length and width and weight, and he'd borrowed a pickup truck that would accommodate the task. But apparently, to the surprise of probably no one except my parents, the rules about moving a body tend to be rather strict. You can't just haul around a casket that's been stuck in the ground for more than 20 years. The casket itself has to go into a special container of its own, one that's clearly marked and labeled. Dad didn't think it was as funny as the shipping dispatcher did when the box proved to be too long to fit in the truck. He didn't think it was funny when the box was strapped in using extension cords. And he certainly didn't think it was funny when he had to pull the truck over to the side of the highway every 10 miles, where he and my mother would have to get out and push the box marked "Caution: human remains" back into the truck as cars zipped past, the other drivers' mouths hanging open, their eyes agog, their necks snapping around at the sight of two old people and their box of bones. But Mom loved every moment. Burying a son once is tragic, but twice, well, that's a habit. She took great pleasure in calling each of her children after arriving home, letting us know that she and Dad were back from a long journey, that our father was exhausted from the drive, and that a box containing our beloved baby brother was currently sitting in her garage. There was an old, almost forgotten glee in her voice. We all noticed it. She seemed to revel in our shock, and laughed at our perplexed horror. She'd never joked about Paul, never. And sure, the jokes were utterly tasteless and wholly inappropriate, but it was nice to see her old, wicked personality kick in. Suddenly, Paul wasn't off-limits. "They're getting creepy," my brother Matt said. "Well, that's what happens when you get old," Colin said. "You never throw anything away." "Remind me to be cremated," I told my brother Casey. "It won't matter," Casey responded. "That'll just make you easier to cart around wherever they go." "Paul's obviously their favorite," Pat said dryly. "Of course, it's easy to love a kid that you don't have to tell to shut up." And there he was. Paul was back among us, our brother at last. We didn't even know we had missed him. We didn't know we could miss him. Years of silence and confusion were, overnight, replaced with deeply inappropriate dead baby jokes, and everyone's favorite, sibling rivalry. Where, we wondered, would they be taking Paul next? Disneyland? We never got to go to Disneyland. "You never took us anywhere," we cried. "How could we?" Mom told us. "You kids were always fighting." But mom was clearly the worst. She relished her gross-out humor and always managed to do one better. Not long after this, she called each of her sons, one by one, to ask in her most serious and earnest voice if we'd ever had a, you know, bad experience with a priest when we were kids. This was in the middle of the terrible molestation scandals, and she told us that she absolutely, positively wanted to know. One by one, we assured her that nothing of the kind had ever happened, that our priests were good guys, and that no one had ever tried anything, ever. "Well crap," she said. "That's what your brothers said, too. I must have raised the six ugliest boys on the face of the earth." And then she laughed and laughed, delighted that she'd gotten another one on us. Dad's voice would pipe up somewhere behind her, mildly irritated at having to remind her, yet again, not six, seven. Michaeul Beaumier, reading an excerpt from his book, I Know You're Out There, which comes out next month. By the way, the town he talks about in that story is Grand Forks, North Dakota. Act Four, Refugee Cat. Well, our program today is about people who keep coming back, no matter what. In this act, we look at people in the opposite situation. They're trying to come back, but finding it very, very hard. There are many people right now from New Orleans who are trying to get back to New Orleans, but fear they will not have homes to go to, because they were renters in the public housing projects there. Before Hurricane Katrina, there were over 12,000 people like that, thousands more were getting section eight vouchers to help them rent apartments around the city. Since the flood, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced that instead of fixing up some of the big housing developments, it's going to tear them down. Four of them are scheduled to go, which means that the 7,500 people who lived in those apartments are going to have to find other places to live. Cheryl Wagner, who lives in New Orleans, has been following all of this. And she has noticed that the guiding principle in this debate seems to be for everybody on all sides, those who want to tear down the projects, and those who want to save them, to make each other, and everybody else, feel as terrible as possible. This is a story that I like to call "Who Should Be Ashamed of Themselves?" There are few spectator sports quite like watching people in the public housing debate skirmish for the moral high ground. Every time some poor sop points out that bringing back the old buildings the way they were might not be such a good idea, that an awful lot of people have gotten shot in or near New Orleans housing projects, that many units are dilapidated, or that the Housing Authority of New Orleans was failing so miserably that HUD took over years ago, someone counters with, "Y'all should be ashamed of yourself for trying to put all those poor, flooded, old ladies and children out in the street." On the other hand, some housing activists cried "For shame," when HUD upped the amount of section eight vouchers 35% to address the soaring rents in the post-Katrina rental market, marking perhaps the first time ever that housing activists protested a government agency giving more money to the poor. And then all sorts of middle-class people started protesting, too, writing editorials to the local paper, complaining that HUD was inflating the price of rentals, and squeezing firemen and teachers out of New Orleans in favor of poor people. Legal secretaries are just as flooded, they point out, and no one upped their salaries 35%. Some of the people throwing stones at HUD aren't even from New Orleans, much less from the projects. Since the storm, both local and what some here might call "carpetbagging" housing activists have rushed to the scene, clutching "Gentrification equals globalization equals racism equals imperialism equals war" flyers. When activists showed up at meetings of the City Housing Authority protesting the destruction of existing public housing stock, that's when the real shame-off began. At one meeting, they brought a stressed-out African-American housing administrator close to tears. They accused her of trying to purge New Orleans of other African-Americans, of taking bribes, of not caring. This is a woman who lives in New Orleans and who was stranded for three days on the roof of her office in Gentilly before being rescued by boat. At that meeting, she shamed back. "I would respect more of you if you lived in our residences," she told the activists, her voice breaking. "I talk to my residents every day." The public housing shame wars also lead to bizarre moments of dueling activism, some hippie-on-hippie. The latest was a few days ago, when a bunch of bicycling and public park groovers made the mistake of saying it would be kind of neat to have a rails-to-trails type public bike path on a devastated and forgotten swath that cuts through the city, some of it near some projects. This prompted a different group of activists to accuse the bikers of colluding with HUD and the permanent expulsion of the community, which amounted to ethnic cleansing. Really, bike paths equal ethnic cleansing. And then along comes Home Depot, who wants a piece of the C. J. Peete Housing Development real estate to build a store. And then there was the displaced granny in her wheelchair, and the mothers and the children threatening to break into their own homes, just to get their belongings, and hopefully clean out their apartments. Because HUD had locked them out with barbed wire, and in some places, steel doors, the spectacle of which should make us all really, truly ashamed. A number of public housing residents simply want their old neighborhoods back, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But HUD claims mold and contamination make these properties uninhabitable. Some residents are quick to point out that HUD has a lot of nerve, given the conditions before the flood. "We've been living in mold. We've been living with backed-up sewage," one displaced resident of the Saint Bernard project rebuked to the local paper. "We've been living with gunshots over our heads and broken everything. Now all of a sudden, it's a hazard? It's been a hazard. But we want to come home." Last week, when I went to the Saint Bernard Housing Project the city has slated for demolition, tall chain link fences and barbed wire surrounded the blocks of deserted apartments. Earlier this month, I went to a meeting that the paper had billed as a place where people would discuss public housing issues. But no one from public housing was there. The man in charge said the paper had it all wrong. They were just looking for volunteers. He pointed to a small boom box and some women sitting at a fold-out table stacked with hot dog buns. "Today we're gutting houses and having a little DJ barbecue after," he said. He told me how he had been gutting and coordinating gutting for elderly and low-income displaced families for nearly a year. I attempted to commiserate, telling him about all the houses that hadn't been gutted in our neighborhood, and how I and others were taking care of many of our elderly and displaced neighbors' yards. "But that's to keep up your own property," he said. "That's people helping themselves when they do that." I had the distinct feeling that he wanted me to put down my pen and pick up a claw hammer and help them gut some houses. I probably should have, but I didn't. I left ashamed. I predict that if things keep going the way they are, soon everyone in New Orleans with half a heart will be ashamed of themselves full time. I'm already ashamed of my boyfriend, who used his emergency disaster food stamps to buy tuna steaks and goat cheese. I'm ashamed of myself for sharing this meal. I'm also ashamed of myself for writing this, instead of gutting an elderly person's house, and for having my 67-year-old mother help me carry rubble buckets from my own house gutting, even though she has both carpal tunnel and trigger finger. I feel bad for not going to Mass for the past 10 years, and for not washing my dogS this week. Does that help? Cheryl Wagner in New Orleans. Our program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Steven January. Covers of the song "The Cat Came Back" today were performed for us by Nedelle Torrisi, the band Headache City, and Mike Treese and DJ Rude One. (SUBJECT) NEDELLE TORRISI [SINGING] So I gave him to a scientist destined for the moon. The cat was used for ballast in an outer space balloon. 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, Mr. Torey Malatia, who has heard what we say about him at the end of every single show. And he has talked to a special public relations consultant, who helped him put together, finally, after all these years, a response. Here it is. Stop it, you buttheads. 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. And let's head back in time-- back to when being on TV meant you sort of half-shouted every single thing you said. This is the primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The year is 1960. In this laboratory, there are approximately 120 rhesus monkeys-- the subject of a study that wants to know the answer to the question, what is an infant's love for its mother? Now, the reason there even was a study asking this very basic question, back when CBS Television took a camera crew to Wisconsin-- well, that is actually the kind of thing that most of us today would find sort of surprising. You see, the researcher that they're filming-- a guy named Harry Harlow, was trying to prove-- I know this is going to sound crazy-- he was trying to prove that love is an important thing that happens between parents and children. And the reason why he felt the need to prove this point was, at the time-- and, again, I know this is going to sound kind of out there-- the psychological establishment, pediatricians, even the federal government were all saying exactly the opposite of that to parents. It's actually one of those things that you say, how could they have thought that? But psychology just didn't believe in love. And if you go back and you pull any of the psychology textbooks, really almost pre-1950, you don't even find it in the index because it was not a word that was used. This is Deborah Blum, the biographer of this renegade researcher, Harry Harlow. She writes about how psychologists at the time actually saw loving behavior towards children as a problem, a menace. At one point, the head of the American Psychological Association declared, "When you're tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument." Yeah, that was John Watson. And he actually said there are serious rocks ahead for the over-kissed child, and then defined over-kissing as kissing your child more than once a year. Wow. I mean, that was the message of almost everything. Yeah. At some point, there are government pamphlets, you write, that are warning parents not to touch their children, and you quote some. One says, "Never kiss a baby, especially on the mouth. Don't rock or play with children." Yeah. Not to say that everyone follows what so-called experts do, right? But, certainly, you had an enormous effect of this affection is wrong, love isn't real-- trust us, we're scientists-- that greatly shaped those kind of perceptions. How is this possible? Well, first of all, psychology was still pretty young, and psychologists hadn't figured out how to measure love, how to quantify it, talk about it in a scientific way. So the thinking about love's role was incredibly crude. And at the same time-- this is all at the beginning of the early 20th century-- medicine was still figuring out how bacteria spread infections. And pediatricians had noticed that, in hospitals, the kids who were picked up a lot by nurses seemed to get more infections. So doctors were saying, don't pick up your child, don't pick up your child, don't pick up your child. So you had a kind of confluence going there. You had pediatricians saying, we're telling you for health reasons that you should never cuddle your child or indulge them. And guess what? Psychology says if you follow those rules, if you show your child no affection, you will make them a better human being. So back off. And this is the way it was for decades, until about the 1940s. Health care workers started to notice that some children in hospitals, in orphanages, who were treated this way never picked up, never loved, would wither and die-- literally die. But even this did not change the opinion of the psychological establishment. So enter Harry Harlow. He sets out to prove that love is important-- in fact, love is a key to normal development in children-- and that what bonds babies and mothers is more than just the baby's need for food. Now this is what we tried. The responses of the baby monkey are very similar to those of the human babies. This is Harry Harlow on CBS in 1960. In the cage with the baby monkey are two dolls. We constructed two substitute mothers. They have absolute patience. They are available 24 hours a day. The mother hits the baby with love. What he did is he gave them two alternative dummy mothers. One was a wire mother with an ugly face, and one was a cloth mother. She had sort of a fluffy terry cloth body. These are the only mothers these babies ever had. And in the simplest experiment, baby monkey would be put in a cage with both mothers, but wire mother had the milk. So by all the theories, the baby should bond to wire mother, because she's feeding him. Here's Baby 106. Watch. The little baby monkey-- which, by the way, is the most insanely cute thing you have ever seen-- scampers under the wire mother, which is like a wire, mesh cylinder with a boxy head and eyes, apparently made from a billiard ball. The monkey sucks from a bottle that comes out of its chest, and then it runs to cuddle with the other mother. Oh, he's going back. He's back on the cloth mother, and he'll stay on the cloth mother. Actually, this baby spends 17 to 18 hours a day on the cloth mother, and less than one hour a day on the wire mother. The monkey rubs itself against the cloth doll until it seems to get some solace from it, and then it relaxes. In other experiments, it comes back to the cloth doll for reassurance when it's put into scary situations. When the cloth mom is nearby, the baby is curious. It walks around and explores. It's confident. And this is how Harlow proved that the relationship between mother and child is more than just about getting food. The baby monkeys needed something else, something that had to do with being cuddled and touched and reassured. It was clear that in this sort of cuddly feeling of affection came all kinds of really important developmental responses. You know, security, curiosity is essential or more essential than being fed. One of the other Harlow experiments was one in which they took nice, cuddly, ever welcoming cloth mother, and they made her into an abusive mother or a rejecting mother. Harlow called these evil mothers. One of the cloth moms had brass spikes embedded that would shoot out when the baby monkey held on. I mean, they were blunt tipped. It didn't cut them to shreds but they hurt. And one was like a shaking mom. Harlow wrote very graphically. He said the babies would be shaken till their teeth and bones rattled in unison. And one would just hurl the baby away. It was spring loaded. But what they found was that when the mom quit-- spikes retracted or shaking stopped-- the babies came back and they did everything they could to make those mothers love them again. And then they cooed and they stroked and they'd groom and they'd flirt, and exactly what human babies do with their moms. And they would abandon their friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them. Harlow spent years as an outcast, fighting for his ideas, before things finally changed. Though Harlow, he did so much to convince people that a parent's love for a child is one of the most important things that anyone could ever get or need, he did not have so much success with the love in his own life. He was notoriously cold. He had a wicked tongue and everyone lived a little bit in fear of it. He was not at all a warm and fuzzy person, and he certainly wasn't a warm and fuzzy father. He had four children by two different marriages. Almost all of them, his children-- the ones I talked to-- remember him as being gone. Was he self aware enough to actually understand how publicly he loved the idea of love, but in his private life he wasn't carrying it out? I don't think he was maybe until the end of his life. And he had difficulty in a lot of relationships. In a way, of course, who else would be so interested in how does love work, except for somebody who really needs to figure it out? Well, today on our program, stories of unconditional love. If you can get a monkey to love a terry cloth towel with a cue ball on its head, it doesn't seem like it should be so hard with your own kids, right? We have two stories today of parents and children, and exactly what unconditional love gets you. We first ran today's show all the way back in 2006. Act One of our show, Love is a Battlefield. Act Two, Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Stay with us. Act One-- Love is a Battlefield. In this act, a family faces a kind of profound question. Can you teach love, even to a child who has all sorts of reasons not to learn love? Alix Spiegel has this story. Until he was seven years old, Daniel Solomon slept sitting up. This wasn't because upright was a particularly comfortable position or because some exotic medical condition prevented him from straightening at the waist. It was just because Daniel didn't have another option. For the first seven years of his life, he lived in a crib in an orphanage in Romania with another child his age. His name was Niku, and he was more a shy kid. He didn't really talk much. And, I mean, it was kind of weird but it was fun to have him in there. It was-- I don't know what we even did, but we were there for seven and a half years and we got along, I guess. During the day, one set of adults would feed and clean Daniel, Niku, and the other 100 or so orphans who lived in the same room. During the night, there was a graveyard crew. But even though Daniel was there for seven and a half years, he can't tell you the name of any of the adults who took care of him. He didn't know any of them well enough to say. He also can't tell you much about how he passed his time, what he thought about. He didn't go to school. He didn't go outside. He only left his crib to eat and go to the bathroom, so there wasn't a lot of material to draw from. There was one window where you could see the city. And I don't remember exactly when I started thinking about it, but you kind of started to think about, like, what is that? I know you'd see all these car lights and all the lights in the city. And I think I started thinking about, like, what is that and why am I here, not there? One thing Daniel does remember is that he didn't spend a lot of his time yearning for a family, imagining some mother and father would drop from the sky to rescue him. No. I've seen several kids who had left and I'd wondered where they were going. But if I knew about it, I would have wondered, obviously, but you didn't know anything about it. It's like, a kid who never eats chocolate doesn't know what chocolate tastes like. I didn't know what a family was, and I didn't think I really thought about it at all. In fact, the story of how Daniel came to have a family, whether or not he actually wanted one, begins with a kind of accident. His mother-- or anyway, the woman who would become his mother, Heidi Solomon-- got a magazine in the mail from the adoption agency that was in the process of evaluating whether she and her husband were fit to have children. We were just in the beginning of our home study when we got a magazine, and it had his picture in it. And I don't really know how, because there was hundreds of pictures of kids. And I just remember telling my husband, I'm like, I think this is our son. So it was just kind of weird. Like, for some reason, his picture just, like, radiated to me. Five months later, Heidi and her husband, Rick, drove from their home in South Euclid, Ohio, to the Cleveland Airport, and took an eight hour flight to Romania to pick up their new son. Heidi is a special education teacher by profession. And she says that she felt certain ever since she was a kid herself that she wanted to adopt children-- wanted to even though she knew that adoption could be difficult, that the kid might have developmental problems or emotional problems or physical problems, or all three. Heidi believes strongly that people should do what they're capable of, and she says she felt capable of adopting a child. Rick, on the other hand, had started with a more conventional fantasy, that he would have biological children. But Rick loved his wife. And so even though it hadn't been part of his original plan, he agreed. And he says that when he and Heidi finally walked off the plane in Romania and saw the dark haired child dancing on the airport ramp, he felt certain that he and his wife had made the right choice. You know, he was just this bouncy, smiling child who was so excited, appeared to be bright eyed and happy and happy to see us. And I think my biggest fear going in was, like, he's just going to turn his back on us and we're going to really have to fight to get his love and attention. And he was not like that at all, at least initially. The family's early weeks back in Ohio were full of firsts-- the first time Daniel wore shoes, the first time Daniel slept alone in a bed. They played, and danced, and worked on English. And even though Daniel had some difficult moments, tantrums and fits of crying, both Heidi and Rick will tell you that, on the whole, the family had a good time. This honeymoon, however, only lasted about six months. And then, Heidi says, came March. Until March, I think it was moving in a manageable direction. Like, there were tantrums, but there was progress, and there was tantrums and progress. And then his birthday is in March. And I remember at the beginning of March he said, they don't have March in Romania because I never had a birthday before. So this whole idea of a birthday was really overwhelming to him. And March came around-- like, that's when I started thinking, like, about the biological thing. You see, until his eighth birthday, Daniel had never confronted the idea that he had been born, and therefore that he had actual parents, people who could have, had they elected to, provided a birthday party at some point before his eighth year of life. This whole concept deeply disturbed him. And even though Heidi did her best to explain the difference between biological and adoptive families, it seems that Daniel didn't get it because he walked away from that conversation fundamentally confused about his relationship to Heidi and Rick. I started thinking that they were my biological parents, and how-- I was really mad at them that they put me there for seven and a half years, and then came and got me, like what happened. Like, why was I there for that long, and what was going on? And that's kind of, I guess, when all hell broke loose. During this period, Daniel conceived a powerful hatred of his parents-- a deep anger that he couldn't shake, even after the difference between biological and adoptive parents had been explained again and again, and his actual relationship to Heidi and Rick became clear. At that point, it just didn't matter. His anger had taken on a logic of its own. Once he learned about the idea of parents and what his had done to him, he needed to hate someone and Heidi and Rick were the people closest at hand. And so his tantrums became tornadoes of rage-- seven, eight hour marathons where he would throw literally anything he could get his hands on. Rick and Heidi say that he put more than 1,000 holes in the walls of his room until, finally, they had to move everything out of his bedroom except a mattress. They called in professional social workers and specialists, several of whom left bleeding, needing medical attention. Remember, Daniel was eight. But, really, Daniel saved the worst of it for Heidi, the person who most wanted to help him. He hated her, appeared to take actual pleasure in her pain. Like, one time, he gave me a black eye when I was trying to help him. And he smiled like he was so happy that he gave me a black eye. And what did you think when you saw your son smiling after you-- I thought he really needs serious help, and he's very disturbing. There was a time where I remember my dad had hired this person to come to our house because my mom didn't feel safe with me in the house. Did you get that? They essentially had to hire a bodyguard. And even so, Heidi found herself calling the police several times a month, until Heidi and Rick turned to the mental health profession. They ferried Daniel from one psychiatrist to another, and religiously followed their advice. One man told them to put Daniel on medication, pills for ADHD, which greatly improved Daniel's handwriting, but otherwise didn't do much to help. Another woman counseled them to buy Daniel a puppy. This also didn't work out so well. Like, in three days, he was strangling the puppy. Heidi was told by at least two psychiatrists that her son would never love her, that she should give him up to foster care. Worse, the situation with Daniel began to affect Heidi's marriage to Rick. It was just so hard on him emotionally, dealing with this kid who made no sense at all. I mean, and I will tell you it put our marriage on the line. I mean, there were times when he said, I'm leaving. Looking back now, I just-- I didn't want to take that step, but I certainly thought about it, just because I was so unhappy with the whole situation. Yeah. I thought about leaving. But Heidi wouldn't give up on Daniel. Changing her son became a kind of singular focus, an idea that obscured all other considerations. I mean, one time a case manager sat down and said, this is what I think's going to happen. Daniel's going to hurt you. You're going to be in the hospital. He'll be in juvenile detention, and your husband's going to leave you. Like, I remember that very clearly. And I looked at him. I said, does this mean we hit bottom, and we can start moving up now? Like-- I mean, I'm like, that was just my response. I'm like, OK, that's your thing. Like, what do we need to do to get better? Like, I understand what the situation is. I mean, would you have sacrificed your marriage? I didn't want to. The portrait that you're painting is you had to take everything out of his room. At a certain point, you kind of hired a bodyguard. It put a strain on your marriage. You called the police regularly. I mean-- I know, like, when you're saying it, and I said-- I mean, I feel like, OK, like, I'm crazy, when you say everything in that list. It's not like I was with the bodyguard and I'm thinking, like, wow, last week-- I wasn't, like, always putting everything together in a list like that. And just, like, this is the way our life was so I just did it. I mean, I'm, like, a really stubborn person. Then one day after school, when Heidi was busy making a snack for Daniel in the kitchen, he grabbed a knife from the counter and held it to Heidi's throat. No one in the family likes to talk about this episode. It clearly frightened both of them. The only thing Heidi's comfortable saying about it now is that the experience convinced her to reconsider the way she went about Daniel's education. I stopped doing any kind of tutoring with him at all for a long time. Because I said, I don't want him to learn how to read. Because-- this was around the time when Columbine happened, and I was like, it's really good that he can't get any information on his own. Did you feel like Daniel was homicidal at any point? Well, I was told he was homicidal. How do you love somebody who is homicidal? Well, because he wasn't-- I mean, even-- because he was my son. I mean, you have to love him or else there's no way out of it. You know, it's like if you're lost, you want to keep moving forward, to get to the end place. Like, I don't think I ever question my love. Heidi says the only time she did question whether or not she should keep Daniel was when she thought about the possibility of Daniel hurting someone else-- a fear that became more pronounced in the wake of an outside incident that happened around Daniel's 10th birthday. By that point, Daniel had been given the diagnosis attachment disorder, meaning his primary problem was that he was unable to feel connected to other people. Heidi knew another kid who had been diagnosed with attachment disorder. She'd met him through her work, and had been so impressed with him that she actually asked the kid, who was slightly older than Daniel, to be his Big Brother. I thought he was doing really well. Like, he had been featured in the newspaper. He, like, delivered Meals on Wheels. And then it was, like, President's Weekend of 2000, he committed murder. Like, I mean, he came home and just sat down on his parents' couch that night after, like, cold blooded murder, without any emotion at all. Like, and I think I had seen him the day before. I mean, it was horrifying in many levels. Like, I'd worked with this kid. It was, like, and that whole professional level, but it was horrifying to me personally. Because I was like, oh, my god, here was a kid with attachment disorder that I thought was doing better, and this is how sick he really is. I was like, I will never be comfortable with Daniel. Heidi was coming to believe something that frightened her. She was coming to believe that because kids with attachment disorder couldn't connect to other people, they couldn't feel empathy. And without empathy, they didn't possess a really important human quality. The bottom line is these people-- like, people with attachment disorder, they don't develop a conscience, and they have the ability to hurt other people without feeling guilty. Like, that's really dangerous. Heidi wanted her son to have a conscience. She didn't want him to be dangerous. And so she began to call around to find out more about aggressive treatments for the problem. The treatment of attachment disorder has a long and controversial history-- such a controversial history that many of the people who practice versions of the therapy decline to use its name. It was started in the mid '70s by a psychiatrist named Foster Cline, who felt that children who acted out because of an inability to connect to their parents should be forcibly regressed, made to feel helpless and hopeless so they'd return to a baby-like dependence. Early versions of the therapy involved berating children, poking them, and physically subduing them by holding them down. Therapists would sometimes direct profanity at a child, and also have the child direct profanity at them. Cline himself acknowledged that this was so harsh it was often difficult even for professionals to watch. But when outsiders criticized the treatment as sadistic, Cline responded that, quote, "These children need the kind of love that forces them to love others." After the '70s, though, the therapy changed substantially, particularly after a couple of children died from being smothered in blankets. And by the time Heidi started hunting for something to help Daniel, most of the extreme methods of attachment therapy had been abandoned. So when Heidi heard about a doctor in Virginia who appeared to have had some success with a highly intensive program related to attachment therapy, she leaped at the opportunity. According to the doctor, Ronald Federici, mother and child needed to spend several months side by side, literally no farther than 3 feet apart. The goal of his plan is to try to recreate the bond that never occurred, because I wasn't with him when he was born. But it'd be very natural for a newborn baby to spend an extended amount of time just next to the mom, until you're trying to recreate that attachment. So Daniel and I were like three feet apart for about eight weeks. I didn't go to school. She stopped her job. When she would go to the bathroom, I would be right outside the door. When I went to the bathroom, she'd be right outside the door. The only time she was not next to me was when I was sleeping. Like, literally, that was it. But it wasn't just being side by side. There were other elements to the program, like eye contact. Federici felt that because mothers and their babies spent a large amount of time just staring into each other's eyes, it was important for Heidi and Daniel to do the same. Daniel was required to look into Heidi's eyes during every interaction they had, and neither of them were allowed to move onto the next activity until Daniel did it correctly. Like, if I was talking to him, I would keep repeating what I was saying until he made correct eye contact. Like, I remember one time we spent, like, 20 minutes him handing me a notebook. Part of it, also, is he is not allowed to ask for anything. He couldn't ask-- because babies don't ask for anything. They learn that they're going to have their needs provided for them. So it's not that he couldn't have a treat or he couldn't have every-- he just couldn't ask. Like, we went to the store, could not ask for anything, because he had to learn that I was going to provide for him what he needed. Predictably, Daniel resisted the program. Oh, I hated it. I totally, absolutely hated it. Yeah, I did every single thing not to do it. Problem was every time Daniel resisted treatment, he was subjected to yet another program-dictated activity-- time-ins, the alternative universe version of time-outs. The idea is that since kids with attachment disorder prefer to be alone, every time they do something bad the response should be to make them spend even more time, even closer together. Like, we would sit on the couch and I would hug him. That was, like, his punishment. Like he said, at first Daniel hated the treatment. And at least initially, his behavior actually deteriorated. But then something happened. I think it was around the third week that I actually-- like, I was with her more. I think I realized that she's not as bad as I thought she was. I think this is kind of when it kind of changed. Like, I didn't have as much time to hate her, I guess. And so, like, I kind of liked her a little more. Like, before, like, she would tell me not to do this. Then for, like, 45 minutes, I would hate her because she told me not to do this. Well, you know, there wasn't a time where I could kind of, like, go somewhere else and hate her. I was next to her. I had to live with her, whether I liked her or not. I don't know. It's just something changed. Daniel says he actually came to understand, maybe for the first time, that his mother loved him. The realization just dawned on him in a different way. Both Heidi and Daniel will say that after eight weeks, Daniel was cured of his violent behavior. It was gone, done. No more tantrums, no more throwing, no more threats. But there were still problems. Instead of acting out against his parents, Daniel started stealing-- at first, just small items from the local store, but it got worse. After one particularly bad episode, where Daniel nearly ended up in juvie, Heidi decided it was time to go back to therapy. There was a center near their home called The Attachment and Bonding Center run by a guy named Greg Keck. Keck proposed a program that was in some ways similar to the three feet plan. In addition to regular counseling, Daniel, who was now 13 and larger than his mother, would participate in holding therapy. That is, every night for a year, 20 minutes a night, Daniel, Heidi, and Rick were supposed to hold on to each other and talk, Rick and Heidi cradling Daniel like a newborn child, which is exactly what they did. I would-- even know he was really big, I would try to cradle him on my lap. Or it was really both Rick and I, because he would take up both of our laps. And I would look into his eyes the same way you would with a baby, and you make eye contact. And we would feed him with a spoon, ice cream. That's what we'd have to do to get him to-- because he liked ice cream. It definitely feels really weird. It's like, what is this? How did that, like, change the way you felt about them? Well, it's like they were feeding me ice cream. So I was like, OK, fine. But, like, it was like-- that's when I actually first started to be able to talk about what I was feeling. For the first time, Daniel really talked about his experience in the orphanage, opened himself up. And maybe it was the holding, and maybe it was the fact that The Attachment and Bonding Center gave Daniel a therapist he says he actually trusted, who led him through the process, but for one reason or another Daniel began to transform. There wasn't a specific moment anyone can point to. If Daniel had gone bad in one month, the going good was a lot more gradual. Without anyone quite noticing, he began to help around the house. They were able to move furniture back into his room. He started to make friends his own age. By that point, the rabbi of their synagogue called Heidi to tell her that Daniel had won something called the Brickner Award. The Brickner is given to the valedictorian of the confirmation class, and it's a huge honor for anyone. But in the case of Daniel, it had particular weight. Heidi had taken Daniel to synagogue initially because she thought that it would help him to develop morals, but the training didn't take. Daniel spent several years being removed from the temple in police cars. At one point, he was actually banned from going to services. So as far as everyone, including Daniel, was concerned, the fact that he got the honor constituted a minor miracle. One element of the award is that the winner gets to make a speech in front of the entire congregation. And Daniel told Heidi and Rick that he wanted them to think of his speech as a gift. And so when Daniel took the stage, the whole family was there. I spent my first half of my childhood in an orphanage in Romania. So for those years, I had no family, no love, no fun, no music, and no toys. Daniel talked about his early life, and all the trouble he'd gone through since. And during most of the talk, he was smooth and composed. But then he got to the end, and even from the audience it was clear that Daniel was shaking, struggling to keep his voice under control. Before I finish, I'd like to thank two people, my mom and dad. The reason that I'm here today and the kind of person I am today is because of you. Mom, never thank you enough for all the places you have taken me to. Even when I absolutely refused to go, I somehow had fun when I got there. Dad, you're one heck of a guy to put up with a crazy family like this. You guys are both amazing. I love you very much. It was, Heidi says, without doubt the most spectacular moment of her life. The question of whether or not it's possible to teach love is not an academic one. There are plenty of people who will face this issue. Adoption these days is on the rise. Most of these children will be fine, but some of them won't. And at least on its face, the story of Heidi and Rick and Daniel seems to offer an encouraging example. Heidi and Rick were able to take a seven-year-old with no direct experience of adult affection and, with a certain amount of pain and suffering, turned him into a loving son. The only problem is that the actual participants in this story see things differently. Do you feel like you can teach love? No. See, Heidi actually has a very humble view of what is and is not possible, what should and should not be expected as far as love is concerned. In fact, she tells me that, in her own mind, what she wanted from Daniel all along was very, very modest. I don't think the goal was ever love. The goal was attachment. Do you feel like you can teach attachment? I mean, I think you can work really hard to create an environment where you can form attachment. You want to create these situations where it's more advantageous for them to attach than to keep doing things their own way and being in their own world, isolated. Heidi seems utterly practical about the whole thing, even about whether or not her son now loves her. Do you feel loved by Daniel? Yeah. I feel loved by Daniel. Like, in a way that you-- Like, I don't think he wants to hurt me. I don't, like, worry about that at all. "I don't think he wants to hurt me. I don't worry about that at all." It's a very unsentimental view of her relationship with her child, but that is probably exactly what has made Heidi so successful. That is, Heidi is an unusually pragmatic person. She's not a flowering earth mother with a wealth of love to give. She is fundamentally realistic, tough minded, and these are precisely the characteristics that are needed in this situation. If you're the kind of person who actually needs love-- really needs love-- chances are, you're not the kind of person who's going to have the wherewithal to create it. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business. Alix Spiegel-- she's the co-host of Invisibilia, a show on NPR about human behavior. Season 5 of Invisibilia starts this weekend. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, another story that's going to make your job as a parent seem way easier than you felt about it at the beginning of this hour. 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 show, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- unconditional love, stories of parents and kids and how hard love can be sometimes in daily practice. Today show was first broadcast in 2006. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. After a bunch of cases where parents of autistic children murdered their own kids, a parent named Cammie McGovern wrote an editorial in the New York Times about all the pressure that she and other parents of autistic kids feel. They hear about these amazing success stories where kids end up at Brown, at Harvard. But those kinds of recoveries can't happen for every kid. This is the nature of autism. "In mythologizing recovery," she wrote, "I fear we've set an impossibly high bar that's left the parents of a half million autistic children feeling like failures." For these parents, the regular parenting rulebook is out the window. There are all these different kinds of treatments. They worry about doing every possible thing. Dave Royko's son was diagnosed with autism at the age of two. Things have gotten harder and harder over the years, and he and his wife recently had to make a decision. They had to decide whether or not to place her son in a facility for the rest of his childhood. Here he is. People say all kinds of things to me and my wife, as parents of an autistic son. And they mean well. People would sometimes say to me in public or in therapy waiting rooms-- there's a lot of interaction with parents and they would say, oh, you're a Saint. And I would just think, well, Jesus Christ, what am I supposed to? Beat the [BLEEP] out of him? Yeah. What else would you do? Well, we have to take a lot of anti-depressants. That helps, but-- Yeah. God bless medication. Yeah. People would often say, I couldn't do what you're doing. And I mean, I know some people would say that-- I mean, it's really a compliment. But sometimes they'll feel like yes, you would do-- Right. You would rise-- Unless you're really a [BLEEP] person and not cut out to be a parent, you would be doing the same thing. The only difference is we have to do it. Right. And so don't-- and it always felt like a little whiff of this crap, like God never gives you more than you can handle. Right. You just want to kick those people in the teeth, don't you? That sounds harsh. Here's what it's like for us. On a typical day, our son, Ben, empties the contents of cereal boxes and egg cartons onto the floor. He opens car doors while we're driving. He walks into traffic. He throws himself up against the sliding glass door in our den. Luckily he's never smashed through, though he has put his hand through the windows in his room. And by the time Ben was 12, he was nearly six feet tall and 250 pounds, a toddler in a giant's body. He dwarfed everyone in our house but me, which is why my wife, Karen's, arms are covered with bruises, scratches, and scars. I've come to call the various wounds he inflicts, "Ben-juries." Almost daily, we experience things that other parents would recount for the rest of their lives as their biggest parenting horror story. Recently, Karen found herself in a toy store with Ben. The store owner complained about Ben's behavior. He looked her right in the eye and unloaded in his pants, which was nothing new. Crap is Ben's trump card, useful in all sorts of situations. And so she walked over, smelled it-- it smelled horrible-- and got really mad. And I said, well, can we use your bathroom? And he wouldn't let me put on his shorts, because they were wet. And so we spent probably 20 minutes in that bathroom with me fighting him, trying to get those shorts on, and him really fighting. And I'm talking about pushing me, scratching me, and trying to get out of that bathroom. And I didn't want to let him out. He had no pants on, no underwear. I'm laughing about it now, but at the time I was just beside myself. I was crying and sobbing. And finally, after a while, I looked out and that bitchy woman was there. She saw me and she said, you have to leave right now. Why did you bring him in here? And so at that point, I just directed all of my anger towards her. And I said, OK, fine. We'll leave. So I just brought him out with no pants on in the store. And then, oh, my god, did she ever lose it. And so what was sort of funny was Ben really still wanted to shop. He wasn't ready to leave. Ben was only nine when we got the first serious suggestion that he needed more than we could provide at home. Two of his therapists sat us down and said that we should consider placing him in a residential program-- and the sooner, the better. As he continued to grow in size, it would only get harder to find a good program that would take him. As grim as it was to imagine sending Ben away, I also found myself agreeing with them and, frankly, feeling relieved at the idea. Life had become an exhausting and sometimes frightening daily struggle to manage what was becoming unmanageable. Hearing them talk about the need for residential treatment felt like validation that, yes, things really had gotten that bad. But Karen had a very different reaction. I was just floored and shocked and appalled and went home and just got under my covers and cried all day. I mean, he's a baby. That's the thing that bothered me the most about the whole decision. I just always felt like I can't do it to him. It's going to be just horrible for him. And as much as this is horrible for us, I can't do that to him. When I realized Karen felt this way, I found myself questioning my own values as a parent-- hell, as a person. What kind of person wants to ship his kid off to an institution? And how would Karen view me for the rest of our lives together if she ever felt like I pushed her into it? So I resigned myself. I decided that if we had to get through another decade with autism before Ben reached adulthood, so be it. And to avoid dropping dead from exhaustion and stress, I better get in shape. I lost 90 pounds. I exercised. I was determined to get through this and come out on the other side alive and able to enjoy life again. As a parent, you want to believe that there is a cure for everything with your child. In the world of autism, there is no shortage of treatments, only a shortage of results. We were providing Ben with as much one-on-one stimulation as humanly possible, and it wasn't working. The summer before sixth grade was the toughest yet. Ben's toileting had regressed badly. He'd become increasingly aggressive. You could be sitting comfortably with Ben, looking at a book, or a TV show, and before you had time to react, his hand would dart out and put a deep scratch into your arm, or his elbow would land a hard blow to your chest, or smash your nose and send your glasses flying. It wasn't clear where these violent outbursts came from. Was he mad, just trying to get a reaction, playing, trying to connect? Worst of all, he would often refuse to go to sleep. Or he'd sleep, and then be up for the day at 3:00 AM. The only time Ben doesn't require direct supervision is when he is asleep, which means if he's up, one of us is up, usually Karen. In 13 years, Karen hadn't had one night of unbroken sleep. Summers were the worst. With no school, Ben was bored, which led to more tantrums and destructive behavior. It also meant no chance for Karen to grab an hour or two of sleep in the afternoon to make up for the night. It was this crushing exhaustion that finally did it. This was starting to feel like it was, like, a fatal-- Ben's autism was becoming a fatal condition for me personally. I was exhausted and can't function. And so I just couldn't do it, just I was done. I couldn't do it. It was just such agony over the years, taking care of Ben. And there really was no one that could sort of save us or save me or save him from this horrible situation. There just wasn't sort of enough help or enough money or anything in the world to really make this tolerable year after year after year. Then Ben started doing worse in school. He was regressing. His behavior and toileting were worse than the year before. It really became clear that this is really bad for Ben. The best thing now isn't for him to have the nurturing of his mother 24/7. And I know you were ready for that to happen sooner. Yeah. Well, it felt nice being-- honestly, it felt nice really for us to be on the same page about this for the first time. It just felt nice being-- and part of it was it felt nice not having to feel like the parent who wasn't as good a parent. Because, in a way, it just felt like, well, am I really not as good a person, like, because I want to send our kid away? And so-- I never thought you weren't a good parent. Even more extreme-- You never tried to talk me into it or convince me. Well, I think part of it is I never really felt it was really open for discussion. I mean, I felt it was just such a basic thing. How could I argue that Ben shouldn't be with mom and dad? At last, we were together on this-- the single biggest decision ever in the life of our family. But there was one more person in the house whose opinion mattered, and that was Ben's twin brother, Jake. And we still had some convincing to do. Jake explained to my producer-- Well, the first time I heard them mention it, I was-- I thought it was just so they could have more time on their hands, and I was pretty angry about that. And I told them, like, stop trying to convince yourself that this is for Ben. It was a good point. Were we doing this for Ben or for ourselves? Karen and I had asked ourselves this question too. And if sending Ben away had only been for the benefit of the three of us, we wouldn't have done it. Instead of being bothered by what Jake said, I was actually touched. Because after all he'd been through, all the plans canceled and events ruined, you'd still empathize with Ben, who could be so hard to empathize with. But even Jake's empathy had to take a back seat to the reality-- that it was time for Ben to go. Do you remember what it was-- where the turning point was for you? When it went from feeling like we were sending him away just for our own sake, versus the turning point where you really felt like it was a thing that was necessary? That one night with the banging and the hitting and the screaming and the sobbing and the more sobbing and the scratching and the banging and the pounding through doors. You remember it. I remembered it. It was a long, nasty tantrum late one night, where Ben lunged at me over and over with all his weight, and I ended up bloody and bruised, holding his bedroom door closed while he smashed himself against it for hours, trying to get out. This was extreme. I mean, there was, like, pounding and it sounded like there was punching going on. I'm not sure if there was. Yeah. What went through your mind? Well, he's certainly not happy. If he's throwing tantrums like that, he's not happy here-- not happy enough. The one thing that likely never will be resolved in all of this, the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night, is what is Ben thinking right now? Does he know he will see us again, that we still love him? An autistic child can't conceive of other people's subjective inner life, and that means he probably can't really wonder if we still love him, because the idea that we feel anything at all is inconceivable to him. But he certainly can wonder why the people he loves most in the world, that he has always known and relied upon and trusted, have abandoned him. In June, we drove Ben to his new life. We were extremely lucky to live near a facility that was perfect for him-- an hour and a half drive from us in Wisconsin. After our meeting with staff and unloading Ben's stuff, it was time for us to go. It was quick. A long goodbye would only make things harder. I gave Ben a big bear hug, said I'll see you soon, and headed out the door, as Karen said her farewell, which I couldn't watch. Very briskly, we walked down the hall and out of the door, accompanied by the sound of Ben's wailing. It was a strange feeling to leave an unhappy Ben with strangers. The familiar urge to swoop in and try to calm Ben down, and protect others from any potential behavioral shrapnel, was hard to resist. We felt terrible. But at the same time, we felt liberated. When we got home that evening, we were so calm that it felt foreign. It felt like we were on muscle relaxants. We hadn't realized just how tense and jangled our nerves had been for 13 years. We sank into the couch and looked at each other. Karen said, this must be what it's like to be let out of prison. Jake and his friends were upstairs, and Karen got the idea to take them for ice cream. My immediate reflex was we can't do that. And then incredibly, three minutes later, we were in the car getting ice cream, like we'd gone through a tunnel and came out in another universe. It was even stranger for Jake. He had never known life without autism. The first couple days, when he was gone, I was so relaxed that I was nauseous. I was, like, sick to my stomach. I felt, like, butterflies in my stomach. Like, what now? It's like I was pulled out from my life and put into another with a couple of people who I still know there, and they're with me. But it didn't feel like home anymore. For me, like, home meant stress, and it meant a 5,000 pound brother who could be dangerous at times and hogged the couch. When weekly visits with Ben began after his first month, we immediately knew we had done the right thing. Ben was happy. In fact, it is very possible that Ben is happier than he's ever been. His days are jammed with activities and tasks from morning until night. Every minute is scheduled. Even the downtime is structured, with rules and responsibilities. That's what Ben needs, and we could never have given it to him. And for us, that's what the choice boils down to. I don't have any second thoughts. I don't feel guilty at all. I know some people, trying to be nice after he went were like, oh, you must feel so guilty or, oh, how are you and you must be doing-- just assuming that I was really doing terribly. And I was like, you know what? I really feel pretty good. I mean, I didn't even have to go to my shrink or anything after. I thought for sure I would be scheduling some appointments with my therapist, but I just feel it was right. Last weekend, we had our first home visit with Ben, and it was a joy. Ben walked into the house and stared momentarily at things that had changed, like the new couch in the living room. Soon we were in the backyard, and he swung on the bench swing for two hours, as happy and relaxed as I have ever seen him. He spent the rest of the day with us. And when it was time to go, Ben and I got in the car and headed back to his new home. A half hour into our drive, Ben said, "The letter D." That was my cue to say, "And D is for?" Ben countered with, "D for a dump truck." And then he said, "D is for daddy." I glanced in the rear view mirror and Ben was looking right at me, a rarity, and smiling. I reached back and, patting his legs, said, "That's right, Ben. D is for daddy, and daddy loves you so much." He beamed and, choking back tears, I said, "You'll always have daddy." It's very possible Ben was oblivious to the meanings I was laying on our conversation. But I swear, it felt to me like we were on exactly the same page. That's Dave Royko. He's a psychologist in Chicago. His sons, Ben and Jake, are now both 25. Jake is a therapist at a mental health center. Ben is living in a facility in Cleveland. David and his wife, Karen, are still living in Chicago, but plan to move full time to Cleveland to be with Ben. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Music help today from Mr. Terry Miller. Additional production help from Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Kathy Hong, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. Or you can download as many shows as you want, watch our videos, and do other stuff using This American Life app. 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, who I tried-- I tried talking him into starting this radio show for years, until that one night-- That one night with the banging, and the hitting, and the screaming, and the sobbing, and the more sobbing, and the scratching, and the banging, and the pounding through doors that-- you remember it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Back when the movie Schindler's List came out, I was friends with these two missionaries. They worked with Chicago gang kids who they would meet in prison and try to bring to God. Anyway, one day I got a call from them. They just had seen Schindler's List, and they wanted to talk about it because, you know, call your Jewish friend. They'd seen Schindler's List, and I was their Jewish friend. Anyway, so we got together. And what they said was, first of all, "We think we understand you better now thanks to Schindler's List.." And I think what that was about was they knew about the Holocaust, of course, before this. But it was more of a kind of a historical fact like you read about in a book. The reality of what happened in the Holocaust I don't think ever had really hit them. The emotional reality of it just hadn't hit them in the gut-- all those people dying. So we got together, and we talked about it. And they said the scene that touched them most was at the end of the film. And if you've seen Schindler's List, it's the scene after the war. And it's this rich guy, Schindler, who had been using his money during the war to save Jews from dying in concentration camps. And he realizes that now that the war is over, he could have saved so many more people. He still had money he hadn't used. He could have saved more people. And there's a scene where he goes from person to person saying stuff like, "I could have sold this pin and saved two more Jews. It's gold. Or this car." (SUBJECT) OSKAR SCHINDLER: This car. What good would have bought this car? Why did I keep the car? 10 people right there. So we're talking about this scene, and my friends, Jane and Glen, the missionaries, say this thing that totally surprised me. They said, "That's us. That's our daily life, that scene. That's our life." This Saturday, for example, Glen says, he wanted to stay home and watch the ballgame on TV. But he thought to himself, "No, no. I've got to go out there, and I've got to save another kid. I've got to try to save another kid. I gotta go to the jail. I gotta go to juvie." And they both said that at the end of their lives, it's going to be just like that scene in Schindler's List. They're going to go to heaven, and they're going to be called into account. And it's going to be, "You took this day off, and you pretended to be doing paperwork. And you could have been out there saving another kid. Or you watched the doubleheader with Cincinnati, and there was a teenager who was ready to hear your message and come to God." And they were going to be held to account. I think before this conversation, my understanding of Jane and Glen's life was pretty much exactly like their understanding of the Holocaust. I understood in my head. I understood intellectually that they had given their lives over to serving God. I understood that as a fact. But what it actually meant had not totally penetrated me. Jane and Glen, my friends, they were like superheroes. They had this incredible power, the power to save somebody, to bring them to God, to turn somebody's life around. And I've got to say, I met kids whose lives were completely straightened out because of them. They did a really nice job. They did save kids. And with their great power came great responsibility, a responsibility they tried really, really hard to live up to. Well, today on our radio show, we have other people who feel that same sense of power and responsibility in their daily lives. And I'm not just talking here about judges and doctors and four-star generals and people you would expect and hope would feel the burden that comes with that amount of power. I'm talking about normal people, people you might not suspect. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, "With Great Power," are shown in three acts. Act One, Objects in Side View Mirror Are Truer Than They Appear. Act Two, Unwelcome Wagon. Act Three, Waiting for Joe. In that act, Shalom Auslander has a tale of the being with more power than any other and more responsibility. Stay with us. Act One, Objects in Side View Mirror Are Truer Than They Appear. Well, the woman in the heart of this next story has the power to change two people's lives. And the thing is, at the height of her power, she doesn't even know she has it. Alex Kotlowitz tells the story. On this one August day in 1979, Carla Dimkoff learned something which shaped the rest of her life and the life of a complete stranger. And the thing about it is it took 26 years for her to realize that. At the time, Carla was 19 years old. She was living in a trailer home in the small town of White Cloud, Michigan, when her father, James Keller, who lived in Tennessee, showed up unannounced driving a motor home. Her father was a bit of a vagabond, someone who lived on the edge. So this surprise visit wasn't all that unusual. He did this all the time. He would basically abandon my mom, and he would just take off for days at a time. And he would end up wherever he wanted in several different states. And this time, he ended back up in Michigan. Carla was kind of at loose ends herself. She'd been raising a daughter alone, and the day her father arrived, Carla had gotten married to a man she'd met just a week before. Her father gave them $20 as a wedding gift and wished them well. Then they went their separate ways for the evening. Carla and her new husband got home around 2:00 AM. But her father was still out. He stayed out most of the night. When I got up the next morning-- it was fairly early. I want to say between 7:00 and 9:00, 10:00 AM. He was in the driveway. I walked outside, and I said, "Hi, where you been?" And at some point, he told me he'd been at the Lamp Lite Bar for a little while. And I was kind of puzzled because the bar is closed at 2:15 or 2:30. And I wondered where he had been the rest of the evening. And I really never got an answer to that. Even stranger was what he was doing in the driveway. He was repairing the side view mirror on his motor home. It had actually been broken off, and he was putting a whole new mirror on it. And he was just doing it in such a hurry and throwing parts into his vehicle, which I thought was strange. Why throw all the junk when you're 10 feet from a dumpster into the motor home? And he was in just such a hurry about it. It just struck me odd for a minute. And the next thing I know he said, "Well, I am out of here." And he left. And I didn't speak to him probably for several months to a year. It wasn't just that Carla's was father was a drifter. That makes him seem benign. He was, by Carla's recollection, a violent man. Carla remembers once she was slurping while eating spaghetti, and he hurled the table on its side. But it was much worse than that. When Carla turned 11, her mother told her that her father had molested a young girl. Carla tried to protect others in the family, and that brought her into direct conflict with her dad. Like one of the times he went after her mother. I stepped into the middle of it, and he punched me in the jaw. And I ended up in the emergency room later that evening. And how old were you? Around 16. At that point, I became afraid physically of my father and emotionally of him. And I was afraid to be alone with them after that. This is all important to know in order to understand what happened next. Shortly after Carla's dad drove out of town, Carla picked up The Times Indicator, their local newspaper, and read that on the very same night her dad didn't come home, just hours before she found him in the driveway fixing his busted side view mirror, a 19-year-old woman had been killed on a nearby road, a deep gash in her head. In the article, the sheriff said, and I quote, "We assume she was hit by an unknown vehicle, maybe by a mirror or some projection." I just thought, "Oh my God." I had an overwhelming feeling that my father had killed someone, and I just needed to tell what I knew. At first, she went to her minister who urged her to go to the police, which she did the very next day. She had a friend driver her to the police station in town where she learned that the detective in charge of the case wasn't in. So she left him a note. This is the letter I wrote to Detective Foster. And it says, "Mr. Foster, I would like to speak with you concerning the death of Kristy Ringler. I do not have a car. If you could possibly stop out to my house after 3:00 PM today, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Mrs. [? Terrel." That evening, there were two detectives that actually came out. They were dressed in plain clothes. They knocked on the door. They came in. I told them the whole story about my dad had been here, he had been gone all night. Gave them just a little bit of a history of my dad-- not a whole lot of history. And they were like, "OK. Well, we have this information. Thank you." I had the feeling when they came in the door that they thought they were wasting their time. I don't even think they sat down. They stood there just kind of towering over me. And I was clearly intimidated by the whole situation, not really ever dealing with anything like this. And maybe I just made myself sound unsure. You see, Carla laid out two possible scenarios for the detectives. One, that her father accidentally struck this girl while driving home from the Lamp Lite Bar. That seemed likely given his shattered side view mirror and his eagerness to get out of town. The other? Well, she thought it was possible that her father killed Kristy Ringler on purpose. That knowing her dad, maybe he tried to flirt with Kristy at the Lamp Lite, that maybe she'd repelled his advances, and that maybe on the way home he saw her on the road and rammed her with his side view mirror. Carla now believes, though, that this speculative scenario didn't sit too well with the detectives. They made me feel like a fool, like I had a grudge to grind when I was trying to get my father in trouble or something. And just this poor trailer park person. And were you conscious about living in a trailer, about being poor? Very, very. I knew that wasn't the thing to do. I knew that's not where I wanted to be. So the detectives leave, and you know in your heart of hearts that your dad was somehow involved in the death of this girl. What do you do with that knowledge? I bury it. When she looks back on it, this was the moment of truth. This was her opportunity to act, and she feels like she just gave up without any kind of fight. Carla ordinarily didn't back down easily, but she'd been dismissed often before. In seventh grade, she went to a guidance counselor about her dad's alleged abuse, and all the counselor did was go tell her parents. Then remember the time she ended up in the emergency room? Well, she told a doctor there that are father had punched her. Nothing came of that either. So when the detectives disregarded what she had to say, it felt familiar, like this was how it was always going to be. Her dad would elude any responsibility for what he'd done. She wasn't about to confront her father, who she feared would physically hurt her if she did. And as for the authorities-- The thought never occurred to me to go back to the police. I didn't want to feel that feeling again of intimidation, of just being dismissed. And that's really a selfish thought now that I think about it. The thing was though, she couldn't keep it buried, at least emotionally. She thought about it all the time-- that her father in all likelihood, accidentally or purposefully, had killed someone and that she hadn't done enough about it. I had these horrible nightmares that this dead girl was walking down the street trying to chase after me. Her body's all dismembered. And I got the feeling in my dream-- God, I sound like a nut-- that she was chasing me. And I couldn't ever figure out, why are you chasing me? There's been times where I could not think about it or I would be a wreck. Can you remember a particular moment? Yeah, I can remember one time driving in the car and just thinking about my life in general and all the things I had going on. And it always ends up with Kristy. And I often thought, "Oh, I could just stop thinking if I just hit that tree." Just tortured. Taping this interview with Larry Pat Souter taking place in Newaygo County Sheriff's Department. Present at this interview is Larry Pat Souter, Deputy John Sutton, and Detective Charles Foster. Today's date is 8/27/79. The time is 15:00. Carla wasn't the only person damaged by Kristy Ringler's death. There was the Ringler family, of course. But there was also someone else, this 27-year-old truck driver named Larry Souter. The tape you just heard is a taped police interview with Larry, a wiry built man with a charming smile who liked to party. And while he didn't live in White Cloud, the night of Ringler's death he had been visiting a friend there. I don't think we drank at his house, if I remember correctly. But we went down to what they call the Lamp Lite Bar, which would have been south of town. And we'd sat there and drank maybe three hours in the bar. Larry met a woman at the Lamp Lite. It was Kristy Ringler. They caught each other's eye, and when Larry and his friend went to party down the road, there was Kristy as well. When you got to the house, what happened? When we got to the out I went in. Joe went in. And I think I sat around for about 15 minutes. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. She was all of a sudden on the front steps, and I went out and sat on the front steps. When I went out into the front of yard there was a tree out there. Kinda sitting set up by the tree and stuff and kind of kissing a little bit and this and that. And then she got up. And she walked off and started walking towards town, which would be back north towards White Cloud. Larry, who had a good deal to drink, says he offered to try to find her a ride. But she insisted she'd be all right. The last time Larry saw her, she was walking down the dark, two-lane road by herself. Two days after Ringler's death, the police asked Larry come down to the station for this questioning. The interview lasted an hour and 15 minutes. Larry didn't bring a lawyer. He didn't feel he had anything to hide. I've got nothing to hide. All right, this tape's going to be terminated at 16:15 on 8/27/79. And I don't think I heard anything from them for probably 12 and 1/2 years. Larry returned to his life, driving a truck and laying gas pipes. He got married to a woman named Melody, and they thought about starting a family together. Then one day-- One day I went to work-- which was November 14. And it's easy to remember because it was the day before deer season. And they came to work and they that you're under arrest for an open murder. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], that's what it was. Did you know what they were talking about? I had no clue. This was in 1992-- like Larry said, 12 and 1/2 years after Kristy Ringler's death. A new sheriff had reopened the case, and it quickly got a lot of publicity. Larry, who's quiet and reserved, felt deeply embarrassed. My name was in the paper. My face was in the paper. It's like, "Oh, my God." I mean, this is humiliation. Had you ever been arrested before? No, sir. But Larry assumed that justice would just find its way. This is Melody, his wife. They offered him a plea bargain for two to five years if he would admit he did it. And he refused to because he didn't. And did he come to you for advice? We were there together. What did you tell him? I told him, "You can't plead guilty to something you didn't do." The prosecutors argued that Larry had bludgeoned Kristy Ringler with a pint-sized bottle of Canadian club whiskey. Their key piece of evidence was the testimony by pathologists that the bottom ridge of the bottle matched Ringler's injuries. At the trial, no mention was made of Carla's note and her subsequent interview with the detectives. The Souters believe the prosecution buried it. Larry was convicted and sentenced to 20 to 60 years. My world just came right out from underneath me, in total shock. It was a nightmare, a straight up nightmare. There is, I suspect, nothing more confounding and debilitating than being sent to prison for something you didn't do. And the years behind bars had their effect on Larry as well as on his wife, Melody. Melody had a car accident after visiting Larry in prison and lost her factory job. She had to move back home with their parents where she spent most of her time going over and over trial transcripts and police reports. She gave up the idea of ever having children. I had a hysterectomy while he was in prison. So you gave that up as well? Yep. And in the years Larry was in prison, he struggled to sustain himself, too. One of the ways he did that was to build these meticulously constructed Western scenes out of toothpicks-- log cabins, churches, saloons, covered bridges. He trimmed the toothpicks-- sometimes 2,500 of them for one model-- with a nail clipper so that they fit together with glue like cut logs. The hours upon hours spent constructing them helped keep his mind off his case. But over the years, Alex, I'll tell you what, yes, I was very, very bitter in there. But I'd just try to say to myself, just let it go. Take one day at a time. Larry and Melody believed there had to be someone out there with some knowledge about what happened that night. And so Melody, along with Larry's sister, searched and searched and searched. We made trips to look for people. We went to Newaygo County when people told us we were crazy. We could get killed. And we interviewed people, we talked to people, we did everything we could to try to find out what really happened to this girl. Of course, the person they were looking for was Carla. But they didn't know she even existed. And Carla was completely unaware of them as well. In the 26 years since Kristy Ringerl's death, Carla had gotten divorced and remarried to a college professor. She now lived a comfortable life outside Grand Rapids in a spacious A-frame home on five acres of land. Her father had died in 1999, and all she could think about afterwards was he'd gotten away with it completely. And that tore at her. And then one day in January of last year, she picked up a newspaper and read for the very first time about Larry Souter. Melody, Larry's wife, had convinced John Smietanka, former prosecutor, to take Larry's case. A medical examiner, who had testified at Larry's trial, now believed it was unlikely Ringler's wounds were caused by a whiskey bottle. I was sitting in here in this living room, and my husband was in the TV room. And I read this article about Kristy Ringler. And I'm like, "Oh, my God. Someone has been convicted of this." I'm telling you, I literally just about fell on the floor. At that moment, it hit Carla because she had held onto this knowledge about her father's probable involvement in Kristy Ringler's death, someone had been sent to prison. The very next morning she called Larry's lawyer and spoke with his associate. I said to her, "You might think I'm a crazy woman or something because I'm sure you don't get these phone calls all the time. But I know this Larry Souter story that you're working on, and I reported that my dad killed that girl." They did, in fact, worry she might be a crazy person. No one had ever seen anything from the police indicating that they'd interviewed Carla. So the attorneys quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and in a stack of police reports they received, they found the very note that Carla had left for Detector Foster as well as half a page of nearly indecipherable notes the detectives took from an apparent phone interview with her father. One thing led to another, and within two months, Larry Souter got word that the authorities finally believed him. His conviction was vacated. And after 13 years and 18 days in prison, on April 1 of last year he walked out a free man. Carla at first asked the attorneys to keep her identity hidden, though that was impossible because it was such a public case. Mostly, she felt she completely failed this man, this stranger, Larry Souter. I cried for a long time-- weeks. About two months after being released from prison, Larry told his lawyer that he wanted to meet Carla. So they agree to have lunch at a local Applebee's, and Carla prepared herself for Larry's fury. My husband literally had to help me out of car I was trembling so much. And I knew who he was right away when he walked in. And we just both kind of collapsed in tears. I wasn't sure why he was crying, but I was just so overwhelmed with guilt that I could hardly look at him. On a recent afternoon, Larry came by to see Carla. Somewhat surprisingly, they've become friends. And in an odd twist of fate, they're both battling cancer and have helped each other out during their respective treatments. On this rainy afternoon, the two stood in the kitchen in a tight embrace. And as they held each other, Carla became overwhelmed with guilt and began to cry. It's gonna be all right. I'm sorry. Sorry. I'm so sorry. Carla can't help herself. Whenever she sees Larry, she breaks down and apologizes. There was even a period of two months when Carla wouldn't return Larry's phone calls. Because you can only apologize so many times, and I felt the need to do it all the time. It just seems like you're awfully hard on yourself. You've righted something, you gave somebody his freedom. I didn't give Larry his freedom. What he didn't do gave him his freedom. If I was going to give him his freedom, I would have given it to him 13 years ago. And I didn't do that, and that's where I failed. But I think you're being so hard on yourself. You didn't know he was there. No, but I knew what the right thing at the moment was. In my heart of hearts I knew what was happening, and I just let it go. And I don't understand a person that can do that. Here's the strange thing about all this. In certain ways, all of this has been harder for Carla to handle than for Larry. Sometimes you happen upon a moment. You'll witness something on the street. Let's say a man's threatening a woman or a parent's hitting a child, and the fate of a complete stranger rests on how you handle things. And you feel powerless to do anything. So you turn your head. You walk away. Or as in Carla's case, you try to do something but not forcefully enough. And then you resume your life though those moment stay with you. Well, imagine if you got a second chance. Carla did, and she paid a price for getting a second shot at it. Now she's even more tormented because it really has sunk in, the kind of power she held 26 years earlier. And so she feels ashamed. Larry, though, sees it all quite differently. She's my angel. That's what he calls me, his angel. Matter of fact, he brought me a gift a couple weeks ago. It's a lawn ornament, and it has-- Couple angels on it. Couple angels on it. And it lights up at night. I want you to know I go out in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and I look at it. While Carla spends sleepless nights staring at her angels, remembering the past, Larry's trying to forget. Right after he got released, he and Melody built a bonfire to burn all the clothes and letters associated with his time in prison. Not long ago as a gift, Larry gave one of his toothpick constructions to Carla. She has it displayed in her living room. It's a log cabin with a chimney, built with pebbles Larry collected from the prison yard. This, of course, is what Larry did to forget. But now Carla has it as a constant reminder. Alex Kotlowitz is the author of several books, most recently, Never a City So Real. We first broadcast this story two years ago. Coming up, a family wishes for years for the power to defend themselves against a dangerous neighbor. And then they get it. And they have to decide if they want to use that power. Back in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're new to this program, of course, we choose a theme, ranging from a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "With Great Power," stories about ordinary people who find themselves with these superheroes' dilemmas. With great power comes great responsibility. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Unwelcome Wagon. There's a kind of a power that only means something if you don't use it. Like for example, threatening to use a nuclear weapon. This story's is about something like that. Except instead of taking place in the desolate borders of rival nations who hate to fear each other, it occurs entirely in a quiet street in the suburbs between next-door neighbors. We've changed the names of everybody you're going to hear from in the story. As we go along you'll see why. It begins years ago with a woman, who we're going to call Betty, and her husband when they decided to move from the inner city to a quiet, suburban neighborhood. Their kids were young. At first it was great. But then their next-door neighbor decided he was going to build a fence on what he thought was the property line. And he kept saying, "I know where the property line is. I've lived here 12 years, and I'm putting my fence on it." And my husband said, "Well, we should get a survey because our deed doesn't show it there." So we asked him to do a survey, and he refused. Here's Betty's daughter, who's now all grown up, who we'll call Julia. So we had a survey done anyway. Of all things, the survey gave even more land to the neighbor than he thought he had, which you would think would have made him happy. But in fact, Betty and Julia say, it just made him mad because he had not waited for the survey to start building his fence. And now, thanks to the survey that he had not wanted, his yard was actually bigger. And he had to move the fence. He was very angry. And he was going to sue us because he said we made him put his fence in the wrong place. It all started from that. And so how much of this fight was actually about the property and how much was it that he just didn't like the look of you? I'm guessing about 10% about the property, 90% didn't like us. The word that they used often about us-- and he very often-- was, "You people ain't from here." We were just different, I guess, than-- We were liberals. Yes. We were liberals. We looked different. We acted different. After that, things started happening. And they started small. One day Betty was on the phone, and she looked out the window towards the neighbor's yard. Each of the two houses had a long driveway coming back from the road, and the two driveways were nearly side by side. The neighbor's truck was in his driveway near the two houses. I could see cigarettes being relit out in his vehicle, and I realized that he sat in his vehicle and watched us. So he watched us for hours into our living room, which had these big picture windows. And I can't think of anything more boring than watching us, but he did. Especially after we got cable. That was the beginning. Wait, so he would just sit there for hours. You guys are like, coming in and out of the family room with a bowl of popcorn. You sit in front of the TV, and you're like, that's what he-- Exactly. Wow. And we didn't go to anybody, because he can sit out in his truck if he wants to. It's a little strange. At first they figured he would just lose interest and stop. But he didn't stop. Other things started happening. They got prank calls. For a while, every time they sat down to dinner they got a call. Their license plate disappeared. The lights outside their house were shot out with a BB gun. They called the cops, only to be told that if they wanted to go to case, they needed to capture the crimes on videotape, which they tried to do. And more interesting than anything else, every time they left the house it seemed like the neighbor was waiting for them. We could not go outside without some interaction, without him yelling or insulting us in some way. And what would he yell? Oh, well, to me, it was always the same. OK, wait just a minute. Stop the tape right there. A real quick warning to listeners, a nice Southern lady is about to get a little salty. Oh, well, to me it was always the same. "Get your ugly old ass out here. You ugly old bitch. You old bitch shouldn't be on this earth." To my husband it would be, "You ain't no man. There's nothing to you. You're worthless. You let your wife wear the pants in the family." And he sat there with popcorn, watching us and mocking us and saying, "All y'all are putting on a big show. Y'all want some popcorn?" And offered it to my dad. Wait, and what were you all doing? Just going into the garage, maybe to get a bike or to get some old furniture out from storage. It's such a commitment to messing with you. Yes, it was his life. One morning they woke up to find this neighborly greeting-- the words bitch and whore literally carved into the lawn in giant block letters. One set was up by the house, the other set, down by the curb. And they were done with some type of very strong weed killer. That would last year. Yeah, we would either have to have them dug out and dig down like two feet or they were going to be there for a year. They were there for a year. And so people would drive by your house for a year, and the word whore would be down on the lawn? The bus would pick me up for school in eighth grade, and it would be there. No one would say anything, though. There was also a picture we interpreted to be a dog doing an obscene act with a woman. You mean he drew it on the lawn? With the weed killer, yes. A dog and a woman? Uh-huh. It was good enough that neighbors knew what it was. And did you have the feeling that the entire neighborhood was against you? Yes. Yes. Really, like everybody sided with him? I don't know that I would go so far to say they sided with him, but more the feeling that "You've stirred up something in the neighborhood that we didn't want stirred up." That we set him off somehow, and that it was our fault. They have other stories. The neighbor would play chicken with their car. He'd point his headlights into their house for hours, flash them on and off. When they went away on vacation, he would drive onto their lawn, spin the tires. When Julia's little brother went out on his bike, the neighbor would get on a bike himself sometimes and circle the little brother, lunge at him so he'd fall off. He was only eight. It was strange, they say, that somebody hated them so much. At some point, he started going after your pets? Yeah. This was a very emotional thing for me. We didn't tell Julia about it until this past year. Not all the details. I was an animal lover as a kid. She was. I always took home the cat on the side of the road. And I had a little black cat named Phoenix, and he killed it. He killed it? One day we found Phoenix beside the fence, but just pushed through the bottom of the fence on our property. And if you looked across his driveway at the end of this house, there was a big metal baseball bat leaning against the house. Well, by that time we had attorneys. And they said, "Take the cat and have it autopsied." And we did, and it had been killed by two blows to it. But that was a part of him. He not only killed the cat, but he wanted you to know how he did it. And by leaving the bat, we knew what happened. He had left it out by the driveway for me to find while I waited for the school bus, but it was a snow day that day. So my parents were the ones who found it. And so did you not find out about it for years later? I just knew he died. We just couldn't tell her. They thought about moving. They even put their house on the market after the words bitch and whore had grown back in the lawn, of course. But the economy wasn't so great. The house didn't sell. So they stayed, vowing not to let the neighbor get to them, which wasn't easy. By now they were in the middle of basically an all-out war. There were restraining orders and counter-restraining orders and court charges and counter charges. By this time, both sides are videotaping each other, Betty and her husband trying over and over to get some proof that would finally incriminate the neighbor and stop him and never getting it. So that's how it went for over two years. And then, a fateful pile of garbage dumped onto their lawn, a pile of garbage that was actually able to change the balance of power, giving Julia and Betty and their family both great power and great responsibility. The neighbor had thrown trash on their property before. Mostly little things-- cans, cigarette butts-- nothing interesting, nothing useful. But one day we went out, and there was a whole lot of stuff. It was papers, letters, bank statements, a mortgage. They had everything about them. That series of numbers that makes us the person we are in America. You mean the social security number? His social security number, yes. He and his wife's. I always suspected it was maybe the wife got mad at him or one of the daughters, because they were adult, young women. And actually in that pile of stuff were letters from the daughters saying, "Oh, Mom, Daddy's terrible and you're good." And personal things as well as business-type things. You photocopied a few of these and sent them to us. That's them, I have them here. They are so unbelievably personal you feel embarrassed to read them. You do, you do. One of them starts with a sort of caveat, "I hope you never read this letter because if you do, it means that things are just very bad between us." And another one, one of the daughters sort of says, "Well, I'm writing this letter while you and Dad are fighting over some silly stuff." And it's so heartbreaking. It is. He was so mean, and that showed what his family thought of him, how he had raised them to be, what his wife thought of him. We were a family that loved each other. We had dinner together, and we still laughed and had fun. So suddenly, you guys had his social security number and all these bank numbers and all that. And you saved it? Yes, we have. We have a briefcase, and it's our little treasure chest. So really, suddenly you had a tremendous leverage over him. You can really do some damage. Right. Did you think about it? Oh, yes. We talked about it. What did you think about doing? Oh, closing up his business and bank account. And posting all his information in some truck stop or in many truck stops across the Southeast so that somebody could steal it. Just like posting his social security number. Right. Yeah, making him a child porn person so he could never live anywhere comfortable again. Put him on a sex offender list and attribute it to Hezbollah. He could join NAMBLA. Any of those type things would be good. There's the joy in your voice as your saying these things. Yeah. So now they had a great power to mess with their neighbor, to punish their neighbor-- he would never know what hit him. He would have no idea it was them. And despite what were I have to say clearly hours and hours that they spent talking about their revenge fantasies, they held their fire. They showed restraint. We had the thoughts, but we never did anything. So it was just nice to hold onto them in the special briefcase as a sort of secret weapon. Yes, like we have a little piece of him in this briefcase. And at any time we could do something with it. Well, in a way then the main thing that finding all these papers that it gives you, it's like a gift because it helps with the one thing you've got which is being able to fantasize about revenge. Right. Right. That's true. And if we ever used it, that would be gone. If we put it out in the truck stop or did something on the internet, that would be gone. We would have done our thing. And we still can fantasize. But it would be different if we didn't have these things because saying if you have no power then not using power means nothing. But we have the power to do something, but we choose not to. It gives us control over him and control over him in a way we never had when he was tormenting us. Eventually the neighbor moved away, stopping back to harass them only occasionally. Julia and Betty and their family moved later. But after all these years, they've kept that briefcase full of papers. You never know when it is that you're going to need your secret super power. Act Three, Waiting for Joe. Well, in this act we make little shift. Now, this is going to be a story about somebody with great power, but the story is going to be told from the point of view of the powerless. When you're powerless, you spend a lot of time speculating about those above you, much more than the other way around, I think. The people above us, they do not care. They don't notice you and me, not in the same way. But we think a lot about them-- our parents, our bosses, our bosses' bosses. "What is going through their heads?" we think. "Why are they treating us this way, especially when they don't seem to be living up to their responsibilities?" And there is one figure like this more than any other. Shalom Auslander has the story. In the beginning, he was always on time. But it had been a long time since the beginning, longer than either Doughnut or Danish could remember. "I don't get it," complained Danish. "Isn't it time?" "It's time," answered Doughnut. "It feels like it's time. It's time." Danish paced anxiously back and forth. Of course it was time. He knew it was time. He didn't need Doughnut to tell him that it was time. "So where is he, then?" asked Danish. Doughnut sat curled up inside their cold, empty feeding bowl, focused intently on the doorknob of the apartment front door, believing with all of his heart that at any moment the doorknob would turn, the door would open, and Joe would appear. "We cannot pretend to think that we know what Joe knows and what Joe doesn't know," pronounced Doughnut with a sharp twitch of his nose, "we must only believe with all of our heart that Joe knows." "I bet he doesn't know!" said Danish. He rose up on his hind legs and flailed uselessly at the glass walls until he became exhausted. Breathing heavily, he lumbered over to the water bottle that hung in the far corner and drew a few drops into his mouth. "You nonbelievers are all the same," scoffed Doughnut. He pushed some dry cedar chips into a small, comfortable mound and settled down upon it. "As if you were the first hamster to ever doubt him!" he said. "Joe knows who believes, Danish, and Joe knows who doesn't. Joe is here, Joe is there, Joe is simply everywhere. You look around at all your plastic tube highways, and your fabulous Habitrail and think you are special. But do ants not build anthills? Do bees not build hives? It is not what we build that makes us unique, it is what we believe; it is that we believe at all! Doubt, my dear Danish, is no great achievement; it is faith that sets us apart. Besides," added Doughnut, "he left his wallet on the front table. He's got to come back." "He did?" asked Danish. He stood up on his back legs and squinted through the glass. "Where?" Doughnut walked over and stood beside Danish. "There, on the table." "Where?" "There!" "That?" "Yes!" "That's not a wallet, you idiot." "Of course it's a wallet." "It's a book," said Danish. "It's not a book." "Sure it is," said Danish, "I can read the spine. Along Came a Spider by James Patterson." He dropped down and shook his head. Oh no, he does not! Doughnut squinted a moment longer. "Damn. It was a paperback." Why would Joe abandon them? Why would he leave a sign for them right there on the foyer table and then make it not a sign? And why James Patterson? What did it all mean? "He does not read James freaking Patterson!" cried Danish. "Our salvation, our provider! We must be out of our minds!" "It's a test," Doughnut said as he crawled back up in his bed. "He's testing our faith." Danish stood on his hind legs and flailed uselessly at the glass wall until he became exhausted. He took a drink of water, climbed up into the plastic tree house, and curled into a tight, angry ball. "I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful," Doughnut said after a moment. "You what?" asked Danish. "Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ! Open your eyes, Doughnut. Don't you see what he's doing to us, holding our food over our heads like this, dangling our fate before us like a banana raisin nut bar tied to the end of the stick? Look at you, Doughnut, are you so desperate to believe that you're actually defending James Patterson?" "I thought Cat & Mouse was a taut, psychological thriller," said Doughnut. Doughnut closed his eyes. Hunger stabbed sharply in his stomach, but he would never admit it to Danish. Where the hell was Joe? Danish rummaged frantically through the seed shells and shavings that covered the floor of their transparent little world. "He isn't coming," he said, looking for even a sliver of a husk of a shell of a seed. "He isn't coming." Doughnut nestled deeper into his bed, eyes shut tight in fervent concentration. "May he who has fed us yesterday," he prayed, "feed us again today and tomorrow and forever. Amen." "Yes!" Danish suddenly shouted, "Yahah!" He pulled a brown chunk of apple from beneath a small mound at the back of the cage and raised it victoriously overhead. Without even stopping to knock off the stray bits of cedar and pine needle that stuck to its sides, Danish opened his mouth wide and dropped in. He made quite a show of chewing it, mmm-ing and oh-ing and ah-ing, finally swallowing it with a loud, dramatic gulp. He smiled, patted his stomach, and burped a deep, long belch of satisfaction. He washed it down with a few drops of water and slid down to the floor with a contented sigh. Doughnut watched Danish, a sour mix of jealousy and disdain on his face. His stomach groaned. Where the hell was Joe? Doughnut stood up and stomped over to Danish, who looked up at him lazily. "Well?" demanded Doughnut. "Well what?" "Well maybe you could give a little thanks," said Doughnut. "Thanks?" asked Danish. "To who?" "To Joe, Danish, to Joe." "For what?" "For the apple he gave you." "The apple he gave me?" asked Danish. "I found that apple myself." "Do you think the apple just grew there?" Doughnut shouted. "How did the apple get there, Danish? We searched this cage 1,000 times and never found a thing. That apple was a miracle, a gift. Joe heard my prayers, and he brought forth upon this cage a holy apple." His stomach grumbled. Danish belched again and rubbed his belly with pride. "Except, Doughnut, that you didn't get any food. You asked, I received. Seems like a strange system to me." He sucked a piece of apple rind out from between his teeth. "Not that I'm complaining. You know what? Next time why don't you ask him for a carrot? I simply must start getting more fiber." "Joe grants food to those who need it most," replied Doughnut bitterly. Danish tired quickly of Doughnut's lectures, particularly when he was hungry, which he certainly was again. He got back up and began searching again through the rough cedar chips that covered the floor. Doughnut dragged himself wearily back to bed. The miracle of the apple had made him ravenous. Doughnut would never admitted it, he was ashamed to even think it, but lately he'd begun to doubt. Lately, Joe and his mysterious ways were beginning to tick him off. It was the same thing with him every damn day, begging, thanks, begging, verse, chorus, verse. "Why me?" wondered Doughnut. It must have been his own fault. He must have sinned. He must have angered Joe. Just last week he had questioned why their litter wasn't changed more frequently. "Perhaps there's a cedar shortage?" he'd asked Danish sarcastically. "It is a hardwood, you know." He'd even complained aloud that their cage was too small. The chutzpah! Some hamsters didn't even have a cage, let alone a Habitrail and an exercise wheel. How could he have been so ungrateful? He barely even used the blessed exercise wheel, a beautiful exercise wheel that any hamster would love, and Doughnut had only ever used it once. He was ashamed of himself. No wonder there wasn't any food. Why should Joe give him anything more if he couldn't appreciate what he had already been given? Doughnut closed his eyes and silently thanked Joe for starving him in order to show him the error of his ways. "Forgive me," he prayed. And with that, Doughnut hurried out of bed and climbed onto the exercise wheel. He ran as fast as he could, huffing and puffing, regret and retribution nipping at his heels. Danish, meanwhile, was going mad. He'd been tricked, tricked by Joe. He was even hungrier now than he'd been before he'd eaten Joe's cursed apple. "Oh, yes. Very good, Joe. Yes, quite witty!" shouted Danish. "Well done, old boy. Touche!" Back on the exercise wheel, Doughnut could run no more. He stumbled back to bed. Danish stood on his hind legs and flailed uselessly at the glass walls until he became exhausted. Doughnut prayed. And behold, suddenly, the doorknob did turn. The apartment door did open, and Joe did appear. Danish peed in excitement. Doughnut crapped in fear. Joe was thin and pale, and he wore a rumpled brown suit. The badge hanging from his chest pocket read, "Mail room." There was a woman with him, too, a woman Danish and Doughnut had never seen before. She had thin hair and thick glasses, and she and Joe wrestled their way through the doorway as one, groping and feeling and rubbing each other, as if each had somehow lost the keys in the other's pants pockets. Joe groaned and tore open her blouse. Danish and Doughnut pressed their noses to the glass. "There'd better be apples in there," said Danish. "Forgive me, Joe, for doubting you," prayed Doughnut. Joe lifted the woman into his arms. She threw her head back and laughed. And as they headed down the hallway toward his bedroom, Joe switched the living room lights off with his elbow. Darkness. Doughnut look at Danish. Danish looked a Doughnut. "We have brought this upon ourselves," said Doughnut. Danish stood on his hind legs and flailed uselessly at the glass walls until he became exhausted. Doughnut prayed. Shalom Auslander. His story, "Waiting for Joe," is from his collection, Beware of God. He is also the author most recently of Foreskin's Lament. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Speigel and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, [? Kathy Hahn, ?] and [? Emily Josef. ?] Music up today from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who wanders into the studio while we are on the air, hands full of snacks. All y'all are putting on a big show. Y'all want some popcorn? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Well, I hold in my hand a ghost story that comes from a publication that is not really known for its tales of the supernatural. I'm talking about the American Journal of Opthalmalogy, a medical journal. This is from a 1921 edition. And just in case your subscription lapsed during World War I, I'm just going to read from one of these articles. This is a letter that a doctor sent in. It's from one of his patients, actually, this letter. She's identified as Mrs. H. And in the letter, she's describing a very strange series of events that happened to her and her family starting when they moved into a rambling old house on November 15, 1921. This house was out of repair, had no electricity. It was lit by gas lights-- a very gloomy house. Albert Donnay is the person who unearthed this article. And he agreed to come into the studio and read from Mrs. H's account of what happened to them. "Mr. H and I had not been in the house more than a couple of days when we felt very depressed. The house was overpoweringly quiet. The servants walked about on thickly carpeted floors so quietly that I could not even hear them at their work." I love how no story of this era can be complete without servants padding about. And they had many servants. "One morning, I heard footsteps in the room over my head. I hurried up the stairs. To my surprise, the room was empty. I passed into the next room, and then into all the rooms on that floor, and then to the floor above, to find that I was the only person in that part of the house. Sometimes after I've gone to bed, the noises from the store room are tremendous, as if furniture was being piled against the door, as if china was being moved about, and occasionally, a long and fearful sigh or a wail. Sometimes as I walk along the hall, I feel as if someone was following me, going to touch me. You cannot understand it if you've not experienced it. But it's real. As I was dressing for breakfast one morning, B, who is four years old, came to my room and asked me why I'd called him. I told him I had not called him, that I had not been in his room. With big and startled eyes, he said, 'Who was it then that called me? Who made that pounding noise?' I told him it was undoubtedly the wind rattling his window. 'No,' he said, 'It was not that. It was somebody that called me. Who was it?' And so on he talked, insisting that he'd been called and for me to explain who it had been." It gets worse. The adults and the children are held down in their beds by unseen figures. Beds shake. The plants die, and their children feel weak. They have no energy. They get severe headaches. "Some nights, after I'd been in bed for a while, I felt as if the bedclothes were jerked off me. And I've also felt as if I'd been struck on the shoulder. One night, I woke up and saw sitting on the foot of my bed a man and a woman. The woman was young, dark, and slight and wore a large picture hat. I was paralyzed and could not move." And so finally, her brother-in-law comes to them, she writes, with a thought about what might be happening. Her husband's brother comes to them in January and says that perhaps they're being poisoned. He'd read a story about a family poisoned by gas who had similar curious delusions. And he advised them to see a professor about this at once. A quick investigation shows that the furnace is actually sending carbon monoxide fumes into the house, instead of up the chimney. They fix that, and the ghostly hauntings stop. They don't feel sick anymore either, which makes a lot of sense, says Albert Donnay. When he's not poking around old medical archives, he's an environmental health engineer and a toxicologist, who spends a lot of his time warning people about carbon monoxide seeping into homes. And he says fumes like this wouldn't just come from the furnace of an old house. The kind of gas that they used in gas lights in that area had as much carbon monoxide as a car's exhaust. And he says carbon monoxide gas can account for everything that this family experienced. No question about it. Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause all manner of hallucinations-- audio, visual, feeling strange things on their skin when there was nothing there. People often report that they hear noises in their ears, bells ringing, rushing sounds. What's amazing about this story is what a completely traditional ghost story it is. I feel like everything that happens to them, I've heard in some ghost story at some point or another. And then it turns out to be carbon monoxide poisoning. And I gotta say, I can't tell if I feel sort of relieved that there's a totally rational explanation or kind of disappointed. I totally share that perspective. It's kind of disappointing to find that it's not some otherworldly explanation. It is kind of like a killjoy story for Halloween. I'm not going to go there. Well, it's Halloween, and this little example shows you what kind of boring killjoy trouble you can get into when you start applying rationality and facts to a perfectly good scary story, a story that never wanted to hurt anyone. From WBEZ Chicago, it's a special Halloween edition of our show, which we're calling-- scary music cue, please-- And the Call Was Coming From the Basement. These stories are all absolutely true. And carbon monoxide, or let me just say, any of your carbon-based gases figure not at all into any of them. Our show today in four scary acts, including the true scary stories that you and listeners like you called into our scary story hotline, and a story in which David Sedaris walks among the dead. Stay with us. Act One, The Hills Have Eyes. Well, one kind of scary story is when something that usually is not dangerous becomes transformed. You know, when something fluffy or funny becomes murderous, like little dolls that come to life, or ventriloquist dummies, or clowns, or little woodland creatures. Alex Blumberg has one such absolutely true tale. He was a producer on our show back when we first ran this episode. Today's show is a rerun. Here's Alex. Michelle and her husband lived in the woods at the end of a long, half mile driveway off a little-used dirt road. They loved it there, surrounded by trees and mountains but still only an hour and a half by train from New York City. One weekend morning, as was their custom, they went out for a short walk. It was a beautiful winter day, almost a foot of snow on the ground. They got to the road and turned around to head back up the drive. My husband tends to walk faster than I do, and he was wanting to sort of do a little jog. And I said, OK, then, why don't you just kind of go ahead? So he went on home, and I had just started on the driveway. And I looked down the straightaway, and I saw this animal that was pretty far down. And then I saw it. I said, oh, it looks like a raccoon. I would say it was at least 150 to 200 feet. It was pretty far away. And I'm looking at it, and I'm thinking, well, it's going to go up into the woods. But it started walking towards me. And then I realized it hasn't seen me yet, and I sort of just waved my arm a little bit. And then all of a sudden, it sees me. And the second it was aware of me, it just bolted towards me. I mean, there wasn't a second of a hesitation. It was like, oh my god. It's like, oh my god. It's coming right at me. I turned, and I started to run. I was trying to outrun it. And I kept turning to see if the animal was bearing down on me, and it was getting closer. And it was now within 5 or 10 feet behind me. And the whole time, I mean from the moment the raccoon saw me, it hissed and snarled. I mean, it was [HISSING]. The feeling was, all it cared about was attacking me. So I don't even know what I was thinking, but I ran off the drive, thinking, well, I'll get away from it. Well, as I run off the drive, it jumps onto my thigh, and I fall into the snow, kind of down behind a rock. And then the next thing I see is his mouth is around my right thigh. The raccoon was about 30 pounds. Michelle, a slight woman, was about 115. She was wearing a big parka and snow pants, so the raccoon wasn't able to get a good grip. Using all her body weight and both hands, she was able to pull it off her leg and pin it in the snow, away from her body. I'm pushing its face into the snow so that it would keep putting its head up and snarling. And then it would keep trying with its claws to scratch at me. But I kept leaning on it and then pushing it into the snow. And I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "Help. Somebody help me. I'm being attacked." I mean, I'm just-- and I'm thinking, the closest neighbor, it's a house that they're sort of weekenders, and often, they're not there. And it seemed like no one was coming out of their house. And I'm a half a mile from my house. And I'm thinking, nobody is going to help me. And so it was after about five minutes, I stopped screaming. And I just started thinking, what am I going to do? This raccoon was behaving in a way that normal raccoons never behave, like it was possessed. And that's because in some sense, it was. It had rabies, a disease that even scientists who study it called diabolical. It's a virus that attacks the aggression centers of the brain. It switches off all an animal's natural inhibitions, including fear and pain. At the same time, it floods the animal's body with adrenaline, making it stronger and more relentless. Animals which are normally shy and easily scared away turn into tireless, ferocious monsters. They become nothing but a vehicle for the virus, attacking anything that moves in order to spread the disease. Which meant for Michelle, she couldn't just try and fling the raccoon away because it would come after her again. She couldn't outrun it. Any trees she could climb, the raccoon could climb faster. Then Michelle remembered that although she usually didn't bring her cell phone with her on walks, that day, she actually had. The question was how to get it out of her pocket. She needed both hands to hold the raccoon down. She was wearing big mittens. But eventually, after many attempts, she was able to get the phone out and toss it in the snow. Using the speaker phone, she called her house. She got her grown son, Alex. And I was screaming. I was screaming at the top of my lungs. And he acted like it was like a joke, and it was because the microphone on the phone was being pinned, where it had this sort of strange noise. And I thought to myself-- because it sounded like he was about to hang up, like it was someone doing a prank. And in my head, I said, you have to calm down. I said, Alex. I said, I've been attacked on the driveway by a raccoon. Within five minutes, her husband, her son, Alex, and his girlfriend were there. Her son grabbed a big fallen branch and laid it across the raccoon's back. He stood on one end. Michelle stood on the other. The two of us are now holding this raccoon, which is still hissing and snarling and clawing. And my husband, he says, I'm going to get a tire iron out of the car and try hitting it and to kill it. So he goes and gets this tire iron out of the car. And he starts to hit it, and he figures he'll hit it once or twice and he'll kill it. Well, he starts hitting it, and he probably hit it between 15 and 20 times. And it's still snarling and clawing. So then I said to my son's girlfriend, Olga, I said, Olga. I said, go to the house, and get a knife. And in the meantime, my son takes the tire iron, and my son starts beating on the raccoon. So for at least five minutes, they're taking turns beating this raccoon. And about at the point where Olga is coming back and gets out of the car with these two big knives, the raccoon had died. What Michelle didn't know at the time was that her encounter was not an isolated incident. There's a rabies epidemic in New York, which started in the '90s. In 1989, there were only 55 rabid animal cases in the entire state. By 1993, the number had reached almost 3,000. In 2004, a rabid otter swam up and attacked a six-year-old at a public beach. The child came out of the water with the otter clinging by its teeth to his arm. And one woman I spoke to told me that a rabid raccoon latched itself onto her leg in the middle of the day on her suburban street when she was getting out of her car after a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond. She said the police had to shoot the raccoon five times before it finally died. Rabies is almost 100% fatal in humans if the vaccine isn't administered right after exposure. And the '90s brought the first human deaths from rabies in the state in half a century. There have been three to date. Two of them were children bitten by rabid bats in their sleep. Which brings me to a quick public service announcement. A bat can bite you in your sleep without you even knowing it and without leaving a mark. So if you find one in a room with the sleeping person, you have to catch it and have it tested. And if you can't catch it, you should go to a doctor. I'm serious. I learned about this, it freaked me out, and now I want to tell people. For Michelle, of course, there was no doubt of exposure. She had two fang marks on her leg, raccoon blood all over her clothes, and a battered raccoon carcass in a plastic bag. But getting treatment proved to be its own type of horror story. First, she called the vet, who told her to call the Health Department. She called the Health Department, but they were closed on weekends, so she left a message and called another Health Department in a different county. Same thing. Eventually, she just went to the emergency room on her own, where she was told that this wasn't an emergency. She had 10 to 14 days before she needed to get a shot, and she should just call the Health Department again after the weekend. Early Monday morning, the guy from the Health Department where she left her first message on Saturday called her back. She told them everything was fine. She'd been to the hospital. And I said, well, I was told I had 10 to 14 days. And he says, you don't have 10 to 14 days. You have 72 hours from the moment that you are bitten. He says, you must have a shot by the end of today. The man on the phone wasn't in Michelle's county, so he told her to go to her own Health Department, and they would give her the shot. But when she called there, they said they needed to test the carcass for rabies first, which meant sending it to the rabies laboratory two hours away in Albany. Michelle begged them to just give her the shot first and worry about Albany later, so they made arrangements for her to go to the closest hospital in yet another county. So my husband and I go. And of course, we have to wait time in the emergency room, and then we get in. And then when we're inside, then someone comes and tells me that I live in Putnam County and I'm in a hospital in Westchester, and that they can't give me the shots. Oh my god. So I am so distraught at this point. And I start crying. The first time during this whole episode, I should point out, that you actually cried, right? Yes, this was. This was the first time that I cried. I was-- you know. I-- You survived the attack by the raccoon. You survived hitting it over the head with a tire iron 50 times. And then the thing that finally brought you to your knees was the US health care system. Yes, that's exactly right. So I started to cry. And I just said, isn't there-- I said, what's the problem? And then I'm starting to learn that rabies immunoglobulin is a very expensive shot. And the retail price of it was something like $3,200 or $3,500. Finally, they gave her the shot, but they gave it to her in the wrong place-- the buttocks, and not in her arm like they were supposed to. And then she needed five follow-up shots, but she couldn't find a doctor to give her any. She called eight doctors, and none of them would even see her until she threatened to call the State Board of Health. Eventually, she got the shots, and today, everything is fine, except Michelle doesn't see her home in the woods the way she once did-- as a peaceful refuge. I mean, I felt so betrayed by nature. That's actually how I felt. I felt that nature betrayed me. Because I would take walks every day in the woods, and I had never felt threatened. And I remember waking up the next day and thinking that all of the hills around me, that there were raccoons standing on all these hills, waiting until I got out the door, and they were going to come running toward-- it was like the army waiting for its victim to come. And I had this image that these raccoons were just all going to come down from the hills. And if I ever go to walk and I don't have the cell phone, I will always feel a little fear. Years before her attack, Michelle went on safari in South Africa. She saw lions and giraffes and rhinos. Coming up her drive at night, after she got home from the trip, she peered into the woods around her house and imagined that there were wild animals out there, like there had been on safari. Now she says she doesn't wonder about it anymore. She knows for a fact there are wild animals out there, and it's not a comforting thought. Alex Blumberg, these days, he's a podcast impresario and the host of the podcast, Without Fail. Act Two, The Hitcher. OK, I believe that we have all learned an important lesson about rabies and bats and raccoons, not to mention a lesson about carbon monoxide. And so to introduce this next story, I don't think there's much more I need to say right now than hitchhiking is dangerous or can be dangerous. They can be bad. And if you don't believe me, Bill Eville tells this true story of what happened to him and his brother. When I was 12 and my older brother, Jim, 14, our parents dropped us off at one of those agricultural fairs, the kind with the big Ferris wheel, blue ribbon pigs, and hot dog eating contests. This was on Martha's Vineyard and usually our parents went with us. But Jim and I were getting older. He was a teenager now, and we wanted to do it alone. There were girls to impress. We were told to call home for a ride when we were ready. But at the end of the night, we decided it would be cooler to hitchhike. We weren't scared. This was 1977 and Martha's Vineyard still a relatively sleepy island. Everyone hitchhiked there. It didn't take us long to get a ride, some guy heading to Edgartown to meet his friends. We lived in Oak Bluffs-- out of his way-- but he said he could take us halfway home. Jim and I didn't even think about saying no. We were too excited for the adventure to begin. True to his word, the guy dropped us off halfway home. This was out by the big bridge along the beach road. During the day, this spot is filled with people jumping off the railing into the water, but at night, no one goes there. No swimmers, or fishermen, or even kids looking to get high. Jim and I stood by the side of the road, listening to the ocean pound the sand and the wind blow through the dunes. We peered into the darkness, hoping to see headlights. But there was nothing, just the moon and some stars and a gnawing feeling we had made a big mistake. After about 20 minutes of standing around, we finally saw a car approaching. "Get in front," Jim said, "And try to look small and pathetic." This wasn't hard to do. The car flew by us, kicking up sand, which stung my legs. "Crap!" I yelled. But then the tires locked up, and the car fishtailed. It skidded to a stop about 100 yards away. We ran to the car. It was a big white cruiser with four doors. I yanked open the back door, jumped in, and slid on my butt to the far window. There were three people up front. The driver was hunched over the wheel and wore his hair in a thick afro. A woman sat in the middle. She had straight blond hair with a crooked part running down the center. Another guy, so tall his head almost touched the roof of the car, rode shotgun . "Thanks for stopping," I said. "We're headed to Oak Bluffs." No one said a word. I turned to the open door where Jim still stood. "Come on," I said. "Get in." Jim hesitated. He looked into the car and shook his head back and forth. Then the driver began revving the engine. I saw my brother take a deep breath. Then he climbed in and joined me. His door barely closed when the car took off. We moved fast, swerving in and out of our lane. No one talked the entire ride. By the time we reached Oak Bluffs, I decided I didn't want these people to know where we lived. "Right here will be fine," I said, just past Waban Park, down near where the Sea View Hotel used to be. The car didn't slow down. Thinking the driver didn't hear me, I tried again. "We'd like to be let out now," I said. We drove by Ocean Park, the flying horses carousel, and then the harbor with all the boats tucked in for the night in their berths. The whole time, I kept asking to be let out, trying to make it sound like each spot I pointed to was the one we really preferred. But there was no reaction. We just kept moving. Eventually, we passed the last house along the Methodist campground, where the Sunday before, I had climbed the stage at the old tabernacle and sang with my cousins before a crowd of hundreds, "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." We began to climb the hill that led out of town, and I grew silent. Jim took up where I left off. Recently, his voice had changed and he had a new, deep baritone. When his voice cracked, making him sound like a little kid again, he stopped talking, too. I tried to convince myself it was just a joke-- scare the crap out of some kids on a boring Saturday night. And I almost believed this. But then, about 15 minutes outside of town, we took a left turn to a graveyard. Jim and I knew this graveyard. We had relatives buried there, old whaling captains who helped settle the island back in the 1600s. We came up here sometimes with our grandfather to pay our respects. It was a heavily wooded place with trails that twisted deep into the forest. During the day, it was fun to run along these trails, jumping out from behind a rock or bush to scare each other. We had never been up here at night, though. I grabbed my brother's hand and pulled myself into his lap. Jim hugged me tight and rested his cheek against mine. He had recently started shaving, and I could feel the hint of razor stubble. This helped calm me down. Jim was the older brother. He would know what to do. The car swerved and began circling a large Jesus statue near the front of the graveyard. I was thrown from Jim's lap and landed in the opposite foot well. I scrambled back up as fast as I could. But before I could reach my brother's lap again, Jim opened his door and jumped out of the car. We were still moving fast, and the open door flapped in the wind. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. It was the tall man. His fingers were strong and dug into my collarbone. I ducked back into the seat well and crawled to the door. The man still held me by the shoulder, but I pushed as hard as I could with my legs. When I leapt from the car, he lost his grip. For a moment, I floated in the air. When I hit the ground, I rolled for a long time. I got up and ran towards the woods. I could see a light in the distance and headed for it. The woods opened up into a small clearing, and there was a house and a party in full swing. Lots of people stood outside, drinking around a keg. As soon as I reached the lawn, I turned around to look for my brother. He was still back in the graveyard, running down one of the dirt roads with the car right behind him. "Jim," I screamed. "Jim, over here." A crowd had formed around me, but I didn't look at them. I just kept screaming my brother's name. And then he was there, bursting through the woods and running across the lawn, until a clothesline flattened him. I ran to him, kneeled down, and put my hand on his chest. "You OK?" I asked. "Yeah," he said. "You?" Before I could answer, a tall kid with thick glasses squatted down next to us. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. Jim and I stood up, began telling everyone what had happened. While we were talking, four guys from the party ran off to the graveyard. The car's headlights were still visible, moving through the woods, looking for us. They were shouting, and then the headlights disappeared. When the guys returned, they said the car took off before they could get the license plate. The tall kid with the glasses walked to the keg, poured two beers into blue plastic cups, and offered them to us. Jim and I chugged them down and asked for more. Later, two women gave us a ride home. I refused to sit in the back seat and rode up front with the driver. Her name was Betsy, and she had long brown hair and tanned skin. Her father owned The Flying Horses and I had seen her around town. On the drive home, she rubbed my hair and put her arm around my shoulder. When we reached our house, Betsy walked with us to the front door and stood on the porch while we told our parents what had happened. Mom bent down so her face was level with mine. Dad stood next to Jim. My parents were very young. Mom even got carded sometimes at R rated movies. Dad wore a thick mustache and looked good in a tight white T-shirt. While we were talking, my grandparents, who had already gone to bed, came down the stairs in their bathrobes. "Close the door," Gram said. "You're letting in the mosquitoes." Betsy patted me on the cheek and then walked back to her car. The rest of us went into the living room, where Jim and I told our story once more. "What do you think?" Grandpa asked. "Should we call the police?" For a moment, no one spoke. "It's late," Dad finally said. "I think the boys have had enough for one night." Gram patted my head. "It's over, and everyone's safe," she said. "No need to drag it out." I looked at Mom. She nodded, and so I did the same, not because I agreed, but I didn't disagree either. I was just glad to be home. "Let's go to bed," Dad said. "There's tennis in the morning." Mom walked me to my bedroom, an old store room I had cleaned out at the beginning of the summer so I could finally have a room of my own. After she tucked me in, I laid there and tried to think about tennis and Labor Day weekend, just three days away. In a little over a week, I would officially be a seventh grader. But I couldn't concentrate. I kept seeing the people in the front seat of that car. Maybe they had followed Betsy's car home from the graveyard and were waiting outside to get me. I rubbed my shoulder where the tall man had grabbed me and got out of bed. I changed out of my pajamas into jeans and my favorite green basketball T-shirt. Then I laid down on the floor and slid underneath my bed. For a moment, I felt safe and hidden, but it didn't last. I got up and walked to Jim's room. But when I got there, I realized I didn't want to go in. I continued down the hall and stood outside my parents' bedroom. I could hear them talking quietly together. I almost knocked on their door. Instead, I turned away and moved on to the front room, where my youngest brother, Ted, slept. Ted was six years old. He'd been asleep when we came home and so didn't know what had happened. I crawled into bed with him and started crying, really crying, so that I had to stuff a pillow in my mouth to keep the noise in. Ted woke up, but didn't say anything at first. He just patted me on the back. Then he asked me what was wrong. But I couldn't speak. I could only cry and hope he kept patting me. And he did, until I finally fell asleep. Bill Eville in New York. Coming up, David Sedaris sees dead people and other scary stories that are absolutely true in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Well, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, And the Call was Coming From the Basement. We have scary stories for Halloween, all of them absolutely true. We've arrived at act three of our program. Act Three, And the Call was Coming From the Listeners. Today's show is a rerun, but back when first did this show, we invited you-- yes, you-- to call a special 800 number that we set up here at our radio show to tell us your true scary stories. Hundreds of people called with all kinds of stories. Here's a selection. My name is Erica Parks. This is from when I was, I guess, 18. I worked at a dollhouse supply store, so I was already sort of in a creepy environment. There was little doll heads and hair and eyeballs. I'd come home after closing up the shop at about 10:00 at night. And I didn't have my own car at the time, so I would either get a ride from my parents, or my dad would let me use his Tracker and I would drive myself home. So I was driving myself home this night. And since I was driving my dad's Tracker, I would have expected him to be home. And I pulled into the house, and all the lights were out. And I don't know if you've ever had the feeling where you know someone's watching you, I guess, or-- even though all the signs are that no one's home, you can feel that there's someone present. So I parked in front of the house. I walked up the front steps and let myself in. It was completely black. I remember whispering, "Hello? Is there anybody home?" And all of a sudden, in the stairwell, the shape of a man and what I saw later was a baseball bat-- but it could have been anything to me at the time-- reared up out of the dark stairwell. And that's when I knew I was dead, murdered, mutilated, something horrible. And dropped to the ground-- apparently without even a yelp of protest, pretty much just a whimper-- into fetal position. And I heard laughing, and the light turned on. It was my dad. This is his idea of a joke. And then later, he claimed that it was a character building test and that now I knew myself better. I knew that I needed to be prepared for being mugged or attacked in the dark because I didn't even try to defend myself. But that moment when my dad reared it on the stairs-- and it could have been just about anybody-- was one of the scariest moments of my life. : Hi, my name is Amy Mackinnon. I was about 2 and 1/2, and it was told around my little neighborhood that a monster had escaped from the local insane asylum. That's what my parents told my brothers and me and our friends' parents told them. And the monster was tall, and green, and really quiet, and ferocious. So they had to cancel Halloween. And we were, of course, devastated, but my parents said, well, because Halloween is canceled, we'll have a party in the basement, in our basement. We'll have all of the friends over from the neighborhood because it would just be too dangerous to be out in the dark with a monster on the loose. So my mother decorated our basement. She did a fantastic job. The best part I remember were the donuts that were hanging from a clothesline. So the party is going really well. All of the kids are there. There are a few mothers there. The music's playing. And all of a sudden, we heard a boom from upstairs. And one mother said, shh, shh. And the music stopped. And my mother was near me. And then we heard boom, boom. And it was dead silence in the basement. And a mother said, "What was that?" And another mother said, "I think it's the monster." And all of a sudden, we heard the basement door creaking open. And then I saw this enormous black boot on the first step. Boom. And then the next. Boom. Very slowly, I could see the boots, the legs, the enormous chest, and sticking straight out, two arms. And the monster came down the stairs so slowly with this green face. Its black suit was too short for it. It had bolts coming out of either side of its neck. Once the arms were visible, chaos in the basement. Kids screaming, running everywhere. My mother was next to me. I, not quite three, grabbed hold of her thigh, and I can remember digging my fingers into her leg, trying desperately to claw onto something, screaming. And I wet my pants. And I can remember seeing my older brother Scott race for a toy chest that was under the stairs. And I can see his eyes, meeting his eyes as he slowly lowered the lid. And I was so angry that I wasn't with him. I can remember my other brothers, Rob and Michael, leaping for the basement window. And there must have been something under it that helped them propel them out the window. They jumped out the window with a friend. They ran down the street to a phone booth, somehow had a quarter, and called the police. Meanwhile, the kids are screaming, and screaming, and screaming everywhere. And the monster is bewildered. He's looking around. His arms are still outstretched. He's not saying anything. He's not grabbing for anyone. And I'm still screaming. My ears hurt because I'm screaming so loudly. And then the monster looked at me, and he said, "It's OK, Amy. It's OK. It's OK." But I couldn't hear him anymore. The next thing I remember is being in a little makeshift bed in my parents' kitchen. And my mother was there. And later, after my father had showered, I can remember him walking to the kitchen. I turned my head and could see his feet. And then he crouched down to talk to me. He said, "Amy--" But before he could get another word out, I threw up on his shoes. Hi. This is Jesse Vorhees. I don't know if this is the kind of scary story you're looking for, but it's the scariest thing that's probably ever happened in my life. My mom had surgery for bladder cancer and got her bladder removed. And I spent the night in the hospital with her the night after her surgery. And I guess when you're ventilated for long enough artificially, your body sort of forgets to breathe for itself. And so after she came out of her surgery, it took a number of hours. She was sort of breathing in these ragged gasps. And sometimes it would take her a long time before she took her next breath. And so my job was sort of to make sure that she didn't-- or at least the job I gave myself was to make sure there wasn't too long between her breaths. And so I would nudge her or wake her up a little bit if it took too long. And so I was beside her in her hospital room while she was sleeping. And I was trying to stay awake. And I think she went in around midnight, and around probably 2:00 in the morning or so, I think I fell asleep. So around 4:00 in the morning, I heard the nurse starting to open up the door. And I suddenly realized I had fallen asleep. And so I listened in the dark for her next breath, and I didn't hear it. And I became convinced that she wasn't going to breathe again and that just because I had fallen asleep, she was gone. I think it's actually probably the most scared I've ever been in my life. And I think what was so scary about it was that there was just no way of getting it back, that something stupid like falling asleep, and there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do to change it. And then a couple of seconds later, I heard her breathe again. And then it was all over. And it's strange because nobody knew what had gone on but me. Nobody really knew that anything scary had happened but me. Whew. That's my story. Thanks to everybody who called our special scary stories hotline. If you're keeping track, the scary things that we have learned so far today that we must avoid at all costs are these. Number one, carbon monoxide. Number two, rabid animals. Number three, hitchhiking. Number four, your own parents. This actually brings us to Act Four, where we're going to learn a few more things to avoid. Act Four, Graveyard Shift. The ghosts and skeletons and monsters who rise from the grave on Halloween are a kind of fake children's story version of death. But one Halloween a couple of years ago, David Sedaris decided that he was going to go for the real thing on Halloween. He was going for the real thing, the medical examiner's office-- the morgue, basically-- the morgue, a place filled with actual dead people. He read his account of what happened there in front of a live audience at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis. The thing about dead people is that they look really dead-- fake almost, like models made of wax. This I learned at a medical examiner's office I visited in the fall of 1997. While the bodies seemed unreal, the tools used to pick them apart were disturbingly familiar. It might be different in places with better funding, but here, they used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages. Chest cavities were emptied of blood with cheap metal soup ladles, the kind they use in cafeterias. And the autopsy tables were lubricated with whatever dish detergent happened to be on sale. Also familiar were the songs-- oldies, mainly, that issued from the blood spattered clock radio and formed a kind of soundtrack. When I was young, I associated Three Dog Night with my seventh grade shop teacher, who proudly identified himself as the group's biggest fan. Now, though, whenever I hear "Joy to the World," I think of a fibroid tumor positioned upon a Styrofoam plate. Funny how that happens. While at the medical examiner's office, I dressed in a protective suit, complete with a bonnet and a pair of Tyvek booties. Citizens were disemboweled, one right after another. And on the surface, I'm sure I seemed fine with it. Then at night, I'd return to my hotel, double lock the door, and stand under the shower until all the soap and shampoo was used up. The people in the next room must have wondered what was going on. An hour of running water and then this blubbery voice-- "I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do." It's not like I'd walked into this completely unprepared. Even as a child, I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and after burying the body, I'd dig it back up, over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. That earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. Igor, they called me. Wicked. Spooky. But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least amongst adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents. And studying it is like a science project-- the good kind that doesn't involve homework. Most kids grow out of it, but the passing of time only heightened my curiosity. As a teenager, I saved up my babysitting money and bought a $75 copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or a non-spiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being, "Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse." I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry. And the best I came up with was pretty lame. Behold the recluse looking pensive. Mildew, though, is quite extensive. On his head, both aft and fore, he maybe should have got out more. I know nothing about biology either. The pathologist tried to educate me, but I was too distracted by the grotesque. My discovery, for instance, that if you jumped from a tall building and land on your back, your eyes will pop out of your head and hang by bloody cables. "Like those joke glasses," I said to the chief medical examiner. The man was nothing if not professional. And his response to my observations was always the same. "Well," he'd sigh. "Not really." After a week in the autopsy suite, I still couldn't open a Denny's menu without wanting to throw up. At night, I'd close my eyes and see the buckets of withered hands stored in the morgue's secondary cooler. They had brains, too, a whole wall of them shelved like preserves in a general store. Then there were the bits and pieces, a forsaken torso, a pretty blond scalp, a pair of eyes floating in a baby food jar. Put them all together, and you had an incredibly bright secretary, who could type like the wind, but never answer the telephone. I'd lie awake thinking of things like this, but then my mind would return to the freshly dead, who are most often whole, or at least, whole-ish. Most of them were delivered naked, zipped up in identical body bags. Family members were not allowed inside the building. And so the corpses had no context. Unconnected to the living, they were like these strange creatures, related only to one another. A police report would explain that Mrs. Daniels had been killed when a truck lost control and drove through the front window of a hamburger stand. She had been a customer waiting in line. In cases like hers, I needed more than a standard report. There had to be a reason this woman was run down, as without one, the same thing might happen to me. Three men are shot to death while attending a child's christening. And you tell yourself, sure, they were hanging out with the wrong crowd. But buying a hamburger-- I buy hamburgers. Or I used to, anyway. This medical examiner's office was in the western United States, in a city where guns are readily available and drivers are known to shoot each other over parking spaces. The building was low-slung and mean looking, set on the far edge of the downtown area, between the railroad tracks and a rubber stamp manufacturer. In the lobby was a potted plant and the receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. "For decomps," she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted a while before being found. We had such a case on Halloween-- an elderly man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a light bulb. Four and 1/2 days on the floor of his un-air-conditioned home. And as the bag was unzipped, the room filled with what the attending pathologist termed, "the smell of job security." The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy system I had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you change a light bulb, call someone from the other room and have them watch until you're finished. By this point in my stay, my list of don'ts covered three pages and included such reminders as, never fall asleep in a dumpster, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get drunk near a train, never get old. I hadn't timed my visit to coincide with Halloween, but that's the way it worked out. You think that most of the casualties would involve trick or treaters hit by cars or done in by tainted candy. But actually, the day was just like any other. In the morning, we had our decomposed senior, and after lunch, I accompanied a female pathologist to a murder trial. She had performed the victim's autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. There were plenty of things that should have concerned me-- the blood spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets. But all I could concentrate on was the defendant's mother, who'd come to court wearing cutoff jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. It couldn't have been easy for her, but still you had to wonder, what would she consider a dress-up occasion? After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work, she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner. And looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. "Fire up the kettle," I told him. "Old-fashioned skull boil at 5:00 PM." It was, of course, the fear talking. That, and a pathetic desire to appear casual-- one of the gang. That evening, instead of returning to my hotel, I sat around with the transporters, one of whom had recently been ticketed for using the carpool lane and then argued, unsuccessfully, that the dead body he was carrying in the back constituted a second passenger. It was just the four of us until around midnight, when a tipsy man in a Daytona Beach sweatshirt came to the front gate and asked for a tour. When told no, he gestured toward an idling car and got his girlfriend to ask. The young woman was lovely and flirtatious, and as she pressed herself against the bars, I imagined her lying upon an autopsy table, her organs piled in a glistening heap beside her. I now looked at everyone this way. And it worried me that I'd never be able to stop. This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth. No one is safe. The world is not manageable. The trick-or-treater may not be struck down on Halloween, but sooner or later, he is going to get it, as am I, and everyone I have ever cared about. It goes without saying that for the next few weeks, I was not much fun to live with. In early November, I returned home and repelled every single person I came into contact with. Gradually, though, my gloominess wore off. By Thanksgiving, I was imagining people naked rather than dead and naked. And this was an improvement. A week later, I was back to smoking in bed. And just as I thought that I'd put it all behind me, I went to my neighborhood grocery store and saw an elderly woman slip on a grape. She fell hard. And after running to her side, I took her by the arm. "You really have to watch yourself in this produce aisle." I know it, she said. "I could have broken my leg." "Actually," I told her, "you could have been killed." The woman attempted to stand, but I wouldn't let her. "I'm serious," I told her. "People die this way. I've seen it." Her expression changed then and became fearful, rather than merely pain. It was the look you get when facing some sudden and insurmountable danger-- the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who holds you too tight and insists with ever increasing urgency that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape. David Sedaris is the author of several books, most recently Calypso. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Marie and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder. Additional production on the rerun from Jessica Lussenhopp, Catherine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Music help today from Jessica Hopper. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thank you, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who, he-- he-- he's coming up behind me. No! Back next week, I hope, with more stories of This American Life.
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The trick to getting a politician's autograph, John Rossi tells me, is to try to do it before they go up to speak. If you wait till afterwards, they'll be mobbed. And sure enough, when he spots Pennsylvania's governor waiting to take his turn at a podium, Rossi darts up to him with a special gold pen he brought just for this purpose, and a photo taken in Allentown a couple months ago, of him and the governor. In about a minute, he returns with his prize. It says, "To John Rossi with appreciation and friendship, Tom Ridge." Now what are you going to do with this? Obviously, get it framed. And I've gotten my photo taken with a lot of very well-known politicians. I've already gotten Jack Kemp, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan. A whole bunch of them, over time, I've collected pictures of myself with. John's an accountant from Whitehall, Pennsylvania, and a low-level party functionary, a Republican area captain in charge of 15 polling places, treasurer of various Lehigh Valley Republican committees and campaigns. He calls himself very conservative. He believes, for instance, in a 100% ban on abortions-- no exceptions-- including if a mother's life is in danger. At 38, he is still a proud member of the Young Republicans. Young for Republicans is officially anybody who's under the age of 40, under their rules. And John's experience at this week's Republican Convention was most definitely not what you've been seeing on television all week. We basically have a lot of activities. For example, SeaWorld, the zoo, Tijuana, plus parties like this that we have throughout the week. We have a nice hotel here with a pool and all kinds of other activities. So we have those things to do. Basically, it's a vacation? It's a vacation, sure. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and ask a number of writers and performers to have at the theme. And this week we bring you a look at the Republican Party and its convention from perspectives you perhaps have not heard in coverage so far. Act One, everyday life at the convention. What do those people actually do all day long? Act Two, a Walter-Mondale-voting, gay-rights-supporting, unrepentant liberal signs up as a Republican Party member and ends up a delegate to the convention. Act Three, we have the newest installment of Michael Lewis's campaign diaries. If you have not heard these or read these at all, they are some of the most evocative and original reporting anybody's doing this year on the election. Stay with us. Act One, Normal Life in an Abnormal Setting. Chances are that if you've paid even a slight amount of attention to what's happened at this convention, you've heard how the right wing of the party dominated the drafting of the party platform, but how the party leadership wanted to look more moderate and inclusive for the television cameras. And so we had key speeches during primetime by pro-choice moderates like Colin Powell and Susan Molinari. Well, in addition to all that, the leadership told right-wing advocacy groups, like the National Rifle Association and the right-to-life organizations, that they would not be allowed to set up booths inside the convention hall. So a renegade vice chairman from the California Republican Party named [? Bach ?] [? Pan ?] arranged to have a 70-foot boat docked just outside the convention hall. The hall happens to stand next to a marina. And three times a day, he organized receptions on that boat for different right-wing groups. He stood on the deck and explained. ?] Right now it's the gun owner. In the afternoon, there will be SAFE California, three strikes, you're out initiative. On Wednesday, I'll be hosting the National Right to Life, the California Civil Rights Initiative. Last Saturday, I hosted an event for California educational freedom. That is the school voucher. Although the official Republican line this week has been that there is peace between the moderates and conservatives in the party, you can measure the distance between the two camps by the distance between this 70-foot catamaran and the convention floor. They're close enough to see each other, but not completely under the same roof. On the boat, people mill around, eat fresh fruit, network. Look at all these people. How are you? So you head up the Irish Repub-- Irish for Dole and the Irish American Assembly, yeah. Do you have a card or something so we can contact you when we head back to Washington? Two women wearing "Viva Dole" buttons take flyers from a guy who's wearing a green "Ask me about the National Assembly of Irish American Republicans" button. My father switched to Republican and all of us boys-- My father was the national chairman of the Irish Democratic Committee for years. He's dead now and I know he voted for Reagan before he died. It used to be that the Irish-Catholics in particular, but Irish Americans period, were far more Democratic. Now, the most recent poll-- it's 47% of Irish Americans say they're going to vote Democratic. 43% say they're going to vote Republican. So that's-- It's a sign of the changes in American politics and the vitality of the Republican Party that many of the people who you meet here at the convention have switched over from the Democratic Party in the last decade or so. Over by the navigation equipment, the head of the Gun Owners of America and a guy from the National Rifle Association give interviews to reporters explaining why they're not supporting the Kemp-Dole ticket and making sweeping statements like-- I know that the ticket right now is going to go down unless they bring gun owners into the fold. Organized gun owners in the country is bigger than the Jewish vote. It's bigger than a lot of other groups that are out there. At some point during this soiree, someone introduces me to a congressional candidate named Chuck Wojslaw. He's a retired professor of electronics engineering, running in a mostly Democratic district on the east side of San Jose. Until 10 years ago, he was a Democrat. Now he stands among Republicans in the afternoon sun, wearing a red, white, and blue bicentennial tie. He spent his time at the convention attending seminars run by GOPAC. That's Newt Gingrich's former political action committee. And these seminars are on how to be an effective candidate in the last two months of the campaign-- how to do fund-raising, how to manage your time and your people in the last two months, how to respond to the Democratic Party propaganda about Medicare and Medicaid, how to bridge the gender gap, get through to more women. One of the pieces of advice was that Republicans tend to do very well in terms of talking about strategy and concepts and principles and data. And when you talk to a woman, she is more qualitative rather than quantitative. And she wants to hear things about what you will do or what the party will do or what the platform is that relates to her everyday life. So you have to do it more anecdotal and more related to everybody's lives, which really makes a lot of sense. But don't they think that one of the reasons why there's a gender gap isn't because of the way the Republicans talk about the issues, but because on the specific issues, women, as a group, don't tend to agree as often with the Republican positions? To some degree. It may be like-- my best guess is a couple, 2% or 3%. Chuck Wojslaw has never run for public office before this. And talking to him, you can tell. He is so much more emotionally present than any normal political candidate who you meet. He looks you in the eye. When you ask him a question, he actually answers the question. And he has none of that robotic, not-quite-human, pod-people affect that many political candidates end up having. I retired a tenured professorship to run for office. So I could have been secure in academia as a tenured professor. Why are you doing this? I love my country. I come from a really humble background. And my country has been-- it has given me opportunity that all I had to do was take advantage of it. I'm the son of a coal miner. Are you somebody who's always wanted to run for office? You've always toyed with it in the back of your mind? No. When did the idea come into your head? Well, I had a family meeting. My daughter and son-- they're grown, college educated, off on their own. My wife and I got together and I says to my kids, looks like I might want to take an early retirement. And so, my daughter says, why don't you run for office? And I says, you've got to be kidding. And I says, do you know what is involved with running for office? The mudslinging and the long hours and whatever. Then, all of a sudden, my daughter came up to me and she says-- and this is what turned my mind-- she says, this is our country. We love it. If not you, who then? If not you, who then? And that's when you decided? Yeah. He's spending $60,000 of his retirement money to do all this. And like many people I met at the convention, what was most striking about Chuck Wojslaw was his idealism. He seemed completely sincere about what he was doing. We talked for a while. And later, as I was climbing off the boat, I passed him as he huddled with another reporter. He was talking into her tape recorder. It wasn't hard to overhear. He was telling the same story about his daughter in the same words and the same heartfelt tone. You all know that I believe in a woman's right to choose and I strongly support affirmative action. And I was invited-- Monday night, depending on where you sat in the convention hall or which network you happened to be watching, you could clearly hear a mix of boos and cheers when General Colin Powell made his big plea for inclusiveness in the Republican Party. It is unclear how inclusive the party really is or wants to be. One persistent and widespread rumor all week long was that gay Republicans had asked for a block of hotel rooms, for their organization the Log Cabin Republicans, and that the party told them no hotel rooms seemed to be available in San Diego or in the surrounding counties, and booked them rooms over the border in Tijuana. That is, the only acceptable place for them was actually outside the borders of the United States of America. This turned out to be false. Not true at all. But the party's attitude about including dissenters is so confused that every time it was said, it had the sound of something that actually might be true. By midweek, everybody knew that inclusion was the word of the week. Everyone was claiming to be inclusive. Even if you were urging people not to yield to others' beliefs, you did it in the language of inclusion. Witness, for example, Pat Buchanan at a Texas delegation breakfast. To give you the setting here, picture him-- here's where he's standing. He's standing in front of a 20-foot-tall cowboy made entirely of red and black and blue balloons. We're being inclusive today, Tom. Let's all be tolerant and inclusive. Now, let me say this. We do want an inclusive party, a broad party. And think back over the last 20 years. When were we at our most broadest and most inclusive? In 1980 and 1984, we stood up and we said, no pale pastels. A party can't be all things to all people. Here's where we stand. Here's what we believe. We are a conservative party. We are strong on defense, strong on life. We will stand up to-- What's it mean to be a Republican, to be a conservative? These questions even extended to the dance floor in San Diego. Early in the week, one of the conservative magazines published, in a special convention issue, an article that questions the kinds of music played at Republican parties. It is, of course, amoral, pop music that does not promote family values, some of it by musicians like the Village People who live a lifestyle the Republican delegates do not approve of. Well, Wednesday night, the Iowa delegation ended up in a bar called Dick's Last Resort. This was late. It's a place with bras strung up over the bar like spoils of war, a big dance floor. And when AC/DC kicked onto the sound system, a sensible-looking delegate named [? Laurie ?] [? Leapholdt, ?] in a sensible skirt, sensible shoes, sensible haircut, wife of a police officer back home, wearing a sticker that said, "Life of the party"-- "life" in big, red letters-- that many of the right-to-life delegates wore. Anyway, she jumped onto the stage and executed what I have to say is the most incredible display of air guitar work I have seen in my life. Literally, people were cheering. She hurled herself to her knees on the power chords, and she just generally rocked out. When I walked up to her afterwards with my tape recorder and asked where she was from, she replied very quickly, France. But then admitted, no, Des Moines. ?] Having a ball. This is just the best. I drove all the way out here in my little red convertible, top down all the way, except for when it rained over the continental divide. It was great. This country is just beautiful and wonderful. And I know all the Republicans here are doing their best to help keep it wonderful and free. Do you think that this kind of music promotes family values? Probably not, I guess. I guess I don't get real excited about a lot of it. If I find something too objectionable-- I'm singing along-- I just change the words. I'm morally grounded enough to know, all right, yes, that has a nice beat and I can dance to it, but I don't necessarily believe everything that it might promote. You know? In a sense, this is a nice statement of how many Republicans feel about many issues, morally grounded enough to decide for themselves what they think and not caring what their fellow Republicans think about it, unless there's some reason to care. Coming up, someone tests the inclusiveness of the party in Act Two. Act Two. Hello, my name is Dan Savage and I am the Republican Party in my neighborhood. I am the Republican Precinct Committee Officer, PCO, for Precinct 1846 in the 43rd District in Seattle, Washington. If you have any questions about the Republican Party, our platform, or any of our candidates, feel free to give me a call. Now I should point out here that Dan Savage is not just a Republican Precinct Committee Officer, he's also a gay sex columnist, a drag queen, and someone who agrees with none of the principles of the Republican Party. Now you're probably wondering how a commie, pinko, drag-fag, sex advice columnist found a home in the hate-mongering, gay-bashing, neo-fascist Republican Party. Well, let me tell you something, pal-- the Republican Party is a big tent, a huge tent. There were no ideological litmus tests at the Republican Party caucuses or conventions that I attended. I didn't have to produce a voter registration card, or a picture ID even, at my very first caucus-- a measure, I believe, of the respect the Republican Party has for the rights of the individual. I just walked through the door, signed on the dotted line-- Dan Savage certifies that he/she considers himself/herself a Republican-- and that was it. Who knew that going over to the dark side could be so simple? OK, here's the story. Back when Pat Buchanan was posting first- and second-place showings in Republican primaries this year, Dan Savage got it into his head that the only way to change a political party that he not only disagreed with but also hated and feared was to sign up and change it from the inside. So he showed up at his local Republican caucus, which in the 43rd is a small group of Republican holdovers in a big gay neighborhood. And at this point, his story took a surprising turn. Once he arrived, he found out that because he was the only person from the little precinct that he lives in-- each caucus is divided up into a lot of little precincts-- because of that, he was automatically made a precinct committee officer and then automatically won a seat at the county Republican convention. Well, he wrote up the experience that he had at the caucus in the most damning partisan tone humanly possible and published it in the paper. But, as he found out, his adventure had barely begun. A couple of weeks after I'd traveled over to the dark side, Daniel Mead Smith, chairman of the 43rd Republican Party, wrote me a letter. "I think you'll be surprised that the hate-mongering, gay-bashing, neo-fascist Republican Party does not exist in the 43rd," Smith wrote. "I invite you to come to one of our meetings and see for yourself." So I went to one of Smith's meetings to see for myself, the 43rd District Republican Caucus. I arrived at the Montlake Community Center for the 1996 43rd District Republican Caucuses at 8:00 AM. I paid my $5, signed in, grabbed a seat, and waited for the work to begin. We were there to elect delegates to the State Republican Convention coming up Memorial Day weekend and vote on non-binding resolutions. The caucus began with a prayer. We asked God to guide us in selecting delegates. And then we were ready to pledge allegiance to the flag. Only trouble was, no one brought a flag. I thought about suggesting we pledge allegiance to the fag-- hey that's me-- but I didn't want to be disruptive. Someone found some red, white, and blue bunting in the back room, tossed it over an easel, and we pledged allegiance to that. The easel was needed post-pledge. So the red, white, and blue bunting to which we had just pledged our allegiance was tossed on the floor. We had to elect delegates before we could get to the resolutions. I won't bore you with the Robert's Rules of Order stuff or the impossibly convoluted process by which the 80 of us in that cramped, steeple-roofed, fluorescent-lit room elected 17 delegates to the State Republican Convention. Suffice to say, it was crushingly dull. To entertain us while we waited for the ballots to be counted four times, Republican Party activists and candidates gave little speeches. Some of these speeches were pure fantasy. One woman read a prepared speech about the United Nations working in concert with abortionists to take over the country. The other recurring fantasy had to do with us, the 43rd District Republicans, retaking the 43rd for the Republican Party. One man reminisced about the time, not too long ago, when the 43rd was a solidly Republican district. "We can make this district Republican again, just like it was when I joined the party 25 years ago. All we have to do is get out there and doorbell and identify the voters in this district who are sympathetic to our issues." Heart pounding, I stuck my hand in the air. "Have any of you been out of the house or walked down Broadway in the last 25 years?" I asked, standing and looking around at the toughest crowd I've probably ever played. The 43rd District, I pointed out, had gone all gay all of a sudden. So long as the Republican Party was identified with homophobes and anti-gay, bigot activists, the Republican Party could kiss the 43rd District goodbye. When I sat down, a little old lady sitting behind me pointed out that she knew a very nice gay couple in the Republican Party. In other words, she, and by extension the party, was not homophobic. And I was wrong. She said to me, "The party isn't against gay people. That's just a false impression you have." Gee, I wonder where I could have picked up that false impression? Maybe from Jesse Helms, Bob Dornan, Bob "$1,000" Dole, anti-gay rights rallies in Iowa during the primaries attended by all the Republican presidential hopefuls-- even moderate Lamar Alexander-- Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Newt Gingrich, Linda Smith, Ellen Craswell, Spokane County Coroner Dexter Amend, the Washington State Legislature, state legislatures all across the country, the Christian Coalition. During a break, an attractive middle-aged man approached me. He was a little angry. "I was offended by you forcing me to take responsibility for Jesse Helms." As if the Republican Party isn't responsible for Jesse Helms. One woman wanted to know why she should support gay people since gay people didn't support her when her home was burned down by arsonists. The arsonists weren't gay or anything. But where were gay people when she needed them? Another pointed out that some gays had broken the windows of the Republican Party headquarters, so who's oppressing who? Another man took me aside during a break to let me know that the gay bashing within the Republican Party wasn't for real. It was only to get out the vote and motivate the front lines. Well, then, I guess that makes it OK. I'm happy to be vilified and scapegoated and denied my civil rights, so long as it motivates people to go to the polls. Disenfranchisement is a small price to pay to increase voter turnout. To his surprise, at this meeting, Dan Savage talked the caucus into approving a resolution that affirmed the rights of gays and lesbians and rejected elements of the party who would exploit fear and hatred of homosexuals for short-term political gain. He could not wait, after this victory, to get to the county convention. As an official delegate, Dan Savage would be allowed to vote there. He'd be allowed to make amendments. He would really be allowed to play a role. He planned to vote, in the straw polls they have at these things, for the most conservative Republican candidates-- in this case, Pat Buchanan for president. And for the governor of Washington State, he was going to vote for Ellen Craswell, who opposes gun control, and gay rights, and moral decay, and who he loathes. Dan Savage's thinking was that the more extreme the Republican ticket would end up being, the more likely they would lose in the general election, and the more likely that the party would eventually abandon this more conservative wing. A few weeks later, the big day arrived. The King County Republican Convention, my first major party function-- hats, speeches, amendments. I bounded out of bed at 7:00 AM, and ran to meet my new friend, Steve, at the QFC on Broadway. Steve attended his precinct caucuses way back in March with the intention of getting himself elected a delegate to the county and state Republican conventions. Like me, he joined the Republican Party out of a sincere desire to move the GOP to the center. Kindred spirits, we decided to attend the county convention together. The doors opened at 7:30 AM. After the crowd settled down, a preacher read an alarming opening invocation which pretty much set the tone for what was to come. "Please forgive our leaders for endorsing perversion. And God, deliver us from spineless compromise." Then we bellowed the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I slipped up to the merchandise tables on the second floor where I bought myself a red, white, and blue "Craswell for Governor" hat. It must have been fate. On my way back down from the merchandise tables, I ran smack dab into Ellen Craswell herself. I said hello, and looking very serious in my little red, white, and blue hat asked, "What are we going to do about the homosexual problem, Miss Craswell? What is the final solution to all this homosexual nonsense?" "So long as they stay inside, we can let them alone," Ellen Craswell confided in me. "But when they organize and demand special rights, we must oppose them. We can't give special rights to something that is an abomination in the eyes of God." Now, Ellen didn't seem interested in elaborating on just what it is we're supposed to stay inside of-- the closet, our apartments, the priesthood. So I said goodbye, promising to vote for her in the primary. You see, the better Ellen does in the primary, the better the Democratic candidate for governor will do in the fall. I made it back to the convention floor just in time for the opening of debate on the party platform. The King County Republican Platform is a document drawn up by committee that lays out what the King County Republican Party stands for. And here's the beautiful part-- delegates are allowed to propose amendments. Once an amendment is proposed, the amendment's sponsor is allowed to speak, followed by a few people in favor, a few opposed. After that, the sponsor gets another minute or so to address the floor. I was a delegate. I had amendments. And so I would get to address the convention over and over and over again. And as amendments are time-consuming, determined delegates can grind the convention to a halt. The first section we were to vote on was the preamble, in which we acknowledged God to be our creator and the family as the foundation of our culture. We embraced free markets, recognized that tax and regulatory burdens are a threat to our freedoms, yadda, yadda, yadda. Before we could vote on the preamble-- and it hadn't occurred to me to amend the preamble-- a delegate proposed that a line be added stating that the party was open to all who accept its basic principles, regardless of race, religion, sex, or national origin. After debate, the first resolution of the day passed by a distressingly narrow margin. Race, creed, sex, national origin-- something was missing. Steve approached the microphone and proposed that the just-passed amendment also be amended to include the words "sexual orientation." Well, Steve's amendment was soundly defeated by a voice vote that, though untabulated, sounded to me like 1,589 to 11. Then the liberty section was up for a vote. I dashed to a microphone wearing my Ellen Craswell hat and proposed this amendment. "As respect for the rights of the individual are the bedrock of Republican values, the King County Republican Party hereby recognizes the fundamental human rights of gay and lesbian American citizens. We reject elements on the fringe of the Republican Party that would exploit fear and hatred of gay and lesbian American citizens for short-term political gain." Through the shouting, I pointed out that we King County Republicans can't have it both ways. We can't say in one breath that we oppose discrimination and with our next breath, support discrimination against gay and lesbian American citizens. So let's vote on it. Do we, the Republicans of King County, recognize the fundamental rights of gay and lesbian American citizens, or do we not? Well, we do not. After some heated debate-- the names I was called-- pervert, sodomite, Democrat-- my amendment was voted down. After my amendment failed, a woman in a Craswell hat approached me. "Why are you wearing that hat?" she briskly inquired. "Because I'm for Craswell." "You know where she stands on gay things, don't you?" Having recently had a conversation with Ellen herself, I most certainly did. "But I'm not," I smilingly inform my new friend and fellow Craswell supporter, "a single-issue voter." Try to imagine now that you're a homophobic, Republican jerk-off-- which might be a triple redundancy-- at your county convention. You came for the speeches, an anti-Clinton T-shirt for your collection, and a hot dog. This is what you do for fun. Woohoo. But these three guys keep introducing pro-gay-rights amendments, moving to have anti-gay amendments struck, and generally messing with your afternoon. You didn't come to the convention to defend your party's homophobia. And you certainly didn't come expecting to listen to gay men giving speeches all day long. Who are these guys? And why is that one wearing a Craswell hat? OK, you're this person. What do you do? You get mad-- very, very mad. One delegate decided to get even. In what can only be described as a David Lynch moment, a palsied delegate staggered up to the microphone and proposed a change in the rules. No further discussion of homosexuality allowed. His resolution needed a 2/3 majority to pass because it was a rules change, not a simple amendment. And pass it did, to hoots and hollers and cheers. But we had yet to vote on the education section, which contained a plank about homosexuality. When we got to education, all hell broke loose. Robert's Rules of Order fetishists leapt to their feet insisting that the anti-gay plank in the Education section would have to be struck. If we can't discuss homosexuality, we can't vote on it, for voting is a discussion. Uh-oh, we were talking about homosexuality again. People were booing, shouting. Oh, the humanity. The chair, bringing the room to order, calmly ruled that the no-further-discussion resolution applied only to pro-gay discussions. We could discuss homosexuality, he said, but only if we weren't saying anything nice about it. And the convention limped to a close, most of the day having been wasted debating gay rights, gay marriage, what makes people gay, and my hat. What I learned. Here's what I learned about Republicans that weekend. They don't like homos very much. They certainly don't like having to talk about us. And they certainly like listening to us even less. But they do like beating up on us in their platforms. So King County Republicans, I'll make you a deal. Leave us out of your platform in '98-- the next convention cycle-- and I'll stay away from your convention. But if we're in the platform, I intend to return. Dan Savage writes a syndicated sex advice column called "Savage Love." He's a writer and editor at a weekly Seattle paper called The Stranger. Coming up, Michael Lewis and more unusual stories of Republican Party politics. That's in a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of writers and stories and storytelling styles. Our program today is about the Republican Convention. Act Three, Campaign Diaries. Throughout this year, we've been bringing you the reportage of Michael Lewis. He's publishing his campaign diaries in The New Republic. And I say this pretty much every time we have him on the show. He's writing about corners of the election process that nobody else is. He just has this eye, also, for the telling, revealing little moment and detail. Regular listeners to our program or regular readers of his know that at some point during this election year, Michael Lewis became mesmerized with a presidential candidate by the name of Morry Taylor. Morry Taylor ran in the Republican primaries. He shows up in this installment you're about to hear. He is outspoken. And he is the founder and CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel. And he goes by the nickname the Grizz. For these campaign diaries, Michael Lewis not only attended the Republican National Convention, he also flew to Russell, Kansas, Bob Dole's boyhood home. August 7-- I don't really expect anyone to answer the door of Bob Dole's house in Russell, Kansas. But I stop by anyway, just to see what might happen. When you travel with Dole, you see the world as it is constructed by the Dole campaign, until you almost forget there is a world outside of it, where people do the unexpected. Indeed, as I reach for the screen door, I half wonder if some SWAT team will leap out of the bushes and haul me back to Bob Dole's campaign plane, Citizenship, for questioning. But Dole is a few days behind me. And the neighborhood remains undisturbed by politics. The only sign that I'm in the right place is the faded pink mat beneath my feet. "Welcome to the home of the Doles," it reads. After a single ring, the front door swings open and an elderly woman steps outside. "Just cleaning up before Bob gets here," she says. It's Bob Dole's sister, Gloria, and she's as matter-of-fact as Dole himself. She then disappears inside, leaving the door open for me to follow. I do. Bob Dole's boyhood home-- his official residence, in fact-- is instantly recognizable to anyone who had grandparents in the 1960s. 1960s old-person's furniture, low-backed lounge chairs; 1960s old-person colors, unnatural shades of green; and 1960s old-person smells, 1940s perfume. Over the roar of the 1960s vacuum cleaner, Gloria opens various drawers and tosses onto various counters items for me to inspect. The drawers contain hundreds of loose photographs of Dole in his youth that neither Gloria nor anyone else has looked at in years. One shot depicts Dole modeling clothes in a fashion show staged by a local department store. Another shows him shirtless, with his muscles slightly flexed. As a collection, they capture both Dole's natural obedience-- he always poses-- and his intense physical vanity. How many 18-year-olds in 1940 lifted weights? "He looks like a movie star," I say to Gloria. "He was a movie star," she says quickly. "He is a movie star." The whole thing happened so fast, it seems only natural that I'm ransacking the home of the Republican presidential nominee. After a thorough search of the premises, we move on to the garage, passing, beside Dole's bed, a strange pair of Little Black Sambo rag dolls of the sort they don't even allow in the South anymore. The inside of the garage is a welter of ancient possessions that have long since ceased to serve any useful purpose-- five-pound cameras, medicine balls, that sort of thing. The outside is equally unremarkable, save for the jury-rigged system of sausage-shaped weights that Dole used to rebuild his arm after the war. According to Gloria, the contraption has simply hung there for the past 50 years, untouched by time or fate. Dole just likes having it around. As I watch the white rope spool through the eye of the silver pulley, I realize I am also watching Bob Dole's campaign in microcosm. Somewhere in America, Dole is either giving a speech or preparing to give a speech in which he invokes the place where I now stand and the things he once did here. "Now let's just take Bob Dole," he'll say, typically. "Nothing special about me. Grew up in a small town. Dad wears overalls to work every day for 42 years, was proud of it. Grew up in a basement apartment, six of us, to make ends meet, in Russell, Kansas. Didn't have any money, but we had lots of values." Then he will allude artfully to his war wound and his heroic recovery from it. The insistence on the importance of events that have occurred 50 years ago in a place where he hasn't lived for 35 years is more than a little strange. It's as if Dole has made a bargain with himself, and with those who would judge him, which enables him to cease all serious self-examination after the age of 25. The deal is something like this. Dole agrees to believe that it was worth it to have his arm and his vanity shattered for the sake of his country. In return, the country agrees not to question what lurks inside him. Thanks to a single decision he made 50 years ago, he is forever the war hero. It's a strangely stunted view of 73 years on the planet. Morry Taylor asks me to meet him in the parking lot by the San Diego Convention Center. But the convention center is closed and the police who surround it have no idea where to find the parking lot. After a half-hour search, I ask a cop if he's seen 5,000 people on Harley-Davidson motorcycles-- the number Morry promised to deliver to the Dole campaign. The police officer looks at me as if I am mad. "How many?" he asks incredulously. "5,000," I say. "There is no way you get 5,000 motorcycles anywhere near here," he says. For the first time since I met him seven months ago, I doubt Morry's ability to throw a party. How do you find 5,000 bikers anyway? Soon enough, I find the parking lot. It lies directly behind a small cluster of protesters, a half mile or so from the convention center. It consists of maybe four acres of concrete at the back of which is a stage. Over the stage is an American flag. And in front of the flag is a huge banner. It reads, "Titan-- America's Newest Tire Company." That's Morry's company. On the stage are five large black men playing loud instruments, each of whom wears a bandanna that says, "The Grizz." That's Morry. At the front of the stage, with a cigar jutting straight out from his mouth, gyrating slightly to the funk, is Morry. The roar of approaching motorcycles soon drowns out everything. Not 5,000, but 7,000 motorcycles are streaming across a bridge. They are ridden by 7,000 Republicans and led by half the United States Congress and various local bigwigs-- Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Dick Armey. But from the moment the bikers arrive at the gates, the Dole campaign ensures that pretty much everything goes wrong. Dole's promise to attend causes the police to keep 6,800 bikers out on the highway. Letting them in will prove too much of a security risk, they say. The thick line dutifully comes to a halt. And the bikers wait restlessly. The Dole campaign goes back and forth until everyone involved is thoroughly unhappy. An hour or so later, the Dole campaign finally admits that Dole won't be coming. The effect is immediate. The senators and congressmen vanish. As the politicians exit out the back gate, the 3,000 or so bikers who remain on the highway enter through the front. Morry claims that most of the bikers are actually doctors and lawyers. But these are doctors and lawyers with wild, big bellies and long facial hair. To a man, they are covered in patches that identify them as ardent champions of the American way. Their most popular cause, by far, is the Vietnam War. Everyone is either a veteran or a friend of a veteran. "Hanoi Jane-- traitor by choice, commie by injection," reads a typical armband. The event quickly degenerates into an enjoyable experience. The glee on Morry's face as the bikers-- he's already calling them "my bikers"-- roar into the lot calls to mind a small child on Christmas morning. The bikers, for their part, seem thrilled, especially when Morry moonwalks across the stage and hurls Grizz T-shirts into the raucous crowd. As he does, the band strikes up a new song, "It's your thing, do what you gotta to. I can't tell you what not to do." Five hours later, I sit behind Ollie North's family watching Pat Buchanan take the stage at a rally in Escondido. Buchanan is going to remain inside the Republican Party. That much we know from the advance copies of the speech distributed by his staff. What we don't know is how his followers will take the news. One moment at the start of the ceremony speaks volumes about what Buchanan's followers are up to, as opposed to what Buchanan claims he's up to. After the Pledge of Allegiance, a claque at the back of the room tacks on a pro-life appendix. "Born and unborn," they shout. When I express astonishment that they have dared to amend the Pledge of Allegiance, a fellow journalist gives me a where-have-you-been look and explains that they've also rewritten "The Star-Spangled Banner" to incorporate some pro-life language. Nothing illustrates so well how anti-conservative Buchanan's movement truly is. Its goal is not to conserve the past but to advance a radical agenda. The constant invocation of the past-- the founding fathers, the declaration, et cetera, is more of a smokescreen than anything else. Given this, it will be difficult to yoke these people to an old-fashioned conservative cause like the Dole campaign. It's like trying to transform a lightning bolt into usable current. That's Dole's real problem here. Temperamentally, he's a conservative. Every fiber in his body is intent on denying anything radical from ever again changing his life. By late afternoon I finally find Morry again, wandering the convention floor. He looks surprised whenever anyone recognizes him. One Fox television crew even stopped to interview him. "Mr. Taylor," began the reporter. "What do you mean with this 'Mr. Taylor' [BEEP]?" asked Morry. "Morry?" said the reporter uncertainly. "The Grizz," boomed Morry. I tell him that just a few hours earlier, a man named Ed Harrison took the podium and started his speech with the immortal words, "Now, I'm not a politician and I'm not a lawyer. I'm a businessman." He had stolen Morry's precise words. This, too, Morry can't quite believe. He hasn't entirely grasped the power of the modern media. I have decided it's finally time to leave him, and I'm wondering how to break the news. The Taylor campaign has come to an end, at least for the moment. I have forgotten the general rule of American politics-- if you hang with Morry Taylor, the action will follow. The rule continues to obtain. We're sitting in the section reserved for the primary candidates, when Pat Buchanan appears for the first time on the convention floor. He's already got maybe 50 journalists with him. He quickly accumulates another 100, plus several hundred delegates keen to shake his hand. The result is a human tsunami that breaks across about a third of the conventional hall and lays waste to anything in its path. "People are being trampled," an enormous security guard shouts into his wrist mic. "Send me 50 people." The crowd at the convention has its own logic, however. People merely attract more people. For every added security man, three curiosity seekers join in. So as Buchanan circles the hall, the tension rises. He's like a ball bearing in a roulette wheel trying to decide where to settle. At length, he comes to rest in the seat directly behind Morry. Fully one third of the convention is watching him and ignoring George W. Bush, who is speaking piously from the podium. "Open up a child daycare center at your church or synagogue." That sort of thing. "I need more help here," blares the guard into his wrist. "Send help. Send help." Then Buchanan notices Morry. "Morry Taylor is the problem here," he shouts mockingly. "He's ruined the convention." "Did they do this to you when you got here, Morry?" shouts Bay Buchanan, joining her brother and ganging up on Morry. It seems needlessly cruel. Morry stands alone watching. "It's you, Pat," says Morry. "Leave Shelley with me and take these people out in the street." The two former rivals vie to condescend to one another. Buchanan is winning on points until he pushes it one inch too far. "Where's the keg, Morry?" he shouts. "Go get the keg." Morry looks up, licks his lip and says, "Hey, Pat, you're unemployed now." Then he turns to the cameras. "He needs a job," Morry explains to the world's news media. "Or else he'll have to take unemployment." Gerald Ford and George Bush speak. But no one around Buchanan listens. All eyes focus on the troublemaker who is giving serial interviews to the networks. At last, Nancy Reagan appears to eulogize Ronny, which is strange. Republicans behave as if he has already died, whereas Nixon, who has actually died, is treated as if he were still alive. She is followed by Colin Powell. Then comes what I am sure will be the defining moment of the convention. Powell raises his voice above the crowd and proclaims his belief in abortion rights. The convention rises to its feet to applaud. I turn around and meet Buchanan's gaze. "Any reaction?" I ask idiotically. In these circumstances it is, as a rule, impossible to think of a decent question. "What?" he says. "Any reaction?" I shout. But the noise from the crowd is too loud. Just in front of Morry, oddly enough, there is a man dressed in a monk's robe. On the back of the robe is a sign. It reads, "Diogenes went through the streets carrying a lantern. He held it up to strangers and said he was looking for an honest man." Dole has invited Morry to join him on the stage Thursday night. But Morry has, for the second time in as many days, declined Dole's invitation. He figures it will merely be another meaningless free-for-all with everyone who ever thought of running for office crammed on to the stage. Although Morry's aides plead with me to try to change his mind, I can't honestly tell him he's wrong. It's nothing personal, though he's still irritated that Dole lacked the sense to address 7,000 raving loyalists on motorcycles. It's just that convention life is less than it's cracked up to be, he's decided. In the morning his plane will take him and his friends to Las Vegas. Michael Lewis-- his campaign diaries appear in The New Republic. This will be in this week's issue. Act Four, Party in the Killing Fields. Political conventions, of course, are basically big, glorified TV shows. But they're also the stuff of memory. Photo-snapping and autograph-seeking was everywhere in San Diego. Well, Cassandra Smith's father and grandfather were both Republicans, black Republicans, because of the ethic of self-reliance and because of Abraham Lincoln. And they were trying to change the Republican Party from the inside. And she has this memory of one convention. I can't swear that I was the only 10-year-old Negro girl at the 1960 Republican Convention. But with the scarcity of black Republicans, especially as enthusiastic as my father, I think I can make the claim. "You'll see democracy in action," Daddy promised. "Yes, history in the making. You'll be the only kid in school to see Dick Nixon in person." I wasn't impressed. I had just seen Soupy Sales at the state fair. And Nixon was only a vice president. Besides, I'd seen his face every morning when I came downstairs for breakfast. Above the fireplace, in a kind of Republican shrine, surrounded by a grey china elephant and a stack of "I Like Ike" buttons, hung a photo of my father, John Smith, and Richard Nixon shaking hands. It was taken in 1958 when Nixon was vice president and Daddy was one of nine Young Republican Vice Chairmen. They are standing toe to toe, wingtip to wingtip, their hands clasped in a no-nonsense handshake. They even look a little alike, same height and build, the same oversize square head, shiny gray suit, intent, unwavering stare. I understand now that these photos were staged for the party faithful. But in 1960, I thought that Dick Nixon and my father were best friends, blood brothers who had cut their palms and clasped them together in a sacred ceremony preserved on film. Daddy was proud of that photo-- framed it, bragged on it, and made sure his daughters kept it dusted. As far as he was concerned, he and Dick were comrades from the front lines. His old friend was about to be promoted from vice president to president. And we were traveling to Chicago to cheer him on. We'd been in Chicago a couple of days, and Mother and I still couldn't get into the convention. Every morning, Daddy had left us waiting while he searched for spectator tickets. When we finally got inside, the seats were in the nosebleed section. I was troubled. If Nixon and my daddy are such good friends, why are we sitting up here? The next day we were in luck. The Republican women had planned to wear yellow dresses to a demonstration. Mother wore hers and we slipped onto the convention floor. What can I tell you about a convention from the eyes of a 10-year-old? Mostly, I saw belt buckles, breasts, and bellies. Red, white, and blue balloons, the crush of bodies, funny hats, popcorn, the smell of Old Spice and Aqua Velva, grown-ups shouting and pushing like a bunch of kids, crushed toes, Texans in 10-gallon hats, and Goldwater delegates who never gave up trying to make you wear their buttons. We joined the parade of Republican women marching round and round the floor demonstrating for or against something. Somehow we were spotted as frauds and led through the exit doors and into the midday sun. The international amphitheater was in the middle of the stockyards. And although most of the slaughterhouses had closed, the smell of death was everywhere. Nearby, Darling and Company, the last of the rendering firms, was boiling down hides, hooves, heads, tails into glue. When the wind was right, you could smell it as far as Hyde Park, four miles away. But on a windless August day, we couldn't breathe. We covered our eyes and mouths. We begged the guards to let us back in or send a message to father. We were stranded alone in a vacant lot overgrown by weeds. By now, I'd had it with Dick Nixon and decided the photo was a fraud, the convention nothing but a staged circus. We had been abandoned, locked out. I still haven't found a political home. This year, the Republican talk about inclusion makes me nervous. They repeat it too often and with too little evidence. But this week, for the first time since 1960, I had a calm political discussion with my father. I was surprised. Although he's proud of Colin Powell and still likes Republican economics, he feels as left out as I do. "The party hasn't changed," he admitted. "They don't want us. Not unless you do what they tell you. That's my problem. I never did what they told me." And for the first time, he explained to me the reason we didn't get tickets to the convention floor in 1960. The state party leaders wanted him to run for the one office usually reserved for blacks. Instead, he ran for a mainstream position and won. And that's how we ended up in a vacant lot that smelled of death, pounding on the doors to get in. Chicago writer Cassandra Smith. She's got a story in the new book, TriQuarterly New Writers. Music by the late Oscar Brown III. Well, our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Hey, want to hear an outtake? Sure you do. From our recording session with Michael Lewis when he did his campaign diaries. Hold on, let me this cued up. Here we go. As he does, the band strikes up a new song. Now, what do I do with this? I don't know what to do with it. [SINGING[ It's your thing-- I can't do that. As he does, the band-- I can't do this. If you would like a copy of this program-- it's only $10-- call us at WBEZ in Chicago. 312-832-3380. Our email address is [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. [SINGING] It's your thing. I can't do that. You ruined my life. Yeah, are we ruining yours? Are we? Well, either way, we're going to be back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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OK, here's a simple way to measure how violent things have gotten in Iraq. Calling around this week to five English-speaking Iraqis. Every one of them knew somebody who's died in the violence since the US invasion. A doctor in Baghdad, who's active in politics, told me he knows over 300 people who've died. A guy in Babylon says it's pretty safe where he lives, but his cousin was shot by Americans when he got too close to them on the road. A medical student's cousins died from an IED exploding in the street. And he has friends who died too. One of them was kidnapped. Then the cops were trying to save them, then accidentally he was shot. Then another friend that I had in college, he was in my grade-- it was last year-- he was in his car, driving to college, and he was suddenly shot by unknown men. Just today told me, when he went to the store near his house, he saw three people were killed. No one knows why. Ali, a bookstore owner in Baghdad that I talked to picked up a list of people he knows who've died. Friends, relatives neighbors. The situation, no matter how much I don't talk about, it cannot described how it is. How often will you hear that a friend or a friend of a friend or a relative has died? Is it once a week? Every day, believe me. No. Every day? I swear. Just two hours ago a neighbor has been killed in our neighborhood. He was shot dead. Shot dead. How, why, where was he? He was with his wife in his car, and some gunmen pulled over and just shot him and gunned him down because he's a Shiite. That's horrible. I saw three similar incidents-- getting a man killed in front of his wife and two children. The oldest girl is about five years of age. And she was shouting, oh, daddy, please daddy, don't die. In front of my eyes. I don't know these people, but this happened in front of my eyes. It's like you're getting used to it. You hear people die. OK, people die. It's at the point now where if you go up to a dead body and try to clear it away, you're in danger of getting shot yourself. It's at the point now where Iraqis are getting their names, addresses, and phone numbers tattooed on their bodies. So if they're killed, their bodies will be identified and returned to their families. People I talked to said they're scared all the time. Everybody said that it was better when Saddam was in power. Not that they like Saddam. Mohaned, an architect, described the choice between Saddam and the current situation in this way. They're two bad choices, I must say. Saddam's staying in power is not a solution. Yeah. And there was no light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. But today there is no tunnel. Seems like every day we hear these stories and numbers from Iraq. Car bombings, more deaths, sectarian killings. But today on our radio show, we try to understand what you would think would be one of the simplest facts about the war, once and for all. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program in three acts today. Now, in the second half of the show we have a very unusual recording of US forces trying to make things right with Iraqis, after the US accidentally killed 12 civilians. In the other acts of the show we talk about a number, and in one of the acts a small news story that nobody ever really seemed to take very seriously at the time. And what was really behind that story. Stay with us. Act One. Truths, Damn Truths, and Statistics. Well, the number that we're going to talk about right now-- and we are going to talk about a number-- the number is how many civilians have died as a result of a war. Fact is, nobody is even pretending to have an accurate count. Iraqi Ministry of Health for a while, early on in the war, was compiling morgue figures from across the country and making them public each week. But that practice was stopped. There's also a privately run nonprofit web site called iraqbodycount.net, which keeps a running tally of confirmed deaths in Iraq. That's as opposed to an estimate of all the deaths in the country. And there have been two studies published in the British medical journal, The Lancet. One of the studies came out just a few weeks ago. The other came out two years ago. And both of these studies arrived at casualty numbers that are so high, they shocked many people. Right now, in this first act, we're going to return to a story that one of our producers, Alex Blumberg, did for our show a year ago about that first Lancet study. Later in the show, in act three, we're going to look at the study that just came out. Anyway, here's Alex. Everyone will tell you counting casualties in wartime is hard. First of all, you need to do something called a large-scale mortality survey. And second of all, you need to do it in the middle of a war zone. The first attempt ever made in Iraq was this 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 a 100,000 Iraqis died as a result of the war. This figure was astonishingly high. 10 times higher than any other casualty estimates at the time. Because of this, and because the study itself got almost no traction in the press, I remember thinking at the time it came out that it was probably bogus and slanted. I'm guessing a lot of people, if they heard about the study at all, felt the way I did. But recently, in trying to find out how many Iraqis 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 figure is actually the best estimate and possibly low. Before the Iraq study, the main thing I was known for-- and that I'd 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 Leone. To a guy in Les Robert's line of work, the war in Iraq had a number of unique and interesting things that deserve study. The main thing that distinguished this war 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 firebombed 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." The lesson here 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 planned 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. Well, he 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 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. And oh, you idiot." Fortunately for Les, Wahid he 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 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 the 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 on 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 picked a town though, the team still had to figure out who the 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 there feeling like they're at risk. And they'd be driving around for a long time to get to the extremes of the city and draw their map before they interviewed the first house. They're 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 he rolled in to 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 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 fifties 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 cards that said Doctor Abdul Salaam, that I was from Bosnia. Because that would explain me being a blue-eyed, non-Arabic speaking, but I could still be a Muslim and that would make me OK. And I was just so worried that 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 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 in to 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%. A 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. That's compared to just one violent death in the period before the war. Of those 21, two people died in firefights where it was unclear where the bullet came from. Three were killed by insurgents, or Saddam loyalists. Seven died from criminal violence-- carjackings, revenge killings, that sort of thing. And the biggest number, nine, were killed by the American-led coalition. 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. So 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, 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'd aim for 30 and pick 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 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 the 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 (SUBJECT 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 28th, 2004, on the day of the results of Les's 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-- Morning Edition and All Things Considered on NPR devoted 45 seconds to the story. 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's previous studies in Africa that he had 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 this study where 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 30th, 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's 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's 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 some time in the evening, and I had yet to read Les's 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, you know 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. And 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 last 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 list 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. Putting in hours, trying to get and kill Saddam Hussein and others. And after Baghdad fell and then on April 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. That literally, 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 is 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 target set better than anyone else. And he figured if there was going to be a war anyway, it 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're 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. 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 mixed emotions about the whole situation, the whole experience. What are those mixed emotions 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-- 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. 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. 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 it's 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 walk down to it, and we get to the bunker. And when we look down on it from the top, there's a whole 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'd 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 nanoseconds. Which is an incredibly short period of time, but it's enough that it 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. When I got there, I went into the hospital and spoke to the director and all the people in there. And 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 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 the weapons worked correctly, if the targets were correct, shouldn't you also be asking were your civilian casualty estimates correct? 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? Why do you even bother doing it? 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. When I was there I was wondering why isn't it done. And now I asked them why isn't it done, and why don't you do it. And I guess the answer that I get back just hasn't satisfied me. It's look, 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 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. 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's 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 at 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 of 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. 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's 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's estimate of 100,000 dead isn't very precise. The number could be thousands or tens of thousands 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 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 on 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 one 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. And well, how can we say that we are really looking after the well being of the Iraqi folks, 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 of what they do then. Also, we take a look at the new Lancet study. The sequel to the one you just heard about. It just came out two weeks ago. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Well 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 show, What's in a Number. In Act One of our show, we heard about the number of Iraqi deaths that occurred in the first year and a half after the US invasion. And this is no longer true in Iraq, but at the time, according to this Johns Hopkins Study we were talking about, the majority of deaths were caused by the US-led forces. Despite everything they did to avoid Iraqi deaths. Well, 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 10th, 2004, for example, insurgents blew up most of the police stations in this area. And the next day, Iraqi Army and police simply stopped showing up for their jobs. One town called Atha was especially troublesome. The 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. So we went in. And for weeks we'd go in there and we would try to 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, the 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 of my life. And the most difficult part for us was in the weeks afterwards. We have 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. And I know that we cannot bring them back. Only Allah can do that. But I hope to be able to help with the healing process. I'm also here to ensure this does not destroy the relationship we've established with people of Atha. 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 just seems like such an incredibly awkward thing you're having to do. I don't think awkward is at all the word you would use to describe something like this. It was possibly most emotional event of my life. Going out and dealing with these people in such incredible grief. Toman. Toman. Akmed. Akmed. Adur. Adur. Azisa. Azis. Aziseh. Aziseh. Aziseh. What happened after that? The way it works in the in the Arabic culture is, there's about a seven to ten 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 seven to ten days, you're thinking these people are deciding they hate us. And they're spreading word about how we killed these people. It's just the worst thing, from a propaganda point of view and winning over people's hearts. That's what your fear is. Well, 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're here to help them. Yeah. 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 seven to ten days. We 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-- it was eet with people, and begin to develop or rebuild relationships. And we continue to conduct operations, continued to pull bad guys out of the town. This is pretty much the standard way that he'd operated in these villages. He says, 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, hey, I just caught this guy, this guy, and this guy. And I found all kinds of explosives, threat CD's, beheading CD's 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, 48 hours you would go back into that town, in a town where kids would not even wave to you or kids 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 Atha, 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 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. 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, as we were 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. Captain Ryan Gist. He left the military in the Fall of 2006. He's now a law student at the University of Wisconsin. Though he still stays in touch, by email, with the Iraqis he knew in Atha. Act Three, The War This Time. So a couple of weeks ago, the Lancet published another study of deaths in Iraq by the same research team who did the earlier study. This time, the number of deaths that they came up with was seen as even more astounding than the first study's number. Over 650,000 extra deaths because of the war. 601,000 of those due to violence. This second study got slightly more coverage than the first study. A reporter even asked President Bush about it. Our producer, Alex Blumberg, examined the debate over this new study. And he called various statisticians and epidemiologists who looked at study. Well, if anything, the methodology is sounder in this study than it was in the last study. A lot of the critiques that were leveled at the last study could not be leveled at this study. For instance? For instance, one of the biggest critiques of the last study was that it had a very wide confidence interval. And in this study, the confidence interval is much narrower, because they went to a lot more places. In this survey they went to 1,850 households total. And the first study, they went to only 988 households. So the critiques that you've seen of this study, are there criticisms of this study or questions about this study that seem particularly compelling though? Everybody I talk to said that if you're doing this in a lab, you would do it differently. But almost everybody agreed that given that they were doing this in a war zone, the methodology was as sound as it could possibly be. And it's hard to imagine that any sort of bias that crept into the methodology could have accounted for a several hundred thousand person overcount. The fact of the number is so shocking to people who know about this stuff, that that's been the basis of criticism. And from groups that you would think would be sort of aligned with the Lancet's results. In other words, this group called Iraq Body Count. This is a group that's basically trying to do the same thing that these researchers are doing. Since the beginning of the war, they've been documenting every news report of where civilians are reported killed. And they've been keeping a running tally. And then, as the war progressed, and as they got more sophisticated, they started incorporating Baghdad morgue data into their into their tallies. And they've also started keeping hospital records. And the number they have on their website is around 50,000 civilians dead. That's their computation based on these methods. Based on these methods. Right, exactly. Which is less than a tenth of what this Lancet survey is saying they came up with. And they admit that they're doing an undercount. They admit that not every death is reported in the press, and that there's problems with the morgue reporting. So they know that they're under, but they don't think they're under by this much. So they came out with a detailed response on their website, and it's very compelling to look at. For instance. So one of the things that they do is they dig into the data. And so, they sort of go into the Lancet study and they say, on average, in the first half of 2006, according to the Lancet, 1,000 Iraqis have been violently killed every single day. With less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms. They're not showing up in the morgue. They're not showing up in the press. Nothing. They're not showing up in the morgue. Or they're not being reported by the morgue. They're not being reported by the Ministry of Health. They're not being documented in press accounts. Right. And then they sort of go on further, because the Lancet breaks down how people die. Of gunshot wounds, which they say that's very likely. It's very possible that you could miss a lot of the gunshot wounds, if somebody is being killed execution style and dumped in a river somewhere, maybe they never show up. But there's a certain percentage who are dying of car bombs. And what they say is, car bombs people notice. And that gets reported in the press. But even according to Lancet figures, if you extrapolate, even the car bomb figures aren't showing up. In other words, if the Lancet study is right. We should be seeing a lot more car bombs in the news and we're just not. And we're just not. Right. And so that's one thing. And then the second thing they say is that there should be a lot more wounded people. Because in modern wars, for every person that's killed, there is at least three that are wounded seriously. That's kind of a general rule of thumb. That's a general rule of thumb based on lots of lots of studies of wars. So for every death-- so if there's 600,000 deaths, there should be some much greater number of wounded people who are showing up. And they do some sort of rough calculations. And they conclude that conservatively, if there are 600,000 people being killed by violence, there should be at least 800,000 people seriously wounded. But if you look at the hospital records all across Iraq, you don't see 800,000 people as having been treated for shrapnel wounds and legs getting blown off and all the things that you would expect to find for this level of violence. And did anybody who you talked to have any explanation for how these numbers could be so high? Well, there's two possibilities. One is that Iraq Body Count has more faith in the reporting mechanisms currently existing in Iraq than they should. And that, in fact, even though it's hard to believe that 800,000 people are showing up at hospitals and that's not getting documented, it might be. The other possibility is that the data is wrong. Either people lied to them and told them that people in their household had died, and then somehow fabricated death certificates to support that. That seems impossible. Because they were randomly selected. So it's impossible that that happened. Or the surveyors themselves concocted data. Said that people died in these households when, in fact, they hadn't. I don't think that happened. I think that would be such a huge conspiracy and such a cover up. And such a risky thing for all these people to do. Because Les was involved-- Les, the guy in the story-- was involved in both of these studies. And he did go there, and he did risk his life. Right. If you're going to make up stuff, why go door to door in dangerous areas? Why not just sit in your office and make up stuff? And if you're going to go door to door, why not just get the data? Right. And if you're going to make up stuff, why make up a number that even the people who are on your alleged side are going to argue with you about? That doesn't make any sense at all. If he was going to fake the data, he would have said, there was 300,000 dead. And then everybody would have been joining in and saying, this is a horrible thing. Right. And instead, he comes up with this much larger number. It just doesn't make any sense. So if you're going to lie, do a better job. If you're going to lie, make it a more plausible lie. Alex Blumberg. Special thanks today to Jerome McDonnell and WBEZ's show Worldview, where you first heard Les Roberts. Thanks Ben Shapiro and Beth Osborne Daponte, Fred Caplan and Michael White, Nancy Yousef. Laura Poitras, who has a new documentary about Iraq coming out called, My Country, My Country. Jamie Tarabay, Adam Davidson, and people at War News Radio, including Wren Elhai. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life is made possible by Volkswagen of America and the Volkswagen Jetta, encouraging listeners to stop stereotyping. Learn more at thejettareport.com. Support for our podcast, our free podcast, comes from audible.com, where you can download audio books, magazines, newspapers, and radio shows, including archives from the last ten years of This American Life. Available at audible.com/thisamericanlife or at the iTunes store. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia. Whenever he finishes a budget or correctly orders a lunch, he calls me into his office, leans back in his chair-- And he looks at 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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Sometimes you set out walking briskly on the path to disaster, without even suspecting. Scott was 23, and he saw an ad in the paper looking for a German interpreter. He'd majored in German in college, lived for a year in Germany, speaking German. What could go wrong? The job was with the Detroit Visitor Information Bureau. And his first assignment was a bunch of tourists who were going to the Ford Wixom plant. He met them early, at the hotel. They seized upon me immediately and started asking me questions. And that's when I realized that I spoke Hochdeutsch or standard German, which is what you learn in school. And they spoke Austrian, which sounds completely different. And so I really couldn't understand them. But no time to worry about that. In minutes they're all put onto buses and off to the Ford plant. And I knew what was going to happen. It was gradually taking shape. But we went in and there was a conference room. A man from Ford was in there with his presentation ready to go. And he said, "So where's the interpreter?" And all the Austrians gestured at me. And he said, "Good. Shall we begin." So the man starts talking all this automobile industry jargon, sort of welcome to the Ford Wixom plant. I'd like to start by explaining how a catalytic converter is implanted on our power train which moves at an estimated 1.5 meters every 10 seconds, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he turned to me. And I just sort of stammered, "Dies ist eine auto Fabrik." This is an auto factory. It was somewhere around this point that Scott realized this was no idle group of Austrian tourists. These were people from the Austrian car industry. And somehow they had picked as their interpreter the one guy in Detroit who knew absolutely nothing about cars. So not only did Scott not know the German words for what they were talking about, he didn't know the English words. So I'm just standing there stammering idiotically. And they were all looking at me politely. And so it was a total free-fall, like if you just threw someone out on an opera stage and said sing opera. And let me just ask you like if it were a simple sentence like, our conveyor belt operates at three miles an hour, can you even say that in German? No. One of the Austrian women stepped forward, and she tried to takeover the translating. What Scott did would seem like the only reasonable thing at the time. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, snuck outside, found a telephone, called a friend to come get him, and he never looked back. He felt a little ashamed. But mostly he felt relieved. It was a good feeling. And can you say like-- people say a lot of about you're in a kind of a sink or swim situation and how gratifying it is to actually overcome all obstacles and to actually swim. But what you're describing, nobody really talks about how great it can be just to totally embrace utter and complete failure. Well, I started to sink in that conference room. And so I just got out of the water and ran. Which brings to the conflict at the heart of today's program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, Sink or Swim. We have three stories of people who get thrown in over their head. In one of our acts we have a guy who is not a doctor who starts doing something that even he admits only a doctor should be doing. In another, the entire world decides that a teenager is something that he feels that he is not. And Jonathan Goldstein brings us the story of the first global sink-or-swim. I'm talking of course about the story of Noah's ark. Stay with us. Act One. Mr. Central High. This is the story of somebody who gets in over his head, gets into water so deep that it is actually hard for him to make it, all by accident. He never intended for it to happen this way. Susan Drury tells the story. There's a famous photograph you may have seen. It's a photo of Bill Clinton as a teenager. He's standing in the Rose Garden, shaking the hand of then President John F. Kennedy. Clinton was in Washington, DC, because he'd been elected governor of Boys State in Arkansas in 1963. Boys State is a mock government program held in most states. And then there's another less famous picture. This time Clinton is President. It's 1998. And he's shaking hands with a teenager named Chauncey Julius, who had been elected governor of Boys State in Tennessee. And if you look closely, you'll notice that Chauncey is giving Clinton a confident two-handed handshake, the kind that Clinton was known for, like Chauncey might be the one in charge. This is a story about how Chauncey got to be in this picture and what happened after, none of which he expected. The story starts when Chauncey's in ninth grade. He lives in Columbia, Tennessee, in a rough part of town. His mom has a good factory job at the Saturn plant. But his dad is addicted to crack and is blowing all the family's money. Chauncey is selling drugs and skipping school. He is the picture of a kid going nowhere. But one day, he decides he wants something different. I remember the day that I stopped selling drugs. There had been a couple raids in the area. Police, and having to hop out of windows and run away so I wouldn't get caught. It was the next day after one of those raids. And I was sitting on the porch. And I remember it was around this time. It was around like sundown. And I wish I had it. But I have a little piece of paper that I still have. I wrote it in ninth grade. And on it, it has some goals. It talks about how I want to graduate from school, maybe go to graduate school. And I said that I wanted to be a CEO of a major-- at that time it was a cosmetic company because Boomerang was big. The movie Boomerang. And he was like the CEO of like a cosmetic company. So I said I want to be a CEO of Revlon or something. I think that would be awesome. Just the girls and everything. They'll like me. I just wanted to be like the guy in Boomerang. And that was that. He quit selling drugs. When Chauncey came back to school, it was the start of 10th grade. He had come out of ninth grade with only half a credit, mostly because he almost never went to school. He didn't know any of the guidance counselors. But he decided he needed someone to help him. So he walked into the guidance counselor's office. There he met this woman, Mary Ann Lynn. He came into the guidance office and said, "Who is the best guidance counselor in this office?" And the secretary said, "Well, Ms. Lynn is the most spirited." He said, "OK, that's who I want to talk to." OK. Let me point something out right here. If you had only gone to school basically to sell drugs for your whole ninth grade year, would you waltz into the office and demand the very best the school had to offer? Probably not. But here's the thing everybody was about to find out about Chauncey. When he needs to turn things around, he will find what he needs to get it done. Here's Mary Ann Lynn. He wanted to know if he had any kind of chance of getting to go to college. That he could not afford anything like that. And I said, "Oh, honey. Oh, yes." I said, "We will work on our grades. There's money. We dig for money." And he says, "I know I want that. I know I may not have the background for it." But he says, "I want that." I began to go to class. I began to go to school. That was a big step. I had to remember my locker combination numbers and dust my books off. Probably one of my priorities was to graduate with my class. The thought of being left behind that was a no-go. That wasn't happening. This seems like a pretty big transition to make when you're 15 years old. But there's something about Chauncey. He wasn't an ordinary kid. He was a kid so self possessed, so good looking, and so confident that everybody noticed him and wanted to know him. Even as a sophomore in high school, you wouldn't have known he was a sophomore. I mean he could come in and sit down and talk to you like he already had his degree. Now where he learned that or how he learned it at that time, I don't know. But I could see him being President or whatever. He just had a God given gift of charisma. If he had had on a neon sign, it wouldn't been any more clear. Chauncey got to work. He took as many summer school classes as he could. He attached himself to several teachers who acted as mentors and coaches. He was in a couple plays. He was on the football team and later became captain. He became a part of a group called Elevated Young Minds. And he went with this group on a tour of black colleges. He also became increasingly involved in church. And he even got ordained as a minister. One of Chauncey's classmates told me it was like Chauncey came out of nowhere, and pretty soon he was everywhere. The kids liked him. And teachers began thinking of him as a leader, as someone who would go somewhere, someone who could do great things. One day during his junior year, Chauncey was walking down the hall on the way to his English class when he saw Mary Ann Lynn in the hallway. Ms. Lynn said, "Listen to the announcements today when they come over the loudspeaker." I was like, am I in trouble? I didn't know what was going on. They caught me totally by surprise with this one. But I was listening to the announcements. And they said, Boys State delegates. My name was mentioned in there. And I was like, did they just recommend me for something? What is Boys State? Boys State is a big deal. Being chosen as a delegate means that the teachers at your high school think you're among most promising, the most impressive boys in the school. The program takes place over a week at a college campus. And the whole thing is geared around mock elections. Hundreds of boys representing every high school in the state are divided into towns, counties, that sort of thing. And the whole week is filled with campaigns for various offices, from sanitation chief to mayor to governor. So Chauncey went at the end of his junior year. He knew it was an honor, but it didn't feel like that big of a deal to him at the time. Mostly it just seemed like it would be fun. Like a long field trip where he would get to hang out in this little school. But Chauncey felt different once he got to Boys State. He was surrounded by all these boys, all of whom were smart and motivated and outgoing. And even though he hadn't planned on it, Chauncey decided he would just go for it and run for governor, the highest office. It was almost like he couldn't help himself. He announced his candidacy in front of hundreds of boys in a huge auditorium. Everyone who was running for governor is in this room. People just yelling out, hey vote for me. Side conversations and everything. People holding up banners. And people got their cronies and their little goons saying, vote for my best friend here. You hear all that added. The other people that was running, they come with all these supplies. Markers. They got construction paper, poster boards. Everything. They came prepped. And I had this little dingy t-shirt that I held up that I wrote with probably a Expo dry erase marker. I wrote, Julius for Governor. And I held the shirt up. And I remember the response. Boo, whatever. Put that shirt down. Ain't nobody voting for you. And immediately, something clicked on the inside. Don't tell me that you're not going to vote for me. Don't tell me that I can't do nothing. You're not going to tell me that I'm not going to win. Chauncey gave a terrific speech and beat out 11 other guys to become the nominee of his party. And as he headed into the general election, people flocked to his campaign. People were just doing crazy stuff like hanging out stuff from their room windows. And across the whole window, they'd hang out a banner that says, "Vote for Julius" or vote for-- And I'm just like, wow, I didn't ask the guy to do that. For the first time Chauncey saw all these people, not just teachers but kids now, pulling for him, doing things for him, just because he was him. He was shocked by it and overwhelmed. I mean what does it say about you when a guy you don't even know shaves your name into his hair? On the day of the election for governor, the other candidates nervously stood at the podium and read their speeches. But Chauncey took to the stage as if he had done it a hundred times before. By this time he'd already preached at his church. And he was really interested in leadership. He'd read all sorts of books on it. He grabbed the mike and walked the stage like a motivational speaker. He was a natural. And he had the audience, hundreds of 17-year-old boys, captivated. It was like it was in slow motion. I got up, and I just began to just go for it. Clapping, standing-O. Everything. It was just like a rush, an adrenalin rush. And where it was so much where I was almost about to pass out because the rush was so great. And it was like a drug. It was-- Wow! He won in a landslide. Chauncey came back home after being elected governor at Boys State. But his position in his hometown had changed. His win was important not just for him, but for lots of people in his town for lots of reasons. Colombia's just 30,000 people. And nobody from Colombia had ever been elected governor of Boys State. And here was Chauncey, the black kid from a tough neighborhood. The kid who turned his life around, bringing home the honor. It became a very big deal. The word is spreading. The word is spreading, even in my neighborhood. Even the people that's my friends that was out there still selling drugs. What you doing man? I saw you in the Daily Herald. You the governor? You won. You the governor now? They was like man, congratulations. The Chamber of Commerce threw him a big party and gave him a plaque. The County Commission named June 19th, Chauncey Julius Day. Chauncey spoke to the local American Legion, the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club. He is a story and a guy people could not get enough of. And though Chauncey had won a mock election for a mock office, he got some very real power out of it at his own school. Administrators asked him to help pick the new principal. And the student government appointed him to a special office created just for him. And when all the seniors voted on the superlatives-- you know, most likely to succeed, most popular, those sorts of things-- Chauncey won so many awards that the administrators had to call him into the office and tell him to pick just two, so other people could have some. He chose Mr. Central High School and Mr. Football. I got away with a whole lot more. Had a little bit of influence. Had a little bit of power. Had some connects. And I can get out of some things a little bit easier, after all I did. I was on the panel to decide who was going to be the next principal. So there was some arrogance there, a little bit. I knew some people. Didn't have to go to class as much because some of the teachers I had, had a hand in helping me go to Boys State. So it's like, it's Chauncey, he all right. But none of the success changed his home life, which was still as unpredictable and crazy as ever. Chauncey's mom, Deborah Julius, told me they lived in a house where you can go to the closet it to get your coat and find that Chauncey's dad had sold it for drugs. She never felt like they belonged in the circles Chauncey was now moving in. Here's Deborah. Part of me kind of, sort of wanted to say why did you do this? Don't get me wrong. I was happy. I was elated. What was happening to Chauncey was great, under any other circumstances, like if he had a dad that was prominent or if he had a dad that even had a good job and was just an ordinary Joe. If we were just a normal family and a functional family. Did you ever think they had it wrong? Every day. Every day I knew they had it wrong. I was same person that brought piles of weed past your doors when I was in ninth grade. Am I really a success? This is just high school, people. We're about to graduate. Not only that, but I'm going through hell in my home. So my grades aren't all that good. I'm still struggling at Algebra II. Will I pass Algebra II? I have a lot of flaws. Ya'll sure you got the right person? Chauncey was facing a whole community, everybody with these huge expectations. And at some point of his senior year, he couldn't do it anymore. He just wanted to disappear. Here's Mary Ann Lynn. We put him in a place where if he came down a notch, he would feel like he failed. I'm not sure we did the right thing on some of that. Then I feel like what happened to him and what happens to anybody in that situation is hey, I do have to be great. They've told me I'm great. I've got to be perfect. And there were still some struggles with some academics. And the background, he just didn't have it. So he had so much pressure on him to be great. I felt the pressure to perform, to perform in academics. The pressure for football. I was a senior. I was a captain. The pressure from friends, where you don't hang out with us as much as you used to because I'm really involved in school activities. And the fact that I'm trying to graduate. Prior to no one knowing my name, I didn't have these pressures. If he could just make it to graduation and pass all his classes, he'd have a full scholarship at Tennessee Tech, thanks to his win at Boys State. The scholarship was Chauncey's dream. But after three years of trying to play catch-up up with the rest of his class, at the end of his senior year he was still one credit short. And I didn't graduate with a diploma. It hurt. Embarrassing, because I was the poster boy. Didn't finish in what really mattered. I wanted that more than anything, to graduate. Here's Mary Ann Lynn. We kind of set him up for failure. Everything went wonderful. And then right before he went to college, it was like throwing mud in his face. So he went down. His feelings about school, about himself, and everything. How did I be so great and then all at once everything go wrong? Chauncey's successes had been very public. But his failure was pretty private. He was allowed to walk in his school's graduation ceremony. And hardly anybody even knew he didn't really graduate. The next fall, Chauncey got another chance. He showed up at college, took the GED test that weekend, and was instantly admitted. But within a couple of weeks, he stopped going to class. College was harder than he thought. And he felt like he had lost his momentum. He spent his time hanging out and partying. He basically fell off the map, like he had in ninth grade. And I had like a lot of support there. I just never used it. I thought that when you go to college everything you need to succeed, you already had to possess. And I didn't. And I felt that I was a fraud. I felt that I had let people down. I was like OK, I don't have what it takes. By the end of freshman year, he had lost his scholarship and was kicked out. He came back to Columbia. He half-heartedly took some classes at the local community college. He worked in a factory and at Long John Silver. Everyone in his hometown, the bankers, the preachers, the drug dealers, knew who he was and had thought he was heading somewhere. He went from possibly the most promising kid in town to just another kid with a GED and no plans for the future. Chauncey decided joining the army would solve his problems. He went down to the recruiter's office and signed up. Recruiters would love a person like this. I mean they didn't have to work hard at all. My recruiter was so laid back because he knew I was so-- He didn't have to work at all. Whatever he put in front of me, I did. I was like, whatever you want. You don't even have to drive me to Nashville to the medical station, I will run from Colombia. That's like 45 miles. And I was like, I will go. Whatever you need for me to do, whatever it takes for me to get away from here, and for me not to face the embarrassment of failing to this community, to my high school, to whatever it takes for me where you're going to enable me to run. I'm going to do it. Ten days later from the time I walked into that office, I was gone. And in the army, the trend that had started years earlier came back. His superiors saw in him something. Leadership, he says. Determination. But there was one difference in the army. Nobody cared about his potential, about what he might do. They only cared about what he actually did. Chauncey got sent to Iraq. And then he came back, got married, and reenlisted for another tour. In all, he spent six years in the Army. And he just got out. Things haven't turned out the way he thought, but they are turning out. For the first time in many years, he feels like he can return home with no shame. And I talked to a lot of my friends. And they say, Chaunce, I thought you'd be on TV by now. Like honestly, like we expected to see you on CNN. Like, what are you doing? They always want to know like what I'm doing. And I'm just, I was in the military for a while. I was in school for a while. And I went into the military. And went to Iraq twice. And I'm back in school. But I'm running my race. I had to learn that. I had to really learn that. And I think what people saw in me is happening right now. What they saw and what they saw can happen possibly is happening right now in my life. Chauncey's counselor, Mary Ann Lynn, has thought a lot about why it took till now for Chauncey to come into his own, about why things went so wrong at the end of high school for him. She's got a gift for finding kids who are about to fall through the cracks. And she makes it her business to try to help them. And when she looks at what happened to Chauncey, she thinks the adults in his life just got carried away. Probably the cruel thing-- Sometimes I've blamed myself with, OK, did I push him too hard and put him into a position that was so hard to survive? But we took him from just being a kid in school and kind of made him famous. And then he had all this stuff thrown at him. And I don't think we realized what we were pushing him into. Chauncey just started school at Kansas State University near Fort Riley, where he was based in the Army. Within the first three weeks of school, one of his deans told him they hadn't seen a student of his stature in 25 years. The dean predicted that Chauncey would take the school by storm. Susan Drury, in Nashville. Coming up, a former heroin addict gets into a situation where he has to invent for himself, on his own, the rules and procedures of being a doctor. 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 we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Sink or Swim. We have stories of people who put themselves into situations that they are completely unprepared for. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two. I'm Not A Doctor But I Play One At The Holiday Inn. Back in the '60s, a heavy drug user, a hippie, named Howard Lotsof, tried a powerful hallucinogen named ibogaine. Lotsof apparently had one of the most intense drug experiences of his life. And when it was done, the odd thing was he had absolutely no desire to ever use drugs again. Just wasn't interested. He stayed clean. And years later, he decided that ibogaine should be used to cure drug addicts. And so he tested and got patents for several different dosages of ibogaine. But for a variety of reasons it never got picked up by any of your mainstream drug companies. But ibogaine hung around on the margins. This drug, like it's supposed to be doing the impossible, especially for heroin addicts. You take it. You go on this intense trip. And at the end of that trip, you have no withdrawal symptoms. None. Nothing. And you also have no desire to ever do heroin again. Well, this brings us to our story, which was put together by Lu Olkowski and Trey Kay. Lu narrates. At his worst, Dimitri was living in his parents' basement in Detroit. He had been using heroin for 27 years. His wife had died. Many of his friends had died, and he was edging towards 40. That was when it finally hit him that it was time to do something. In 2002, Dimitri went to Amsterdam for an experimental ibogaine treatment. It was given to him by a woman who cared for drug users our of her thatched roof farmhouse, surrounded by her five kids. Thirty hours after taking the drug, Dimitri was cured of his heroin addiction, literally cured of his 27-year-old habit. He remembers waking up at the crack of dawn three days later and experiencing a sensation that he hadn't felt in years, joy. I have never felt that good in my life. Didn't need heroin. I was completely exhausted. And I just kept on saying-- I said praise God, over and over and over again. And one of the little girls-- I can't remember which daughter it was. She said, "We had a black man from the Bronx, and he kept saying the same thing. Praise God and praise God." Dimitri says a lot of people come out of ibogaine treatments feeling euphoric, almost evangelical. And Dimitri became a kind of ibogaine convert, determined to take the good news about this miracle drug that had instantly cured him, to other junkies. He knew tons of people back in the States that needed help. And as far as Dimitri was concerned, they weren't treated well by the traditional medical establishment. I mean my girlfriend works at a hospital. She comes back and tells me these stories. I've seen it. I've been in a hospital when I was an active user and fought with doctors for friends of mine. I had a friend of mine sitting home with spinal meningitis and aspirin because they didn't believe it. And he turned out to be HIV-positive too. And I take him in a second time. And got in a big fight with this doctor who started moralizing. "God only gives you three chances." None as an MD, but he knows how many chances God gives you. And so Dimitri decided to become an ibogaine provider himself, to save his friends just like the woman in Amsterdam had saved him. There were only two problems with this otherwise laudable goal. First of all, because ibogaine is a hallucinogen, it's illegal in the US. It's a Schedule I drug, like heroin. And if Dimitri was caught buying or selling ibogaine, he could go to prison for the rest of his life. The second problem was that by giving people ibogaine, Dimitri was basically doing the job of a doctor or nurse, without being either. Dimitri was a small-time rock star, bike messenger, dishwasher. He hadn't even taken a first aid course. And ibogaine is a potentially dangerous psychotropic. So for guidance, Dimitri hooked up with other underground ibogaine providers, former junkies like Dimitri who over several decades had developed a kind of ad hoc collection of protocols about dosage and care. And the first time he gave a treatment, it went OK. But with the second guy, a drug dealer who helped Dimitri find ibogaine and who actually referred addicts to him for treatment, it didn't go so smoothly, So we go through the process. He gets done with it basically. OK. This is my second treatment. And then he goes into a seizure, eyes rolling to the back of his head, foaming at the mouth, biting his tongue, a seizure. It was unbelievable. I thought he was dead, Long story short, I was freaked. And actually at that point I panicked. I didn't know what to do. This guy was going to die and what the hell am I doing? And this guy's going to die. And yeah, what business do I have to do this? Dimitri managed to get the guy to a hospital, where he eventually recovered. But this was the first time Dimitri realized exactly what he had gotten himself into. How crazy it was to be flying without a net, doing a job that put other people's lives into his hands. And this is the issue. Dimitri knows what it's like to be a junkie, to be desperate, frantic, to quit. And he believes that since he has what he thinks is a cure, despite the risk, it's his moral responsibility, his obligation really, to help. It's terrifying, man. And especially, you spend time with these people. You get to know people. God, you don't want them to die. You don't want them to be hurt in any way. Because Dimitri doesn't want his clients to be hurt in any way, he tries to be as much like a professional clinic as a former junkie with a by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation can be. He says he's even cobbled together a set of rules, more or less through trial and error. For example, a client should be clean of drugs and alcohol for a certain amount of time before treatment. They should get EKGs if possible and liver panels. And so just like he's had to invent nearly everything else about this job, he's had to invent boundaries for himself. Boundaries that are hard to maintain with everyone. They ring my doorbell, call me up in the night. I had a guy threatening to shoot me two weeks ago who had had a relapse. And this is like a real close guy, man. He wanted to [BLEEP] kill me. Having a client threaten to shoot you probably wouldn't be accepted in the world of professional medicine. But Dimitri sees addicts differently than most people do. He loves them. I interviewed him for a total of 35 hours over seven months. And here's how he described every single addict he knows. He's really a god. He's a beautiful guy. He's a great guy. He's a musician. He's a writer. He's an incredibly sweet man. And he's such a great guy. He's got great taste in music. He's read some great books. He's funny. He's strange. I like him, man. I really like him. One of the people Dimitri talks about this way, one of his clients, is Jimmy. Jimmy's middle-aged, clean cut, working class. The kind of guy you'd see working at the post office or sitting next you on a bus. He's clearly genuinely a sweet guy. But if you hang around with him long enough, you feel the dark cloud that follows him around. I talked to Jimmy a few days before Dimitri was going to give him an ibogaine treatment And he told me he had tried to shake heroin many times before. He'd done traditional rehab, and a whole array of alternative treatments. He even tried ibogaine once before, with another underground provider. According to Jimmy, ibogaine pretty much worked the first time around. He says after the treatment he felt no craving for heroin. The thing that made him relapse was the dark cloud, all the other problems in his life. Somewhere around three or four months when I started feeling a little bit lonely again. It's like, why isn't anything really happening? I mean I'm feeling all these feelings, but what's really changing in my life. I remember Eric was talking about a guy taking ibogaine. And a few months later he met a girl. He got married. So I'm like, when is this going to happen for me? And then I started getting to feel like, ahh, maybe I'm just the same old person, and there is no cure. Let's see where this knucklehead is. I'm standing on a street corner in the rain in midtown Manhattan with Dimitri. It's 5:00 PM, the time Jimmy is supposed to show for his treatment. But he's late. Dimitri is not happy. Just the week before, he was waiting for a client in the exact same spot and the guy never showed. It's not unusual. The flake factor is an occupational hazard when your entire client base is heroin addicts. But it still gets to Dimitri, who's always nervous and tense before a treatment. I'm getting hives, which is normal. You see. It's all over my legs and my feet. I get hives every treatment. Finally, three hours later-- three hours-- Jimmy arrives. There he is. [WHISTLES] Jimmy! Jimmy! We drive up and open the car door for Jimmy. [BLEEP]. Get the [BLEEP] in the car. Sorry for putting you through a lot of crap. What did you forget? That you're going to take like a [BLEEP] strong African hallucinogen today. It like slipped your mind? Yeah. I just crashed because I was like up all night. Oh, OK. At least you got some sleep. And then Dimitri begins the underground provider equivalent of an intake survey. You been hydrating yourself today? Yeah, sort of. When's the last time you used? Thursday. What time? 7:00 maybe, 8:00. OK. How many bags were you doing at the end? It really depended on how much money I had. I tried to hold a bundle through the whole week. And I ended up doing the whole bundle of in one day. I mean I can't hold onto it. It sucks. Yeah, yeah. As I listen to this exchange, it's hard to tell if Dimitri is getting any useful information. It's all so casual. Basically, Dimitri and Jimmy just joke around until we get to the hotel in New Jersey. A comfortable chain, where Dimitri has instructed Jimmy to book an economy suite with a small bedroom and a separate living space with cable TV. While Jimmy hangs out, Dimitri puts away some groceries and preps the room. I'm going to set up a bucket for him to puke in. I want to make the room as dark as possible. Good thing we're starting at night. Dimitri is careful to make everything as comfortable as possible for Jimmy. He even turns around the LCD alarm clock because he knows people are really sensitive to light when they're on ibogaine. Then he takes out about 20 capsules containing varying amounts of ibogaine. He leaves the pills on the desk and tries to figure out how much to give Jimmy. All right. I'm going to do about 16. [WHISTLING] Hmm, that's too much. Hmm. Can you see what you're doing? I'm going to give him a dose of like 16 milligrams per kilogram. I'm just trying to combine the pills so they add up to that. Yup, that's right. OK. You ready, buddy? Yeah, I'm ready. Jimmy strips down to his underpants and crawls into bed before taking the dose. His job is to lay there, as still as possible, in this dark room and let the drug take effect. Dimitri's job is to wait on the other side of the door in case anything goes wrong. After two hours, Dimitri goes in to check on his patient. Jimmy doesn't acknowledge we're there until Dimitri asks how he's doing. He opens his eyes and looks around. But just like a newborn baby, his eyes don't really focus on anything. Oh, it's really intense. It's really intense? Yeah. OK. Did you throw up a little bit? Huh? Did you throw up a little bit? Yeah. You're doing fine though, buddy. You're doing really good. Do you want me to get a towel for you? Huh? You want a towel? No. OK, buddy. OK. The treatment takes about 30 hours and is, at least for Dimitri and me, uneventful. We watch a lot of TV. Dimitri checks in on Jimmy and cleans him up when he throws up. Jimmy just lies there having visions, not sleeping, but not fully coherent either. Dimitri seems worried when Jimmy's finished with the treatment. Jimmy's isn't euphoric the way people usually are. Instead, he's kind of depressed and agitated. And after chatting a little bit, Jimmy reveals that he'd been doing coke the night before. I was getting high the night before. Coke. Oh, you did coke the night before. Yeah. I was smoking crack. Oh, smoking crack. Oh, let me tell you something. Don't smoke crack the night before. I actually prior to when you called me up, I was smoking crack. When you called me and asked me where I was. At 5:00 o'clock? Yeah. Oh, my god. Now remember that when we picked Jimmy up, he told Dimitri he'd been clean since Thursday, the day before the treatment. So did you smoke crack all night? Yeah. So you didn't get any sleep? No. I was smoking crack. So basically you haven't slept since Thursday morning. And it's Sunday evening. Right, right. So like, yeah, so you kind of had that crack ibogaine combo a little bit, right? Yeah. I was doing benzos and methadone too. Oh, really. How long? For about two weeks. Anything else? I mean right now it doesn't really matter. Just for my amusement. No, no. You weren't like sniffing shoe polish or anything like that? No, no glue. OK. All right. Dimitri was joking. But later when I talked to him, he copped to the fact that mixing all those drugs was a really bad idea. Something horrible could have happened. And so, the risk would be like heart attack? I don't know. I don't know. To be honest with you, I don't know. Maybe I should know, but I don't. When I went home, I called the doctor who does ibogaine treatments at a licensed clinic in Cancun, Mexico. He told me that because Jimmy had taken benzodiazepine, there was a serious risk of seizure and potentially death, which brings us back to Dimitri's constant dilemma. He knows he's doing a really risky job. He can't control everything. And the stakes are very high. And when I raise this with him, he suddenly seemed sad. I probably don't have a lot of business doing it in a certain sense. But there's nobody else doing it. And that it seems is the heart of it. No one else is doing it. So far everything's worked out OK for Dimitri. No one has been killed or hurt on his watch. In fact, he feels he's helped many people. And he likes doing this work. The actual work is basically touching people, cleaning people, nurturing people, holding people up, soothing their fears, being stern when they need some direction. And during the actual-- and being really patient and quiet. It's not about me. The job is to love these people, he says. But sometimes that's really hard. There are just so many addicts with so many problems. OK. This guy's got a probation officer. And he needs to do this, this, and this. But he doesn't have a house. And this other guy's homeless too. And she's got like all these abandonment issues. And then this one can't really get it, because to get off the psych meds would be too much. And on and on and on. All these people with really sad, hard lives. I think about like what am I really doing? How important is it? And I think about that a lot. I think I've said this many times. This is what I can do. OK. This little thing. This little thing. Dimitri just hopes doing that one little thing is enough. Lu Olkowski. She reported this story with Trey Kay. Contrary to what most people think, the years leading up to the great flood were actually quite joyful. The pre-flood generation saw that the random smitings, the slavery, and the back-breaking labor of the early days had left their forefathers bitter and hateful. And so they collectively resolved to live lives of greater ease. Work, they realized, was overrated. Two days of toil a week were plenty. In this way, they had time for hobbies. People drew pictures, played music, and danced. It was a golden age of art. And the pre-flood generation really felt like they were onto something. One man though felt that this whole business was ass-backwards and off track. His name was Noah. He was over 400 years old and was used to the work ethic of the good old days. Noah swore in his wrath that he for one would always remain old school and he would keep his children old school, by teaching them about the value of good, hard work. Noah and his sons were contractors. They built huts for people. Officially, the company name was Noah and Son and Son and Son. Though in private, Noah referred to his outfit as Noah and his good for nothing dummies. He called his sons dummies at least 100 times a day. Noah knew he disciplined his boys with great ferocity. But he also knew it was necessary. During those dark, evil days, one had to teach one's children right from wrong. And if that involved the use of straps, riding crops, thick branches, throat punches, and leg locks, so be it. That was what a father had to do. One day while yelling at his sons as they worked, Noah heard a voice. He could only hear it faintly, under his own words. At first he thought it was a whistling in his nose hairs. He pressed a finger to each side of his nose and shotgunned mucus onto the floor. But still, the ghostly voice below the surface of his own speech persisted. When he stopped to try and hear it better, the little voice would cease. Noah started to speak once more. And once more he heard the tiny voice behind his own voice. It was mumbly and high pitched, and he could hardly hear it. He kept his mouth shut for the rest of the day, communicating his wishes to his sons through a hardy assortment of lashes, sucker punches, and head butts. He put down his wine jug and waited for sobriety to return, whereupon he would take a long walk with Brandy, his beloved poodle. He would talk freely. He would see if the little voice still lingered. Several weeks went by, and the voice continued still. Eventually, Noah began to understand little bits here and there. Out in the woods, Noah would speak. I am talking. I am talking. Blah, blah, blah. My sons are dummies. Blah, blah, blah. I am listening, and I'm talking. Blah, blah, blah. And as he spoke, he could hear, "You must build an ark made of gopher wood. I will guide your hand to choose animals, which you will place within the ark. There is going to be a great flood. All will drown except you and yours, and the chosen animals." "What is gopher wood?" "It's this wood that gophers like." "Can I enlist the help of the dummies to build the ark?" "No. You must do it yourself." "Why build an ark?" "I shall bring a flood that will wipe out the world. The whole thing was a bad mistake, except for you. You I like." "Who are you?" "I'm the creator of the universe." Noah decided to set the whole family down and tell them what God had in store. I was just talking with the Lord, said Noah. And you know what, he regrets having made his children too. And he says it just like this. I will blot them out. The brothers looked at each other. "What does that mean, blot them out?", asked his son Shem. You take your thumb and you smoosh 'em into the earth like lady bugs. He's going to drown the whole world with his tears of rage. And after everyone's dead, he's going to start fresh. And guess who he chose to spearhead the operation? That's right. Me. Also, you virginal dummies have to get married so we can reseed the earth. Enough waxing the nimrod. Clean your toga and get out there. His father had had visions before. And so the prevailing opinion was that the old man was, once again, off his rocker. Of everyone, the family, the neighbors, the village at large, it was Noah's youngest son Ham who was the only one that sort of believed that his father might not be crazy. From what Ham had heard about God, he was a lot like their father. Tough, stubborn, and prone to yelling right in your face for pretty much no reason. To Ham, a flood didn't seem that out of the question. And God would have chosen his father, because his father felt just like he did. He hated his kids, and was going to teach them the meaning of righteousness by killing them dead. Sometimes when his father was hard at work on his ark, Ham would sit off to the side and draw pictures of it. It incensed Noah. Are you sick in the head, Noah would exclaim. Why would anyone want to make stupid pictures? Can you eat them? Can you build a house with them? Can you use your precious art to diaper your loins? As far as Noah could see, Ham's artist friends did not contribute much to society. Still, Ham liked them. He spent much of his time with a woman artist named Lila. Recently, Lila had covered an apple tree in bear fur and replaced all the apples with dead snakes. She called it the tree of knowledge. Ham thought Lila's work was provocative. And he thought Lila herself was possessed of a strange blond-haired, weasel-like beauty. While sitting together one day sketching pictures of Noah as he worked, Ham turned to Lila and said, "If somehow the old man is right about this whole flood thing, I'd like you to come and ride out the flood with me." Lila considered Ham's offer. Then she took his hand. When the ark was ready, Noah took to the task of gathering animals. After only one day of work, he already looked like hell. He appeared to be bleeding out of every pore in his body. He had two black eyes, three broken ribs, and his nose hung half off his face from a bobcat bite. So great was his pain, that after the very first day even Noah began to doubt whether he had actually heard the voice of God. "Is one obligated to trust the voice inside one's nose?" Noah asked himself. Maybe I am sick in the head. But what is there left for me? If I admit to that, it means the dancing dummies are right about the world and I am wrong. There is nothing left for me to do but to persist. And so he persisted. As Noah hunted around for animals, he judged them. He wanted to try and bring only the most worthy animals aboard his ark. He would stop by a group of rabbits and figure out who was a hardworking rabbit and who was a lazy, stupid dummy. Judging the rabbits made him feel a bit like God. He liked that. As he walked away with the ones he had chosen for salvation, he would look back at their brethren and shake his head disapprovingly. Goodbye, you dead dummies. And that was that. The flood started slowly. It did not seem biblical at all. The first day was nothing more than a drizzle really. Nothing to cause alarm. It continued like this for some time. We sure are getting an awful lot of rain for this time of year, people said. But eventually it got worse. The rain fell faster and heavier. Each drop fat with purpose and spite. Ham stood looking at the ark with Lila at his side. His father was already on board. He'd begun to live in there several days earlier as the very first drops of water fell. Ham turned his head towards the sky and felt the drops of rain pock-mark his face. He imagined them all in the ark. He imagined the aardvarks, the orangutans, the smell, the claustrophobia, his father's constant screams and shouts. He imagined himself deciding at the very last minute to forego the ark entirely and take his chances with the flood. The sky began to hemorrhage. All at once, the drops became indistinguishable one from the other. The water poured down like all the heavens had become an inverted ocean. Ham opened his mouth to scream and caught a yap-full of water. The taste reminded him of this time when he was 10 and had almost drowned at the beach. In a panic, he grabbed Lila by the skin of her bicep and together, they ran up the plank and into the cold, echoey darkness of the ark. The first hands he heard banging at the outside walls of the ark felt like nails pushing into his temples. Then there were more hands, pounding, punching, scratching. Then kicks and shrieking that even drowned out the sound of the rain. The worst was when Ham was able to make out individual voices. He could hear their neighbor [? Zebala ?] and her little daughter Ariel. They called his name. "Let them bang", said Noah. "God knows what he's doing." "You know, we can empty out the alligator cage to make room for a few more people", offered Ham. "The world can do without alligators." "And disobey God? You dummy. And you try reopening that door. Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass we'd be in for? No thanks." Noah sat down and ate apples in the dark, waiting for his ark to rise above the world. For 40 days and 40 nights, they rode the ark as the animals roared, whined, and screeched. Sometimes when things quieted down, Noah and his family pressed their ears against the walls to try and figure out where they were. Most often though, they just spent their time remembering. Ham thought back to the days he'd spent with his artist friends and some of the old crowd he ran with. There was Aloysius, who lived in a tree house and made big pots of bark soup for the hungry. And Gwendolyn, a young widow who kept her big fat baby in a sack on her back. And when she danced, you couldn't help but smile. He thought about every single person he had ever known, and how he would never see them again. Believing it might bring him some solace, Ham pulled out a stick of a sketching tool and some parchment, and went over to draw the puppies in their cages. He studied their faces. He tried to see what God and his father had seen in them, why they had chosen in these particular dogs over all the others. The two dogs paced about their cage. And as Ham watched them, the puppy that was slightly larger set upon the haunch of the other. And for no apparent reason, tore into it with nasty, purposeful bites. The smaller dog yelped, twisted its body over, and sank its teeth into the ear of its attacker. Flopped upon each other in this way, the puppies rolled across the floor. Ham turned away and walked over to the giraffe cage. There he found the long-necked beasts eye-to-eye, each trying to step on the other's hooves. He looked over at the tiger cage, where the tigers were scraping at the walls to get at the bear cubs next door. And the bear cubs sat stock still, eyeing Ham with hunger. Ham left the cages and went looking for Lila. She was sitting on the floor, painting a flower onto a rock she held in her hand. He knelt down beside her, put his face in her hair, and waited for the rain to stop. Jonathan Goldstein. He's the host of the CBC radio program, Wire Tap. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is always coming up and asking me, what is the point to all these radio shows that we do? Can you eat them? Can you build a house with them? Can you use your precious art to diaper your loins? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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You probably remember when those Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed caused so much anger in the Muslim world. Violent protests over Europe and the Middle East, flags were burned, Danish products pulled off shelves. It's blasphemy to depict the prophet at all. Many American newspapers would not reprint the Danish cartoons. And is this true for you? I am not actually sure I've ever seen any kind of picture of the prophet Mohammed, ever. Well with that in mind, it's kind of interesting to hear that there is a place in this country where you can see an image of Mohammed right now. There's actually a sculpture of Mohammed on display in Washington, DC. And not in some crackpot salon. This is actually in a US government building. And it's not just any US government building. It's the Supreme Court building. And it's not just any room in the Supreme Court building. It's actually in the room where the justices hear cases. You're a US Supreme Court Justice, you look up and to the right from the bench, and there's Mohammed. And hearing this, perhaps right now you're asking yourself the exact same question that Ibrahim Hooper had when he first heard about this. Why would they have an image of the prophet Mohammed in the Supreme Court? Unlike you, however, it is Ibrahim Hooper's job to get to the bottom of this kind of thing. Hooper, I should tell you, seems like an unusually cheerful man to have the job that he has. Every single day he goes off to work in an office with the not so simple mission of explaining the Muslim perspective to non-Muslims. I'm spokesman or communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And it was in this job that back in 1996, he first heard about this sculpture. And he looked into it. What you see when you go in to the Supreme Court is there's a series of sculptures around the top of the main room. And one of them is of the prophet Mohammed. And he is shown with a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other. He's actually one of 18 figures, all of them lawgivers throughout the ages including Moses and Solomon, Hammurabi the King of Babylon, King John of England whose seal is actually on the Magna Carta, Augustus Caesar who was the first emperor of Rome. You have Charlemagne, Confucius, Napoleon, basically all of them lined up in a row like it's a small, small world at Disneyland but for lawyers, OK? And they tell us it was designed to pay tribute to these people, including the prophet Mohammed. And we don't disagree with that. Now it's my understanding this has been there since the '30s. Yeah, and we almost hated to bring it up to them of this. If they really think it's there to honor them, it's like well what else are these guys going to complain about? Ibrahim says that the problem from a Muslim perspective was not just that they depicted the prophet Mohammed in this sculpture. But in this case in particular, you've got a somewhat stereotypical representation in that it has the sword and the Koran, which is often-- people make the stereotype of Islam was spread with camel riding Muslims going across the desert with a sword in one hand and the Koran in the other. So that in itself, along with the visual representation of the prophet, is a problem for Muslims. So, on behalf of his organization and American Muslims, Ibrahim wrote a letter to the Supreme Court. And he met with the Supreme Court staff in what he says was a very amicable meeting. And before long, he got an answer about the sculpture and a letter from then Chief Justice Rehnquist. They came back saying basically that because it was designed to honor the prophet, that it would not be changed. But that the literature describing-- it's called the North Wall Frieze-- would be changed to reflect some of the criticism. "Altering the stone carving," the Chief Justice wrote, would quote "impair the artistic integrity of the whole." And as to the fact that Mohammed was shown with a sword, Rehnquist said, quote, "I would point out that swords are used throughout the Court's architecture as a symbol of justice. Nearly a dozen swords appear in the courtroom friezes alone." And so, with that, the statue stays. But the official Supreme Court information sheet about it says, quote, "The figure above is a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor Mohammed and it bears no resemblance to Mohammed." And then it says, "Muslims generally have a strong aversion to sculptured or pictured representations of their prophet." That is, we know you are offended, and we acknowledge that. Now sit down. A bit disappointing, but at least we did what we needed to do. I have to say, the moral of the story is sort of dispiriting. It's one of these moments where people are trying to be inclusive. And even then, they screw it up. Yeah, and it's kind of a situation where people aren't quite understanding each other's perspective. We would hope that people would understand why we would raise objections about this portrayal. But I have the feeling that people on the other side are scratching their heads and going, you can't please them. We thought we were doing a good thing by putting in an image of the prophet Mohammed and still they don't like it. And how typical is this kind of thing? Well it seems to be getting worse as we go along. We had the recent situation where we had the imams praying in an airport in Minnesota. And that seemed to freak people out. And then they were taken off the plane. And from our perspective, who could object to somebody praying? But from other people's perspectives, they say, well they prayed before they crashed the planes into the World Trade Centers. Which brings us to today's program, stories of Muslims and non-Muslims shouting across a divide, trying to communicate with each other and not always getting their point across. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of today's show, forget about the problems of presidents and diplomats have being understood by each other. Why would it be so hard for Muslims and non-Muslims to get along in the fourth grade. Act Two, America the Ad Campaign. In that act, Shalom Auslander explains the difficulties of selling brand America to the Arab world, which he experienced in his job at a big ad agency. Stay with us. Act One, Which One of These is Not Like the Others? This is partly a story about Muslims and non-Muslims not seeing eye to eye. But it's also about how that kind of dispute can affect a family. And effect it in a really big way, a surprisingly large way. Alix Spiegel tells what happened. This sad story begins with a happy one, a love story set in a location not usually associated with love stories, the West Bank. It was there that Serry met her husband, a man with a wonderful sense of humor who, like Serry, felt strongly about his Islamic faith. Now because they were observant Muslims, the couple didn't date in the traditional American way. Instead, they met exclusively in the presence of family, talked, exchange philosophies. Serry was, is, an American, born and bred. But these restrictions didn't bother her, didn't faze her at all. I pretty much knew this was the person I wanted to have children with. I knew he was a really decent, to the core kind of guy. And it really didn't take long for us to realize, we were pretty much soul mates. So there really was no question that they would get married. No question that they would spend the rest of their lives together. The only real question was where to raise their family. On this point, Serry felt pretty strongly. When they were getting to know each other, her husband had shared horror stories about his childhood in the West Bank, stories of situations that Serry, who grew up in a large American city without being exposed to strife of any kind, had no interest in experiencing firsthand. So I convinced him to come to America. And I said it would be a perfect place to raise our children because they would never have to go through some of the things he went through as a child. Anyway, he was very hopeful. He came to this country on a very hopeful note. And we were really happy. We were really happy, very blessed. The couple started out in New York City, but after having three children, decided that they wanted a more suburban existence, a quiet place where their kids could play outside. Now let me clarify something about Serry and her husband. Though they were personally devout Muslims, they were all about assimilation. In fact, growing up, Serry had almost no Muslim friends. So when it came time to move, they didn't worry much about finding a community where there were people who shared their faith. Instead, they picked a small, prosperous town on the East Coast. There was no mosque around. The nearest mosque was actually about an hour from where we lived. We went there maybe sporadically. But it was never really an issue because we always thought we were free to practice our religion anywhere we were. And honestly, to me, I think it's very boring if I were just surrounded by Muslims. So I was actually looking forward to raising my children where we landed. The family spent four happy years in their new home, had two more children, a successful local business. And then came September 11. Like everyone else, Serry and her husband watched in horror as the towers came down, worried about their friends and family. And then, like most people, went back to their day to day lives. But suddenly, Serry says, her neighbors in her small town seemed to see her in a different way. They didn't return her greetings and stared at her hijab, the headscarf she wore out of respect for God. I saw it in people. I saw something that wasn't there before. And it was-- sometimes I would drive, and drivers in the next lane would give me the finger. Serry says she usually flashed the peace sign back, then drove away. But every time this happened, it absolutely floored her. It just didn't conform to her idea of herself. You mostly saw yourself as American, right? Yes, absolutely. I mean that was my primary identifier. Then almost a year after September 11, Serry got a very clear signal that at least one of her neighbors didn't see her as American as she saw herself. I got up in the morning and piled the kids into my minivan only to find out that our minivan had been vandalized. Our windshield was broken, and there was a note that was left on the broken windshield saying-- essentially ordered us to leave the country. Serry immediately hid the note in her purse, and tried to minimize the whole thing for the kids. I told them things would be OK. And I told them not to really talk about it to anyone. Why did you tell them not to tell anybody or talk about it? Well, I didn't want them bringing attention to themselves that way. As a mother, I just didn't want people to perceive us as victims, as people that this is done to. I was hoping it was just an isolated incident. And so that's what I told the kids. It was probably some maybe adolescent who had a bad day. So we chalked it up to that. Serry's husband, however, had a different view. Perhaps because of his background, perhaps for some other reason, he found the incident profoundly unsettling. But, like Serry, he minimized the situation in front of the kids. He never showed the children that he was upset really. He just told them, these things happen from time to time. Vandalisms happen unfortunately. And so the family continued as it had. In private, Serry and her husband prayed five times a day. But in the outside world, aside from the hijab Serry wore, they downplayed their faith, rarely talked about it. This was also true of their children. I really didn't have any Muslim friends. Really? No. This is Serry's twelve year old daughter, her eldest. I'll call her Chloe. Chloe, like her mother, is shockingly beautiful. So it's no surprise to hear that even though she had no Muslim friends, for most of her life Chloe was extremely popular. That's what her mother says, and Chloe agrees. I had a lot of friends. We were into horses basically. And we went over to each other's houses just to play with them, talk about them, and draw them. Because Chloe spent most of her life in the same town, growing up with the same kids, September 11 didn't really affect her relationships. Her friends knew she was Muslim, but clearly didn't care. They still went to each other's houses and played with their toy horses. At least that's how it was for about a year after the towers came down. Then, Chloe turned nine and entered the fourth grade. Chloe, who had always done well academically, was looking forward to going back to class. She thought it would be a normal school year. And in fact, when Chloe showed up in her classroom at the end of the summer, close to the year anniversary of September 11, things did seem pretty normal. I got to meet my teacher, and she seemed nice the first day, the first week. But it all changed on September 11, that one day. I picked up the children from school that day, and she was in tears. She was inconsolable. She wasn't even making sense. She just was crying and crying. Apparently, as part of the lesson for the 9/11 anniversary, the teacher in Chloe's class had passed out a book, a slim paperback intended to educate the students about the 9/11 tragedy. On the cover it was a picture of The World Trade Center in flames. And the first thing was, September 11 was a horrible day. Thousands and thousands died. And it said, "Who did it? We don't know, but here's a clue." Muslims hate Christians. Muslims hate Americans. Muslims believe that anyone who doesn't practice Islam is evil, and that the Koran teaches war and hate. There were three other people sitting at my table. And we were all just looking at the book. And I was glancing at their faces while we were reading it. And some of them-- their eyes started to widen, and they just kind of looked at me every time she said the word Muslim. There were some pictures of Muslim ladies wearing the headscarf, hijab. And some of them said, "Hey, those weird ladies. Her mom is one of them." And then they just all looked at me and said, "You're one of those bad Muslims, aren't you?" And I just said, no, no I'm not. Naturally, after hearing about her daughter's day, Serry called the principal, who was sympathetic but explained to Serry that there just wasn't much she could do. It turns out that this was actually a district-wide lesson, meaning that there was a book presented to all the fourth grades in the district. Now you might remember that in America following 9/11, there was an immediate press to construct some narrative about what had happened, a need for an explanation of why and what for. And so, all over the country in hundreds of school districts, educators set to work trying to pull together the few facts they had, assemble them into a plausible argument. Now from Serry's perspective, the version of the narrative presented to her daughter's class was visibly, plainly destructive. But when she confronted Chloe's teacher about the book, the woman didn't seem to agree. The teacher really didn't have any problem with it. She actually shrugged her shoulders and said well, this is the district-wide lesson. At that point, Serry's kids were the only practicing Muslims in the school. There was one other Middle Eastern family, but they were secular, and their children were younger, still in kindergarten. In fact, it was pointed out to Serry by school administrators, she was the only parent of any child in the school who had a problem with the 9/11 materials. And then the matter was pretty much dropped by the administration. But moving on was much more difficult for Chloe and her classmates. They all saw me as a different person. Before reading the book, I was just a normal child. And then, I turned into an Islamic extremist who hated the world and wanted to kill everybody. And there's a big difference there. That's when the taunting began. It was just overnight. They called me "loser Muslim" and "Osama." They said he was related to me because my mom looks different and she looks like his people. All my friends were starting to question me nonstop. And they were asking me, why does your mom wear that on her head again? And are you sure you're not related to Osama? It got so bad that when Chloe tried to explain to her best friend that none of this was right, that Muslims weren't bad people who wanted to kill everyone, even her best friend could only reluctantly agree. She said, "Well OK, if you say it, then I'll believe you. But it's in a book so it must be true." I didn't want them to think about it anymore. Maybe if I just changed the subject each time they brought it up, I could just move on. If we were in the library, I'll just pick a book and say, have you ever read this book? Let's look at it. Or we would talk about horses. But it didn't really seem to work. And so Chloe came up with a different strategy. She decided to renounce her religion. One day that fall, she sat down with her mother and explained that was it all just too much pressure. I just thought that I can't be Muslim anymore, because then everybody's going to keep bothering me. Everybody is going to make fun of me. And if I had a mom that didn't wear hijab, maybe they would feel that they could be seen with me and have fun with me. Did she seem sad when you told her that you didn't want to be Muslim anymore? Yeah, she seemed very upset. Serry was very upset. For her, faith in God was sustaining. It helped her get up in the morning. But given her daughter's difficult time in school, she and the rest of the family decided to make some adjustments. We didn't want to force it on her. So in a way, we all kind of stopped practicing the way we did before. They did nothing for Ramadan that year. That was one concession. There were others. And in this way, the family stumbled forward. October came and went. November came and went. And then there was December. In December, everything went downhill again. December 1, my teacher said, "We're going to be reading a Christmas book every single day. I have a whole collection. I have hundreds of books at home. And we're going to read them every day." Chloe says the idea of reading a Christmas book every day actually didn't bother her. She did Christmas activities every year, and her family usually went out to celebrate the holiday with one or another of their Christian friends. So Chloe wasn't worried. But then on the fifth day of December, the teacher brought in a book that talked about Jesus' blood, how the blood of God's only son could save you. And to underline her point, she used a visual aid. Here's Serry. Apparently the teacher had held up a candy cane, passed out candy canes to the class and said, "Look children. Let's reflect on the candy cane. It's in the shape of a J for Jesus. And it has red stripes signifying the blood of Jesus." Then, from her own words, she said, "Jesus' blood will save us all. So as long as you're Christian, you'll be saved and you're fine." And that really upset me a lot. I said, "What if we aren't Christians?" She said, "Well, just believe in Jesus and his blood will save you. Jesus' blood will save you." The kids of course picked up on this as well. And the idea that their classmate would go to hell was quickly incorporated into the daily teasing. But the response of her peers wasn't the real issue anymore. Chloe now had bigger problems. She was afraid that she and her family would burn in hellfire for eternity. Serry says she seemed to become obsessed with this idea. "Are we going to go to hell if I don't believe Jesus' blood saves me? Are we going to go to hell?" How often would she ask you if she was going to go to hell? Well during the last couple weeks of December, it was pretty much-- it was her focus. She started to get sick, literally physically ill. She would stay home for days at a time. Serry grew more and more concerned. And so over the December break, she set up a meeting with Chloe's teacher and the school's principal. Apparently, this meeting didn't go very well. Serry says the teacher seemed defensive and ended up leaving abruptly. Now I should say here that I did contact the school to get their side of the story, but they declined to comment because of a pending civil lawsuit. According to Serry, however, the meeting ended on a somewhat promising note. She says she left the school with the distinct impression that the problems between her daughter and her teacher would be addressed. This, however, was not the conclusion presented to Chloe on the morning of her return. Her teacher approached her in front of the class and said, "You need to transfer to a different classroom. Since you're so uncomfortable, I think you need to transfer to a different classroom." And Chloe said-- "But I'd like to stay here because all my friends are here." And she said "No, but I insist. You may go transfer to another classroom." But then some other children in the class called her "loser Muslim." "Get lost, loser Muslim. We don't want you here. Get lost." And my teacher was just sitting and watching. Chloe came home that afternoon and immediately got into bed. She didn't want to go to school the next day, told her mother that she never wanted to go again. But the night after she was told to leave, she got a phone call from one of her friends. Her girlfriend called her and told her she missed her. So that helped her to go to school the next day. But she went into school, and again the kids said "Well why are you here, loser Muslim? The teacher told you to leave. Why are you here?" When she had missed that day before and gone to bed, her teacher had told the class that she was no longer in their class. So when she showed up the next day, the kids wanted to know why she was back. So all through lunch, and then outside at recess, the kids were following her around, telling her she was a loser and they didn't want her in their class. When I picked her up and brought her home, she was still shaking and crying. And nothing, nothing stopped it. No amount of hugs, no amount of comforting helped. And it was so bad the next morning when she got up, the little blood vessels in her face had burst from just sobbing so hard. And she went to bed, and she didn't get out of bed for five days. It was around this time that Serry's husband also began to go downhill. Serry says that for some reason, watching his daughter's torment seemed to undermine his self-confidence in a way she could never have anticipated. It made him feel helpless. He just didn't know how to handle it. And he became very depressed, severely depressed. I mean I would go and run some errands, and then I would come back and I'd find her in bed and then him on the couch, just staring at the ceiling. Serry says her husband had never behaved this way before. No, no, never. He was the kind who would walk into the room and people would just start laughing. He had that effect on people. And he changed. I think it did effect him a lot. Chloe, like her mother, says she noticed a distinct change in her father during this time. She tells me about one sad day that winter, when her father took her and her sisters to the park. And I came up to him and I said, "Dad, you want to come play with us?" He said, "Um, maybe later. I don't feel so good right now." And that just became his answer to everything. He just sat in front of the TV or he went to bed. And I just thought that's not really him. I think it was because of what was happening in school. Because I think when he was younger, he went through the same thing. Because over there in Palestine, the Muslims are having trouble. And I just think he felt bad because I was going through it this time. Because of the strain, Serry and her husband began to fight, long arguments about where they had decided to live and the nature of the country that they had made their home. He thought it was a mistake that he had come to America. And that was difficult for me to hear, because I was the one who brought him to this country. And I was one who said our kids would never have to deal with anything like he dealt with. And so did you try to convince him, no this isn't really what America is like? Yeah, but it was really difficult to tell him that, when the reality was-- I mean our children, and it wasn't just Chloe anymore. It was even my other girls. Chloe's sister, [? Samia, ?] was punched in the face by the younger brother of one of Chloe's main tormentors. Then Serry's other daughter admitted that the boys at school had been harassing her. Every day or so after lunch, they would surround her on the playground. They would all point at her and make a motion of unzipping their pants and say, "We're all going to pee on her. Let's all pee on her." But the last straw, as far as Chloe was concerned, happened sometime in late March, the day after she had been transferred against her will to a new classroom. Walking down the hall, she spied the girl who had been her best friend in her old class, probably the only girl who had really stuck by her through all her trouble. But when Chloe waved, the girl didn't respond. I was just kind of thinking maybe she just didn't see me and hear me. But then when I went to lunch, I said hi again. And I went in front of her and I said hi. And she turned her head. And that's when I knew. Everybody has turned against me. I dropped out from there. I stayed home for a long time. For the rest of her fourth grade year, Chloe was tutored. The school found someone to come twice a week. Now I should say that while I was not able to speak to the school about what happened, the US Department of Justice, which eventually got involved in this case, was able to confirm the broad outlines of Chloe and Serry's story, including that the teacher behaved inappropriately by proselytizing during class time in a public school, and that the teacher's behavior towards Chloe contributed to an atmosphere in which Chloe was harassed by her peers. The man that I spoke to at the Justice Department was Eric Treene who supervises cases of religious discrimination. He told me that Justice first learned about Chloe's case during one of the post 9/11 get-togethers that the department now holds with a variety of Muslim groups. At one of these meetings, a woman from a Muslim women's group brought up this case and said, well is this the type of case you might be able to do anything about? And we said, well yes. We thoroughly investigated the situation. We believed that certain action, remedial action, was merited here. And we reached an agreement with the school district requiring such remedial action. In other words, the school district ended up settling the Justice Department's claims against them. Now because there was a settlement, the Justice Department can't discuss the details of the case. Can't tell us, for example, which of the allegations made by Serry and Chloe they were able to verify. Treene, however, was able to say this about what the school ultimately agreed to. All teachers would receive diversity training, as would all students. And then there would be, for this particular teacher, specific performance goals that had to be met and oversight. And they needed to report to us on both the general program of diversity training, as well as the goals set forth for this particular teacher. That agreement was reached in March of 2005. But according to Serry, by that time it was too late, way too late. See, during the summer after Chloe's fourth grade year, Serry and her husband decided to transfer all their kids to a different school. She says they wanted to start again. They met with district administrators and asked for a placement in a school where their kids would know that they were safe. But in late summer, the district people said that they couldn't offer any absolute assurances that the children wouldn't face harassment. And as far as Serry was concerned, that meant just one thing. The family would have to move. She couldn't take another year of turmoil. So over a few weeks' time, we literally packed up, and we pretty much were forced to leave. Serry remembers sitting down with her husband to try to figure out whether the family should move east, west, north or south. But her husband had a very different idea. When it came time for us to move from where we were, he wanted to leave the country, which I couldn't fathom. And so he wound up leaving us. He wound up just walking out one day. Serry naturally was devastated. She loved her husband. She loves her husband. But she didn't want to move back to the West Bank, and that was the place her husband yearned to go. He argued that at least everyone in the West Bank had the same problem, was in the same boat. And for him, that made the difficulties bearable. In America, he said, you face the same troubles, but you face them alone. Serry didn't see things that way at all. She says that because she grew up in this country, she just had a more subtle reading of what had happened to her family. In other words-- well I was born and raised in this country, and I'm aware of what makes this country great, and I know that what happened to our family, it doesn't speak to American values. And I feel like this is such a fluke. I have to believe this is not what America is about. I know that. But I don't think that's the same for my husband. I think he came to this country with certain hopes and dreams, and it was pretty much a big letdown. Today, Serry lives alone with her five children in a small apartment about an hour away from her old town. Instead of being a full time mom, as she was for over a decade, she has two jobs and goes to school at night. This means that she rarely sees her children. To keep up with their lives, she has built a mailbox for the kitchen counter. She asks her kids to write her letters about their lives, what happened to them during the day, week. And then, late at night after they've gone to sleep, she sits alone in her bed and reads them. She says that when they don't make her cry, they make her laugh. It's been almost a year since her husband walked out, went to live with a cousin in a distant state while the family tries to figure out what to do. Serry says that every night she prays for him to come back to her, but they only talks sporadically. Still, she hasn't changed her feelings about moving to the West Bank or her interpretation of what happened to her children and family. I have to believe this was a fluke. I have to. Otherwise, it's really hard to keep moving forward. But I also think it's a sign of our times. It's happening all across America. It's not just happening in our little town here. We hear stories of different things going on in schools, and places of employment, and public places, in restaurants. From his post at the Justice Department, Eric Treene, in his own way, has seen the same thing. There's been a dramatic rise in hate crimes since 9/11 against Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, who are often mistaken as being Muslim, and South Asians. And sometimes people with dark skin, such as a Portuguese man, just because they're perceived to be Arab or Muslim. In fact, says Treene, since 9/11, one in five of the complaints reviewed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission involves a case of discrimination against Muslims. That number, one in five, is of course totally out of proportion to the number of Muslims that live in America. As for Chloe, she's now happy in her new school, and so far hasn't encountered any problems. She's even gone back to being Muslim. I pray and occasionally will go to the mosque and everything. And we celebrated Ramadan. And how did that feel? It felt good. But, she says, she never acknowledges her religion to her new friends, or really to anyone at her new school. It just wouldn't be a good idea, she tells me. We're still going through war and everything, and it's just so a bad time. Alix Spiegel in Washington, DC. Coming up, now a quick word from our friendly sponsor, who happens to be the world's only superpower. How to explain America in 30 seconds on television to people far, far away. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life from Ira Glass. Each week on our program we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Shouting Across the Divide, stories of Muslims and non-Muslims trying to communicate with each other, and running into some difficulty sometimes doing that. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, America the Ad Campaign. Not long after September 11, as the United States started to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, there came to be a great interest in this country in bolstering America's image abroad among people who did not seem to see us the way that we see ourselves. We wanted to change that. And one man who got swept up in that effort was one of our regular contributors here at our radio show, Shalom Auslander. Here he is. I worked for an advertising agency in New York City. A major soft drink company needed some commercials for the urban youth market. This meant black kids. They wanted a magic liquid campaign. This meant that someone in the commercial would drink the soda and become magically transformed. The unhappy would become happy. The stupid would become smart. The unpopular would become beloved. I showed them some commercials a week later. One commercial took place at a swimming pool where the kids were unhappy. Then they drank the soda. Then they were happy. A long, uncomfortable silence filled the room. Finally, the chief creative director spoke. "Do black kids swim?" he asked. A long debate followed. I hated my job. Three months after 9/11, a meeting was held in the chief creative director's office. America had an image problem in the Muslim world, and the State Department had asked a number of advertising agencies to help fix it. Our agency was one of them. "It wasn't just a chance to help the country," said the chief creative director, "it was a chance to help earn some positive PR for the agency by doing something good." As he spoke the word good, he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. Nobody wanted to work on it. There were a half dozen senior creative directors below the chief creative director, each of whom was responsible for his or her own accounts. Their job performance, salaries, and raises were evaluated in terms of how much money their accounts made or lost over the course of the year. "I don't have time for this pro bono crap," said one. "I mean, I'd love to help, but my software client is up my wazoo with a pitch fork." Others nodded. "Are they doing TV?" asked one. "It's possible," said the chief creative director, "but it won't run in this country." Everyone groaned. If the ads didn't air on American television, then they weren't eligible for American advertising awards shows. Most of the creative directors bailed. I was a freelancer at the time, a hired gun. I worked on whatever they told me to work on. The briefing would be later that afternoon. The chief creative director followed me out the door. "Don't let this interfere with the soda account," he said. "We really have to nail that." I decided to get some lunch. A message was waiting for me when I returned. The account director on Project Dialogue had phoned. That was the code name for the brand America account, Project Dialogue. I phoned her back. "Do you need an Arab?" she asked. "Hello?" "Do you need an Arab?" "I don't need an Arab." "OK" "Thanks though." "If you need one, let me know. We can get you one." "I'm good." I took a bite of my chicken sandwich, and flipped through the newspapers and magazines that had collected on my desk. Advertizing Age had a cover story on why it's so hard to cram the benefits of brand USA into a 30-second spot and what might work. They had interviewed famous creative directors across the nation. "You have to infiltrate their lives," said one. "You set up events. You show them movies." He suggested Boogie Nights. The Project Dialogue briefing was supposed to begin at 3:00, but trouble on an international cosmetics account pushed it back to 4:00. And news of a possible fast-food pitch pushed it back again until 5:00. Finally, at 5:45, the creative director arrived. He glanced at his watch. "Christ almighty," he said. "Let's get this over with." The lights dimmed and the Powerpoint presentation began. As with any other target audience, Muslims had been divided into a few different groups. Likely to agree, the moderate Muslims. Unlikely to agree, the radical Muslims. And the undecideds. A red arrow appeared beside the word "undecideds" and began to flash. "This," said the strategic planner, "is our sweet spot." A few slides later, the undecideds were further broken down into three more subgroups. The hero worshipers, the economic hopefuls, and the future seekers, each of which was divided again into another three groups, all nine of which would require their own distinct form of messaging. "What's the message?" someone asked. "We don't know," answered the strategic planner. "Do they like humor?" someone asked. "We don't know." "Do they trust commercials?" "We don't know." "Are there any commercials they do like?" "We don't know?" "Is a direct approach the best?" "No." "How will they react to an indirect approach?" "Badly." For a group of people setting out to convince another group of people how much we had in common, we didn't seem to know the first thing about them. And I was no exception. The only footage I had ever seen of Afghanistan was of madrassas. Row after row of children rocking back and forth reciting passages loudly from the Koran, a sight so eerily similar to the childhood I'd spent locked up like a veal in an orthodox Jewish yeshiva that I wanted to bomb the place myself. The strategic planner told us that basic messaging concepts were still being tested in focus groups in Egypt and Jordan. And we wouldn't have the final strategy until the following afternoon. The basic function, though, of all communications would be to convince the Muslim world that we all wanted a better life, and that freedom and democracy were the best ways of achieving those desires. I realized that if you switched freedom and democracy with cool and refreshing, it was pretty much the same strategy as the one I'd been given for selling soda to African American kids. But I thought it might be best to bring this up after the meeting. "So what do you think?" the creative director asked me after the meeting. "I think it's the same strategy as the soda account." "How is that going?" he asked. "Good," I said. "I've been thinking. What if we change it from a swimming pool to a picnic." He thought about that for a moment before frowning and shaking his head. "No good?" I asked. He continued shaking his head. "Black kids don't have picnics?" I asked. "More urban," he said, "you know, like fire hydrants." "Fire hydrants?" "Yeah," he said "you know, when they open the fire hydrants. When it's hot." "Sure," I said. "When it's hot." I assumed we would cut before the cops came and started beating the kids with their night sticks. He nodded, growing increasingly pleased with his idea. "I like that," he said. "A bunch of kids in their bathing suits, jumping around a fire hydrant. We'll get somebody good to direct it. That could be nice, don't you think?" I nodded. "Do black kids have bathing suits?" I asked. "I mean, if they don't swim?" "I like that," he ignored me. "I like that a lot. "Write a few more like that, will you?" "Sure," I said. "How's Friday?" "How's tomorrow?" he asked. "Tomorrow," I said, "no problem." The following morning I was sitting in my office writing commercials about black kids and fire hydrants when there was a knock on my door. I looked up to see a man roughly my age with dark skin, slicked back hair, and a drawing pad. "Shalom?" he asked. "I'm Sabhi." I rose and shook his hand. "You must be the Arab," I said. "I'm the Jew." Sabhi was from Lebanon where he had studied graphic arts at the University of Beirut. I asked him what life was like there, how people felt about America, how they felt about their lives and their future. He told me there was a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. There were economic problems, governmental problems, social problems. I asked him what the cause of the problems might be. He told me it was the Jews. "The Jews?" I asked. "The Israelis," he said. He explained that according to Islamic legend, the prophet Mohammed said they would never be peace in the Muslim world until three cities were under Muslim rule. They currently had Mecca and Medina, but Jerusalem was still controlled by the Jews. "The Jews?" I asked. "The Israelis," he said. "And so," he added, "that's why there can be no peace for Muslims." An awkward silence followed and an unexpected disappointment overcame me. I realize that as naive as it might have been to think that advertising could solve these century-old problems, a small part of me, and a large part of the US government, hoped that it could. That something, anything, might be said or filmed or edited into a 30-second TV commercial that would undo all that had been so horribly done, and that would avoid all the bad that seemed so certain to come in the future. Unfortunately, I was raised with orthodox religion. And the minute I hear people talking about prophets and holy cities, I lose all hope. That, combined with yesterday's discussion about whether black people swim, and if they do, whether or not they own bathing suits, had caused me to wonder whether we could ever understand the person living right beside us, let alone people on the other side of the world. "Well, you've got Mecca and Medina," I offered Sabhi. "Two out of three isn't bad." He kind of laughed. I kind of laughed back. Then he left. The telephone rang. "How did it go?" asked the account director. "Fine," I said. "Was it helpful?" "Very," I said. "Should I get you another one?" she asked. The focus groups in Jordan and Egypt had not been very helpful. The moderator had shown a number of different boards to a number of different Arab men ages 18 to 34. The first board read, "Children deserve a happy future. And in order to have a happy future, people must be free." "Do you agree with this statement?" asked the moderator. Everyone nodded. "But we don't have freedom," said one, "because of Israel." Everyone nodded. The moderator held up a second board. "We all deserve happiness," read the board, "and part of happiness is having the freedom to pursue your business and economic dreams." Everyone nodded. "We could pursue our economic dreams," said one, "if it weren't for Israel." This continued for some time. It continued with women age 18 to 34. It continued with men age 35 to 50. It continued with women age 35 to 50. "Were they all like that?" I asked the strategic planner. He nodded. "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Get off this goddamn assignment," he said. There was a four o'clock meeting later that afternoon for me to present my new soda commercials. I made my way to the creative director's office a few minutes early and asked if I could speak with him. "I can't work on this America thing," I told him. "Why not?" he asked. "Did you come up with anything?" "I've got a slogan," I told him. "Two out of three ain't bad. It's about the holy cities." On the television behind his desk, Geraldo Rivera was reporting from Tora Bora. "We want Osama bin Laden behind bars," said Geraldo. "Or six feet under. Or maybe just one foot under. Or maybe just a pile of ash." They cut back to Laurie Dhue in the studio. "Well said Geraldo," said Laurie Dhue. The creative director sighed and shook his head. "It's hopeless, isn't it?" he said. "Mankind?" I asked. "Yes," I said, "it is." We went into the conference room and I presented my black kids around a fire hydrant commercial. For the next 20 minutes, 15 Caucasian people sat around a long, oak table discussing whether or not fire hydrants were racist. And if they weren't, would black kids have bathing suits, given that they don't swim? I still hated my job, but at least I was off the America thing. Within a few months, everyone was off it. After dozens of focus groups and tens of thousands of dollars, the only conclusion anyone could reach regarding the question of how to speak to Muslims was that nobody had any idea how to speak to Muslims. It wasn't long before the department within the State Department that had been charged with this assignment was dismantled. A few projects survived. Some radio stations were jammed. Some leaflets were dropped. Then Iraq was invaded. Then Shiites began killing Sunnis. Then Sunnis began killing Shiites. Maybe it was naive, but five years ago when all this was happening, someone said, let's talk to Muslims. Lately, more and more people are saying, let's not. Let's let Iran talk to them. Let's let Syria talk to them. Let's let the Muslims talk to themselves. My fire hydrant commercials never ran either. In the end, it was felt that the fire hydrants might be perceived as racist. And they were replaced in the script with swimming pools and diving boards, scripts a moderator then showed to a roomful of African Americans age 16 to 21. "Do you like these commercials?" the moderator asked. Everyone frowned. "Black kids don't swim," said the African Americans age 16 to 21. Someone suggested the location should be more urban, a city perhaps, maybe a fire hydrant. The moderator nodded. A few weeks later, the project was reassigned to an African American agency. It was thought best that they talked to themselves. Shalom Auslander. He's the author of a book of short stories called Beware of God. A new book about his own very strict religious upbringing comes out next year. Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Cathy Hoang. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia. You know he just invited me to his house party for the weekend. A bunch of kids in their bathing suits, jumping around a fire hydrant. That could be nice, don't you think? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Peter has been on the job for 20 years. He's got the uniform. He's got the office in the basement behind the laundry room. He's got the keys. That's a lot of crap on there, but hey. Let's just count them. Let's basically count them. Yeah. All right, so you got your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. This is a keyring that is so big that it not only has tons of keys, it also has smaller baby key rings-- subsidiary key rings hanging off of it, each with its own keys. And almost none of these keys has any kind of label indicating what it is that it opens. And have you ever seen a guy carrying this kind of thing, and you've wondered, OK, well, how does he remember which key goes to which lock? Oh, wait a second. Peter's nearly done counting. 45, 46, 47, 48, 49. It's about 50 keys. He actually skipped a lot of keys. Anyway, I was saying, if you ever wondered how he remembers which key goes to which thing, Peter says 3/4 of these keys, he has no idea what they're for. Every time I change a lock or I get a new key to this or that, it just gets added on there. I never took the time to take the old ones off. Practical. Above all, Peter is a practical man. In his line of work, that's essential. He's a super, in charge of keeping the elevators humming, and the boiler going, and the roof from leaking, and the sidewalks clean, and 100 other things every single day. He works at a fancy building on New York's Upper East Side. Or maybe I should say it's a medium-fancy building, fancy enough that Woody Allen and Mayor Giuliani shopped for apartments there, but not fancy enough that they actually moved in. To hold a job like this for very long, even in a medium-fancy building, you have to sweat the details of everything. My compactor room, a woman could give birth, no infection would set in. Come, I'll show you. He uses a key from the part of the key chain where he knows what's going on. And suddenly we're in an immaculate room with concrete floors. Oh my god, it's so wonderful in here. [INHALES] And this is the garbage room. It doesn't smell like garbage. No. You want to go up to the roof and oil the circulation pumps with me? That really has to be the worst pickup line ever. We dropped by the pump room to check some gauges, and then we head back into the elevator and pass one of the doormen who works with Peter. Martin, your parole officer called. Give him a call. Martin smiles. The doors close. So can you joke around with the tenants in this building? Not like that. No, you don't want to go there. I'm pretty friendly with some of them, but there's a line. Yeah. I tell these guys, you've got to keep it short and sweet. Good morning. Good evening. How about them Knicks? Happy holidays. Martin's kind of new. He wanted to say Happy Hanukkah to a few people. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No Merry Christmas, no Happy Hanukkah. It's happy holidays. Oh, but, uh-- I said, no. You're going to miss. You're going to miss. I'm telling you, you're going to miss. You're going to throw one the wrong way, and it's going to come back. It's delicate, dealing with the tenants-- surprisingly delicate. People in the building gossip about him. Then he's got his own secret thoughts about them, too. For today in our program, we have stories of the super. He sees everybody come and go. He knows way more about the tenants than they know about him. I mean, Peter has a security camera, for God's sake. He's on call 24 hours a day. He's both a figure of authority and kind of an in-house servant. From WBEZ Chicago is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in three acts-- three very dramatic acts, actually, starting-- let's just get right to it-- starting with this one from Jack Hitt. His act is like an epic novel with plot twists, and unforeseen danger, and bizarre coincidences, and unlikely heroes, and even more unlikely bad guys. Here's Jack. During New York City's great crime wave of the 1980s, getting an apartment was simple. All you had to do was commit a crime. We had heard from a friend of a friend that if we went down and gave key money-- that is to say, one month's rent, it was the going fee-- to this superintendent-- that is to say, Bob-- that we would be able to get an apartment. This is my friend Kevin. He and I got our apartments in the same building on 99th Street in the early '80s by bribing the same superintendent, a guy named Bob. These were old beat-up flats with screaming radiators and warped floors and exposed pipes. A city engineer once inspected the building and declared that it was six stories of dust, held up by 100 years of paint. These were our first New York apartments. We were there to start our lives. New York was all romance, and everything was outsized and outrageous-- the buildings in Midtown, our ambition, the nightlife, and as we quickly discovered, our super, Bob. All sorts of things about him were truly spectacular, like, for example, the way he repaired our apartments. Here's Chris, another tenant in the building. After we got burglarized, Bob put in safety gates for the fire escape, which he welded so that nobody could get in, but you couldn't get out in a fire either. There was no way to open them. He told us that they were installing sliding revolving doors, which he never explained what those were, but I do remember thinking to myself, how can he say they're sliding revolving doors? But he said it with such a totally straight face. Bob's work habits were a thing of wonder. I remember one time, Bob showed up with his assistant, a generally talented guy named Smitty. My sink was backed up, and Bob started pouring this heavy black liquid from a gallon jug into the standing water. Smitty started backing up, and with experience as my guide, I started backing up, too. "One cup," Smitty yelled, "just one cup." "Shut up," Bob explained. And he emptied the entire jug into the water. There were nasty rumblings. Hot chemical reactions were happening somewhere in the walls. I was very scared. And suddenly the doors below the sink where I kept my cleaning stuff, they blew open with an explosion. And this unspeakable oily sludge poured out across the kitchen floor. Bob was so much more than just a bad handyman. Very early on, I began to perceive Bob's talents as a fabulist. It was really painful to go down and pay the rent every month. You had to give it to him, which meant you had to stand there and listen to 10, 15, 20 minutes of completely insane stories. A big running theme was Bob's importance in the world in general, and particularly in Brazil. I definitely remember his cattle ranch stories. This is Anne, another tenant during those early days, and now married to Chris. He had seven cattle ranches, four cattle ranches he owned in Brazil, and the seven vineyards he had in Italy. Or it might have been seven cattle ranches in Brazil and four vineyards in Italy. If you actually took him-- after he left the room and you thought about what he said, you'd think, why is he living here? Because he was like basically a king. The village people would just welcome him. He claimed that there was a clause in the constitution of Brazil that gave him immunity from any prosecution whatsoever. And that, in fact, he could, as he put it, go and kill the president of the Brazilian state, and he would still be immune from prosecution. Of course, Bob, being Bob, had an explanation for how he went from being a South American cattle baron to a New York City super. He had had two heart attacks, and his doctor had-- this is an actual story. His doctor had prescribed that he gain a lot of weight and move to America. So probably the first time in medical history that enormous weight gain was prescribed for a heart condition. In his own way, Bob united the building. All of us, the elderly black businessman, the Puerto Rican grandmother, the handsome Bombay immigrant, me, the Southerner in exile, we all had our favorite Bob stories. We all did our own impersonations of Bob. It was impossible not to try to out-Bob whoever was talking with an even more outlandish Bob story of your own. We collected and traded Bob stories, comparing versions, analyzing his technique. He was remarkably unfazed by any show of skepticism about his stories. There was the story about how he had once hung a bag of acid from the roof of the building to chase away the various homeless men who would, in those days, often come and congregate by the edge-- the corner of this building. Bob had supposedly hung a bag of acid from the top that would drip down steadily on them. Now I have no idea how you hang a bag of acid-- how you get the acid in the bag and put that up there. That's no small feat in itself. But of course, the best part is Bob is telling us this story at the very same time that you could lean out of the office where he's talking and see the three or four homeless guys sitting on the corner-- Sitting right there. --apparently completely unscarred or bothered by dripping acid. The other story that I've always found really captured just sort of like all of Bob's essence for me was when-- every kitchen in this building has these funny, circular fluorescent bulbs, very specialized light bulbs. They're also in the hallways out on the first floor. And mine, after 10 years of noble service, finally burnt out. And I looked at it, and I thought, huh. Where do you buy one of those? So I trotted on down to Bob's office one morning, and I said, Bob, the light bulb in my kitchen has burned out. And I'm just wondering, do I buy that and replace it? And if so, where do you buy them? Or do you all just replace that for me? And of course, he went into this total Bob tear. He was like, yes, that's right. You, let me tell you something, mister. Don't try to steal one of the light bulbs in the hallway. I know what you're thinking. But I've booby trapped them. And if you climb up there and you try to take the light bulb, it will blow up and shoot the glass in your eyes. And you will be blind for all time. Yeah. And I said-- I remember saying, so I take that to mean that I have to buy the bulb myself. The very opposite of Bob was Allan, the landlord. If Bob was larger than life, Allan was smack in the middle, the average percentile. He had a family. He lived in White Plains. I had met his wife. Doing business with Allan was a completely routine experience. If it was a toilet to be fixed, he'd make sure the crew got there on time and got it done. Even in our biggest blowouts, he was always reasonable, civil even. One time, things got a little testy when Allan started neglecting the old Puerto Rican folks in the building. I'd become friendly with one grandmother, who showed me her tub full of green stagnant bathwater. Allan and I had some tense words, and I and some others even held meetings to start a rent strike. But in the end, Allan gracefully withdrew, and we all went back to normal business. Back to Bob-- the inscrutable, endless mystery that was Bob. Fast forward to 1989. I'd been in my apartment eight years. I had a steady job, and I was walking to work one morning. Somewhere along the way, I saw The Daily News blaring the latest tabloid crime story. Headline, "Terror Landlord." I looked closer and realized it was Allan-- my Allan, the landlord, the nice guy whose kids I knew. The story was incredible. He had been arrested for murder for hiring hitmen to kill his brother-in-law, Arthur Katz, in 1980. And as the story got out, it quickly became clear that Bob was the one who had ratted Allan out. Allan was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, where he remains today. More time passed. I got a new apartment in the West Village. Then I got married, had children, and later moved to another state, where Allan and Bob became memories, proof that I lived in New York back when crack was king and the murder rates topped 2,000 a year. In the late '90s, almost a decade after I'd last seen Bob or Allan, I was working on an investigative piece about money laundering, and a source at the Treasury Department had suggested I call this really smart prosecutor in New York named John Moscow. So I rang him up and started just yakking, the, way you do. I asked him if he'd handled financial crime a lot, and he was quick to say that he'd worked homicide in New York back in the '80s, during the crime wave, when crack was king and the murder rates topped 2,000 a year. Yeah, I said. I lived there, too. I told him I was actually involved in one of those tabloid stories, mine involving a landlord who had hired contract killers to murder his brother-in-law and then gets ratted out by the super. There was a peculiar pause on the phone. Then Moscow said, Allan Stern, West 99th Street? I'm the guy who put him behind bars. Right away, of course, we started talking about Bob. I told him the light bulb story. Moscow had a good laugh. And then I went on in the way we residents of 99th Street can do. I finally get to the one about Bob claiming that he had a special exemption from the Brazilian constitution and could murder anyone in Brazil. Again, there was that odd Moscow pause. And then he said, yeah, the thing is, that one's kind of true. I asked him, when you were in the military, where were you assigned? I was in the military police. Here's John Moscow, describing Bob's testimony on the witness stand. And what was your job? My job was to locate, interrogate, and execute politically unreliable persons. Get out of here. Bob had been in the Death Squad in Brazil. And he was asked, did you kill any people while you were there? Yes. Was it more than one? Yes. Was it more than five? I don't know. What do you mean, you don't know? Well, if you shoot somebody at long range, and they go down, you don't know if they're dead or wounded. There comes a point when you realize that beneath all of the fanciful stories, there usually is a substantial amount of truth. He said he came north for his health and perhaps to protect his heart. But he was thinking about high impact lead poisoning. Apparently, a number of-- now he was in his 20s when he was in the Death Squad. And he realized at one point that a substantial number of people in his squad were dead of violent causes, which would be consistent either with their being suicidal in the risks they took or with somebody having a list of the names and where they were located, someone whose relatives had been mishandled. So he decided that leaving was good for his health. All those crazy Bob stories we swapped for years, who'd have thought that the truth about Bob would be just as crazy? According to Moscow, not only had Bob been in the Death Squad, but he had been a key figure in the murder of Allan's brother-in-law. Bob was crucial in securing the talents of the two hitmen named Sammy Feet and Crazy Joe. And according to the court documents, Bob was in the boiler room with some of his crew when news of the hit came down. They celebrated with Martini and Rossi. And things really got going when a portable radio just happened to belt out that Queen song. You know the one. The hit was just one of numerous crimes-- brilliant crimes, really-- that Bob and Allan pulled off from that little office. It turns out that when it comes to crime, Bob was incredibly competent. He and Allan set up dummy construction companies. They defrauded the state with counterfeit charges. To force out one tenant, they rewired the electrical outlets to high voltage lines to fry all the apartment appliances. My favorite was their natural gas scam. They put fake cones out on the street and actually jack hammered through the asphalt to a working gas line. They bypassed the meters and in time, eliminated more than $800,000 of Allan's gas bills. On top of all this, Bob helped the prosecution snare Allan. Bob tapped Allen's phones. Bob wore a wire. And in court transcripts, Allan calmly weighs the relative merits of buying off some people versus having them killed. And this is what really comes across when you talk to Moscow-- just how wrong all of us were at sizing up Bob and Allan. We had 2,200 homicides in New York, as opposed to fewer than 500, which is what we're on for this year. You had a lot of people talking about killing people. There was a certain rationality and cold-bloodedness about this murder that was just plain different. And I just-- Bob testified under oath at trial. I watched him when he was being cross-examined. And I don't think I'll ever forget. Defense counsel asked him, did you torture men or women? And he said, my specialty was men. And the way he said it, my blood felt about 10 degrees colder. And there was just absolute-- the courtroom-- everyone was persuaded that he meant it. So how did Bob, former Brazilian Death Squad officer, rat out Allan? Bob, I think, called tips to report the murder. Tips? Right. You mean like the 1-800 number or one of the local crime reporting-- [INAUDIBLE] tips or whatever, yeah. So he calls that. And then he goes and makes an appointment and meets with the Major Case Squad. What drove him to turn Allan in? Allan and his family had discussed selling the building and moving to Florida. And in the course of that, Allan had discussed having the president and the vice president of the Tenants Association murdered. And Bob figured that Allan was going to have these two guys whacked and blame Bob. What year was this? This was 1988. Now I only bring that up because there was a-- at one point, there was a rent strike that was going to be put together in my building. And I was the tenant leader of that. I mean, was that the rent problem that Allan was upset about? Unless there was another rent strike. Wow. So Allan might have actually tried to get me whacked. Ultimately, Bob went into the police station and admitted his own role in a murder and thought he was going to prison because his perception at the time was that Allan would cause these murders to take place. And so he protected himself by ratting Allan out first. So Bob turning state's evidence basically saved my life, or the life of the tenant organizers. That was Bob's thought. I found Bob. I reached him on the phone, and we had a nice chat. He remembers me as the tall blond guy on the first floor. He wanted to talk to me for this story, but his lawyer told him, not today or ever. And then Bob suggested that I not bother to call back. I wanted to ask him about the cattle ranches and being written into the constitution and give those stories a fresh listen, knowing what I know now. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was the one who was going to get whacked. I wasn't the only tenant organizer in the building at the time, but I'll never get that answer now. All I have is another Bob story, full of details I can't confirm, but so delicious that I can't wait to go back to my old pals and tell it to them. So this is one of the lawyers talking to Bob during the trial. When you began your testimony on direct yesterday, you told us about your military experience in Brazil. I would like to-- Chris and Anne live in Queens now. I read to them the court transcripts that John Moscow had told me about. More than one. Was it more than 10? More than 10. All right, let's go on. Did you torture both men and women? My specialty was men. Holy [BLEEP]. Was he making this up or-- No, OK. No, I-- This is the testimony that-- this is-- I mean, it's under oath. Wow. You've taken it to a whole new level, sir. Holy [BLEEP]. That is scary. Whoa. But it does make you sort of go back and rethink the whole pattern of exchanges you had with him. I never come in-- like, I never said to myself, there's some reality to who this guy says he is. I mean, I used to get furious at him. But to think, oh, I was talking to a murdering torturer-- He was definitely toying with us. Yeah, but now it's a different level of toying. Instead of just being some [BLEEP] it's like he's a professional. I feel like-- I'm sitting here amazed now that we weren't killed and tortured. We were only psychologically tortured, but he-- I mean, this could have been a very horrible story. You know what? Our current super is looking much better. It doesn't surprise me, in a way. Again, here's Kevin. I mean, it's like, talk about the banality of evil. He strikes me as one of these Eichmann type characters, who would, in certain contexts, do completely awful, disgusting things. And then if removed from them and put in some more m banal surrounding, would settle back and just be a windy superintendent of a building. It was kind of interesting, though. After this was all over, after he had testified and Allan was put away, of course, Allan's daughters, I believe, then owned the buildings. So of course, Bob lost his free apartment and his super's position. And it was almost like he kind of deflated. Nobody had to talk to him anymore, so he would walk around-- it was almost pathetic. He'd walk up and down the block and say hi. And people would just kind of go by-- nod to him and go by. And then after a short time after this, he just wasn't around anymore. He was gone. And I have no idea where he went to. Where is he anyway? Did you find out anyway? He's an elevator inspector in New York City. Good God. We're all in trouble now. I found Allan also at his website, allanstern.net. He's been appealing his conviction for over 15 years. He makes the case that he's innocent. His argument is that the entire story of Sammy Feet and Crazy Joe and the explanation of the brother-in-law's murder and all the rest of it is hearsay, a grandiose fiction. In other words, Allan is saying, he can top us all. That he's the victim of the most outlandish Bob story ever told. Jack Hitt. He now lives in New Haven in a house, where he is his own super. He's also the co-host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Uncivil. If you haven't heard it, seriously, give it a try. He's currently developing a new podcast. It's been many years since we first reported this story. In 2014, Allan Stern was released from prison. Bob, as far as we can tell, is no longer an elevator inspector for the city of New York. John Moscow is now practicing criminal law in Manhattan. Coming up, a super gets a crush. 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 a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Super. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Super Duper. We now move from a story about an East Coast super to a story about a West Coast super, from Alex Blumberg. Josh lives in a Spanish courtyard building in Los Angeles, a city in which even apartment buildings act like they're on TV. It's a little bit like Melrose Place, a lot of communal activity. And sort of presiding above it is the super. He's not really a super like you would have in maybe a larger building or a larger city. He's-- A larger city than LA? All right. I guess more like a dense urban city, is what I meant to say. But so he doesn't have, like, a tool belt and show up and fix things. But he'll sort of call the guy who does that. And he takes the rent. And he is kind of a solitary guy, for the most part. He sort of likes to spend a lot of time reading and stuff. So he just kind of like hangs out up there in the building. Josh and the rest of the tenants in the building like their super, whom we'll call Dave, and hung out with him. At the time of the story, Dave was going through chemotherapy for leukemia. And occasionally, he'd call different residents to ask for help with things. One Christmas, he contacted Josh. He calls and he says, this really weird thing happened. And I came over to his apartment. He had this orchid that was sitting on the table next to him. And he said, well, I had this visitor. And it was a very strange visit. And he started to tell me that a couple of months ago, in between chemotherapy treatments-- he'd had two chemotherapy treatments. And so he was out somewhere, and he was in his Land Cruiser, I think he has. And he was at this gas station, and he sees this woman pulls up in a big black Escalade. And she's on the opposite side of the pumps as him. She was an older woman, but he said very elegant and attractive in the elegant older woman way. And she had fancy clothes and, like, furs. And I think he mentioned that she had espadrilles on. And she was in this black Escalade, so she seemed to be classy or something, or well off. And so they're standing there at the pumps, and they start chatting. She initiates conversation with him, and they're getting on very well. And then he told me that she said something about him being bald, which was from the chemotherapy. And she said, are you bald from the chemotherapy? Or are you just bald because you think it's sexy? Something like that. And he was not offended by that. He thought it was kind of like this romantic repartee or something. And then she gives him a card. And the card was sort of like an old style carte de visite that just had her name. It wasn't a business card that had a company or information on it. It was just sort of like a calling card that you used to leave at the door of Count Vronsky's estate when you would stop by or something. And so he remembered thinking that that was kind of a classy touch. And very mysterious. Very mysterious. And so then he gave her his information. And they parted ways. Until Christmas, two months after their first meeting at the gas station, when the mysterious lady called out of the blue. She'd asked how Dave was, and he told her about his recent health problems. An infection from the chemotherapy had turned serious, and he'd spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in a near coma. That's terrible, the lady said. Is there anything I can do? Can I come by and visit? Dave said yes, and so she'd arrived that morning dressed in the same elegant manner as at the gas station, bearing the orchid which Dave now had on his table. And they'd sat and chatted. Somehow, the topic of fate came up. And that was the point when she said, I know this is kind of a weird time, but I actually have something I wanted to share with you. And he says, what's that? And she says that she was abroad with this group of investors who had developed this really interesting investment opportunity. And she says, I know that this is a weird time. But this is very exciting, so I feel like I should just let you in on this investment opportunity right now. He was a little surprised. And but he said, oh, all right. So what's the investment opportunity? And she said, well, I've gotten involved with this very canny group of investors. And it seems that they have located this snowman that can bench press 400 pounds. What? Yeah, so-- I said-- so then I'm asking, OK-- well, what do you mean? What kind of a snowman? It's hard to exactly figure out what the proper follow-up question is. Yeah. And so I said, well, OK, so, like, it's the Abominable Snowman. He's like, no, no, no. She said it's a totally normal snowman with a carrot nose and the coal for the eyes and a top hat and everything. It's just that this snowman can bench press 400 pounds. And so then-- but so I'm saying, well, OK, but what-- what's the investment opportunity? Is he running a hedge fund or what? I mean, I don't understand. And then he said, no. See, what happened is the investors, they've got it all worked out. They're going to put together a variety show with the snowman as the lead act. And then they're going to take the snowman show on tour. And so the investment opportunity is the geographic territorial rights to the show. So when the show goes to different states, you get to reap the rewards if you've bought into the rights to the show. So the woman said that she had already-- she got in on the ground floor with this thing. And so she got California and Nevada, like the west. So he said that the United States was all snapped up. So but now Indonesia is wide open. For the variety show starring the weightlifting snowman? The weightlifting snowman. Yeah, so the price for Indonesia's territorial rights to the show, to the snowman show, were not cheap. It was like $30,000 or something. OK. So what I don't understand, though, is if you actually discovered a snowman that had somehow become animated, it seems like the last sort of thing that you would do is then design a variety show for it. I know. Well, right. That is what I was asking him. I said, well, listen. Wait, hold on a second. Isn't there going to be-- there's going to be a lot more important things happening than publicity for your variety show. Because the whole world is going to change. Science will have to readjust everything it's ever known. All the various theologians of the world are going to have to deal with the news, like animated snowman world. Right. They would have to really sort a lot of things out, just even the basic question of, well, how-- did the snowman roll himself up into three balls and find a carrot nose? And like, how did the investors find the snowman? That's the other thing that I was curious about. Were they driving around the woods and they just saw this snowman lifting logs, and they high-fived each other and said, all right, we've got a variety show? Like they're in a caravan of black suburbans with their cigars, like, we did it. The weird thing was even though Dave found the story of a weightlifting snowman just as preposterous as Josh did, he seem somehow persuaded by this mysterious woman. He said it was hard to explain, but he felt like he'd known her his entire life. And he looked at life differently now, anyway. He said something about how after-- when you get cancer or something like that, a serious illness, you just start to re-evaluate things. What might have seemed risky beforehand isn't now. And so he said, I kind of just felt like maybe there was a reason to take a risk. Maybe there's a reason I met the woman at the Shell station, and maybe this is kind of a risk to take. And then that's basically when he said, so I wrote her a check for $30,000. Oh my God. What did you think? I was alarmed. And I was worried that it was a con, and obviously. Right. But I kind of actually was a little bit convinced by his whole theory. I was thinking like maybe it's not so bad. Right. Thinking it's sort of his money and-- Right. If that's how he is going to sort of embrace life after cancer, then who am I to say? Right. So I kind of felt like I had to accept that. Over the next year, Josh told the weightlifting snowman story to everybody he could. He loved it. And his audiences seemed to love it, too. At one point, he decided, with Dave's consent, to write it up for a magazine humor section. The final step in publishing it was to have it fact-checked. And so the magazine called Dave. He called me and said, so the magazine's fact-checkers called. And I told them what I'm about to tell you, which is that I actually made that whole story up. And there was no lady with the carte de visite or espadrilles or furs or the snowman. Did you ask him why? He just thought that it would be a story that would amuse me, and he was absolutely correct. I guess he had no idea how successfully that story was going to appeal to me. And so, I mean, I kind of bought it. I mean, the idea of you lived to be in your middle ages, and you kind of never took any risks, and then things get totally-- the perspective refocuses in such a way that a weightlifting snowman makes as much sense as anything else. I kind of like it. You kind of like it that he created a world in which it made sense to spend $30,000 on a weightlifting snowman? Yeah. Yeah. Huh. In a weird sense, you were the con. Yeah, I mean, it was like a double reverse reveal at the end of some movie, where I would have been writing some check for like a million dollars at the end, right? Because somehow I got sucked into the whole thing. But you did get sucked into it. You wanted it so bad. I think part of what I love about it-- and maybe you do, too-- is just sort of the image of the snowman, like this stick-armed, carrot-nosed snowman actually just lying on a weight bench in the middle of the Siberian wood. Well, also bench pressing in particular is like, you require a bench. So I still don't understand. Let's say they found the snowman in the woods, then did he have his own bench? Was it made out of snow? He wasn't doing squats. Alex Blumberg talking with Josh Bearman. These days, Alex runs the podcasting company Gimlet Media, the home of Reply All and Heavyweight and The Nod and many other shows. Josh has been a regular contributor to our show. And these days, he's a producer in the new Apple TV series Little America, which comes out next month. Ken Hunter was the super who made up that story about the snowman and who had a real talent for telling outrageous and ridiculous stories. There's no easy way to say this. He died a few years ago. Act Three, Please Re-Lease Me. That's re-lease me. We changed the names of the people in this story to protect the tenants involved. Sometimes somebody tells you your future, and you do not want to believe it. You can't believe it. When Dennis was 21, he became the super of this apartment building that his dad owned, a big 100-unit building in what was once a rough neighborhood. And his dad gave him this warning, father to son, super to super, about the tenants. They will make a good person bad. Maybe you go into the landlording and business and you have good intentions and you're a good person. But people-- the lies they tell you, the tricks they play on you, the damage they do to your property, you will eventually lose that innocence and become a meaner person. I was like, wow. That kind of sucks. I hope that never happens to me. Dennis always figured he'd be a different kind of super than his dad anyway. His dad had been a plumber. Nothing made him happier than fixing the plumbing and the washing machines in the building. And his dad had some old world ways of doing things. If somebody was causing trouble, selling drugs or making a ruckus, he'd pound on doors and get in their face if he had to. The neighborhood was slowly improving, but when he first bought the building, people didn't care what the lease said or didn't say, and he had to deal with a lot of things man to man. Dennis, meanwhile, was just out of college. His dad had scrimped and sacrificed to put him through Catholic schools, all the way from elementary up through his undergraduate degree. His mom-- his parents were split up-- his mom had always been a devout Catholic, communion every day. And all that stuff that the Jesuits taught Dennis in school about being a good person, he took it to heart. One of the things that go into the Jesuit University is just like, they want you to be men and women for others. Not that everything I did, I tried to live up to that high standard, because I know I couldn't. But that was definitely in the back of my head. Which brings us to our story. At first, the super job went great. People liked Dennis. He got Christmas cards from families in the building. But there was this one couple. They had lived in the building for almost 20 years, since back when his dad first bought the place. They were long-term tenants. They were good tenants. They were nice people. In the beginning, it wasn't too much bad you could say about them. And your dad liked them. Yeah, my dad liked them, yeah. He lived below them, actually, so he liked them. Literally lived right below them. My freshman year of high school, I lived with my father, so I lived below them, too, for a year. And so I saw them, and they knew who I was. I mean, even before that, even before high school, when we were little kids, we'd be running around, playing in the courtyard, hanging from the trees. But yeah, I mean, they were a regular fixture. But everything for this couple changed when their daughter died. The woman quit her job to go to school. They threw all of their savings into that. But she had trouble with the classes, couldn't make the grade. And things just kept going downhill from there. She started drinking. They got behind on their rent. She'd drop off a check to me. And then a day later or two days later, she'd call me and say, hey, did you deposit that check yet? And I was like, no, we haven't deposited it yet. Well, could you tear up that check and let me-- I'll give you another check. Forget about that check. And so then we'd tear up that check, and she'd bring down another check. And then that check would bounce. And I think they got to maybe like $4,000 in the hole. Oh, wow. So they were behind $4,000 in like-- Like six months. Six months, yeah. A half year behind. Yeah. Wow. I was like, Dad, we got to kick these people out. We got to get rid of them. And my dad was very reluctant to do that. And he was like, work with them. Work it out. Work with them. Now why? Like, why? Well, he knew that her husband had a good job. And he knew that they had money coming in and that you could get money out of them, basically. Oh, I didn't realize that. So it becomes a test of you. The problem wasn't them. Because they've got the money. The problem is you, his son. Yeah, so it's like, how good are you? Dennis wanted to do right by his dad. He wanted to do a good job. Remember he had never had a job before. He was still living with his mom, and now he was in charge of his dad's business. When it came to this couple, he was just flailing around. And he wasn't exactly sure how to get money out of them. But he decided he was going to do it. And he remembered his Jesuit teachers. I thought to myself. I'm like, it wasn't my job to ease these people through this or get them through it. But I know that if I was in that situation, if I was down on my luck, that I would want somebody to cut me that break or cut me that slack. So he sat down and he created a payment plan for them, a few hundred bucks every paycheck. But it was incredibly hard to make them stick to it. They had excuses. They couldn't do it. So he sat them down again, and they made up an agreement. And this time, they put it in writing. And then after month upon month of struggle-- it took over a year-- they finally paid it all back. Then things were OK for a while, but slowly but surely, started falling back into their own ways. And basically what I think it was the alcohol, basically. I remember vividly that she would come down to the laundry room. The laundry room was just outside the office. And she would go to the vending machine and buy can of pop after can of pop after can of pop. And I always thought that was so weird. I was like, why is she buying, like, eight cans of Sprite or Coke when we're right next door to Walgreens, and she can just go buy a 12-pack? And I think what it was, was she was just getting Cokes to mix drinks with up in her apartment. I just remembered that being so weird. So Dennis watched and worried. He worried a lot. Anybody who knew Dennis that time would tell you. It was all he talked about. He'd go out with his friends, and this is what would be on his mind. What should he do? Was he being a sucker? What was going on with this couple? It was the kind of worrying that you might expect from a family member or something. And of course, he was just the super, the property manager. And things got worse. At one point, another tenant found the wife passed out in the hallway of the building, lying there like she was dead, covered in vomit. Dennis ran to her side. And I was like, oh my God. What's wrong here? What happened to you? And she's just like, [GROANING]. She can't talk to me. She can't put a sentence together. She's just slurring all her words. And so I was like, what do I do? I'm like, do I take her to the hospital? Do I call an ambulance? Like, well, what do I do? And anyway, she's like, I just need to go to bed. And so she was too drunk to basically open her door. So I got her into bed. And she's in bed, and she's laying on her back. And I'm like, I've heard stories. Like, this is how Jimi Hendrix died or something like that. And I'm like, what if she pukes again? Is she going to choke on her puke? Finally I get a hold of her husband, and he's like, all right, I'll take care of it, I'll take care of it. But he's at work, and who knows when he's going to get home to take care of this? I'm down in the office, I'm trying to do work. And so I went back up and checked on her a couple of times. And she's sleeping, and she's breathing. And so then I go back down, and I can't get any work done because I was like, God, if this lady dies, I'm never going to forgive myself. I just remember that being a really terrifying experience. It's so weird because part of it is like, you have this business relationship with these people. But you're there in their building. Like, you're there in their house. Like, you own their house, you know? And so it's so personal. Yeah. Well, you definitely can't avoid it, so you've lived side by side with them. It becomes more of a neighbor-to-neighbor relationship. They were slipping on the rent. They'd plead with them. And it was always something. They had to pay other bills. Christmas or Thanksgiving coming up. They asked for extensions. And he was so inside their lives that at one point, he said, sure, they could pay a little later if he could see their tax forms to see what it is that they actually earn. And they showed him, $50,000 a year, which totally got under his skin. I was like, you know what? Why can't they pay me? And I started basically putting pen to paper and running some numbers. And I say to the lady-- I'm like, look. Come down to the office. Bring your bills, and we'll do a budget. And I'll show you that you can afford to pay your rent. And after we literally picked every little nit picky thing there could be money that they could spend money on, like kitty litter, laundry, transportation to and from work for her husband, we had like $3,000 left over. And I was like, look, you can afford this apartment. So did that help? Did they end up paying the rent on time for the few months after that? No, it didn't help. Wow, that's quite a lesson right there. Yeah. It ended up getting really frustrating. And in the end, I was losing my patience, and I was getting really, really mad. She started running out of excuses. And she'd be like, well, my husband borrowed money from people at work. And he's got to pay them back. And that made me really mad. I was like, look. You know what? You guys have been taking advantage of me. You've been playing me like a fiddle. And that's it. I'm not taking a back seat anymore. You guys get caught up. You start paying on time, or I'm going to kick you out. And so I was in July and August telling them, like, look. I don't care if it's Christmas. I don't care if it's Thanksgiving. I don't care if it's the holidays. I'm going to kick you out. Can I ask what is going to be a really naive question? If you have a 100-unit building, like, in reality, how important is it that you get the rent on one unit? Well, I guess in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to make you or break you. But I mean, that's the deal. If you can't afford it, then I tell them, look, if you can't afford it, move to a smaller apartment. I'll give you a smaller apartment. But they didn't want to move. They did not want to move. By the time Dennis was drawing up a budget for this couple, he'd been at it on and off for six years with them. And his feelings would vacillate all over the place. But his dad-- the very man who told him how running a building hardens you-- his dad never wavered in support of the couple. My dad and I would have battles. Like, we should kick them out. We should kick them out. My dad would be like, no, I don't want to kick them out. I'd be like, look, these people are way behind their rent. You gotta kick them out. Dad, just get rid of these people. And we'd talk, and he'd reminisce about the stories. And one of the stories he tells me is that he went to the wake for the child that passed away. And he said to-- I think it was like the sister of the lady's husband. He's like, I used to hear the baby crying all night long, just crying and crying and crying. And the gentleman's sister is like, well, you're not going to have to hear the baby crying anymore. She turned around and walked away from him. Oh, she took it completely wrong. Yeah, my dad didn't mean it like, that kid was keeping me awake all night. Oh, thank God, now I can sleep. He's had kids of his own, and so he might know what it's like to see your kid in pain. So that, for him, was very, I think, just an emotional bond, where it was like, these people have just been through too much. I can't kick them out. In the end, he decided to sit down one more time and have a heart-to-heart talk with the couple. He told them he knew that they were good people. They just had a problem and they needed help. He would wait for the money they owed if the woman would just get help and go to rehab. If you do this, we'll repaint your apartment. Tell me what colors you want, and when you come back from rehab, we'll have this done for you. She wanted her kitchen painted yellow or something like that. And so she went to rehab. And I have a letter from her from August. OK, why don't you read it? Want me to read it? Sure. It says, well, I'm incarcerated and writing you from Cell Block C. You have no idea how touched I was by our talk, your caring, and generosity. The group here is very nice, as is the facility. I'm imagining what our apartment will look like upon my return. I'm so excited. I feel part of your family. You are in my prayers, which reminds me-- get your ass to church and make your ma happy. And when you got this letter, did you feel good? Yeah, I felt really good. I was like, oh, this is great. She's in there, she's getting help. But then-- I don't know when it was-- a day or two or three later, I'm walking down the courtyard. And who do I see coming towards me but her. And this was supposed to be a two week or a month long stay. I was like, I can't believe it. Why is she-- and so that was the beginning of the end. Shortly after that is when I filed the court papers for eviction. It was just-- it was devastating. It was like, ugh, you have to stand in front of the judge, looking at this person who I ran up and down the courtyard and maybe they threw the ball to me when I was, like, eight years old. And now I'm sitting here in front of the judge, telling them, Your Honor, please remove these people forcibly from the building. I'm like, that's what it comes down to. I have to do what I have to do to win this case. I was mad. I wanted them out. And do you feel like this changed you? Definitely. Yeah, definitely changed me. Now, I don't like to get personally involved with tenants. Like, it's just too hard. One time, these two guys moved into a two-bedroom apartment. And they were like, aw, you guys are great. Why don't you come out and have a beer with us? I was like, you know what? I got something to do tonight. I'm sorry. Maybe some other time, though. I'd really love to get a beer with you. But I had no intentions of ever going out for a beer with them. I would just-- I don't know-- make up an excuse or avoid it at all costs because, you know, you can't be their friends. What I try and do now is I try to never have to kick somebody out. And the way I do that is by screening and screening and screening. But that's the thing that I find interesting about this. I never thought about that as like it has anything to do with your feelings. This goes beyond the business stuff, that you're checking out all their credentials and all that sort of stuff. Are you saying it's actually like, it's too emotional? Yeah, it really is. I mean, for example, I do remember somebody coming in and applying for an apartment. And they're like, look, my credit's all messed up. I'm going through a divorce. And I don't know if my wife messed up my credit. And I was like, I don't care. Maybe that's the truth. Maybe that guy would have been a fine tenant. Maybe he would have paid his rent on time. But I just can't take that chance anymore. What would your Jesuit teacher say about that? I don't know. Maybe they would be disappointed in it. And do you care? No. If they're mad about it, I would say, well, the next person who rented that apartment, Father, I did try to treat them justly and fairly and ethically. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder. Additional production on the rerun of today's show from Jessica Lussenhop, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Peter Roach, the super there that you heard at the very beginning of the show, he retired a few years ago. He now performs in, quote, "every nursing home in Northeast Pennsylvania under the name, 'The Singin' Super.'" 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 has this message for any This American Life employee who's listening to the radio right now. Don't try to steal one of the light bulbs in the hallway. I know what you're thinking, but I've booby trapped them. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Michael had been in the business for over 35 years, and he never had a customer like this one. Michael designs and sells tombstones. And this customer, who we're not going to name for reasons that will become clear the further into the story I get-- we'll just call him Mr. X-- Mr. X is what they call in the funeral business a pre-needs customer. Pre-needs is basically a polite funeral business way to say he wasn't dead. He was buying a plot and a tombstone before he needed them. You know, he explained that this was for himself, and he said he had some special requests that he wanted on the memorial. So I obviously asked what they were, and we started going through it. He wanted his picture on there. He also wanted to know if he could put his son's names on and their pictures, and he would also like to put their dates of death. And at that point, I say, "oh, I'm very sorry for your loss." And that's when he says, "no, they're not dead." And I was slightly speechless for a moment because I'm trying to figure out what's go on. Is he trying to tell me that he's going to kill them? Or is it-- what's happening? You know. And so we proceeded slightly further in the conversation, and he basically takes out a sheet of paper and hands it to me. And I start reading it, and he said, "this is what I want on the monument." And what did it say? Well, I wish I had it and saved it. It was really very blunt, to the effect that, "my two sons stole money from me." And it kind of broke his heart. In his eyes, they were not alive any longer. They were dead to him. They're dead to him because of something they did to him. When I first read it, it didn't even click. And then I read it again, and I looked at him and said, "are you serious?" And he said, "yes." I said, "OK." I said, "it's pretty strong." And he said, "that's what I want." And the cemetery wouldn't allow him to put it on there in that way. And you need to, you know, kind of soften it up a little bit. And I should say now, this monument is actually standing. The guy still is alive. The monument is standing in a cemetery right now, and it has his picture-- kind of a big picture of him at the top, and his name, and date of birth, and then blank for the date of death-- and then underneath it there are pictures of two of his sons. Then it says, "in memory of." And it says each of their names and the date of death. And I guess those are the dates when they broke his heart and became dead to him. Exactly. And then underneath-- let me just ask you to read the text of what it says underneath. And leave out their names. OK. It says, "I'll never forget"-- and someone's name-- "and"-- someone's name. "Even in death, these two people put an everlasting mark on my heart. Money will come between family no matter how close you are. Even in death, I still feel the pain." I called this guy. I talked to him. In fact, I've talked to him a couple times, and he didn't want to come on the radio or anything. And he explained that in his mind, this was the perfect plan. Because basically, he could finally get the last word. Yeah, and it's cut in stone. That's a saying around here. It's permanent. It's there forever, for eternity. Now, when I talked to Mr. X about all this, he told me that he carries around photos of the monument, and he shows those photos to people. He likes seeing their reactions. He says that he visits the monument every five or six weeks, polishes it up. He has a fantasy of his sons coming to his funeral and seeing the monument for the first time. He pictures the looks on their faces. But the problem with this plan-- and Mr. X is the very first person to admit this-- the problem with this plan is, who wants to wait until they're dead to get the satisfaction? You know? On the other hand, if they find out now, while he's alive, then they might get mad, they might argue. And that would defeat the whole point of the whole thing. He wouldn't get the last word. And Michael sees another problem with Mr. X's plan. Maybe they're just going to look at it and go, "oh, he's crazy. Who cares?" You know what I mean? Oh, wouldn't that be horrible for him? Yeah. And then they'd just walk away. That would be the worst case scenario, that they would see it and just shrug. And it wouldn't surprise me if they spotted the monument-- I'm almost thinking that if the sons saw that, they would probably try to remove their photographs, at least, which they could do. They could break them or remove them. Because I think he was even concerned about that. Oh, he was? Yeah. I think he might have been going to leave some money somehow set up in a trust or something to take care of replacing them or something like that if something happened to them. You know, in the end, this is the problem with Mr. X's plan: all of eternity is stretching in front of Mr. X, and in that time, somebody can deface the tombstone, or a great, great, great, great, great, great grandson can decide that it is embarrassing, this tombstone, and have it removed. Well, today on our show, we have stories of people who put together what they think are brilliant plans, and then all sorts of things that they didn't really account for finally get to them. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today, My Brilliant Plan, in two acts. Act One, Mr. Adam's Neighborhood. That act is a simple story involving a money-saving, information-getting, life-embracing plan that just had one thing, one little thing going against it, and that is where it was happening. Act Two, Tragedy Minus Time Equals Happily Ever After. In that act, an 11-year-old child makes up a plan, a completely unlikely kid's plan, the kind of plan that no adult would ever think could work. And then the kid sticks with that plan into his 20s, into his 30s, into his 40s, into his 50s. He sticks with this plan for so long that somehow this fantastically unreasonable plan becomes, decades later, somehow suddenly rather reasonable. Stay with us. It does seem absolutely crazy now. I mean, the idea of going out and renting a house in Baghdad today, it would be instant suicide. But back then, in 2003, it was such a different place. I had friends who would go jogging in this track at Baghdad University. I'd go shopping every day. And I felt totally safe. I would wander-- I can remember there would be these angry protests-- and I would wander into these protests of hundreds of screaming young men and interview them, and felt no fear. I don't think I was irresponsible. I had an awareness things could get out of control. But having a house seemed like the smart move. It seemed like the clever, safe move, because we'd be off in the city somewhere, invisible. It seemed so much smarter than being in one of these big compounds with lots and lots of foreigners that was like easy pickings for any insurgent. And just lay out the finances. How much were you paying in rent? And what were the costs of this place? Well, here's how I figured it. It was $14,000 every three months' rent. I knew I needed a staff, a couple security guards and a cleaning lady. So let's say with them it's $5,000 a month. We had five or six bedrooms. I had one British journalist who was committed to a little over $2,000 a month. Marketplace was going to throw $1,000 a month in, so I really only needed $2,000 a month. Marketplace was your employer at the time. My employer at the time was going to give me $1,000 a month, Marketplace. So all I needed was to make $2,000 a month and I had three bedrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer. It seemed like a no-brainer. You know, I started asking myself, "is it ethical for me to actually make money?" You know, "I'll probably rent each of those bedrooms out for over $1,000 a month. So at the very least, maybe I won't pay anything, and maybe I'll even make money." Given everything that happened in later months, I just can't help but laugh at this moment in time when you were feeling guilty at how you were going to be taking advantage of other people by making a profit, which you obviously never were able to do. No, I'm still paying off. I'm actually still-- I think I've got my debts, because of the house, down to about $4,000 now. Are you kidding? You still have $4,000 worth of debt from this house? Yeah, which I owe my mom because she lent me the money. But yeah, I still owe $4,000 from the house, and it's-- you know, I left it two and a half years ago. How much have you paid off between when you left and now? I came back, like, $22,000 in debt. Oh my god, Adam. Yeah. Which means my entire salary, plus Marketplace's expenses, plus $22,000 went into that place. But let's go back before the debt, before everything that would happen later. Just talk about what it was like in the beginning, because in the beginning, the house did seem to work like you wanted it to. Yeah, I mean, in the very beginning everything seemed to be working pretty well. Working pretty well how? How would a typical day go? You know, a typical morning is everyone goes out and reports their story. But in the evenings, everyone comes back and we would just have these lovely dinner parties. We would have friends over for dinner from the hotels. People would come over, or from the other newspaper, radio, or TV houses would come over. And the wine tended to be pretty awful, but the beer was good, and you could get hard liquor. And it was just really fun. And word would get out. One of the things I really loved about the house is the entire time I was in the house, the US was occupying Iraq. And you would go to these kind of formal settings, and you'd meet these US occupying officials, and they were so tight-lipped, so on-message, so incapable of communicating. And so the ones I liked I'd invite over to the house. I mean, I genuinely liked them, but also we'd get them a little drunk on wine. We'd tell them, hey, tonight everything's off the record. And we'd get real information. I mean, that was how I found out that, even within the CPA, even within the US occupational forces, all these people running Iraq, people realized this is a disaster. We were getting this public message from the White House and from the folks in Iraq that everything's going really well, we just don't know it. But we'd get these people over to our house, they'd have some wine, and they'd be like, "oh, it's so much worse than you know." And I liked hanging out the Iraqi staff, the guards and drivers. It was really fun. One of the guards was a sheik of a tribe, and I would sit with him and learn tribal law, and how do you resolve conflicts. One of our nighttime guards had a small business. He had a little stationery shop, and I would learn from him about these new taxes that Shiite militias were charging, and the business people who were in favor of the resistance against the Americans. But also, I didn't like all of our staff, but I liked a lot of our staff. I went to many of their houses for dinner, which is a big deal Iraq to have a guest for dinner. And all the time you were also learning Arab. And I was learning Iraqi Arabic. But it wasn't even just to learn. It was just fun. You know, we would-- I don't know. They were just funny, cool guys. I liked a lot of them. And then, at some point, things started to go wrong. What first just started to kind of break down? The truth is, things were going wrong from the very beginning. It was just a very slow process of realizing it. I mean, one of the things, I had a translator who I was very close to and a driver I was very close to. And we are all good friends, so I get the house and before we even move in I say, "hey, I need security staff." So my driver and translator say, "oh, have we got the guys for you." "He just happens to he related to us." Yeah. So my driver-- let's call him Faras-- so Faras, my driver, says, "listen, my wife's father, you know, he was in the army. This is a guy who's a trained security man. He is hardcore." I hire him sight unseen. I say, "sure. He sounds perfect." [? Abu Rasheed ?] is going to be my nighttime guard. [? Abu Rasheed ?] shows up. He's this short, very overweight, late 50s guy. Walks in, first question: "where do I sleep?" That is not a promising start for the nighttime security guard. And he didn't seem to know how to use a gun, and I didn't have the guts to fire him. So he stayed on throughout. Then my translator proposed his uncle, first to be a driver for some of the people who lived in the house. But on the first day he went out with one of my friends, it turned out he spoke no English whatsoever and didn't know Baghdad at all because he was from Najaf. He actually was kind of a big, tough-looking guy, kind of growly. He seemed to know how to use a gun. But then I learned the reason he had moved to Baghdad from Najaf was his father was the leader of the Baath party in Najaf, and Najaf is the capital of the Shiite world. It is the most anti-Baathist part of Iraq. At the time, there were death squads going around killing former Baathists, and so-- He needed to get out of town. He needed to get out of town, and he came to our house to be our guard. Because, when you're an American in Baghdad, it always helps to also have a former Baathist Shiite guy in your house who is on the run from death squads. Guarding your house. Guarding your house. So very quickly there was a lot of competition. The driver wanted more of his relatives and fewer of the translator's relatives, and vice versa. Because we were the one place that was filled with a constantly shifting array of freelancers-- people who needed drivers and translators-- we ended up being a gathering point for all these different Iraqi drivers and translators for hire. And someone would come and work with a guest for a few weeks, and then they'd just sort of hang out and wait for the next guest. And it took me way too long to realize that these guys were form-- the different drivers and translators, I mean, there could be days where there was a dozen or more-- they were forming different alliances. They tended to mostly be Shiite because they all knew each other. There was a few Sunnis, but mostly Shiite. But they'd be from different neighborhoods, from different tribes. They'd have different backgrounds. So there would be factions fighting each other, and there was just a lot of manipulation, a lot of anger. The hardest thing: I really wanted to fire a few people. I felt they weren't doing their job. And I never could. I got to know them all so well. I knew how desperate they were, how poor they were, how much they needed the money. The average government ministry employee was making $20 a month. And every problem that came up I dealt with by throwing money at it. So I didn't like the guards, but I didn't fire them or cut their pay. I hired additional guards. The guests weren't buying enough food, I would pay more money for more food. I remember one day-- the house came with this kind of old, cranky generator that always had a lot of problems. That was another big money drain. We were constantly hiring people to come fix it. So it dies, 4:45 PM, before the big Eid, which is a week-long holiday. Nothing's open. No stores are open. Everything's closed. And we drive like crazy. There's one store open. They have one generator. And the guy, the salesmen or the owner immediately knows. He knows exactly what's going on. He knows I need this generator. He's got you. He charged me like $5,500, way more than I want to spend, but I just shelled the money out immediately. Then we had to hire a guy with a truck to carry the thing with one of these giant cranes, and then to take away the old generator, and to install the new generator. And then we had to hire a team of electricians to plug it in. I don't even remember, it was several hundred dollars. We had two refrigerators when we started. They both broke. The microwave broke. So I had to buy new fridges. I had to buy new microwaves. And my financial account-keeping was ridiculous. I had a drawer. When people paid me money for staying in the house, I'd throw it in the drawer. When there was an expense, I'd take it out of the drawer. But then I started putting my own money. Like, Marketplace would wire me my salary and I'd start putting that in the drawer. And I just was not in any serious way keeping track. I remember there was a moment-- and this should have been a big warning sign; this should have been the sign I need to get out-- I remember spending an afternoon looking at bed and breakfast management software. There's actually an amazing number of software programs for people managing beds and breakfasts. You're in the middle of a war zone looking at software to help you manage the house that you had originally decided to rent in order to make your life easier and cheaper. Yes. And all the software was like $500. I decided not to do it, but I should have. But the thing that just, when I think about it even now, two and a half years later, I just get tired, what I think of is closing the door to my bedroom, closing my eyes, and someone is knocking at the door. Bringing you a problem. Bringing me a problem. Journalists or Iraqis? Journalists and Iraqis both. They would come to my door, they'd knock on my door. "Adam, Abu Faisal has left his truck here for three days. He's only leaving his truck here so that no other driver will come, but I want my cousin, who's a driver, to come. You have to tell Abu Faisal to leave." So I go to Abu Faisal. "Abut Faisal, why is your truck here?" "Oh, my truck's here just for you, Adam. It's just so I can be here. I want to be ready to go at 3:00 in the morning. If there's a problem, I can come rescue you and take you away." How do I resolve that? I don't know who to trust. I don't know what to deal with. But I'm the guy who's going to solve it. "Mr. Adam, you have given Abu Faisal the last four guests to drive, but my cousin, Abu Enmar, is a better driver than him, and he has a nicer car, and he knows Baghdad even more better than Abu Faisal. Why don't you let him drive?" "Mr. Adam, Abu Faris is telling us that you said that he can take $10 from every driver because he's managing the drivers now. Is this true?" "No." "Well, then you must tell Abu Faris." "Just don't"-- Don't give him-- "Just don't give him the money. Don't give him the money." And then the journalists. Knock on the door. "Adam, hey, sorry to bother you, man. Hey, do you know who in the press center handles questions about embeds?" "Yeah. Um, hang on. I'll get you his cell phone." And then I close my eyes. "Adam, the internet's down again. Can you look at that?" Or, "Adam, the generator's not working and I don't know how to talk to the guard because he doesn't speak English. Can you tell him that we've got to get the generator working?" "Adam, man, we're running low on water." "Yeah, can you get water, actually? Because I don't think you've gotten water." "Yeah, but hey, man, I'm on deadline. I've got to"-- "All right, just tell your driver to get water." "Well, my driver doesn't know where to get water, and he doesn't know what kind of water." "All right, all right. I'll take care of it." So here's the package of things that were happening in the house: steadily worsening security, proliferation of unexpected costs, lack of reliable accounting, and all of this stitched together with a kind of cheery American can-do spirit that completely underestimated the magnitude of what you'd taken on. Now, that all sounds very familiar. Yeah. I mean, I do think that my experience is a reasonable metaphor for the overall American effort there. You know, I chose the wrong staff. I chose the wrong strategy to think about this as a business. I had the wrong stance in terms of security. And the bombings increased. We'd hear more and more bombing. We'd hear more and more about bombings that killed people. There was a few very big car bombs. And as things got worse outside, things got more frenzied inside. And we-- I mean, I remember we shifted from beer to hard liquor. We started drinking more heavily. We started drinking to get drunk. I know that there were people in the house-- in Iraqi pharmacies, you can just walk in and buy liquid Valium-- I never did, but other people started swigging liquid Valium. There were people who were smoking a lot of hash, which I never did, but there were other people doing that. I think that's a combination of things. I mean, I think part of it is the outside got worse. We were living in a much more dangerous environment. So obviously, it just causes tension. Optimism was plummeting. If the first six months or so after the fall of Baghdad it was reasonable to think, "you know, things aren't going that well, but someone's going to figure it out, it's going to get back on track," it no longer seemed reasonable. It seemed pretty clear that things were going to get worse and worse and worse. And obviously they have. So this is actually the point in your stay in Baghdad when I went to Baghdad to report there for about a month. And you were excited about your house. You showed me all around the house. And I saw you, over the course of this month, get scared. And it seemed like a few things happened in rapid succession that really spooked you. There were some specific things that happened to me, personally. One thing is I had a leading tribal sheik whose tribe is in Anbar province, whose tribe is one of the tribes fighting the Americans. And I thought of him as a good friend, and he was my escape valve. I'd already worked it out: if things get really bad, he was going to smuggle me out of the country and take care of me. And two people came up to me, two separate people came up to me and said, "you know, that sheik who you're friends with, he's telling people you're a CIA agent. Oh my god. Which for many parts of Iraq, that's a death sentence. You don't want anyone to think you're a CIA agent. I now think that he was actually showing off, but it's a weird way to show off since it put my life at risk. So that was very scary. Then this driver, the driver who wanted to be the head driver of our house, he had left his big SUV in our driveway. And because the other drivers got mad, I forced him to take the SUV out. And the driver community, the foreign press driver community in Iraq was small enough, the way I put it together now, he felt kind of humiliated that he got kicked out of my house. And so he didn't want to tell other people that he left because I told him to. He told people, "oh, I left because Adam's house is under surveillance and the insurgents are going to attack it." I don't think that was true, but I was getting-- people were telling me that. And it's pretty terrifying when people start telling you your house could be attacked. And in a weird way, the scariest thing was this: I was at the Hamrah Hotel having drinks with some friends and I had to go home, and I got a cab. And I got in the cab. And I speak Arabic pretty well. I was telling him where my house was. And it was a cab driver, I've never seen this guy before in my life. And I'm telling him where my house is, and he says, "oh, you mean Mr. Adam's house." And I just found that absolutely chilling. This man I've never seen before, doesn't know I'm Mr. Adam, knows where Mr. Adam's house is. Because up to this point, you'd thought-- your security plan was to sort of fly under the radar. Right. The whole point of the house was, if there's some insurgent who wants to kidnap or kill an American journalist, he's going to go to the hotel. I'm going to be off in a neighborhood somewhere. He doesn't even know where I am. So to find out-- That a random cab driver-- That a random cab driver knows where my house is, knows that there's a Western journalist named Mr. Adam living in this house, that means a lot of people know that. And that means that if there's an insurgent out there who wants to kidnap or kill an American, why go to a hotel which has all this security when you can just go to this house? And that was really terrifying to me. And then a bunch of other things happened. This was about the year anniversary of the war. I think people were very fed up. It's right around the time where it just felt like the whole country was sort of realizing, oh, man, there's just no hope. And then the Mount Lebanon Hotel-- The Mount Lebanon Hotel bombing, which I think was the first day you were there. And I remember you were talking to Iraqi kids-- there were some young boys who were playing around there-- and they were saying, "oh, the Americans did this. The Americans." Yeah, everybody. It was this weird thing where-- I mean, "the Americans had bombed the hotel." This is what they were saying. That the Americans had bombed the hotel. I remember there was this huge crater. There were car parts everywhere in this crater. It was so obviously a car bomb. But everyone was saying it was an American RPG. And everyone was saying it was an American missile. And I remember one guy saying, "if this had been a car bomb, you'd see car parts. Why are there no car parts?" I'm like, "but there's nothing but car parts." He's like, "oh, no. That's from a different car." And there was sort of an angry crowd. It was the first crowd of Iraqis angry at us. Not angry-- About the bombing. About the bombing and telling us about it, but angry at us. That felt scary. And then, one of my friends, who's like a much more seasoned war correspondent, sat me down and said, "because you've had all these American officials at your house, this house is a legitimate military target." Because you were bringing people from the Coalition Provisional Authority. You were bringing soldiers. We were bringing the occupational forces to our house. And we were one of the few unprotected places in Baghdad where people had seen American-- could have seen. I don't know if anyone did see, but could have seen American officials. And when this guy who said this to you, did you think, "you know, I was thinking of myself as separate from the occupation and other people. Iraqis are sort of mistaking me as being part of it?" And did you realize, "oh, wait, I'm part of this in some way that I hadn't understood up until now or I hadn't wanted to see or accept?" I certainly started to get that that's how Iraqis perceived. I think for all my difference-- learning Iraqi Arabic, living in the city, becoming friends with Iraqis, traveling the city-- you know, I misread the place pretty badly. I ended up making some really bad calls. And it's also funny. Like, we don't get Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds. We don't get the difference between a kind of poorly educated Shiite who lives in Sadr City as different from a middle class Shiite who lives in [? Qadisiya. ?] These are all things completely lost to the Americans. But to the Iraqis, they don't get us. You know, they don't get that some Americans are Republican loyalists, and others are anti-war activists, and others are journalists who really want to just know the truth. Just like we don't understand them, they don't understand us. Adam Davidson with Nancy Updike. Since returning to America, Adam joined the staff of NPR's daily news programs. He now covers the global economy for them. He wrote about his house in Baghdad in Harper's Magazine. Coming up, when the plan you invented for yourself at 11 years old ends up dominating the rest of your life. 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 show, My Brilliant Plan, stories of plans that arrive in a flash of inspiration, and then what happens to them. We've arrived at Act Two, Tragedy Minus Time Equals Happily Ever After. OK, so there's this guy and he has a very simple problem: he wants to see his dead father again. And he comes up with what is possibly the world's most complicated solution to this problem. It's so complicated that to fully understand his solution, you would need to master the following disciplines. Ordinary calculus, or multi-variable calculus, differential equations, partial differential equations, vector analysis, vector calculus, matrix analysis, tensor calculus, group theory, and, oh, Green's functions. Right, and that's just the math. You also need to know physics, theoretical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and general relativity. If you know all of these things, you'd be able to get what he's done, which is to take the first baby step in maybe getting to see his father again. OK, here it is, his invention. Omega is equal to g times row divided by a times cq. This is the key equation. Josh Gleason explains this very complicated and brilliant plan, and what all this means. Actually, even before you understand the math and the physics and the seemingly impossible goal that Ron Mallett has spent more than 50 years trying to achieve, you need to understand something much simpler, which is how much Ron loved his dad, Boyd Mallett. Lots of 10-year-old boys feel like there's nothing their Dad can't do, but in Ron's case, there was hard evidence. He wired their train set to obey voice commands. At parties in their Bronx apartment, he'd rig the toilet so that when someone opened the lid, music would play. He had helped wire the new United Nations building in Manhattan, but his main job was fixing TVs and radios. Ron adored his father so much that he says his day only really began in the evenings when his dad came home from work. He'd meet him at the subway and carry his toolbox home. As the oldest son, I felt like the heir apparent, and he treated me that way. In fact, as I got older, he would actually take me and show me the parts of the television set. I can remember him telling me about the yolk that was supporting the television tube and everything. So he was actually grooming me to be part of his world. So that there was just, for me, this aura around him. It's like a prince around the king. On the night of his parents' 11th wedding anniversary, after a party at their house, Ron woke up to the sound of his mother crying. He wandered into his parents' bedroom and saw his father lying dead on the bed. He'd had a massive heart attack. For Ron, this was almost impossible to comprehend. He was 10 years old. It was like Superman had just died. I don't know. It's so hard to describe the feeling of anguish and total loss that I felt, even then. It was just like he was the most important thing in my life. He was the center of my universe. So, if he had said, you know, "will you come with me," and I knew that that would be the end of everything for me, I would have gone gladly without even a second's hesitation. Ron became a different kid after that. He stopped being interested in friends or school. He stopped caring about pretty much everything. The only thing he wanted to do was read. His dad had introduced him to this series of comics called Classics Illustrated based on classic books. And it was one of these comics that led to his big plan, the plan that would become the focus of his life for the next 50 years. The comic was The Time Machine, based on the book by H.G. Wells, and Ron remembers the moment he first saw it on the rack at the drugstore. On the cover was a picture of this guy working on a futuristic machine that had wires and tubes coming out of it. And there were a bunch of tools laying around, the same tools that Ron's dad had used. In fact, the picture looked incredibly similar to one Ron had of his father working behind a giant TV set. And I still remember reading those words that were in there on the first page of it, saying that time is a kind of space and we can go forward and backward in time just as we can in space. And that hit me. I mean, that hit me so hard. I knew immediately what that would have to mean, that if you had a machine that could travel forward in time and backward in time, then, with that machine, I could go back in time, when my father was still alive. I have to say, that was the defining moment, besides my father's death, of my life, was seeing that comic. And I remember getting it and reading it cover to cover again and again and again. And I felt, this is it. This is it. This is the key. This is the thing that I have to do. I have to find a way of building a time machine. And that became my goal. It became my total obsession. Fascinating. What is it? This is only a small experimental model, of course. Ron saw the movie version of the book five times. To carry a man, a larger edition is needed. To carry a man? Where? Into the past or into the future. He always sat fifth row center, always alone. He recognized from the moment he got his idea that it had to be a secret. Like I said, he'd read a lot of these Classics Illustrateds, including some based on Shakespeare. I knew Hamlet. I actually knew what it meant when people thought that people were crazy. And I knew that that was not a thing that you wanted to have people know about you, and I thought people would think that this was crazy. First, let me tell you how it works. Here, in this compartment, you see the saddle where the time traveler sits. Forward pressure sends the machine into the future, backward pressure into the past. So Ron started building his time machine on the sly, down in the basement. Not even his brothers knew what he was doing. He figured if he could build a machine that looked exactly like the picture on the cover of the book, it would work. He would go back in time and warn his father that he was going to die if he didn't take care of his heart problem. He went to the junkyard and started collecting things: tire rims, a bicycles seat, anything that looked like the stuff on the comic book cover. He raided his dad's old equipment, picking out wires, vacuum tubes, an old radio chassis. For weeks he'd rushed home from school so he could work on the time machine. Finally, he was done. I thought that this was going to work, because you know, if I plugged it in, just like my father when he would work on the sets-- when he plugged it in, it worked-- this was going to work. And there was a cord and I plugged it in, and it was nothing. I was disappointed. But the thing is, is that that's when I began to think, you know, I've got to read the story again. That's when I decided to go to the real book. Because I figured, well, maybe there's not enough details in the Classic Illustrated, so if I go to the original book, it'll have more detailed instructions. This is the part of the story where kids like you and me and kids like Ron part ways, because most kids would give up at this point, but Ron didn't do that. Instead, he became even more determined to figure out a way to build a time machine. He struggled through the adult version of Wells's book, and this was a kid who had pretty much given up on school. He began spending his lunch money on science paperbacks at the local Salvation Army. This left him eating so little and getting so scrawny that he eventually became anemic, and his mom had to start packing him lunches. Here's the other unusual thing about Ron. He's the rare person whose life was shaped almost entirely by books, one after the other. In fact, nearly every big change in his life, every major decision, can be traced directly to something he read. When he was 12, for instance, he found a copy of The Universe and Dr. Einstein. He had heard the name Einstein before, and the book had a picture of an hourglass on the cover, which he knew was a symbol for time. For me, the notion of time was abstract. But then, in this book, it actually represented-- this is going to sound like a very simple thing-- but it represented time by a symbol: t. That was the next important thing in my life, because here was an articulation. It made time no longer an abstract concept. It made time an object. And what it said in the book was that-- which, I didn't understand the equation, now don't get me wrong. I didn't understand the equation, but I understood that Einstein said that time could be changed by motion. So you asked, why didn't I think it was crazy. It was because everyone said this great genius Einstein, you know, he knows everything, if he says time can be changed, then time can be changed and a time machine is possible. The equation he's talking about here is called the Lorentz transformation, and Ron treated it like some holy mantra. He wrote it all over his school notebooks. Needless to say, he wasn't very popular. In fact, he had no friends at all. He was a nerd who couldn't even hang out with other nerds. In the school, there would have been other nerds, but I was an African American kid. I was not in the upper-- I wasn't in that income group where I would have been able to run with the white nerds of the-- you know what I'm saying? You see what I'm saying? You have to remember, we're talking about the '50s here. And the white community had the key club and the science club, and I was not a part of any of these groups. Ron forced himself to study math and electronics, all in the service of the time machine. When he finished high school, he immediately enlisted in the Air Force so he could go to college on the G.I. Bill. He trained as an electrical engineer and read whatever he could get his hands on, anything that seemed like it might help him figure out how time worked, even books he really had no hope of understanding, as if he could absorb them by sheer force of will. Eventually, he learned enough to realize that he was on the wrong track. It wasn't electronics he needed to know. It was something called quantum mechanics. He needed to become a physicist. He got his PhD and became a tenured professor at the University of Connecticut. And somewhere along the way, he figured out how to talk to women and got married. But all this time, he never forgot about the time machine. You'd think that the more he learned, the more ridiculous his idea might seem to him, but the opposite happened. Every shred of information he collected seemed to confirm that time travel may be possible. While he felt comfortable telling his wife about his dream, he never told anyone at the university. Already he was worried about being taken seriously in the physics world as an African American. But to be a black physicist obsessed with time travel, that seemed like a double whammy he could never get away with. Since he couldn't do out-and-out research on time travel, he became an expert in the next best thing: black holes, which had been shown to twist time. But after a couple decades studying cosmic solutions-- worm holes, cosmic strings-- his plan was stalled, and Ron was getting discouraged. It's great if you have a way of harnessing a worm hole or a black hole or cosmic strings, but these are things out there. I wanted something that would be in a laboratory, something that would be a device, something that was close to the time traveler in The Time Machine. So that was the problem, and I didn't feel like I was getting closer to that. And it was driving me to distraction. You might say it was sort of a desert period. If you looked at what was happening in my professional life, I mean, I was publishing, I got my professorship. But if you looked at what was happening to me inside of my personal life, I was beginning to emotionally shut down. I began thinking I had been wasting all of my life, that this goal of the time machine was not something that was achievable. Even his wife, Dorothy, who had been supportive of his obsession all these years, couldn't console him. I would come home and she would ask me how things were going, and I would just simply say, OK. And then I would go up to my room to go to bed and lay there all the rest of the night, and not talk to her. And think about what? And actually just think about how wasted my life felt, how what I was doing just wasn't meaningful, and just that I just failed myself. And I just-- you know, I was listening to old Simon & Garfunkel songs. Like what songs? Oh, you know, "Hello Darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk to you again." You know, things like that. You have to remember, here I am, from 11 all the way up through the service, all the way up-- I mean, my identity is wrapped up in this thing, this time machine. I mean, that's my identity now. To lose that dream was now like losing my identity. Because my identity-- if I don't have this goal of the time machine, then what do I have? And that was it. It was like, nothing. He hadn't built a time machine, but all the years of trying to build it had basically accomplished the same thing: it let him live in the past. He imagined the scene over and over, what it would be like to see his father again. He'd knock at the apartment door, 11B, and see this young guy, now both shorter and younger than himself, and calmly tell him that although he knew it sounded crazy, time travel was possible. He'd mention Einstein and use TV as an analogy, how sending pictures through space wasn't all that different from sending people through time. And then he'd show him family photos. He'd say, "this is your family in the future." "One of the things I'm trying to tell you is that you are not in these pictures, later pictures. And the reason why you're not is the reason why I'm here." And I would say, "you know, I know that you're going to have a hard time understanding or believing this, but I am your son. I am your son. And I come from another time. And I'm here to tell you that you are going to die, and you're going to die in the near future. And that's why you're not in these pictures. These are pictures of your family without you. And the reason that you're not is because of the fact that you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, you don't take care of yourself, you've got a very weak heart. If you change, you will live. And that's what I've come here to tell you." And the thing is, is that I would hope that I would convince him of that, but I also know that there's a chance that he might not believe me. I also know that one of the other things I would tell him, which I know that I never had a chance to tell him when I was a child, is that I loved him. And of course, just the physical thing of seeing him real and alive and hearing that voice again that I only heard, can really remember from audio tapes, just to hear that again. So what you're going to see here are four intersecting laser beams that will be making up a ring laser, but you'll be seeing-- how many layers were you able to get? One, two, three, four. You were able to get four layers? Yeah. Oh, fantastic. When he was 57, Ron finally made his time machine, or at least a model, anyway. He showed it to me in his lab in the woods, and the fact that it exists at all is sort of surprising. Through most of his 40s, he got more and more despondent. His marriage had broken up and he'd basically given up on the time machine. To give himself something new to focus on, he married again and concentrated on his new family. But then heart problems forced him to take a medical leave from the university. He realized he couldn't stand the thought of dying without giving the time machine one last shot. He threw himself again into research. if you look up through here, you actually can see down through the center of the square. That's where the neutron would be coming up through. Ron worked for weeks and weeks solving hundreds of equations by hand, using number two pencils on legal pads, sometimes for 15 hours a day, and ended up with a four-page paper which presented that equation you heard at the beginning of the story. Omega is equal to g times row divided by a times c cubed, which basically says that light, not just matter, can affect gravity, which could lead to a twisting of time. This model is the practical result of his math. It's about the size of a blender, a cylinder with four layers of red light beams shining through it. The idea is that the small, high intensity rings of light can actually alter gravity within the machine, sort of like a spoon stirring coffee in a cup. And as Einstein said, when you alter gravity, you affect time. To test the machine, you drop in a neutron, like dropping a sugar cube into that same cup of swirling coffee, and see what happens. This is only a small experimental model, of course. To carry a man, a larger edition is needed. Ron published his findings. And even though the idea was only a theoretical basis for a time machine, nowhere near the actual thing, it turned out that people were really, really interested in time machines. The magazine New Scientist ran a cover article on him. After more than 40 years of working in secret, Ron was finally out of the closet as a guy who was seriously studying time travel. When that came out, I remember turning on my email-- I was used to getting a couple of emails every day-- I remember turning it on one day and it was lit up. I mean, it was like hundreds of emails from all over the world. And I started getting interviews from everywhere asking about this new work that I was doing. Even though other people were accepting of it-- and I have to say, it's even now I feel like, you know, they really aren't carting me away. [LAUGHING] Finally, he presented his work before other physicists at the Third International Association for Relativistic Dynamics Conference in Washington, DC. In the audience was Bryce DeWitt, a contemporary of Einstein's and a physics giant, who had helped pioneer a new approach to quantum mechanics. After his presentation, Ron told the physicist about his father and why he was so interested in time travel. What I didn't expect-- DeWitt asked a technical question with some of the other people, but then when the question and answer period was over, he actually said, to the whole audience, he said, well, "I don't know whether you'll ever see your father again, but he would have been proud of you." And I have to tell you,-- Is that not something you had thought of before? I wouldn't have thought of it just in that way. But you know, I would have. But it's one thing when you think about, well, you know, I'm proud of what I've done, or my father might be proud of-- it's a whole different thing when it's someone totally independent of you. DeWitt's statement was a validation to me of my life, because here was this great man saying, "your father would be proud of you." I mean, it was like, to me, it couldn't get better than that. But something else happened at the conference, too. DeWitt had said this other thing, that he didn't know if Ron would ever see his father again. And Ron started to puzzle over that, over why DeWitt would say that. And then he sort of sheepishly realized something he'd never taken a moment to think through, which is that his time machine would never work, at least not the way he wanted it to. Maybe he'd be able to stir up time inside the machine, but if Ron followed his own equations to their logical conclusion, the furthest he'd ever be able to go back is the moment the machine was first switched on. So he wouldn't be able to return to the 1950s to save his father. Weirdly, Ron says he wasn't devastated when he realized that. For most of his life, he'd held on to this plan he invented as an 11-year-old. He turned himself into a scientist, sacrificed his marriage, and worked in secret for decades. And finally, in his 50s, without him ever really noticing, the plan he made as a boy got replaced with a more adult plan, one based on an adult's understanding of what was actually possible. So by the time he found out he'd never see his father again, he didn't need to. Josh Gleason in Portland, Maine. Ron Mallett has a memoir about his dad and his research called Time Traveler. I wasn't in that income group where I would have been able to run with the white nerds. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Randall Bell's got a kind of weird job. He's an economist who specializes in damaged real estate of all kinds. And in practice what that means is that he is the guy that you call when a house becomes notorious for some reason and you have to figure out, how in the world are you going to sell it? For instance, he's consulted in some homes where some pretty grisly murders have happened. Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, the Heaven's Gate home where 39 people committed suicide, and what he says is that it takes a little longer to sell these home. It takes a year or two. And they sell for a little bit less than they would otherwise. But really, it's not that much of a discount. 10%, 15%, 20% discount will do the job. You don't have to go really too much beyond that. And he says it doesn't take long for the houses to be back at their full real estate value, like nothing ever happened there. Typically, it takes three to seven years. That is just shockingly fast. Well, people move into the house, people see that life goes on. The property gets changed around, it gets lived in. For example, the Manson property where Sharon Tate was murdered and others, that property sold for full value in about 1989. What happens to the people who move in? I would wonder especially if a family had kids growing up in the house that was the murder house. Well, I've dealt with people who do have kids and I would not advise someone to buy one of these houses with little kids. I'm familiar with a case that I was consulted on with a really hideous murder up in New Jersey, and very smart people bought the house and they had little kids. And, at the school, the kids were teasing them and asking them questions like, is there blood on your pillow when you sleep? Birthday parties, or neighborhood get-togethers, the kids would not come inside the house. The friends would come to the doorstep and the kids would have to come out of their house to play. So they started trying to put the birthday parties in the backyard, and the kids wouldn't even come in the backyard for a birthday party. So it became so problematic that eventually the family moved. So while the real estate market might be willing to forget a house's reputation, third graders never will. I think you nailed it. I had an opportunity myself, personally, to buy the Heaven's Gate mansion where the 39 people killed themselves. And when I suggested it or mentioned it to my wife, she looked at me like I was the village idiot because we have four little kids. People never forget what happened in most of these houses, he says. They just get used to it. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Houses of Ill Repute. All of our stories today are about houses with terrible reputations. And in every one of these stories, in every one of these houses, actually, there's a truly astonishing level of badness that kind of sneaks up on people, and then they just get used to it. You know, they get stuck there and they get used to it and they live with it. Our show today in three acts. Act One, It's not a Crack House, It's a Crack Home, in which we see what happens when bad houses happen to good people. Act Two, The Crisco Kid. I bet Act Two is one of these stories which has an actual moral. There's an actual moral to the story. And it's kind of a simple moral, and I don't think I'm going to spoil anything here by telling you what the moral is. The moral of that story is, kids, stay in school. Act Three, The Bully's Pulpit, in which we visit with a house, and we ask, is there any hope for this house, this house with one of the worst reputations of any house in the country? I refer to the US House of Representatives. Stay with us. Act One, It's Not a Crack House, It's a Crack Home. Maherin Gangat has this story. And before we start, a quick warning to sensitive listeners that the story mentions the existence of prostitution and of drug use. Here's Maherin. Originally, I was trying to do a story about drug use in Brooklyn, and I was looking for prostitutes to interview. And on Starr Street in Brooklyn, there's a notorious house, a gathering place for prostitutes and addicts. So when I saw the house I knew exactly what it was. Broken windows, missing shingles, garbage thrown all over, women heading in and out at all hours, shiny new Escalades parked in front, young men draped in gold chains. This was not just a house of ill repute, this was a full-on den of inequity. So when the front door of the house opened, the person who came out was not what I expected. An 80-year-old man with white, messy hair. I can't give you my real name. It was too atrocious. I had to Americanize it. What was your real name? Gerlando ?] Guisseppe Amedeo. I simply read Joseph G. Amedeo. No one could pronounce it. Amedeo, a simple name. They call me Yamamoto, which is a Japanese admiral. Armadillo, which is a rodent with an outer shell. What else? Amarillo, which is a city in Texas. It's the summer, but Joe's wearing a grungy sweater. You could easily mistake him for a homeless person. But when he talks, he's lucid, chatty, which has the perverse effect of making everything he says seem even weirder, like when I ask him about the prostitutes who live in his house. They offered to bring me food, but I keep telling them I'm on a special diet. They eat all kinds of oily things and things that are heavily sugared, which I will not touch. I've relaxed a little bit. I will eat some corn muffins now and cookies and Oreos. Not too many. The body tells me when I've had enough. I said, this is too sweet. I don't like it. If you don't mind my asking-- it's somewhat of a personal question-- Quiet. Go ahead. If you don't mind, do you take drugs? Absolutely not. I have diabetes, for which I take a pill, and I have hypertension, for which I take another pill. I don't like needles of any kind. For three months, I kept going back to Joe's house, to try and figure out exactly how and why this courtly, 80-year-old man ending up turning his home over to prostitutes and junkies. OK, this is how I came to know about the house. I was over here prostituting. This is Sylvia. And. One of the girls was like, I [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I want somewhere to go get high because I'm the one-- so she brought me here. And after she brought me here, I kept coming back. I never stop coming back here. Before Sylvia ended up at Joe's house back in 2001, she'd been living on the street. She said there were around seven women in Joe's house when she was there, all of them finding Johns to make money, using the money to buy drugs, bringing the drugs back to the house to get high, and hanging out. And Joe was their unlikely patron, a World War II veteran, never married, former mortuary caretaker, and lifelong rare book enthusiast. The excitement of finding a rare book that you bought it for $0.25 and you sell it for $25. What was the best deal you ever got? A letter from John Foster Dulles. I bought it for $0.50 in a famous bookshop. They had it outside tucked into a book, some silly book, and that was about $60. Here's how Joe ended up so far from the book business. He's lived in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn his whole life, the last 50 years in this house on Starr Street. Bushwick started changing in the 1970s and '80s, back when Joe's house was still just a normal, neat, middle class home. Back then, as one hyperbole-inclined former junkie I talked to put it, over 200 different types of heroin could be bought at a corner just three blocks from Joe's house. As the neighborhood declined, people started breaking into Joe's house regularly. He'd get home from work and find his belongings rifled through. Joe didn't have much worth stealing. There's not a lot of street resale value in the letters of John Foster Dulles. But the constant break-ins unnerved him. He didn't believe the police would help, so he came up with a plan. I picked some girls that are always walking in front of the house that I would see. I didn't know them. And for a free pack of cigarettes every day, they would watch the building, just let me know who's coming into my house. His plan worked, and it continued this way for years, with Joe gradually getting to know the women outside, until one cold day. November came along, 1995, and they say, hey, we're cold. We're cold. We're cold. Can we come in? Perhaps it was just an especially cold night. Perhaps it's because 1995 is the year Joe retired and he was spending all his time alone in his house. But for whatever reason, he let them in. And this was a pivotal decision. The women stayed upstairs that night, and he became friends with one of them. Her name is Jean, and she took care of Joe, including once when he was very ill. I had diarrhea. And I told her, I feel very sick. My legs are weak. I can't walk. I said, I soiled my pants with this diarrhea that I'm having. She says, well, if you have to do it in your pants, do it in your pants. I'll clean it. Now, what person-- I mean, isn't this something? It's a person that tells you that, not even my mother would do that maybe if I were ill as a baby. But that was impressive. And that's the first one I brought in to stay. But the drug habit was there and there's nothing I could do. Jean started to tell her friends, other prostitutes and addicts, about Joe's kindness. And some of them moved into Joe's house. And for a while, it worked really well, even for Joe. Some of the people who showed up, including the Johns, were useful. One of the girls had an attorney which helped me without charging me the fee. We had a dentist. There was another fellow there, Bill. He did repairs on the house. He can fix storm windows or anything, repair anything about the house. I was so happy I had them [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But then the house started attracting more than just lawyers and handymen. Scarier types began showing up, and more people overall. And men moved in, and people who didn't even talk to Joe. And whatever lingering normalcy was left in the house vanished. Joe became a tenant in his own house, cramped into one room on the ground floor while anywhere between half a dozen and 15 other people just took the place over. Joe never let me see the inside of the house. He would only talk to me outside. I think he just didn't want to see my reaction to how he was living and what his house had become. Joe's project, as he calls it, had spiraled out of control. The project as it is today is a failure. The thing I started doesn't exist anymore. Now we're getting in the criminal-- the criminal set is coming here. There's a pipeline among criminals and they all find their way to this house, you see. Do you feel a little isolated or scared inside the house? It's too late to be frightened. Do you have your own room here? I had all of the rooms were mine. Now I have just a little tiny little space here. The entire upper floors were empty at that time and very neat. Today, you'll find hell. Actually, wholly hell. This is the foretaste of hell. I haven't been up there since 2002. I know what those rooms used to look like. I don't dare, I just don't want to see it. I don't want the memory picture. A lot of people didn't even want to go in there. A lot of Johns didn't want to go in there. But they do. This is Sylvia again, describing that upper floor where Joe stopped going in 2002. There was like rats moving around and the rats are almost as big as the people. I never seen a cockroach. I only see rats. There's no bathroom. I used to hold it and try to go to the restaurant on the block, but if I couldn't hold it, I couldn't hold it. But all the time I used to hold it. And so, I mean, are there buckets in there? Mmm-hmm. Of waste. Besides the buckets of human waste and the rats, Sylvia said there were holes in the roof, so when it rained, it rained inside the house. There was no running water, only one room had electricity. It'd been divided up into cubicles. This is where the women slept and sometimes brought Johns. I wound up at Joe's house after I had quit working for the escort service. Lisa is 27, really skinny, though she tells me her weight's not as low as it used to be. She's got sores on her lips. Even though Joe's house is a step up from the street, it's one of the last stops on a long, downhill journey for a lot of the women there. Before moving into Joe's, Lisa worked as an escort, making around $1,000 a night, she says, and moving in upscale circles. We would go everywhere, basically. There were clubs we went to. Some of them would take you out to eat. Well, I'll put it like this, I've been to the Waldorf for a few calls, and it is a big hotel. The biggest chandelier you could ever see. That was two years ago. Today, Lisa says she makes a lot less, between $100 and $400 a day. Though she spends $250 a day on heroin and crack. I ask her about her relationship with Joe. He doesn't care what we do. He just likes the fact that's there's people with him. Does he interact with you guys a lot? Because I know he doesn't go upstairs. Sometimes. No, he don't come upstairs at all. He doesn't deal with what we do. He gives us our space. And he socializes. I mean, as soon as company does come, he gets lifted up. Like, when I'm around, I give him attention and affection, you know what I'm saying? Like a father to a daughter. And it lifts him up. It's like, when you give him attention, it's like he's happy that someone's talking to him. And he could talk to you for hours. So one reason Joe let his house turn into a brothel, he's lonely. And I honestly couldn't figure out the exact nature of his relationship with these women. Joe was always forthcoming with his answers, except this one. When I asked him point blank about whether he considered any of the women a girlfriend, his non-answer was revealing. I can't answer that question. I can't answer that question. Sorry, I can't. It's just that I don't want to fabricate if I can avoid it. This is how I see it. Joe's living in a house full of prostitutes, many of whom are very fond of him. I wouldn't be surprised at all if in the 10 years since the women first moved in, Joe occasionally went from the downstairs tenant to a client. Then again, the thought occurred to me, he might be gay. Joe's a lifelong bachelor who lived with his mother well into his 30s and loves rare books. But what was clear to me the longer I spent with Joe is that, even though he liked having company in his house, he felt trapped. I asked him over and over again, why don't you just call the police? How could you let this happen to your house? Joe could never answer those questions. I think there's a lot of reasons. I think part of it is that the changes happen incrementally over time. There was never one clear moment to draw the line. And partly, Joe likes having people to take care of. It's nice to still have the power to do that, especially if you're vulnerable and needy yourself. These are homeless people. Take them and put them in your house. Hi Jojo. Hello. I fought with them. I didn't quite fight with them, but I spoke to the neighborhood groups. They're afraid. You have prostitutes here, and this and that, which is true. They says, we have to raise our children here. I says, well, these girls go out at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 in the morning. Do your kids go out at that hour? Not that Joe doesn't have problems with the things he sees the women do. When a girl might have a needle syringe sticking out of her neck and hanging down, or another would jab her neck once and become frustrated she couldn't get the vein. She try a second time and put a second hole in her neck. I says, get away from your neck, please. Don't do that. Don't do that. Then I had to realize that one of them said, if I have $5, I'll do $5 worth of drugs. If I have $500, I would do $500 worth of drugs. In other words, they wanted this so much that it was futile for me or anyone else to try and stop it, until the girl comes to the realization, I don't want this anymore, I don't want this kind of life anymore. And some of them did that. This is true. During the time I was reporting this story, Lisa quit using drugs. She said she's glad the house was there for her. Good evening, gentlemen. What's up, mister? Are you the elderly man? I'm afraid I am. It's a rainy night, around 7:00 PM, and two police officers show up at Joe's house. Joe seems calm, not surprised or worried. His house has been raided before. As long as somebody holds the light for you. Joe struggles to unlock the gate, so one of the cops does it for him. Then we all go inside. The cops tell Joe to sit down. Who's up there? The man who helps me with the house. [INAUDIBLE]. Joey, come on out for a minute. You got lights in here? You don't have any lights, do you? I cut them off. It turns out, this visit isn't a raid. The cops are here at the request of Adult Protective Services. It's all part of a plan by the district attorney to clean up the neighborhood. Step one, get Joe out. Step two, get the prostitutes and everyone else out. A caseworker wants to take Joe to the hospital. Joe doesn't want to go. So the caseworker has asked the cops to remove him. Joey. Yes, sir. How are you, buddy? Not bad. You feeling better? I know you had a cold last week. This is Sergeant Zegilla of the 83rd Precinct. He's been at the house before. Nine cops are milling around inside Joe's house. Some go upstairs. Sergeant Zegilla stays downstairs with Joe. Let me ask you a few questions. I'm in my 80s. What's your date of birth? And if you want me to survive, then I remain here. Joe, Joe. We're going to calm down. We're not to that point yet at all. Oh, you're not? I just want to ask you a few simple questions. I am not worthy of your attention. Oh, you most certainly are Joe. Everybody-- --babies and children out there. Everybody in Bushwick's worthy of my attention. All right, Joe. You know what year it is? 2006. There you go. You know who the president is? What's his name? Bush. Sergeant Zegilla asks Joe when he last ate. Joe tells him he had turkey for lunch. He tells Sergeant Zegilla he wants to stay in the house, but I don't hear the rest of the conversation, because that's when the cops kick me out. Around 10 minutes later, Joe walks out and into a waiting ambulance. None of the women living in the house full-time are around. The next day, I visit Joe at the hospital. He's on the phone with his niece. She lives in New Jersey. They're just running tests right now. Are the people nice there? Very. Very polite. They look like they have training. They have training? I would say so, yes. Joe gets a lot of visitors at the hospital during the 12 days he's there. People from the house, social workers, cops. Everyone has the same conversation with Joe. What's next? Where is he going to go? The city is threatening to condemn the building. One cop is particularly concerned. I'm just wondering what the next step is when you're released from the hospital. Well, that's a good question. I read the Times Newsweekly that there's a big article in the paper about the problems over there on Starr Street. They actually mention your building. If there's anything you can do to delay bringing the building down, because I lived there 50 years and this could be my last gasp. I don't know about that, Joe. I'd feel a lot better if, like, at the end of this, you were somewhere where you could live without having the walls coming down around you and prostitutes shooting up. You know, I mean-- A functioning bathroom. Yeah. Running water. This might help. The day before Thanksgiving, the city condemned the building and started to board it up. The city had been threatening Joe for years, but this time a sign on the house said, quote, "Conditions in this premises are imminently perilous to life." I went inside for a few minutes with the inspector from the Buildings Department. I'd never been upstairs before. As I headed up now, the building inspector got my attention and pointed something out. Sorry? Oh, he's pointing out a rat to my right. Going into Joe's room. Thanks. The second story was a mess. Every inch of the floor was covered with stuff. Bikes, sheets, mattresses, dozens of buckets, and books from Joe's collections scattered everywhere, on the floors, in the halls. The Buildings Department crew was sealing up the windows with boards. What are you guys doing? You're clearing it out? Yeah, we got to close and seal up the window. So is this as bad as other houses that you've done or worse? That's the worst one. This is the worst one? Yep. I headed downstairs to Joe's room. It's the first chance I've had to look around. I'm just peeking my head in because I can't even step inside. What I see is packages, packages of books, just all sealed up, just ready to be mailed. Oh, my God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. I'm moving my feet because I know there are rats here. I can hear them and I just want to keep moving. There's a beer can on the bottom here. There's a bucket. Oh, dear God. I guess that's what Joe used. After Joe heard about the house, I visited him in the hospital. I was surprised, he looked well rested. His face had filled out. He seemed calm, resigned. I think it's a good thing, personally. Not good for me, but for the general welfare, I think it's good. And especially for the people who live around the area, it's a good thing. But as he said, not good for him. In fact, a huge loss. His friends disappeared. And he lost his home and everything inside it. The house was sealed before he could get any of his papers or books. He said he felt homeless. He said he'd probably go live with his sister and her husband in Florida, even though he hates the heat. I should somehow go with them because they ran out of money, and the thing for me to do is go there and have my address changed to hers and give them my pension money to help along. That'd be the sensible thing to do. The sensible thing. Sounds unappealing, doesn't it? For the last 10 years living in his house, Joe has not been doing the sensible thing. And I think he liked that. He liked that everything he was doing was unexpected for a man of his age. It made him feel young. And in a weird way, in spite of everything that went wrong in the house, I think it made him feel in control of his life. When I met him, one of the first things he said to me was that he had to live in the house because it was the only way to have the lifestyle he wanted. I never understood what he meant, what lifestyle he was talking about exactly, till that last visit in the hospital. Then I realized, every day he stayed in that house was one more day he wasn't in Florida, living with his sister, being a sensible retiree. Maherin Gangat in New York City. Well, coming up, when your starter apartment actually has a starter, and a spare tire, and a steering wheel. How could the next place you live in possibly be any worse? Well, we have answers in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Well, 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, Houses of Ill Repute. We have stories about places that are notoriously bad, and about how living in these places can actually be very different than most people assume it would be. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act two, The Crisco Kid. You know, when you're young and you move out of your parents' house and you're just starting out, you want to act like you're a grownup. And you know what that's supposed to look like on the surface: a job, your own place to live. And then you get those things and you have to pretend that you know what the hell you're doing, even though you really don't. This happened to lots of us this way, including David Wilcox. A quick warning before we start this story for sensitive listeners, this act, like our first act, mentions sex and drugs. When I was in high school, I never bothered looking at different colleges. From the start of my senior year I knew where I was going, the University of Houston, because my girlfriend was there. Most alumni don't look back fondly on U of H. It's a commuter school. There's no campus life, no identity. If you lived in the dorms, you went home every weekend because student services shut down late Friday afternoon. But going home wasn't an option for me. My family had sold their house in the Houston suburbs a few months after I graduated and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where my dad's company was based. The spring of my freshman year I roomed in the dorms with a guy named Bill, who was 25 and fresh out of the army. He'd shown up at my front door with nothing but a duffel bag and a double-chambered bong. Our routine was pretty simple. We'd stay up until dawn getting stoned, eating frozen chicken sandwiches out of a vending machine, and watching late night game shows. If we didn't pass out, we'd hit the cafeteria breakfast buffet as soon as it opened, then go to bed and sleep until mid-afternoon. Eventually, two of Bill's friends, who made money selling ecstasy and building lasers for raves, started sleeping on our floor two or three nights a week. I'd stopped going to class midway through the semester and got a minimum-wage job in the receiving department of a chain bookstore. The dorm was like a squat, a hovel occupied by too many people where I didn't have to pay rent. There were no responsibilities, no chores, no pressure, but it was utterly depressing. As the months passed, I decided it was time to grow up and get out on my own, make a life for myself, though I had no idea what that might look like. By the time summer rolled around, my parents and I were barely speaking. They were furious that I'd given up on school, and I refused to listen to anyone who thought I was making a mistake. But that was just part of it. I also didn't want to talk to them because I was afraid they were going to yell at me. When the dorms closed up and I moved out, I didn't even bother telling them where they could find me. But it just so happens that they knew my first residence quite well, a white Chevy Beretta my dad had given me. I showered at friends' houses and occasionally crashed on their couches. Otherwise, I curled up like a cat on piles of dirty clothes in my backseat. By early June, after being turned away by a dozen landlords, I finally found an efficiency in a two-story complex called Westmoreland Square. The property manager had no problem renting to a minor with no credit, no rental history, and no money. When I filled out my rental application, he even told me about a friend of his who could get me a half ounce of weed for $40. It took a few days for the paperwork to go through. In the meantime, my dad got word to me through my girlfriend's parents that he was coming to town on a business trip and wanted me to stop by his hotel. We met for lunch. He had a note pad in front of him with a list of things he wanted me to consider, all of them variations on two themes: what are you doing, and how do you think you're going to accomplish it? The thing is, he was so calm and so reasonable. That threw me. I didn't have a good answer, but I also didn't think he knew what he was talking about. All I could do was stammer and repeat the same thing over and over. I'm doing this because I have to. I'd been unhappy at school and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I finally was in a position for the first time in my life where, if I didn't want to do something, I could just stop. I made this decision because I could. When lunch was over, my dad told me he'd have to take the Beretta back if I wasn't going to stay in school. Do what you have to do, he told me, but I won't pay for it. Then, just as I was giving him the keys, he gave me a check for $4,000. It was more money than I'd ever seen. I'm paying you for the car, he explained. Make sure you spend it wisely. Most of the money went toward a '67 Volkswagen, and the rest went into the $350 apartment I'd just been approved for. It had a low ceiling with exposed beams, carpeting that was old but stain-free, and a plate glass window that ran floor to ceiling in the living room. Everything seemed to work OK, except the garbage disposal. Pretty early on, I flushed some leftover spaghetti down the kitchen sink and the noodles somehow wound up in the bathtub. My first month in the apartment was relatively quiet. I didn't know any of my neighbors and I kept to myself. Then, one day, the starter in my car went out, and I spent the afternoon underneath it in the car port. I was trying to get a screwdriver across the solenoid when I heard a soft, cheery voice. That your Type 3? Vintage Volkswagens fall into four types. Mine was a square back, a Type 3. You can always tell a VW nerd by their insistence on referring to a car by its type, never its name. Yeah, I said, scooting out from under the frame. The guy introduced himself as Steve. I guessed he was in his late 30s. He'd been living in the same apartment for over a decade. We wound up spending the next couple afternoons fiddling around with my car. He was nice, kind of shy, a little mysterious. He worked from home, building some sort of toy for men out of vacuums and cylinders and selling it through classifieds and gay porn mags. I think we were replacing my battery connectors when he brought up our current residence. You know about this place, right? What people call it? I had no idea what he was talking about. Crisco Corner, he said. Everybody calls it Crisco Corner. A name like Crisco Corner might speak for itself, but Steve broke it down for me anyway. Basically, as soon as the bars let out every night, randy gay men would start circling the complex over and over looking to pick up a resident. If they got impatient, they'd park their cars and wander through the courtyard. Anyone interested in company would just leave their front door open and these strangers would walk in and join them. Really, it's no big deal, Steve said. It's not like it used to be in the glory days, not since this new company but the security gates up. And then he paused. But, it's probably not a good idea to hang out at the pool by yourself. And you might want to lock the laundry room door behind you if it's late. Suddenly, I saw everything going on around me. It was as if Steve had dropped a token in an arcade machine. The complex sprang to life. Gangs of drag queens paraded through the courtyard at all hours of the day and night. Guys in leather bondage masks grilled burgers on their front stoops. Maintenance men made service calls in short shorts and roller skates. Still, I didn't mind calling Crisco Corner home. Sure, I got hit on. Every now and then, I'd go out on my porch to smoke a joint and some strange man passing by on the street below would ask me for the code to the security gate, so we could hang out in the pool together. But after an initial period of shock, it seemed like a perfectly normal way to live. Every week or so, my mom called. She'd ask how work was going, how I was getting along, and I'd say fine. Things were fine for the most part. My lights had been cut off. My car kept breaking down. But I was making rent and feeding myself, if nothing else. Regardless of how bad it got, I wasn't going to ask for help. And regardless of how worried she might have been, my mom wasn't offering. She'd ask how it was going, and I'd say fine, and that would be that. A couple days before Halloween, around midnight, I was sprawled out on my living room floor in my boxer shorts. The lights were out, the TV was on mute, and I was listening to a Replacements record through headphones. Alex Chilton had just queued up when I noticed the shadow of a man pass by my window. Based on the shoulder length hair, I knew who it was. A middle-aged bean pole I'd taken to calling the Nuge, though he looked nothing like Ted Nugent. The record played through. I flipped it over. Just as side two started, The Nuge passed by again. A few minutes later, he came back. This time, he stopped. He was facing my window, moving his head around as if a guy with a tall hat had just sat in front of him in a movie theater. I got up to see what was going on and The Nuge squatted down. Without even thinking about it, I opened the blinds to get a better look. When I was a kid, there were a few things my parents taught me about taking care of myself, things I had to understand before they'd leave me alone for a night or a weekend. Basic stuff, the number for poison control, keeping doors locked, not telling anyone on the phone that I was home alone. We never went over what I was supposed to do should I discover a six-foot hippie enjoying the sight of me in my underwear way, way too much. Nor did we discuss the best emergency hotline to call should that same hippie confuse my panic with excitement, move away from the window with his pants undone, and start lightly rapping on the door. So I stood there, paralyzed, a shell-shocked teenager trying to figure out the best way to let a pervert know I wasn't that kind of guy. I finally did what I thought any self-respecting adult would do. I went to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find and walked back to the window. The Nuge lurched back over into his squat just as I jerked open the blinds and pressed the blade against the glass. He immediately gave me two OK signs, zipped up his pants, and scooted away. I spent the rest of the night huddled on the couch with the knife right beside me on the arm rest. Then something really bad happened. A few weeks after my night with The Nuge, Crisco Corner was hit by a tornado. It was 8:30 in the morning, and I woke up to what sounded like a freight train roaring through my apartment. That's a cliche, I know, but it's not just how the tornado sounds, it's how it feels. Fast and ferocious and gone before you know it. You close your eyes and 10 seconds later, when you open them, you expect everything around you to be rubble. Amazingly, my apartment was untouched, but everything on the other side of my bedroom wall, including the apartment next door, was completely demolished. The property manager wound up moving me and my girlfriend into a two-bedroom in the courtyard. If you have any interest in seeing what it looked like, you can rent a movie called Rush that came out in the early '90s. It stars Jason Patrick and Jennifer Jason Leigh as narcs who get addicted to drugs and fall in love. There's a scene about halfway through where Patrick comes home to find Leigh crawling around frantically searching the carpet for stray dope. Nothing he does to get her to calm down works, so as a last resort he tosses her face down on a bed and violently sodomizes her. Let me repeat that. He violently sodomizes her so she'll calm down. That scene was filmed in my bedroom. I kept trying to tough it out at Crisco Corner, but things only got worse. The property manager was so desperate to keep the place occupied after the tornado that he gave up even pretending to screen tenants. Most of my new neighbors looked like they were hooked on drugs far more serious than anything I'd ever touched. The cops started showing up on a regular basis. And the scarier it got, the more trapped I felt. Up until all of this, the idea of living on my own had seemed liberating, fun. But I'd never realized what I was signing up for. The possibility that when something truly horrible happened, no one was going to step in and save me, that's what hit me for the first time the morning the tornado struck. I'd started looking for a pay phone so I could call my parents. At one point, I crossed under some police tape and a cop threatened to take me to jail. Telling him I was trying to get home to my apartment didn't matter. Giving him a hangdog look that said I was just a kid who needed someone, anyone, to make life a little easier didn't make a difference. To this cop, I was just another guy standing around in his pajamas, kicking shingles with his slippers, wondering where to go from here. I wound up calling my mom from a grocery store a mile away. The conversation was short and matter of fact. But if there was ever a point at which I was willing to admit that I wasn't fine, that was it. She didn't ask how I was doing. For the first time in months, the only thing she asked was, what are you going to do now? I told her I didn't know. And then there was a long pause. Mom, I could have died. But you didn't, she said. You're OK. As I was getting off the phone, she told me to call if I needed anything. I hung up knowing I wouldn't. Then I went home and spent the rest of the day by the pool, staring at a dresser that had sunk to the bottom of the deep end. David Wilcox in Chicago. Act Three, The Bully's Pulpit. Well, we now turn to one of the biggest houses of ill repute on the planet, the US House of Representatives. And, yes, you've heard about the corruption, you've heard about the lobbying scandals, you've heard about the notorious inability to address some of our most serious national problems. Why is it so dysfunctional? Well, for the last few years, Democrats blamed all of this, every part of it, on the Republicans who were running the place. As the majority, the Republicans were-- it is hard to deny this. They were pretty ruthless. They kept Democratic Party voices out of the debate. They rammed legislation through. Because they could. They had the votes. And now, of course, the tables have turned. The Democrats are the majority in the House of Representatives. And the question is, will things run any better? Will they run more fairly? Well, one of our producers, Alex Blumberg, went to DC to visit the House of Representatives to ask these questions. A warning to sensitive listeners, he's actually going to be describing the legislative process of the United States of America. Back when the Republicans still ran Congress this past summer, I spent several hours with Peter Defazio, a Democratic representative from Oregon. We talked mainly about how much it sucked being in the minority. The Republicans, Defazio said, would wait until the last minute to make bills available so that the minority Democrats had to vote on legislation they hadn't even had a chance to read. They'd hold meetings in the dead of night, where they'd take bills that had already been voted on and rewrite them. They wouldn't let the minority bring any of their own legislation to the floor. Even if it had broad bipartisan support, it would almost certainly pass. And the minority couldn't even offer amendments without visiting a special committee, called the Rules Committee, and getting their approval, which they almost never gave. You know, you come in and sometimes there will be a fair number of people. Other times there will just be one or two people there. And generally, the Republicans act very bored. The Democrats try and be helpful and make points about your amendment. But the Republicans just act bored. I've had the chairman of the committee turn his back on me when I was testifying just to chat with his staff, just to show his contempt and the fact that I'm insignificant. He's not going to allow my amendment. You might as well leave now. Parliamentary inquiry. And then, there was this trick, holding the vote open. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] inquire. The speaker, I have a plane to catch in about one hour. Am I going to be able to do it? Will the vote be ended by that time? Not a proper parliamentary inquiry. You're listening to the House floor debate on an oil refineries bill from October of 2005. The guy saying he has a plane to catch is a Democrat. And what he's really doing is trying to get the speaker to stop holding the vote open. See, it's the speaker's job to ask members to cast their votes and to tally those votes up. This casting and tallying is supposed to take a couple of minutes, enough time for everyone to press their yea or nay button. But occasionally, like on this bill, all the votes will come in, the speaker will see that the legislation hasn't passed, and instead of tallying and certifying the results, he does what's called holding the vote open. He and his colleagues go around and try to convince wayward Republicans to change their votes. Frustrated Democrats, who can see on the big tally screen that they've won, have to just sit and wait. For 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, while the majority tries to undo their victory. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] inquire. Is the discretion of the chair or the abuse of the discretion of the chair and the abuse of power subject to a vote of the House? This all happened for the first time when Democrats were in power. Once, in 1987, Speaker Jim Wright kept a vote on a budget bill open for 15 minutes while one of his colleagues came back to the floor to change his vote. At the time, it almost sparked a riot among the minority Republicans. Trent Lott smacked a chair in anger so hard that he almost broke it. And then congressman Dick Cheney described it as, quote, "The most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power I've ever seen in the 10 years that I've been here." The Republicans pulled this move repeatedly in their last couple of years in power. The most extraordinary example was in 2003, during the vote on the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Republicans held the vote open for three hours, and this was well after midnight, at the end of a long day in session. They do these things really late, both to avoid the press, and also it's like a torture technique. The whole Congress was on the floor, including Peter Defazio. Their own members are tired. They want to go home, and everybody wants to go home. And they figure, well, we can pressure some people when they're more tired. You know, it was pretty chaotic on their side, because they brought in some cabinet secretaries who were working out of the Republican cloak room. They were dragging people off the floor to take phone calls from George Bush and Dick Cheney. You know, it was pretty-- All while the vote is being held up? Oh yeah. And on our side, we're just sitting there staring at them. And every once in a while, we'll just try and say, point of order. Point of order is the rules say no vote should be held open more than 17 minutes. What's going on? And then they overrule our point of order. Mr. Speaker. For what purpose does the gentlelady rise? Mr. Speaker, for the parliamentary inquiry. The gentlelady may inquire. Mr. Speaker, my parliamentary inquiry, is it not bringing dishonor to the House of Representatives for this body to act-- Gentlelady is not stating a proper parliamentary inquiry. This is not part of the culture of corruption of the Republican Party. Does this gentlelady parliamentary inquiry? To dishonor the wishes of people who have spoken. Does the gentlelady have a parliamentary-- I have a parliamentary inquiry. When are you going to honor-- So we would occasionally try and do that. Or every once in a while, yeah, we would break into a chorus of shame. Because it was shameful. It was incredibly shameful. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. It would be different people at different times. I mean, you're sitting there. It's 5 o'clock in the morning, you've been sitting there for three hours. You know, something to do. Raise your fist and yell shame. Come on, you guys have no shame. Those Democrats that were here in '93 and '94 before the Republicans took control, they put the screws to the Republicans on a daily basis. They didn't allow for amendments on large pieces of legislation and they shut Republicans out. As you can imagine, Republicans disagree with Peter Defazio's assessment that their behavior is at all unusual. This is Patrick McHenry, Republican from North Carolina. He says what a lot of Republicans say. They learned everything they know about majority rule from the Democrats, who abused their Republican counterparts throughout the 40 years that they held the majority in Congress. Republican amendments were routinely denied, Republican voices barred from the debate. And that whole keeping the vote open thing? They learned that from a Democrat too, don't forget. Now, generally, a discussion about who started it never gets anywhere. Just ask the Israelis and the Palestinians, or your mom for that matter. And it can be a dispiriting exercise talking to representatives about this stuff. The tactic on both sides seems to be deflect all criticism with attacks of your own, as if this were a game, which you win by never once admitting your side might have behaved badly. Patrick McHenry is particularly good at this. He's a rising star in his party, in just his second term. He's young, charming, and very good at offense. When I spoke to him, he had two of his press aides in the room, and it was clear that their strategy was to counter every question I asked about Republican strong arm tactics with an equally egregious Democratic abuse. Why did the Republicans hold the vote open for three hours in the middle of the night? Well, Democrats, when they were in power, wouldn't even allow a motion to recommit with instructions. Then, of course, you don't know what a motion to recommit with instructions is. And so you have to ask and, boom, you're deflected. Or even worse, you do know what a motion to recommit is, and you say, but wait a minute, a motion to recommit is a token parliamentary procedure in which the minority offers a substitute, but which is invariably voted down since votes on parliamentary motions are generally considered to be tests of party loyalty and proceed almost always along party lines. And then you get into an argument about whether or not a motion to recommit is a meaningless formality or a cornerstone of democracy. And, boom, you're deflected even more. At one point, after a particularly dexterous verbal parry of this kind. I saw McHenry glance over to one of his aides, who sort of closed his eyes, smiled, and gave a little fist pump, the same gesture a pitcher makes when he strikes a batter out. But fortunately, the recent midterm elections have created a perfect laboratory for the study of majority versus minority behavior. As we all know, in 2006, the Democrats came to power, and it didn't take long for roles to reverse. And so in our first 100 hours of legislation, which will begin next week, we will begin by making America safer by passing the 9/11 Commission recommendations. This is Nancy Pelosi, the newly elected Democratic speaker of the House, of course, in early January, announcing her party's legislative agenda for its first 100 hours in power. The Democrats passed all the bills in their agenda by pretty wide margins. But in doing so, they bypassed the committee process. They waited till the last minute to make their legislation available. And they didn't allow amendments, or any input really, from the Republicans, who, by the way, had also switched roles. Good afternoon, thank you for joining us today. A group assembled here today are leading the fight for the minority bill of rights, encouraging honest, open, and fair legislative debate. That's Patrick McHenry, who also made a brief appearance on TV recently at a press conference with a handful of other Republican congressmen. And he didn't deny that what he was asking for might sound familiar. Pelosi asked for the same things in a letter she sent back when she was in the minority. The bill we offer today, the minority bill of rights, is crafted based on the exact text that then minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, submitted in 2004 to then speaker of the house Dennis Hastert. The point being that if Pelosi wanted open debate and minority participation then, she had to grant it now. Although it's hard not to note that when Pelosi asked for it in 2004, she was utterly ignored by the Republican leadership. McHenry says, there's no inconsistency. Well, because Republicans, that wasn't a key part of our campaign, talking about openness and fairness. It was a key part of the Democrat strategy and Democrat campaign. So for them to come in on their first days in power and say, we actually are going back on our campaign pledge for openness and bipartisanship in their first hours, that is hypocrisy. That is the height of hypocrisy for them to campaign on openness, but govern in a closed fashion. It takes a lot of chutzpah to make this argument. Essentially, it's worse for the Democrats to act imperiously because they said they wouldn't, whereas the Republicans never even claimed they'd be fair. Democrats say, look, this is just for the first 100 hours. And besides, all that legislation had been debated over and over again. Here's Peter Defazio. Everything we're voting on in the 100 hours, we have proposed previously, we've attempted to trigger votes on the increase in the minimum wage. We begged them. We tried parliamentary maneuvers. We tried a dozen ways to bring that bill up in the House. They know exactly what they're voting on. In fact, half the Republicans wanted to vote for it in the end. I think it's an aberration from how we will treat them consistently after we get through the first 100 hours. How do you keep, though-- how do you make sure that that actually happens? You know, because I think human nature is, well, wow, it was really easy. If we just keep limiting debate. It seems to me like there must be quite a powerful incentive as the majority to limit debate and to sort of make it easier for yourself. Well, that will remain to be seen. I mean, going from this point forward. I have heard very little discussion from anybody, even the hot heads, on my side of the aisle saying, no, we should just abuse them day in, day out the way they did us, and abuse the process. Not in the caucus, not in the gym, not anywhere. I haven't heard it. What's strange is, everyone I talked to, on both sides of the aisle, said exactly the same thing about the way things should be. One party doesn't have a lock on good ideas. Minority input almost always makes legislation better. And they both seemed upset, honestly so, when talking about their treatment as the minority. It made me realize something. Leaving aside the question of what shutting out the minority does to democracy, to the people in the minority, it hurts and it makes them mad. Imagine, you're being told that, though you represent nearly half the country, your vote will never count, your ideas will never be considered, no one will ever listen to you, you don't matter at all. It's an utterly demeaning feeling. And it's a feeling the Democrats felt for the last 12 years, and the Republicans felt for the 40 years before that, which partly explains why this behavior can perpetuate, even though nobody really wants it to. It's hard to let go. You may look like a majority, but you still feel like a minority. Well, there is a lot of pent-up anger. I mean, 12 years of being abused. 12 years, or at least, I think, 8 years of having the rules chairman sneer at us and turn his back. Now he's down their whining that they're not getting open rules and all these sorts of things. There is some tendency to say, yeah, this is payback. And boy, it's tough, isn't it? So I think that actually the 100 hours could be healthy. If for the first 100 hours, we treat them somewhat the same way they treated us for 12 years, and then, after that, we restore some of what I think are proper rights and privileges to the minority. Perhaps if they take back over again, they'll be a little more respectful. The other thing about arguments over who started it, once they get going they're hard to stop. No one knows this better than Jim Wright, the democratic speaker who held the vote open back in 1987, cracking the door that the Republicans burst through two decades later. Speaking in 2004 at a ceremony in his honor, he had this to say about that day. "The bottom line is that what I'd done that day did not contribute to harmonious relations. Although the maneuvers were legal and in keeping with the rules, my mind was too determined, my attitude too insistent. I believed that I offended a number of my Republican colleagues. I won the vote, but sacrificed a more precious commodity: good will. In the end, it wasn't worth it. If that day were to do over again, I like to think I'd do it differently." Alex Blumberg. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, where not only can you get the absolutely free podcast of our program or listen to any of our old programs online, this week on the website there is information about our upcoming six-city national tour. That's New York, LA, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle. We are coming to your town if you live in one of those six cities. And we are doing our show live on stage. Live. Now, the lineup of performers is going to vary from city to city, but they include, depending on where you are, Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Jonathan Goldstein, John Hodgman, Dan Savage, Alexa Junge, Mates of State, plus outtakes from our new television show. To see who is playing in your city and to find out about tickets, go to our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who called me into his office the other day with a question. You know about this place, right? What people call it? Crisco Corner. Everybody calls it Crisco Corner. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Bob Harris has won two cars and a lot of money playing Jeopardy on television. But he insists he's not that smart. What he is, he says, is somebody who decided when he was going to be on Jeopardy to take measures. I told my girlfriend at the time, hi. I'm rearranging the furniture now. And I need to make my house look like the Jeopardy studio. I set up low bookcases to be sort of like where the podiums were, about the same height. And I would stand there. I had a little homemade buzzer that I made out of a ballpoint pen and some masking tape. He got bright halogen lights. And he pumped up the air conditioning to make it feel like the inside of a TV studio. He placed a big picture of Jeopardy's host, Alex Trebek, in about the spot where the real Alex Trebek stands. I even tried to time my meals to when I would be eating at Jeopardy, so that my whole body clock would be exactly in harmony. So he played along with videotapes of the TV show. And he studied for months, memorizing all kinds of stuff, the guys who ran the United Nations in order, the presidents in order, rivers, the elements, British kings, the novels of E. M. Forster-- which include, by the way, Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End. The way to remember a lot of stuff is to build really big, goofy images. It takes an extra couple of seconds, maybe even a minute or two of thought, but then it stays better. So it's time well invested. I made this big picture in my head of a room with a view. OK, so you've got this nice, really big, like-- a friend of mine in Ohio grew up in this big mansion, so it's actually his living room in my head. So OK, it's a room with a beautiful view. And Howards End was the next one on the list that I just happened to have in front of me. And so Howards End, and you've got A Room With a View. I mean, how can you not have, like, Howard-- I have a friend named Howard. And so I made a 30-foot buttocks and stuck it in the window. So you have a room with a view of Howard's end where angels fear to tread. So the angels are in this room, and there's this giant 30-foot buttocks in the window. That's why the angels fear to tread there. Who really wants to be there, really? All I can say is, you do not want to know how he got Passage to India in there. Bob says that a third of the answers that he gave on television-- a third-- came from cramming information into his head with these weird pictures that he would create for himself. And one of his biggest wins came when-- thanks to brute memorization-- he knew the name of an old book called The Compleat Angler, which to this day he has never read, has only the vaguest idea what it's about. And one of his biggest losses came when he could not remember the poem, "Jabberwocky." And I was particularly frustrated because this was my father's favorite poem. And he recited it to me pretty constantly. And yet, when they asked me about it under pressure, I just completely choked. And so Brillig became my nickname, for some people. I wonder if the reason why you didn't remember it was because it wasn't part of your Jeopardy knowledge, but because it was part of your real knowledge. I think that's exactly right. I think there are a lot of times in the game-- most of the big mistakes I ever made were like that, where it wasn't in my Jeopardy notebooks, my study materials, the almanacs. It's funny. It's sort of like it was in the wrong section of your brain. Yeah, exactly. It was in my real brain, the one I walk around with that doesn't have much in it. Talking to Bob about all this, you realize that a show like Jeopardy, a quiz show, any quiz show on the surface seems like it's about facts, retrieving facts to win prizes. But what's really going on for the players is totally different than just retrieving facts. There's a whole inner world happening, an inner world that is not on TV at all, an inner world that actually may be a lot more interesting than what's in the program that's on TV. Well today, we dive in to look at that inner world, at the secret life of quiz shows. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three rounds. Round One, Gamester of Ireland is Fine. The round is about somebody who goes on to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and the most amazing thing he comes up with is not any fact, not any answer, it is the sheer courage to appear at all. Round Two, Dire Enigmas for Elite Fans, where we visit with some of the best quiz masters anywhere on an all-weekend, all-day, all-night quiz bender. Round Three, Girls in Need of a Safer Time. By the way, if you are noticing anything special about these round names, five points for you as you play along at home. Anyway, round three is an attempt to use quiz shows-- yes, quiz shows-- to change teenage girls. Stay with us. Act One, Gamester of Ireland is Fine. When Ronan Kelly went to talk to the guy in this next story, all he knew about him was that he had won a lot of money on a quiz show on RTE, which is the main television station in Ireland. And Ronan just figured that anybody who had won that kind of money must have some kind of story to tell. And anyway, the guy lived nearby. So Ronan got onto his bike with his recording gear, and he bicycled over to the guy's house. When he got there, he figured that the first thing they would do is watch the video of the guy on the quiz show. But although this man had won hundreds of thousands of pounds, he actually did not have the technology to do that. What you're about to hear is the story that Ronan put together for Irish radio about this guy. The guy is named Roger Dowds. When I got to Roger's house to watch the tape of his appearance, he didn't have a VCR. We had to go back to the radio station to watch it. Roger Dowds from Dublin. January 2001. Were you told to wave? Oh, yes. They made a big issue about waving and smiling and looking as happy as possible. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] from Dublin. And it's Fastest Finger first. Stand by your keypads, please. He was a contestant on the quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I should have put the word "unlikely" in there. Roger was an unlikely contestant, and you'll find out why as the program unfolds. Silence in the studio, please. This is your question. Starting with the largest, arrange these Mediterranean islands in order of size, starting with the largest. Crete, Cyprus, Sicily, Malta. Well, there was a phone number you could ring on RTE, obviously. And I rang many times, anyway, with no luck. And eventually, I got a call from someone to say I'd been short-listed. It was a couple of days before the show. You know, they said, oh, you're allowed to have five Phone-a-Friends. I don't have many close friends, so I got two of my brothers. I got someone I play table tennis with. I got the husband of someone I play badminton with, a friend of my brother's, I think. They were the five. And who got there quickest? Two right answers. But Roger Dowds beat it at 4.9 seconds. 4.9 seconds. Well done, Roger. There you go. You know, I wasn't one of these so-called professional quiz people. I'm not an outgoing enough person to be like that, really. People were astounded that I would think of going on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Now ladies and gentlemen, our next contestant is Roger Dowds. He works as a maintenance assistant in a nursing home. And he lives in Glasnevin in Dublin. And he specifically wants me to mention that his mother, Nora, is deceased, but would be very proud, indeed, to see him on this show. Why did you say that? Well, I still was getting over my mother's death somewhat at the time. She was about three years' dead at the time. And she had been such a part of my life. She probably was quite concerned about my future when she died. And if he won GBP 1 million, he says, he'd help the residents of the nursing home where he works to buy a place and run it however they please. And then he would love to have enough money-- You know, because you don't really believe you're going to be on, and you go through a lot of questions, what you might say in a circumstance, and I kind of said something very frivolous, expecting not to ever be saying anything. All right, good luck to you. Let's play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And for GBP 100, answer this one, Roger. In the 1968 cartoon, what was the color of the Beatles' submarine? Was it blue, yellow, green, or red? Yellow. OK. For GBP 100, yellow is right. You've got GBP 100, Roger. Financially, how were things at the time? Was that an interest for you? Yes, it was a factor. I never had full-time employment ever in my life. I was at the time working in this home. But I was only working part-time. And I might have done the odd little odd job, but I was on an extremely low income. So I suppose the money aspect could be significant to me and my position. It's not the other name. So Bill. Bill? That's my answer. For GBP 500? Yeah. You've got it. It's the Bill. GBP 500. Did you practice first? No, there wasn't time to practice. I didn't practice at all. I remember going in the day, and there were all the other contestants. And some of them were poring over quiz books. I just was trying to cope with being there. They made a tremendous day out of it. You were kind of treated like royalty. We were chauffeur-driven in. I think we got a very special lunch that no one else in RTE was getting. And I remember thinking, oh, something different is happening today, because I saw some of the people that I recognize who were actors in Fair City. And, I don't know, one or two-- someone who's in Sport in RTE, in addition to all these people. And I don't know whether I'm starstruck or not. No doubt about that one. You have GBP 1,000. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is the right answer. Now, you can never sit in the chair where Roger is sitting if you don't take those telephone numbers. They're 1550-717171 [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I'll remember that phone number for the rest of my life. Do you want to tell the audience what happened to you in Morocco, Roger? Well, I-- Well, no I don't. You're going to make me, anyway. I was there last month, in fact, in December-- I didn't really want to be distracted by anecdotes. Moroccan dirham, as they call the currency there. So being a bit shy and retiring, I wanted to get rid of them. And all I could find was an Irish-- Where does this sensitivity come from, this lack of confidence come from? I'm still trying to work that one out. Well, I was uncommonly close my mother. And I was reluctant to go out into the world and do things as a result. I was almost reclusive in kind of a way, because I didn't go out. I did go to college for a while, and it didn't work out. This is in your early 20s? Yeah, I was about 21 at the time. GAA fan, are you? Actually not particularly, but I had that answer before the counties came up. So I think I-- You're going with that? --have to go with that. Final answer, Kildare? Final answer. And it makes you worth GBP 8,000, Roger. My father, I suppose, was a little distant from us. It was hard to get any sense of what he expected from us. I sort of feel, in some ways, he was a bit childlike, so sometimes I felt I was fighting for my mother's affection with him. And we had this kind of slightly niggly, sort of relationship as a result. I suppose we were all a bit on our own little wavelength. I was so much younger than the rest, so I think that separated me a bit. I feel as it's a historical question, now I have a brother who's-- he is a bit of a historian. He studied history. So I think maybe I should phone him. It's my brother, Robert. Your brother Robert. OK. Robert. Hello. Hello, Robert. Yes, hello. Good evening to you. This is Gay Byrne on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Hello. And your brother Roger has made it to the hot seat. And he needs your help in answering a question, all right? Thanks very much. There are four possible answers to this question. The next voice you hear will be his. And Roger, you have 30 seconds, starting now. Robert, where did the Asgard land guns for the Irish Volunteers in July 1914? Was it Banna Strand, Scarriff, Howth, or Arklow? Howth. Thank you very much. You're sure about that? About 95%. I thought it might be that myself. So thank you. OK. Bye. Thank you very much. Bye. I'll go with that. Howth. Howth, final answer? Final answer. Could Roger be right in saying Howth for the answer? We'll take a break here. Come back to us after this. Thank you. Can you remember the day you decided that college wasn't for you or that college wasn't working out? Oh, I didn't feel part of anything there. And I had all sorts of essays and assignments that I was supposed to have done. And I hadn't started on anything. And just one day, I didn't go in. I was so lacking in resources to deal with things then that I couldn't tell anyone. I actually pretended for a whole term to go to college. I spent most of the days like a homeless person, walking around town. Whatever I did. I brought in my sandwiches just as I normally had done. And my brother, in particular, was trying to get me to go back. But it just didn't seem possible. It was simple as that. The question was, where did the Asgard land guns for the Irish Volunteers in July 1914? He had to check with his brother, Robert. Robert said Howth. He went with Howth. That was his final answer. And it means he's worth GBP 16,000. The next question is worth GBP 32,000, Roger. OK. Have a look at it. Who was the first person to run a mile in under four minutes? I couldn't believe my luck with this question. Sebastian Coe, Harold Abrahams-- You're shaking your head. Yeah, because I'm going to know it before I see any answers. Well, I think you arranged this question for me, because it just happens it's my namesake, Roger Bannister. I've always had an interest in athletics. And I'm quite sure about this one. Roger Bannister. 1954, I believe it was. Roger, don't confuse me with dates. I'm sorry. I felt I should be offering more information. Whatever about the angels, Roger. I think mama's looking after you as well, is she? Because you've just won GBP 32,000. The crowd seemed to get particularly enthusiastic at that point. They must have all those checks written out, do they? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. There's no writing involved. GBP 32,000. And you get to keep that. Nobody can take that from you. No matter what. No matter what, that's yours, OK? And you're right. Bannister did run the mile in 1954, not that we asked you. Did your mother encourage you to go out into the world? She did try to encourage me when I left college. She was always looking at courses that I might do. Because I used to do the garden at home or I did a bit of cooking at home, oh, will you do a cookery course? Will you do a gardening course? You know, just to see me doing something. But then I gradually-- as my parents got older, they started becoming infirm. And I did become more of a benefit, because I just became their chauffeur and stuff like that. Was it a time you felt good about yourself? I think I felt better that I had some little sense of duty in doing something. Because when I was first at home and my parents were still a bit active, I remember, literally, sometimes that people came in during the day and maybe they thought I should be out. And I'd actually literally hide under the bed-- a grown man in his 20s-- just to avoid having to explain myself. That must have made you so angry. I couldn't express anger. I was such a-- I don't know-- such a-- well, withdrawn from anger. I was angry in some way. But I didn't recognize it as anger. Well, I was so full of self-hatred. I didn't have any sense of self-esteem. So I think because of that I couldn't do things at all. I think I have nothing to lose. I shall go for Venus as my final answer. That's your final answer? Final answer. Venus, final answer. You had GBP 32,000, Roger. You now have GBP 64,000. The biscuits are from the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] cookery book. Tea and biscuits in Roger's house. The biscuits are on a plate bought by his family to support the Protestant side in the 1957 boycott, where Catholics boycotted Protestant businesses, and Protestants, like Rogers' family, bought things to keep those businesses alive. She compiled a cookery book, which seemed to go all around Protestant communities around Ireland. Roger felt isolated as a child. And the fact that he was part of a minority community only made that feeling of isolation more intense. But being a Protestant also got him out of the house. He travels miles to play racket sports in clubs that used to be exclusive to his church, something that's no longer the case, and he's glad of that. He goes out to play the organ at church services. And through the church community, he found work in a retirement home set up originally for Protestant residents. I mean, it has been a tremendous experience over the years. I met some very special people who have passed away because they were old. Well, my mother died at the end of 1997. And shortly after that a woman called Joyce [? Schultheis ?] came into the home. And she just was a tremendous-- excuse me crying-- but gift to me at the time. From the generation she came from, she was a person of rare understanding. You could tell her anything, and she was unshockable. And because of the slightly narrow environment I'd been living in, I felt things had to be kept secret and kind of hidden. Suddenly, I got this different perspective. I feel very strongly that it's Patrick Kavanagh. I think Louis MacNeice died earlier than 1967. So I'll go for Patrick Kavanagh as my final answer. Final answer? Final answer, Gay. No turning back. No turning back. We've gone to [? orange. ?] That was one of the most surprising pieces of thinking I've seen on this show so far. And it's won you GBP 100,000. Around the time I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionare, I started going to a counselor, who I'm still going to. I think she's helped with sort of relieving me after the awful self-hatred. Why did you decide you needed her? I got very friendly with quite an elderly man. And as I said, it was the summer just before I went to school. Oh, sorry, college. And I used to go and visit him. And unfortunately, he started abusing me. And although I was 18, I suppose I was 12. I hadn't had sex education of any kind. I didn't really consent to anything, but I allowed this to happen for about a year, I don't know, because I suppose in some way I valued his attention. And finally-- because I'd never not confided in my mother-- so I did eventually confide in her about this. And it was a very difficult thing for her. She was used to kind of sweeping things aside, putting them under the carpet. I lost a little bit of something with my mother that day. I'm sorry. I missed that. You what? I kind of lost a little bit of something with my mother. I idealized her so much. And she was so wonderful. And did you go back to the elderly man? I went once. But I didn't-- I remember going once to the door and talking to him. And I made up some outlandish story and, well, lies. So as a result of that, he kind of didn't want to have anything more to do with me anyway. I suppose I pretended I'd gone off with someone else. Did he think there was something else in what you were doing? How do you mean? Sorry. Well, did he see it in the same way as you did? Or did he see it as something else? Did he see it as abuse? Or did he see it as a relationship? No, he probably saw it as a relationship or something. I don't think he would have had any sense of the abuse I was feeling. At that point, I think I could have let anyone do anything to me. I had so little self-esteem, I suppose I couldn't-- It's like as if I became mute, and I couldn't shout stop. I'm very sure I know this one, Gay. I couldn't believe the audience's response. I thought they were going to collapse. They're really behind you. Yeah, yeah, extraordinarily so. I explained the situation earlier, Roger. You have GBP 125,000. You walk now, there's the check. I have it. You could walk now with that. If you go for this and get it wrong, you lose GBP 93,000. That's a bit drastic, all right. Yes. But I do know a bit about birds. And that is my final answer, Gay. Final answer. Final answer. You had GBP 125,000, Roger. You now have GBP 250,000. The whole audience had won it, themselves. Imagine having to take home a cartload of money. I want to shed a few tears now. All that was going through my head was that Gay Byrne, himself, had lost a lot of money. Don't start crying on me at this stage. The next question is worth half a million pounds. I don't feel I want to look at it, actually. Look at it. Now, what did you think of that? What does a vexillologist study? I didn't think much. A vexillologist study? Is it-- I think my brain had seized up. I couldn't come up with anything. --flags, or skin diseases? Vexillologist. And if you look at me and say, funnily enough, Gay, I know the answer-- Funnily enough, I know the answer-- You were fairly entertaining, weren't you? Yeah, I was surprised how many people thought I was entertaining. No, I'll have to be quite honest to you. Were you disappointed you hadn't got an easy one? Well, I couldn't believe my luck up to that. I was carried on in the tide of wanting to keep going, just not even to do with the money, just I was enjoying being up there in some way. So I didn't want to stop. What's the word? I shall retire now, or whatever I should say. To get all this positive feedback from other people was extraordinary, to feel I was worth something and people could admire me. It says, pay Roger Dowds GBP 250,000. Take it with our blessing and our thanks. You've been a lovely, lovely competitor and played extremely well. You deserve it. Thank you very much. Enjoy. Thank you. Enjoy your [INAUDIBLE]. And did friends and family deal differently with you afterwards? Not enormously. Well, I think they admired me for having done it. I'm the youngest of my family, and I think maybe I was always seen as very vulnerable or sensitive. And maybe they felt the less reason to be worried about my future. So what has that future been for Roger? What did he do with the hundreds of thousands? Well, he uses it as an income to supplement part-time work gardening and house minding. It also allows him time to visit elderly people and do messages for them. I was persuaded that I absolutely had to get an alarm for the house. I went on a nice, organized cycling holiday in France, I remember. And I went skiing. I'd never been skiing. The main thing Roger got from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire wasn't the money. It was self-confidence. Well, I think I'm a lot less shy than I was, perhaps. I have more sense of well being within myself. I don't have the awful self-hatred. In his modest house with his very modest car outside, Roger has one luxury to show for his night on the tele with Gay, a piano organ. Ronan Kelly's story about Roger Dowds, from the Irish radio program, Flux on RTE Radio 1. It was a winner of the Third Coast International Audio Competition, which is where we heard of it. Since this show aired, Roger Dowds has picked up another award. He won a gold medal for Ireland in tennis at the Outgames, a competition of gay and lesbian athletes in Montreal. Coming up, can quiz shows save the world? One woman believed yes. 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 we choose a theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Secret Life of Quiz Shows. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Dire Enigmas For Elite Fans. Every winter, there is this event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some of the country's very best puzzle solvers go up against the very best puzzle writers. It's called the MIT Mystery Hunt. And what it is is a series of puzzles-- word puzzles, number puzzles, scavenger hunts, picture puzzles, puzzles which don't even have a name. And eventually what all this leads to-- this takes all weekend or longer-- what it leads to, the final answer, it leads you to a coin hidden somewhere on the MIT campus. This is a team competition. The teams are made up of MIT students, and also elite puzzle solvers who fly in from around the country for the event. One of our producers, Lisa Pollak, joined them for last year's contest. She was following a team called Dr. Awkward. And for those of you who are playing along at home, Dr. Awkward is spelled, D-R period Awkward, A-W-K-W-A-R-D. Give yourself two points if you noticed that that is a palindrome, spelled the same forwards and backwards. Here's Lisa. When you hang out with a puzzle team, you hear a lot of stories like Dave Dickerson's. When Dave was just a kid, he got this book. He'll never forget the title. Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles, Puzzles. Actually, the title might have just been Puzzles, but that's what the cover said. Dave was obsessed with this book. The puzzles were harder than any he'd ever seen, but he couldn't put them down. And I even remember when I saw one of the clues-- not an elegant clue by modern standards-- but it said, damn, I'm trying to fix these socks. And the answer was darn. The darn socks. You know, needle and thread. And I thought, I get that. And I solved it. It was the first clue I had actually solved. And I thought, I can do this. I had never been challenged this much in my life. And I didn't realize I could do it. Not only could Dave do it, he found it impossible to stop doing it, which is how, almost 30 years later, he ended up here, standing in an MIT classroom with the rest of the Dr. Awkward team, warming up for the mystery hunt. And by warming up, I mean they were plugging in their laptops and setting up a snack table. This was an experienced team with about 45 people on the roster. And as far as brainpower goes, they were an intimidating crew-- crossword champs, PhDs, a guy handing out DVDs of his recent appearance on Jeopardy, two guys whose T-shirts I needed help deciphering, and this man, whose nickname I'm still trying to figure out. Ucaoimhu, spelled U-C-A-O-I-M-H-U. And it's from my real name, Kevin Wald. You split it up as KEV-IN W-ALD. Ald is an archaic form of the word "old," so you take an old-style "W", which is two "U's." You take "Kev" the way it's in the original Irish spelling, which is C-A-O-I-M-H. And you put it in the two "U's," so you get Ucaoimhu. We're definitely a dangerous team. There's no question about it. That's Dave again. He's the person who invited me to hang out here. And he warned me that the puzzles I'd see his team solve that weekend wouldn't be what most of us imagine when we think of puzzles. Mystery hunt puzzles are so elaborate, so complex, that lots of times they don't even have instructions, just a page of words or pictures or numbers arranged in some cryptic way, which means you've often got to solve a puzzle just to know what puzzle you're trying to solve. So for example, the first puzzle hunt-- or maybe one of the first-- the guy who did it did a puzzle in Linear A, which is an old language. I think it's older than Greek, a very, very primitive, ancient language. And he didn't tell anyone it was Linear A. And he took the only two books on Linear A out of the MIT library. People solved it anyway. Hey, everybody! How you doing today? That's right. The mystery hunt started with an opening ceremony put on by last year's winning team. They're called The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight. That's the way the hunt works. The group that won last year's hunt designs and runs this year's contest. Dozens of teams pack the lobby of an MIT building. And though they were competing, from what I could tell the mood seemed pretty friendly. The Evil Midnight Bombers kicked things off with a skit. Then all the teams headed off to various locations around campus, and the solving began. So what do you do with FNTLLLLLLSNN? Those ?] just might be an index to something else. It might not even be an index to something in this round. That's Jeremy and [? Tripp, ?] two Dr. Awkward teammates, standing at a blackboard a few hours into the hunt. Now I'll be honest, as a spectator sport, competitive puzzle solving has some problems. Most of the time there wasn't much to see, just people huddled in small groups around laptops and conferring over printouts, batting around one idea after another until they hit on an answer. The third one is Gilligan's Island. Who's writing this down? Things seemed to be going pretty well. The blackboard was filling up with answers and new puzzles kept coming. But there were some stumpers, too. And that doesn't look promising. So look at last letters. The name of this puzzle was Continental Divide. It was one of those no-instruction puzzles. There was a sheet of paper with a bunch of pictures of DVD movie covers on it. And the covers were arranged in a grid, six boxes across and five down. The bottom right-hand box was empty. All the titles on the covers were blacked out. Finding those was the easy part. It turns out all the films had a city, state, or country in the name. Raising Arizona, Road to Singapore, The Tailor of Panama. And so on. The answer, everyone agreed, had something to do with those place names, but what? Were they trying to put a title in the missing box? Spell a sentence from a combination of letters? I watched for more than an hour as at least a dozen different people tried together to figure it out. Annapolis, Dallas, Essex, Cancun. All of these in this column do not end in vowels. They plotted the names on a map. They typed them into a spreadsheet. They put them in a grid and they color coded them by continent. No pattern was too absurd to consider. Arizona Iced Tea, Singapore sling, Panama hat. I still think we might be able to get drinks out of them. India pale ale. India pale ale and-- OK, yeah. These are drinks across. Oh, my God. They could not have been more wrong. I like the idea from half an hour ago where we were mapping these things to letters. The answer ended up having something to do with DVD country codes. But they didn't know that yet. For now, despite all the work, they weren't getting anywhere. At times I couldn't believe they were actually doing this for fun. But for puzzle people, the struggle is part of the fun. It's not in vain, because they know that somewhere out there there's an answer. I mean, somebody can say something in the next 15 seconds that will just break this whole thing wide open. That's Eric, a veteran of the team. And what he's talking about there, that flash of insight, that aha moment when something suddenly becomes clear, that's the payoff. An observation that nobody else saw, seeing through the problem. And that's difficult to do. And I'm not going to do it on every puzzle. I'm not one of the geniuses around here. But I am able to contribute something, and I'm just waiting for that to happen. You don't have to solve a puzzle to have an aha moment. The puzzles, if you're a puzzle person, are a pretty reliable way to get them, as opposed to real life, where, as a team member named John pointed out to me, most problems don't come with their own answers. You know, it's very different trying to figure out, why does my daughter hate me? And how can I help her? Because there's no solution to that. Versus, OK, what are those numbers in the background of the evil video? Are they trying to say some message there? This you get the joy of, OK. At least you got the answer, and you know that you got the answer. It is right now 1:23 in the morning. And we're in the sixth round. We've got tons and tons of puzzles in these rounds. When I caught up with Ucaoimhu, the Dr. Awkward team had been solving puzzles for 13 and 1/2 straight hours. The desks were covered with empty food containers. And the classroom was starting to smell like a dorm room whose residents hadn't showered in a while. Some team members had gone home to sleep. And a night crew with fresher brains had shown up to relieve them. But Ucaoimhu, like a lot of the 20 or so people here, had been there since the start. How are you feeling right now? Right now, I'm feeling tired. And I'll probably leave within the next hour or so. Fortunately, what I'm working on now is a nice, gentle kind of puzzle. And by a nice, gentle kind of puzzle, what Ucaoimhu meant was a grid that looked kind of like a crossword puzzle, only with no blacked-in squares, no numbers, and no clues. I repeat, no clues at all, just empty boxes. Oh, and in the background, a red cross, like on an English flag. And yes, they solved it. I stuck around that night watching until 6:00 in the morning. And what struck me about the whole scene was how matter of fact everyone was, like there was nothing out of the ordinary here, as if this was the most normal thing in the world, men and women, some college students, but plenty with spouses and kids at home, staying up all night in a college classroom solving puzzles. But the next day, as the hunt stretched into its 30th hour, I caught up with Dave, the guy who invited me here. And he told me that, as a puzzle person, he was constantly being reminded that the rest of the world doesn't work this way. Just the other day, he'd gone into a bar. And when the female bartender came over, he told her about this cool new anagram he'd heard, how if you take the phrase, a dream within a dream, and rearrange the letters, you get, what am I? A mind reader. This didn't go over so well. The bartender-- apparently finding this fact neither interesting nor charming-- just looked at Dave like he was weird. Dave told me that years ago, while he was working as a greeting card writer for Hallmark in Kansas City, he actually got in trouble for doing this kind of thing. My mentor came to me and said, Dave, we have to talk. And he said, Dave, you're using too many literary allusions in your casual speech and people are complaining. Wait, wait. In your speech, not in your greeting cards? Right, right, just in my everyday speech. I knew better than to use obscure allusions in greeting cards, goodness gracious. I asked my supervisor, what the hell does that even mean? And he said, I was just told to tell it to you. Dave started obsessing about this. He wasn't even sure what the problem was, so he began keeping track. One week, every time he had the urge to say something at work, he wrote it in a notebook instead. By the end of that week, my notebook was full of the most random crap. None of it was a literary allusion. Maybe, Dave thought, the problem wasn't him. He'd recently been transferred from the humor department to the serious writing staff. And he was surrounded by all these new people who probably just didn't understand him. I was still doing lunch with the guys from humor. That was what I felt was my real home, and I could be myself there. And so I was at lunch with them maybe two or three weeks later, and one of the guys, as we were going to lunch, said, you know-- and it was a cluster of us, five or six of us, all heading toward the lunch room. And one of the guys said, you know, we do a lot of monkey cards. And yet-- You mean cards with pictures of monkeys? Yes, yes, more or less, because what he actually said was, and yet, they're all illustrated with chimpanzees. And chimpanzees aren't monkeys, are they? And I said-- because I had done a report on this in fourth grade, and because it was something of an obsession of mine, monkeys, apes, and so on-- was I said, actually, chimpanzees are apes, along with orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons. And in fact, one of the weird things about Planet of the Apes is they don't have any gibbons in them. The orangutans that they claim are orangutans look like gibbons. And the way you distinguish apes from monkeys is apes have no tails and they're not exclusively arboreal. And there was this pause. And I said, actually, there's a whole subset of other animals that are like monkeys called prosimians. And they include the lemur, and the tarsier, and the kinkajou, and the galago-- also called the bush baby-- and they're really goofy looking. And boy, if they had a Planet of the Prosimians, I would totally watch that movie. And there was a further pause. And one of my friends said, oh, Dave, hey, speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat's ass that I give? And I thought, oh, that's my problem. I inform people against their will. So what you're saying is that the thing that can be very annoying in the real world is the same thing that makes you really good at solving puzzles? Yes, yes. Although I also feel obliged to point out that perhaps the more important point-- as far as I'm concerned-- is the thing that makes me annoying in the regular world is not annoying here. This environment is one of the only places where I can say something like that and not worry that I might be irritating someone by saying it, that even if it's not relevant, people at least understand the impulse. On a puzzle team, Dave can be himself only better. And I think this is true for a lot of people whose talents require the right context in which to shine. Think about it. A boxer without a boxing ring is just a guy punching people. In a puzzle competition, a guy with a mind for obscure facts can be a star. Yes. Good job, guys. Good work. Lisa Pollak. The 2007 MIT Mystery Hunt was won in 38 hours and 14 minutes by none other than the Dr. Awkward team, whose members immediately began planning for this year's hunt, which was won two weeks ago by the team, Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight. If you'd like to try some of these mystery hunt puzzles yourself, you can find them all by Googling MIT Mystery Hunt. And God have mercy on your soul. Act Three, Girls in Need of a Safer Time. Robin Epstein remembers the ad. There was a hospital nursery full of babies. And one baby girl tosses off her pink knit cap. It lands on the floor. This inspires other little baby girls to do the same. Pink hats come flying off of heads. Finally, the first little baby girl raises her little baby fist into the air, as Helen Reddy sings, "I Am Woman." Please, don't stand up in your cars. This was an ad for the Oxygen Network, all-women's network, just about to go on the air, February 2, 2000, which Robin found completely thrilling. It was this really wonderful moment of, here we go. It sort of heralded our arrival, and the birth of the network, and the excitement behind it. And it felt like it was something really to cheer for. Robin had just gotten a job on a brand-new show on this brand-new network. It was a quiz show for teenage girls called Clued In. Robin was going to write all the questions in the quiz. And she did this with a real sense of mission. It just seemed like a fantastic idea for a show to me, which was to get teenage girls on a quiz show and to show the world, really, how smart they were. Show the world and show other teenage girls? Absolutely. And I wanted to show that these were the girls that you should be looking up to, that there were, in fact, role models that you weren't seeing. Right, and they walk among us. They're everyday girls. That's right. Yeah. Did you know about these studies at the time that-- I think the researcher was named Gilligan. Yeah, Carol Gilligan. Absolutely. Yes. I think it was basically until the age of 11 or so, girls in class, they are constantly raising their hands. It's important that they look smart. They want to impress their teachers. And so they're constantly all about giving the right answer, and reading, and researching, and whatnot. And then there's something that happens to these girls at age 12 or 13 where it inverts. And suddenly, appearing smart is not important at all for the majority of them. And when you began this show, did you know about that research? And did you believe it? I absolutely knew about the research. I didn't buy it. I thought, no way. I mean, sort of based on my own experiences in school, I was in a public school, but a lot of my friends were really smart girls. And we were all sort of very pleased with being high achievers and doing all this stuff. And I just thought, that research is a crock. You know, where is this woman going? What schools? How many girls did she actually interview? Welcome back. Welcome back. I'm Ian Kesler, and it's time to get Clued In. And just describe what the early shows were like, what kinds of questions there were, how people would respond. Right. So in the early shows, we would ask a range of questions. And I thought that there was a baseline of things that clued-in people should be aware of and should know. All right, here's the question. When stocks rise, it's a bull market. What animal symbolizes a market decline? Allison. Chicken? No. Good guess, but that wasn't it. Janine. A bird? No, that's incorrect. Do you want to give it a shot, Jacqueline? No. No, you don't? You don't want to embarrass yourself? All right, so actually it's a bear. It's a bear market. OK, don't worry about it. So is that pretty typical? Yes. There started to be a creeping sensation that the questions were way, way too hard when she came out with chicken. That's where I thought, oh, OK, we have a problem. Here we go. 500-point follow-up, same category. What losing presidential candidate lost the use of his hand in World War II? Three seconds. Emily. Teddy Roosevelt? No. Anybody else want to give it a shot? Come on. Bob Dole. Bob Dole. Yeah, World War II. With the girls out there not able to get answers, not able to get these answers, did you ever feel a little guilty? You know what I mean? Like you're doing them a disservice, you're making them look bad. Oh, absolutely, every day. It was one of these things where, when they had the blank stares and they were not ringing in on their buzzers, I would sort of sit there and I just had my hand on my forehead, sort of looking down, and just feeling like, what have I done? Like I have put them in this position. It is my fault that they can not answer, that in fact, not only am I not showing that girls are smart, I have put on the air that girls are stupid. That's really good. And actually, Lauren, that's wrong, too. So you don't get any points. I'm sorry. All right. Jasmine, are you ready? Here's your first question. Now, this is a show on a network for women-- Yes. --and it's aimed at girls. Yes. Why is the host a guy? Yeah, that is a great question. We actually auditioned scores of women to be hosts of the show. There was one girl who was possibly a good fit for the show. And? And she was not really pretty enough to be on TV. Are you serious? Mmm-hmm. She was good, but she wasn't just pretty enough? Yes. Even on this sort of pro-woman network? Even on the we-love-you-for-what's-on-the-inside network. Yes. And what did you think when you saw that go down? Did you just feel like, OK, well, whatever, it's television? Yeah. I mean, we were TV people, and so there-- and the assumption also was that if we wanted teen girls to be interested, maybe we give them a little eye candy. And the host that we chose sort of had a passing resemblance to Matt Damon. He was like a Matt Damon type. And here's the question. What amendment gave women the right to vote? Kocey. There you go, [? Kocey. ?] It's all you. Eighth? Ninth? 14th? 15th? Eighth? Three seconds. Ninth? Eighth? Ninth? Say Ninth. The Ninth. No, wait. No, no, she didn't say it. She said Ninth. I'm going to guess 14th. That's incorrect. Actually, it's the 19th Amendment. 19th Amendment. None of us deserve the right to vote, because we don't know that. That's true, exactly. So nobody gets the final question. None of us deserves the right to vote. Yes, exactly. So the girls can't answer most of the questions that you designed for the show. What do you do? You dumb down questions. You give them things that anyone of any age, of any mental capacity could possibly answer. Jesus is known as the son of whom? Fane. God. God, that's right. So you're up to 4,000 points. Abby, you've got 3,250. Which one do you want to go with? All right, I'll take This Spells Disaster. This Spells Disaster. Here's the question. Without fumbling, who can spell her first name backwards? Katie. There you go. She's on the board. Yeah, that wasn't one of my prouder moments as a question writer. Which one would you like to go with? I'll take Sign Me Up, please. Sign Me Up, all right. This is actually a physical challenge. We want to see who can get an autograph on their arm from the cutest boy in the audience. All right, Rachel, here you go. Here's a pen. You've got 15 seconds. Go right now. 15 seconds. Come on, cheer for her. 15 seconds. So in this one, they're running through the audience with pens. And isn't this pretty much exactly the kind of boy crazy culture that you were trying to not encourage? Yes. This was pretty much exactly the opposite of what we were trying to show with the show. And that did kind of made me sad that here are these-- they're the ones who are on air and who should be the role models. And it was pretty disappointing to realize that, even though we were trying to find them and to show this, we were failing at it. What would be your dream car? Um, I guess my dream car would be a Mustang. A Mustang. Like a new one or an old one? Whatever. Like, I probably-- And so, when you got into this, your whole idea was, like, OK, let's show how smart girls are. And at the end of this experience, how did you feel? I felt girls are dumb. Girls are dumb. Girls are dumb. Just listen to yourself. I know. This experience remains one of these things that I'm not entirely sure how to explain. I do think women are smart. But the lesson of what I saw versus what I want to believe is very different. But is it possible the girls were smart but just not smart in a way that could be made apparent in a trivia quiz? Yes. I just think that, for a lot of it, the girls seemed much more interested in just sort of showing this really superficial side to themselves, that it was all about sort of what they looked like, and it was all about how they were presenting themselves, as opposed to what was more on the inside, or what seemed like good things to achieve. I wonder if just in the end your mistake was you just thought more people were like you than really are. And that's the mistake that runs the world, basically. Yeah. I mean, I think that's probably the case. Probably not many other girls were spending their weekends playing Trivial Pursuit with their friends. But I no longer feel like it is mine to try and improve the quality of girls. That was maybe an idealistic something that I had in my 20s. Because you don't think they need it or because you think it's hopeless? Because I don't-- I'm not sure it's possible. Yeah? Yeah. I'd like not use the word, "hopeless," but hard, certainly. And I don't know what can. I think there's just-- I mean, I think that there can be a role model, per se, that maybe could have this influence. But it's not a game show. Certainly coming up with a quick fix, or a quick answer, or ringing in for something at the buzzer doesn't seem like the long-term solution. Robin Epstein in New York. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself. Bob Harris, the Jeopardy champ that we heard from at the beginning of our program, has written a memoir about how he won and then lost on Jeopardy called Prisoner of Trebekistan. Our website, where you can find our free weekly podcast, absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. And the show that we originally had been planning for this week, with the theme, Tough Room, which includes a visit to the very tough room that is the editorial offices of The Onion, will be here next week. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has this announcement, that I believe will come as a great relief to mothers everywhere. I no longer feel like it is mine to try and improve the quality of girls. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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There's really no way around some arguments. Maybe arguments just want to happen. One of the producers of our radio show, This American Life, was at this conference recently, and this guy named Eric Molinsky told her about this strangely and unexpectedly fierce argument that he had gotten into with a good friend of his. It was his cousin in fact. And the whole thing started with no warning at all. Like he told Nancy, they were happily chatting away in a nice warm cafe. Everything was like comfort food, comfort seats and we were so comfortable--. I'm getting tense already just hearing about it. We were so comfortable. It was one of those things where you actually could hardly touch the table. You actually had to sit up in your giant lounge chair to get the soup on the little table. The comfy soup. The comfy soup, yeah. So we were talking along, and I remember I-- somehow I brought this up, about corporate tax loopholes. And then she was like, first she said, well, let me play the devil's advocate here. Not that I'm defending corporations, but don't you think that if you're going to make them pay taxes, they're just going to pick up and leave and go to another state? And she kept saying, not that I'm defending corporations. And we kind of got deeper and deeper into this, and she sort of eventually stopped apologizing for defending corporations and really was going after this idea that it was just irresponsible. It was typical kind of liberal--. Knee jerk. Knee jerk. Anti-business. Exactly And this is the way the world works. This is the way the world goes around. Money, money, money. I ended up being grandstanding. This goes into the highways, this goes into health care for everybody. And in the middle of this tirade, in the back of his mind, Eric was thinking, why are we getting so heated up over this, both of us? And then, something occurred to Eric. I think the way that I said it was, you know, I have to admit, I really don't know a lot about this issue. Or I didn't really know a lot about it until my ex-girlfriend explained it to me. When you said that, what did your cousin say? Well, she paused. And she said, well, to be honest, I didn't really know a lot about this issue either. But I had an ex-boyfriend who educated me on it. Eric's ex-girlfriend was a political activist with a special focus on corporate tax loopholes. His cousin Mara's ex-boyfriend worked in hedge funds. And so we just stopped for a second. And it was interesting, because that was the end of the argument and that's when I said to her, I think that my ex-girlfriend just got into a huge, 20-minute argument with your ex-boyfriend. You know when you fall in love with somebody, it's like they have an open path straight to your heart. And without you even realizing it, other things can just ride in on that path-- political ideas, favorite bands, favorite writers, pet peeves. And where those things are concerned, you basically just become the person you love. You're like their proxy. In my own life, my own opinions about television are so thoroughly shaped by my wife's opinions that a coworker recently told me that sometimes she wished that she could just skip the middleman and talk straight to my wife. But I think that we don't just become proxies for the people that we love. It happens with friends. It happens in business settings. It happens in politics. And when it happens, things can get very confusing. When you really step in for somebody else, substitute yourself for somebody else, it can be hard to tell if you're doing the right thing at all. If you're doing what they would want or what you want. Well, from Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, By Proxy, stories of people turning into proxies for other people, sometimes by choice, sometimes they just find that it's happened to them without them even noticing. Act one of our show today, I'm The Decider. What do you do when a friend asks you to make a decision that she probably should be making for herself? Well, Davy Rothbart found himself in that very position. Act two, Killing The Messengers, what it's like to be the proxy for the least popular guys in town, when the town is Mosul and the guys are the US Army. Act three, Redemption By Proxy, a teenage girl and a message from beyond the grave. Stay with us. Act one, I'm The Decider. There are all kinds of situations where we step in as reluctant proxies. As a favor for friends or family, taking over some chore they don't want to do, taking their kids or their pets off their hands for a while. Doing something because it's the right thing to do and nobody else is stepping in. That's what happened to Davy Rothbart, more or less. So Cassandra is this childhood friend of mine who moved away when she was maybe 13 to Chicago, then to California, then Pensacola, Florida. I think she had kind of a tough go of things growing up. She never really knew her dad, and her and her mom and brother kept moving around a ton. A couple times she called me crying when she had to pull up stakes again. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth, and when we were 20, we traveled around Eastern Europe together, just as friends. Every couple of years since, she'll surface in my life by way of a middle of the night phone call. She'll be in the midst of a crisis and desperate for my advice. Maybe about problems at her work, or with school, or with a boyfriend, her little brother in trouble with the law. She'll say things to me like, you're so sensible. You understand how things work. You're so smart about things. Not just smart, but wise. It's kind of hard to resist. So after she calls me with a problem, for a week or so we talk every day, just going through it all. And by then, we've figured out a good approach. Say she's got a manager at work who's overly flirtatious, making her uncomfortable. I kind of ask her a bunch of questions. What's he doing exactly? How often? Have other people witnessed his behavior? Who's his supervisor? After talking a bunch, we make a plan for some kind of decisive action. She feels a whole lot better, and I, in turn, feel sensible, knowledgeable and smart. Not just smart, but wise. Then a few years ago she called me, freaking out. She had a new kind of crisis, not like anything I had ever dealt with before. She was pregnant, almost three months pregnant. The dad was her sometimes boyfriend, a hippie wanderer type named Rainbow Bear. She was living in Santa Barbara, she said, without any close friends around, no one to really turn to, and she was really upset and confused, torn up about whether she should have this baby or not. Rainbow Bear wasn't involved. She said to me, tell me what to do and I'll do it. So I did pretty much what any sensible and smart person would do in that situation. I told her I couldn't make the decision for her, but that I would do everything I could to equip her with as much information as possible, so that she'd be able to decide what to do on her own. Then I got to work. I knew one friend who'd had an abortion and had always been haunted by it, and another friend who'd had an abortion and, while sad about it of course, really believed it had been the right thing to do. I also found a woman who'd given her baby up for adoption, and another who'd kept her baby and was a single mom. I got them all to agree to talk to Cassandra, but she was really shy, and too upset to reach out to strangers. Those are your friends, not mine, she said, I'll feel weird calling them. So OK, I changed my plan, and talked at great length to each of these women myself, then relayed their stories to Cassandra, careful to present them in a balanced way, so it wouldn't seem like I was favoring one option over another. I'd even gone so far as so talk to a couple of friends in med school to gauge the medical risks of a later first term abortion. Relatively safe, it turns out. At the end of all this, Cassandra was only more confused and overwhelmed. Please, she begged me, tell me what you think I should do. And that's where I should have said, look, nobody can tell you what to do in this situation. Of course this is agonizing, but only you can know what path to take. Whatever you choose, that will be the right decision. But that's not what I said. Cassandra was barely getting by on her own as a cashier at a health food store. No medical insurance, shady roommates, a shaky lease, a boyfriend named Rainbow Bear. Cassandra, I said, I know being a mother appeals to you but you're still so young. Maybe this isn't the right time. Down the road you'll have the chance to have a baby with a guy who's going to be there to raise the child with you. It's just going to be so hard on your own. I think you should wait. I think you should wait. Sort of a pleasant euphemism for kill the fetus. Cassandra sounded sad but she said I was right, and that now she knew what to do. She kept thanking me for being such a kind and generous friend. We talked maybe once more the next day, and then she disappeared again. For months afterwards, I felt weird about what I'd done. I did think it was probably for the best, but what if something went wrong and she was never able to have children again? Or what if she never found the right guy and this had been her one chance to be a mother? I think it would have felt equally weird if I'd told her to have the baby too. I just felt like I shouldn't have been the one to decide. Three years later, I'm living in Chicago and I get a call. It's Cassandra. She's in the Chicago suburbs staying with her grandfather. She invites me out to visitor her and we agree to meet the next day at the playground across from her grandfather's house. I pull up, hop out of my car, and there's Cassandra, waving to me from beside the swing set. Then I see, tearing through the grass toward me, a little blond, two year old boy. It's Cassandra's son of course. She had the baby after all, and he's got the same name as my favorite basketball player in the world, Isaiah, like Isaiah Thomas. Davy, meet Isaiah Bear. My eyes got all watery. And Isaiah, he's like the most incredible, joyous, dazzlingly intelligent two year old boy I've ever met in my life. I swear this is true. That night, we brought him to my friend Nicole's house. I was couch surfing at her place at the time. And when we introduced him to 12 people in a circle, he went right back around and knew every single person's name. Incredible. At the same time, as amazing as Isaiah was, Cassandra was struggling. Rainbow bear had rumbled off and she'd been bouncing from town to town, first staying with his parents, then an old boyfriend or two, and now her grandfather. But that was a bad situation too. She had to get out of there. And here I was. I felt pretty guilty for having pressed Cassandra to have an abortion. Somehow I thought, if I could help his path toward a good life, I could make up for that little part where I'd suggested he be exterminated. So I jumped back in again. I took over. And I came up with a plan. I'd move back home to my folks' house in Michigan for a little while. I'd bring Cassandra and Isaiah to live with us for a couple of months in Ann Arbor. And Cassandra said that's what she wanted. Stay with my folks, get a job, work and save money, then move into her own place and raise her son. I was really excited about the whole thing. I truly wanted to help Cassandra, you know? She'd been a lifelong friend. And I also liked the idea of being altruistic. And the idea that this other girl I was chasing after at the time might see me as altruistic. And it occurred to me that living with Cassandra and Isaiah would be kind of like having my own kid. At the basketball court where I'd played ball in Chicago, there was this one guy who always brought his two kids with him, like two and four years old. Between games, he'd mess around with them for a couple of minutes, or shout at them from wandering too far away. I liked the idea of showing up at the court in Ann Arbor with Isaiah, and being able to cuff him, roughhouse with him and teach him how to shoot. Being a dad, or acting as a dad, makes you feel more like a man. Makes you seem a little more tough and rugged. Having Cassandra and Isaiah in Ann Arbor was great. My mom got a little kiddy pool for the backyard, and Sandra and Isaiah spent all afternoon and evening back there. Cassandra made soup and all kinds of complicated vegan foods in the kitchen and washed her clothes with a hose and hung them up to dry on the old, rusty playground equipment out back. We had a basketball hoop in our driveway, and me and my friends started showing young Isaiah how to shoot. We called him Zeke, after Isaiah Thomas' nickname. And the kid, Zeke, had the sunniest disposition, and he was a natural athlete. I started in pretty quickly trying to find Sandra a job. Between me, my friends, and my parents, we found a few solid leads, solid enough that all she had to do was show up for an interview and the job would be hers. These weren't dream jobs, but they were decent paying jobs, like working the register at a Birkenstock store or taking phone orders at Bell's Pizza. But every time we had an interview set up for Sandra, she managed to miss it. She got lost on her way there or Isaiah was nursing and she couldn't leave him right then, those kinds of things. Finally, one day I drove her to an interview. Though she had her own car, I just wanted to make sure she actually went to it. She got the job, a receptionist at a new agey type salon. They asked her to start work the next morning. I drew a careful map with clear directions so she'd have no trouble finding the place and even set her alarm clock to wake her in plenty of time to get to work. My plan was for me and my dad to split the day looking after Zeke, and then on days we weren't around, Zeke could go to daycare. But the next morning, I wake up and Cassandra's just laying in bed, playing with Zeke. I charged into the room. Oh my God, you're two hours late for work, and it's your first day. And she's just like, oh, I decided not to go. If you knew Cassandra, you'd be shocked when I told you that she never smoked pot because she just had that total, glassy, dreamlike air to her, completely unperturbed by real world situations. In a lot of ways, she was like a child, which became so frustrating. Cassandra kept putting all of her decisions in my hands, but then she wasn't actually doing any of the things I was telling her to do. And I finally realized, things that were easy for me, like showing up for work on time, showing up at all, were not easy for her. It was clear, she wasn't going to get a job. And I don't want to be too critical. Taking care of her two year old, she was exhausted all the time. And really, I began to understand just how difficult it would be to raise a kid on your own. I mean, that stuff is relentless when you have two parents. But all alone, it's brutal. Even for me, the allure of playing dad began to wane. I was stuck babysitting a lot. When I tried to take Zeke with me to the schoolyard where I always played basketball, he didn't understand that he couldn't come out on the court when the grownups were playing, and I had to leave the game and take him home. And most days, I'd be at home, trying to get some kind of important work done on the computer, and play Hungry Hungry Hippo at the same time. Suddenly, I felt desperately like I needed an out. My parents recognized that Cassandra had no intention of finding her own housing and they were ready to have their house back and I was ready to have my life back. My stab at playing dad revealed itself for what it was all along-- a theme park ride, a novelty, a selfish gift. So naturally, I hatched a new, even more ill-conceived plan, and tried to hook Cassandra up with my friend Brandy, so he could take her off my hands. I knew Brandy was into Cassandra, and he was great with Isaiah, so I kept making plans for all of us to hang out together, then ducking out at the last minute. Randy took over all the dad responsibilities I'd felt saddled with, and Cassandra enjoyed Brandy's kindness and attention. There was actually a momentary romantic spark, and I saw everything unspooling beautifully. But Randy was living at home with his own mom, and they were barely making ends meet as it was. Randy's mom quashed everything really quick. There's no way they're moving in here with us. One of the lowest moments of this whole strange saga was when Cassandra said to me one day-- not angrily, just plainly-- if you want me to leave, I'll leave. You don't have to try and peddle me off on your friends. There's a TV show from the '80s that I saw only a handful of times, but always really loved, called Quantum Leap. Remember that? Each week's episode would revolve around a different person caught up in a complicated and difficult situation that they couldn't fix. And the star of the show, Scott Bakula, would actually be zapped into that person's body, become that person, and he would make things right. It's one thing to get involved in other people's problems and do your best to help them. But man, it'd be a whole other thing if you could actually inhabit their body and fix everything up yourself. Then you could really help some people. I'm sure in the end, it's not the best way to do it. At the very least, it's kind of a bullying way to look at other people's problems. But I guess that's me, wanting the ball in my hands, wanting to run the show. Not long after Cassandra told me I didn't need to peddle her onto my friends, she decided that she and Zeke would pack up and leave town. She had been talking to Zeke's dad, Rainbow Bear, on the phone, and they were going to try to get back together. Rainbow had moved to Hawaii, and Sandra and Isaiah were headed there to meet up with him. It was one of those things where it seemed clearly kind of sad and hopeless, and at the same time, I didn't want to talk her out of it, because it meant they'd be gone and I could resume my own directionless life. Cassandra was nothing but sweet and totally appreciative of what me and my family had done for her. But I felt miserable. I worked with little Zeke one last afternoon on his perimeter shooting, then watched him and Cassandra drive away. And then I cried. Davy Rothbart in Ann Arbor. His book of stories is The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He's also the creator of Found Magazine, which is at foundmagazine.com. Coming up, so your country's been occupied by a foreign army, and you work for that army. Who should you really be loyal to? A guy caught in the middle of that problem 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, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, By Proxy, stories of people substituting themselves for other people, and the difficulties that can create. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, Killing The Messengers. Being a proxy can get you murdered. Basim grew up in Iraq, trainined to be an English interpreter. And when the US Army arrived, he got a chance to try out his language skills on actual native English speakers for the first time in his life. Iraq had been cut off from the world for so long, he says, that generations of English teachers were not able to travel outside the country and speak English. So his English had all kinds of mistakes in it as a result. But he spoke well enough that the Americans offered him a job as an interpreter, and it was a job that he really loved. He made decent money, and he felt like he was helping rebuild his country and bring it into the modern world. But translating for the US Army meant being a proxy for the Americans when he was talking to Iraqis, and being a proxy for the Iraqis when he was talking to American soldiers, which put him in a lot of tough situations. A quick example: sometimes Iraqi policemen and police trainees would be standing right next to the Americans and then bad mouth them in Arabic. Basim wouldn't translate what they said. That would just make trouble. Instead, he would warn the police in Arabic that they should watch their mouths. That some translators would, in fact, tell the Americans what they were saying word for word, and there was no predicting how the Americans would react. Sometimes the Iraqi police would reply that Basim was taking the Americans' side. It was their country. And we are talking about Iraqi policemen. They were an authority in Iraq. And it's hard to be in the middle between American soldiers-- I don't want to say that American soldiers are arrogant or something like that, but it is an army kind of life. And those policemen are being very sensitive, because, well, their country is occupied, their army is being defeated. And now, they have to receive orders and instructions from their former enemy. So you have to be very sensitive in order to create a kind of, let's say, a friendship, a kind of common understanding between the two parties. And so give me an example of an order the way the Americans would say it, and what you would have to do to it in order to get it across. Yeah, like for example, I used to have a boss who is a lieutenant colonel in the American Army, who was very keen on the hygiene of Iraqi policemen, or on the cleanness of their police station. And we are in Iraq, we have the tradition to smoke everywhere. We can smoke in any place we want. And that Army commander was very keen on seeing Iraqi policemen, for example, throwing the butts of their cigarettes on the ground. And he used to follow them one by one, telling them to pick the cigarettes butts up from the ground and put it in an ashtray, or in a trash basket where it belongs. And sometimes, a form of military order like that would be interpreted in a bad way, like the Iraqi policemen would think, OK, this is my police station, this is my country. I can do whatever I want. I can throw my cigarette butt whenever I want, or wherever I want. So when you interpret a situation like that, where you have an American commander telling an Iraqi policeman, hey, don't just throw the butt of your cigarette on the ground, it would have to be interpreted in another way, like, well, do you think that somebody is going to come and clean that after you? So please be very kind, and when you smoke, please be aware that you have to throw your cigarette butt in a place where it reflects a good image of your police station. You don't want the Americans to think that you are dirty or something. And this is how we interpret situations. Basim, why not just turn to the Americans and say, well let these men be. This is our culture here, we throw the cigarettes. What difference does it make? Well, because I have this kind of belief that if we listen to those people, to the Americans, things would be better for us. We need this kind of education. And it starts from small things, and it grows up to the big things. If the American soldier or commander have the time to teach you where to throw your cigarette, then he would be teaching you how to treat your prisoners. He would be teaching you how to have like a professional ethics. He would be teaching you how to do much more important things. And also you're working for him. It's your job to say what he wants you to say. And this is one part of the story, yeah. The more you tell these stories, the more it's clear that your job is so much more than translating the words. There is a situation where I was with a new boss. We have received somebody who is a Major in the army who was in charge of our unit, and I had to lie to him in one incident. Because we went to the City Hall in the city of Mosul, trying to do some security assessment of the building itself. And there were about 150 or more Iraqi protesters who are protesting against the Americans at that point. And our new commander has said, well, we have to do it no matter what. We have to do that assessment today. And I told him, but there are protesters who can be provoked by our existence, like we with our Humvees and with our weapons and stuff like that. And he said, no, it doesn't matter. And I was talking to an Iraqi policeman who said, well, you can do the assessment now-- he's a high ranking officer in the police-- and we can manage with the protester if they got any kind of action, or if they start to throw stones or something like that. And the way I translated it to the American officer, I told him that the Iraqi officer was saying that we should leave right now, because we don't want to provoke the protesters, we don't want to use their weapons against them today. And the American officer thought about it and said, yeah, let's do the assessment another day. In a situation like that, the Iraqi officer did not have the right judgment about the situation, because those protesters were very angry. And the American officer has his schedule, has his plan, he wants to do the building security assessment. But I was the only one who can see a group of Iraqi people who were angry, and who can start throwing stones, and somebody can get in the middle of them with a weapon or with a rifle and start shooting, and the Americans and the Iraqi police will shoot back, and there will be casualties, which is something that can be avoided. In a situation like that, I thought this is the only lie that I felt very comfortable about. When you study to be an interpreter, did they tell you to be completely neutral? Yes. I know that. But we have not received any kind of study, any kind of academic study on how to be translators in a war situation, in a battlefield, if you know what I mean. I know. What's interesting about these examples is that it's not just that you're just interpreting what's going on, but in a sense, you're taking over for whoever's in charge. Do you know what I mean? With the protesters, you're saying that you know better what's going to get everyone through the situation, and you're actually taking over. Yeah, because if something wrong happened, where the Americans whom I work with have to shoot some people who are demonstrating and people got killed, or other people got wounded, or an American friend of mine got killed or got wounded, I would never forgive myself because I didn't take an action, because I didn't took a stand. Because I have to do something. We have to avoid tension, if you know what I mean. The Army unit that Basim was working with trained Iraqi police. This meant that Basim spent a lot of time translating American police manuals into Arabic, and transiting lectures about police procedure. And as an Iraqi who had always been afraid of the police under Saddam, when police seemed able to do whatever it is that they wanted, Basim really liked this part of his job, teaching Iraqi police to work the way the police operate in modern countries, Western countries. On how to treat detainees, how to respect prisoners' human rights. How to stop a riot without brutality. How to exercise authority fairly, without taking bribes. And so in April, 2004, when photos from Abu Ghraib prison became public, it was especially disheartening to Basim. This is not what he believed the Americans were all about. For me as a person, it was just like the shock of my lifetime, because it was the total opposite of what we were teaching the Iraqi prison guards on how to treat and deal with the prisoners. And that was the biggest thing that has turned most of the Iraqis against the Americans. Even those Iraqis who were somehow supporting the American were very afraid to show their support to the American. They couldn't show any kind of support to the American anymore. You mean after Abu Ghraib? And here comes the loud voice of religious men and the tribal leaders in my city. They said that everything that the American has came with is just a lie, just like their democracy, just like their liberty, just like their freedom of speech. This is what they do to you if they arrest you, even if it was a wrongful arrest, or something like that. This is nothing that I was fighting for. This is not the thing that I was willing to see happening again in my country. We have seen and heard too many examples of torture, of abuse of prisoners in Saddam's time. During this period, it became much harder, Basim says, to convince Iraqis that the Americans were doing anything good. The unit that I was working with was doing its best, but people were not receiving the message. Give me an example of the kind of thing that would happen in those months. For example, there were small kids who were just around the American convoys. Those kids, for example, sell CDs, like music CDs, movies to the American soldier. And he gives them candy, and he looks at the things that they are selling, and he tries to help them with $1 or $2. And the next day we hear the imams in the mosque saying that the Americans are distributing porn CDs to the young children who were always around their convoys. Which was really shocking for me because I was there, and I know exactly that the Americans would not do that and I have not seen any incident that the American would do that. Everything was received negatively, at least by the people in my town, in my city. Before long, it became dangerous to be a translator. Early in the occupation, clerics had issued an official statement saying it was OK for Iraqis to work with the Americans, including translators. But a year into the occupation, the mood in the country had changed. Translator friends of Basim's were getting killed. One of his teachers, an assistant professor who trained English interpreters at the University of Mosul was killed by people who said that she was graduating traitors. One day Basim's unit was supposed to process and release a bunch of prisoners who had been transported from Abu Ghraib. Men, they were told, who had been investigated by the Americans and found to have done nothing wrong. So one of those prisoners who were about to be released after spending six months in Abu Ghraib prison. He said, we will kill you one by one. And I asked him, who do you mean by killing one by one? The Americans or us, the policemen or the translator? He said, no, you. And for me, I thought, well, this is a man who is totally angry for being in a prison for six months, and who has maybe been treated badly and I measure it out and say that this is an angry man. He would not be killing anybody after he was released. So things like that, those things that I will not be translating, for example. I don't know if I committed a mistake or not. You wouldn't tell the Americans he said that he's going to kill you? No, I didn't tell them. Because you just assumed, well, they will just throw him back in prison? Yeah, because I don't like to have anybody, because of me, get back to prison or receive any bad treatment, especially if he was Iraqi. Was it frightening? Well, I was not frightened, I was surrounded by like 20 American soldiers or something like that. But after I left, and I sat back home with my wife, and I told her, and she said something that made me really frightened, saying that those people, especially those who've been in the prison and who have received bad treatment, will not sit down and feel very happy about they are being released. They will come back trying to get revenge, not necessarily from the Americans but from anybody who they suspect has participated in putting them into prison. And in that time especially, in early 2004, the word translator itself has became a taboo in Iraqi society. It has became a very scary word, like Sunni religious authorities have suddenly decided that everybody who's working for the Americans is-- forgive me for saying this-- is worse than the Americans themselves. If you have the chance to kill a translator or American, kill the translator first. That's such a shocking thing. What did you think? Do you remember where you were standing? What did you think when you heard that? The feeling wasn't great, because you're just in the middle of 27 million, most of them thinking that killing you would be better than killing the Americans. So it is just one of those feelings that make you really, really scared. You might not imagine that, or maybe your audience might not imagine that, but speaking English-- like you're walking down the street with your friends, and it came up to your mind that now you are going to speak an English word, this is at some point in Iraq, especially in 2005, 2006, has become enough reason for somebody who do that to get killed. Speaking one word or two words in English in the street, or in the market, or in front of anybody else, would be enough reason for you to get assassinated. A few weeks after the prisoner said that he was going to kill Basim, Basim got a threatening phone call. And then a package arrived. It was a message printed by a typical printer, by computer. The beginning was some verses of Ram Koran. Then there is this message to me with my full name on it, saying that we have recognized you and identified you as an infidel and a traitor, and a helper of the infidels. And if you don't quit your job at once, you would be killed with all your family. And that was serious because there was a CD disc, a disc, a compact disc with the message, showing the beheading of a friend of mine. Well, he's a colleague more than a friend. Another translator? Another translator, of course. He's a Christian. When you get a DVD like that, did you watch the DVD? I watched the first part of it before the beheading started. And that feeling was just indescribable because it is the most scary feeling ever. Seeing it happen to somebody that you know, somebody that you have talked to, somebody that you had conversation with is the most painful part of it, because those monsters were treating him very bad. They knew that they will behead him in minutes, but it was full of insults, and full of bad words. They beated him, they spoke to him very badly. Did he speak in the video? Well, he spoke his name in a very low voice, because I think his teeth were broken or something. He spoke his name, and they asked him about the nature of his job, so he said, I'm a traitor. It seems like they told him to say so. I haven't finished the rest of the film but I guess you can find it on the internet if you look for it, because they have posted like tens and hundreds of those films. And so around this time, your family basically kicked you out of the house, right? They didn't want you there because it made things too dangerous for them. They kicked me out of the house. They told me, this is your choice. You are not young. You are an adult. And you don't want us to die because of a decision that you have taken. So it is not enough for you to quit your job now, it has become a necessity for you to disappear. Basim went on the run. He hid in another town. But when his pregnant wife gave birth to their son, he drove back after curfew to reach her. A three hour drive in the dark past checkpoints where he had to guess if the checkpoints were Sunni or Shia. When they ask if you're Sunni or Shia, if you give the wrong answer, you're dead. Then he just hid for three months. Before all this running, he'd actually gone to the Americans to ask for help and for protection. The Americans offered to let him live on the Army base, though without his family. Or they said they would drive him home every night in a military convoy to his family's house. At that point I realized that the Americans-- most of them-- have not realized the nature of their enemy. It is not a good thing to be seen in an American convoy that drives you to your home. That will be the cause of the death of maybe my whole family and my neighbors too. So in the end, you wanted to be a bridge between these two cultures, between the Americans and the Iraqis? Yeah. Was it naive to believe that someone could stand in the middle like that? No, it wasn't at all. Because most of the misunderstandings, most of the problems that are happening now between the Americans and the normal Iraqi people are due to the lack of full understanding. And in order to achieve that level of full understanding between those totally different group of people, there should be somebody. Our job is building a bridge. If you are a translator, then you build a bridge. And I always say that if something happened, something wrong happened in the process of building that bridge, the first people who sink into the water are people who are on the bridge, trying to reach out for the other side. And we translators play that role, not only in this war, but in all the wars that happens around the world between nations with different languages. It always happens like that. If I move away, and anybody move away, this would be the best chance for the evil forces, for the terrorism, to control the country, and to cut the bridges that we were trying to build. In the end, Basim felt he had no choice. He left Iraq feeling like he should still be there. Today, Iraqis doing translation for the American forces are kind of an endangered species, a hunted species. The company that hired Basim to work for the Americans, Titan Corporation, has had 323 of its interpreters killed while on the job according to The Christian Science Monitor. But when the US Army relies on interpreters from outside Iraq, Basim says, they have trouble with Iraqi dialects, local meanings and customs. And they make all kinds of translating mistakes that no Iraqi would make. Basim and his wife and his son are now in Europe, in a community where there are a number of Pakistani and Iranian and Iraqi exiles. Back in Iraq, he was constantly having to explain the Americans to people. But in Europe, he's trying very hard to avoid doing that. He specifically tries to avoid telling people that he was an interpreter for the United States in Iraq. It is not something to be ashamed of. It is not dangerous here to tell people that I was a translator. But it's just, I wanted to avoid any situation where I have to justify why did I did what I've done in Iraq. And I don't want to be asked by people, now you have been a friend with the American, why did they do that? Why did they do this? So I just don't want to put myself in a situation like that. I just decided that I'm not really with or against the American policy, or the things that the Americans are doing in Iraq. And I don't feel like I have to explain anything to anyone. Act three, Redemption By Proxy. When you get right down to it, a reputation is kind of a strange idea. It is this idea about you, about who you really are that is somehow connected to you, but that is utterly abstract at the same time. You can't touch it. You can't pin it down in any exact way, and it changes depending on what you do. Until the day you die, then your reputation is in the hands of whoever cares enough to step in as your proxy and take charge of the historical record and tell people who you really were. Eve Abrams has this story. I taught elementary school for 10 years in New York City at this place called The Neighborhood School. It was one of those schools where students call teachers by their first names and where teachers really get to know their students well-- their families, their strengths, their dramas. But sometimes, one kid stands out. This is a story about one of those kids, and his friend, and his teacher. Sophia is the teacher, and also a friend of mine. Lily was our student years ago. She's 16 now. And Lily's classmate Robert was our student too, but he's dead, so I'll let Lily tell you about him. I really had a hard time telling people who had died for a while, because I didn't want to say friend, and I didn't want to say best friend, because that makes it seem like, my best friend. You know what I mean? Anyone can say that they were his best friend. I mean, he lived so close to me, so we'd hang out 24/7. We talked about everything. In our school, everyone was pretty quiet and good, and I don't know, to me, he just seemed like he was different, and he was fun, and everyone else was boring. Teachers never liked him. He was probably a little bit rude. Like he didn't do his homework. That was like a big thing, because at The Neighborhood School, everyone was like, got to do your homework, got to do your homework, or you're not going to go out for recess and all this stuff. And whatever, he'd be like, never going out for recess because he never did his homework. Robert didn't defer to adults and other kids were drawn to that. But he was also sort of hapless. He was the kind of kid who, when he cut school, got caught. He got kicked out of middle school, which was always like really weird to me, because there were so many kids that were so much worse. There was kids that came in that school once a week at 10 o'clock, and like grabbed a girl and left. I had a crush on him the second I saw him. Fifth grade was the big year that I really had a big crush on him. It was just like, oh my God, I love you. He one time left me flowers at my door-- it was my birthday-- and knocked on the door and ran away. And so I opened the door and there's flowers, and I was like, oh my God, he loves me, like flowers. And so I picked it up and there was a note, and it said: From Robert, To Lily, Happy Birthday. PS, don't get happy. Like, as in like, whatever, don't get happy, don't think I like you because I'm doing this. Don't get happy. I was like, but I am happy because you left me flowers. I realized it's actually because I liked him so much as a friend, and I never really had somebody that was a boy that I liked so much as a friend. So I figured I must be in love with him or I must like have the big-- but it's also like I just actually always really liked him as a person. That's how Lily saw Robert. Sofia saw him differently. After he was in my class, Robert moved on to Sophia's class right next door, and a lot of times, I'd see and hear them out in the hall together. Mostly I'd hear Sofia. She would lecture Robert about homework and effort and attitude, and her voice got really loud and annoyed. While Sophia lectured, Robert just stood there. Rolling his eyes. I mean, it was more a physical manifestation, just kind of listening to me, but not really listening, kind of looking off in the distance. Head was at a tilt, arms crossed, kind of like waiting for the episode to end. Sophia had a harder time with Robert than I did. He was older by the time she taught him, but his reading wasn't much better, and he still struggled with his schoolwork. He'd also gotten really good at deflecting all of the things that teachers would try-- ordering, cajoling, tricking. Sofia would see Robert around the neighborhood after school, hanging out with older boys, doing nothing much. And it frustrated her to no end that this smart, charming kid seemed headed for a lifetime of dead end jobs and disappointments. At one point, when I was kind of getting near the end of my rope, I talked to his family about making him stay after school in the classroom just so he can get his homework done. And I think we did it for like a week or two, and I don't think it was a very successful-- it wasn't a habit he could replicate at home. Incidents between Sophia and Robert piled up and the year ended badly between them. Someone wrote an obscenity about Sofia on the school wall, up high where only a tall kid could write, and our principal was convinced it was Robert. He ended up being banned from the big end of the year party. When Robert didn't show up at graduation, other kids at the school, including Lily, blamed Sofia, even though Sophia had nothing to do with it. Not going had been Robert's decision. Mostly, Sophia felt she'd done the best that she could with Robert, but she wasn't sure. She felt bad when she thought about him-- bad for not reaching him, bad for having been hard on him. And for the next few years, she dreaded seeing Robert around the neighborhood, especially with other kids she knew, like Lily. And then one day Sophia heard Robert was dead, stabbed to death for reasons no one knows, even today. He had just turned 16 two weeks before. After Robert was killed, I had this nightmare. I dreamed that two or three of the girls in that class were really upset with me, and they were talking about the time when I had asked Robert to stay after school and work on his homework. One of the girls had accused me of preventing him from joining a basketball league. And she said that because I didn't let him do that, because I made him stay after school to work on his homework, he didn't get a chance to make better friends, and do something that was better for him and more productive. And it really felt like maybe they have something there. If nothing else had happened, Robert would have stayed like that in Sophia's head for years-- a kid she always had regrets about, always wished she'd done a better job with. But about six weeks after Robert died, Lily came back to her old elementary school and showed up in Sophia's classroom out of the blue, and she did something none of our students had ever done. I was surprised to see her, of all people, in my room, in my class, visiting me. And then she said, I wanted to give you this, and she handed me a note that she'd written, and then she left. And then when I read the note, I couldn't believe-- I just couldn't leave. I had to read the letter over again. I keep it in my wallet. I wanted to frame it. But sometimes I feel like I just need to read that letter again, just to remind me. Would you mind getting it now? Sure, I'll read it. Dear Sophia, this is a letter of appreciation to you from me and Rob. Thank you very much for coming to Rob's wake. I know it would have meant so much to him to see how many people showed up. In the past three years, well, four years since me and Rob left The Neighborhood School, we have been best friends together every day. I just wanted to let you know how much Rob appreciated what you did for him as a teacher. Whenever we would talk about the past, he said that he understood everything you did for him, and that he was grateful for it. He showed me that people care for you, that's why sometimes they are harsh. For that reason, I thank you for teaching it to him. Rob always liked when people showed him they cared. He cared for you very much. Hope to see you soon, Lilly Torres. Lily wrote the note to Sophia on an impulse while she was grieving. She wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do, or if it was weird, or even if Robert would approve. But before she could talk herself out of it, she sat down at her kitchen counter and wrote it on a pink PostIt. I think the thing is I really wanted people to know that he was a really great person. I mean, teachers were just always not liking him. And I just maybe thought maybe even if one teacher that he had knew that he liked them, or that-- not to change his reputation with every teacher that he ever had, but I was just trying to take a little bit of the bad off of his name, because I don't think he really deserved any bad at all. He was so mature about that whole thing about her and I wasn't at all. I thought maybe by showing her that, that she would know that he actually turned out pretty well. He said, I'm not mad, because I think that she was trying to do the best thing that she could for me, because we are talking about Sophia. I was just kind of like, she didn't how to handle you. And he was like, what are you talking about, she didn't know how to handle me? I was bad and she was just trying to help me. And he said that he was thankful that she took the time out to even care about him, even if it was yelling, or whatever it was, he said that it showed him that she cared. Sophia never wrote back to Lily. She'd wanted to find the perfect way to thank her, but she couldn't decide what to say. And then she figured too much time had passed. Though Lily doesn't see it that way. It's fine if she doesn't write me back. Or if she does, I don't think it's ever too late. You just never know what people need to know. Until I spoke to her, Lily had no idea how much her note had meant to Sophia. That Sophia kept the note in her wallet, that it had lifted away years of guilt. For Lily, the note was about saving Robert, the part of him that was left in the world. She hadn't realized that it would also rescue Sophia. Eve Abrams, in New York. Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollack and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, Tommy Andres, PJ Vogt, and Emily Yousef. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to Dan Ephron, Sean Cullen, Dan Calhoun. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support for This American Life is provided by Saab, founded by 16 Swedish aircraft engineers who decided to bring the spirit of flight down to Earth. Saab, born from jets. Learn more at saabusa.com. Support for PRI comes from PBS, featuring their new series inspired by Car Talk, Click and Clack's As The Wrench Turns, premiering Wednesday night on most PBS stations. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, I tried to bring to him to my weekly basketball game. I tried, I tried, but it just didn't work out. He didn't understand that he couldn't come out on the court when the grownups were playing, and I had to leave the game and take him home. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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So what are we going to make of television anyway? I think the most interesting idea you hear about television right now is this idea that right now-- all of us-- we are living through the golden age of television, that this is the kind of golden age that people are going to look back on years from now, the way we look back on the '20s and '30s as the heyday of jazz, or the '70s as the heyday for a certain kind of movie. What's exciting is that the conventions of TV seemed to be changing all the time and expanding. That's J.J. Abrams, one of the creators of Lost, and Alias, and Felicity. And he says the same thing that lots of people in TV say, that because network television audiences go down every year-- because of the Internet, because of video games, because of competition from cable-- what we have is a situation where the big networks are scrambling to keep audiences. And then there are dozens of cable channels that are competing for those audiences, which has led to this period of incredible experimentation. Networks realize in the increasing, desperate need to grab an audience, that they need to do things that stand out, that are unique, that are different, stories and series that will generate discussion. And so there is this climate where people are just trying different stuff. And as a result, in any given week there are probably at least two great shows on the air. And then another bunch of shows that are just kind of interesting. So you've got The Daily Show, and The Office, and Friday Night Lights, and South Park, and Intervention, and Project Runway and 30 Rock-- just a lot of interesting stuff out there. Though of course, not everybody feels that TV is so great. When the television version of our radio show first premiered in 2007, we took our show on a six-city tour-- to Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. And when I would mention to the crowd that we, ourselves, had just finished shooting a television show, it sometimes got a little chilly. In Minneapolis, a guy actually yelled, "Judas." There are a lot of people who think that television is terrible, that it's bad for kids, it's bad for American politics, it's the cause of all kinds of problems in this country. And so, with this disagreement all around us, we decided to tackle the subject head on. Television is at the center of our culture. It's hard to avoid. What does it do to us anyway? Well, from WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today-- on this weekend when we begin the second season of our television show-- What We Learned from Television. Our show was recorded in front of live audiences on the six-city tour in 2007. Our show in four acts-- Act One, 29. David Rackoff-- like a wild child raised in the woods, a foreigner to our people-- tries TV for the first time since he was a child. Act Two, Turkeys in Pilgrim Clothing, Sarah Vowell examines what happens when TV takes on a project it really has no business taking on at all. Act Three, Radio on the TV. In that act, a few words about what I've personally learned about television during the first year in which I worked on a television show myself. Act Four, My Other Dog's a German Shepherd. In that act, Dan Savage-- a syndicated sex-columnist and podcaster who is not put off by dirty content-- finds something so filthy, so weird, and perverted on television that he doesn't want his son to watch it. And it's a kid's show made for children. On our six-city tour, we were lucky enough to travel with a band that we love, the Mates of State-- Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel. So you'll be hearing from them too. Stay with us. Act One, 29. We were curious how somebody who hasn't seen TV in a while would react to the cornucopia of stuff that is on today. And so we turned to David Rakoff. David Rakoff pretty much stopped watching television when he got out of college 20 years ago. We asked him to watch 29 hours-- any channels, any shows-- and tell us his impressions. We chose 29 hours because that is the amount the average American watches in one week. [AUDIENCE GASP] Do you guys not live in the United States of America? [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] You literally gasped. David has this report. Television and I broke up a long time ago. Before this assignment, it would have taken me at least four months to watch 29 hours of TV. I know how that sounds-- smarmy, superior, like one of those people who looks down on others for watching television and says things like, "Well, I enjoy Nova." It's not that I'm above the medium. It's that I can't be trusted around television. Watching television was forbidden when I was a child, a tactic which anyone knows only results in raising an addict. When my parents weren't around, I secretly watched it all. I had no standards, no filter. I loved everything. These days my set lives in the closet. Yeah, the cheap metaphor of that isn't lost on me. Television is my secret shame. And that was fine with me until Alex Blumberg-- my producer from This American Life-- called and offered to set me up with cable for this story. My friends were a little too excited about the news. When I tell Jodi that I'm getting cable, she is as thrilled as if I'd told her I'd just fallen in love. "Thank God," she says, "Now we'll have something to talk about." Had I really been such terrible company? I know, of course I was. I am terrible company. I can be a joyless, little rain cloud of a thing. But was I terrible company because I didn't have cable? Does that explain everything that is wrong with me? All the therapy, the brief experimentation with serotonin reuptake inhibitors, all that money thrown away, when all the while help lay on the other end of an 800 number at Time Warner Cable. The installation guy arrives and sets me up. And I gingerly settle into my new life as a Nielsen family of one. Things don't begin well. I go looking for Project Runway and find instead that the channel has been taken over by a show called The Real Housewives of Orange County. It's an all-day marathon. And yet, nothing happens. It is like watching paint dry-- stupid, shallow, fake-breasted, Republican paint. It seems that in the intervening years of TV-lessness I've gotten the monkey off of my back a little bit too well. I can't keep the housewives on for longer than eight minutes before I have to turn it off. And for the next few days, I do anything but watch television. That's right. I procrastinate from watching television. I bake bread-- three loaves. I clean my apartment. I make meals and take them to sick people. I even write. I am procrastinating from TV by doing my job. Alex, my producer, calls about a week later to see how it's all going. He can hear the suspicious lack of television in the background. "Aren't you supposed to be working?" he asks. I tell him, "I don't want to be that curmudgeonly guy inveighing against the kids with their rock and roll music, but I'm appalled by what I've seen so far. He listens patiently to my Rip Van Winkle just-up-from-his-nap jeremiad explaining how I've missed the reality TV moment, how my muscles of appreciation for the form aren't developed. He talks me down. And even as he is doing so, I know how ridiculous I am being. Who needs to be talked down from watching TV? I get over myself, and I wade back in and actually watch entire programs. I even enjoy some of the things I see, enjoy them immensely. Kyra Sedgwick is amazing on The Closer, and Lisa Kudrow's almost unendurable humiliation in The Comeback-- to name just two. I would drink Jon Stewart's bath water. And Channel 93-- New York City public access-- is nothing but a mesmerizing, silent traffic camera at the corner of Canal Street and the West Side Highway. It is as pretty as waves. I would happily fill out the rest of my quota watching just this. Do I sound like Bambi sniffing a flower? Well, my TV forest is suddenly new and filled with wonder and discovery. I stumble upon an Evangelical channel called, Pray. And hallelujah, they are showing All About Eve, a movie I love and know virtually by heart. It seems an odd choice for an Evangelical channel. The characters all swill gin, sleep around, and work in the theater. And I feel safe in saying that of all the prayers out there in the ether that the Pray channel most hopes to answer, those of an aging, Jewish, homosexual movie buff in New York City trolling around for something to watch on TV aren't really high on that list. It also doesn't sit very well with Alex, who calls the next week. When I proudly tell him that I've upped my tally to eight hours, he seems unimpressed, pointing out that I am two weeks and 21 hours behind schedule. And in fact, he docks me two hours, saying that a movie I've seen over 30 times doesn't count. Homophobe. The purpose of the exercise, it seems, is to watch television. Well, I can't do that. Clearly I need a guide through this underworld, someone who truly loves the medium. I call up Jodi and I invite her over. I will cook her supper in exchange for some patient instruction. Jodi has been one of my closest friends for 12 years. But suddenly, I am as awkward as a schoolboy. OK, so should we eat supper at the table? Or should we eat supper in front of the television set? Is there good TV on now? Because it's only about 6:40. I feel like we're about to have sex. It's not that complicated. We're just watching TV. Things begin pleasantly enough. We bop around the dial happily for a while, eventually landing on an MTV program called My Super Sweet 16. I get into the spirit at first. But for a reality virgin like myself, I'm in over my head in short order-- the callow, young sailor on shore leave looking for some tenderness who suddenly finds himself handcuffed to the bed. This particular episode of My Super Sweet 16 stars a bumptious blond from Tennessee. They might as well call the show, My Last Birthday Before Rehab. She seems an improbable 16, certainly not 16 earth-years because she looks, frankly, 35. A hard 35. A two ex-husbands, pack a day of Merits, trying her hand at real estate, sun-damaged kind of opening-your-robe-for-the-grocery-delivery-boys 35. Do you get the picture? When we meet her, she is behind the wheel of a stretch Humvee, which costs upwards of $100,000. She'd like it for her very own, and indicates this desire to her thuggish, hairy-knuckled father, just the first in what will surely be a series of men during her lifetime she will refer to as "Daddy." I looked over at Jodi , and she's having a great time, whereas I want to tear my eyes from my head and soak them in lye. "Why do you always add this weird layer to things?" she asks me. "Doesn't it just remind you of when you were 16?" I am going to the bad place, as is my wont. Jodi reaches for the remote and dials it down a bit. We end up watching the TV equivalent of the vanilla, missionary position-- America's Funniest Home Videos. Oh. Why do they both have sunglasses? Oh. Disaster. What was she thinking? I am completely embarrassed to admit how incapacitated I am by the home movies of beloved grandmothers falling out of chairs or toddler after toddler bringing entire Christmas trees down upon themselves. Oh and look at the kitty cat open a cereal box. I am on my sofa laughing like an idiot. See? Oh, look at the excitement you have on your face. You love America's Funniest Home Videos. You should have been introduced to this a week ago. This is the worst night of my life. Why? You're laughing and you're enjoying yourself. Don't you feel-- Look, there are tears coming out of your eyes. Embrace it. Don't be afraid. You're trying to act like you weren't just having fun. There are tears on your face. I've never seen you laugh so hard. Don't you feel like taking a shower after all of this? See? It goes back to me feeling like we're going to have sex. No. This is fine. What's wrong with enjoying that? She's right. Why can't I just let myself enjoy it? Part of it is that denying pleasure is my middle name. But Jodi feels that I'm trying to be above it all, that I'm judging her. After all, she spends time at home in front of the television, sometimes with a glass of wine even, just as we're doing. But there is a seminal difference between Jodi and myself. When she watches TV at home, alone with a drink, she has a husband in the next room. When I watch television, I am by myself. Watching TV, for me, is a referendum on my loneliness. Having the television on just seems like some desperate simulacrum of company, stuffing the other side of the bed with clothes. It is a chilly reality, brought home to me-- with all the force of a frying pan to the face-- by a small item in the New York Times on Sunday the 18th of February. The article was about how a man, a 70-year-old widower named Vincenzo Ricardo was found in his home, dead. Officials believed that Mr. Ricardo-- discovered sitting in his chair-- had been dead for more than a year. He was very well preserved, mummified, by the hot dry air in his home. Air, no doubt made even hotter and drier by the fact that for the entire year plus that Mr. Vincenzo sat stiff and expired in his recliner, his television was on. There was apparently a study recently that showed that people who watch episodic television-- following a set of characters on an ongoing basis-- experienced many of the same positive effects that people derive from having friends, actual friends. TV is a friend, one might conclude. Well, call me old-fashioned, but the minimum of true friendship strikes me as being-- at the very least-- the capacity for one friend to look over at another and be able to say, hey buddy, how are you doing? Do you want me to call 911 or something? Because you're looking a little-- oh, I don't know-- dead. I suppose I would just rather be authentically alone than wait around in vain for Jennifer Garner to come over and give me the Heimlich maneuver. My producer, Alex, thought that was too negative a note on which to end this story, that there needed to be some moment of uplift, some edifying public radio insight. Alex suggested that what I've learned from this experience is that it is not TV that I hate so much as the fellow watching it, that I won't truly love television until I love myself. Perhaps he is right. I canceled the cable. David Rakoff. His latest book, Don't Get Too Comfortable. Mates of State. Act Two, Turkey's in Pilgrim Clothing. I think, actually, some really interesting moments of television come when a show attempts something that it never normally does, and especially, I think, when a comedy show decides it's going to get serious. Do you know what I mean? Like think about when Letterman talked to his own audience about September 11, or when he talked about his own heart attack, or, going back a ways, MASH killing off one of its own characters. When shows like that do that, it's moving and it's powerful. And it reminds you of what is great about those shows. But when a comedy show decides to get serious, it can also lead to Gary Coleman sitting on Nancy Reagan's knee and saying no to drugs. It's embarrassing. And it reminds you what is incredibly dumb about the shows. So what happens when comedies decide to take on the rather serious history of the United States of America? How do they do? Well, for insight into that, we turn to an expert, Sarah Vowell, who's in the middle of researching and writing a history of the pilgrims and puritans in America and who has reviewed the key TV episodes that handle this same material. Please welcome Sarah Vowell. I was in third grade when I saw the Happy Days Thanksgiving episode, and I loved it. The whole cast was in pilgrim costumes. So that was great. And Joanie Cunningham complains that, "Being a pilgrim sure is a drageth." And the Fonz says things like, "Greetethamundo." Not to brag, but by third grade I was a veteran of four Thanksgiving pageants and considered myself to be something of a Mayflower expert. Or so I thought, up until the moment Joanie leaves the room and her goody-goody brother, Richie, asks, "Father, are you letting her go out like that? Have you seen her skirt? It's up to her ankles." I remember sitting there and watching that and realizing for the first of many times, oh, maybe the people who founded this country were kind of crazy. There are actually a surprising number of sitcoms that have done episodes set in 17th century New England, even though 17th century New England is all situation and no comedy. Here's how Mayflower passenger William Bradford described the pilgrims' first few months after arriving in Plymouth in 1620. "Being ye depth of winter and wanting houses and other comforts, being infected with ye scurvie and other diseases which this long voyage had brought upon them, there died sometimes two or three a day." Half of them died in the first year. Half. Starvation, lack of shelter, and-- this is appalling when you really think about it-- these were people with the farming skills of Mr. Magoo. And if that weren't enough, they were religious zealots. So they believed they deserved every misfortune visited upon them, because their beloved God apparently decided their lives should suck just a little bit more. Yet the Puritan episode is a sitcom staple, maybe because TV networks have to broadcast something on Thanksgiving. But even when a sitcom is trying to be about something bigger-- like history, or teen pregnancy, or underage drinking-- sitcoms are like people, they're self-absorbed. What they're most interested in is themselves. And when they do history, they always put their own characters at the center of the story. Mr. Ed, the talking horse, tells the tale of the pilgrim horse who saved the first Thanksgiving. And if you were under the impression that the Salem witch trials ended because rich and powerful people started getting accused of witchcraft, think again. It was Samantha on Bewitched. Or take that Happy Days Thanksgiving episode in which it's revealed that the person who gave us Thanksgiving was not Squanto or William Bradford but the Fonz. That's right, the Fonz. Here's how it went down. All the pilgrims were afraid of the Indians except pilgrim Fonzie, who was their friend. Then Joanie gets her foot caught in one of Potsie's stupid beaver traps. That Potsie. But you know that thing Fonzie does with the jukebox? Where he whacks it with his fist and the music plays? Turns out that works on beaver traps too. They open right up. But he won't free Joanie until everyone renounces their racism, and acts nice to the Indians, and invites them to dinner. Fonzie, he's the Martin Luther King of candied yams. Mostly sitcom Puritans are rendered in the tone I like to call the boy, people used to be so stupid school of history. Bewitched produced not one but two time travel witch trial episodes, one for each Darrin. They're both diatribes about tolerance straight out of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, only crappier and with magical nose crinkles. Samantha brings a ballpoint pen with her to 17th century Salem, and the townspeople think it's an instrument of black magic. So they try her for witchcraft and want to hang her. I mean, can you believe those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death? Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago. The biggest thing sitcoms gloss over about Plymouth is the most important fact of life there, the suffering. But in 1999, there was one sitcom that tried something daring. It included all the normal sitcom characters-- the wacky neighbor, the hard to please mother-in-law, the bumbling dad-- but it also reveled in and dwelled on the grim brutality of life in colonial New England. It was set entirely in 1621 Plymouth. It was called, Thanks-- as in Thanksgiving, as in thanks a lot. I know you never saw it, which is probably why it was canceled after six weeks. But I loved it. Thanks involved two of my favorite, but usually separate, things-- TV and American history-- coming together. Imagine if you were an avid stamp collector, and you found out that CBS was about to debut its new series, CSI: Philately. You'd be psyched. Even the most idealistic and cheerful character on Thanks-- the dad, James Winthrop-- welcomes in the spring saying, "What a beautiful day it is. The snow is melting, everyone out and about airing out their clothes, lugging out their dead." James Winthrop is surely modeled on John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts and author of the famous hopeful sermon about how he and his fellow Englishmen are to be as a city upon a hill. On Thanks that sort of idealism is literally a joke. Says Winthrop, "We're not the kind of people who are easily discouraged by a few snow flurries, a couple of head colds, the 50% mortality rate. No, we're pilgrims, strong-willed people who never give up. He's wrong. The only thing his fellow residents of New England want is to get the hell back to old England. The genius of Thanks was that it was a kind of meta-sitcom, making jokes out of standard sitcom ingredients. The funniest ongoing gag involved Abigail-- your typical, sitcom, teenage, bombshell daughter. After a disagreement with her parents about boys, she lets loose the sort of routine, girl outburst that's been seen on prime time since the dawn of Gidget. "I hate my life," she yells. But where a modern TV teenager would run upstairs and slam the door to her room, the 17th century teenager lives in a tiny, one-room cabin. So she can only run about a foot and a half before she throws herself face first onto a bed, right next to the table where everyone would eat if there was any food. Thanks was so refreshing because of its frankness, especially compared to earlier sitcoms. In one scene, Mrs. Winthrop meets Squanto, the famous English-speaking Indian. She asks him, "What are you doing in our neck of the woods?" Squanto answers, "Actually, we like to think of it as our neck of the woods." That's pretty much the whole story right there. It's so quick and clean and concise. Plymouth was actually built on the site of Squanto's hometown, Patuxet. All his friends and family, his whole village, died from the diseases that arrived with earlier European visitors. Squanto is hanging around because it's the only home he knows. That's why he's there to help the incompetent white people grow corn, using the seeds they'd stolen from some other Indians on Cape Cod. 'We like to think of it as our neck of the woods." There's so much meaning in that one little wise crack. It shows you history doesn't have to be trampled by the sitcom format. Here's another example. There's a crackerjack Thanksgiving dinner scene in the pilgrim episode of The Simpsons. Ned Flanders-- playing the purest of all the Puritans-- is talking to Indian Chief Wiggum. Get it? And Flanders says, "Chief Wiggum, we could never have survived our first year in the New World without you. I almost regret what we Europeans are going to do to you." Chief Wiggum, "What are you going to do?" Flanders, "Oh, give you the biggest slice of pumpkin pie. Also, we're going to take your land and wipe you out. Who wants whipped topping?" Flanders isn't embarrassed about the harsh story of America. If anything, he's cheerful. And there's something sort of profound about that combination. In fact, the greatest sitcom characters-- which is to say, the funniest and the most riveting to watch-- are cheerful at the same time that they're self-absorbed, and galling, and oblivious to the destruction left in their wake. Think Homer Simpson, Michael Scott on The Office, Ted Baxter from Mary Tyler Moore, Larry David, the entire cast of Seinfeld. And you know what else is like that? The United States of America. I don't know why you would applaud that. That's why it doesn't really matter if these pilgrim episodes are factually accurate, because sitcoms tell the true story of our nation every time the Michaels, and Homers, and Larrys open their mouths. We're well-meaning, lovable, unintentionally destructive, believing we're more important than we are, like we're some kind of city upon a hill. Thank you. Sarah Vowell is the author of Assassination Vacation and other books with surprisingly funny histories of America in them. Her upcoming book about the Puritans is called, The Wordy Shipmates. Coming up, which is more powerful, television or family? 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 we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, What I Learned From Television. And by that, I mean what we all learned from television. We've arrived at Act Three. Act Three, Radio on the TV. OK, so we just finished shooting and editing this weekly television show. And the main thing I want to say to you is, the radio show is not going off the air. So the strangest experience I had during this period-- the strangest thing I actually learned from TV-- came while we were putting together our television show. But it didn't actually come from anything that we worked on. One Thursday night, I was watching The O.C. with my wife, Anaheed. I don't know if you're watching The O.C., or were watching it before it got taken off. I loved that show. It's kind of a great, funny, interesting show. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go to season one, rent the Chrismukkah episode, OK? And it was a teen soap opera on the FOX network. And the main couple was Seth and Summer, not Marissa and Ryan. They could have killed off Marissa back in season one, as far as I was concerned. And so there's the scene-- this particular Thursday night-- where Seth is in his room talking to his girlfriend, Summer, on the phone. And a girl is in his room. It's Taylor, who is basically the same character as Paris on The Gilmore Girls, but that's a whole other thing. And so there's this girl in his room. And Summer hears this girl's voice in her boyfriend's room. And she asks him about it. And this moment happens. -That sounded like a girl. -Did it? Yeah. Well, sure. Because I'm listening to the radio. And This American Life is on. And so there's a girl talking. OK, and then Summer makes this reply, which, I have to say, just totally-- -Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Ekhh. God. Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Ekhh. I have to say, I had this experience where I was just like-- it was like having fictional characters on the FOX network, like, they said my name. And I literally stood up and went like-- like did that just happen? And it just totally was like, was this on everybody's TiVo? Or is this just like-- And you know, radio is so different from television. And as we've been making our television show, people keep asking me which is better? You know what I mean? People ask me this all the time now. So which is it going to be? Is it going to be radio or TV? Which is better? Like we're all going to have to choose sides between radio and TV because there's going to be a big war. You know. And in fact, actually, there was a war. And radio kind of lost that war. And the fact is, radio and TV-- they're just good for different things. Radio is so intimate and personal. And TV can be so weirdly grand in what it does. And just thinking about The O. C. and the other shows I love-- I have to say-- thinking about this moment, I realize that my feelings about my favorite shows on television, they are exactly the same as my feelings about the shows that I love on the radio. The things I love, I love completely. And it's totally personal, my feelings about these shows. It's personal in the deepest possible way. And I'm a kind of dorky fan when it comes to stuff. My wife is here in the room. So maybe this is bad to be telling this story. Every week, The O.C. comes on, and my wife, Anaheed, and I, we sit on the couch. And when the theme comes on, "California," we sing along with it in full voice. Do you know what I mean? Think about what that takes. I'm 47 years old. I'm a grown ass man, you know? We're a married couple. Sober. We are sober, singing the theme to a FOX show. And I have got to say, every single week it makes me love my wife, and love TV, and love everything in the world all at once. And last week, when The O.C. went off TV, I cried. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. Mates of State. A married couple singing that song. Act Four, My Other Dog's a German Shepherd. Well, Dan Savage has this story of what a person can and can not learn from television, a story drawing from his own experience. A quick warning to listeners. There's nothing explicit in Dan's story at all. But he does use a slang word to refer to gay people. A word that is actually perfectly OK for him to use, but not necessarily something you will want your six-year-old child to repeat. So take that under advisement. Here's Dan Savage. My dad liked to watch cop shows. He was a cop, a homicide detective assigned to Chicago's seedy, gay neighborhood in the '70s. And like all cops, what he most enjoyed about watching cop shows was pointing out where they got it wrong. There was just one show on TV that got police work even slightly right-- according to my dad-- Barney Miller, which ran on ABC from 1975-- when I was eleven-- to 1982-- when I was 17. The officers on Barney Miller weren't beat cops. They were detectives, like my dad. Their jobs were tedious, like my dad's-- all paperwork and bad coffee, no car chases, no shootouts. And the detectives were middle aged and out of shape, like my dad. And like my dad, the detectives on Barney Miller policed a seedy, gay neighborhood, New York City's Greenwich Village. There was a recurring gay character on Barney Miller, one of the first on television. Very swishy, total stereotype, carried a purse, owned a poodle. My dad liked cop movies too. And I remember watching one in particular with my dad-- The Choirboys, a 1977 movie-- in our living room some time after it came out on video. And how's this for a coincidence? The cops in Choirboys policed Los Angeles' seedy, gay neighborhood. And in one scene, a guy-- one of the cops-- is handcuffed to a tree in a cruisy park and left there with his pants around his ankles. And who should come upon this helpless, bare-assed cop first? A swish carrying a purse, walking a poodle. He takes one look at the cop and says, "I can't believe it. A naked man chained to a tree. That's a crazy, mad, salacious dream." They speak briefly-- the swish and the naked cop. The cop threatens him, "I'll kill you if you touch me, you fag son of a bitch." This is played for laughs. "I'll rip your damn kidneys. I'll punch your spleen." The swish replies, "You'd do that for me?" The swish leaves with his poodle, which is dyed pink. Watching that with my dad when I was a teenager made me want to die because I knew I would be some kind of fag when I grew up and so did he. I wasn't ready to talk about it with him. And he certainly wasn't going to go anywhere near the subject. So when gays popped up on TV-- something that, inconveniently enough, began to happen with greater and greater frequency just as I hit puberty-- things got awkward. I'm sure we both sat there during The Choirboys in silence. Here was this subject we were avoiding at all costs. And all of the sudden, we were ambushed by the television set. I found out years later that he was fine with me being gay, and that the reason he didn't laugh or react to scenes with gay characters on TV was that he didn't want to make me feel bad. At the time, I interpreted his silence as a quietly simmering anger and disgust. And sitting in front of the TV, I made a resolution. I was going to be some kind of fag when I grow up, but I wasn't going to be that kind of fag. I wouldn't carry a purse. And I would never come upon a half-naked cop, chained to a tree in a cruisy park, late at night, because I wasn't going to be walking any poodles around cruisy parks late at night, because I wasn't going to own a poodle. That's what I learned from television. Don't own a poodle. I made up my mind to be a different sort of homo, not like the gay people you saw on TV, which were the only gay people I ever saw. And straight people, I figured-- my dad, Jerry Falwell, Anita Bryant-- they were going to like me. That's when I stopped giving a damn about how gays were portrayed on TV. And for years, whenever a friend would complain about gays on television, I would grant them that, yes, most of the gay people on television were stereotypes. But was the portrayal of heterosexuals on television any better? Do real straight people act anything like those crazy ass breeders on Desperate Housewives? Do real straight people act like the fake straight people on Lost? Does anyone act like the people on Lost? Do real straight people act like Tom Cruise on Oprah? Only an idiot-- I would tell my friends-- would look to television to form a picture of what straight people are really like. An idiot. Or a child. Perhaps a child with gay parents. As soon as our adopted son D.J.-- who's eight now-- was old enough to use the TV remote, I felt like I was regressing to my early teenage years, suddenly worried again about how sexuality is portrayed on television. But not my sexuality. His. Heterosexuality. Now before we go any further, a word about why I say with such confidence that my son is straight. The first time he picked up a football he tossed a perfect spiral. He's into trucks not dolls. If it can't be used as a gun, it's not a toy he's interested in owning. I know D.J.'s straight the same way my parents knew I was gay. And I know D.J. is now learning about his sexuality watching television, just as I once learned about mine watching television. And the treatment of heterosexuality, on just one show in particular, offends me so terribly that I've tried to stop him from watching it. And I'm not talking about Nip/Tuck, or The Sopranos, or I Love New York. We wouldn't let him watch those shows if he wanted to. And he doesn't want to. Those shows, to him, are just grown-ups shouting at each other. And he doesn't have to watch TV for that. No, this is a show for kids on the Disney channel, one of the most popular shows on TV. It's already two video games. And it's a show D.J. adores. The Suite Life of Zack and Cody is about twin brothers who live in a hotel in Boston, the Tipton, where their divorced mom works as a cabaret singer. So it's Suite Life-- S-U-I-T-E, not S-W-E-E-T. The boys are always getting into crazy scrapes and hatching hair-brained schemes. They're preteens-- 10 or 11. Now in some ways, this show defies stereotypes. There's a character named London-- spoiled rich girl played by an Asian actress-- but get this, she's Asian but she's dumb. And then there's Maddie, a teenaged girl who works at the hotel candy shop, played by a blond actress, but she's smart. And then there's Mr. Moseby, the hotel manager, played by a black actor. But he's fussy. Some might go so far as to say clean and articulate. But what offends me-- what worries me-- is how horny one of the twins always seems to be. Zack is sexually precocious in a deeply creepy way. Can a pre-pubescent boy be sexually precocious in a way that isn't deeply creepy? Zack is also the more charismatic twin. Zack is Lucy to Cody's Ethel-- more athletic, more of a risk-taker. And Zack wants, aches for, pines for, goes for Maddie, the smart blond that works in the candy counter in the lobby. Maddie is 16 or 17, which is to say, Zack is in elementary school, Maddie is in high school. I don't let D.J. watch TV alone much. So I'll plop down on the couch with a book and sit with him, which is how I caught episodes of Suite Life where Zack worries about Maddie hooking up with other guys, and episodes where Zack instructs other little boys on the art of talking to babes. His advice, you lie to babes. In one particular episode, "A Prom Story," Zack walks up to Maddie and-- well let's just read the dialogue. Zack-- looking Maddie up and down-- "Hey, sweet thing. What's the special today? I hope it's tall, blond and curvy." I'm not sure how a teenager would react to being hit on by a 10-year-old boy in real life because it never happens. But somehow, fictional Zack escapes the humiliation or the punch in the chest that a real life Zack would be subjected to. Instead, Zack emerges from this encounter with the impression that Maddie has just asked him to go with her to her prom. Zack runs up to Cody. Zack, excited-- "Did you hear that? Maddie wants to dance with me at her prom. I'd better practice my kissing." Cody, nauseated-- "Don't look at me." That is a threefer right there. You've got your horny, pre-pubescent boy, and an incest joke, and a cliche homophobic reaction to the idea of two boys kissing, brothers or not. Good stuff. Thanks, Disney. And here's why this show worries me so much. D.J. watches Suite Life of Zack and Cody with a look of concentration on his face, a look he doesn't get watching any other shows, a look we certainly don't get when we're talking to him. He looks like he's filing things away for future reference. For a boy without older brothers, a boy without straight male uncles or cousins living nearby, we worry that the way Zack treats women could be a problem every bit as damaging to a young straight boy as those images of gay men with poodles were to me. I cling to one hope. Despite my exposure to all those swishy gay men walking poodles on TV during my formative years, I grew up to be a different kind of gay. And despite the girl-crazy little boys D.J. Sees on the Disney channel, he may grow up to be a different kind of straight. Maybe we'll both defy the stereotypes. The only problem with that is fate. You can defy a stereotype. You can work against it. But sometimes stereotypes are patient. They'll wait you out, wear you down, lull you into a false sense of security. And then bam, you own a poodle. D.J. asked for a poodle a few years ago. And I know how awful that sounds. The son of two gay men begins to adopt the homosexual lifestyle, poodles and all. Purses are next. And he didn't want any poodle, he wanted a toy poodle. A poodle he planned to name Pierre. I tried to stop it-- selfishly, for my own sake-- but framing every argument in concern for D.J. We can't do this to him, I told my boyfriend. He's already got gay parents and I'm one of them. Isn't that a big enough pink cross to bear? Did we really intend to nail a poodle to it too? But D.J. was adamant. He had a friend, a little boy with opposite sex parents-- that's what we call those mixed gender couples. And his friend with the opposite sex parents had a toy poodle. These people recruited my son. These opposite sex poodle parent people. That's what poodle people do. They lure people into their poodle lifestyle. We did manage to talk D.J. into a less gay name for his toy poodle. Stinker has just one eye, is completely deaf, doesn't come when you call him, and runs into walls and chairs and trees. And D.J. loves him. I know all about Stinker's habit of running into trees because I'm the one that gets stuck walking the dog. We live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, which is Seattle's gay neighborhood. And there's a big park near our house, Seattle's crusiest, Volunteer Park. You can find the volunteers under every bush. And you can often find me there, late at night, walking the poodle. I want to scream whenever someone passes me, "It's not my poodle. It's my straight son's poodle. I swear." Somehow, my straight son managed to get me out on the streets with a poodle. So I have to believe that we-- as a family-- exert a more powerful influence than television ultimately, and that we can help D.J. gracefully adjust to girl-crazy, when his time comes, the same way he helped me adjust to Stinker. And if I can walk a poodle and not feel like a total fag, D.J. can go girl crazy one day and not be a total Zack. Or that's what I tell myself anyway when I'm walking D.J.'s poodle in the cruisy park late at night. I'm sure it's only a matter of time now before Stinker runs head first into a tree that has a bare-assed cop handcuffed to it. Thank you. Dan Savage. He's the author of several books including The Commitment, including The Kid, What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant. He also writes the syndicated sex advice column, "Savage Love." Our show is produced today by Jane Feltes and our senior producer, Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Jeff [? Tober ?] runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Other help from Jorge Just. Our show today, recorded in part in a live performance at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and in part in Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Seattle. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Torey Malatia, who describes our staff this way. We're well-meaning, lovable, unintentionally destructive, believing we're more important than we are. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. The new season of our show, This American Life, premieres Sunday, May 4 at 10:00 PM. 1-800-SHOWTIME or sho.com. PRI. Public Radio International.
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First of all, is your last named pronounced Ivv-ins or Eye-vins? Eye-vins. And what's your correct title now? Astronaut. Like, on your business card, it says, "astronaut?" It actually does. That is the most glamorous thing I've ever heard. OK, here's a question. We've got 95 active-duty astronauts in our country, but they almost never go into space anymore. Some years, there's just one shuttle mission. The most we ever do is three or four. So if you're an astronaut, OK, you show up for work at Johnson Space Flight Center every morning. What do you do all day? Monday's are the days from hell. So Monday, I go to meetings all day long. Marsha Ivins is a veteran of five space missions between 1990 and 2001. We have the astronaut office meeting. We have the staff meeting. Because I support the new constellation program, they have a staff meeting. We've got to sit in a lot of conference rooms. Chris Cassidy was chosen to be an astronaut in 2004. And sometimes I find that tedious. And as a new guy astronaut, we go to a lot of those meetings. I would say the worst part is probably the meetings. Cady Coleman flew space missions in 1995 and, most recently, 1999. There is also the paperwork. When you work for the government, you have to go to a security refresher and ethics refresher. OK, so it's the day you get back from a shuttle mission, are there special weird forms that you have to fill out on that day? Well, there is a travel voucher. You know, we work for the government, all of us. And there is some government thing that says, when you're traveling, you will be paid for just the fact that you are gone from home, and there must be something you had to buy. Oh yeah, the $3.50 a day thing. It's $3.50 a day? I think that's the government, what they call meals and incidentals rate. So if I'm going to Washington, DC to go to NASA headquarters, it authorizes me the mode of transportation, you know, commercial air, or train, or taxi, or whatever when I'm there. So when we go to space, we get travel orders that authorize us to go from Houston to the Kennedy Space Center to Earth orbit and return. Wait, and is there a place on it where it says, like, taxi, jet, space shuttle? Like, is that an actual box you fill in? It's government air. Government air? It's government air. And then lodging is provided, transportation is provided, meals are provided. The astronauts all have offices, three or four of them to a room, on the sixth floor of a nondescript office building. They do some public speaking. Cady, for example, had just talked to a ninth grade biology class. Chris had welcomed the Farm Credit Bank of Texas Annual Stockholders Meeting to Houston just a couple of hours before our interview. If they have a mission coming up, they train all the time, but they almost never have a mission coming up. Most of the time they spend on the ground seems to be helping design the gear that's used in space, and teaching others how to use that gear and practicing on that gear. They have to do a lot of studying. It's like grad school, one of them said, the operating systems of the space shuttle. And once a week, each of them has to practice flying a real jet, which is to say it's like any good job. For all the stuff that's kind of interesting and sort of fun, there's lots of stuff that you just kind of have to get through. Cady and Chris both estimated they spend maybe one day a week doing the things that they really love. That is the stuff, like, being physically in a big white spacesuit and getting lowered into a giant swimming pool and practicing spacewalking. Now, here in civilian life, when we try to say that something's really difficult, we say, well, it's not rocket science. If you're actually in rocket science, what do you say? You say it's not rocket science, the same thing. And everybody laughs about it, just like we are right now. Here's something else. Many astronauts are just incredible super-achievers. Chris Cassidy was a navy seal. He led operations in the caves on the Afghan-Pakistan border. He was awarded two bronze stars at a presidential unit citation. Cady Coleman has a PhD in polymer science. Before she was an astronaut, her official NASA bio says, she used to quote, "synthesize model compounds to investigate the use of organic polymers for third order nonlinear optical applications, such as advanced computers." These are people who are used to accomplishing big, big things. And the main thing they do as astronauts is not go into space. 44 of the 95 astronauts have never been in space. 19 of the astronauts, like Chris Cassidy, aren't even scheduled for a mission. And time is running out on them. The space shuttle is going to stop flying in 2010. And the next space vehicle isn't going to be ready until 2020. Here's Marsha Ivins. Most people are pretty realists about the nature of things now. I was very fortunate to be selected and assigned to flights in an era where you could actually fly every two or three years. That's never going to happen again. The guys that are in the office now realize that they'll be lucky to get one flight in the 10 or 15 years they spend in the office, maybe two. And so, yes, there's a huge level of frustration and it's not just with astronauts, but with the NASA administrator, with the program managers. You look at the moon every night like a big giant tease out there because it's not any closer. And so she does what us non-astronauts do, she gets some of her space exploration on TV. I do watch Battlestar Galactica and Farscape and all of them. I watch them all. And what do you think when you see them flying around there in space? What's that like if you're an astronaut? Hugely jealous. You know, they have left earth orbit. They have left the solar system. They have developed technologies that enable them to do that. So if you want to talk about frustrating, it's like the commercial, where were those cars of the future that you promised us back when I was a kid? Well, where are those spaceships? Where is that? I want that. You know, I made it through my entire career at NASA, where is that? There's frustration for you. Does it actually remind you in any real way of being in space? Absolutely none. None, it doesn't? Absolutely not. Well, all of those shows assume that there are some sort of magical gravity things, so that when you're in your vehicle, everybody's all walking on the floor. Well, not in our space program. They've got fighter jet flying. They have pointy noses and wings and they make them look like fighters. None of that is any advantage when there is no atmosphere. You don't need a wing. You don't need a pointed nose. You could be a box and have the same maneuverability as you do-- you know, the Borg had it right. They're a big cube. They're perfectly maneuverable, as opposed to the little Star Fighter with a pointed nose and the wings and the engine in the back. 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 of dream jobs and how all those jobs, of course, have certain aspects that turn out to be not so perfectly dreamy. Our show today in four acts. Act One, I'm Not a TV Star, But I Play One on TV. John Hodgman ends up on a dream job that he never even dreamt of himself. Act Two, Show Me the Annuity. In that act, a dream job that you have almost certainly never heard of, unless you have won $1 million in the lottery. Act Three, The Homesick Explorer. Sarah Vowell tells that story. Act Four, Just One Thing Missing, in which a girl is stopped from getting her dream job by one of the most powerful forces on this earth. Stay with us. Act One, I'm Not a TV Star, But I Play One on TV. John Hodgman was a magazine writer and he was a contributor to our radio show, and then he started appearing on television. He now appears about twice a month on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he appears about one million times a month on a series of ads for Apple Computers. You've probably seen these ads, one of the most noticeable ad campaigns in the country. There's two guys against a white background, one's a Mac, one's a PC. John is the PC. At one of our live shows in Los Angeles-- Los Angeles, of course, the epicenter of American television production-- John talked about what it is like to have this strange new job. Good evening. My name is John Hodgman. Thank you for meeting me here in Los Angeles. I've been enjoying getting to know your city of Los Angeles. Until recently, my only experience within LA had been as a child. I had come here in the early '80s with my dad. He was on business. He took me along. And we went to the Universal Studios tour, and this was traumatic. What happened was we were sitting on some kind of a bench when I was approached by a small human dressed as Charlie Chaplin. At this time in my life, I had very long hair. I was 10 years old, but I had very long hair. It was a really stupid affectation, but the problem was that people routinely thought that I was a girl. And this would lead to occasional embarrassing situations. Double takes as I entered the men's room, for example. Or being expected, say, to kiss Charlie Chaplin on his white powdered cheek. And so, after some predictable and annoying cane and bowler hat shenanigans, the moment came. Charlie Chaplin sat next to me and indicated that he was ready for me to kiss him. He waited me out. It was clear what was expected of me and what was going to happen. And finally, I let it happen. So that was my introduction to your city, a traumatic, gender-confused silent comedy date rape. At the time, I had no idea why someone would expect a complete stranger to want to kiss them on the cheek. But now I understand, because now I am on television. Now my life has glamour. There is an original definition of the word "glamour" that I did not know about until I read fantasy novels. A glamour is a kind of magical spell originally, to where glamour is to surround yourself with a kind of aura that causes people to see you in a different way, to see you as you are not. It's a disguise. And being on television, I've discovered, is sort of like wearing a disguise, one that you didn't necessarily choose to put on, and only other people can actually see it. Over the past year, I've been trying to make sense of exactly how this all came about. I had written a book and I had been asked to be a guest on The Daily Show. And next I was asked to audition for a series of ads for a computer company. And I got that job, too. And just like that, I was on TV, pretty much by accident. And as a result, I am an older, and fatter, and more jowly person than most people who are making their careers on TV, who are starting out on television now. Here are some of the words that blogs have used when describing me on television. "The pudgy John Hodgman." The chubby John Hodgman." "Round John Hodgman." "Stout John Hodgman." "Tubby John Hodgman." "Portly John Hodgman" and "Cutie." There's always an outlier. That last one came from a website that includes a regular feature mapping out celebrity sightings in New York City. And in this an anonymous tipster reported accurately that I was taking the B train south from my home in Manhattan. And I remembered this. I remember this exact thing happening. I was on the subway and I was wearing my brown jacket and my brown pants, and a neighbor had earlier said, you know, you look like a UPS guy in that outfit. And I was sort of thinking about that, and a woman got on the subway and sort of looked at me like, I know you. But then she just immediately started typing on her BlackBerry. And then, a guy got on and did sort of the same kind of double take look. And which one of those people is the anonymous tipster? Which one thinks I am cutie? So highly subjectively, the tipster reported that I was cutie. And then, returning once again to accuracy, the tipster reported I was dressed like a UPS man. After that these strange brushes with fame, in which I bizarrely was the famous person, started coming about fairly frequently. Dateline, the Radio Shack, Big Y Plaza, Greenfield, Massachusetts, the young guy at the counter asked me to autograph an old receipt that he pulls out of the garbage. What are you doing here? He asks in a way that conveys several more questions. What are you doing in Massachusetts? In Greenfield? At Radio Shack? At the Big Y Plaza? I am buying speaker wire, I tell him. The West Side Highway in the 20s, two men in a brown Chrysler pull up alongside my car. When spotted, double thumbs up. The Apple Store, SoHo. General storewide freakout. There are waves of double takes as I walk to buy a cable. The store greeter cannot believe it is me. She jumps up and down. The staff starts to play the ads that I'm in on a giant video screen. Suddenly, I am like a mascot walking around a theme park. I'm Charlie Chaplin at Universal Studios, and everyone is rushing to kiss me. Not long ago, I was spotted at the airport in New York on my way here. A successful looking businessman passed by me as I was waiting in line. He immediately smiled and said, what, no corporate jet for you? Ha ha, I said. Then the businessman said, whatever they're paying you, you ought to tell them, keep the cash and pay you in flights. Ha ha, I said. Beyond ha ha, I didn't know what to say, really, for two reasons. First, because prior to my being on television, businessmen in airports did not generally ever speak to me, or even see me. Second, I have to say I was a little confused. As best as I could make it out, this businessman's financial plan for me was as follows. I should give up all payment for my work and instead, barter my services for free airfare. I wondered if he had taken his own advice. Had he given up his paycheck for a trip around the world? Had he left his family behind, the children he could no longer feed, and the wife who could not understand his weird decision? Did he now spend his days forever ascending and descending, buckling and unbuckling? And now was he trying to trick me, like a fairy in a fable, into joining his strange, lonely, floating world? Still, I said, ha ha. In a way, that said, that's a good idea. Because I almost instinctively wanted to please him even though he was clearly insane. Only much later, like, weeks later, would I consider a different explanation for his behavior, that the businessman was starstruck. He knew me from TV, he wanted to make a connection, and said the first thing that came to his head, a very, very bad business idea that made no sense. And I had to consider for the first time the possibility that I didn't need to please him, the successful businessman was trying to please me. Not to complain, but this has been something of a difficult adjustment in my life. When you are in your 20s, it seems inevitable, somehow, that you will be on television, or an astronaut, or the president. It is hard-wired into every gland, this ambition to be known and renowned. And then, of course, you grow older, pudgier, stouter, more portly. Then, just when you've discarded the last shred of a shred of a shred of the fantasy of, say, being an astronaut, to then have someone knock at your door one day and say, it's time. Suit up. It's time to go into outer space. It's exciting, but also unsettling. You think, why now? And your idea of yourself never really catches up. You put on the space suit and you learn to eat dehydrated food and poop while floating upside down or whatever. You adjust, but you never really feel like you're supposed to be up there, orbiting the earth. Thank you very much. John Hodgman recorded at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. He's the author of the book, The Areas of My Expertise. Act Two, Show Me the Annuity. Alex Blumberg has this story of a guy who ends up in what turns out to be the perfect job for him. Ed was working in a bar in Portland, Oregon, where he'd just moved with a bunch of friends from college, when he ran into trouble. Oregon at the time had pioneered an innovative new method of playing the state lottery. They'd come out with these video poker terminals that you played five card stud on for money, just like if you're playing online or at a casino. The difference was that all the money you won or lost came in or out of the Oregon state lottery fund. They were incredibly popular. Almost every bar in Portland had a few of these video poker machines. And Ed found them very hard to resist. If I had to be some place, let's say, at 7 o'clock, and I had an hour to kill, then I'd play for an hour. If I had $50 in my pocket, odds are I'd play those $50. And so, for me, I was so embarrassed of the fact that I was doing that, that that's really how I was spending so much of my free time, that I would tend to seek out bars in parts of the city that I knew my friends would be least prone to be in. And those bars that I often went to were strip clubs. And the fact that there were naked girls dancing around was bonus. It was a nice treat, but it really wasn't why I was there. I went to the strip clubs because I figured that odds are no one else would be at a strip club at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. So you went to the strip clubs to play the lottery? Yeah. It's like saying I read Playboy for the articles. I know, but meaning it. And is it safe to say that one of the main reasons that you left Portland was because you were playing the lottery too much? Absolutely. It was just better for all parties involved if I cut my losses and packed my truck and drove home, which is specifically what I did. Deep in debt and feeling pretty bad, Ed spent the next 14 months living in his parents' basement, stuck in a mid-20s career malaise. Until one night, he got a call from a friend saying that she'd met this guy. He owned a company and that the company was hiring. Ed came in for an interview, and lo and behold, he got the job, a job that, before the interview, he hadn't even known existed, but for which he was strangely well prepared. The company buys and sells long-term payment streams from lottery winners. The firm where Ed was hired was one of the first entrants into a fledgling industry, which called itself the lump sum industry. And to understand how it works, you have to understand a little about the lottery. Most lottery winners, especially in the '90s, when Ed started his job, didn't get all their money up front, but got paid in installments, annuities. So for example, if you won $1 million, that was actually only $50,000 a year for the next 20 years. 50,000 times 20 is a million. And with taxes, it's not even $50,000. It's more like $35,000. One of the big problems that comes as a result of that is that the way these winners are marketed to and the way, when they win, they say, $1 winner, millionaire, millionaire in all these different capacities. And on their billboards and in their radio advertising and TV advertising. And even though they know that they just got a check for $35,000, they go out and they start acting like they think a millionaire should act. And so, even though they've only got $35,000 in the bank, they go out and they buy a Porsche or they buy an Escalade, or they buy a new house, or two new houses, or six cars, or whatever it might be. And almost instantly, they get themselves in real hot water financially because they're living how they think they should, or think they can. If you think you're a millionaire, and in reality what you're getting is an extra $35,000 a year, not only are you not a millionaire, you've barely cracked the next income level, basically. You know, you're barely in a different tax bracket. You're absolutely right. And believe me, broke lottery winners or financially troubled lottery winners are the rule. They are hardly the exception. Ed's job was to find these broke lottery winners and offer them cash up front, a lump sum, in exchange for the yearly checks they'd be getting from the lottery. Of course, the lump sum would be less than the total value of the long-term payments. So if you won $1 million, your lump sum would be about half that. The industry advertises. They advertise on television, Judge Judy or all the daytime People's Court kind of things. And then, generally, somebody will see an ad and then they'll call in to the firm. Yeah, and back when I first started there, we got so many call-ins that you could literally cherry pick. I mean, it was as competitive as the industry became. Back then, it was like the Wild Wild West. And not to mention, of course, there was a tremendous amount of cold calling out to them. Jus pretend that I'm a lottery winner. You got me on the phone. What would you say as a cold caller? What do you say to me? Well, you know, anything you can do not to get hung up on is a good place to start. Any question that you could ask that was going to give you a nugget to be able to work off of. You're trying to figure out, are they in any type of financial hardship, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, a financial hardship might be that their daughter's getting married in the fall and they want to throw her a big lottery-winner wedding. And it could be something as sad as the fact that they're going bankrupt or they opened a restaurant and-- like, so many lottery winners open a restaurant, and they don't know the first thing about opening restaurants. And I mean, there's so many failed bars and restaurants that lottery winners sank money into. But anything that you could do to try to find out what they need money for, even if it hadn't occurred to them. Ed quickly worked his way up, eventually becoming the best salesmen in the company, with a corner office and a multiple six-figure income. One thing to keep in mind. Ed was a middleman. He wasn't buying the lottery payments for himself, but on behalf of investors who put up a lump sum of cash now for a guaranteed income stream over the next 20 years. So if an investor was willing to pay, say, $500,000, and Ed got the lottery winner to agree to $480,000, then the firm made $20,000, A big portion of which went to Ed. The smaller the amount Ed got the lottery winner to agree to, the more money Ed made. And so the last thing Ed wanted to do was get into a deep discussion about the ins and outs of every deal, which, surprisingly, most lottery winners didn't want to do either. What Ed found was that, if lottery winners felt like they could relate to him, could trust him, then they'd be much more willing to do the deal, no matter what the terms. And Ed found it wasn't hard to get them comfortable because they actually had a lot in common. It was just a natural fit for me. One of the biggest things that helped me was my intimate understanding of the mind of a gambler. A fellow I did a deal with in Florida, we went to a notary to get certain pages of the contracts, all the contracts needed to be signed. Some of the signature pages needed to be notarized. And this notary happened to also sell lottery tickets. And when we went and got these pages notarized, he whipped out a wad of bills out of his pocket and bought 1,000 scratch tickets while the notary slash lottery ticket salesperson was notarizing the signature pages on his contract to sell me his annuity from the lottery win. He was sitting there. He didn't even look at the contracts. He's just scratching away. He couldn't even wait to get away from the booth. I'll never forget the way the notary looked at me sort of in awe. And yeah, it was a little daunting, a little bizarre seeing it. But I knew just who this cat was. I'd been that guy. And I would like to think that maybe I was a little bit better than scratch tickets in the airport, but I don't know that scratch tickets in the airport are that much classier than video poker machines in the strip clubs of Oregon. Do you think that that was part of what made you good, that you could see yourself making the exact same choices that they had made? I think it was my secret weapon. Forget about what I pretended to be in the office, but I knew who I was when I looked in the mirror. And I knew I was a lottery winner. I just never bought a ticket. We've all heard stories about how winning the lottery can be a mixed blessing, with the unwanted attention and the cousins of friends of coworkers looking for handouts. But when Ed discusses lottery winners, it can sound like he's talking about someone getting cancer. Because in his experience, it's not even a mixed blessing. It's a catastrophe. Of the winners he's met, he figures 80% of them wished they'd never won. More money often just intensifies your own worst tendencies and allows you to get in much worse trouble, be it through gambling, philandering, drinking, or just plain boneheadedness than you ever could have at $15 an hour. And, he says, it makes you paranoid. He did a deal with one woman. He showed up at her house for their appointment. I get into her front yard and the second I opened-- there's a gate to her front yard. And she opened her front door, purposely letting out maybe seven or eight huge dogs that cornered me. I'm a dog person. I grew up with dogs. I love dogs, but not these dogs. These dogs literally cornered me in the corner of her yard. And I kept this sort of smile on my face thinking that, OK, this is a little awkward, but I don't want to ruin the deal. She's obviously coming out to deal with the dogs. She's going to come and she's going to pull the dogs off me. But she just sort of cracked her head outside. And I'm sitting there. I have my hands up and I have my briefcase over my shoulder. And she says to me, she says, do you have an offer? I thought she was kidding. At first I did. I laughed. I remember nervously laughing. But it kind of quickly occurred to me that maybe these dogs out in the yard wasn't fully a mistake on her part. If nothing else, it surely got my attention. And I will tell you, it worked. It did. I mean those dogs made her at least $10,000. But the dogs were just the tip of the paranoia iceberg. The woman agreed to Ed's figure from her doorway, grabbed her keys, and said, let's go. They headed to the notary, she in her car, Ed in his rental. But when Ed pulled into the parking space at the notary, the woman zoomed away. Eventually, she called Ed from a pay phone and told him that she was reconsidering. Ed tried to talk her down over the phone, but this was a little difficult. I guess she had watched too many cop shows or too many movies, because even though I'd been at her house, and I'd spoken to her on the phone, and I knew what her phone number was, and I knew where to find if I wanted her, she was afraid, somehow, that on my cellphone that I would be able to figure out where she was if she stayed on the phone with me for more than 30 seconds at a time. Because in the movies-- and who knows if it's true-- but classically, that's how long it takes to tap a phone or to do a search, or whatever it, where you find out their location. So for the next two days, I'm down in this town in Virginia. And we developed a whole new relationship on the phone, sort of starting from scratch and going through the entire sales process. But now, we'd be talking and you could literally set your watch to it. And we would talk for-- you know, 30 seconds isn't a hell of a long time when you're try to get a deal done. And every 30 seconds, boom, she'd hang up again. And she'd call right back. Or she'd wait a minute or two, or whatever it was. But the one thing I tried to do was not to talk too fast. I didn't want to seem like I was fazed by the fact that I only had 30 seconds. And so I'd be very casual. And I'd ask her how she's doing and if she's thought anymore about it. And then sometimes in the middle of a sentence she'd just hang up. And sometimes even when she was feeling, I guess, a little bit more relaxed, she'd forget about the 30 seconds and I'd even remind her. And then she'd hang up. And I'd sit there and wait and then she'd call me back on my phone. And this went on for two days. That's the way, in the end, that we were able to get our deal done, is if she was able to regain a sense of control that she somehow felt she had lost pulling into the notary. Do you think that she was that paranoid before, or do you think this was all because she was a lottery winner? I think that it was as a direct result of the lottery. I think that it was an absolute cause effect. Ed left his job after seven years, partly for reasons anyone leaves a high stakes, high pressure sales job: the stress, the competition, the constant travel. But there was another part, too. Ed believed in the lump sum option. Still does. It makes more sense to take the money up front and invest it, than it does to let the state hold onto it interest free for 20 years. But it doesn't necessarily make sense to buy the lump sum from Ed, the middle man, because he's taking a cut for himself. And this was the inescapable truth to Ed's job, a truth that, because he identified so much with lottery winners, he found it especially hard to ignore. The more the lottery winners liked him, the less likely they were to notice how big a cut he took. And the more desperate they were for cash, the more lucrative Ed's deal was likely to be. There was a fella who needed to do a deal and needed to do a deal right away. And in the lump sum game, that's real good. But the reason that it gave me sort of the heebie-jeebies was why he needed to do the deal. This fella, who's a terrific guy, but he needed to sell his entire prize in five minutes, so he could put a half million dollars into a very famous defense attorney's bank account so that he, the attorney, would defend his son, the lottery winner's son, in a murder trial. And the son, as we speak, was found guilty. He was found guilty in his appeal. A young kid, 18, 19 years old, killed a woman. And this winner, he had to get in bed with the lump sum industry and he had to sell his payment under very rushed circumstances, which, of course, is to his detriment. And he had to do all that because he was trying to save his son from going to prison for the rest of his life. And in the end, he got a good deal, but we made a few dollars, too. And I think that that sort of ambiguity was always present in a lottery deal. It was always there. It was always sort of riding shotgun in the car with me, that, yeah, I might be solving his problem, but I'm sure as hell not hurting mine. And it's also sort of like in a way you're profiting from his problem. Not in a way, absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with that, but isn't there? That's OK. I mean, people profit all the time from other people's problems, but it never made me feel great. You know what I mean? Like, you were looking for people that were in bad shape because people who are in bad shape put me in good shape. In the year since Ed first got into the business, the lump sum industry has gone through huge changes. New companies entered the field, increasing competition. The states themselves got into the action. A decade ago, almost none of them offered a lump sum option to their lottery winners. Today, almost all of them do. And they offer pretty much the exact same terms Ed was offering, roughly $0.5 million up front on a $1 million win, but minus, of course, Ed's commission. The state has effectively cut out the middlemen like Ed. The overwhelming majority of winners take their deal. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our program. Ed Ugel has written a book about his time in the lottery industry. It comes out in September and is called, Money for Nothing. Coming up, out on the frontier, treading the new world. The only thing lacking is a salt shaker. 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, Nice Work If You Can Get It, stories about people who land dream jobs, and how even dream jobs have parts that aren't really necessary so dreamy. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, The Homesick Explorer. When we think of the Fremont expeditions to map the American West, as we so often do, we think of epic men, the kind of men who don't call their jobs jobs. They call their jobs destinies. Well, Sarah Vowell has some thoughts about one of the lesser-known guys on that trip, and the job he did. John Charles Fremont was the spirited flashing light of a man from whom Las Vegas' flashy, lit-up Fremont Street would one day get its name. In 1842, the United States government sent him to lead one of the most important expeditions of the 19th century, a mission to make maps and issue reports on what would come to be called the Oregon Trail. He hired the famous fur trapper and mountaineer, Kit Carson, to be the expedition scout. To make maps and drawings along the way, Fremont employed a German immigrant named Charles Preuss. Fremont's lively report to Congress of his findings, illustrated with Preuss's drawings and maps, became a bestseller. And Preuss's map of the Oregon trail Congress published in 1846 was soon crammed into the glove box of every Conestoga rolling West. If you ever had to reach across a copy of the Book of Mormon blocking the Parmesan cheese at a pizza place outside of Provo, it's because Brigham Young was so intrigued with Fremont's description of the bucolic area surrounding Utah's Great Salt Lake, he promptly moved his Mormon brethren there. So Charles Preuss was one of the most important, influential, and talented cartographers of his generation. Problem was, this excellent mapmaker just so happened to loathe pretty much every minute of actual exploring. Preuss's diaries from his three trips out West with Fremont seethe with manly, gung-ho cowboy bravery like-- I wish I were at the market with a shopping basket. Or, mulling over the roasting mule meat that is to be his dinner. What a treat it would be with a bottle of wine. But stop, that thought is too beautiful. Preuss's boss on the trip, John Charles Fremont, was manifest destiny's advance man. As a young surveyor, he'd cut his teeth mapping the Cherokee lands in the southeast in the 1830s, so the US government had an accurate account of the real estate it was about to steal. Later on, Fremont came home from his expeditions out West a hero and celebrity. His nickname, "The Pathfinder." He went on to become the first presidential candidate of the Republican party. And the signature image used for all his later self-promotion, including his presidential campaign, was one incident from his Western journeys. It became the iconic moment of his life, what crossing the Delaware was for Washington, what tripping over the ottoman was for Dick Van Dyke. Fremont climbed alone to what he thought was the highest peak in the Rockies, stood up straight and tall and jabbed an American flag into the mountain top, Old Glory whipping defiantly in the icy wind. Think about the kind of person you have to be to do that, to be so unapologetically grand. Preuss, meanwhile, was farther down the mountain, striking a less Neil Armstrongy pose. I slipped, sat down on my pants, and slid downhill at a great speed. Although I made all efforts to hold back by trying to dig my fingers into the icy crust, I slid down about 200 feet until the bare rock stopped me again. When I arrived, I rolled over twice and got away with two light bruises, one on my right arm, and one on my arse. The pain made me sit still for a few minutes. Fremont wrote of this climb that, standing where never a human foot had stood before, that he "felt the exaltation of first explorers." Preuss put it this way. All my pants are torn. Preuss's resentment of the bugs, the landscape, the Indians, and the monotony, pales compared to his many varied flipouts about food. His entry for June 12, 1842 cheers up with the slaughter of an ox. Preuss thinks that after the meat ages overnight-- Tomorrow, to be sure, it will taste excellent. June 13. It did not taste excellent. Preuss has an entire subset of food complaints involving salt and the lack thereof. One of his happiest entries takes place in the Sierra Mountains on February 15, 1843, near what is now the California-Nevada border. The great good news is that the men have bartered rock salt from the Indians. Just now, Taplin is bringing in a big lump. Preuss was so giddy about the salt that he doesn't mention what the expedition was doing while they were waiting around for the seasoning to show up: discovering Lake Tahoe. It makes sense that Preuss, a man who was outstanding at measuring and drawing and using barometric data to construct a two-dimensional topographical representation of a mountain, might suck at climbing said mountain. Cartography was Preuss's calling. But in order for him to do the job he loved to do, he had to live a life he hated. The thing I admire most about Charles Preuss is that Fremont, his boss, apparently had no idea just how miserable the cartographer was on the job. Preuss' diaries were meant for one reader, his wife, and they weren't published until 1958, after Preuss and all his colleagues had been dead for a century. In fact, Fremont commended Preuss for "his even temper and patient endurance of hardship," noting Preuss had a "cheerful philosophy of his own, which often brightened dark situations." I respect that. Preuss had a job to do and he bucked up and did it. The other people on these expeditions, John Charles Fremont, and his legendary scout, Kit Carson, are the sort of grand, hardy, how-the-west-was-won figures who are easily made into colossal statues. But there's something comforting, even heroic, about a human scale footnote like Preuss, a man who made history even though all he ever wanted was to make maps. Sarah Vowell. She's the author most recently of Assassination Vacation. Charles Preuss' diaries were read by actor Dermot Mulroney. Act Four, Just One Thing Missing. Well, we end our show today with somebody who was blocked from getting their dream job, blocked by the government of the United States of America. Douglas McGray has the story. He's changed the name of the woman in this story to protect her identity. Martha doesn't like to talk about her future anymore. She'd wanted to go to med school, become an OB/GYN. And she's exactly the kind of kid everyone roots for. She grew up in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood in east LA, where most people didn't graduate from high school, and nobody talked about college. But Martha got into UCLA. She couldn't believe it, UCLA. She majored in chemistry, threw herself into six-hour lab sessions, ran a volunteer organization on campus. But the fact is, she can't become a doctor. She can't work at all in the United States, not legally, anyway. She's an undocumented immigrant. Her mother brought her to the US from Mexico when she was nine. So now she's a waitress, earning minimum wage, working off the books. And it may be the best job she can hope to get. The worst part? Well, first of all, I suck at it. My boss always gets these complaints for me. Oh, she takes too long to get my drinks. She forgot to put this on my order. She changed my order. I asked her well done and she brought medium. And I'm extremely clumsy. I really suck at it. I can't multitask. I'm horrible at that. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm very clumsy by nature and you can't be a clumsy waitress. You know, that's like an oxymoron. And that's one thing. And the other thing is I am a very proud person. I don't like people treating me a certain way. So many people have come and told me, oh, here, here's $20 for the milk for your baby boy. People look at me and right off the bat assume that I have a bunch of children, I'm probably a single mother. And that bothers me. And I don't know. I think being a waitress bothers me because people don't see my potential. When Martha arrived at UCLA, she figured she'd be the only undocumented kid there. But she was wrong. She found others. A high school valedictorian and prom queen from Compton who went to UCLA when the Marines rejected her. Only legal residents can enlist. Another valedictorian, brought to the United States as an infant who spoke her first word in English. A shy girl who arrived as a toddler and took 11 AP classes in high school. They're a tiny, close community. They actually have a small student club. They go out and mentor undocumented high school kids and raise money for scholarships. And they understand each other in a way that no one else can, like what they go through to stay in school. Most live really far from campus. Two and a half hours in Martha's case. And they have to be creative to survive. Being on hobo mode is something that we students, undocumented students, specifically, that's what we call it. It's living on campus because we don't have a home near campus because we can't afford it. It's really expensive. So we'd stay here days at a time. Sometimes a week. Or sometimes, in my case, I did it weeks at a time. I would stay in the library and sleep in the library. I would store my food in, like, a lounge in a building. I would take showers in the locker room. And I would store all my clothing because I'd bring underwear. I'd bring a change of clothes for every single day and store it in the locker room. It's really difficult to do that. And also, it's kind of stigmatizing because you kind of get ashamed if people find out you're in hobo mode. 20 years ago, California allowed undocumented kids to go to state universities with financial aid and everything. Five years later, the courts reversed that. Kids like Martha would have to pay huge out-of-state fees. Four years after that, a ballot initiative barred undocumented kids from college altogether. Then the courts got involved again. Today, the laws for someone like Martha are different in every state. 10 states, including California and Texas, allow undocumented kids to go to state schools and pay in-state tuition, but no financial aid, no Pell Grant, no work study job, not even a student loan. To apply for a green card, which would solve all their problems, Martha would have to quit school, move to Mexico, wait in a line that can stretch 10 or 15 years, and most likely get rejected. Last year, Martha found a perfect job to support herself, on campus even. But she couldn't accept it. A UCLA professor needed a research assistant, someone to help her interview Spanish-speaking families in East LA. Martha knew the neighborhood, spoke Spanish fluently. The professor called Martha to say she got the job. And I got the phone call. I was so excited. I was like, oh my God. This is a really good job. But it didn't click to me that I was going to be on the payroll. I thought, oh, well, maybe she can just pay me cash or whatever. I was very naive. And I was really bummed out. But I try not to think about it too much. What kept you motivated through all of this? Med school. I want to go to med school. I wanted to be-- I still want to. I mean, there's still a possibility it could happen, it's just not now. Why do you want to be a doctor? I want to be a doctor because I've always seen myself as a public servant. But I also see myself as a scientist. And to me, that's the only thing that I see myself doing. Because it gains you respect from people. And well, right now, I try not to think about it because it depresses me that I can't do it right now. Listening to you, I get the sense that you think that respect is something you have to fight for. Yes. Unfortunately, not everybody gets respect just by being a human being. I'm not the kind of person that seeks power. I don't like that. I don't want to rule people. You know, that's not what I want. I'm not ambitious in that sense. I just would like to be someone whose opinion people respect. Someone like, say, oh, there's this really important issue that we need to solve and we need your help. Or someone that people will say, oh, look, there she is. Let's go talk to her because we really like her work. We really like what she does. That kind of thing. When Martha and I talked, she kept calling herself a quitter. She said the word like it was the worst word she knew. She said it over and over. I told her she was being ridiculous. I've known Martha for almost two years and I've never seen someone put so much pressure on herself. When her grades were mediocre, she wouldn't blame her home life, or her commute, or the pair of double waitressing shifts she worked most weekends. She would just say she hadn't tried hard enough. One quarter, desperate to find more time to study, she actually started driving to school even though it scared her to drive without a license. As an undocumented immigrant, she's not allowed to get one. I kept asking her, what do you mean, quitter? Finally, she explained. Fall quarter, I just gave up on myself. I dropped all my classes and I withdrew from the quarter, because I felt so tired. I felt like, I don't want to do this anymore. That was the quarter that you were going to graduate at the end of that quarter? Right at that quarter. Can you believe that? It was the last quarter. I could have just worked harder, but I didn't. I was just so overwhelmed. My future is so uncertain and so unbelievably sad that I think to myself, well, why should I try, like, harder? I just gave up on that. [CRYING] Sorry. I shouldn't give up because a lot of people don't and the fact that I do really hurts me. None of my friends know. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't talk to anybody about it, because it's really embarrassing for me to say that I'm such a quitter. What happened to Martha is she saw graduation approaching and after it, nothing. The blankness of her future, suddenly only weeks away, drained the fight right out of her. Her entire college career seemed like a mean joke. She had exhausted herself working twice as hard as most of her classmates to get a UCLA education, Plus waitressing, plus the commute, plus cooking and cleaning when her parents were working, which was most of the time. And for what? She had no way to pay for a medical degree, and no hope of becoming a licensed doctor if she did. There's a very simple solution to all of this. A bill called the Dream Act would offer conditional citizenship to those few kids, like Martha, who grow up in the United States and make it to college or the military. If they get a degree, or finish their service, they become full citizens. By 2004, the Senate version of the Dream Act had actually picked up 47 co-sponsors. But the Dream Act keeps getting bogged down in immigration politics, tacked onto a bunch of big, messy immigration proposals that nobody in Congress could agree on. Earlier this year, the Dream Act was introduced again in the House and Senate. How would your working life change if you became a legal resident or a citizen tomorrow? Wow, the possibilities are endless. The sky's the limit. I mean, I could take any job I wanted. And I'm good at a lot of things. I mean, I could take any job at any lab. I could work for UCLA. Sometimes I think, well, what if it's not enough, that I'll still be unhappy? But the more I think about it, that's not a possibility. I mean, yes, a green card's not going to buy you happiness, but it's going to buy you a lot of peace of mind. It really is. Just being able to work with dignity. Martha went back to school a few days ago, and I don't think her temporary dropout counts as quitting, no matter how she sees it. She hasn't given up hope. Maybe the laws will change. Maybe there'll be a normal life for her here after all. She graduates in June. Douglas McGray. He's a fellow at the New America Foundation. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our longtime webmaster, Elizabeth Meister, who created our website, is retiring from the website to go make radio herself. She has done an amazing job thinking through what it is that we would do on the internet in the first place and then making it happen for so many years. I do not know what would be doing on the web without her. Elizabeth, we all wish you the best. You can see the latest incarnation of our website, souped up now with podcasts and free video, at www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who cannot wait to slip into his monogrammed silk bathrobe, ease into his leather chair and listen to this week's shows. What a treat it would be with a bottle of wine. But stop, that thought is too beautiful. 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, recording this in 2006. This episode of our show, Episode 33, is one that actually never was broadcast nationally. We did a local broadcast of it in Chicago and always intended to go back to it and make it into a national version and never did. In fact, we don't even have a master copy of it, a digital recording of it. And what you're about to hear is actually from a cassette we have of the show, which is the only copy we can find. Anyway, here we go. I don't remember when I first wandered into The Wieners Circle. I'm sure it was after midnight. I'm sure that, as always, the place was mobbed. I'm sure that, as always, people were screaming. I need a veggie burger! Lady? Lady! Veggie burger, double cheeseburger and a fry. Char burger! The front of the hot dog stand is filled with a swarm of people. When I first went, it was a weird mix of cops-- there was a lot of cops there-- drunk yuppie 20-somethings, working class people who work in the neighborhood. But what really got to me was the staff. There's one of these windows you can look through, they ask for your order through. And they're in a space so small you could not park a car back there. And it's hot. You can tell it's hot. There are deep fryers and grills pouring off heat. There's hot grease everywhere. And they are constantly bumping into each other, getting into each other's way. And all of them, all of them are screaming nonstop. It's a kind of work environment that makes you wonder only one thing. Why don't these people want to kill each other? I don't know. What does he got? Stop being so miserable, you bastard. I don't know. What in the [BLEEP] did you order? That's all I'm asking. $2.30. That's all. Very easy. Now we'll get along. Now you can talk to me. [BLEEP] But if you watch the workers at The Wieners Circle a little while more, you realize something else. They actually seem kind of happy. They're getting along. They kind of love each other. They joke around. I thought, whoever manages this place really knows how to run a restaurant. I mean, they're taking a job that seems like one of the hardest, most grinding physically and psychologically, on your feet all day, yelling backwards and forwards, and somehow they have turned it into a job that the people there actually seem to kind of like. I have more respect for this job than I can say almost any job that I've ever had. And I've had a lot of jobs. You want to be here. It's like you're not working for money. You want to be here for real. Come on. Yeah, I'm serious. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, a night at The Wieners Circle. I was there from 9:00 at night until dawn a couple Saturday nights ago. I saw hundreds of screaming drunks. A guy walked in who'd been carrying a statue of Zeus from one bar to the next. I saw a couple meet and flirt and get together. The staff cursed out the patrons. They cursed, sang them songs. Sometimes they sang them songs, mysteriously I should say, in Hebrew. What else happened? A man exposed himself to the women behind the counter. At their request. And at the end of the evening, everybody agreed, for them, it had been a quiet night. Each week on our show, of course, we invite a variety of writers and performers. And this week, our contributors gave us stories about working in the lovely food service industry, about fast food places, about meat. Anyway, stay with us. So let us go back now. I guess an elegant sound transition would've been a good idea there, but whatever. Let us go back now in time to a Saturday night. It is time to meet our cast of characters. There are Larry and Barry, the owners of The Wieners Circle. Larry's a 50-year-old man in Spandex pants when he works Saturday nights. He lives in the high-rise across the street from The Wieners Circle. That's on Clark Street, by the way, between Fullerton and Diversey. Larry lives on the lowest floor so he can see in. Barry is 41. Shot up from 180 pounds to 300 since they bought The Wieners Circle, from eating the mistakes, he says. In the last two years, he's lost 100 of those pounds. And sitting on the picnic tables in front of the hot dog stand, they laugh about all the excuses that employees used to get out of work or show up late over the course of years. And they're talking about this when right at that moment, their night shift grill man walks up. Here comes one of our employees who was supposed to be in at 8:00. He's moseying in like nothing ever happened. You're about to hear one of the excuses. This is Tony. Tell him why you were supposed to be here at 8:00 and you're here at 10:00. I'm sorry. But I got a flat tire, so-- See? That was one of the excuses. That's an old one. Thank you anyways, Tony. He doesn't even own a car. Yeah, so that was-- The bus. The bus had the flat tire, I think. As you can see, we're not uptight about it. These guys are like the Car Guys, you know? I don't know if you're getting much sense of this. When they first opened The Wieners Circle 15 years ago, this is the sort of thing, showing up late, that they would fire people for. But they realized over time that it takes so long to train somebody that it just was not worth it for them to hire somebody new who then would have exactly the same number of late days and excuses and all that. So they have mellowed. They have mellowed over the years. And they view that as basically their experience, they told me. On the Saturday night shift, there's also Vicky who is married to Barry, but refuses to work the same shift as Barry does. There's Noni on fries, Tony on the grill, Patricia and Freddie at the counter with Coffee. Coffee is a person, by the way. Coffee is a person whose real name is Pat, but she insists on Coffee because, as she will be the first to tell you-- Because I grind so fine. She's the backbone. Everybody asks for-- You'll see her at her best, though, after midnight. After midnight, baby. I'm good after midnight. It is Coffee who sticks her long tongue out at men, on request and not. It is Coffee who can get the last word with any customer. It is Coffee, by the way, who accidentally cursed out Laurence Fishburne this week in the restaurant, not realizing who he was. The night I was there, a guy walked in at one point early in the night and says to Coffee and Patricia, who are standing behind the counter, "You work here?" And, of course, it's Coffee who says-- Do you work here? [BLEEP] no. We're just standing back here for decoration. What the [BLEEP] you thought? We just standing here because we like it. What the [BLEEP] are you having? The guy sputters. Newcomers to The Wieners Circle late at night usually are not prepared for what they get. Regulars, on the other hand, come in all night and try to get the last word on Coffee and on everybody else. But especially on Coffee. Coffee's like-- you know those old Westerns where there's the gunslinger who's the top gun? That's Coffee. And that's the problem with being the top gun, if you remember your John Wayne movies. That's the problem with being the top gun. There's always somebody who thinks he's just a little quicker. Being top gun. And that's exactly what it is, being top gun. If they can score, if they can score on me, then that's the whole thing. I mean, I feel like when I'll be here, I'm as famous as Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman. Don't [BLEEP] with her! Don't [BLEEP] with her. [BLEEP] you, midget. I have so much charming tape of them yelling at each other, like hours and hours of it. Coffee has four kids. The older ones have seen her cursing at The Wieners Circle and were shocked at first, she says. But then they understood that's just how she is at work. And she does have another job, she told me. I teach preschoolers, believe it or not. Over the course of a Saturday night these days, The Weiners Circle is mostly filled with yuppies, yuppie 20-somethings, seriously drunk. It is not an attractive sight. The women behind the counter call each other and themselves "bitch" mostly, as in-- Tell the black bitch as many times as she needs to know. There are not many settings in our mostly segregated city of Chicago where you can see a room of mostly white jock-like boys screaming insults, yelling bitch at women, sometimes actually throwing money, literally throwing dollar bills at a group of mostly non-white women and men. Coming to The Wieners Circle drunk, they have license to talk and act like they talk and act nowhere else. But when I ask Coffee about it, she says that she doesn't see any big racial edge to what goes on at her job. She likes most of her customers. She truly likes them. And she says they don't go over the line. She tells me this story about a white South African who came in and misinterpreted the license that was happening inside The Wieners Circle. And he said to me, he said, "You black ass nigger. You don't talk like that to me. Do you know who I am?" And at first, when he first said it, OK, I was laughing it off. Because I always laugh it off. Like, if somebody say, "Hey, you black bitch," I say, "Thank you." Or "You a dirty--" I say, "Thank you." So I thought he was playing at first, until he said something that one of the customers knew that he was actually being prejudiced about. And what happened was two of the other white guys that usually come in jumped onto him and started to fight him. When they take their breaks, The Wieners Circle staff seem to actually like each other. At one point, I was talking to Vicky and Coffee. And as Coffee was talking, Vicky gently reached over and wiped some mustard off of Coffee's cheek. Friday and Saturday nights from midnight until 4:00, working The Wieners Circle has the intensity of working in an emergency room. Except, of course, it's about hot dogs. And The Wieners Circle staff has bonded the way that emergency room staffs bond. And at dawn, after screaming at each other all night long, I mean, it sounds really corny to say it, but they are really affectionate with each other. They have no anger left over. If you ask the customers why they come here, most of them say it is the food and the employees. Or as one man put it, very concisely I thought, "It's dinner and a show." And some of the staff view it as a show also. And they say that if they weren't putting on a show, this would just be another food service job. Freddy, for example, said that he has worked the days at The Wieners Circle. And during the day, there's none of this acting up. There's none of the screaming. It is a normal hot dog stand that you can take your kids to. And Freddy said it's hard to bear. The hours drag by. It is not much fun at all. It's like, you'll say, please, thank you, have a nice day, and all that. And during the night, it's a bunch of drunks. And it's like playing all night, playing all night. And so if you couldn't scream, it would just be another job. Absolutely. Now, I have something to confess to you, my beloved radio listeners. Though I have really amazing tape of other things which happened that night at The Wieners Circle, tape of Vicky and Patricia and Larry and the staff. And then some of the customers who really had some stories to tell, I have to say. Including-- this is a hot dog stand, oddly, haunted by David Schwimmer, for reasons I can't even begin to imagine. There's also just stuff which happened, and without going into details, I will just say that those parts of the story did not get completed for tonight's show but will be completed, not for this coming Saturday, when we're talking about the Democrats, but the Saturday after that. You can hear this and more, more, more, a much more vivid little story. So listen to our little show for that, OK? Because there's a lot more to say about The Wieners Circle than I'm saying right now. And I want to share it with you. Act Two, The Customer. Well, of course, the relationship between staff and customers at The Wieners Circle is not your typical relationship between restaurant staff and restaurant worker. And for a more typical story, we turn to Beau O'Reilly, who not only is a playwright and a frequent contributor to our show, but he actually works at a restaurant, has worked at many restaurants, and has this story of a possibly recognizable restaurant in our possibly recognizable Chicagoland area. In our restaurant, restaurant workers give out new names to favorite customers or-- and this is a much bigger category-- favorite customers to hate and be bugged by. And the names usually come from restaurant habits-- 5:00 Window Seat Lady, Mr. Saturday Night, Two Ashtray Al-- or more potently and likely to stick forever, favorite food orders. The Scone Man always has one, a scone, and it's always well done. He's a favorite with a spot on the restaurant worker's heart because of his consistency. The Is There Wheat In This Lady who always brings a shudder of annoyance so deep that the restaurant worker feels he must be suffering a stroke or a brain aneurysm. "Is there wheat in this? What about the soup? Is there wheat in it? The lasagna, is there wheat in it? The bread, is there wheat it it? I can't have wheat. Can I have half a bowl? Not the medium bowl, a tiny bowl. Can I have it to go? I can't eat it here. Can you double wrap it? Can you heat it on the stove? I can't have it microwaved. I can't have microwaves. Can I have some water while I wait? Is there wheat in this water?" The restaurant worker has been known to lock the door when he sees the Is There Wheat In This Lady coming. The Mustard Man is more deserving of pity, and the restaurant worker is aware of this. The Mustard Man is a limo driver who has gone legally blind, and he's probably harmless when he's not behind the wheel. He's pursuing a new line of work now, but like a middle-aged fat man pursuing a spot on the Olympic decathlon team, a new line of work may be outside his reach. The Mustard Man studies podiatry at the foot school across the street from where the restaurant worker works. The Mustard Man is a near member of that school's graduating class for the seventh time. Before The Mustard Man became The Mustard Man, he was that guy from the school who offers to rub your feet, especially if your feet were lovely and your gams were shapely. He would offer to work on your foot without batting an eye, as if he were asking you to pass the ketchup. And his food orders were almost normal back then. Almost normal, but broken up and oddly shaped. Soup, soup must be served first, but soup always served cold until the restaurant worker anticipated it being served that way, and then he, The Mustard Man, would send it back with the instructions to nuke it until boiling. And when that soup was bubbling like a lava flow out of Mount Vesuvius, The Mustard Man would dump ice into it just to cool it back down. Desserts were worried over with hopes that the dessert at least would be included for free, forks exchanged randomly for extra spoons, knives sent back to the dishwasher, extra napkins, extra bread, extra, extra, extra. And every little variation of the dinner order was announced with an increased urgency that pretended towards the matter of fact. The Mustard Man's ordering technique seemed designed to ask the restaurant worker to pay attention to him as many times as possible. And the longer The Mustard Man came to the restaurant, gradually he increased his visits from once a week to three or four times a week. The more the restaurant worker's trips to The Mustard Man's tables had to be increased, the restaurant worker took on a permanent look of vexation and rage that only The Mustard Man seemed not to notice. Other customers, they withered from that look. Their bold orders for whole meals were reduced to weak pleas for cups of tea and mumbled requests to use the phone. The idea of putting even one more straw on this restaurant worker's back by ordering real food was too much for these sensitive souls. But not The Mustard Man. The Mustard Man continued his barrage. More water, warm not hot. Fresh oregano. Mint toothpicks. Fresh bowls. As the weeks went on, The Mustard Man seemed to settle in, and he began to feel at home. He started table hopping. And usually, the other tables, they were filled with other near-graduates of the podiatry school, most of whom learned the mysteries of the human foot in a short one or two years. And in our restaurant, The Mustard Man's table hopping, that was not acceptable. The students would cringe with disapproval as he approached them, declaiming the science of feet in a loud voice and manically grabbing at any unprotected Birkenstocks in a compulsive need to work on your foot, work on your foot. But The Mustard Man was crafty. He would rotate his table hopping so no one student group had too much cause to complain. The restaurant worker's annoyance was growing. Indeed, it had passed rage now, and it had moved into a gibbering, idiot hatred that worked on his brain. That's the thing about restaurants, working in restaurants. The workers hate the customers. It's an unnatural relationship. You're there to serve them. Why should you serve them? Until one day, The Mustard Man met the restaurant worker at the door as the restaurant worker was opening our restaurant for the evening. And he seemed particularly happy, The Mustard Man, reciting the entire menu aloud as the restaurant worker busied himself making coffee in a feeble attempt to ignore The Mustard Man. The door opens, and in walks a potential performer. Now, his voice is just quivering with excitement at the possibility of using the place for avant garde karaoke or contact wild turkey improvisation parties, something. His eyes speak of wild parties, wild turkey and more. His voice gets loud and rapid firing questions. And the restaurant worker puts him off, insisting on an appointment at a later date, a demo tape, a blueprint proposal, at another time. Right now, the restaurant worker, he's running a pot of coffee. And that coffee requires a lot of attention. And The Mustard Man, he jumps up to help. He's taking the potential performer on a tour of the restaurant worker's restaurant, our restaurant. The lovely stage and the handsome tablecloths and the cheerful crockery. And the two of them are constructing a loud Tower of Babel that has the restaurant worker seething now. And as The Mustard Man finally escorts the potential performer out the door, shouting "We'll get back to you with an offer." "An offer of what?" fumes the restaurant worker. The Mustard Man gives the potential performer one last longing look, glancing down at the potential performer's wingtips and wondering about the feet that they might hold. And then the restaurant worker lets him have it. Inappropriate, spew. Boundary issues, spew. Spew, spew. Attention monger, spew. Self-involved juvenile, spew, spew. Inappropriate, inappropriate, inappropriate behavior, spew! The restaurant worker, expanding and puffed-up like a porcupine on defense. And The Mustard Man, shrinking and inappropriate now, is backing out the door. The Mustard Man didn't stop coming to our restaurant. He still appeared regularly. But now he never sat, he never table-hopped, ordering only bread gobbed with mustard to go. He became The Mustard Man. "Bread with mustard to go, please," in a clear but subdued voice. And the restaurant worker never spoke personally to him again. Things were ice between them, professional, appropriate. And sometimes The Mustard Man wouldn't even come in. The restaurant worker would look up from strangling a fruit salad or burning a bagel to death and see The Mustard Man, his face pressed against the restaurant window like the restaurant was a new pair of Converse high-tops and the restaurant worker a wondrous pair of feet The Mustard Man would love to get his hands on. And the restaurant worker thought The Mustard Man looked particularly bad with his face pressed against the window like that. Beau O'Reilly's running the Rhino Fest and he works at The Lunar Cabaret restaurant. Coming up on our program-- coming up, what is coming up? Coming up, hot dogs as metaphor for all politics in the city of Chicago and ever so much more as our little food program continues. Act Three, A Parable of Politics. Well, I'm joined now in the studio by one of the public radio reporters here in Chicago, Shirley Jahad. Welcome to our studio. Hi there, Ira. And Shirley, you've agreed to do a little assignment for us, because hot dogs in Chicago are not just food. They are a lens through which we can see the workings of our great city. And I know that you have a story here of a company that did everything it was supposed to, here in the city that works, to grease the skids and see that things went well, and ran into some trouble and finally-- well, we'll say whether they prevailed or not as the story proceeds. But why don't you explain who this company is? Well, that's right, Ira. We're talking about Chicago's own Vienna Beef Hot Dog. This is a very established company in the city, been here for more than 100 years. And like you said, they've done everything right. They employ 500 people in the city, they stayed in town when other people went to the suburbs, the head of the company, Jim Bodman, is a good corporate citizen, a contributor to all the right campaigns, including Mayor Daley's campaign, Mayor Richard Daley's campaign. He gives the maximum amount he can. Whenever City Hall calls, he says, he responds as much as he can. He sends hot dogs to the parks for kids. He's even contributing hot dogs to the big media party for journalists and delegates coming to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And every year, he contributes to the city's big summer party, the city's best summer festival, The Taste of Chicago. The city tries to draw in area residents and tourists from all around using this festival. And they ask us for money to help them do that. And we give them money. And they promise us that all the food that is served there will be our food, and they put our name up. It's a classic example of you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back. Pretty simple, and it works very well. So the guy's playing by the rules. Everything's going just as it's supposed to. And now at this point, I can pick up the story a little bit. Because about a year ago, I just happened to be sitting in Jim Bodman's office at the Vienna Beef Sausage Company for reasons too complicated to go into here. And I'm sitting there and the phone rings, and it's somebody from the mayor's office. And they want 200 hot dogs for some event in some park for some kids. And Bodman says, "Sure, sure, sure." And then his voice goes kind of low. And he says, "Listen to me. Can you give me any help on this Navy Pier thing? They're killing me on this Navy Pier thing. And I don't understand it. I don't understand why we can't get our dogs out onto Navy Pier." Ira, take us to Navy Pier. Hit that sound. All right. Let's hit the sound through the magic of radio. That was such a public radio moment, wasn't it? Here we are on Navy Pier, Ira. It's a wonderful place for summer fun. Carousels, Ferris wheels-- Watch out for that kid with that balloon, Shirley. [LAUGHTER] It's so realistic. There's a lot of shops, a lot of food, you know, the water and the boats and whatnot. It's called the jewel of Chicago's lakefront. It's this high-traffic showcase area. Tourists. A lot of tourists, a lot of folks from the suburbs, a lot of kids-- A lot of kids. --and grown ups. It cost $100 million of taxpayer money, bond money, to refurbish Navy Pier. And it was all carefully planned which businesses were going to go where. Now, Bodman told me that he couldn't get the dog out on Navy Pier. Did he bid on the contract? Bodman bid $0.45 lower per pound for his dogs to be on Navy Pier, and he still didn't get the contract. That seems to me to be not the way things are done. It's not the way things should have been done-- Here in Chicago. --in Chicago. Somehow this New York hot dog migrated into our backyard. And it didn't happen by random occurrence. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody. And they said, let's get Charlie's Hot Dogs into Navy Pier and we'll really have a big time with it because it's a very public place. No, it wasn't random. Something happened. Somebody said something to someone, and that's the way the world works. And that's the way our city works. The fix was in. Well, yeah. He doesn't quite say the fix was in. He just sort of leaves it at that. I guess it's part of the Chicago code of honor in politics. You don't know nobody, nobody [? sins. ?] So he wasn't going to exactly tell me who that somebody was who knew somebody. He wouldn't tell you? Ah. He would not tell you? He would not say. Who was that, do you know? No. Was it somebody who worked for the Pier? And if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Was it someone who worked for the Pier? I might be a hot dog salesman, but I'm not stupid. Was it, like-- do you think-- I'm not going to tell you. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah. Was it, was it, like-- I don't know. I'm not going to tell you. See, there is a tactic you don't see many big corporate executives use with reporters, is just to mock you in a falsetto. That's true, Ira. He was a tough one to crack. You know what I'm saying? He wouldn't come forward and tell me the name. Well, that's our system. That's our system here in Chicago. So where did you go? So of course we had to take it to City Hall. Bodman wasn't talking, so we had to go to our City Hall sources. And of course, they did talk, albeit in a whisper. I mean, they weren't free to say everything openly. They weren't talking on tape, or anything. But off tape, my City Hall sources did talk to me about this whole thing with the hot dogs on the Pier and how it really went down. How come the Chicago company didn't get their dogs on the Pier? Now, did they give you a name of somebody who was the person who was keeping us off the Pier, keeping our homegrown dogs off the Pier? Did they give you a name? We don't have a name. We don't have a name. We still don't have a name. All right. Well, what do we have? But we do have some very important information. We do have confirmation, as we say in the business. We have confirmation. Because the City Hall source has confirmed to me that, yeah, this is how Chicago works. It's been this way for years and years and years, and it's always going to be this way, he says. It's not necessarily the best way, but it is the way it is. And he said to me, quote, "The fix was in." I would say, actually, given the fact that Bodman bid $0.45 less a pound and didn't get the contract, I'd say that I would believe that. You would believe that. OK, well, we have confirmation. "The fix was in," he says. And then he says, "People need to be taken care of." These are his words, not mine. Then he paused, though. This was the interesting part. He takes a pause. "People need to be taken care of," he says, and he pauses. And he says, "And that's not necessarily a corrupt thing." That's how it is in Chicago, you know? Well, you know. The streets are paved. The garbage is picked up. That's a good thing. That's right. So people need to be taken care of. That's right. And-- Then Bodman is-- --Bodman is absolutely-- He's one of those people. He's one of those people. At this point, he really feels like he needs to be taken care of. Contributor to the mayor. He feels like he's been left hung out to dry after he did everything right. He gives to the mayor's campaign. He comes whenever he's called at City Hall, and whatnot. So next is? So of course, what's next in politics? A meeting. Absolutely. They called a meeting. And all the players got together. And so this is one of those quintessential Chicago-style political meetings. You've all heard about them, maybe imagined them, high-powered, back room, smoke-filled-- I wish I could only see-- --cigars. --the mayor's schedule for that day. "11:00 to 11:30, hot dog meeting." No detail too small. So what do we know about who was at this meeting? Well, you know, we have conflicting information on exactly who was at the meeting. My City Hall source tells me the mayor was, in fact, at the meeting, but of course-- This all-important, high-powered hot dog meeting, how could he miss it? But Bodman insists, no, the mayor wasn't there. He has more important things to do than deal with these "weenie problems." Those are Bodman's words, again, not mine. But who was there? So who was there? All these officials from Navy Pier, the governing body of Navy Pier. That's a state agency, the Metropolitan Pier and Convention Authority, or some name like that. OK, a state agency. So we've got people from a state agency, we've got the mayor. And assistants to the mayor and all different kinds of liaisons from the mayor's office. And we have Bodman and his people. And we have some people from the catering company that deals with the contracts-- At the pier, right? --on Navy Pier. So like we say, it's one of those, you know-- And you picture this kind of thing, and you picture sort of a very high-powered glamorous sort of thing. Let's hear how Bodman tells it. It was interesting. There were about 15 people in the room. It was like a school board meeting. You know, everybody likes to hear themselves talk. I'm so glad I was not there. It may have not been that exciting. As somebody who has been to many school board meetings, I just want to say. OK, so did he get satisfaction? In the end, Bodman says justice was served. And now you can, dear listener, get your Vienna Beef dog on Navy Pier if you come to Chicago. Justice was served on a sesame seed bun. Poppy seed bun, my dear. Poppy seed bun, excuse me. With hot peppers, thank you. All right. So justice was served, and you can get your dog on Navy Pier now. You can get your dog out on Navy Pier. That's our city. It's the city that works. It's a place where politics runs deep thick throughout everything. It's in the air. You can't even see it. Even hot dogs, you've got to take it to the fifth floor. You've got to take it to the mayor's office, that's right. That's what we're talking about. And Bodman says this is just business. It's not politics. Just business. It's not politics. The truth of the matter is that this is just a business deal. They were using hot dogs, and we didn't like the fact that they came from a competitor, and that's how our economic system works. You get in there and you fight and you ask and you beg and you do whatever you can do that's legal and moral. And you try to get the business. And that's what the other people are trying to do also. Did we use the political people to help us in that fight? You bet we did. We called the mayor. I would have called Bill Clinton had he answered the telephone. Because if you've got some competitive blood flowing in your veins, that's what you do. We didn't need Bill. We needed Rich. And Rich is-- Rich, I should say for our listeners at home, Rich, of course, Rich Daley, our mayor. --the guy who helped us. We used them. We don't use them very often, but this is one time that we did use them. But it was not political influence as much as it was just seeking help from people who we've helped before. I just want to stop the tape right there. If that is not political influence, what is politics if it is not seeking help from people who you have helped before? Sounds kind of political. All right. But not to say there's anything wrong with that. Not to say there's anything wrong with that. It's all legal. It's legal. Yeah. Above board. All above board. Well, there's our city right there. Shirley Jahad, thank you for helping us with this little parable of the city that works and exactly how it works and how it extends even down to the lowliest bun. Thank you, Ira. Thank you. You know, I should also say thanks to Dick Bodman who really had no good reason to talk to us. That is a sign of a decent person. And he's actually a listener to our radio station. It is a generous act, and we appreciate that. Act Four, Fast Food Heart. One of the things about fast food is, like everything else in our in our culture, everything that's made to be throw-away, everything that's made to be disposable, like bad TV shows, everything like that, sooner or later we become so fond of it and it becomes a deep part of our experience. And then it becomes basically who we are. That's the most philosophical thing I'm going to say on this show for the next year. Let me just say that right now. Anyway, so with that in mind, we have a story here by Cassandra Smith about the meaning of one particular fast food and fast food establishment. On the 18th day in Japan, I finally broke down. Nearly three weeks and I had refused all Western food. Not a cup of coffee or a glass of milk. I refused beef, white bread. I'd even given up chewing gum. My hostess was worried. "Breakfast American style?" she asked every evening after my dinner of raw fish or shrimp. She had heard me gagging and crying late at night. "No," I answered. I was determined to live and eat Japanese style. Seafood, soy sauce, and rice. Even the candy is made out of rice. On the 18th day, I cracked. On a back street in Kyoto, the smell of hot fried chicken sliced through the air. It was a siren song, a pied piper that led me zombie-like through the narrow streets. I followed the thick, greasy fragrance and found, jammed between the noodle shops and sushi bars, a safe haven. Here on a main street in Kyoto, Japan, next door to a kimono boutique, stood an outpost of civilization, a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The aroma of 11 herbs and spices pushed out into the evening air, past geishas on their way to work in full regalia and career girls rushing home with takeout sushi. Standing at the door was a five-foot statue of the Colonel. He was dressed all in white and holding a gold-tipped cane. His eyes were slanted and his cheeks round and red like Santa, but it was him, the Colonel, with his right hand raised in a sign of peace. I rushed inside. Once in, I felt a flood of relief. The familiar vinyl booths, the Colonel's smiling face over the menu, which even though it was in Japanese, I instantly understood. Breast and wing, slaw and biscuit. The cardboard box popped open like a magic jewel case. I sank my teeth into a greasy breast and heaved a sigh filled with tears. When I finally looked up, I realized the restaurant was jam-packed with Japanese eating chicken and biscuits. In the bright fluorescent light, they sucked bones and licked their fingers with gusto. The excitement was unbelievable. And when I translated the cost of a snack box from yen to dollars, I realized that at these prices, this was a serious night out on the town. Suddenly, the taste of the chicken went sour in my mouth. The Japanese believe in the Colonel. They think he invented this recipe. I was numb with fury. "This is mine. Mine," I wanted to scream. Black slaves invented this recipe. You think that old white man stood over a wood stove frying chicken? I looked from face to face, the voice screaming inside of my brain. I wanted their gratitude. I wanted credit for their greasy smiles. "Look at me," I wanted to shout. "I'm the 11 herbs and spices. I'm the secret recipe." All around, people were laughing and smacking and licking their fingers. And in the dark of the Kyoto night, the bright white statue of the Colonel shone like a beacon. Then I realized something else. This Colonel had destroyed my world and everything in it. Now, follow me here. This is what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that to understand the history of the last 40 years, you have to understand the history of chicken. Kentucky Fried Chicken has wiped out a way of life, destroyed a culture. It used to be that every black woman in America had her own secret recipe. But nobody fries chicken anymore, not when they can pick up a bucket for eight. And on top of that, chicken dinners were the foundation of an underground economy. Need a few extra dollars? Sell dinners. We've experienced a hostile takeover of enormous proportions. Church women who cleaned offices all night and sold dinners all day, they fed us and left our churches mortgage-free. We've forgotten our recipes. And a few more years of the Colonel, and I'm afraid we might not remember anything. Cassandra Smith. Act Five, Know Your Meat. This is a poem by Lisa Buscani. I remember red meat. In red meat's time, our lives were marbled with victory. Fat meant winning, and we had room for bounce. The flesh of our fingers folded over our sacred rings, burying our eyes and doubling our smiles. In red meat's time, we slapped it down to fry pans, to roasters, to broilers, through grinders. Skip the lying, seeping, surface. That's life. That's death. That's the way it is. That's the way it's always been. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I'll give you something to cry about. The men then were men, and the women were bubbly. Fuzzy, bunny, bubbly. Impossibly singed, chiffon, giggling, bubbly. Thigh-high, long-line, nylon, fly-me-to-Rio bubbly. Excuse us while we powder our nose. [GASP] And in the under and the back, deals were made featuring details you shouldn't know about sealed with the tight fiber of rare, red meat chased with hard, gold liquor, unnatural laughter, and prayer. And the men shifted in the overstuffed chairs, fearing and loving their birthrights as manly steaks, and godly brats snuggled under intestinal tissue for a long, long nap. It was science, blasted bodies of knowledge that ended it. Showing us how our hearts stopped too soon, our colons packed rock-solid with the remnants of grand tours, our veins viscous with bad fats. Educations, cries, rattle, and gnash for alternatives, so we searched for other stuffs to tear between our teeth. Enter the fruits of the sea. The albacores, prawn, cods, swordfish, and soles that lay light and oily and sour on our plate. In seafood's time, we tread lightly. You could almost hear the wind chimes when we walked. The world was beige, the wood was blond, and California had its airy tentacles in everything. We melted down to skeletal angles, laid artificial blends on our backs, and stalked the mandatory party. In seafood's time, men were men and the women were sullen. Straight-haired and bare-faced, they grew tired of waiting for their share of the shrimp. Any male smile was sniffed and suspected of sexism. Sisters had been fooled before. Women pulled back into books and behind low-level desks, waiting for the moment when they would emerge equal, like the butterfly folding back to cocoon in search of a greater wing. Some men, shaken by the loss of their girls, grew sideburns and frantically ran to make room. Others rumbled away disgruntled, slamming their spiked tails against a volatile ground in the hope that something would come from the backlash. The edge bled into gray as we abandoned right or wrong in Zen cowardice. The sex was shudder and exercise. Looking hard to the eye was far too messy and heavy for the time. And soon, we discovered that seafood stuck more to its shells than to our ribs, and its bones were always a problem. It was never cheap in a land-locked region and took too long to cook, thrashing its death throes in mad, cruel water. So we began again, looking for the food that wouldn't scar us. And along came poultry. Light and filling, miraculously versatile. After all, didn't everything else aspire to taste like it? Poultry gave itself up to us selflessly, blending perfectly in all our dishes. In life, these beaks were mean, jutting little monsters. But in death, nude and hanging from its ankles, poultry was considerate enough to see that our blood kept pumping unobstructed. In poultry's time, we filled back to livable weights, but not grossly so. And with its fuel, we ran hard at what we wanted. The world was-- the world was-- well, we can't remember what the world looked like. We never stopped long enough for it to focus from its blur. In poultry's time, the men were men and the women were men. Check the musculature. See the stamina. We watched as women tore up stomach lining with the best of them. Weren't their heads for fourth quarter figures and baby-making afterthoughts? Wasn't their laughter the most false silk, much like the scarves they wore as their last shred of sex? Kiss the kids and pass the paprikash, there was work to be done. And the men, feeling rushed and outrun, slipped into hard, sleek, Italian numbers, legions of bloodless Pat Rileys. They began to look downward for their models, not bothering to play by rules they kept changing. I'll bet you a Boesky and raise you two Trumps. In poultry's time, pork made a stab at such a claim, stamping its feet like a naggy little brother. "I'm white meat. Put me in, coach." But we would not be swayed. In the name of an ovine utopia, it was poultry that we loved. Until we found out how it was cleaned. Or rather, how it wasn't cleaned. Salmonella stories and other beastly bacteria. Jim Fixx dropped like a fly in mid-jog. Nothing was ever what it seemed. And all promises lay shattered at the pedestal's base. Now we wander listlessly from food to food. Nothing fills us like we once knew. Pasta is a sometime friend that bores us with its quantity. And we can never seem to bring the vegetable over from the side dish. Our options are melting like spring ice, and we are slipping to old-world poverties. Men and women are coming down slowly from their separate mountains. "Sorry. Really, sorry for everything. I mean it." They are remembering the goodness in each other's faces, benevolent skin and bone. There is so much less static and distraction, and we have time now. Can't we try again? And if you listen closely, you can hear the reticent, reformed tapping of red meat at our survival's door. "Hi. I was in the neighborhood. Don't the words 'lean' and 'free range' mean anything to anyone? Give me another chance. Can't you?" Lisa Buscani, a Chicago poet who now lives in Boston. Man, that song is nasty. Well, our program produced today by Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike, Peter Clowney and myself. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. I'm just switching music here. If you would like a copy of this program, it's only $10. Call us at WBEZ to order that. 312-832-3380. 312-832-3380. All of the shows we do are available on cassette. Our email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass-- Hi. Me again. 2006. That's pretty much all we have of that show. I hope you enjoyed it.
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So Robyn was the only woman working on this men's magazine, which, OK, is weird to start with. This magazine, you should picture Maxim or FHM, but not as classy. They would get a medium famous TV star, like Alyssa Milano, out into the desert and convince her to take off her top for a photo shoot, that kind of thing. So, Robyn's working there, and she's 23, just out of college. And she had started as the intern. She would write little music reviews. And then her bosses asked her to do a much more substantial story than she'd ever done, about a Japanese pop star name Seiko. They came to me, and this was a possible cover. I'm sure my jaw just dropped. And she's coming in tomorrow, she is the Japanese Madonna. You need to go to the photo shoot, she's going to get completely naked. This is the first time that this woman has ever done anything scandalous. And you get to be the one to break this story, of her coming to America. And how'd that go? Um, not well. I hadn't had a lot of experience with high-level celebrities. And she had eight people come to the interview with us. She also had figured out a way of doing this interview style that's very mirroring, where she would repeat back to me what I had asked. Like what? Give me an example. So, "What kind of clothes do you like to wear when you're performing?" "What kinds of clothes would you like to wear?" And I'd be like, "Well, I'm not sure because I'm not performing. But, if I were, I'd probably want to wear chaps, a small cowboy hat." I didn't know how to react, you know? When I was asking her about her romantic life, she would do that same style. And I think it really worked. It did unsettle me. I'd say, "Are you involved with anyone? What do you love about men?" And she'd be like, "What do you love about men?" And I left the interview pretty close to being in tears. So I went home, with a very brief interview, where essentially I had more of myself on tape than I had of her. And I called back to office, and I said, there's just nothing here. On every level, there's nothing here. And they said, well, make it work. It's a 2,000 word piece now. It's a feature. It's our main feature on the feature wall. Go home, and take your notes, and write what you can with it. So she didn't know what to do. And then she started thinking, OK, how would all the guys in the office write this story? The magazine she worked for, they did that men's magazine thing where the writer basically just drools over the girl in the story, and how hot that girl is. And Robyn thought, OK, fill enough paragraphs with that and the fact that she had no decent quotes from Seiko wouldn't even matter. And I decided, my name sort of sounds like a boy anyway. I'm just going to write it as if I'm a man who thinks she's the most attractive woman that's ever walked the earth, which is what I did. OK. And so we have the article here. Can I just ask you to read-- here's the article. Can I ask you to just read the first paragraph or two? "The prospect of seeing a beautiful woman's bare skin keeps me sane as I sit in traffic, en route to the photo session for Seiko, the reigning Japanese pop queen. Hot flashes of the Asian teen queen under an erotic spell of the camera blazes me a path through LA, bumper to bumper, and I arrive eager, mentally aroused, and a half an hour late. The nude has been shot. Proof of the event is handed to me in Polaroid form. There I get my first glimpse of Seiko, as she posed a mere 30 minutes prior wearing only a good girl smile and a fan splayed over her privates. And immediately, I'm consumed with the need to see in person what looks so tempting on film." Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Did the men who you work with, did they like this? They thought it was like, wow, look at her. How cool that our little girl's, you know-- Our little 's growing up. Our little girl's growing up to be a misogynist. Were thrilled. So after a while, the magazine hits the newsstands. And when Robyn gets to work the next day, her phone is already ringing. It's Seiko's publicist. I thought she was calling me because I had written an article that she found offensive. But I found out it was really she was upset because this woman had gotten naked on the set of our photo shoot, and she was going to have to try to control this so it basically doesn't cause this huge scandal in Japan. Oh, because she's supposed to be a wholesome girl. That's her image, wholesome girl. Yes. So this is the first time she's ever really shown skin or anything like that. So I'm waiting in the office, prepared to deal with camera crews that want to talk about her nudity. And I remember I came up-- there might be have even been more than one TV crew waiting in the reception area. And when I came out, and I was a woman, they were completely freaked out. Now, the reason why they freaked out-- as best as Robyn was able to piece together later-- the reason why was that when Seiko came to the United States to try to establish herself, not just as a Japanese pop star, but as an American pop star, this rumor started circulating in Japan that Seiko was leaving her husband behind, for some American. And so the press, the Japanese press, were trying to figure out, is there an American? Who was this American? So when they got this article, they were like, well, this person certainly seems obsessed with her, and very sexually hot for her. Maybe Mr. Robyn Forest is her current lover. So when Mr. Robyn Forest came out and Mr. Robyn Forest is a college-aged girl, they were really freaked out. Now Seiko has left her husband for this college-age girl, who's obsessed with her. Who looks just like an LA surfer girl. And that just sent them into a tizzy. Like the story has gotten so much better than they ever dreamed. Right, right, right. So Robyn sits down for this first interview, and she has no idea about any of this at the time, right? She thinks that they are only there to talk about the nudity. And she tries to do right by Seiko. She says what a nice girl Seiko is, how she hopes Seiko's album does great in the United States. And that was that. So that first interview, I remember I just thought, well, I really set the record straight there. You know? And I thought that would be the end of the TV crews coming. So then, the second day, about three or four came. So I did another interview with one of them. I thought, well, maybe this will make them leave. And in that interview, that was the first time anyone said, "Are you attracted to her?" And I'm on camera. I was like, oh wait, you think that I-- I was like, "Oh no, no, no, no. I'm not a lesbian." And did you say you didn't find her sexy? Because you have a whole article here saying you did. I said, you know, I can recognize that she's attractive as a woman. But no. I'm not attracted to her. And then they would just try to slip in a quick question like, "Did you touch her breast?" And I would be like, "Um, no." And then they'd just move on, really clever. And then they'd be like, "What are your hobbies, Robyn?" They were trying to throw me off. So that third interview, I was starting to get annoyed. And as the interviews got more and more-- I probably did about 20-- they would just get right to the point. "Did you sleep with her? What parts of her body did you see naked? Did you touch her breast? Are you still talking to her?" And then they just didn't even try to be polite. And I was getting hate mail from fans. From her fans? Yeah. And people really just were never convinced that I wasn't the person that was having an affair with her. Mainly, she just wished that her bosses had killed the story like she asked, back when the original interview went so badly. I was like, "I told you guys that we shouldn't try to make this into a story. And now look. I'm a lesbian in Japan." And all of this had consequences in America, too. See, before all this, among the very few articles Robyn had ever written, she'd done another story that had made publicists angry with her. People that are the handlers of celebrities, when they found out about all of this-- the publicists in LA definitely let each other know when things are going wrong. And there was, to some degree, I feel like, a bit of a black ball going on. My reputation was that of being a wild card. Maybe not to trusted with bigger celebrities. So I recognized that this is probably the end for me. It was pretty much done. So wait, so your entire career in journalism, you basically wrote two stories. You ruined your own reputation. Yes. I did. And that was it. That was it. You don't get to choose what makes your reputation. One dumb mistake can do it. Well from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, My Reputation. Stories of people finding themselves at the mercy of what other people think of them. And very much not agreeing with what other people think of them. Act one of our show, Not Everybody Loves Raymond. It that act, we have the story of a politician who goes through the kind of scandal that destroys a person's reputation. But he's the unusual politician in that he is willing to talk about it all, with a reporter, in a way you never hear. Act two, The Hole Truth. A man asks his closest friends, on tape, what they really think of him. And he is surprised at what they say. And not in a good way. Stay with us. Act one, Not Everybody Love Raymond. This story begins right after a political stampede in New Hampshire. Last year, Democrats won majorities in the State Senate, in the House, they toppled both incumbent Republicans in congress to take the state's two house seats in Washington. They already had a Democratic governor, but now they also took local boards and city councils. The day after the election, Republicans called it a tsunami. Keep in mind, this is New Hampshire, which is usually dominated by Republicans. A kind of Libertarian "Live free or die" sort of Republican. The last time Democrats had the House and the Senate and the governor's mansion in New Hampshire? 1874. The last time they had all that, and the two representatives in DC was in the 1850s. In a sense, the politics of New Hampshire is, in a way, small town politics. State Representative is a part-time job. It only pays $100 a year. Political news happens on a half dozen public cable access shows that not many people watch. But it's also sort of big politics, because New Hampshire, of course, has the first presidential primary in the country. And New Hampshire politicians and political operatives hang out for months with the presidential hopefuls. OK. So that is the setting for this story Sarah Koenig, tells what happened. The day after election day was suddenly a very, very good time to be a Democrat in New Hampshire. And a good time to be Ray Buckley, too. Buckley was one of the main strategists behind the landslide. Here's how he began his weekly political talk show on cable access TV the next morning. The takeover caused statewide euphoria among Democrats, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone happier about it than Buckley. He'd been waiting for this day nearly his entire life. Is New Hampshire going to become a permanent democratic state? That makes every phone call, every envelope that I've stuffed, every sign that I've put up, every single bit of that over the last 40 years, absolutely worth it. Because I feel this is what this has all been for. Buckley is a tall, blond, round-faced guy who doesn't like the outdoors and has the figure to prove it. He's either called an operative or a hack, depending on your point of view. Whatever he does, he's good at it. And by now he should be. He says he's been obsessed by politics since third grade. By the time he was 14, he made his mother volunteer to run his town's Democratic committee, a job he was actually already doing, but was too young to have officially. Because he was 14. And since then, he's been deep in political campaigns all the time. Either running himself-- he was a state rep for 18 years-- or getting other people elected. He knows the stats on hundreds of Democrats around the state. I found this out at a fundraiser when I casually asked him the name of the woman we'd just been talking to. Her first name is Ellie, that woman? Ellie Carpenito. Ellie Carpenito. Yep. From Salem. 15 Scully Square, 03079. And how do you know that? I remember most people's address and phone numbers and emails. That's-- You do? Some of these people I've been mailing-- I've either hand addressed or put labels for 20, 30 years on an envelope. You know? What's her address? Maggie Lozano? 417 Walnut Street, Manchester, New Hampshire. He's probably been to a lot of their houses, too. New Hampshire is tiny, about a million people. So everybody knows everybody for years back. Especially, it seems, in the political world. And for Buckley, this decades-long attention to who's who paid off in November's victories. A few years ago, the Senate Democrats asked him to run their Political Action Committee. He said yes, but only if they'd sign on to what a lot of people thought was a pipe dream. To not only keep the eight seats they had, but to take a majority of the Senate. He studied 20 years' worth of financial records. He invented a new fundraising strategy. And he forced safe candidates, the incumbents, to help the new candidates. It worked. They took the Senate and helped Democrats all the way down the ticket. Now Buckley wanted to be chairman of the party. He wanted to be the guy to make sure New Hampshire stayed democratic for good. It's an elected position and it only took two weeks for Buckley to get more than a 140 of the 196 committee members to promise they'd vote for him, including all the state's most influential Democrats. But three months before the vote, Buckley was accused of one of the worst things a person can be accused of. Something so ugly and dark that almost no one accused of it ever really shakes it, guilty or not. It threatened to ruin not just his career, but his life. We've all seen this story from a distance. The politician accused, the public outcry, embattled press conferences, TV crews tailing a haunted official on his way to a waiting car. And that's all we get. We rarely get to hear what happens offstage. For Ray Buckley, the hardest thing was getting his mind around what the accusation meant. That his dream job, the job he'd already locked up, had suddenly vanished. And that was part of the horror during the ordeal. To suddenly be benched, at a time that is going to be a watershed time for our party, was just-- it's not just the public humiliation, it's not just all of the other stuff of having all these enormous legal bills. It was, I'd just spent 40 years working towards this, and it's gone. The whole thing started with another politician. A guy named Steve Vaillancourt. Vaillancourt is a Republican state representative from Manchester. An eccentric, and a viper when provoked. And he's often provoked. I once wrote a profile of him for the Concord Monitor newspaper, in which a colleague affectionately compared him to nuclear waste. He sometimes harmed the very causes he fought for, legalized gambling, legalized marijuana, abolishing the death penalty. He's in perpetual motion and he's also obsessive. He once wrote a book of 5,000 trivia questions about the OJ Simpson trial. To give you some sense of his frantic style, he's got his own public access TV show called More Politically Alert. And the unedited rawness of it is kind of remarkable. Here he's talking about the committee he has just been assigned to in the Legislature, Environment and Agriculture. What he wanted was the Finance Committee, and he doesn't disguise that. We have the introduction of Steve Taylor, the Department of Agriculture chairman came in. We make almost a billion dollars a year out of agriculture in this state, and about half of that comes from flowers and garden supplies and things like that. It's going to be a fun year on the Agriculture Committee, not that I deserve to be on Finance, although Ben Baroody, and Tom Fahey, junior leader column, said that I was much better suited for finance than him. And most other people say I'm intelligent. All the media this week has been saying, you're one of the most intelligent people around. Well I've never claimed to be intelligent, or unintelligent, I've just claimed to be what I am, a meat eater. [LAUGHTER] Oh my god. It's all like this. A dazzling stream of consciousness that's like an unfiltered glimpse into his brain, and it's also completely entertaining. Vaillancourt is theatrical, but he's also smart, so his colleagues don't tune him out completely. And it was on his show, in early January, that he dropped this little bomb about the chairman's race. That front runner, Ray Buckley, will not win as the Democratic party chairman in balloting later in January. You heard it here first, a shoe will drop. Later in the show, he cues a swirly background, and repeats this forecast about Buckley, in the looser Vaillancourt style. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm getting dizzy. Watch out, or Ray Buckley will say I'm drooling. Hey Ray-bo, how you doing? You are not going to be Chairman of the Democratic party, we predict. Vaillancourt knew a shoe would drop in the chairman's race, because he had already dropped it. He had written a letter to governor John Lynch. "Raymond Buckley," he wrote, "has a long history with kiddie pornography. I know for a fact that Mr. Buckley used to smuggle kiddie porn from Amsterdam and Denmark into the United States inside Newsweek and other magazines. You could not enter his room without stepping over kiddie porn, strewn on the floor," the letter said. Someone leaked the letter to the TV news and, once it got out, it was huge. Sources tell News 9, a fellow politician and former friend of Buckley's-- Well, Jen and Tom, this is the letter. It's dated December 26, it's a one-pager, written by state representative Steve Vaillancourt. It accuses Buckley of being attracted to boys aged four through nine. It talks about a computer purchased by the Manchester City Democrats in 1998, and allegedly used by Buckley to surf the Internet for child porn. Buckley emphatically denies the allegations, but he has not responded to repeated attempts for interviews. The investigation-- Vaillancourt ended the letter by saying "I can only assume that even a cursory investigation will convince you that Mr. Buckley is not the person Democrats, or New Hampshire, want in a leadership position." The man he sent the letter to, Governor Lynch, has made it a priority to get tougher prison sentences for child predators. And Vaillancourt almost dared him to ignore the letter. And he hit the most sensitive political issue in the state. New Hampshire's status as the first place to hold presidential primaries every four years. Last summer, Nevada moved its caucus ahead of New Hampshire's primary, and New Hampshire officials have been freaking out ever since. A scandal at the top of the party could give presidential candidates pause. Would they really want to pose for pictures with an accused pervert? And might give other states ammunition for arguing that New Hampshire shouldn't be first anymore. So Governor Lynch responded as Vaillancourt must have known he would. There were serious allegations made by a state representative, which is why we immediately forwarded the letter to the Department of Justice, and they are managing the situation now. And this was the other thing Lynch said. Well, you know, I didn't and I don't believe that while this matter is pending he should be running for state party chair. Vaillancourt began pushing his case in public. He held an interminable press conference. In the first two and a half minutes, he somehow managed to weave together Julius Caesar, Berlin, Germany, the San Diego Chargers and Catherine the Great. But he also had moments of clarity. I don't need to be here. So if you ask me, is this going to ruin your career, Representative Vaillancourt, and I've been asked that often. Ruin my career? Ruin a $100 a year job? Ruin my reputation? I say what I feel because I believe somebody has to step forward and tell the truth. I'm not going to come off looking like a good guy no matter what happens, somebody that turns in a friend. But if you believe me, then you've got to believe that at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, maybe more, have known about this for a long time. If you believe me. And as I say, don't believe me if you don't want to, but I do not lie. I do exaggerate, occasionally I do comedy. But I never lie. I do tend to exaggerate. And most of the things I've said I don't have proof about, but I think I have enough information so that if you don't want to believe me, you better think twice about not believing me. I'm looking, reading a letter that my first response is, boy, to have written this sort of a letter, he's got to really hate you. Before it made the TV news, before it made the paper, Ray Buckley had gotten a knock at his office door, and two friends had sat him down in a conference room and showed him the letter. And then I just, I was kind of thinking of him and saying, I don't think he's thought this through. I don't think he realizes what he just did. And so we went through the letter, step by step, and it was like, there's no truth to any of this. There's nobody that's going to corroborate any of this. How could anyone take this letter seriously? His friends assured him the governor was taking it seriously, and that he'd rescinded his support for Buckley's candidacy. Since he's the most important Democrat in the state, their top elected official, this was a big deal. As was the fact that he publicly called for Buckley to withdraw. But Buckley thought, well, it's such nonsense, it'll blow over. I was thinking, well it's just going to take a couple days, it's going to be over with by the end of the week and it probably might not even ever make the papers. Well, I went out of the meeting and, at this point, it's now after 5:00. I went home. Are you alone? Yeah. I sorted socks. At that point, I didn't want to upset my family, so I didn't want to call them. I couldn't talk to any of my immediate friends, in case they were going to be called in for questioning. So I had nobody to talk to. So I remembered that I really hadn't organized my sock drawer for a while, and I brought them all in, and dumped them on the couch and I sat there, watching TV and matched socks. It sounds calming, but Buckley says his mind was racing. He's the oldest of nine children and he's close with his parents and step-parents. And he was horrified at the idea that they would all be drawn into this somehow. And what was going to happen to his career? And how would he pay for the lawyer? And how should he act right this minute? He started to get a little paranoid. You know, are the police going to show up at my door tonight? So, don't move anything. I watched one too many TV shows, I guess. I'm thinking they're going to say, oh, if you moved that book, and so there's no dust there. I didn't dare touch anything in my house. I literally didn't even throw out my trash for the first couple weeks. I put it in my basement, so I could say, nothing has left this house. Here's my trash. I didn't clean out my car. Because I was afraid that someone would see me taking something out of my car and throwing it away. And I would be accused of throwing something out. So my car through the whole ordeal, just became increasingly filled with random stuff. There were Christmas gifts that I just hadn't taken out of the car yet. Your fear and-- the first night, I look over at the pictures of my 10 nieces and six nephews. It was like, are they going to think that odd that I have my nieces and nephews on my living room wall? Do other uncles have their nieces and nephews? I don't know. Does that imply something ugly? He couldn't sleep. And for the first time in his life, he lost his appetite. Over the next two months he'd lose 40 pounds. He'd lie awake at 4:00 in the morning and obsess, so he tried sleeping pills, which didn't really help. Of course, he had to tell his parents that soon all their friends were going to see their son accused of kiddie porn in the news. He says this isn't something anyone wishes on their parents. It's like they're being punished, too. His family was still recovering from the death of his 11-year-old niece, who died of cystic fibrosis. He says at least when something like that happens, family friends know how to react. People, they would offer my parents and my siblings or whatever, love and support. People knew how to show that sort of support to a family that's grieving. It's like it's hard, but you know what to say. Exactly. Exactly. This is not something that you naturally know whether to bring it up, not to bring it up. It is a whole different conversation of like, oh, isn't this horrible, this is happening to Raymond. And knowing, deep down, that a person is like, oh, this is really-- it just goes down a road that you don't go when you're showing your sympathy towards a grieving family. Once the news hit, Buckley figured out pretty quickly that the investigation would take weeks, not days, and he finally did what the governor wanted. He pulled out of the chairman's race. And all this time, of course, he had stuff to do. He was head of the Manchester City Democrats, vice chair the New Hampshire Democratic Party, chairman of the Eastern Region of the DNC, a member of its executive committee. He was vice president the state Chairs Association, and a board member of the National Stonewall Democrats. And he still had a day job, as executive director of the Senate Democratic Caucus. He had to go to work. And all day long he's talking to people who are reading these headlines. But for Buckley one advantage of doing politics in such a small place, is that everybody knew him. And they also knew Vaillancourt, and they knew the history between them. And most people reacted to the charges with skepticism. Even the state's most notoriously conservative newspaper, the Union Leader, said, quote, "This is nothing more than a suspect allegation, and it should be treated as such." The fact that Vaillancourt admitted having no proof made headlines. No political leaders at the state level, Republican or Democrat, stood by Vaillancourt, who told me that many people in the gay community did come to him privately, saying they believed him, even if not many public figures did. I was vilified, but I expected to be vilified. People that I had talked to, friends of mine in advance, said, don't do this, it's going to be down to your detriment. I decided that to get my conscience clear once and for all, I would put it out there no matter what it cost me. Meanwhile, Buckley's friends and allies, it was almost as if they started a campaign to keep Buckley from curling up into a fetal position and never leaving his house. This is Donna Soucy, who works for the Senate Democrats. Most importantly in the beginning, I was the one who made him just go to public events, and just reach out. Kathy Sullivan was chairwoman of the state party at the time. A couple of us said to Raymond, you are going to the inauguration. It's important for you to be out there. Judy Reardon, former Chief of Staff for a previous governor. You know, be out there. Don't not go to things. He went to the governor's Inaugural Ball the next day after it had broken publicly. And he said, again, they're not going to want me there. And we said, no, you are going to the Inaugural Ball because you have to show people that you're not hiding, you have nothing to be ashamed of, that this is all crap. All his friends operated from this notion, that it was all crap. And they were confident about that because this was just the latest skirmish between Vaillancourt and Buckley. For the last 10 years or so, Vaillancourt has had it out for Ray Buckley for reasons that only Vaillancourt knows. I've asked and asked, and no one seems to have the answer. Or at least admits they do. There are theories. Unrequited love, chief among them. They're both gay, but both men swear there's never been a romantic or sexual moment between them. And it's convincing when they say that. They make that face you might make when you imagine your parents in bed. Their friends second the denials. Katherine Rogers has known them both for decades. And she makes that same face. Was he in love with Raymond Buckley. Like, why--? Oh god, no. And I've seen it in print, you know, maybe there was some relationship. No. There was never anything with the two of them. But Buckley rented a room in Vaillancourt's house for 16 years, and they were close friends. They hung out all the time, and travelled together. They both talk about taking care of each other when one was sick or depressed. Vaillancourt used to be painfully shy, and Kathy Rogers remembers trying to lure him out of his room with M&Ms, ET style. But Buckley encouraged him to run for the House, and he did. Back then, Vaillancourt was a Democrat. And once he was elected, he was quickly promoted to leadership positions because he was talented. But so was Buckley. He'd become the Democratic Whip, and Vaillancourt was furious. This is Peter Burling. He was House Democratic Leader back then, and he says Vaillancourt behaved so badly after that, attacking Buckley, attacking him, that he had to demote him. You know, on some level, as I look at these episodes over the last 14 years, I cannot help feeling a profound sense of sadness for Mr. Vaillancourt. It is clear that there is a whole level of competitive anxiety, shall we say, that Ray Buckley's success brings out in Mr. Vaillancourt. After that demotion, Vaillancourt started to break with the party. Around that same time, he kicked Buckley out of his house, and they went to court over claims of unpaid rent. It wasn't long before Vaillancourt became a Republican. And all this stuff was very public. Not only because of the smallness of the place, because of public access TV in Manchester. Politics in that city, in particular, as Peter Burling said to me, is of the whack and slash variety. This plays out in about half a dozen political TV shows, which can get mean. And Buckley is no innocent here. He can be refined and diplomatic, attending small private gatherings with Barack Obama or John Edwards, but he also gets nasty. That's his job as a party operative. He's like James Carville. On his show, In the Know, he's called other politicians half-witted and freakish, suggested they were mildly retarded, or plastered. And just a few months before Vaillancourt sent his letter to the governor, Buckley went after him. Do you want this guy representing you? Do you want your family's reputation stained by having this guy, who absolutely gets unhinged, has no ability to really control his behavior, his mouth, and his antics? So when Vaillancourt made his accusation, Buckley's friends dismissed the whole thing as an act of revenge. But the cops didn't see it that way. They searched for Buckley's old computer. They questioned more than a dozen people, many of whom Vaillancourt said would corroborate his claims. And Vaillancourt kept on. He wanted to take a lie detector test, on TV if necessary. He made up a set of polygraph questions, complete with his answers. One of which was, "Did you and Mr. Buckley ever have a sexual relationship. Answer: No." And handed it around. He offered to be hypnotized, to take phenobarbital. When I asked him about the various theories people have for why he'd written his letter, Vaillancourt said his reason was simply to tell the truth. There was no jealousy, no vendetta. Wipe that out of your mind. There are three people I really hate in the world. Ray Buckley is not one of them. In fact, I admire Ray Buckley for being a good vegetarian, and for doing a lot of good things. So that is just hogwash. Peter Burling is one of the people I hate most in the world, and he's the one that developed that hogwash. Because what he'll say is you have professional jealousy. I've just explained to you, I have no professional jealousy. I have no desire to move up in the political ranks. I have a desire to promote my philosophy of government, get out of my back, out of my bed and out of my wallet. Weeks passed. And then a second set of charges came out against Buckley. This time, an unnamed former party staffer, calling himself a concerned Democrat, said Buckley was quote "Vulgar, disgraceful and indecent in the workplace." The person said his daily behavior included quote, "Sexually harassing male staffers, and blacklisting staffers that were not receptive to his sexual remarks or advances." Buckley was floored. He prides himself on getting young people interested in politics, the way he was. And he's got many proteges as proof. But Buckley can be really raunchy. He's quick to make a dick joke. And so it's easy to see how he could offend someone. The Senate Democrats hired a lawyer to investigate, and Buckley was cleared of any wrongdoing. But still, it had made the papers, and the piling on was just exhausting. Part of you is like, I don't want to talk about this anymore. I just want to get my life back. Then you realize that, wow, every time you've ever read of something even remotely similar to this happening to someone, you thought you understood what they were going through. And, oh boy, you do not. And you do not. What was the most surprising part, just talk about that. What was the thing you hadn't anticipated or couldn't have imagined? The feeling that you're not in control of your life. That was probably the most difficult thing through the whole ordeal is that I wasn't in charge of my life. And as someone who, starting as a very small child, seemed to think that they were, at least, in control of me. That I was at the mercy of how people thought of me. I was at the mercy-- although, my entire life, obviously, was based on other people voting for me for either a party office or for an elective office and so my entire life has been at the mercy of other people and what they thought of me. But this was at a different level. Buckley became unsure. Not just about whether to throw out his trash, but unsure in the most basic way. You just run through everything. It's like, was this a good choice for your life? What was this all about? Why did I move in that house? Why did I befriend that person that I knew was a different kind of person from day one? You know, why did my ego lead me to believe that I was going to fix this broken person? Good afternoon. My name is Kelly Ayotte, the Attorney General for the state. I have with me the police chief from the City of Manchester, John Jaskolka. And then, after more than two months, the Attorney General called a press conference. We are here today to report that our investigation revealed absolutely no evidence that Raymond Buckley possessed child pornography. Therefore, we will not be bringing any criminal charges against Mr. Raymond Buckley. And with those two sentences, it was over. The AG went on to say that no one they interviewed could corroborate anything Vaillancourt had said. No one had come forward with any evidence whatsoever. And that Vaillancourt himself couldn't describe seeing anything that constituted child pornography under New Hampshire statute. And that he had admitted to police that he had exaggerated in his letter to the governor. And then someone asked whether Vaillancourt had essentially made all this up. It is clear that if she could have, the Attorney General would have said yes. I can tell you that we seriously considered bringing charges against Mr. Vaillancourt. However, the statute requires that we prove that someone knowingly made a false report to law enforcement. And so, therefore, that would be a difficult hurdle for us to initially overcome. Vaillancourt was there in the crowd. Wearing a parka that belonged to Buckley's father, by the way, and videotaping the whole thing. He even asked a couple of questions. And the AG and the cops are answering, using his name in the third person like they don't recognize him, which maybe they don't. In any case, he stages a press conference immediately afterwards. I guess it's always good to quote those Dixie Chicks. "Not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down." Absolutely everything I wrote in the letter to Governor Lynch is correct. I have to say, I am so saddened in a sense today, because this investigation takes me back to when Mark Fuhrman found one glove behind Kato Kaelin's house and Detective Vannatter was running around Los Angeles, 30 miles with a vial of blood. Not since then has an investigation been so botched as this one. Vaillancourt said he was sure there was a cover-up, which he still believes. He said people had known about Buckley for years, and he couldn't understand why the cops gave up so easily. Then someone asked whether he was worried about what would happen to him now, about whether his reputation was ruined. I have only been happier three times in my life. Two other times. Once, my senior year in college, I was extremely happy. Good times. When I fell in love I was extremely happy. And now. I think it's like a giant cloud has been lifted from my soul. And I feel very happy and at peace with myself, more than I have ever done. His only regret, he said, was that he hadn't come forward sooner. But it was like if your sister's doing heroin, he said, you should turn her in, but you just can't. She's your sister. Buckley had been exonerated in the strongest way possible. And within days, he was back on top, doing what New Hampshire politicians do, attending events with presidential candidates. In this case, another scandal survivor, Hillary Clinton. And Raymond Buckley, an early congratulations. You have-- and I have a bit of an idea what it's been like-- you have gone through this with grace and courage. Congratulations. Hey, Rob. It's Ray Buckley, how are you? How are you? Good, good. Hey, obviously, I'm calling through the list for the state chair's race and calling to re-solicit your support, and hoping that you'd consider casting your ballot for me on the 24th? Ray's calling his former supporters. This one jokes, "You mean I can't abstain?" You mean I can't abstain? No. [LAUGHING] Yes, of course you have-- I still have to ask, Rob. Buckley was back in the race. The governor endorsed him again. I met with Buckley at the headquarters of the Manchester Democrats, eight days before the election. Buckley was working his way down a list of 196 names in tiny print. Let me make another call. I'm in the zone here. Hi, Jerry. It's Ray Buckley, how are you? I'm fine, Ray, how are you? I'm terrific now. [LAUGHING] It was going well. But while I was sitting there in his office, Buckley's cellphone started going nuts, buzzing every minute or two. He'd glance at it, and then keep talking. Until a call came from the current chair of the party, Kathy Sullivan. He spoke to her for a second, and then asked me to leave the room. And while I was standing outside his closed door, a local reporter called me and tipped me off about what was happening. Paul Hodes, the newly elected congressman, one of the state's top Democrats, had just issued a press release saying he was withdrawing his support for Buckley's candidacy because he'd seen a video of Buckley posted on YouTube. Hodes also said he thought the proper authorities should look into the matter. Suddenly, Buckley's candidacy was in jeopardy all over again. The YouTube thing had been posted the day before. Vaillancourt didn't post it himself, but he gave another Manchester Republican some old home movies for it. It showed Buckley in his 20s and 30s behaving not badly exactly, but embarrassingly. Doing things maybe a gay frat boy would do, and saying things you might say if you were on vacation with your friends, or playing a board game late at night. Which he was. Would you like me to [BLEEP] you hard? About this trip to the Hague. Hitler should have bombed it. This is from Vaillancourt's old home movies. And what's striking is how intimate they are. Even though the content is awful. He and Buckley were such close friends when he shot these movies. Put little clips on them and pull you down the [BLEEP] street right by your little nipples. In another part of the video, a narrator points out that Buckley has a MySpace page that's just a few clicks away from gay teenagers. When I came back into the room, Buckley was trying to call his staff members back to work. He needed to send out an urgent email to party members to try to neutralize Hodes' statement. It was a Friday night, and there was a blizzard. Yeah. Hey, can you help me try to track down Michael so he can get back here? I can't hear you, Donna. His car probably isn't going to drive very well in this snow, but I need to send out an email. I'm at the city Dems office. I had asked Buckley about the YouTube clip the day before, when it was posted, and he laughed it off, saying the worst thing about it was that he realized how much he'd aged. The newspapers didn't seem interested either, and they didn't bother writing about it. Now Hodes had just made it a story, by saying he's withdrawing his support for Buckley because of it. And Buckley had to fight back. I dropped out once, I'm not doing it again. Two staffers came in and went straight to their desks, as if they already knew what to do. Buckley sat down at a laptop. At this moment, he's fighting for his career. For his life's work, really. And what that entails, couldn't be more annoyingly small. He's trying to log on to YouTube and extract a six-minute video from cyberspace. Don't touch. Because this is-- how do you even type on this thing? 2006. No, it's my birthday. I was not born in 2006, Michael. I was kidding, sir. Oh. No one's saying much. They all seem utterly focused and purposeful, like a special ops team. Reporters are calling and Buckley is not picking up. And friends, a couple of whom are lawyers, are calling to give advice. It occurs to me that Buckley's probably had to do this dozens of times for other candidates. Politics is all about tearing down reputations and building them back up. So of course he knows what to do for his own crisis. They find out they can't shut down the video, but they can complain about it online. So their next strategy is to get their friends to become YouTube members, so they can flag the video as offensive. You know, Chris is at home. Obviously, Donna's at home. Call Judy. Just have them start calling people. After about 40 minutes, they give up on Youtube, and concentrate instead on the email they're writing to committee members. Michael is on the phone with an adviser, and they decide on what the message should be. That at the time these movies were filmed, Buckley was young and immature. Michael suggests they fib about his age, and say the video was shot when Buckley was in his 20s. Buckley doesn't take his advice. He sidesteps how old he was and instead concentrates on the bigger question, who should they blame for the attack? Party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan is on the phone, and she proposes blaming the Republican party as a whole. But Buckley isn't so sure. Well, think about it. Because if it's clearly pinpointed, it's just the two of them operating on their own, as these two rogue, disgraced individuals. I guess I don't want to make this entirely about me against the Republican party. You sure about that? That night the YouTube video had only been seen 365 times. Despite everything Buckley's people did, the thing stayed in the news for days. And by the end of the week, it had been seen 7,000 more times. If all of you members of the state committee could please take your seats. Finally, the state party had its meeting, where they would elect the new chairman. Oh, Martha's writing a check. Then we won't have her take her seat. This was the moment Buckley had been fighting for three months. The moment that would decide whether he'd get his dream job. Whether he'd really survived. There was a little skirmish when congressman Paul Hodes, the guy who had started the Youtube flap, gave his speech. But mostly it was pretty civil. Eventually Kathy Sullivan took the mic. I have the results. Our new chairman, with a vote of 109, is Raymond Buckley. After all the cheering, reporters mobbed Buckley, who talked about how, as the new chairman, he wanted to improve civility in political life in New Hampshire. After the three months that I've just lived through, it's really my mission now. There's no way that you could've survived the few months that I did without coming out a changed person. Throughout this whole thing, people kept talking about the politics of personal destruction, and how shocked they were that these tactics had come to New Hampshire. But in a presidential primary year especially, it's hard to be optimistic that people will suddenly be nicer to each other. The real change to come out of all this public, political drama, will probably end up being private and personal. Because even though his career might have survived, Buckley is changed. He told me he no longer trusts people the way he used to. He no longer wants to make new friends. He polices himself all the time, making sure he doesn't say anything that someone else might find offensive. The other day at lunch, a staff person used extreme language to reference a person. And I just quickly picked up what was left of my lunch and I said, "I have to leave the room, because you said that word. I have to leave." Whereas before you would have laughed or just-- I wouldn't pay attention, I wouldn't be listening. Now I listen to everything that's going on around me, to make sure that nobody can misinterpret anything that anyone is saying near me that was inappropriate. Because the attorney general's report was so emphatic about clearing him, and because the report was such big news, his reputation's about as good as he could hope for. Some people even said he came out looking stronger for all this. But Buckley thinks he's permanently changed. That he's not sure he'll ever really feel in control of his life again. Sarah Koenig is a producer of our show. Coming up, what if you have a terrible reputation, and then you figure out that it is absolutely correct. 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 your a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show "My Reputation." We've arrived at act two of our show, act two. The Hole Truth. I think most of us would rather not think about our reputations tpp much, you know? What's the point? What's it going to do for you? But in this next story one man, one brave man, faces his reputation. He sets out to learn, once and for all, what people really think of him. This brave man's name is Gabe Delahaye. A warning to listeners that a word shows up in this story. A word that we beep. I'm well aware that I have a certain reputation. My roommate, Andrew, who went to high school with me and knows me better than almost anyone, who is one of the most thoughtful and considerate people I know, puts it best. This is actually really hard to say to somebody's face, it turns out. I mean everyone-- I don't know. Sorry, I am actually trying to figure out the best way to do this. I don't know, everyone just thinks you're an ass[BLEEP]. I mean, it's true that I make fun of people all the time. But with my friends, at least, it comes from a good place. Like that time that Danielle asked me at the bar if I'd seen that episode of 90210 and I shouted "No," before she could even tell me which one. And then I laughed in her face. And, OK, I'd just met her that night. So Lindsey turned to me and said that she wanted me to teach her how to be such an ass[BLEEP]. And I told her it couldn't be taught. But we were all just joking around, right? That's how I saw it. And I assumed my friends saw it that way, too. I mean, Andrew calls me an ass[BLEEP] all the time. He warns people about me, right in front of me. But he wouldn't still be my friend if it wasn't kind of a joke. It's just this role that I've been assigned in our group of friends, a role I'm more than happy to play. So I sat Andrew down, to make sure he felt the same way. That I'm a quote, unquote, ass[BLEEP]. But I'm not really an ass[BLEEP]. And, right away, he brings up the emails that led to this very conversation. I had written to ask him if he could be home at 8:00, to talk on tape. And at this point, I say, "All right, that sounds pretty good. Make sure to tell craft services I am ovo-lacto," which is maybe not the funniest joke but, you know. And you reply, I think out of nowhere, "Sure. How do you take your coffee? Like your women, right? So that's rarely." And then you write, "Zing." I thought the whole thing was a little unnecessary. But you don't, uh, drink a lot of coffee. Right? Yeah, that's true. Have you ever seen me be nice to people? Yeah. I can't think of any examples, but I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have. Like if you weren't paying attention or something. You've probably gotten up on the subway for somebody or something, right? Maybe not. Why are you still friends with me? I don't know. Inertia? Inertia. Did you hear him say that he was only friends with me out of inertia? And I'm the ass[BLEEP]? So we're sitting there talking about this stuff, and our friend Travis, who lives in the neighborhood, showed up. And once the two of them could compare notes, something changed. For one, they didn't just think I was an ass[BLEEP] because of a well meaning joke taken too far. It was more than that. Like the time Travis wouldn't take off his stupid bicycle helmet. I think I was carrying something else. Like, it was just easier to just put the helmet on my head, even though I wasn't on my bike. But for some reason, that prompted you to keeps hitting me on my head. Which, you know, it was kind of funny the first time but it actually kind of hurt. And I was, like, stop doing that. So I was telling someone else about it. Like, can you believe what a jerk this guy is? Like, why is he your friend? It's like, well. I was telling you to take the helmet off, though. Yeah, but that's not a good way to tell someone to take the helmet off. He was right, that was kind of bad. It was like in elementary school when someone would grab your hand and start hitting you in the face with your own hand, and ask you why you were hitting yourself. Who does that? Apparently, I do. And the more they talked, the more obvious it became that their feelings about my behavior went much deeper than just thinking I can be an ass[BLEEP]. They admitted that lots of times they'll email each other all day long without including me, because they figure I'll just make fun of them. And at that moment, in the middle of a question, I had one of those realizations in which you see something you thought you understood in a totally new light. I find that there have been countless situations where I'll call you, and you're out with everybody. And no one has called me. Now that could be because I'm an ass[BLEEP] and you guys don't want to hang out with me, I'm now realizing. Only now. But that's a very-- that's always been very hurtful to me. It's hard to describe what this was like. The room actually seemed to shrink. Of course it wasn't that every single one of my friends forgot to invite me, repeatedly. Of course. And maybe it was the uncomfortable laughter, but they hardly noticed that my face was red, and I was drenched in sweat. I could imagine that an acquaintance, or somebody who had just met me, might feel this way about me. But these were two of my best friends and there were times when they would just rather avoid me altogether. Here's Travis. It kind of seems like you intentionally try and be the kind of aggressive guy who makes people uncomfortable, or whatever. Andrew chimed in. Yeah. I feel like you end up setting the threshold for what people's comfort level with your relationship is. The amount of aggression, or back and forth. And if they don't like it, it's often just, like, that's it. I guess I just assumed we all have our flaws. Andrew is the kind of guy who argues everything, and I mean everything. Like the word grill, which is popular slang for face. Andrew has maintained for years that it is slang for a rib cage, despite a thousand rap songs to the contrary. Or if Andrew's tired, and you're hanging out with him, he just talks about being tired the whole time. And it's like, dude, I get it. You're tired. Go take a nap. But that's my point. We're friends, so I accept all that about him. I don't warn people to avoid the word grill around Andrew. I don't tell them in advance that most of Travis' day-to-day conversation is a string of impenetrable one liner inside jokes that he would never bother explaining to someone who didn't understand them already. I accept these things about Andrew and Travis as part of the deal. Just like I expected them to accept that I can be an ass[BLEEP]. Which, actually, I guess they do. I just don't get to decide what that acceptance looks like. We're friends. We're friends. But some of the time spent with you is not fun. That's really well put. It's not about like or dislike. It's about just how you treat people, I guess. When Travis left, it was pretty tense in our apartment. Andrew and I spent half an hour making small talk. Saying things like, "Dinner is a really great meal, you know? Like out of the three?" Just to ensure that our friendship hadn't suffered a mortal blow. The next morning, I woke up with an emotional hangover. I had that anxiety where it feels like someone is sitting on your chest and I left early for work to avoid seeing Andrew again. I spent the whole day writing emails to people, asking them to remind me that I'm not an ass[BLEEP]. When I told them that I was confronting this reputation head on, the typical reaction was not reassure me, but just to tell me how brave I was for trying. "Oh," one of them wrote. "I don't think I could do what you're doing. That sounds really hard." Over the next few weeks, I talked to friends and family to see if they felt the same way. And everyone, down to the last man, had something to say on the subject. My brother. You know, it's embarrassing, of course. Sometimes you go a bit over the top. My ex-girlfriend Kate. I think you, honestly, embrace it. I mean, do you like knowing that people say they don't like you? My friend Scott. I didn't like you before I met you. And I had decided that I was not going to talk to you or give you the time of day. And I also tried to persuade other people to dislike you. Even my mom. Well, it used to bother me. Because I thought, wow, all this energy I put into this kid and he makes fun of me. Then I got OK with it. I think that's kind of where I'm at, I'm mostly OK with it. It's easy to dismiss Andrew or Scott. But my mom? How do I dismiss my mom? By the time I talked to my friend Carey, who just decided, like, last Friday that she didn't hate me anymore, she asked me the next logical question. So what are you going to do? Are you going to change? Well. Uh. It was in that pause right there, when I avoided answering, that I realized what I had done. I believe I'm the first person in history to have staged an intervention on himself. What started out as an attempt to force Andrew into admitting that I wasn't an ass[BLEEP] became a referendum on me as a person, with everyone agreeing that he was kind of right. And while I might not have thrown any furniture, or beaten my fist against the wall, crying out, "How could you all do this to me?" I did what a lot of people in interventions do. I looked my friends and family in the eye, apologized and then politely refused to go to rehab. Because, unpleasant as I discovered I can be, I just know in my heart that I'm not changing. And in response to Carey's question, which is the most obvious question to ask, what am I going to do? Why don't I change? Why don't I stop the teasing and the fake punching and the helmet slapping? I don't know. Inertia? Gabriel Delahaye, is an ass[BLEEP] living in New York. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help for our show by Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Web help from Jorge Just and Xioa Jao Yung. Our website, were you can get our free weekly podcast, see free clips from our television show, or listen to any of our old shows for that same price, free. www.thisamericanlife.org. We are also trying this experiment right now on vox.com, we have a place where you can talk about This American Life online with other people who listen to the show. vox.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Torey Malatia, who really wishes we hadn't aired that story about him a couple weeks ago. Yeah, no, I was like, "I told you guys that we shouldn't try to make this into a story. And now look. I'm a lesbian in Japan." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life.
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So here's how a lawyer meets with his client when his client is a prisoner at Guantanamo. There's a little hut with a metal table. He's brought out of the box and shackled to an eye bolt in the floor with his back to the door. He's forbidden to face the natural light. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees at Guantanamo, and he says that to understand that thing about the natural light, you have to understand that the detention facilities at Guantanamo were designed to be the perfect interrogation chambers. And so anything the prisoner wants, including sunlight, he's only going to get with the permission of his interrogators as a reward for cooperating. And anything can be used that way. Mail. Another lawyer discovered when he first got there that his client, a middle-aged gentlemen with five children. He's a London businessman who was picked up in the Gambia, and he wasn't getting any mail from his family, and he couldn't understand it because he felt abandoned and alone from his five children. And the lawyer had the presence of mind to make inquiries to see what was the matter and discovered that 16 letters were in the military's possession that they had refused to deliver. And when they did finally deliver them, someone had actually taken the time to redact out the words from the children, we miss you daddy, we love you daddy, we're thinking of you. That is apparently not right because it disrupts the sense of isolation and despair that they are trying to cultivate. If prisoners feel despair, they'll cooperate, they'll talk. They'll tell us all the dangerous things they know. That's the idea. Let's make them feel hopeless. Ever since President Bush announced the global war on terror, we've been told this is a different kind of war with different rules. The battlefield isn't a jungle in Asia or a beach in France, it's everywhere. Soldiers aren't guys in uniform, they could be anybody. And prisoners of war are different too. So dangerous, we're told, that we keep them in an offshore facility and as close to total secrecy as possible. To interrogate whenever we want, however long we want, using methods we have never approved for other wars. And one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that in all of these years that it's been going, why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio and TV? Roughly 400 of them have been released. About a year ago on our radio show we were talking about this and we realized that none of us had ever read or heard any interview with any of them. And so we decided that we were going to try to get some of these guys onto the air. And the show that we put together and put on the air a year ago with those interviews just won a big award, the Peabody Award. And so because of that, we bring you that show again today. Updated here and there where the facts have changed a little bit. And so today you're going to hear from two of these Guantanamo detainees who have been released. And I believe you're going to be very surprised at what they're like. We're also going to try to explain, once and for all, what all of these kind of technical sounding things about hearings and raids and new rules of war that we all hear in the news from time to time, what it all adds up to. It's This American Life from Chicago Public Radio, distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Our guide for all of this is Jack Hitt. Here he is. As best as they can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics, sort of the Pashto edition of The Onion. The first joke that got them into trouble was when they published a poem about a politician called, "I am Glad to be a Leader." Here's Badr. Let me translate a few lines for you. Sure. Before I was so thin and weak and now I have big stomach. Stuff like that, yeah. So the guy with the big stomach called about Badr and his brother. He threatened them. And as best as they can tell, told authorities that they were linked to al-Qaeda, which landed them in Guantanamo, and which leads us to the second joke. This one was in an issue of Badr's magazine that came out in the '90s, after our government set a $5 million reward for Osama bin Laden. Badr's magazine issued its own bounty for the capture of an American leader. President Bill Clinton. Giving the details how to identify that he has blue eyes and he's clean-shaven. And the most important thing is that there is some scandal going on between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. If someone finds that man, he will be rewarded $5 million of money. Of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] currency, which was equal to $113 at that time. So it's impossible to [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. In Guantanamo, were you interrogated about your Clinton satire? Exactly. They would see if we really to want to kill President Clinton. And we said, no, that was only a satire and it's only a way of expression. It's allowed. It's protected in your country, in American law. How many times were you interrogated you think about the Clinton article? Many times. Many times. Me and my brother, each one of us have been interrogated more than 150 times. So after hearing the punchline explained a 150 times, we finally get the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home. It had been three years since the Pakistani army surrounded their house in Peshawar, came into their living room, which is lined with wall to wall bookcases and arrested them. That's Badr's version of why we jailed him. Here's President Bush's. These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill US troops. I want to make sure before they're released that they don't come back to kill again. The administration has never wavered on this point. Here's Dick Cheney on Guantanamo. The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an offshore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Badr. And every day, more stories like his are coming out. And they raise the question, is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes? In a new study from Seton Hall's law school, researcher simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here's what they found. Only 5% of our detainees in Guantanamo were scooped up by American troops on the battlefield, or anywhere else. 5%. The rest, we never saw them fighting. And here's something else. Only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as al-Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Dunleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many quote, "Mickey Mouse prisoners." In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation, interviewing dozens of high-level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus. That out of nearly 600 men at Guantanamo, the number who could give us useful information about al-Qaeda, was quote, "only a relative handful." Some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen. The Seton Hall study might help explain that. It revealed that 86% of the detainees were handed over to us by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance. And some were handed over to us by a new method. Here's Badr. Actually, in our interrogation, the American interrogators have been telling us that they have paid a lot of money to those who handed over us to American. The problem was, we were offering bounties. You know, $5,000 or $10,000. Al-Qaeda brought more than Taliban did and, so OK, fine, here's your money. Take them to Gitmo. That's where Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyer. He was the judge advocate general until 2000. He says, essentially, we bought Badr and a whole lot of other prisoners. When you look at the economy at that part of the world, that really is kind of a king's ransom. When the Pentagon started offering these rewards, large fees for top leaders, like Bin laden, and smaller payouts for lower level terrorists and Taliban, it seemed like a good idea. They didn't think it would lead to innocent people being turned in. Here's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, just two months after September 11. We have large rewards out. And our hope is that the incentive through the great principle of University of Chicago economics incentivize a large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves looking for the bad folks. We all know this is a new war with new rules, but what were the old rules? Well, one had to do with POWs. The military has always known that all kinds of prisoners get picked up in the fog of war, so it was important to get those numbers down to just the real POWs since troops on the move didn't want to be burdened with looking after lots and lots of captives. This problem had been more or less solved by the old Geneva Conventions, which required a quote, "competent tribunal." It sounds crazy, a kind of impromptu court hearing, right after a battle. But that is exactly what used to happen. And typically, some 75% to 90% of the people scooped up would be sent home. In the Gulf War of 1991, we captured 982 people, released 750 of them right away, and the remainder were POWs. Like in the old war movies, they give name, rank, and serial number, and they got certain things. Everything from a pledge that they wouldn't be tortured, to a promise that they would be released once the war ended, and even the right to send letters home. Here's rear admiral Hutson, the navy's top lawyer. And those were some of the things that now Attorney General Gonzales referred to as being quaint and outdated. You get athletic uniforms. You get a certain amount of money paid in Swiss francs, I believe. And those things probably are-- You get paid as a POW? Yeah, it's a very small amount of money, but to go to the commissary and buy chewing gum and cigarettes kind of thing. And those things probably are largely outdated. And they are in some respects, quaint. What happened though, is by saying that the Geneva Conventions in those respects were quaint and outdated, they just threw the baby out with the bath water. This is a new kind of war after all, and the administration made the argument that the Geneva Conventions apply only when you're fighting another country, a country with a uniformed army, not when you're fighting terrorists. They do not apply where the individuals captured haven't deserved, haven't shown that they deserve those protections. That's Brian Boyle. He was associate attorney general for President Bush when these decisions were made. They did not legally qualify as prisoners of war because they are not fighting in uniform. Because they try to blend in with the civilian population. Because they try to take cover in civilian areas. Hasn't that been a problem for war for most of the 20th century, or at least, in the last couple of conflicts we've been in? I mean, is rooting out al-Qaeda any harder, or how is it harder than rooting out Viet Cong in a local village? And I take the point. I guess the point I was making earlier is that I don't think you can conclude given the nature of the enemy we're facing that how we treat al-Qaeda operatives that we're able to capture is going to make any difference at all in how they would treat American personnel in their custody. It wouldn't make a difference at all. That argument can really take you to some dark places, I think. Here's rear admiral Hutson. If we pick and choose, then other countries can pick and choose whether they're going to apply the Geneva Conventions. That is a slippery slope that Secretary Powell and others did not want us to go down. Because they're looking over the horizon. They know that this isn't the last war we're going to fight. It's not even the next the last war we're going to fight. This quarrel about the Geneva Conventions continued for three years and eventually, got down to one, very practical question. If you're a prisoner and you're not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and you might be held indefinitely, could you at least make an appeal in a US court? Here's attorney general Alberto Gonzales. We really are, for all intents and purposes, at war. And so you need not provide access to counsel. You need not provide the ability to challenge their detention in a criminal court. It would be like saying that Germans that were captured during World War II would have to provided lawyers. The truth of the matter is, the rules and procedures of our criminal justice system simply do not apply in this case. And he's absolutely right, about the Germans. Except the Germans were covered by the Geneva Conventions. Finally, in 2004, the United States Supreme Court stepped in. It said, if prisoners aren't going to be covered by the Geneva Conventions, that's fine. But they couldn't be permitted to fall into a legal black hole, not protected by any law at all. They had to be given some way to challenge their detainment. It's one of the oldest rights in Western civilization, known as habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, it's a phrase we all know, but let's be honest, can't ever really remember what it means. It's not a trial or anything like one. It's more, well, primal. It's a hearing that commands the executive-- in this case, the president-- to explain why he has jailed somebody. The idea dates back to 1215 England when the nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta and agree to the great writ, later known as habeas corpus. In Latin, it means, "show me the body." In other words, a neutral judge got to see the prisoner in person to check if he'd been tortured, and then the judge had the power to require the king to explain, why is this guy jailed? All the executive had to do was answer with a convincing story, and then the guy went back to the dungeon. It's a right so elemental that it's in Article 1 of the United States Constitution. It's one of the reasons we fought the Revolutionary War. And after the Supreme Court granted the detainees access to the courts, right away President Bush started talking like a habeas loving King John. Yeah, look, we are a nation of laws and to the extent that people say, well, America is no longer a nation of laws, that does hurt our reputation. But I think it's an unfair criticism. As you might remember, our courts have made a ruling. They looked at the jurisdiction, the right of people in Guantanamo to have habeas review, and so we're now complying with the court's decisions. The administration quickly put together a kind of hearing based in part on the old Geneva Conventions hearing they'd abandoned. They called this hearing, a combatant status review tribunal, or in the elegant shorthand of the Pentagon, a CSRT. These new hearings have one oddity to them. The tribunal assumes all the evidence against the detainee is correct. If the detainee wants to prove them wrong, it will be difficult because he's not allowed to see the evidence. It's classified. As a result, these hearings makes strange reading. In many of them, there comes a moment in the dialogue like this one between detainee Abdulmalik and the judging panel. Malik-- Regarding the charge that I worked at various guest houses and offices, what was the work? Baher Azmy is a lawyer who represents one of the detainees, but he couldn't attend his client's CSRT because actual lawyers aren't allowed. They were each appointed a personal representative who's a military officer. Who, in my case, met with my client the day before for 15 minutes, sat silent, and failed to present all of the exculpatory evidence in his file. Which of course, any lawyer would have done. Not the personal representative. And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all of the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing. The classified files contains-- the Washington Post wrote about it-- six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is, memos saying this person was here, so and so witnessed him. In Kurnaz's case, there are five or six statements saying, there's no evidence of any connection to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he's got no connection to al-Qaeda. There's no evidence linking him to the Taliban, over and over and over again. But here's the thing, at the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it and Kurnaz, himself, doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant and sent back to his cell. But wait, there's more. The reason they give for holding him, a friend of his named [? Selcuk Bilgin ?] blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's two years after Kurnaz got picked up. So setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one's friend does, it's factually preposterous. And a sort of simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well in [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and under no suspicion of any such thing. You heard that right. Kurnaz was held in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, some guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn't become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany. Yeah, he's walking around in Germany. I've met him. Then there's a bunch of Chinese Muslims who we accidentally picked up during our sweep in Afghanistan. They're an ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs, and they've been battling the communist Chinese since World War II. Conservatives love the Uyghurs, which is why they've been passionately defended by the National Review and the Weekly Standard. After a corporate lawyer named Sabin Willett heard about them, he volunteered to represent a Uyghur named Adel Abdul Hakim and some others, and he flew to Guantanamo to meet them. The main thing they wanted to talk about it and that was so puzzling to them was that the previous May, the military had told them that they were in their words, "innocent." And why were they still here if they were innocent? What you're saying is, is that Adel and the other Uyghurs are, in your opinion, have never been members of any kind of al-Qaeda or Jihad, or anything like that? Yeah, it's not just my opinion. The Defense Department has determined that. That means they were never al-Qaeda, never Taliban, never any of that. When I interviewed Willett, back when this story was first broadcast a year ago, the government said they'd release Adel and the other Uyghurs if only it could find another country to send them to. At the time, there seemed like an obvious solution. Adel could go 90 miles north to Miami, where there's an entire city of anti-communists. Or, he could be sent to one of the largest Uyghur ex-pat communities, Washington DC. So why didn't that happen? Here's Willett. I'll tell you what I think the answer is, although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, and took their pictures, and had them on TV shows or the radio, they'd be shocked. Because they've been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists and that they're the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel, you're going to suddenly realize you've been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first him, like the kind of kid your college age son would bring home. You know, his roommate. His buddy from college home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting and their jaw is a little bit unsprung, and they don't say much. Because it's hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know, this guy is in Guantanamo? If Willett's right, this gets to the heart of habeas. The whole point is that the king shouldn't have the right to just detain somebody because it'd be an embarrassment to have the guy free. The Pentagon has an acronym for people like the Uyghurs, it's pronounced [? "en leck." ?] It means, no longer enemy combatant. But as Willett notes, it should be never was enemy combatant. Since I first talked to Willett for our original broadcast, the White House finally found a refugee center in Albania where they sent 5 of the 23 Uyghurs, including Adel. The others are still in Guantanamo and are classified as enemy combatants. The problem with creating an offshore legal limbo, where there's no habeas proceeding to separate the al-Qaeda fighter from the comedy writer, comes during interrogation. If we've labeled them as terrorists, then that's how they get treated. Josh Colangelo-Bryan is a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York who volunteered at Guantanamo. He represents Juma al-Dossary. For a while, the government thought al-Dossary was a recruiter in America for al-Qaeda. Possibly involved in the case known as the Lackawanna Seven. But this is never brought up at his CSRT hearing. Instead, the government simply states that he's al-Qaeda. And as proof, lists the various places he's been. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan, the Pakistan border. Supposedly he was fighting in some of those places, but the government provides no evidence of that. They don't quote witnesses. Nobody is on record saying he's al-Qaeda. Here's Colangelo-Bryan. What's interesting to me when we talk about what he was doing in that part of the world is the allegation that the US military makes against him. That he was quote, "present at Tora Bora," close quote. The military offers no allegations as to when Juma was supposedly in Tora Bora. It says nothing about what supposedly he was doing. Simply that at some point in history, he was present in that place. Now, Juma says that he's never been to Tora bora. And again, even if that allegation is true, frankly, it doesn't prove anything. Absent some evidence of some involvement in terrorist activity, I simply don't know how you can call someone a terrorist. We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Juma al-Dossary. Colangelo-Bryan met with him many times and cataloged what was done with him. Al-Dossary said that Americans forced him to the ground and urinated on him. We put out our cigarettes on him. We shocked him with an electric device. We spat on him. We poured a hot cup of tea on his head. We told him that quote, "we brought you here to kill you." We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left him in a frigid, air conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold him forever, and we told him that we would send him to Egypt to be tortured. On a different day, we chained him to the floor and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual blood on his body. When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face. We kissed the cross around our neck and said, "this is a gift from Christ for you Muslims." We videotaped the entire episode. There's no way to confirm that all this happened to al-Dossary. But other prisoners, and officials at Guantanamo have described variations of every technique on the list, including the menstrual blood, the Israeli flag, the references to Christianity, the beatings, the sexual humiliation. Al-Dossary's interrogated still, about once a month. During one visit last winter he asked Colangelo-Bryan, what can I do to keep myself from going crazy? A few months later, during a meeting, al-Dossary asked to go to the bathroom. Colangelo-Bryan and the MP stepped outside the hut and waited. After five minutes, colangelo-Bryan got concerned. He cracked the door open. When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor in front of me. I then looked up and saw a figure hanging. I yelled to the MPs for help. They then began to cut down the noose around Juma's neck. It wasn't Al-Dossay's first suicide attempt. About three weeks later I was back in Guantanamo, Juma said to me that he didn't want to kill himself without an outside witness. His fear was that if he died and only the military knew, nobody would have known what happened. Of course, as we are often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one that lets somebody go, who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker. So for the military, there's also this other new thing, a terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees, and has been trying to make sense of what's happened at Guantanamo. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible-- and there's a lot of evidence to support this. They had no idea who they were going to be capturing. And they thought they might get more serious people. People who were more seriously involved. The reality is those people never came to Guantanamo. The most serious folks are the ones in CIA custody, of which there are approximately 30. 27, 30, something like that. Those are the people in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The people of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo, but they didn't know that when the base opened. They said at the time that these were the worst of the worst, they were trained killers, they would gnaw through hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo. I mean, they used the most inflammatory rhetoric. And it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken. And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. And at the same time, there was this sense, this nagging sense, that, well, maybe they are really bad, but we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers as all appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to find out. So they kept turning up the heat and using more and more coercive techniques on people who were less and less significant. Meanwhile, our clients are experiencing this really scary deterioration in their mental health as hope gradually disappears. They have become increasingly desperate, and so that's why there's a hunger strike there going on, an unknown number of people who are starving themselves. Who are being force fed through a tube through their nose that goes into their stomach, and they're only staying alive through that. In this new war, the plan was to build a prison so bleak that the detainees would give up hope and talk. The military was given a mission and they did a good job. But many prisoners are now moving into year five. If they're al-Qaeda, detainment is perfectly justified. No one argues that. But think about what these incarcerations are for men wrongfully and indefinitely detained. It's like being buried alive in a coffin. Nobody knows how many of the prisoners are, in fact, the worst of the worst, and how many are innocent. But we have a way to find out, it's called habeas corpus. Jack Hitt. Coming up, the most popular poem among prisoners at Guantanamo. Or if not the most popular, at least it's very, very popular we're told. 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. Our program today, "Habeas Schmabeas," stories from Guantanamo. We're rebroadcasting a show that we first broadcast one year ago. So where do things stand now? Well, in the Fall of 2006, this past Fall, the president signed a law with solid bipartisan majorities that officially denies habeas rights to Guantanamo prisoners. At this point, the CSRT is still the closest thing the detainees have to a habeas hearing, and the CSRT rules have not changed. Prisoners don't get to see the evidence that's used against them. And evidence obtained through torture can be used. All of this is on appeal and will probably end up in the Supreme Court. This actually brings us to act two of our show. Act two, "September 11, 1660." Habeas rights were originally created in England, and in one of the Supreme Court cases on this issue, 175 members of the British parliament filed a, "friend of the court" brief, an amicus brief. The first time in Supreme Court history that this has happened. And they argued first of all, that British citizens being held at Guantanamo deserved better than what they were getting in terms of these rights. And they also said, essentially, are you guys nuts? This is from their brief. "The exercise of executive power without possibility of judicial review jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations. Namely, the rule of law." It also pointed out the history of habeas. How after World War II Winston Churchill wanted to suspend habeas rights for Nazi leaders and just shoot them. And it was the United States which argued for habeas and for trials, which led to the Nuremberg Trials. They also finally pointed out how badly it had gone the last time that they, in England, tried to suspend habeas like this. "In the 1600s, they write, during the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." The guy who did that was named Lord Clarendon. And in England, one of our regular contributors, Jon Ronson, decided to look into it. So it turns out that the last person to come up with this exact same way to sidestep habeas corpus is a lord I have never heard of, a not household name lord called Clarendon. Who was he? I went to a professional, Tony McDonnell, who said he'd take me to Clarendon's grave in Westminster Abbey. Yes, we're here in the south of Westminster Abbey. I noticed we just passed Charles Darwin's grave. Yes, Charles Darwin is buried here. You said you were once showing an American party around and somebody spat it, spat at Charles Darwin's grave. On his grave, yes. And wanted to know why he was buried here. And we just passed the spot where Elton John sang "Candle in the Wind" at Princess diana's funeral. Yes, that was in front of Lord Stanhope's memorial in the nave. You have to be famous or a great loyalist, or at least someone who worked here, like an organist to be buried here. Tony is a historian and a blue badge guide, an official Westminster tour guide. He took me down corridors and through chambers until we came to a flagstone on the floor, Lord Clarendon's grave. He's in [? vaulted ?] company. Henry the V is buried just to his left, and Elizabeth the I lies a couple of yards in front of him. Tony explains who Lord Clarendon was. He was for want of a better word, nowadays he'd probably be called a prime minister. And he was the main adviser to the king. So Clarendon had this job. He was the king's advisor in the middle of a civil war, in which the king was killed. There were two sides. You've got the monarchists and then you've got the puritans who murdered the king because they saw the kingdom as debauched and decadent. Now I know you Americans see puritans as kindly settlers constantly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. We see them as bastards. They were religious fundamentalists. In other words, they were-- Men who believed that all they had to do was to overthrow the government and the reign of Jesus Christ would come once more among them. So this was a bustle of civilization. It was a bustle of religious ideology. It was most definitely a bustle of religious ideology. So as puritans, were they seen to be kind of crazy, religious fundamentalists, these people? Some of the people were, and they were among the most persecuted after the Restoration. The Restoration. This is when the whole sending people away to offshore islands with dubious sovereignty business took place. It was the period after the war. The puritans had been defeated, a king, Charles the II was restored to power, along with his main advisor, Lord Clarendon. Consider what it was like for Clarendon and the monarchists. They'd been in exile for years. Many of their friends and supporters had been locked up or killed. The puritans had been vicious. They had killed the king. And many of the men who'd done it, were still at large, plotting out there. It was a 9/11 style trauma and Clarendon behaved in a traumatized way. He probably was paranoid to some extent. The whole of the new establishment were paranoid. They saw plots everywhere. And there was a feeling of retribution in the air. Some people say they had good reason to be paranoid. Well, these people had done the most unimaginably horrific acts. They killed the king. They had killed the king and they were capable of anything is what that would have been said. That's why they were put where they were and it was for the safety of all of us, and we're doing you all a favor. Heaven knows what would have happened. They were wicked people and those were the people who were then shipped off by Clarendon. The exact location of Lord Clarendon's Guantanamo is lost to history. It was probably in Jersey or Guernsey, which today are rather nice seaside tax havens for the rich. But suspending habeas corpus didn't work out well for Lord Clarendon. He was impeached. At his impeachment trial, he was accused of sending people away to, quote, "remote islands, garrisons, and other places, thereby to prevent them from the benefit of the law, and to produce precedence for the imprisoning of any other of his majesty's subjects in like manner." And remember, democracy as we know it is still centuries away. Innocent until proven guilty, one man one vote, only the most extreme radicals held these views. These were dark times. There were heads on spikes all over London. And still, the people were shocked by Clarendon's disregard for habeas corpus. People took it seriously and they would have bandied it about with each other, this idea that you had to produce somebody and accuse them in law in front of their own peers. The parallels are so obvious when you read the history of habeas corpus and the amount of times it's just been suspended. That is what they always, always do. They say that these people are capable of anything. These people do not hold the same values as we do. They're out to destroy our way of life. It's more or less the same situation. The one outcome of all of this was the habeas corpus act of 1679, which specifically forbade what Clarendon had done and made it illegal to send a prison quote, "into Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, Tangier, or into parts, garrisons, islands, or places beyond the seas, which are, or at any time hereafter, shall be within or without the dominions of his majesty." And forbade at his remains for 330 years. In England, anyway. Jon Ronson. He does documentaries for the BBS and is the author of the book, Them. Act Three, we interrogate the detainees. Yes, the US military had their chance with them. In this act, Jack Hitt talks to two former detainees from Guantanamo. One of these guys you've heard a little bit from earlier in our show, Badr Zaman Badr, the guy who ran the satirical magazine named Pashto with his brother in Pakistan. The other guy was 19 when he was picked up, Abdullah Al Noaimi, a kid from a well to do family in Bahrain. Here's Jack. Abdullah wound up in American custody the way a lot of the men at Guantanamo did, he was a foreigner in Pakistan and we were offering bounties for guys like that. Remember Murat Kurnaz, the guy whose friend was supposedly a suicide bomber and Juma's al-Dossary? Same thing happened to them. In Abdullah's case, he was first taken to Kandahar, to a makeshift prison the US set up at an air base with about 20 men to a tent. When we first go in Kandahar, I was surprised, like I never seen those pictures or those views. Only in the ancient movies, like dark ages. We were chained by the legs, like shackled. And they ordered us to pick up rocks. Can you imagine this? They said, you should pick up the rocks on the ground, like put it all together on a pile. There was no water to make [UNINTELLIGIBLE] or to take a shower. Badr, the satirist, was taken to that same air base at Kandahar. The MPs were treating us very harshly. We had to be on our knees for long hours and to put our hands on our head. And mostly they used the word [BLEEP]. And they used to tell us to put our [BLEEP] hands on our [BLEEP] heads. And we didn't like that. In the camps, Badr got separated from his brother, the poet. So he devised a way to find him. The detainees didn't have toilets, instead they got a bucket, which got filled up with what Badr modestly calls "dirt." Every day, some detainee get chosen to empty the buckets. Badr volunteered. Because I wanted to meet my brother. To go from tent to tent. Then my brother, when I saw my brother and he was giving me his bucket to empty that was the first springtime. He said, what a spring it is. There are no flowers and instead of the smell of the flowers, we have this dirt smell. I can't translate it. And actually, it's in Pashto. These are really beautiful lines. The sanitary conditions were just as bad, if not worse, for Abdullah. The tent he shared with other detainees was open on all sides and located at the end of the military airstrip. Every takeoff and landing meant a tornado of dirt-- the literal kind-- blasted through. In the first few days, he heard the other prisoners in the tent talking about their interrogations. They told me that they had electric shocks on them. And one of them was threatened to be raped. And they took off his pants. And I was thinking, what am I going to do? They took me at night. There was two interrogators. They wanted me to say that I was a terrorist. I told them, no, I'm not and everything. Then they started pushing me and everything. And then they brought a cigarette that the interrogator was smoking. He blew the smoke on my face and then he came very close, very, very close to my face, and brought the cigarette between my eyes. And he said, I swear to God I'm going to put it in your forehead if you don't tell me what I want to hear. I thought about it. I felt like this is a jungle and only the strong lived in it. But still there is small creatures that can live, but not by facing-- the lions aren't facing big animals. No. But by maybe hiding or changing their colors as the trees. So I just told them whatever you want to hear from me I'm going to tell you. What do you want me to say? He said, say that you're a terrorist. You want me to say I'm a terrorist? Are you going to let me go? Are you going to let me go sleep? Because they always torture, like not keeping me asleep. They keep me awake all the time. So I tell them, OK. I'm going to tell you whatever you want. Yeah, I'm a terrorist and go tell your bosses. They left me. This is not how he thought things would go with the Americans. In fact, back when he was being held on a Pakistan jail, when he found out that Americans would be taking them, he was relieved. He told the other prisoners it was good news. He knew America, he knew how the people were. And I lived so many places, like Europe and England, and Germany, and France. But the difference was in the states, everywhere you go they welcome you. Like when you go in the supermarket, everybody goes, how you doing and everything. That's the thing that was in my mind. I was like, please, everything's going to be fine. They're going to understand. So how did he know so much about American supermarkets? Well, in 1994, he came to America for the World Cup finals. In fact, Abdullah's been here a lot. He's been downhill skiing in the Midwest. He attended Old Dominion University in Virginia for a while, and has taken other trips too. And in '96 I was in Disneyland in Orlando. For spring break I was in Daytona Beach with some of my friends. You were in Daytona Beach for spring break? Yeah, it was year 2000. Bikers week. I remember the guys, young guys standing by the sidewalk having the signs for the car for [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Some expressions [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], show us. Oh, right. That expression, the show us your-- Yeah, that expression. That's the most I remember about Daytona. So a year after seeing the sights in Daytona Beach, Abdullah found himself facing an American interrogator in Kandahar. I got shocked. I got shocked when the first interview, like cursing me up and down. Cursing my father, cursing my family. Cursing my country. Cursing my government, everything. Why? That was the question I wanted to know. What's going on? Do I know you? What do you have against me? What did I do to you? Badr had learned of the West from more scholarly sources. He's a big fan of the Canterbury Tales and Gulliver's Travels. And he also knew about the Geneva Conventions and spoke up when he realized they weren't going to apply. Actually, our complaint was that they were not accepting us as prisoner of war. They were not giving us those rights. And actually, they were just running from American legal system. I mean, I had told my interrogators many times, if we are really guilty, why don't they put us on trial in American courts? Finally, Badr and Abdullah were each taken out of the camps at Kandahar and put on a plane to Guantanamo. Remember, this is an international flight from Afghanistan to Cuba, over 20 hours long. We were handcuffed and the handcuffs was tied to our stomachs. And there is a chain connected to our legs. Other detainees next to you are stuck to you. They used to put [UNINTELLIGIBLE] on our head. And we had masks that we can hardly breath. We could not hear, we could not see. We can even not touch. So they had to stop all senses completely. To have hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, those things only human can have. Once they got to Guantanamo, both Badr and Abdullah described being stripped naked, medically examined, and then put into cages until a new round of interrogations began. Mostly they used to ask questions about the various organizations and how they get money why people hurt Americans and so and so. And there have been even stupid questions. Like? There have been stupid questions, that if we have seen Osama bin Laden, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], if we intend to attack Americans. As if I know Osama bin Laden. I was shocked, I'm 19 years old. Abdullah and Badr, by the way, arrived at different times at the base, and never knew each other. But they both described meeting lots of ordinary people, farmers, teachers, cab drivers, who were also sold to the Americans. Abdullah talked to one guy who sold by his own father-in-law. Badr met men who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden. Abdullah was originally arrested while traveling in Pakistan. A man offered him a meal, and a place to rest, and later turned him over to the army for the bounty. Abdullah says he saw the money change hands at the jail. Once in American custody, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan and proclaiming his desire to carry out Jihad. Sometimes the interrogators want to put the stress on us. They come and ask me, do you want to go home? They don't want to take me home, but they're just asking. To make you angry and nervous that you'll never go home and keep telling you those things. but in response, I tell them the same thing. No in fact, I don't want to go to home. I'm OK here. I like you so much and I don't want to leave you. Now did they think you were a smartass? How did they react to that? They got surprised the first time, but then they got used to it because everybody say it. Even if, for example. stop you from food, stop you from sleeping, stop you from talking. I don't know why, you just keep smiling. So much of what we hear about Guantanamo is about the harsh treatment there. But of course, like any place, the days mostly pass in boredom. The interrogators might be rough, but the MPs and guards who had to spend time with the detainees sometimes would get comfortable and start talking to the prisoners. They ask me, tell me the truth. Are you a terrorist or not? They were told that I'm a terrorist, but they still ask me. Why? Because of doubt in their hearts. They still have doubt. They don't seem like as we've heard. And then we start talking and talking and talking. Most of the guards they told me that when I first came here I was trained that everybody over here is like monsters. They're going to jump from the cages and they're going to chew you up and everything. They said, we thought different. We thought that the American forces captured you in a battle or something. So some people they are forced to treat us bad. But you can see, you can tell from their eyes. And some they feel like this is not the right thing to do. They feel this is wrong. They told me themself. Some of them told me, if I don't follow orders, I'm going to be in your place. I really miss them now. To pass the time, the prisoners would sing together, or try out new poems they'd written. They developed a secret postal system for passing notes and photos, and figured out how to talk to each other through the air conditioning vents. Sometimes, the guards and prisoners would hold little competitions, like the styrofoam cup challenge. The object was to turn the cup inside out without cracking it. The guards went first. They spent hours and hours and hours and they came back. They couldn't do it. They said, OK, let's try it to flip the cup underwater. They tried and it didn't work. Then the detainees said, OK, we're going to do it for you. The detainees did it. They flipped the cup inside out. Like totally inside out. You could read the brand of the cup inside the cup instead of outside. What was the brand? It Dart. Dart. Yeah, one was Dart and the other was Oklahoma. Yeah, community of Oklahoma for blinds. Since pen and paper were forbidden, Badr's brother wrote his poetry by scratching the words into styrofoam cups with his fingernails. After a year, they were allowed to use pens and to read books. Abdullah read David Copperfield. Badr and his brother composed some 25,000 lines of verse. The other inmates memorized the best of them. The most popular couplet went like this. It says, [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] These are the first two lines. It means, they bring good and bad people to the same jail and there is no oil and salt in the rice. Get that? There's no oil or salt in the rice. It's really funny in Pashto if you just [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to any Pashto speaker in your country, he would really love that. [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Finally, one day, four years after he left Pakistan, Abdullah was pulled aside by a military officer who had news. Abdullah was going home. Abdullah says he was asked by a government lawyer, a major, to sign a contract promising not to join a terrorist group and giving the US permission to rearrest him at any time. He refused to sign. Other detainees say they were shown similar letters and also refused to sign, believing this was just another trick. Did they ever explain why they were letting you go? No. But they told you they had made a mistake in the end? The government lawyer, he didn't say a mistake by the lack of vocabulary of mistake. He didn't say mistake. But he said we picked you up as enemy combatant, but it turned out that you are not one. We don't see that you're an enemy combatant. He just give me an example of a mistake, but he didn't say we made a mistake. And just as suddenly, Abdullah was on an airplane and back in Bahrain. He was quickly ushered past the news media and into a room where he saw his family. They greeted me. They welcomed me. They hugged me and everything. Then they took me home. I didn't tell them anything. Everybody's crying. I left my sister and she was very young, about five, six years. I didn't know her when I saw her. She was like a lady. When you saw your brothers and your father, what was that like? Have you ever heard the expression, "home sweet home?" Yes, I have, actually. Yeah, of course. That's the best time to say home sweet home. Americans are going to think that because you were at Guantanamo Bay that you were a terrorist. And that everybody there was. What would you say to them? I would say even if I were an angel, I would still be a terrorist to them because it's the thing that they want. People don't want to take the responsibilities of their mistakes. They want to put it on others. It's like slaughtering a sheep, for example. And when the sheep keeps shaking, and the blood's spilling all over the place, they would scream at the sheep and say, you are a bad sheep. Bad, bad sheep because your blood came on my clothes or my [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. You know what I'm saying? They would take you, maybe torture you, or maybe kill you, or put you under so much stress and circumstance and then they would say, you're a bad person because you've been through those things. Why did you put me in those things in the first place? In the years Abdullah was gone, his parents moved to new house, a big house, with lots of rooms. But there was no bedroom for him. His old clothes were gone. They thought he would never come home. He says it's like he's come back from the dead. Jack Hitt. In the year since we first broadcast this show, Abdullah's gotten married. He has a six month old son. He's entered business school in Bahrain. The other detainee that Jack talked to, Badr Zaman Badr is back in Pakistan. He and his brother wrote a book in Pashto about what happened to them in detention in Kandahar and Guantanamo. Because of this, Badr's brother has been detained by the Pakistan government. In this past year, about 200 detainees have been released. About 385 are still in Guantanamo. 38 of them are currently classified as NLEC, No Longer Enemy Combatants. That is, they've been found to be completely innocent, but they're still in custody. In September 2006, after criticism that not many truly dangerous prisoners were at Guantanamo, 14 high-value al-Qaeda prisoners were moved to Guantanamo from CIA black sites. And finally, just this week, the Justice Department filed petitions in federal court to try to curtail how often detainees can talk to their American lawyers, guys like Joe Margulies and the other attorneys that you heard this hour. An affidavit by a Navy lawyer, commander Patrick McCarthy, complained among other things, that those lawyers were providing information to the news media about the detainees. 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. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Seth Lind, Thea Chaloner, Tommy Andreas. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is attributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia. You know what he always says about us. If anybody actually met these guys, they'd be shocked. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK America, there's a phone number that you can call in Kansas, and when they pick up the phone, they say--. Good afternoon, Center for Army Lessons Learned. May I help you? The Center for Army Lessons Learned. The first time you hear that name, it's hard to believe that it's real, and not one of those places like the Hogwarts School, that it would be so amazing to believe that it existed. But of course, it never could exist. I guess you would say we collect lessons learned. Colonel Steve Mains runs the center. Lessons that the units are learning in combat, lessons that are being learned in training, and also in experimentation. And we are kind of the connective tissue, then, to distill those lessons, and then get them out to the people that need them; to transfer knowledge faster than our enemy. It is a 200 person operation to do all this. And this is a pretty new thing for the Army. The center has only been around since the mid 1980s, and didn't really get cooking until the first Gulf War. One way they get their information, they embed researchers with units all over the world, including combat units in Iraq, for six months or a year at a time, to report from the field about the latest innovations-- what works, what doesn't work. And then, to get those lessons out, the center puts out reports and handbooks. There's this massive website for soldiers to download all this stuff. And if that weren't enough, there's a reference desk. This is a place where, if the soldier doesn't have the information, or the commander doesn't have the information, he can call my folks here and request the specific information that he needs. And then our guys will get it out to them, if they're deployed within 24 hours. Right now, we're answering just about 500 warriors a month. Craig Hayes runs the desk that answers these requests for information, which are almost all over email. He's officially a civilian, a retired lieutenant colonel, and a veteran of the current war in Iraq. He is the very first person who's ever had a full time job answering these inquiries. It's amazing what kind of questions the warriors will come up with. It could be current convoy operations, traffic control points. It could be how many spaces between letters on an official document. It could be the surge. So now we're getting more questions on what we got to do to deploy. What kind of insurgency tactics, training Iraqi police, getting Sunni and Shiite in your area to get along better. When it comes to a lot of these things, Colonel Mains says, the questions that the center gets pretty much amount to--. What's the latest? What's the state of the art? What has worked in the past, and what were the pitfalls? Colonel, what did we do in other wars? Well, it was a much more informal process. If you go back to World War II, Slam Marshall did a lot of studies, particularly in the Pacific, but there was a big delay. He went around, and he collected his information, and then he had to come back and compile it in a report. And then that report has got to be sent paper copy back out to the units that would need it. I mean, this morning, I've already answered four or five questions already. This morning you've answered four or five questions already? What were those about? What's causing vehicles to roll over, I guess, was one. That's Lane Rolf, who works the reference desk answering questions. He says that back when he was in Baghdad as military police, he was a company commander, he could have used some of the information that he now gives out every day in his job, like how to recognize improvised explosive devices, IEDs, something his unit had to learn on the fly. Though other questions he gets, he never would have needed help with. A friend of mine-- I'll also do a lot of informal questions. A friend of mine's over their right now in a unit. There are some MWR questions that we can answer just to help soldiers stay current over there. What's MWR? Morale, welfare, and recreation. What did your friend want to know? He wanted to know how the Oklahoma Sooners did in the draft, and how the Big 12 is going to do this year in football. He wanted to know because he's out of touch. So that would be a morale question right there? Yes. He remembers one email that he got from a military policeman, a young sergeant who was heading over to Iraq for the first time. He was worried because he had never had to lead a squad before. He wanted to know how to train them better so everybody would come back alive. I called him right away, because we don't necessarily just have to respond by email. I said, hey Sergeant, there's a reason why you're a leader now. Don't doubt what you know, first of all. I need to know where you're going, and I can provide you with a whole bunch of information derived from last units coming back. And he said, holy cow sir, this is exactly what I need. This will help me sleep at night. I know that I'm going to help my guys. And that right there really touched my heart. And I had to go outside and have a cup of coffee. And like, you know what? This is exactly why I want this job. Every day I feel like I help another soldier. I fought to come over to get this job. You did? There was a lot of other people fighting for this job. Talking to guys at the Center for Army Lessons Learned, it's hard not to feel kind of hopeful. It's the US Army at its best: smart, practical, can-do. And today on our show, during this war in Iraq that drags out for month after month, longer than our involvement in World War II, longer than the Civil War, we wanted to feel a little hopeful for a change, and talk about what's been learned, and try to understand why there's certain lessons that we're taking so long to learn. From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio international. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today for this Memorial Day weekend, The Center For Lessons Learned. Our show in three acts, including Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City on lessons for civilians in this war. And Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, the author of Fiasco, in Baghdad, who says there's a whole different sensibility in the air in the Green Zone these days, where Americans seem to have learned some lessons. Stay with us. Act one, Cassandra. Everybody knows that we occupied Germany after World War II, but you might not know that we occupied part of Germany after World War I. And two interesting things happened. One, it did not go so well. And two, the soldiers involved took very good notes. In fact, there's a four volume report on that occupation, hand typed, complete with typos, in which one Colonel Erwin L. Hunt summed up what happened this way: quote, "The American army of occupation lacked both the training and organization to guide the destinies of the nearly 1 million civilians, whom the fortunes of war had placed under its temporary sovereignty." So when World War II happened, military planners did not want to botch another occupation in the same exact country, and they returned to this report to understand what went wrong. And the occupation after World War II went very differently, not only the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe, but there was an entire infrastructure of schools, and classes, and training devoted to getting Americans, American military, prepared to occupy and rebuild another country. Which is to say, we learned from our mistake. We figured out how to occupy and rebuild a country after a war. Well, Nancy Updike has this story about one man's quest to make America remember that particular lesson. I want to read to you from page 42 of this booklet that came out in January of 2003. That's two months before we invaded Iraq. Here's what it says. "The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious. Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution. Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation, the United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow, of new problems of America's own making." That paragraph is only one of this report's many predictions, observations, and warnings that have made a guy named Conrad Crane famous in certain circles as a man who should have been listened to. The report is called "Reconstructing Iraq." It was commissioned by the Army in the run-up to the Iraq War. They wanted a guide for what to do after the fighting ended, how to occupy, stabilize, and reconstruct a country, based on previous wars, and on Iraq's specific challenges. And the booklet ends with a detailed nine page chart listing what would need to get done, who should do it, everything from securing the borders, the banking system, the museums, to dealing with sewage and medical waste. Crane co-wrote the booklet. He's a historian, a 26 year Army veteran, and director of the Army's archives at the US Army War College, the Military History Institute. And seven years ago, in 2000, before he became known for having written this booklet, Crane was just one more historian with pale hair, glasses, and a head full of ideas, and a problem that is not uncommon among idea people. People would kind of treat me like a humorous eccentric, like a salesman for some commodity that they didn't really want. The unwanted commodity that Crane was pushing was an idea he'd been trying to get the military to take seriously for years. It started like this. Crane had been studying the aftermath of US military involvements big and small, going back more than 100 years. Nation building in Germany and Japan, the toppling of Noriega in Panama, our long occupation of the Philippines, humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts in Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, even reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War. And what Crane found was that after major combat ends, there are always a whole bunch of unglamorous, bigger than expected, absolutely crucial tasks that the military is often the only one around to do; tasks that can mean the difference between stability and chaos. And Crane's idea was this: that the military needed to become much better prepared to take on everything that happens after major combat ends in a given war or conflict, the so-called--. Messy aftermath. Post-conflict operations, the stability operations, reconstructions, occupations. The point was that the wars are won in the way that peace is established, really. To say that now, wars are won or lost in the way that peace is established, is to state the obvious. We wouldn't still be in Iraq or Afghanistan if it weren't true. But before Iraq and Afghanistan, before 9/11, Crane's notion that the military should devote a lot more thought, money, and manpower to post-war planning was an idea that could not get traction. It was one small, unpopular corner of the never-ending debate about military strategy and doctrine. After we invaded two countries and toppled two governments, suddenly rebuilding and stabilizing a postwar country became arguably the most urgent job, not just for our national security, but also for the security of large chunks of the rest of the world. But back in the fall of 2002, a half year before the invasion of Iraq, Crane and a Middle East expert named Andrew Terrill started cranking out that booklet I read from earlier, "Reconstructing Iraq." They did it in three months, working like crazy, and getting input from other civilian and military experts from the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Joint Forces Command, the Army. We had a great sense of urgency. We wanted to get it out as fast as we could. We expected it was going to have a major impact. We knew the Army staff at the time was interested in it. We were sending stuff constantly to the planners in the theater. And we got some good input from the planners in the theater as well. It was only later, a few months we get in the middle of 2003 where we started to get a sense that, boy, I wish we'd been listened to more than we were. Reading this booklet four years into the war, it feels like Crane and Terrill came from the future and traveled back in time to January, 2003 to try and warn us. Page 24, "Even under free elections, differences within Iraqi society may be further exacerbated." Page 34, "Unlike a variety of other dictatorships, many Iraqi citizens have access to firearms. These weapons can become a problem following the war." Page 32, "To tear apart the Iraqi army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society. Breaking up large elements of the army also raises the possibility that demobilized soldiers could affiliate with ethnic or tribal militias." Page 40, "If the United States assumes control of Iraq, it will assume control of a badly battered economy." Page 38, "After the first year, the possibility of a serious uprising may increase, should severe disillusionment set in, and Iraqis begin to draw parallels between US actions and historical examples of Western imperialism." Page 35, "Having entered into Iraq, the United States will find itself unable to leave rapidly, despite the many pressures to do so." So if we had this booklet, why weren't we better prepared for what to do after President Bush declared--. Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. [APPLAUSE] Well, one thing that Crane found about previous wars is that the Pentagon, that is the military and its civilian leadership, has a sort of amnesia about these post-conflict stability operations. The military doesn't like to do them, so they often don't prepare to do them, or they underprepare. The Gulf War is a perfect example. We were so focused on winning the war, that we got surprised at the end of the war by how much there was to do in Kuwait. And believe it or not, there was a lot to do. According to the Army, tiny Kuwait ended up being the largest civil military reconstruction effort the US had undertaken since World War II. But in the run-up to the war, Crane found, all those post-conflict tasks were treated, as one US commander put it, like quote, "a dripping bag of manure." That's from John Yeosock, who commanded the 3rd Army in the first Gulf War. And he talked about his experiences going into his staff when they get ready to go on the operation, he asked questions about how are we taking care of prisoners of war? How are we taking care of refugees? And people hadn't kind of thought about that stuff. And he said, it was a dripping bag of manure that nobody wanted to handle. Because the assumption was somebody else was going to do this. The UN or-- This is somebody else's bag of manure? That's right. The UN's going to take care of this, or the Iraqis themselves are. Or the Red Cross will do it. But he said, no, we've got to be prepared to do this. I'm John Yeosock. I commanded the US, UK, and French Army ground forces during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. I've been retired now for a dozen years. And probably my worst feelings about that whole war is that so many things went so well, so quickly. Because no one was left with an understanding of really what it takes to get it done. Getting it done for Lieutenant General Yeosock did not just mean coordinating battles. No, after this short, seemingly easy war was officially over, Kuwait was in shambles. The Kuwaiti government and a lot of its workforce had fled. Iraq had been occupying the country for months. There were landmines to clear, a port to dredge, oil wells on fire, and a lot of just plain destruction of buildings and infrastructure, plus tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees and prisoners of war. Not to mention all the things we're now familiar with, because they didn't get done in the Iraq War: getting electricity and water back to normal, policing the streets, a thousand issues. Made my head hurt always, because I could not think of everything. You live your whole life learning how to dominate an enemy, and all that kind of stuff. Who likes to be in charge of ensuring that diapers are available for these displaced civilians? But as a human being, you understand that, well by golly, you just do it. Of course, civilian agencies do a lot of this postwar work too. But sometimes it's not safe for large numbers of civilians to come in, even after major combat is over. Remember the UN compound getting bombed in Iraq? The military is used to operating in the midst of chaos, so they end up handling a lot of nonmilitary tasks when major combat ends, whether they prepare for them or not. After the first Gulf War, which we won in 100 hours on the ground, the Department of Defense spent a year rebuilding Kuwait. Desert Storm was such an overwhelming success, in terms of measures like time, casualties, et cetera, that because so many of these things went so smoothly, I think just too many people didn't understand that things like this had to be done. It was probably one of the worst lessons we took away. It looks so easy on the surface. Here's Crane again, talking about the first Gulf War. The stuff that happened afterwards just was not-- didn't get any notice. And it wasn't studied and it should have been. There's a military saying that defeat is an army's best teacher. An unspoken corollary is that success is often not the best teacher. And because the aftermath of the first Gulf War wasn't studied and absorbed, the lesson that many in the military and civilian leadership took away from that war is that if we wanted to, we could do a better kind of war, quick and decisive. That's what the current war in Iraq was supposed to be, as was Afghanistan. It was part of the revolution former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was pushing in the Pentagon: fewer soldiers, more high tech gear, no nation building. It seems crazy to think about this now, but after Baghdad fell, the plan was to get most of our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2003. Crane is one of dozens of people inside and outside the military who tried to push for more troops for Iraq, not because we'd need them to win the war, but because we wouldn't be able to stabilize the country without them. So whatever happened to Crane and Terrill's booklet, the one that foresaw a lot of the problems we've had in Iraq, and offered a plan for how to prevent them? We got our study out in the end of January. And one of the ironies of it is almost exactly the time we finished the study, is the time that the-- the main reason we had done the study kind of disappeared. On January 20, 2003, two months before the invasion, the White House decided to switch gears. The Army would not take charge of the occupation after the war. Instead, that would be done by a newly formed civilian body, what would later become the Coalition Provisional Authority. And with that announcement, Crane and Terrill's booklet, months of work, was dropped from the planning process for the war. And they weren't the only ones. In the months leading up to the invasion, other detailed plans and warnings about the coming occupation were also being ignored or shut out, including efforts by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development, the Marine Corps, the National Defense University, the Rand Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations. One of the tragedies of Iraq is that so many people did try to plan for the post-major combat phase. But the civilian leadership at the Pentagon resisted suggestions that the occupation might be long and complicated and require nation building. So almost none of that planning, not Crane and Terrill's, not any of the others, was put into action when it might have mattered. Anything we've worked on, the main payback is going to be that it's going to be valuable to people in the field, and we're going to save lives. And I think we really felt that about the study, that's this was something that people in important places are going to be able to make real use of this. Instead of seeing people in important places make use of his research, Crane had the opposite experience. He had to watch while one thing after another that he and Terrill had hoped to prevent came to pass. I kept asking him, didn't that drive you crazy? But he wouldn't take the bait. He's a former soldier and historian, not much given to public acts of gloating or hand wringing. The one time he did show real frustration, in the form of a sharp sigh, was when I asked him about the moment in 2003 when he'd heard the Iraqi army had been disbanded, something he and Terrill had strongly warned against in the booklet, saying that sending home men with guns was a bad idea, that they might turn the guns on us. So here comes that sigh. I had [SIGH]-- I was actually in communication by email with a couple of colonels who were working on how to kind of reform the Iraqi army. And I got to admit that I was really surprised, as were these colonels, shocked is probably too mild a term. Basically, I read it in the newspaper like everybody else. I was here at the War College, just reading the paper, and boom, there it was. And many people have pointed to that as maybe the greatest single mistake in our post-major combat operations actions. But we just had no inroads into the decision making process. You look at it with disappointment. You wish it'd gone different. And you hope that it was the right decision. You hope to be wrong? The way I explain to people when they say, well gee, how come they didn't listen to you? There are a lot of competing truths out there. I understand why very high level decision makers went the route they did, based on other truths. We have a very pessimistic view of Iraq, which in the end, I think turned out to be the right one. But we're just a bunch of observers at the Army War College. We did not have the prestige some of the other agencies had that were producing much more rosy scenarios of what was going to happen. But we did all we could do. We did more than we could do, if you look at some of the back channel routes we took to send this thing around. I read the report all in one sitting, and I was preparing to come over to Iraq. In fact, I was frustrated in my inability to get over here sooner. Colonel H.R. McMaster was one of the people Crane gave the booklet to on his own initiative, through back channels. He got it to him in April, 2003, one month into the war. McMaster went on to pull off one of the astounding feats of the war. He figured out a strategy in a place called Tal Afar to do what we've been finding mostly impossible elsewhere in Iraq: defeating a fierce insurgency. I called him in Baghdad. Doctor Crane said that you told him you handed out the booklet when you got to Iraq. You handed out his booklet like Hari Krishna literature. Is that true? Yes, it is true. Well, I had an in with Conrad Crane, so I asked him to send me a box of them, essentially, and loaded up every spare space in my luggage with the published monograph. About how many? Gosh, I think about 50. 50? Right. And then Doctor Crane sent me some more also, once I had a mailing address where I was based in [? Gutter ?] at the time. I don't even know the highest ranking person who read this. I mean, without naming any names, how high up were you able to get this booklet? I probably can't-- it probably just wouldn't be appropriate for me to answer that. Right. As things were unfolding, and you had this booklet, this information on your mind, did you wish that more people had read it? Gosh, I probably shouldn't comment on that one too much either. These days, McMaster splits his time between a London think tank and Iraq, where he's part of the team assembled by the top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to redesign US strategy in the country. But when McMaster first arrived in Baghdad, Crane and Terrill's booklet helped him grasp the scope of what he was facing. And then, like Crane had done, he went on a history binge. A scholar at West Point went to the library at Columbia University, and pulled out a lot of books that were published by the British in the 1920s, photocopied the pages, scanned them in, and sent them to us on email. The pages had a breakdown of the tribes in the area where he and his soldiers were fighting. He also brought in an officer with a degree in Middle East history to serve with his regiment for two months. He reached out to other scholars, talked to Iraqis, all of which seems smart and straightforward. Why not look back and learn? The way McMaster and Crane saw it, we were facing tasks in Iraq we had faced before: counterinsurgency, stabilization and reconstruction. We knew how to do these things. But until well into the Iraq war, looking back was out of fashion among the people running the Pentagon. All through the 1990s and right up through 2003, the Defense Department was so focused on propelling itself into the future, that in the process, lessons from the past got ignored, and some tried and true, old school, boots on the ground soldiering just got eliminated. We wrote out of our doctrine in the 1990s reconnaissance, finding out about the enemy, discovering the intentions of the enemy through questioning the population, through forcing the enemy to react with a reconnaissance force that could also fight for information. We also wrote out security operations, because we decided that we're not going to be surprised anymore. And this was a time where many people were sort of filled with a hubris about American technological superiority. There are two faith based arguments out there. Here's Crane again. The one is that, I guess you'd call it the historians who say that nothing is new. Everything is based in the past, and if you understand the past, then you're prepared for the future. Then there's the, I guess you'd call them the technocrats, who say no, no, no, technology has changed everything. It's all brand new. The past is irrelevant. And it's always been a problem for any generals trying to predict what the future's going to be like, how much is new and how much is old? Nobody ever gets it right. Sir Michael Howard, the famous British military historian, he says nobody ever gets it right. The question is, how can you make sure that you're not so wrong that you can't make up for your mistakes? You were saying before that in all of the competing truths and reports that were circulating before the war started, that you guys somehow didn't have as much muscle or prestige as other reports or truths that were circulating. Do you feel like the fact that you were so prescient in this report, do you feel like you have a little more muscle now? That people will listen to you? I get invited a lot more conferences, to give a lot more presentations. That sounds like a punishment. Not really. Andy Terrill was one of the people working with the Iraq Study Group. I've been asked to do a lot of work with people on developing scenarios, stability ops. Got drawn into the development of counterinsurgency doctrine for the Army and the Marine Corps. Everybody is thinking about this stuff now. It's very encouraging. But the question I get every time I do a presentation on counterinsurgency, and this new impetus on irregular warfare, and all these things we've talked about is, after Iraq, will we still be interested in it? Or is there are going to be this reaction again, like post-Vietnam, where we're all going to try to pull back in our shell? What do you think? I think that the best answer to that was one that was given by David Kilcullen. He's a counterinsurgency expert who's now advising Petraeus. That's the one. And he said basically, you know, our enemies are going to make us fight these kind of wars until we get them right. And that's the future we face; these very messy wars that play to our weaknesses, not to our strengths. I don't think we're going to be able to pull back and ignore these kind of things. That story from Nancy Updike, one of the producers of our show. Coming up, the sober discussion ends and the yelling begins. 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 for this Memorial Day weekend, The Center For Lessons Learned. We have stories from Iraq, what we've learned, what we did not learn in time. We began our show today talking to people at the Army's Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And the men at the reference desk there say that their most popular item these days is this 79 page booklet called "A Soldiers' Handbook: The First 100 Days." Colonel Steven Maines, who runs the center, says the whole reason for this booklet comes out of something that they found in the research. We did some statistical analysis, and showed that the first 100 days is really the most dangerous part of a deployment. Most of the casualties happen in the first 100 days. So based on that, we said let's transfer that information. Things that the guy knows at day 250, let's transfer that information to the soldier before he deploys. So to figure this out, they surveyed soldiers who were in Iraq. How did they survive? What were the factors that led to their comrades getting killed? And then they put together this handbook. I have one here. One of the biggest things that got people killed in the first 100 days, soldiers told the center, was just complacency; not properly preparing for patrols, losing focus. Going on patrols at the same time every day, or along the same route, or with the same stops, so the enemy would be able to pick up a routine. This book reviews all kinds of practical things like what to do if you're ambushed, how to deal with a sniper. There are procedures that were invented in Iraq on what to do if a bomb stops you in the road. They have names like the five to five drill. Here's the five Cs. In fact, fully half of this booklet is about IEDs, improvised explosive devices, with page after page here of different kinds of IEDs. And then they have these photos of detonators, the detonators which include the most mundane, household stuff, like for example, the little push button thing on your key chain that unlocks your car door. Milt Hileman is a senior military analyst. He was the lead analyst for the information in this booklet. One of the things overall that the handbook's trying to impress upon soldiers is this is a very sophisticated enemy, very intent on killing you and killing your buddies. He's a smart guy. He watches what we do. He learns from us, and we got to be just as smart about looking at what he does and learning from what he does. Down on page seven, there's a list of be alert for--. Mm-hmm. I should say to our audience that we've agreed to let you vet which of this material we're going to put over the radio. Yeah. One of the things that shows up a couple of times in the book that you tell people to be alert for is people videotaping ordinary activities. Correct. Explain that one. Why is that one in there? Information operation is a big tool of the insurgency. And they videotape their successful attacks as a way of propaganda and recruiting. So it takes a cameraman in the right place to observe what's going on. There's another section in here. If you'd be willing, I'd like to ask you just to read. Go to page 45. These are tips on how to face the injured and dead. Can I just ask you to just read it? Let me just read one paragraph here. "You may be struck with combinations of pity, horror, repulsion, and anger at the senselessness or the malice of an event. You may feel guilty for failing to prevent it, or surviving it. These reactions are all normal, part of being human. You may blame yourself or the USA. It hurts. Keep in mind that these feelings are honorable and confirm your humanity. At times, however, you may feel emotionally numb. Whatever you feel, remember that the mission must continue." And then there's a series of tips. You have 17 tips here that you say can help you do the mission and live with the memories without being haunted by them. And they include very practical things like number eight, keep humor alive, even graveyard humor, with buddies who understand it. Right. But don't get too gross or too personal. Right. Number 16, don't be disheartened by horrible dreams, feeling tense or intrusive memories. These are normal. And it's better to have them now than to suppress them. Don't keep them hidden. Share them with your buddies. Right. We're trying to give the soldiers the tools to say hey, I'm OK. These are natural feelings. Get it off my chest, and then I can focus on the mission the next day. Milt Hileman. So if all of that is what the military is thinking about when it comes to this war, what do we civilians mostly think about? Well, we have one answer anyway now, in act two of our show, on the civilian perspective. Act two, Am Not. Are Too. Am Not. Are Too. The journalist George Packer, who reports from Iraq and who wrote the book Assassin's Gate said in an interview recently, when he was back in the United States, that while Iraqis tend to get stuck arguing and refighting old historical battles, there is an American version of that too, where we seem condemned to keep reliving the debates from before the Iraq War over whether to go to war, because they never really happened the right way the first time, out in the open, in the sunlight, which I think is true. In Salt Lake City, they recently reargued that argument over the war. It was a good place for it, actually, because Salt Lake City is like the Austin, Texas of Utah, the one liberal city in the state. But because the conservatives are more conservative in Utah, it seems like the liberals are more fiercely liberal. And each of those sides brought a champion, so it was kind of like a superfight of the two sides. On the left, you had the liberal mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, who's traveled around the country calling for President Bush's impeachment. And on the right, one of the icons of conservative talk radio-- and TV for that matter-- Mr. Sean Hannity. One of our regular contributors, Scott Carrier, lives in Salt Lake. And he was there too, sitting way in the back on the lower level. It was in the air, walking into the theater. Truth be told, we don't like each other very much, us and them. We can be surprisingly civil in the grocery store, or even on the road. But inside the theater, our contempt for each other was naked and exposed. Both sides had come for blood. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Associated Students of the University of Utah, we would like to welcome you to our campus. The place was sold out and the seating was mixed, so Hannity supporters were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Rocky supporters, and everyone was checking out their surroundings, trying to read hairstyles and body posture. Who is us, and who is them? And now, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, Mr. Rocky Anderson. [CHEERS AND BOOS] Suddenly, it was like, at last, it's on. There was a half minute of cheering, followed by a half minute of booing, and nothing had happened yet. [CHANTING - "ROCKY, ROCKY"] All right, there will be a time for that. It is now my great privilege, please join us in welcoming national television and radio host, Mr. Sean Hannity. [CHEERS AND BOOS] I looked around at all the Hannity people and started to count. So on my right, there were two married couples, mid-30's, maybe friends who had left their kids with the same babysitter, clapping and cheering for Hannity. And behind, to my left, were five lesbians, like a rugby team, shouting, Rocky, Rocky. It seemed the two sides were about even, and that everyone had gone equally crazy. Rocky went first. He had 30 minutes to lay out his argument. We are in the midst of a tragic, disastrous, illegal war of aggression, into which this nation was led by a disastrous presidency. Rocky's a civil litigator by training and profession, so his strategy was, present the evidence. And he had a lot of it. He showed quotes from intelligence reports, and played video of speeches all up on the big screen with a PowerPoint presentation, like President Bush from 2002, speaking about Iraq. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today-- and we do-- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger, and develops even more dangerous weapons? Here's Rocky. We were deceived. President Bush had no basis whatsoever for making those categorical statements. Because the Bush administration was not acting in self defense. The tragic invasion and occupation of Iraq has been utterly illegal. It constitutes a crime against peace, the same crime for which people were convicted at the Nuremberg Trial. Those costs of the war to the Iraqi people have been massive and tragic. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has no doubt been the best terrorist recruiting tool Bin Laden could ever have hoped for. [APPLAUSE] Given the scale, frequency, and moral depravity of these outrages, President Bush must be held to account through impeachment and removal from office. If we do not call for accountability, we are complicit. [APPLAUSE] Let me explain something. Utah is about 2/3 Mormon, except for right here in the city of their most holy temple, where they're actually in the minority. Rocky was born into a prominent Mormon family, but as a teenager, he crossed over and began to fight what he called the culture of obedience-- people blindly following authority. And this is why we elected him as our mayor. It's also the reason we, or at least a lot of us, are so proud of him now. And it's why the rest of the state pretty much hates him. After Rocky, Hannity had his 30 minutes. We've got a lot of ground to cover. I want to thank the mayor for being here, taking time, especially out of his busy protesting schedule. I know he's been going around the country on his I hate George Bush tour, it's nice to see him back in Salt Lake City a few days. I wonder how much the people of Salt Lake City paid for that little PowerPoint presentation from the 1980s. Hannity didn't talk about the things Rocky had said, whether we were lied to or misled by the President, or whether the invasion of Iraq was a criminal act. Instead, he attacked. Did you, in all this talk about impeaching the president, all the platitudes, did you hear any solutions on how we're going to win the war on terror against people that want to destroy our cities? Did you hear anything about how to help our president win a war after one of the worst attacks in American history? Did you hear any praise for these brave men and women that, as we speak tonight, are in harm's way? Did you hear any talk about any success, how our troops are responsible for liberating 50 million people between Afghanistan and Iraq, women and children and men and women? Did you hear any discussion about how we closed rape rooms, and torture chambers, and mass graves tonight? Or did you hear the same, old, predictable I hate George Bush? George lied, George lied, George lied. It is the same thing. Hannity's main point, and he said it over and over, was that there was nothing wrong with President Bush wanting to go to war with Iraq. Lots of Democrats wanted it too. He had video to prove it, of John Kerry, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton. Intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaida members. And I will say this, if Rocky Anderson will not be equally intellectually honest and open and criticize the very same people that made the very same arguments, it's not George Bush who should be impeached or removed from office, it's your mayor. Thank you for hearing me out. After the 30-minute opening statements, the next round was a question and answer period. Rocky got to ask the first question. We're to start the clock right now. Mayor Anderson questioning Mr. Hannity. We rely upon governmental leaders for our protection, billions of tax dollars-- But instead of asking a question, Rocky made a three minute background statement. And this upset even some of his supporters. Finally, Hannity stepped in. What's the question, mayor? Do you have a question? I know you don't want to know what's in the rest this memorandum, but this memorandum that laid out-- Then the moderator jumped in, Ken Verdoya from the local public television station. Ladies and gentlemen, everyone including Mayor Anderson, this is, by your agreed format, a question and answer period. [APPLAUSE] And so, I've got to call for the question. So, this memorandum, this brief was given to the President. Mr. Hannity-- Rocky wasted a lot of time and energy throwing punches in the air, while Hannity walked the stage, gesturing to the crowd. In all of my research of you, all my research of you Mr. Mayor, you focus on one person: George Bush. I have never heard on the issues of weapons of mass destruction. You have never, in any press I've seen, asked for John Kerry to resign, Hillary Clinton to resign. You admire Joe Biden, you've said in interviews. You've said you admire the former Klansman Robert Byrd. Why won't you, and here's my question, why won't you show intellectual honesty? And if you're going to demand that George Bush be removed from office, what about some of your democratic friends who made the same arguments? OK, do I get a chance to respond? I, as everybody here probably knows, you say you've read my speeches, but apparently you haven't gotten through to the end. I think that our Congress is absolutely complicit. Those who voted for this resolution were wrong. But let me tell you--. Too much. It got ugly. Verdoya, the moderator, tried to keep things in line, but there wasn't much he could do. Opportunity for the question, Mayor. He just said something. I want to respond to that. I want to respond. I will let you do that, because I can't stop anybody else. I would throw this watch away, but it was a gift from my wife. [LAUGHTER] I've researched you. I know you are out of town, what 74 days out of the year last year. I know that you have-- [BOOS] Hang on. You know, I knew you would do this. Can I finish? This is classic--. All right, all right. Gentlemen, OK, right now, we're going to freeze. I want to take a break. I do not want this to go any more personal. I want you to ask a damn question about Iraq, and I want you to answer it. Get to the point, ask the question, find the bottom line, put it out there, and then you respond. When I asking that question, he divides everybody, liberals, conservatives. Now, the question please, Mr. Mayor. The question is, let me give the background. When it was over, I walked home feeling tired, asking myself, what just happened? There was no knockout, no clear decision. Everybody came out thinking their guy had won. Nobody had changed their minds. And then I remembered there were two moments in the debate when everybody felt the same way, like what happens sometimes in a concert or a play. The audience becomes one emotion. It happened the first time when Rocky showed photos of dead Iraqi civilians, including bloody bodies of Iraqi children. Initially, the audience cried foul. You're hitting below the belt. But as the images continued, the room became quiet. Photos of dead children, time stopped, thinking stopped. All that was left was the feeling, this can't go on. We have to stop doing this. It was like mass nausea. Then the screen showed a government document, and everyone snapped out of it. It went by so quickly, but then it happened again, when Hannity showed documentary footage of dead Kurds, victims of Saddam's nerve gas bombings. Whole families lying dead in the street, little kids, dead children. The room became like a quiet lake. And I thought, this is it. The solution lies here. Forget all the political arguments, and just sit by this lake and try to figure out its name. The moon was nearly full. The city was going to sleep. Train horns spread out across the valley floor, and rolled up the sides of the foothills. We don't like each other very much, us and them. But we have this lake between us. Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. He's the author of Running After Antelope, and a producer with hearingvoices.com. Act three, The Lessons of Tomorrow, Today. Earlier in our radio show, we were talking about how lately, Congress has been debating withdrawing from Iraq, and timelines for withdrawal, and benchmarks for withdrawal. And we all just felt like, what happened? It's like suddenly people have staked out positions for and against withdrawing from Iraq, and they're all shouting at each other, and there is this momentum toward withdrawal. And the only question seems to be how soon. Is it going to be super soon or is it only going to be somewhat soon? And it's like the US skipped the part where everybody looks seriously at whether withdrawal is a good idea in the first place, or what would happen in Iraq if we would withdraw. You know what it's like? It's like we got into the war in Iraq without much of a national debate about realistically what's this war going to mean? What's it going to mean to be in Iraq? And now people are talking about withdrawing, without much serious discussion at all about realistically what it will mean to leave, or why we're leaving. So to get some perspective on all these questions about Iraq that are not being talked about so much, we called Thomas Ricks, a Washington Post reporter, author of the book Fiasco, about the invasion and the early years of the war. I reached him in Baghdad. Right now here in the States, I feel like we hear two opposite things that will happen if the US leaves. And one is that if we leave, it's going to be terrible and it will be a bloodbath. And then the other thing we hear is that if we withdraw, it will help make things better. That we are part of the problem. That we are preventing the Iraqis from sitting down and working this thing out themselves. Those are two radically different versions of what the future would be. Can I ask you to talk about how do we even think about that? How should we even think about this question? I think it's a good question. I would add a corollary to it though, which is the debate also presumes that it's a binary situation. Either we get out or we stay big and heavy like we are now. You might be able to get yourself to a situation where you stay in a much smaller way, not as an occupying force, which is what we are really now, but as a small security guarantee for all parties. And that might be one aspect of the discussion of withdrawal, is there's different ways to withdraw. There is a responsible way, perhaps. What should we be thinking about in thinking about that? Well, you certainly would be playing a different role. You no longer would be an intervener in the daily life of Iraqis. What would your role be? You probably would have a few thousand American troops training and advising this Iraqi army we created. You probably would have a few more thousand American troops to be available to bail out that Iraqi army, if it got in a big difficult fight, or to rescue the American advisers if they were somehow beleaguered. You'd also want a few thousand troops in Baghdad as a security guarantor for the Iraqi government you created. All that probably adds up to somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 US troops. And the only thing is, this was actually the recommendation made at the Pentagon last fall by a group of smart colonels, who were convened to consider the future strategy for Iraq. They summarized it as three options: go big, go long, go home. Go long, meaning have a smaller force, but stay for a longer period of time? Exactly. Find a way to get smaller and stay longer. Let me ask you something very basic, and that is it seems that the only reason to do a kind of mass pullout from our presence in Iraq is if it turns out we are doing not much good for anybody at all. How do we tell when we've gotten to that point? I think actually the break-point for something like that would probably come out of the American political system. The scenarios you hear here in Iraq from people are things like this: what happens if an Iraqi army unit turns on an American unit and slaughters it? Would the American political system, at that point, simply get us out of there? We don't need this. Or if it becomes very clear that there is a full-blown civil war going on in this country, not just the low level chronic civil war you have now. I have to tell you, it's hard to understand how that version of the civil war would look so terribly different from this version of the civil war from here. It would look and feel very different here in Iraq, I think. This is not a normal country right now, by any means. You've had kind of a soft ethnic cleansing going on, but you haven't had the forced movements of hundreds of thousands of people under fire like you had in Bosnia, for example. It would look very different, I think. So in thinking about different ways to leave, what should we be thinking about in thinking about that? Leaving is problematic. It is actually not-- the most difficult of all military movements is retreat under fire. And leaving would probably would be that. Basically, you have 40% of the US Army's equipment, and 40% of the US Marine Corps' equipment in this country. Literally tens of thousands of Humvees, of trucks, of tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stryker fighting vehicles, and all this sort of gear of war, of a high tech war of generators and computers. It would take a long time to get all the Americans out of the country and all the American equipment. So you'd have the prospect of long American convoys, thousands of vehicles trailed, or interspersed among them, with thousands of Iraqi refugees. Month upon month of convoys heading from here to Kuwait. It would be daily televised images for months, perhaps also of those convoys being bombed or shot at. Do you think somehow it's connected, the fact that we didn't debate so well how to get into the war, and the fact that we're not debating so well what to do at this stage, and how to withdraw or end or adjust to what to do next in the war? I think because we didn't have the debate going in, because we didn't have congressional oversight, hearings on things like what our strategy was, what the training program for Iraqis was, how many American troops were involved, how much did it cost, was it effective? The basic questions were never asked about this war. It was only last fall, after the Iraq War had gone on longer than American participation in World War II, that Congress kind of began to awake from its slumbers and ask some of the basic questions. But there's an awful lot of lost time there, and Congress still hasn't held a lot of the basic hearings about this war, how it operates. And I think that's one reason the debate seems both so rudimentary, so lacking in information, and so unable to move forward and consider alternatives, and third ways, and consequences. Right. It's a debate that's built on slogans. Yeah. And one of the things that is not happening here in the States is people talking about, well, what is our moral obligation to this country that we invaded? Don't we have an obligation to just stay until something gets fixed, until we fix something? Does that idea come up among the soldiers you talk to? Do they talk about our obligation to the Iraqi people? Not with the front-line grunt. Yeah, in the cool confines of the military planners, yeah, you do have those conversations. And that might be why you see a movement to a different sort of American presence. I've got to tell you, the American military approach here now feels very different to me than it did in 2003, 2004, 2005. Back then, the American military was very focused on killing or capturing the enemy, and treated the Iraqi people basically as the playing field on which the game was played. And there wasn't a lot of looking out for the interest, I think, of the Iraqi people, of saying the paramount thing is to protect the Iraqi population. Now they are clearly being told by the American generals here, the troops are being told, your number one priority is protecting the Iraqis. Listen to the Iraqis. Respect the Iraqis. Honor the Iraqis. That's a very different message going out to our troops. And putting US forces out in these small combat outposts does increase the risk to US troops, and you're seeing that with the numbers of troops, the 6, 12, 15 a day you're seeing die right now. You are taking more risk. We're seeing more American troops die in the service of protecting the Iraqi population. So it is possible to change the nature of the American presence. It was really striking to me. I was down in the Green Zone today, where the American headquarters is in Baghdad. And I thought man, I used to hate coming into the Green Zone. And the reason I hated it is because it had such an air of unreality to it. It gave me a headache. I would rather be out on the hot, nasty streets of Baghdad than inside the air conditioned hallways of the palace there. Because it was just so wildly irrelevant to what was happening outside the walls of the Green Zone in the real Iraq. I remember getting a little bit surly with an American general about 14 months ago here, it was February '06. And I said, you have no idea what it's like on the streets of Baghdad, do you? Because it was really a pure Hobbesian state at that point. And he said, no, no, it's actually pretty good out there. I said, put on civilian clothes, and see if you can walk one mile anywhere in Baghdad alone. And I said, I guarantee you, you won't. By the end of that mile, you're going to be dead or kidnapped. And he said, I don't believe you. And I thought, these guys are just totally out of touch. It struck me today, being here in the Green Zone, what the assessments are to the situation, this is the first time I've really heard American officials talk about this in a way that the average Iraqi man on the street could understand and say, yeah, that's right. That's pretty much what's happening here. But it was very sober, very understanding of how many mistakes we've made, how much this has been screwed up by the US government, and what a deep hole they're in. I found the sobriety and the edge of pessimism refreshing. I have to say, that sounds actually sort of hopeful. Hopeful in the bizarre sense that it's a different crew in here now. The problem is, and the huge question is, is it simply too little, too late? Thomas Ricks in Baghdad. A new paperback edition of his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq comes out in July, with a new afterword discussing some of these questions about what now. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updaike and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollack, and Alisa Shipp. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind and Tommy Andres. Music help from Jessica Hopper, web help from Sho Jou Yung. Special thanks today to Steve Cashket, Dan Ephron, Andrew Metz, Haider Hamza, Kiki Munchy, and Brian Sargent. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support also comes from audible.com, where you can download audio books, magazines, newspapers, and radio shows, including archives from the last 10 years of this show, audible.com/thisamericanlife. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Torey Malatia, who says we are not using his real talents. You know, you live your whole life learning how to dominate an enemy and all that kind of stuff. Who likes to be in charge of ensuring that diapers are available? 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. Mr. Goodman and I get these regularly. Sometimes people think we make them up. Vincent Homenick and his boss, Norman Goodman, have to enlist 1,800 jurors a day for the state courts of New York City. And they have heard every possible excuse, real and fake, for avoiding jury duty. And they've saved some of them in this very thick folder. Believe it or not, we still get the old, my cat threw up on the summons and I could not send it in. Here's a summons with cat throw-up on the back. It's red and sort of a mustard color. We get used tubes of Anusol, stating that the woman has hemorrhoids and can't sit. We get pictures. Instead of a doctor's note, they send in pictures of their condition as if we know it's the actual person. Oh, this is just a random photo of a man in a wheelchair. That's right. And he says, as you can see, I'm not able to serve on jury duty. Actually, using a wheelchair, or blindness-- or deafness, for that matter-- will not get you out of jury duty in New York. I got a letter the other day and it was not signed by the doctor. This is Vincent's boss, Norman, who's been in this job since 1969. It was signed by a nurse in the doctor's office. And the nurse said that this prospective juror has a chronic condition. Well, so have we all. Wait. It didn't say what the condition was? Didn't say what the condition was. Just said she's got a chronic condition that prohibits her from serving on jury service. An unspecified medical condition is one they've seen a lot in their jobs as county clerk and chief clerk. They also encounter a certain amount of rudeness. "Dear County Jerk," one letter opens. "Are you brain-dead?" Many New York citizens send back things we cannot broadcast on their official jury forms. Now here's one where someone has just scrawled in black pen to F off. We, unfortunately, get a lot of these. They seem to think that they can write anything on an official court document, which is not the case. One particular gentleman, during a noncompliance proceeding, blamed his seven-year-old sister for sending in pornography that was attached to our juror qualification questionnaire. The judge did not believe him. The judge did fine him, and he ended up serving. Serving his jury duty, that is. One man wrote in saying that he was simply too racist to be on a jury. But the single most common excuse? People can't afford the time. They're single moms with no childcare. They're people who will not be able to pay the bills if they take off work. They think they are simply too important for jury duty. None of this cut it with Norman and Vincent, by the way. Court clerks talk to these people, try to accommodate their schedule somehow. And part of the formula is the court clerks appeal to their idealism, their sense of duty. You make it a personal thing. I tell them, if you had a case or a family member, you'd want the best jury possible. You'd want a fair cross-section. And that's the only way to get fair jurors is to get a fair cross-section and let everybody be part of it. So it's important that everybody serves. When you give people that speech, does that work on most people? I think it does. And in general-- in general-- people are responsible. People want to serve. They're generous with their time. And-- not to put too fine a point on it-- they are threatened with fines and jail time if they don't show up. But most do show up. Only 9% of the people who are summoned here for jury duty fail to show. Another 15%, Norman and Vincent say, try to contest or postpone their eligibility. And there is one curious thing that the court's own exit questionnaires show, and that is that people who actually get to sit on a case and hear evidence and get to a verdict say they liked the experience way more than the people who just show up and don't get a case and then actually get to go home earlier. Something kicks in for the people who actually get on to juries. Suddenly, it seems important to do the right thing. Which brings us to today's program. Today we're going to devote our entire show to the story of somebody who gets called for a job that he does not want-- that nobody would want, really. The kind of family obligation all of us face at some point or another, in some form. Though, this guy faces a more extreme version of it than most of us do. And he goes. Because, corny as it sounds, sometimes duty calls. And sometimes it calls you to Florida. Stay with us. When Josh Bearman grew up in suburban Pasadena, his dad worked for NASA-- was a physicist. He had a stepmom, and he had a brother named Ethan. That's not his whole family. When we first ran this next story in 2007, his mom was living in Florida along with his half-brother, David. Josh had gone for a while, not spending much time with them, but one day, he had no choice. Here's how different the two halves of my family are. My brother Ethan, who grew up with me in California, left high school early for a conservatory, where he studied French horn. He has a house, a wife, a son, and fills in with the LA Philharmonic. But my brother David in Florida, well, here he is. Yeah, I just got this police report for my DUI, and I'm gonna read it here. But I can already see a couple of things that are absolute bull-[BLEEP]. This wasn't even the original officer, and he's gonna talk about what he saw. David's been arrested a bunch of times-- not for anything violent, just a DUI, a shoplifting charge or two. Then there's my father, the nuclear physicist. He sometimes launches at Caltech's Athenaem, surrounded by Nobel laureates. Here's my mom describing someone she might have lunch with. OK, Terron-- I used to call him the creeper. He's a street hustler, and that's all he'll ever be. He's waiting for a liver transplant. The last time I lived with my mother, I was nine. After my parents' divorce, my half-brother David-- he was just an infant at the time-- stayed with my mother, and my father got custody over me and Ethan. That's when my mom started drinking seriously. As she got worse, we only caught glimpses of her. Occasional drunken phone calls late at night, a few sightings on family holidays. For several years in there, I didn't even know where she was. Once, in an effort to connect with her, I arranged for me, my brother Ethan, and my girlfriend Ronnie to all fly across the country to meet my mother and David for a visit at my grandparents' house. My mother didn't show. A few years ago, my grandparents staged a rescue. They brought my mom and David to Florida, where they all lived among the palm trees and strip malls. It was a strange world down there. David got into rapping, freestyling at MC battles so he could leave his mark on the greater Palm Beach area hip-hop scene. He made friends with a producer, Jermaine, who was not exactly a producer, but a kid who met David at the Olive Garden and then moved in with him and my mom. At first, I was skeptical of this arrangement, until I realized that Jermaine was the most responsible one of the bunch, with David mostly jobless, and my mom still devising elaborate cover stories for morning trips to the liquor store. These were transparent to me, but often fooled my grandparents, who devoted their final years to trying to manage all this-- posting bail, taking care of rent, paying for treatment plans, and David's $3,000 cell phone bills. I'd visit a few times a year and always felt stunned at the way they lived. I'd have to remind myself sometimes that these people were my immediate family. I didn't understand them, and they played little role in my daily life. Then one day last year, they took over my life. It started with a phone call from David. By this time, my grandparents had both died, and my mom and David lived in my grandfather's condo at Century Village, a retirement community in West Palm Beach. Now David was calling because he was about to start a 30-day jail sentence. Our mother, he said, had been so drunk she hadn't moved from the couch in weeks. He was sure she would die if he left her there. I got a neighbor to go over. She took one look at my mother and called an ambulance. When the paramedics brought her to intensive care, the attending physician called me to ask what the hell happened to her. I said I didn't know. The next morning, I got on a plane for Florida. When I arrived, my mom was in the hospital, unconscious, and attached to a tangle of intravenous drips. The DTs would set in over the next few days. It was shocking, but equally shocking was what I saw when I went to her condo. The place was so bad, it looked like a crime scene. The couch had a blackened depression where she'd been sitting for God knows how long. There were overflowing ashtrays, real and improvised, and trash everywhere. It smelled like urine and nicotine. There were burns in the couch, and a 4-foot patch of blackened carpet that looked like someone had spent several days rubbing bong water and soot into the floor on purpose. It took a month for me to even begin sorting it all out. I arranged for David to complete his jail sentence in the condo under house arrest. When my mother stabilized, I got her transferred to a nursing facility-- the only one that would accept her with no insurance. But that was just the beginning. With my grandparents gone, it was clear that she and David literally had no idea how to survive by themselves. Now she faced destitution from all the medical bills, and David was on the verge of serious jail time was one more screw up. It began to dawn on me that I couldn't go back home to California. Someone had to help get them back on their feet, and there was nobody left but me. And that's how I wound up spending four months in Florida as a reluctant social worker for my own family. Hi. I've got kind of a strange situation. My mom lives at 240 Bedford J, and she's in the hospital-- It's a typical Wednesday. My mom's still in the nursing home, but there are various documents I need to pick up from her condo. The problem is Century Village is a rather heavily fortified retirement community. It's set up like some kind of geriatric army base, with many thousands of octogenarians housed in blocks and protected from solicitors and terrorists alike by a big walled perimeter. You can't get past the tightly-monitored gates without having someone add your name to a list or flashing a residence pass. David recently lost his own pass and began resorting to commando tactics-- sneaking in through gaps in the golf course fence, or scaling the wall behind the gas station. I can't get on the stupid list myself, since you can only add visitors' names by calling from within your house. So my mom can't call me in from the nursing home where she's living now. Instead, I have to rely on her neighbors, who are easily confused and don't like to rock the boat. Hello? Hi, it's Josh calling again. Yes? So I called my mom and she couldn't really figure out any other way for me to get in. Uh-huh. So I don't know. I wanted to try to return to the idea of maybe you calling me in somehow. Well-- The neighbor does not call me in, which is nothing new. But after half an hour, I managed to convince one of the commanding officers of the gatehouse regime to let me through. Inside the wall, Century Village is like its own city. There are acres of condos amongst man-made lakes, and the whole thing is serviced by a pharmacy and general store. There are several club houses and a shuttle system that takes residents to nearby shopping centers. In Century Village-- where the entire place knows when you've put your car in the wrong parking spot-- imagine the impression made by my mother, drunk on the shuttle at noon, or David in a wife-beater, arguing with his pill-popping girlfriend on the grass at midnight. Needless to say, they made for very conspicuous neighbors at 240 Bedford J. So I'm just getting to my mom's condo in Century Village. The window's broken. That's from a hurricane. And this place is a real mess. What's in the f-- oh, boy. There's even roaches in the fridge. And there's roaches in the microwave. I should just turn the microwave on. That'll fix that problem. [MICROWAVE BEEPS] [MICROWAVE RUNNING] All right. I'm getting out of here. It's been about a month since I was here the last time-- since my mom was rushed to the hospital-- and coming back is surprisingly emotional. I looked for this old photo that was in the bedroom on my last visit. My mom's got a-- there's a picture of her when she was really young. And I saw that and I started crying. This is the picture of my mom that sort of made me upset. And it's actually a picture I've seen around for a long time. This is my mom probably when she's 30 years old. My mom was like this happy, healthy, attractive woman. And it reminded me what it meant that my mom has wound up this way. She's unrecognizable when you compare her to this picture. [COUGHING] Excuse me. You've got grandma's cough. I know. Yeah. My mom and I are in the car. She's improved considerably since I checked her into the nursing home. At that time, she was still in a wheelchair and couldn't eat solid food. Now she's walking, back up to two packs a day, and complaining about her roommate. Well, and then for one thing, I was in the same room with Mrs. Ayala, the Jesus freak. Yeah. At 5:00 AM she'd be up yelling, praise Jesus! Glory, hallelujah! And then she turned on the religious station. It'd be on all day. If I attempted to change the channel, she'd start reading Bible verses to me. Then one day, I got annoyed at her. I said, enough is enough. It's been on since 5:30 till 10 o'clock at night. I want to watch a regular show. She called me the devil. That was it. I called Corinne. I said, I'm out of this room. She called you the devil? Yeah. She says, you're the devil. But she was all friendly when I was there. Oh, yeah. Well, that's her. She's got a whole lot of stuffed animals, that's for sure. From a purely medical perspective, my mother has made a dramatic recovery. Along the way, she's created a whole life for herself at the nursing home. And this is the first floor. She takes me on a tour, waving at the staff she likes and pointing out all the friends she's made. I hang out with Jean and Judy, the smokers. Judy's the one that has the cute little shoes. And Jean's the one-- she lives on the second floor. She has a room all to herself. She's older-- yeah, eyepatch. Oh, she's the one with the little designer eyepatch? Yeah. Well, it's not a designer eyepatch. Well, it's not black. No. Here's the lady who takes her clothes off all the time. Oh, there she is. Oh, she's in the process right now? As far as I'm concerned, she's too comfortable here. This nursing home is fairly grim. Kind of a hellhole, actually. Did you ever see that movie Jacob's Ladder? You know that scene where Tim Robbins hallucinates being admitted into a hospital run by monsters? It's kind of like that. The place is totally isolated, surrounded by swamp. There are catatonics parked in the halls, drooling. One woman roams around constantly weeping. Michael, a stroke victim, seems to be standing in every corner, staring at you with these sad, hollow eyes. And that's the good floor. Upstairs are the real basket cases. That's where the howling dwarf lives. We're all afraid to go up there. My mother saw him only once, but you can hear him every night, his voice echoing out into the sawgrass. The only thing worse is the buzzing. God knows why, but the patients' call button in this place isn't a bell or a buzzer like in any normal hospital. It's this. This can go on for 10, 15 minutes straight. An hour, even. Sometimes my mother wakes up in the night to find the buzzer blaring and an orderly asleep in her room. I find it frustrating that she's not more frustrated. Well, as far as the nursing home is concerned, you're sort of stuck there. You might as well make the best of it. At least have a few people you can talk to and-- But I mean emotionally. I mean, you haven't actually been too upset about your situation, outwardly. Well, what am I supposed to do Joshua, cry all the time, or throw a fit all the time? No, I mean, I was glad to see that, in that sense, you were kind of bounced back to normal much faster than I thought. But to me, when I come here-- and for years I'd come here-- and you don't have any idea, but to me and Ethan, this is not normal at all, the way you and David live. It's kind of always like something happens that makes things a little bit worse, and it seems worse, but then you adjust to it, and the sudden that becomes normal. That doesn't ever translate into some kind of action, I guess. Well, it has. And then I put out this great effort, and then I start to lose the energy and I can't get it back. I don't seem to be able to get it back. And I get more and more depressed. I don't know how to explain it. I really don't. If I knew the answers to these questions, Josh, I'd be a very mentally healthy person. This quality of hers-- this ability to adapt to anything-- is what got her here in the first place. My mom adapted to each new rung on the ladder, and then the next step down didn't seem so bad. Take, for example, the hurricane that hit Florida a month before the paramedics came for my mom. As the category five storm was making landfall, David decided to go for a drive. He was pulled over by the cops, which wasn't that surprising since the car had no registration, no insurance, no working tail lights, and a cracked windshield. David, who had no license and maybe had taken some pills to boot, had been pulled over twice already for having that car on the road. He was thrown in jail for a week, and my mother was left all alone. I mean, I was sitting here in total darkness. There weren't even any streetlights on, you know, wires falling down. Everything was so chaotic. And then, of course, I started drinking out of control, and that was-- I started out saying, I just want a little relief from this insanity, and it made me even more insane. How come you didn't call me during that whole period? Maybe because I really didn't know what to say, Josh. Well, I wish I'd have known to come down. I mean, that's-- and then, especially as it got worse, I mean, I wish somebody had called and-- Yeah, I know. --Ethan or I could have come out. Yeah. Yeah I understand that, Josh, but it's just like-- And I'm not-- I wasn't saying that's to make you feel guilty about not calling me. I was just-- No, it's hard to explain. It's just like, you just don't want to intrude into you and Ethan's life and say, one more time, one more time, one more time. Well, I wouldn't have minded. Well, I didn't know that. I would rather have done that than wind up down here for four months. Yeah, I know that. Well, it's part of the whole cycle. It's that you don't want to tell anybody else because if you tell somebody else, then you're telling yourself, which is the last thing you want to do. All right, what are we doing right now? Right now we're about to go into the Green Acres Police Station to get a copy of my ticket and police report that I need so I can go sign up for the DUI class. This is my brother, David, and we're doing what I do every day down here-- repetitive, exasperating errands, like retrieving a copy of David's DUI charge so he can register for his court-mandated Mothers Against Drunk Driving Victim Impact Panel. This is one of his many conditions for probation. There's a lot of registering for this, reporting for that, retrieving this piece of documentation from that bureaucracy. Everything requires a money order, which, of course, requires money. You guys do money orders? Yeah. How much? $35. That'll be $36. $36? Do I have to pay that? Yeah. I don't have $36. I don't have $5. Riding along for David's probationary checklist, it's easy to see how the downward spiral works. Fail to turn in one piece of paper, and next time you have to show up with two more. Miss a date, and your probation is longer. And that means paying extra to the court for the extended supervision, which means borrowing money, or pawning something, or wiring money, all of which come with huge fees. And David knows this better than anybody. When you're breaking the law, you just watch your money decrease more and more. And not to mention, it's like three, four years ago-- even in 2004, two years ago-- I was doing my thing in the studio. I was getting music done. I was taking care of what I needed to do with that. And since I got off that path and just starting getting all these stupid little charges and [BLEEP], it takes away from my time to do anything. And you don't exactly feel too creative when you're behind bars. They want to try to say that they're going to rehabilitate you, but they don't know what's wrong with you to begin with to rehabilitate that anyway, you know? Right. I mean, rehabilitation involves all kinds of complicated stuff. Figuring out-- What's wrong with you. --why you haven't been holding down a job, or why you keep screwing around, and then helping out once you get out, like I've been doing. Right. Exactly. Like if I didn't have all this help now that I have, it would have been a lot easier-- not saying that I necessarily would have, but it would definitely have been a lot easier to just fall back into that like, well, what's the point of trying type [BLEEP], you know? Because there's nothing to look forward to. There's no way out, so you're like, [BLEEP] it. It's a powerful force, that gravitational pull of downward mobility, because, if you think about it, David really shouldn't be that bad off. He can hold down a job. And he's not a bad rapper, either. He has dozens of notebooks filled with lyrics, and he's even recorded some songs. He's also really funny. Here he is talking about his latest job at the Village Diner, a blue-plate special place that was just outside the gates of Century Village, and where, every day, a busload of regulars would arrive on the noon shuttle for lunch. There was this guy, Big Balls-- well, he would just come in every single day, faithfully, and he'd order the same thing, which was meatloaf, a side of chicken noodle soup, and chocolate ice cream. I still remember. Every single day. But if you walked up like-- you'd want to fill out his ticket already because you already knew what he was ordering. So you'd start writing it, and he'd be like, so what's the special today? And so you'd run through it anyway, knowing damn well that, at the end, he's still just going to say, let me get the meatloaf. And he always seemed surprised when he did it, too. He'd be thinking for a second. Let me get the meatloaf-- every single time. And you'd have to just humor him because there was a couple times when I was like, I know you want the usual. And he's like, wait, wait. Good afternoon, doctor's office. Hi. I wanted to inquire about a letter that I requested from Dr. Thompson regarding my mother, a former patient of his. Meanwhile, my mom's $100,000 hospital bill finally showed up. This is on top of the mounting nursing home expenses. And the only way she can pay for all of it is if I get her on Medicaid and/or Social Security disability, which means tracking down records for every doctor she's ever had. Then there's the fact that my mother is my mother. Like some kind of tragic supervillain who can't control her destructive powers, my mother somehow leaves an accidental trail of carnage wherever she goes. Mailbox 1. You have 21 old messages. [BEEP] Allied Interstate calling in regards to an important personal matter that was described in a letter to you. Due to federal and ethical state statutes, no further information may be left. This is not a solicitation. In this case, it seems that my mom ran into a car, gave the woman driving outdated insurance information, and then left the scene before police showed up. I'd found a letter from the woman and her attorney in the trash, unopened. This is typical of my mother's approach. She doesn't want to confront her problems, and she finds very particular ways of avoiding them. Yeah, I really don't know the layout of this place. Apparel is this way. Every time I call now, my mother demands that I take her shopping. Each day, there's a strangely specific new request-- flip-flops, costume jewelry, hair dye, lottery tickets. When I call to get the name of her neurologist, she wants to know if I picked up the socks she asked for. I told you I'd take you to Walmart eventually. Yeah, right. Why were you dying to get here? I know. Because I need those-- I need a couple-- I need jeans. I think I understand the shopping. My mom doesn't have much control in her life-- no car, no money-- and so buying jean shorts is a goal she can handle. And in Walmart, there's no tragic past or scary future. She's just a customer in the unburdened present. And so we go to Target, Walgreens, and the Dollar Store. One day, I find myself entering a strip mall with the following to-do list. One carton of Marlboro 100s, a 12-pack of [INAUDIBLE] adult diapers, and a jar of herring packed in cream. My friend Starlee is visiting me in Florida, and she can see that it's getting to me. Starlee-- her voice might be familiar because she's done stories on This American Life before-- comes with me on yet another errand, and we discuss my mother's endless to-do list. Last week it was the phone card. We had to get a phone card. We drove all these different places looking for a phone card. And she had a phone card before I got here. And I was saying, well, where did you get that phone card? Wherever you got that one, get it from them! I don't want to drive around and find you a phone card all over Palm Beach County with this. It takes a half an hour between 7-Elevens to get-- it's all so time consuming, and U-turns, and nobody knows where it is. We went to three different places. They didn't have the right phone card. And then we went to one place and she's like, no, I don't want that one. That's not the cheap one. And then we got the phone card, and you know how much-- what the amount of the phone card was that we spent all this time? $5. It lasted $5 worth of minutes? Yeah, she bought only $5 worth of minutes. She said this is the cheap one. It's plenty of minutes on here. Oh, my god. I don't know what to do. I mean, there's a huge-- the thing is that it's not like you come to get her and she's like, let's go to the beach today. I feel I need to be out with the living at the beach, or at the movies, or going to work on something productive in my life-- not like that. It's all the errands revolve around the stuff she needs to take back to this weird place that she now lives. It's like there was never a time before the home, all of the sudden. I know. It's weird, right? But also, compared to the other people in that place-- the rest of the cast of Jacob's Ladder in there-- she looks like she's literally in the administration. I mean, she hangs around with the administrators and the social workers. And she hangs out with them and talks to them, like what are we gonna do about this case that we've got here? And she's totally high-functioning and in on all the decisions about what did you do with the VCR and what's going on with Michael's family? Are they coming today or not? We gotta get him ready. The problem is that, while my mother is obsessing with the small things, there are big things we need to do, like, for example, figure out a plan for her. She can't stay at the nursing home because it's too expensive and depressing. She can't go back to Century Village because she'd be alone and could easily start drinking again. I'd like her to go into some kind of long-term treatment center, but whenever I talk to her about it, she has her own plans. I was going to go up north-- remember we discussed this-- for a few months. And then I'm going to come back here. So your plan is-- I mean, do you think that you'd be better off back here? Yeah, for a time. I mean, I'm asking because, when we moved you in here, Ethan and I, we did that because that made the most practical sense in the short-term, but we were both worried that exactly what happened was going to happen. And you were saying, oh, things are going to be fine. And they weren't fine. They were disastrous to the tune of $100,000 now, maybe. Right, right. No, that's true. But I'm done with the alcohol, Josh. I really am. It kicked my ass so bad this time, physical and emotional. Are you sure? I mean, that's what I want to know. That's what I feel like I need to know. I don't want to go through that pain ever again. Never. Hello, Regan. I'm Damien Karras. And I'm the devil! Now kindly undo these straps! There's this one small, but telling, moment in the movie The Exorcist that's always reminded me of my mother. It's when the devil, through Regan, the possessed girl, is pretending to be Father Karras' dead mother. She speaks to him softly in Greek, and he wants to believe it. You can see his face overcome with emotion, missing her, regretting, and resisting, because he knows it's not his mother. It's a demon. And it's the kind of acting job that all alcoholics can turn out at will. There have been times when my brother, Ethan, and I have had to prepare to talk to my mother the same way that Max von Sydow warns Father Karras before they enter Regan's room. He's a liar. The demon is a liar. He will like to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don't listen to him. Remember that. Do not listen. Doesn't it frustrate you that your mom never acts like your mom? Yeah. Yeah. It's a really horrible feeling, actually, to feel like your mom is lying to you, and that you can't trust anything she says, and that you have to guard yourself against everything, and that you can't-- like now, she says that this is the worst, and I don't want to feel that pain again, and I really want to go in there with her and sympathize. But I absolutely have to-- I learned a long time ago you cannot. You can't because that's when you're susceptible to-- The demon. To the demon. And the demon wants to go to Minnesota now. And I don't know if the demon should go to Minnesota. I want to let the demon go to Minnesota. I want to untie her from the bed and let her free, but then she's going to throw me out the window. The thing is, you would like nothing more than to say-- it'd be a relief for her to just go to Minnesota, probably. It would be a relief. Yeah. Well, coming up, Josh's mom starts talking to him in Greek, so to speak. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, a story that we first ran back in 2007, about Joshuah Bearman and the family duty that he found himself trying to fulfill. When we left off before the break, his mom was still in a nursing home. His half-brother, David, was trying to get his life together and stay out of jail. Josh picks up the story from there. Time can be merciless in South Florida. It's easy for a numbing routine to develop down here, which is exactly what happens as I spend countless hours Xeroxing medical records and driving 40 miles to fix the kitchen sink because David can't quite figure out how to operate the plumber's wrench. Every time there's progress on some small thing, I look up and realize the horizon is still miles away. But at least my mom hasn't been drinking. I was sure that, as soon as she could walk, she'd take the pocket cash I gave her each week and convince someone to smuggle booze into the nursing home. It really wouldn't be that hard. This is a woman who could figure out how to get hooch if she were trapped in Apollo 13. But she's resisted so far, which means one less thing to worry about. It also means I can talk to her without the sway of alcohol clouding every conversation. I can ask her questions that would have been impossible before, like how exactly did this all begin? You know, it's hardly like I woke up one day and said, gee, I'd like to become an alcoholic. And there was absolutely no question that it was brought on by my post-traumatic stress disorder. Flashbacks of the scenario in Minneapolis, vivid, like I was experiencing it all over again. The scenario in Minneapolis? That's another big part of the story-- one that I haven't told you about yet. Part of the reason for my parents' messy divorce was that, when my dad left for his NASA job, my mom was supposed to stay behind, finish up our school year, sell the house, and meet him in Pasadena. Instead, she met a man named Sonny at a Minneapolis nightclub. He was a Cherokee, six-foot-five and lean, charming but moody, and often carrying his guitar. He was the very opposite of my father. Sonny moved in, and my mother never made it to Pasadena. Sonny was also a drug dealer. Sometimes his friends would fill the house, partying full steam and staying up late. I remember being babysat by Sonny's stoned Sioux friends, showing them my dinosaur dioramas and trying to convince them to play Dungeons and Dragons with me. I'm not sure what my mother was after, but she loved Sonny, and my father was heartbroken. And so after my parents' divorce, Ethan and I went back and forth for a while-- a year in California, a year in Minnesota. It was around then that that photograph was taken-- the one I found in my mother's bedroom after she was rushed to the hospital. It's actually a picture of her and Sonny together. My mom is dressed up, yellow lapel points flaring out over a black dress. Sonny is wearing a tan suit. They're on a couch together, both facing the camera. It's my mother's favorite photo from those days. How old was I there? 30? Yeah. In fact, I know it was 30 because it was in August, and it was his 40th birthday, and I was three months pregnant with David. It was a happy time. I remember how good I felt then. I also remember how much I missed feeling like that, enjoying things, just being in love, and all those things. Do you remember when we used to go to the Nature Center, all of us? We'd go with Sonny to Richfield Nature Center? No, I don't remember that. And then I would be coming down the walk, and you guys would jump out at me and try and scare me? I remember that. That was at the Nature Center. I remember just doing that always. Always, yeah. Right. Like in the grocery store and wherever. Someone recently asked me if I love my mother, and I realized I actually had to think about it. I do, of course, but for months I've seen her only as a set of problems. It's often hard to remember the person my mother once was when she enrolled at Cornell at 16, spoke French, and got a master's degree. When she was lucid, I used to like hearing her stories about growing up with my grandparents and their exploits in pre-war Palestine, or talking about the news, since she was always intensely political. I hadn't seen much of that old self on this trip to Florida. And then one evening, I took my mother to dinner at Red Lobster. It must have put her in some kind of good mood because, while we were going over the menu, she starts telling me some story, a tiny episode from my childhood, a little glimpse of what it was like before all this. And I can't even remember what it was other than it flooded me with the sudden, overwhelming realization that this person across from me actually is my mother and that if things had been different, we could have been getting dinner together like normal people. And when I start crying right there, at 4:30 PM at the Red Lobster on Okeechobee Boulevard, my mother tries to comfort me, like mothers do, for the first time in as long as I can remember. I wish things were different, I say. I wish they were, too, she answers. It's hard to say exactly how the woman I remember from childhood became the one sitting with me today. But there's no question a lot of it had to do with that scenario in Minneapolis, which was this one night when some strangers showed up at the house. And these people came to the door and told me that they were having car trouble, asked me if my husband was home, and did we have jumper cables. And it all seemed legit to me because I couldn't get my car started that day. It was really, really cold. So they wanted to use the phone, which sounded logical, although there was a payphone on the corner, and I should have told them to go there or asked them for the number and never let them in the house. What I should have done and what I did do are two different things. So anyway, they came in and they were-- they must have heard him coming up the pathway, because the snow was packed on the walkway. He came in, and that's when the guy puts a gun to my hip and told him, don't come any further. I'm going to blow this bitch away. I was there that night, too. I actually answered the door. I remember how cold it was when the couple came inside. I didn't see him, but outside was a third man. There's always a third man at a hit, the police later said, but I didn't know what was happening. I was in the other room, watching CHiPs with David, when Sonny came home and drew his own 9 millimeter. I heard gunfire, and looked up to see bullets coming through the walls near David. I took him out of his high chair, hid in the bathroom, and watched the hitman out the window, running off past the icicles in the alley. In the other room, Sonny was down. My mother was so frantic she couldn't remember his name when she called 911. I had to get on the line and explain to the paramedics where we lived. I was nine-- or I would be the next day. A few weeks later, Sonny died in the hospital. That's why my father got full custody of me and Ethan. David was Sonny's kid, so he stayed with my mother. We saw them during summer for a few years, but things were never the same. I don't even remember the turning point, but eventually she stopped working, and we stopped going. I've always assumed that those missing years were rough for my mother and David, but while in Florida, I discovered that they were worse than I thought. So I need to find a bunch of records in here. They must have stored boxes. One day, back in the condo, I'm searching for some medical documents. Surprisingly, my mother's effects are pretty well organized, fitting mostly in one small, gunmetal file case. It occurs to me, flipping through, that there's not much in it because not much has happened to my mother. Her entire life fits in this little box. This is something addressed to my mom, 1985. Des Moines Child Guidance Center. Oh, this is about David. "I saw David Parks, age four, on May 22, 1985, after you had referred him to the Des Moines Child Guidance Center at the suggestion of Candace Bennett of juvenile court." Well, that's crazy. How can you be involved in court at age four? Well, here it says, "this was following an escapade in which David stole money out of your purse, wandered away from home, and told the police that he was going to the store to buy some food because his mother had not fed him breakfast. When I saw David, he was living with you but had recently been in a foster home for about a week, or 10 days, while you were in the hospital." Huh. I didn't know David was ever in a foster home. That poor kid. And I didn't know that she was in the hospital in 1985. I didn't quite realize things were that bad that early. A few days later, I bring up those missing years with David. For the first time, I get a clearer picture of what life was like for him, living with a grieving mother who was drinking more and more, and getting caught up with a string of abusive men. They weren't good people. I mean, they weren't the worst people in the world, either. But they all were in and out of jail, beating up Mom, threatening to kill her, threatening to kill me. Like at 14 years old or something, I was thrown into the glass china cabinet that Mom had by her boyfriend, Mark. And he was so drunk, I ended up fighting him that night and finally I restrained him to this chair. It's a weird feeling when you're that young and you've got to stick up for your mother because you're the only-- you are the man of the household. And if you don't stand up for that, then all this other crazy [BLEEP] is going to happen. And having cops called to the house all the time, and then watching her, because she had feelings for him, tell the cops, oh, nothing is happening, or hide him out and [BLEEP] like that. And you, at that age, when you're going through all that, you know it's not right, so you try to act your life isn't bad. You try to act like your life is normal. You hide all that away from the rest of the world. I was scared to have people-- friends of mine-- come over and sleep over at the house because the average kid is going to be freaked out. You try to warn them ahead of time like, look, this situation is grim. You're going to hear [BLEEP] you aren't supposed to hear. You're going to see [BLEEP] that you definitely shouldn't be seeing at this age. And it's real. It's right there in front of you. Cops might be called. Violent acts might occur around you. You've just got to-- you know, you're like a soldier. And so then the kids that do end up coming over that become regulars are the ones just as [BLEEP]-up as you. We went up to this cabin up north, me and this kid named Kenny, who was the son of Kenny, Sr., who was Mark's friend. So they're all drinking. And they put some bottles up on this old truck that's all gutted out or whatever. And there was a competition between me and Kenny on who-- we took a .22 rifle, and who could knock down the most bottles. And I guess they might have put money on the whole thing, whatever. We're in the middle of nowhere, up north Minnesota, close to the Canadian border. So I ended up winning the competition because I was always a good shot. And Kenny, Jr., ended up getting beat by his father because I won. Because that [BLEEP] was so important to them that his son was now a pansy or whatever, because he didn't beat me. David also provided some new details to the story about Sonny. Mom likes to downplay Sonny's drug dealing, although, during one of our conversations, she did let slip that, well, OK, maybe there was cocaine in the house when Sonny was killed, and that she cleverly hid this cocaine from the cops by throwing it in David's diaper hamper. And then David adds this. He was selling cocaine-- I mean, living the gangster lifestyle, and not just normal gangster lifestyle. He used to have a passport, going to all these countries and smuggling drugs and jewels and [BLEEP]. Not just your like small-time around-the-block. Wait, wait, wait. What's with the passport? I never heard about the fake passport. No, it was a real passport. He went to all these countries like Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan. And he used to go there-- and this was back in times when you had a false bottom in the suitcase, and he would smuggle back, with his brother-- my uncle-- Larry. Yeah. They would smuggle back drugs and jewels and things like that. Matter of fact, my grandmother on my father's side was working in a bank, and she used to launder some of their money. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, so-- You never heard all this? No, I never-- I never heard about the Cherokee drug-smuggling, money-laundering operation. It's startling to compare David's life at this time-- the life I could have had-- with the life I actually did have in Pasadena with my father. Things weren't perfect there, I should say. As a teenager, I started fighting with my dad enough that I moved out at 16. I spent a summer working at Pizza Hut in Ontario, California, sharing a house with meth heads. But the difference is that my dad gave me perspective. I knew what was normal. We'd had regular bedtimes, built model rockets, and went to art class on Saturday mornings. I always expected I'd go to college. Even at that dingy Pizza Hut, I'd sit on a pickle bucket in the back, reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich and thinking about grad school. In other words, when I strayed, I knew it. David's problem is that he doesn't know normal. That's how he could live in squalor with my mother, drunk on the couch for a month, and not call the paramedics. It's not his fault he doesn't know that people require medical attention when their skin turns yellow. He'd seen things like that many times before. I can't even begin to describe how it feels to have to pick your mom up off the floor or have to wipe up her blood. I mean, Mom has hit her head on so many things at this point-- edge of a bad, a couch, the floor, the cement, those little cement rails that they put in front of a parking space that says your number on it. Yeah, all of those. Oh, man. That's rough. I mean, there's been plenty of times when she hit the back of her head and was bleeding profusely all over her pillows and everything else, and you have to be the one to stand there and keep the pressure on it, you know what I mean? You were telling me before about how, when you're in that home, when you're growing up with Mom and them, especially up in Minnesota with Mark, and you're just surrounded by alcoholics, and then probably even down here, where you just get to this point where you feel like that's normal. Yeah. It would seem like everything is just normal. Everything is cool. No big deal. You can come and look at the house and be like, what the [BLEEP] is going on here? Yeah. I mean, frankly, it's crazy. Right. Well, the only thing, actually, that I have to say has kept me grounded was you and Ethan and other people in the family who are living somewhat normal lives compared to what I saw every day in the house. And hearing about just the things that you talk about, things that Ethan talks about, the way that normal people integrate-- that has kept me grounded to where I knew that what was going on with me wasn't normal. So part of me has always wanted to become just like a normal member of society and do what everybody else does, but I know that's never possible for me. I mean, it's possible for me to come close to that, but I know I'll never be, you know, fully there because I started the race like 10 seconds after the gun went off. That's when I started to run. Well, you're starting right now. Yeah. At 25. Exactly. It's four months after I first arrived in Florida. My mom is still in the nursing home. We're still waiting to hear from Medicaid. And I'm still trying to convince her to go into a substance abuse program. Then I get a call from the nursing home. My mother had been caught smoking in her room. It's a small infraction in the scheme of things, but it's against the rules, I guess. I fight with the administration, but they still give her 30 days to move out. David and I take her to the only place she can go, the condo at Century Village, which has been empty since David started staying at his girlfriend's, and has slid back into disorder. I'm thirsty. You're not going to go drink that soda in there, are you? Yes, I am. No, that soda-- no. What do you know? The soda is ancient. And the fridge is filled with roaches. That fridge is not filled with roaches. Why don't you take a look and see what's in here? Dead roaches everywhere. Little baby roaches. Well, they're dead. That's my mother. Adaptable, as usual, but oblivious to the big picture. Luckily, David is a little more stable now, with a job over at Marshall's. When he and I go out to the car to get Mom's stuff, we try to figure out what to do. Right now, we're back to square one, right where she was right before this all got completely [BLEEP] out of control. And all it takes-- She's sitting in the exact spot. Yeah, I know. I thought the same thing to myself, too. And the funny thing is that right now, all it takes is the wind to blow the wrong way and everything is right back to that same [BLEEP] because, obviously, she's going to be tempted to drink. It's hard to feel like all these months have accomplished anything, even when, the next day, a spot miraculously opens at a subsidized sober living place not that far away. Of course, my mother doesn't want to go. We spend hours arguing about it. Her excuses are very frustrating. The pace will be too fast. She doesn't have the right clothes. She works better on her own. In other words, just another version of the same argument I've been having with her for the past four months. Josh, you don't seem to understand that I have physical, concrete, physical limitations, which I think are going to make it very difficult for me to run the pace of a residential program, where you have to go from this appointment to this appointment to this appointment, back for a meeting, da, da, da, da, da. Well, I don't-- I don't know why-- hold on a second. You decided you're ready for change, but then you're angry and fighting at every step of the way when we're trying to figure out the plan for yourself. You said you had a plan for yourself. What's the plan? The plan is to take care of my body, my mind, and my spirit. But that is not an actual-- that doesn't specify what you're going to do. How are you going to do that? You're going to come back here? Well, I own this place. I think I ought to come. Well, how are you going to get your stuff? This is-- right now, if you don't go into the sober living place tomorrow, we're at square one. We're back in January. You're going to be here-- Oh, I don't think that. You are sitting in the place where you almost died right now. Josh, I'm barely able to get from point A to point B, and it takes me forever to do everything. I understand. So why would you want to do that at home, alone, by yourself, with no resources, no transportation, no way to do anything for yourself? Why is that better? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That last recording is from a year ago. My mother ended up going to the facility, but she only lasted a few weeks. She's back at the condo now, where neither of our predictions have come true. She's drinking again, sporadically, but the house hasn't descended into chaos, either. David's back there, too. After a few more brushes with the law, David managed to complete all the requirements of his probation. He's now looking for another job to save up some money to get back in the studio for a demo. He's even talking seriously about going back to school. Together, they're maintaining. My mother is more broke than ever, but she's not homeless or dead. Still, it's hard to let go of the notion that I could save my mother or convince her to change, to realize that this might be what salvation looks like for her. At least for now. Nothing is getting better. But if it gets worse, I'm sure they'll call me. Josh Bearman. He lives in Los Angeles. His mom passed away in 2012. He did a story about that for our show, which you can find at our website. That's Josh's brother, AKA DJ Scraps. Today's program was produced by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Production help for today's show by Emmanuel Dzotsi. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Our staff includes Elise Bergerson, Emily Condon, Kimberly Henderson, and Seth Lind. Music help from Jessica Hopper. As I said before in today's show, this show was originally broadcast in 2007. Vince Homenick and Norman Goodman, who you heard at the beginning of the show, they're still around, but they have retired from their job getting jurors into New York juries. 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-found, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he's giving tours now of the This American Life offices. Judy's the one that has the cute little shoes. And here's the lady who takes her clothes off all the time. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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When I was in seventh grade, I was at my friend Dave [? Berowi's ?] house. And we went to the fridge for a snack. And he opens up the door to the fridge. And inside was a six pack of beer. And I had never seen beer in real life, in someone's house. Beer was just something from TV. You know, it was just like one of those things from TV that was out there that never really showed up in the real life of anybody that you knew. And I say this knowing how this sounds, how sheltered this sounds. But my parents were Jews. And I grew up on this block in suburban Baltimore where everybody was Jewish. And just people didn't drink when I was a kid. I did not see booze in people's houses. But this was seventh grade. And I was getting off the block for the first time. And seeing this beer, I remember it seemed dangerous. It seemed actually dangerous. I remember thinking the [? Berowis ?] have this secret, this dirty little secret. Mr. [? Berowi ?] suddenly seemed capable of anything. But at the same time, the [? Berowis ?] were really great. I used to go to the ocean with their family during the summer. They were great. And I remember I had to rearrange in my head all of my half-baked ideas about alcohol to accommodate the thought that normal people drink, which I guess is what happens when you see a little more of the world. I was like the first bird among all my friends. And nobody could believe that I got visa to go to America. Valentina was 24 when she left Odessa-- in the former Soviet Union-- to come work in the United States. And after two weeks here, she had a sudden and very urgent need to go to the store. And I went to the supermarket to get what I need, my feminine hygiene products. And it took me probably long, long time to find the right aisle. And I saw the rows of tampons. Maxi, mini, super, with wings, without wings. Got that? It was overwhelming. Maxi, mini, super, with wings, without wings. And thinking, I don't know what they use it for. First, it was very interesting. Then it was confusing. And then it was sad. And then it was frustrated. It was a very, very sad experience for me. She left the store without buying anything, went to the place she was staying, and cried. And I couldn't ask for help because my American friends, they were still new to me. And I didn't want them to look at me like I'm from the forest or from a cave. I really wanted to go home. It made me feel very small. Though you know, sometimes when the world gets bigger, it's great. One of the regular contributors to our program, Starlee Kine, tells this story about her dad. Starlee's family's house was so chaotic when she was growing up-- they never ate regular meals together. Nothing was normal-- that after she moved away from home, whenever she would fly back to see her family, she would actually stay with a friend, not with her parents. And her dad would come and hang out with her at her friend's house. And after her parents split up, she was staying at her friend Allison's. And usually when he comes over, he'll just kind of walk around, asking lots of questions. And he touches everything. And he'll pick up pencils, and pens, and anything that's lying around. Little objects on top of the mantel place. Kind of how they arranged their living room furniture. And at Allison's house, she has an aquarium. In the living room is a huge aquarium with lots of fish. And they're all pretty and different kinds of fish. And the first time my dad ever came to Allison's house, he looked at this aquarium for like an hour. And I thought he was really into fish. Or something. I didn't understand what was going on. And then he started asking Allison all these questions like, who feeds the fish in the house? And where's the fish food kept? And all these kinds of things. And Allison would be all, like, either I feed it, or my brother feeds it, or Ben feeds it, someone around. And my dad got really confused. And he was like, I don't understand. Wouldn't you over-feed it if you guys are all feeding the fish? And she'd be like, no. We just know who's fed it before. And he's like, I don't-- do you-- how do you commun-- He just was really confused about how they communicated this information to each other. And then finally Allison was like, we just tell each other who's fed the fish. I talk to my brother. And that's how I know. And then my dad was totally blown away. I realize that what my dad-- why he was staring at the fish tank was that he couldn't understand how a very simple thing like fish getting fed worked in a functional household. And it was like, as soon as she said that they talked to each other, my dad realized there was an entirely different way for families to function, which involved communicating basic things. You can travel to another continent to see how the rest of the world lives. Or you can do that sitting on a couch, in a house that's just ten minutes from your own. I think it was hopeful. Because I think it's always when you discover that the world is bigger, or there's something new that you haven't known, like a different way of doing something, it's pretty exciting. For today on our show, the Big Wide World, and how it's both exciting and frightening when you head out to discover the new things you hadn't known. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in two acts. Act One, Teen Wolf Blitzer. Act Two, I've Got The Whole World in My Hands. In that act, a girl who can not see wanders around a place that she's never been and tries to figure out, not just if it's safe or dangerous, but at a much more basic level, where is she? Stay with us. Haider Hamza was a professional teenager. This is how his job worked. Say a group of Japanese dignitaries were coming to Iraq. The Ministry of Information would call Haider and a couple of other teenagers to come and be the face of Iraqi youth at a get together. Or some foreign journalists would show up and want to do a story about Iraqi teens. Well, the Ministry of Information would assign Haider to be the subject. Or Haider would work as a fixer, helping reporters to find other people to interview-- other kids-- people who wouldn't say anything too bad about the regime. He was part of Saddam's propaganda machine. And he liked it. For me it was kind of cool. Because I was 19. I got to skip all classes at school. I didn't have to go to school. All I needed to go was just to go to my professor and say, well, I'm wanted at the Ministry of Information. And Saddam's son, Uday, was the one in charge on most of the media in Iraq at the time. So I was like, oh, Mr. Uday wants us at the Ministry. And he'd go, of course, of course, just go ahead. And I kept getting straight A's. And I hardly went to school. And the salary was good. I was making more money than my dad. And my dad was an ambassador for, like, 40 years. And I had this badge that said Ministry of Information. And the thing is, most of the employees of the Ministry of Information actually work for the intelligence. And they take it as a cover, like for the Mukhabarat, which is the intelligence service in Iraq. So when I show it, people think I work for the intelligence service. So I wouldn't stand in any lines. I wouldn't wait anywhere. At 19? At 19. Yeah. So I loved the attention, just like any 19-year-old would. And we got to stay at five-star hotels, because whenever a delegation of journalists comes to visit the country, they would take us to stay with them at the hotel and just guide them around. And basically also make sure they don't interview someone they're not supposed to interview, or they don't say something they're not supposed to say, or any of that. So I enjoyed it. I quite enjoyed it. At first, Haider's job was just part-time. But by 2002, more and more journalists were showing up in Baghdad asking questions about the war that was looming. And the Ministry needed Haider to work full time. He wound up in a lot of news stories about youth in Iraq, and on several panels with American students, answering their questions. Hi, and welcome. I'm Vanessa Rae, and today we're participating in a historic discussion between the young people of two countries on the brink of war. We're building a bridge to Baghdad. And in New York City-- This is from a TV program called Bridge to Baghdad. Just before the invasion, a New York group called Downtown Community Television connected two groups of students via satellite. Iraqi and American kids talking war. The Iraqi group includes a couple of Ministry of Information plants, including Haider. The Americans sit in comfy couches near glass windows overlooking the New York skyline. The Iraqis are on fold-out chairs in a Baghdad art gallery, where, just off-camera, stands a pack of Ministry of Information minders and Ba'ath Party officials. Well, hi there, dudes. My name is Haider. And I won't say anything else, because I'm really, really eager to rock and roll. What Saddam wanted to do is to show a different image of Iraq that was sort of portrayed in the West and the US, an image of a backward country, and people are oppressed, and uneducated, and people don't have any freedom. And our policy was mostly to stay as social as possible, and avoid being political as much as possible. How are things resolved within the government when there are differences of opinion? Can we change the subject a bit? Do you like sports, any of you? Do you-- The most striking thing about the footage is how earnestly the American teens ask questions that no Iraqi could ever answer without risking jail time, and how uncomfortable the Iraqi teens look when trying to answer. Are you guys-- are you able to find a new leader if you wanted one? We feel that this person really represents that. So we are supporting him, of course. Haider generally didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on the bad things that Saddam's regime had done. Sure, Saddam had run Iraq with an iron fist. But this didn't seem all that different from the leaders of Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or lots of other countries in the region to Haider. And living in Iraq, he didn't exactly hear details about Saddam's atrocities. People didn't talk about those things. They were rumors, vapors, hard to be sure of. Meanwhile, every time he turned on a TV or opened a textbook, there he was, smiling benevolently. Papa Saddam. Like a member of your family. Even though they were just teens, Haider and the other kids at the Ministry of Information got treated like professionals. Before press appearances, they'd be exhaustively prepped, sometimes for days. They would sit us in a room. And we'd have all these different professors, and intelligence officers, and diplomats, and a psychiatrist as well, actually. He came to tell us about human psychology, and what to say, and what not to say, and our facial expressions, how they should be. And they gave us sheets. And we did exams. And how to answer-- if we're going to be asked about Halabja, how to avoid talking about the invasion of Kuwait, how to avoid talking about mass graves, and all this kind of stuff that we wouldn't dare to talk about. So for me it was very thrilling that I could actually have a conversation with an Iraqi official about these things, because I was not even allowed to talk with this with my parents at home. It was like a taboo. Would you say-- do you think it's fair to say that your job was sort of as a professional-- I don't want to say actor, but professional kind of representative, mouthpiece? I was a diplomat. You were a diplomat. That's how you view yourself. Yeah. You were a 19-year-old diplomat on behalf of Saddam. Yeah. My father was an ambassador. So I was like, OK, I'm a little him. I'm also a diplomat. I'm doing what he's doing. Because he spent all his life. My father was-- Lying? Spinning? Sorry. Well, no. That's what politicians do. But he-- What do diplomats do? They sort of dress up the truth, and make it look nice, and make it friendly. I think it's less mean, less evil, than what politicians do. Haider's father used to tell Haider being a diplomat was the safest way to work inside the regime. If you're in the Foreign Service, he'd say, you can live abroad, and they can't monitor you too carefully. And they can't ask you to do things too terrible. The worst thing they can ask you to do is lie. Haider's dad had been a diplomat for 40 years and for four different governments. Monarchs, military coups, the Ba'ath party, and then Saddam. But despite-- or maybe because of-- this, he was totally opposed to his son's new job at the Ministry of Information. Because he thought I was very naive, that I would do anything they asked me to. So they might ask me to do something that's going to hurt him, but I would still do it. He would say, listen, this is not a rational government you're dealing with. It's not about what you do. You can get in trouble even though you are doing everything right. He was worried about you becoming an out-and-out intelligence agent. And that. He was worried about me becoming arrogant. He was worrying about me becoming a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] person. He was worrying about me becoming Saddam-ish, basically. Right. That's what he was worried about. And he was worried about me getting killed. Haider tuned his father out. He was 19, and, like most self-respecting teenagers, felt that he could handle making decisions on his own. But the Ministry of Information gig didn't just creep his father out. I remember my best friend at the time, he didn't hang out with me anymore. Because he said, listen, you're going to get in trouble one day. And I don't want to be driven down with you as well. What does that mean, you were going to get in trouble? Well, it means that on one of the shows or one of the interviews I'm going to say something stupid. Or I'm going to slip, and say something I'm not supposed to say. And then-- And I think something close to that happened. I remember I was interviewed by ABC Australian. And at the time, they did a whole documentary. They would follow me around. And we would go to a football match. And they would film me at a football match with my friends, and stuff like that. And I think it was at the stadium, they were asking me, what do you think of Saddam? And I've seen Saddam. I met him once back then. And they said, what do you think of Saddam? And I just posed. And I said, I think he is very polite. And they said, and? I was like, that's it. And it's like, what do you mean, that's it? It's like, very polite? Is that all you can say about him? Then they said, well, is he, like, the best? And I said, well, no one is perfect. He's not a prophet or anything. So he definitely has some merits and demerits just like any other person. And I kept it to that. I thought that was not offending anyone. But people disagreed back in the office. And they said, how dare you say that he's just like any other person. He's not. He's Saddam. Haider spent a night in detention answering intelligence officers' questions about his relationship with the reporter and his feelings about Saddam. But maybe because the war was looming and there were bigger fish to fry, all Haider got was a reprimand. He went back to work at the Ministry. In the days leading up to the invasion, Haider spent most of his time at the Ministry. School, classes, family and friends all took the backseat. Haider filled his days doing interviews, hosting delegations, and working on songs and poems for Iraqi youth radio. Overseeing his work was Dr. Huda Ammash. Her nickname when she wound up on the coalition's deck of cards a few weeks later was Dr. Germ, for the work that she'd done in the development of Iraq's biological weapons program. But to Haider, she was a kindred spirit. Every day, she helped him and the rest of the Ministry of Information's junior league craft their messages and toe the party line. Working with her, Haider felt important and safe. I have to confess I was enjoying this for a while, that I forgot how serious this is. And that's the other thing. We didn't feel there was a war. I remember until five days before the war, I had an exam at school. And I went to school and had my exam. We still went to school every day. There was still running water, electricity, and phone lines. People didn't leave. We didn't see anyone packing and leaving. I believe until two or three days before the war, I thought, the US is not going to invade. And it's because I was close to all-- well not close, but I was around many senior officials of the government. And I think most of them believed that it's not going to happen. They believed it was just a threat. Russia and France would never allow that. They'll take care of us. And no, they'd give a warning to Saddam if it gets too serious. And that they can strengthen the sanctions, or impose more, or whatever, but that's going to be it. They're not going to actually invade. But I think it was three days before the war, it was the last time I met with Dr. Germ. It was the last radio show we did. And when we were leaving, she said, where is your family? And I said, we're all still in Baghdad. And she said, take them out. And I was like, well, why? And she said, just take them out. They are coming. So take them out. And I think that was when I believed it's going to happen. It was that moment when she said that. I said, OK. It sort of took me out of the whole world of having fun, and talking to the media, and having cameras around me, and showing off, and walking out with my badge, and all that fun. That night, Haider relayed to his parents what Dr. Ammash had told him. It was time to get out of Baghdad. Haider's father knew a place where they could lay low. There was a farmhouse four hours north of the city. It was a good place for the family-- Haider, his parents, and three siblings-- to wait and see what would happen next. Grudgingly, Haider climbed into the family car and left. We went there. There was no electricity, of course. And there was no running water. It was totally different. And it was hot. At the time it was getting hot. It was in April or March. And there were all these mosquitoes, I remember, because it was a farm. It was one night I spent there. When I left I didn't tell any of my friends. So I got up, and I walked up to my dad, and I said, I can't stay here. I'm going back. And he was like, what are you talking about? I was like, we still have shows scheduled. We still have interviews on schedule. And I want to be part of that. I don't want to be living in a farm with a bunch of horses and cows. He said, you're out of your mind. You're not going to go back. You're going to die. We are so lucky. We should be thankful that we made it here. We're going to stay here until this whole thing is over. I went back to my mom and said, I'm leaving. She knows that I can not handle it there. She wasn't-- I mean, it was horr-- It was not a way to live. You have to sleep on the floor. And you have no electricity. They didn't even have a bathroom. It was like they had something that they called a bathroom, which was like you have to walk forever out in the middle of nowhere. And I was like, I can't live like that. I'm a celebrity. I am not going to live like that. You're used to being in cars and having a badge. It was funny. It was very odd. I believed there was a war coming. And I believed truly that it was the safest place to be, probably, if the war was going to happen. But I didn't want that. I didn't want to be in the safest place and not have any stories to tell afterwards. I was like, but I believe this whole thing is going to be over one time, and that I'm going to meet back, and they're going to say, OK, tell us how was the time in the war? What am I going to say? That I spent it with cows and sheep in the middle of nowhere? I was like, no. You were going to need some stories to tell. Exactly. I said, I can do better than that. I mean, it was that many things else, of course. But that came across my mind as well, I have to say. So my dad was like, I'm not driving back to Baghdad. And I have young siblings. And he said, I'm not taking your siblings through this. If you're crazy, you have to face that alone. You don't have to let your siblings face that with you. So I said, OK. I'll just take a cab. But there were no cabs around. So I had to walk for half an hour or so until I got to the closest house. And there was a farmer there with a pickup truck. And I said, would you take me to Baghdad? At the time I paid him, it was about $13. But in Iraq, $13 is a lot of money. And he said, OK, I'll drive you. Just one way. I'll drive you. So I go, OK. So I went, I packed. My dad wouldn't even see me off. He was really angry that I'm doing this. But I got in, and I drove back. And I drove directly to the radio station, because at the time there was a show ongoing. And I saw my group and stuff. And I saw everyone. And everyone was like, so what are you guys doing? And they said, oh, we're all leaving. I was like, where are you leaving? They said, we're leaving Baghdad. Because we all believed that the war was going to happen in Baghdad. It was going to be sieged for like months. And Saddam might even use chemical weapons. Because we didn't know if he owned them or not. So all my friends said, oh, we're leaving. I said, but now? I just came back. So I realized I just made a mistake by coming back. I should have just stayed there. And all of a sudden, the life of cows and sheep didn't look so bad. And maybe that was the best option, and I should go back. So I called the driver. I was like, I want you to drive me back to that farm. And this time I had to pay $30, because it was getting serious. And no one would go anywhere. Everyone was busy with his own family. I got down, and I went to the family, the farm. And I was like, I'm back. I'm taking my stuff down. And he said, no. I was like, what? He said, your parents just left-- went back to Baghdad-- because they couldn't be away from you. And there were no phones. He said, they just left. They just went to Baghdad. Your dad didn't sleep all night. He was crying all night, actually. And he thought you were going to be trapped. And he said, the family is not going to be in two different locations. All the family will be together. So this morning-- about two hours ago-- your family went back to Baghdad because of you. I actually felt, I felt like [BLEEP] at the time. I felt-- I don't know. I felt like nothing, you know. I was like, what am I doing? They saw me. I almost had a breakdown. So they took me inside. And they were just talking. And the guy, the owner of the house, is an older man. And he was like, listen, your dad is definitely concerned about your life more than he's concerned about his own. But just go back and be with your family. I said, what if I go back and they come back here again? And he he was like, no, it was just broadcasted on the news that people are allowed to get in the city but not out of the city. So you're going to be able to go back. They're not going to be able to leave anymore. And that's what I did. I went back. I was praying, all the way, that I'd find them and that they're not going to be angry. So I went back home. And I saw their car was parked outside. So I knew they were there. And my mom was outside in the garage waiting. And she was holding prayer beads at the time. And she was just praying and stuff. I saw her. And I came down. She really hugged me. And she was crying. And she was like, never do this again. Haider's father was more reserved. He gave his son the silent treatment at first. Ignoring his advice about the Ministry of Information job was one thing. But coming back to Baghdad? Their family's house was close to three major military targets-- the Baghdad airport, Iraq's national security headquarters, and one of Saddam's main palaces. The whole neighborhood was being evacuated. All the major roads were closed. And now, getting out of the city would be tough. So we all go. We had a family meeting, and we're talking. And we were suggesting ideas. And my dad was like, nobody suggest anything. It's going to be my call. And we're going to go all the way south, as far as we can. Because if they're going to invade, the US troops will invade from Kuwait, from the south. So we're going to go to a point where we're going to be behind their lines as soon as possible. You know what I'm saying? He's like-- Yeah, no, absolutely. He said, they're going to pass us-- exactly. Exactly, he said, if there's a war, if there's an invasion, they're going to pass us in the early days. And then if they're going to siege Baghdad, or bomb Baghdad, or whatever, we're going to be safe. So it was back in the car, this time headed in the opposite direction. And there was something new to worry about. The Iraqi army was looking for anyone over 17 to send to the front lines. They'd put up checkpoints on highways and bridges. Haider's father was too old, and his younger brother had yet to hit puberty. So if the car were stopped, it was Haider who was likely to be seized. And my dad was very paranoid that I'm going to be taken away. And he had a plan. He was thinking of a plan. So what if we accidentally run through a checkpoint and they want to take you away? What are we going to say? My mom said, oh, we have to tell them that you're retarded. And you have to act retarded. And we're going to say he's retarded. You can't take him. And I was rehearsing in the back with my sister. I was rehearsing being retarded, basically. And I would, like, just have my tongue out. Like blah, blah, blah, and that kind of stuff. I mean, now it sounds funny. But at the time it wasn't. My sister thought it was funny, but-- I was talking to my sister, like listen, don't look at me if we ever get caught. Because I'm going to laugh if I see you laughing. So just turn your face off. And I was talking to her. Then my dad stopped the car, and he turned back, and he said, listen, this is not a joke. This is your life we're talking about here. He literally said, this is not a show. After a tense four and a half hours in the car, Haider and his family finally made it to a tiny tribal village in Diyala province, close to the Kuwait border. There, Haider's father had arranged with a family friend to stay as guests until it was safe to return to Baghdad. Haider unpacked his things from the car and introduced himself to the large countrified family who were now his new hosts. That night, crammed in the living room, they listened together to radio reports of air strikes across Iraq. The war had begun. The next morning, everything was different. I remember I walked out of the house. And everyone was trying to get at the door. And we were looking down the road. And on the main highway there were American soldiers with the full gear. They were on one knee down, on the gunning position. And they were not moving. It was as if they were statues. And they just showed overnight. At night, no one would go out, of course, because there were sirens. So when you can go out in the morning, you saw them. And they were not there the last time you checked. So it was like they showed out of nowhere. And the people were just staring at them. It was funny. It was like watching E.T. landing in your front yard. Seriously, that's how they were looking at them. People didn't know, should they walk down and talk to them? Should they be friendly? Should they not? I couldn't wait, actually, to go talk to them. Very quickly, Haider got his chance. The Americans were the Army's Third Infantry Division. On that first night they had arrested two local imams. This did not go over well. Several villagers, including Haider's host family, approached the American army to plead for the imams' release. But something was getting lost in translation. The Americans had an interpreter, an Egyptian. But he was having a very tough time penetrating the town's rural Iraqi dialect. Perhaps, the villagers suggested, Haider might be able to help. He spoke English well, and he had talked to Americans before. So Haider went to speak with the Americans and brokered the imams' release. He walked out of the base a hero. Later that day, a squad of American soldiers showed up at his door asking if he was interested in taking over the translator's job. It would be a chance for Haider and his family to get back to Baghdad with American protection. Haider was intrigued. His dad, not so much. My dad was totally against the idea. I loved the idea. I was like, of course. Sure. I'm going to go. And he was like, no you're not. I was like, yes I am. And he was like, no. And we were talking about it. I was like, listen, it's a good way to make money. It's a good way to have protection. And I want to go to Baghdad. And they will take me to Baghdad. I would rather be with them than be alone, because I'll be in the armored vehicles and stuff. And he was like, you're crazy. No. He said, listen. Throughout history, whenever there's an occupation, whenever there are foreign soldiers, there's always a resistance. We still don't know how strong the resistance is going to be. We still don't know how ruthless it's going to be. So it's too early to take any sides. You should just not take any sides. Don't show that you are the American side. Don't show that you're with the resistance. Just don't take any sides now. And that's how your dad had survived, right? Exactly. That's how he had been so-- And that's what he told me. He said, listen, I've been through several changes. And the only way I made it so far is by not joining sides when it's too early. Haider was starting to realize that he and his father looked at life very differently. Haider's dad had always survived by being cautious, keeping a low profile. To Haider that sounded like a perfect plan for wasting away. I would tell him that I would rather regret things I've done than regret things I haven't done. For him it was no. It was just if you have doubts about anything, just don't try. And then you won't regret it. Because you didn't try, so it wouldn't go wrong. Basically my dad would say that his ideology is, or theory is, to-- He would always say that you should climb the stairs step after step. Not jump any steps. Because if you jump, you can tremble and fall, and go all the way down the stairs. I jump steps. With the war, suddenly a new world had arrived in Iraq, with a new set of rules. And Haider saw it as full of possibilities for someone willing to stick his neck out. So he took the Americans up on their offer. And the family split up. Haider would ride back to Baghdad with the Americans in a Bradley assault vehicle. His father and siblings would stay behind. His mother would keep an eye on Haider, following the American convoy in the family car. About an hour and a half outside of the city, Haider saw smoke over Baghdad. And as they got closer, wreckage from the US assault. I remember when I saw all that, I saw all the military vehicles completely destroyed. We saw all the destruction, the houses, all the headquarters of the Ba'ath party knocked down. You didn't know-- you go back and say, oh but wait, that's my country. Oh but wait, that was my army. And this is not my army that I'm with. Who are these people then? And that's when you start asking that. I remember, that's when I said, you know what? I want to be with my family. I want to be in the car. I don't want to be in the Bradley. It was not cool anymore. It didn't feel so cool. It felt weird. It felt awkward. And I kept going back and forth. I kept having these trials like, no, I should get over it. I shouldn't be so emotional. Saddam didn't represent me anyway. Saddam was not a-- it was not a democratic regime that we had. It was a dictatorship. So that wasn't my army anyway, or my country. But then you go, no, but it is. It was very, like, you had this conflict going on all throughout the roads. Just a month before, Haider was working for Saddam Hussein. And now here he was, riding into town with the invaders. His father had warned him about picking sides too soon. And he was starting to regret the one that he'd picked. So shortly after he got back to Baghdad, Haider quit his job with the Americans. Coming up, out of one dangerous job and into one that's probably even more dangerous. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International. When our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, stories of people discovering the big, wide, dangerous world. Gideon Yago's story about Haider Hamza continues. Haider spent his days at home. And his father, sisters, and brother had returned from the south. There was no running water in their home, no regular electricity in Baghdad. He was 19, packed in the house with his family, hot, bored, and with no exit strategy. If he was going to stay sane, he needed to get out of the house. So he decided to look for work as a translator. He got a job with Reuters, and later with ABC News. The city was cracking up into different factions. And Haider thought that working with the media was the smart thing to do. I felt that with all the chaos happening, with all the different parties being formed-- the Americans, the insurgency, the radical Islamists, the nationalists, Saddam's loyalists, the political parties, the Kurds, the Shias, the Sunnis-- all these parties being formed around you. Everyone is getting into groups. You either join one of these groups, or you need to get a protection. You can't be by your own. If you're alone, you're a very soft target. So I thought my protection was going to be by working with the media. You have media badge, you're protected. You're protected by your organization, your network. You're protected by the US military and from the US military in the same time. I remember there was-- when they do a military operation, they just go raiding houses. My house was raided twice. Random raids. They broke down the door, because that's how they do it. I don't know why they never knock. They just kick down the door. They go inside, they start shouting and screaming at everyone. The power is off, and they have these torch lights on their rifles. And all you see is the lights running around. And you panic. You don't know what to do. But when they came into my house and they did all of this-- they knocked the door down-- I stayed in my room, waiting for them to come in. It's not a good idea to go out looking for them. You might as well wait for them to come to you. So they walked into my room and stuff. And I showed them all my badges. And I said, I work for the media. Basically, you're just not like a poor Iraqi guy who doesn't know what to do, who doesn't know what his rights are. You're like an aristocrat. They would know that you're a journalist. You know what your rights are. You're going to go back and report all this. You have contacts in the media. You have contacts in the Iraqi government. You have contacts at the US military. So they ended up paying for the door they knocked down. They paid us compensations. They apologized. And they gave me a camel bag. That I just thought it was cool to have one. But things were tense at home. While Haider was going out on assignment, the rest of the family was stuck in the house. His father was retired. His older sister had dropped out of Baghdad U. And his little brother and sisters had stopped going to grammar school classes. Once again, Haider's dad would make noise whenever his son would come home about Haider's decisions, his job. He thought they were too risky, too public. Haider began to lie, telling his dad that he spent his days chained to some desk, filing papers, stuff like that. Instead, he was in the field, covering the Marine offensive in Fallujah or at interviews with heads of state in the Green Zone. Or covering Saddam's trial. Then the city really started to go nuts. Remember the TV show that Haider had participated in at the beginning of this story, Bridge to Baghdad? A few months after the invasion, the producers came back to tape a follow-up with the same teens, only this time, no Ministry of Information minders. They wanted an honest conversation, where the kids were free to speak their minds. The Iraqi teens agreed to do the show, but on one condition-- that it would not air in the Middle East. It was mid-2003, and the stances that you took in Baghdad were starting to have very real repercussions. The kids were assured that the show wouldn't make it onto the Arab airwaves. But somehow, without the producers at Downtown Community Television knowing, the program found its way on to Al Jazeera. For a week leading up to the airing, Al Jazeera heavily promoted it, using the most inflammatory clips from the Iraqi teens. Here are two, Saif and Waleed. I've waited to say this word for 19 years. I hate this man. Saddam Hussein, of course, everybody knows that he's a big torturist. We are glad to get rid of him. We don't agree with him. There's actually nothing that bad in the show. Mainly Haider and the rest of the kids talking about how devastating the invasion and occupation had become. But Haider was nervous, particularly because the show ended with one of the teenagers playing a new song that he'd written with his heavy metal band. It was called "Saddam Sucks." I knew it was going to be aired now. I remember my mom also went in to pray that no one would watch it. Pray for low ratings? Yes. Exactly. She was praying that nobody has electricity. No one's going to be able to watch it. And I'm not going to get in any trouble. Then the way I knew that people did watch it, is that-- I think it was aired on a Wednesday night or something. On Friday morning, there was the Friday prayers, which is the big prayers for the Muslims. It's like the Sunday mass for Christians, basically. So in Friday prayers, there is always a speech by the imam, just like there's a speech by the priest. But the difference, in the mosque there are loudspeakers. So for those who can not make it to the mosque, they will listen to the speech while they're at home. All you need to do is just open the window. It's really loud. I don't usually listen to the speeches that much. But it was there, and someone was shouting. And I was just walking around in the house, doing whatever I was doing. And then, suddenly I heard my full name in the speech. I was like, was that my name? And then, basically he was saying that a group of young Iraqis who claimed to be Muslims-- he didn't even call us Muslims-- have participated in a show on a channel of infidels. Pamphlets started to appear in the street with Haider's picture on them. Wanted posters. Threatening his family's safety and Haider's life. The day after the imam's speech, Haider came home to find his parents had packed his bags and left them at the front door. It was too dangerous for him to stay at home anymore. He moved into his office in the Green Zone for a while. Day in, day out, Haider's parents begged him to quit. So I would always say, OK, one more month. OK, something's going to come up. I'm going to get an offer somewhere overseas. Something's going to happen, you know? And that was the only hope, because otherwise you would sit at home and hope for what? Maybe I'm going to die as well. That's the thing. And yet before the war, there were certain red lines during Saddam's regime. You don't talk bad about him. You don't talk bad about his regime. You don't talk bad about his character. You'll be OK. No one's going to hurt you. You do, you die. Now, there are no red lines. If there are, then they're invisible. You don't know what they there. You can be standing on the traffic light, and the car next to you goes off, and you die. Just a lost bullet goes through your head. You're driving and a US convoy shows out of nowhere, and they open fire, you get caught in the firefight and you die. You go shopping in the market, and a suicide bomber blows himself up, and you-- so it's not up to you anymore. It's not that you avoid certain things and you survive. Haider ran this argument by his father. And his father said it was all the more reason to stay inside. Like he said, you don't go and jump off a bridge and you say, well, maybe I'll die, and maybe something-- a miracle is going to happen, and I'm not going to die. So if you hide at home, you have much higher chances of surviving. But I was looking at it as a slow death. To sit at home with no electricity, no water, fighting with my dad all day, that is slow death. That's how death is like. My world was much bigger than my parents' world. That was the problem. My dad's world is his home and his kids. It's not even the neighborhood, because he can not go out. That's his world. So that's why, for him, I mean so much, because his world is so small that everything in it just means everything. My world was much bigger. My world was like media, with globalization as a world. My world is like America, and Iraq, and Britain, and the coalition forces, and everything. That's my world. So my world was much bigger than that. So will I give all this up and go to the much smaller, limited world? I can't. You can't. After a while, you can't. You just can't. So when it came to your dad trying to be a parent, did he even have a chance? Well, that was the struggle. He had the feeling that he is not needed. I don't need him. I don't need a dad anymore, which I'm sure was not easy for him. And he would always walk up to me and say never give up having a dad. Don't-- he would literally use the term like don't put me on the shelf yet. Haider kept working for two more years as a producer and translator, while all around him, the new Iraq disintegrated. Then one day, on a field assignment in Najaf, Haider finally understood what his father had been trying to tell him. He was there to cover Ashura, the annual Shia pilgrimage, which every year since the start of the war has come under attack with car bombings and shootings. And just a warning to listeners, this is where the story gets a little graphic. You know Ashura? Pretty violent. And there's a blast every year. And people know it. And you know what? That's what is sad. We go there. We know people will die. And that's why we go, so we're going to be there when they die. So it was like, I tell you there is a time bomb next door. And you say, oh, OK, great. And you go next door, and you set up your camera so you can film the time bomb when it goes off. And that's sad. So they were going to say, OK, there's Ashura. People are going to die. You have to go and be ready. And get us a decent life position so we get good shots of people dying. That's the level that we got there. And we do it. And 3 million people gather. They know some of them are going to die. They still come. And I didn't tell my parents. My parents were like, if you're going to go to that, that's suicide, if you're going to go to that ceremony. Because people are going to die. You're going to be one of them. Don't go. I said, oh, I promise I'm not going. I had to go. I told them I'm going north, like just the opposite side. I'm going there to cover whatever, I told them. There was a golf field opened. They're opening a golf field on the US military base for the officers to go play with their cigars and stuff. And we did do that story, as well. But I wasn't on that team. So I told them I was going to do that instead. I went down there. And the last day of December, we knew there was going to be something. All the cameras were rolling 24 hours, because we knew it was going to be any second, and we wanted to catch it. You see how crazy it is. So we were rolling, and it happened. There were seven blasts, a series of seven blasts in a row. About 400 people were killed. That's a lot of people. And I remember the scene, what you see when the blast-- when the bomb goes off. You actually can see the bodies just flying in the air. And I was down with the crowd at the time. I was looking at my trousers, my pants, and I saw all these tiny pieces of human flesh that stuck to you. I didn't know what they were in the beginning. I was looking. I was like, that's meat. And then I was like, wait a second. That's human flesh. One of the cameramen came in. He had a tape. I was sitting in the SNG just feeding stuff. And he came. He had a tape. And he had a nervous breakdown. He was like, blah, blah, blah. He couldn't talk. I was like, what? And he said, he died, blah, blah, blah. So I took the tape. And there was a scene, a horrific scene. A woman, she was Iranian, because a lot of Iranians come to the ceremony. And she was-- you could see her holding her child, like from the armpits like that. His head was laying down. She was so silent. She was not crying, she was not shouting, she was not weeping. She was just quiet, looking around, holding her son. And her son is only-- he was cut from here. You can't see. Just from over the belt. And you can only see the flesh hanging down. And blood was just pouring down from his body. And she was holding him as if he was alive and he was a full body, although he's just half-child. And she was in shock, that she was not reacting at all. She was not even looking at him. She was looking around as if she's looking and saying, what are these crazy people? What are these crazy people doing? And then I saw that. And what it was like-- I thought of my family right away. And I said, I have to call them. I called my family. And my mom picked up the phone. She was already crying. And she was like, I saw the news. I know you are there. She's like, are you fine? I was like, yes I am. And she was like, don't let me-- I mean, in Islam, if a person dies, his family has to wash the body before burial. She was like, don't let me wash your body one day. And I was like, I'm not. She said, I'll go talk to your dad. Your dad knows as well. And I said, oh, I'm in so much trouble. I don't want to go back home. I did go back home. First, both my parents were hugging me and stuff. And then my dad grabbed me, and sat me down, and said, listen, one of these days I pass away, then it's your fault. It's because of you. What does that mean? It means he was so worried about me, that if he's going to die of a heart attack or stroke, then it's because of me, and my job, and my lifestyle. And that for me was very-- I don't know. I didn't expect something like that to come out of him, actually. And, I realized-- Why? I don't know. Maybe I was too self-centered at that point that I couldn't see-- I would think, oh please, what is all this drama? I couldn't see how crazy it was, what I was doing. I remember thinking, that was one of the things I considered the most of everything he said all his life to me. He's an older man. If anything happens to him, how would I be able to live with that? Haider decided that he had to leave Iraq. An American employee for ABC who Haider had met during the Saddam trial told him about the Fulbright scholarship. It was a chance for Haider to study in the US for free. He applied and won. A year later, Haider was on a plane to New York. I haven't seen my parents since last August. Though I know they're really proud. I know he is really proud, especially now. I know he changed, that he changed his thought about me. I think he's now wondering, you know what? Maybe he was right. Maybe the kid knew what he was doing. Maybe this is a different time. And I'm just the old school. And that doesn't work anymore. When he was 16, he chose to be a spokesman for Iraq. And now, living in New York, he finds that he's still one. His classmates and people that he meets always have a ton of questions about his hometown, what happened, and what's coming next. Though Haider says living in America on the Fulbright scholarship with the US government paying for his college classes, it's confusing. I mean, it's very weird. I have a whole mix of feelings here when I came. After all, I'm in the country that's in a war with my country. And the same time, I love this country, and I wanted to come here for so long. It's my childhood dream to come to New York. But that was before America invaded Iraq. So that makes it very-- I don't know. It makes me feel weird. It makes me feel guilty. Do I fit here, do I belong here? I still don't know. I still don't know that. That story from Gideon Yago. Act Two. Well, we just have time for one more quick story about heading out into the unknown of the big, wide world. Sally Goode was born blind. Filmmaker Tony Hill took her to a location but didn't tell her what it was. I can sense something in front of me. I can hear it in the sound. The sound changes as you're just walking around. This feels quite closed in. I think it's a wall in front of me. I'm just going to put my hand out. Yes it is. It's a brick wall. We're walking up onto the grass now. Right, we are in front of a rather large object. A stone arch, about my head height. And another stone structure. This again is standing on a pedestal like a tower. This one is kind of cylindrical. A cylindrical tower this is standing on. And then it comes up to a long barrel-shaped stone object. Just placed on top of the tower horizontally. And then on top of it there's another cylindrical object placed vertically on the long the barrel. Bang. Lots of bangs going on. I don't know quite what's happening. But you can hear there are quite a lot of birds. Twigs underfoot. Well, well. This is quite a big rectangular, extremely tall, extremely wide stone block. Now I'm going to follow this and see where it goes. It goes a long way. It's going to the right now. It's a huge place. Off to the right again. I've just nearly fallen over onto the stone structure. The wall is now on our left, and I'm following it round to the left. It's just a great big, huge, stone wall. And a big metal [KNOCKING ON METAL] object. A cube-shaped object. Going way up, higher than me. I haven't the faintest idea what this could be. Following the wall again on our left. There's a bit sticking out there. That could be a door. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] No, it won't open. Hm, that's interesting. This is a clock. But I can't see where you'd wind it. Following the wall around again to the left. We're on a path now. It goes in a little bit. We've reached a big-- ooh. There's an echo. Hello! We've reached a big wooden door. And the right of it is a handle. Just above the handle is a sort of a catch that you push down. A bit like on an outside door. Wall's coming around to the right again. All right. Another one of those metal cubular objects. And I found a window. I think that this could possibly be a church. The reason I say that is, sometimes church windows are like square shapes and diamond shapes. I think this possibly might be stained glass, which means we are by a church. We're walking up onto the grass. And now a stone table on a big platform. [KNOCKING] And there's some more lettering here. And I'm trying to work, and find if it makes any sense to me. That looks like an S or a two. I'm not sure about this. It's a bit worn away. This is another stone structure. But I haven't really worked out what they're supposed to be yet. Oh my. The only other thing I can think of is gravestones. Sally Goode, at the churchyard at Radbourne, Derbyshire. That story was produced by Tony Hill with thanks to Sally Goode and the Derbyshire Association for the Blind. Story is called A Sense of Place. Part of the Audible Picture Show, which is a collection of stories that they call a dark cinema. It is at www.audiblepictureshow.org.uk. Thanks to the Third Coast International Audio Festival, where we heard about this. Thanks also today to Jon Alpert at Downtown Community Television, Michael DiBenedetto at Next Next Entertainment. Waleed Rabi'a, David Novak, [? Debbie Rothbert, ?] [? Michael Esse, ?] and [? Paul Bolester. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show, by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who just never can decide. Maxi, mini, super , with wings, without wings. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Tim Jaccard is full of stories that from anybody else would not be believable. For instance, this girl, Katie Longendyke, who had no idea she was pregnant until the day she gave birth. She was actually taking birth control pills during the entire pregnancy and was unaware of it. So she was in what we refer to as denial. Total denial on this pregnancy. She started having abdominal pain. She says she never felt the baby kicking ever. And then there was the 15-year-old in Staten Island who kept her entire pregnancy secret from her parents. And then she actually gave birth in her bedroom by herself with her mother and father sleeping at the other end of the house. She hid that pregnancy straight through. And she handed the baby off to us on the side of the building and told us to leave. And we disappeared with the baby. Tim got into the business of rescuing babies years ago. He was a medical officer in an ambulance. And he was sickened by the number of one-day-old babies that they would be called out for, babies that had been killed or left to die. In 1998, he helped write the country's first safe-haven law that allows women to deliver their babies anonymously and relinquish them without going to prison for abandoning their kids. He started a hotline that hooks women up with free prenatal care and delivery, and adoption services if they don't want to raise the baby. And it's had an effect. In New York where he operates, he says the number of dead babies that they find in a year has dropped from 16 back when he began to 3 nowadays. That 3 still bothers him, though. That there's still some mothers he can't reach. She called the crisis center, got on the phone. She was ready to give birth soon. I told her that we would come and help her. And I was supposed to meet her at a Burger King. And I waited for a good two and a half hours for her. I had the cell phone number of her. I called her on the cell phone, called her back a couple of times. And there was no answer. I told her I'm waiting for her. I'm not going to leave. You could go back, come. I'm still here. And after two and a half hours, she never called. And two days later, there was a baby found in a dumpster right near, in that neighborhood over there. So I was just wondering whether or not-- was it this girl, or was it not this girl? We don't know. And we never will know. So-- I just don't understand why she didn't come. Did I say something wrong? Was I too aggressive? I even asked her if she was willing to meet with a woman rather than me, with a man. She just didn't show up. OK, you see Gabriel. Gabriel Hope, Christina Hope. We have Jonathan and Matthew, Holly Hope. And this is just rows and rows. And rows. We have-- One, two, three, four. How many-- 84 babies buried here at this site here. At Holy Rood Cemetery, Tim has arranged for funeral plots for the babies that he has not been able to save. The strangest thing about these little grave markers is that there's just one date beside each name. The date of birth is the date of death. Whoever finds the baby chooses a first name. Hope is always given as the last name. Tim says that he used to think about it a lot, all the kids that he couldn't save. But now he does a kind of moral calculation. He's at least able to give them a decent burial, he thinks. And news of each death gives him press, which leads to more pregnant moms coming forward to hand over their babies. Nicholas Hope, for instance-- we had four birth mothers call because of Nicholas Hope. He was found on top of a trash can in Hicksville Train Station. But through his death, we had four birth mothers call. Where's he? Nicholas Hope, right here. November 27 of last year, in winter. This math, the four babies saved for the one that was lost, it's comforting to Tim, as are the photos on a bulletin board in his office-- there's got to be 100 of those shots-- of babies that he's saved, some of them now grown into little kids, smiling at the camera. Which brings us to today's program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, Who Can You Save? Stories of people making this kind of life and death calculation. Act one of our show today, Kill One, Save Five. Act two, Rescue You, Rescue Me. Act three, The Murderer. Stay with us. Act One. So how do we make these moral calculations in our lives? What is happening literally in our brains, really? Well, my favorite new show on public radio these days, a show called Radiolab, took up that question not long ago. Radiolab is one of these shows that's still not on everywhere. And in lots of places, it's on at weird times. And lots of people haven't heard it. Chances are maybe you have never heard it. And so we asked the hosts of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, we asked them to let us excerpt some of what they said about this question. Here they are. Everybody knows that sometimes you feel something is right, sometimes you feel something is wrong. We want to know-- where does that feeling begin? Where does it come from? How old is it? Can we get started, please? OK, OK. I was just going on a bit. Why don't we start with two morality thought experiments? Are you with me? Begrudgingly, yes. This is a famous problem. It's been floating around forever. There are two parts to this problem. And you're going to have to make a choice at the end of each one. Each one-- what? You mean you're going to tell me a story? Yeah, I'm going to tell you a story. And you're going to make a choice. Part one, you ready? Yeah. All right. You're near some train tracks. Go there in your mind. There are five workers on the tracks, working. They've got their backs turned to the trolley which is coming in the distance. You mean they're repairing the tracks. They are repairing the tracks. This is unbeknownst to them, the trolley is approaching? They don't see it. You can't shout to them. And if you do nothing, here's what will happen. [FIVE PEOPLE SCREAMING AS A TRAIN HITS THEM] Five workers will die. Oh my God! That was a horrible experience. I don't want that to happen to them. No you don't. But you have a choice. You can do A, nothing. Or B, it so happens next to you is a lever. Pull the lever and the trolley will jump onto some side tracks where there is only one person working. [ONE PERSON SCREAMING AS A TRAIN HITS HIM] So if the trolley goes on the second track, it will kill the one guy. Yeah, so there's your choice. Do you kill one man by pulling a lever? Or do you kill five men by doing nothing? Well, I'm going to pull the lever. Naturally. All right. Here's part two. You're standing near some train tracks. Five guys are on the tracks, just as before. And there is the trolley coming like before. I hear the train coming. The same five guys are working on the track? Same five guys. Backs to the train? They can't see it? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. However, I'm going to make a couple of changes. Now you're standing on a foot bridge that passes over the tracks. You're looking down onto the tracks. There's no lever anywhere to be seen. Except next to you, there is a guy. What do you mean there's a guy? A large guy, large individual standing next to you on the bridge, looking down with you over the tracks. And you realize, wait, I can save those five workers if I push this man, give him a little tap. [ONE PERSON SCREAMING AS HE FALLS FROM A BRIDGE] He'll land on the tracks, and-- He stops the train! Right. Oh man, I'm not going to do that! I'm not going to do that. But surely you realize that the math is the same. You mean I'll save four people this way? Yeah. Yeah, but this time I'm pushing the guy. Are you insane? No. All right, here's the thing. If you ask people these questions-- and we did, starting with the first, is it OK to kill one man to save five using a lever-- 9 out of 10 people will say-- Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But if you ask them, is it OK to kill one man to save five by pushing the guy, 9 out of 10 people will say-- No. No. Never. No. No. It is practically universal. Educational level, no effect. Male versus female, no effect. That's Marc Hauser, Professor at Harvard. He actually posed the trolley scenarios to hundreds of thousands of people on the internet and found the same thing. Everyone agrees. But then he took it a step further and asked them why? Why is murder-- because that's what it is-- why is murder OK when you're pulling a lever, but not OK when you're pushing the guy? And what he found is that consistently, people have no clue. People have no clue. They don't understand what drove their judgments, which were completely spontaneous and automatic and immediate. And once they appreciate the dilemma that they're now in, of lack of consistency, the whole thing basically begins to unravel. The pulling the lever to save the five, I don't know. That feels better than pushing the one to save the five. But I don't really know why. So there's a good moral quandary for you. And if, as we said in the beginning, having a moral sense is a unique and special human quality, then maybe we-- us two humans anyway, you and me-- should at least inquire as to why this happens. And I happened to have met somebody who has a hunch. He's a young guy at Princeton University, wild curly hair, bit of mischief in his eye. His name is Josh Greene. Alrighty. And he spent the last few years trying to figure out where this inconsistency comes from. How do people make this judgment? Forget whether or not these judgments are right or wrong. Just what's going on in the brain that makes people distinguish so naturally and intuitively between these two cases, which from an actuarial point of view are very, very, very similar if not identical? Josh is, by the way, a philosopher and a neuroscientist. So this gives him special powers. He doesn't sort of sit back in a chair, smoke a pipe, and think, now why do you have these differences? He said, no, I would like to look inside people's heads. Because in our heads, we may find clues as to where these feelings of revulsion or acceptance come from. In our brains. So we're here in the control room. We basically just see-- And it just so happens that in the basement of Princeton, there was this-- um, well-- --big circular thing. Yeah, it looks kind of like an airplane engine. 180,000-pound brain scanner. What Josh does is he invites people into this room, has them lie down on what is essentially a cot on rollers, and he rolls them into the machine. Their heads are braced so they're stuck in there. Have you ever done this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Several times. And then he tells them stories. He tells them the same two trolley tales that you told before. And then at the very instant that they're deciding, whether I should push the lever or whether I should push the man, at that instant, the scanner snaps pictures of their brains. And what he found in those pictures was frankly a little startling. He showed us some. I'll show you some stuff. OK. The picture that I'm looking at is a brain looked at, I guess, from the top down? Yeah. It's the top down and sort of sliced like a deli slicer. And the first slide that he showed me was a human brain being asked the question, would you pull the lever? And the answer in most cases was yes. Yeah, I'd pull the lever. When the brain's saying yes, you'd see little peanut-shaped spots of yellow. It's this little guy right here. And these two guys right there. The brain was being active in these places. And oddly enough, whenever people said yes-- Yes. Yes. --to the lever question, the very same pattern lit up. Then he showed me another slide. This was a slide of a brain saying no-- No, I would not push the man. --I will not push the large man. And in this picture-- This one we're looking at here, this-- --it was a totally different constellation of regions that lit up. --this is the no, no, no crowd? I think this is part of the no, no, no crowd. So when people answer yes to the lever question, there are places in their brain which glow? Right. But when they answer no, I will not push the man, then you get a completely different part of the brain lighting up. Even though the questions are basically the same? Mhm. Well, what does that mean? And what does Josh make of this? Well, he has a theory about this. Well, a theory not proven. But I think that this is what I think the evidence suggests. He suggests that the human brain doesn't hum along like one big unified system. Instead he says, maybe in your brain, in every brain, you'll find little, warring tribes, little sub-groups. One that is doing the logical counting kind of thing. You've got one part of the brain that says, huh, five lives versus one life? Wouldn't it be better to save five versus one? And that's the part that would glow when you answer yes, I'd pull the lever. Yeah, I'll pull the lever. But there's this other part of the brain which really, really doesn't like personally killing another human being, and gets very upset at the fat man case, and shouts in effect-- No! No! It understands it on that level, and says-- No! No! --no, bad, don't do. No, I don't think I could push-- No. No. Never. --a person. No. Instead of having one system that just sort of churns out the answer and bing, we have multiple systems that give different answers. And they duke it out. And hopefully, out of that competition comes morality. This is not a trivial discovery, that you struggle to find right and wrong depending upon what part of your brain is shouting the loudest. This is like bleachers morality. Do you buy this? Uh, you know, I just don't know. I've always kind of suspected that a sense of right and wrong is mostly stuff that you get from your mom and your dad and from experience, that it's culturally learned, for the most part. Josh is kind of a radical in this respect. He thinks it's biological, I mean deeply biological. That somehow we inherit from the deep past a sense of right and wrong that's already in our brains from the get-go, before mom and dad. Our primate ancestors, before we were full-blown humans, had intensely social lives. And so deep in our brain, we have what you might call basic primate morality. And basic primate morality doesn't understand things like tax evasion. But it does understand things like pushing your buddy off of a cliff. Oh, so you're thinking then that the man on the bridge-- that I'm on the bridge next to the large man, and I have hundreds of thousands of years of training in my brain that says, don't murder the large man. Right. Whereas-- And even if I'm thinking, if I murder the large man, I'm going save five lives and only kill the one man, that there's something deeper down there that says, don't murder the large man? Right. In that case, I think it's a pretty easy case. Even though it's five versus one, in that case, people just go with what we might call the inner-chimp. But there are other-- Inner-chimp is your unfortunate way of describing an act of deep goodness. Right, well, that's what's interesting. Thou shalt not-- it's the Ten Commandments, for God's-- inner-chimp! Right. Well, what's interesting is that we think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high. And it's probably better to say that it was handed up from below. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab. That was produced by Jad and Ellen Horne. Go to their website. Download their shows for free. You will not be disappointed. radiolab.org. Act Two, Rescue You, Rescue Me. Well, now we move from saving strangers from an onrushing train to saving strangers by taking a new job. There are these jobs that are up for grabs. And they're all about helping people. But the catch is-- and there is a catch-- they all come with what the official job descriptions call danger pay. Before your first day, you're trained on how to handle a gun, how to do evasive driving, including busting through roadblocks. These are US government jobs, civilian jobs, doing reconstruction in Iraq. And the state department is having so much trouble filling these positions that in February, the head of the agency, Condoleezza Rice, told Congress that it was too hard. She was going to have to get Army Reservists to do 40% of the open jobs, 129 positions. And when a 51-year-old father of three, Randy Frescoln, signed up for one of these civilian jobs, his wife did a very simple moral calculation. Keep in mind, I'm a volunteer. I was not a soldier. And I did not have to go. I was a pure volunteer. And I asked my wife. She said she could not understand why someone would volunteer to go to a war zone, put their life in risk to help people we don't really care about. And that's harsh, but this is what she's saying. Well, let me ask you, what's the answer to your wife's question? Why go to Iraq? I just couldn't stand watching it on TV anymore from the sidelines. I come from my father, mother, brother, uncle, we're all Marines. And you think to yourself, is there something that I could contribute in a positive way? Now, if this sounds old-fashioned or grand, I should tell you that Randy Frescoln is more qualified to contribute in a positive way to the reconstruction of Iraq than most of us. In 2004, he did that same job in Afghanistan, setting up orchards and bridges and water systems and vocational training and all kinds of other stuff. Which actually is not too different from the job he does here in the States. He works for the US Department of Agriculture in Iowa, where he has set up hundreds of projects to help communities and businesses all over the state. He's the kind of guy who loves driving down the highway and spotting a biodiesel plant or wind turbines that he helped fund. But what happened to him in Iraq changed him, made him rethink what it means to help people, to serve your country, to do good. He got there in December, 2006, lived on an army base in the Sunni triangle. And it was so violent that any time he left the base to meet with Iraqis, he had a full military escort and was told that convoys carrying his co-workers had been hit eight times. But the biggest difference from his experience in Afghanistan was the people. Any Iraqis who talked to him risked being seen as collaborators and killed. So he didn't get close to anybody. After one meeting with local agricultural leaders, Randy's translator took him aside and told him that the Iraqis had been saying to each other, during the meeting in Arabic, just tell the Americans whatever they want to hear. Nobody seemed to see him as anything but somebody to be appeased, or somebody to demand things from, a nuisance, or the enemy. Is there some that you thought would kill you if they had the opportunity? Yeah. I had never encountered-- what you could say the word-- hatred than I got from some of those folks over there. It was the worst feeling in my life. You go, what a dumbass I am for jeopardizing my career, my family, to come all the way over here for this. How dumb are you? Tell me about a time when you felt that. Tell me about a time when that actually happened to you. Who were you talking to? Probably the University, because I had very high expectations for the University. You would think they're good people doing good things. Well, when I get there, they brought in two professors who got their PhDs in America. Oh, wow. And one of them had worked for USDA for three years in Wyoming. So you just felt like, OK, that's it. I'm set. We're good. Yeah, I looked at him and I said, you know exactly what I'm here for, what we're trying to do. And they said, yes. And then we carried on our dialogue. And I kept looking at him. And I finally said, I see something in your eyes. What is it that I don't know that you need to tell me. And I had to ask him that multiple times. And finally, they said, you need to understand. He's in charge. And he was their boss. It started to dawn on Randy that even here, even in the University, with these two Iraqis who actually seemed to understand him, even here he was not going to get anywhere. Instead of the normal things that farmers might need in a poor or economically-ravaged country, their boss asked for high-tech equipment. If you're trying to build capacity, if you don't have anything, the last thing you're going to ask for is advanced technology like that, right? Why would you want that? So it could be sold for cash. Oh, I see. Yeah. Despite all this, Randy was able to accomplish a couple things. He set up a model program that got Iraqi farmers and tribal Sheiks and the University and the government working together for the first time. But he and other people in these civilian jobs in Iraq wonder sometimes, is that level of success worth it? Randy and other civilians are sent through Iraq on what are officially called PRTs, Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These were established two and a half years after the US invasion, with the idea that they were going to create small economic development projects. And also they were going to train local governments around Iraq to do the things that local governments do in a democracy: devise budgets, hold meetings in front of the public, set up courthouses with local judges. But from the start, the PRTs have been plagued by a lack of planning, qualified people, money. Civilians found themselves in war zones without telephones to do their jobs, or desks. An article in the in-house magazine for State Department employees, the Foreign Service Journal, said, quote, "a common refrain from foreign service members speaking about their experience in new PRTs is that they have felt like pins on a map, sent out so officials in Washington could say they were there. They felt cut off and were given no clear instruction on their role." I was retired at the time. And I have to say that I was against the invasion from the very beginning. Nevertheless, we did it. And this is my country. So when a call went out for people with the kind of background I had, I thought it was perhaps a moral obligation to go and see if I could do something useful. Kiki Munshi is a veteran diplomat who ran the PRT in Diyala province, and is now back in the United States. In testimony to Congress this February, she said that in spite of the quote, "quietly heroic work of lots of people, the PRTs cannot succeed. The obstacles are too great." The biggest problem is the obvious one, the violence. She says you can't create local democracy without the rule of law. In Diyala province, she was working with the provincial council, which is the local government. She was feeling optimistic. And then everything really fell apart when a Shiite general was assigned to run the Iraqi army in that particular area. --who at first seemed like a very good person. But gradually we began to see warning signs. He was transferring Sunni officers out, replacing them with Shia. And our military compiled a very complete dossier on the fact that he was running death squads against the Sunni, doing mass detentions, torture, a lot of unpleasant things that would not promote intersecterian peace. And so did that pretty much mean the end of all your projects? Yes. Yes, gradually the provincial council stopped meeting. They haven't had a quorum since October. The business then left. The ones who could afford it went on to Syria or to Jordan. The ones who couldn't have gone to Baghdad. The security situation around the PRTs is so tough that an audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that only four of 13 PRTs were generally able to carry out their missions, and recommended closing offices in two provinces. Few people are faced with the decision is it worth dying for? That's the Iraqi question. The question of whether PRTs are actually worth anybody's life became a very personal question for Randy Frescoln. Just three months into his one-year stint in Iraq, he decided to quit. I cannot say strongly enough how this shook him up. You know what? Even today, it still bothers me that-- even today, I go, I know I went for the right reasons. I feel incredibly good, what I accomplished. It still eats at my gut. And talk about how you made that decision. Well, every three months, they schedule R&Rs. You're supposed to have rest and relaxation. And for me is, when I started working on that, I called home, and I was talking about dates and that sort of thing. And my little nine-year-old girl asked me very honestly, very simply, when she found out I was going back, that I was coming home and not staying, she said, why are you going to go back to Iraq? And for two nights, I couldn't sleep thinking about that. And it's a tough question, because it's still going through my mind. I'm still going through my mind, trying to come up with answers. But for me, the cost exceeded the benefit. And I don't know-- for me, it's not worth dying for the people that I was working with. I don't know how else to explain it. If I would have died trying to help them, none of them would have cared. And the only one that would have bore the price was my family. He had gone to Iraq saying he wanted to do his part in the war on terror. And he came back telling his 18-year-old son not to sign up. That's what I told him. He had both Air Force and a Navy college scholarships that he was working on. And I said, son, when Paris Hilton can get drafted, and George Bush's daughters get drafted, when everybody can get drafted and serve, and they declare war, then I'll want you in the military. And what did your son say? He listened. Because before I had left for Iraq, anybody who raised an opposition to the war I thought was extremely unpatriotic. Like I said, I'm about as red, white, and blue of a guy as you could possibly want, and from a military family. But I guess we need to talk in a rational manner about what's the cost benefits of us getting involved in the world. I, as a team leader, and my deputy team leader had to make the decision, was this mission today worth risking not just the lives of our people that work directly for us, but the lives of the soldiers that were going to be sent out in the convoy to protect them? Stephanie Miley was Randy's boss in Iraq. She set up the PRT in Tikrit. And she ran it while Randy was there. And so it's the second assignment that she volunteered for in Iraq. And when she looks at the costs and benefits of having the PRTs, she points to successes. Her PRT got the provincial council to have open meetings with the press there, and budgets that anybody can look up. They trained policemen to get proper evidence and started planning an economic development zone. I asked her about the things that Randy said made him decide that it wasn't worth it to stay in Iraq-- that it was too hard to do much good for people. Maybe it's just too soon to do economic and political development, if any Iraqi who meets with Americans becomes a target for assassination. Well, we did talk at the time. And I want to say Randy made some excellent contributions to our work there. And I think the things that he put in place, we're still seeing progress on that. Not the progress we would like, but progress. I think there are a couple things to consider when we're thinking about this. Certainly the contractors who work on projects are targeted and killed, the workers intimidated, and things like that. It's a very difficult emotional issue, frankly. Because when I first arrived in the country, I met the governor of the province, Ala'Adeen. And he said to me, you know, I want you to meet my wife. Because you two are just alike. You're professional women trying to make Iraq better. And I did have the opportunity to meet his wife several times. She was the head surgeon for the maternity ward at the teaching hospital in Tikrit, a lovely woman. Governor was very proud of his wife and what she was doing and things like that. And I asked her how it was that she had met the governor, because he was a few years older than she. And she explained that her sister, who was also a physician-- they had gone to school together, lived together, practiced together-- had been kidnapped two years before. The governor had assisted the family, trying to find out what had happened. They thought it was a ransom issue. It turned out to be that she'd been kidnapped by terrorists and was executed. So that is how she met the governor. We met, as I said, several times. And one thing that she really wanted me to do was to work with her on what was going on at the hospital. And so on July 10, I had the opportunity last year to go to the teaching hospital, meet with her and several others, take a tour, see the facilities, see what their needs were to work on it. On July 11, she walked into her clinic and was blown up by an IED. They were waiting for her. It's very difficult to see something like that happen to a person who is the future of Iraq. It's very difficult to see that happen to the governor, who was understandably devastated by the loss of his wife. And it's very difficult to think that maybe because she was seen as being too close to the US presence there, that she became more of a target. It can sometimes be a very difficult position to be in, as Randy was saying, when you realize that the people you're talking to today may not be there tomorrow because they were talking to you today. Well, here's the thing I really wanted to talk to you about, is I've talked to people who have been at PRTs. And the conclusion that they've come to is that it's too soon for these to be effective, or they don't feel like they're doing enough good to justify being there themselves. And it seems like you've come to a different conclusion, that actually it's worth doing the PRTs, and it's worth trying to make this stuff happen now. And I wonder, why? Could you talk about that? Sure. I think it's worth doing because it is showing the Iraqi people that we are there with them in partnership. We are not abandoning them. So it's going to go in fits and starts. Some of these things happen in a strange fashion, where there's a long lag time. And then suddenly the dam breaks and things move forward. So it's a difficult thing. I do believe that PRTs are the way forward, because I don't see the alternative. We can't have a situation where the US military is the only presence. But you just have to push forward on all of these areas at the same time. In January, President Bush proposed doubling the number of PRTs this year. And those plans are being put into effect. Currently available PRT jobs in Iraq are listed at federalgovernmentjobs.us among other sites. Coming up, strangers in the night exchanging glances-- will one of them murder the other? 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. This week on our show, Who Can You Save? And we've arrived at act three of our show. Act Three, The Murderer. Well, so far, we've heard today about people deciding whether they would save babies, whether they would save people from a train, whether they would save Iraq. Brady Udall has this story about people facing a few other decisions like this. The deepest hours of a wintry Iowa night, and it sounded like somebody was knocking on our sliding glass door. I had been typing on the computer down in our basement, and I told myself that the sound had to be a raccoon or a stray dog sniffing around on the deck. Or maybe it was my wife, who was supposed to be sleeping in the bedroom with our newborn son, up to get a glass of water. But then it came again, the hollow sound of a knuckle rapping on glass. Had we still lived in town, a visitor dropping by at 3:00 AM wouldn't have been such a surprise. In Iowa City, it wasn't all that uncommon to have a half-drunk sorority girl pop in to ask if we had any spare condoms, of for one of my fellow graduate students to come by to recite his latest confessional poem, usually titled something like "Why I Bleed." But six months ago, we had said goodbye to the cosmopolitan nightlife of Iowa City and moved out to this remote cabin on the banks of the Iowa River in an effort to simplify our lives, to get closer to the natural world, and most importantly, to discourage people from dropping by to read their poetry to us. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away on the opposite side of the river. I walked up the stairs, comforting myself with the idea that homicidal maniacs aren't generally known for having the courtesy to knock before entering the houses of their victims. I got to the top and saw who was waiting outside. On the other side of the glass was a man who bore a strong resemblance to the murderer I had been imagining. Six foot four, greasy black hair, a misaligned face pocked with acne scars. I could tell right away that this was not a person who had been blessed with a happy childhood. His clothes: long overcoat, combat boots, Judas Priest concert t-shirt were crusted with mud. And it appeared that he had spent the entire evening digging graves and now only needed the bodies to fill them with. We looked at each other for a good long time, this man and I. Because I had been laboring all night in the freezing basement, I happened to be wearing my wife's magenta flannel-lined jogging outfit, metallic running shoes, and a novelty ski hat that looked like something you might find on the head of an elf. We were both, it was clear, deeply troubled by the sight of each other. It's difficult to explain why I didn't do something sensible, like go for the knife drawer, or barricade myself in the bedroom and call 911. I believe it had to do with my weakened state at the time. I was in what my mother would have generously called "a funk." There had been complications with the birth of our son, which our meager insurance had failed to cover, and we were now sunk in debt. I was spent, sorry for myself, and apparently didn't have the energy or the guts to defend my home and family. So when the murderer knocked again on the glass, I slid the door open, and like somebody manning the drive-thru at Wendy's asked, "may I help you?" The first thing he said to me was, "man, take a look at my hand." He held up his hand and I could see that his knuckles were shredded and bleeding. It looked like he'd tried to cram his fist into a blender. "I ran my car off the road," he said. "And I got so mad, I punched a tree, which I now regret." I had no response to that, so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to invite him in. "Oh, I wouldn't want to track mud on your carpet," said the murderer. He explained that his car was stuck, and he needed some help getting it out. He made it clear that he wanted to do this without the cops or any other public authorities getting involved, and wondered if I could give him a hand. "Man," he said, "I'm partying with this guy Peanut. Maybe you've heard of him. And then I'm driving home, minding my own [BLEEP] business, and the next thing I know, my car is sunk up to the axles in a dry lakebed. What the [BLEEP], right? It's on the other side of those trees there. Not far at all. I'll do all the pushing. All you've got to do is work the controls." I told him I would get my coat and shoes and be right with him. I slipped into the bathroom, suddenly weak with relief. I felt I had been spared, at least for the moment, and it felt very, very good. But this guy's story about his car being stuck in a lakebed seemed suspicious. Surely it was a ruse to lure me into the woods so he and his friend Peanut could take care of me with the least amount of fuss, and then later return to plunder my house and butcher my family. My survival instincts, which had been in remission for a few months now, began to stir. I decided I needed something to defend myself with. There were the knives in the kitchen, but they were in plain view of the deck. And my chainsaw, which I used as a makeshift weed whacker to keep the thistles down around the house, was out in the shed. For some time, I considered the plunger next to the toilet. I ransacked the bathroom. And in a cabinet under the sink, I found a hammer my wife had once used to build bird houses. It was tiny, almost a toy, and I don't think you could've broken open a soft-boiled egg with that hammer. But unlike the plunger, I could hide it safely in the band of my wife's jogging pants. And in the event that I had to defend myself with it, at least I would be able to leave this world with a small scrap of dignity. Once I had the hammer tucked safely away, I met the murderer out on the deck. And without further ado, he led me into the dark forest. I hadn't thought to bring a flashlight. And once we had moved away from the house, it was utterly black. I tripped over stumps, and saplings stabbed me in the eyes with their branches. He made comments like, "just past this gulley, I think," and "not too much longer," and "ow, [BLEEP], what was that," and "oh, [BLEEP] log." After a while, I couldn't hear him anymore, and I thought I'd lost him completely. But then he was behind me, his boots crunching on the frost-crusted leaves. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I thought I could see the dark form of Peanut or some other delinquent crouching behind every other thicket or tree. I felt the hair on my arms stand up. And it came to me with a certainty. This was it. The ambush was on. I was going to die in these lonely, barren woods, wearing a woman's jogging suit and the hat of an elf. It was around this time that the hammer slipped out of my waist band and made its way down the leg of my pants. In a panic, I hopped on one foot. And as casually as possible, tried to shake the hammer out of the cuff of my pants so it would fall unnoticed to the side of the path. I thought I might have succeeded until I heard the footfalls stop behind me. "Dropped your hammer," the murderer said. "Oh, yes. Thank you," I said, and immediately began swatting at thickets and overhanging branches as if I had brought it along for the purpose of clearing out brush. I hacked at every bramble and dead weed in reach until we emerged from the trees. There, not 50 feet in front of us, sat a generously dented duster sunk in the mud of a barren cornfield. The murderer slapped me on the back. "God damn," he said. "You found it." There is not much to say about the fiasco that followed. We were able to push the car out of one rut only to get it stuck in another. We'd get it moving across the furrows, wheels spinning and mud flying everywhere, our hopes on the rise, only to watch it lose traction and sink slowly back into the muck. More than once, my companion tried to give up. But I was a constant source of encouragement. I had all the energy in the world. While he sat up front, pressing wearily on the gas, I labored at the back bumper in a hailstorm of mud. After nearly an hour, we were both so surprised at having got it up on the gravel road that we nearly let it roll into the ditch on the other side. Wearied and encased entirely in mud, we slumped against the car to get our wind back. The murderer heaved and clutched his side. "Son of a bitch," he said, "I think I activated my hernia again." He eventually climbed into his car and in the rubbish pile on the passenger side floor located a pen and scrap of paper. With great care and concentration, he wrote something on the paper and handed it to me. In stylish, looping cursive, it said, "Donny Solomon, 377-2908, Malibu Acres Trailer Park." "That's my name and privileged information," he said. "Very few people have access to it. You need something, you just call that number or head over to Malibu Acres and say my name. They'll know where to find me. He stood up and regarded me intently. "I mean anything. I don't care where or what it is, which side of the law it's on. You've done me a great favor here tonight." I took off my elf hat, wiped my forehead, and patted the hood of the duster. "Just glad I could be of help," I said. Before he got back in his car, he pulled me in and hooked his arm around my shoulder in a manly half-hug. "Hey," he said in a little voice, "maybe you're queer or whatever. But that don't mean nothing to me." He drove off, sliding all over the frosty road, and I trudged home, making sure to lock the door behind me. This is a story I used to tell all the time. I'm partial to it because, unlike most of the stories I tell, it's almost entirely true. And as stories go, it's a good one. A dark and stormy night, a stranger at the door, a little comic relief to lighten the mood, and that which brightens every heart, a happy ending. Even better, it had provided me with a prop, that mud-smeared scrap of paper with Donny Solomon's name and privileged information. After that night in Iowa, I didn't see Donny Solomon for six years, had no communication at all with him. But that didn't prevent him from becoming a part of my life. I had told the story so often, invoked his name so many times, that I began to think of him as a friend. There were times during those six years that I came close to calling in the favor he'd promised. There are so many people in our lives who might benefit from a sound beating at the hands of an ex-con. But I kept his phone number folded in my wallet for the day when I truly needed it. Just the idea of that slip of paper was a comfort. I did not need God or the saints or any other higher power. I had Donny Solomon. And then, in the summer of 2002, I found myself back in Iowa City, and I knew I'd have to look Donny up. I wanted him to know me as I was now, a professor, a published author, a person of some note, not that pantywaist of six years ago. Above all else, I wanted more of Donny Solomon. I don't know how else to say it. I wanted another story to tell. I wanted a bigger piece of him than the small one I already owned. I tried his number several times until a woman answered, late in the afternoon, and explained that Donny didn't live at that address anymore, that he and his wife had moved out of town to someplace called Stilton's Corner. I followed the simple directions she had given me and ended up on a dirt road on the far south end of town. At a 90 degree turn in the road sat the yellow cinder block house she had promised. Its paint was peeling away in broad, curling flakes, and blooms of mildew had congregated like shadows along its soffits and eaves. It was early summer, and the milkweed pods along the rivers and ditches had opened and sent their cotton blowing, creating drifts along the margins of the road. I had to kick through a mound of fluff to climb up the steps to the front door, and was about to knock when a woman pulled up in an old station wagon. She called out the window, "you the therapist?" I shook my head, and she cursed. She was a bony, narrow-hipped woman in a light blue, two-piece outfit, the kind worn by people who work in hospitals and old folks' homes. I introduced myself, explained that I was an old acquaintance of Donny Solomon's. And she told me her name was Tina, and that she was Donny's wife. She pushed open the door and hustled me inside. I hesitated in the doorway, blinking, everything in the room a dim, massive shadow. A teenage girl rose from a couch. And there was a brief conversation and exchange of money, and the girl ducked past me without a word or glance, as if making an escape. A rough, phlegm-edged voice called out, "oh, the door. My god damn eyes." I pulled shut the door and peered into the dim room. Its most obvious feature was an old hospital bed, occupied by a grizzled, stick figure of a man, sunk to his waist in tangled sheets. He had the heels of his hands jammed into his eye sockets, and he was moaning in a thoughtless, almost distracted way. Tina moved quickly into the small kitchen, began slapping open cabinets and pulling drawers. "Baby doll," she spoke in the exaggerated tones typically used for small children or the hard of hearing, "somebody here to see you. Speak up, and try to be nice." Slowly, and with what seemed a great effort, the man lifted his face to look at me. From this angle, it was impossible not to notice the thin scar that started at his temple, made its way through his stiff, patchy hair, and ended in a curlicue behind his ear. He didn't speak, but his large, feverish eyes pulsed with what looked like the desire to communicate something uncommon and meaningful. I was confused, even a little disoriented in that dark room, heavy with medicinal smells. "Is this Donny Solomon's house," I asked the old man. "Do you know if he's home?" The man opened his mouth, but couldn't seem to form it around the necessary syllables. On his second try, he said, "you are an [BLEEP] hole." "Donny," scolded Tina, who was now standing in the kitchen entryway. "You're going to scare him away." She brought in a shot glass full of at least a dozen pills and a silver can of Coors Light. She sighed. "I guess you didn't know about his accident? I don't think I'd have recognized him either. He's changed that much. Here, baby doll, I've got your pills." Nothing in this man's face, in his bony arms, or stiff, colorless hair recalled the oversized presence who'd shown up on my front deck six years before. Only the large, black widow tattoo on his neck, which now looked more like a nasty skin condition than anything menacing, convinced me that this was the same person. Tina sang a made-up nursery tune called "Pill Time," and began inserting the pills one by one into Donny's pursed lips. He seemed resigned to this indignity, until she held up the can of beer to his mouth, and he jerked forward, swatting the can out of her hand and scattering the remaining pills onto the bed and carpet. "My drink," he shouted, his voice thin with an infantile petulance. "My special drink!" "God damn you, Donny." Tina stood up, tensing her shoulders in a way that suggested she might strike him. Instead she held out her shirt, which was covered with flecks of beer foam. "Look at this," she cried, "I don't know how I stand it." She gave me a pained, apologetic look, holding out her wet hands. She told me that the only way Donny would take his pills these days was with his special drink, which they happened to be out of. She wondered if I wouldn't mind sitting with him while she ran down to the liquor store. "You two can catch up," she suggested, "talk about boy things." On her way out the door, she let me know that Donny was subject to severe epileptic seizures, which is why he couldn't be left alone. "If something like that happens, go ahead and call 911. They'll tell you what to do." I made no move to stop her, only sat dumbly on the couch watching Donny, who spent most of his time trying to untangle his legs from the bedding. "Can't figure this blanket out," he kept saying. He didn't seem much interested in me. And even though I knew it was pointless, I sat on the edge of his bed and asked him if he remembered how we'd first met, how he'd shown up at my door in the middle of the night. It didn't seem he was listening until I mentioned how drunk he must have been to get his car stuck so far off the main road. "I was not drunk," he spat, his voice dark with sudden menace. He pointed a wavering finger at me and told me that if I made such a claim again, he would not hesitate to break my neck. I abandoned the bed for the couch on the other side of the room. Even though he was about as harmless as a human being could be, I took him at his word. Right away, he got fidgety, his shoulders slumping with remorse. And he asked me to come back and talk to him some more. "Be nice, man," he said, "and I'll be nice too." We didn't have much to say to each other after that. The late afternoon sun had sunk below the tree line, and a dusty light angled through the lowered blinds. Just when I was beginning to consider the idea that Tina had run off for good, leaving me to take over as Donny's sole guardian and caretaker, her old car rattled up the drive. Somewhere between here and the liquor store, she'd put on a flowery, rayon blouse and skirt and enough musky perfume to alert us of her presence before she came through the door, clutching two paper bags full of clinking bottles. She called me back to the kitchen and asked me if I wanted to stay for dinner. "I got some fried chicken here, and I thought we'd do a macaroni salad," she said. I claimed that I wasn't hungry, but she waved me off. "We'll get us some drinks and then we'll have dinner. You can stay the night if you want. Donny won't mind. We don't get a lot of company here since his accident." While I was trying to sort out what she meant by "stay the night," she got some water boiling for the pasta and told me the story of Donny's accident. It was the sort of absurdly tragic tale that fills you with guilty euphoria for having been spared the obscenities and injustices of this existence. About a year and a half ago, she explained, Donny had come out of one of his stints at the county lockup a changed man. He had been touched by God while in jail, and God had told him to change his ways. He joined AA, quit selling and smoking pot, said farewell to his many low-life friends. He cut his hair and got a job at the concrete plant. He decided he had a purpose in life, which was to reconnect to his daughter, April, a teenager who he had not seen since she was in kindergarten, having lost custody of her after the divorce with his first wife. After he'd proven his honorable intentions, Donny was allowed a few brief visits with April, a movie, a trip to the mall, and finally a full day of Christian fellowship at Silverwood Lake with the New Life Missionary Baptist Church. Donny was so nervous about being with his daughter all day around Godly, upright people that he didn't sleep the entire night before. So nervous that, as some of those Godly, upright people later claimed, he had gone back to his car throughout the day to take snorts off a hidden bottle of whiskey. Daddy and daughter drove home that night after a long day of weenie roasts and sack races and hymns sung by the fire. And Donny, drunk, exhausted, or some combination of the two, allowed the car to drift off the road and into a deep ravine, where it rolled, ejecting both of them into a stand of pines. The wreck was not discovered until the next morning. April died sometime during the night. And her father, despite shattered legs and pelvis, a broken back, ruptured liver, and irreversible brain damage, survived. "And that's where we are now," Tina said, giving me a wide, bright-eyed look of forced cheerfulness. "Donny out there with the mind of a 12-year-old and the ex-wife suing us for the clothes on our backs." She cackled and shook her head. "How [BLEEP] delightful." She took three jelly jars out of the freezer, poured a shot of vodka into each one, and filled them the rest of the way with cheap champagne. I accepted the drink and took a sip of it. I had never been much of a drinker, but this seemed like a reasonable time to start. We repaired to the front room, where Tina made a big production out of feeding Donny his remaining pills. And he gulped his drink like it was Gatorade. It didn't take him long to drink himself into a stupor. And eventually Tina edged over and sat next to me, so close that our hips and knees touched. A second later, her perfume settled on us like a fog bank. I pretended to sip my drink, and she watched me, turning slowly to show me her cleavage. "Now how did you and Donny meet," she said. "I never really got that part." I started to tell her the story. I thought it might distract her from the life she had found herself in, make her laugh a little, maybe convince her to move her knee away from mine. But I couldn't go through with it. The words crumbled in my mouth, and I made up a lie about how Donny and I used to hang out at a bar downtown. I pulled out my wallet and produced the slip of paper with Donny's information, and when she saw it, her eyes went damp. "He was proud of his penmanship," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. "He wrote like a [BLEEP] girl." Donny had been watching us closely the entire time. He shifted a little, made a noise in the back of his throat, "Teeny, come back," he called out weakly, barely moving his lips. "Come back over here." "Oh, baby doll," she said, and crawled onto the bed and cooed over and petted him, nuzzled his neck and kissed his stubbly head. I sat on the couch, took a few more fake sips of my drink, and decided that I couldn't stand watching them, couldn't be a part of this anymore. I asked to use the bathroom, and hurried down the narrow hall and locked the door behind me. I sat on the carpeted toilet lid and rehearsed my exit speech. I wanted it to be compassionate and dignified, so I could make my escape cleanly, without ugliness or hurt feelings. It took me another minute to find my nerve. When I came out, I found Tina and Donny dozing against each other, both clutching empty jelly jars. I didn't have to think about it. I went straight for the door, walking with such exquisite care that I felt cushions of air under my feet. As I passed the bed, Donny opened his eyes to look at me, which stopped me cold. And only when he gave me a little nod, the slightest dip of his head, did I reach for the doorknob and slip out into the warm evening. I hurried across the yard, stepping over the drifts of milkweed fluff. And by the time I made it to the road, I felt a hot stab of shame. Not for sneaking away like some kind of Judas, or for abandoning these people, but for not needing them any longer. Donny Solomon was useless to me now, nothing more than a sad, baffled soul. Just like me. Brady Udall in Teasdale, Utah. He's the author of the novel The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Special thanks today to Steve Keshket and Jennifer Murgey and Emily Voight who co-produced our story about Tim Jaccard. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Torey Malatia, who says he has a very good reason for showing up so late to our broadcast today. "I'm partying with this guy Peanut. Maybe you've heard of him. And the next thing I know, my car is sunk up to the axles in a dry lakebed. What the [BLEEP], right?" I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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I'm Dal LaMagna. Ira Glass will be here in a minute. Just bear with me. I was heading to the Middle East, and there were friends of mine who had been there before and they gave me some tips. Salam aleikum. Salam aleikum. That's it. Alaikum salam. Alaikum salam. Aleikum salam. So do I say salam aleikum first? Depends. It's a mutual exchange. You'll probably both say it at the same time. Salam aleikum. Aleikum salam. Aleikum salam. And say that everywhere. That's going to be very good for you. The day before I went, I stopped by Tony, who is a friend of mine and my tailor, to get some clothes. You're sure you're not going to wear a tuxedo there? I thought for sure you'd have to wear the tuxedo. I'm not going to any parties. I'm meeting with the resistance. Oh. I'm having meetings with sheikhs. You know? The sheikhs know good clothes. No, they do. They're all dressed in their-- They know nice clothes. I had dinner at my sister's house the night before I left with her and her husband. I was going to Iraq hoping to do some good there. And they weren't very keen about it at all. Well at least you're trying to do something. I think you're crazy, but at least you're trying to do something. Don Quixote. See the attitude I get from people about what I'm doing? OK, here's Ira Glass. Thanks Dal LaMagna. As you can hear, Dal is somebody who is capable of a lot of things, opening a radio show for instance. And the reason that Dal was going to Iraq was to end the violence there. Literally, to broker a ceasefire between the Sunni resistance and the coalition forces. Basically, he wanted to get Iraqis to stop shooting at Americans. He doesn't speak Arabic. He's got no policy making experience. He's not a diplomat, or a CIA agent, or an ex-Marine. He's not Bono. He's just a guy, which brings us to today's program. Dal, give them the ID. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Want me to do it again? No, that was perfect. Today on our show, Man vs. History, we have two stories in two different acts of two different men, regular guys, taking history into their own hands. Stay with us. Act One. Well we heard about Dal LaMagna actually by reading about him in the newspaper. There was this article in the New York Times about a Sunni politician from Iraq who was in Washington, DC lobbying on Capitol Hill. And this article mentioned a tweezer magnate, the maker of the Tweezerman tweezer, which at that time I had never heard of, but since then, all the women in my life have informed me is the greatest thing ever. And this Tweezerman guy, Dal LaMagna, was doing all kinds of things with his millions to advance peace in the Middle East, including setting up meetings between this Sunni politician and members of Congress. But at the time, he was planning what was going to be his biggest project of all, the thing you heard him talk about at the beginning of the show. This mission to get the Sunni resistance to sit down with coalition forces and try to get to terms for a ceasefire. We heard about that and we wondered, how this is going to go? And so we called him up. And we asked him if he would be willing to take a little recorder with him. He came back with over 25 hours of sound. And This American Life producer Sarah Koenig sifted through all that sound and then had Dal come into the studio to talk about it. Here's Sarah. When Dal LaMagna gets an idea, he charges at it with everything he's got. He has bankrolled movies. He ran for Congress in 1996 and spent $1 million of his own money on his campaign, literally all of his money at the time, and lost. And then four years later, he ran again. He's the kind of guy who would run for president even though he has no hope of actually becoming president. In fact, right now he is running for president. And so when he got frustrated lobbying Washington about the war, he figured, why try to convince congressmen to convince the president to set a new course with the Iraqis? Cut out the middleman. And so, back in June, he boarded a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight, fell sleep and woke up in Amman, Jordan where his ceasefire project would begin. Address here? My address here? I'm staying with Mohammed al-Dynee. al-Dynee. He's a member of the Iraq Parliament. We're staying here. Dal met Mohammed al-Dynee, the Sunni politician we read about in that New York Times article when Mohammed came to Washington, DC. He's one of the youngest members of Iraq's parliament, and he stayed at Dal's house for three weeks while Dal took him around Congress. And now Mohammed had invited Dal to come stay at his place in Amman. Amman is where lots of Iraqi political players are living now that it's so dangerous in Iraq. So Amman is where Dal and Mohammed will begin to map out a peace agreement for one of the largest regional conflicts in the world. Their strategy? Meetings, lots of meetings. Tomorrow morning, we're meeting Sheikh Harith al-Dari. Oh, really. Dal's first meeting is with Sheikh Harith al-Dari, a Sunni cleric so important, the story goes, that President Bush has tried to meet with him and the sheikh has declined. And if you're asking why he turned down the president of the United States but said yes to Tweezerman, here's why. Dal had unwittingly become a big deal in Mohammed's political circle because of Mohammed's trip to DC. Dal had thought the trip was kind of a bust. Even the New York Times story wasn't exactly positive. It suggested that Mohammed might be a liar, or worse a criminal, which Dal thought was ridiculous, but still. And they didn't meet nearly as many congressmen as they wanted. I was very disappointed, but from Mohammed's point of view, and from everybody who he represented this point of view back there, he was the first member of parliament from the national side to get any voice. From their point of view, the story in the New York Times was terrific. The fact that it was a full page story with a picture and the fact that I was the one who facilitated it, raised my status dramatically amongst all these nationalist forces. This first meeting with Sheikh Harith al-Dari is arguably the most important meeting he'll have his whole trip. Al-Dari is considered hugely influential in Sunni resistance groups, some of the same groups the American government calls insurgents. Their plan is that once Dal has gotten in with Sheikh al-Dari, they can then go see the US commanders in Baghdad. Dal can announce that he's met with the sheikh, the same one they've been trying to talk to but can't. And after that, Dal will become the liaison between the Sunni resistance and the US forces. And they can start to talk ceasefire. So I just left my meeting with Sheikh Harith al-Dari. I wasn't allowed to record it. And so I frantically wrote notes. I've got 35 pages. And the sheikh has a very, very gentle face. He's a very calm man. And we go? OK. It's two o'clock in the morning. I'm still up. Everybody else is in bed. Yesterday I went to see the sheikh. I guess I would have to admit I was a little nervous. Well this meeting went on for three hours. I was starting to get hot. I was in my suit. And I was looking for my opportunity to ask him the question that I wanted to ask him. Thinking that he actually had the power to call a ceasefire against American soldiers, I said to him, "Look, here's the situation. You need to do something unexpected. If you can do something unexpected, you could break through this stalemate. And an unexpected thing to do would be for the resistance to have a ceasefire, to stop shooting at the American soldiers and to concentrate on Al-Qaeda." He looked at me and said, "You know, I can't tell the Iraqis what to do. The Iraqis do what they do and what they want to do. They are against the occupation. And for me, the only way I can influence them is if the Americans announced that they were going to withdraw." Of course as of now, no Iraqi believes America will ever withdraw. And when I went outside, my first though was how I was a little disappointed. But this meeting did two things for Dal. First, the simple fact that he had met with the sheikh, like an audience with royalty, made him someone who everyone wanted to meet with. And second, now at least he knew the starting point for negotiations. The sheikh wouldn't lean on the Sunnis unless the Americans announced a withdrawal. Since America wasn't about to announce a withdrawal, somewhere in there, he'd have to find some wiggle room. But this is just day one, a Tuesday. By the following Tuesday, Dal had sat through 15 meetings. There was a school teacher who survived an assassination attempt. Iraq's former minister of oil, a guy who was injured in a suicide bombing. Iraq's ambassador to Jordan, people from Diyala, Anbar, Baghdad Amarah Kirkuk. There was another very important sheikh, this time a shia, who came all the way from Syria just to see Dal. The fact that if the American troops stay in Iraq, it will definitely lead to a civil war. A chief of one of the largest Kurdish tribes. He is saying, with respect, Bush himself has said that he made a mistake. Condoleezza Rice says we made thousands of mistakes. A group of seven argumentative parliamentarians. Were you ever thinking, I'm not the guy they think I am? I mean did you ever just worry, they're thinking I'm more influential than I am? No, never occurred to me. I don't think that way. I'm an entrepreneur. My entire life, that's what I am, an entrepreneur. And what is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is somebody who makes things happen. And I'm making things happen. And I'm not thinking about, oh well, I'm not an important enough person to do this. I'm just making the things happen. And certainly if it was Bill Clinton doing it or Jimmy Carter doing it or anybody else, yeah, it would be big news. And there would be conversations about it. But they're not doing it. So I'm doing it. When you think about how many experts there are out there in this stuff and how many people have been working their whole careers on solving the problems in the Middle East, the fact that you would even fantasize about that sounds a little grandiose and crazy. I don't think it's crazy. I'm not a crazy person. I'm a person who, when I founded Tweezerman 25 years ago and I was walking around with this tweezer. And people were saying to me-- I was going to build a company around it-- and they were saying, you should sell it to Revlon. Or you should do this, you should do that. How are you ever going to it out? And there are always naysayers, always people who can't imagine how anybody can accomplish any of the great things that we aspire to. And I did it. And the thought that one could do great things is a reasonable thought. It's not a crazy thought. The Iraqis he's talking to, mostly Sunnis, call themselves nationalists, which means they want a secular government that's fair to everyone, Sunni, Shia and Kurd. And so all of them have plenty of complaints about the current Shia led government of Nouri al-Maliki, which has reported ties to Shia militias and death squads. They also hate Iran. But Dal is more interested in solutions than complaints. And he tries to push the conversations toward practical ideas. And the solution then is? The solution is to burn Iran from east to west. Burn Iran from east to west. That's a member of parliament talking by the way. And all this time, Dal is trying to make sense of what he's hearing. Remember, his specialty is selling personal grooming products so even the basics are new to him. I thought Al-Qaeda came from Saudi Arabia. No, they didn't come. Any come from Saudi Arabia? Jihad is a fight, fighting for your rights. And what is mujahideen? Mujahideen means fighters. And I'm confused. Talabani is the president of Iraq. He has a brother? In the 25 hours of Dal's recordings, of course there are moments like this. But there's another side too. We all read the same newspaper stories. We all sit at home and feel horrible about the war. Dal actually did something about it. He found his way to Iraqi politicians. He got on a plane. He's trying. I'm sitting at the pool at the Marriott hotel at the Dead Sea in Amman, Jordan. So I'm here sitting thinking about this whole idea of what am I doing. Why am I here? What can one American with absolutely no political access-- well, I've learned something from my mother. And that is if your enemy knows you, and you know him, really well, and the better you know each other, the harder it is to maintain a fight. My mother used to tie my sister and myself together when we would have our flights until we made up. And it always worked. After being tied together for however long it was, next thing you know we were laughing about it, and we weren't fighting anymore. Maybe we get the resistance together with the generals for a weekend at one of these resorts. And have them hang out, and eat dinner together, and eat lunch together and go swimming together. It's three o'clock Amman time. One of my assistants back in America sent me a link to a Seattle Times posting about the sheikh that I visited the first day I was here. And whoa, just a string of hate comments, people calling me a moron and a traitor. And who the hell do I think I am? Not one positive comment. I mean here I am trying to talk a sheikh into a ceasefire against our soldiers, and they're calling me a traitor. After a week in Jordan, Mohammed gets a call that Dal's visa to Iraq is ready. As always on this trip, he's getting the kind of treatment a high-level diplomat would get. The Iraqi ambassador to Jordan has personally expedited his paperwork. So now they're ready to go to Baghdad. And they get another important message. The big news is that we actually got a meeting with General Petraeus, which is something we've been trying to do for the last four months, at 11:20 tomorrow in Baghdad at the embassy. We're leaving tomorrow morning on a seven o'clock flight. And so I need to bring a suit, right? OK, we're here an hour and a half before the plane leaves. So I think it was my tweezers that stopped us at the gate. Yeah well, I'm looking down today at Baghdad. It looks like any other place. Well, there aren't too many trees down there. Looks relatively calm. Dal puts on body armor and they head to the Green Zone, where they're scheduled to meet with General David Petraeus, who's in charge of US forces in Iraq. Petraeus's assistant, Mary Kohler, has set it up. And Dal, Mohammed and [? Hasam, ?] their translator, wait for her outside the American embassy so she can escort them in as VIPs. Mary? I'm sorry. The General has just been called away. That's why I'm late. So I'm going to have you meet with Major General Newton. Oh God. I can't believe it. He's really sorry. Two hours earlier, the Shiite shrine in Samarra had been blown up for the second time, the most serious incident in months. And American commanders were scrambling. The government would declare a curfew and Baghdad would be shut down for days. But of course Dal knows none of this. Since Petraeus can't make it, Mary has arranged for them to sit down with the top British commanders, General Graeme Lamb and Major General Paul Newton. Lamb is in charge of reconciliation in Iraq. You can tell this is the British office. Exactly. Basically-- And so you fit in where? I'm Dal LaMagna. Got it. I'm a citizen diplomat. I'm not-- This is what all the meetings had been leading up to. Dal would help Mohammed present the Sunni resistance position to the coalition forces. Finally, he was bringing the two sides together. But right away, the meeting goes off course. First of all, nobody seems much impressed that Dal has met with Sheikh Harith al-Dari, Dal's supposed pipeline to the bigwigs in the Sunni resistance slash insurgency. Sure, al-Dari is a big deal, but he's sitting in Jordan. Then Mohammed starts to argue with Lamb. "The Maliki government is corrupt," he says. "Then change it," Lamb says. But the constitution is very clear. If you wish to challenge the government through the constitutional process, that is open to this parliament. But Mohammed says even showing up to debate the constitution could get them killed by Maliki's people. This goes around and around. Mohammed raises all the complaints that Sunnis have been talking about all week in their meetings with Dal, the open border with Iran, how dangerous it is for Sunni members of parliament, the crooked Shia police. And the generals keep repeating, take it up with the Maliki government. And then Dal steps in. It's not useful here in this meeting to argue with the general about the failures and the problems with the Maliki government. It's just not useful because there's nothing they can do. The top commanders in Iraq say they make it a practice to listen to nobodies who might turn out to be somebody. They're smart enough to know that they can't predict where progress might lurk. But they're not in the practice of wasting time. Finally General Newton asks them in his polite, British roundabout way, what exactly are you doing here? Do you mind if I ask a question? What General Lamb is painting here is that we are not in a position to do grand deals behind the back of the sovereign, elected government. However, naturally we have channels of communication open to people who can deliver a reduction in bombs. I am unclear exactly what is being proposed. That we should be put in touch with specific groups? What is being offered in the way of a practical opportunity for dialogue? Here's when it becomes clear that the generals see them as essentially empty-handed. They'd love a ceasefire, but is anyone actually offering one? If there is a firm proposal involving being able to take that dialogue forward with armed groups, then I haven't heard what the specific proposal is. Right, that's good. Mohammed speaks up. We have eight groups, eight major groups. Those people are ready to start talking, but it will be a confidential talk only with the coalition forces. That's constructive. So he has eight groups. We'll start a dialogue. And they'll decide how to handle it. But let's end on that note. The generals don't say anything. The meeting ends. Everyone seems a little testy. But Dal is feeling hopeful, until as they're leaving, Lamb says something to Dal. For four years I've been having these conversations. Oh my God. Lamb's parting shot to me was when I tried to get his contact information and he wouldn't give it to me was, look I've been doing this for four years. I can't tell you how many meetings I've had with people saying they represent the resistance or this is going to happen and that is going to happen. So he stuck a pin in the balloon that had filled up during that meeting at the very end. Yeah, so I went from one high to the low. Because he said that to you? That that was like, oh my God, could this have just been theater? All right. This guy from America who's here. And he got here. He's here with this member of parliament. We have to meet with them. Let's just humor them. Well it was rather difficult for me to even get out of bed this morning after my meetings with these two generals yesterday. But there a moment there yesterday when I was in a meeting with General Lamb where I swore to myself that I was in one meeting and Mohammed was in another. And I just got the reality that the people I'm talking to, they're so out of the game, so deluded themselves into what is that can happen. And I don't mean to be disparaging. It's almost like I feel as if I should just pack up my bags and go home and forget the whole thing. And you're just feeling-- you run around and now you find out your assumptions about what can be done are wrong. But he doesn't pack up and leave. He wakes up on Saturday and tells the tape recorder, "You don't wait for things to happen. The entrepreneurial way is to make things happen." After just two days, he's back on mission. He decides the generals weren't humoring him. They were giving him an opportunity. He and Mohammed just need to present them a concrete proposal, which they draw up, a three page document that's vague about a lot of things but does mention a timetable for US withdrawal and a ceasefire. Dal sends it to the generals. Weeks pass. He never hears anything back. Dal is pretty disappointed. We've had our meetings. Thank you very much. And it's over. I mean that's-- So you're not hopeful about-- No. Does that mean you've given up? I've given up on the strategy of helping to broker a deal between the national forces and the coalition forces. I've given up on that. So now I'm on to the other strategy. One thing that I have to say about myself, and I think it's a good trait, is that I don't get trapped by my imagined solutions for things. When I can see it's not working, I move on and I try something else. And eventually I'll find something that does work. Here's his latest solution. He's using videotape of the meetings he held in Amman to make commercials. In them, Iraqis say point blank what they want us to do, which is leave Iraq. He's using them as the ads for his presidential campaign. And they're definitely unlike any other candidate advertising you've ever seen. He has gone from citizen diplomat to citizen ad man. He'll fight this war stateside for now. Sarah Koenig. Coming up, we switch from America's current war to the good old days of the Cold 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. This week on our show, Man vs. History, the stories of individuals taking action themselves during big historic moments. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, Wenceslas Square. We have this short story about the final days of the Cold War from Arthur Phillips. In October of 1988, Tyler Vanalden received his second CIA posting, his first in the Communist bloc. He was dispatched to Prague, Czechoslovakia posing as a State Department third secretary in the US embassy. Eight weeks after his arrival in Prague, Tyler was standing at the cramped and decaying bar cafe he visited for an hour or so after work most days where he could practice a little Czech. It was a Friday. The room was filling up and growing noisy with talk and music. Tyler looked up. Across the room, a beautiful young woman with short, blond hair was staring at him. She held his eye for a moment, then turned away, bit her lip, lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. "What made you suspicious?" his CIA supervisor Ed Marshall asked Tyler nine hours later in a dawn meeting back at the embassy. "You're a good looking guy. It could have been real." "No," said Tyler, "she looked a lot like a girl I went out with in college. When I first saw her I really thought it was her for a second. There's a picture of us in the yearbook kissing at a hockey game. And the little tattoo on her neck. You could see it in the picture." "And your new friend, this--" Ed examined his notes. "This Jarmila has a tattoo on her neck?" "And the same haircut," Tyler said. "You look as sad as I feel," said the girl in not bad English, 20 uncertain minutes after he first saw her. "Will you join me for a drink?" Closer, she didn't really look much like Kim Wilsey , Tyler's happy, wholesome psych-major girlfriend for a few months of his senior year at Colby until she dumped him for being, quote, "emotionally unavailable, artificial, perfect, untouchable, impenetrable, affectless." But the Czech girl looked similar enough to attract him. She ran the tips of her fingers over her tattoo and said she was embarrassed by her poor English. "You are from USA. What is it like there? We are told some very strange things about USA," she said with a sad, ironic smile. She would like to visit the USA someday but this is surely not possible because-- she trails off. She's sad. Does the handsome diplomat Tyler know what it is like to be sad? To feel hopeless? "Yes, I have known this," he says in slightly poorer Czech than he can actually speak. "I would like to help you if I can." Her boyfriend has beaten her, she whispers. Tyler looks duly horrified, though he nearly laughs at this excessive, almost baroque ornamentation. "I would like," she whispers so low that Tyler has to lean close and place his ear next to her lips, "to escape from Czechoslovakia somehow and from Igor." She pours wine for them both. "You are most beautiful girl I think to seeing in my whole life," Tyler muttered in clumsy Czech. "Nice," said Ed Marshall, not looking up from his note taking. "Was that true, by the way?" "No. She's cute, nothing special," Tyler lied unnecessarily even as he wondered why. After almost two hours, a significant silence sat between them until she said, "Do you want to kiss me?" "More than anything I've ever wanted ever." She placed her soft lips on his just long enough for him to taste a drop of her wine. She pulled back hastily. "Oh dear God what time it is." She wrenched her head to look at the clock behind her on the stained, brown and white wall and executed a flawless Cinderella. "I am so late. He will know. He will ask me. Oh Tyler, don't forget me. Please, you are so good and I so much need something good." A flustered gathering of her things, a momentary hand on his cheek, and out the door she ran in tearful panic. "And you boiled with desire," said Ed Marshall. "Yep," said Tyler. "And felt conspicuous. And got stuck with the tab." That afternoon, a second meeting with a larger team was held in a secure room at the embassy. They worked up a plan. She would surface again, no question. And when she did, Tyler would churn with contradictions. Relieved she's OK, but his pride injured that she ran off. Infatuated, but cautious. When alcohol entered the scene, he would slowly repeat that he hated his job. The US was a mess, politics a joke, blah blah blah. Every night for a week, Tyler returned to drink at The Wounded Bear. Seven nights, giving up later each night, dribbling smaller and smaller tips behind him. Night eight, December 14, 1988. She appears, very late, after Tyler has apparently drunk quite a bit alone in the noisy crowd. "Oh thank God," she murmurs as she slides next to him. "I hoped, Tyler, but I did not dare to dream." He pulls away from her. She apologizes. He pouts. "Do not be like that please." "Then how should I be?" "If only you knew what Igor was like you would not be cruel to me. I thought you were different. So this is how you are." She stands and leaves again. This time though, he swears aloud, drops money on the table, runs after her. He reaches her outside on the cobbled street, the snow just starting to turn heavy. He grabs her arm, turns her towards him. He tries to kiss her. "Have you gone mad?" she hisses in terror, pulls away. "We must not be seen together." And she glides over the snow into an alley. He has her tightly now. "My God you are such a handsome," she whispers. "But Igor--" Igor is cruel, a weasel, a wolf of a man. He terrifies her. She thinks he's having her watched, perhaps even right now. If only she could think of how to be free of him. "I'll kill him," boasted engorged Tyler Vanalden. "I have diplomatic immunity." "Oh dear heaven, God no. He's powerful. He works for--" "Of course he does," said Marshall the next morning. "Bless his heart." Weasel Igor worked for some vague division of the secret police. Jarmila certainly didn't know its name or where it was, only that Igor's job was to find out secrets about foreigners working in Czechoslovakia. And she simply could not think of how to escape his violent and lustful embrace described in increasing moist detail. She would go anywhere with Tyler if only she knew she was free and safe. His kiss makes her bold. She will meet him. Enough of fear. She whispers an address and a time next Monday night, her friend's apartment. "For God's sake, be discreet going there. I have an idea," she says, "but I am afraid to ask you." "Ask me anything. Anything at all," he says. If you could bring me something to show Igor. Nothing really of value. I don't care what it is, a box of paper clips with your ambassador's name on them, then maybe I'm thinking, I can make Igor think I'm useful. I will not tell him about you of course. I am so frightened of him." She trembled. She kissed him. "Until Monday," she sobbed. And off she ran looking all around in fear. "So who is this traitor, Tyler Vanalden?" Ed Marshall asks Tyler and the team. Tyler, they decided, is eager to please her but still wary of doing any real harm, more out of habit than principle. And so he has photocopied the personal information page from his nominal state department boss's file. Nothing much more than you could find in Washington, DC phone book, but plainly stamped confidential. This first stolen document was prepared. How Vanalden had procured it was determined. His attitude to his lover for Monday was debated and decided. Bits of pivotal dialogue were drafted and rehearsed. "This is for you," said Tyler, panting, nervous, pushing the Syrian envelope into her hands when she opened the door of her friend's apartment. "No," she cried, letting the poisonous thing fall. "I do not care. I do not want to see it. It does not matter. Only you matter." And she pulled Tyler Vanalden onto an old mattress on the floor of the bear, unnecessarily under-heated room where, to the audible accompaniment of a cassette of Beatles songs in Czech, and the inaudible accompaniment of hidden video cameras, Tyler displayed a wide range of emotional turmoil, having passable sex with Jarmila Herbeck of the Czech intelligence service. "O my brave boy," she exalted an hour later over the document that she saw at once was perfectly worthless, but which was her novice traitor's tentative first step. While she did feel a thrill that she could actually do this, inspire men to treachery, she was also slightly insulted that he didn't price her affections any higher. A form 12C Department of State personnel file cover page? It was like bringing a few wilted daisies. She clapped her hands and stared at him in wonder and love. And then her face suddenly wrinkled with worry. "How do I use this now with Igor?" she asked, not having thought through her scheme at all, just a simple girl in way over her head. Tyler took manly control of her fears, rehearsed her. His sister was an actress, he said. Tyler was very happy. The candle did gutter in the cold apartment. The mattress did smell of her perfume. The old town square did glow gold outside the window. That there were other realities shrouding this one did not mean this one wasn't there. "You really are so very beautiful," he said. "Like nothing I've ever seen." "And now we are up and running," said Marshall. "She'll ask. You'll provide. You'll get better at it. Produce more impressive results. They have to get addicted to you, Tyler. Just like they're trying to get you addicted to her. Now, how are you feeling about all this?" "I'm watching from six miles up," responded Tyler, believing it himself. Marshall's ad hoc team in the embassy kept control of Operation Brief Encounter for a few more weeks. And into the middle of January, the new lovers met. Late at night, lying in her arms, shaking with cold and fear and shame, he would whisper, "What am I doing? This is all wrong." And Jarmila would have to steady him. All of this Tyler understood and duly filed in his well-written reports. But once, she was waiting for him at the apartment sobbing and drinking, and she had a black eye. The sight of it so enraged Tyler that he punched a wall, breaking his wrist. As he's having it bandaged later that night by an embassy nurse, he replays the moments leading up to impact over and over again in his mind's eye trying to understand them. He recalls gently touching Jarmila's eye, showing the appropriate horrified concern tinged with anger, though in fact he was invisibly amused and just curious to see how the Czechs had achieve the effect. Makeup was too risky, so subcutaneous dye? A temporary tattoo? Henna? When he saw and felt that the bruise was real, saw her flinch from his touch, he turned away to gather his thoughts. And as he was deciding how he was supposed to react, he was also trying to understand why he was so upset, though he realized it a split second later. They had really punched her. He knew that a display of ostensible rage was needed even as he was in fact enraged. He remembers that he thought to myself, I suppose I would punch the wall in frustration, even as he remembers seeing, with some surprise, his fist already approaching the wall. And he remembers thinking, I should pull this punch so I don't hurt myself. But by then, his fist had been seized by the fist it was portraying. And they had punched the wall together. Jarmila rewinds the video, recalls his face as he approached her, touched her injury. An unforgettable look in his eye, sadness and anger and disappointed plans for the night ahead. He's like a child, lusts and rages and muddled loyalties. And she's helping him grow into a man, a man who will do anything she asks. She knows she, they, will have to be more careful with him now as she watches the green infrared fist hit the black void again and again. And there's something more she sees now, replaying his entrance into the apartment, recalling his heart-broken twisted face. He's more than what management and the steering committee have seen in him. He's not just a lustful fool, a boy of the fraternity. And he wouldn't have responded this way, with this devotion and extraordinary intelligence payoff, to just some semi-trained prostitute coughed up by the intelligence service. This boy has a unique ability to give himself to something or someone, an ability that would only express itself when he met precisely the right object of devotion, her. She rewinds the tape again. "I really like this one," Johnny 1950 said to Jarmila as he entered one morning, drawing from his briefcase the videocassette of one of her recent evenings with Source Prep School. Someone had labeled the betamax cassette, "February 1, 1989, four and a half stars." "It's excellent work," he continued. "You do excellent work for the Party, comrade." He was a creepy little bald man, and she had gagged when he maneuvered to direct the video surveillance of her trysts. He was called Johnny 1950 because in 1950, when he was 11 and a farm boy in Canada, his Canadian, communist parents decided that what was happening in post-war, Eastern Europe was the coming of the world proletarian democratic paradise, the end of history. And they were not going to sit on their six acres in Alberta and let it pass them by. They sold all their belongings and were three of a very, very small number of people who emigrated to Czechoslovakia when most Czechs were pulling their hair out trying to emigrate somewhere like Alberta. He was ugly and lonely. He repeatedly fell hopelessly in love with unattainably beautiful women. He would have done anything for Jarmila. Six days of demonstrations against the communist government took everyone by surprise, but the force with which the Czechs dealt with it surprised no one in the US embassy who understood the permanent nature of communism. The arrests of 800, including the dissident playwright Vaclev Havel, proved that this bear was here to stay. At the same time, Ed Marshall decided that the value of Operation Brief Encounter was proven and should now be managed as a piece of the big picture. So the forged documents, the chronology of hand-offs, the scripts, the course of the love affair and Tyler Vanalden's personality would all be overseen by an operational guidance group back in Langley, Virginia. The operational guidance group set to work, staffed with Czech culture experts, psychologists specializing in the emotional terrain of romance and treachery, an in-house playwright, forgers, counterintelligence strategists, game theorists and two mid-level managers. One, a man named Michael Boortz, who had, for the last three years, been a paid agent of the KGB. It didn't take long for the KGB to identify Operation Brief Encounter and to learn that the false information the Czechs had received from Vanalden had already led to the arrest and near execution of a loyal, Romanian intelligence officer. Clearly, the Czechs should be notified that they were being lied to. But there was a problem. It would be unacceptable to end that operation with any suddenness since the Americans would immediately begin looking for leaks, putting Boortz at unnecessary risk. In the end, they told the head of the Czech service that Source Prep School was contaminated, and any information gained from him was to be considered 100% unreliable. However, under no circumstances was the female agent to be told anything which would cause her to have any, quote, "difficulties playing the role to which she was accustomed." Jarmila sensed that something was wrong. The steering committee for Source Prep School was being reshuffled, and there was a new, second rate team now in charge of her life. The USA attitudes expert, who spoke no English, the playwright who mooned like a little girl over Vaclev Havel stories. And honestly, by now they had more than enough footage to start blackmailing Prep School. Why was she being treated like this? She deserved respect and promotion. She bleached her hair for this. She had gotten a stupid tattoo for this. She had even convinced vile little Johnny 1950 to punch her in the eye twice since he had been so feeble on the first swing. And obviously, she had sacrificed in other ways, even if Prep School was not an ugly man. The group in Virginia received a directive in July telling them to slow down a bit. And now Ed had to tell Tyler that weeks were going to pass in which Tyler was simply to quote, "carry on without making any obvious progress, without handing over any tangible lies, just pretending to want her while resisting her efforts to force things." "The director is trying to stoke their hunger, Ty," Ed said. "We want them to focus their desires, really boil for something specific. And then we can pass them a zinger. Look, I'm sorry. I really am. I know this isn't easy. Jesus, Ty, look at your face. Are you still up for this?" When he left Ed Marshall's office, Tyler's heart was thumping. He had won himself at least four perfect meetings with her in which there was to be no talk of work. He invited her for a picnic in the countryside. Her steering committee was divided. No video or audio team could hide near the picnic, argued Yuri from eavesdropping. There was no question of wiring her considering that she and Prep School were likely to become intimate. Johnny 1950 left it up to Jarmila, who couldn't see how she could say no. They ate in a wooded grove, not far from a stream, a lover's scene from the Bohemian countryside under any regime. Tyler fed her grapes. He made her laugh with the story of how he had snuck out of Prague to meet her. She started to say she was nervous about Igor, but he merely put his finger on her lips. "Not now," he said. "No Igor today." After lunch, he slept soundly with his head on her lap and she stroked his hair. She debated whether to broach work again. When he woke, he described his parents' house on Cape Cod, and Vic, the Labrador he had loved and lost. After a long silence, he said, "You know, I would do anything for you. Just ask. You have more power over me than any blackmailer." "What a strange thing to say," she said quietly. "Just an expression," he said. "But now that I think about it, I don't think I would respond to blackmail. For you though, I'd jump through fire." He'd been thinking just how to say this for some time now to make it sound like the natural conversation of an unsuspecting, traitorous diplomat. If her service was thinking about making the shift, using the pictures of him they must certainly have had by now, he wanted her to argue against it and for a continuation of the love affair instead. At the steering committee's disorganized meeting on the first of August, Johnny 1950 asked the committee if, considering how little information Source Prep School had provided in the preceding weeks, they thought the time had come to squeeze him, to tell him he'd better start coughing up or the news of his betrayals and some compelling video would be sent to his ambassador. Jarmila argued that this would be a mistake. She just had a feeling. She didn't mention to the committee that she'd rather by a long shot spend evenings with a slavishly devoted lover than have some moron from manipulation pretend to be Igor and run the blackmail while she took a dull holiday on the Black Sea. "Be patient with him," she told the committee. "Prep School will produce. I know he will." Meanwhile, Tyler watched as communism crumbled in Hungary and Poland. And he had the strangest sensation as he read each unimaginable dispatch from these other countries. He prayed the democratic virus would be contained, that the Czechs would hold on. But then, the politburo resigned. December 3. They walked, side by side, as 150,000 protested the communists' last-ditch effort to allow only a minority opposition presence in a new government. They did not hold hands. They pretended to smile at what they saw. Neither of them spoke. Tyler the traitor should have been delighted. It's over. She's free. He did his dirty bit for her without hurting anyone or getting caught. And now it's passed. Jarmila the oppressed should have been delighted. Her country was free. Her future was her own. If, in character, he told her now she should come with him to the West, escape Igor and their shameful past, but she said no, and she certainly would, then he would be forced to ask her why not. And she would be forced to admit that she'd been lying to him all along and their time together would end. Or he could tell her he knew she was a spy for a communist spy service. And now, in the new world unfolding all around them, she would be in danger of arrest and retribution. So she should come to the US, be his pet defector. And they could be together. Of course that would mean admitting that he'd been lying to her since the beginning. That there was no Tyler the traitor. That there was nothing about him that she actually knew. That revelation would also be his first act of actual treachery. It was impossible. She watched him. Something was not right here. According to all logic, he should have been happy to see the changes underway. He should have been offering her a way out with him. This should mean the end of his spying for her. This should mean the end of Igor's control over her. So why was he silent? For that matter, why wasn't he telling her to come away with him to Cape Cod? To a wedding on his parents' lawn? Frolicks with some new Labrador? She saw it clearly. He was a liar. That was why. He felt no slavish love for her. He had done what he had done out of lust and weakness, and then lazy momentum, and fear of being blackmailed and nothing else. He was precisely what the playwrights and the planners on the steering committees had always said he was, a depressive, a weakling, lonely and vulnerable, unprincipled and uninterested. In other words, he was an ordinary man. She felt foolish. Did this egotist really fear she would want to come away with him? Had she painted herself as needy as all that? How embarrassing now in daylight. Tyler looked at her. She had no real feeling for him. That was clear. If any part of her had felt something real in this little farce of theirs, she would say so now. True, she hadn't seen the best of him. She was judging from false evidence. But surely, she'd seen something under that stuff. Surely she'd been having fun too. Surely also he had been the very opposite of emotionally unavailable, artificial, perfect, untouchable, impenetrable, affectless. Complete silence, except for the throng of cheering, pot-banging Czechs who washed into them. He moved to their left. She moved to their right. The crowd swelled and they both kept walking, not even looking up to be sure they had lost sight of each other. A month earlier, the IRS had found lumpy, indigestible discrepancies in Michael Boortz's tax returns. An investigation soon revealed that he had 13 separate savings accounts. The subsequent CIA interrogation of a sobbing, farting Boortz revealed much of what Boortz had betrayed over the years, including Operation Brief Encounter. And so, before his arrest, and in exchange for vague promises of leniency at his trial, Boortz delivered a final flurry of reports to his Soviet handlers, including one put together by the operational guidance group at the request of Ed Marshall. Jarmila Herbeck, said his report, had been a CIA agent all along. When Vanalden gave her false information, she had knowingly passed it on. And when she was out of her boss's view, she had delivered Czech secrets to Vanalden. This happened in the countryside on picnics. Well, it was better than nothing, Marshall figured. It would throw the remaining Czechs into chaos. But that was a small comfort when you admitted you had just spent months accomplishing exactly nothing. The poor kid. He called Tyler in, told him he'd been doing a stellar job. Marshall himself was putting Tyler up for an intelligence medal. "The downside though, Ty, is a little more complex. It would appear that possibly they knew about you, about us, from a pretty early time. Actually likely." Tyler knew he should be depressed. His life and work for months had been a travesty. He was a videotaped joke. Yet he felt some growing sensation of happiness. Why had the Czechs kept it going if they knew it was garbage? Because she had wanted to. She must have argued for it, for him, propped up the whole shabby structure with justifications just to see him. Every time she met him had been a victory for the two of them, snatched from a dubious Czech service. "Sit down," said Johnny 1950. She had come in to see if there was an office at all today, the day the communist president swore in an opposition government and then resigned. The few people still in the office were visibly worried. Nobody knew if they were going to be the secret service of the new republic or a pile of corpses shot for their work on behalf of the old republic. "There is some news," said Johnny, "I told you to sit down." He was such a turd, this little man, all bossy and official now of all times. "News?" she said, unconcerned. "Yes," he said. "About two weeks ago, Source Prep School was arrested and shipped back to the USA." She was confused and then realized Tyler was going to jail now. And she wondered if and how she could save him. A sentimental, girlish thought that offended her even as it occurred to her. She nodded, said nothing, turned back to her desk. "Wait, don't ask many questions yet," said Johnny. "It gets worse." He examined her beautiful face as he told her that they had been holding a losing hand. Prep School was CIA from the very first pass, not State. And she had never noticed. Her sacrifices had been worthless, Johnny repeated twice more for good measure, trying to soften her up. "Wait," he said with a mix of pity and vengeance and pride at knowing more than anyone else. "It gets worse." She laughed out loud. "Yes worse," he said. "A report has come in from our old friends, perhaps ex-friends, to the East, saying that you have known since day one that Prep School was CIA. Wait, don't talk. It's better if you don't say a word just yet. This report also says you have been sending things the other direction, working for the Americans the whole time. Don't speak. At first, management was going to have you arrested but we actually don't have anyone who does that sort of thing for us right now. We're in a vacuum. Listen and think. If you did this, no one is sure if that's good or bad. If you did this, no one knows what to do about it. Maybe you're a traitor to the Czech people, but maybe you're a hero of the revolution. Don't, don't speak." Johnny's tone softened. "Don't worry Jarmila. I can handle this for us. I know how these people think. I grew up among the people you know. You and I, we can help each other." The department of personnel approved Tyler's quick, unsolicited proposal, agreeing that the venture would place him near potential sources, and that the role fit his real personality and official history excellently. And so in May, 1990, four months after he'd been bundled out of Prague, he returned, a vaguely disgraced but un-indicted ex-diplomat running his own business, hawking to the new democracy an expertise they were sure to need. He sat in his hotel room and watched a documentary on Czech TV. It had been made in April by a once banned filmmaker, and was written and produced by a Johnny McDougal. The Revolution's Hidden Heroes it was called. And it profiled those extraordinary souls who had secretly helped the democratic cause from the inside. She looked good on television. Even better as a brunette. The president of Vanalden Communications paid $500 to attend a meet-and-greet in the banquet room of the Palace Hotel. He arrived two hours early, examined the seating arrangement, and discreetly changed it. He returned later to the crowded room alongside representatives of a dozen other political consulting firms. And he drank cocktails and chatted with an assortment of civic forum candidates running in the first free Czech election since 1946. Dinner was served. He took his time going to the seat he had usurped. "You look like someone I once knew," he said to the parliamentary candidate seated to his left. "I have that kind of face," she said, smiling. "I saw you on television," he said. "You sacrificed terribly for the revolution." She laughed. "You can't begin to imagine." "You know," he said, "I think I could be of great help to you in your campaign." "I'd have to consult with my fiance," she said, gesturing to the suddenly despondent bald man who, far away down the long table, had just recognized Vanalden. "But I doubt he will protest. Tell me about yourself." Arthur Phillips, reading an abridged version of his story, "Wenceslas Square," which first appeared in a collection of essays and short stories entitled Wild East, Stories From the Last Frontier. Arthur Phillip's most recent novel is Angelica. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Torey Malatia, who reminds you every pledge drive-- "Don't forget me, please. You are so good. And I so much need something good." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Adults don't understand anymore what it means to be a nerd. Have you noticed this? Nerd, somehow, has become a badge of honor. You meet all kinds of people who say, proudly, that they were nerds in high school. It's like anybody who had anything that made them feel different now says that they were a nerd. And that population-- the population that thinks that it was different-- that's like, everybody who went to high school. You know? People who were chubby, people who were in band, people who liked comic books, people who just didn't drink. I've met people who were actually popular, who actually had a social circle and boyfriends or girlfriends, who now claim they were nerds. That is just wrong. I believe that we have forgotten the sweaty, unsexy, cringe-inducing face of hard core nerdom. I remember seeing a character on Beverly Hills 90210 wearing sports jackets to school. And I decided that that was a cool thing to do, and that I would do that. And it was the sort of thing that nobody quite understood. And everyone thought I was dressing up for something I had to go to after school. Everyone was sort of already tired of me at that point. That's David Iserson. When he was 13, David got a chance to change schools, leave the tiny school where everybody had known him since he was five, and start all over at a big public school where nobody knew him. And he had a very clear strategy for how he was going to create a glorious new life for himself. I bore no illusions that I was going to be cool. So my only goal was to be anonymous. And I had some friends who were a year ahead of me in school. And that was their advice to me. Go in there. Do not say a word. Don't talk to anyone. Don't go up to anyone. Just sit in the back and stay anonymous. And that was my goal. That was actually a pretty exciting prospect, of just being somebody that people barely noticed. And for a few months it worked. But David didn't just want to be invisible. He also wanted to be an actor. I know. Complete contradiction. He was 13, remember. He'd had a small part in Guys and Dolls at summer camp. He played a boy who talked to whales in this tiny community theater. And a couple times a week, his grandmother would drive him to auditions for TV commercials, though he never got cast in anything. Then, his dad came to him with a proposition. His dad worked in the family business, this furniture store called Silvert's Furniture. And they'd just added a room full of desks, and beds, and shelving that was designed specifically for teenagers. And for a while he had been doing the local television commercials for the store. So he said to me, "You want to be in commercials. I have a great idea. You should do the commercial for our store." I think he may have even presented it like, you know, I'm only so good at this, but you are a talented young actor. So I think you should promote our room of teen furniture. He was flattered. He was thrilled. And they shot the ad. Which was a gas. So a few weeks later, my dad brings it home. And he's really, really excited about it. He talked to the guy, the director of it, and they both decided that this was a great commercial. And so he gathered the family into the family room. And he put on the VHS tape. And he started the commercial. And it didn't even have to run for a second before I just had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like, this was horrible. I'm sure all your parents know about the great selection of furniture for them here at Silvert's in Freehold. But they may not know about Silvert's huge selection of teen furniture. After all, we need something that suits us too. Could you just describe what your hair cut looks like right here? Well, I was sort of fashion-- I guess what could be described as a pompadour. I would describe you more as, like-- and I don't want this to sound harsh. I mean this in a -- you look like Big Boy. You know Big Boy? From the hamburger chain? But with braces. Yeah. I think that's probably accurate. For somebody who wanted to stay invisible, it is hard to imagine how this particular ad could have been worse for him. Everybody saw it. In the commercial David has an air of perfectly cheerful naivete. In the first shot, he crosses the screen, careful to never stop facing the camera as he does this. Cut to him putting his school books onto a table. Cut to him lying on a bed on his stomach. In one shot he nods knowingly to the audience. And furniture we feel comfortable just hanging out in. Oh yeah, Silvert's has sets for you girls, too. So take your mom and dad-- To stop it there-- I mean, I think that's the line. That's the line that killed me. "We have sets for you girls, too." If anyone was to watch that commercial-- and when anyone did watch that commercial, who went to school with me, or anything like that-- that's the big laugh line. That's the thing bullies would say. You know, if I'm walking down the hall, and I hear someone say, "We have furniture for you girls, too," I know that I'm about to get shoved into a wall of lockers. It was almost like my warning. That's the line that ended up following me, basically, all through my adolescence. I have to say, when you say it, you give a little jaunty, over the shoulder, one thumb point. As I recall, that's how I was directed. And thank God they didn't use the take where I think I actually took a comb, and I combed it through my hair as I said it. Because if it could ever possibly be worse, it would have been worse by doing that. And let's just describe what happens in the very last moment of the commercial. So I'm saying my last little button on there. And my dad walks in-- So take your mom and dad to Silvert's Furniture in downtown Freehold for all the furniture we need. Thanks, Dave. I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm smiling. He puts his hand on my shoulder. I mean, it's like holding hands with your mom in the mall. And the "Thanks, Dave. I couldn't have said it better myself," was another line that got a lot of life out of it when I was walking through the halls of junior high school, and then later, high school. He says that a day did not go by for the next year without somebody mentioning the ad. Strangers, his friends, even adults. One teacher tried to get him to quote the commercial in a school play. The ad ran a lot during New York Rangers hockey games. If you know anything about Rangers fans, this is maybe the least hospitable possible audience for an ad featuring a pompadour-wearing 13-year-old. These huge guys, men, would stop David and make him perform the ad for their girlfriends. David always tried to protect himself by telling people that the stuff that he said in the commercial-- the way the he acted-- the store made him do all that. But, um, that wasn't true. He had written the whole thing himself. And when he watched the ad, it was actually a profound thing for him. He thought, this is how I seem to people? This is how it comes across when I talk? My big fear was that they were all right, that everything they were making fun of was true. That that was me. Like I'd presented myself, and that was me. Do you think it was you? When you shot the commercial, you thought it was good. You wrote the commercial. I mean, truthfully, I think it was me. I think it was me. I think as bad as it was, yeah, that was me. And in a way, that's so much worse. It's unbelievably worse. Because you can't escape that reputation even when you're alone. But whatever it did to his personal life and to the way that he saw himself, the ad worked. It got people into the store. It ran for years. He was a successful spokesman, which is the subject of today's program. From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, The Spokesman. A program in three acts. We have a story where some people refuse to believe that a certain spokesman is an actual, real person. Adamantly refuse, to the point where it becomes a real public fight. That story from Jon Ronson, in Act One. In Act Two, we have the story of a teenage spokesman whose private life is the exact opposite, almost, of what he seems like in public. And in Act Three, a very unusual look inside the life of a presidential spokesman. Stay with us. Act One, What Part of "Bomb" Don't You Understand?" Jon Ronson has this story about somebody who becomes a spokesperson entirely by accident. A quick warning to people who are listening to our show on the internet, on our podcast or by streaming. For the internet version of this show, we have left in-- this is an experiment for us-- we have left in one curse word that occurs at a crucial moment in the story. Versus the broadcast version, where we bleeped it out. Here's Jon. One morning two years ago, Rachel North, who works in advertising, got on the Piccadilly Line tube at Finsbury Park, in north London. It was the most rammed carriage I have ever been on in my entire life of using that line. And more and more people were pushing on and on. And I was sitting there thinking, this is ridiculous. And the train trundled off. And we'd been going for about 45 seconds, and then there was this explosion. I was about seven or eight feet away from it. So I felt this huge power smashing me to the floor. And everything went dark. And you could hear the brakes screaming, and it was racketing around. It was about being on an out of control fairground ride, but in the dark. And it was very hot. You couldn't breathe at all. The air was just completely thick with smoke. And I was suddenly wet, completely wet. And I was on the floor. And there were people lying on top of me. And then the screaming started. Three years earlier, Rachel had been violently attacked by a stranger in her home. In July, 2005, she wrote an article about the attack in Marie Claire magazine. That's what she was doing the moment the bomb exploded, standing on a packed tube train, reading the Marie Claire article about her violent attack. As she lay on the ground she thought, not again. We started to evacuate the train. And I was one of the last people to get off. And as I went to leave, I did a quick sweep around behind me. And I did see some of what had happened, yes. And that has stayed with me, because I still worry whether I should have stayed and tried to help people, even though it was really dark and all I could see was that there was some bent metal, there was people on the floor, there was-- I won't say what I saw, but it was pretty horrific. How many people died in your carriage? 26 people died in my carriage. It should have been more, but because the carriage was so packed-- what happened was the people who were very close to the bomb got the full blast. And then the people who were about three, four yards away from the bomb got very bad lower limb injuries. There had been three simultaneous bomb explosions on London Underground trains around 9:00 AM and one more on a bus an hour later. 56 people were killed, including the four suicide bombers who were all from England, and one was a primary school teacher. 700 people were injured. Rachel had a bad gash full of glass on her wrist, which was so deep she could see her bone. But she was what paramedics call walking wounded. When she got home from the hospital a few hours later, she took a shower and tried to sleep. But she couldn't. So instead she got up and went online to her favorite web site, a large London community message board. There were hundreds of messages about the bombs already. But none had been written by someone who had actually been a passenger on a bombed train. She began posting. "Thursday, 7th of July, one minute to 11. I was on a crowded train to work. It was 8:40 AM when I boarded the Grand Piccadilly Line train at Finsbury Park--" She wrote and wrote, day after day. A flood of blog postings. The BBC discovered her blog and published it on their website. Her accounts of the July 7 bombings became one of the most read, and most beautifully written, on the internet. "Saturday, 9th of July. Yesterday was a weird day. Couldn't stop watching news. When I started hearing the bomb was in my carriage, I flipped. I started pacing about. I was alternately pounding with anger and adrenaline and having mini flashbacks, then feeling falling over tired. I drank several whiskeys. My sister came to visit--" I didn't see it as putting myself into the public eye as a spokesperson at all. I just wrote about it. It was a way of disentangling all these horrible memories that were keeping me up at night. And by typing them down, it was like cleaning a wound. I was picking all the grit and the smoke out of my mind. Rachel started getting emails from other survivors who had seen her blog. These were people like her, who had walked away that day in a daze, and just tried to get on with their lives. But they discovered they were experiencing much the same post traumatic symptoms. There were people saying that they were unable to feel any joy in being alive. Every time they went to sleep, they would have nightmares. They would have nightmares of banging their hands against the glass of the train, battering away, trying to smash their way out of this train that was filled with smoke. And a lot of people thought they were going to burn to death. And they couldn't get out. There was no way of escaping. And they all thought they were literally going to die entombed. And none of us expected it. We were just on the way to work. Rachel organized for them all to meet in a pub together once a month. They formed a kind of unofficial support group and called themselves Kings Cross United. The media found out about them and thought it was a good story. So they needed a spokesman. Rachel had a background in advertising, and now she was quite a famous blogger. And she was able to hold it together in public. So she was the obvious candidate. She carried on writing her blog. And this is when it started getting a bit strange. People she didn't know began posting weird, cryptic comments she didn't quite understand on her site. You can install a thing that tells you where your visitors are coming from called Site Meter. I noticed a few weeks after installing that, I seemed to be getting an awful lot of hits from a particular website. So I went to look to the website. And I was interested to discover that somebody on that website had taken my original account of the bombs, and was claiming that it was actually a description of a power surge, which I found very strange, because a power surge doesn't rip people's limbs off and kill people. There's a small but loud group of July 7 conspiracy theorists who believe that an accidental power surge had coursed through the London Underground that day, and that the British government wanted to cover up this corporate manslaughter by blaming it on Islamic suicide bombers. On the site that Rachel found, a poster had quoted one of her original descriptions of her experience, where she writes about the electricity being cut out and the train descending into total darkness. The poster used her writing as evidence to support this power surge theory. As Rachel read all of this stuff, she wondered how they'd account for the bus bombing. And then she found it. The conspiracy theorists maintained that the bus on Tavistock Square didn't really explode. It was actually a fake stunt using fancy pyrotechnics and stuntmen and actors. Which I thought was just obscene, given that, by that stage, I had met people who had lost loved ones on that bus. To call the people on the bus, who died, actors and stuntmen, was, I thought, quite abhorrent. And the people who were spreading these theories, had they brought you into it at this point? They were just quoting me, as if I had-- Confirmed it. Confirmed it. And so Rachel felt uncontrollably compelled to do something unwise. She decided to jump into the fray, jump into the lives of the internet conspiracy theorists. She decided to get involved, and try and convince them that their theories weren't true. He was inviting comments on his website. So I dived in, and I read all his stuff. And then I came up for air. And then I left a very angry comment going, how dare you misquote me in this way. Power surges do not tear people's legs off. And then he responded by saying, you didn't even know the bomb was in your carriage. You keep changing your story. And basically had a go at me. And you started engaging with him a lot? I was furious with him. I just thought, oh, they don't realize. As soon as they actually talk to a real person, they'll realize it's a load of nonsense and they'll give up. I had no idea, at all then, about what these people were like. But what comes through again and again is this lack of empathy. Complete lack of empathy. So they would, for example, cut and paste these most harrowing descriptions by emergency services officers of going into carriages and seeing buckled walls that were streaming with blood, and pieces of human flesh, and stepping over body parts. And stepping over the hole where the bomb had torn a crater in the floor. They'd post this. And you couldn't read it without actually wanting to weep. And then they would say, that you see. The hole there appears to be on the right-hand side. And that would be their comment. They're just interested in the crater? Yeah, just weird. Rachel believed what most people believe, that the July 7 attacks were the workers of Mohammed Sidique Khan and his three accomplices, and not a conspiracy involving actors and the British government. She told the conspiracy theorists that they were fantasists, and that it wasn't nice to find yourself a character in another person's paranoid fantasy, especially when you've just been blown up on the tube. But by engaging with them, Rachel herself became part of the conspiracy. They all started discussing me. And they formed the most bizarre theories about me. They decided that because I had this group that I'd set up, and that I had this blog that I'd set up, I was feeding the official story to the survivors. And I was somehow controlling them. And I was a government mouthpiece who'd been tasked with disseminating disinformation. And they became very suspicious of me. They formed this theory that I was some kind of counterintelligence professional or security services covert operative. Actually, some of them thought I didn't even exist. They thought I was a team of men who were tasked with creating this Rachel from north London persona, and maintaining it as a means of what they called psy-ops, you know, psychological operations to control the population of the UK. I've just found what somebody's written about you here. "Rachel--" and then in brackets "Rachel Schmachel" as if to imply that your name's not really Rachel. "It's your tone of voice that is the give away. You also seem to think that having been involved directly in the events of the day-- were you really-- confers upon you some special status and insight." That's annoying. Oh, that wasn't even the worst of it. There was a lot worse than that. [INTERPOSING VOICES] "--people disinformation shill all [BLEEP] and no evidence. It should be clear from Rachel's dis-info tactics she's part of the same lying media and police who set up this scam. Bet it ain't even female." They're referring to you as it. They're saying, "Bet it ain't even female." You wrote this at the bottom of all this stuff about you, which just seems really sad. You wrote, "I do not work for the government. I'm a normal person. I have a normal job in a normal office, and I'm getting sick of this. I'm requesting politely that you drop this and stop making accusations which are not true. It is completely out of order, frankly. Please stop." What they were doing to Rachel was incredibly insulting. She'd almost been killed. She runs a support group for people who were almost killed. And now she was getting death threats from the conspiracy theorists. They contacted her parents, who found the whole thing frightening and confusing. So Rachel decided to confront them, face to face. She went to a meeting where the conspiracy theorists spokesman, David Shayler, was speaking. The floor was opened up for Q and A's. And Rachel raised her hand and argued against the idea that July 7 was an inside job. Then everybody started shouting. And so I raised my voice to be heard over them shouting. They shouted, I shouted. They make it sound like I got up from the floor, marched onto the stage and started declaiming away. That's not what happened. The whole room erupted in shouting. Let me talk about Rachel North being an excellent composite MI5 person. This is David Shayler, who was on stage that night. He's a former MI5 officer who's jumped sides to become a hero to the conspiracy theorists. He says it's not so crazy to believe that Rachel is the creation of a team of agents from his old organization. Honestly, I think you should present the evidence to people of why people are saying that. OK. Why do you think people are saying that? They're saying it was so because Rachel North won't have a dispassionate briefing about 7/7 in which somebody talks her through the evidence. Anybody who's not prepared to engage with evidence, their opinion is not worth anything. So do you think there's a chance that Rachel North is a composite of MI5 agents? Well, I don't know. I'm sorry. I haven't seen the full evidence on that. All I know is-- But do you think it's a possibility? Well, anything is a possibility, isn't it? Of course anything's a possibility. But I don't think we should dismiss these things, the idea that the intelligence services would create a composite figure. I don't think we should dismiss that idea, because that's exactly the kind of thing they would do. But you've met her? I've met her. But what I'm trying to say is that Rachel North can exist as a figure. But it doesn't mean necessarily there's not five people behind her, posting in her name on the internet to get stuff out there. Once you've got a name, anybody could be posting that stuff on the internet, can't we? Well I think you seem to think that the only reason why Rachel might be a group of men working for MI5 is because she doesn't want to sit down and engage with the conspiracy theorists. No, I'm not. It's to do with her prestigious posting on the internet. And again, I think you should look at the evidence there about how many posts she was doing at one point. She was posting a lot. Because I think other people have looked at this in the movement, and come to the opposite conclusion, that there were far too many posts to come from one person. You know what bloggers are like. They just write, and write, and write. I don't understand why, because they're not getting paid. I've crossed paths with the conspiracy theorists myself. I've spoken out against their irrational thoughts. And in retaliation they've set up a discussion thread called "Jon Ronson, shill or stupid?" A shill is a paid stooge. My experience with them is nothing compared to the abuse and the hate that Rachel incurred. But still, I've had terrible online fights with them. You're probably thinking it's nuts to engage with them. And you'd be right. It is nuts. It does nothing but bad. But when you're inside the bubble, sitting alone in your room, staring at the internet, sometimes it's really hard to control yourself and do the sensible thing. Do you regret jumping in and getting involved with them? I think morally it was the right thing to do. I think from a personal point of view, I could do without the hate mail. I could do-- I've had death threats. I feel upset that my family were contacted. When somebody who was actually there, at the moment of the explosion-- rather than somebody who sits at home on the internet and theorizes-- comes and confronts the theorists, why do the conspiracy theorists get so angry and so personal? Well, I think again, you're trying to make this to be the case. But I have to say when Rachel North did come to one of our meetings, I thought her behavior showed signs of mental illness. You think Rachel is mentally ill? No, I'm saying that the behavior I saw of her then-- I don't know her particularly well-- showed signs of mental illness. What did she do that was mentally ill-ish? It was the degree with which she attacked me for happening to say this thing about precisely the same stations. It was a fact that once she said it, she stood up, came running towards me and started shouting at me. There was a madness about this. And I would invite you to actually interview anybody else who was there, because they will say the same thing. But that's because Rachel thinks it's nonsense-- But how does she know until she's seen the evidence? I'm getting the same sort of vibe off you here, Jon. You think it's nonsense. You haven't seen the evidence, you see? This is the problem we're in, because a viewpoint arrived at without evidence is prejudiced. And to say that Muslims carried out 9/11, those three guys from Leeds, and one from Aylsebury, without evidence-- 7/7, you mean? Sorry, 7/7. Sorry, 7/7. The four guys that supposedly carried out 7/7, the evidence is simply not there to say it. What about-- To say they did it-- What about the video? Was that set up? Is racist, Jon. It's racist. You're being racist against Muslims, if you think those three guys carried out that attack on the evidence there. Oh, fuck off. It's what I uncontrollably feel as if I should say to you, though. For so many reasons, David. -- include the recording of that in the actual interview, please, because-- or could I have a recording of that to play to people now? Because I don't think Jon here is actually being an objective interviewer at all. This is very, very personal, Jon. No one seems to appreciate that I've come to talk to you today. There has been enormous interest in 9/11 Truth Movement. I'll be absolutely honest with you that certain people have said to me, before I came here, you should be very careful of this man. He may be a shill, and so on. I said, I don't think that. I'm going to go and talk to the man and find out what he's all about. And now that you've met me, do you think they're right and that I am a shill? No, I don't. I don't think you're a shill at all. No. So will you tell them that I'm not a shill? Of course I will. In fact, that's a conclusion I've-- Well let me explain. What I've read about you, and what I understand of this interview here, Jon, I honestly can say, the honest opinion from my heart, I don't think you're a shill. I've got to admit, the whole thing began because I inadvertently typed my name into Google, and accidentally pressed search. And I found a website-- or I found a discussion that was called "Jon Ronson, shill or stupid?" Well as I said, I don't think you're a shill. But I think we're entitled to say anybody-- You think I'm stupid? No, no, no. But if you don't want to see the evidence about 9/11, I've got to say that's not a sign of intellect. OK. When you go back and tell them, will you tell them that I'm not a shill, but also that I'm not stupid? Because it's a bit insulting. Jon, I get the same thing myself. So I'm entirely sympathetic to you. But I have to say with proviso, again, that if you don't take the briefing, I will have to say that's a sign of-- Shilldom? No, no, no-- Stupidity? No. Ignorance. Ignorance. OK. Well he's not a shill, he's not stupid, but he's ignorant. I can live with that. That I can live with. The conspiracy theorists insist that if I, or Rachel, or anyone else sits down and takes their briefing, we'll agree with them by the end. I think they truly can't imagine it working out any other way. I guess it's pejorative, but the reason why I don't want to take the briefing is because I think the experience would suck the very soul out of my body through my ears. When they hear this, they're still not going to believe that you exist, some of them, especially because I'm interviewing you, because they see me as part of the cabal. I've given up trying to change their minds now. I know I exist. All the people on the train who've met me know I exist. I got off the train covered in blood, and smoke, and soot, with glass in my hair, and metal sticking out of my wrist bone. I went and gave a statement to the police. I was photographed. I was stitched up in a hospital. I can produce dozens of witnesses that I was there, that I am who I am. And if some people choose not to believe that, then I pity them really. Jon Ronson, who did that story, is the author of a book about conspiracy theorists called Them. A version of this story also appeared on his BBC Radio 4 series, John Ronson On. Coming up, I was a teenage spokesman. Not me, actually, the kid in the story. 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 show The Spokesman. Stories about what it can be like to be the spokesman. We've arrived at act two of our program, Act Two, Mr. Successful. OK. Anybody's who's ever been to a wedding knows that not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Well, Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15-years-old, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now. And he has become so well-known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, that he was appointed to the blue ribbon commission that's now aiming to reform the largest foster care system in the country, the one in California, Anthony's home state. In addition, Anthony still speaks to judges and legislators all over the state and all over the country, to different groups, sometimes every week. But it's gotten complicated. Douglas McGray tells the story. Anthony is at a hotel near San Francisco Airport. He knows the room. Not this one, exactly, but dozens just like it. The long, windowless walls, the bad carpeting, the government officials, social workers, and nonprofit types sitting in quiet rows, as his host wraps up a long interaction. And I just want to let you all know you're in for a real treat. I've seen Anthony speak several times. He's a wonderful, wonderful, powerful advocate. Welcome Anthony Pico. Anthony walks toward the mic. I know what he's thinking right now, because I asked him. I look down at the lectern. Get a sense for my space, how much I need to project, all this other stuff. I usually take a slight pause, look around. So again, my name is Anthony Pico. Anthony is a steady presence up there, eyes calm and appraising. He doesn't shrink, doesn't hesitate. He just lays out his life. Well, I grew up in the foster care system, was born into it. Adopted at 12 by a relative. That person died when I was 14. And I re-entered the foster care system with another relative, the person who died last year. I've been within the mental health system since the age of 11 and had enough therapists that I believe I have my own PhD. Most kids in foster care couldn't stand up there, talk for an hour with a half page of notes, and own the room the way Anthony does. Most of them are struggling just to hold their lives together. University of Chicago researchers did a massive survey of teens leaving the foster care system at 18. Within a year, nearly 70% had dropped out of high school. Half had lost their health insurance. Almost half the girls had gotten pregnant. One in five kids had spent a night in jail. And 15% had been homeless. What saved Anthony is public speaking. It came easily to him. He has always been a talker. Yeah, I'd start conversations with anyone. It wasn't hard for me to break the ice. I was this little goth fat kid who would start conversations with people. And so then how is it different now? I'm this tall, fat, politician kid who starts conversations with people. Anthony has the kind of life story you'd expect from a kid in foster care. Born crack-addicted to a mother who disappeared from the hospital just after she gave birth. Never knew his father. Relatives have mostly abused or ignored him. By 15, he was an angry, withdrawn kid. He weighed almost 300 pounds. He hated school, hated his life, thought about killing himself. Then he started giving speeches, and everything changed. Suddenly foster care wasn't just something happening to him. It was knowledge, knowledge that other people wanted, especially from a teenager who could speak fluent grown-up and who knows how the bureaucracy works and doesn't work. How many people have had another agency call them and say, yeah, I have this youth and I really think they're more under what your service provision is. And we can't really help them right now. So go ahead, and if you could take this youth, or this case, or this stack of papers, that'd be great. How many of you have had that? That's ridiculous to me. And I'm 18. I'm not supposed to know what ridiculous is yet. People in my classes didn't like me because I would always talk about how bad my life was. I would say, well, I don't have a dad. This and that, I'm worthless, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, when I started doing public speaking, it became-- not necessarily a badge of honor, but almost like a purple heart. It's the quarterly meeting of California's blue ribbon commission on foster care. Big shots in the state legislature, the courts, foundations, and the University of California have gathered for a couple days in a hotel near LA. They just finished dinner-- white table cloths, steaks, it was a nice spread. Now everyone's milling around, schmoozing, networking. Anthony too. He's always angling for new speaking gigs. So Ken, when are you going to take me up to [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? You are welcome anytime. He is especially interested in tonight's guest speaker, an influential judge from Utah. Anthony has two half-siblings in Utah he wants to contact, but they've been adopted and their file is sealed. He wants the judge's help finding them. They end up talking for more than an hour. Anthony keeps up easily, even when the jargon and the acronyms start to span several complicated, overlapping bureaucracies, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, BIA. Anthony and his siblings are Native American. It probably wouldn't be that hard to just go through BIA and see if they have them under their roll too. Because wouldn't BIA have a list of all enrolled members of every-- I don't think they do. Because each of them determines their own eligibility for membership. This is what Anthony has learned in three years of public speaking, how to work the system and his connections to get what he needs. In the end, the judge agrees to help him. Later, he tells me about a time he transferred schools and got stuck halfway. The new school wouldn't let him in. Most foster kids would have stayed home for weeks, maybe longer. And they do. This sort of thing happens all the time. They kept me out of school because I didn't have the right papers. Well, there's a law that was passed about a year and a half before I tried to go into that school that said you can not keep a foster youth out of school for more than three days, regardless of if they have their paperwork, or uniform, or anything like that. You have to keep them in school. And I emailed them after about a week saying, you are out of compliance with AB 490. If you do not enroll me as soon as possible, I will call my lawyer and the state ombudsperson. And I forwarded it to the school district, my placement office, my lawyer, and the foster care liaison to the district. It almost sounds like you're your own pushy parent here. Yeah. Pretty much. I will be the person whose, like, I don't get a [BLEEP] what you say. I'm going to raise hell. Anythony's gotten good at a lot of things most kids leave to their parents, like finances. During a break, I give him a ride to a cash machine so he can make a deposit. Savings are a huge problem for most kids leaving foster care. But Anthony's banked $10,000, working close to full time at a movie theater. Alone in his hotel room, Anthony unpacks. He's been on the road all week. He came to LA straight from another speaking appearance outside San Diego. He pulls an armful of conference swag out of his wheeled suitcase. A windbreaker. A travel thermos. A squishy stress ball. He unfolds four or five dress shirts, hangs them in the closet. Then he stops, pushes everything else to the floor, and plops in an overstuffed chair by the window. He is quiet for a minute. Then he says what's on his mind. I've been speaking for so long that it's kind of second nature for me to just get up, say a 10, 15, 30 minute speech, sit down, and it's nothing. It's part of my personality, part of who I am. I don't think. But that's what's tiring about it. I don't know what the hell I'm doing in the world anymore. Not that an 18-year-old is supposed to, but I'm at this pivotal point where, where does this fit in 10 years down the line? At 18, he's almost out of foster care. And when he leaves the system, his days as a spokeskid are pretty much over. All this will end. The next day, Anthony visits a local prison with the blue ribbon commission. It's a low, sprawling complex. It's looks a bit like an elementary school surrounded by razor wire. We have to go through a security checkpoint. It takes forever. Once we're through, a man approaches Anthony. And you are the man of the hour? Yeah. OK. I'm the administrative assistant to the warden and public information officer. And you are? Anthony Pico. Anthony-- Pico. Pico. OK. What's your claim to fame, Mr. Pico? Born and raised in foster care. I'm a commissioner on the commission that's here. You're a success story? Sort of. We're yet to see. Well, you are. I can look in your eyes and tell. You are definitely a success story. Anthony winces. People say stuff like this to him all the time. And he hates it. He doesn't like being called a success story, because he knows there's a big difference between the way people see him and the way his life looks and feels from the inside. The fact is, Anthony's gone to six high schools in four years. And he's not close to graduating. Most people who meet Anthony have no idea. The few who do are worried and keep nagging him to finish. If you want to drive Anthony crazy, talk about his potential. The word is like an insult to him. A bunch of times, when we talked, he cut me off mid-sentence. You're not going to say potential, are you? Don't say potential. I know, I know, potential. Please don't say anything about my potential. I hang out with Anthony for a few weeks, trying to understand how this kid who seems like he should be doing great isn't doing well at all. Our relationship settles into a routine. I follow him everywhere with a microphone. He feels free to tell me-- I'm totally uninterested in your questions right now. He gets a kick out of needling me. Let's get a nice sound of my back cracking. God, that still makes me shudder. And he calls me late at night to talk about girls. He is always up late. Sometimes that means grown-ups having to drag him out of bed in the morning, like at a blue ribbon commission meeting that was supposed to start at 8:30 AM. It's Christy from downstairs. I was told to come get you, make sure you're awake. This sort of thing can frustrate the adults who depend on him as a speaker. Despite really good intentions, some of them want it both ways. They want Anthony to speak for kids, but they don't want him to act like one. The more time I spend with Anthony, though, the harder it is to see anything but a kid. I kind of think I should put my retainers in, because my teeth are starting to shift way too much. For the last couple years, Anthony's been living on his own in a group home for foster youth near a highway overpass in San Francisco. Here's our living room. That's my roommate's uneaten food. I mean, isn't it lovely? There's oil all over the stove, a pan with a bunch of oil, a pot with potatoes. Yeah, it's just really dirty. The dirt is not what gets me. What does is this. The place is crushingly lonely. The neighborhood outside is dead. Anthony's roommates are strangers. Every couple months, someone moves in and someone else moves out. Some are OK. Some pick fights. For the most part, everyone holes up in their locked bedrooms and avoids each other. Anthony spends his time online, checking email, MySpace, Facebook. When he gets curious who else is home, he flips off the hallway light and looks for a glow under each bedroom door. I start to understand why he travels so much. Texas, Atlanta, Washington state. And that's outside of California. Inside California, all the way up to Arcata, Humboldt, a lot in southern California, Monterey-- Most of the time, there is no adult at the group home. None. There's someone there during business hours. But when the kids come home from school or work they're alone. Nobody for advice or protection. Nobody to crack the whip. Public speaking gave Anthony access to caring adults. He's lucky, kind of. When he's anxious, or facing a big decision, he makes the rounds, asks all the adults he knows what he should do. But the problem is they never agree. And they can't make him do anything. Add them all up and they don't equal even one stable parent. Back at the hotel, I had watched Anthony put on his tie, and asked who taught him. No one, he said. He stood in front of a mirror one day, knotting and unknotting, until he figured it out. He doesn't have a driver's license. He doesn't really know what it takes to get one. And he doesn't want to go to the DMV alone. I'm driving Anthony to school. Finally, I'm going to see what happens that keeps Anthony from living up to his-- sorry, Anthony. No other word for this-- potential. I could tell as soon as I had picked him up it was going to be a bad day. So describe to me what's around us. You've got the narrator position. You [BLEEP] narrate it. Fair enough. Here's the situation. Anthony should be off to a university in the fall. He's fallen a full year behind though. So he enrolled in a couple summer classes at City College to try and catch up. Today is his first day of class. But it isn't the first day of class. That was a week ago. He skipped week one of just a six-week session so he could make his speaking gigs in southern California. I'm relieved he's finally here. Anthony's a little dismayed about this, but I've become one more adult in his life, all wound up about his high school diploma. So tell me what class-- I'm going to today? What class we're going to hear today. Learn 50. It's wonderful. It's for retards. Wait, what? So what do you learn in Learn 50? Study skills. Stuff like that. Do you think it's a good idea to take it? For me, yes, because I don't have study skills. I have procrastination skills and [BLEEP] skills. But I don't have study skills. Turn right up here. He had to skip orientation too. So he's not sure where the classroom is. We start wandering around campus. We go to one office then another. We cross the entire campus twice. Finally, someone points him to a building. Let's hope it's down this way. Hi. Who you looking for? I'm supposed to go to the Guardian Scholars Program, I might have gotten this wrong. Yeah. I just wrote down 233. No. Wrong room. Guardian scholars? I'm not sure where you go. OK. Thank you. Well, I feel like a dumb ass. The longer we look, the more anxious he gets. And embarrassed. He pokes his head into another classroom. I may be in the wrong room. Yeah. Sorry. OK. [BLEEP] I give up. We go outside, stand in a small courtyard, silent for a moment. I don't know what to do. I wonder if I should keep my mouth shut, see what he decides to do on his own. But I can't help it. I try to convince him to go back inside, ask someone else, make a phone call, anything. So where could you find out the class number? Is there like a number at the college you could call? [BLEEP] that. I'm not going to even bother. I give up. Well, you've still got, five minutes. We can find-- we're right there. Five minutes late is better than not there at all. Not there at all is what I'd prefer, though. I don't get anywhere. So we walk to the car and get in. Let me ask you something. And I don't want this question to sound disrespectful at all. It's just-- Do I even care about education anymore? Well, you can answer. That wasn't exactly what I was going to ask. But maybe that's a good one to answer. Not really. What were you going to ask? Why not, though? No. What were you going to ask? I was going to ask if today was something you wanted to do if you would have found the room? Yeah. But do you think, like-- I know you missed last week. And I know you're stressed about education and stuff. Are you sort of digging a hole here? Well, that's because this is a [BLEEP] class. But it is a class. I mean, it's credits. It gets you closer to graduation. I don't care if it's-- I want to be able to learn something when I go to class. I don't want it to be a filler class. I hate [BLEEP] filler classes. This is the flip side of everything public speaking has given him. At some point, it turned into maybe the biggest obstacle keeping him from graduating. He's made the same choice-- in one form or another-- over and over again. He's put public speaking first and school last. Speaking, he gets his own hotel room. He gets to spend time with people who appreciate him. He gets to feel mastery over something. He gets to be a star. Going to school, he gets math homework and the feeling of being a screw up. It can't compete. Do you think you'll go to college? I don't think I'm college material. Do you think you'll graduate from high school? No. All signs point to no. I'm not, apparently, willing to change anything to make myself graduate. And thus far, I've failed at every turn. Education-- no matter how important in the back of my head-- it has not been a priority. And I don't know why. It's not clear to anyone whether Anthony will make it or not. Not to me, not to him. And if he can't make it-- with all his talent and connections, an actual spokesman for foster kids-- you have to wonder, who can? Anthony is the kind of kid you can find at any high school. That super smart one, who has so much messy, distracting stuff going on outside school that he can't keep it in the background. Anthony's problems are just bigger. And he has nothing like a family to help him through, not even a dysfunctional family. But now that he's 18, he doesn't have much time left to fix things and graduate. The fact is, foster kids who don't have a diploma when they leave the system almost never get one. Anthony knows he's contributing to his own problems, probably more than anyone else at this point. He also knows that the older he gets, the more he'll be able to mess up his life in a lasting way. He's just not sure he knows how to stop. It's a lot harder than talking about it. Douglas McGray, he is a fellow at the New America Foundation. In the year since we first broadcast this story, a lot has changed for Anthony. He met a California legislator. And she took a chance on him, hired him onto her staff, answering phones, helping out. Anthony moved out of the group home, got an apartment, got his GED, and is currently enrolled in community college. Act Three, Impeachment Day. Well you can't do a spokesman show without hearing from a presidential spokesman. And there is an unusually candid recording of Joe Lockhart, who did that job for President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2000. Long after Lockhart was out of the White House, he agreed to go on stage as part of The Moth, which is this group that does these great storytelling evenings. Lockhart went on stage and talked about his early days on the job as White House spokesman. Just after I started, we went on a trip. We went off to Russia. We were going to Ireland, doing big foreign policy stuff. Trip was going pretty. The last night in Moscow, I was coming into the hotel. And I ran into a friend of mine, an old friend of mine, the godfather to my daughter, I hadn't seen in a couple years. He said, come on, we've got to go out. We've got to go out. And he convinced me, you know, we were going to go see the real Moscow. And we went to-- I'll never forget-- a place called The Hungry Duck. And they were doing things there that I couldn't take my eyes off, so I had to stay till 5:00 in the morning, which was OK because we weren't leaving till 6:00. So I got back to my hotel and made one mistake, which was to sit down on the bed. And obviously, I fell asleep. And I'm telling you, you don't know anxiety until you've woken up as the White House press secretary on your first foreign trip at 6:15 in Moscow without a passport, knowing you've missed Air Force One. Now the only good thing that I could think of-- The only good thing I think of was the day couldn't get worse. When I finally caught up with the traveling party, I was immediately surrounded by reporters who said, how do you feel about being the first White House press secretary to ever miss Air Force One on a foreign trip? And a strange phrase just caught in my head. And I couldn't lose it. About a week earlier, the president had been at a prayer breakfast talking about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. And he said, you know, I'm really sorry for what I did. And I'm working very hard to make up for it, particularly to those I've hurt the most. So when I got the question of how do you feel, I said, I'm really sorry for what I've done wrong. And I'm working hard to fix it, particularly those who I've hurt the most. Now mocking the president of the United States when you make a mistake isn't always the best idea. But it came in my head, and I said it. So anyway, the day went on. And we finally had a little break where the president had some private meetings. And I went to the back of the Irish Ambassador's residence to go to sleep. And I hadn't been asleep for more than five minutes. And I was actually pretty hungover, which was why I needed the sleep. And the president's personal aide came back and said, the president's in a meeting right now. And he wants you to come into it. Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But this had practical joke written all over it. And I said, get lost. About three minutes later, he came in and said, hey, the president's in. He's in with the band U2, with Bono, and they want to talk to you. I said, well, if the president wants to see me, he can walk his presidential ass right back to this room and ask me himself. Well, about 60 seconds later, the presidential ass showed up and said, what is your problem? These guys want to meet you. So I walked into the meeting. And this guy, this rock star, Bono comes up and gives me this big hug and says, I really want to meet you. And I said, well, that's great Mr. Bono, but why? And he said, anyone who can handle world affairs-- you know, Monica Lewinsky and all that-- and still has time to stay out all night drinking is my kind of guy. When he was on stage at The Moth, Joe Lockhart also talked about what it was like to be press secretary the day that Congress voted to impeach the president, December 19, 1998. He had, he said, three things to deal with that day. The impeachment vote, of course. Also the same day, Bob Livingston, the speaker of the House, declared that he'd had an affair and he was going to resign. And so the White House had to beat back the notion that President Clinton should also resign because of Monica Lewinsky. That was just the early afternoon. Also that day, the Defense Department had bombed Iraq with cruise missiles, because Iraq was not complying with the UN weapons inspections. And Joe Lockhart had to convince the press-- and the country-- that the attacks on Iraq were not a kind of Wag the Dog distraction. I then had what we call in the business a communications challenge, because we had two things we had to do in the same time space. And we tried to figure out what to do. We had 150 members of Congress down to stand with the president-- Democrats-- and say, this impeachment was all partisan, it's all politics. And then we had to talk about the war. And I thought, you know what? Sometimes the best thing to do is not worry very much about it, just go out and do it. So out on the south lawn we had the Democrats, very simple message. Partisans, this is politics, Republicans suck. It all went well. Then we went inside-- only 10 minutes apart, the same podium, just a different room, a different set of flags-- and said, there are no Republicans in this country. There are no Democrats. It's just Americans, and we've won the war. And then the president left, leaving me in the room to explain to 50 waiting reporters how the two things fit together. And I think it was so audacious that we even took the breath away from the press. And they seemed to let us get away with it. And I remember at the end of this long day, walking across the hall about 20 feet to my office, going in. And one of my closest friends in the White House was there, one of the president's top aides. And he saw me come in. And I sat down. And he went over to the little bar in the office, and got two beers, opened them up, sat down, put his feet up. And I'll never forget what he said to me, which was, you know, except for getting impeached, we had a pretty good day. Joe Lockhart. He's now a consultant in corporate and political messaging in Washington DC. Thanks to The Moth, You can listen to all kinds of stories like this at their website, themoth.org. And of course, those are the musical stylings of the 42nd president of the United States, recorded in Prague on an official foreign trip. Our program today was produced by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our web site. Production help from Seth Lind and PJ Vogt. Musical help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who, as always, has this bit of narration to end our program. You've got the narrator position. You [BLEEP] narrate it. 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. It's so embarrassing. I don't want to get upset. But like, he has a car. So the last time I saw him on purpose was just in the car in front of my house. I don't know. It's just bad. Bad like when you walk out of your house you think like, there his car was? Yeah. I still look for it. It's crazy. [LAUGHS] OK. Now we're about a block from your house. Like in front of that building right there. This like churchy-looking building was where we were parked when we first had the conversation where we decided we were going to be exclusive. Which was a joke. Like I don't really date around, and I don't think he does, either. But it's kind of a big conversation. But yeah, we were parked in the middle of that block right where that white car is. And so every time you walk down this street, you'll think like, oh yeah, there's the spot? I don't walk down this street. I just don't. Like I haven't even seen him for a month. You know what I mean? When I walked around Lauren's neighborhood with her, it had been two months since her boyfriend broke up with her. They'd gone out for about 10 months before that. She was incredibly nice to let herself be taped in still a pretty raw state. But even in the middle of that raw state, she was acutely aware, and said herself that everything she was going through was a cliché-- a cliché that she was forced to live through. That's the crazy thing about it. Breaking up with someone is literally the most common thing. Like everyone you know broke up with everyone they ever dated until maybe the person they're with right now, if they're with someone right now. But when it happens to you, it feels so specific. [LAUGHS] I don't want to say I can't get over it in like a flippant way. Like you kind of can't get over it. You're like, what? This is what's happening? It's so shocking. If I had to say one thing about Lauren, it's that she was full of feelings that completely contradicted each other, which I guess just comes with this territory. Like she emphatically did not want him to call. But also maybe a little bit wanted him to call. She missed him, and she didn't want to stop thinking about him. But she also did all this elaborate math to calculate the day that she would finally be over him and not thinking about him and with somebody else. We get to an area where she had been on walks with the ex-boyfriend. There are benches and a sidewalk promenade. I don't know. We used to just-- it's not that we took a ton of walks, but we took some walks. And what happened down here? You know, I can't say that anything of substance happened. It's not like any one specific thing. It's just-- I don't know. It's just that there was an us. I know. There really was. That's the thing that's so weird. It's like you put so much energy into something, and then one day, it's time to stop. I don't know. During a breakup, you just stare at what happened. There's a before, and there's an after, and you just can't believe it. Lauren says she still doesn't even understand what went wrong between her and him. And that's part of it, too, so much of the time. Well, we got the idea for today's radio show from an email that a listener sent. It says, "Dear This American Life, I'm suffering from a gut-wrenching breakup with my former boyfriend and I searched your site for shows about breakups and general heartbreak to commiserate, but to my surprise, I didn't find many stories specifically regarding the act of breaking up. I hope you consider it. A show like that would really cheer me up." And so with that in mind, we devote our show today to breakups. Partly today, we have an anatomy of the completely contradictory feelings that are part of a breakup. I think that's what makes it such a special and particularly cursed state. And we have stories today about people trying in some very unusual, very resourceful ways to make themselves feel better during a breakup. The key word there would be "trying." Our show today in four acts. In Act One, Starlee Kine heads out on a breakup mission unlike any we have ever heard of. In Act Two, an eight year old heads out into the world to get some answers about her parents' breakup. In Act Three, a man who has turned his back on the ways of his people-- his people, in this case, being divorce lawyers. Act Four, Merrill Markoe notes one possibly overlooked way to mend a broken heart, and it involves a soggy, plastic, disky thing. You'll just have to trust me on that one. Stay with us. Act One, Dr. Phil. When one of our regular contributors, Starlee Kine, was in the middle of getting over a breakup, she tried to feel better in a way that few people ever try, and that maybe even she shouldn't have. Here's Starlee. Before I explain why I decided to write and record a breakup song even though I have no musical ability and can't play an instrument of any kind, I should probably explain a bit about the breakup itself. It was only after Anthony broke up with me that all the warning signs I had missed came sharply into focus. Like the time he told me he didn't like taking pictures of girlfriends because it was a downer to have those photos around once a relationship was over. I'd had a crush on him since the day we met, but he always had a girlfriend in Canada. Then she broke up with him, and we got together. A week after that, he told me I was the one, which, in retrospect, was probably the biggest warning sign of all. It was, hands down, the corniest relationship I've ever been in. And by corniest, I mean greatest. We'd pass entire evenings just complimenting each other. We took hand-holding to new heights. And we listened to hours and hours of music, teenager style, playing one song after another while smiling a lot. I don't quite remember how our Phil Collins phase began. I think it was one of those things that started off ironically, with Anthony lip-syncing, adorably, to "Against All Odds" one night. But over time, it became less and less ironic, until one day, we were actual fans. (SINGING) How can I just let you walk away, just let you leave without a trace, when I stand here taking every breath with you? Ooh, ooh. You're the only one who really knew me at all. We liked how honest and sad it was. "How can I just let you walk away, just let you leave without a trace? You're the only one who really knew me at all." We pictured Phil Collins at the piano writing it, the tears running down his face. (SINGING) I wish I could just make you turn around, turn around and see me cry. There's so much I need to say to you, so many reasons why. Anthony broke up with me on New Year's Eve. I told you-- corny. I didn't really see it coming, and I definitely didn't want it to happen. He said, you're going to be OK. I just cried and cried. I wanted to stop it, to fix it. I searched deep inside myself for the right words to say, and out of my mouth popped this. How can you just let me walk away? I'm the only one who really knew you at all. And I meant it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, in that moment, no one could have conveyed how I was feeling better than Phil Collins. (SINGING) Take a good look at me now 'cause I'll still be standing here. And you coming back to me is against all odds. It's the chance I've got to take. If I thought I'd been in the Phil Collins phase before, it was nothing compared to what came next. I was no longer listening to a song for pleasure, but for pain. They were breakup songs, and hearing them was the only thing that made me feel better. And by better, I mean worse. There's something so satisfying about listening to sad songs. They're like how you would actually be spending your day if you were allowed to just break down and sob and grab hold of everyone you met. They make you feel less alone with your crazy thoughts. They don't judge you. In fact, they understand you. A breakup song won't ever suggest you start online dating or that you're better off without him. They tell you that you're worse without him, which is exactly what you want to hear because it's how you feel. I didn't want to be cheered up. I didn't want to bounce back. I didn't want to meet someone new. I wanted to wallow, big time, deeply, and with the least amount of perspective possible. And the only way to do that was by turning off my phone and turning up the sad, sad music, like this song that I love by the band The Magnetic Fields. (SINGING) I don't want to get over you. I guess I could take a sleeping pill and sleep at will and not have to go through what I go through. I guess I should take Prozac, right? And just smile all night at somebody new, somebody not too bright, but sweet and kind, who would try to get you off my mind. I could leave this agony behind, which is just what I'd do if I wanted to, but I don't want to get over you. It's great because the lyrics perfectly articulate this feeling you didn't even know you had. Then there's the Bonnie Raitt song, "I Can't Make You Love Me." (SINGING) I'll close my eyes, then I won't see the love you don't feel when you're holding me. The song was written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin after they read this little article in the newspaper about a guy who'd gotten drunk and shot up his girlfriend's car. At his sentencing, he was asked if he learned any lessons from what he'd done. And he said, "Yes. You can't make a woman love you if she don't." (SINGING) 'Cause I can't make you love me if you don't. You can't make your heart feel something it won't. Before the breakup, I had no idea how much breakup music was out there. For example, every song ever written. Or at least every third. But once you're heartbroken, you notice it everywhere. You find yourself in the supermarket, listening to a song you've heard before, but never really heard, thinking to yourself, it's just so true. (SINGING) In my life, there's been heartache and pain. I don't know if I can face it again. Can't stop now. I've traveled so far to change this lonely life. I wanna know what love is. It's not just that you overlook the cheesiness. You embrace it. You do want to know what love is. There's nothing restrained or subtle about being crushed by the person you care most about in the world. It's big and gaudy, and so it only makes sense that songs about it are, too. (SINGING) I know you can show me. Ohhh. It was after listening to all these songs for months that I knew what I had to do. I had to write one myself. I needed to take charge of my pain. I needed to take wallowing to the next level. It wasn't enough just to be lying on the floor in my pajamas, listening to these songs at 3:00 in the afternoon. I wanted to be the songs. I wanted to be the pain. I wanted to be inside the stereo speakers, to be the sound waves coming into my own head. I wanted to be the thing creating the feeling I was feeling. And I knew just what kind of breakup song I would write. Torch songs are about the most pathetic, desperate, and lonely part of yourself-- the part you'd never admit to your friends, the part of you that knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that you would take him back. Not only that, he wouldn't have to beg or even apologize. Dusty Springfield made a whole career out of these songs. "I Just Can't Make It Alone," "I Only Want to Be with You," "All I See Is You," "Losing You," or this one, which might be the most pitiful sentiment ever uttered out loud. (SINGING) You don't have to say you love me. Just be close at hand. You don't have to stay forever. I will understand. Believe me. Believe me. I can't help but love you. But believe me. I'll never tie you down. It's just so pathetic. And deep down, it's how I felt, too. And it felt good to have someone just come out and say it. There are some words you can never speak, but somehow you can sing. So I knew what kind of song I was going to write, but I had no idea how to go about writing it. I needed some advice. And out of thousands of musicians who write about heartbreak, there was only one I cared to talk to. Hi. Hi. Hi, Starlee. Can you hear me OK? Yeah, I can hear you great. Phil Collins, of course. What? Is that weird? I got it into my head that it'd be great to ask Phil Collins how to write a breakup song, the same way you might think to yourself, I'd really love to talk to Michael Jordan about free throws. I never thought it would actually happen. Then, against all odds, it turned out I had a friend who was on the road with Phil Collins, on his Genesis reunion tour, shooting footage for the DVD extras. He gave me his contact info, and I sent him an email. "Dear Mr. Collins, I have a rather unusual request." Then I waited, refreshing my inbox every three seconds. When his email finally appeared, he was friendly and casual. We set up a time to talk. In my mind, he was already so intimately involved in my breakup that it seemed crazy that he didn't actually know about it. So I told him. Well, I'm going to tell you the whole story of my breakup and stuff, OK? Is that OK? Yeah. Yeah, it's your 45 minutes. [LAUGHS] OK. Well, it also involves you. So I was dating my boyfriend, Anthony, and he kind of broke up with me on New Year's Eve. Oh, nice. Yeah. Whereas before, it was Anthony and I talking about Phil, now it was Phil and I talking about Anthony. Actually pretty tidy, when you think about it. And at one point, I turned to him and it just flew out of my mouth. I just looked at him and I was like, I can't believe you're just going to let me-- Walk away? Yeah. [LAUGHS] And before long, Phil Collins and I were commiserating about heartbreak, which he also went through recently. So I mean, I've just been through a marriage breakup. And you talk about New Year's Eve. My divorce was final on my birthday. Oh, really? And I didn't want it at all. So that's something that-- you know, you always remember these things. Like you'll always remember New Year's Eve, and I'll always remember my birthday. I know. It makes me want to skip those dates, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Up until this conversation, I never thought I had much in common with Phil Collins. He started playing in Genesis at the age of 19. I didn't. He performed in Live Aid, while I only watched it on TV. He was in the movie Buster, which I never actually saw. But talking to him was easy. He told me that, when he was in Genesis, he just played drums and sang. He didn't write. "Against All Odds" was one of the first songs he wrote himself, when he was working on his first solo album. That song, particularly, was written during my first divorce. My first wife and the kids had gone, and I was just left there. So it was written totally out of experience as opposed to "this is a what-if" song. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think you could have written that song if your wife hadn't left? Probably not. I mean, frankly, if that personal stuff had not happened to me at that time, I probably would never have made an album. And if I was to have made an album eventually, it would have been more of a jazz/rock thing because that was my output. Apart from Genesis, I was in a band called Brand X. And I was a player. So no. Without that stuff, I wouldn't have felt the things I felt that made me sit at a piano night after night, day after day, writing stuff. Did it help? Well, it helped inasmuch as-- it was kind of, well, when she hears this, it's all going to be OK. Really? Is that what you thought? I did, yeah. Foolish, huh? I mean, I did. Did you get over it? There's various people in your life that you never quite get over. I mean, that's kind of the cliché. And then sometimes, with me, for example, because of children, you are morally obligated, and if you want to be with the kids as much as possible, you have to be in touch with this person that's really hurt you. So it's not like you can just walk away and leave without a trace because, in this instance, there's a couple of little guys that are looking up to you, saying, what am I going to do, Dad? OK. There are so many crazy things about this. First of all, even Phil Collins can't help but quote Phil Collins. Second, if it hadn't been for his wife leaving him in 1979, Phil Collins would never have become Phil Collins. Heartbreak turned a jazz/rock fusion drummer into an international pop icon. But the other crazy thing was how honest and normal he was about it. Once again, Phil Collins put into words what I was feeling. There's a part of me-- and it is not a small part-- that wants my ex, Anthony, to hear the song I write and ask to come back. I told Phil that I'd been trying to write my songs, but they just didn't feel right. They were too wordy or something. But when I tried to consult songs that I loved to see how it was done, even the lyrics to the best songs looked flat on the page. I wanted to know how to transform clichéd sentiment into a song that captured the entire range of human emotions. I wanted to know how simple sentences like "love hurts. Love scars" became-- (SINGING) Love hurts. Love scars. Love wounds and mars. Most of the time, it's the direct-- I mean, if it's a good song, what makes it good is the fact that it's-- you know, so many people try to fluff things up or disguise them or make them a little bit too clever, but sometimes it's the simplest thing that actually reaches people. (SINGING) Love hurts. Mm, love hurts. It actually looks corny when you look at it on the page. But then, you see, what becomes important then is the way that it's sung. Yeah. Because otherwise, you get-- and I don't mean any disrespect-- but you get into sort of Michael Bolton territory. And I've got nothing against Michael. I'm just using him as an example. I'm sure people would use me as an example of something that gets overblown and polished as opposed to a simple idea, simply sung, and obviously sounds like it's sung with conviction. So now I had the advice. I had the pain. It was time to start writing. It was pretty terrifying at first. Every single word I put down seemed wrong, even the ones that seemed like they had to go in-- the no-brainers. I'd type the word love, then erase it, and then type it again. Then, one day, I was waiting for the train, and I started thinking about how that train reminded me of Anthony, and then how our love was sort of like a runaway train. Oh, that's good, I thought, and scribbled the line down on the back of my gas bill. Suddenly, heartbreak was flowing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, and it was up to me to transform it into song. The next problem was-- and it felt like a small problem, really-- was my complete lack of musical ability. So I asked a guy named Joe McGinty for some help. He's a New York musician who has played with everyone from The Ramones to Ryan Adams to Ronnie Spector. He was in The Psychedelic Furs. He has a million songs. More importantly-- for my purposes, at least-- Joe is a man who understands heartbreak. Here's one of his songs I really like. (SINGING) This song is three weeks old. Guess I should sing it happy birthday. And your image, it still holds a happy accident. I can't seem to shake you from my mind. Hi. Is anybody else-- glad I got that. I'm good. So I met up with Joe and also Julia Greenberg, a musician and songwriter who plays with Joe a lot. I'd written about a dozen songs, some of them more finished than others. When I printed them out, I had six freshly typed pages of lyrics and then about 15 crazy-looking pages with a few lines here and there, separated by random spaces. I had sent these all off to Joe and Julia before our meeting. Here's Joe reading the one I thought was farthest along. OK, "Imaginary Boyfriend." "I can't help but think this all could have been prevented if I'd just gone to a small liberal arts school because then I would have met my imaginary boyfriend at a stand-up comedy open mic. It was love at first eye roll. He said he drew comic books, like David on Roseanne. Wow. I thought I'd been working on a song, but I don't even know how to describe what that was. A creative writing class essay, maybe. It was clear that I'd ignored Phil Collins' advice. Keep it simple, not clever. Joe and Julia agreed. I think the "like David on Roseanne" I can't turn into a song. When Julia pulled out her favorite of my songs from the very bottom of the stack. I'd been so sure it wasn't a contender that I'd almost not included it at all. You had the lyric, "It doesn't do me any good. In fact, it does me bad." It kind of seems impossible to me that that hasn't been in a pop song before. But that's a classic kind of pop song. That's what you look for, right? Yeah, that's a classic pop song line. I have to admit I was skeptical. That lyric was from the crazy pile, just notes for an idea I had for a torch song. I tried to think of the most pathetic scenario I could. What I came up with was this. Anthony goes back to his ex-girlfriend. But rather than letting him go, I agree to be this awkward third wheel, as long as it means still getting to see him occasionally. The lines were literally, "I liked you, and you liked her, and I sort of liked her because you liked her." Julia had run with the idea, with one minor change. You know that you had it all "like," and I changed it to "love." That was the biggest-- God, that makes-- I feel like there's something really, deeply-- there are like even more issues that I have to work out with myself that I put "like" and not "love." It didn't even occur to me. Julia had been so sure it was an actual song that she'd gotten to work before our meeting. She'd sketched out a melody and sung it to Joe on his answering machine. They played it for me. Yeah, all right. This is going to be a rough-- It's very rough. --rendering of the opus. Yeah, OK. (SINGING) I loved you, and you loved her, and I sort of loved her 'cause I love everything you loved. Then she stops, stops loving you, and glory, hallelujah, somehow you start loving me. And I don't know why I love you. I just do. I really do. And it doesn't do me any good. In fact, it does me bad. And you're oh so gone. And I'm oh so sad. So yes, in theory, I knew all this, that music was important. It transforms words, unites the universe together. But I'd never actually seen it happen in front of me. Come up with some more interesting ones. I cannot believe that's the one that you choose. But then, when you were singing it, it was like the words were like flying off the page, and there was like pixie dust on them or something, like a magic spell had-- you tapped it with a wand. And it makes total sense now after hearing it that that should be the one. So now the three of us had written a song about the other three of us. Over the next week, we finessed the lyrics, tweaked the melody, and recorded the song. It seemed obvious who should get the first listen. And no, I don't mean Anthony. That'd be crazy. I mean Phil Collins. Can I play my song for you? Is that OK? I don't want to put you on the spot and make you-- No, no, no, I would like to hear it. We've been talking about it? Really? OK, cool. And just be honest. Oh, OK. Here it goes. So I played him the song. I'll skip the part you've already heard and the bridge and jump right to the end. (SINGING) Now it's just the three of us. The names may have changed, but the sorry facts remain the same-- that I love you, and she loves you. I'm OK with second best. Just love her more and love me less. I don't know why I love you. I just do. I really do. It doesn't do me any good. In fact, it does me bad. 'Cause you're oh so gone, and I'm oh so sad. You're oh so gone, and I'm oh so sad. Well, well. There's some great stuff in there. I really like-- what's the line about doing me no good. In fact, it's doing me bad? "It doesn't do me any good. In fact, it does me bad." Yeah. That's fantastic. Really? And afterwards, the line that says, and you're oh so gone. I laughed when I heard that. "You're oh so gone, and I'm oh so sad." I mean, it's just really smart. I can't believe it. That's so nice of you. I can't-- this is like the-- It's not being nice. I just like it. I mean, I would easily have said, hey, it's not for me, you know? But I heard it, and I thought there was some very-- it's very funny. It's very clever. Thank you. Well, that's what I mean, though, about how, like I told you, I was trying to write all these crazy concepts and conceptual ideas, and then the one that seemed to work was just the one that's how I feel. Yeah. Do you think he'll come back? I hope so because you obviously do feel a lot for him. Oh. Do you think I'll ever stop feeling bad, like I am now? But you kind of like feeling bad, don't you? Oh yeah. Well, it's something-- I don't think you really want to get over it. I think you're kind of enjoying it. So that's kind of a dilemma you have to sort out. You really have me pegged. It feels important or big or something. Like I felt so much for him when I was with him, and the only way to still feel like that strongly about something is to not let it go. I would love to be the person who was just like, he meant nothing to me. But instead, I'm the person who's like, OK, I'm going to write a breakup song and play it over the airwaves. I've like lost all my cool. Well, I don't see it like that. Really? You're just addressing something you need to address, and this is, amongst other things, getting it out of your system. You've had the satisfaction of actually getting something tangible that you can play out of this relationship. That's true. But don't you sometimes wonder like, is it better to have the song in the end or the relationship? Oh, no. Surely, you'd rather have the relationship. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. But you don't have the choice. Now that the song is done, it's really hard not to wonder if Anthony is going to hear it. I'd like to say I've gone back and forth on whether I even want him to, but the truth is, of course I do. Everyone I talk to, from my best friend all the way to Phil Collins, says he'll listen. And yes, if the roles were reversed, and it were me, I definitely would. But I know Anthony. If anyone could resist listening, it would be him. You're just going to have to trust me on this one. Which doesn't mean I think he'll never hear the song. I can see him keeping a copy of it in some box stuffed with mixtapes and copies of SAT scores so that he can listen to it one day when he's ready. I picture him 40 years from now, an old man living in some house that I'll never see, which breaks my heart. In my head, he doesn't look like a real old man, but like a young one wearing stage makeup. I imagine him sitting down to finally listen on the CD player that people make fun of him for still having. He loads it in and hits play. He listens to the entire song from start to finish. And when it's over, he plays it again and again until the tears are running down his face. Starlee Kine. You can hear more stories from Starlee Kine on her podcast Mystery Show. Coming up, a big city mayor, an eight-year-old girl, and a dog weigh in with their solutions to getting over your next breakup. 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 show, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "Break-Up," stories from inside the vortex of shockingly contradictory feelings that happen after a breakup. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, But Why? After a relationship ends, you can puzzle for years over why things went wrong and did they have to. And you yearn for a simple story that explains it. And that's not just true for the people in the relationship. It's true for the kids. And now, with that thought, let's flip on the radio time machine. Reforming welfare in this half hour. This is Noah Adams. And I'm Renee Montagne with All Things Considered. The welfare reform that they're talking about here is that of President George Herbert Walker Bush. The day that this aired, February 11, 1987, I was one of the lower-level producers at All Things Considered. But that day, I got to work on this story about breakups that I still think about, a story about somebody who was wanting to understand a breakup and reaching out to various people out in the world to do that-- in a way, like Starlee did. So OK, all you need to know is it's 1987. Edward Koch is the mayor of New York City. Noah Adams is one of the hosts of All Things Considered at the time, and he does the interview. Betsy, tell me your full name, please. Betty Allison Walter. Betsy Allison Walter. And you're eight years old? Almost nine. And you live in Manhattan? Mhm. And you're in our studio in New York. I appreciate you taking some time to come in and telling us this story. You wrote a letter to the mayor of New York, Mayor Koch. Right. Tell me about that, please. Well, I wrote to him because my parents are getting divorced, and I really don't know who to turn to. And I just told him that my parents are getting divorced and my dad is with somebody else. And I was just really used to something and now this. And it's really kind of hard on me. And I'd like an opinion. Why did you write to Mayor Koch? Because he's somebody who I've thought, he's very good to us, I guess, because he's the mayor, and he knows a lot of things. And I thought he would know about this, too. Yeah. Did you get an answer back? Yes. What'd he say? It's very short. "Thank you for the letter. I was saddened to learn of the difficult times you are experiencing now. It is important for you to share your feelings and thoughts with someone during this time. I wish there was an easy solution to these problems, but there is not. Please remember that you are loved and that people care about you. All the best. Sincerely, Edward Koch." That's nice. Was that reassuring to you in a way? No. No? Did you have any thought in your mind that perhaps he could actually do something about it? For example, call your father and get your mom and dad back together? No. No? You just wanted some advice. But see, I try to sometimes like-- because I had a dance recital one day, and I invited them both, but I wanted them to sit next to each other, but they didn't. Yeah. What other advice have you been able to come across, to find? Well, the guidance counselor, she said that a lot of kids have the same problems. Say there are 400 in school, and like 300 of them have the same problem. Sure. Sure. You know, most people you talk with will have had parents who were divorced. Oh. Yeah, most people. It's kind of a sad thing, but most people get through it all right, too. That's my advice for you. Thank you. You wrote another letter to somebody who had written a book called The Boys and Girls Book of Divorce? Yes. A psychologist? Mhm. And what did that person tell you? Well, he said that I should try another of his books to find out help. Oh, he wanted you to go out and buy his book. Did you? Well, we had the one he recommended. And how did that go? What did you think of that one? Well, the problem is he puts things in a way that I can't quite get it through me, that I already know. And I want some real advice that my questions really are, not just answers that people keep telling me over and over again. Can you give me an example, Betsy? Why did they get divorced? What happened? Do you think that parents sometimes don't think children are old enough to understand or can't handle it and so will hide some information? Yes. Not that they have to say everything, but you think there ought to be a little bit more sharing of the information? Yeah. That's what my mom said. Yeah. And in terms of their own divorce, do you understand it better now? No. No? Why? What still don't you understand about that? Well, why did they have to go off and do it? Because see, the most painful part is when I saw my dad packing up. And I really don't understand. It's hard because they won't tell me what happened to them. And I really want them back together. And I don't understand why they can't. Yeah. What do you think you've learned from this? Do you think if somebody else in school, for example, told you that their parents were getting divorced, how do you think you could advise them? Well, I wrote a book, and I think I would say the same information that I said. You wrote a very small book? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have it there? Mhm. Could you read some of it for me, please? All right. Let me get it. It's called A Book about Divorce. Should I read the whole book? It's short. Sure. "It's not your fault when your parents get divorced. Why does it have to be you? Because Mommy and Daddy don't love each other anymore. Remember, it's OK to be sad and cry. Tell someone about your feelings." That's it. That's nice. Listen, Betsy. Thank you for talking with us. I appreciate it. And I wish you the best. I hope things go well for you. Thank you. And maybe this is the beginning of a writing experience for you, and you can grow up to be a writer. I don't want to. But I want to write like one book that would make it, but not a whole series, you know? You just want to write a book and make a lot of money. No, not money, just famous. OK. [LAUGHS] OK, Betsy, thank you. Good night. OK, good night. So that's the tape from 20 years ago. And you're in the studio with us now. Tell us your name. Betsy Allison Walter. How old are you? I just turned 29. And you're working? I am. I have been an elementary school teacher for the past seven years. How many times over the years do you think you've heard this taped interview? Probably 12. A dozen. Because I didn't hear it for a while. I think I heard it again when I was about 22, 23. Every time I've had a boyfriend, I've played it for him. And each time it's got to be different. How's it been changing for you? Yeah. Recently was the first change. Really? I used to only hear it with my exact inner monologue from when I was there in the studio. And when I heard certain things, I can still remember the exact thoughts running through my head. I remember it very clearly. I remember thinking that you were just another grown-up offering your advice. All these grown-ups kept telling me things, but I felt like I knew what they were going to say. They were going to say, it'll be OK, and people fall out of love. But that wasn't what I wanted to hear. I remember everything. I don't know how. And then recently-- I think it was probably when I graduated college when I heard it again-- I heard it as an adult. And it was so heartbreaking. I didn't think it was sad when it was me. It was just what was going on. And it made me sad to hear pain in my voice, confusion. And now I hear it even differently as an educator. I hear it as, what would I say to her? And looking back at that moment, did you really want the truth or did you want things to be well again and whole again? I don't believe that I wanted what the truth really was, but I wanted what I had created the truth to be in my head. I wanted them to say something to the fact that, oh, we just needed time apart, and of course we'll come back together. I wanted what I thought the truth was. If I had heard the real truth, I think that it would have been devastating. Your dad was fooling around? Mhm. And my mom did an amazing job of never, ever putting any blame on him, of always being supportive of us, having a relationship. But if she had said the truth, I couldn't have a relationship with him. I would have been too angry. OK, let's imagine this. Your advice just to that eight-year-old Betsy, who was you. I do grapple with this. It's hard because I know exactly what I wanted to hear when I was eight. I think I would tell her that-- you know what? I would actually say, this is probably how your life is going to be. Your parents made this choice for you. And now, instead of questioning and wondering for so long why this choice was made, how are you going to live your life now, knowing this is your life? I still know myself, and I would have been persistent, wanting answers regardless. But I do think that I needed to feel less helpless. It's been years since we first broadcast this show, and Betsy Allison Walter is now Betsy New-Schneider. She has two little kids of her own, one of whom is actually near the age Betsy was when she first sat down for her first interview with Noah Adams more than 30 years ago. You can still hear Noah on various NPR news shows. Act Three, Let No Court Put Asunder. Now we have this example of somebody trying to make breakups less horrible than they are. Barry Berkman used to be like any divorce lawyer. He fought for his clients. He tried to get them big settlements. But he came to believe that what he was doing actually was not so good for most of his clients, which, you know, was kind of a big problem. Here's the kind of thing he would see. A guy comes in, ready for a divorce. His wife had a lot of money. They had worked out a deal, but they did it on their own, without seeing lawyers. What'd they decide? And what they decided was that, in order for him-- he was a musician. Didn't have that much money. But in order for him to live close to her and to be able to see the kids, which they both wanted, she was going to give him enough money to purchase a small co-op. And it was great. They were both happy as could be. They were ready to do it. They were told to see lawyers. He came to see us. We were fine with it, and we said sure. This looks good. You did a good job. She went to see a lawyer. No way. How can you give him that much? It's not right. That's what her lawyer was saying? Absolutely. For the lawyer, it was too much because he had an argument which could theoretically end up giving her the greater part of her separate property. She ended up listening to the lawyer. We ended up with a custody fight as well as a divorce fight. Wait. And is that because the money fight got so bitter at some point? Exactly. Really? Yeah. Then they started fighting over the kids, which they hadn't fought over at all. Wait. How did that kick in? Like what was the moment where it went from being just about money to being about the kids, too? What happened was the parties got so angry at each other that they started quibbling about everything. So if he had a gig and couldn't be home on time one evening, she decided he was an unfit parent. If she was spending too much time with her new boyfriend, which this guy decided wasn't appropriate, she became an unfit parent. So the parties ended up fighting not only about money, but about the kids. Used up a good bit of her vast inheritance in the case. And in the end, she ended up buying him the same, or similar, co-op in a similar neighborhood as the one she would have in the first place. But it took a couple of years, embittered everyone, and you had to think, was this worthwhile? Did it have to happen? Adversarial style divorces make up a ton of all divorce proceedings around the country. And Barry felt like most of those cases ended up like this one-- incredibly expensive, taking a huge emotional toll on everybody, damaging children. So after 15 years of doing these cases like this, he started looking for a different way. And he found something called collaborative divorce. In collaborative divorce, each spouse gets a lawyer, and then the spouses and the lawyers sit down in a room together to work out some kind of agreement. But under the rules of collaborative divorce, if one of the lawyers thinks that the other side is being intransigent or unreasonable, not only can he not threaten to go to court, if it does go to court, he has to give up the case. He has to give the case to another lawyer to do. So the lawyers have an incentive to work everything out. So OK. They all sit down together, the spouses and the lawyers. And Barry Berkman says that, even though the spouses enter this situation with good intentions of working everything out, the biggest obstacle he has is something very simple. I think often what happens is couples in conflict lose the ability to listen to each other. And so you find yourself, very often, saying to your own client, no, no, no, no. Listen to what they're saying. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so one of the things-- Not to agree with it, but at least to understand it. That's the whole question-- to recognize that your point of view doesn't necessarily invalidate your spouse's point of view. You're saying the most important thing people need to do is simply just listen to each other and try to get along. Well, I would say listen to each other. Yeah, I don't know about getting along. They don't have to try to get along. Certainly, listening goes a long way. Do things get so reasonable that you get people listening to each other well enough that people eventually just get back together? I've had that happen once. What happened? What happened was, we had people who simply couldn't listen to each other. He became very, very busy in his own law practice. She felt she was losing him. Part of it was they couldn't find the time to talk to each other. But this collaborative divorce process makes you actually show up to meetings with your spouse and your lawyers and start talking. And as these two people talked, they started to see each other's side of things. Maybe he hadn't been around enough. Maybe she could have been more supportive. I think the turning point came when they were talking about what to do with the house, and each one kind of recognized that they didn't really want to be living anywhere without the other person. Usually, of course, the spouses do not get back together. When the process works, Barry Berkman says, at least they end up feeling a little better about each other. Do people ever say, at the end of this process, they appreciate your help and they're glad for the results, but they're still full of pain? Yeah. I mean, we're not going to get rid of the pain. The pain is there. Long marriages-- the pain is there. I think going through this process enables people to get in touch with that pain and the real sadness that they're experiencing, which is sometimes covered up by their anger. Are you saying that, at the end of this process, actually just going through the dividing of assets-- which is really, in the end, all you're trying to do-- actually makes people's anger dissipate? When you do it this way? I think going through the process, where we reach-- and it's not just the assets. The assets are usually relatively easy. Don't forget we have the kids and the parenting and the decision-making. That's often a lot tougher. I think going through the process where people reach points of understanding, where maybe for the first time they get a glimpse of where the other person is coming from, and so all of the sudden, they realize, you know what? It's not necessary to demonize this person anymore. And when they have those moments of understanding, it goes a long way toward helping them get on with the rest of their lives, actually. Barry Berkman is a lawyer in New York and a member of the New York Association of Collaborative Professionals, which he helped found. Collaborative divorce, by the way, was invented by a Minneapolis lawyer named Stuart Webb. Act Four, Divorce Is Rrruuffff! We close our show today with this vignette of just how lost you feel when you lose somebody, from Merrill Markoe, recorded on stage at Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles. Today, our friend Paul came to the house in a near dissociative state of panic. Suddenly and without warning, it appeared that his marriage was unraveling. He sat down on the big, red couch in the living room, and I offered him a vodka as he started detailing his anguish. "Up until yesterday, if you'd asked me if my marriage was a happy one, I would have said yes," he said, choking back tears. "And then last night, out of the blue, my wife comes in and tells me she wants a divorce." As Paul spoke, Andy's dog, Puppy Boy, a skinny, brown-and-black Tijuana shepherd, approached with his mouth full of a large, black, completely deflated soccer ball. He placed the flat, wet piece of rubber gently on Paul's knee and then sat down right in front of him to wait for the games to begin. Paul was too upset to notice. "She told me she wants to start seeing other men," Paul said, tears welling up in his eyes. "And that's not even the worst of it. Today, I found out from friends they've already seen her around town with another guy. They didn't want to say anything until now." He began to cry. And as he did, Puppy Boy. Attempted to apply a little additional pressure by picking up the deflated piece of rubber off Paul's knee and moving it to a new spot a little further up Paul's leg. But Paul had the bad manners to be completely preoccupied by his own tragedy. "I have no idea what I'm going to do," he said, as Puppy Boy moved in a little closer and began staring a little harder, his eyes going intently from the black, flat, rubber thing that was now balancing on Paul's thigh, to Paul's face, and then back to the flat, black, rubber thing, as if to help Paul out in case he was having trouble locating it. "It's been just emotionally devastating," Paul continued. "Everything I've worked for has fallen apart. And what happens to me now? Am I going to lose everything-- my house, my cars, my savings?" He broke down and began to sob, the only time I've ever seen this incredibly stoic man cry. Which was the signal to Puppy Boy that the game was finally about to get going. So he picked up the deflated soccer ball off Paul's thigh and moved it to the most conveniently located spot of all-- the very center of Paul's lap. Then he sat back down in front of Paul and resumed his intense staring. So he kept doing this for the whole two hours that Paul was at our house. Later that night, after Paul had gone home to pick up the pieces of his shattered existence, I began to wonder what Puppy Boy might have to say for himself about this behavior. So I asked him. Puppy Boy replies, "Hello, new seated person. I am Puppy Boy. And I can see that you are very upset for some reason, but I have something on my mind. I'm going out on a limb here and tell you that it is the most important thing I have ever had to say, and it is this. I have placed a thing on you that you must throw. If you look down now, you will see it. It is that large, flat thing that is balancing on your knee. Please listen to me when I tell you that this is an opportunity you cannot pass up. By the way, you have noticed that your knee has a big, flat, wet thing balancing on it, haven't you? Or are you so busy sobbing and weeping and talking about yourself that you are having trouble seeing it? Here's a hint. I'm staring at it right now. So if you can imagine a laser beam coming from my eyes, and then follow it down to the spot on your leg where it is focused, it'll lead you right to it. The only other possible explanation for your puzzling lack of interest is that you are purposefully ignoring me. And why would you do that? Especially since you are really hurting yourself more than you are hurting me because, let's face it, you're the one who's passing up a great opportunity. And by a great opportunity, I'm referring to the chance to have the kind of fun that everyone dreams of having. I speak of the chance to throw a big, flat, stretchy, wet thing. And guess where it is right now? Throw it now or live a life of regret. I mean, I can't stop you if you'd rather just listen to yourself talk. Wife, wife, wife. She did this. She did that. Really fascinating. For Christ's sakes, look into my eyes and play along! Pick up the big, flat, wet thing. Pick it up! Pick up the big, flat, wet thing. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick up the big, flat, wet thing. Can you hear me OK? Pick up the big, flat, wet thing. Are you even listening? You know, maybe if you had listened a little better during your marriage, your wife wouldn't want a divorce. Did you ever think of that? It wouldn't surprise me if you never threw the thing she brought you, either." Thank you. Merrill Markoe at Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles. Merrill's most recent collection of essays is called Cool, Calm, and Contentious. Thanks to Greg Miller of Un-Cabaret. Well, our program was produced today by Robyn Semien and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Marie, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production helpfrom Seth Lind, Lygia Navarro, PJ Vogt, and Alvin Melathe. Music help for today's show from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to NPR. Noah Adams' interview from 1987 was originally broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, where I was a proud staffer, and was used with permission of NPR. Thanks to Ellen Weiss. Thanks to the musicians who played Starlee's song in Act One-- Joe McGinty on keyboard, Jeremy Chatzky on bass and electric guitar, Julia Greenberg on vocals and acoustic guitar, and Natalie Weiss sings backup. Starlee Kine on tambourine. When we first ran this show, we invited listeners to take the raw tracks of Starlee's song and mix their own versions. The response was kind of incredible-- 129 entries. You can hear the winners of our breakup song contest at our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can also listen to-- for free-- any of our old shows in our archive. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's been listening to the show over the phone this week, and he has some thoughts. Well, well. There's some great stuff in there. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Sure, the Democrats are doing great in the polls this week, but to consider where they are as a party, consider please the case of Joe Cabazuela, a middle class guy, used to vote Democratic, lives in San Diego, in a state that the Democrats have to take if they're going to take the White House. And let's begin with this fact about him. Although his parents emigrated from Mexico and eventually became citizens, he says that his entire family is in favor of proposition 187, the law that would deny public services to illegal aliens, no public schooling, no social services. To me, I don't think they should get a free education. If they want an education, they want to come over here, let them pay for it. Me, as a Mexican-American, I cannot go over there and get it. Their government is not supplying the needs of the people over there. That's why they're coming over here, because this government's giving it away free. Charge them for it. That's the way I see it. He says he voted Democratic most his life. And then, when George Bush ran for president, he just started seeing things differently. And although he, himself, had been on and off welfare a couple times, and although his daughter has been on welfare for five years herself, what the Republicans were saying, especially about welfare, made a lot of sense to him. Because I could be on disability if I wanted to. Because of my legs I am disabled. I've had three surgeries. But I refuse to sit at home and watch TV and collect a monthly check. That's not me. I believe that that's what made this country great, is the fact that we can work. The Republicans seem to share these middle class values. When I asked him if he liked any of the things that Democrats stood for, he paused a long, long time. And then finally he said-- Well, what do they stand for? Women in the military. Gay rights. It wasn't that he disagreed with them. It's that they seem to stand for nothing, which brings us to the topic at hand-- this week's Democratic National Convention. Delegates had been instructed that when they talked to the press, they were to talk about the three big themes-- three big themes, I should say, designed precisely to win over voters like Joe Cabazuela. We have been told that we should be emphasizing the themes of opportunity, responsibility, and community. But these themes are so vague. It's so vague. Anything could be community, opportunity, and responsibility. I mean, those could be the Republican themes. That's true. That's true. In fact, this woman, Ruth Horowitz, told me that her delegation, which was from Vermont, had been playing this little game with the theme. The way that it worked is that you'd try to make up a sentence using all the three words, and then you'd try to work that sentence into everyday conversation. So for example, if you're getting into the cab, you say something like, I feel it's my responsibility as a member of this community to give you the opportunity to get in first. In a certain way, this was not that different from what people were trying to do in seriousness. Several people went through the motions for me of trying to express their beliefs in terms of the three big themes. But it always had the air of somebody fulfilling a ninth-grade essay topic. It never had the directness and conviction that the Republican delegates in San Diego had when they talked to me about their very concrete goals-- 50% tax cut, banning abortion, getting school vouchers, stuff like that. And it's hard to imagine Joe Cabazuela would have been satisfied with what he heard among the Democrats. Well, I don't know if I can find a fancy way to say this, but from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, we bring you stories from a variety of writers and performers on some topic. In this hour, today, stories from the Democratic Convention you probably have not heard elsewhere, and how did the Democrats communicate what they stand for? Act One, A Little Tour Inside the Message Machine. Act Two, the latest installment of Michael Lewis' Campaign Diaries. This week-- Michael makes Al Gore nervous. Act Three, this act, you may remember a bestselling book from a few years ago called There Are No Children Here by a writer named Alex Kotlowitz. There was a Oprah Winfrey movie of this. It was about two boys growing up in Chicago's Henry Horner public housing projects. Well, those projects are the projects that are directly across the street from the Democratic Convention. And one of the kids from that book, who's now grown up, gives us a tour. There's been some superficial cleaning up for the convention, you've probably heard, but there's a way more profound and interesting change going on in the neighborhood as well. Act Four, webmaster and Beverly Hills, 90201 expert, Danny Drennan on the convention, and more. Stay with us. Act One. Two days before the Republican Convention started, security was already very tight. Two days before the Democratic Convention, it was still possible just to breeze into the hall, walk into all the hidden corridors, go straight to the makeup room, to the speech writers' room, to the sign rooms, which are basically these big freezers filled with pre-printed signs for the pre-planned floor demonstrations. They said stuff like "The Brady Bill," "10 Million New Jobs," "Protecting Education." Late Saturday night, senator Barbara Boxer came into the mostly empty hall with a few aides, just to check it out. The wall of TV screens that's behind the podium had no images on them before she stepped on the dais. And then, as if activated by the mere presence of a United States senator, they filled with heartwarming black-and-white images of everyday Americans. Most of the other people in the hall to witness this were balloon wranglers. One of the problems of trying to report on these conventions over a television and radio is that it's hard to convey the sheer size of what they're about, the hundreds of lavish parties each day, the millions of dollars of TV studios and offices bought and brought in just for this occasion, an Olympic village of these in trailers outside the hall, which all get torn down after four days. So to get a sense of the scale of this, let's just take one small aspect of it, and let's take the balloon drop. 150,000 balloons, in bags of 1,000 balloons each, they get hoisted slowly up to the ceiling of the United Center. This is the second biggest balloon drop ever, according to Tanzi Lewis, who's one of the minority contractors who got the contract to do the drop. What's the next biggest job you've done to this job? To be honest, my largest odd-job was at the Taste of Chicago this summer. How many balloons was that? That consisted of only 1,000 balloons. So that's just the number of balloons in one of these bags. That's correct. It took 150 people four days and nights to fill the balloons. They did it at Malcolm X College, which is just two blocks from the convention site. One can only imagine what Malcolm X would have said about all this. Upstairs in the school, "By Any Means Necessary" is painted on the wall. Downstairs, 150 people were filling balloons to celebrate Bill Clinton, loading those into huge nets, each 40 feet long. If you picture a bag that you could drive three pickup trucks into, you've pretty much got the idea of what one of these things look like. And 11 of them, filled with red, white, and blue balloons, lay on the floor of the gymnasium. The air was thick with the plastic, powdery smell of balloons. There's a sentence you don't get to say very often. Take, twist, turn, in the net. Take, twist, not in the net. What is that, athletic tape around your fingers? Right, to keep it from burning, because after a while your fingers start to burn. You get, like, a blister. Surprisingly, even here, in Democratic Chicago, in a roomful of people preparing a big party for Bill Clinton, people who don't even know if they're going to get paid for their work, feelings about the president were tepid. Now, are you a big President Clinton supporter? No. I mean, I support him because he's the president, but I'm voting for Dole. Really? Yeah. How come? Because I am a born-again Christian, and I don't believe in abortion, and I don't believe in certain things that President Clinton is for. America is turning away from God. And so, therefore, the God is turning from America. And I really do. And that's why you're having high crime rates. Across the room, 11-year-old Jaris King and two other people hoist a 40-foot-long bag of balloons over their heads and carry it out into the hallway. And Jaris declares, to no one in particular-- I feel like I'm a black smurf. It does kind of look like a job for the smurfs. The balloons are carried down the hall, up a stairway, around a series of tight turns and doorways, out onto a loading dock, and over two blocks on Damen to the convention building, where they're checked by the Secret Service, and then lifted up to the ceiling. There's three days of work for a few seconds of special effects. And it doesn't really make sense, but we gotta do it anyway. Of course, there has to be a balloon drop. It's the kiss at the end of the wedding. It's the money shot. Democrats all, delegates, alternates, friends, families, on to victory in '96, welcome to this issues forum, this overview. Monday morning, the hotel ballroom. We've got several speakers today describing what the winning strategy is for the Democrats, and to arm us so we go out for doing battle. I'm Heather Booth, the training director of the Democratic National Committee. Every day, the DNC held these morning seminars. They combine practical information about campaign law, the latest talking points on issues, speakers, like campaign strategist James Carville, who used a mix of truths, half-truths, and, I have to say, real whoppers to inspire the party faithful. And I love when the Republicans and Bob Dole say, "Well, the teachers are all for the Democrats." OK, yeah, the teachers are for the Democrats. The tobacco companies are for the Republicans. Now, I got a question for ya. When your kids grows up, what would you rather do, be a teacher or smoke cigarettes? In fact, the tobacco companies sponsor both political parties, and that support included sponsorship of a number of events at this very convention. After Carville, Congressman Steny Hoyer presented a series of charts and graphs on overhead slides to make the case for how the Democrats could take 20 new seats in the House of Representatives, which would give them the House majority, and knock Newt Gingrich out of the speaker's chair. Now, this is the important point, because I want all of you to believe, deeply ingrained, intellectually and emotionally, when you go back to your states, Hoyer was right, we can win back the House of Representatives. Republicans currently hold 28 seats that traditionally perform Democratically. These are Democratic seats. We oughta have 'em. Republicans hold 77 seats that Clinton won. 33 of these Republican seats belong to freshmen who came in with less than 55% of the vote. It was one chart after another, each with a climbing upward yellow arrow. When it came to the part of the presentation where Congressman Hoyer had to name actual races that were in the bag, he could only name five or six. If you ask nonpartisan experts who follow this kind of thing, like Charles Cook, who publishes a well-known Washington newsletter called Cook's Political Report, they put the Democrats' chances of taking back the House this way. I think Democrats have about a 30% or 40% chance of getting the House back, but that's down from about 50%, 40% or 50% maybe a month or so ago. One of the questions we're watching very carefully is something called the Generic Congressional Ballot test. It's when you ask, if the election were held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress or Republican candidate? And we were seeing Democrats with a six-, seven-, even eight-point lead on a lot of polls late June, early July. And at that level, it was roughly a tidal wave of the magnitude that you saw Republicans win in 1994. Today, it's down at the two- or three-point range, which is right about at the edge of what they need to to get that House back. Interestingly, Mr. Cook was one of the experts Congressman Hoyer cited, but when Congressman Hoyer quoted him, it was to support the case that a Democratic sweep was imminent. In the convention hall, the rule of thumb is that the fewer colorful buttons someone wears, the more important they are. You probably also didn't see this at home-- but does everybody know this-- periodically throughout the convention, everyone on the floor would stop the business of politics and just do the Macarena. It happened over and over. The Macarena is the official song of the Democratic National Convention. A political convention like this essentially has to solve a theatrical problem, how to take an ordinary person and make him seem larger than life. And that problem is compounded in the age of television, because who could we possibly know more intimately then we know Bill Clinton. He's in our homes every day on television. We've heard about his sex life. We've heard about his finances. We've heard about his bad investments. We know his ideas. We know what he eats. We know what the man wears jogging. I mean, do you know what your friends wear jogging? Justin Hayford attended the Convention for American Theater. And he said to make him seem larger than life in this setting, they used one of the oldest tricks in the book, and that is the long, slow arrival. You know, where the person's constantly being announced. We're constantly hearing word of the great man's imminent arrival. And of course, there was the train trip, the 1,800-mile mile train trip. That's gorgeous, because the most postmodern element about this convention is the performance of absence, that they are working extremely hard to make his absence a sort of ache, a longing for this man. And so, from the very first day, there are train updates. I don't know if these ended up on television or not, but there are train updates where they cut away on the large video screen to a little schematic map of his 1,800-mile train route, going through the Heartland, of course. And they would say, and here's a live shot of his train pulling into Lindley, Ohio or somewhere. And you see a train going by. And people cheer as though they haven't seen a train before. And so he's getting closer and closer, and the gospel choir comes out and they sing, "If you want him, if you need him, if you adore him, shout yes." And they never mention who him is, so one must assume it's the president. So we're following his progress. I thought he was going to sail across the lake, is what I had heard, which I thought was a sort of beautiful, Cleopatraesque move, like coming in on a great golden barge, but he didn't. He came in by helicopter, which is quite an entrance. And then Daley said, "Mr. President, we've waited four days to see you." Which I thought was the ultimate capper to that entrance, which is, we're dying for your presence, we are dying to eat you with our eyes, as though we haven't for the last four years. Every intimate detail of his life, we've seen. So in the hall, did this create an aching desire to see the president? Well, Justin Hayford says that on the first day, with the first train update-- People screamed like it was David Bowie or something. And yesterday, I was there in the afternoon, and they did the same thing. It was the newest train update, and nobody paid any attention to it. Of course, he says, when Bill Clinton finally did appear in person, by that point, he had appeared so many times in the hall on video, that there was something kind of thrilling to see him in person. You know, you're so used to him on television,. And in the age of television, that is the rarest thing of all, to see the man live. And the theater of it is really hard to beat. [SINGING] You are so nice to me. You are on my side. You are the man with the Midas touch. You are on my side with the Midas touch. Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. You are the man who has the plans. You have the ability to put people to work. You are the President of the United States. I'm just going to stop the song right there. That is my favorite line in this song, and maybe in almost any song. OK, here's your writing assignment. You want to write a song about the president. This, by the way, is Wesley Willis, a local Chicago artist. So what are you go to say? Well, you know, you can kind of run out of things of inspiration, so then you can just going into just straight factual mode. You are the President of the United States. [SINGING] You are the man who has the plans. You have the ability to put people to work. You are the President of the United States. I like you a lot and I will award you. Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. Act Two, No Show. 15,000 members of the press were here in Chicago for the convention. And, well, you probably have guessed that political conventions are a big reunion for party regulars of the two major political parties. And unless you think about it, you might not realize that, for many reporters, it's also a big reunion. I saw people at the convention who I have not seen in years. And that was true in San Diego as well. So what do people talk about at these very high-powered media events? Well, as far as I can tell, it's a little politics, a lot of gossip. And then, the other night, I was with some friends visiting from New York City to cover the convention, and my friends from New York got into this conversation that was so strange to me that, at some point, I pulled out my tape recorder and just started taping them. The conversation was about The New York Times. And it began when one of the New Yorkers said, with pleasure, with a kind of intense pleasure, actually, that the Times arrives at 7:00 in the morning at the hotel. She sort of announced this. At home, she gets the Times at 5:30, which is better, of course, but 7:00 was still just very, very good, above the sort of standard that they were all used to when they travel around in hotels. Then all the New York media people started quizzing each other about The New York Times at length, in minute detail. Chess columnists who'd gone on to other beats, and people who had moved to Atlanta and from Atlanta, people who I have never even heard of. Who does his main beat is basically, like, feelings and psychology. Oh, Gorman. Yeah. Wow, I thought-- Do you know Gorman? --that it'd be harder. Who's the doctor columnist? Medical? Ah, what's his name? Altman. Who sometimes uses MD and then sometimes doesn't. My more or less atheist friends from the liberal, elite media have the same relationship to The New York Times that certain Catholics have with the Vatican. The Times speaks definitively. They kneel before it. They quibble with it. They sneer. I have to say, this was the most animated conversation they had all night, and it lasted, like half an hour. I mean, at some point, I just had to say good night. They could've kept going. OK, now, Steven I know knows this, so I'll just post it to the rest of you. Who is most likely, if it's discovered that there is or is not a god, who is most likely to have the story? Rosenthal. No, there is one reporter who is the existential reporter for the Times. There you have it, life in the fast lane. Overpriced drinks came from the hotel bar, went quickly onto some TV network's charge card. Well, one reporter who was here with the 15,000 was Michael Lewis, who has been publishing his Campaign Diaries in The New Republic. I'm reading them from time to time on our very program. He's new to this whole pack journalism thing, and to political conventions. And here's the latest installment from his Campaign Diaries. August the 19th, one moment I'm sleeping soundly in my hotel room in San Diego, the next the phone is ringing and a voice on the other end of the line is asking, "This is the Vice President's office, can you take the call?" Al Gore himself is on the line. In a moment of weakness, thinking that maybe I should interview someone important, I had sent a message to Gore's office saying that I wanted to speak with him. I hardly expected him to take it seriously. "It's nerve-racking getting a call from the Vice President," I say, pretending to be wide awake. Gore chuckles unhappily. I've made him uncomfortable. "No, seriously," I say. "This is the highest I've climbed in the world." This merely makes things worse. "I don't believe that at all," he says nervously, attempting to maneuver me back into some acceptable mode of political discourse. "I have only five minutes to interview. Two of them are now gone." Well, I'm sort of curious to know if Gore's environmentalism, as it appears, has vanished down the sinkhole of practical politics. But the Vice President's conversation is littered with "franklies," and "to be honest with you's," and "it is my understanding's," all of which translates into civilian English as, I'm never going to tell you the truth about anything, so why on earth are you asking? Before he hangs up, Gore tells me that, A, Americans truly are committed to nature, B, that he's not more intimidated having to debate Jack Kemp than having to debate, say, Connie Mack, and C, that the collection of speeches written by White House speech writers and now published as a book by Bill Clinton was penned entirely by Clinton himself. It is his understanding, Gore says. August the 26th and 27th. Your first day at a convention is like your first day at school. Upon seeing the hordes, your first instinct is that something important is happening, that everyone must know something you don't. For a few hours, I'm engaged in a wild, undignified scramble to find out what that something is. During this uncomfortable period, all sorts of information lands on my lap-- a stack of old articles from Chicago Magazine, drafts of speeches by retired congressmen, lists of delegates, stuff no one in his right mind would read. But nothing can be ignored. I even interview a delegate. But then there is this tremendous noise on one side of the convention hall, a spontaneous outbreak of whistles and cheers that draws all the attention to the entrance beneath the Nevada delegation. The sound is exactly what you would expect if a billionaire was handing out sacks of cash, of if a woman were performing a striptease. Here, I think, is clearly where the action is. I plow through the crowd to find out what it is. It is Al Gore. A normal person might well wonder what 15,000 journalists are doing covering an event of dubious importance. It's not an easy question to answer. The journalists who write about other journalists, like Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post, write about the futility of being a journalist at the Democratic Convention. The Post, I'm told, has sent the same number of people here as they have in all their foreign bureaus combined. The famous journalists invert their occupation and give interviews to other journalists. The rest of us are resigned to finding some nugget slightly different from the nuggets of others. It turns out few of the journalists actually attend the convention, except during prime time. The journalists remain in their tents outside the United Center. In the first two days, between 3:30 in the afternoon and 7:00 at night, maybe a few dozen people pass through the section of the hall reserved for the periodical press. This is a shame, because the best time to be in the hall is when no one is paying much attention. For example, Hillary Clinton pops in mid-afternoon to check the mic levels and the height of her podium. She steps up in her pink suit, and when she sees that the podium is too high, kicks off her pink heels. She stands there girlishly in her stockinged feet, asking too many questions of the men around here. And you can see that, like everyone else who plays her adamantine role, she is far more vulnerable than she lets on. Later I hear from one of her speech writers that she's as nervous as she looks. It's her first speech in prime time. Even after the convention begins, no one pays it much heed. And so, when Dick Gephardt speaks, I'm able to crawl right up behind him on the platform and see what life looks like from the speaker's point of view. Essentially, life looks predetermined. The speaker stares into four teleprompters, one at his left shoulder, another at his right shoulder, a third mounted straight ahead of him across the hall just beneath the cameras, so that he can appear to be looking at you when you're watching him on TV. The fourth is embedded into the podium, just above his navel. Gephardt's speech, in letters four inches high, like the text of a book for the elderly, scrolls gently across. Gephardt has only to swivel back and forth between the teleprompters and pretend not to be reading word for word, which he is. "We meet here to offer a vision, not just a show for television," he is saying. No wonder no one listens. Part of the thrill of watching a public speaker lies in the risk the speaker takes in putting himself before you. Jesse Jackson, for one, understands this. In the first two days, he alone shuts down the teleprompters and speaks from loose notes. And he alone fully engages the crowd. Interestingly, the moment he first brings the crowd to its feet is just the moment that he leaves his notes. But Jackson is the exception. The average convention speech arises not out of the need of the speaker to say something important, but out of the speaker's desire to have delivered a speech at the convention. Its purpose, from the speaker's point of view, is to establish his position in the official structure of the Democratic Party. The big exception are the speeches designed to make people cry-- Ron Brown's widow, Jim Brady's wife, and Christopher Reeve are, of course, well-known victims. The speeches delivered by relative unknowns in the wee hours of the afternoon contain wagon-loads more of the same bathos. Here is a representative sample of opening lines, snatched in a single pass at the press table. "As the father of a child brutally murdered by a habitual violent criminal--" "As many of you know, my husband was a former tobacco lobbyist who died this past March." "December 7, 1993, that was the day a man with a semiautomatic weapon boarded the train. My husband was one of those killed." By early in the second day, you can see that people's capacity to absorb bad news has dwindled to nothing. A pleasant middle-aged woman describes the recent death of her husband from lung cancer, for instance, and no one in the hall pays her any mind. It is an incongruous sight, a woman in bright yellow, on the verge of tears as she relates her tragic loss, over a loud hum from the audience below, most of which is engrossed in small talk and hot dogs. Raising my binoculars-- necessary equipment here-- from the floor to the ceiling, I can't help but notice something. The higher you get, the whiter the people get. Almost all of the black people are on the floor. The faces in the sky boxes are lily white. A nugget! At the end of the first evening, I make my way up to the sky boxes. The sky boxes at the convention, it turns out, are much like the sky boxes at the Bulls games. They've been reserved for the rich people and their companies who can afford to pay for them. These include some of the 72 corporate CEOs, many of them Republicans, who coughed up $100,000 each to be honorary vice chairmen of the Democratic Convention. Here is where you see curtained-off rooms decorated with signs that say "The Democratic Party would like to thank especially the Chicago Board Options Exchange and Patton Boggs LLB." Here is where you can find the people on whom the politicians focus their private attention. These people sit sipping red wine and nibbling on goodies, looking down upon the politicians, who tomorrow will have no choice but to take their phone calls. It's the end of the first night and pretty much everyone has left. But inside one of the many suites toils a middle-aged woman in a black-and-white penguin suit. For maybe half an hour, the woman works alone, tossing out open but untouched bottles of wine, and dumping large silver trays of food into giant green trash bags. The food tumbles into the bag in mouth-watering heaps. Chicken and beef satay, fried potato puffballs, shrimp remoulade, thinly sliced meats rolled up like oriental carpets. I'm curious what the woman is being paid to chuck out thousands of dollars of untouched food, but ask instead more generally about salaries at the United Center. "You mean what do I make?" she asks cheerfully as she empties a cow's worth of beef satay into the garbage. "$4 an hour." "This was one of the rooms reserved for the White House staff," the woman says idly. "They never came. They never called to cancel." That's when you know you've arrive in the Democratic Party, I think, when you don't even care to use your reserved suite. When I watched George Stephanopoulos in the Chicago Health Club earlier today, reading the newspaper as the convention unfolded on the TV above his head, I didn't appreciate what I was seeing. The coolest thing to be at the Democratic Convention is a no-show. Michael Lewis' Campaign Diaries appear in The New Republic. Coming up, Michael Lewis lets us listen in on a private conversation he has with President Clinton, and read some advanced copies of Hillary Clinton's speeches. Actually, he just talks to us about Dick Martin. Dick Morris. Dick Martin! He talks to us about Dick Martin. He talks to us about Dick Morris. Anyway, that's coming up 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 topic and bring you documentary stories, radio monologues, reportage, found tapes, anything we can think of. Our subject today is the Democratic Convention that has been happening right here in our own backyard in Chicago, which is where we broadcast from. So Michael Lewis wrote those diary entries that you just heard. And then, on the last day of the convention, when he came into our studio to record them, the news had broken that campaign strategist Dick Morris, the strategist who pushed the president to embrace family values, had let a prostitute listen in on phone conversations he had with the president and looked at the first lady's convention speech. Michael had not written about this yet, but he had thoughts about it. Your first emotional reaction to the news about Dick Morris was-- Glee. I was very happy. And I guess I shouldn't have been, right? Because it's a very sad thing that happens to someone, a family man caught with a prostitute. And I'm not quite sure why I felt such glee. But I'm still very happy, as you can see. I think what it is is that I've been covering this process for now six months, and the serious political people-- Dole and Clinton, anyway-- present this sort of slick facade that's entirely phony, so that whenever anything like this that's seemingly authentic happens, it comes as an enormous relief, some little glimpse of reality. And you feel like their best-laid plans have been completely shattered by their advisor's desire to get laid. You can't help but dwell on it. I mean, compare that one incident to the entire Democratic Convention, and which is more interesting? Which will people talk about? It's no question, people are going to talk about Dick Morris and the prostitute. And what could they have been talking about at the convention or in their campaigns that would have provided a counter? Well, I just imagine if it had been a different time, or a time when the major parties were seriously grappling with major social problems, if someone was talking about, I don't know, things like the maldistribution of wealth, or the need for universal health care, or big social problems and addressing them in an interesting way, there'd be at least some counterweight to this. There'd be something else you want to talk about. There's nothing that's been said at the Democratic Convention that you care to dwell on. Right. Instead, in the Democratic Convention, it's all just, let's not get kids to smoke. Right. It's a parade of unobjectionable sentiment. And small issues rather than big ones. Right. Let's not frighten people, let's just-- it's just kind of, I don't know, low-level niceness, which I find really unpleasant. It's interesting comparing it to '92, because remember in '92 when the Gennifer Flowers story came out, one of the spins that was put on it, I remember, was precisely James Carville saying, look, you can talk about the sex stuff all you want, but what we're talking about is national health care. That's what we're talking about. And it worked. I mean, people are interested in big issues. And if you confront the society head on and talk to it directly about things that concern it deeply, people won't be that distracted by the other things. I mean, you can see kind of a maturation in the electorate with regard to peccadilloes that-- I think there are all sorts of reasons for this. But Bill Clinton has been a great educator-- that we don't need our politicians to be saints. Are you sort of surprised what you found once you went out and followed the campaigns around as much as you have? Well, you know, I've always thought of myself as a good Democrat. It's probably more true to say that it was a good liberal. But I'm having this very weird experience in covering the campaign, actually getting close to politics, which I've never really done until six months ago. I think I know now what it feels like to be an adolescent boy who discovers that he's more sexually attracted to boys than to girls. That I'm discovering, here I've gotten into this process thinking I'm a Democrat, and I'm discovering that I'm more attracted to Republicans than to Democrats, thinking maybe I'm a Republican. So I'm just sorting this out, why I have these feelings. And maybe a few months of therapy and some discussion with friendly Democrats, maybe I'll come around. So why do you think you're having these feelings? Is it because of their ideas? Are you agreeing with them on the school voucher and on the 15% tax cut? No. You see, this is what's so strange about it, is that I still disagree with them as much as ever. I just like them more. I found that they're generally more truthful, easier to-- I've learned more from them. And I also feel like, it's easier to have an open discussion and disagree. With Democrats-- and maybe because they're in power in the White House, I'm covering a presidential campaign, it just always feels like this-- their careers are at stake whenever I'm talking to them. Whereas with a number of Republicans who I've been writing about, I feel like they're just talking to me, and making sense to me. And where we disagree, we can disagree. So do you feel like that's also a function of the fact that the Republicans are themselves more the party of ideas and more trying to work out their ideas of what it means to be a conservative? Does it mean you're more libertarian? Does it mean that you're more a fiscal conservative? Does it mean you're more Christian right kind of-- Oh, I think that's very true. I think it's completely true, that most of the interesting debate is taking place in the Republican Party. Where is the interesting debate about welfare reform? It should be in the Democratic Party, and it's not happening. There's a war in the Republican Party about abortion still, and about all sorts of related social issues. There are Republicans who will fight it out with Jack Kemp about supply-side economics. And on the Democratic side? Well, my feeling on the Democrat's side is just, right now it's all about winning, that no debate will happen until after November. It's very fallow on the Democratic side, not very interesting. You don't sit down with Democrats and have interesting discussions about policy. Michael Lewis. If you want a good time, pick up his book, Liar's Poker. He's assembling his Campaign Diaries in a new book. That'll be out some time. Act Three, Neighbors. You've probably heard at this point about the multimillion dollar cleanup Chicago has done for the convention, along the route between the downtown hotels, especially, and the United Center where the convention is held. Well, one night after the convention, I jumped into a cab with some other people, some strangers. We sped up Monroe Street, them to the hotels, me back to the radio studio. The moon was out, the air was perfect, the street was freshly paved. And a woman from Washington, DC, a lobbyist, who had attended the convention in a sky box, remarked, "Chicago is so wonderful. There are no potholes, no homeless people, and the weather's so beautiful." I don't even know where to begin with that. I mean, I did not know that money could buy that amount of misinformation and misperception. I did not know that it was possible to create that. I'm sure you know about the weather, right? She's just as wrong about the potholes and the homeless people. Well, our next story is about our multimillion dollar civic cleanup. You may remember the bestselling book There Are No Children Here from a few years back. In There Are No Children Here, writer Alex Kotlowitz described the lives of two brothers at the Henry Horner homes. And the book was made into a TV film by Oprah Winfrey. It's been mentioned many times in speeches by Jack Kemp and others. Well, Henry Horner is the public housing project that sits directly across the street from the United Center. And when Chicago did its multimillion dollar cleanup for the Democratic Convention, it cleaned up some of Horner as part of it. Well, the boys from Alex Kotlowitz's book are now young men and they don't actually live at Horner anymore, though they go back every now and then. And one of them, Pharoah Walton, who's now 18, put together this story. He gives us a little tour of what has changed at Horner because of the convention, and what hasn't changed. When I left Henry Horner five years ago, it looked like a ghost town, no green grass, broken windows, graffiti everywhere. Now Henry Horner is a different place. There are rows of flowers outside the maintenance building, and new windows in the office where my mother used to pay rent. There are trees, new elevators. Most of the changes are on the side of the buildings that face the United Center. And on Washington Street, where the old [? Bernie ?] School used to be, there's a new playground, with a big lot and a huge, new blue and green jungle gym, nicer than any playground I've ever seen in the city, even on the north side, and everyone knows why. I like it. It's fun. I know why they did it, because the president's coming. And then they'll all be taking kids and they gonna be killing people. The president [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. People say a lot of other things, too, and not all of them make sense, like what Canoe Howe told me about the playground. The Democratic new convention coming. And now I can't be outside. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] There going to be a lot of police in our building, and the president supposed to be in our building. People at Horner are glad about the physical changes, but most of them say that they're mad that it took a president before the city would clean up a parking lot, or plant a tree. Some things at Henry Horner have changed, and some things are still the same, like shooters and hot days. When I was a kid, I would run in the house when the shooting started, same with my nephew, Snuggles, and his friend, Jeremy, today. They always trying to shoot on a hot day. They start gang-banging whenever a hot day. And then all the kids gotta go in the house. Like two weeks ago, some girl got shot. She got shot in the eye. Probably dead now. She is dead. They be shootin' all the time. Over there. Usually, when you hear about the projects, you hear that things are bad and they're getting worse, but when I went to Horner, I heard a different story. There are still shootings, still drugs, still gangs, but mostly people told me that things have slowed down. In 1991, the residence of Henry Horner filed a lawsuit against the city and won. Because of that, the Chicago Housing Authority is cleaning it up, renovating old apartments, putting in a new elevators, tearing down the worst buildings. They've moved 233 families out of Horner since 1995, and installed 24-hour security guards. My friend Sylvia told me she feels safer. It's doing a lot better since 20 years it was looking around here, so crime gonna stop a lot better, too. They ain't doing too much shootin' or nothing, so it's good. Police are around a little more, so that's better, too, since they put that United Center out there, because they watch that a lot. Sylvia says police are always driving around the neighborhood since the United Center was built. Now, I visited my grandmother, and she said the same things, that things are getting better. We sat in her apartment, with gospel music on the radio and a preacher on the television, and she told me about life at Horner now. But it's not too bad around here. I never read about nothing happening around here, like somebody getting killed in a drive-by shooting. It's not too bad. I walk out this house every day and those lights be out. I have to take a flashlight, but I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. Of course, I got God, first of all. One of the things that the president and the delegates at the convention won't see when they look at Horner from across the United Center parking lot is the Boys & Girls Club. Physically, the Boys & Girls Club hasn't changed since I was little-- old pool tables, a basketball court, cinderblock walls. It's not in great shape. I talked to the grandfather of the community, Major Adams. He's worked at the Boys & Girls Club for 40 years. Everybody knows him and everybody respects him. Kids will listen to Major before they listen to teachers or parents or even the police. He's the only person at Horner who can walk into the middle of a gang fight and make it stop. In fact, he's famous for jumping into the middle of fights. And Major would be the first person to tell you about all the fights he's stopped. He was going to jump on eight guys with these three knives. I didn't know he had three knives. But he had one in his hand. He was going to get these guys. So I had to grab this guy and take this knife away from him, while the guy-- I came out there, 12 of them was jumping on one guy. And it made me so mad. I said, "Well, look, I'm going to take all 12 of you guys one at a time." And I take them one at a time, and I whooped all 12 of them. I'm going to do it by myself. I picked him up and throwed him over the fence. I'm telling you, you've got to-- Some people say the neighborhood is safer because over 200 families moved out. There are fewer people to get in trouble or shoot each other. My friend Sylvia says people have less time to fool around because the housing authority is hiring residents to do construction and clean the place up. Another friend of mine says people are getting their act together because now the city is kicking people out and tearing buildings down. And they don't want to lose their homes. But the way Major sees it, the neighborhood is better because there are people in Horner who are trying to make a difference. I'll tell you, crime has went down in our neighborhood, this neighborhood, because you have a guy like me working in the neighborhood. When you walk in here, a lot of them gang-bangers just came, I fed them. So there's a lot of things I do for them. I let them play basketball. When they want to go back to school, I see that they go back to school. They go to jail, I send them money and stuff like that. Like my Aunt Milly says, you can't beautify the outside when the inside ain't right. Major is working hard to beautify the inside. In the main room at the Boys & Girls Club, there's a trophy case. Inside, there are all the trophies won by Horner baseball teams, basketball teams, and football teams. And pinned to the back of the trophy case, there are pictures of Horner residents who've made something of their lives, who've gotten out of the projects, went on to do great things. All three of those young men up there are teachers. They grew up in the area. Those three up there? Yeah, those three there. And this is Dr. Steven Parker at Chicago State. That's Verdine from Earth, Wind, & Fire. Then he pointed out a blank spot and asked me for a picture, his way of saying he knew I was going to make it. Pharoah Walton. He's a senior at Culver Academy in Indiana. He asked us to play some of this song after his story. Act Four, TV Show. Danny Drennan is, as far as we can tell, an expert on two things in this world-- the worldwide web and the TV show Beverly Hills, 90210. I feel like we're going from the sublime to the ridiculous here. He created one of the more interesting and eccentric pages on the worldwide web, a weekly wrap-up of 90210 in a very unusual style. He writes about television in a way that no one else does, and a couple weeks ago we asked him to review a Bob Dole appearance when Bob Dole appeared on Larry King Live. For this week, we asked him to review the Democratic National Convention. So I'm watching the Democratic National Convention the other night on C-SPAN, and let me just say how thankful I am that C-SPAN exists. The best part of the convention is when everyone is going home and all the other networks have moved on to other things, but there's good old gavel-to-gavel C-SPAN still filming every last bit, including interviews with teenage convention volunteers who refused entrance to one of the Gore daughters because she didn't have her ID with her. And C-SPAN also does this great phone interview thing where people from Canada can call up and tell America how much they hate our political conventions. How about you mind your own business up there in Canada? And stop reminding us that liberal is not an epithet in Canada, and about gun control in Canada, and about health care in Canada, and about all the other things the Democrats should be doing here that already exist in Canada. I'm totally convinced that people from the Canadian tourist board or whatever are constantly calling up C-SPAN pretending to be interested in American politics to try and convince Americans to move up north. And the other thing I like about C-SPAN is that it gets all the unscripted bits, like Hillary Clinton waiting for her cue to start talking, but then jumping the gun and then stopping, and then going "great" under her breath, totally angry, and then starting again and delivering her lines all deadpan, like so ticked off that she just made a fool of herself on live television. So later on, we get a big, old tribute to former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, with a video of people saying nice things about Ron Brown, and then his widow, Alma Brown, talking about her husband. But then, all of a sudden, we switch to the Alma Brown variety hour, because in the middle of talking about her deceased husband, Alma Brown up and introduces Kenny G. How scary is that, to be talking about your dead husband one minute, and then to have to introduce some god-awful white jazz musician the next? If you combined the Lawrence Welk Show with Rod Serling's Night Gallery, you would get Alma Brown introducing Kenny G at the Democratic National Convention. And if I were Kenny G, I would seriously fire my agent. The only gigs that Kenny G gets are the Democratic National Convention and Kelly Taylor's birthday party on Beverly Hills, 90210. And even more upsetting, perhaps, is the whole Hollywoodization of the political process. I mean, can I just ask how much plastic surgery did that house minority leader guy, Richard Gephardt, have done? And how many so-called Hollywood stars could they bring in to speak during the convention? Like Edward James Olmos, who came up with the most brilliantly obtuse quote of the evening when he said, and I quote, "the complexity of this question is so intense that I could never try to attempt to answer it." That is a direct quote. What does that mean? And do I really need Edward James Olmos passionately giving me a definition of what dissing means? And someone should also probably talk to Christopher Reeve's manager. I mean, I hate to say it, but how much in common with the so-called people does a rich, overpaid, covered-by-health-insurance actor who broke his neck while enjoying some totally elitist equestrian sport have? And maybe the producers of this convention, who also produce the Oscars, where Reeve also appeared, gave Christopher Reeve, a three-engagement deal or something. Or maybe Christopher Reeve just sells his Nielsen share to the highest bidder. And let me just say, if I had to labor with every single solitary breath just to speak three words at a time, and then wait because everyone in the audience takes that as a cue to clap even though I haven't finish my point yet, I sure as hell wouldn't waste that breath on Bill Clinton. So then we get about five million people plugging Hillary Clinton's book. And then later, the convention moves on to the politically expedient death and personal medical catastrophe part of the show, exemplified by Al Gore's kid and sister and every other speaker this evening. Like there's nothing about Clinton that tugs our heart strings, so they have to bring in all these death and tragedy stories that have absolutely nothing to do with him. And so then we see Sarah Brady and her husband, Jim, and I'm sure that Sarah Brady meant well, moving her husband, Jim, around the convention stage like a living political prop, and talking about the Brady Bill and gun control. But if you look at Bill Clinton's track record so far, you might worry that gun control is just another step in Bill Clinton's goal to declare a national state of emergency and establish martial law in this country. He already wants to set up curfews, and he's already responsible for the biggest increase in FBI wiretapping in American history, and he wants to take away guns, and he wants to put more cops on the street, and the political protesters at the convention were supposed to be content with receiving a lottery-derived slot of time for them to protest. Could someone please clue me in to the moment in time when the Constitution of the United States started parceling out the First Amendment on a time-sharing basis? Are we going to have alternate side of the street freedom of speech at some point soon? And this is from the Democrats. And if you think I'm crazy, just count the number of times that Bill Clinton mentions the 21st century and new technology. How annoying is it when Bill Clinton goes on and on about wanting to hook up every school to the so-called information superhighway, when in reality the internet is a huge dumping ground of useless information? I mean, kids can't even read or write, but let's hook them up to the biggest waste of technology going. Of course, only after we sensor it. And if I were paranoid, I would say that Bill Clinton is, in fact, Big Brother, who wants to preside over a hugely illiterate population, tied into the government via government-censored internet links, gunless and with cops at every street corner, entertained and sedated by Hollywood has-beens, in order to pave the way for his beast of the apocalypse, one-world government takeover. And maybe moving to Canada isn't such a bad idea after all. Danny Drennan's website, www.inquisitor.com. Proceed at your own risk. Our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. If you would like a copy of this program, it's only $10. Call us on the phone at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I am Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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My wife and I are standing at the door to our place, and we're arguing. A delivery guy has arrived with something, and it's early morning, and I hold the dog and I ask her to go to the door. And she doesn't want to go to the door because of the way that she's dressed. And I insist, no, no, no, no. It's fine. And we go around on this for a while, and the guy's at the door and I don't give in and she finally goes to the door. And then the guy leaves, and she's mad, and she cannot understand why I made her do that. And finally, I look at her, and I see what it is that she's talking about. She's in an undershirt and pajama bottoms. And I see why she wouldn't want to go to the door. I see it. I see it. But what I say is, "That shirt's not so revealing." This just comes out of me, without thinking. A complete lie. And she says, you know, this is that thing you do. This is that the thing right here. You can't admit when you did something wrong, which she is totally right about. She's so right, in fact, that I still don't admit it. Though, to describe it this way makes it seem like I'm actually doing a computation in my head and thinking things through and weighing things out. Should I admit it? Should I not admit it? And then I conclude, no. No, don't do it, don't admit it, don't give in. But, in fact, all this happens in an instant in my head. It's like lightning. There's no thought at all. I say, no, no, no, the shirt's fine, I don't see a problem. And then she points out that it's crazy-making, living with me. That if I could just admit that I did something wrong at the beginning, her life would be so much better. This happens all the time. Part of getting older, I think, is learning that you do these things, without thinking, that you are not proud of. I have a list. I interrupt people, I snap at people, I get a condescending, know-it-all tone sometimes without even knowing I'm doing it. I fake laugh at stuff I don't find funny, because I'm only half listening. And while I'm self-absorbed enough to do all that, unfortunately I am not so self-absorbed that I don't notice the look on other people's faces and realize what I've done. This is a very bad middle ground to be in. You know, if I were more sensitive, I wouldn't be doing these things in the first place. And if I was less sensitive, I wouldn't notice what an ass I am, which would be less painful, for me. Most of us have these things, these little devils inside of us that we're fighting against. And some of the devils aren't so little. You know? Sometimes you're spending your life fighting one of these devils and then you become president of the United States, and somehow end up messing around with an intern, which ruins your presidency and possibly, depending on how you see it, leads to the election of a guy who sends our nation into what becomes a very unpopular war. Well, that's the subject of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today we have stories of people for whom fighting the devils inside them, it became the biggest struggle of their lives. In Act One, a guy goes to extraordinary lengths to rid himself of certain feelings, feelings of prejudice, feelings of bigotry, that he's having and finds he cannot control. In Act Two, we let the devils inside people's heads speak, en masse, here on the radio. In Act Three, a man starts off by battling certain doubts in his head, and ends up in a real biblical stand-off with a demon who shows up one day in his college classroom. Stay with us. Act one, And So We Meet Again. So let's say you find yourself bothered by some very extreme and unreasonable things knocking around in your head. Maybe you try to fix that by doing something extreme. Lisa Pollak has the story of one guy who did just that. We first broadcast her story a year ago. Last winter, if you happened to be watching the campus TV station at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, you might have seen this. Happy Holidays from the Parkland College Business Club. Come join us. A video montage of Season's Greetings from campus clubs and departments. Happy Holidays from Financial Aid. Happy Holidays from the Occupational Therapy Assistant Program. And if you couldn't pull yourself away, you'd eventually get to this. Two guys, one slight and bearded, with dark skin speaking Arabic. And the other, a tall, broad shouldered white guy with the translation. Greetings from the Muslim Student Association at Parkland College. We want to wish you and everyone else a happy Holiday season. The second guy, the one speaking English, that's Sam Slaven. And what he doesn't say in the video is that even though he's in the Muslim Student Association, he's not a Muslim. He doesn't want to be a Muslim. In fact, not so long ago, he couldn't stand to be in the same room with Muslims. The idea of Sam joining the Muslim Student Association was so improbable that even some of the people who knew him best thought he was kidding when he first told them about it. It's not a choice anybody would expect from a guy who use words like this to describe Muslims-- You know, we call them Haji or raghead or camel jockey. All kinds of things. I don't know. I don't think most of them make your cut here. Mother [BLEEP], you know. [BLEEP]. To understand home Sam went from being that guy to the guy extending Seasons Greetings on behalf of the Muslim Student Association, and then even becoming friends, real friends, with the bearded guy in that video, you have to go back a few years to the first place Sam ever really learned about Muslims. It wasn't Parkland College. It was Iraq. Sam's from Indiana. After high school, he enrolled at Purdue. But college wasn't for him back then, so he dropped out and joined the Army. When he was sent to Baghdad in 2003, at the start of the war, he was Sergeant Sam Slaven, of the 2nd Armored Calvary. He didn't know much about the people in Iraq, or their religion, but he knew he wanted to help them. And, at first, it seemed like they wanted that, too. In fact, listening to Sam describe the early days of the invasion, I realized I'd forgotten that scenes like this ever existed. Nobody shooting at us. They were just, you know, happy to see us, glad to be there. They'd bring tea out for us and sit and socialize. We even had one family bake us a cake. After a few months of that treatment, it's no wonder that when Sam came under fire for the first time, outside a power station he was guarding, he was truly surprised. It just didn't make sense to have somebody right there shooting at us. And I was just like, this is ridiculous. What are you doing? Because, you know, I'm going to have to shoot back. And, you know, we did. As the insurgency got going, so did Sam's piecemeal education in Islam. His unit was stationed in Sadr City, where the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was building his own militia. And translators told the soldiers, Iraqis were being urged to, quote, "Kill the infidels." And I guess we were the infidels, or whatever, so it seemed like the Imams telling the people that just kind of influenced everybody to go ahead and conduct those actions against us. And we were pretty upset, just at Islam because their leaders were the ones telling them to do that. At least that's what we were told. Then came the day that changed things for a lot of guys in Sam's unit. On October 9, 2003, his platoon was out on patrol. On a nearby street, another platoon from the unit drove straight into an ambush. They were lured in by a woman and child pretending they needed help. They stopped to help them and a couple of the privates saw people running with guns, and then just everything let loose. IEDs, RPGs, and rifles and machine guns and just so many, so many guns going off all at once. And I'd never even seen anything like it in a war movie. It was literally a wall of red just moving from left to right and right to left. With all these bullets and the crossfiring. And, of course, we weren't armored. We didn't even have doors on our vehicles. There was nothing we could do. We could have stand there and traded fire with them all day long, but, you know, just the numbers. There's no way we would have survived. It was just terrifying. We weren't in the worst part of the whole thing, but it was still the scariest thing I've ever seen, probably ever will see. Two guys from Sam's unit were killed that night. And the Americans felt betrayed. The ambush was so big that plenty of the locals must have known about it, but no one, not any of the people they'd been trying to help, had warned them. After that, Sam says, he could never really look at Iraqis the same way. I mean, just from that point, we were just like, you know, we ought to just kill all these people, just to be safe. Instead of saying hello to them, you tell them, F you, or some sort of insult. We knew plenty of them in their own language there, and had no problems talking about them, or their mothers or whatever. It was a two-way street there. They hated us more and we hated them more. The feeling really was shared throughout our unit. One day I walked in and we had a TV and DVD player set up. There was this group of privates, they're all great kids, and they were yelling and cheering and I was, like, what is this? They kept rewinding part of this movie, and they'd just keep playing it. It was from the movie Rules of Engagement, where Samuel L. Jackson tells some marines, waste 'em, and all the guys open up on this crowd of Arabs and just kills everybody in it. And they'd yell and cheer and rewind it and watch it again and just rewind it. Because it's what they wanted to do. And was it what you wanted to do, too? Oh yeah. It's not what he did do, Sam told me, and I want to be clear about that. I spoke to an officer who was one of Sam's superiors back then, and he vouched for Sam's conduct, his adherence to the rules of engagement, the real ones, not the Hollywood ones. Sam's feelings didn't go away when he got back to the States. If anything, they festered. When his year in Iraq was up, he was assigned to an Army recruiting battalion, and stationed in Miami. Which sounds like a nice change of pace for a guy fresh from a war zone, but it wasn't. Because I was in south Florida, it looked a lot like around Baghdad, where we were. It had the palm trees and the canals and it was hot. And between my apartment and recruiting station, there was a mosque. I'd see that and I could physically feel myself tense up. My heart would start pounding, and just make me angry. It's like, oh, I've got to watch out for this place because they're going to run out of that place with guns and just shoot me up. And when you would see people go into the mosque? Well, yeah, I was just like, maybe we should copy down some license plate numbers. Which, it's the same thing we were doing in Iraq. Just keep an eye out on these people, see where they're going. I had just become more angry. And I'd talk to other soldiers in my station, but none of them had ever been to Iraq. I'd be like, you know, don't you think we ought to watch out for these people? Thinking, hey, man, these people are out to get us. But nobody else is seeing this but me. Sam began to have nightmares and trouble sleeping, and other symptoms of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We've all heard of PTSD, but we don't usually hear the details of what it actually feels like to have it. Falling apart isn't something soldiers brag about. But once, at the end of an interview, I asked Sam if he ever hit bottom, and he said yes. I was sitting in my recruiting office, and I was sitting in the far back, and a new recruiter, even newer than I was, they had him up front practicing his little speeches he's supposed to give there on all of us recruiters. He hadn't been to Iraq, but he was giving a speech on how not bad Iraq was. I was just sitting in the back of the room and I was like, I just can't take this, knowing that we're lying to these kids, we're training people to lie to these kids. And I just left the office, went into the small storage area there and just sat down and I just broke down. I was crying, I couldn't take it. And a female recruiter came in, asked me, what's wrong? And I was like, I just can't take this any more. I just had to go home and just quit. And that's totally unacceptable in the Army, and even more unacceptable in recruiting. Really, if anything, I was doing recruiting a favor just because how many people are going to come in and join the Army when they see another recruiter, the only war vet in there, crying because he can't stand the war anymore? After that day, Sam got help. He started treatment for PTSD, retired from the Army, moved to Champaign, where he had family. And in May 2006, at age 28, started classes at Parkland, a community college. But Sam was still struggling. And to help me understand some of what he was going through, Sam gave me permission to talk to his VA therapist. His name is Tim Kohlbecker. He runs a PTSD clinic serving veterans in Illinois and parts of Indiana. And he explained what can happen to soldiers in combat this way. Imagine you're in a room with 10 identical chairs. You're told to sit in one of them, and you get an electric shock. The next day, you're told to sit in the same chair again, and you get shocked again. The third day, you wise up. You're not sitting in that chair anymore. I say, how about one of these other chairs? And you're looking around at those and you're thinking, no, no. They may all be wired up. Because they all look exactly the same as the chair? They all look the same. It all seems the same. It's the same thing. So you've developed a fear of all of them. Well, that happens with somebody in a combat situation, where you are on full alert all the time. You never know who the enemy is. You don't know when they're going to pop up. So you develop an anxiety, or a fear, or an avoidance of all. Sam's college campus wasn't exactly a hotbed of Arab and Muslim culture. But for Sam, it didn't take much. Just the site of an Arab man in a beard could trigger his anxiety. I was just like, oh, man, there's Muslims everywhere. If I saw one of them, I would just walk the other way, find another way to get to wherever I was going to. Like, literally turn around and--? Yeah. Yeah, because I wasn't sure if I got too close to the guy, what would happen? One day he almost did get too close. In the hallway of a campus building, he spotted this guy, Middle-Eastern looking, with a long beard. As I saw him there and I thought, oh, man, there's another one of them. And it's just like an instantaneous rush of anxiety and adrenaline, and I was like what do I do? And, of course, the thought of ridding him from that situation was an option. And-- What do you mean? Well, you know, just choke him out or take him in for questioning, or something. But I'm like, what am I doing? This isn't a war zone. Why am I even thinking this nonsense? I'm not armed. I'm not a killer. I mean, I never was, prior to the war. And all I [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and I was just like, you know, wait. Stop. Stand here a minute and think about it. You know, I want to say that I felt good that nothing happened, but at the same time I just felt terrible. It was like, what have I become? I mean, I didn't have any, you know, notions or thoughts about Muslims prior to joining the Army, but I was, like, why am I not like that anymore? And I was like, what can I do to get back to the way I was? A better person. I sat and thought, and I looked up from the chair I was sitting in and I saw a little poster on a bulletin board that said, "Learn about Islam. Join the Muslim Student Association. It meets on Thursdays." And I thought, you know what? Maybe that'd be good for me. So I went to this Muslim Student Association meeting the next Thursday. Now, before I tell you what happened at that meeting, some background on the Muslim Student Association at Parkland College. You've already met the founder and president, Yousif Radeef. He was the guy speaking Arabic on the holiday video. He also happens to be the bearded man who Sam wanted to jump in the hallway that day. And he's an Iraqi, though his family left Iraq when he was 10 and moved to Jordan, and then the United Arab Emirates before coming to Illinois three years ago. Yousif was 17 when he got here. And other Muslims warned him to be careful what he said, that as a Muslim from the Arab world, anything he did might be viewed with suspicion. The first six months was like the darkest months of my experience in the United States, because I did not have the chance to say what I wanted to say. I did not behave like myself or the guy who I was. I have had to be from a guy who talks about my religion to a guy who advised not to talk about it. So it was a really sudden change. It was so bad, it was so bad. But it got better. I'm glad that it got better. It got better mostly because Yousif made it better. He decided he didn't want to hide who he was or what he thought. So when he got to Parkland College, he threw himself into campus life. He joined clubs and got elected to student government, and wasn't afraid to say that he opposed the Iraq War. And he started the school's first official chapter of the Muslim Student Association. Yousif wanted this particular chapter to be different than other Muslim student groups he had heard about. One of his main goals was to reach out to students who weren't Muslim, especially the ones who had a bad impression of his faith. Somebody have to speak up. Somebody have to tell everybody that what they see in the news, what they hear on the radio, what they read in the magazines and the newspapers is not really true. They only see violence with the name of Islam. So, it's like, OK, it's a religion of violence. And I have heard a lot of people saying this exact quote. For Yousif, having a guy like Sam, someone filled with negative feelings about Muslims, just walk into an MSA meeting was actually kind of a dream scenario. It was like he'd hit the jackpot. Though, Yousif, going above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to bridging the cultural divide, chose this analogy. What would a kid feel like on Christmas day, when he get the presents he want and some extra? I felt more, more than great. Great is a small word when I hear that he said, he was a soldier, he had this thing going on, and he came here to change his mind, and all by himself. Nobody urged him to do so. I was super excited, super excited. I tell you what, that first day I was in there, I was sweating and trembling and just like, my god, what am I doing? There were about 10, maybe 12 students at the meeting, including Yousif, who Sam recognized instantly. I walked in the door and I saw that same bearded guy that I'd been behind the week before. And thought, oh, wow, this is something here. And I saw a lot of females on one side of the room, and the males on the other. And just thought, I know I'm not supposed to sit by the women or something-- that's what they told us in Iraq-- but that's where the door is and I need to be near that door. And I kind of sat there. I know I was-- my hands were clenched on the desk, and I was just trembling and sweating and just felt like I was about to have some sort of major anxiety attack, just because it was the first time I'd been outnumbered by Arabs and Muslims since I'd been in Iraq. So I felt like, hey, I'm back in Iraq again. But I had to keep telling myself, no, no you're not. You're sitting here. You're in a classroom, in college here. You're here voluntarily. You're here at a meeting. I remember the very first day when he came, it was very shocking for us. That's [? Manal, ?] an MSA member from Morocco. Sam wasn't the only one in the room having a hard time that day. [? Manal ?], and her sister [? Lahmie ?], told me they were uncomfortable, too. Only for them, the reason was Sam. We ?] were really saying, what was he doing there? Is he there as a spy? Or to record all the information that we're saying? He was asking a lot of questions at the beginning, like where are you from? And how do you spell your name? And things like that. It just made you a little skeptical. I know somebody asked me, they're like, so why are you here? Not in a condescending manner. It was just, why are you here? What do you want to learn from this? And all I said was, like, I'm doing this for therapy. And they just looked at me like I was kind of crazy. And they're like, what do you mean? And I said, well, I was in the war and I just want to change my perspective on why I feel the way I feel about your religion and people. You said that the first day? Yeah. Yeah, and some of them were like, oh, man, we've got to watch out for this guy. They were probably more concerned about me than I was concerned about them at that point. The first ?] time he was talking about himself-- Lahmie, ?] [? Manal's ?] sister. He wasn't showing any regrets or any feelings about his experience in Iraq. And that was some kind of hurting for us, because of we do have feelings for what is happening in Iraq. Manal ?] told me about one young woman at the meeting who was from Iraq. And ?] he asked that very girl from Iraq, how was the situation before? And she just told him, it was much better than now. She had some family members that died in the recent Iraq War. It was very hurting for her. The meeting ended. And sometime later, Sam and Yousif ended up running into each other on campus. And I did pretty well. I shook the guy's hand, which I never thought I'd do after the first time I saw the guy. And what really struck me was when he said, I'm from Iraq. And I just froze. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm standing here with an Iraqi. I was like, wow. Not only was I with all these Muslims and everything today, but I stood there and talked to an Iraqi and shook his hand. I went home and I called the therapist and I was like, I sat down with a bunch of Muslims this week. And we was like, oh, no, what happened? I still remember the day he told me he joined the Muslim Student Association. I almost fell off my chair. What Sam had done was not the course of action his therapist had recommended. He'd basically cooked up for himself an extreme version of a pretty standard treatment for trauma, exposure therapy, where you re-experience a traumatic event as a way of recovering from it. What you're trying to ultimately do is take what we call a hot memory-- that's a traumatic memory that still owns him, so to speak-- and turn it into just a bad memory. Everybody's got bad memories and we can live with bad memories. You're not going to make it go away. You just want to desensitize it so that it's not having such an intrusive effect in their lives. The problem with what Sam did, and why Kohlbecker says he'd never counsel a patient to do it, is that it wasn't gradual. It was like he jumped into the deep end not knowing if he could swim. But his doctor thought he could handle it, so Sam kept going back. I know it was extremely difficult for him to make himself stay in the room, but it got gradually easier and easier and easier. Probably by the fifth or sixth week, I'd move away from the seat by the door and I start talking to the people and I'd ask questions. Like, why have I always heard this about whatever aspect of Islam? To try and understand why what happened in the name of Islam happened when I was in Iraq. And they'd be like, well, that's because that guy is totally nuts. That's why. I'm like, that makes sense. I grew up here in the US of A-- what are we? Pretty much a Christian nation, and we got a lot of Christian nuts out here. I was like, yeah, I could see. I guess they're entitled to have their wackos, too. As the school year went on, some of the other students in the MSA started noticing something about Sam. The only non-Muslim in their group had become one of its most active members. Whenever we had meetings, he was the first person to come and we would always find him at the door, waiting for the other members. Manal ?] had stopped wondering if Sam was a spy. His dedication had won her over. And he also volunteered, almost always, to sit in a table that we would set in the college center to outreach other people and get them to know about what we really believe in, and that we're not all terrorists, things to dispel the misconceptions that people had. And it was him that was doing this job from times to others. Did you catch that? Sam actually sat at a table on campus, representing Muslim students. It had a really good impact on everyone. He just showed us he was very devoted to the work he was doing. The adviser to the MSA, Dennis Kaczor, noticed another change in Sam. I began to find out that Yousif and him were doing things, going different places and hanging out. And they weren't talking about the Iraq war, either. He said he's an Iraq war veteran. And he knows I'm a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Iraqi. This is one of things that got us involved together, one of them. But the most thing that got us involved is probably magic, the magic tricks. That's right, magic tricks. See, Sam's a magician, a detail that might not be relevant were it not for the fact that Yousif loves magic. And one day, in an MSA seeming, Sam took out a deck of cards. Magicians, if they have nothing to do, they just practice on their cards while they're listening in a class, I believe. So he came in with his cards in his hands and he's trying to shuffle them, flip them, do the tricks. I saw him, I was like, ooh, that's cool. I asked him a couple of questions and he answered me back. And soon they were spending time together. [CARDS SHUFFLING] Practicing magic tricks. What I'm going to going do, I'm going to take your card, and without looking at it, I'm just going to insert it down there. Taking their first car ride. It was like, wow, I'm actually sitting in the car with an Iraqi. Were you driving me or was I driving you? You were driving. And I think I said it out loud. I was like, I can't believe I'm sitting in here without a gun, because every time I'd been in a vehicle with an Iraqi, I was armed. Like any friends, they were there for each other. Yousif helped Sam fix his roof, and Sam gave Yousif advice on the best way to approach Americans when raising money for the MSA. Sam told me, when we go inside, don't tell them it's the Muslim Student Association. Don't tell them we're from the Muslim Student Association, just say MSA. Because we didn't want them to say, oh, wait, I'm not supporting that kind of organization. It's probably al Qaeda or something. And then, last April, came Sam and Yousif's most ambitious collaboration. WCIA-3 News at 10:00. Well, some runners in Champaign were busy fighting the negative image of Islam today through exercise. Parkland College's Muslim Student organization held a 5K run this morning. Runners from all over the country participated for the $1,000 top prize. The 5K run was the MSA's biggest project, and it never would have happened without Sam. He volunteered to organize the race, and spent months planning and publicizing it. And in the end, it was just what Yousif had hoped for, a positive event for the whole community that just happened to be sponsored by Muslims. It was a big day. And to top it off, after the race, Yousif invited Sam to play in a soccer game with a group of Muslim students from the state university. A year earlier just the idea of being on a playing field, surrounded by Muslim men he didn't know, would have made Sam anxious. I considered that particular day to just be a big milestone in overcoming all the PTSD and everything. Because one, I was kind of like in a gladiator pit full of Muslims, and-- Totally. But just to show you how complicated their situation was, at the same time Sam was realizing how far he'd come, Yousif was having the opposite experience, getting a reminder of how far apart their two worlds still were. And I guess I should add that Sam wasn't with us when Yousif told me this part of the story. We got there, we played and people asked me who he was. So I told him he was Sam from the MSA, Muslim Student Association of Parkland, as you know, American and an Iraq War veteran. And some people started being suspicious. What is he doing in the MSA? He should not be in the MSA. MSA only for Muslims. He's an Iraq War veteran, don't think he's spying on us? All these things that made me feel sick to a certain point. What did you say to them? I didn't reply back. I just kept quiet. We have hang out for, I don't know, six months by then. And we were just regular friends, go out, talk, hang out at Parkland College. I kind of don't feel he was an Iraq War veteran anymore. This is just some footage from the turret of a tank. When I went to Champaign, I took Sam up on his offer to play me some of the videotape he'd shot in Iraq. After all the talking we'd done about the war, it was interesting to actually see him there. There were shots of Sam him driving his Humvee, and on guard duty, and a lot of funny scenes, off-duty soldiers just goofing around. Like these guys, amusing themselves during down time by shocking themselves with tasers. C'mon, you can take it. Ah. [BLEEP] Ah, [BLEEP]. Yousif was in the room with us. He'd come to Sam's house to meet me that day, and he'd also been curious to see the video. I kept thinking how weird it must have been for him to be watching some of the footage, even just seeing Sam in Yousif's country, wearing camouflage and sunglasses and carrying a rifle was a little startling. In one shot, Sam tells the camera that there isn't much to see in Iraq, besides trash and filth and the scum of the earth. And then there was this scene, a bunch of soldiers standing around telling jokes to a guy named Hamsa, their Iraqi translator. Hey, Hamsa, you know what the difference is between an Iraqi and a human? Everything. The next one was hard to hear, So Sam repeated it. The next kid here, he's saying, "What's the difference between a dead Iraqi in the road and a dead skunk in the road?" The punchline is "There's tire skid marks on the road before the dead skunk." And then came Sam's joke. Hey, why do Iraqi men wear mustaches? So they can look like their mothers. I glanced over at Yousif to see how he was reacting. I was feeling incredibly uncomfortable. But when I asked Yousif how he was feeling, he said even though he knew some Iraqis would be offended by the jokes, he wasn't. He didn't blame Sam for talking this way. He was just like any other American soldier down in the battlefield. Do you think they're all like that? I would assume so. Or worse. Probably he was the best soldier [? in mood ?] back then, being this way. It's a battlefield. I mean, it's not a joke. It is a serious thing. So I do not feel different from the videos. I don't know. But more than anything, Yousif says, the Sam in the video just wasn't the Sam he knows. They are two different guys. And when I talk to Sam, that's basically the same thing he says. The war changed him. You know, somebody listening to this right now might say, well, I would never say Iraqi men wear mustaches so they can look like their mothers. But you know what? Can you honestly say that without being in the situation? Because I sit here now and say, well, I'd never say that, but that's what happened. That's just how you get through it. It's obviously not something that I'm proud of, or probably most people are proud of, but you don't care that it's perceived as bigoted or just inhumane. It doesn't matter to you because you're in this situation. They were trying to kill you. And when somebody is trying to kill you, everything you thought you believed up until the point when bullets start flying by your head, changes. It didn't bring out the very worst in me, but it is the worst I'm ever going to be in my life. I can tell you that. Sam told me later he was actually a little nervous showing Yousif the videos, but just a little. He trusted Yousif, trusted their friendship, which is a long way to come from wanting to take him down in a hallway. It was only by the sheer force of will that Sam even went to the Muslim Student Association in the first place. And to do it, he had to overlook every instinct he had telling him to run the other way. And then he had to meet someone like Yousif, who welcomed him, ignoring anything Sam might have done in the past. When you consider what it took for Sam to overcome his hatred, it's no wonder it happens so rarely. Lisa Pollak. She is one of the producers of our show. Last fall, Yousif move to the University of Illinois where he's studying molecular and cell biology. He plans to be a dentist. Sam is at Eastern Illinois University, where he is studying geography. Coming up, what to do if the very reasonable, very persuasive voice inside your head tells you to drink, to smoke, to stop ironing that skirt. 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 show, The Devil Inside Me. We have stories of people battling things inside themselves, impulses and thoughts they would rather not have. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act two, Vox Diaboli. Of course, we all have things inside ourselves that we want to fight. 12-step programs and self-help books and organized religion would not do such a thriving business if this were not so common. But sometimes, the voice in one's head really does seem like a voice. Addicts talk about this a lot. This is the voice of having one drink, you know, just one drink. You deserve it, you can handle it. Just one drink. Well, one of our producers, Nancy Updike, started asking around about whether people felt like they were under a spell of an inner voice like this. And it was like people had been waiting all their lives for somebody to ask them this question. She heard from serial cheaters, and road ragers, and move-aholics, a guy who obsessively buys too much food to the point where he goes into debt, people compulsive in ways that she had never heard of. Here are some of them. A quick warning to listeners, there's nothing explicit in here, but one of the people in here does acknowledge the existence of sex. I certainly know voice you're talking about. The voice is irresistible, always. I'm in the thrall of that voice. Totally out of control. It's got this life of its own, and I can't tame it anymore. Up until recently, that voice has made me a very poor man. I actually have a name for the voice. I call it Stan. Stan is the guy who tells me to have the extra glass of wine. Stan is the guy who tells me to smoke. I remember somehow realizing just how finely calibrated the voice was to every nuance, every part of my feelings, including the feeling that I didn't want to smoke cigarettes. And it's just like, might as well have another cigarette, because this is it. Tomorrow you're going to quit. Oh yeah, my voice can pull up statistics, like, obesity is a killer. So the voice would also say, well, it's not that many beers. Because, in fact, if you're thin enough, you actually don't have to drink all that much to get high. Go back to bed for five minutes, just five minutes. Five more minutes, close your eyes, you'll feel great. And then tomorrow something would happen, and there's a good reason to smoke that day. And then it was, oh you already smoked today, so today's not the day you are going to quit, so smoke another cigarette. And then I'll get up five minutes later and it'll be like, eh, I mean, you don't need to iron a skirt. Do you really need to iron the skirt? If you need to iron the skirt, do you need to be wearing the skirt? Maybe you could wear a different skirt, and then you could sleep for 10 more minutes. And that seems like a reasonable negotiation. One of the things I do, that the voice came up with, is when I binge and purge, you never can be sure how much you got back up. The voice came up with the idea that, if I put a coffee can on a scale and adjusted the weight to include the weight of the coffee can, and weighed all my food before I ate it, and then threw up in the same coffee can, I could judge by the weight how much came up. But that's one of the things that I don't want to do that. How complicated and time consuming and just humiliating is that? And the voice is like, yeah, but do you really want to run the risk of leaving some extra food in there? The voice definitely brings in also an element of shame. It says, you want everyone to think that you have money. You want everyone to see that you're generous and you can give and put yourself out there financially. It will prove that you're not a poor kid. And it also says a lot of mean things, too. Your husband's too good for you, you may as well have a glass of wine because without it you won't be as entertaining. When we decided to get engaged and we had been living together for a little while, the voice was like, you tricked him into giving you the ring, OK, that's a start. But you better try your hardest to make sure he doesn't take it away, because he's going to find out the truth about you and how much you suck. So you better distract him with a really thin body. Well, let me just do this one. If I pop it, I'll have smooth skin, my skin will look nice after I do this. I've definitely scarred my skin. I can see the scars, even though I'm wearing makeup and everything. It's the same thing and it always pushes me the same direction, and I'm always the same 40 minutes late. I think I probably gave the bank over $2,000 in service charges. That voice. It was so charming. I think one thing that got me in a standoff against the voice this year was I slept with a guy who has a girlfriend, and she's kind of a bigger girl. And he had slept with a bunch of other girls in town that I knew. And they were all heavy girls. And I slept with him, and I was thinking to myself, I must have rocked his world, because I'm thin and he's used to these fat girls. And then I found out he was going around town saying that having sex with me was like having sex with a pile of paper clips, which is not nice. And for a couple of days I was kind of like, you know, maybe you're wrong, voice. Maybe you're wrong and maybe I should gain weight and maybe I should stop sleeping with these men. And that lasted for a couple of days and then the voice was like, when he said pile of paper clips, all the other girls were jealous when they heard that. And at least he's talking about you. At least you made an impression on him. No matter what they say, the voice turns it into a compliment. Do you feel like the voice is winning? Right now, yeah. I think I'm in some serious trouble, to be honest. Thanks to everybody who talked with us. That story from Nancy Updike. Act three, The Devil Wears Birkenstocks. Well, we've heard today from people who are battling all kinds of inner demons. David Dickerson has done that, and he's gone one step further. When I was 23 years old and wrestling with my faith, the last big battle for my soul came when I had to face down an actual demon who was a guest in one of my university classes. Or that's how I saw it at the time. But the battle had started long before, when I was a kid. I had been raised a fundamentalist Christian. Adam and Eve, the flood, David and Goliath, all of that really happened. Jesus walked on water and was born of the Virgin and said everything that the four gospels tell us. But after years of religious studies classes at the University of Arizona, I felt myself swerving toward a moderate Catholicism and wasn't quite sure about many of the things I had been raised to believe. The history of the Bible wasn't as pure as I had been taught. I was questioning inconsistencies, like how simple textual analysis pretty much proves Paul didn't write the book of Hebrews. Basic facts about the nature of Jesus, of God, of our duties on this earth seemed to me less like eternal truths and more like things I happen to believe. But I was still sure about two things. There was a spiritual world behind what we could see, and it contained both good and evil spirits. Angels, that is, and demons. I believed this for a couple reasons. First of all, the Bible said so. Time and again in the gospels, a demon-possessed person will cross Jesus' path and then the demon inside the person snarls and curses. Jesus rebukes the demon, casts them out, and the person is healed. But beyond just the Bible, my sister and father had both seen demons. They've always been kind of closet charismatics, and for a while our family was going to both kinds of services. Charismatic Christians are the ones who speak in tongues and lay hands on sick people. At that church, we got regular reports from visiting missionaries who would tell hair-raising stories about how they'd faced down local witch doctors who would suddenly yell at the missionaries in a strange voice and in perfect English, or cause spears to levitate over them menacingly. I'd never actually seen a demon myself, but all of us Christian kids traded demon tales the way other kids swap ghost stories, and for the same reason, because it's scary, but exciting, but scary, but exciting. So even though years went by, and I still never saw a demon, a little sliver of that fear stayed with me and kept me on my guard, just in case. If I ever did meet one, I wouldn't make the mistake of treating it like a metaphor. So anyway, at the time of this story, I was a college senior, and to fill out my last semester of electives, I decided to take a class called Paranormal Anthropology. This was about strange phenomena. Dowsing, UFOs, ESP, past life regression, all that stuff you find on the X-Files. And the professor was really interesting, because although our textbook was a skeptical look at all these things, he would bring in guest lecturers who were actual believers, so we could get both sides of the story. We were lectured one week by three UFO abductees. And the next week, we had a dowser try and trace the water mains on the University green. The dowser failed, and the abductees were weird. And, on the whole, it looked like science was winning. But then, one day, the professor announced that our guest next time would be a medium, a woman who channeled spirits. And she was going to let herself get possessed, right there in the classroom, two days from now. As soon as he said it, I was terrified. For all my book learning, in some raw, anxious way I was still 10 years old and overwhelmed. There was going to be a demon in this classroom-- an actual agent of spiritual evil-- who was counting on people not believing in him. People would ask this demon questions, and this demon would answer, speaking with the voice of Satan, and everyone would nod and no one would know the real agenda of this creature. I was the only conservative Christian I knew of in that class, which meant that I was the only one who could save us from, well, from being corrupted by evil in some direct, horrible way. I wasn't at all sure what the demon would do or say. All I knew was that what had been a simple academic pursuit had suddenly turned into the most serious spiritual test of my life. Only, I was really not up to the task. My faith had wandered. I had gone to Catholic mass. I had several gay friends. I had said skeptical things about the authorship of Hebrews. Now it was as if the god of my old Christianity, the real God, the straightforward God, the God who the Bible plainly states is there and whom I had become too highfalutin to simply accept, was calling me back to the battlefield. And I had two days to get into spiritual shape. I started fasting immediately, and holed up in my room for hours. I prayed, "Lord, Jesus, please protect me in this coming battle. Build a wall of protection around the classroom, and protect all my fellow students. Give me the wisdom to know what to say, the courage to face this evil in your name and please, please, please, please protect me." I repeated this over and over for the next two days. I didn't watch TV. I didn't use my computer. I couldn't let anything distract me, because I knew that if I failed-- well, you probably saw The Exorcist, same idea. This was a magic monster, one who could probably smell the Holy Spirit dwelling inside me, and who would find some way to attack. All this was scary, but I have to admit, it was exciting, too, which is basically what the conservative Christian's whole life is like. There's temptation on every side, you have to constantly immerse yourself in prayer, in the Bible, in the community of faith. But with that fear comes the thrill of getting to be an instrument of goodness in an evil world. And for me now, with this impending demon, here it suddenly was, years after I'd given up expecting it. I'd been groomed for this battle since I was a little kid. This was my chance to be a hero for the faith, just like my namesake, King David. I had read the Bible stories about him hundreds of times. I walked in the class that Thursday wearing a cross necklace I had lately been setting aside, and I slapped down my New International Version Study Bible right there in front of me on the table. I just stared at it and prayed and didn't talk to anyone. I was trembling, partly from fear and tension, and partly, of course, from hunger. And then the medium came in, an overweight woman of about 55. Faded jeans, faded T-shirt, tacky bead necklaces and long, graying hair. She had a friend with her who acted as her assistant. And this friend, also frumpy, said that the medium often had several different spirits come through her in a session, so we might notice her voice changing. They dimmed the lights slightly. The medium went into her trance. And then her assistant said, she's just reached her spirit guide, who's an Indian chief from the Hopi tribe who died in the 1800s. Does anyone have any questions? An old sort of hippie-ish woman, an Indian spirit guide. This started seeming less sinister and more like something out of community theater. But, of course I told myself, that's exactly what Satan would want me to think, because if the devil doesn't want us to believe in him, this was a really perfect disguise. But, then again, how would I know the difference? And just then, the medium moaned and rolled her head, and her friend announced, she is now channeling the spirit of King David. King David. Hell, I was a Bible scholar, this was my turf. I flipped to the Psalms, the book that David is supposed to have written, and found a question I had always been curious about. When the teacher asked, does anyone have a question for King David?, my hand shot up. The professor called on me and I rose to my feet. And, still staring intently at my open Bible, and with a voice that was actually quivering, I said, "Yes, um, King David? I notice here that some of your Psalms are called Maskils, and some are called Miktams, and according to my footnotes, these are musical terms. But scholars don't actually know what they mean. Could you please explain the difference?" There was a brief pause. I was too scared to look at her face. Finally, the medium said, "Yes, I could explain. But the answer would be very technical, and I don't think it would interest anybody." And her friend said, "Next question." It all happened so quickly that I wasn't sure how to understand it. I decided that the demon, who would clearly have known the answer, just didn't blurt it out because he wanted to avoid a fight with a real Christian. The second the bell rang, the women left the classroom without a word. I thanked God for the victory, and went to grab some pizza. While I was sitting at a booth, waiting for my slice to arrive, I mentally replayed exactly what had happened. And I realized that God hadn't technically won. A win for God would have been the demon calling me out in a creepy voice, and me brandishing the cross and saying, "In the name of Jesus, I command you," and maybe papers flying everywhere. Instead, what had happened was that a liar had come into our classroom, and I'd beaten her with scholarship. What's more, it hadn't even been close. Book learning had been easier, swifter, and more powerful than prayer and fasting combined. Right then, for the first time, I saw myself from the outside. And what I saw was that my belief in demons was actually kind of silly. My next immediate thought was, well, if demons don't exist except in stories I hear from other people, what about angels? For that matter, what about the Virgin birth? Oh, my god. And before I knew it, I felt like I was falling helplessly, because it turns out you can't actually make yourself believe something if the doubts seem more likely. When I think about it now, that one rational question put to the demon, that shipwrecked my faith. I had kicked open one door too many, and I could no longer stay inside where I felt safe. For a few years, I kept going to church. I kept trying to believe. But after awhile, I let go altogether. If you ask my family, they'd claim that when I fought that nonexistent demon, Satan actually won, that he couldn't have chosen a better answer to make the whole idea of demons seem ridiculous, and kill my faith forever. Dave Dickerson in New York. Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Jule Snyder, Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [? Navarro ?], Bruce Wallace and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Happy birthday, Jessica. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. And you know, part of management oversight is that he calls us into his office once a year for annual evaluations and reviews. I actually have right here a recording of one of the sessions. C'mon you can take it. Ah. [BLEEP]. Ah, [BLEEP]. 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 have a relative that's my aunt. She doesn't really know how to talk to kids. She's sort of-- My grandma. She doesn't know what to say to me. She's trying to talk to me, but usually she doesn't know what to say. The people on my dad's side, they don't know how to talk to kids. They go, oh, you're so cute. They have got to say like, oh, he's so cute-- Oh, you're so cute. --like you were born yesterday. Not me only, but a lot of other kids don't like to be talked down to like they're three years old. Sometimes when they speak to children, their voice changes into this kind of voice where they're talking to two year olds. It's like they're talking to you with baby talk. Yeah. They still think I'm a five year old. Fellow adults, if you have ever had the experience of hanging around with a kid and not knowing what to say, and you told yourself, well, whatever, they're just a child. They're so different from us. They won't really notice. Turns out? Wrong. She says, how's school? What's going on? She tries to understand-- So, how was school? How was school is the typical adult question. So you have to answer it like 6,000 times a year. So if they say, how is school, you know they have nothing else to say, or they don't know what to say. So, how is school? All adults do that, no matter what. Some adults are worse than others, but-- Adults should know by now, kids don't really like talking about school. It's always like, what did you do? And the kid says, nothing. Or they'll say something like, we had math today. Yeah, with my parents, I just go, can you ask more specific? When it's just like that, and I just want to get out of it, I just go, oh, it's been really nice. Yeah, I like science the best. Assuming their next question, and then getting out of it. If you want to talk to kids, kids say, talk about stuff that interests you and them, like you would with anybody. Also, not so much teasing all the time. Also, don't repeat the same things to them every time you see them. My parents, they're always asking, so, who do you have a crush on? Mine too! Mine too. Well, I have a neighbor that kind of teases me. He's pretty old. He always says like, you're a mama's boy and, who's your girlfriend? Well, it just doesn't feel right. Also, sometimes they make a joke when you're seven, and you laugh so much at it. And then, when you're 10 or 11, it's not so funny anymore. And they keep saying the joke. And you just go, oh, that's not very funny anymore. Can you think of an example like that? My dad, he's the kind of guy who makes those jokes all the time. And he's like-- I asked him now, can you make me a sandwich? He's like, poof! Aw, didn't work. And that really annoys me. He does that all the time in front of my friends. And it kind of annoys me sometimes. Now was that funny when you were five? Yeah. It was funny like the first couple of times. Honestly, when his dad goes like, poof, sandwich! Aw, didn't work, honestly, I find that really funny, sometimes. You're not around him all the time. And it gets repetitive. And it's not that funny anymore. Now are you saying that people should talk to you guys like you're adults exactly? Or is there a difference? Not like adults, but just like, not three year olds. Just ten year olds, which we are. Of course for the kids it's totally obvious the difference between a three year old and a ten year old, and a fifteen year old, and whatever. But for adults, that is exactly what is so delicate. You don't want to talk down, but you also don't want to be unclear. You want to relate and be fun, but you also are the adult and you have to be the voice of responsibility, and sometimes, actually, discipline. And so today we bring you stories of people who have struggled to do this well, taking very different approaches, in some very tough situations. Some real stumpers, actually. Situations where most of us would have a hard time figuring out what to say. Our show today in three acts. Act One, So, Kids: A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Hooker Walk into a Bar. In that act, two men get a job where they have to make jokes for kids, though they actually don't have any special understanding of kids at all. Act Two, Age of Consent. You know, you tell your kids, come to me, tell me anything. So what do you do then when they take you up on it, and say things to you that you have no idea how to respond to? Act Three, Use Your Words. In that act, Dan Savage makes the case for yelling at children. No kidding. Not just yelling, but trying to scare them with your yelling. Stay with us. Act One. Sean O'Connor and Nick Maritato have jobs that keep them about as far away from talking to kids as anybody could be. They're professional comedians. Young ones, just starting out. Their job is basically to say stuff that kids shouldn't hear. Until this summer. They got hired to perform at summer camps, six summer camps. Average age of the audience? 11. One of the producers of our show, Jane Feltes, tells what happened. Sean usually gets to work around 9:00 or 10:00 at night. He often performs at a bar called Rififi, in the East Village in New York City. Everyone here is in their 20s, drinking, and talking about where they're going to drink later. You know, adult stuff. I just got kicked out of college. And I called my friend up. And I was like, hey, Jimmy, what are you doing tonight? And he's like, oh man, I just bet Steve that I could do heroin and not get addicted to it. Sean is 22, and he's hilarious. He has a small following. Sometimes he headlines. His audience loves him. He's kind of like a younger, blonder, cuddlier Jack Black. His material is about doing drugs, and being lazy, and getting in trouble in high school, and being mistaken for gay. So who would ask this guy to make jokes for kids at summer camp? Rachel Tipograph. And she has a lot of experience. I went to camp. I went to day camp. And then I went seven years sleep away camp in Maine. And I was a counselor at camp last summer. Rachel is in college, and she's a super ambitious 20 year old. She has business cards and letterhead. This summer, drawing on her eight years of camp experience, Rachel came up with an idea. Camps hire local entertainers, who Rachel thinks could be more entertaining. A lot of times, you'll see a magician. And he's been there for 15 years. And he's getting very old. And he has his son helping him. Or you'll see a local DJ, you know, ex-hippie, knows all about Woodstock, he was there. So I was like, you know what? Entertainment doesn't have to be corny. It doesn't have to be crappy. These camps are in travelable distance from New York City. The New York City comedy world's great, but it's not lucrative. So why not send these young comedians, who are very flexible, out to the camps? So she set up this business and started to recruit comedians. Which led her to Nick and Sean. But it wasn't an easy sell. Here's Nick. When Sean asked me to do this, he asked me via text message. He was like, hey, do you want to do comedy for camps this summer? And I said, no, exclamation point. And then I was like, uh, we're getting paid for that, right? This is Sean. She was like, there's a ton of money involved. And I was like, awesome! Perfect! Say no more. This is great. Did your eyes turn into dollar signs? It did, it did. And I opened my mouth, and just went cha-ching. It was weird. My head was a cash register. The ton of money that turns a struggling comedian's head into a cash register might not be as much as you think. Nick and Sean usually don't even get paid. In fact, they told me that a lot of the time, they have to pay to get on stage. Or do what's called a bringer-- bring their own audience. And that gets old fast for the handful of friends who are willing to go. Rachel, on the other hand, was offering $500 a show. And they were doing six shows. A ton of money to these guys. But they were going to have to work for it. Boom! Falling off a couch. Falling into a couch. Falling next to a couch. To write all new, kid friendly comedy, the guys spent hours in the living room, watching Nickelodeon, looking for pointers. Nothing better on a peanut butter sandwich than pickled chips, a little bit of mustard. Foods like chili, and mustard, and pickles? Hilarious. Stand up comedy is all about relating to an audience. Talking really frankly about the things we all experience, and then adding some funny observation that we wish we thought of. That's why so many jokes start with, so you know when you're at the DMV? Or, the thing about working in an office is. But these kids are 11. Nick told me they thought about producing some tutorial videos that would give the campers the essential background information they needed, in order to understand his jokes. We had this idea. We were like, it would be funny if we-- Like, tell a joke, and it would be about sex. And then cut to, OK, when a man loves a woman-- like have to explain life to them before. And a long time ago, white people thought it was OK to own black people. They used a very dirty word called the n-word. And we're not going to use it right now. Do kids at this age know they're going to die yet? No? Hey, Rachel. How are you? I'm good, how are you? To top it all off, Rachel gave them a list of things they're absolutely not allowed to joke about. No sex, drugs, alcohol, getting in trouble, no ethnic jokes, no making fun of kids, no making fun of parents, no making fun of camp counselors, no hurting anyone's feelings, which really doesn't leave the guys much to work with. And they call Rachel now and then to run ideas by her. We just were wondering about like I have this joke about how I got gay-bashed. Can I talk about that? No. If you guys started doing that, I can honestly see a camp woman getting on stage, and kicking you guys off. Whoa. I wouldn't want that. I don't want that. Yeah, I don't want that either. Can we make fat jokes, like about us? Um. If you honestly think like, oh, well this joke might get me in trouble, I wouldn't do it. OK, thanks Rachel. OK. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye. They tried adapting some of their regular material, like a joke Sean had about having a party when your parents are out of town, and getting drunk and destroying stuff. Only without the party, or the drinking, or the destruction. A few days before the first show, Rachel asked Nick and Sean to send over a script of their entire routine, just so she could be absolutely sure they were on schedule and being kid appropriate. And she approved almost all it. Which sounded promising. Until I asked Sean to try out some of the material on me. Yeah. Oh, man. They're so bad. I love soup because not only is it delicious, it's also an awesome weapon. I don't get it. It's hot. Because soups hot. If you throw it at someone, it hurts. What if I said hot soup? It's a three hour drive north to Camp Taconic in Massachusetts. And on the way up, the guys are singing along to music, and stopping for donuts, and doing impressions of Rachel. But the mood turns as we get closer to camp. Oh, my Lord. It's a real camp. The first thing we see when we pull up to Camp Taconic are rows of cute little cabins. There's a pond, and a barn, and a tether ball, and kids scattered about. I quit. See you later. I'm done. We're done. This is over. Interview done. Oh, my God. This is so weird. And scary. I have so many different feelings right now. Like? Fear. Nervousness. Getting bitten by bugs, is that a feeling? The show is being held in a little lodge. And there are long wooden benches full of fidgety kids wrapped in blankets. A few hundred of them. They look so tiny. You can tell they're really excited. I overhear one boy asking his friends, "Do you think these guys know Dane Cook?" Who is pretty much the favorite stand-up among preteens right now. Counselors get their kids to quiet down, and Nick and Sean walk to the mic. They have been planning this moment for weeks, writing, and rewriting, and guessing about how the kids would react. And now, here they were. The longer it takes for you to be quiet, the longer it takes for us to start. Thank you very much. The first thing that you could do is introduce what we are going to do first, for this friggin' awesome thing. Friggin'. He said friggin'. Kids look at each other like, what did he almost say? It just throws everybody, Sean and Nick included. Um. What are we going to do? It goes steadily downhill from there. Jokes don't land. And some jokes, they're like not even jokes. Here's another reason why I didn't want to go to sleep away camp. You have got to sleep in bunks. And that weirds me out. Because bunks are 100% made of wood, right? And you know what I am really afraid of is fire. And wood is the easiest thing to set on fire. I don't want to be set on fire when I'm sleeping. I mean, who does, right? What? What is he even talking about? We live in wood bunks, you know. I know. Has anybody tried to set you guys on fire before? The counselors' faces say it all. They're horrified. They're even giving me dirty looks. And then, there are hecklers. Four boys sitting on the floor in front of Sean who are talking to him through his entire act. I mean they will not shut up. I think-- you guys know Applebee's? You love Applebee's? It's your grandparents' favorite restaurant? Yeah, it's my grandparents' favorite restaurant. Great. I love you. You just keep talking. It's awesome. Because that's what I wanted. I wanted to come up here and just talk to-- what's your name? Daniel. Daniel? Awesome. You guys are so good. Come up here. Four little boys jump up, totally excited and grinning. It's clear to everyone in the room that in the battle between adults and children, the children had suddenly got the upper hand. It's Lord of the Flies up in here. Sean's losing control. OK. Since you guys just love attention and stuff, you guys can all each tell a joke. And if they don't laugh, you have to go sit down and not talk. All right. OK, I'll go first. You go first! So there are two Irish guys in a pub. OK! [LAUGHTER] We're good! No, you win! Ethnic joke? Check. Drinking joke? Check. He was right to cut him off. And this speaks to the whole problem here. Sean and Nick are telling kids jokes to kids who already know adult jokes and find them funny. After all, Dane Cook is their favorite comedian. And he's crazy dirty. At one point, the guys just give up. The kids are talking, not laughing, not paying attention. But Sean and Nick can't end the show yet, because it's a camp. And every hour is planned. The kids have to stay in this building, sitting down, fidgeting until bedtime. So Sean and Nick stop being comedians. They just do anything they can think of to keep the crowd occupied. I mean it's like, how bad do you guys just want to scream at the top of your lungs? I want to scream! AHHHHHH! Good! Good! Good! Finally it's over. And the kids rush back to their bunks. No signing of autographs, no high fives. I talked to a few of them about what we just saw. They're definitely not comedians. Do you have any advice for next time? They could make the jokes a little more mature and things. Be funnier. Yeah, exactly. Get better at it. Practice at it. Read some joke books. Exactly. I find a group of staff people standing outside the lodge. There are six grown people standing here in a circle. Six of them, hands in their pockets, kicking the dirt. Do you think the kids liked it? Did you guys like it? Anyone? I thought it was a little inappropriate. Talk about death and burning bunks. Adults maybe can handle it. But these are kids. So I thought it was a little inappropriate. On the way home, the guys talked about how it wasn't that bad, and about stuff that had nothing to do with the performance at all. I kept my thoughts to myself. A week later, we finally sat down together. You know, I think part of being a performer is living in denial about failing. You don't want to decide you're the comedian who bombs, because then how hard would it be to go on stage next time? How do you think it went? The shows, they went well. A lot better than I thought they were going to go. They didn't-- I don't think that it was amazing. And you Sean? I thought the shows were awesome. What did they think? All right. Well, they all hated it. Now, when you say they, do you mean all? They all hated it. What did they say? were scary. Yeah, you know what? That's pretty right on. The counselors thought that it was totally inappropriate. They said you were unprepared. A couple of girls told me that their counselor felt so bad that they had to sit through it, that they got to stay up really late out in the field playing games, so that they could have had something fun to do that night. I agree. I felt it. I went out there. I looked at them. They were just confused. They didn't like it. Of course, this is just the opposite of what he said when I first asked him just a minute before, which he cops to right away. Why would I really think that was good? I was literally going through the motions. But if outright you have clips of people saying that it's terrible and things like-- OK, I'm not going to hide it. I'm not a moron. That was bad. I didn't have a fun time. I was so happy when it was over. Honestly, when I got home on Monday, it felt so weird, because it felt like a part of me was missing. I'm not even kidding when I say this. So don't roll your eyes. I got so stressed out, I just felt like it was like my whole world came crashing down. I went home to my parents' house, because I had my dad's car from that trip. And when I dropped it off, I just went upstairs to my room and laid in my bed. And I woke up at 1:00 AM. And I felt so disoriented. What happened was my heart started racing. Sean said he started to breathe faster. And he was sweating. And then suddenly, he felt a pain when he tried to swallow. And it just wouldn't go away. After a few minutes, he had convinced himself that he had throat cancer and was about to die. And I Googled throat cancer. And of course, when you Google something you have all the symptoms, because you could have all those symptoms and have anything. But they're the same symptoms as a cold. So I Googled that. And I was like, oh, I do have throat cancer. So I actually woke my parents up. I was like, take me to the hospital. That was the first of four trips to the ER. He had blood work done, and CAT scans, and a barium swallow, and various other tests. All of which came back negative. No cancer. No nothing. Turned out he was having panic attacks and was told to start seeing someone about his anxiety. Well my whole thing was I didn't want to bomb. Not having people like me. That's pretty much-- that was where all the stress was coming. When I do comedy, when everyone does comedy, if you don't find the jokes funny, it's really hard to say them with conviction. There's no way to sell jokes that you don't find funny. You guys forgot that you were funny. Yeah, that's really what it was. Everyone was just going like, just be funny, be funny. And then you're like, I have got to be funny. But if you just are funny, it's better than trying. Trying to be funny is the worst. You could smell that from a mile away, the desperation of needing laughter. In a way, they were doomed from the start. Like I said, Sean is 22, Nick is 20. And this is the worst possible age to connect with an 11 year old. When you're 22, you don't want to remember what it was like to be 11. You're frantically running away from that. No wonder they couldn't be funny for kids. The guys did five other camp shows. And they swear-- for real, for real this time-- that they got better. For one thing, they weren't as nervous. Believe it or not, they're going out again next summer. Jane Feltes. Coming up, kids talk about sex. Dan Savage doesn't. Incredible. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Chelsea is 18. And because she sees some problems with the way that many adults talk to kids about sex, she became one of the editors of a magazine where teenagers write about sex for a teenage audience. It's called Sex, Etc. And of course they have a website, though be careful how you type in the address. Sexetc.com actually is porn. But sexetc.org, that's our site. That's Karen, another teen editor. I talked to seven of them. There is also [? Sharonia ?], Natasha, Michael, Erica, and Ethan. All but two of them are seniors in high school, 17 years old. In the magazine they write very chatty and very frank articles about say, boys saying no to sex, about the availability of abortion for teenagers, about misperceptions about HIV, and condoms, and how you get pregnant. I visited them because they seemed like the perfect people to discuss how adults talk about sex with kids. For one thing, they had done a survey of their readers on this very subject. Actually the first time sex ever came up between me and my parents-- A warning to listeners, we don't get very explicit in this discussion, but we do acknowledge that people, and teenagers, have sex. --what happened was, it was when Friends, that TV sitcom, was like really big. So my parents used to watch it all the time. And they used to have a lot of sex jokes on that show. So one day, during a commercial break, I turned to my dad-- which I picked the wrong parent, by the way. I should have really just asked my mother. I asked my dad, what is sex? And he had no idea what to tell me for a second. So he turned off the TV, he looked at me, and he said, "It's when grown adults want to, like, hold each other and hug each other." I mean, that was such a terrible explanation. I was so unsatisfied with what he told me. In their survey, lots of kids complained about vagueness and lack of useful information. One kid wrote, "My first conversation with my mom about sex was really weird. It was almost like she was preaching to me how if I have sex, I will have a baby, and then die. It was the night before my sixth grade dance." Another wrote, "My dad started the conversation. He took me out in the backyard when the orange tree was pollinating, and explained how it worked." One student wrote that her mom ambushed her in the car. "The first time you have sex is not going to be fun," was her first warning. "It's awkward, it's embarrassing-- and trust me on this-- it's going to hurt." Well thanks, Mom. And the survey done by Sex, Etc. showed that sex ed classes in schools are all over the place right now. Here's Natasha, who wrote the survey questions. Some people didn't even have sex ed. They were like, I don't have sex ed. Some people were like, I wish I had sex ed, but I don't. Some people talked about how their teacher just talked about abstinence only. They didn't really answer any of their questions. Some people said they had really good teachers. But most of the people that really replied said that they really weren't satisfied with their sex ed. I was actually the one. I raised my hand in class and I said, but how does the sperm get to the vagina? And I guess it wasn't in the material. They're not supposed to talk about it. So they were just like-- they just didn't talk to us about it. It's confusing. You don't know what that means. When I was younger, I thought sex was just sort of like people rubbing up against each other. Because you can see on TV shows or movies, you see that, but you don't actually see. So you're like, OK, they rub against each other, but then how does that little fish get inside her body? And I would think of it as like a little fish, because you see it on the movie. And so how does it get inside her body? It's so confusing and vague. Most of the stuff, honestly, most of the things I learned about sex are probably from watching pornography, because there's a lot there. You might as well be taking notes, because it's very up close and personal. And they're not trying to censor themselves. So they can show anything they want. And you learn. Because they're wearing condoms most of the time. Porn kind of shows you exactly what happens. Like you'll see it on TV, and they're just kind of rubbing together under the covers. But porn is like there. Like it zooms in, and all kinds of stuff. So it really shows you what actually happens. The most confusing thing about talking to these kids is to find out that there are so many ways for parents to mess this up. Kids complain when parents don't approach them to talk about sex. They also complain that parents bring it up out of the blue, when they're unprepared, and trap them. They complain that parents are usually vague, though of course when they want details, they emphatically do not want to hear first person accounts of their parents' sex lives. One kid in the survey wrote, "I was in fifth grade at the time when my parents started the sex talk with, 'The first time your father and I had intercourse--' I didn't need the details." I don't want to know nothing. I don't want to know about the backseat. I don't want to know about when they had drive-in movie theaters. I don't want to know about nothing. I just don't want to know. Like my father-- no, my father-- says stuff to me like that. "Yeah, me and your mother went to the hotel, and we--" I don't want to know. But there's a surprising lack of consensus among these seven teenagers, seven kids who write about this, and have thought about this a lot, about how parents should go about talking sex with their own kids. Two of the editors said that their parents are so uncomfortable with the subject, they preferred not to talk to them about it. The two editors who had the easiest time talking about sex with their own parents have the kind of incredibly close relationships with their parents where they can talk about anything. So it's hard to draw any kind of lesson from their experience, other than the not very helpful, have a great relationship with your kid. For parents who are not spectacularly close with their own teenagers-- which is to say, most parents-- there was agreement about two things. One, parents need to understand that teenagers do not have the facts. They're not getting the facts in school, probably. And they need some basic information from books, or websites, or teachers, or wherever. And number two, no matter how hard it is, parents should at least try to talk to them. Again here's Natasha. I know you're getting older. Sex may become an issue, or sex is a part of growing up. It's natural. If you have questions-- Even as you're saying this, it's so awkward. I feel so awkward hearing you say this. This sounds terrible. [LAUGHTER] Basically-- You're terrible at this. I did a good job on my brother. I did a really good job on him. But I actually locked my little brother in my room with me, because I wasn't sure if my mom was going to do it or not. So I was like, somebody has to do it. How old was he? He was 13. I just showed him diagrams. I showed him the picture. So I gave him condoms and everything. I was like, here, take these. If you're going to do it, use these. I said, this is what happens when you do this. This is what happens when you do that. If you want to do this, you should do this. But if I had my own child, and I watched them grow up from a baby into this adult, then yeah, it would definitely be difficult, just because of the age difference, because of-- No, I understand that. I understand. It's just interesting that you have in your head, oh someday I'm going to be older. And then I'm not going to be able to talk to my kid either. Yeah, it's just kind of the norm. You kind of assume that when you get older, you're not going to be able to talk to your kids about sex. I'm comfortable with my brother. I can talk to him about it. But if it's my child, it would just be awkward. Were there certain things that you said to your brother, and the way you said them, that it's impossible to imagine your mother or father saying to you? Definitely. Like I told my brother, wrap it before you tap it. That kind of thing. I wouln't expect for my mother to say that to me. It's really hard for your parents to be that blunt with you, because it's a really, really awkward situation. It's just really awkward. That's really what it is. Awkward. I think it's really hard for parents. But they've just got to suck it up. They've done a lot of hard things in their life. Talking about sex shouldn't be one of the hardest things they've ever done, so. It can be very hard for parents, especially when their kids don't just come to them to talk about sex, but let them know that they're doing things that the parents don't necessarily approve of. This woman sent in an essay to us that she had written about what is happening in her family, between her and one of her daughters. It's so frank about what's happening, as you'll hear, that we have changed everybody's names and, in fact, had somebody else read it on the air. Here it is. I sit alone at my kitchen table, nibbling on a stale oatmeal cookie. It's midnight, and I'm hoping that the dose of tryptophan I had washed down with a glass of cold milk will kick in soon, so I can sleep. I'm a bundle of nerves because my 16 year old daughter just told me she lost her virginity the night before. When Didi delivered the news tonight, I had nothing to say, which surprised me, because I'd always thought this is what I wanted with my three daughters, an open relationship. I hadn't thought through what that means. Which is that they talk, and then I talk. In this case, Didi talked. And I could only come up with a bland admonition. Don't sleep around, I said dryly. I am not the mother I had hoped to be. My three girls are not the daughters I thought they'd be. I didn't think any of the girls would be valedictorians. But I expected my oldest daughter to graduate with something higher than a 1.8 GPA. My middle daughter didn't even do that well. She dropped out of high school. I never dreamed I would raise a smoker. And yet, my baby, Didi, carries a pack of Camels in her purse. I squint at a magazine in the dim kitchen light, but can't concentrate. I take a couple of valerian capsules-- tryptophan is not enough tonight-- and go back to bed. Tomorrow, I'll make a doctor's appointment for Didi to get birth control. When I call the clinic to make an appointment for Didi, the receptionist's tone turns icy when I explain what I want. She says, neither the doctor nor the nurse practitioner has any openings until May. It's March. I can feel her disapproval through the phone. She seems to be implying that I am encouraging my daughter to have sex by arranging birth control for her, that I should encourage-- no, demand-- abstinence from Didi. I picture a good mother saying to her daughter, you're too young to have sex. Don't do it again until you're mature enough for a committed relationship, or better yet, until you're married. And the good daughter nods dutifully in agreement, and says, OK, Mom. It was fun, but you're right. We won't have sex anymore. Didi and I occupy an alternate universe. In the afternoon, she returns home from school with a single red rose. It's from Jack, she says. You know, because. Yeah, I know, I say. Then she pulls from her purse something else that Jack brought her. A morning after pill. I thought you said he pulled out, I scream. Not that I think this is a reliable method, but it had provided me with a shred of hope that Didi's first time wouldn't result in a pregnancy. No, I, I just said that so you wouldn't worry, she said. Don't lie, I say. I can't stand it when you lie. Nothing ever good comes from a lie. He was really concerned. That's why he did that, she continues as she returns the pill to her purse. I'm concerned too, I say. I would have helped you. I realize May is too long to wait. I phone the doctor's office again. I plead, can't they speed this up somehow? A much more accommodating receptionist says they can. Less than a week after losing her virginity, Didi is on the pill. Two weeks later, we're in Chicago. It's spring break, and Didi has persuaded me to take the train down for some shopping. Jack and a group of their friends are here. And Didi plans to meet up with them to go to a concert out in the suburbs later tonight. Is it OK, she asks, if it's really late tonight after the concert-- I mean, it shouldn't be. And Jack could stay with his friends in the suburbs. But then I might have to come back by myself, because I don't know if Lisa and Rachel are going. And they're staying at another hotel anyway. And I was wondering because of that, because I don't really want to come back by myself, and Jack doesn't really know his way back, if he just drops me off, I was wondering if it might be OK if he stays in our room? We're having lunch in an Indian restaurant. And between Didi's tortured syntax and my rice pudding, it takes me a few seconds to fully understand what my teenage daughter is asking me. Um, I don't know, I say. I prefer you come back. And I don't want you to travel by yourself at night. But, um, I don't know. Sometime after midnight, I hear the hotel key card in the door. Groggy from a sleeping pill, I'm aware of whispers and movement in the double bed next to mine in the moments before I drift off. When I awake the next morning, they are tangled in the blankets, their heads nearly touching. Didi's mouth is parted a bit, as it often is in sleep, and Jack's stockinged feet protrude over the edge of the mattress. Two weeks earlier, I was on the verge of a panic attack because Didi and her boyfriend had had sex for the first time. And now we're all sleeping in the same room together? What am I doing? I'm the first to admit I don't have a clue. What I do know is that I can't recall ever looking as happy as my daughter looks right now. I feel a disquieting sense of envy for Didi. My husband and I don't even share our queen size bed, and I prefer it that way. At 53, Rob is retired, and spends his days consuming vast quantities of beer and napping. He doesn't bother to shower, shave, get his hair cut. We go months without riding in the same vehicle. We do not exchange gifts, or cards even. Maybe it's best we don't do cards. It's hard to find one that says, even though I don't love you anymore, happy birthday anyway. A few weeks later, after we return from Chicago, I'm reading in bed on a summer night when I hear strange noises from Didi's room below. When I open her bedroom door, she's cutting the screen out of her side window. "What are you doing?" I ask. "My mom, I have got to go." She slams her cellphone shut. "Uh, um, well, Jack called. And he's with his friends. And um, they wanted to drive around and get drunk. But he doesn't want to. And his parents are mad at him. But they think he's spending the night with those guys. So he can't really go home. So I told him he could come here. But I didn't want to wake anybody up. So I figured he could come in the window?" "You ruined the screen." I wave my arms in exasperation. "Why didn't you just say something to me?" "But, um, can he come over? He could be here any minute." I sigh. He'd spent the night at the hotel. I know they're having sex somewhere. And Didi is on the pill, so I know she won't get pregnant. What's the harm? Making my daughter happy seems closer to right than protecting her virginity or reputation. I know that I was raised to be chaste, to put off sex until marriage. And how did that turn out for me? I had sex atop dorm room bunks and secondhand sofas. Worried whether I'd be invited to stay the night, felt ashamed the next morning. I fawned over the bad boys. Now I'm tired and unhappy. Maybe there is another way. OK, I say, listening for sounds of Rob fumbling around upstairs. But let him in the front door. Jack becomes a late night regular at our house. Even though they barely speak, the tension between Didi and her dad comes to a boil in the week since Jack first began spending the night. She says to me one day, "I can't stand it. Can't you leave him now?" Didi wants me to leave Rob, and buy a house near downtown so the three of us-- herself, Mandy, and I-- can get on with our lives. I can't tell her that I don't have the money, that I don't have the energy, that I am afraid of what will become of me, and her, and her sisters. A good mother wouldn't continue to live with a bad father. A good mother would never have married someone like Rob in the first place. "I can't stand it here," Didi says, the tears still flowing. "I think I need to go back on anti-depressants." All of us, except Rob, the one who needs the most, has been on, or is on, anti-depressants. "Take a few of mine." I want to shout, "Snap out of it." "Oh Mom, I just have to get out of this house. Would you please, please let me stay at a hotel tonight with Jack? Please? I just need to get away." "A hotel costs a lot of money," I point out. "I mean, I'd like to go away too, but, I can't do that every time I want." "Just for tonight?" she asks. "Please. I just have to get out of here, away from him." She looks in the direction of the living room, where Rob lays on the couch, mouth agape. Of course, I want to help her. Indulge her. I understand her pain. But at the cost of $100 or more? "You've spent more than that on hotels for Mandy," she says. "It's like, well, like therapy." It's true. I've spent a lot sending Mandy to anime conventions around the country, but they were for a purpose. Not just because she didn't want to sleep at home. And I know responsible mothers would not pay for a night at a hotel for their minor child, with a boyfriend no less. It's unseemly. But somehow none of those reasons seem to matter. And I agree it could be therapeutic for Didi. I'm a believer in retreats and getaways to revitalize the spirit. And I know that Didi will be unrelenting until I finally say yes. I give in. "See if you can find a deal on hotwire.com," I say. She throws her arms around me. The tears have left damp tracks on her cheeks. "Thank you, thank you, thank you." And she rushes off to wheel and deal her way into a room at the Holiday Inn. Because she is 16, I have to check her in. When we leave the house, I call to Rob, who's still on the sofa, "Didi is staying with a friend tonight. I'm going to drop her off now." He doesn't have to know the details about this. Didi snags a room overlooking the indoor pool and courtyard. I stand on its balcony and watch the people dining in the tropical-themed restaurant. Families playing in the pool, adults soaking in the hot tub, everyone looks happy. I turn back to the room. Jack is at work and he'll be along later. Didi has invited one of her girlfriends over to go swimming. While we wait on her, both of us sprawl across the king sized bed. "Comfortable?" I ask and close my eyes. "Yeah, I'll say," she says. "Thanks for letting me do this, Mom." I understand why she wanted to come here. The windowless room is soothing and anonymous. The sliding glass doors face the courtyard, and artificial light spills into the room. From the pool below, there is the faint aroma of chlorine. I don't want to leave. I want to crawl under the covers for a long nap. Julie Snyder. Reading an essay sent in to us by a woman who lives in the Midwest. ACT 3, Use Your Words. Well we close today's show with this story from Dan Savage about how to talk to kids, and how his views on the subject have changed pretty radically, how he believes stuff now that he would have found repellent years ago. Here's Dan. In the fall of 1989, I was living in West Berlin and needed a job. The only one I could find was working as a substitute German teacher at a grade school on the US Army base. One day, this kid-- this little black haired, black eyed, black hearted boy-- started winding up my worst class, Berlin's fightin' fourth graders, taunting weaker kids, firing paper clips around the room with a rubber band, all the while shooting me looks that said, what are you going to do about it, you pathetic excuse for a German teacher? I glared. I issued idle threats. I raised my voice. Nothing worked. I was on the verge of losing complete control of the classroom. So I got up, walked over to this kid's desk, and snatched the rubber band out of his hand. Then I leaned in close so only he could hear me and said, "Knock it the [BEEP] off, you little [BEEP]." I said it with the most threateningly murderous tone I could affect. I wanted this kid to think me capable of anything. Anything. It worked, or seemed to. The kid was quiet for the rest of class. And I hoped that we had come to an understanding. Then I got summoned to the principal's office ten minutes into my next class. When I walked in, the black haired kid was standing by his desk. The principal asked me if I had used the f-word in front of this precious child, that I had told this child that he was a piece of s-word. Mr. Savage, the principal said, interrupting me before I could answer, "I'm afraid this would be a firing offense, if it were true." I took in the look on the principal's face as I paused to consider my response. It wasn't an angry look. It was a do we understand each other look. I understood. He didn't want to fire me any more than I wanted to be fired. If the position of substitute German teacher was easier to fill, he wouldn't have hired me in the first place. I barely spoke the language. "No," I said. "It's not true." "He said it," the kid choked out. "He did!" The principal leaned back in his chair. "Or perhaps," the principal said, "it was all a misunderstanding." The principal had us shake hands and then dismissed us together. I wasn't fired. And, revealingly, the kid wasn't in any trouble. The boy shot me a look when we got into the hall. I knew I lied. He knew I lied. I knew he knew. And we both knew the principal knew. I felt terrible, honestly. For years later-- long after I forgot what little German I knew-- my mind would occasionally flash to the look on that boy's face. That kid was bad. But I proved to him that adults are worse. We swear, we lie, we abuse our authority. And for years, I had the decency to feel bad about the indecent thing I had done that day. But now I don't feel bad about it. Yes, the lying was wrong, I guess. But telling him to knock it the [BEEP] off? He had it coming. And why do I feel this way? Because I have my own nine year old now. And I have gone Alec Baldwin on his ass many times. I want to tell you something, OK? And I want to leave a message for you right now. You have insulted me for the last time. In fact, when the phone message the actor left for his daughter was made public, I thought, what's the big deal? Apparently his daughter missed some scheduled phone calls with him. You have insulted me. You don't have the brains, or the decency as a human being. I don't give a damn that you're 12 years old, or 11 years old, or that you're a child, or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass who doesn't care about what you do, as far as I'm concerned. You have humiliated me for the last time with this phone. And when I come out there next week, I'm going to fly out there for the day just to straighten you out on this issue. I'm going to let you know just how disappointed in you I am. Everyone seemed to think that Baldwin losing his temper like that-- and he did lose his temper-- was grounds for denying him visitation rights. Baldwin hit the public contrition circuit. People were talking about whether or not his career would survive. But I wasn't the only one out there that couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. A lot of people listened to the Baldwin tape and came to the same conclusion I had. No. Big. Deal. Who were these people? Parents. Parents like me. We didn't speak up then because we were afraid. We were cowards, thoughtless cowards, without the brains or the decency of human beings. Only after the Baldwin scandal blew over, did we parents slowly and carefully begin to check in with each other and confide in each other. That wasn't so bad, right? I've said worse things, haven't you? I'm sorry we weren't there for you, Alec. So you better be ready Friday, the 20th, to meet with me. So I'm going to let you know just how I feel about what a rude little pig you really are. You are a rude, thoughtless little pig. Have you talked to your kids like that? Oh yes, I have. Yeah. I yell all the time at my kids. John is a stay at home dad with three boys and a girl. My son, DJ, plays with John's kids. I caught John on the phone while his younger children were napping. What was your reaction when you heard the Alec Baldwin tape? Just what he actually said, out of context, seems incredibly benign. It seems like a typical tirade by a typical parent. I talked to other parents, but they all said the same thing. They've said worse. They've lost it. Someone told me recently about one father-- a loving father, a good father-- who told his son, "I could kill you, and make another one, just like you." Alissa is the mother of two kids. A son, and a daughter the same age as Alec Baldwin's daughter. And please note my technique here. I draw the interview subject out by refusing to let her get a word in edgewise. Because when I heard that, I thought of all the times I've-- you know, we live in a two-story house. I thought of all the times I have barked up the stairs, "Don't make me come up there." Which sounds like, if I come up there, I'm going to throw you through a wall. And I want it to sound like that, a little bit. Like I, as a father, try to affect that tone, because it's kind of all I got. You can't hit him. Well, absolutely. You really can't hit him. No. No, you can't hit them. It's not fair. It's not a fair fight. And so sometimes I feel trapped, like the only way I can communicate my intense displeasure, and also, to my kid, how far he's pushed it, and that he might not want to push it that far with me, or other adults, or strangers on the street, is by sounding like I'm going to kill him. Physically, like I'm going to take his little neck in my hands and choke the life out of him. And so I feel like, oh my God, if somebody was walking down the street, and they heard the tone of my voice, and what I just said, they'd call the police. Of course. Absolutely. Well you know, I have had my children, when they were smaller, behave so badly at the playground. I was so angry at them. They were walking ahead of me, going home down the sidewalk. And I was walking behind them, giving them the finger behind their heads. And I'm sure people looked at me and thought, oh my God, take that woman's children away. And I do feel like really yelling can be really cathartic. And you know what? It scares the crap out of them. When I yell at my kids-- which I don't do that much-- their eyes get enormous. They can tell how furious you are. My children have said to me, you have no idea how terrifying you are when you're angry. You're so much scarier than Daddy. And I thought well, you know what? Good, good. I've cultivated that. But I feel-- you know, listening to the tape, listening to Alec Baldwin, thinking about the times I've blown up in a similar way at my kid, I feel like, please don't take this away from me. Because he has to understand that there are limits, that you can push someone too far. And he has to learn that. And if I can teach him that just through volume, maybe he won't get beat up by a cop one day. I believe that. I feel that way all the time, especially with my son. My impression of kids-- having been a parent, lo, these ten years now-- is that kids are sociopaths until you beat it out of them. Metaphorically, beat it out of them. All children start out as sociopaths. They all have to be civilized, as you said. And the only tool we have to do that with is language. Yeah. Or taking things away from them. Without that, without really giving them real limits, you can't expect them to behave. How are they supposed to know what to do? They're like little aliens dropped here, naked, no money, nothing. If anything, with the removal of violence from the parenting arsenal, we've had to ramp up the screaming, and yelling, and profanity. It soaks up the energy and anger that might otherwise have gone into a clean, quick, smack. My son, DJ, turned nine last March. He just started the fourth grade. He can be a handful. And every once in a while his teacher has to reign him in. I don't expect that DJ's fourth grade teacher would ever swear at him the way I swore at that kid in Berlin. I was an inexperienced, untrained substitute. She's a pro. But knowing what I know now about kids, if DJ's teacher ever reaches the breaking point, if she ever leans in close and whispers, "Knock it the [BEEP] off," just loud enough for DJ to hear, I'd back her up. Because however bad he can be, DJ needs to understand that she, that all adults, can be much, much worse. Dan Savage is the author of several books and host of the fantastically enjoyable Savage Love podcasts, which you can find on the internet with a Google search, Savage Love podcast. Or go to the iTunes store. OK, they rub up against each other, but then how does that little fish get inside her body? And I would think of it as a little fish, because you see it on the movie. And so how does it get inside her body? You know, it's just so confusing and vague. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, this is one of those things that you probably have never heard, and then as soon as somebody tells you, you're like, right, of course. You know how murder figures into so much of American pop culture? On crime shows, and thrillers, and video games and all kinds of stuff. Well, if you knew somebody who actually got murdered, it turns out you might not be into that stuff so much. I can't watch Law & Order. Not going to watch Law & Order or play Clue, or go to a murder mystery dinner theater. Rachel Howard's dad was killed when she was 10. And as an adult she's met a lot of people whose family members were killed. Though she says that some of them love shows like CSI and Murder She Wrote, any kind of murder show, officially, organizations like the group Parents of Murdered Children, take a stand against murder as entertainment. You know, at the Parents of Murdered Children Conference, they have certain presentations really down to give you a little punch in the gut. And one of them is that they have a whole one on this murder mystery dinners. And the way that they always do it is they say, let's just pretend that you were going to have a rape mystery dinner and you were going to show up and the rule of the game was going to be that someone's been raped, and we're all going to find the rapist. That wouldn't go over. Nobody would do it. Everybody would feel that that was deeply distasteful. Yeah, and creepy. Yeah, creepy. Why would you want to put yourself in that role? At these conferences for Parents of Murdered Children she says, everybody has a different way of dealing with their loss. Some meet with psychologists, some with crime investigators, some with psychics. But among the families who have a murder that is unsolved, it's common for them to be on a mission to find the killers and get justice. And this is where Rachel is different. A few years ago she wrote a memoir about her family and her dad's murder. The murder was never solved. The book is called The Lost Night, and she was invited to talk about it on a radio show called The Victim's Voice. And the woman who hosts this show, her daughter had been killed, and she was one of those parents who had made it her crusade to track down the killer at any cost. And then she was telling me the whole story about her daughter's murder and how it had been for her to never give up hope. And I have to have you on my show because it'll get the word out there. You never know what's going to come up. Who knows something. Maybe a reward will come through and I have lots of contacts in the local detectives office. And if you want me to talk to someone about your dad's case. And so we had this very awkward conversation. It was quite a long phone call and at every turn I was kind of saying, I'm not really interested in doing that. I don't really want to do that. I talked to the detectives and if something comes up, great. I'll be happy to know about it. But you know, this isn't really what I'm about. And she just seemed baffled. I tried to say that I had reached a point where it didn't really matter to me anymore, looking for who killed him. And that what I was doing now, he would rather see me not thinking about it every day and just moving on. Rachel did have years where she felt she should be trying to figure out who killed her dad. That if she didn't let it take over her life she was being selfish, it meant she didn't love him enough. And in writing her book she started to work the case. She talked to the police, tracked down leads, made freedom of information requests for documents, tried to convince detectives to release the case file to her. And after poking around like that for a while she asked a crime reporter to look at what she had. And he suggested that she give up. I remember sitting in the living room that day and having that conversation and feeling liberated. Why liberated? Because this guy was telling me, look, I've looked at a lot of these cases and it doesn't sound like you have a whole lot here. And my first reaction was, good. I don't have to do this anymore. That's it. This guy just told me it's hopeless. Great. I'm free. I've done everything possible. And do you worry about how heartless that might sound? I mean, why does it sound heartless, though? Because it has nothing to do with how much I love my father. You know, why should that sound heartless? If you want to talk me about my father, I love him. I'll tell you all kinds of things about him. But why should it sound heartless to not have to keep looking for who killed him? It took her years to get to this point, where she felt so resolved about all this. In the Atlantic Monthly years ago, a writer named Eric Schlosser wrote, "Americans are fascinated by murder and murderers, but not by the families of people who are killed. One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality, they're far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt." Rachel says that she first read that when she was in college and she felt for the first time that there were other people like her, going through what she went through. That this wasn't like losing a parent any other way. You know, everyone loses parents. You know, someone tells you, oh, my father died five years ago. Oh, I'm so sorry. That must have been very difficult. But you know that that's what we all have to go through so that person will work through it. It's not that way with murder. There's no guarantee that that person's going to work through it. They could be ruined by it forever. This brings us to today's radio show, people doing their damnedest not to get ruined forever by a murder in the family. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today, How to Rest in Peace. Our show today in two acts. In act one, a son who knows that there's something wrong with him, something he has to fix when it comes to his mother's murder, and his feelings about it. In act two, a different son immerses himself in the facts of his mother's death, the cold, hard reality of it, starting long before she actually dies. Stay with us. Act one. Well, we begin with this story in which a man tries to solve his problems using, among other things, videotape. Our reporter for this story is Brett Martin. One day in March of 2005, a documentary film crew showed up at the house of a woman named Sumter Adolf in Westchester County, New York. Well, should we-- I don't know. Should we sit down and talk? What's best in this situation? You're the director. Well, we really wanted to talk to you about sort of your experiences in the house. I don't know. Mrs. Adolf had lived in the house for 21 years. It's an ordinary enough suburban home at the end of a long driveway with grey aluminum siding, patches of woods on either side, and an open field out back. She and her family love the house, but at some point they began noticing strange occurrences. They'd hear moaning and sighing. Sometimes the dishwasher would start by itself. I wouldn't even say I was cognizant of things until my daughter-- I'm going to say five or six years ago-- woke up screaming in the night. Mommy, Mommy, come, come, come. There's someone in my room. There's someone in my room. Turn on the light, there's somebody in my room. And she was under the covers terrified. I mean I've never-- And she was 11 or 12? She must have been. On the couch, sitting across from Mrs. Adolf in her living room is 35 year old Jason Minter, the director of this documentary. Next to Jason is his younger sister, Maggie. 27 years ago, Jason and Maggie's mother was murdered while visiting the house, along with another mom, the woman who then lived here. Jason and Maggie, then age six and three, were listening in the next room. I didn't really start to relate it all until we spoke. Yeah, I mean. But a friend told me to bring a candle from church home. That a friend of his had had somebody living in their house and they burned a candle and said, go to the light. You know, it's OK. And so, as I do these things, I say, I am a mother and I understand your frustration, your anguish of leaving your kids. So it's OK. And I would try to reassure whichever mom is here. I know, I feel the same way. I'm sorry. Eventually, Jason and Maggie venture upstairs to the room where the murders took place. I don't remember this half of the house. I remember this. I remember going up those stairs, of course. The last time they were here, the room was a dark-paneled boys room, but now it's clearly the room of a teen girl. A border of lavender flowers runs around the walls, there's a horse figurine, and a boom box. And next to the door hangs an enormous collection of prize ribbons. The room is filled with sunlight. I remember them coming to the door and the next thing I remember is sitting up on the bed. You remember that? And I remember them putting the gun to your head. Yes, I remember that as well. You remember the running from the house and so on? I remember following you to the bedroom. And you remember-- yeah. You still have those memories? Is this too difficult? The weird thing in this scene is that while it's Maggie who starts to cry, it's Jason who you can't take your eyes off of. He's stiff and awkward, unsure of how to stand or where to look. If he's not breaking down, it doesn't seem to be because he's bearing up manfully under the strain. It's that he seems altogether distant feeling nothing, but clearly trying to. Does the house trigger things, being in the house or no? It's all a little weird. We've never talked about it before, ever, even amongst ourselves. That's a whole nother-- because we grew up really not discussing this at all. You know, we didn't discuss with my family because our family just wanted to get over it. That's why you have to do this now. I've always thought that if I could understand everything and see everything with my own eyes again, and so on, and see how things really are and look at everything that I would feel much better. I'd feel like, you know what? I've confronted it. I can put it behind me now. Is that where you're coming from too, or no? Well, I don't know that I feel like I need to confront it as much as you do. I had no idea whether I would break down when I walked into that bedroom or I'd feel nothing, and I didn't feel a lot. That's for sure. It's two years after the footage of Maggie and Jason's trip to the house was shot and we're in the apartment Jason shares with his wife in Inwood, at the very top of Manhattan. It seems like my sister has a much better handle on how to sort of deal with this than I do, or she seems to be dealing with it in a more-- what's the word? In a more natural way, I guess, than I have dealt with it. I think that's a better-- What does that mean? My sister seemed to in a way, cry on cue. I mean she seemed to react where she presumably should react when she did. She broke down and I did not. Did you ever cry? Over my mother's death, or just in general? Yeah over your mother's death. No, I don't I ever have. I can't recall ever. No. This has bothered Jason for almost 30 years, that he never had the emotions he should have had. That he never really mourned his mother's death. That's why he revisited the house and why he's filming the documentary. Making the film has become a quest in which he's resolved to revisit and catalog every aspect of the day she died. Surely something, some detail, or person, or location, when looked at head on, even relived, will trigger the feelings he craves. The logic of this approach becomes clear when you realize that, for many years, he revisited nothing about the murder. All he knew was what he remembered from that day. And let's start there. A warning: this gets kind of violent. Back in 1977, the Minters were friends with another family in the neighborhood with kids the same age, a boy who was six and a girl who was three. On that afternoon, March 2, Jason had the boy over to play while Maggie went to the neighbors. It was getting late, time for the friend to go home, and for Jason's mom to pick up Maggie. So we got in the car and we drove up to the house and there was a blue van sitting in the driveway. I think I remember my mother asking the boy if there was an electrician or plumber maybe at the house. It looked like sort of a utility vehicle. My mother and the boy walked into the house and I sat in the car alone until a guy came outside and I just remember a guy wearing like a ski cap and started letting the air out of the tires while I was sitting in the car and I thought, well, is he-- maybe this van is related to some sort of auto mechanic or something and he's doing something to the car. And then he snatched my mother's purse out of the front seat and said, hey, kid, your mother wants you. And I followed him up into the house. We walked in and the house looked like a hurricane had hit the inside of it. It was completely destroyed. The guy took me up the stairs and into a room where my mother and the other woman were sitting on a bed. My sister was sitting on a bed with her friend and my friend was also sitting there as well. The little girls were crying and the boy was trying to calm them down. I remember one of the guys calling my mother or the other woman a bitch. I was silent for a while and then I couldn't hold it in any longer. I just became more and more alarmed. I started to talk. What's going on? What is this? Who are you? And one of the guys took a, I guess it was a 22 caliber pistol and cocked the trigger and pressed the gun against my nose and said, "Shut the [BLEEP] up." And then I was quiet. And then I remember the men looking in, brushing a shower curtain aside with a pistol, like looking into the tub. And they went through an adjoining bathroom into another bedroom with the women. They closed the door and the next thing I knew-- I thought I heard only four shots. Of course, now I realize I was 14 or something. But we heard these shots and then we heard the van screech away and then knew that these guys were gone. Went into the room and saw-- I went in first. I told everyone to stay there and saw the two women who were both-- well, my mother was lying face down. I guess the other one was on her side. And there was blood I recall, but not a lot. It was clear to me that they had been shot in the head, or at least my mother had. But it wasn't clear that she was dead. I remember the other boy coming in, lifting his mother's arm up, and it just dropping. And that's when I ran from the house. Jason ran through the woods to the closest neighbor's house. At first, the family there didn't believe him. Then the other kids came running up behind and the police were called. Two days later, three men would be arrested in what would turn out to be a burglary gone terribly wrong. The night of the murders, Jason and his father slept together in a room at the neighbor's while police cars came and went next door. In the night, he listened while his father wept. Nobody ever actually told Jason that his mother was dead. In fact, when he'd asked the cop at the scene of the crime if she was OK, the cop said, sure. Jason wasn't taken to the burial. Finally, he got the idea that she would never be coming back. And that's pretty much where his information stopped for the next dozen years. I should say at the outset that in the years following the murder, Jason was sent to the parade of therapists you'd expect. His father seems to have tried to do everything he could do, given the fact that he was going through a devastating trauma of his own. But none of it gave Jason what he was looking for, a way to grieve his mother's death. So when he was 19, he took a train to White Plains where the killers had been tried. At the courthouse he'd photocopied the police reports and then he sat and devoured them on the way back to Grand Central. For the first time, he learned the names of his mother's killers. He learned that only two of the men had participated in the murders, while the third man, James Walls, who Jason had seen letting the air out of his mother's tires, had waited in the van, not knowing what was going on. He also learned more disturbing details. Both his mother and the other woman had been raped before being killed. His mother had been shot three times. The first was to the head and likely killed her instantly. The other woman, not as lucky, had been shot some 11 times. While all of this was horrifying for Jason, it was also, oddly satisfying. For the first time, he felt like he was getting a grasp on the murder. And this is where the idea of the documentary came to him. Under the pretense of shooting the film, he could accomplish what time hadn't and what therapy hadn't. He would continue to work his way through the case bit by bit, like a brass rubbing, until finally the picture was complete and he could move on. All right. I don't know. I don't see any semblance of any-- well, here's a number. We went to a district attorney's office, which one I'm not allowed to say. I wasn't supposed to do this at all, but they were sort of cutting me a break. But anyway, I went to a district attorney's office and looked through, I think there were six or nine banker's boxes full of evidence. Everything from the police reports to crime scene photos, to autopsy photos, and so on. And methodically, I went through them one by one. Oh, this is Shirley Abraham's testimony. Very interesting. In the boxes were many letters. Letters from one of the murderers, Willie Profit, nicknamed "Scrap," to his girlfriend at the time. And there was a letter from James Walls, the guy who had stayed in the van to the same woman, whose name was Shirley. In its, Walls pleads with Shirley to corroborate his story that he didn't commit any of the violence that day. He also narrates the murders from his perspective. Another warning: here it gets more graphic. A few seconds, I heard a woman's voice say, it must be the furniture people or something. I heard Scraps say, hold it, bitch. And I saw another little boy in the lady's car. I then told the boy his mother wanted him. He got out of the car and went inside. I then went and picked the lady's pocketbook off the front seat and put it in the van. I waited in the van about 10 minutes, then got out. I walked in the front of van thinking that Scrap and Sammy were tying the two ladies up. I'm still in front of the van and that's when I hear the shots. Then I was about to jump in the van and drive away. As I was about to do so, Scrap and Sammy came running out of the house, hopped in the van, Scrap said to me he's going to drive, so he did. He was laughing and acting like a madman, and so was Sammy. I asked them, did you guys really shoot those ladies? And they both said, yes. I said to them, why? I think Scraps said, because the lady saw their faces. And then Sammy said to me, D, I don't know that little black had a long black [BLEEP]. And then Scraps said, boy, I [BLEEP] out of that bitch, D. And I said, what? And Sammy said, yeah, D. He [BLEEP] out of her. And then Sammy says, he [BLEEP] the fat bitch. And then I said to myself, these guys are made man-- madmen. And Shirley, keep in mind that these are the facts and the truth, and the only words of truth. Because remember, I was at the scene of the crime. Be cool and keep your head up, D.D. Walls. That's quite a letter. I feel like I should have a round of applause or something for reading that. Jason continues going through boxes, avoiding the folder of crime scene photos until his friend who's behind the camera prods him along. Look at the pictures. You, what are you, Oprah? Going to make me look at something. I mean, look, I'm getting to horrible stuff now. Photo exhibits. Oh, Jesus. Well, I guess we had to get to it sometime. This, I believe, is my mother and this is what I saw that day. And I think I mentioned that I thought she was still alive. I mean, as you can see the wounds are from a small caliber gun. To a kid that didn't look like a really big deal. I don't find it all that disturbing. No, I really don't. I mean, first of all I'm not seeing my mother's face in these pictures. She's lying face down. I don't know. I'm not getting that-- Jesus, what is this? What the hell is this stuff now? They turn the bodies over? So how did Jason get here? How did he stay numb for so long that he needs to stare at pictures of his mother's corpse to try to provoke a reaction? Not only was his mother's death never discussed while he was growing up, neither was her life. Soon after the murders, Jason's father remarried, to a woman who, for motives that seem to be a mix of well intentioned and kind of crazy, set about erasing all the physical evidence that Jason's mother had ever existed. Jason doesn't even know how many letters and photos and other personal items his new stepmother threw out. But he knows that all the gifts his mother had given him disappeared. His father divorced his second wife and married a third. Jason developed a severe case of separation anxiety. The fear that he was going to lose his father too. He also decided that it was up to him to see that nothing like the crime ever happened again. Like sort of security obsession where I built locks for doors and windows in our house, and drilled holes in things, and built weapons, and did all sorts of things to protect the home, protect the family. I built weapons and I hid them all over the property and all over the house. What kind of weapons did you build? I had all sorts of things. I had bats with nails sticking out of them, to makeshift morning stars, to swords, to spears, to clubs. I had an arsenal of BB gun and pellet guns. And these were spread out around your house? Well, yes. Yes, they were. When I got a little older I set up a really primitive closed circuit TV in my room. I had a card table and an old black and white television sitting on it. Then I had probably one of the first affordable consumer video cameras to ever come out, it was sitting in the hallway just pointing at the stairs. And I would just sit there staring at the stairs with a bunch of BB guns on the table. You would spend hours doing that? I would spend hours staring at it, waiting for somebody to just come-- basically-- make my day. At one point, I was building-- I had seen Ben or Willard on television and I thought that I could raise rats and train them to sort of protect me and the family, and sort of do my bidding. So I had this plan to go to the pet store and buy some rats. And I started building a pen down in one of the old stables and my father caught me hauling a big door down. He said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm going to set up a pen to raise rats. And he just looked at me and said, no you're not. I mean, I'm curious that you say-- it sounds like your sense of your dad's response to all this was that he was annoyed by it. He was annoyed by it. And you know, I don't remember the specific incident. I mean, I think I was putting maybe a new lock on the basement door or something and drilling holes. And he came home from work and caught me doing this. I said, well, how can you not be afraid? How can you not be nervous? And he said, because lightning doesn't strike the same place twice. And that annoyed me because I just didn't buy that at all. For all the confusion and trauma of his youth, Jason did manage to graduate from high school, go to film school, get married, and basically take care of himself. In fact, it's impossible to tell Jason's story without at least mentioning what he does for a living. For the past nine years or so, he's worked for the TV show The Sopranos. First as a location manager, essentially driving through suburban neighborhoods looking for houses where he could stage murders. And then as an associate producer and assistant to the show's creator, David Chase. I'm not the first person to have drawn a connection between his childhood experiences and the fact that he wound up spending almost a decade helping to recreate graphic, often random and senseless violence on screen. I'm also not the first person to have Jason shut me down. Jason says it has nothing to do with his childhood. He didn't create the series. He didn't write the series. Sometimes a good job is just a good job. So on and off for years, Jason was doing one of the few things you can do to get over a trauma. He returned to the details of what happened. He immersed himself in them, filming all sorts of people and locations. And when it failed to deliver the emotional catharsis he was looking for, he became gripped by a different goal. He doesn't just want to revisit his mother's murder, he also wants to re-solve it. Never mind that the police solved it years ago and that the three men involved were all serving sentences of 25 years to life. Jason's totally serious about this and spent probably a third of our interview on the subject. For a long time, he's had the suspicion that maybe the murders weren't entirely random. That the killers didn't just happen upon that house by accident, but were sent there to kill a particular person. He even has a theory about who and why, a theory I can't actually repeat on the radio because it's probably libelous. He talks about interviewing up to 30 more people. From assistant DAs to distant relatives of the killers, almost all of them to help make his case. And when the Department of Corrections agreed to set up a meeting in the medium security wing of Attica with James Walls, the guy who had stayed in the van, Jason had visions of finding some kind of new clue to support his theory. Would you be Mr. Walls? Mr. Walls, I'm Jason Minter. How are you? I'm fine. Last time you saw me I had hair. So did you for that matter. Yes I did. For the record, yes, the last time they saw each other was the day of the murders. This joke should give you a sense of the tenor of the conversation, which is held in an empty prison cafeteria. Jason's all business. Walls is a middle-aged black man with a neat moustache and oversized round wire glasses. He slides back and forth between expressing regret for his involvement in the crime and self pity over the unfortunate coincidence-- almost 30 years ago-- of running into the murderers as they were on their way to what they said would be a simple breaking and entering. Meanwhile, Jason has his gumshoe hat on and hammers away at the point he's most interested in. Did the other two men know where they were going, or did they choose a random home? What did they say? Do you remember specifically? Did they say they were going on a B&E, or was it something else? Did somebody tell them about-- No, they was conversing about a breaking and entering, but they didn't know where they was going as far as what I understood. So there's no chance of them knowing, there was no chance of them targeting any of these houses, do you think? They couldn't have known about this, any of these houses? I don't think so. You don't think so? No. Because the way they was acting inside the van when they were-- they was talking more or less like pick and choose. So you really don't think they knew where they were going? No. Because like I was saying. after they made an approach to one house and the woman came to the door and the dog was barking, they sort of like backed up. Because when they saw the big dog, like I said, they sort of backed up and jumped right back into the van and took off. And they was talking [BLEEP] about, yeah, man, you see that big ass [BLEEP] dog, man. I ain't [BLEEP] going in. It was one of those things where, let's go over here. None of this could have come as a surprise to Jason because everyone tells him his theory is almost certainly false. Including the cops who investigated the case who Jason interviewed. When pressed, even Jason admits there's not much evidence to back him up. Still, it's easy to understand the allure of the idea that the crimes weren't just a random incident. Imagine going through life not just knowing, but really knowing that your life can implode in the worst possible way at any moment. Imagine internalizing the notion that every little decision, like driving over to the neighbor's house to drop off a friend, could put you in the path of disaster. If that sense of a random universe were gone, it might allow Jason to stand down his defenses. And not just metaphorically. Jason's apartment features a level of security that's excessive even by New York standards. Three dead bolts and a heavy burglar bar are on the door. Jason says he'd own a gun if New York state didn't make it such a pain to get a license. Instead, scattered about are a collection of swords, including a samurai number that Jason keeps by the bed. There's also a sai, then an ax that Jason insists are antiques rather than weapons, but look like they'd probably do in a pinch. Nothing Jason has done has gotten him any closer to getting rid of those weapons, let alone moving past his mother's death. And lately, he's slowed down his investigation of the murder night. He has permission from the prison system to go see the two killers themselves, but he hasn't been able to bring himself to pay a visit. Are you at all afraid that you're going to some day know everything and not feel any better? Yeah, certainly. I wouldn't be any worse off than I am now for that matter. I mean I'm certainly a functional adult. Well, a functional immature adult. You seem quite functional. I mean, as far as I can tell. As far as certainly on the scale of external problems you could have. You are married. You've held a job for a long time. You're starting a business. You have a nice house, two cats. You are capable of social interaction. I mean, these are all things-- so what is your problem? Well, are you asking what I hope to accomplish by-- Well what is missing? What is the drive? Is this for you or is it for your mother? My hope is that I'm able to stop or to cease to obsess over that day. I hope to not think about the murder 26 times a day. Maybe once a day or once every two days. To stop sort of obsessing about it. And here, three hours into our interview, an interview that began with him declaring that if he just knew everything about the murder night he could move on, we get to this-- You know, I looked at crime scene photos, I went back into that room. I talked to one of the guys and where did it get me? I just feel like I haven't accomplished the task yet. Has it occurred to you that maybe it's not that you haven't done enough, but that the exercise is flawed? That has occurred to me. Absolutely. Now I feel like I wonder whether I should just, really just intensely try to focus on my mother and forget-- not forget about the crime, obviously. But try to stay away from that as much as possible, mentally and to just not make the rest of the film. About a year ago, Jason found a box of old cookbooks that belonged to his mother in his father's garage. Somehow they'd been overlooked by his first stepmother when she was purging the house of Bonnie Minter's things. You know, yeah, I found old recipes that were stuffed into these pages that weren't looked at that she stuffed in there 30 years ago. That's when it occurred to me that you've never really thought of your mother as a real person. She's just been this event or this horrible thing that happened to you. Not that she was a horrible thing, but she was a victim of this horrible thing that, in some ways, has defined my whole life. Yeah, that wall is OK. Most of it's going to come down. It's just a big garage here. But you can see the potential. When The Sopranos ended, Jason decided to get out of television and open a restaurant. He leased a corner storefront not far from his apartment and negotiated a good deal to buy the tables, chairs, and service ware of Vesuvius, the Soprano's fictional Italian joint. One clear memory Jason has of his mother is of her in the kitchen. He remembers long strands of fresh pasta slung between chairs throughout the house. And finding the cookbooks made him think that cooking could be a way to connect with her memory. There will be a big, wine, beer bar over here. Sort of an open kitchen. Right now the space is raw and empty, but it's a beautiful spot looking out on a green stretch of trees and park. Jason and his wife have put a huge Halloween display in one window for the neighborhood kids. It would be glib to say that the restaurant is the opposite of the documentary. That one looks back and the other forward. One focuses on what's lost, the other on building something new. That one's about death and the other life. It's just too simple to be true. But standing there in the space, listening to Jason describe his vision for a homey neighborhood hangout, seeing people stop by to ask when he'll finally open, it does seem a little true. As he's locking up, a boy and his father come walking out of the park. The kid runs up to the door, tries to push his way in. Not quite yet, Jason says hopefully. Soon. Brett Martin, he's a correspondent for GQ magazine. In the two years since we first broadcast this story, Jason has opened his restaurant, Indian Road Cafe. It's thriving. His mom's murderer agreed to be interviewed for Jason's movie, but with the restaurant so busy, the film's on hold for now. Coming up, your mom calls you up and says, I want to rehearse my own suicide. And you're a good kid, you want your mom to be happy, and you get in your car and you go help her. 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, "How to Rest in Peace." Well, so far today, we've heard from people who have had a really hard time getting over the violent death of a parent. Now in act two, we turn to somebody who's actually kind of at peace with his mother's death, which when you hear how she died, is kind of amazing. Her plan was to take the whole bottle of pills sitting in her bed with a plastic bag ready and a scarf ready to wrap around her neck to seal the bag. And that she would take the pills, put the plastic bag on, put the scarf around, and lie down. And that's what she did. We'll call this guy Edward. And when his mother killed herself at 79, she wasn't depressed, she wasn't sick with some terrible illness. No, she was lively, funny, social, able to take care of herself. But she planned for her own death for decades ever since she saw what happened to her mom when her mom got old. Her mother suffered from dementia, became confused and incoherent. Edward's mom had a hard time even visiting her mom during those years. Also, she hated doctors. Hated them. Hated hospitals too. It was a strong, gut feeling on her part that this was terrible. She couldn't stand the thought of seeing people in hospitals with tubes coming out of them. And she was determined never to be in that environment if she could possibly help it. And she and my father-- but really at her initiation-- promised each other that they would help each other. That they would not let each other suffer in old age. And they bought the book, Final Exit, by Derek Humphrey, which talked about this. They were counting on each other. And at some point she gets you involved in this, right? She got me most involved when my father died. What she asked me to do was to basically, to play the part that my father would have done for her. But he was dead. And I felt it was an obligation to do this for her. Did she say it so flatly as, I want you to do what your father would have done? I forget how she phrased it. She was really asking me not to interfere, not to oppose, to support her in this. She didn't want me to help her. She was very concerned about something happening to me. She didn't want me to be in trouble. She didn't even want me to be embarrassed. She said, the ambulance is going to come and the police will come and the neighbors will see. It'll be bad for your reputation. How can I do this? So I was in the rather odd position of having to reassure her that she could do this without embarrassing me. So I was in this double situation of not wanting to encourage her, but also wanting to comfort her so that she doesn't feel anxious about the consequences for me or anybody else. But that's the thing that I was wondering, is it seems like you're in a very delicate position because you don't want to be encouraging her, I assume, to kill herself. That's correct. I didn't want to encourage her, but I didn't want to refuse to discuss it with her, to help her emotionally go through the process of talking about it and dealing with the preparation for it. It's interesting. I think a lot of people are so uncomfortable talking about death with someone else. Was it hard for you? It wasn't that hard, and I got used to it. I had a lot of preparation. This was nothing new. And she was very focused on this end for well over 20 years. It was just an established fact. This is what she wanted. This is the way I could love her. This is what she really asked me for. She didn't ask me for anything. This is what she asked me for. She used to say that she did not want to live to be very old. She said 80. That's far enough. Why do I have to live past 80? She would go into this stuff. Why live past 80? Right. I don't want to get so old. Why do people want to live so long? What's the point? Did she have the experience of observing herself getting more forgetful and feeling more confused and she knew that she was experiencing dementia, the early stages of it, and she remembered her mom? I observed for the last 10 years, a slow deterioration. She had been always a big cook and taking cooking lessons, and Chinese, and all sorts of things. And at the very end, about a month before she died, she had asked my wife to come down and she said she couldn't make a cup of coffee. She just couldn't make a decent cup of coffee. She was really frustrated she had to go out for coffee. And so she asked my wife to come down and show her what was going wrong. And my wife spent about an hour trying to explain the process of using a French press, which is what she was using. Which is about as simple a way to make coffee as you can have. Right. You take the grounds, you put it in, you pour the water on top. You wait, and then you push the thing down. Exactly. It was a real struggle for her to get that. And I think that's the kind of thing that she did all the time. These kinds of things could all of a sudden become an incredible burden to her. Now one of the things I wanted to ask you about that I know you went through is that your mom would rehearse. Like she would run through scenarios and drag you into this? Well, she did a test. She knew that she had to get some sleeping pills. So she basically went to two different doctors and lied and said that she couldn't sleep and needed it. She took a couple of these and I was there. She wanted to see what would happen. And she took two of these and she was out in a matter of a couple of a couple of minutes. She started rehearsing because she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to do it. Or she wouldn't remember to do it. Or she wouldn't remember what to do. So she would ask me to come down and watch her while she did this. And so what was it like? It was weird. It was definitely weird. And so, wait. So you'd be at home and she'd call you up and she'd say, like, can you come on over tonight, I want to rehearse the thing. I want to practice. Really? That's it? Exactly. There would be some joking about it and that kind of stuff. And she was not somber. She wasn't depressed. And so you would like order in some Chinese and go over to your mom's house. Maybe she invited me for dinner. She would make the dinner and she would invite me for dinner, and then she would do the practice. And she also wrote out a note to be prepared. She wanted to be prepared, so she wrote out a note explaining what she was doing in a more lucid moment when she could do that. And she got her things that she wanted to use. You know, the scarf, and the bag, and the note, and she actually put together the books, like the Final Exit book and I think she had some other books. She placed it all out, so that anybody coming, and the police, I had to call the police. And when they came, this was all laid out. It's interesting. It isn't just her rehearsing herself, it's almost like she was rehearsing you too, so you could go through your feelings when it would finally happen. I think so. Now legally, could she call you and say OK, I'm doing it today and have you know? Everybody knew. The family came. She did this at the end of August and over the summer her sister and brothers came, my cousins came, and friends came to pay a visit. And I was calling people and explaining that she's planning to do this and it's not going to be that long, and maybe you would like to come and visit her. And people did come. With her brother, who was the last one, she played a total game with him. He was opposed to her doing it. He thought she was depressed. And he thought that she just needed to get out. So he wanted to invite her down to New York City. They'd go into the city and do things that she used to like to do. And go to the museums and go out and so he was trying to encourage her to do that thinking that she must be depressed. And she said, sure. And they made plans for her to go down to the city the next week. And when he left she called me and said she's going to do it now. She said that if I don't do it now, I will not be able to do it. Did she do it right after the brother was there because she realized that she was weakening? That she could weaken? She could just-- I don't think so. I think she played a total game with him. She would not want to hurt his feelings while he was there. She would just play along. He's telling her these things and she would say, oh, sure. That sounds lovely. But she would know inside of herself, this isn't at all what she wants. And I think that she knew that she was really losing her ability to organize her thoughts enough to be able to carry this out. And so then you have to hang up the phone, and then you're sitting in your house and you know that she's in her house and she's doing this thing right then? No, I went down. She asked me to come down. Oh, she did? Yeah. So I went down. And we talked about it. And she was determined to do it. And she got all her stuff ready and we said goodbye, and I left. And it was very odd, me leaving knowing what she's doing. Where'd you go? I just drove around. I went shopping. I went to the supermarket. I didn't know what to do. I mean I didn't sit there wringing my hands. It was somewhat surreal, the experience. It just seems so sad that she has to be alone at that moment. It was terrible. It seems like that's the moment where of all moments she would want somebody with her to hold her hand and comfort her. Right. That was probably the worst part of it, that she had to do it alone. Me and her other family members could not be there because we live in a society that does not respect people's desire to control the end of their life. So you go back into the house. Was there a part of you where you thought, well, maybe she didn't do it? My fear was that she didn't die. That I would go in and should be still alive. She had taken this overdose of medication and somehow she was still alive and what was I going to do then? I mean the worst thing, the last thing she would want me to do is to call an ambulance and take her to the emergency room. I mean, that would be the last thing she would want. She did me a great favor by being successful. It just seems so terrible. You walk in and it seems so-- the fact that she's there with a bag over her head. Yes. It was odd. And it was an image that stays with me. I honestly didn't sit in the room for a long time. It wasn't something that I wanted to have imprinted on me any more than it had to be. And it was very emotional, obviously, to see her dead. And I sat down and I cried at that moment as I am now. Then I had to walk down to the police and tell them that she had done it and they came. And they took it seriously. I told them the whole story. I told them that the relatives had all come and talked about it. Everybody knew what was going on. And they took evidence. They took the glass that she had used. And they took her note and got fingerprints and all that kind of stuff. But she had handled everything. She had done it all. Do you have a sense that your mother tamed death? That she made it less frightening for herself by going into the details and thinking it through to this degree? I think she did. I think that would be accurate. I think that she had the normal fear of death. Fear of unknown, fear of also losing life. And I think by talking about it is the way that she convinced herself. I've got to say it seems very rare for somebody to get to that point and to come to grips with death in such a thoughtful way. I think it is. You don't hear about it frequently. People who are involved in assisted suicide are usually people who have objectively certifiable problems. What's interesting talking to you about it is how at peace you are with it. How there's no ambiguity that it was the right thing. I think I'm expressing the determination that she had. She was her own unique person. This is what she wanted. This is the way she thought about life. My son had children just a few years after she died and she would have very much like to have seen that. But that year, I think within six months of her death, her sister was killed in an automobile accident, and I think that she would have been devastated by that. So who can say what she should have done or not done? Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Bruce Wallace and Aaron Scott. Seth Lind's our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's come up with a new scheme to solve his personnel problems. All the employees that he's unhappy with, all of us who don't do what he wants, he's lining up some replacements. And I thought that I could raise rats and train them to sort of do my bidding. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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Some businesses and some businessmen just press things further than other people are willing to go. John Nash Pickle grew up poor on a farm in Mississippi, learned to work with steel, started his own company in 1972 with a few thousand dollars. And he did well. The John Pickle Company became a multimillion-dollar business based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They manufactured these huge 200-ton steel tanks that are used in the oil business and other big industrial processes. Until the 1990s, reporter John Bowe says, when Pickle found himself competing against foreign companies who were stealing a lot of his potential customers. Even down the road, a few miles from him, they won a contract that he was bidding for on a pressure tank for some utility company literally 10 miles from his factory. So he saw these companies coming in from thousands of miles away and he thought, well, he just couldn't keep up, because they didn't have all these pollution regulations and taxes and stuff that poor American manufacturers like himself had to deal with. So at first, Pickle decided to do what so many US companies have done. He'd open his own factory overseas. He'd manufacture his steel tanks near the oil fields in Kuwait, in a joint venture with the Kuwaitis. And the way these kinds of factories are run in Kuwait, apparently, the workers aren't Kuwaiti or American. They bring in labor from the Philippines and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Pickle hired a recruiting agency in India to find him qualified workers, which they did. They sent two groups of workers, 27 of them in all, to Tulsa for a few months training in Pickle's main plant. And then they were shipped out to Kuwait. And this right here is where our story really begins. In October of 2001, Pickle brought over a third group of Indian workers, 52 men. And these men say Pickle did not hire them to go to Kuwait. No, no, no. They say he was doing something a little more spectacular. He wasn't just going to run an overseas factory in Kuwait. They say he also wanted to run an overseas factory right here on US soil, inside his own Tulsa, Oklahoma plant. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. You know that idea, "It's not personal, it's business," that what a company does is all about trying to make a sale, trying to stay afloat, trying to respond to market forces in the best way possible. It is not about anybody's feelings. Well, today we have two stories about the places that market competition leads two very different firms. One of them, John Pickle's company, makes industrial equipment. The other, in Boise, Idaho, makes local TV newscasts. And in both of these stories you'll hear, things could not be more personal. There is nothing cut and dried and businesslike about any of this, for the people in the companies and for the people who surround the companies. Our show today in two acts. Act One, Cowboys and Indians. Act Two, The Race to Number Two. Stay with us. Act One. Cowboys and Indians. Now, we know a lot about the person who's at the heart of this story, John Nash Pickle. But you're not going to be hearing from him directly. That's because this story involves a court case that he's been found on the wrong side of, and his attorneys have advised him not to talk to the press anymore about it. Fortunately, before he got that advice, he'd already talked to a bunch of reporters, including John Bowe, who tells his story in his book, Nobodies, and who put us onto this story. Now, as John Bowe explains in his book, back in 2001, John Pickle had an Indian company recruit 52 men for him to bring over to the United States. And all of them swore in affidavits that they were promised that they were going to come to the US, they were going to be working for at least two years, they were going to be given medical insurance, driver's licenses. They would eventually be given the means to obtain a green card and get their families over there. John Pickle himself says, you're going to hire for the John Pickle company in America. He said that it's going to be in the United States. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] had a great job, what Indians call a permanent job. It's like a tenured position, but in a factory. He had over a decade's experience when he took a position with John Pickle. He also had a new baby. Pickle flew to India himself to interview the recruits, shake their hands, make small talk about their families. He could be charming. And the Indians were impressed that the owner of the operation would go to the trouble to meet them. He mentioned about the good accommodation [? of the ?] facility. And you guys have internet facility and the phone facility. You guys have 24-hour-- all the channels you can watch. Especially he mentioned about the different channels, you know, bad channels and stuff. Bad channels? Oh. He mentioned about porno movies. And I didn't know, regularly, at that time, what was a porno. So he said, it's bad channels. And you can watch. But before their plane left the ground, a few things happened that made the men kind of nervous. They noticed that the visas to go to America that Pickle had gotten them were only for six months. And the visas classified them as trainees, not as real workers. They were told this was just a formality. It was just a month after September 11th, and this was the only way to get them visas. It would be fixed later, which seemed reasonable to them. And a couple days later, they were in Oklahoma. Again, John Bowe: And of course, they were surprised when they got to the factory in Tulsa and there is John Pickle's wife. She collected their passports as they left the bus. And some of them had the temerity to ask, well, why are you taking our passport? And again they were assured, this is just a formality. Since September 11th, blah blah blah, we have to do this. And then they're shown to makeshift barracks that have been built for them inside the factory. Dozens of bunk beds squeezed together, barely room between them to walk. The walls were flimsy partitions that didn't reach the ceiling. A bathroom on the other side. Again, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. My bed was very close to where people were taking showers and they go to the restroom. And I was sleeping in the nighttime, and the people would come through from the night shift. And they'd come about 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock. And they'd take a shower. All the water comes out from their wall and spraying on you and makes so much noise. And I told him, I cannot sleep here. And they said, no, we don't have any more beds. You have to sleep here. They put the numbers on the beds. So he said, this is your number. You've got to go there and sleep. You don't like it? Go home. We have tickets ready to pack you up. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] had 18 years experience as a metal fabricator when he came to work for Pickle. He says that, although he was surprised at the living conditions of the factory, mostly he stayed pretty hopeful. He was in America. Soon enough he'd get to bring over his family. We just lived there, because we thought, in the beginning, that that was just a temporary arrangement, because Mr. Pickle must be working on that, to find a good apartment or something. So I gave my benefit of doubt every time. I think good. Because I am a good-hearted man, I always think positive. But it wasn't just that these men wanted it to turn out happily for them at John Pickle's plant, they needed it to. Most of them had taken a huge gamble, coming to America. Hoping to transform their family's lives and move here permanently someday, they gave up jobs back in India that would be hard to get back, and many of them had gone deep into debt to come here. The recruiting agency in India charged each of them a fee that amounted to a small fortune for them, $2,200 each. And they'd taken out high-interest loans, sold their houses, borrowed life savings from family members. If this didn't work out, if they got sent back early, they'd have a hard time paying that money back. Again, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Yeah, that's a lot of money for me at that time. And if I lose that money, it would be a problem for me, because I borrowed that money from my mother-in-law. How long would it take you to earn that in India? Oh, there? Maybe 10 years. 10 years? Yeah, 10 years to save that much money. Because how much did your job pay, say, in one year? Maybe $200 per month. As the weeks passed, things worsened. There rarely seemed to be enough food, for one thing. And they were making just $2 to $3 an hour, less than they'd been promised back in India, and half the minimum wage. And they were working side by side with men doing the same jobs for as much as $17 an hour. The company sacked its janitors, and managers tried to force the Indians to clean toilets. As skilled workers with decades of experience, the Indians were indignant about this. Nearly all of them refused. There was other menial work. Five of them moved a septic tank. A few of them did yard work. And one of the most interesting things about this story is the possibility-- and this is a serious possibility-- that company officials and Pickle truly thought they were doing nothing wrong. Again, reporter John Bowe. He really didn't think, I'm just a guy trying to save a buck. He thought, I'm a guy who likes to help Indians because they're starving. Now, never mind that he always refers to them as "the India boys" or "them Indian boys." He told me all these stories about how one of them started crying to him, saying, I never had anything to eat in my life but a handful of rice. And he had been to Mumbai to see the conditions there. And of course, it's true. There are millions of very, very poor people there. So in his mind, though, he was doing a great thing. He was really doing them a big favor. And as he put it, why not treat them like the guests of America that they were? Which explains why Pickle had the guys come to his house one weekend and showed them how to fish with a rod and reel, and why, at the holidays, he drove them around to see the Christmas lights of Tulsa, and why, once everything blew up and this hit the local news, there'd be moments like this one. Pickle says he's a hardworking businessman and has done nothing improper. I'm kind of a halfway [? do-gooder, ?] I guess. I've had many people go in business. I've had people get education. I feel like I went over backwards to help these people, and I'm getting shot in the back. OK? And he really believed all that? I think he really, really genuinely believed that. I mean, I really do think, in Pickle's mind, most of what he did was legal. And as far as the things that might not be legal, well, he was still morally correct, because the shortcuts he was taking were just examples where the federal government was being too intrusive in our lives. For example, he said, sure, I could have paid them minimum wage and let them all find their own houses, but I thought it's probably better for them if I just house them inside my company barracks and don't make them do the work of finding their own apartments. And so, because I'm doing that, I don't really have to pay them minimum wage, because they're still going to be making out anyway. There was a meeting. They said this a paradise for you. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] says that company officials would even try to say this stuff to the Indians themselves. Yeah, that's what he said, that you are happy to get this food, because in India you are dying by hunger. But that was not true, because we are skilled men, skilled full-fledged workers. At this meeting, where the Indians were told that they were in paradise, one of the workers, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], argued with one of the managers. "When I heard this, I became angry," he said in a deposition later. "We were not dying of hunger in our country. I asked them why they did not tell us in India that they would be unable to provide the right food and accommodations for us. I told him that he misunderstood the life in India, if he thought that we should be happy with the insufficient food and accommodations being provided here. I told him that if he had told us the truth in India, we would not be in this situation, would not have come, and for this reason we would not now be complaining. I told them that to tell us to be quiet now made no sense. He became very angry with me." Within weeks, the company told [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] to pack his bags. He was a troublemaker. They were taking him and another worker to the airport to be deported. Both of them ran away before the planes took off, and lived with Indian friends in America. Meanwhile, back at the plant, Pickle fired 30 of his American workers, keeping the Indians to handle the jobs at a fraction of the cost. When there was overtime work, managers were told to give it to the Indian workers, not the remaining Americans. And all this time, the Indians were in a strange country, whose rules most of them didn't know. When they asked to be driven to a store or to a movie, often they were just told no, and they were warned it was too dangerous for them to go out on their own. Again, reporter John Bowe. Theri bosses told them repeatedly, don't leave the factory premises. Americans have a hard time understanding these cases, because you think, were they in handcuffs? Were they tied to something? Was their door locked? In fact, it's a whole bunch of layers of threats that add up to coercion. They used to say, you're are not going to go out. If you are to go, you've got to get permission. There was a sign put on the wall that, if you leave this place without permission, you'll be terminated and deported back to India. Again, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] I mean, it was totally, completely, the situation-- you know, out of hand. We were all scared. People were scared to even speak their problems. Things continued this way until help came from right across the road. The John Pickle plant takes up almost a city block, so our church is on the back side of the factory and across the street. This is Mark Massey. Up until now in our story, every single person is motivated by the goal of doing better in the global economy, making more money. That's true for Pickle. That's true for the workers. That's not what motivated Massey the day he saw a couple of Indian workers show up for Pentecostal service. It's a little country-type church. And they came into the church Sunday morning. And they came and it was kind of-- you could feel like they were uneasy and maybe they were, I guess because maybe they weren't supposed to be there. And what happened? You saw them just-- they came in, sat in the back. And did they participate in the service? They did. But the congregation usually will shake hands and try to befriend any visitor that would come in, and get to know them more than just the face or a handshake as they leave. So Mark Massey approaches the Indian men. And he's a lay minister, did a lot of outreach with the homeless and teaching English in the Spanish community, so he is being very, very friendly. And one of the men who came to this church early on, a vessel fitter with 25 years' experience named [UNINTELLIGIBLE], says that this just made him suspicious. I didn't even like that, because John Pickle did the same, like that, with the smiling face. And he did wrong things. Oh, I understand. You didn't trust it when the Americans smiled and shook your hand. Yes, that is right. I am not ready to trust the people, because of all the experience through John Pickle. The men edge away from Mark, but he perseveres, invites them back to church, and back to church again, and to a church dinner where one of the guys starts to open up a little. He told me that he had a degree in electrical engineering, a college degree in engineering. I thought, oh, wow. And so I said, wow, to bring you from India, you must be making some good money, I don't know. And he told me he was making $2 an hour. And I didn't make much comment about it, but after they had left, I said I must have misunderstood him. He told me he was just making $2, and he's got a college degree. Part of the problem was the men's English was so bad. So eventually, Mark gets an Indian guy he knows in Tulsa, who happens to come from the same state as some of these workers, to come and translate. And Massey finally gets the whole story: their working conditions, how they're not supposed to leave the plant, their fears. I told them, if the situation gets too bad and something happens, that I had a couple houses close to the factory. So I actually left the key underneath the mat, is what I did. And I said, if anything happens, it's a vacant house. I just fixed it up to sell it. I'd bought it and reconditioned it, and was going to sell it. This is actually Mark's business. He had bought a cheap house in this sketchy area near the plant and fixed it up with a partner. And it didn't take long for the Indian men to get in touch, to ask if they could move into the house. They called me and they said that they had to leave. They were afraid the next day they were going to be deporting some people. And they were very scared. So I drove up. I had an eight-passenger van. I drove up outside of the factory. And it was kind of a scary feeling. It was moving a little quicker than I wanted it to. I didn't know just what I was getting into. I didn't know if I was doing things legal, illegal. You still had a nervousness about helping, not knowing if you were violating something. So it was a scary feeling. It was in the evening, and as I drove up-- they told me to pull up on the outside. There was a little bitty hamburger stand that was shut down. It was closed during the time I pulled up there. There was a phone there you could park by. And I parked by there, and as you watched these guys, they were sneaking some luggage out and bringing it by a train that was set in there. There's a big train track that runs through that area. And they were hiding all their luggage behind the train. And then they were crawling and sneaking and bringing all their luggage into my van. Crawling. He means crawling under the fence that protected the Pickle factory. And there was a Hindu man. He was helping them. His name was [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. He sat in my van, and he knew I was helping these Christian guys who came to my church. So after he had loaded them up, he said, I'm Hindu. Will you help me? And I said, well, yeah. That's what it's all about, is helping each other. So five of the guys are now out of the factory, never to return. The next morning, Mark went to get the men's passports back from Pickle. And this is when the simmering problem in the plant breaks into full-out open conflict, because managers have got wind of what Massey was doing, and were putting their own plan into motion. Mark Massey shows up at the John Pickle Company and sits down with the vice president, Joe Reeble, to beg him for the men's passports. And he sits in his office chair, kind of rocking back and forth, and he begins to tell me that we're living in a different time, in a different era, that if companies are going to compete, they're going to have to-- this is how things are going to have to be. Wait, this is how things are going to have to be, meaning we have to steal their passports? It's a competitive field out there, and if they're going to work in a world market, that they're going to have to-- this is how they're going to have to do it. And so, while Massey is talking to Reeble, John Pickle is sort of storming in and out of the office, looking really furious. And he is totally out of breath. And he was very furious. He was very hot. And just seeing him, you would think-- in my mind, I thought, man, this guy is fixing to stroke out or something. He is just boiling, furious. And what Massey didn't know was that Pickle was actually deporting seven of the men, of the Indians that he had deemed troublemakers, at that very moment. By complete coincidence, Massey had shown up at the factory on the same day the sheriff was arriving to escort these seven men to Tulsa International. When Massey comes to understand what's happening, he's able to get immigration officials to pull the men from their plane on a stopover in Atlanta. They're allowed to stay in America. Most of them return to Tulsa, where Mark finds them a place to live. Meanwhile, back in the Pickle factory, security tightens. The men are all warned that anybody who escapes, or tries to leave without authorization, will go to jail. One of the guards starts carrying a gun. To deal with everything that was happening, Mark tried to hire this lawyer named Kent Felty. Here's Mark. I couldn't think of no one else to go to. My brother had divorced several years before, and this was the lawyer he used in his divorce case. It was really strange. I think I might have been the only lawyer they knew. And at that time, I don't know if I could have spelled immigration. This is Kent Felty, and when he looked at this case at the beginning, he didn't bother with the big questions that it raised, like can you open a low-wage factory with foreign workers on US soil? Or was this human trafficking? No, instead of dealing with that, he looked at what seemed like clear-cut, provable violations of normal laws that most of us have actually heard of. The men weren't being paid minimum wage, for instance. That's illegal. They received radically different salaries and treatment than the American workers got, so he might be able to argue discrimination under civil rights laws. And when the men interviewed for these jobs back in India, they'd been promised certain pay and working conditions that hadn't been delivered, so there might be fraud. Well, the first thing that hit me was-- I remember going up to the lawyer for John Pickle and knowing that I have strong facts. And if I were in his shoes, I would settle this case immediately. And I told him. I said, look, basically, I've got you. And of course, the lawyer for John Pickle laughed and basically said, no, we're going to club you like a baby seal. Wait, were those his words? Those weren't his words. That was their mode the whole time. They knew that they had the resources and expertise to beat us up. And they did for a long time. Well, and in fact, it's a sensible calculation on their part, right? Yeah. We had great facts and that's all we had. We didn't have any money. At one point, we couldn't get-- Kinko's was calling us and saying, you have a $500 order of copies. Can you please come pick them up? And we could not pick them up. We couldn't get copies out. We barely had our filing fee. Filing fee is just the fee that you give the clerk to submit papers? Yeah. That's $200. And that's embarrassing to say, and I'm sure my wife will be upset that I'm being so candid about our finances, but it was a major hardship. But the more Kent Felty learned about the case, the more amazed he was at how easily John Pickle might have smoothed things out with these workers. Truly, one of the most remarkable things about the case is how clumsily Pickle ran this illegal enterprise. If he had just given the men regular raises, been more responsive to their complaints, he might have kept them going for a long time. But instead, the Indians testified in court to all kinds of humiliations. One experienced welder named [UNINTELLIGIBLE], who'd worked in Saudi Arabia before coming to the US, who'd run a business of his own, described being ordered to clean toilets, which he refused to do. And he then was suspended for three days. He finally agreed to sweep the shop floor, so he'd be allowed to come back to work. After half an hour of this, one of the bosses told him, this is not fast enough. You have to do it faster. They went back and forth about this, and, finally, the boss said, this is why Americans say that Indians are a lazy people. He repeats this three times, according to the testimony, and then tells [UNINTELLIGIBLE] that he doesn't like him, and that he's going to punish him. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] told the court how afraid he was. He thought of killing himself. He'd lost all control of his own life. Many men gave examples like this, of what seems like gratuitously harsh treatment. And one of the biggest examples, Kent Felty says, is something the men faced every single day: the food. Back when John Pickle met the workers in India, he made a point of promising good food. And he brought two Indian cooks with him to Tulsa from Mumbai. You know, the part of this I don't understand is, why didn't he feed them better? You know, that is the craziest thing, because this case probably would not have come to me on national origin discrimination or any civil rights claims or false imprisonment or fraud. The men, their primary complaint was that the food was substandard. In the first beginning, he bought some food, Indian food. And then after, he decided he's not going to buy any more Indian food. And he said, I cannot buy your goddamn Indian groceries, because it's so expensive. Again, Mark Massey. It was a crazy thing to me. I mean, had the men had adequate food, they wouldn't have become as discontent, because the food situation-- they worked hard all day long, and in the morning, when they cooked a little omelette with one egg, he would come through and cut it in half. No, no. Oh, yes. So each man had to half of a one-egg omelette. Half of a one-egg omelette. And then there were items that Mr. Pickle bought that he got special prices on, like old bread, old fruit. That He was actually rationing apples. He'd cut an apple into four pieces, and a quarter apiece. After the meal, for dessert, they were given a quarter of an apple. He would ration milk. For the Hindu guys, that's a really important source of protein. I mean, I was strictly vegetarian. I had to start eating meat because it was not enough food. There were some of my other friends who were also vegetarian. They wouldn't even eat the-- I mean, hardly enough food. And Pickle would mock them and mock them, and say, well, I don't know any grown man that drinks milk. The food provider that came to court to testify, they asked him, the food he delivered, how many men it would feed. The guy testified that, for the 54 Indian men Pickle had brought over, he was supposed to deliver food for 27 men. So it sounds trivial, but all those things added up to, really, disrespect, I think. Just moments ago, Indian nationals working at the John Pickle Company walked out. Channel 2's Rebecca Seebirt is following that story for us, and she joins us with the latest. Just more than an hour ago, more than 30 of the men marched off the John Pickle Company premises and went to a nearby house to celebrate their walkout. The disrespect had consequences. Four months after they arrived in the United States, all the Indians who were still living in Pickle's factory finally left. Mark, who is not a rich man by any means, took it on himself to give all these men a place to live, and he organized churches and local Indian businesses to provide their meals. It took over all his time. And how did your family feel about it? How did your wife feel about all this? It was difficult for her. I had to pick her up and move her into one of the rent houses. And I moved 52 men into this big old house out in the country. So there was a lot of difficulties for her. And it was hard. It was a lot of stressful situation. But did I just understand right? You moved your wife into a different house so the men could have the house that you and she were living in? Right. Right. Did you know people who just thought, wow, this is nuts what you're doing? Maybe even people in your own church? Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. We didn't become popular for doing this, or even praised, really. There's been a lot of hurt and distance, people that we felt like-- and they were our friends. But I think sometimes there's still more prejudice in us than we really realize. Our churches have been good to help foreign missions, but when the foreign comes into our own district, our own comfort area, we're not always ready to accept. And what would these people say to you? Well, there were ministers, because we weren't successful real quick in getting help and visas, and they just felt like it wasn't God's will that I did what I did. Because we weren't real successful in the first part of our efforts to help these guys. It took a while. They're saying that, because it was really hard, that meant that God didn't want this to happen? Right. And my theory, my biblical feelings are different than probably most people. To me, the gospel and ministering and our faith should be very incorporated. And I know we can't help everybody, but I think everybody is given a little portion that they can do. And I know we can't turn around and change the world tomorrow, but just what's put in our little field here, our little corner, I feel like we're responsible for. So I felt like that was put in my corner. Mark did end up getting a lot of help, including legal help from Catholic charities. And there were private donors in some churches. And at some point, the federal government stepped in. A lawyer from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission joined the case, and ended up running a lot of it. At last, Kent could get his photocopies out of Kinko's, and pay for somebody to take depositions. It takes a year before all of this came to trial, and for that year, the men lived together in this house that Mark lent them, not working, not sure what was going to happen to them, and incredibly, most of them not telling their families anything, not even that they were out of a job. I just was lying to my wife a lot. Yeah, they don't know about that. Because our aim is to make our family happy. I told my wife in secret. I didn't talk to my parents. My father, he has heart troubles. And I said, don't tell him, because he's going to upset. Now, John Pickle and the people who ran his company have their own version of this whole story. And we contacted Pickle, Pickle's lawyers, and three other company officials, and none of them wanted to come on the air to talk about any of this. I spoke with Pickle and one of his managers at length on the phone. They mostly repeated things that they'd already said in court, but declined to say the same things on the radio. Their version of the story is that the Indians, all 52 of them, are lying. Here's reporter John Bowe. All of the top brass at the Pickle Company supported the boss. And they said that the Indian workers had turned on them, and they were lying in a scheme to get visas and green cards to stay in the US. What they kept saying, over and over again, was these guys read about slavery, and they read about trafficking cases on the internet. And that's how they found out how to do this scam, that they would cry "slavery, slavery," and then all these do-gooders would rush in, including the federal government, and give them green cards. And they could stay in the US forever. That's because of a 2000 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. If you're a foreign worker in a human trafficking case, it says, you get a special visa, called a T-visa, that lets you stay in the country while the case works its way through the courts, which means years. So with that in mind, John Pickle says that everything the men allege is a lie, as part of this scam to stay in the United States. He says that the food in the plant was good, that the men were free to come and go, and that the deal that the Indians signed up for was not, as all 52 Indians claim, to come and work long-term in the US, but to get six months training in Tulsa before being shipped to Kuwait. His argument did not carry the day in court. In a 100-page opinion, the judge found Pickle guilty of a laundry list of violations. There's fraud and false imprisonment, employment and labor law violations having to do with harsh working conditions and living conditions and the minimum wage. And the Indian workers won their discrimination case for being treated so differently than the American workers. In fact, the Pickle case has become a precedent, a way to go after human trafficking and forced labor in court without actually bringing human trafficking charges, which are criminal charges and harder to prove. Again, reporter John Bowe. Pickle is assessed a fine of over $1 million. And I called him up a while after that, and asked him how he felt about all that. And he kind of chuckled into the phone. He said, well, let's just say that I'm a guy who lives with his wife in a nice house. And the house is in her name. And basically he said, if they want to come after me for that money, they can, but good luck. Recently, Kent Felty has started the process of going after that money. The $1.3 million that Pickle owes the Indians isn't really much cash. It comes out to less than $25,000 for each of the 52 workers. But even if they don't get Pickle's money, the workers got what they wanted in the first place, thanks to John Pickle. It's only because Pickle tried to exploit them that they ended up in court, and now have visas that let them work and live legally in the United States. [? Joseph ?] now pulls in $28 an hour, which seems typical for these guys. He's brought over his wife and his son, just like he'd hoped for. He thanks Mark Massey. In the Bible study, there is a good Samaritan. He is the one. You know what I mean? Yeah. That is a good Samaritan. One man, laying down in the street. Nobody will help. The Bible says a good Samaritan comes over there and takes him. And that's what Mark was. Yes, that's what Mark was. It's interesting that, when you met Mark at first, you didn't trust him. Yeah. I had doubts. I had doubts, that's all. Yeah. But he helped us. None of us have gotten a dollar, but I think every single person would do it again. Kent Felty says that his life's been transformed by the experience. His law practice is about immigrants and people who hire them. Mark Massey has also made cases like these Indians into his full-time job. Everybody came out better, except Pickle, who lost his business because of the case. Back in the beginning of all this, Pickle and the Indians found each other because each of them had a certain stereotyped idea about the other's country. Pickle saw India as filled with impoverished people living on a handful of rice a day. They saw America as prosperous and full of opportunity and fair. In the end, not only was Pickle wrong about them and their country, he was wrong about his own country, too, and what he could get away with here. And the Indians, maybe because they were lucky and found all the people who helped them, it turns out the Indians were right about America. John Bowe's book, which tells this whole story, is called Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. Coming up, what do you do when your gut says no, but your boss at the local TV station says yes, yes, yes? 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, Competition. We have stories today about market forces and the things that they lead people to do. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, The Race for Second Place. When TV stations go after each other-- like when any kind of companies go after each other-- there's fallout in random people's lives. Boise, Idaho had four TV stations doing local news. One station dominated the ratings, a local NBC affiliate, so everybody else was fighting to be number two. Thanh Tan was a reporter at the CBS affiliate, Channel 2, and she tells what happened. A warning to listeners that this story mentions, in a very non-graphic way, the existence of sex. Back in October 2005, I was working as a TV news reporter in Boise, Idaho. My station's closest competitor for the number-two rating spot was the ABC affiliate, Channel 6. We couldn't afford to get beaten on anything. On this one day in October, we got wind of what sounded like a really solid story. It had a clear, concise conflict, exactly what we like to cover. Our competitors got wind of it, too. We were two stations with the same exact information, same name, same guy, same everything. But we came to completely different conclusions about what to do with the information. Let's start with the competition. My name is Scott Picken, P-I-C-K-E-N. I am the news director for KIVI, Channel 6 news. 6 On Your Side has learned tonight, a registered sex offender works with children at Idaho Ice World as a referee. It actually started out, believe it or not, as a viewer tip. Somebody had, I believe, emailed me and said that they had become aware that Mr. Kimball, who was a registered sex offender in the state of Idaho, was I believe coaching youth hockey at Idaho Ice World. He was a referee, actually. And so I thought that was kind of weird. So we checked it out and found out it was true. --a concerned viewer, and tonight we've confirmed it's true. Brandi Smith joins us live with a story you'll see only on 6. Brandi? Michelle, yes, James Kimball does work here as a referee at Idaho Ice World. He's a convicted sex offender. He was convicted-- I remember the email. I remember going out on the story, going to Ice World. Here's the Channel 6 reporter, Brandi Smith. She doesn't work at the station anymore. And back at the newsroom, they were researching more about the documents about the charges, if I remember right. And I remember having to go through Ice World and ask people what their response was. And I could only get one woman to comment. And she was pretty outraged, as any parent would be if you heard that a sex offender was working with your kids. Fire him. Get rid of him. Get him away from children. At Idaho Ice World, many parents had this same reaction when we told them one of the referees here has a rap sheet that includes-- I was the Brandi at Channel 6's competitor, Channel 2. But I didn't do the story. The tip had come late in the day, and what I'd been able to find out was that Jim Kimball was a registered sex offender. The charge was statutory rape, but the case was from 1992, 13 years earlier. It was too late to look up his file at the courthouse, so we decided to hold off a day until we could get the details of what happened. Maybe it was more complicated than it sounded. I'd actually heard of cases in Idaho where boyfriends were charged with having sex with their underage girlfriends. Meanwhile, Channel 6 kept going with a second report. --offender. He was convicted in 1992 of statutory rape of a child under 16. He is just a subcontractor. He doesn't work with the city of Boise directly. Also, he doesn't work with children directly. He's a referee, and the GM says at any time, there are at least two or three officials on the ice, and that it's very unlikely that Kimball would have any one-on-one time with children, that he would be left alone with them at all. Now, again, this-- Well, I felt the initial concern of a sex offender working with children at Ice World was completely valid. Here's Brandi again. But as the day progressed, I think we learned more about what the charge was, how long ago it had been. And by the time the live shot rolled around, I just remember voicing concern to my photographer. And I just kept commenting to Lance, we're ruining this guy's life. We're ruining his life. At the time, I was actually just doing some work on my computer, and it was just before 5 o'clock. It was literally five minutes of 5:00, just before they go on the air. And here's the guy who all the fuss was about, Jim Kimball. And I actually got a call from an attorney friend of mine who was our state risk manager for Idaho amateur hockey. And he said, look out. Jim's a 39-year-old hockey and football fanatic, husband and father of two. He didn't know it, but news editors all over the state were deciding that day whether to wreak havoc with his life, to dredge his name up for a crime he'd committed 13 years earlier. He was at a point in his life where he thought the story was behind him. Well, my first reaction was, I think my stomach fell somewhere down around my toes. I'm like, who-- I had all these-- basically, I was a walking question mark. I didn't know who or what or why. And that night I think my wife was working a little bit late, so I phoned her and said, we've got a problem here. So here's where, after day one of the Channel 6 coverage, the two stations diverged for good on the Kimball story. I went to the courthouse the next day and got his case file. I found out Jim was 23 at the time, his alleged victim a 15-year-old girl. But looking closely at his record, I found out he wasn't actually a convicted sex offender, as Channel 6 had been reporting. The judge on the case had withheld judgment for three years. There were conditions. Jim did 90 days in a work-release program, took classes for sex offenders, and was on probation. At the end of the three years, the same judge dismissed the case. But Channel 6 wasn't reporting that part. Because of a technicality, Jim still had to register as a sex offender, even though his charge had been dismissed. The hockey association that hired him knew all about his record. He never lied about it. I talked it over with my news director, and we decided this wasn't a thing, not in 2005. My station, Channel 2, never did the story, neither did Channel 7, or Channel 12, or the AP, or the Idaho Statesman, or the local radio stations. But Channel 6, our closest competitor, kept at it day after day. My news director at the time was Mark Browning. He watched it all in the newsroom, knowing his boss downstairs was watching it, too. Did you feel a pounding in those days after the initial story broke? I did. And I remember some of the talk within the newsroom, and even within the discussions with our management team, said, did we miss one here? In our hesitancy to be ultra-correct, did we miss one here? And we still were very confident there was no story there. But it was hard, from a competitive standpoint. And in our situation, we were a distant number-three station. We needed wins like that, with so-called big stories, to be able to go to the people and say, look, this is what you miss by not watching Channel 2. The two news directors simply had two different ideas about whether Kimball deserved to have his face appear in living rooms all over his hometown. My boss, Mark, thought the guy had paid for his crime, and there was no reason to humiliate him all over again. Big difference, in my book, between sexual predator and sexual offender. But you attach that word "sexual" in front of it, and it changes the entire dynamic with people. And I think what it does is it gives newsrooms license to hunt, where really there's no game there. Scott, at Channel 6, he thought the guy basically had it coming. Jim was driving a school bus when this happened, and the girl he tried to have sex with was a student on his route. To Scott, this was a breach of public trust that shouldn't be forgiven, regardless of whether the charge had been dismissed. Whatever the legal standing, he did it. He did it. And to Joe Smith out there, the legalities of the thing are not really as relevant as the fact that this is a man who violated a trust, and did something that, frankly, I would have never done, and I think that most men put in a position of trust like that don't contemplate doing. He made a decision. He made a conscious decisions. This wasn't like an accidental act of sex. That's the kind of decision that's going to affect him for the rest of his life. There was another angle to Jim's story, which is what allowed it to live on for days. Jim worked for a city-owned ice rink, but he was hired by a subcontractor. Back when he applied for the job, the subcontractor had automatically denied his application because of his record, but they encouraged him to appeal the decision, and he did. A state panel found that Jim wasn't a risk to kids, and he got the job. But city officials said they didn't know any of this until Channel 6 aired the story. On camera, they said they would review their hiring policy. So for Scott, the story became a TV news trifecta. It had a dubious main character, a public accountability angle, and the bonus of a possible policy change. Scott wrote a memo to the staff congratulating them on their work. They had what we in the TV news business might refer to as a win. Brandi, the reporter, should have been feeling great. Instead, she felt awful. This guy had a clean record from then until now. A judge had withheld judgment on the charge. A board of several people had decided he was OK to work with children. So where do I come in and say, no, that's not right? We were doing more damage to his life than we were benefiting the community. So why are we doing the story, besides to damage this man? And I called the newsroom and said, I just don't know. I'm not certain that we should go with this. And I don't remember if it was our executive producer or if it was Scott just saying, you have to do this. And I said, I don't want to. And it was, you're doing the story. Get over it, you're doing the story. Stop complaining. You're out there. You're going to go live in 15 minutes. That's it. Scott remembers the argument, but from his point of view, Brandi just didn't understand the bigger picture of what he was trying to do. Brandi, when she was here-- and I love Brandi to death, but she was extremely young, and was very inexperienced. And this is not meant to be an insult on Brandi or anyone here, but the fact of the matter is that in order to become a viable journalistic organization in this market, we had to step up our game some. And I think sometimes people need to understand that, just because you're uncomfortable with something, or just because you're being asked to do something that's not in your realm, doesn't necessarily make it incorrect or wrong. It just means you have to go to the next level. You have to take it to a new level. For Scott, Jim Kimball was the next level. This story was exactly the kind of thing he wanted his reporters to be doing every day. Scott had been hired at Channel 6 just two weeks earlier. His bosses felt the station was going nowhere. Scott was supposed to turn it all around. His strategy was to make what he calls a hard-nose convenience play, which means a lot of short hard-news stories packed into 10-minute chunks. The station dropped its 6 On Your Side slogan, and became Today's Channel 6 News. When I first walked in Channel 6, I had never walked into a newsroom in my life that had as much of an inferiority complex as this one did. They just all looked over and they said, we're never going to be as good as the other guys. We're never going to do better. We're never going to win. So it was a very, very depressing place. And I walked in there and said, you know what, you're not only going to be as good as Channel 7, you're going to be better. Every day, every minute you're on the air, you're going to be better. You're going to work twice as hard. You're going to produce three times more work than they do. And there was a lot of pressure. This new guy comes in. You never know what he plans to do with reporters. You never know what he plans to do with anchors. The entire newsroom was in upheaval, essentially. So there was a sense that everyone was trying to prove themselves to him. We need to stay. You need to keep us as a reporter. Please don't fire us. Under her previous boss, Brandi was supposed to deliver a story from a live location during her shift, which was the night shift. And even then, she didn't go live every single night. Under Scott, that requirement tripled. She had to go live at 5:30, 6:00, and 10:00. --On Your Side. We will have the latest for this story tomorrow. Reporting live in Boise, Brandi Smith, 6 On Your Side. On the Kimball story, since no other media thought it was worth covering, it became a Channel 6 exclusive, and Scott made sure every anchor mentioned it at every broadcast. Scott says he was signalling to the public that the station was changing, and also trying to boost morale inside the office. They were kicking ass and he wanted everyone to know it. Brandi Smith is live with the story you'll see only on 6. --because of a story you saw only on 6. The move seems to be in response to a 6 On Your Side investigation where we found a registered sex offender was allowed-- It's an exclusive story. Brandi, you've been all over it. I'm sure you'll continue to follow it for us, tell us what the exact-- They had Brandi go live from Ice World three times that first day. They showed an undated, grainy headshot of Jim, his hair short like a buzz cut. He looks uncomfortable. In later broadcasts, they showed that same picture in black and white, even though the shot in the registry was in color. At one point, the video slowly zooms in to Jim's eyes, fades them in and out. But the thing that really killed Jim was that they juxtaposed his mug shot with video of little kids skating and walking around the rink. They're showing Mighty Mite kids that are five, six, seven years old. It makes me look like a pervert, and that I was preying on six- and seven-year-old kids. That's false. And so when I look at that, I'm going, wrong, wrong, wrong. To me, even though, yeah, I have a public record, but I feel in some ways they treated this as like a National Enquirer story, like this is going to draw in viewers. We've got this exclusive. Jim's real story isn't the most sympathetic. He lives with his wife and two daughters in a Boise suburb in a modest house in one of those newer cookie-cutter subdivisions. He makes sure his daughters aren't within earshot as he tells me what happened. Jim says he was immature at the time, living at home with his parents. He says he struck up a flirtation with the girl, picked her up at her house one day. They didn't quite have sex, but it amounted to the same thing. He's pretty clear that he was an idiot to have done it. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. I think the problem was I wasn't thinking at the time, and that's what led to it. I've regretted it every day. And there's probably not a day goes by that you don't think about it, maybe for even just a split second. Before the story broke on Channel 6, things were going pretty well for Jim and his wife, [? Shar. ?] They were working on getting his record expunged. Their daughters were doing well at school. Once the story hit, it was like their lives had exploded. They had to tell friends about the rape charge, and wonder if they'd stay friends. They had to tell their nine-year-old daughter about Jim's mistake, years before they'd planned to, in case people were talking about it at school. They worried that if he attended his daughter's school functions, someone would report him for being around kids, and so he skipped his older daughter's choir concert. Jim told me he cried on and off for days. So did his wife. Even talking about it now, she cries. ?] You know, there's a lot of people that we know, that we'd known for years, that had known us for years, that didn't really understand what had happened and why it happened. They misinterpret the charge. They misinterpret what he is. What do you think? When you watched that news coverage, how do you think they depicted your husband? ?] As a child molester. And that's how people at my work saw it. That's how lot of people saw it. They saw him as a child molester. What did they say to you? ?] Primarily, they went to my supervisor. And [? Jade ?] asked me what was going on, and I told her the whole story. And she said, people are asking questions. And I said, just send them to me. I'll talk to them, but-- Jim's across the room, leaning up against the wall. He looks ashamed and sad. Are you OK, Jim? Yeah. No, this is fine. Anybody else would have probably told me to go to hell. And rightfully so. I ?] was ready to two years ago. Were you really that close? ?] When this all came back to the front, like I said, it almost ruined our lives. It really did. It must have been very difficult to stand by him during that time. It ?] still is. After a couple of days, Jim was fired from Ice World. A sex offender working with Treasure Valley children as a hockey referee is off the ice tonight. The city of Boise suspended James Kimball from Idaho Ice World after 6 On Your Side broke news of his past. Brandi Smith joins us with much more on a story you'll see only on 6. Brandi? I think the biggest thing in this whole ordeal was they never once, not one time, ever called to ask my side. So let's not go to the source and let's not go to the person who actually did this. Let's just do a submarine job on him, and the hell with the facts. That's crap reporting. Scott Picken, Brandi's boss, says his staff tried to contact Jim but couldn't find a number. In fact, Jim couldn't have been easier to find when the story broke. He's in the phone book. His address is online. But this is the sort of story where if you talk to the person and find out all the facts, it can kill the story. I don't remember if we looked him up, if we tried to call him. I don't know that we did. Why not? I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember. No, I don't think I ever called him. And that was likely bad reporting on my part. I probably ought to have tried to call him and get his side of the story. And I don't know why I didn't. Months after she did the Kimball story, a coworker at Channel 6 told Brandi she should include it on her resume tape. Brandi didn't. It's not a story she's proud of. I've been in Brandi's situation more times than I'd like to admit. I've had to cover stories I hated. I've made mistakes. I've smeared people's names because of those mistakes, like the time police gave me the wrong mug shot for a suspect on the run. Yeah. Imagine being that guy. I felt like a dumbass, but it was live TV. There was no time to double-check. You're sometimes assigned three different stories in a day, so at some point, you make do with what you have. Scott stands by their coverage of Jim. He says they acted in good faith, and that's the main thing. Even as he watches the stories with us again on a DVD, it's not the content that bothers him so much as the production value. All he sees is how far they've come. Yeah, the graphics are ugly, to say the least. Michelle, we've done a lot with Michelle in order to change her image and change her look. We've actually worked with cosmetic and look consultants and what have you. We've changed the background of the set, got it less orange and things along those lines. We don't use three-shot desk sets anymore at all. And so things along those lines-- We've got this saying in the business, "We have to make the black go away," meaning we have to fill the news shows with something. Car crashes and crime are really easy to do. They don't take up resources, and they freak people out, get people talking. As much as I'd like to say our station came out ahead by not covering the Kimball story, I can't. This coverage worked for Channel 6. It set the stage for their comeback. And the result of that has been numerous awards, an Emmy for Best Newscast, which we are very proud of. And a product which people are watching more and more. Our July book just came in. We are up 75% at 10 o'clock. And I suppose a cynic could say it's all about ratings, it's all about ratings, it's all about ratings. No, it's about more than that. I have this analogy I like to use sometimes. If a tree falls in the woods and there's not a news crew there to film it, did it happen? And the answer is, well, yes, but who cares? The fact of the matter is is that there's no relevance to it, because no one knows about it. Your stories gain impact, are more valuable, when more people are watching them. And that's the important thing that you need to remember about the drive for ratings. It is not an unworthy goal. It's a very worthy goal. If I'd had Scott as my news director instead of Mark, I could have easily been the reporter ordered to stand outside Ice World that day, showing everyone that disturbing picture of Jim. And I have to ask myself whether I would have had the courage to walk away from the story. I hate saying this, but probably not. Scott's convincing, and it's tempting to want to see the business the way he does. If ratings are any measure, a lot of people do. Thanh Tan. She's now a TV reporter in Portland, Oregon. Well, our program was produced today by Robyn Semien and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Bruce Wallace. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, right before today's show, I went to him and said I wasn't sure about doing that Pickle story. But he told me, You're doing the story. Get over it. You're doing the story. Stop complaining. You're going to go live in 15 minutes. That's it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Support for the This American Life podcast is provided by Anheuser-Busch, introducing Budweiser American Ale, with caramel malted barley and cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest. Learn more at budamericanale.com. And by audible.com, where you can download best-selling audio books, magazines, and radio shows, like this one, to your iPod or mp3 player. Visit audible.com/thisamericanlife today to access over 10 years of our archives, and much more. When holiday season began last November, Yvonne started getting it from all sides, friends, family. I think people look at me sometimes, because I live alone, and think that I'm lonely. Like, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I had to really convince everybody that it's OK. I'm going to be home alone on Thanksgiving. Go to Virginia, go to auntie whomever. Do your thing. And I'm going to be fine. Well, you know. No, I'm really going to be fine. Yvonne talked to researcher Allison McKim and our producer, John Jeter. She's lived alone since her kids moved out 12 years ago, and she says it took her five years before she came to actually enjoy it. I like the fact that it is self-indulgent. What I want to eat, whether I choose to talk to anybody on the phone, if I want the TV and the radio going at the same time. And I'm not looking at or listening to either one. I enjoy cooking, so cooking is not an issue, per se. But I don't want to have to do anything. And so, I would want to cook when I want to, and I don't even want to compromise on it. OK, so you do Wednesday and Thursday, and I'll do-- No, I'll do it when I feel like it. I want to do everything I feel like doing when I feel like doing it. It's like killing a waterbug. I'm going to run from it if I'm here by myself. But if, like you two are here, I was like, oh, no. I'll get it. I'll get it. Where's the spray? I can do that with other people, but I can just be the coward that I am when I'm alone. And you don't have to save face. Right, exactly. Exactly. When she gets involved with men, they're perfectly fine, she says. But eventually she always decides that she would enjoy being alone more. Though, at first, she was scared to live alone, scared that somebody was going to break in, scared about how she was going to fill her time. That took some getting used to. And these days, she's afraid what's going to happen to her when she gets older, which is something her daughter worries about, too. Yeah, she's worried that I'm going to be old, broke, possibly sick, and maybe unhappy that I've made this choice. Like, the rest of them, they want to see me happy, and they don't believe that I can be happy unless I have a companion. Every now and then, the thought occurs to me, what if they're right? It does happen every now and then. What if they're right? If this is as good as it gets, right now, and then I'm on to steady decline. You'll have to interview me in 20 years, when I'll say, why didn't you stop me then, when I had a chance? I don't know. I'm good right now. Today in our radio show, Home Alone. We have three stories today of people living alone. Act One is the story of detective work in the homes of those who live by themselves. Act Two is about a teenager who ends up living all alone. Act three is about a woman who has to trick an armed man into doing the right thing. It's This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. Stay with us. Act One, A Plot Without a Story. You may remember a couple years back in Chicago, in 1995, over 700 people died after a massive heat wave. And hundreds of them died alone, at home. Well, sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote a book about all this, called Heat Wave. And he says people die alone like this all the time, all over the country. In fact, big cities have special personnel to deal with those deaths, who travel, Eric says, in the secret society of those who live and die alone. In Los Angeles, the county has an entire department, 100 people, just to manage the bodies and belongings of the deceased. And we sent Eric to LA, to watch what they do. Mary Ann lived alone, and she died that way, too. She was 79 years old when she called herself an ambulance and went into the hospital. Her life ended there two weeks later, after a full cardiac arrest. She didn't have a friend or relative at her side. In fact, the only person she'd even listed as an emergency contact was this woman, Sue, who delivered drugs for her pharmacy. I was really surprised when they called me and said that my name was on there as the person to contact. I went, oh, really. OK. I didn't even know if she had a brother or had family. Sue last heard from Mary Ann on a phone call from the hospital. She left an urgent message, pleading with Sue to feed and look after her dogs, who were chained up outside the house. When she called, she was just crying, because she said, if somebody doesn't pick up the mail, they'll take her dogs away. And she said, they're all I have. She goes, I promise I won't cheat you. I'll pay you. I wasn't worried about that. It just broke my heart a little bit, you know, she would think that that's all she had. That's what she said. This is the hospital where Mary Ann died. It's been two weeks, and her body's still here. No one's planned a funeral, or even picked up her things. The only personal property left at the hospital, according to their records, is a purse with glasses. This is Emily [? Issa ?]. She's a deputy investigator for the Los Angeles County Public Administrator, which means she's sort of like a detective for people who die alone. Emily combs through the remains of people's lives, trying to figure out what they left behind and who should get it, searching for next of kin. Emily and her colleagues get 3,000 cases each year. Hi. I'm here to see Carla Moreno in Patient Services, to pick up some property for a decedent. In this case, Mary Ann was single, with no known siblings or children. But she owned her house. She had a bank account, and who knows what other valuables in her home. Now someone stands to inherit it, and it's Emily's job to find out who. She's looking for someone who knew Mary Ann, to lead her to a relative. There's also the question of who's going to bury her. Before Emily's finished, she wants to resolve that, too. We start our search at the Patient Services Office. There's a nun working there. And, at first, we think she might know something helpful, because when she sees Mary Ann's name on the case file, her face lights up. Oh. I know her. How well did you know her? I just met her a couple of times, was able to visit her. Yeah. Just when she was here. Anyway, so let's just have you-- She ever mention anything about family to you? Did she ever-- No. The nun hands Emily a big plastic bag. Inside is everything Mary Ann brought with her to the hospital, and Emily starts combing through it, looking for clues. There's a fluffy blue robe, a small black purse. There's some medication, some baby powder, just some glasses, typical things you'd find in a female's purse. These are coupons. Here's the ads that she got the coupons from. None of this is of much use to Emily. She needs contact information, an address book, a cell phone with some names on the speed-dial. There's nothing like that in the purse. She finds a notebook, and she flips through it in search of a personal note, maybe a list of last wishes. But every page is blank. What she does get is a set of keys to Mary Ann's house. And Emily tells me that the best-case scenario is that, once we get there, we'll find a will or some instructions. That only happens rarely, and in her line of work, it's like hitting the jackpot. I've been out to a case where I walked in, and on the night stand next to the bed, it said "In case of emergency." And I opened the envelope, and it had listed everything that I would want to know. And I'm like, wow. That's five minutes and I'm done. Mary Ann's case isn't that easy. When we get to her house, the two dogs are still chained up in the yard, so Emily calls animal control to take them away. The outside of Mary Ann's house is a mess. The wood panels are rotting. There's powdery gray dirt where grass should be. An old Volkswagen minibus with flat tires sits in the dusty driveway. The inside's even worse. It's dark and dusty, cluttered with stacks of video cassettes, empty juice cans, boxes from the Home Shopping Network, many never even opened. I'm putting on my gloves so that we can start looking through the house. Emily, who seems completely unfazed by all this, declares it mildly pack-rat. This seems really pack-rat to me. There's not an inch of-- You can walk on the ground. You can still see the ground. We see plenty of cases where you can't even walk on the ground. There is no floor, because it's packed with stuff where you're climbing over. Emily is so used to places like this that she never goes on a search without gloves and tennis shoes, not to mention a mask, in case the person died at home and wasn't found for awhile. Usually, she has to dig around. Emily doesn't just open drawers and medicine cabinets. If she has to, she climbs to the attic. She breaks down locked doors. She once found someone's business records in a refrigerator. OK, so let me start poking around here. Emily is searching through Mary Ann's living room. You can tell she has basically condensed her life into this one area. There's an unmade makeshift day bed in front of the dusty television. So right now I'm just lifting up all of the different layers of the bed, the padding and blankets that are here. You'd be surprised how many times we actually find people that hide money and things under their bed. But there's nothing under there, just stacks of egg crates and musty blankets. Oh, back here. This is a table and chairs. There's an entire dining room set hidden under the clutter. Emily seizes on a stack of mail and canceled checks and starts rifling through it, but she doesn't find what she's looking for. No business card from an attorney, no photos of friends or relatives, not even a personal check, just payments to AARP, Ladies Home Journal, TV Guide. In fact, there's not a single sign that there was another person in Mary Ann's life, and I find that much stranger than the mess. Is this unusual? I mean, we've now been here for maybe 45 minutes and we've not found a single personal item. Not at all. It's not unusual? Not at all. It's hard to describe, but there is a common thread that runs through a lot of our cases, where it's just like this, people surrounding themselves with things, things rather than people. But she's surrounded herself. She almost built herself into a little cave here, behind all of her stuff. And you can tell that this is where she spent most of her time. Emily's just looking for contact information, not to piece together someone's life story. But sometimes she gets those stories anyway. She tells me about one case that she can't stop thinking about. A woman's husband died in World War II. She survived another 60 years, but her personal correspondence was a record of how she'd tried to avoid moving on. I found the letters from the military telling her that his plane went down and that they couldn't find him. I found the letter that said, we found his plane now and he's still missing. And then I found the final letter that said, we found your husband's body. And she stopped living. Never remarried. They never had children. I mean, she just was-- it was like a time warp. She just completely cut off the rest of the world. It's remarkable how little we find out about Mary Ann. We learn that her mother once lived with her at this address. There's lots of mail to her. Her father married four times. Her mom was the third marriage. She was into herbal medicine and natural remedies. She had microchipped the dogs. Emily tells me she doesn't want to make a personal connection with the people she's investigating. She doesn't usually try to figure them out, because there are just so many of them. It would be hard to take. But I have to ask. Do you ever wonder who she thought would clean this up? No. It's never even crossed my mind to think of. Most of the time, you see these people don't want anybody in here. People who knew them never knew that they had this part of their lives that existed. She must have known that someday she would die, and someone would come in and find all these things. Maybe it's just part of her knowing that she has no one to leave it to. Where, who cares about my mess? Because I don't have anyone to leave my stuff anyway, so I might as well leave a mess. After nearly two hours, the only thing we found that might help Emily find a relative is a 30-year-old Christmas card addressed to Mary Ann and her mother. It's from a family in Virginia, and they must be related, because in the card they ask for help with the family tree for the kids. Emily deposits it in a clear plastic bag she'll bring back to the office. Emily seals the front door and walks outside. A few neighbors are looking at us curiously, and she asked them what they know about Mary Ann. Did you ever see her? Did she have family? After more than 20 years, I had never seen no visitors. This is Luis, who owns the house next door, and he says Mary Ann was never all that friendly. She doesn't seems to be very happy lady. Lonely. A lonely person is not a happy person. She was very lonely most of the years. George, another neighbor, had a different take. He thought she was happy. Yeah, all the time she talked with us. She talked with my son. And every day I come from work, about 3:30, 4 o'clock, and she sometimes on the porch. Hi, Mary. Hi, George. So George thinks Mary Ann was happy. Luis thinks unhappy. Emily tells me this probably says more about Luis and George, and their personal feelings about people who are alone than Mary Ann. There's a stigma against living alone, and an even stronger one against dying alone. I think one reason Emily is so well-suited for her job is that she believes most people live the way they want to live. She may be right, but I'm not so sure. When someone keeps to herself, there's no way to know whether she lived and died outside the reach of friends and family because she preferred it that way or because of things beyond her control. Good afternoon. My name is Emily [? Issa ?]. I'm a deputy calling from the Los Angeles County-- Back in her cubicle, Emily makes a bunch of phone calls. She tracks down the number of the man whose name was on the one clue she found in Mary Ann's house, the 30-year-old Christmas card. His name is Terry. He asked me not to use his last name. But when Emily gets him on the phone, there's a problem. He's got no idea who Mary Ann is. Terry tells Emily to call his ex-wife. She's the one who actually wrote the card. Moments later, Emily's talking to her. Oh, he's the one that gave me the phone number for you, and he said he had never heard of her. So you think that she was his aunt. I see. The ex-wife was partly right. Mary Ann was a relative Terry's, but a distant one. Her mother was Terry's great aunt. But Terry had never met Mary Ann, never even spoken to her. And he knew virtually nothing about her. We've been just going back and forth on this, trying to figure out, who is this person? And meantime, I went back to the genealogy records, and I found all these Christmas cards. And lo and behold, it was Mary Ann and her mother. Terry doesn't hesitate to admit that it was hard to feel emotional about Mary Ann's death. My only feeling towards this right now is I feel responsibility to try to resolve her situation, to tidy up her life, I guess. One month after Mary Ann died, Terry and his cousins were still deciding whether they wanted the county to settle the estate or handle it themselves. Emily told me that, because Mary Ann's assets total more than $6,000, the Public Administrator would arrange for her to be buried in a local cemetery. But what if she didn't have $6,000? LA County would still take care of things. Honored guests, on this day we are gathered here for the annual mass burial, committing to this earthly resting place 1,918 brothers and sisters of humankind who passed away-- When people die alone here without the money for burial, their bodies are cremated, and their ashes are stored in individual boxes for four years. After that, if no one claims them, the ashes are removed from the boxes and buried together in a mass grave. The burial takes place once a year. This year's ceremony happened just a couple weeks ago. We desire to honor these lives and the deaths of our unclaimed and seemingly forgotten people. Just as-- We're in the corner of a massive cemetery, right next to a construction site that's torn up the whole street. The service is heartfelt, but a little empty, too. Besides the chaplain, only 10 people, all county employees, showed up for the service. One of them pointed out the tiny plaques that mark each year's grave site. The remains of 1,900 people fill a hole that's 10 feet long, eight feet wide, eight feet deep. Look right over here. Half covered in dirt and sand, you've got 1984, and then three feet away is 1969. And there's 1966. And if we walk up this road, the numbers are going to keep dropping off and off and off, and go decades back. And you think about right here, in the span of just three feet, are the remains of thousands of people. And from 10 feet away, you would never know that these plaques are here. Right here. All these thousands of people who lived alone and died alone aren't alone anymore. Of course, being mourned is a kind of privilege, one that only comes to people who are actually close to other people. Whether they lived alone by choice or by accident, Mary Ann and those 1,918 dead won't get that luxury. Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at NYU and is working on a book called Alone in America. Thea Chaloner did the reporting at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles. In the end, Mary Ann's family said that they're going to step in and take care of everything after her death. They'd be responsible for burying her or cremating her. And they'd clean out her house where, a month after her death, there was still a working phone line, and an answering machine. This is a message phone. No name, no number, no message, no answer. Coming up, so you're 15 and living by yourself in an apartment, and you need money. So you and a 12-year-old named [? Moochie ?] go in on an investment scheme. 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, Home Alone. And we have, in the second half of our show, two adventure stories of things that happened to people who were home alone. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Boy Interrupted. Before we get to what Clevins Browne actually did once he was living completely on his own as a teenager, a couple words about how he ended up that way. Sarah Koenig talked to Clevins. When he was little, Clevins Browne moved all around New York with his mother, to different apartments or homeless shelters. He says a few months was the longest they ever stayed anywhere. His mom would get in a fight with someone, or have a bad experience in a neighborhood, and they were off. But all that changed when Clevins was 12. That's when they finally got a subsidized apartment in Brooklyn, in a public housing complex known as the Pink Houses. Clevins says it was the first time he felt like maybe he could be a normal kid. He could invite friends over. He could decorate his own room. I was putting up posters of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. And I also had posters of Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit decorating our refrigerator, stuff like that, stuff that we never really got to do, because since we didn't really own the house we can't really do that. But I just felt a sense of pride to say, hey, this is my wall. I can put whatever I want on my wall, because I own this will. Like, wow, I've never owned a wall before. Clevins says he was happy in the Pink Houses. He liked school, and he had a couple of good friends in the project. And then one day in the spring, when he had just turned 15 and was about to graduate from eighth grade, his mom got sick. We were just watching television. We were watching WB. That's basically what my mom and I do every night. We watch the WB, or we watch UPN. And we were watching this one episode of The Fresh Prince. My mother and I have seen this episode a million times. And a joke came on. I forgot exactly what Will Smith said, but it was just one of those jokes that Will Smith said that we would always laugh at, and I just found myself, that I was the only person laughing. And then my mother was just staring at the television blankly. And I said, Mom, you didn't think that was funny this time? And she just remained quiet. And then she asked me to make her some tea, which really, in my house, with her is really skeptical, because my mother never makes me do anything for her. So when she asked me to make her tea, I felt something was wrong. So while I was making her the tea, I just heard her-- I just heard, like, a boom sound. Like, she just hit the floor. Next thing you know, I walk into the room and then my mother is just holding her stomach. And she's closing her eyes and clenching her teeth. She's screaming and everything. Now my first initial reaction is to call 911 and run to the house phone, but then I realized that the house phone is disconnected. So I run downstairs and I find a pay phone, and I called 911. The operator responded by saying, 911, what's your emergency? It took me about 10 seconds to respond to her. I mean, I wanted to tell her that there was an emergency upstairs, but at the same time I didn't want to speak up about that. Because I felt that if I spoke up about that, some way, somehow, Child Services would be involved. And that's really the last thing I wanted. Why did you think that? I mean, because I felt that if my mother was going to the hospital, then I would basically be upstairs by myself. And I know pretty sure well that I might be taken away or something like that. Like, the law would not allow a minor to be in the house by themselves. Had you ever been in Child Services before? No. So you had no experience with that system. It wasn't like, I'm not going back to the foster care, or something like that. I was in foster care, actually, before. But Child Services, I got so many myths about. Like it's just the worst thing in the world. You just don't ever want to be there. So I dialed 911, and the operator on the other line was saying hello three times. And I pretended to be someone else. And I said to the operator, "Um, hello, ma'am. There seems to be an emergency going on in apartment 8D, 1165 Stanley Avenue." Is that a character you had done before? Oh, you want to know the inspiration for the voice? I do. When I was younger, I was always fascinated at the fact that you can be sitting in a movie theater, and there's always this one voice that you always hear. This summer, coming to a theater near you. And I'm like, who is this guy? Somebody tell me who he is. And growing up I always thought he was this huge muscular dude, like this really, really large man, something like Paul Bunyan almost. So when you call 911, you're essentially pretending to be Paul Bunyan. Pretty much. I guess you could say that I'm pretending to be Paul Bunyan making an anonymous tip. And the operator asked me. She was just asking me all these probing questions. Because she doesn't believe. I think she thought it was a prank phone call. So then she asked me again, is there anyone else inside the house with her? "Oh, no. It's just this lady. So I just figured I should just call you guys and let you know." So I run back upstairs, and the situation with my mother is a little bit tenser. She's not screaming at this point. She could actually speak to me. She was like, you need to stop crying right now. Don't worry. Oh, you were crying. I was crying. And then moments later I'm hearing sirens, and I'm looking out the window. So I told her that the ambulance are here for you. Don't tell them that I'm here. And at this point I just ran into the closet. I was really panicking right now, because I said to myself, Here they come. I can hear their footsteps, and I'm hearing walkie talkies and static. So I just closed the door in the closet. And then, at that point, I was pretty much home alone. They were gone. I'm looking out the window, watching them drive along and everything. And I'm just like, I actually pulled this off. I don't believe that I did that. Clevins' mother had a serious stomach illness. Clevins says it was a cyst. But after that was taken care of, she ended up in the psychiatric ward. Clevins doesn't like to talk about it much, but his mom has a pretty long history of mental illness, depression, which accounts for all the moving. She'd been hospitalized for it before. This time, she'd be away for about five months, but Clevins had no way of knowing that or anything about her condition. She couldn't call. Their phone wasn't working. And so he really had no idea what had just happened, where they'd taken her. He barely slept that first night. The next morning, everything just seemed weird. I remember leaving the apartment, and everything just looked new to me. In front of my project building there was a sign that says "Hi, you're stepping into Louis H. Pink Houses." And that's a sign I see every single day, but that one day it just looked new to me. I felt older. I just felt like, there's no one here. There's no one that's going to do things for me from this moment on. I have to find out some way to do things on my own. So you didn't want any of your neighbors to know you were there. No. Because why? I felt that they would call someone, like a Child Services representative. Because I really didn't want to go anywhere else. Another thing that was really fearing me is that I felt like if I just got up and left, then maybe we would be evicted. But I also knew that I didn't have any money to pay rent, so either way I was sort of stuck. And then how do you-- at what point did you run out of food? A little bit a half month later. And then, there has been a point where I just haven't been eating for days upon days. Were you hungry? Very hungry. So what I would do is-- during the summer, different schools would have breakfast and lunch every single day-- so what I would do, I would just go to schools, any schools within the area, and just have breakfast and lunch there. And then there were some Saturdays and Sundays where I didn't eat anything at all. Or, if I'm lucky, I would probably get dinner from a friend of mine, like [? Everoll ?], for example, or my neighbor Marie. But there was some Saturdays and Sundays that would pass by, and I'm not eating anything at all. Wow. How long were you without any money at all? Two months. Two months? Mm-hm. So were you literally-- like, you did not have a dollar? Nothing. How did you do anything? You live in New York City. How did you get on the subway? Never really got on the subway. Did you take the bus anywhere? No. So what did you do all day? I was basically just isolated to where I was at, just on my block. That's where I was at every day. Didn't really have any desire to go anywhere, really. And what did you do at night? I would just be outside, just hanging out. It was summer, and there's no one that's going to tell me that you have to be home at a certain time. So I would just be out. I spent my entire summer just riding my bike, really. It really was difficult for me to adjust to the fact that my mother's not here. There's no one for me to talk to. Where is she at at this very moment? Is she OK at this very moment? Is she thinking about me at this very moment? And, at times, I would even listen to radio stations that my mother would listen to, even though I totally hated them. They'd play old music from way back in the day. Sugarfly honey bunch. They played The Temptations and all this stuff. So while my mother was gone, I'd just start listening to WBLS. That's the best way I could really make the house lose its emptiness. So I really had no money in the house and everything. So [? Everoll ?] and I and a couple of our friends were walking in the street one day, and we found this garbage bag that had boxes of cigarettes inside there. So I have a stick, a little twig, that I'm just walking by, dragging it along the fence. So I see the garbage bag and I started poking it, and just started poking the bag and everything. So then, all these cigarettes, I don't know where they came from, just fall out of the bag. Individual cigarettes, or packs? In packs. And then [? Everoll ?] and I made a-- [? Everoll ?] made a joke, actually. He said, How many packs of cigarettes does it take to kill one person? And then I just said, Maybe this is it right here. And then we go home. And then I'm inside my house, just watching TV, and I realized to myself-- I remember on my way upstairs, I saw people smoking cigarettes. And I'm saying to myself, people are wasting their money buying these cigarettes. So I just had to go back and get them. And so did you? Mm-hmm. As much as I could. I didn't grab every last one, but I grabbed as much as I can. And then what did you do? I went to Marie and I asked her if she would like to buy some cigarettes. And she's like, What you doing selling cigarettes for? I'm like, It's not like I'm selling drugs. These are cigarettes. If the store can sell it, why can't I? So she buys it. And she's like, how much do you want for them? I'm like, $2. So she bought one box. Next thing you know, I have a whole line of people just knocking on my door, asking for cigarettes. And in that one night, I made about $100. Like any good businessman, Clevins invested some of that money into a new venture, and made a profit of $150, with the help of his friend, [? Moochie. ?] [? Moochie ?] was about 12, but he was shrewd. And he convinced Clevins, the way to make more money was to throw a party at his house and charge people $7 to come. [? Moochie ?] arranged the whole thing, the boom box, the food, which his mom cooked. The clean up and security detail, all [? Moochie's ?] little friends. And it worked, and Clevins was getting by, mostly staying out of trouble. And then at about the two-month mark, he found a permanent solution to the food problem. There is this thing called an EBT card. EBT cards are food stamps. How did you find the card? Going through my mother's stuff. Where was it? It was inside her purse that she left. Oh, so she didn't even have her purse with her. No. Oh my God. So basically my mother had this card, and basically that's where all our food was coming from, like she would take this card, go to supermarkets. So I was always under the impression that the code-- because there's a code, a four-digit number code-- I was always under the impression that it was my mother's birthday, 9763. So I took the card to a supermarket, and I swiped the card and I have all this bunch of food and everything. What had you picked out? I had picked out tons of pop tarts, cereal, peanut butter and jelly, bread, and all that. And I just throw it on the counter, and I swipe the card in. And I type in 9763. But then the card said, "invalid entry. Read error." And before I figured out the access code, I would always go down to the supermarket and just run a test. I would take one item, and see if I could possibly pay for it by entering this access code. So I'm trying to figure it out, and I'm just scavenging through all of her stuff. And my mother has this leather jacket that is a unisex jacket, and I always wanted to wear this jacket. I personally think the jacket looks better on me than it does on her. And I would take this jacket. I would pretend that I'm Shaft. And I had these two cap guns, these two black toy cap guns that I had. So what I would do is I would go in front of the mirror and put the guns inside my coat pocket and pull them out and just start shooting them. And I'm just going through the rest of the pockets. So then I found an envelope that I was about to throw out. And I read it, and it was a letter from the food stamps company, reminding my mother that her access code is this, this, this. And to my surprise, I went down to the supermarket and purchased some food, and it was actually the correct number. Now, what the food stamps card does is that they give you cash and they give you food stamps. I had about $200 in cash and $200 in food stamps. So I was really excited and grateful that this happened. All this time, his mom's close friend, a woman Clevins calls Aunt Elizabeth, one of the few adults he'd told about his situation, had been calling around to different hospitals trying to track down his mother. Eventually, she did. Clevins found an old prescription of his mom's, and Aunt Elizabeth called the number and there she was, at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn. Clevins rode his bike to go see her. It was pretty upsetting. There were some other people in there who had some really serious mental issues in there. And it really just made me feel uncomfortable. The people that she's in the ward with, those people are talking to themselves. And I'm always asking myself, why is my mother even with these people? She's really nothing like them. Why is she considered to be one of them? My mother's pretty sane, but these guys are the total opposite. Did you ask her that? No. Do you feel like you know why, now? Not really. Still trying to figure that out. By this time, the summer was almost over. And even though this whole thing had been hard on Clevins, still, in another way, he had lived the 15-year-old's dream summer. Unlimited freedom, nothing to do but hang out with his friends. But now he had to start high school all on his own. He was supposed to go to South Shore High School, which he knew nothing about, not even how to get there. He'd never even really been on the subway without his mom. That first day, he asked the train conductor directions to his school, as if the guy was his personal tour guide. He never made it. But on day two, once Clevins did get there, he was immediately miserable. The place was huge. He says it was like a jungle. And it was so easy to cut classes, which he did, sometimes to go visit his mom. His grades slipped. Most of all, he hated how people at his school saw him. I didn't want to walk in to school being this panicky kid with problems. That's not who I wanted to be. I just wanted to be a regular student. Did you feel like people would look at you and know, oh, that kid. Nobody's taking care of-- did you look different from other kids? Did you feel like you looked different? Were your clothes dirty or something? My clothes were dirty, actually. And I was really antisocial. I didn't really mix myself with other students and all that. Because why? I just didn't feel like-- it just wasn't in me. I felt like I didn't know what direction I was going in. It's like you're being teased. Like, you have something in front of your eyes, but you can't get a hold of it. I'm always able to see my mother and talk to her, but I don't know when she's going to come out. I don't know how long she's going to be there. And that really just drove me insane. I don't know what to do right now. And I never talked to anyone. Never talked to my teachers. There could be times where a teacher-- I'm sitting in a class and a teacher would call my name-- and I would just ignore them, like they're not even there. Like, don't talk to me. Were are you feeling self-conscious, that people would find out? Yeah. I was barely washing my clothes. Could you tell? Could people tell? Yeah. Did anyone ever say anything about it? My guidance counselor. She just said, what's going on? I could obviously see something's wrong with you. That's really a sign of something going on wrong at home, when people don't wash their clothes. What was your response to that? I was just like, are you just attacking me? Is that what it is? Until now, I didn't see it-- I saw it as a way, oh, she's just attacking me. She's just trying to judge and disrespect me. So I'm just going to leave her alone. Forget about it. Forget you, too. So did you not go see her again? No, I didn't. And it was because she said that? Mm-hm. And then, one day, the hospital called Aunt Elizabeth and told her Clevins' mom was ready to come home. Prior to that day, the house was extremely messy, and my mother comes home. Were you worried? Yeah. I thought she was really going to freak out with the way the house looked. Actually, right before I opened the door, I'm like, Mom, you have to brace yourself for what you're about to see. There are just so many unholy things going on in this house right now that you do not want to look at. Describe how messy we're talking. If you opened the door, imagine you're walking outside on a snowy day, and you have to struggle your ankles to get through the snow. Just substitute the snow with clothes and potato chip bags. And I thought she was just going to be really upset. I was like, Mom, I'm going to take care of this. This is my mess. I'll take care of it. No need to get mad or anything. She didn't get upset. But I looked in her eyes and I felt like this is probably her way, a small way, of making up for the time she spent gone. So that's why she really, really wanted to clean. I've left you alone for this long. This is the least I could possibly do for you. So I came back just to check up on her. The house is completely spotless. There was no evidence of my five months of garbage piling up in there. She just got rid of it all. The clothes were neatly packed up, the garbage is gone, the floor is mopped and swept. I'm like, what? Did she ever say anything, directly, about the time you'd been alone? Did you guys ever have a conversation about it? Yeah, she kept on apologizing. I said, there's no need for you to apologize. You didn't intentionally say you want to leave me for five months. So it's not your fault. Was there any part of you that sort of-- Like, obviously, you love your mom and you wanted her to come home, but did you worry that certain things would become harder if she came home, too? I felt that, when she comes home, I felt like I'm just going to be in the same predicament again one day. I don't know when. But I just knew and felt that it's going to happen again one day. And I just felt like I just want to be more prepared the next time it happens. A few years later, it did happen again. His mom disappeared. Clevins was evicted. But this time, Clevins was 18, and he did handle it a lot better. Since then, Clevins has been living in a friend's apartment. He's working now, and he's planning on going to college next year. Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. Act Three, The Man Who Came to Dinner. Well, we end our show today with the story of a mother who was home alone with her two small children, when one of the scariest things that can happen actually happens. This was in the early 1980s. Jennifer Schaller was one of the two little children at the time, and she tells the story. There's a story that my mother doesn't like to tell, because it brings back too many bad memories for her. But I love to hear her tell it. It captures her perfectly, how fierce she is. It also shows what was really going on when I was a kid, and I didn't even know it. We were living in Hightstown, New Jersey, in a one-bedroom apartment in a big courtyard building. It was fall. My brother Alan and I were home from school playing outside. I was five or six, and Alan was a year younger. My mom, Ezra, picks up the story from here. I was in the house by myself. And then, he knocks on the door, and I open it up. And he identifies himself as one of Raymond's friends, or associates, as they call each other. Raymond is my father. He wasn't around much. My parents told me that it was because of his job as a salesman. I imagined he was a traveling salesman who pushed appliances. I found out later that he was a pusher, but his job had nothing to do with vacuums or dishwashers. When my mother and father first met, he was a legitimate jewelry salesman. Then he traveled to Peru for his father's funeral, and while he was there his half-brother introduced him to the world of cocaine trafficking. The drugs were a constant source of tension between my father and mother, who begged him to stop selling. He promised he would, but never did. At the time this story takes place, Raymond had been gone for more than a week, and my mom didn't know where he was. The man at the door told my mother he had business to discuss with Raymond. He wasn't going to leave until they had settled the matter. And at that moment, both you and Alan run up behind him to see who it was that was at the door. And I really didn't know what to say to you guys. So he said that he was actually going to be staying with us for a while. And you guys were satisfied with that. And, you know, Oh, cool. And you just take off and you start playing with your cousins again. And so, at that point, he comes inside the apartment, and he shows me the gun. The gunman said he had to make a phone call, so my mother took him to the phone in the kitchen. She listened to his conversation. It became clear that he was on the phone with his boss in Florida. She overheard him report that Raymond was not around. He said my mom didn't know where my father was or how to get a hold of him. Then he turned to my mom and said his boss wanted to speak with her. The man from Florida never identified himself, never actually gave his name. He just proceeded to tell me that he was very disappointed with Raymond, and that Raymond had disappeared. It'd been four or five days already. Absolutely no communication with him. He had a kilo of coke on him, and it belonged to the man from Florida. So he was concerned about his merchandise and his money. So this is why that man wound up at our doorstep, to help smoke Raymond out. I hang up the phone with the guy from Florida, after he had told me that he was going to kill my children and me if Raymond didn't show up. I hang up the phone with the guy and I tell him, well, I guess we might as well get comfortable, because it looks like you're going to be here for a while, because Raymond isn't going to show up anytime soon. When my mom tells the story today, there's a lot of bravado. But at the time, she was terrified, mainly for us. She wanted to keep me and my brother physically safe, but she didn't want this episode to scar us emotionally either. And so she made a decision. She would continue with the ruse as long as she needed to. She carried on normally, as if the gunmen really was an old friend, staying with us for a short time. That evening you guys came in, I made dinner for us. And you and your brother just joked around, because you thought he was a friend of your dad's. So you guys were just being yourselves and joking around and stuff. And I put you guys to bed. And after I put you guys to bed, I went into the bathroom, and I grabbed a towel and I bunched it up and put it on my face. And I started screaming into it, as quietly as I could. And then I started crying. And then, I thought to myself, OK, that's it. This guy can't know that you're upset or that you're fearful. Because the moment he sees fear, he's going to think he's got control. So he's not going to get that control from me. But how does a single mother with two small kids gain control over a hired gunman? Moments after her tears in the bathroom, my mother saw an opportunity brought about by the television. I wash my face, and I go back out into the living room, and I sat down. And, at that time, it was probably about 8 or 9 o'clock, a movie started on TV, and it was The Godfather. I know. The Godfather. Can you believe it? I started conversing with the guy, and I tell him. I says, yeah, you know. I have an uncle that's in the mafia. As I was telling him this story, his eyes got bigger. And he gets up quietly, and he goes over to the telephone, and he calls the guy in Florida. He's explaining to him, you know, I'm not sure that we should be here in this place with this woman, because she has connections. And he was very nervous. I could see that. And then he comes and he sits down. And I just kept talking, like nothing. And I saw that I had the upper hand at that moment, so I was going to just go with it. My mother's uncle actually wasn't in the mafia, but his family all believed he was because that's what he told them. He was actually hiding a girlfriend, and later on another family, from his wife. He was a polygamist and not a goodfella. This lie struck a nerve with the hired gunman, who had settled in and slept nights on the sofa. My mother waited on him, bringing him things to eat and drink. The next day, you guys go to school, and I spend the whole entire day with this guy in our apartment. What did you guys do? Just watch TV? Pretty much just watched TV, yeah. And, every hour or two hours, the man from Florida would call and try and intimidate me and harass me, asking me where Raymond was and threatening to kill us. And I said, well, I don't know what to tell you, man. But you do what you got to do. If you feel that you got to kill us, then I guess I don't have any control over that. This is the point my mother says where her fear turned to rage. She was enraged at my dad for getting us into this mess, at her captor for his intrusion, and at the man on the other end of the phone for his constant threats. So she amped things up a notch. While watching an episode of Miami Vice, she casually mentioned a cousin who was a police detective. This, my mother said, made her captor seem even more nervous. Then she began working on an excuse to see my aunt and uncle who lived in the apartment next door. I had run out of milk. And the guy was insisting that I couldn't go anywhere, and that he had to watch me at all times. And I said well, cool, that's fine, but we need milk for the kids. And I asked him, I said, OK, you won't allow me to go to the store. Can I go right next door to my aunt's house and just ask her for a container of milk? And he just thought about it, and thought about it, and he waves his hand at me and says go ahead, go ahead, but you better be fast. Come back, and you better not be longer than five minutes. So I go next door, and I tell my uncle what's going on. And my uncle right away grabs his rifle, one of his rifles, and he says, well, I'm going over there and we're going to take care of this. And I said well, no, I don't want you getting involved in this. I don't want anything to happen to you. So I said, can I use your phone? Let me call Tito real quick. Tito was an old family friend. He was working as a delivery man at the time. My mother didn't call the police for two reasons. She didn't want my father to go to jail, and she also feared that her children would be caught up in a violent mess. She called Tito to ask him to drop by so that our captor would know that we had people, that we were not alone. Things ended up working out better than she thought. The gunman mistakenly assumed that Tito was the police detective my mother mentioned earlier. I guess it was because of the clothing that he was wearing. He had on a dark navy blue t-shirt and dark navy blue pants. And he didn't have any type of insignia on his clothing. And so, Tito comes in and he sits down. I introduce him to the guy from Florida. And Tito's, you know, Hi, I just thought I'd come by and see how my comrade's doing, and find out how the kids are doing. I haven't talked to them in a while. So the guy kind of slowly weens his way back towards the telephone in the kitchen, and he's on the phone again. And I tell Tito. I says, Tito, shh. Listen to what he's saying. And he was in a panic. He says, I'm leaving. I am not staying. You do whatever the hell it is that you need to do, but I'm getting the hell out of here because now her cousin, who's the detective from New York City, is here. What the hell am I supposed to do now? The man on the other end of the phone somehow talked him into staying, and he did for three more days, with me and my brother coming and going to school and my mother waiting on him hand and foot. But by this point, the only person in the house who seemed afraid was the man with the gun, which brings us to what might be my mother's greatest triumph. My brother and I never suspected any of this was going on. When I think back on this time, I remember going to kindergarten every day. I liked to hug my teacher. My favorite food was pizza, and I was the best speller in my class. I have no recollection of being held hostage by a gunman. Neither does my brother. As a child, I was never angry at my dad for running off with someone else's cocaine. And I don't think this memory is repressed. I think my mother wanted more than anything for my brother and me to believe that our household was like any other, and she succeeded. I only learned what happened that week years later, when I was grown. I didn't show or demonstrate any anxiety. Whenever you guys were around, I was my normal self with you. I would play with you. I would feed you guys. I would read a book to you before you went to bed. And I went about business normally, our daily lives as I normally would. That was pretty much it. That's maybe why you don't remember it ever happening. On our fourth day as hostages, my father showed up with the money and an explanation which seemed to placate the man who took us hostage, but not my mother. This ordeal stamped out any hope she'd had of reconciling with my dad. The man with the gun was about to leave when my mother went into the backyard. I had stepped outside into the backyard. I mean, after so many days of being stuck inside the house, I needed fresh air. So I stepped outside, and so the man steps outside. And he says to me, you know, senora, I am so sorry. I hope that you are not going to hold this against me and tell your cousins or your uncle to come after me, because I really didn't want to be a part of this. I was forced into this situation, and ma'am, I really, really, really am sorry about this whole thing. And he grabs my hand, and I thought he was going to shake my hand. He grabs my hand, and he kissed it. That was when I thought, damn, I'm good. That was the moment, truthfully. That was it. That was when I thought, damn. And to this day, I think about it, and my palms get all sweaty. I was really in the zone. I had my control back. I had taken it back. And it felt great. It really did. It felt really good. My father went on selling drugs for years. When I was 11, he went to prison. But my mother says this experience changed her. Nothing rattles her even now, she says. Not long ago, a client-- my mom's an insurance agent-- became irate with her, and, from across the desk in her office, threatened her with bodily harm. My mom, all of five foot two, says she stood up, stepped out from behind her desk, and said calmly to the man, Well, have at it. The man walked out of office in a huff and never bothered her again. Jennifer Schaller lives in New Mexico. Our program was produced today by John Jeter and our senior producer Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Bruce Wallace. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Yvonne, the woman at the top of our program today, was originally interviewed for Eric Klinenberg's forthcoming book. That research is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast, 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-- this is so weird. He kept pledging over and over to public radio, hoping that he was going to win a big stuffed doll, until he spent all his savings. Why didn't you stop me then, when I had a chance? 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. And to explain the idea behind this week's radio show, I need to tell you about this date that one of the producers of our show, Jane Feltes, went on recently. There was this guy who she talked to briefly after a rock show, and then the guy called Jane's friend Ray for her telephone number. And Ray is a really good friend of Jane's, and Jane says that Ray was all for this. Ray saying things like, you really should date this guy. Like this is going to be great. And he would use these arguments like, he went to BU. I don't know what that-- is that Boston University? Yeah. Is that a good school? I don't know. I don't know either. He's like, he went to BU, he's friends with Joe Biden's nephew. Right. Not Joe Biden. Or Joe Biden's nephew. Jane is recently single, so she figured, why not, might as well see what happens. But comes the night of the date with a friend of the nephew of Joe Biden, and things start badly. She's about to leave work to go meet him, and she gets a text message that he's going to be late. About an hour later, she gets another one. She waits. It had passed after, after-work drink time, and then it passed regular dinnertime to like, now, 10 o'clock. And I thought, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, because you never know. Maybe he would show up, and he would have like, a big shark bite or something. Just to name one of the common reasons why people show up late for dates. I don't know. Well, that would-- I mean-- It would totally explain it. It would explain a couple of hours. When the guy finally arrives, he does not have a shark bite, but he is 100%, totally, completely stoned. They walk to a restaurant, where the guy does not try to be charming. He does not really talk much at all. And then he kept doing this thing, I think because he was so stoned, but I'm not sure. But he kept doing this thing where I would be talking, and he kept like half closing his eyes, and then he would go-- he would like shake himself awake, an he'd be like, wait, sorry, what? I just tuned out just then. Over and over and over again. When the bill came, they each took out credit cards. Jane figured they'd split this. But when he saw her card, he put his away and let her pay for the whole thing. And then it was time to go. The guy asked if Jane wanted to smoke another joint. Jane pointed out that she hadn't been there for the first one. So when you leave this date, what are your feelings about Ray, who set you up? I mean, all kinds of stuff went through my head like, do you see me as so desperate? I mean, I'm really close with Ray. He is one of my best friends. I couldn't see how he put the two of us together. I couldn't see how he thought we would make a good match. I started taking it personal like, oh, there must be something really wrong with me if one of my closest friend thinks this is the kind of guy I deserve. Well, you know, we should call your friend Ray. I'd love that. Hello. Hi, Ray. Hi, Jane. OK, I'll just summarize a little bit here of what happened next. Ray was apologetic about how badly the date had gone. And he reminded Jane that he really didn't know that guy very well. And then we got to the big issue at hand. Jane has a question for you, and, if I can paraphrase the question, the question is, why did you think that he would be a good date for her? The answer would be threefold. First, he was friends with Joe Biden's nephew, who is like a pretty good guy. OK, you don't even need to hear the other two reasons. They made just as little sense as number one. But after talking for a while, Ray did finally explain the fix up this way. You always get the guy who's too rough. This guy seemed like-- since he had like a clean-cut haircut, and he was like a college guy-- He was kind of like friends with the bad guys. So you could go out with the bad guy. He seemed like a normal guy too. This is so crazy, because I had no idea you'd given it this much thought. Up until this point, Jane had no idea that Ray saw her this way, or that he felt so strongly about who she dates that he might actually try to fix it. When you set up your friends you can't avoid revealing what you really think about them. Things you haven't even told them. You're sticking your neck out more then they are when they go on the date. And so we have for you today an entire show of people meddling, interfering, thinking they know what's best for others. We've got Yentas, we've got busybodies, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. Our show today-- Matchmakers. We have three stories in three acts. Act one is a match done out of pure giddiness. Act two is somebody who matches up people who, the most important thing they'll ever do together, they'll do the first time they meet. Act three is matchmaking between real children and plastic children. Stay with us. Act One, a Good Year for Grand Gestures. The matchmakers in this next story try to bring two people together who love each other. But there are different kinds of love, and different ways to think about love as they discover. Gregory Warner tells what happened. Once upon a time in Afghanistan, a tall, curly haired man named Mohammed Sabir saw a short young woman at his brother's wedding. He never said a word to her, but he was smitten. And normally. that would have been the end of the love story. In Afghanistan, men aren't allowed to talk with strange women. But this one was different. As the younger sister of his brother's new wife, she could visit Sabir's house with her parents. Sabir could even manage to sit next to her on the couch, which he did three months later. Was that the first time you talked alone to a girl that wasn't your sister? Yes, that is my first time. Sabir speaks some English, but he brought along his friend Dr. Wasai to help translate the rest. [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] It was very delicious time for me. He said it was sweet and tasty? Yeah, it was sweet and tasty, and his body also was shaking. And while he sat there shaking, Sabir told the girl she was very beautiful. The girl, whose name was Kotsea , told Sabir he had nice hair. If it was possible, I will take your hair on my head. She wanted to put your head on her head? What did that mean when she said that do you think? It means-- know he is in love with her. All that flirting over the hair was racy enough by Afghan standards, but what happened next says Sabir, could have gotten him killed. He went over to his brother's house. And he found Kotsea alone in her bedroom. And then, violating every rule he'd ever been taught, they kissed. After that one kiss, our love became the stronger and the stronger. The stronger their love got, the more secret they had to be. Sabir was then 28. Kotsea was 18. They'd steal looks over the dinner table. Quick glances, Sabir says, like camera flashes. They decided to get married. I said for she, I love you. She says, I love you, you can marriage for me? I said, OK, no problem. I wait for you. She said, I'll wait for you? Yes, yes, she's wait for me. Sabir needed about $10,000 to get married. $4,000 for her father for her hand in marriage, another $6,000 for the wedding itself. But Sabir doesn't make that kind of salary. He's a driver for a Dutch development organization. He saves maybe $30 a month. At that rate, it would take three decades to raise what he'd need. So each year, Kotsea would wait, and each year Sabir would tell her, he didn't have the money. Four years passed. And then something happened which should have had nothing to do with either of them. Sabir's boss, Nikaj van Wees, went to a party at the Dutch embassy. There Nikaj met an American aid worker, and he fell in love with her. Her name was Miriam. Before that, Nikaj had a pretty regular work relationship with his driver, Sabir. They didn't talk about personal stuff. But when Miriam moved in with Nikaj the mood changed. Miriam talked to Sabir as a friend. I was in the car with Sabir, and I asked Sabir, so are you married? Do you have a wife? Do you have kids? He says, oh no, sir. He calls me sir. Oh no, sir. This is Miriam. She is sitting at the dinner table next to Nikaj. And so is there a girl? Is there a girl? Oh yes, sir. Do you love her? Oh yes, sir. He's brownish, but he got a very red head. He can blush. He is the only Afghan I've ever seen who can turn beet red. And I said, are you going to marry her? Oh no, sir. I don't have money, sir. Here's how it usually works when a man can't afford the dowry to get married. He waits for his sister to get engaged, and then he uses the money she gets for her dowry to pay for his new wife. It's like a dowry recycling. But Miriam found out that Sabir's father broke that tradition. Because his father doesn't believe in selling his daughters. So the fact that Sabir's father never charged a dowry for his daughters means that Sabir doesn't have any cash to pay for his own dowry. And that seemed particularly tragic to Miriam and Nikaj, who were just beginning a fairy tale story of there own. Before they met, both of them were in unhappy relationships. The last place they expected to find their soulmate was Afghanistan. But Miriam had only been in the country a week when she met Nikaj. And a few weeks after their first kiss, she was flying back to America to divorce her husband. Nikaj flew to Holland to break up with his long-term girlfriend. It wasn't just love, it was that giddy, you won't believe what I found, stage of love, when you think things like, gosh, wouldn't the world be perfect if everybody could find this? It's when lovers are at their most dangerous and prone to set you up with their friends. As Miriam planned her wedding with Nikaj, she was bugged by Sabir's story. I wanted to give them something. A heart gift my mom calls it. I wanted to give them something that meant something to me that was more than a token. And so Nikaj and I chewed on this for a while. And that, along with the fact that we didn't want any gifts, gave us an idea. So we had the idea of passing the hat around, so to speak. Instead of gifts, they could donate to the Sabir wedding fund. If we marry, he marry. If we get married, he gets married. But their friends are all aid workers, and they don't have much money to give. So it fell to Miriam and Nikaj to scrape together the money Sabir needed. But in giving $10,000 to an Afghan that you met six months before, Miriam was breaking one of the basic rules of development work. In all her years in the business, she'd never given away even $100 to someone. One of her jobs is to certify new aid workers. That includes teaching them not to fork over their own cash, because you don't want people to always be turning to you to fix their problems. If one of my staff, if an ex-pat came up to me and said, yeah, I'm giving $10,000 to this family, because I really like them, I'd say, are you nuts? I would have said, you're crazy. Because I don't give money to beggars, not usually. I believe in the bigger plan, funding hospitals, and orphanages, and education centers. You don't just give money away. That's just not what you do. So don't mess with the system. Yeah, you don't want to set that precedent of I give, you receive. And so that's, I guess, in some ways, how this broke my personal rule. But Sabir also broke the rules, she said, because he was the one who chose Kotsea. It wasn't a match made by his family, as almost all marriages in Afghanistan are. That appealed to Miriam. It felt like true love. He doesn't want any girl. He's really fixed on this one, not anybody, this one. And I think that's what originally drew us to him. That's unusual in Afghanistan. And I liked that. I don't know. It felt like a good year for grand gestures. We were really excited about life in general, and we felt like spreading it out. And Sabir seemed to be the best direction to put it in. So Miriam and Nikaj put $2,500 in an envelope, a sort of down payment on the girl, Kotsea, . And they gave the envelope to Dr. Wasai, Sabir's friend, who also works for Nikaj. And Dr. Wasai took the money to Sabir's house, and he sat down with Sabir's family to arrange everything. And that's when he found out they hated the idea. They ask me, his father and his sisters, they asked me, please talk with Sabir. We are not happy with that girl. Turned out Sabir's family knew all about the secret fling. They'd suffered for years the googly eyes, the flash of the camera looks at the dinner table, and they thought Kotsea was a terrible match for Sabir. They didn't worry as long as Sabir didn't have the cash, but now he had foreign backers, international money from Nikaj and Miriam. The family marshaled against intruders. Even Wasai told Sabir to drop the girl. She was too short, he said. I told him, reject her, and dump the agreement with her, because Miriam and Nikaj, they are the same tall. Miriam and Nikaj are the same height? Yes, and Me and my wife, we are the same tall. And when you're touching with your wife, all the parts of your body will be separate from each other. Sabir is sitting next to Wasai on the couch. Not laughing, just looking down at his hands, giving me a full view of his thick, fluffy hair. In the end, it didn't matter how tall Kotsea was, her father said no to the marriage. Sabir was just a driver, he said, with a rented house. He wanted a better provider for his daughter. And so it was over. Sabir was heartbroken, still single. And Miriam and Nikaj were left wondering what would happen to their $2,500. Two months passed. and then I met again with Sabir and Dr. Wasai. And Sabir told me this. And then I'm with a new girl. Sabir had a new fiancee. She is a very good, beautiful girl. I like her. The new girl's 22, he tells me, just like Kotsea is. But this one was chosen by Sabir's sister. She's Sabir's nephew's high school classmate, and everything else was done in accordance with tradition. Sabir met the girl's father, the father gave Sabir a bag of candy, Sabir gave the dad some of Miriam and Nikaj's money. She is taller than the first one. She has nice hairs. I know for they showed to me her photo. You've never seen her? You've only seen her photo? Yes, I receive a photo, not see she. Sabir hadn't even seen the new girl, which made this a very different kind of love story. No secret kisses, no stolen glances, no tortured tale of young love. It felt about as romantic as a mail order catalog. And Sabir sounded so practical. Are you in love with the new girl? Yeah, now that she's my wife. I love her. You do love her? Yeah, yeah, because she is now my wife. I won't play you tape where I kept asking Sabir to compare the new girl to the old one. He got uncomfortable. I felt like a spoil-sport. And finally, Wasai told me to drop it. Look, he said, Sabir's 32 years old. He's never talked to any other women, let alone been in a relationship with somebody. Sabir thinks he was in love, Wasai says, but it was something else. Pseudo love. Pseudo love. A pseudo love? Well, we would call it lust, I think. It means, the young boy get a little bit thirsty, especially in Afghanistan. Wait, the boy is very thirsty, you said? Yes, and for example, when you drink some things more and more, you are not thirsty. In European countries or in your country, it's very easy to talk with a girl. In Afghanistan, maybe 90% of love is wrong love. Nobody took Sabir's love very seriously, not his family, not Dr. Wasai, not even, apparently, Sabir himself. The only ones left to believe the love story were Miriam and Nikaj. Four months had passed since I'd last seen them. Nikaj had changed jobs, they'd lost touch with Sabir. They knew they were paying for a new wedding, but they didn't know the full story. So I sat them down on the couch. I have good news and bad news. The good news is Sabir is getting married. Miriam was eight months pregnant, balancing a cup of green tea on her stomach. I told her about the new fiance, and she looked so disappointed. But does Sabir like this new girl? Sabir hasn't seen her. It's a crap shoot. That's not fair. He's going to be happy. His sisters checked the girl out. They talked with her mom, and they liked her, and thinks they are a match. But that's the problem, is that Sabir is a romantic guy. I think he has high expectations. If he were Mr. Joe Schmo, who didn't cry when he told a story or get the bad case of giggles, it wouldn't really matter if she wasn't the love of his life, because he's just another guy marrying another arranged girl and with no expectations. But that's not Sabir. Sabir is a sensitive kind of guy. And I think he expects to be happily ever after. And what if he's not? The way Miriam had seen it, Sabir was a man who had glimpsed the promised land, the promise was true love. And she just wanted to help him get there. But now she has to face the fact that he was fine with an arranged marriage-- not just fine, happy. And by the end of our conversation, Miriam decided she was happy with whatever made Sabir happy. I wanted him to see something he liked, go after it, and have it be his. But baby, this is Afghanistan. Exactly, that's exactly the point. He and she found what they wanted, and it was an usual, out of the ordinary way of doing, and they did it. They would have done it, if he had married that girl. But instead, they just went back to the status quo. And that's not really what we're looking for. We weren't looking to fund an arranged marriage. We were looking to fund two people who fell in love. Well, just to make Sabir happy as well. And he needs a wife. We thought giving him Benjamin Franklins would make everything OK. And it wasn't just that, it was a little bit more complex. Sounds like a development project. Sabir says he's not planning to tell the new wife where their wedding money came from, at least, not till well afterwards. For now, he doesn't want her to know that he's doing anything different from the way things are always done. Gregory Warner in Afghanistan, since we first aired this story last January, Sabir has gotten married in that arranged marriage, and says that he is a very happy man. Coming up, fake babies, a fake nurse, and a bet that nobody wants to win. 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 show-- Matchmakers. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Part of Me, Why Not Take Part of Me. The woman in this next story was on our show briefly, once before, talking about how she donated a kidney as a good deed, and lied to her own mother about it until after the surgery. But after that experience, this woman, who's an orthodox Jewish woman named Chaya Lipschutz, started noticing all these ads where people were looking for donors, desperate people. And because she couldn't donate a second time herself, she decided to devote herself to rounding up potential kidney donors and matching them up with strangers in need of kidneys. She became, basically, a kidney matchmaker. Mary Robertson and Sarah Koenig co-reported this story which Sarah tells. It's really, really hard to do what Chaya was trying to do. She's trying to persuade people, alive people, to give their kidneys to people they've never met, who don't necessarily live anywhere near them, who have nothing to do with them. Needless to say, people like this are very rare. For almost a year, Chaya posted ads on Craigslist in every state, under the volunteers section, seeking kidney donors. Life is exactly the same-- Oh, I should say, do you know. Life is exactly-- OK, no I could just say, life is exactly the same with two kidneys as one-- She updates the ads constantly, answers people who respond. Hope you-- able to do this great act. Just think of how proud of you everyone who knows you will be. But even when someone says they want to donate, maybe they don't follow through. And every hospital has different rules, so people get rejected all the time for different reasons. Or maybe there's a problem with their tests, or a family member talks them out of it. It can be constant frustration and disappointment. And for the first year of trying, it was. None of Chaya's matches went through. An then Chaya got a break. This woman, Sandy, who heard Chaya give a talk about kidney donation at a synagogue, called Chaya up and said she wanted to donate and was all enthusiastic about it. And Chaya was thrilled. She matched her up with this guy, Max. The blood type was the same, and it was all working out. She was very excited about it, because she happens to know the family. And she's good friends with the daughter. I was like, ah, perfect. So even when I told her that I have a back up, she didn't want to hear of it. This was her beshert. This is the person who was meant for her. Beshert is a Yiddish word that means destiny. And it's almost always used for romantic matches. And that's kind of how Chaya sees what she is doing. Not that it's romantic, of course, but that she's connecting strangers in the most intimate way possible. She hopes the people will bond. Maybe Sandy and Max will become like family to each other. Then on the day the surgery, when Sandy and Max were in the operating room, IVs in their arms and everything, they did a last minute blood test on Sandy. And it showed a problem, and the whole thing fell apart. Chaya was crestfallen. She left a message on my colleague Mary's machine, one of many, many, long messages about the Sandy situation. Hi, Mary-- Chaya. I spoke to the kidney transplant coordinator at the hospital. And it's just a mess, it's just a mess-- And then, in the same message, Chaya is on to her next problem. This older guy, Abe Salem, had been waiting for kidney. But he'd gotten too sick for surgery, so she skipped over him. But now, he was ready, and she wasn't sure she had a donor. She'd originally offered up her brother to Abe, but then, when Abe got so sick, she matched up her brother with this other man instead, Mark Raymon. Now she's overwhelmed. I get clearance for Abe Salem. I didn't tell you that? Abe Salem is ready to have a kidney transplant. Good grief, what am I going to do now. Now they're all over my back with Salem's family. Oh, my goodness. It's crazy, it's crazy, so they want my brother now. Abe Salem wants my brother, Mark Raymon wants my brother. Bye. Chaya's an unlikely agent for this line of work. She's not connected to a hospital. She's not a social worker. She's never been trained in the subtle, ethical considerations that go into living donor transplants. To be blunt, she's eccentric. She's excitable. And she's emotionally involved with the cases on her list. She doesn't strong-arm potential donors, but she does nudge and cajole. And she doesn't offer money, which is a illegal, but she does offer the promise that if you donate, people will think the world of you. You will feel gratified. It will boost your self-esteem. An expectation of quid pro quo which might horrify a professional transplant coordinator. Frankly, some hospitals are wary of Chaya and won't deal with her. But here she is, dedicating almost all her time, unpaid, trying to save these kidney patients. Within days of the Sandy disappointment, Chaya has rebounded and she's trying to match her brother, Yosef, with Mark Raymon. Abe, by this time, had dropped out again. If this works, it'll be her first successful match. Mark, hi, good morning, it's Chaya. How are you? Mark is 56. A computer guy who's been unable to work since his kidneys failed. He has to be on dialysis for three hours, three days a week. Dialysis is pretty horrible. It's nowhere near as effective as a new kidney, and people die on dialysis all the time. So Chaya is constantly on the phone and the email, working out the details of a possible transplant for Mark. the problem with this case is that her brother is willing to donate, but he needs to do it by the following week, because he has to get back to work. You know what, if you want my brother's kidney you're going to have to go out to Staten Island, not wait until next Monday or Tuesday, because it might be too late. I'm just suggesting strongly, if you want a kidney by next week-- I'm sorry. Yes, yes, if they can-- tell them there's a possibility you won't get a kidney if-- huh? Mark Raymon and Yosef Lipschutz, Chaya's brother, go to the hospital in Brooklyn for their final round of tests, two days before the transplant is supposed to happen. Yosef, the donor, might be the sweetest man I've ever met. He's so nice, he thanks the nurses during routine questioning. All right, any problems with your kidneys? None whatsoever, thank you. Oh, thank you. He's never met Mark before, but they bumped into each other that morning at the admitting desk while they were signing in. He said that you're very kind to do this thing. I said, sure, my pleasure. And we discussed enough of the old neighborhood. He lives in Borough Park. I used to live in Borough Park. A little chitchat, nothing special-- We found Mark upstairs, waiting for his tests. Did you have a vision in your head of what Yosef would look like, or how he would be, before you met him this morning? Not really, but he looks OK. He's not overweight. He looks basically OK. So you were surveying him like for his health. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sizing him up like-- I'd like to get a healthy kidney so that I can get on with my life. Mark is pretty worried about the transplant. Not that it won't work, but that it won't happen. He's been through this before. About a year ago, he got to just about this stage of a transplant when the donor's family convinced her to back out. He was crushed. Anything can go wrong. Even now, I mean, I coughed when I was being worked on by this lady inside, the nurse. She said, well if you're going to cough, that means you have a cold. If you have a cold, you can't be operated on. And if they try to postpone it, then my donor's going to run away, because he has a work schedule to keep up. So I'm not going to cough the next time. The next person I talk to, I'm not going to cough. So it's so tense. Yeah, that's right. Chaya's at the hospital too, making sure everything is moving ahead, making sure her brother's OK. I have a yogurt for you, and I brought a couple slices of whole wheat bread. We have to make sure your kidneys are going to stay in good health till Wednesday at least. She's a little agitated. Every few minutes, she adjusting this bobby pin that's in the back of her long dark hair, but that doesn't actually seem to be holding anything in place. And she's writing notes all the time on these little strips of cardboard that she keeps in her purse. I realize there the things you pull off the top of a Kleenex box. The hospital administration arranges a photographer to take a PR picture of Mark and Yosef. It's a big thing for the hospital to have a stranger donate his kidney like this. So they put them next to each other on a bench, and it's incredibly awkward. They shake hands, pretend to meet again for the first time. Nice meeting you, hopefully everything turns out all right. Got any hot tips on the stock market? No, it's no fun that. Chaya is beaming. She's got her camera out too. Everyone's feeling good. And Mark is starting to relax. Now I'm beginning to believe, God willing, that this is going to happen. Obviously, I've been disappointed before, but this time I believe this is, God willing, is going to be. Seconds after he says that, Vicki, the hospital's transplant coordinator, walks up and says she's got to talk to Yosef and Mark. She says, there's a little bit of a situation. Can I tape this? No, this is not good. A drug called Plavix showed up in one of Mark's blood tests. It's a blood thinner he takes. They'll have to postpone the surgery until the following Monday, when the Plavix will be out of Mark's system. But Monday is after Yosef's deadline, when he's supposed to be back at work. Chaya looks stricken. So does Mark. And then Vicki asks Yosef right there, in front of everybody, whether he'll still donate, even though he's said many times, he needs to have it done by the end of this week. Yosef pauses, and then says, he will. That was hard that they told you that right while he's sitting there. You can't refuse. I can't refuse, number one and luckily, I have an open date sort of like next week. I just hope that it's not postponed anymore. Too, just to have him sitting there like, what can you say. Well, I'm not going to break his heart. You know what I mean? Could you see that he was looking heartbroken? I felt it. I didn't have to look, I just could feel it. Chaya sometimes downplays what she's doing, but this is huge for her, maybe her life's purpose. And in her circles, Orthodox Jewish circles, it's crucial that she have a purpose. I didn't realize this until I asked her what I thought was an innocent question, how old she was. I don't want to say. I don't want to say. Ask me another time. Wait, how come you don't want to tell me how old you are? I don't want to say. I don't know, I don't want to say. You don't want, in the story, for anyone to know how old you are? Right. Do you feel uncomfortable with your age? Yeah, and you know why? Because I'm not married. And so it like looks strange. Someone my age should be married. In her world, a Jewish girl finishes high school and then gets married and has babies. It's what her sisters did, what her girlfriends did. Chaya came close, but it never happened. And now she's a woman of undetermined age, living with her elderly mother in a tiny, two room basement apartment in Borough Park, an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn. Chaya's an anomaly here, and she feels it every day. She knows her landlady and the other tenants in the building probably talk about her. I don't know exactly what people are thinking, but I'm assuming like they see, they look at me like, oh, she's not married. And they probably say, oh, that's terrible. Or we feel bad for her. I'm sure they feel that way. I'm sure they feel that way. Yeah, you know, I kind of feel like an outsider, in a way, because I am different from them. That must be hard though to feel sort of different or even judged, or that people are out there like pitying you for something. Yeah, yeah it does, it does. I do feel kind of funny about it. Like sometimes I do wonder, what are they thinking when they see me, whatever. They also could think there's something wrong with me mentally. But I feel bad for my mother, because I'm sure she has people say, oh, so how many children do you have, and how many children are married, and this and that. And I'm sure she'd love to say, all them. I know she probably skips the subject. Sometimes she tells me, now I know why, what your purpose in life is. And so she sees that maybe this was my purpose in life. So because Chaya can't call herself a wife or a mother, it's almost like, to her neighbors, she has no identity at all. She's had to find one, kidney matchmaker. But for that title to make sense, she has to actually arrange at least one successful match. It helps explain why she's so worried that something's going to go wrong on Monday, the day of the surgery. That morning, they do a final blood test on Yosef. But what if they took blood from him now, what if they find out something is not-- Like what? I don't know? What do they take, a CBC now and all that? I mean I don't think-- No, because-- listen. Anything can happen, even at last minute. It's 6:00 AM and Mark and Yosef are in a pre-op room separated by a curtain. A team of medical people is getting them ready. A doctor puts an x on Yosef's left side to mark which kidney they're going to take. Chaya's checking in on both of them. She takes the opportunity to lecture Mark a little. Take good care of my brother's kidney when you get out of the hospital. Eat healthy, high fiber, low fat-- I plan on it. That's the condition. If you want my brother's kidney, you got to take care of it and yourself. I'd plan on it. Otherwise, he's going to take it back. I'm only kidding. Mark doesn't say anything. Yosef's surgeon arrives. We're on it. This is it. The moment of truth. Yeah, just grab the IV for me. Tell your sister you'll see her later, OK? The nurse just asked Yosef if he's ready to roll. Meaning, is he ready to have four small incisions to cut loose his kidney, and then a larger incision that the person with the smallest hand on the surgical team will reach into and pull out his kidney. The answer is yes. Yosef is ready to roll. Chaya hands over small holy book that she hopes will keep her brother safe. Say with me, [SPEAKING HEBREW]. And as soon as Yosef is out of sight-- You're going to be fine, don't worry. Chaya yells out to the surgeon. She's freaking out. She's still thinking this could all go wrong. How will I know when they start the surgery, can somebody come out and say it's started? No. What time is it starting? Usually, it's going to start, I'd say in about 20 minutes from now. Because I don't want to leave. I want to know that it's started. I don't want to here that he backed out or something last minute. I'll ask somebody to come out and let you know. Thank you very much, thank you, yes, thanks. You know what, don't-- I mean, it's not funny, because I know somebody who backed out the day of the surgery. I hope they lock the doors there. Yosef doesn't run out of the operating room, and now Chaya just has to wait. One of her older sisters is there too, Aliza. They talk about the things you talk about when you're trying to pass five or six hours. Aliza has no trouble with this, she can really, really talk. About her own operations. I remember when I had my tumor on my ovary many, many years ago. And they had to operate. They had to do so much cutting. Today, thank the Almighty, they do so much cutting. About her bus driver on the way to the hospital. He made a whole big deal about my shopping cart. Take the stuff out of the shopping cart. You can't come on the bus with a shopping cart. And I left, be well [SPEAKING YIDDISH] have a good day. I couldn't believe it. I don't know if he was Jewish. It doesn't matter. It was nice of him to say that. About the kosher joke book she's written. Two pelicans went into a restaurant, it's a corny joke, and they-- what do you call it-- they ate a meal. And they said where is the bill? The bill? They have a bill. Two pelicans go into a restaurant, they say where is the bill? And then, finally, it's over. Everyone's fine. They can go visit Yosef. And it's at this moment that what Chaya has done suddenly becomes clear, most of all to her. For an instant, her single-minded kidney advocacy vanishes, and she's just a sister, looking at her brother, lying in the ICU. Hi, oh no, you look bad. He does look bad. He's barely conscious. And from the expression on his face, it seems like he's in too much pain to even speak. Are you in pain? Yeah. They tell you to squeeze some pain medicine? No. No? Should I ask them to do something? Yes. Excuse me, what are they going to do for his pain? Chaya had worried about this, about how much it would hurt him, how he would handle it when he woke up. She goes back out into the hall. Are you OK? Yeah, I'm OK. [CRYING] I'm going to be OK. he's in pain? Yeah. She says he's not in pain, and that he's just very tired. Looked like he's falling asleep, which is good. Let him sleep maybe. And just like that, Chaya has snaps out of it. If she had any doubts about her purpose after seeing Yosef, they were fleeting. She goes back into his room and spends the rest of the day with him in recovery. After a couple of nerve-racking weeks of complications the transplant took. Yosef went back to work, and Mark did too. A year later, they're not really in touch. For her part, Chaya is still at it. In the past year, she's made two other successful matches, saved two more lives. And now she is not so anxious about the whole endeavor. She's proved to everyone that she's a bona fide matchmaker. Her mother is very proud. Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. She co-reported that story with Mary Robertson. Act Three, Babies Buying Babies. Elna Baker always wanted to be an actress. But when she graduated from college, the only acting job she could get in New York City was at a toy store, FAO Schwarz, where they had salespeople put on costumes to demonstrate various toys. And this, is where Elna Baker accidentally got into the matchmaking game. For the first few weeks I rotated from toy to toy so that Chad, the FAO toy demo manager, could analyze my acting strengths before placing me on a specific product. I demonstrated anything from Robo-transformers to plush puppets. There was a preschool veterinarian kit, and it came with a stuffed puppy and doctor tools. For six hours I was supposed to fake diagnose an inanimate object and get other people excited about it. I would interrupt families as they strolled through the store. Spot is sick, will you help me figure out what's wrong with Spot? And then I would hand the child a stethoscope, while the parents waited impatiently. I might as well have said, you and your family want to be left alone, but I'm an actor. After two weeks of rotating, I was assigned to the Lee Middleton Doll collection. This was a coveted position. Lee Middleton Dolls were special. We were told that they were made with materials developed by NASA. They looked exactly like real babies, and they were weighted in the head and in the bottom so that they actually flopped like real babies. Every day I dressed in a nurse's uniform, and I worked with two other nurses slash actresses in the adoption center, a small cottage on the second floor of a FAO Schwartz. A typical day of work would go as follows. Parents and their children would go from incubator to incubator admiring all the babies. If they decided that they were serious about adoption, we would open the gate to the white picket fence that surrounded the cottage and invite them inside. We would sit across from the perspective parent, usually a seven year old girl, in one of two rocking chairs and begin an adoption interview. Do you promise to love and care for the baby? Will you read to the baby? Will you change the baby's diaper? Yes, the little girls would answer with sincerity. And then the final question, what would you like to name the baby? The girls always chose frilly names like Princess Tiffany of Fairy Flower Land. We would write Princess Tiffany on the doll's hospital bracelet, along with the date of birth, which usually happened to be the previous day. And then we would fill out a birth certificate. We would hand the birth certificate to the little girl's parents and say, now all you have to do is pay the adoption fee, wink, wink. We were instructed by Chad never to use words like cost, purchase, or buy. He said that that would quote, break the illusion of the world, unquote. When work got slow, us nurses were not allowed to socialize. According to Chad that would also break the illusion of the world. Instead, if we weren't working with a customer, we had to always be holding, rocking, or bouncing the display baby doll. The display baby doll is on display for a reason. It could not be sold. Something terrible happened in the factory on the day of its birth, because the dolls fingers were not like the other babies. They had been molded together making it look like it had flippers instead of hands. As if that weren't bad enough, it had curly red hair, scary green eyes, and its head weighed at least five pounds more than all the other babies' heads. As a result, when you lifted the baby, its head would automatically flop back, and its little flippers would flip up like a monster baby. Which is how the doll earned its nickname. We called it Nubbins. And because Nubbins was for display purposes only, he didn't have an incubator like the other babies. Instead, he was kept in a cupboard. This was especially disturbing, because Nubbins had a knack for looking realistically dead. So when you'd open the cupboard, you'd find him slumped over onto his enormous head, with his arms flopped behind him like he died in a yoga class. September and October are traditionally slow months at FAO Schwarz. And with no customers to attend to, we spent a lot of time holding, rocking, and bouncing baby Nubbins. So much time that we actually started to resent him. So to entertain ourselves we invented a game. Actually, I invented it, but the other girls went along with it. The object of the game was this, while a nurse was working with a customer, you had to try and get her to break character by doing something horrible to baby Nubbins. For example, I'd open all the doors to all the cabinets in the adoption center, and while another nurse was doing an adoption, I'd carefully walk down the aisle and rock Nubbins's head into the jagged edges of each drawer, while humming a lullaby. It was fun to torture Nubbins in front of each other, but it was even better when there was a crowd of people standing outside the adoption center. It took real comedic timing. You'd change Nubbins's diaper on the diaper changing table. Then you'd carefully lift him. You'd gently place him on your shoulder and burp him ever so slightly. And at just the right moment, you'd drop him. It worked every time. Everyone watching knew Nubbins wasn't real, but when he hit the floor, they still jumped and gasped. And the best part was that they did it sync, so it looked like a minor earthquake had just occurred. That is how us nurses spent our time. We'd sell overpriced dolls when we had customers, and we'd torture Nubbins when we didn't. And then one day, everything changed. A few months before I started working as a toy demonstrator, two girls from the MTV reality show, Rich Girls, came in to FAO Schwartz with a camera crew and adopted a baby. On November 15th the episode aired. By 9 o'clock the next morning, every mother on the Upper East Side had to have a Lee Middleton Doll for her child. There was a line of anxious parents and spoiled children outside the store. We were doing adoptions left and right. Gone were the days of horseplay and pranks. This was real work, and it was exhausting. Do you promise to love and care for the baby? Will you read to the baby? Will you change the baby's diaper? What do you want to name the baby? Fill out birth certificate, repeat. Business was so good that no one saw it coming until it was too late. Within a week of the episode's air date, we sold out of all the white babies. That's right, we sold out of all the white babies. All we had left were incubator upon incubator of minority babies. The manager of FAO Schwarz had a conniption fit. With Christmas only five weeks away, the Lee Middleton factory was already on back-order. There was absolutely no way to get a new shipment in until mid-January. Day after day, the same scenario would repeat itself. Eager mothers would rush to the adoption center. Is this the Lee Middleton Doll collection, they'd ask. Then they'd stop, dead in their tracks. I'd watch their heads go from incubator to incubator. They'd pause briefly at the Asian baby. Oh-- no. And then, trying as hard as they could be politically correct, the mothers would look at us and say, do you have any other shades of babies? Chad, the toy demo manager, had prepped us with a response. He'd taped a memo in the women's locker room reading, if the mother's express a disinterest in the babies due to ethnicity, kindly inform them that while these are all the babies we have in stock, there's a wider selection available online. And they're more than welcome to order online. But this is not what the mothers wanted to hear. These dolls don't look like my little Susan, they'd explain, pointing to their child. I want something that looks like Susan, wink, wink. Us nurses decided to make the most of the situation. And so we invented another game. If a mother didn't want to adopt a doll because of its ethnicity, we worked on her child. It was pretty easy. First, we would ask the little girl if she wanted to hold one of the babies. Wow, we'd exclaim. This little baby has really taken to you. You look like you'd make an excellent mommy for her. The little girls would gently stroke the babies while the mothers would look at us in a state of panic. You could almost hear them thinking, why are you doing this to me? What did I ever do to you? The other game we invented stemmed from Chad's memo. Instead of saying, there's a wider selection available online, we would try and say, there is a whiter selection available online, without getting caught or breaking character. In spite of these games, the situation still depressed me. I remember one mother in particular. She was in her mid-30s with blond hair and a pinched face. When I offered her an Hispanic baby, she looked at me and said, Oh, come on. We don't want a dark child. What would people think it Jessica was carrying a dark baby? She touched my hand and looked into my eyes. You know what I mean. I knew what she was trying to say. She was saying that since we were both white, I understood her. But what she didn't know is that while I'm fair-skinned, I'm actually half-Mexican. And besides that, I did not know what she meant. Did she honestly think that if someone saw her daughter carrying a Hispanic baby doll that they would think that Juan, her gardener, had knocked her up? There were so many things I wanted to say to these mothers. But that's when it sucks to be employed, because the customer's always right. So instead of speaking up, I took my hand out from under the pinched-face woman's and said, you are more than welcome to order online. There's a whiter selection available online. But this was only half of the story. Technically, we hadn't sold out of all the white babies. Technically, we still had one left, Nubbins. As a result, when mothers would rush to the adoption center and realize there were only minority babies, they'd immediately notice Nubbins. They'd spot him in our arms, round and pudgy with a head of red hair. He was the answer to their prayers. Can I see that baby? They would insist. All we ever had to do was turn Nubbins around. His head would flop back. His flippers would flip up. And the mothers would quickly say, never mind. This happened so often that eventually us nurses decided to make a bet. Who do you think will go first, baby Nubbins or all the minority babies? To be honest, when I've told this story in the past, and I've told it a number of times, I've said that I bet on the minority babies, because I thought Nubbins would be the last to go, if he'd go at all. And then what I'd say happened was that Nubbins sold first, leaving behind an entire toy nursery of minority babies and isn't that crazy. But that wasn't exactly true. What actually happened was much harder to admit. It was this. The minority babies did start to sell, slowly. First, we sold out of all the Asian babies. Then we sold out of all the Hispanic babies. And finally, all we had left was Nubbins and incubators of black baby dolls. This just made us all feel worse. Inadvertently, the bet had become, who do you think will go first, Nubbins or every black baby in the nursery. I stood by my initial bet. We'll never sell Nubbins, I insisted. And then a week later, a mother marched up to the adoption center. Nurse, she yelled, is this some sort of a joke? Her face was frozen in disgust. In one hand, she was holding a Bergdorf shopping bag, with the other she was dragging a very solemn child. Where are all the white babies? I wasn't used to the mothers being quite so direct. We're all out, I said. You have got to be kidding, she began. And then her eyes focused on Nubbins, who was nestled in my arms. What about that one, she asked. I turned Nubbins around, slowly, for full impact. His head flopped back. His flippers flipped up. I waited for her horrified response. We'll take it, she said. What, I thought, Nubbins? You want to adopt Nubbins? Was Nubbins even up for adoption? I opened the white picket fence and escorted the mother and her daughter over to the rocking chairs. I sat baby Nubbins in the solemn little girl's lap, sat in the seat across from her and began. Do you promise to love and care for this baby? The little girl looked up at me. No. I had been doing adoptions for two months now. I'd interviewed hundreds of little girls. No one had ever answered no before. Technically she had just failed the adoption interview. For lack of a better response, I ignored her answer, and I moved on to the next question. Will you read to the baby? No. OK, I said, moving to the next question. What would you like to name the baby? Stupid, she said. While I wasn't exactly Nubbins's best friend, I wasn't about to write Stupid on his birth certificate. Why don't we try calling him-- Just name the baby Veronica, her mother interrupted. I scribbled Veronica in the name section of the baby bracelet and birth certificate and then I handed the paperwork to the mother. As they walked away, I laid out a pink blanket instead of a blue one, and set Nubbins in the center. For the last time, his head flopped back, and his little flippers flipped up. That's when it hit me. Nubbins has been adopted. There will be no more Nubbins. A little montage in honor of the doll began to play in my head. There he was being tossed across the adoption center by Jenny. There was the time Carla had accidentally rocked on him with rocking chair, and a crowd gasping as he tumbled onto a marble floor. It had never occurred to me before, but I loved Nubbins. And if I sold baby Nubbins, what it meant was just too depressing. I mean, after all the weird comments from our customers about our baby inventory, I still didn't want to face what it said if a factory reject monster baby was adopted before a whole nursery of perfectly cute black babies. I tried to think of ways to prevent this. I thought about lying and telling them Nubbins had already been purchased. I even thought about buying Nubbins myself. I imagined what I'd say to my dad when I called him to borrow the $120. Um, dad, there was this baby at the adoption center, and he was about to go to a bad family, and I think that I could be a good family. And then I looked up. The woman and her daughter had returned with their receipt. Reluctantly, I placed baby Nubbins in the little girl's arms. I'm sure baby Veronica will have a wonderful home, I lied. As she and her mother walked out of the store, I watched Nubbins's head bobbing on her shoulder until I couldn't see them anymore. Elna Baker performs her stories on stage around New York City, and she has a book coming out, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, a Memoir. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes with our senior producer Julie Snyder, and with Alex Blumberg, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollack, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Emily Youssef. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for a program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia who is always stopping me in the hallway to share his feelings about me. If it was possible, I will take your hair on my head." And um, what exactly does that mean? It means-- know he is in love. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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They can laugh about it now, the Ohm family. It was Thanksgiving dinner, suburban Minneapolis, big spread, pumpkins on the table, 14 people, and it was 2002, a year after 9/11. We were all just talking about 9/11, just 9/11 anything. This is Alexis, the baby of the family. She and her parents came into our studio and talked with one of our show's producers, Alex Blumberg. And one of the topics that was brought up was Osama bin Laden, and I just for some reason just said I thought he was attractive. I thought he was hot. And my dad really didn't appreciate that comment. I wasn't going to listen to any of it. I really wasn't. I mean, I wasn't going to let any comment like that about his looks get one inch further out of her mouth. I'll say to this day, it was ridiculous. What did your father say? I think he told me to [BLEEP] off. That had never happened before. Alexis looked at her two little cousins, Henry and Hugo, who didn't know how to react. Her mom Diane didn't know how to react. I just my whole meal that I had spent a week preparing kind of going up in flames with that statement. The minute the F-bomb landed, I thought, well now, what am I going to do? There sat these two precious little boys, and their eyes were as big as saucers, and I had to do something, anything to smooth this horrible situation over. So I think I probably said something like, well, you know what? He does kind of look like Jesus, the long hair. Just to smooth it over, that's what I remember myself saying. Yeah, needless to say, comparing Osama bin Laden to Jesus didn't exactly smooth things over. Then we all just started yelling. Yeah, I probably went to about 250 degrees, because I just-- I think you got out of your chair. I think I got out of my chair, I really did. I said, if that's the best we can come up with after what's happened to our country, boy, I'll tell you. He was going off. And when Jeff goes off, we all listen. I do remember him saying something horrible, like I think the Middle East should be made into a parking lot. I don't think I ever said that. I think you do that day. No, I know I didn't. Yes, you did. I guess in retrospect, my reaction, I regret what I said. But I had to get my point across. I just for some reason had no appreciation for what Osama bin Laden looked like. This guy, I don't care what he looks like. I don't care if he looked like Paul Newman. He's still responsible for what he did. The looks thing, it just jacked me right there. Alexis pretty much knew what she was getting into to talk about Osama bin Laden this way with her dad. He is conservative and served in the army. She knew what kind of room she was working. But she hadn't really factored in the fact that it was Thanksgiving dinner. Her dad says that's a lot of what made it blow up. That was just the wrong place at the wrong time. It really was. I think the tension of Thanksgiving, getting the food all on the table, getting prepared, getting going. And then all of a sudden, here we go. Today on our show, we have stories of people facing various kinds of tough rooms, trying to calculate what they're going to say, what they can get away with, and usually not getting the reactions they figured they were going to get. WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, Tough Room in four tough acts. Act one, Make 'Em Laff, in which we go among comedy professionals who face a room that is so tough, there's just one laugh every 100 jokes. Act two, Bar Car Prophecy. A young person tries to hang out in a tough room full of adults, adults and booze. Act three, Mission Impossible. At the doorsteps to one of the great secular temples to science ever built, New York's Museum of Natural History, two Mormon missionaries work a very tough sidewalk as they try to bring unbelievers over to their way of seeing things. Act four, Tough Newsroom. Writer Malcolm Gladwell remembers getting a newspaper job with no experience, and no real idea of how to write for a newspaper. Stay with us. Act one, Make 'Em Laff. There are tough rooms for salesmen, and tough rooms for politicians, and tough rooms for teachers, and grant applicants, and job interviewees, and doctoral students taking their orals. But I think the classic tough room, the tough room that defines them all, is when a comedian stands in front of a silent audience, delivering one joke after another, and getting nothing back whatsoever. And there's no tougher audience than other comedians. All right, here we go. Global warming proven by one 50-degree day in January. Area man just wants to know if he should cancel his annual Oscars party or not. Nation guesses it will have the chicken Caesar salad. It's Monday morning in the offices of The Onion, and to start the new issue, each of the writers has brought in a list of 15 headlines for their fake news newspaper. There are eight people at the table, seven men and one woman, which is par for the course in the comedy business, almost all of them in their 20s. Seth Reiss goes first. He's just 24, been at the paper for two years. And the way it works is, if Seth can convince two people to vote for a headline, it survives one more day until the next round of editing. Star of David to add seventh point. Sure. Report: America runs on-- I'm sorry. It got enough votes, I just didn't understand why that was funny, and I was going to ask for it but I-- I just think it's silly. OK. I'm just saying. The joke survives. Seth marks it with a highlighter. I came here because, by the time they're done with this process, The Onion is one of the most reliably funny things out there. And I heard that one of the reasons for that was this room. This was a very tough room, with a tough minded editorial process that they've been using for 20 years, and I wanted to see what that meant. Car commercial pretty adamant about car. Yeah. Class struggle a breeze for local investment banker. Todd? [LAUGHTER] Now you're just calling out who you want to vote for them? That's not right. Though it's incredibly popular, with three quarters of a million copies in print each week plus 5 million individual visitors at the website every month, it's possible that, especially if you're older, you've never actually read The Onion. So here's what you need to know. It's written in newspaper form, though lots of the funniest stories aren't really news parody, but just everyday life described in a deadpan newspaper style, like "Stoners announce plans to get stoned for that," or "Rejection letter silently flipped off," or "Control of anecdote wrested from boyfriend." These were all considered for this one issue, by the way. The younger staffers say that it's hard not to take what happens in this room personally sometimes. Seth Reiss tells me that he's made a resolution to stop muttering under his breath, you're all wrong, when the group rejects his headlines, because after all, they can't all be wrong. Megan Ganz, who is 23 and who has been at the paper for a year and a half, says it can be a blow, and it smarts when a headline that you're sure of, that you love, doesn't make the cut. That happens a lot. And then all of that work just evaporates into nothing. There are headlines that I remember pitching that I think I know that they're not any good, but some part of my heart is like attached to them. Like I had this one that was, "Spork used as knife." And for some reason that was like the funniest thing I thought I'd ever thought of, was the fact that here's a utensil that's two utensils, and you're using it as the only utensil it isn't. And it didn't even get a titter in the meeting. Nothing, it just died. And I read it twice, and they were like, yeah, move on. Still, that must have been this summer. It was like months ago that I wrote that headline. I still think about it. World's most depressing technical college creates world's most depressing bus ad. It's a slight variation on one that I've-- I still like that. I like that one. The highlighter is passed to Todd Hanson, who's not just the oldest person at the table, he's been at The Onion longer than anybody else. He started in 1990 when The Onion wasn't really a business, but more of a hobby for a few friends who all worked crappy jobs elsewhere to support themselves. In these meetings, he tends to talk the most, partly out of seniority, and partly, as he admits, because he just can't be any other way. Though when he reads his list, he's just like any of the other writers. And this is really the damnedest thing about their jobs. Even with all his years of experience, even he can't tell which of his brand new jokes is any good. Man evidently thinks those sideburns make him look cool. It's not funny. I kind of like that. Really? Kind of. Is it funny with something other than sideburns? Sideburns? No? OK, all right. Pornography desensitized populace demands new orifice to look at. Yes. OK. Area man not technically pathetic in that he fails to elicit pathos. But are you just making a joke about how people incorrectly use the word pathetic? It takes them two long mornings, on Monday and on Tuesday, to come up with these 16 headlines they're going to use in the paper this week. And to get to those 16, they go through-- and I know this number is going to sound kind of crazy-- 600 possible headlines. OK, this is a sad joke that comes straight from real life. Casual relationship enters third year. So that's still going on? [LAUGHTER] Sorry. I'm sorry. That wasn't to be mean, that was a legitimate question, because we've talked about it before. Truthfully, the staff is a lot nicer to each other than I figured they'd be. Comedians can be incredibly competitive, and The Onion has gone through phases when the chemistry wasn't so chill. But mainly, they're just tough on the material. It's a tough room because of how minutely they dissect all the jokes. Over the years, they've developed a way of discussing the material that helps them decide whether something is so outstandingly funny, it beats a lot of other jokes that are also pretty funny, and what makes each joke funny, and how to make it funnier. As an outsider, and not privy to these shared assumptions and what one of them called their hive mentality, it's sometimes hard to figure out why, for instance, "Local girlfriend always wants to do stuff" was a good enough headline to make it into the paper, while a headline that seems nearly identical, "Nation's girlfriends call for more quality time," literally gets jeers. Jeers. Listen. Nation's girlfriends call for more quality time. Or nation's wives spend all the husband's money on expensive hats. Coming home with another round shaped box. Look at that stack of round boxes. I'm pregnant. Lucy? Or why does this joke get immediate, unquestioning approval? Beauty regimen horrifying. Yes. Yes, definitely. That's funny. While the headline "Roommate's unopened bag of Doritos taunting area man" deserved a long discussion over whether the point of the joke was in fact the taunting. The reason it's funny is because the word taunting-- Like he's been staring at it from a distance of 15 feet from his couch for the past 10 minutes. Or do the Doritos themselves make the joke too obvious? It would be funny, and it would have funny details in it, but on its immediate surface, it's a joke about Doritos, and like a food item-- I agree that Doritos is an immediate go-to kind of snack. Is there another snack it could be? I mean Doritos is the exact right product. Watching them parse jokes like this, with a kind of academic precision that they're sort of proud of, hour after hour, it's not just tedious, it's the opposite of comedy. And the other thing that was very odd watching them work, was that most of the jokes that got the biggest laughs from the writers themselves did not make it into the paper. For example, this headline. Cardinal teaches pope to make church by interlocking his fingers. Or this one. Gay retard teased. [LAUGHTER] That one's great. That's so awful. Or here's another. Infertile woman treats frog shaped humidifier as human child. [LAUGHTER] And what the hell? Let's just do one more. Biologist realizes he's been studying Cadbury egg. After the meeting, I get explanations for the many mysterious decisions I've witnessed. I'm told that usually the jokes that get laughs on Monday do not survive. Again, Megan Ganz. A lot of the jokes that we laugh really hard at don't make it in the paper, because they're just like initially funny, but then we sit down on Tuesday and go, well what does that mean though? What will we say about that? Where does that joke go? There was a headline once that everyone laughed at really hard, that was "Woman crying by penguin exhibit." Do you guys remember this headline? "Woman sobbing near penguin exhibit." And everyone laughed really hard, and then everyone went, OK, but why is that funny? It's funny because it's penguins, I guess, and like women crying is kind of a weird thing to be happening near them. But then nobody would pitch that on a Tuesday meeting as being funny, even though it made everyone laugh. Nobody would pitch that, because what do you write about that? It doesn't go anywhere. And then there's this mystery. Why did the story "Local girlfriend always wants to do stuff" make the paper, while "Nation's girlfriends call for more quality time" got heckled. Todd Hanson and Dan Guterman explain that the story that went with "Local girlfriend always wants to do stuff" was actually written in a way that made fun of the guy in the relationship. In talking about what a sort of lowly loser he is for being irked by his girlfriend's desire to do things. It's just more like, she's always wanting to go do stuff, and be around people. And she always wants to leave the house. And that seemed more original and different to us, whereas nation girlfriends-- what was it? Call for more quality time. Just seemed like a joke about nagging girlfriends. And the problem with a joke about nagging girlfriends isn't the political correctness of it, but simply it's a really tired joke. It's a really tired joke. In fact, all through their editorial meanings, they're talking constantly about what jokes are tired. A joke about the Green Party and marijuana brownies was killed partly because mentioning the Green Party at all seemed passe. A headline about Nicole Richie's new baby, "Nicole Richie thinks baby looks fat," was ditched on the theory that any Nicole Richie fat or anorexia reference was very 2005. But one area where tastes differ on the staff is when it comes to silliness. They're for silliness, sometimes. Take the joke, "Scientist realizes he's been studying Cadbury egg" that got such a big laugh on Monday. It's just a silly joke, says Megan. Like, we do silly jokes, granted. But it just doesn't have that X factor of being silly and kind of compelling. I don't know, it doesn't have-- I can't explain what the difference is between that one and we ran one that was "Thirsty mayor drinks town's entire water supply." And that one, we had the same reaction when it was read. We laughed really hard. And then it went in the paper. And why is that one sillier and in a better way than the other one is silly? It's funny because it's almost always agreed upon in the meetings. Almost, but not quite. When Todd Hanson and I sat down for an interview, he spontaneously brought up the exact same headline Megan had mentioned, but to make a very different point. No, no, don't get me wrong. I like the silly jokes. I just have to think them through and find out what they're saying. Like I remember there was a joke, "Thirsty mayor drinks entire town's water supply." And I just kept saying, why? What is it? Thirsty guy drinks a whole lake? Like what's funny about that? That's just silly in a way that isn't funny. And they're like, no, no, you got to trust us. It's funny because he's the thirsty mayor, he drinks the whole town. And they were trying to explain it to me, and I just didn't get it. And then finally, it clicked in my head, and I said, oh I get it. It's about misappropriation of public resources by a corrupt ruling oligarchy, or whatever. And then everyone made fun of me, like oh yeah, that's what it's about. It's not just silly. Well, of course it's silly, but it has something to say, and that's why it's funny. That's what I think. I just don't think jokes that don't have anything to say are that funny. If you can't find something legitimate to say within the context of the joke, no matter how silly it is, I don't see the point of it. In fact, to sort this out, a whole language has emerged over the years at The Onion to talk about whether something is too silly, or silly in the wrong way. Writers speak about a joke taking them to Silly Town, or Crazyville, or Sillytown Heights, which is either good or bad depending on the person. And it can be bad, though it's usually good, when something is called a laffer. That's laffer with two f's. A laffer is a big dumb joke that you have to laugh at. If the photo that accompanies a story is a sandwich holding a press conference, that's a laffer. And the whole story is a laffertunity. Laffers are often the most emailed stories, the most popular things that The Onion does. And while everybody on staff likes both silly jokes and jokes with a bigger meaning, a few of the younger writers definitely have more tolerance for jokes that are purely silly, and a different vision for what should go in the paper. And there are a couple times during the editorial meetings that I watched where the two sides squared off against each other. At one point, they were discussing two headlines that covered very familiar ground at The Onion. "Plan to stay in all weekend and play video games goes off smoothly," and "Area man makes it through day." Seth, one of the newest staffers, and Todd, the oldest, saw these very differently. Especially the video game one seems very Onion by the numbers. That's kind of why I liked it. I know. But almost to a point where it's like that sentiment, I don't think we're doing anything new there. I don't know, I just think that that is The Onion's ethos. That's kind of like what The Onion is about. That's what America is-- I feel like you've done that joke before. The reason we've done that joke before is American has been like that for a long time, and it still is. But the sentiment is so similar to the sentiment of a lot of Onion headlines that people aren't going to notice that. They're just going to be like, oh, The Onion does this again. It just doesn't feel right to me. I'm going to keep writing jokes like that till the day I die. So I'm just warning you. At the heart of this dispute is a problem that comes up in any creative project that lasts even a few years. You don't want to become a parody of yourself. You don't want to keep repeating the same things over and over. And yet, there are some things that you do a lot of, that are just built into the DNA of what you make. This is definitely something that we struggle with here on our radio show. And in fact, The Onion once did an article that made fun of us for rehashing certain kinds of stories, which was funny, and it stung. Megan Ganz says that as one of the newer writers on staff, she worries sometimes that they're just repeating the same jokes over and over with different words. There's one, for instance, where a big government institution just acts like your schmo college roommate, like "Syria attends Mideast peace talks for free continental breakfast." Funny, but it's a formula. And now, they have with the youngs and olds, the promise is all of the young people grew up reading the stuff that the older people wrote. So we formed our sense of humor on The Onion, and then became writers for The Onion. You're trying to write for your idols. It's strange. It's strange for us. We've talked about it many times, the young people here, it's strange for us to write for your idols. But also are you saying to Todd, who's been here forever, like yeah, you can't do that again. Don't do that joke again. I'm tired of that joke. That is really horrible, isn't it? So I've been trying to mimic him throughout my life to get to where I am. And now that I'm where I am, I'm like, don't do what you do. In the end, "Area man makes it through day" makes it onto a list of stories that will appear in upcoming issues of The Onion, partly because the founder and editor in chief of the paper, Scott Dikkers, liked it. But this disagreement wan't even close to the biggest fight they've all had lately. That fight, I'm told, was over the headline "Ghost just dropped by to say boo." One group 100% hated it, one group 100% loved it. People raised their voices. One usually mild mannered editor walked out in protest. I guess people kind of read it as like a third grade joke book joke. Editor Joe Randazzo says it was an existential fight about what kind of paper they were, that would or would not publish such a thing. One member of staff may love The Onion that would never have "Ghost just dropped by to say boo," while another member of staff may love the fact that The Onion can include a joke that says "Ghost just dropped by to say boo." It's totally subjective though. Finally, the editor in chief had to tell everybody to cut it out, and they published the joke. And this one headline did not ruin the paper. But a roomful of people who would even entertain the possibility that it might, who feel that strongly about it, that's a very tough room. Act two, Bar Car Prophecy. When you're a kid, adulthood itself can seem kind of a tough room, in which you're going to have to adapt to the strange custom that is the world of adults. But for Rosie Schaap, when she was a kid, the prospect of hanging with the adults seemed exciting, an adventure. In 1986, when I was 15, I discovered the bar car on the Metro North New Haven line, a dingy, crowded, badly ventilated chamber, where commuters drank enough to get a decent buzz going, told dirty jokes, and chain smoked. These were my kind of people, and even though in my memory the whole place is covered in a sort of grimy yellow film, it was my kind of joint. I took the train once a week from Westport, Connecticut, to Manhattan's Grand Central Station to see my psychoanalyst. As self-absorbed as any teenager, I'd come to enjoy psychoanalysis. I'd been going since eighth grade, and the 50-minute sessions made me feel like the featured guest on a talk show. It helped that my shrink sounded a lot like Dick Cavett. But from the moment I first stumbled into the bar car after one of our appointments, my return trip to Westport became the best part of my Thursday visits. I liked the company of grownups, especially strangers. With them, I found it easy to feel smart and funny and interesting. Once when I was eight and we were vacationing at the beach, my mother sent me to borrow a skillet from the neighbors, a bunch of 30-somethings in a shared rental. They were lounging on an L-shaped white couch, and seemed to get a kick out of everything I said, even the word skillet. I wasn't even sure what the word meant until a tall woman handed me a heavy pan with flared sides. I thanked her and turned to leave, but they weren't ready to let me go. They had questions. Who was I? What grade was I in? What was I into? I was astonished by their interest. I sat myself down and asked if they wanted to hear a joke. So this Jewish American princess married an Indian chief. Guess what they name their baby? I paused for effect. White fish. It's a terrible joke. I'd heard my mother tell it to one of her friends. I didn't exactly get it. But these grownups sitting there drinking wine tumbled off the big white couch laughing, and I felt like a superstar. That's how I wanted to feel in the bar car, surrounded by its regulars, mostly men in wrinkled suits and loosened neckties. I liked listening to them. They drank beer or scotch, laughed loudly, talked fast, and always seemed happy to see each other. They were a tribe, and I wanted in. Still, I didn't dare pony up to the bar and order myself a beer. There was no way the weary Metro North crew would serve me. I needed a point of entry. I found what I was looking for the night I pulled my Tarot cards from my backpack and gave myself a reading right there in the bar car. I had been studying The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a 1910 primer by Arthur Edward Waite, and had cultivated a look that fell somewhere between Janis Joplin and Madam Blavatsky, gauzy Indian dresses, batik caftans, chunky silver rings on my fingers. My Tarot cards smelled of patchouli and sandalwood, cigarettes and pot. I shuffled them and then began to lay them out in the Celtic cross pattern I'd learned from Waite's book. First, the significator, the card that stood for me. Then the card that crossed me, signifying the things that blocked my path. Next, the card that crowned me, representing my ideals and aims. And so on and so on, until it laid out the 10th and final card, which would reveal the answer to my question. By then, a small crowd had gathered around me. When I finished, a woman asked if I'd give her a reading. It was the first time someone in the bar car had spoken to me without wanting to see my ticket. She asked what I charged. I hadn't thought about that. I mulled it over and told her I thought it was kind of bad mojo to take money for readings, but I was cool with bartering, and I wouldn't mind a beer. She didn't ask how old I was. Her reading was good, mostly positive cards. Yes, I told her, she would thrive at her new job. She might even get a promotion soon. She smiled and discreetly got me that beer. Suddenly, it was like a divination marathon. I must have done five readings in an hour. The more I read, the more confident I grew. A routine took shape. As I laid down the cards, I'd sing Neil Young's After the Gold Rush quietly, almost under my breath. Then, when I was done, I'd give the whole pattern an initial once over and look solemnly into the questioner's eyes. The cards are here to guide us, I'd say in a voice an octave lower than my own, but what they tell us is not carved in stone. You have the power to change any of this. And all these grownups, accountants, lawyers, executives, hung on my every word. The next week, after therapy, my fortune telling for alcohol scheme began in earnest. Again, I settled into the bar car and gave myself a reading. And again, a cluster of commuters assembled around me. I felt like I'd cracked a code. They'd sit down next to me and listen obediently. When you shuffle the cards, put your energy into them. Concentrate on your question, I instructed them. If you're doing this half-heartedly, the cards will know. This continued for weeks, and out of it I got plenty of beer, a couple of books, a pair of silver earrings. That, and the undivided attention of all these adults. I'd explain what each position in the Celtic cross meant, the significance of casting more cups than swords, more wands than pentacles. If someone's reading turned up an unusually high number of Major Arcana cards, I'd go quiet for a moment before I disclosed to him how much power that foretold, and urged him to use that power responsibly for the greater good. I never asked them their names, and I never told them mine, not my real one anyway. Yet time after time, as I laid out their futures, complete strangers would drop intimate clues about their lives, their jobs, their families. More than once, a wingtip wearing banker or salesman confided in me that he'd taken acid and sloshed around in the mud at Woodstock, and felt very connected to the energy of the universe. I'd nod and say something like, that's awesome, man. I wish I'd been there. It was as if I'd materialized before their eyes, like some ghost from their youth come back to answer questions about their future. Of course there were people in the bar car who paid me no mind, and others who made their skepticism known. But I was dismissive of the nonbelievers. They were out of touch, and that was their loss. Still, one heckler in the crowd made me nervous. I couldn't pinpoint his age, mid-30s I guessed. He was a broad shouldered, thick necked guy with a beer gut, strawberry blonde hair, and a big, ruddy face. He looked like a Kennedy, but you couldn't quite put your finger on which one. And did he have a mouth on him. The F-word used as a noun, verb, and adjective strung together in one sentence, and then the next, and the next, like artillery fire. The guy was always drunker and louder than anyone else. Once, he cupped his hands into a makeshift megaphone and sort of stage shouted at me something like, the '60s are over. Get a life. As much as I basked in my bar car celebrity, I dreaded seeing that guy. And then one Thursday, after I'd already served a few of my patrons, he half-staggered, half-swaggered over to me. All right, he said, this is total BS, but go ahead, do mine. He plunked himself down across from me, his knees a little too close. I wanted to tell him to go away. I wanted to tell him that his unwillingness to believe would insult the spirits and make them uncooperative, but I worried he'd call me a fraud. I played it cool and started my spiel. Shuffle, focus, give the cards your energy. He rolled his eyes but played along. He cut the cards once and handed me the deck. I laid them out. First I set down his significator, the 10 of swords, possibly the worst card of all, with a solitary, prostrate figure under a black sky, pierced in the back by all 10 swords. It represents, in Waite's words, pain, affliction, sadness. The rest of the cards weren't much better. He pulled the tower, a card signaling corruption, destruction, and the presence of evil. He got the death card too. And as much as I disliked the guy, I really didn't like what I saw on those cards, not for anyone, not even for him. I kept quiet for long minute while I tried to figure out how to spin this, but there was nothing good I could say. Maintaining eye contact is key to being a good mystic, but I couldn't even meet his gaze. Well, what's it say? he finally asked. I took a deep breath. None of this is carved in stone or written in blood. He cut me off, well, what? So I told him what I saw, and as I interpreted one dismal symbol after another, the guy leaned in closer, put his elbows on the table, buried his head in his hands, and started to cry. He told me that his marriage was falling apart. That he constantly worried about his health. That he was too young for heart problems, but he had them. That he felt as though his life had added up to zero. He asked, will I ever be happy? The cards, I answered bluntly, said no. But, I told him, just like I told everyone else, you have the power to change that. He shook his head and glared at me with red, swollen eyes that said he did not. Maybe he didn't. Maybe no one had the power. Maybe the days that lie ahead of us are set in stone and that was that, and maybe I'd been the cynic. Something I had believed in had become a gambit for attention. I hadn't thought it through, and maybe I'd even hurt people. In the background, other passengers were caught up in conversation, laughing and drinking and carrying on. I could think of nothing more to say to the guy, nothing reassuring. I felt small and foolish, and when the guy finally got off the train a couple of stops before mine, I was relieved. I sat awake in my bed that night and thought about him. I imagined him going home to a white clapboard colonial, to an unhappy wife pretending to be asleep. I imagined him returning the next day to a job he hated, and getting wasted again that afternoon. But of course, at 15, I couldn't imagine what it was like to be him, to live his life, and I realized I didn't want to be able to. Reading Tarot cards in the bar car had been fun until it got serious. Adults had problems I could not begin to fathom, and they had things to say I wasn't ready to hear. I didn't go back to the bar car. I missed the grownups, I missed their attention, but I was not one of them. I didn't belong there. Although I could feel adulthood encroaching, real adulthood, which now seemed less about drinking and smoking and freedom, and more about loss, and fear, and the sense that death itself lay waiting somewhere just ahead. Rosie Schaap. This story comes from a book of essays that she's writing about drinking called Drinking With Men. She's looking for a publisher. Coming up, if Jerry Seinfeld became a Mormon tomorrow, the most likely way that it would happen would be because of two guys that we are going to introduce you 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 show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme, and-- Hello? Hello? [TAPS MICROPHONE] Hello? Anybody out there? OK, if you're out there, make a noise. Tough room. That's our theme. Very clever how we do this here on the public radio, huh? We've arrived at act three of our show. Act three, Mission Impossible. In the Bible, God is constantly sending his prophets into situations where nobody wants to hear what they have to say. And after high school, young Mormon men are basically supposed to do the same thing. They are encouraged to go on a two year mission to spread the gospel. They pay their own way. Jane Feltes has followed two of these guys out to convert people in a place that we usually don't think of as a bastion of Mormonism, or particularly friendly to missionaries: the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Elder [? Longing-- ?] elder doesn't mean older, it's just a title given to missionaries-- is 20, an army brat most recently from Utah. Elder [? Meller ?] is from Utah too, and he's 21. They're both in the second year of their mission, so they kind of have it down. How are doing today sir? Have you ever had the chance to read the Book of Mormon? No chance? All right, do you know anyone in the area we can share our message about Christ with? The guy literally tells him, get lost. You don't know anybody in the area we can do some service for? All right, you have a great day, sir. Today they're stopping people outside the American Museum of Natural History, but they work all over New York and its suburbs. And the toughest thing about being a missionary in New York isn't what you might think, that it's too secular, too Jewish, or too unfriendly or too cool for school, especially Sunday school. No, the problem is competition. In New York, there are so many distractions on the street, people trying to hand you fliers or get you into their hair salon or comedy show. And if you're saying no to someone who asks, do you have one minute to save the environment, you're not going to say yes to these guys. Everyone's walking on the street, and everybody's walking about the same pace, and anything that will disrupt the flow will cause them to be angry, just because they're already in the mindset that they're going somewhere. Anything that stops them is going to make them angry. And usually we're the ones that stop them. We're usually that disruption. Both guys are living off their savings while they're here. Elder [? Longing ?] lives in Chinatown with three other missionaries in a two bedroom apartment. Elder [? Meller's ?] two bedroom in Harlem houses six missionaries. And for 12 hours every day, from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, most of their interactions are less than 30 seconds, if you can even call them interactions. Hey sister. Elder [? Meller ?] calls out to a cute woman in her late 20s. Have you ever seen this picture before? I'm sorry? He shows her a picture of Jesus baptizing Peter on the cover of his Book of Mormon. Have you ever seen this picture before? Yes, I have. That's good. We want to invite you to be baptized by that same authority that he's given. I'm Christian. I don't know if that matters. Yeah, we are too. But I'm not Mormon. Thank you though. But I'm not Mormon, she says, thank you though. I wouldn't talk to you if you were Mormon, right? Where are you from? She's gone within seven seconds. Par for the course, says Elder [? Longing. I don't know if you saw, but when people say no, and we're still trying to talk to them, we're just trying different things. No, I don't want that. Do you know anyone who does want it? No, I don't know. Well, do you know anyone who wants to come to church? No, I don't know anybody. Well, do you want to come to church? And then they walk away and you feel what? And I feel like that guy really does not want to go to church. Sometimes I get defensive, like under my breath, I'll mutter something. Elder [? Longing, ?] do you ever get my baby's sleeping, I have to go watch it. Oh yeah. I hate that. It's like, it's sleeping, you don't need to watch it. Yeah, excuses. Hey brother, how are you feeling today? How are you doing today, brother? Hey sisters, can we invite you guys to get your Mormon on by coming-- Calling everybody brother and sister was not working at all for them. Have a good one. I figured it had to be a Mormon thing. Turns out it's not. I picked that up in the Bronx. You'd say hey, what's up brother? And so usually in the Bronx, they're like, hey, what's up? And they'll say it back. This definitely ain't the Bronx though. Right across the street lives Jerry Seinfeld, Glenn Close, John McEnroe, and Helen Gurley Brown, which makes it the toughest kind of neighborhood for missionaries. In the Bronx, people will talk to them, let them visit their homes. But the wealthier the area, they say, like here on Central Park West, it's a much harder sell. Spreading the word about Mormonism is a numbers game, and to talk to the greatest number of people in a day in New York City, the guys have each learned how to strike up a conversation in at least five different languages. Elder [? Longing ?] approaches a man sitting on the steps. Elder [? Meller ?] hears a woman speaking French to her child. And Elder [? Longing, ?] he even knows some sign language. My sign language is improving. Over the course of the afternoon, approaching every person who walks by, they get a couple dozen cards with the church's address into people's hands. They say on average they manage to get about three or four new people to come to church each week, which seems amazingly low, given that it's two of them working basically every waking minute. Are these skills that you're learning out here these few years, are they things you think you're going to take into your career? Yes. Most definitely. Most definitely. What are you going to do? I thought about it. I was like, I bet selling life insurance is way easier than this. Because I've met people who do sell life insurance, and they're like-- They're happy people. They're very successful. I wonder what I could do if I did that. Or like those guys who sell scissors, go door to door, like Cutco, they sell scissors. I'm like, I'm sure I could sell some scissors. Like sometimes I think, I think I could sell scissors better than that guy, because you know how to deal with people turning you down. Like even if you get turned down over and over again, it's finding that little thing that keeps you going, that little thing that keeps you talking to people. But in this, that little thing that keeps you going is like eternal life. With scissors, I don't know if-- I don't know, a paycheck. I don't know. While I'm with them, their longest conversations are with guys who seem down on their luck. One guy might have been drunk, and another guy who, if he wasn't homeless, was probably often mistaken for homeless. And they spend even more time with people they have no hope of baptizing, like this guy. Here you go, last one. I don't like the way they translated it, but OK. Read this. Elder [? Meller is ?] standing talking to a middle aged orthodox Jewish man in a navy trench coat and hat. The two men get into a long, in-depth discussion about religion, specifically whether, as the Mormons believe, a prophet walked the Earth in America in the 1800s. What about Jeremiah and things like that? In dreams, they had dreams. God did not speak to them. All right. Our message is that God has a prophet on the Earth again. There are many prophets. This is true, but there are those ordained, like Moses. It's like watching a couple football fans talk about the Super Bowl, even though they were rooting for different teams. They know they'll never convince the other that their team is better, but they're really enjoying the back and forth. They seemed relieved to have found someone who relates to the world the way they do. God bless you. You too brother. Have a good one. I think some of my favorite people I like talking to, I like talking to Jews, and I like talking to Muslims. Muslims are really cool, just because I find that they're more devout. It's easier for me to talk to them because they are very faithful people. You guys have that in common. That's true. But more like going along with the Jews and Muslims and stuff is they understand the idea of a covenant, a two way agreement. So they're more devout with it. At 6:00 PM, it's dark and so cold nobody's on the street anymore. So the guys head off on a home visit, to meet with a new potential convert. They have three hours of work ahead of them today, and roughly a combined 3,240 hours to go. Jane Feltes is one of the producers of our show. Act four, Tough Newsroom. These days, Malcolm Gladwell is very good at what he does. He's a reporter. He writes for the New Yorker magazine. He's had a number of iconic bestselling books, including The Tipping Point and Blink. But it was not always this way. No, no, no. Once upon a time, the world of journalism was a totally forbidden and alien place to him. And he talked about this onstage at The Moth in New York City. My first job, my first real job, was at the Washington Post, and I still don't know really know how I got hired, because I didn't have any newspaper experience. I hadn't even worked for my high school newspaper. But they put me on the business desk, which is where you put people at the Washington Post who don't know anything about journalism. And I just sat there for the first six weeks, and I didn't do a thing. And people were looking at me and wondering about me, and finally the business editor took pity on me, and he gave me an earnings story to do. It was about a local company named Maryland Biosciences, and I just had to write up their earnings. And so I wrote it up, like three paragraphs long, it took me like five hours, and that was my first story in the Washington Post. But unfortunately, I wrote that the Maryland Biosciences had lost $5 million in the previous quarter, and they in fact had made $5 million in the previous quarter. And on the morning the story ran, the stock dropped 10 points. And the CEO called Ben Bradlee on the phone and just chewed him out. And I got in all kinds of trouble, and I was put on probation. And if I had doubts about journalism before, they were redoubled now. And I was wondering, what am I doing? I can't even read a balance sheet properly. And I really was despairing, and I was turning over this story again and again. How did I do it? Where did I go wrong? And then I had a kind of epiphany, which I really credit for why I stayed in journalism, and didn't go selling real estate, or whatever the other things I was thinking of doing in that moment. I realized first of all that I had made up this story, but I'd gotten into the paper, and no one had stopped me. And secondly, I'd moved the stock 10 points. And it was a kind of Jayson Blair moment. And all of a sudden, there's a little glimmer, and I can begin to see that there's some hope in this profession. This thing that didn't make sense to me is now kind of making sense. I get moved to the health desk and science desk, which is where they put you at the Washington Post if you know even less than the people in the business. And one of the first stories I did was a story about the AIDS conference, which was a big deal back then. There were three cities being considered for the next conference, Rome, Vancouver, and Amsterdam. And it's a big deal for a reporter, because you got to go to one of these cities, and it was a week's paid vacation. But my problem with Rome, Amsterdam, and Vancouver, they're very nice cities, but I'd been to all of them. And I really in my heart of hearts wanted to go to Australia. And so I'm writing up the story, and I thought, would anyone mind? So I just said, NIH officials said they were considering Rome, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Sydney. And the next morning, I see that the wires have picked up the story, and they've called the Sydney Tourist Bureau, and they said are you at all interested in hosting the AIDS convention? And they said, well of course. And then the Miami Herald picked up the story, and they called the NIH, and they said, Sydney says they're really interested in hosting. And the guys at NIH, what do they know? They're like, that's fantastic. Yes, we are considering-- I can't tell you how exhilarated this makes me feel. And I have a sense of real power for the first time. Right around that time, a new guy joined the science desk, a guy named Billy Booth, and Billy didn't come from newspapers either. And I could tell that he was as shell shocked as I had been. So I went to him and I said, Billy, I know how you feel. I've been there. But there's a secret to this business. It's not what you think, it's actually quite-- and one of the things we get to do is that we had to read all of these medical journals every week. And every week there would be some new paper describing some incredibly obscure disease that scientists had made some advance against. And I said to Billy, we can write about these diseases, but we don't have to tell anyone that they're obscure. And so we started something called disease of the week. We would write about these diseases, and we would find some lab technician, and we would quote them as saying this is the greatest thing that ever happened. Of course, it was for the lab technician. We'd put in like the 19th paragraph that this a disease that only afflicted one in every 400 million people. And every week we did another disease, and every week we got a little bolder. And the stories got just a little bit more outrageous, and they started running not on a 16, or not on 15, and then 13, and then 2, and then on the front page. And we started to have a certain kind of swagger. We felt like drunk with power. But it wasn't enough. And we began to think, you know what? It's not enough just to cure diseases. We'd like to effect to change the very language of American journalism. And that's when the contest was born. Now, I don't remember whose idea the contest was, whether it was me or Billy, but we were just so inseparable in those days, it was probably a combination. But what we decided was to introduce the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" to American journalism. And the contest was that we were going to give ourselves a month, and the person who got that phrase into the newspaper the most times over the course of the month would win. And so I struck first. It was a story on Medicare spending. Medicare had gone up 12% the previous year, which I said raises new and troubling questions about the status of the American health care establishment. Billy comes back the next day, he'd got a piece from one of the physics journals about this sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson, which was very big in the '90s. And he said that this recent work on Higgs boson raises new and troubling questions about our understanding of dark matter. And so we're tied. Two days later, I come back. Piece on FDA cutbacks, raises new and troubling questions about the safety of the nation's drug supply. Billy does a piece, a wonderful profile of this botanist, in which he said that her most recent work raises new and troubling questions about our understanding of non-flowering perennials. It's back and forth. It's a horse race. And we get consumed by this. And we're showing up 8:00 in the morning to check the wires, looking for things that are conceivably both new and troubling. One day left in the contest, we've done 30 days, I'm ahead 10-9, and I'm convinced I got it in the bag. Right at the end of the afternoon, Billy pulls something off the wires about declining test scores, writes a little thing, it's this long, about how this raises new and troubling questions about the intellectual fitness of American schoolchildren. Gets it in the paper, and not only that, the copy desk, when they're making up the headline for the story, the headline is, "Report raises new and troubling questions." It's a twofer. He goes ahead of me 11-10, I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach. It's devastating. And I go to Billy and I say, we're not done. We need to have a championship round. And by the way, raises new and troubling questions was too easy, because everything raises new and troubling questions. So we need to have a much tougher standard this time. I said, what are you thinking? He said, I think we should use the word perverse. And I said, no way. I think we should use the phrase often baffling. So we argue back and forth, and finally we compromise, and we go with perverse and often baffling. Now, I don't need to tell you how hard it is to get the phrase perverse and often baffling into a newspaper. You've got to find something that is-- perverse isn't good enough. Baffling isn't good enough. Perverse and baffling isn't good enough. It must be perverse and often baffling. It must oscillate between the state of bafflement and transparency, while simultaneously remaining perverse. We killed ourselves on that one. Literally, it was an obsession. We would come in and we would just sweat it out, and we would try and try. Billy did a piece on mollusks once, in which he tried to claim that mollusks represented a perverse and often baffling something. And the copy desk took out often, arguing, I think correctly, that mollusks were either baffling or they weren't. Mollusks did not oscillate. I came back with a piece on the anthropology of women's breasts. I claimed that they represented a perverse and often baffling development in anthropology, and my editor took out perverse and said, this is a family newspaper. You can't call women's breasts perverse. And I went to the mat on that one. Finally, the story was killed. It was ugly. Anyway, we're really broken up about this. We can't get this damn phrase in the paper, and we're going out drinking at night. And a lot of my old doubts about journalism are starting to come back. And I'm saying, do I really want to be part of a profession that has no room for the perverse and the often baffling? And then one day, I'm having this conversation with a gastroentrologist. And he tells me that, did I know that there were more gastroentrologists per capita in Washington DC than any other city in the country? And I said, I did not know that. But then I said, I thought that doctor's fees were higher in Washington DC than anywhere else in the country? And he goes, yeah. Light bulb goes on above my head, because the law of supply and demand says, the greater the supply, the lower the price should be. But here we have a case where we've got a very large supply of gastroentrologists, but the price of gastroentrologists is going up. That is a perverse phenomenon, and until I explain it to you, it's baffling. I raced back to the office, whipping into my desk, make a couple of phone calls, and I bang it out. And you can look it up, right on the front page, September 21, 1992, "Washington DC has more gastroentrologists per capita than any other city in the country. But in a reflection of the perverse and often baffling economics of the health care profession, it simultaneously has the highest doctor's fees in the country." Billy is devastated. I am triumphant. All those doubts about journalism melt away, and I say, this thing called newspaper writing, I can do it. One week passes, I get a letter in the mail. Dear sir, with respect to your story on the gastroentrologists of the Washington DC region, the economics of the health care profession are neither perverse nor baffling. Malcolm Gladwell, on stage at the Moth, where people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales. This story appears in one of the Moth's greatest hits collections. Their website, where they have all kinds of free stories to listen to, is themoth.org. By the way, if there's any ambiguity in here at all, young journalists please note, putting false information into the newspaper is wrong. Our program was produced today by Robyn Semien, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Emily Youssef. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to Michael Purdy, Bradley Olsen, and Robert Krulwich. Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast or listen to any of our old shows for absolutely free, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who says that he is absolutely certain that all these years doing the pledge drive must be good for something. I thought about it. I was like, I bet selling life insurance is way easier than this. Or like those guys who sell scissors, go door to door, like Cutco, they sell scissors. I'm like, I'm sure I can sell some scissors. I'm Ira Glass. I'm 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. Love, love, love, love, love. What do we talk about when we talk about love? Well since the 13th century, this is what we talk about. This very moment. Coup de foudre. Coup de foudre in French means the bolt of lightning, seeing someone and in an instant falling in love, love which happens in the moment of a flash. This is Richard Klein of Cornell University. In the 13th century, he says, Petrarch is walking by a fountain in the south of France, turns a corner, sees Laura. Petrarch looks into her eyes and in an instant his life is transformed. And he writes the first lyric love poems ever written. He says, before this moment, one lives in a state of distraction. And things come and go, experiences, fragmentary, and chaotic. And all of a sudden, at the moment at which you encounter the eye of the other, it turns you into something else. You suddenly become-- your whole being becomes-- focused on that experience. And all you want to do once you've had that experience is to return over and over to that. 30 years later in Florence, Dante goes through the same thing when he sees, at the top of a flight of stairs, Beatrice. He writes about it. And the idea of this moment, the bolt of lightning, gets repeated in literature, and song, and theater all through the Renaissance, up through the 19th century, and into the present day. Today, people who have not experienced that bolt of lightning in years, people who have been married for decades go to the movies, watch TV, to see it reenacted over and over. This is what we talk about when we talk about love. In ancient Greek, the Greeks had two verbs for seeing, [? taorain ?] and [? drachain. ?] [? Taorain ?] is a way of seeing that we ordinarily understand as observation. [? Drachain ?] refers to the look that eyes can flash like lightning, like dragon breath, that not only illuminates the eye, but sends out a kind of fire that penetrates the eye of the other. And they Fhas specifically a separate word for that? That's right. For the moment when eyes flash. And flash in a way which implies some kind of faithful encounter. I was struck looking at those tapes of Monica Lewinsky embracing the president on those rope lines. The thing that's most compelling about those images is the way her eyes flash at him. And one can't help but be struck by the light that's coming from those eyes. OK, now here's the crazy thing. Everybody knows that that moment of initial rapture, that instant when your eyes meet and you're obsessed with the other person, thinking about them all the time-- everybody knows that that feeling doesn't usually last, that in some way it's just a dream, that over time it changes into something different. Here's the thing, even on the day that this romantic myth of love was born-- that day in the 13th century when Petrarch saw Laura-- even on that day, it was clear that it was just a myth. It was just a dream. Petrarch doesn't get the girl. No, the usual story is that the guy doesn't get the girl. But maybe you never get the girl. Maybe that's the sort of condition of falling in love. It always remains something sort of inaccessible. At the moment that desire is fulfilled, desire dies. Psychologists have estimated that you can only stick in love for 18 months. That's the limit. After that, it becomes something else, becomes admiration, respect, affection, and so forth. But the-- The dream of it dissolves and becomes something else. Something else. I wonder if you would be saying this and explaining this in these terms if you, yourself, were falling in love right now. Well, as a matter of fact, I think I am. Well then, you're going to get in trouble when this goes on the radio, aren't you? Oh, I'm going to be in so much trouble. You have no idea. So you're falling in love right now and you're holding to the idea that this is an illusion and a sort of illusory experience? Oh, but all I want is more, more illusion, more illusion. So today, beloved listener, we come to you with a mission. Since stories of love-- in fact, our whole idea of love-- these things are usually about how it feels during those first moments of falling in love. Today, for Valentine's Day, as a public service, we make an attempt to understand another side of what love means. We bring you stories of couples that all take place decades after the moment their eyes meet. Act One, "Before and After," the beginning of love as viewed from a moment near its ending. Act Two, "The Over-Protective Kind," in which a husband worries about his wife's safety on a very dangerous undertaking she's about to go on, to a beach resort. Act Three, "Istanbul," Ian Brown talks about what it means to stay monogamous. Stay with us. Act One. "Before and after." Well as a kid growing up in the east coast in the 1970s, for me, the most romantic songs in the world-- and this is kind of a corny thing to admit now years later, with retrospect-- the most romantic songs in the world were Bruce Springsteen's. Songs about falling in love in rundown beach towns on the Jersey shore, songs about hitting the road together to who knows where. But once Bruce hit a certain age, he stopped writing songs about that moment when lightning flashes between people, when their eyes meet. And he wrote a series of songs where basically every song takes place long after the couple fell out of love. And the narrator, or the singer in these songs, is remembering that exhilarating moment of falling in love and then describing the moment he's in now, the drudgery of his marriage now. And he's laying these two moments side by side, trying to make sense of how one of them has any connection in the world to the other, how one of them led to the other. Well, this next story is something like that. It's by Richard Bausch. It's exactly 20 minutes to midnight, on this, the eve of my 70th birthday. And I've decided to address you, for a change, in writing, odd as that might seem. I'm perfectly aware of how you're going to take the fact that I'm doing this at all, so late at night with everybody due to arrive tomorrow and the house still unready. I haven't spent almost five decades with you without learning a few things about you that I can predict and describe with some accuracy. Though I admit that, as you put it, lately we've been more like strangers than husband and wife. Well, so if we are like strangers, perhaps there are some things I can tell you that you won't have already figured out about the way I feel. Tonight we had another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument. Remember? Over pepper. We had been bickering all day really, but at dinner I put paper on my potatoes and you said that about how I shouldn't have pepper because it always upsets my stomach. I'm bothered to remark that I used to eat chili peppers for breakfast. And if I wanted to put plain, old, ordinary black pepper on my potatoes-- as I had been doing for more than 60 years-- that was my privilege. Writing this now, it sounds far more testy than I meant it. But that isn't really the point. In any case, you chose to overlook my tone. You simply said, "John, you were up all night the last time you had pepper with your dinner." I said, "I was up all night because I ate green peppers, not black pepper but green peppers." "A pepper is a pepper. Isn't it?" You said. And then I started in on you. I got-- as you call it-- legal with you, pointing out that green peppers are not black pepper. And from there we moved on to an evening of mutual disregard for each other that ended with your decision to go to bed early. The grandchildren will make you tired and there's still the house to do. You had every reason to want to get some rest. And yet, I felt that you were also making a point of getting yourself out of proximity with me, leaving me to my displeasure with another ridiculous argument settling between us like a fog. So after you went to bed, I got out the whiskey and started pouring drinks. And I had every intention of putting myself into a stupor. It was also my birthday, after all, and-- forgive this, it's the way I felt at the time-- you had nagged me into an argument and then gone off to bed. The day had ended as so many of our days end now. And I felt, well, entitled. I had a few drinks without any appreciable effect, though you might well see this letter as firm evidence to the contrary. And then I decided to do something to shake you up. I would leave. I'd make a lot of noise going out the door. I'd take a walk around the neighborhood and make you wonder where I could be. Perhaps I'd go check into a motel for the night. The thought even crossed my mind that I might leave you all together. I admit that I entertained the thought, Marie. I saw our life together now as the day to day round of petty quarreling and tension that it's mostly been over the past couple of years or so. And I wanted out as sincerely as I ever wanted out of anything. And I got up from my seat in front of the television and walked back down the hall to the entrance of our room to look at you. I suppose I hoped you'd still be awake so I could tell you of this momentous decision I felt I'd reached. And maybe you were awake. One of our oldest areas of contention being the noise I make, the feather thin membrane of your sleep that I am always disturbing with my restlessness in the nights. All right, assuming you were asleep and don't know that I stood in the doorway of our room, I will say that I stood there for perhaps five minutes looking at you in the half dark, the shape of your body under the blanket. You really did look like one of the girls when they were little and I used to stand in the doorway of their rooms. Your illness last year made you so small again. And as I said, I thought I had decided to leave you for your peace as well as mine. I know you have gone to sleep crying, Marie. I know you felt sorry about things and wished we could find some way to stop irritating each other so much. Well, of course, I didn't go anywhere. I came back to this room and drank more of the whiskey and watched television. It was like all the other nights. The shows came on and ended and the whiskey began to wear off. There was a little rain shower. I had a moment of the shock of knowing I was 70. After the rain ended, I did go outside for a few minutes. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house. The kids, with their kids, were on the road somewhere between their homes and here. I walked up to the end of the block and back and a pleasant breeze blew and shook the drops out of the trees. My stomach was bothering me some and maybe it was the pepper I'd put on my potatoes. It could just as well have been the whiskey. Anyway, as I came back to the house, I began to have an eerie feeling that I had reached the last night of my life. There was this small discomfort in my stomach and no other physical pang or pain. And I'm used to the small ills and side effects of my ways of eating and drinking. Yet I felt a sense of the end of things more strongly than I can describe. When I stood in the entrance of our room and looked at you again, wondering if I would make it through to the morning, I suddenly found myself trying to think what I would say to you if, indeed, this were the last time I would ever be able to speak to you. And I began to know I would write you this letter. At least words in a letter aren't blurred by tone of voice, by the old, aggravating sound of me talking to you. I began with this and with the idea that, after months of thinking about it, I would at last try to say something to you that wasn't colored by our disaffection. What I have to tell you must be explained in a rather round about way. I've been thinking about my cousin, Louise, and her husband. When he died and she stayed with us last summer, something brought back to me what is really only the memory of a moment. Yet it reached me, that moment, across more than 50 years. As you know, Louise is nine years older than I and more like an older sister than a cousin. I must have told you, at one time or another, that I spent some weeks with her back in 1933, when she was first married. The memory I'm talking about comes from that time. And what I have decided I have to tell you comes from that memory. Father had been dead four years. We were all used to the fact that times were hard and that there was no man in the house, though I suppose I filled that role in some titular way. In any case, when mother became ill, there was the problem of us, her children. Though I was the oldest, I wasn't old enough to stay in the house alone or to nurse her either. My grandfather came up with a solution-- and everybody went along with it-- that I would go to Louise's for a time and the two girls would go to stay with grandfather. So we closed up the house and I got on a train to Virginia. I was a few weeks shy of 14 years old. I remember that I was not able to believe that anything truly bad would come of mother's pleurisy and was consequently glad of the opportunity it afforded me to travel the 100 miles south to Charlottesville, where cousin Louise had moved with her new husband only a month earlier, after her wedding. Because we traveled so much at the beginning, you never got to really know Charles when he was young. In 1933 he was a very tall, imposing fellow with bright red hair and a graceful way of moving that always made me think of athletics and contests of skill. He had worked at the Navy Yard in Washington and had been laid off in the first months of Roosevelt's New Deal. Louise was teaching in a day school in Charlottesville so they could make ends meet. And Charles was spending most of his time looking for work and fixing up the house. I had only met Charles once or twice before the wedding, but already I admired him and wanted to emulate him. The prospect of spending time in his house, or perhaps going fishing with him in the small streams of central Virginia, was all I thought about on the way down. And I remember that we did go fishing one weekend, that I wound up spending a lot of time with Charles, helping to paint the house and to run water lines under it for indoor plumbing. Oh, I had time with Louise too, listening to her read from the books she wanted me to be interested in, walking with her around Charlottesville in the evenings, and looking at the city as it was then, or sitting on her small porch and talking about the family, mother's stubborn illness, the children Louise saw every day at school. But what I want to tell you has to do with the very first day I was there. I know you think I use far too much energy thinking about and pining away for the past. And I therefore know that I'm taking a risk by talking about this ancient history and by trying to make you see it. But this all has to do with you and me, my dear, and our late inability to find ourselves in the same room together without bitterness and pain. That summer, 1933, was unusually warm in Virginia. And the heat, along with my impatience to arrive, made the train almost unbearable. I think it was just past noon when it pulled into the station in Charlottesville, with me hanging out one of the windows looking for Louise or Charles. It was Charles who had come to meet me. He stood in a crisp-looking seersucker suit with a straw boater cocked at just the angle you'd expect a young, newly married man to wear a straw boater, even in the middle of economic disaster. I waved at him and he waved back and I might have jumped out the window if the train had slowed even a little more than it had before it stopped in the shade of platform. I made my way out, carrying the cloth bag my grandfather had given me for the trip. Mother had said, through her room, that I looked like a carpetbagger. And when I stepped down to shake hands with Charles, I noticed that what I thought was a new suit was tattered at the ends of the sleeves. "Well," he said, "Young John." I smiled at him and I was perceptive enough to see that his cheerfulness was not entirely effortless. He was a man out of work, after all. And so, in spite of himself, there was worry in his face, the slightest shadow in an otherwise glad and proud countenance. We walked through the station to the street and on up the steep hill to the house, which was a small, clapboard structure, a cottage really, with a porch at the end of the short sidewalk lined with flowers. They were marigolds, I think. And here was Louise coming out of the house, her arms already stretched wide to embrace me. "Lord," she said, "I swear you've grown since the wedding, John." Charles took my bag and went inside. "Let me look at you, young man," Louise said. I stood for inspection. And as she looked me over, I saw that her hair was pulled back, that a few strands of it had come loose, that it was brilliantly auburn in the sun. I suppose I was a little in love with her. She was grown and married now. She was a part of what seemed a great mystery to me, even as I was about to enter it. And of course, you remember how that feels, Marie, when one is on the verge of things, nearly adult, nearly old enough to fall in love. I looked at Louise's happy, flushed face and felt a deep ache as she ushered me into her house. I wanted so to be older. Inside, Charles had poured lemonade for us and was sitting in the easy chair by the fireplace, already sipping his. Louise wanted to show me the house and the backyard, which she had tilled and turned into a small vegetable garden. But she must have sensed how thirsty I was and so she asked me to sit down and have a cool drink before she showed me the upstairs. Now of course, looking back on it, I remember that those rooms she was so anxious to show me were meager indeed. They were not much bigger than closets really, and the paint was faded and dull. The furniture she'd arranged so artfully was coming apart. The pictures she'd put on the walls were prints she'd cut out, magazine covers mostly. And the curtains over the windows were the same ones that hung in her childhood bedroom for 20 years. "Recognize these?" she said with a deprecating smile. Of course, the quality of her pride had nothing to do with the fineness, or lack of it, in these things, but in the fact that they belonged to her and that she was a married lady in her own house. On this day in July, in 1933, she and Charles were waiting for the delivery of a fan they had scrounged enough money to buy from Sears, through the catalog. There were things they would rather have been doing, especially in this heat, and especially with me there. Monticello wasn't far away. The university was within walking distance. And without too much expense, one could ride a taxi to one of the lakes nearby. They had hoped that the fan would arrive before I did, but since it hadn't-- and since neither Louise nor Charles was willing to leave the other alone while traipsing off with me that day-- there wasn't anything to do but wait around for it. Louise had opened the windows and shut the shades and we sat in her small living room and drank the lemonade, fanning ourselves with folded parts of Charles' morning newspaper. From time to time, an anemic breath of air would move the shades slightly. But everything grew still again. Louise sat on the arm of Charles's chair and I sat on the sofa. We talked about pleurisy and, I think, about the fact that Thomas Jefferson had invented the dumbwaiter, how the plumbing at Monticello was at least a century ahead of its time. Charles remarked that it was the spirit of invention that would make a man's career in these days. "That's what I'm aiming for, to be inventive in a job, no matter what it winds up being." When the lemonade ran out, Louise got up and went into the kitchen to make some more. Charles and I talked about taking a weekend to go fishing. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head looking satisfied. In the kitchen, Louise was chipping ice for our glasses. And she began singing something low for her own pleasure, a barely audible lilting. And Charles and I sat listening. It occurred to me that I was very happy. I had the sense that soon I would be embarked on my own life, as Charles was. And that an attractive woman like Louise would be there with me. Charles yawned and said, "God, listen to that. Doesn't Louise have the loveliest voice?" And that's all I have from that day. I don't even know if the fan arrived later. And I have no clear memory of how we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening. I remember Louise singing a song, her husband leaning back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head, expressing his pleasure in his young wife's voice. I remember that I felt quite extraordinarily content just then. And that's all I remember. But there are, of course, the things we both know. We know they moved to Colorado to be near Charles' parents. We know they never had any children. We know that Charles fell down a shaft at a construction site in the fall of 1957 and was hurt so badly that he never walked again. And I know that when she came to stay with us last summer, she told me she'd learned to hate him, and not for what she'd had to help him do all those years. No, it started earlier and was deeper than that. She hadn't minded the care of him-- the washing and feeding and all the numberless small tasks she had to perform each and every day, all day. She hadn't minded this. In fact, she thought there was something in her makeup that liked being needed so completely. The trouble was simply that whatever she had once loved in him she had stopped loving. And for many, many years before he died, she'd felt only suffocation when he was near enough to touch her, only irritation and anxiety when he spoke. She said all this and then looked at me, her cousin, who had been fortunate enough to have children and to be in love over time and said, "John, how have you and Marie managed it?" And what I wanted to tell you has to do with this fact. That while you and I had had one of our whispering arguments only moments before, I felt quite certain of the simple truth of the matter, which is that-- whatever our complications-- we have managed to be in love over time. "Louise," I said. "People start out with such high hopes," she said, as if I wasn't there. She looked at me. "Don't they?" "Yes," I said. She seemed to consider this a moment and she said, "I wonder how it happens." I said, "You ought to get some rest," or something equally pointless and admonitory. As she moved away from me, I had an image of Charles standing on the station platform in Charlottesville that summer, the straw boater set at its cocky angle. It was an image I would see most of the rest of that night, and on many another night since. I can almost hear your voice as you point out that, once again, I've managed to dwell too long in a memory of something that's passed and gone. The difference is that I'm not grieving over the past now. I am merely reporting a memory so that you might understand what I'm about to say to you. The fact is, we aren't the people we were even then, just a year ago. I know that as I know things have been slowly eroding between us for a very long time. We are a little tired of each other. And there are annoyances and old scars that won't be obliterated with a letter, even a long one written in the middle of the night in desperate sincerity, under the influence-- admittedly-- of a considerable portion of bourbon whisky, but nevertheless, with the best intention and hope that you may know how, over the course of this night, I came to the end of needing an explanation for our difficulty. We have reached this place, everything we say seems rather aggravating mindless and automatic, like something one stranger might say to another in one of the thousand circumstances where strangers are thrown together for a time, and the silence begins to grow heavy on their minds and someone has to say something. Darling, we go so long these days without having anything at all to do with each other. And the children are arriving tomorrow. And once more we'll be in the position of making all of the gestures that give them back their parents as they think their parents are. And what I wanted to say to you-- what came to me as I thought about Louise and Charles on that day so long ago, when they were young and so obviously glad of each other, and I looked at them and do it and was happy-- what came to me was that even the harsh things that happened to them, even the years of anger and silence, even the disappointment and the bitterness and the wanting not to be in the same room anymore, even all that must have been worth it for such loveliness. At least I am here, at 70 years old, hoping so. Tonight, I went back to our room again and stood gazing at you asleep, dreaming whatever you were dreaming. And I had a moment of thinking how we were always friends too, because what I wanted, finally, to say was that I remember well our own sweet times, our own old loveliness. And I would like to think that even if-- at the very beginning of our lives together-- I had somehow been shown that we would end up here with this longing to be away from each other, this feeling of being trapped together, of being tied to each other in a way that makes us wish for other times, some other place, I would have known enough to accept it all freely for the chance at that love. And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it. Even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary, for everything that I remember. Richard Bausch's story-- "Letter to the Lady of the House," is in his book, Selected Stories from Richard Bausch. That's from the Modern Library. His newest book is Thanksgiving Night. Coming up, a very different kind of marriage, one where they serve and protect. She serves. He protects. Or actually, 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, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and reporters and performers to tackle that theme. Today we wanted to bring you stories about love. But not the usual kind of love stories which try to capture that moment when your eyes meet and your heart sings and you fall, fall, fall, fall, fall. No, no no. We have a different mission. Today, as a public service, we are bringing you love stories about people who have been in the same relationship for years, stories of love years after the lightning has already struck. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, "The Over-Protective Kind." Veronica Chater tells this story. The setting-- the Bay area suburbs. The characters-- 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 have 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 nut. 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 thirty. 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 of 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, so I'm concerned 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, but 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 who have been there and it's been fine. And we're not that naive, my goodness sakes. We're-- Do you really think Mom's being naive to say-- Yes, yes. I think she is. There we go. I think there's a-- 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 letter. 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, concealment, 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 higher 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 to the kitchen. He has one shot of gin and he has a beer, OK. And then he's got his little hors d'Oeuvres 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. And that's it. And so there's no visiting. He's got his thing. He does it. [? da, ?] duh, da, duh, da, duh, da, duh. Every night, same thing. He's so routinized, he drives you crazy. And 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 in it-- there's 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 drop 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, Castaway, 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. So, OK, so we go 0-1-1. I suggest we call Mom to check up on her. Well, we cannot believe the humidity here, the heat. We've just had to stay in the hotel 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. It really 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. What are we in here? This is ridiculous. I don't know. But anyways-- Haven't you done any shopping or-- 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, are you ready? Yes. OK. It's fabulous, absolutely fabulous. Oh, now I'm getting depressed again. I'm sorry, but I need 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 the 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 food 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 the way-- Oven or the microwave? No, in the microwave. No, oven is always better for those things. Well, it's too late. Those were 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-protective and laying down the 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 want her to go and have a good time. It isn't that. It's just that 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 is 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 that'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 liked, 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. Well, we end our program today, about what love is like long after the moment you fall in love, with this story about monogamy itself, from Ian Brown. There's a couple across my street who make love in their living room. I hear them in the evening when I walk after dinner. From the sidewalk, I can see cream walls, a mantle draped in animal hides, African carvings. The woman makes most of the noise-- mid-range ohs, a second apart, dropping like small crystal cups out of the open French windows of their flat. Passion and disregard for the neighbors, a tremendous combination. The air stops moving around me. Is their sex better than my own? I wonder what she looks like when she's moaning. Does she love him, presuming it's a him, which I always do? Or is she there just for the sex? I can never decide which would be more exciting. I imagine she's in her 30s and that she has dark hair, an ordinary woman with ordinary chores whose passion is nonetheless excitingly unsuppressible in the evening. But which woman is it? Is the moaner the doctor who just had a baby, only now returning to sex? The Mexican girl who works out all the time at the gym? Or the Chinese caterer, the woman who drives the Volvo with Ohio license plates? Her cries never last more than half a block. Walking back to my house, I usually have a few bent, embarrassed thoughts. I think, you're a 39-year-old married man who stands in front of his house listening to an unseen couple make love. You're sick. But I keep stepping out there, hoping to hear that little duet. My wife wants to have a baby. And it's not just talk or a plan she inherited at birth or the fantasizing she used to practice with the girlfriends-- well, I want to have four-- no, this is different, more insistent. "When would you like to start?" she said again this morning, third time in a week, as we read the newspaper over breakfast. The sun was already bearing down furiously at half past eight in the God damn morning. I could hear the buzz of a weed whacker next door. "Anytime you like," I said, not taking my eyes off the paper. I didn't want to encourage her because the truth is this. Some days I'm for it. But when I'm not for it, I'm really not for it. My wife's body has changed. Her body, overtaken by hormonal committee, is telling her to get on with its grandest physical purpose. I can see it in the slight, post-marital widening of her hips-- no less sexy than the originals, but still wider-- when she lilts away from the bed at night to perform her ablutions. I can see it in her taste in clothes. She doesn't go any more for the sprayed-on Lycra skirts I used to buy her. Even in her sexual habits, she has less interest in sex than she used to. She wants to make love now for keeps. Pause here for sadness. Last week, as if by magic, two baby books appeared in the pile on the floor on her side of the bed. At the bottom of the pile, but there they were. I walked into the bedroom, saw them like a promise I made long ago and had to leave the house. I went to a matinee. When did all that happen? I can't remember anything. The dates of our courtship, the countless touching things she claims I said, they're at best a blur to me, a fog of declarations. One day, I was living my comfortable life and the next she was living with me. On a bad day, it makes me nervous to remember all this. On a bad day, when I think about the slow gelling of our togetherness-- it's gathering weight and formality-- the muscle around my heart closes in and my breath comes short and I start to panic. One day she and I were dating, and then we were living together, and then we bought a house, and then we married, and then she wanted to have a baby-- an escalator of commitments on to which I had apparently stepped. My friends were astonished. They said I wasn't the type to marry. A few of them had made bets against it. I told them I wanted to find out what lay on the other side of boredom. I stole that line from an old girlfriend. I thought I was an adventurer. And yet, here I stand in a well-trimmed front yard, surrounded by neighbors and swing sets and sport utility vehicles-- the movable monuments of domesticity-- listening to a couple copulate. And across the yards, I see another man looking warily back at me, doing exactly the same thing. Just because I'm married now, and practicing what's known as monogamy, doesn't mean I don't think about other women because I do. I still conjure up women from my past. And I still ask myself the question. You know the question. Every man does. Women have their own version of it. The question is the question you ask yourself every time you see a woman on the street-- every single time, no matter who she is, how old she is, no matter how attractive she is or isn't. And the question is, would I sleep with her? Or her? Or how about her? Not, will I sleep with her? Or, how can I sleep with her? Or even, could I sleep with her? The question is, would I? But even though I always ask the question, I don't act on it because I'm trying to be monogamous. That's why monogamy has such a bad reputation. It's boring. Monogamy is the habit of not acting on what you want. I even hate the word itself. It sounds so staid, so bourgeois. Monogamy, like a board game, the approximation of excitement. Sometimes, of course, I hear about open marriages. Jung had one, Sartre had won, Henry Miller, Dickens, Freud. I hear about open marriages, and they seem like some fabulous, exotic city that I've always wanted to visit but never seem to get to. Istanbul, open marriages are like Istanbul. Some ancient, mysterious place where there are minarets and strange music, where one entire civilization suddenly ends and a whole new stranger one begins, a whole new religion even, the mysterious east. I've always wanted to go to Istanbul. Like most couples, my wife and I sometimes talk about open marriages. Well, I say we talk about it. It'd be more accurate to say that the subject comes up and immediately lies down again. We'll be lying in bed in the dark and talking about our lives-- about what we like and what we miss-- in that quiet, pleasant way you do when you're trying to be monogamous. Then my wife will say in the dark, "You know, if you ever have sex with someone else, some passing fling, I don't want you to tell me about it." And I say, "Really?" I say, really, because I don't know what else to say. If I say, "OK honey, that's fine with me." She'll say, "What, are you thinking about it?" Then I'll have to say, "Of course not," even if I am. So I say, "Really?" Or I'll say something non-committal like, "Don't worry." Whatever I say, a few minutes go by. And then she always says, still in the dark, "But I don't want you to sleep with someone else anyway. OK?" And I say, "OK." That's the kind of conversation you have when you agree to be monogamous. I don't want to sleep with anyone else. Or to be more exact, I'd like to, but I really don't have the constitution for infidelity or for an open marriage or for the guilt. Monogamy may be boring, but the alternatives take up a lot more time and energy. I don't pretend it has anything to do with moral standards. In fact, I suspect it comes down to something my wife once said to me. We were having one of our conversational minuets in the dark, one of our gentle but ever so delicate chats about faithfulness, when my wife said that the only thing she missed as a monogamous woman-- at least, I assume she was speaking as a monogamous women-- was newness, new bodies, new hands, new sex. I said I knew what she meant. And I said, "But isn't that kind of sad? I mean, if you go through your whole life-- 20, 30, 40, 60 years of marriage-- without ever straying, you do that, you never get to know what it's like to be unfaithful. You never get to know what it feels like to be emotionally illegal. And that's an important feeling, one of the great human themes, after all, a whole constellation of humanity you'll never know. My wife is quiet for a long time. I could hear the fridge downstairs, and in the street light coming through the curtains, I could just see her outline. And I thought to myself, I've spent a long time in this bed. "Yes," my wife said then, "That's true. But if you do sleep around, you'll never know what it's like to be faithful to one person your whole life, which might also be an important constellation of humanity." There was just a touch of sarcasm in her voice. And then it was my turn to lie in the dark for a long time. I'd never considered monogamy as an adventure. I thought it was, well, domestic travel, where no international borders are crossed. But monogamy is an adventure, and in some ways, a more mysterious one than open marriage. Because trying to be faithful to one person is a trip that takes time. And you never really know if you're getting close or if you've reached the destination. You never really know when you've arrived. For my generation, the first one that assumed free love for both sexes was a birth right, for us, monogamy is the last sexual mystery on earth, the great unknown. We've tried everything else. It's certainly a different kind of trip than open marriage, which has lots of stops along the way, though most of them are the same. Maybe that's the problem with open marriage, not many surprises. It's titillating, but not very mysterious. Maybe that's why hearing about open marriages always makes me a little sad, why there's always a whiff of defeat about them. I lay there in the dark beside my wife thinking about all this, as I say, for a long time. I thought about that dream of hers, to be faithful her whole life. I thought, it's a sweet dream, almost like an ideal. And I knew I didn't want to be the one to prove to her that it couldn't come true. It scared me too, all that responsibility, because it's not such a wise thing to promise. Anyway, I'm trying to be monogamous. Maybe not even for myself, maybe I'm just doing it for her. Is that so unusual? Maybe if I do it for her long enough, I'll start to do it for me as well. It's not that I don't want to go to Istanbul anymore, I really want to. In fact, I think about Istanbul all the time, if only to remind myself that it's still there. It's just that, there's this other place I want to get to first, a little town that, for the longest time, I never even knew was there. Ian Brown is the host of Talking Books on CBC Radio, and the anchor for two TV shows on TV Ontario. Part of his comments are from his book, Man Medium Rare. Well, our program was produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Senior Editor for this show, Paul Tough. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Emily Youssef. Our website, where you can get our free weekly podcast. Free. www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia. And you know, you would think a job like his-- running a public radio station-- would just be fun, fun, fun. For me it's the opposite of having fun. It's a purgatory. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. P R I, Public Radio International.
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So how many years were you an executioner in your job? That period lasted for maybe five or six years. That's a really long time. Oh it was a very long time. It was very, very depressing. Chris is a mild-mannered, decent guy who was an executioner in the sense that he fired over 1,500 people. He was working for a financial services firm. And the internet boom went bust, 9/11 happened, the economy was bad, business was terrible. And as a result, call centers with hundreds of people were barely getting any calls. And when the company downsized, he had to see that all of these people, hundreds of them, were dismissed. And then at the end of the process, he was fired. The whole unit I was in at that time, the organization decided that they were going to fold that unit and not be in that business directly. So did you have to fire yourself? Was it like a samurai movie, where they gave you an order saying you will execute all these people and then you will execute yourself? No, it wasn't that way. Pretty much all of us took a turn. We were all in the wrong seat eventually. I'd say 90% of us, anyway. You might notice that in my conversation with Chris, I use the word executioner, but he never does. He is such an old school human resources guy. So old school that decades ago, he was actually part of a group that helped popularize the phrase human resources department, replacing the term personnel department, which means that he is much too smooth, and experienced, and truly empathetic to ever use the word executioner. Or the word fired for that matter. I would never use it. I think that's something that-- I think that's an unhelpful and kind of a dated concept. If you've done it skillfully, they're going to feel that there was a parting of the ways, there was an exit of the unit, or whatever the factors are. I know when I received a package, I came through the door and said, "Hey, I've been exited. I got a package. They're closing down the unit." And I hadn't actually thought of myself as being fired for a second. This is a very positive, glass half full kind of man. So it was sort of miserable for him during those five or six years, flying around the country, checking into hotels and then planning what he was going to say to certain people. Preparing himself to go into these big call centers to arrange for hundreds of people to be fired at one time. Well it feels bad, obviously. And it's a painful thing. Many people had grown up there for years. And this was their life as well as their role and their job. And before you get there, they know. I mean the jungle drums are out there. And you walk into a call center, there isn't a receptionist. You walk down the halls and past the desks, and people will kind of look at you. Did you ever actually hear people say, as you walked by, here they come? That's happened, yes. I've had people say, is this the executioner? It's not-- you know they're wondering, is it going to be me? How's it going to impact my life? So just to be clear, so you've personally fired dozens of people and then overseen the firing of hundreds of people, right? Yes. OK, can I ask you to just fire me right now? OK, OK. Hi, Ira. How are you? I'm doing OK. Good, good. Ira, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I want to let you know that up front. You know we've been going through serious changes in the market environment over the last 12, 18 months. And so the organization, I think as you know, is making some decisions to downsize. And I have the bad news for you, which is that you're part of that downsizing. So you know your role-- As Chris did this, from the moment that he said this is going to be a difficult conversation, I feel like he got the message across. I was going to be fired. And then even though I knew this was made up, my mind went blank. His language was so abstract and businessy that it just let my mind kind of wander and think, "Oh, I've been fired. I've been fired. What am I going to do now?" And then next thing I knew, he was talking about my severance package. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about the support that we're going to provide for you in terms of salary continuation, and medical coverage, and things like that. So when Chris was done firing me, I asked him about how clinical his language had been, if that was a technique of some sort, to lull me into accepting my firing. It just comes out that way because you start with the facts. And you also need to be careful about what you say. So you don't want to enrage the person on a personal level. So you really want to keep it calm and talk much more about their exit package. Now, did you get nervous as you were doing that? Sure. You sounded a little nervous. And also I have to say, I am sitting here at a mixing console, so I'm controlling the volume of your voice. The volume of your voice cut in half. I've been pushing up the volume of your voice steadily the entire time. It's not a comfortable thing. It's not a comfortable thing. Even for you. No. It's never comfortable. It's something, I don't think-- you can do it 100 times and it still feels bad. And I think it's because at the end of the day, people have much less control than organizations do in the world of work. The actual job finding processes are still pretty antiquated for individuals, whereas organizations can have recruiters and search firms, and advertise, and et cetera, et cetera. An individual, they're kind of like a little boat in a big sea. And they're going to bob around there. And they're going to have to scratch together a living again. The company always has more power than we do. And if we're lucky, they manage us well, they're fair, they keep us busy enough but not too busy. But we are not always lucky. Today on our show we have stories about how our lives get run by these institutions. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, Human Resources, in three acts. Act One, The Rubber Room. In that act, hundreds of public school teachers who are not in the classroom but who get paid full salaries to do nothing. Act Two, The Plan. The secret cabal who may or may not run real estate markets all over the country. Act Three, Almost Human Resources. Human management of animals has gotten to the point where even the federal government has started to build animals retirement homes. No kidding. Stay with us. Act One, Rubber Room. A former schoolteacher named Jeremy Garrett decided to make a movie about one of the things the school system puts his colleagues through, something that seemed like terrible mismanagement to him in the New York City public schools where he worked. Jeremy had heard about teachers who were removed from their classrooms and sent to a place that everybody calls the rubber room. Like for example this teacher that he interviewed, who did not want his name used. He was having personality conflicts with the principal. And the principal suggested that he could be reassigned elsewhere. It sounded great to the teacher. And then for the next few days, instead of going to school, he went to this room in a Department of Education building. It's kind of embarrassing. The first two days as I'm sitting down there, I was naive enough to say to the secretary, about what time do you think I'll be meeting with somebody? And she's like, well, you're just going to sit there until you do meet with somebody. And then at the end of the second day, I'm like, this is crazy. I mean, I have an after school Regents Prep program to help the kids with the Regents Exam. I'm like, this is nuts. These kids have to take a Regents Exam. They're like a week away. And then eventually the light goes on over your head as you start meeting other people that are sitting there too. And you realize, all right, this is going to be a long term kind of thing. This is the rubber room. Some teachers are put there because they are accused of something like putting their hands on a kid, where the school would want them out of the classroom while it investigates and determines guilt or innocence. But many of the teachers are just there for things like insubordination, unsatisfactory performance. And some teachers don't know why they're there. And instead of finding them guilty and firing them, or finding them innocent and returning them to the classroom, the New York schools just hold them, sometimes for years, doing nothing-- nothing. All day long, nothing-- in these big rooms. The environment has a culture all its own. And when you're there long enough-- like I was there for a year. When you're there long enough, you see the stages of the culture. New people sit there, and are very quiet, and say nothing to anybody under any circumstances. And then a couple weeks go by, they realize OK, I guess I'm going to be here for a while. I might as well start getting relaxed. A lot of people come in with suit and tie because they figure they're going to meet with somebody immediately, and then get back into the classroom, because they think this whole thing is a joke. What am I here for in the first place? So once it dawns on them that you're going to be here for a while, then they start to loosen up. They don't dress as nice. They realize, I've got to be comfortable because I'm going to be sitting down in a room for six hours. Then on stage three, you start opening up, you start talking to people, you start interacting. What you like? Oh, I like doing crossword puzzles. You start building bonds with people. This guy spent a full year in the rubber room. And then he was fired without any formal charges. At any given time there are as many as a dozen or so rubber rooms around the city of New York, in all five boroughs, holding as many as 700 or 800 teachers. Teachers show up every day, all day. And they're paid their full salaries, meaning taxpayers are putting out tens of millions of dollars for this every year. Well, this teacher's film about the rubber room made us wonder more about what life is like inside the rubber room. And with the filmmaker's permission, we asked the team at Radio Diaries-- Joe Richman, Samara Freemark, and Anayansi Diaz Cortes-- to go out and do a radio version of the story. Here it is. My ?] name is [? Iago Kier ?]. I'm 32 years old. I was an English teacher in the Bronx for three years. My name is Grace Colon. I've been a teacher in New York City for 16 years. I'm starting my second year in the rubber room. My name is Jonathan. I was a teacher in the New York City public school system for one month and in the rubber room for four months. Yeah. I spent much longer in the rubber room than I did in the classroom. I ?] was under a lot of stress at work. I was three months into teaching. And I rolled into work that day, it was two days after my 29th birthday. And I was going from group to group, helping them out if they had answers with the prompts, things like that. I'm sitting down with one particular group, and they're all speaking really loudly and I'd not paid attention. And the classroom and turned into a chaos. The next thing I know, I'm screaming, I'm cursing, I am basically unhinged. And I picked up a chair. And I threw it at a blackboard. And I didn't really get a lot of torque on it. I didn't really release it like I wish I could have. And it bounced off a wall and on the way down nicked a student. I then left the classroom. I just couldn't believe what I had done. I went and splashed cold water on my neck. And I just tried to assess just what I had done, you know. I remember going back into the classroom. And to them it was-- well I mean, looking at it objectively, to them, it must have been-- not fun per se-- but hugely entertaining to see an adult, someone in a position of power, completely lose their [BLEEP]. And then the next day, I'm taken out of the classroom and reassigned. My principal called me into the office just before Christmas, 2006. She had a paper. And she told me that I am being reassigned to a reassignment center. And I'm asking, what does this mean? What does reassignment center mean? Somebody looked at me and said, well, you're in the rubber room. I said the word [BLEEP] in the hallway at my school in a conversation with another teacher. And unbeknownst to me, there was an open door nearby, and a classroom of eighth graders heard me. I knew that I was going to be in trouble. The principal pulled me aside on my way to my classroom and charged me with verbal abuse of a child. It's child abuse, verbal abuse. So she literally accused me of abusing a child by accidentally using a single four letter word. And I had no idea at that moment I would never see my students again. I had no idea. When I did go to the so-called reassignment center, you walk into a typical city office, almost like either welfare office, food stamp office. People walking around, trying to look busy, not making eye contact. You start thinking, where are you? And ?] there are about eight to 10 rooms. In every room there are about 10 people. And space is at a premium. I mean, you had the black corner, you had the Hispanic corner, you had the few white people that were scared to death. And so you have to make a quick decision, because everybody else is sort of looking you, sizing you up. Where do I go? My first day there, I went in and I reported to the supervisor in charge. She said, well go find yourself a chair, but be careful because people are territorial, and, in fact, fights have broken out over chairs. And I thought to myself, what are you talking about? Fights-- people-- fights breaking out among teachers over chairs? And I went and I saw-- the first open seat I saw, I went and I sat down in it. And I opened up my book. And the person next to me said, you can't sit there. That's blah-blah-blah's seat. And I said, well where's blah-blah-blah? He said, well, he didn't come in, because it's Friday and he wanted the three day weekend. And I said, well, when he comes in, we could talk about it then. So she got up and left the room. And a minute later she came back and she said, I found you a seat. I got you a seat. You'll like it better there, I can see you like to read. It's a quieter room. So I thought that's a friendly thing to do. And she went and took me in the other room and she asked my name. And she said, everybody this is Jonathan. And she went around the room. And she introduced me to everyone in the room. And she said, here's your chair. And sure enough, there was an empty chair. And then she left. And I went and I sat down. And the woman a couple of chairs away said, you can't sit there. That's blah-blah-blah's seat. And I want to emphasize, I was not in a good mood. I was not happy to be there. I didn't know what was going on with me. I was I was feeling hostile. And well, I'm kind of a big guy. And this is a rather petite woman some years older than me. And I leaned right over and I got in her face. I said, now you listen to me. I'm going to sit in that chair. And if anybody doesn't like it, if anybody's got a problem about it, you send them right to me and we'll talk about it. And I sat right down, and I opened my book. And she gave me a dirty look and didn't say anything. So I sat in that very same chair every day. And that was my chair. And sometimes I could get an empty chair and put it in front of me and turn it around and use it as a table. And that was nice. My ?] name is [? Gail Friedman. ?] I am now in the rubber room. And I've been in there since February of 2007. The children don't know what happened to me. They might have thought maybe I moved away or I went to another school. You're just not there anymore. You're in this forgotten little place. My name is Pete Sinclair, but that's really not my name. And I have been in the rubber room for about a year and a half. It's that feeling of lack of momentum, of anything moving. It's like purgatory. And time just goes by. And everyone is just sort of playing cards. It's just like you sit and wait. As if you'd be in a waiting room, except that you're waiting for months. Sometimes people wait for years. You just wait. When I first come in to the rubber room in the mornings, I look at the papers. Then I look through my bag, I usually stick bills and stuff, my checkbook. You just kind of go there, you sign in, you sit down, you stare at the wall. You get into a conversation with somebody. You make a phone call. You check your stocks if you want. Some people play cards. Some people gossip. Some people have portable VCRs. They look at movies. And then there were little classes that were held. I took Spanish classes from a Spanish teacher. There were drawing classes. There was a book club, very popular. And they would meet twice a week for 90 minutes. And you would have 20 people in this little room that housed the refrigerator and the microwave. And they'd be talking about the novel or what have you. But you know, that might be three or four hours a week. Even if you did all the activities, it's just a few hours a week. And there are a lot of people who would just bring in pillows and would sleep all day. No lesson plans, no homework, no papers to grade, no dealing with parents, no dealing with screaming kids. And indeed there are teachers and reverence for years collecting the salary for a job that they're not doing. And for some people that's not so bad. If you really hated teaching, and you really liked playing cards, the money's the same. So yeah, the noise for me might have been the worst part of actually being there. And the sound of it was really the most distinctive thing of it. I wanted to get a souvenir. I brought in a little digital voice recorder. So I just laid the recorder down on the table. I'll play it for you. It's very crowded, the acoustics are terrible, very echoey. And teachers like to talk. I agree. We're off from what society condones as the norm. Like at a loud party, where you're talking to somebody and after a while you realize that you're both shouting. And then you realize that everybody in the room is shouting. It's really difficult to sit there and try to read or get anything done when people are yelling, or fighting, or screaming over a missing bottle of jelly in the refrigerator. You have people that are in denial. You have people that are angry. You have people that have shut down. You have people that have introverted into not even speaking. They just come in and exist. I mean there are some really nutty people in there. You don't want to make eye contact. There have been a lot of fights. The dumbest stuff. Someone went into the refrigerator and stole someone's butter. There have been arguments over paper, over someone stealing someone's pen. Some of the people in the room like the lights off because it's more restful and maybe they even want to sleep. And the rest of the people want the lights on, because they want to read or play cards. So somebody will get up and turn the lights off. And somebody else will get up and turn the lights back on. It's a conflict of wills. There were fights, a couple of fights. I heard them because they'd be going on, say, in the room next door in the hallway, and then everybody would spill out into the hallway to go watch. It's a prison type of culture. If you go out of your comfort zone then people will mess with you. Let's say if I were to go to the white area and decide I want their chair and stuff. The people there are going to look out for their chairs. And so there will be a confrontation. You want to be very careful not to step on anybody's space, because space seems to be the last control. That's the last thing they have control over. People fight over the few things that there are to fight over, such as territory. It's this amazing thing because one of the more popular members of the group went back to her school. She got sent back. And there were literally tearful farewells. There were flowers. There was cake. Goodbye, goodbye. And before the end of the day, somebody had claimed her seat. And everybody had kind of moved up in the pecking order, territorially. It's not so much the chair as it is the real estate it sits upon. So what you want is a nice spot. It's nice to sit near a window. It makes a difference whether there's some shrieking banshee four feet away from your ear. It makes a difference whether the light fixture flickers. I mean, you're going to be there for seven hours a day, five days a week. You wouldn't think it would make so much of a difference. But you're there for a long time, so it does. The ?] strangest feeling is getting up in the morning with a purpose-- taking a shower, brushing your teeth, having that first cigarette, getting on the train, dealing with all these commuters-- to show up to work to do nothing. And I think I think it's made that way. I think that's kind of the point. They punish you with boredom. It's kind of an indelicate question to ask somebody how long they've been there. It's a little bit like asking somebody what they're in for. It's embarrassing. It's humiliating. After ?] about a week of going there and reading all day, you begin to realize that there is no cavalry. There is no one coming in your defense. There's no one beating down the door, saying, give us back our teacher. There's no one making phone calls to clear your name. And that's when it hits you. That's when you realize, holy crap, I could be here indefinitely. When you first start out, you're in denial. And you're sort of frozen. You have no emotion. I think that went on for me for maybe two to three months. And then after six months, at that point we had our summer vacation. You come back, and then you get angry all over again. Here you are, starting again, yet a new school semester, in this limbo. The thing with the Department of Education, it's such a large system. A million kids, a million students. If you begin to think about it, it's staggering. There are 70,000 teachers. So even if 700 have these Kafka-esque things happening to them, that's still only one in 100. Wait, that is a lot. 1%. I feel that the Department of Education, in many ways, is hiding a secret. The rubber room. I certainly hear the term rubber room thrown around. I use the phrase reassignment center. Temporary reassignment center. My name is Dan Weisberg. I'm the chief executive labor policy for the New York City Department of Education. I don't doubt that there are teachers in the reassignment centers who believe, A, they didn't do anything wrong, or there are teachers there who think that what they did really doesn't warrant the punishment, as they see it, of being reassigned. In some cases those are difficult decisions. But we are entrusted with the safety of over a million kids, including, by the way, mine. The benefit of the doubt has to go to the kids. We're not an auto company. We're not an accounting firm. We're dealing with something unique, and that is the well being of children. My sense is that there's been a more aggressive policy about trying to bring teachers up on charges, and as a result the numbers of people going into the rubber room have increased a lot lately. I'm Sam Freedman and I write the On Education column for the New York Times. And I've been covering education on and off for about 30 years. There are many incompetent, and some abusive and exploitative teachers who are totally deserving of having their licenses taken away, and who should be never allowed to be in the presence of children. That said, this is still not the humane way to deal with them. And it has also, in my view, not been an effective way of separating out who's facing legitimate accusations and who's there because of a grudge with a principal and is otherwise an entirely capable educator. There isn't a whole lot they can do about it, except to have their day in court, or more exactly, have their date with a hearing officer. I'm starting my second year in the rubber room. I'm waiting to have my hearing. My case was very, very different. In my case, I had a principal who was willing to go to bat for me. After two weeks I was reinstated and allowed to come back and teach. Well, I fully expect to be fired. And I've got another job. By most measures it's a better job. I'll make a little more money. I have a little more responsibility. There's more room for advancement. But it's not what I chose. I chose to teach in the public schools. And I don't think I'm going to make the kind of difference in people's lives, doing what I'm going to be doing, that I could have made teaching. Our story on the rubber room was produced by Joe Richman, Samara Freemark, and Anayansi Diaz Cortes of Radio Diaries. Their website, where you can hear their stories for absolutely free, radiodiaries.org. The movie about rubber rooms that inspired us to do this story is at rubberroommovie.com. Coming up, in managing the lives of apes for medical research, we have accidentally given them a taste for one TV show, in particular. What that show 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 a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Human Resources. Stories of the ways that our lives are controlled by managers, bosses, institutions, central offices, home offices, all far away from us. And we've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, The Plan. American cities have gone through a massive wave of gentrification in the last few decades. But to a lot of people, that process does not represent the natural ebb and flow of the real estate market, but something more sinister, more orchestrated. It's a plot, and they are its targets. One of our producers, Jon Jeter, headed to the changing neighborhoods of Washington, DC, to try to get a picture of how people see this particular plot. John Burroughs Elementary is one of those public schools that parents feel lucky to have in their neighborhood. Maria Jones lives right across the street from the school in the northeast corridor of Washington, DC. And her daughter is in kindergarten here. We have a great principal, wonderful teachers, everybody knows one another. The parents work well, an active PTA body. We love this school. But a few months ago, Maria and other parents were at the school for career day when they heard the news. The mayor was going to close 23 public schools, including theirs. And what was shocking were the reasons the mayor gave: falling enrollment and poor performance. Enrollment isn't falling at Burroughs, Maria says. Our enrollment has been building. And then the other thing, failing test scores. We are not failing at all. We are 15th in reading out of 81 District of Columbia public elementary schools. We are in the top 20 percentile in math out of all 81 elementary schools. And so the question is, why would they want to close the school, which the neighborhood seems to enjoy, which is sort of an anchor? It's an anchor. Isn't it beautiful? It's a beautiful school from what I can see. What the community is saying is that it must be a land grab. Because if you look all the way down into 20th Street and all the way down to 18th, this is one beautiful long block. And then we have this great green field that's just there for kids to play on. And everybody knows that the developers have converged upon DC and are just going after the property that they want. So this has got to be one of those scenarios. What else can it be? We're not failing. We're a model school. In Washington DC, it's not difficult to find people who believe in something called the plan. The Plan. It is essentially a conspiracy theory, dating back at least 40 years to the '68 riots, when whites fled the city in droves, leaving behind a black majority. Some people, white and black, have for years written off the plan as paranoia. But residents like Maria look around and see new homes and new shops, and new neighbors, and-- this seems to be the litmus test for whether your neighborhood is gentrifying-- white couples walking their dogs. They never saw that before. It doesn't seem like a conspiracy, some hidden conspiracy. It seems like an out and out plan for displacement. Especially when you have other buildings-- like the Pierce School, Lovejoy, and some of the other buildings-- that have been turned into condos, that have clearly been closed as schools and opened up with the same structure as million dollar condos that people are living in now. You don't just hear this kind of talk in DC. In fact, all across the country, if you're black and older than, say, 20, chances are you've heard of some shadowy scheme in your city to move blacks out of certain neighborhoods and whites in. My dad has been telling me this for years. I am 44 years old. I can remember when I was growing up my dad would always say, well you know, Valerie, there's a plan. There's a plan. Valerie Leonard grew up on Chicago's south side, in a neighborhood called Lawndale, where she still lives and fights against gentrification. He was saying this in the '60s and the '70s. You know, this may be a black neighborhood now. But there's a plan on the books that they're going to displace black people and push enough people out so that it's only 25% black. And I said, mm-hmm. You wouldn't believe him, because my dad was one of those conspiracy theorists. And lo and behold, I'm an adult now, and everything that he said is coming to fruition. Did your father ever have or share with you any specific details of what he thought was the strategies that the city leaders would adopt to take back this land? I think one of them was planned neglect, that they would just let it run down to nothing, which was true, and let it be overcome with crime. And then once the community runs down, they'll come back and grab the land at a much cheaper price and rebuild it for their own people. In New Orleans, Edmond Louis remembers talk of a conspiracy back in the '70s, when he was in elementary school, shortly after the city elected its first black mayor. Yeah, there were community activists who were invited into the school. I remember some of the Black Panthers in New Orleans visiting the school. And yeah, they talked about how whites definitely wanted the city back, they wanted control. I remember Reverend Avery C. Alexander, one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement in New Orleans and an activist minister who-- he came to the school. And he said there are some beautiful homes in the neighborhood where the school is, and basically that they want to move young white professionals into this neighborhood and move black people out. Marcel Diallo was born in 1972 in the Bay Area and remembers rumors of a white takeover of Oakland. And some of the things that I was hearing as early as the '80s, back in the crack era, was that-- all the elders in my family would always say, oh, you think they're paving that road for us? You think they're fixing that park for us? The white people got their eye on this place. And they're coming back. That was like urban lore. That was the folklore growing up, that white people one day were going to return and try to kick us out. On a bitterly cold Saturday morning in January, about 60 protesters marched to the home of Washington, DC City Council member, Carol Schwartz, who hasn't been helping them slow gentrification in the city. In the crowd I meet Jabari Zakiya who believes-- has always believed, truth be told-- that DC's mayor and elected officials receive their marching orders from congressional and business leaders in the city. I almost really believe, literally, that when these city council people get close to being elected-- because DC is basically a democratic town. If you win the primary, you're going to win, right? So they see who's going to win the primary. And they get that little call at night, saying look, we want to see you. And they take you to that little room and sit you down, say look, this is the deal. Over the past decade, cities like DC, Chicago, Oakland and New Orleans have embarked on what is essentially a fire sale. Schools, libraries, public housing, all of which have been auctioned off and converted into condos, lofts, charter schools, sushi bars, and sports stadiums. Washington, DC's changing demographics have ushered in the first white majority on the city council since Congress approved home rule for Washington more than 30 years ago. But even someone like Jabari, who firmly believes in the plan, doesn't see it as simply a matter of white versus black. To me, the black members aren't any much different than the white members. In fact, many of the white ones seem to be more progressive than the black ones. I mean look, we've never had a white mayor. I think it's the plan of any of those people who want to make money. This is [? Marjorie Rhode, ?] another protester. ?] Let us move out the people who are not going to give us profit. And that begins to break right along racial lines. So whether the plan is to move black people out, it doesn't matter. That's the net effect. Marjorie is an art professor at the University of the District of Columbia. She has taught there for nearly 30 years and can remember when the enrollment was more than 15,000, triple what it is now. As the enrollment shrinks, the campus shrinks. ?] That is such a mouth-watering piece of land. So it's hard not to believe that behind closed doors, somebody's really looking at that land. My somewhat paranoid theory, perhaps, is that they're letting the buildings deteriorate. And they're not doing much to support its enrollment. We're not up to date in terms of a lot of our technology and so forth. And then they can say, well, see. Benign neglect, benign neglect. No neglect is benign. It's always malignant. And one of the buildings they took was where we had the art department, the music and so forth. Wonderful building, wonderful building. They took us out of it supposedly to renovate it. It is now lofts, condos. OK? DC residents point to a group of businessmen called the Federal City Council who have been around since the '50s and who the current mayor says he consults with frequently. Similar business groups exist in other cities. Which seems benign, if you have a certain frame of mind and sinister if you think there's a plan. This much is clear. DC is much different from just a decade ago, when blacks were 64% of the population. Now they're 57%, a huge drop. And everyone believes it won't be long before the city is no longer majority black. People like Charles Brown, a limo driver here, say they believe it's a plot. And he knows that lots of people would think that's crazy. But at this point he says the evidence lines up very much in his favor. Just look around. You don't have to believe anything I say. Just look around. That's all you have to do. Just take a look. If you're in Harlem, if you're in Chicago, if you're in New Orleans, if you're in Washington, if you're in LA, I don't care where you are. The plan has worked. Jon Jeter. He's the author of the forthcoming book Flat Broke in the Free Market, about people whose lives are made worse by globalization. We need them because, first of all, there are over 3,000 chimps in the United States. Now, among those would be pets, entertainers, and former research lab chimpanzees. We have, actually, a surplus of research lab chimps in the United States. And the reason for that is when AIDS was-- the first big outbreak, it was sort of logically assumed that chimps would offer us a possible cure because they share so much of our DNA. That turned out to be bogus. Chimps can't get human AIDS. So anyway, we ended up with all these excess breeded chimps that could not be used for AIDS research and for no other research. And so there was this surplus. And the government-- this was near the end of Clinton's administration-- was actually faced with this, I guess, moral, ethical dilemma. What do you do with all these near humans? We can't just euthanize them. And so one of the last acts of the Clinton administration was the Chimp Act. And they actually came up with the idea to build a government-funded retirement home outside of Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to this place. When I first saw it, I thought this is sort of the Jurassic Park of chip retirement. This is the pinnacle of retirement homes for chimps. OK, more on that place-- it's called Chimp Haven-- in just a minute. Charles Siebert says that it's not just research chimps who are getting this treatment. At this point, we know so much more than we used to about how similar chimps brains are to ours-- what they feel, and what they know, and how much like us they really are-- that they have become an animal that we usually do not ever euthanize. Which, when you think about how nearly every other animal of the animal kingdom that we have contact with, we feel utterly free to kill at whim, en masse, is very unusual. But then, of course, we get into this problem. If we're not going to kill the chimps after they cease to be useful to us, where should we keep them? Under what conditions? Consider the problem of chimpanzees who work in the entertainment business, who perform in the circus, or appear on TV commercials, or in movies. Here is something that most of us do not know about chimp entertainers. These chimps have about a 4 to 5 year period of viability as actors. And then they just get too strong, too willful, too out of control. And is that because 4 or 5 is when they hit adolescence or something? Like, that's when they become adult, and before that they're just little kids, basically? Precisely. A chimpanzee, a full grown adult chimpanzee, is five times as strong as a human man. And especially male chimps are very, very volatile, and competitive, and aggressive. So for that one or two yuks that we get on television, they then spend another 40 to 50 years locked up somewhere because they're no longer usable. So these are chimps, basically, who've been working in the human working world. And when they retire, I know there's a discussion about how much we should try to re-chimp them. Yes. And can you just talk about the range of solutions that people have come up with to that problem? The different ways people think about that, the different ways these different retirement homes are set up. What's the range of things that you've seen? These are chimps that, the official word used is they've been inculturated. A lot of them have been eating off of caterers' tables, been only around humans. And they like us. They're very social animals and, especially if we're imprinted on them very early, they form very tight bonds. So the gradations would be-- I guess, the one extreme would be Cheeta's life. That would seem sort of like the human paradigm, a retirement home in Palm Springs, riding around in golf carts. You mean Cheeta from the Tarzan films? Yes, who is 75 now, although there is some dispute about whether he is actually that old. He's at a retirement home in Palm Springs. He was walking around the house. We sat out back by the swimming pool at a picnic table. He was eating Doritos and drinking diet iced tea. He's a diabetic. He goes into the living room, sits at the piano, bangs on the keys. There's a selection of his movies on the living room coffee table. And he has been given to watching his old movies on TV. He recognizes scenes. He gets up and he claps. He remembers. He's basically living like the aging Bob Hope. Exactly. There's the one extreme. The humanoid version of chimp retirement. The opposite extreme would be the Center for Great Apes in Florida, where all the retired ape actors are. Or ape entertainers. Circus, TV, movies, and some pets. You have, basically, caged farce. You have these geodesic dome-like structures-- very tall and elaborate, and spacious-- where the chimps are nearly swinging through the trees. The whole ethos of that place, I suppose, would be that they're trying to get them as close back to a state of wild chimpdom as is possible. OK, so you have the caged farce like that on the one hand, and the nearly Bob Hope style retirement at the other extreme. And then there's this third approach to chimp retirement, the approach that they take at the multimillion dollar facility the government built for research chimps, mostly, outside of Shreveport, Louisiana, Chimp Haven. There chimps live a hybrid sort of retirement, part chimp, part human. It has bedrooms with swinging cots and patios. And they have in their rooms television, VCRs, CDs. And access through these little walkways to little moated forests. It's the most strange blend of the urban and the wild. And you asked earlier about gradations of repatriation of chimps. Some of these chimps were born in captivity. Some were taken from the wild. And at Chimp Haven, what they try to do is get the remaining wild ones together with the totally captive born ones, so that the wild ones can teach the captive ones how to be chimps again. Some of the captive ones don't even know what a tree is. Some of the research ones have not even been around ground. They've been in cement cells all their lives, getting shots of different diseases. So they get released and they-- there's this one video I saw of a chimp who had never been on the earth before. And he wouldn't get out of his crate. He was touching down on the earth as though it were the moon. It was the most bizarre thing to see. So what kind of success do they end up having, in getting those chimps to do those things, to climb trees and to acclimate to those chimp-like behaviors? Tremendous success, actually. Over time, these chimps do very well. Have these days oddly bifurcated by chimp activities and human activities, and they live out a life of that kind of to and fro, between the two. So going from what sort of thing to what sort of thing? Well they have access to their little pie-shaped five acre wedges of forest. So they're out there swinging in the trees, and socializing with one another, and even doing a little crude form of food gathering. They're food gathering, you mean the staff hides food out in the middle of the fake forest? They try to grow certain things in the forest that's conducive to things chimps would-- you know, fruits and berries, that kind of thing. But not really enough to sustain them, so they come back in for dinner. And meals, I mean they come for their three squares, which they have been used to getting. So that, to me, is a two-tiered kind of a day. Where you're playing chimp in the jungle, but you're coming back for dinner and watching some television. And these chimps are all inculturated. They've been around medical labs. They've been around doctors and researchers in white coats. So guess what their favorite television show is. General Hospital. So yes, they have access to the woods where they can go be chimps. But they like coming back to their room and watching television and being around people. So they're having this balance. And at one point, I said, so in a way, what you're saying to me is, it would be just as cruel to now fully excerpt them from human contact, given their history. And they said, yeah. They still need access to what they knew as they were reared. When you describe it this way, it sounds actually kind of like a nice life. They get to do some chimp things, they get to do some human things. Is that OK, or do you feel like somehow we've denatured them, or there's something wrong with this? Well, I've come to feel that it's the best we can do for them, given the circumstances. But in the best of worlds it should have never happened, that they just shouldn't be kidnapped from their lives for these purposes. And they live longer lives in captivity, but they're wild animals and they have their life. And in the course of doing this book and other articles, I've been in the wild and had a chance to see them in the wild. Yeah, and when you see that, what do you see? I don't know. You feel a very deep stirring. I was running for hours through the woods and just hearing rampant chimp screams. Pods moving, they move with unbelievable felicity through the jungle, really fast. So I began to despair of ever catching up to them. And then suddenly, my guide put this quiet gesture in front of his mouth and pointed up. And there was a mother and a baby about 50 feet up high in a tree, and the baby is staring down at me. And I don't know. I just got chills. It just took my breath away. And I thought about it a lot afterwards, what that kind of meant. It really was very moving. Charles Siebert. The book he's writing about the weeks that moved into a chimp retirement community is called The Wauchula Woods Accord. Our program was produced today by our senior producer Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Blumberg Jane Feltes, Jon Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Our production manager is Seth Lind. Production help today from Emily Youssef and Andy Dixon. Musical help from Jessica Hopper. Thanks today to Jeremy Garrett and Justin Cegnar of Five Boroughs Productions. Thanks to George Saunders, and Sean McDonald, and [? Anahi Delany, ?] to [? Zane El Amin ?], and Parisa Norouzi, and Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., to Empower DC, who helped us with our story about the plan. Their website, empowerdc.org. Our website, where tickets have just gone on sale for our next live show. This is going to be broadcast from a stage in New York to movie theaters all over the country, so you can see it in your town. That is going to happen on April 23. Tickets just went on sale. Go to our website, www.thisamericanlife.org to get your tickets. This American life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who-- I've never understood this. He calls me into the office every single episode of the show that we do. And he always begins the same way. Ira, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I want to let you know that up front. I don't know what he's driving at. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Fifth grade. It was so long ago. Who can remember that far back? Two whole years. I remember all of, like, the old things. Like, we used to read the book Harry Potter. And we made curtains. Harry Potter curtains. And, like, they have new curtains now. And I look back at them, and I'm like-- I look at them and I'm like, wow, you know. It's changed. And I wish it was still there somehow. This is Kayla Hernandez, in seventh grade at the Pulaski School in Chicago. She says she actually visits her fifth grade classroom, room 211, and her fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Chan, fairly often, and reminisces about the past. Recently I went through the shelves, and our books are still there. Like, Our America. You're talking about the book, Our America. Yeah. You know, I'm reminiscing about when we used to read that book, and how it showed lots of racism. Back in fifth grade, she covered her copy of Our America with one of those paper book covers you get. It was her copy, though they're not allowed to write their name in the fronts of books at her school. They had numbers, and my number, I think, was like, 30. So you did find book number 30? Yeah, I did. I saw the book, and it was just there, without its paperback cover. And everything that was mine is not mine anymore. I think that's the hardest thing from switching to another grade, into another classroom and to another teacher. And there is new environments and new and different things to learn, and old memories to leave behind. 20 years from now, 30 years from now, when you try to remember back to seventh grade, what do you think you're going to remember from this year? I think I'll remember barely anything. Isn't that kind of strange, though, to think that you're going through all these experiences now that somehow are going to get wiped off the blackboard? Yeah. But I even have that experience now. Like, I can't remember things from second grade. I see some things. Like, I remember this kid, he wrote this Valentine card for me. It's like, you're pretty as a rose. I don't know. Something like that. But I can't remember teachers really well like I used to. Do you feel sad about that, or is that OK? I feel sad about that, because it's a part of me. It's like you don't even remember what's happened. It's kind of hard because it's been a part of you. When I asked Kayla which of her friends she wouldn't remember at all some day, it wasn't hard for her to answer. Cynthia. I'll probably forget Alíleni. I'll probably forget Diana and Maria. I'll forget Erica Sorio. I'll forget a whole bunch of people. She's not close to these kids or anything. But as she said their names, it was like watching them vaporize or something. Someday they'll just be gone, erased from the history of her life, like they had never been there in the first place. We forget most of everything. And then sometimes we go back and try to remember. And there really is no predicting which people and places and moments we're going to be able to get back. Diana and Maria, they could still make the cut. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, "Return to Childhood," what you find and what you do not find when you go back. Our show today in four acts. Act 1, Ich bin ein mophead. In that act, a 34-year-old man investigates who he was at nine years old and learns a thing or two he would just as soon not remember. Act 2, Punk In a Gray Flannel Suit, in which a mortgage broker discovers that the punk band he was in the '70s is hot in Japan and decides to leave corporate life for a little bit and go back on tour. Act 3, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, and Me-- an American teenager who dreams of someday being the prime minister of a nation where he does not even reside. Act 4, When We Were Angels, in which we hear the purest possible student uprising imaginable, the most innocent, documented by an actual student using the crudest tools-- a telephone answering machine and a shiny red boom box. Stay with us. Act 1, Ich bin ein mophead. Alex Blumberg was a producer on our program for many years, and back when he was working here-- today's show is a rerun-- he made a decision to return to his childhood. He went searching for somebody named Susan Jordan, who he and his sister Kate and their parents knew for about a year when Alex was growing up in Cincinnati. These are the things that I remember about Susan Jordan. Me and her sitting in the back room and telling her about the day camp I went to that summer. I can't get myself to shut up. "And they had alligators and snakes," I can hear myself telling her. "And this one time, this one alligator got out, and the counselor had to catch it," and on and on like that. Me and Susan flipping through one of those Time Life books-- Rock and Roll Through the Decades: The Sixties. She has long brown hair. She's incredibly skinny. It's 1975. She's wearing bell bottom Levis, a faded jean jacket. Hi, mom. Hi, Alex. Do you want to know why I'm calling? I do. I do. You remember Susan Jordan, right? Susan Jordan. Susan Jordan. Yes, it's ringing a bell, but I can't place it. She was our babysitter. Oh, OK. Chicken Legs and Mophead. One of the many ideas that Susan introduced to our household was the concept of the nickname. I think that's all I want to say about Chicken Legs and Mophead. I'd gone to my mother to fill in gaps in my memory of Susan, but she didn't remember much more than I did. She was a babysitter that really had more of a relationship with you two than she did with us. She seemed to have a very meaningful relationship with you, almost the kind of relationship that you might have with another adult. That was about the extent of it. And she never stayed around when I came home. She was out of there. What talking to my mom did do was make me look at my childhood memories from an adult perspective-- like, for example, what I remembered about her living situation. I didn't get the impression that she was close to her family. I got the impression that she was very much out on her own very young. I think she must have been in the process of breaking with her own parents during that time. That's-- yeah. See, my memory is that, like, she was in high school, right? She went to Withrow. Yeah, mm-hmm. But I also remember her living on her-- for some reason I remember her own house. Yeah. And the reason I thought that she lived by herself was we went to some-- we went to her house or her boy-- we had to go pick something up somewhere, and we were in her car. This big blue Duster, I think it was. And her boyfriend was there, and her boyfriend had let the cats out, and they were gone. And she was furious. And then I got in the car. And then she slammed the door. And I think we peeled out. And he was sort of standing-- you know, he was sort of standing there and trying to reason with her, and we were out of there. Well, what did you think? It made me-- I think I felt sad for her. This is sort of in retrospect, but I think I had some sort of inkling of this idea at the time. I'm just sort of now realizing it. But I remember thinking that he was one of the few people that she had in her life, and she couldn't even really depend on him. Yeah. You were probably right. She was a struggler. And you may have been at that point, at that moment, her only friend, you know? My mom didn't have any idea where I could find Susan, which made things difficult. Because A, Susan Jordan is a very common name, and B, it's probably not her name anymore. I called the county court records department to find all the Susan Jordans married in Cincinnati. My mom asked a friend who worked for the city to search all the Cincinnati birth records. I contacted high school alumni associations. I asked friends at high-powered newspapers to run background checks. Finally, there was one former Susan Jordan who stood out. She seemed the right age. She was married, living in a Cincinnati suburb. She had a couple of kids. Her husband was a lawyer. I got her number from information. And it wasn't until I sat down to call her that it hit me. A phone call from someone you babysat 20 years ago might not be a welcome surprise, but in fact strange and creepy. Here I am practicing sounding benign. One two, one two. Susan. Is this Susan Jordan? Is the Susan Jordan? Oh, god. Oh, god. Finally, I made the call. Hello? Hello. Hi, is this Susan? Yeah. Hi. My name's Alex Blumberg, and I'm calling from a radio program called This American Life. And this is probably a very strange phone call to receive, but I was wondering-- first of all, do you remember me? No. It turns out there are a lot of Susan Jordans who don't remember me. A lot. One guy even called his ex-wife, a former Susan Jordan, and then called me back to tell me she'd never heard of me. I was getting nowhere by myself. So I contacted a professional, one Irving Botwinick, a certified New York City private investigator. Three days after putting him on the case, I got a message saying he'd found her. I called him back. I called her this morning early, roughly around 7:30. I said, good morning, I'd to introduce myself. I said, my name is so and so, and I'm a licensed private investigator in New York, and I'm looking for someone that used to live in Cincinnati and went to a particular school there. And her name at the time was Susan Jordan. And she said, that's me. And I said, OK. And I said, do you know anybody named Alex Blumberg? And right away, she-- yeah, I babysat for him. And the interesting part about the whole thing is she definitely likes you, remembers you, and she's going to call you. Hello, is this Susan? Yes. This is Alex Blumberg. Hi, Alex. How you doing? I'm doing OK. How are you? Fine. Did you get my email? I got your email, yeah. Oh, OK. And I called you at work, and then I realized that I'd also gotten this number from the private investigator. Susan and I talked for over three hours on the phone, catching up, comparing notes. She asked about my sister and kids that used to live on the street and our old family dog. How are you doing? I'm doing OK. It was amazing how much she remembered and how much we remembered in common, even small incidents like the time that we were stopped at the traffic light and I stared too long at the guy on the motorcycle. I think I remember that. Was it on Erie Avenue? Probably. Probably. And he said, did he say something to you? And I said, no, he didn't say anything to me. And you said, he said something to you, didn't he? And you were about to get out of the car and kick that guy's ass, I'm sure. I think I can remember your face. I think you were sitting very still with your hands in your lap. Were you afraid? I was terrified. Yeah. I didn't know that he would notice me exactly. But, uh-- Well, don't worry. I would have taken him out. I had no fear, I'm telling you. Do you remember a time-- it was, like, maybe six or seven or eight years after you babysat us. And I was working-- The grocery store? Yeah. Yeah, I remember. In Norwood, right? In Norwood, right. At the Thriftway. Yeah, I remember. I guess you-- were you bagging my groceries, but I didn't recognize you? I don't-- And then you told me who you were, and then I did. Right, right. I think you said Mophead. Oh my god. I did warp you. Do people still call you that? No. Susan got married when she was still in college and went to work for the phone company as a repair person. She spent the next 20 years or so hanging from a telephone pole, she said. She hated it, but the money was good. Around the time her first marriage ended, she finally got up the courage to quit and find work using her degree. She now teaches at a special school for mentally ill children. She lives in Florida with her second husband, and she seems happy. Of course, when you dive back into the past like this, you find how partial and incomplete your memory is. First there are the facts you get wrong. Turns out Susan had been a college freshman when she babysat us, not in high school like I thought. My sister remembered she'd ridden a motorcycle. Also not true. And the guy who she got in the fight with over the cats, who in my mind was her hairy '70s boyfriend, turned out to be her roommate's boyfriend. But besides the facts you change, there are the facts you completely omit. That fight over the cats, Susan had forgotten totally that I'd been there. And it was a little strange because my presence was the only thing she'd forgotten. Other details she remembered fine, even the names of the cats themselves. Possom and Tom. We were hillbillies, remember? But I can't imagine what I took you over there for. I'm sure it was for-- you know, I think we were just running errands. You're so lucky. It's funny, because I remember these very particular incidents, and that was one of them. And probably the reason I remember it is because it seemed very significant to you. I think I sensed as a kid that it was really upsetting to you because I think I felt at that time that you didn't really have very many people in your life at that point who you could trust. Oh, I didn't have hardly anybody. My whole family moved out of town. I had no family at all. Let's see, I moved out the day I graduated from high school, and I was 17 because I started a year early. I just wanted out. And see, I had found out that I got the scholarship. I packed up that night. Why'd you want to get out so bad? Because my family was dysfunctional. But my mom-- it was pretty bad. The girl that I lived with-- at that time, she was taking a lot of drugs. And her boyfriend. And every time I would come home, they would always try to get me to take drugs with them or something. And I really didn't do it much at all. And it was tough to come home. And I guess I must have been suffering a little bit. I really missed my little brothers and my little sister. And they were gone. And I was, I guess, maybe trying to substitute. I think maybe that's one of the reasons that I remember that we remember you so fondly, though, because I think it worked both ways. I think that we felt-- if that did make you feel closer to us, I think that we responded. Well, I was desperately-- I guess I was looking for a family, really. But I mean, if only you knew, you probably wouldn't have hired me. But, I mean, people are complicated. Now, what I really wanted to do was spend more time with your mom and dad. But I was terrified. I mean, I just couldn't do it. I was too shy. So a lot of times, it was-- I thought they were asking me to stay longer and talk, and I would just run out. I'm sure they were. And they probably thought, what's wrong with her? But I just couldn't do it. So you sort of talk to us instead, it sounds like. Yes. I was comfortable around kids because I had kids in my family. Every time the subject of her hard times came up, I hear a subtle hesitancy in Susan's voice. At first I thought it was embarrassment, but that wasn't it exactly. It wasn't until we had been talking for hours that I realized what it was. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She hadn't forgotten that her past had happened. She'd just forgotten that I'd witnessed part of it. And her fear, it became clear, the one that had been gnawing at her our entire conversation, was that I was calling to say she had damaged me by exposing me to it. I don't think I was too kind back then, because there was a lot of turmoil in my life and in my family. And that's what my fear is, that I might have had some kind of negative impact on people. And I know probably I did on a couple people, but they were my age. But you just want to remember, yeah, I was a babysitter. The kids love me. Blah, blah, blah. But I would be devastated if I heard anything different. There are parts of your past you don't want to go back to, parts of yourself you don't want to go back to. And for Susan Jordan, the year of her life that I remember is a year she'd just as soon forget. And it turns out, I had also done my best to forget what I was like that year. I didn't think of myself this way at all, but Susan Jordan reminded me, in the gentlest terms possible, when I was nine, I was anxious and bookish. I was kind of uptight. Not to seem as an insult, but I just kept thinking, these kids don't know how to play. When I went to your rooms, it didn't seem like you had a whole lot of toys. I hope I've got this right, but it just seems like there were mostly books and more educational things. I mean, I remember you had planets in your room and a chemistry set. And I didn't remember that Kate had hardly any dolls. You didn't seem quite as playful as other kids that I had babysat. Just more serious in general. So mainly, I think that's what I did, was try to play. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this whole story is how little our memories had deceived us about each other, even if they had deceived us about ourselves. As Susan said at one point, each of us remembered what we needed to about the other. I needed to remember the part of Susan that she doesn't think about much, her toughness in the face of hardship. She said she mostly remembered a side of my family that I just take for granted-- that it was calm in our house, that there were books, there wasn't much fighting. It was the first time in my life where I had ever seen that people lived differently than the way I lived. And that's what I decided I wanted for myself. You can try to return to childhood by looking at photos or visiting the old neighborhood or listening to recordings. Or you can find someone who knew you back then, someone you haven't seen since. They still carry within themselves a picture of you that's unclouded by the years in between. They'll remember you better than you remember yourself. And you can do the same thing for them. Alex Blumberg. He did that story back when he was a producer here at our show. Now he runs a podcasting company called Gimlet Media, and he's the host of the podcast Without Fail. Act 2, Punk In a Gray Flannel Suit. For a long time, David Philp was the president of a mortgage brokerage firm in Beverly Hills. As you might imagine, in Beverly Hills, they handle rather large mortgages. He dresses in beautiful clothes. He's clean cut. But back in the 1970s, in England, where he grew up, he was in a punk band called the Automatics. They were never really a big commercial success, but they were respected and known in the history of punk by people who care about that kind of thing. And a few years back, through an odd series of connections, he ended up revisiting his teenage years for the first time by going back on tour in a version of his band in Japan. Here's how something like that happens. I mentioned it to a client. And I said, well, you know, I played in a punk group when I was a kid. And he said, oh, really? And he's interested. And the next day, he sent me a copy of an eBay auction and said, is this you? And I sort of-- so, it was. And I watched this auction. And I watched this price shoot through the roof. And then I began to realize, wait a minute. I'm collectible. Let's get down to brass tacks here. How much were you guys? I think that one actually went at $48. I particularly liked looking at all those sort of other groups that were going at $0.25. You know, music business offerings along punk lines that I thought, what a load of old nonsense, at the time. And it was good to see that their records weren't valued years later. I mean, it was-- Wow. That history came out on the right side. Yes. That there is a sort of Darwinism in record collecting. What happened next? I went to go and see Ricky, the drummer. And Ricky collected everything. And he very kindly lent me these two scrapbooks. So I took pictures and things out of there. I just put it up on a-- had a friend put it up on a website. And then I got an email from Fi-Fi in Japan saying, oh, I play in a Japanese punk rock band, and-- Fi-Fi's a name of a person? Yes. And your record changed my life. And he found out through the website that there was an unreleased album. So he asked if he could put me in touch with Toshio Iijima of Base Records. We struck up a deal. And then they said, well, would you come over here and play some gigs to, you know, promote? So you go to tour. How old are you at that point? 45. 45 years old. A little bit of gray hair coming in, perhaps? A little bit of gray hair coming in. And I really wasn't sure whether I'd still be able to do it, because I hadn't played those songs in 22 years. Not in my shower, not to anyone. I mean, prior to being married-- I mean, I remember dating women for a year who never knew that I played, had ever played. It wouldn't even come up? It wouldn't come up, really. I mean, I'd have a guitar hanging around, but lots of other guys did too. Would you ever pick up the guitar and play for yourself? Yes. I wrote a lot of songs for my dog during this period. Really? Some of the titles would be? "We're Going to the Park" was a big favorite. To be followed by that hit, "Who's a Good Boy?" "Oh, What a Good Boy" is actually a-- It is. [PANTING] (SINGING) What a, what a good boy! So we went over there, what, October 6. I took my wife, which possibly was a miscalculation. No, it was a good thing to take my wife, because-- You were approached by dozens of teenage girls? I was getting stopped on the street. So what happened the first night you went onstage? Well, there was just the announcement, the light, and sort of a moment's silence, which lasted forever. And then sort of out at the back, I heard the opening riff of "When the Tanks Roll Over Poland." And there was just this whole ignition of energy from the club, in front. And all these kids just started going mad. And it just clicked right in. It felt like I was in an Automatics cover band or something like that, because it was so long ago I didn't feel that association as the writer, though-- because I wrote the material and all that. I didn't have that association as the writer anymore. See, but I would wonder if, as you sing the songs, the conviction of the writing returns to you and you remember all of the feelings of it. Did that happen? There's a muscle memory that was there. You know, the movements are all locked in the lyric and the beat and the parts. And as I played them, they all started to come out. And it was just like a sort of-- like being a marionette or something. Here you punch the air. There you sort of bring it, remind the drummer to come down. And there you point at the guitarist for the solo. Had you've forgotten the thrill of being onstage? Yes, I'd forgotten what it was to have the audience right there. Before this, had you ever performed a punk show sober? Never. Well, unless I was taking the antibiotics. Not unless I-- There's so much information contained in such a brief sentence. No, it actually was one of the great paradoxes, really, I suppose, that it was great to do it sober. Were there moments onstage where you felt your age, where you just thought, oh, hey? Towards the end, you really feel yourself. Because it's like a sauna up there. I mean, there's so much energy going around, and it's louder than bombs. So your wife had never seen you do this before. There must have been a part of you which felt so pleased that she could see it. Yes. I felt kind of like I'd become this other person. And when I was over there, my life over here seemed to have a sort of almost dreamlike substance. And then, of course, as soon as I got back, the events in October in Japan just began to assume that sort of mantle of dream. I did three shows-- two in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. And all three, just great? All three sold out. In Kyoto, we set a club record for the largest attendance ever. And it was so packed we couldn't actually get off stage. The only way out was over. I had to sling myself over the audience, and they carried me on their hands back through the crowd and gently deposited me at the stage door. So this is your last gig? That was your last gig? Yes. And it ended with the entire audience lifting you up and passing you bodily out and gently depositing you out of the club? Well, not out of the club but to the stage door, yes. It was amazing. I don't think I've ever really been lifted by a mob of teenagers and people in their 20s. What exactly is that like? Well, in Kyoto I felt pretty good about it. I'm not sure how I would have felt about it in London in 1977 where the scene was incredibly violent. Whenever you played, you were just as likely to get beaten up as you were to get paid. Describe what it was like to come back after the tour. It was hard for me to get motivated again to do my business after the tour. It just wasn't as thrilling as being on a stage in front of cheering-- Well, not many things are. And it's a bit like-- you know, my dad's generation. You know, after sort of growing up as a kid, being fired on in World War II and all that kind of stuff. It was kind of hard getting it up for working in the shipping industry again. Shortly after I got back, Steve Lillywhite was in town. And that is? He was the original producer. And he was also my roommate at the time that all the Automatics stuff was going on. And now he's incredibly successful. He does U2, Dave Matthews, and all that stuff. And anyway, he was in town, he had some time. And so we hung out together for a couple of days. And Hunter was off. Hunter, your wife. Yes. Hunter, my wife. So we got to hang out. And we talked a little about the old days. And he told me, you know, Big Paul from Specs does catering. And Nigel from the members is in Australia now. And Walter from the Heartbreakers, he's a stockbroker in Manhattan. So I think I got to see, we don't get what we deserve. We get what we get. And we have to be OK with that. David Philp, lead singer of the Automatics. David is still writing music. He's released several albums since we first did this interview a few years back. A couple of those new songs even became number one hits on the UK charts. His latest album, West of Wherever, comes out in November. Coming up, a fascinating day in the life of a future prime minister, maybe. 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "Return to Childhood," stories of people revisiting the past, what they find there, what they do not find there. We first aired today's show a few years back. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show. Act 3, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, and Me. Sometimes when we revisit our childhood, it is not very pleasant what we find. Take, for example, our next guest. When he was a teenager, he started reading the biography of David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. And one of the things that he learned is that all of his life, David Ben Gurion kept a diary. And the whole package seemed like a good idea-- the job, the diary. "December 3, 1986, Wednesday. Another fascinating day in the life of Adam Davidson. I have a math test tomorrow. I'm going to school early to tutor a girl in my class for the aforementioned test. "My math class, a joint pre-calculus and calculus class, consists mainly of seniors not especially interested in learning. I guess that I'm the, quote, class expert, unquote, in that I always do the math problems which no one else can. And for this, I'm disliked. I guess that because I apply myself, think clearly, and do a little work as well as some intelligence helping out, I am a geek. In truth, I am far from it." When you first read that to yourself, when you first saw it, your reaction was? It was pure horror. Recently, Adam Davidson, an occasional contributor to our program, found his old high school diaries. Adam's mom is Israeli. His dad is American. Adam grew up in New York. Well, his body was in New York. His brain, as the diaries reveal, was somewhere else entirely. I remember when I was writing it, I remember very clearly-- although I don't say this in the diary-- that it was very clear to me that this was the diary of the future prime minister of Israel, me, that I would one day be prime minister, and it would be very important for history, for people to know the deep thoughts of a young Zionist as he prepared his way to lead his nation. Now, our regular listeners here on This American Life might remember that you've been on our program describing your experience in Israeli army summer camp. That was right before I started writing this diary. Read me another. Sure. Let's see. "There's so much wrong with Jews and Israel that I'm going to have a job ahead of me. One thing is the lack of any strong Jewish identity among most Jews. This attitude sickens me. "You Jews of the world, stop worrying about money and well-being. I do not know what exactly I'll do. But if this situation continues when I'm a bit older, then watch out, world Jewry, here comes Adam." And "Watch out, world Jewry, here comes Adam" was all in capital letters. Wow. Yep. It's interesting that you actually are addressing a readership. I know. I know. That's what's kind of amazing. And that readership is world Jewry. Right. Yeah. The Jews of the world will one day read this book and will say, if he knew this at 16, how could I be living so badly? Can I ask you to just read one of the passages where you talk about Israel? Sure. Let's see. I mean, I have this thing from January 4, 1987. "I memorized 'The Hope,' 'Hatikvah,'" which is the Israeli National anthem, "a few minutes ago. That will help me in Israel." And I find that really amazing that here I am, the future prime minister of Israel, and one of the things I need-- oh God, I need to know the national anthem. I'll probably be called upon to recite that at some point. There will be a ballgame or something where you just stand up and sing it. Right, exactly. "January 14, 1987. Wednesday. I'm getting more and more angered by the effects of Arab propaganda. They blame the Jews for everything. And the world, including Jews, go along with it. Entirely ridiculous." I mean, I really thought this was a testament for the ages. I really thought that this writing was powerful and persuasive, and anyone who would read it would immediately become a Zionist. At 16, I had such an inflated sense of myself. There was so much going on in my life then that I can remember, and I wasn't recording it. Instead, I was creating this ridiculous fantasy of, you know, I'm not just a 16-year-old kid who's having crushes and a hopeless geek who can't get a girl to kiss him and being scared and confused about growing old. I'm the future prime minister of Israel, and everything goes through that. But I don't know. I mean, just-- But maybe keeping a diary where one tells the truth, maybe that's a luxury of being a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation. Maybe other people in another kind of situation need to actually make up a little fantasy. Yeah. I think I didn't have much angst about being the future prime minister of Israel. I was very calm and confident and comfortable with it. And I had so much angst about every other aspect of my life. And so I now see it as just kind of-- maybe it was a good solution. It was a good way to deal with what I was going through, to have this space where I could just be one of the greats. I wonder what the 16-year-old Adam Davidson would feel in knowing that finally an audience of a million people was getting some of the reading from this diary. I think this would feel so small to that 16-year-old. This would feel so nothing. I mean, I remember I was very disappointed and very sad about my parents. I mean, I was reading biographies, of course, of all the prime ministers of Israel. And I would just think about my parents and just think, how do you wake up every day knowing that your actions won't affect millions of people? Like, how is that enough motivation just to have your petty little craft and your petty little family and your small little apartment? You know, it just seemed pathetic. And I mean, they have the kind of life that, I mean, basically I want my for myself. What you're saying, though, is that the 16-year-old you would be cringing at your 30-year-old version, just as your 30-year-old version is cringing at the 16. Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, he would be very, very disgusted if he heard this radio piece. It would seem like I had settled in a pathetic way. Adam Davidson. These days, he's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Act 4, When We Were Angels. This story originally came to us from a graduate student. Hillary Frank was studying drawing at the New York Academy of Art, and she mailed our radio show a story that she wanted to get onto the program. And what she had done is that she had recorded the interviews using her little microcassette answering machine. And then to edit the quotes that she had gotten, what she would do is that she would record by dubbing and recording onto her shiny red boombox. It was crude, yes, but the story sounded remarkably like a story from This American Life. Now, for one reason or another and time considerations, that unsolicited story never made it onto the radio. For this week's show, however, we had her put together another story using that same style which we added music to here at the radio station to make it fully sound like a story on our show. It's a story about an incident that happened to her back when she was an undergraduate. Tufts University is a pretty straight place. Entertainment for most people means fraternity keggers. It's not the sort of place you'd expect people to watch a guy sitting on another guy's shoulders pretending to be a giant. It happened by accident in 1994. My friend Scott was the top half. It was the beginning of the school year, and we were kind of bored one night. And we decided to go up to the quad. And I guess basically Jeff got up on someone's back, and he started yelling and screaming about how giant he was, and how magnificent he was. And I think actually right after that I might have gotten on someone's back and said, yeah, I am also giant. And I guess that really struck a chord in me. I thought that was pretty amusing. I guess I thought a lot about it. It actually did start me thinking along a particular path. Scott talked about the idea one night in the dining hall. The next day, on the way to class, he saw signs all over campus that said in bold print, "I am nine feet tall. Come see Giant Man, 8:00 PM on the quad." Scott had no idea who put them up. He learned later that the signs were posted by a guy who had overheard him talking at dinner. Scott decided he would go to the quad at the specified time and undertake the challenge. To pull this off, he would need to create a character and a costume for the giant. He gave Giant Man a booming voice. I don't even know exactly. It was something like, you know, behold! I am Giant! Just this-- not even loud but just kind of weird and suggesting man-ness in some vague way. You know? I don't know. Scott asked his tallest friend, Podo, to ask as Giant Man's legs. They grabbed some props before heading up to the quad-- a blanket to wrap around their middle to hide Podo, a long wooden staff, and a black curly wig, like the guys in Kiss. We picked out a point in the bushes, Podo and I, and we kind of really couldn't see what was going on out on the quad. And so the time came, and I got on his shoulders, basically, and tied the blanket around my waist, and we walked out. And I remember there just being maybe 10 people, 15 people. And I remember them being way on the other side and sort of running. And what was so ridiculous about it was, there was just a handful of people. And they were so spread out, but they were all sort of coming towards me. It was like, what the hell am I doing here? He decided to plan another Giant Man appearance the following week. They posted more signs and told everyone they knew, go see Giant Man, it'll blow your mind. Word spread quickly, and amazingly they were able to keep it secret that they themselves were Giant Man. Most students believed there was an actual nine-foot man come to Tufts for some mysterious reason. I was friends with these guys, and I didn't even know yet. At the next appearance, almost 200 people were waiting for Giant Man and chanting his name. It was like a political rally. Some of them carried signs that said things like, "We love you, Giant Man," "Why are you here," "Save us from ourselves, Giant Man," "Nine Feet of Lovin'," and "Giant freak, go home." Giant Man made his way onto the quad, and the crowd went wild. People came rushing out of their dorms to see what was going on. When Giant Man reached his fans, he made a small speech. "I am giant," he boomed. "I am huge, and I have brought you butterscotch." He then threw cellophane-wrapped butterscotch to the crowd, and they dove for it. On the walk up, I just stopped in the bookstore and saw some candy. And I was starting to think, what was the most ridiculous candy that nobody ever ate? And there was butterscotch there and some kind of cellophane wrapper. It looked like nobody was eating it. Butterscotch became Giant Man's trademark treat. When he ran out of things to say, he would revert to throwing candy. The fact of the matter is, Giant Man had very little to tell the Tufts community other than, "My strength is amazing, my girth is enormous, and my height is unequaled." He would brag like this for only two or three minutes and then retreat back to the bushes. The problem was Podo would get really tired really quickly. Like, he walked out really fast, like he almost was running out. And he got really tired and didn't even know where he was going. And he kind of just-- I mean, it must have looked absolutely idiotic. So he couldn't see? Yeah. I mean, his eyes were covered. I remember, I would sit on his head and I would put both my hands on his head, kind of give him direction by maybe forcing his head in a certain direction. Giant Man became a phenomenon. Enthusiasts wore "I Love Giant Man" T-shirts, which had silhouettes of a huge man with a bulging middle. There was once a parade across canvas with noisemakers and a trumpet to greet him. Another time there were torch jugglers and bodyguards. Letters were written to the student newspaper, pro and con Giant Man. Teachers were mentioning Giant Man in class. There was a discussion in an ethics course in which people who hadn't seen Giant Man argued about whether or not we were exploiting a freak of nature. I remember, I was out there. There was this guy that I kind of vaguely knew who was there with a bunch of his buddies. I guess we were from the same fraternity or something. And they were jumping around and stuff. And they're saying, yeah, we're going to take Giant Man down. When I went out there, I was talking for a little while. And I saw him. He was sort of right behind me, or they were coming up from the side, him and his buddies. And I remember him just sort of coming up and starting to pull on my sheet and stuff. And one of them tried to push me. And Podo, who could barely stand as it was, after walking out there and with me on his shoulders, he was sort of shaking a little bit and managed to stay on his feet. I remember just sort of offering them butterscotch and just screaming about how much I loved them. And they just kind of took off, and it was over. Do you think that if Giant Man had been an actual political cause that you would have gotten such a big turnout and there would have been such a big deal about it? Yeah, I doubt that. I mean, if there was really-- that's one of the things I think that was a big draw about it was that, you know, it didn't have any meaning. And for whatever reason, people were really drawn to that. I mean, if it had meaning or was trying to pitch some ideas or something, it would kind of seem less real, I think. I mean, there was really something fundamentally interesting and truthful about Giant Man, I guess. I mean, there is something that people are drawn to, to that absurdity, for whatever reason. By the end, Giant Man's following had grown to about 350 people. I don't think any of us have had any experience like it since. When you're a student, it still feels like something exciting might happen at any moment. Life feels full of all this potential. But when you get out of school, that potential just doesn't seem to be there. What do you do now? Well, I'm an engineer. What kind of engineer? A computer engineer, designing computer circuits and things like that. And do you have Giant Man-like experiences today? No. I mean, not really. I'm not parading around talking about my magnificence. There's actually a recording of Giant Man's final public appearance. There was a band called the Electric Fun Machine that dedicated a song to him, and he appeared with them at a concert on the quad. Giant Man! Giant Man! Giant Man! Students of Tufts, fear me not! For I am the benevolent Giant Man! I have come to show love! As a symbol of my benevolence, I shall once again shower you with-- And then, Giant Man threw butterscotch candy. Hillary Frank. In the years since she first did this story for us, she has created many radio stories and a podcast called The Longest Shortest Time, which is about parenting. Her most recent book is Weird Parenting Wins. Well, today's program was produced by Jonathan Goldstein and myself with Alex Blumberg, Starlee Kine, Aaron Yankee, and Annie Baxter, and mixed by Jared Ford and Catherine Raimondo. Senior producer of today's show was Julie Snyder. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from Anna Martin. Musical help today from Mr. John Connor. Special thanks today to Lawrench Weschler, Lacey Kine, Craig Danwire, and Anaheed Alani. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he's been rereading the Bible and talking about it with me in the break room. I don't know about his interpretation of the Bible. Like, OK. God creates two people to live in the Garden of Eden. I really don't think he says-- Watch out, world Jewry. Here comes Adam. 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. It used to be if something was big news, it got turned into a song. This one's about a famous kidnapping that happened in 1912, the kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar, a four-year-old boy. For two years, the details of his disappearance, and the search for him, and how he was found, and the trial of his kidnapper was all front page news, reported breathlessly all across the country. But some of the biggest mysteries of the case were never solved, until long after nearly everybody involved was dead, almost a century after it happened, the mysteries finally got solved when one of Bobby Dunbar's descendants started poking around the old stories, looking for answers she wasn't really expecting to find. Today, we devote our entire show to the legend of Bobby Dunbar and to what his granddaughter discovered-- the messy, real story of what actually happened, which, as you'll hear, turns out to be a lot more interesting than the legend. Tal McThenia is our reporter. Everybody in the family knew it-- the legend of Bobby Dunbar, the lost boy who was found. Well, the legend was that, back in the early 1900s, my grandfather became missing. My grandfather had gone on a camping trip with his parents. It was on a lake. Swayze Lake. It's actually a swamp in Louisiana. And he disappeared. Bobby was just four years old at the time, and Swayze Lake was teeming with alligators, surrounded by dark, thick woods. There was a massive search that started in the swamp and spread across the country, but nothing for eight months, until-- They found him in Mississippi in the hands of a Mr. Walters. The peddler in Columbia, Mississippi. They brought him home. Rode in on a fire truck. There was a tremendous parade, with a fire truck. And the whole town came out. And there was a band, and everybody celebrated. And he was found. But Bobby Dunbar wasn't out of danger yet. Someone else tried to claim him, another mother. She'd lost her child, too, and said that the boy they found in Mississippi was hers. There was a big trial that proved her wrong, and Bobby stayed with his parents, Percy and Lessie Dunbar, in Opelousas, where he lived for the rest of his life. It was just a story, a tale you would tell your grandchildren. Which she would know. She was one of them. Margaret Dunbar Cutright, out of everyone in the family, was the most captivated by the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping. As a girl, she would beg her grandmother to tell the story over and over. When she had children of her own, Margaret told them the legend, too. Then, in 1999, her younger brother, Robbie, died in a plane crash. A month later, she was sitting in the den with her father, and he gave her a scrapbook that had been her great grandmother's, overstuffed with photographs and letters and newspaper clippings from the early 1900s, all about her grandfather's kidnapping. It was about 400 articles, not in chronological order. Dad said, this would be a great project for you, Margaret. He had no idea what would come of that. Without realizing it, Bob had set his daughter on a path that would nearly tear their family apart. But in the beginning, all Margaret knew was that the scrapbook felt like the thing she'd been waiting for. In 1999, her kids were growing up and in the house less and less. Her husband, Wayne, was working in a different state and only home on weekends. And Margaret was in mourning for her brother. She had long, empty days, and the scrapbook could fill them. But the more she dug in, the more she began to realize this was not the breezy adventure tale she'd grown up imagining. Even the simplest moments in the story, like when her great grandparents are finally united with their son after an eight-month-long national search. Reporters from several papers were following the couple, Lessie and Percy Dunbar, on the train to Mississippi. Throngs of people were surrounding the house where the boy was being kept. Lessie and Percy went inside, but reports diverge on what happened next. This article says that the mother faints. The headline reads, "Mother Faints, Sight of Kidnapped Child. When the mother reached the house where the boy was being kept, he was asleep. Mrs. Dunbar made a careful examination of the lad without awakening him and was standing over the bed a few hours later, when the child opened his eyes. The boy recognized his mother instantly. 'Mother,' he cried as he reached up and stretched out his arms to her. The mother convulsively embraced the boy and then fainted." And the second article, the headline was, "Mrs. Dunbar Not Positive Lad is Her Missing Boy. When they reached the home, the child was asleep at the time. When awakened, it began to cry. Mrs. Dunbar looked in the dim light of a smoky oil lamp and then fell back with a gasp. 'I do not know. I am not quite sure,' faltered Mrs. Dunbar." In fact, Percy and Lessie both told the papers that the boy didn't look like their son. His eyes were too small. But then the next day, they came back and Lessie gave the boy a bath and identified the moles and scars on his skin and declared he was hers. And according to some newspapers, Bobby didn't recognize his father or mother, either, or his brother Alonzo. One paper said, quote, "Bobby, at first meeting, turns upon Alonzo with a scowl of anger. There appeared no recognition of his little brother." And then another paper said, quote, "The instant they met, Robert said, 'there's my bubba, Alonzo,' and reached over and kissed him." It was a frequent occurrence in the newspapers to contradict one another. It's very difficult to know for certain what really happened. So to sort out what happened, to try to get to the truth of the story, Margaret went on an obsessive quest to small-town libraries and archives and courthouses all over the South. For her birthday, her husband gave her a card for the Library of Congress, and she spent weeks in the reading rooms there. And as she dug into the historical record, certain figures from the family legend started to seem like real people for the first time. Take the mother who came forward and claimed that Bobby Dunbar was actually her child. Margaret had never given her much thought. She'd just been the woman trying to steal her grandfather. But in the newspapers, this woman has a name-- Julia Anderson. She's a single mom working in North Carolina as a field hand and a caretaker for the parents of William C. Walters, the kidnapper. Walters claimed that Julia gave him the boy willingly, that his name wasn't Bobby Dunbar, but Bruce Anderson, and that they'd been traveling together for over a year. When Julia first shows up in the papers, she confirms his story, although she contests some of his details. The first article that even brought her into light, in a way-- there was an affidavit printed. "William C. Walters left Barnesville, North Carolina, with my son, Charles Bruce, in February of 1912, saying that he only wanted to take the child with him for a few days on a visit to the home of his sister. I have not seen the child from that day to this. I did not give him the child, I merely consented for him to take my son for a few days. Walters had been at the home of his father, Mr. JP Walters, near Barnesville since November of 1911. And while he was there, he and the child were together a great deal and seemed very fond of each other. The boy would go anywhere with Walters. I would know my son if I were to see him, and I am sure he would know me. I have no picture of the child, but have a lock of his hair." What was your reaction to that? Her statement struck me as a very truthful statement. This woman was telling truth. She did have a son. And my heart hurts for Julia at this point, believing that this boy is her son. You know, it's really awkward because Lessie and Julia are in the same position. They're both missing children. From May of 1913 on, Julia was all over the headlines. A New Orleans paper paid for her trip to Opelousas to see if she really could identify the boy as hers. The story, as it was played out in the front pages, was this. Julia arrived, weary from an overnight train ride, and was taken into an Opelousas home. Five boys around Bruce's age, including the child the Dunbars had claimed as Bobby, were brought in at different times, and Julia had to choose. When Bobby came in, he was in tears, and so was Julia. He showed no signs of recognition, even when she offered him an orange. But Julia asked the lawyers in the room if this was the child who was recovered. They refused to answer. Finally, she said she just didn't know, and the test was declared a failure. Julia begged for a second chance. And the next day, she was allowed to see the boy again and undress him. This time, she felt more certain that it was her son. But her failure the night before was already national news. Julia had no lawyer and no money and very few allies in Opelousas, so she left town and began the long trip back to North Carolina. And from that point on, the boy was Bobby Dunbar. The more Margaret learned about Julia Anderson's life, the more tragic the story seemed. Julia had three children by two different men, neither her husband. And she'd lost all her children in just a single year-- a daughter she gave up for adoption, a baby whose sudden death she was wrongfully blamed for, and now Bruce. But the newspapers weren't very sympathetic. They implied she was a prostitute, called her illiterate and naive. Take this article in the New Orleans Item titled, "Julia Has Forgotten." "Julia Has Forgotten," by Jerome G. Beatty. "Her long journey had been in vain. She had not seen her son since February of 1912, and she had forgotten him. Animals don't forget, but this big, coarse countrywoman, several times a mother, she forgot. She cared little for her young. Children were only regrettable incidents in her life." Now, see? I hate this article. "She hopes her son isn't dead, just as she hopes that the cotton crop will be good this year. Of true mother love, she has none." See? How judgmental. Then one day, Margaret found a Julia Anderson listed on an online genealogy site with this biographical note. Quote, "Julia had a son from her first marriage, named Bruce, who was kidnapped from North Carolina when he was six years old and taken to Louisiana. She tried to get him back, but the people that kidnapped him won him in court and changed his name to Bobby Dunbar." Well, that was not what my grandmother told me. That was not right. It was like an upside down world opened up to Margaret, with a family who believed exactly the opposite of what her family believed. And in 2000, Margaret did what nobody else in her family, to her knowledge, had ever done before. She went to meet and visit with the descendants of Julia Anderson, her two living children, Hollis Rawls and Jewel Tarver, and Jewel's daughter, Linda. My name is Linda Tarver, and I'm the daughter of Jewel Rawls Tarver, who is the daughter of Julia Anderson. And Julia Anderson would be my grandmother. All of us cousins grew up-- we knew that we had an uncle that had been taken by the Dunbar family in Opelousas, Louisiana. We always said "kidnapped." We said they kidnapped him. From the Andersons, Margaret learned what happened to Julia after the controversy over Bobby Dunbar. Julia moved to Poplarville, Mississippi, 200 miles east of Opelousas, got married, and had seven children. Jewel and Hollis are the youngest, now in their 80s. Talking to Jewel and Hollis and Linda, a very different picture of Julia emerges than the one in the newspapers of a barely literate woman of loose morals. Here's Linda. Grandmother loved to read, and she used to read Zane Grey books. And then she would sit them around at night and she would tell them the stories that she had read that day. But then, when she became a Christian, she decided reading Zane Grey was the wrong thing to, so they never got anymore Zane Grey stories, but they had to listen to the Bible then. We went to church, I'm telling you. And you behaved, too, in church. This is Jewel and Hollis, Julia's children. And we'd walk through these woods, across an old hickory log, across a creek, and go to church. And it'd be dinnertime before we'd leave, and we'd starve to death before we got home. Hollis and Jewel revere their mother. Julia didn't just go to church, they say, she founded the church. She was a nurse and a midwife for the entire community. During the Depression, she sewed all her children's clothes out of fertilizer bags. And they were always well fed. There was only one thing missing. She always talked about Bruce, but she called him Bobby. She was always looking for him. She never forgot it-- never, ever forgot the boy. And she'd always, once in a while, bring it up, and what the boy looked like. And she'd take a while to tell it, you know, about he did so and so and this, that, and the other, you know? And if it'd been possible for her to have got the child legally back or anything, she would have done it, if possible. She would have. She loved the child. She loved Bruce. She sure did. So growing up, you knew that Bruce was out there. We knew. We knew we had a brother. We knew we had a brother. We knew it. We knew that. We kept thinking, well, one day, we'll get to go to this town, and we'll find him. But we never did go. Even though Opelousas is just 200 miles from Poplarville, they didn't have a lot of money back then, and that kind of travel was expensive. They told me that when Julia went back up to North Carolina for her mother's funeral, they had to sell the family mule to pay for the trip. But it wasn't just the cost, Hollis says. I reckon you'd be afraid, if you want to know the real word. I knew, according to the signs and things that they had in Opelousas, that the Dunbars were well-off people. Dunbars everywhere. Everywhere you look, there's a Dunbar sign on a building. They're something of the-- and people that has those signs up, I was always told that you didn't mess with them. And we figured if they took Mama's son, well, what kind of people were they to begin with? And if people can do that through the laws and get away with it, who are we to try to do or interfere with something like that? For all the new things Margaret learned about Julia Anderson's family, one of the most surprising revelations Jewel and Hollis offered was about Margaret's grandfather. As much as the Andersons wondered about Bobby, it seemed he'd been wondering about them, as well. Hollis remembers a day in 1944, maybe, when he was in his late 20s. He was working at an ice plant in Poplarville, and a man he'd never seen before came in and started making small talk. Finally, he introduced himself. He was Bobby Dunbar from Opelousas, Louisiana. Hollis was startled. But before he could process it, a customer came in and Hollis had to rush off to work. When he came back, Bobby was still there. More small talk, and now a lot of looking each other over. But Hollis' work got in the way again, and eventually Bobby left. But 30 minutes after he left, it dawned on me what I had done. Here was a man that I'd been looking for for 20, almost 30-- 20-something years, anyhow, and Mother had been telling me about. Here he is, looking me straight in the eye, and I didn't do nothing about trying to find out more about the situation. But I didn't. I just didn't, and I regret that. Hollis' sister, Jewel, had a similar story. She was working at a service station that she and her husband ran at a crossroads outside Poplarville. A man came in and talked to her for maybe an hour, she says, just sat and drank coffee, looking only at her and asking all kinds of questions. But he didn't identify himself. After he left then and I got to thinking about it, I said, that is who I believe he was-- Bobby. When Margaret heard this story during her first visit with Hollis and Jewel back in 2000, she had her doubts. But later, Margaret was visiting with her uncle and aunt, her father's siblings. And while they were in the car, Margaret was telling them about her research and the mysterious encounters that Hollis and Jewel remembered. In the rear view mirror, she saw her uncle and aunt exchange a charged look. Then they told her this story. Here's Margaret's uncle, Gerald, Bobby Dunbar's youngest son. It would have been 1963, so I would have been 13 years old, right? We were coming back from a trip, my brother's wedding in Ohio, in Cincinnati. And on the way back, we went through Mississippi. And I remember my dad pointing. He says, those were the people that they came to pick me up from. And he asked, he said, should I stop? And my mother sort of responded, if you think you should. And so they did. We stopped. Then he went into the store. And so we stayed there for maybe 30 minutes or so. And he came back, and we left. Margaret, the granddaughter of Bobby Dunbar, and Linda, the granddaughter of Julia Anderson, interpreted this eerie coincidence differently. They'd been discussing Margaret's research on the phone and online since they first met. On the one hand, they were ideal research partners since they both were singularly fascinated with the story. But on the other hand, it was an uneasy alliance. Here's Linda. Margaret was totally convinced that it was Bobby Dunbar all along. I was totally convinced that it was Bruce Anderson all along. We understood that we were both coming from different angles. Again, Margaret. But what was there to do but butt heads, you know? And yet, we tried to do it very subtly for months. Good morning to everyone. And we are certainly glad to have all of you with us. Agreeing to disagree gets old fast. The differences between Margaret and Linda came to a head in Columbia, Mississippi, when Margaret was invited to share her research at the Historical Society in town. The sound you're hearing is from a video of the event. In the front of the room were Julia Anderson's children, Hollis and Jewel. Several times during her presentation, Margaret used phrases like this. The illegitimate child of a domestic, Julia Anderson. The illegitimate child of a domestic, Julia Anderson. Jewel and Hollis bristled. That was their mom she was talking about. Margaret went on to describe Julia like a character in a story-- working in the fields with coarse hands and bare, dirty feet. And she made it clear that she didn't really believe the Anderson family's version of what happened, that Bobby was Bruce, but her own family's, that Bobby was Bobby, son of her great grandparents, Percy and Lessie Dunbar. When Jewel and Hollis got home and told Linda what happened, she got mad. I truly don't believe that, when she spoke and the way she spoke, I don't believe that she meant to say it to be as derogatory as we took it either, if you want to know the truth. She had spoken the truth of Julia Anderson had children out of wedlock. So she was a loose woman, which, if you have to accept that, you have to accept it. But I wanted her to see it from my point of view, you know? I felt like she had looked at it from her point of view long enough, that it was my turn. And I don't remember if it was a written letter or email, but I told her, the very woman that you maligned at that meeting today could very well turn out to be your great grandmother. She said to me-- Again, Margaret. --you need to look a lot more closely. You keep wanting to know all about Julia. You need to look more into Lessie and Percy and judge their characters. And that did not make me happy. It sort of angered me to have her say that. But in retrospect, she was absolutely right. I did need to put down what I believed and be able to look at it with fresh eyes. Coming up, what Margaret discovers. Plus, the kidnapper speaks. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our story unraveling the century-old mystery of what happened to Bobby Dunbar continues. Again, here's Tal McThenia. By 2003, Margaret had been researching for four years. She'd taken all the articles from the scrapbook and all the articles from all the libraries and typed them, over 1,200 total. Margaret had maps, and photo albums, and tape recordings, and books on her shelf like, Social History of the American Alligator. That year, she started looking for descendants of William Walters, the wandering handyman, the man who'd kidnapped her grandfather. In 1914, Walters was convicted of kidnapping Bobby Dunbar. His lawyers appealed, and the state supreme court ordered a retrial. But incredibly, because the first trial cost the town so much money, prosecutors decided to drop the case instead. Walters was released. In 2003, Margaret opened up something called the Walters Family Genealogy Book. She pored over the names in the book and started making phone calls. I'm Jean Cooper, and I'm the great niece of William Cantwell Walters. We always called him Uncle Cant. I never knew he had a William Cantwell until all this came up. He was always Uncle Cant. We met with Jean and her sister Barbara in Savannah, Georgia. Just like Hollis and Jewel and Margaret, they'd grown up hearing the Bobby Dunbar story, too, only their version was a little racier. Well, the story we heard was that this Miss Julia Anderson was a fine young lady. But you know, mostly, fine young ladies get entrapped. And I'll tell you what, there's many a handsome, young, sweet-talking man come around and entrapped them. So that's what happened to Miss Julia, as the story went. Now, I know it was rumored that Uncle Cant was the father and that one of his brothers was the father. It could have been Uncle Bunt. He was a rounder. He was a real rounder. But they all denied it. They said it was another feller. Jean and Barbara grew up on a farm in Georgia with their ailing grandfather, Rad, William Walter's brother. After getting released from jail, William Walters had gone back to his life as a tinker, a traveling handyman, tuning pianos in people's parlors and fixing organs in country churches. And at least once or twice a year, his travels would bring him around to his brother's house for a visit. Seeing Uncle Cant come with his wagon a-trinkling and a-bouncing, the pots and pans a-bouncing against each other, you couldn't help but know it was Uncle Cant. But Grandpa would lighten up. Oh, he would just brighten up. There's Cant. There's Cant. Young'uns, put some more wood on the fire. Go see what's in the kitchen. Fix him some supper. He'd always come about dark. Every time I remember him coming, it was about dark, wasn't it, Barbie? Yeah, night. And it didn't matter if we'd already had supper and the fire had gone out in the stove. We had to light up the fire and fix Uncle Cant some supper so he could sit with Grandpa till midnight. But each and every time he'd come-- and he would come several times a year and stay a month at the time, or three, two to four weeks-- they sat and talked over the case of the kidnapping and how innocent he was. It was like it had just happened. During one visit, Jean and Barbara's grandfather asked William Walters what he was doing traveling around the country with somebody else's boy in the first place. Walters explained that Julia was in dire straits, and she couldn't take care of Bruce. And he was planning on bringing the boy back once she got on her feet. And also, there was the business element. Uncle Cant told Grandpa that, with that little boy with him, people were a lot nicer when he stopped to spend the night. Because he would stop along the road at farm houses and around in his travels and ask for a night's lodging and hay for the horses. And then he would do things for them-- tune their pianos, organs, or whatever. And he said, with that little boy, the mothers just couldn't wait to get their hands on the little boy and feed him, and cuddle him, and bathe him. In fact, a woman told me one time she had a neighbor-- if I'm getting off the beaten path, but it'll kind of explain it-- that was ugly as homemade sin. And she was all the time wanting to take her little grandchild with her everywhere, shopping, and to the grocery store, and walking. And I said, well, why does she want to carry him along with her all the time? She says, well, she is so ugly it makes her look better to have a little child along with her. So that could have been Uncle Cant having that little child, especially the ladies in the house were a lot nicer. This is the defense file. These are photocopies. Margaret had also tracked down the granddaughter of William Walters' lawyer, who had saved in a closet the complete defense file from the kidnapping case. When Margaret heard that, she dropped everything, bought a portable scanner, and showed up at the woman's doorstep. She spent a week scanning the entire thing and then four months back at home typing and deciphering it. The defense file was a gold mine. It had correspondence from the governors of Mississippi and Louisiana, handwritten letters from Julia Anderson, and dozens of sworn affidavits from Mississippi residents saying that the child was Bruce Anderson and that they'd seen him in the area with Walters months before Bobby Dunbar went missing. And then there was this letter, written by William Walters himself just days after he was arrested and thrown in jail, addressed directly to Percy Dunbar, who had just taken the boy home with him. "I see that you got Bruce, but you have heaped up trouble for yourselves. I had no chance to prove up, but I know by now you have decided you are wrong. It is very likely I will lose my life on account of that. And if I do, the great God will hold you accountable. That boy's mother is Julia Anderson. You ask him, and he will tell you. I did not teach him to beg or bum. But in as much as you have him, take good care of him. So you have a lost Robert and me a lost Bruce. May God bless my darling boy. Write me, if I don't get lynched. I think you will be sad a long time, but hope not too bad." The defense file was 400 pages of evidence that directly challenged Margaret's family legend. And pretty soon, Margaret reached a breaking point. Toward the very end of me typing the defense file, which was not in chronological order, I came across a letter that totally-- it was my epiphany. It was a letter written by a Christian woman. I don't even know her name. She just signed it "A Christian Woman." And it was written to the attorneys of William Walters. And it says, "Kindly pardon me. I am ill in bed. But this matter has just worried me. Dear sir, in view of human justice to Julia Anderson and mothers, I am prompted to write to you. I sincerely believe the Dunbars have Bruce Anderson and not their boy. If this is their child, why are they afraid for anyone to see or interview him privately? I would see nothing to fear, and this seems strange. The Dunbars claim that--" The letter goes on for six pages, laying out a point-by-point, common sense argument that the Dunbars have the wrong child. Why haven't pictures of Bobby and Bruce been printed side by side so the world could see whether they look alike or not? Why is Julia judged more harshly for wavering than Lessie, when neither of them recognized the child at first? Which gets A Christian Woman to her biggest point-- a look back at that fateful night in Mississippi when the Dunbars first saw the boy and didn't recognize him, until Lessie gave him a bath and saw his moles and scars. "If this had been their own child and he had been gone eight months, do you think his features would be so changed that they would not know him only by moles and scars? This is a farce. If the Dunbars do not know their child who has only been gone eight months by his features, why, they don't know him at all." Reason, by reason, by reason, this woman is giving me every-- she apparently followed this very closely in the newspapers. And it just simply dawned on me, oh, my god, she's right. What a farce. What a farce this is. The idea for a DNA test had been floating around for years, but Margaret hadn't wanted to do it unless all her uncles and aunts, Bobby Dunbar's children, agreed to it. And then, four years into her research, a reporter from the Associated Press, Allen Breed, got wind of the story. Margaret remembers being in the room when Allen asked her father if he would consent to a DNA test. She was startled at his answer. Yes, he said. He wanted to do it now. He'd waited long enough. Margaret's father, Bob Dunbar, Jr., was Bobby Dunbar's oldest son. He'd heard the legend, of course, but he'd never heard it from his father. It was not something that we discussed at home. It was just the stuff was in the attic-- newspaper articles, some pictures. It was stuff that my mother gathered. At home, we never discussed it. But Bob had been watching Margaret's research with interest. Remember, he'd given her the scrapbook that got this whole thing started. Bob had just spent weeks in the hospital with congestive heart failure and explained his decision this way, in a letter to his family. "Daddy did not have the science of DNA to confirm the decision of the court in his youth. I feel it is my responsibility to achieve that before I go." The easiest way to do the test would be to compare the DNA of two different lines of Dunbars, someone from Bobby's line, since his identity was in doubt, and someone from his brother Alonzo's line, since there was no question he was a Dunbar. Bob and Margaret spoke with Alonzo's son, David, and he agreed to do the test. The plan was to keep the results sealed until all Bob's siblings agreed to open them. A month passed. I called to check with the laboratory, and the laboratory assistant ended up blurting to me the results over the phone. The DNA did not match. You know, as far as she was concerned, it was a paternity test. She had no idea the impact of what she was saying to me. It was a shock to me, not really the conclusion, but to hear it. Margaret got off the phone and drove 10 hours that day to tell her father in person. He was still in the hospital. It took my breath away. You know, I hadn't considered that. My thought was to prove that Daddy was Bobby Dunbar. So it took me-- well, I had a lot of time. I was in the hospital a while. And I just pondered, you know? All right, if my past is wrong-- Bobby Dunbar, all the legends, all the stories-- and then all of the sudden you find out, well, that's not who your blood says you are. Where does that leave me? If my grandpa isn't my grandpa, who am I? Bob's siblings had no idea he'd taken the test. And that an AP reporter was preparing to write an article for the National Wire. Bob had to tell them. And when he did, they were all stunned and really mad-- mad at Bob, but especially mad at Margaret, who they blamed for orchestrating the whole thing and making it national news. Margaret's younger brother, Swin, explained what it was like. You know, she was really going up against the entire family, including myself. In fact, I'm not sure of any family member that was for it, except for her and possibly my dad. And in retrospect, you know, she was doing what she felt was right. But I felt like she was alienating everybody else in doing so. The other thing about all that is some of us in the family, and probably even me at one time, probably felt like she was being a little bit selfish, you know? Why do this? Why do you need to do this? Nobody in the family wants to know. After the story ran in 2004, a thick silence descended between Margaret and her relatives. And that schism has persisted to this day. When she told them I'd called her about doing this radio story, the relatives were furious. They told Margaret that, yet again, she'd proven that she couldn't be trusted. They said she was disrespecting their heritage and destroying family relationships. They told her that they were Dunbars, and that's all they wanted to be. But the other two families involved took it a little better. For Jean and Barbara Cooper, the great-nieces of William Walters, it meant their ancestor wasn't a kidnapper, which was nice to hear. You don't like to think of your people being guilty of something like that. And I don't think we had many people, did we, that was falsely accused. The ones that were accused were usually guilty. And proven so. And for the Andersons, it was literally the answer to a lifetime of prayers. Margaret's father, Bob, and his wife, Imelda, went down to Mississippi to deliver the news in person to Linda, Jewel, and Hollis. We didn't know what was up. They said, be there. We have some-- No, they didn't tell us. They wouldn't tell us what, till got to the meeting. And he told us that the DNA had been run, and that he was not a Dunbar, you know? And that's where the eyes-- you know, we all just-- I got up from where we were sitting on the couch, and I went around, and I think I hugged his neck, just knowing that, man, we were family. We were just family. When Bobby Jr. and Miss Imelda came and they told us about the DNA testing, that's the day Bobby came home. And he came in the form of his son. And we were proud for Julia. The one thing she wanted most in her life was her child back, and she got him. I told him that day. I said, now, we're not expecting nothing from them, but friendship. That's all that we ever wanted. We have no hard feelings against nobody of what has happened. Because back in those days, I am sure they thought they were doing the right thing. And if I'd have been back in those days, I might have felt the same way in a way about some things like that. I don't know. But now, we're just happy about the situation, but not happy they're unhappy, if you know what I'm talking about. We're just happy because we know the truth now. Let's see. We're coming up-- we're getting closer to where my grandmother lived and my grandfather. Oh my gosh, it was this house right here. Margaret's taking me on a driving tour of Opelousas. She grew up spending summer vacations here at her grandmother's with her whole family. It's a mix of personal history and history she's read about in her research. We go by the public pool where she used to spend afternoons swimming and hanging out and also the old jail site where William Walters played a homemade harp to the crowds outside his cell window. We want to turn left. We drive into a subdivision that her great uncle Alonzo developed-- sprawling ranches, big lawns, strange street names. Yeah. And he named some of these streets, like this one was named after himself. And he named one called Anna Lee, after his wife. And there's one called Dunbar Street, which here we are at Dunbar Street. There are still Dunbars in Opelousas, relatives that Margaret knows and loves, but she doesn't feel comfortable bringing me in for a visit. We're tiptoeing around. Margaret's cigarette breaks are happening more and more frequently. The contrast between the tension in Opelousas and the welcome she'd received two days ago from the Andersons in Poplarville is hard to miss. Julia Anderson's children have done nothing but welcome and embrace me into their lives. And they think that I'm brave and smart. And William Walters' family thinks that I'm a whiz. [LAUGHS] I think, for my family, when I started this project, I thought that this would sort of keep us bonded, and it didn't. It divided. So in a way, I feel like a failure. There are people upset by it. And there are some people who still don't accept the truth. It's like they don't believe me. They don't believe me. The disappearance of Bobby Dunbar blew apart the lives of three different families. But the people you'd think would be hurt the worst by it actually come out the best, like Julia Anderson. Before Bobby's disappearance, she was a field hand in North Carolina, on her own, not making enough money to feed her own child. The people she worked for mistreated her. The man she married shot her in the foot the night after her wedding. But William Walters' kidnapping trial got her out of there to a better place-- Poplarville, Mississippi. Back in 1912 and 1913, William Walters and Julia's son, Bruce, had been well-known fixtures in the Poplarville area. He and Bruce stayed in people's homes for weeks at a time while he tuned pianos and repaired the church organ. And when William Walters went to trial, these very people-- at least 20 of them-- came forward to testify to his innocence. And that's where they met Julia, the mother of the child they'd known and cared for, who was also there to testify for Walters. After the trial, Julia had no money and no place to go. The people from Mississippi took her in. It was almost like she was adopted just like Bruce was taken in to be Bobby. And both of them were given a new life. I mean, everything bad could be said about somebody was said about Julia. At this trial, you know, everything that could be said was said. But these people saw something in her, or they wouldn't have taken her in their home. Yeah, the people here in Poplarville out at Ford's Creek. They could have left her in Opelousas. They could've left her in New Orleans, but they brought her home with them. She lost everything. She had a baby that died just before she came down here, you know? And now she's lost Bruce. What did she have to live for? Suicide was not unheard of, you know? I'm sure they didn't promise her-- they just said, come home with us. Come home with us till you get on your feet. Come home with us till you can get up and do for yourself. So I can't regret it. I cannot regret for one minute that she came down here. I'm sad that she did not have that child. And I don't believe that she would ever made-- given the opportunity of saying, OK, we'll give you a new life if you'll give us this child, she would have never given that child up. I don't believe that. But if you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are, if that makes any sense. And I don't hate that I am. I rejoice in that I am. I rejoice in the family that we've got. And I feel like Grandmother felt the same way. As for the consequences for Bobby, even Julia Anderson's children, Hollis and Jewel, figure he was probably better off with the Dunbars. I don't want to put him down or my mother down, either, you know what I mean? She did the best she could with what probably she had to do with. But here's some people that-- he got off the wagon to get in a car. "Enclosed are the divorce papers I promised you. I know that these are official copies because the notary seals are raised." The divorce papers of Percy and Lessie Dunbar are brief, but even the bare facts are enough to imagine what life in the Dunbar family was like for Bobby after the trial. Lessie and Percy separated in 1920, meaning five years after the court affirmed that Bobby was hers, Lessie left him, her husband, and her other son, Alonzo, behind and moved to New Orleans. Bobby was 12, and Alonzo was 10. Also in 1920, Percy beat and stabbed a man while on a trip to Florida on the eighth anniversary of the day of Bobby's disappearance. His court record for this assault is included in the divorce papers. Lessie makes accusations of repeated and ongoing infidelity, but Percy denies the charges. Elsewhere, there is another court record that corroborates Lessie's claim. It's an arrest record for Percy on charges of adultery and cohabitation. But perhaps the most compelling detail is a handwritten note that accompanies the packet. It's from Lessie herself to Elizabeth, her granddaughter who took care of her in her old age. This says, "For Elizabeth Dunbar to read after my death so she may know why I stayed in my shell of grief." She stayed in her shell of grief? I think she had to have, on some level, known. And maybe she didn't. I don't know. I think maybe she was in a denial her entire life. From everything I've heard, she truly believed that this was her son, Bobby. But I can't help but wonder that maybe, underneath, where you go and can't talk about, she must have known that this was not her son that she birthed. And this is probably at the heart of the Dunbar family's unhappiness with this story, what it suggests about their ancestors and their ancestors' motives and characters. It's likely to me that Percy must have known somewhere inside of him that this little boy he took from Mississippi was not his son. And I don't say that lightly. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion. After reading all of the articles and the court records, these divorce papers, I realized that if he was capable of doing these things, if Percy was capable-- if he could stab a man, if he could be with another woman while he was married-- you know, he lies in these papers. Could he lie about this child? Did he lie about this child? He had a motive to save his wife's sanity. Could he do that? I think he could. I think he did. It's hard to look square in the face of this. And doing so has put Margaret and her father, Bob, at odds with the rest of their family. But Bob says, only by looking at it squarely can you see the redemption in their family story. When Bobby Dunbar was 18, he fell in love with a girl from a nearby town. It took him nine years to get her to marry him, but once she did, they raised four children, who all remember a very happy upbringing, full of love. And Bobby Dunbar gave rise to this family despite all that he'd been through-- whisked away from his mother at three, living in a wagon with an old man, huddling by fires in the woods at night, a two-year-long gauntlet of undressing, and parading, and sobbing, and staring. And when that was all over, his new family fractured and fell apart. And once again, he was abandoned. To come out of that, to create a family after that, to Bob, is a story of triumph. I feel like my daddy could have had all the excuses in the world to be a drunk and a child abuser or anything, a rascal. He had a terrible, traumatic young life, but he chose my mother, and he chose to be a family man. And that was his world. That was his life. And I truly believe that those experiences, for him and for a mother who lost her father before she even knew him, were forces that gravitated them towards one another and towards a common feeling that they would be family. I realize that I grew up in a charmed environment. Everybody can't say that. And Daddy couldn't say that, But he made that environment for us. At Swayze Lake, there are now houses where fishing shacks used to be. Margaret's standing on the concrete bridge that replaced the railroad trestle, looking out on the embankment where they found a four-year-old's footprints in 1912. After considering what Bobby Dunbar's disappearance did to everyone in three families for 100 years, there's only one person who's not accounted for. If Bobby was really Bruce, what happened to Bobby? I think he fell off this bridge and was eaten by an alligator and died. That's the most likely scenario. When you think about the boy that died here, does that feel like your grandfather? It's like my grandfather became two people. He was really Bruce Anderson. That's who he was born. That's where his blood came from, but he lived Bobby Dunbar's life. In 1932, when Bobby Dunbar was 24, he was asked to look back on his kidnapping. The Lindbergh baby had been stolen, and some reporters came around for a word with the famous kidnapped child of yesteryear. "A lot of people still believe I was eaten by an alligator," Bobby said in the interview. "I can assure you I was not." He went on to recount a memory of being with William Walters on the wagon on the road before the arrest, before he was recovered by the Dunbars. In the memory, there was another boy with him who fell off the wagon and died and was buried. There was a theory put forth by the prosecution at the trial that William Walters might have been traveling with two boys, Bobby Dunbar and Bruce Anderson. This would explain why two boys had been lost, but only one was found. It would answer the question, what happened to Bruce? 19 years later, in 1932, Bobby had taken that theory and made it into a memory, a memory which might have served another purpose altogether. If Bobby Dunbar is to fully become Bobby Dunbar, then Bruce Anderson needs to be dead. Maybe it was by settling on this memory-- the other boy on the wagon-- that he created the legend he needed to begin his new life, his own legend of Bobby Dunbar. Tal McThenia. In the years since we first broadcast this story back in 2008, Jewel Tarver and Hollis Rawls have both died. Our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Our technical director was Matt Tierney. Production help from Alvin Melathe. Our newly designed, totally upgraded website with staff recommendation lists for shows and stories to listen to and all of our old videos is 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 says we young people have it so easy. He remembers what it was like back in the day to come the radio station every morning when he was a little boy. Through these woods, across an old hickory log, across a creek. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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OK, this just in. People don't like to admit it when they mess up. It's true for little kids, true for adults, and maybe especially true for politicians. In just the last few weeks, President Trump has refused to apologize for calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five, even though somebody else admitted to that crime, and DNA evidence confirmed that version of the story. Joe Biden has refused to apologize for saying this about a segregationist senator back in the '70s, quote, "He never called me boy. He always called me son." Presidential candidate and senator Cory Booker called on Biden to apologize for it. Biden refused to apologize, called on Booker to apologize for the very thought that the remark might have been wrongheaded. And when politicians do apologize, you know how it goes. It's usually the kind of insincere, I regret the error. I meant no harm, I will do better kind of thing. Like the apology the Prime Minister of Hong Kong issued this month after two million people took to the streets to protest how cozy she is with mainland China. As a chief executive she said, I still have more to learn, and to do better to balance diverse interests and listen to people from all walks of life. Just imagine for a second your partner or your spouse saying something like that to you with that tone. You would not feel reassured that they were really sorry. OK, so years ago when Barack Obama was still president-- and I remember he was apologizing for some remark he'd made about small town America. And around the same time, Hillary Clinton was apologizing for saying that she flew into Bosnia under sniper fire, which did not happen-- I was interviewing this guy about something else completely. And somehow we got into the subject of this whole apology business. And the guy has two daughters. They were both around 13 years old back then. And he told me that whenever one of his daughters does something to the other, and he tells him to apologize as their parent, usually, the apology is fake-- just pro forma fake, the kid version of the politician's non-apology apology. And what do you do with that? Because how do you make somebody actually feel sorry for something they don't feel sorry for? I mean, there they are. And you're like, say you're sorry. Say it like you mean it. And they don't mean it, and they're not going to. They don't yet have the empathy. Trying to explain to one of them, look, the way your sister feels is they go through life, they share with you. And then when you aren't generous with them, that makes them feel-- you're trying to explain it like this. And you can see the look on their eye, like this cold steely look. Like I hear what you're saying. I hear your little fable. I'm just not buying it. And I don't know. They'll do lip service to it. They'll kind of sigh and shrug, and sort of, in a sense, allow that, perhaps that's the case. And then they take another shot at the apology. But as a parent, don't you feel like, well, OK, if all I'm going to get is lip service, at least I'm going to get the lip service. At least they recognize-- Yes, sir. --our moral code. Even if your heart's not in this, I want to watch you go through the motions. This is what people do when they really are sorry. See, but that makes me feel more sympathetic to politicians or to this act which actually, usually fills me with contempt. I feel like, well, at least the politician is pretending and acknowledging, yes, there is a moral code. They don't feel sorry, but they'll acknowledge that someone should feel sorry. And I feel like, well, if that's what we're going to get out of our politicians, well, OK. I guess it's not what I want, but I can kind of live with that. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with all the details of that Bible story about David and Bathsheba. And it's almost this funny modern politics story, right? No, I don't know this one. Oh, OK. Well, so here's King David, powerful king of Israel, and he basically commits adultery in office. He sees a woman that he can have because of his power, who's not his wife, and arranges her to come to the palace and has his way with her. And then, the story's going to break. And her husband's going to find out. And he, in a very modern way, tries to quell the story, quash it, before it gets out. He has her husband sent to the front lines of battle, where he gets killed. He does everything he can to hope that he can just actually hide it. He does not feel sorry about it. And he really digs himself in deep. And time goes on. And a prophet becomes aware of this divinely and comes to confront David on it. And what does he do? He tells him a story. He gets him engaged in this little fable about somebody who has a pet lamb, a poor man with a pet lamb that he loves like a pet. And that a rich man goes in and gets that lamb and prepares it for a meal. Because of his power, he's able to-- the poor man's like a serf who lives on his land, so the rich man is just like, hey-- I'm taking that. Yeah, because it's-- you know, everything you have is mine. So it's this really awful thing of something that someone else valued very highly was valued very low by the rich man just because of his power. And but Nathan's not telling him the story like it's a fable. He's telling him like this is happening in your kingdom. What are you going to do about it? David gets all enraged on behalf of the victim and says, bring him here. We're going to do justice on him. We're going to see this done right. We're going to bring that rich man here, and we're going to punish him to the full extent of the law. And so David is demanding justice for the perpetrator. And the prophet looks at him and says, you are the man. And that does it. Then David really gets it, and he comes apart. And he has a very genuine apology and repentance. I mean, but he does really end up paying for it. And he's a much better king afterward. And so if you could sit down Clinton or Obama-- and I don't know, you'd have to do something like that, maybe. What's sad is that they both know this story. They're always talking about how they're always going to church. Yeah. [LAUGHS] That was a good point. They've already heard this story. Yeah. You wonder if one of their pastors will sit them down, tell them that story, and then say, you are the man. With WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Today on our program, Mistakes Were Made-- stories of people apologizing in that way that amounts to not apologizing at all, not accepting responsibility for the things they've done. Our show today in two acts-- Act One, You're Cold as Ice. Act Two, You're Willing to Sacrifice Our Love. Stay with us. Act One, You're Cold as Ice. So many scientific advances begin with amateur enthusiasts. Or is that enthusiasts? Whatever. I'm talking about people who form little groups to explore new scientific ideas like robots, or computers, or just whatever. This story is about a group like that and the guy who led them. Sam Shaw tells the story. It was the 1960s, the decade of the first heart transplant and the first working laser. New antibiotics gave the Surgeon General such a jolt of confidence, he announced to Congress that the time had come, and I quote, "to close the book on infectious diseases." It was against this backdrop of high-flying optimism that a Michigan College professor named Robert Ettinger wrote a book posing a simple question-- what if death itself was just another disease-- generally fatal, but not necessarily incurable? His theory went like this. If you could freeze somebody at the exact moment of clinical death, maybe, just maybe, in 50 years or 100 years or 1,000, the doctors of the future could bring him back to life. This was cryonics or cryonic suspension. And groups of enthusiasts began to spring up here and there, which is how Bob Nelson got involved. I was on the freeway in a traffic jam-- very common here in California. And it came on the radio that there was going to be the first meeting of the Suspended Animation Group at Helen Kline's house. And I remember going there thinking that I'm probably not going to be allowed in, because I'm not a scientist. But at least I'll get to see some of the scientists. And I went in. I was allowed in, and I came out voted president. Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever. Hadn't even finished high school. He was a 30-year-old TV repairman with a wife and three kids. But he was charming, the kind of charm where you like him because he lets you know in 100 ways that he likes you. After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye. And Bob sincerely believed that cryonics was going to save millions of lives, and that belief was infectious. He did some press, local TV and radio. Turned out he was a really good salesman. And it did. It took off like a cyclone. It was stunning. I remember once going into a restaurant, and I was at the urinal and overheard two guys talking, saying, you know who that is? That's the guy that freezes people. And the other guy said, why does he do that? And I thought it was just bizarre to be in that situation where you're famous for something that you don't know quite how it happened. The members of Bob's group weren't experts. They were just fans of an idea. As you'd expect, many were older people, some of them sick and thinking about their own deaths. They set up a non-profit, the Cryonics Society of California. And before long, they'd drafted a lineup of scientific advisors. At this point, nobody had actually been frozen yet, and the scientists set one condition for their participation-- that nobody try, not yet. They wanted to take things slow, conduct research, publish papers. And that was fine with Bob until he got a call from the son of a psychology professor who was dying of cancer, a man who couldn't wait for the research to pan out. His name was James Bedford. Dr. Bedford wanted to be frozen, and he wondered if the Cryonics Society could help him. So Bob says he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement. Well, I called Robert Ettinger that night, and I told him what had happened. And he said, oh my god, this is the biggest thing that's happened in the cryonics program. And so Ettinger said, we need to go ahead and do it. And I said, but we'll lose the scientific advisory council. He said, maybe not all of them. And if we do, we'll get them again. He said, there's nothing that will push the program of cryonics forward than the freezing of the first man. Were you right? Did you lose them? Absolutely. Lost every one of them the next day. So Bob assembled a team of doctors to carry out the freezing. Though when Dr. Bedford died on January 12, 1967, they were all caught off guard. Dr. Bedford's nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbors. Cryonics was still just a theory, and the proceedings had the slightly manic quality of a local theater production forced to open a couple of weeks early. A half a year later, when a member of their own group turned up at the morgue, wearing a medical bracelet saying she was supposed to be frozen, Bob wasn't much better prepared. Her name was Marie Sweet. And among the things she left when she died, there was a photograph someone had taken of her 27 years earlier, along with a handwritten message. It said, "This is as I wish to be restored." Bob called a couple of student embalmers with access to equipment at the mortuary college, and they performed the freezing the only place they could, in the Cryonics Society office on two desks pushed together and covered with a sheet. I was a nervous wreck because I'm thinking, I don't know how many violations I'm committing here. For example, a dead body legally can only be moved by a mortician. And then I had no idea if I was committing any violations by having the body up in our offices, and putting her on ice there, and then carrying her down the stairs. It was all just really peculiar. One challenge with cryonics is that the freezing process itself can do a lot of damage to the body. Living cells are full of water, and when water freezes, it expands, like a house in winter where the pipes burst. To minimize the damage, Bob and his team replace the blood with special chemicals, a process called perfusion. Meanwhile, they packed ice around the head and body-- a lot of ice. The goal was to get Marie into a giant stainless steel container cooled by liquid nitrogen. A cryonics buff in Arizona had started building capsules for exactly this purpose. That's where Dr. Bedford ended up, sent there by his son after the first freezing. But it wasn't clear where to send Marie. The Cryonics Society had no place to keep a frozen body. For all they knew, centuries might pass before she could be thawed out and brought back to life. Which is to say, they needed someplace really permanent. That was going to cost a lot of money. Marie Sweet's husband managed to scrape together a few hundred dollars-- that's it. And the society was broke. What the society did have was a lot of enthusiastic members, all of them hoping to be suspended. Bob figured he'd let them decide whether to keep Marie frozen. It wasn't a very tough room. They all said, yeah, yeah, go ahead, Bob. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, OK. So I should have said, well, is anybody going to help here? Or is it just me? And but it turned out it was just me. And then I get to the point where I begin to realize that this was me. I had the power, the decision, to say, OK, we're going to give up on Marie, which we should have done in hindsight. But I kept thinking that it's going to work. So it just seemed that it was worth going just a little bit further. I never intended with Marie Sweet to forever keep her in preservation at my own expense. No. I just felt for a while to see what happened next. This very reasonable position led Bob into a lot of very unreasonable decisions over the next few years-- decisions he's still explaining decades later. And what happened next is that another member of the society died. Now Helen Kline-- let me preface by saying-- was, for me, very special. This was the lady that introduced me to the concept of cryonics. She was the one that had that first meeting. She just somehow put a spell on me. You know? I just loved her. The society already had one body on its hands and no real plan of action. Like Marie Sweet, Helen Kline had died more or less penniless, leaving no funds to pay for a proper cryonic suspension. But the truth is Bob liked these people, and he didn't want to let them down. And who knew? Maybe cryonics would be huge, and there'd be money in it someday. Once again, Bob put the question to the group. And once again, they all agreed. Their friend deserved a shot at a second life. So Helen Kline followed Marie Sweet to a mortuary in the city of Buena Park, where Bob had jerry-rigged a temporary storage container-- basically, a wooden box lined with polyurethane. Actually, what the wooden box is, is when they ship a casket, it's the outer box-- the wooden box that they ship them in. And we would put styrofoam on the sides and on the top, and they make excellent refrigeration units. In other words, a giant cooler filled with a lot of dry ice. The problem was dry ice is expensive. So he made what seemed like a simple decision at the time. We had a container with a lady in dry ice already. It didn't cost anymore to put this little lady in there. Once we put Helen Kline in-- she was a tiny little thing, and so was Marie. Maintaining the cooler was a big job, but Bob didn't really see an alternative. Every week or so, he put hundreds of pounds of dry ice in the backseat of his little vintage Porsche and drove two hours from Woodland Hills to the mortuary in Buena Park, where the bodies were stored. Not in some state of the art permanent facility, remember. Here's Joe Klockgether, the mortician at the facility. It was in the garage that I had them. So I have to say the storage facility because when you say storage facility, you think of something much neater. But it was the garage, but it didn't make any difference, really, except that, oh, you kept them in a garage. That doesn't sound good. But yeah, I was anxious to get them out of here. Bob, come on, I got to use my garage. I got things I want to do. I don't want to keep doing this here. And I don't want to play around with the health department. See, there's a term, temporary storage. They don't really clarify what temporary means, but you or I know temporary doesn't mean forever. Temporary-- something should be down on the road. You should have some kind of a date. It was at this point, with Bob dodging Joe Klockgether, and Joe Klockgether dodging the health department, that a third member of the society died unexpectedly. Russ Stanley, a man in a position to solve all of Bob's problems. Russ Stanley used to call me at home every night and drive me nuts on the telephone for an hour, sometimes two hours-- I couldn't get rid of him-- telling me about every little thing that happened everywhere in the country about cryonics. To him, there was nothing else in life but cryonics and assuring me always that when he died, the society would be in good, good shape. Russ used to always say, I am loaded. I own my own house. So I expected him to leave a couple hundred thousand dollars or something. But had he left that much money? He left his money to his next door neighbor, who was his ex-lover, a Mr. Coco. Mr. Coco hated cryonics. So he called me about three or four days after we had Russ in dry-- we put him in the container, too. So now we got three people in this dry ice container. It was big. I couldn't put anymore in there, but I figured, well, this was going to save the day. But Mr. Coco said, Russ Stanley directed me to give the Cryonics Society $5,000 now and $5,000 in three months. It was enough money, at least, to solve Bob's most pressing problem-- to get a legal place to store the frozen bodies he was keeping in the garage. So he bought a plot of land and built a vault in a cemetery in Chatsworth, 30 miles north of LA. A 15x20 room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside. Now all he needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity. But as luck would have it, we got a call from Mrs. Bowers. Mrs. Marie Bowers was a housewife from Detroit. A few years back her father had died, and she'd arranged to have him frozen by Ed Hope, the same guy who was storing Dr. Bedford in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father had spent a year and a half there in a one-man capsule the size of a standard water heater. Now, as it turned out, Marie was in a fix of her own. She couldn't pay the storage that Ed Hope was charging. She couldn't pay the liquid nitrogen. And she says, I owe him $1,500. And her exact words, she says, "He threatened to kick the effin' capsule out into the street." So she called me, and I went, wait. Well, hmm. Boy. If I could put a couple of people in that capsule, if I could get them all in there-- I didn't know if four people would fit in one capsule-- boy, would that solve my problem. And that would solve her problem. And again, that's probably the only thing that I am somewhat ashamed about-- that I didn't tell her that I was going to put three more people in there. Why didn't you tell her? I don't know. Probably fear. Were you afraid-- was there part of you that was nervous if you did tell her that she might not go for it? I wasn't worried about that because she had no alternative. She had nowhere else to go. So why not tell her? What's the risk? Well, I didn't think it was necessary to burden her with that big complex problem of her dad being coupled with other people. It might have been a problem for her. I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't have been. The capsule arrived at the mortuary in Buena Park in the spring of 1969, and Bob was there to greet it. A cryonic container is basically a giant thermos, one steel tube inside another with a vacuum in between. So long as you added liquid nitrogen once every few months, the tank stayed really cold. These containers weren't designed to be open and shut again, so when the time came to add the extra bodies, Bob had to improvise. He drained the liquid nitrogen and had a welder open the capsule with a blowtorch. They spent most of the night unsealing the tank and arranging the bodies, which they wrapped head to toe in Mylar. Joe Klockgether was there, too. Here again, I'm just kind of helping them because it's here. And I'm curious, too. Anybody would be curious just to see. I was feeling excited and nervous because the question was, would we be able to orchestrate the arrangement of these bodies inside that container successfully? Well, first of all, you have to see how much room was in there. Yeah, just to move-- because of the configuration of the container. Well, it was round, of course. But just to get it to fit right, you know? These people were frozen. And when they were frozen, it could have been maybe an elbow out, so you might have to turn them another way to get the other one to slide beside them. I mean, oh, it was cramped. Yeah, it was cramped. I had to have gloves on because the body is like steel. And 300 degrees below zero, it's like holding a pot that's 300 degrees above zero. It's just, you can't do it. And it took probably a couple of hours to get them so that everyone was comfortably arranged. Then they sealed the container back up. It was that simple. Bob told two confidants about the welder and the four bodies in the tank. Otherwise, he kept it a secret. He'd done what he felt he had to do. And for the moment, what he felt was relief. He'd steered the car back onto the road, secured a working capsule for the four people in his care and a legal vault to keep it in. From here on out, he'd be practical and businesslike. No more soft-hearted exceptions. No more pro bono freezings. But the capsule Bob had pinned his hopes on needed round-the-clock attention. When you're dealing with equipment that's supposed to last hundreds of years, you want the kind of engineering that goes into building a space capsule. This was not that. We had to keep a pump, an electronic pump, pulling the vacuum 24 hours a day, seven days a week. At Chatsworth, the temperatures got up to over 100, 110 sometimes. And that was death to these vacuum pumps. They couldn't take that heat. The pumps would burn out, need to be replaced. Then it just got worse and worse and worse. I was there, I would say, virtually every day. After Bob opened up the tank, it was never quite the same. The vacuum was shot, and the liquid nitrogen would boil away to nothing. Bob was constantly refilling the tank with coolant at a few hundred bucks a pop. Sometimes he wrote checks from his personal bank account. Sometimes the checks would bounce. Meanwhile, he was flying around the country, giving lectures, showing off artist's renderings of the futuristic cryonics facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV talk shows-- Regis Philbin, Phil Donahue. What exactly is the perfusion process? The perfusion process-- Here he is on a local LA newscast. --protecting the patient biologically for the cold temperatures that he is going to be exposed to. You ever seen or heard the movie Three Faces of Eve? This is the Two Faces of Bob Nelson. The dual role of my life was to on the one hand, be a spokesman for cryonics, and then on the other hand was my nightmare responsibility of keeping this antique capsule running. The publicity worked. It attracted new people to be frozen, some of them with the ability to pay for it. Then, in July of 1971, Bob got a call from a Canadian man named Guy, the father of a seven-year-old girl dying of a rare kidney cancer. One day, everything was fine. The next day, doctors were telling him his child had weeks to live. The way Guy saw it, it didn't matter if cryonics was a long shot. Bob Nelson presented the only slim hope his daughter had left. Guy didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to fly Genevieve to California, where he got her admitted to a children's hospital. Bob remembers meeting her there. She was sitting on the bed, and her dad was with her. And she always had the expression of-- it was so sad. So, so sad. Because she knew how sick she was. She knew she was dying, and she didn't want to. Did her parents talk to her about the idea of being frozen? Yes, they did. And she didn't seem to have much of an opinion one way or the other. Because it still meant that she had to die. And she didn't want to leave her sisters and her family. She wanted to go back to school. Bob knew he shouldn't be performing another free suspension, but he couldn't help it. He had a daughter of his own just a couple of years older. He went to see Genevieve a lot. One day, she made a request. Genevieve only spoke French, so the mother would interpret. And her mom said, Mr. Nelson, Genevieve wants to ask you a question. So I said, what? And she said, did I know where Disneyland was? And I said, yes, I do. Matter of fact, my buddy Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse work there. And so she told Genevieve that, and Genevieve, ooh-- like that. And I said to her mom, why is-- she said, the doctor said that it'd be OK for her to go because sitting here is not good for her. I said, I can't believe it. So I said, tell Genevieve, could she be ready to go to Disneyland tomorrow morning? We went the next morning and picked up Genevieve and drove to Disneyland. And we got her in a wheelchair and drove her, pushed her around. And she got in the tea cup and the different things with my young daughter. And then, at one point, she was in one of these little kid-- turtle game, I think it was. And her mom says, Mr. Nelson, Genevieve wants to ask you another question. And I said, sure, what would that be? And she said, would I learn French, so that she could talk to me? And I said, I will do that just for you. For a little while, it looked like Genevieve was improving. Then one morning, Bob was back at the hospital. Guy was sitting on the bed, and he was holding her. And oh, I stopped. I knew this was a sacred moment. And so he looked up, and he said, get the nurse. I think Genevieve has passed. And so I got the nurse, and sure enough, she had passed. So he put her back on the bed, and then it was all business. It was critically important to get her temperature down. That's the most important thing about a cryonic suspension is that once the heart stops, the temperature has got to drop. Nothing is more important than that. They packed her in ice, put her in what's called a body bag. It's a plastic bag that they put ice on the bottom. And then they lay her on that, and then totally cover her body with ice, and put her on a gurney, and put her in the hearse. So within an hour and a half, she was on the mortuary table, receiving a perfusion and having her temperature further lowered. According to Bob, Guy hoped to raise $10,000 to pay for a capsule, but he just couldn't manage. He had a pile of medical bills and two other kids to worry about. So Bob found himself back in the same fix-- short on funds with a couple of bodies in temporary dry ice storage. He did the only thing he knew how to do. In 1972, Bob arranged to take custody of a cryonics patient named Steven Mandell, who'd been frozen and sealed in a capsule in New York. It was the Marie Bowers capsule all over again. He opened it up, added Genevieve and another woman he'd frozen, Mildred Harris, and welded it shut again. By now, the first capsule was breaking down more or less constantly. And Bob had hit a wall. The way he describes it, it's as if he was the captain of a sinking ship, throwing cargo over the side to stay afloat. He couldn't save them all. And so he'd come to a decision. He would let the first capsule fail. This much is clear. He kept it a secret. The second capsule was practically as bad as the first, constantly malfunctioning, boiling off liquid nitrogen. But Bob kept it going. Then a few years later, he had to leave town for a week. He paid a groundskeeper $100 to babysit the capsule, and the pump broke. And when the groundskeeper called a company to fix it, they never showed. I came back, drove up to the vault, looked at the capsule. There's a nozzle that comes out of the capsule that has steam, visible, because the liquid nitrogen is evaporating away. And when I drove up and I looked, that steam wasn't there. So I just didn't want to acknowledge what that meant. But the test was to go and touch that pipe, and if it was cold, then there was some hope. That meant that it was still cold inside. And then, going through my mind, what if it's hot? What if those bodies have decomposed? So I walk up to the capsule. I put my finger on it. And it was like touching a hot frying pan. It was the most painful, emotional experience of my life. I had failed that little girl. I promised her dad. And she was gone. Bob says he immediately flew to Montreal to tell Genevieve's father in person. In Montreal, though, is where the story really starts to get interesting. And that's coming up in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Mistakes Were Made. Sam Shaw's story about Bob Nelson continues. Bob has just discovered that his second freezing capsule has failed. Liquid nitrogen has leaked out. And he says the first person that he went to tell was the little girl, Genevieve's father. So he met me at the airport in a little snack shop, coffee shop. He was right in my face instantly. What happened? And I tried to tell him as gently as I could. Then when he pressed me, how many days? How long? I said, I don't know. Three, four, five? I don't know. And what he said just totally blew me away. He said, well, I guess we'll just have to start it up again and continue on. And I said, OK. I think I should have fought it out with him right there, but I didn't. I turned around and walked away. Cowardly, I think. He was shook. He left, and I could see his face was red. He was upset. Next, Bob says he flew to see Terry Harris, whose mother, Mildred Harris, was in the second capsule with Genevieve and whose father, Gaylord, was also in the vault. And he met me at the airport and introduced me to his wife. I told him what happened. And he just said, oh. Well, did you fill it up again? I said, yeah. So he essentially said the same thing that Guy said. Did he understand what it meant? It's almost like he didn't care. I mean, no, no, no, let me take that back. Not that he didn't care-- no, it was more like, oh, well. Far enough into the future, they'll be able to fix that, too. A few days after Bob told me a story, I talked on the phone with Genevieve's father, Guy. He was polite, and I must say, very patient with my questions. But he didn't want to be interviewed on the radio. The memory of Genevieve's death and suspension was just too painful. He said a little ruefully that the whole idea of cryonics might be a moot point, anyway, given the state of the world. The way things were going, even if the science panned out, there might not be a future to return to. And then he told me something else. That meeting at the airport Bob remembered so vividly, Guy said it never happened. So next, I contacted Terry Harris, and I told him Bob's version of what transpired. Terry, as you know, Bob tells this very detailed story about coming to tell you that the capsule-- Terry says Bob never told him about the failure of the capsule. He had to hear about it from an article in the California newspaper that his aunt sent him in Des Moines. They said in the article that the machinery had broken down. And it was just incredulous. I just couldn't believe it. So I called Bob, and he assured me that everything was fine. And the paper was just trying to generate a sensational readership. And so I never saw him. I just talked to him on the phone at that point. Right. So there was never a time when Bob flew out and met with you at the airport? No. That would have been the right and honorable thing to do. And I wish it had occurred. But it's just not accurate. Terry Harris was in his early 20s when he met Bob Nelson. He'd lost both his parents in a span of three months. And cryonics had seemed like this great thing he could give them in return. He sometimes imagined what it would be like when they were all reunited as a family in some distant, dreamlike future. It gave him hope. And then everything had gone so wrong. So I called Bob, and I told him about my conversations with Guy and Terry. He was shocked, and he stuck to his story. Later that day, he sent me a long pained email, calling the situation a heart-wrenching predicament. He called Terry Harris a liar. But Guy was another matter. Bob said he was devastated that Guy didn't remember their talk in the Montreal airport. He wondered if it was possible that Guy had repressed the memory. Then I spoke to him a few days later, and he offered this take. I would say this about that, that if Guy said that I never came to the airport in Montreal, then he's right. I have to concede that it's possible that what happened-- because I've been mulling this over for the past few days. It's possible what I'm remembering is going through this scenario with him over the phone. Yeah. I mean, when you talked about it, it sounded so vivid. You remember it being in a sandwich shop and-- Well, in my mind, I must have been over it 1,000 times. What it was going to be like to face him, to talk to him. And it was just the horror of my life because it just-- so anyway, I have to agree that most likely, I didn't go to Montreal. To be clear, Guy says he never heard from Bob at all-- no visit, no phone call, nothing. I'm just wondering if, when you look at that memory, that seems like it was a faulty memory, if it gives you any pause and makes you wonder whether there are other parts of this set of memories that you have that may also not be totally trustworthy. Other parts? Such as? Well, such as Terry Harris. No. Sam, I'm never going to budge one speck from that. You need to believe what you need to believe, Sam. I'm only telling you that I'm telling you what I-- and there would be no reason for me to make up that I went to see Terry Harris and them. That's not part of the story. That isn't important to my story. But don't you think that there might be a reason why it would be important for you to believe that you went out and had those conversations with them face to face? How do you defend yourself-- I don't know. How do you defend yourself against something that's not true? I don't know. What's clear is that Bob's convinced he did right by Terry and Guy, and Terry and Guy are equally convinced that he didn't. If it sounds like Bob is harder on Terry than he is on Guy, there's one more thing you have to understand. When the truth about the two failed capsules and the nine bodies in the vault finally came to light, when all those hard decisions Bob had made on the fly became sound bites on the 10 o'clock news, there wasn't just a public reckoning. There was a trial. Terry and his brother were two of the plaintiffs, and they won to the tune of $800,000. The half they actually collected came out of mortician Joe Klockgether's malpractice insurance. In 1979, the Harris brothers flew out to California to meet an attorney who led them to the vault at Chatsworth, along with a local TV news team. By that point, Bob had washed his hands of the Cryonics Society. He was dead broke, and his marriage had fallen apart. And he just walked away. And for the first time, Terry saw the reality of his parents' situation with his own eyes. Well, the door in the facility was made of steel. And it was then chained and padlocked closed. The chain was rusty, and there was grass growing around that door where, before, it wasn't. And our attorney brought a pair of bolt cutters, and removed that lock and chain, and slid the door back. And we went down, and you could just see that there was a piece of equipment here and there, and the capsule lid open. And it was unbearable, just unbearable. And I was just-- I was just numb. Just numb. Well, I couldn't look inside that capsule, but I just backed away when I realized that there were just remains inside. We brought flowers. And so we laid them there by the capsule, and then I just went up the stairs and left. I felt guilty because I should have been there night and day, which, of course, isn't very realistic. But at the time, I felt very guilty. Here's the entrance. This is the management office over here. I mean, it looks identical to the day that I was here 40 years ago. This little shack was here. This chapel was exactly the same. Bob and I drove out the cemetery in Chatsworth on a sunny afternoon in March. We spent about an hour wandering the grounds, Bob pointing out landmarks and citing names and dates like a breezy tour guide. He said it felt good to be back. Oakwood is a really beautiful spot, a rolling park surrounded by jagged sandstone hilltops. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are buried there. And the cemetery staff will point you to the grave sites of a half dozen lesser stars. But none of the groundskeepers we talked to had ever heard of a cryonics facility there. And really, it's no surprise. Where the vault used to be, there's just an empty swath of grass-- no padlocked opening, no monument or plaque. See where the ground rises up over here? This was where the vault is. See where these-- they've put two benches right here. Bob says all but two of the people he froze are still sealed in the vault, now covered over with sod. But the cemetery management tells a different story. They say the bodies were all disinterred years ago, which leaves one final question. Again, Terry Harris. I have no idea where my parents are. You have no idea where they're buried now? No. No. The management of the cemetery said, well, they're gone. And I said, well, what do you mean gone? And he said, well, one day, a big pickup truck came up there and disinterred them, and took them away. And he said he didn't have any legal permit to do that. They didn't provide anything. Now, doesn't that sound outlandish to you? This is where all Bob's secrets and lies about the bodies finally led-- to Terry Harris making phone calls, writing letters, combing through legal documents. Somewhere he figured there had to be a record-- a clue that would tell him what had become of his parents. He's never found it. Cryonics carried on without Bob Nelson. And all these years later, when people in the field tell Bob's story, they call it the Chatsworth disaster. On cryonics discussion boards, he's been labeled a murderer-- though, of course, all the people he supposedly killed were dead to begin with. When Bob talks about those years, he says he's gotten a bad rap. He genuinely seems to feel bad about failing Genevieve and her family, and for dragging the mortician, Joe Klockgether, through the trial. But just as emphatically, he'll tell you that his main mistake was caring too much. That the secrets he kept were necessary to keep the project going. And above all, that the people he froze had donated their bodies under the Anatomical Gift Act. Which meant that they donated their body to the Cryonics Society of California. And according to my attorney, we could grind them up for hamburger if that's what we wanted to do. We were given the right by the state of California to carry on research and do whatever we wanted in the perfection of suspended animation. And so we just felt that there's no need to be telling other people. I mean, I could have just locked that capsule, that vault up, and not told anybody that we'd stop putting liquid nitrogen in there. That probably could have gone on until today. You know? But at some point, I had to settle back down to reality. Bob says a lot depends on your perspective. If the science of cryonics pans out, it'll be possible to look at Genevieve, and Mildred Harris, and Helen Kline as casualties of progress-- or as Bob calls them, frozen heroes. Bob's not a rich guy, but he's managed to save $28,000 to pay for his own freezing at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. He thinks his odds of reanimation are pretty good. And in the end, that's the thing that sustains him-- the hope that someday, in 50 years, or 100, or 1,000, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes. A world where Chatsworth wasn't a disaster, but the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all. Sam Shaw-- his regular job, he writes for television. Bob Nelson published a memoir about his years in cryonics. It's called Freezing People is Not Easy. Today's show is a rerun, actually, from 2008. And years after we first ran this episode, Bob died. That was in June 2018. And as for his body, it took some time, but his family raised the money to honor his wishes. Bob is awaiting reanimation at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, alongside his hero, Robert Ettinger. His old friend and co-defendant, the mortician, Joe Klockgether, oversaw his suspension. Act Two, You're Willing to Sacrifice Our Love. So one of our producers, Sean Cole-- when we came up with this idea to do an episode about people who were apologizing without fully apologizing, he pointed out this poem, which is basically that in a nutshell. In addition to making radio, Sean is a published poet. So the poem's by William Carlos Williams. And it's a poem that's taught a lot in all sorts of poetry classes everywhere and, particularly, elementary schools, which is where I heard about it. And the way it was taught to me was that it was an actual note that William Carlos Williams left for his wife. And I always sort of imagined it sitting there on the kitchen table, waiting for her. Right. And it's called, "This Is Just to Say." "I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold." What's funny about the poem is that he never really apologizes. He never apologizes. He says forgive me, which is kind of a command. And so I feel like it's like, oh, I ate the plums, and that was a bad thing. But I'm not sorry I did it. It's interesting to me that it makes you mad. The thing that really breaks my heart is that she was saving them. And when he says probably saving them for breakfast, he knew she was saving them for breakfast. There's no probably about it. They live together. Now, this is a poem that is often imitated? Imitated. Spoofed by many a poet. It's kind of become a game among poets to write a version of "This Is Just to Say." My favorite one is by a poet named Kenneth Koch. OK, let's hear him. "I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry. But it was morning, and I had nothing to do. And its wooden beams were so inviting." "Last evening we went dancing, and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy, and I wanted you here in the wards where I am the doctor." That story has everything, that last one. It really does. It's an entire novel in three lines. So my favorite of all the variations on this is written by a student named Andrew-- maybe it's pronounced Vech-ee-oh-nay? Veck-ee-oh-nay, maybe. Veck-ee-oh-nay, maybe. And could I ask you to read that? It's called "Sorry, But It Was Beautiful." Yeah. "Sorry I took your money and burned it, but it looked like the world falling apart when it crackled and burned. So I think it was worth it. After all, you can't see the world fall apart every day." That's the work of sixth grader Andrew Vecchione from a book by Kenneth Koch about teaching poetry to kids, in which he has them write their own versions of "This Is Just to Say." The book is called Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Sean Cole says the poetry book of his that is easiest to find-- and he has assured me that it is not easy at all-- it's called ITTY CITY. We asked some of our regular contributors to do their own variations on the poem. Here they are. "This Is Just to Say," by Sarah Vowell. I carved your name, not mine, into the arm of dad's chair. Sorry you were punished, but the wood was so gummy, and my knife was so sharp. "This Is Just to Say," by David Rakoff. At our wedding, I disappeared briefly to have sex with your sister up against the back of the Portosans. What can I say? The chardonnay was so fresh and cold, and I, so full of love and a sense of family. And I said, I'm sure one day we'll laugh about this. Well, by one day, I meant that day. And by we, I meant me. And by laugh, I meant laugh. "This Is Just to Say," by Starlee Kine. One, I chose the other girl. I'm sorry. It's not just that I'm more attracted to her. It's also that she is more interesting. Two, I used your dog as an excuse to pick up girls at the dog park, which is especially tacky since I'm your boyfriend. Please forgive me. I'm really bad at being in a relationship, and I'm pretty sure I told you that when we first got together. "This Is Just to Say," by Jonathan Goldstein. This is just to say I have eaten the fruit of knowledge, but nothing happened. Not a word, no lightning or volcanoes, not even a drop of rain. So I was just wondering, are you there? "This Is Just to Say," by Shalom Auslander. One, I'm sorry you're overweight and drinking, and feeling like everything in your life is doomed to failure. But this is probably why Mom said I was her favorite. Two, it sucks, little doe, that I hit you with my car, but at least you weren't alive to watch the hunters shoot your children. Three, he was a troublemaker, OK? And didn't know when to shut up. Still, we never would have killed him if we'd known he was the Lord. "This Is Just to Say," by Heather O'Neill. Dear Mom, this is just to say I forgive you for eating all the plums, the apples, the pears, and even drinking the last of the orange juice. I forgive you for emptying Dad's bank account and for painting stars on our station wagon right before you got in and drove away. I forgive you for leaving us without even saying goodbye. Your plans were always so sweet, so delicious, and so cold. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Beree, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind. Music help today from Jessica Hopper. Additional help on today's rerun from Bim Adewunmi, Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Thanks today to Dave Dickerson and Chris Gethard, David Rakoff, one of our longtime contributors who wrote a variation of "This Is Just to Say," in that last act, he died back in 2012. He is not frozen, but his books are still out there. 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 reminds you, don't mess with them. I am loaded. I own my own house. 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. I lie, probably, every weekend to my mom. So, about what kinds of things? Mostly drinking and what time I get home. Where I am. Who I'm with. This girl is a high school senior. And let's just identify her as living somewhere in North America. And, probably, the biggest lie she perpetrated against her mom was an ongoing deception that lasted two years, starting when she was 14, a freshman. She would stay out till midnight in the park with her friends, drinking, most Friday and Saturday nights, which her mom definitely would not allow. So she told her mom that they were at a Chinese restaurant every weekend for two years. She'd come home drunk and convince her mom she was sober. What I'm doing, she never normally, really finds out. Like, I think she has no idea that I hung out in a park for two years of my life. And what would happen if she found out? I think she'd just be really upset, because she really thinks she knows exactly what's going on in my life, and she really has no idea. I think that would just hurt her. Oh, she thinks you guys are really close. Yeah, she thinks we are really close. And, yeah, she thinks she knows everything I do, and she doesn't. But now, they're both at a turning point. Graduation is next week, which makes this girl just old enough that she's starting to wonder if, someday, she should let her mom know the truth about all of it. In the past when she thought about telling her mom the truth, it was actually more of a revenge kind of thing. There have been points where, I really just want my mom to feel kind of stupid and let down. Has been points when, I've been really mad at her, we haven't been getting along, that's been like, I want to make you feel like you really don't know what you're talking about. Because every time she's always like, you know I'll always catch you. You know I always know what you're doing. And there's been points where I just want to be like, listen mom, you really don't know what's going on. This is what's happened for the past four years of my life. You really haven't known much. It would just be like a really big power trip for me. And now with school ending and college so soon, already her mom is loosening up the reins and not checking up on her so much. She could see that maybe it would be best for everybody, her and her mom, if the truth never came out. And if it did come out, she'd want it to be for a good reason. I mean, I might not never tell her, might not ever tell her about the park. I'll see. I've actually thought about it. I've had serious thoughts about telling her the truth, once I'm in college. I really do want to become close to my mom again. We had a really big falling out, especially, when she started going out with her boyfriend. And we have gotten a lot closer since we started talking again, and like we told each other how we feel and stuff. And it's just-- I have a lot of older friends who have had some troubles with their parents in the past and like, once they were in college, got really close to them again. And I really want that. Like, I want to be closer with my mom. I want to be able to tell her everything and tell her the truth. And so I think that is the main reason that I would tell her at this point. I don't really need her to be feeling stupid anymore like, now it'd just be to get close. I think one of the least accurate truisms, or if it's a folk wisdom, is the idea, the truth will come out. Of course, it doesn't come out. So many lies are so small, they're not even worth exposing. And then any lie that matters, has somebody invested in keeping it a lie. In a way it's remarkably rare for the truth to come out at all. It takes ingenuity, and effort, and cunning, and a decision. Today we have three stories of lies, finally exposed, each under very dramatic circumstances. Act one, "Lieland" in which we bring you a cheerfully and surprisingly unrepentant story about lying. Act two, "The Spy Who Bugged Me," journalist Lawrence Wright tries to uncover some basic truths about whether his phone is being tapped and by whom. And when he finds the whom behind it, they are also surprisingly unrepentant. Act three, "Rosa In The Study With the ATM Card," A woman tries to get to the bottom of a domestic mystery in her father's house. And the suspect, one of the butlers, kind of. Stay with us. Robbie was seven when he told his first lie. His mother had given him a wrinkled, old, 10 lira bill and asked him to go buy a pack of king-sized Kents at the grocery store. Robbie bought an ice cream cone instead. He took the change and hid the coins under a white rock in the backyard of their apartment building. And when mother asked him what had happened, he told her that a giant red-headed kid, with a front-tooth missing, tackled him in the street, slapped him, and took the money. Mother believed him. And Robbie hadn't stopped lying since. When he was in high school, he spent the better part of an entire week vegging out on the beach in Eilat, after selling the student counselor a story about his aunt from Beersheba, who discovered she had cancer. When he was in the army, this imaginary aunt went blind and saved his ass big-time for going AWOL-- no detention, not even confined to barracks, nothing. Once, he justified being two hours late to work with a lie about a German shepherd he'd found lying beside the road. The dog had been run over, and Robbie had taken it to the vet. In this lie, the dog remained paralyzed in two of its legs. Those legs did the trick. There were a lot of lies along the way in Robbie's life: lies without arms, and lies that were ill, lies that do harm, and lies that could kill, lies with legs, lies on wheels, lies in tuxedos, lies that steal, lies he made up in a flash and just as soon forgot about. It all started with a dream, a short, fuzzy dream about his dead mother. In this dream, the two of them are sitting on a straw mat in the middle of a clear, white surface, devoid of all detail, that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Next to them on this infinite, white surface was a gumball machine with a bubble top, the old fashioned kind where you put a coin in the slot, turn the handle and out comes a gumball. And in his dream, Robbie's mother told him that the afterworld was driving her up the wall. Because the people there were OK, but there were no cigarettes-- not just no cigarettes, no coffee or talk shows, nothing. "You've got to help me Robbie," she said. "You've got to buy me a gumball. I raised you. All these years, I gave you everything and asked for nothing, but now it's time to give something back to your mom. Get me a gum ball, a red one if you can, but blue is OK, too." And in his dream, Robbie rummaged through his pockets, over and over, trying to find some change. Nothing. "I haven't got any, Mom," he said, the tears welling in his eyes. "I haven't got any change. I've gone through all my pockets." Considering that he never cried when he was awake, it was strange to be crying in his dream. "Did you look under the rock?" his mother asked, and clasped his hands in her own. "Maybe the coins are still there." Then he woke up. It was 5:00 AM on a Saturday, still dark out. Robbie found himself getting into the car and driving to the place where he had grown up. On a Saturday morning with no traffic on the road, it took less than 20 minutes to get there. On the ground floor of the building, where Plisken's grocery store had been, there was a dollar store. And next to it, instead of the shoe-repair guy, there was a cell phone outlet offering upgrades like there was no tomorrow. But the building itself hadn't changed. More than 20 years had gone by since they moved out, and it hadn't even been painted. The yard was still the same too, a few flowers, a spigot, a rusty water-meter, and weeds. And in the corner, next to the clotheslines, was the white rock, waiting. There he stood in the backyard of the building where he'd grown up, wearing his parka, holding a big, plastic flashlight, and feeling strange, like some kind of thief-- no, not a thief, a nutjob. 5:15 AM on a Saturday, if a neighbor were to show up, what would tell him? My dead mother appeared in my dream and asked me to buy her a gumball, so I came here to look for change? It seemed strange that the rock would still be there after all those years. Then again, if you thought about it, it wasn't really as strange as all that. It's not as if rocks just get up and walk away. Half-afraid, he picked it up gingerly, as if there might be a scorpion hiding underneath. But there was no scorpion, and no snake, either, and no coins, just a hole the width of his arm, and a light shining out of it. Robbie tried to peek into the hole, but the light was dazzling. He hesitated a second, then reached in. Lying on the ground, he extended his entire arm, all the way to shoulder, trying to touch something at the bottom. But there was no bottom. And the only thing he could reach was made of cold metal and felt like a handle, the handle of a gumball machine. Robbie turned it as hard as he could and felt the handle respond to his touch. This was exactly the moment where the gumball should have rolled out. This was exactly when it should have come all the way out of the innards of the machine, right into the hand of the little boy who was waiting impatiently for it to emerge. This was exactly the point when all that was supposed to happen. But it didn't. And as soon as Robbie finished turning the handle of the machine, he showed up here. Here was a different place but a familiar one too. It was the place from his mother's dream: stark white, no walls, no floor, no ceiling, no sunshine, just whiteness and a gumball machine-- a gumball machine, and a sweaty, ugly, red-headed boy. And before Robbie had a chance to smile at the boy or say anything at all, the red-head gave him a kick in the shins as hard as he could. And Robbie dropped to the ground, writhing. Now, with Robbie down on his knees, he and the kid were the same height. The kid looked Robbie in the eye. And even though Robbie knew they'd never me, there was something familiar about him. "Who are you?" he asked the kid, who was standing up close, glaring at him. "Me?" the boy answered, showing a mean smile with a front-tooth missing. "I'm your first lie." Robbie struggled to his feet. His leg, where the kid had kicked him, hurt like hell. The kid himself was long gone. Robbie studied the gumball machine. In between the round gumballs, there were those translucent, plastic balls with trinkets inside. He rummaged through his pocket for some change, but then remembered that the kid had grabbed his wallet before he split. Robbie limped off in no particular direction. Since there was nothing to go by on the white surface except the gumball machine, the only thing left for him to do is to try to move away from it. Every few steps, he turned around to make sure the machine really was becoming smaller. At one point, he turned, and he discovered a German shepherd, with a leash dragging behind it, next to a skinny, old man with a glass eye and no hands. The dog he recognized at once, by the way it half crawled forward, its two forelegs struggling to pull its paralyzed pelvis. It was the run-over dog from one of the lies he'd told at work. The dog panting with effort and excitement, wagged its tail. He licked Robbie's hand and looked at him intently, with glistening eyes. The man held out the hook attached to the stump of his right arm, for what passed as a handshake. Robbie couldn't place him. "I'm Robbie," he said. "I am Igor," the old man introduced himself and gave Robbie a pat with one of his hooks. "Do we know each other?" Robbie asked, after a few seconds' awkward silence. "No," Igor said, lifting the leash with one of his hooks. "I am only here because of him. He sniffed you from miles away and got worked up. He wanted us to come." "So, there's no connection between us?" Robbie asked. He felt a sense of relief as he said this. "Between us? No, no connection. I'm somebody else's lie." Robbie almost asked whose lie he was, but he didn't know whether the question was considered polite around here. For that matter, he'd have liked to ask what this place was exactly. And whether there were a lot more people there, or lies, or whatever they call themselves. But he thought that this also might be a sensitive topic, and that he shouldn't bring it up just yet. For the moment, he patted Igor's handicapped dog. He was a nice dog and seemed happy to have met Robbie, who felt bad that he couldn't have gone and made up a lie with a little less pain and suffering in it. "The gumball machine," he asked Igor, when a few minutes had passed. "What coins does it take?" "Liras," the old man said. "If you don't have any--" "There was a kid here, just now," Robbie said, "he took my wallet. But even if he hadn't, there wouldn't be any liras in it." "A kid with a tooth missing?" Igor asked. "That little scum steals from everyone. He even eats the dog's kennel ration. Where I come from in Russia, they take a kid like that and they'd stick him out in the snow. And they wouldn't let him back in the house until his whole body turned blue." With one of his hooks, Igor pointed to his back pocket. "In there, I got some liras. Help yourself, it's on " Robbie hesitated, but he took the lira out of Igor's pocket. And after thanking him, Robbie offered to give him his Swatch in return. "Thanks," Igor nodded. "But the last thing I need is a watch, especially a plastic one. I'm in no hurry to get anywhere anyway." When he saw Robbie looking around for something else to give him, Igor stopped him and said, "I owed you. If you hadn't made up that lie about the dog, I'd be here completely on my own. We're even." Robbie hobbled back in the direction of the gumball machine. He was still smarting from the red-head's kick, but much less now. He dropped the lira into the slot, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and twisted the handle quickly. When he made one full turn, he found himself stretched on the ground in the yard of their old building. The dawn light was painting the sky dark shades of blue. Robbie pulled his arm out of the hole in the ground. When he opened his fist, there was a red gumball inside. Before he left, he replaced the rock where it had been. He didn't ask himself what had happened there in the hole. He just got in the car, backed up, and drove away. The red gumball, he put under his pillow for his mother, in case she came back in his dream. But she never did. And he never went back to their old yard. He thought about it all the time at first, about that place, about the dog, about Igor, about other lies he'd told and how lucky he was not to have met them too. He kept lying at first. But the lies he told were sort-of positive, the kind of lie where no one beats anyone up, and no one's crippled or dies of cancer. He couldn't make it, because he had to water the plants in some aunt's apartment while she was visiting her successful son abroad. He was late, because a cat just had kittens practically on his stoop, and he had to take care of the litter, stuff like that. The trouble with all these positive lies was how much more complicated they were to think up, at least if you wanted them to sound plausible. In general, if you tell people something bad, they buy right into it, because it strikes them as normal. But when you make-up good things, they get suspicious. And so, very gradually, Robbie found himself tapering off with the lies. And to make sure he did less lying, he did less talking too. And to do that, he met less with people, which was supposed to leave him more time to think about life, and about the lies, and about the hole in the corner of the yard next to clotheslines. But he didn't. At least, not until the morning when he overheard Natasha, from accounting, talking in the hallway with the boss. Her uncle Igor had had a heart attack, and she needed some time off. Poor guy, a widower-- lost both hands in an accident a few years ago, and now his heart. He was so alone, so helpless. The head of accounting granted her time-off right away, no questions asked. She went to her office, took her bag, and left the building. Robbie followed her to her car, then approached her. "You work in requisitions, don't you?" she asked, turning to face him. "Securities assistant?" "Yeah, my name's Robbie." "Cool, Robbie," Natasha said, with a nervous Russian smile. "So, what's up Robbie, need something?" "It's about the lie you told earlier to the head of accounting," Robbie stammered. "I know him." "You follow me all the way to my car just to accuse me of being a liar?" "No," said Robbie. "I didn't mean to accuse you. Really, your being a liar is cool. I'm a liar, too. But this Igor from your lie, I met him. He's a good guy. And you, if you don't mind me saying so, you've made things pretty hard for him as it is. So, I just wanted to say--" "Would you get out of my way," Natasha said. "You're blocking the door of my car." "I know this sounds far-fetched, but I can prove it," Robbie said, feeling more and more uneasy. "This Igor doesn't have an eye. I mean, he has an eye, but only one. At one point, you must have made up something about how he'd lost an eye, right? See, how would I know that if I hadn't really met him?" Natasha had already started to get into her car but stopped, "Well, how do you know that, about the glass eye? Are you a friend of Slava's?" "I don't know any Slava." Robbie muttered, "Just Igor, really. If you want, I can take you to him." They were standing in the backyard of his building. Robbie moved the rock, lay down on the damp soil, and pushed his arm all the way into the hole. He kept going till his fingers felt the cold, metal handle. Natasha was standing over him. He held out his other arm and said, "hold on tight." Natasha looked at the man stretched out at her feet: thirty-something, good looking in an ironed, white shirt, now slightly more wrinkled and soiled. His one arm was stuck in the hole, his cheek was glued to the ground. "Hold tight," he said. And as she held out her hand to him, she couldn't help wondering how it was she always wound up with the oddballs. When he'd started with that nonsense by the car, she thought maybe it was a cute way of hitting on her. But now she realized the guy with the soft eyes and the bashful smile, really was a nutcase. His fingers were clasping hers. They stayed that way, frozen for a minute or so, him on the ground, and her standing over him slightly stooped, looking bewildered. "OK," Natasha whispered, in a gentle, almost therapeutic voice. "So, we're holding hands. Now what?" "Now," Robbie said, "I'll turn the handle." It took them a long time to find Igor. Igor was in pretty bad shape. His skin was yellow, and he was sweating heavily. But when he saw Natasha, his face lit up. He was so thrilled that he got up and hugged her, even though he could hardly stand. At that point, Natasha started to cry, and asked him to forgive her. Because this Igor wasn't just one of her lies, he was also her uncle, a made-up uncle, but still. And Igor told her she shouldn't feel bad. The life she invented for him may not always have been easy, but he enjoyed every minute. And she had nothing to worry about because, compared to the car crash in Minsk, the stick-up in Odessa, the lightning that struck him in Vladivostok, and the pack of rabid wolves in Siberia, this heart attack was small change. And when they got back to the gumball machine, Robbie put in a one lira coin, took Natasha's hand and asked her to turn the handle. And when they were back in the yard, she found herself holding a plastic ball with a trinket inside, an ugly, silvery, heart-shaped charm. "You know," she said, "I was supposed to be going to Sinai tonight for a few days with a girlfriend, but I think I'm going to call it off and go back tomorrow to take care of Igor. Would you like to come?" Robbie nodded. He knew he'd have to make something up at the office. He wasn't quite sure what it would be. All he knew was that it would be a happy lie, full of flowers and sunshine, maybe even a baby or two. And they'd be smiling. Actor Dermot Mulroney reading a story by Etgar Keret. The story was translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger. Etgar has a new book of short stories called The Girl in the Fridge. His movie, Jellyfish, is in a handful of theaters around the country. Coming up, yes, when your parents get old, you have to help them run their lives, deal with doctors, handle emergencies, and of course, do their detective work. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. I got a call from one of those FBI agents that I had previously spoken with. And he said that he and another member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Austin wanted to come visit me. And I thought it was the same kind of thing, they were asking for guidance. But it was pretty clear that this was a more formal kind of interrogation. He and the other man, who was a member of the Food and Drug Administration, a clerk there, they were asking me questions about telephone calls that had been made from my home office number to a number in England. It was a plus 44207 number, and could I tell them who it is? And I said, well, you don't know? I mean, it seemed quite a failure of investigation that they couldn't figure out a London telephone number. But I said, I'll look on my computer. And so, I looked up on my Palm. And it belonged to Gareth Peirce, who is a solicitor that-- matter of fact, Emma Thompson played her in a movie called, In the Name of the Father. At that time, she had been representing IRA people, and now she was representing jihadis that I'd been talking to in London. And so I told them who it was. And then they said, that we understand the person who initiated the calls is a person named Caroline. Somebody by that name in the house? I said, that's my daughter. And they said, well, would her last name be Brown? I said no, but she just graduated from Brown. Caroline's name is not on any of our phones. So I don't know how her name would have arisen. What is your feeling as you're hearing this, is it fear, is it confusion? Describe your state of mind. I would describe it as confusion boiling into anger, as I began to realize what must be going on. it suggested, they must have gotten information that they overheard. And I had assumed that the laws were such as they were written, that in order to listen to an American citizen's telephone conversations, one needs a warrant. It seemed really unlikely to me that there had been probable cause for a warrant for me. And I didn't know at that time, nor did most Americans, that there was a secret program under way called the Terrorist Surveillance Program that superseded this. And it had been created by the White House, allowing warrantless wiretaps on an untold number of Americans. So how'd you figure it out? It was in December 2005, and I'd read the New York Times front page story about warrantless wiretaps. And I thought, that happened to me. It was just immediately a moment of recognition that that's what had gone on. At once, I connected the dots. The FBI coming to my house with what, obviously, seemed to be actual information that had come from my telephone call. All of that, suddenly fell into place. What had been puzzling me all along, was the law as it was written which forbid this kind of government intrusion. How did they know about these calls that I'd been making to London? And where did they get the name of my daughter? These things had been on the back of my mind for a couple of years. I couldn't figure out how, legally, those things could have happened. And then suddenly, I saw the New York Times story, and I realized that, well maybe it wasn't legal, but this is how they went about it. I see, right. And it's interesting, because, one of the things that people started to think about when that story first broke-- I know the question occurred to me, and I'm sure other people as well-- like, oh, does that mean that they've ever listened to me? The hard part about that story was there's no way to verify because you don't-- They're not going to tell you. They're not going to tell you. So, it strikes me, that you're one of the few people in the country that actually knew they were being targeted by this program. And you ended up talking to the guy in charge of the program. You wrote a profile of Mike McConnell, he's the top dog in United States intelligence, for the New Yorker Magazine. That's correct. So again, you're in a completely unique position. You're one of the few people who actually knows that you were targeted by this wireless surveillance program. And now, you're writing a profile of the person who's in charge of that program. When did you first to bring up your own experience with this program, with him? The first we had a conversation was in early July last year. And it was a, kind of, get acquainted meeting. And he was talking about the thing that was most on his mind, was for him to have more flexibility in accessing calls between people abroad and American citizens or people who might be in America at that time. And I said, in the interest of full disclosure, I want you to know that I've been monitored. He seemed a little surprised and taken aback. And I told him about the FBI coming to my house. And we went over this conversation three or four different times in the course of our interviews, because he kept coming back to it. It clearly got under his skin. Because I told him about them getting Caroline's name. It really bugs me, because I don't know how her name could have come up. And so he said, well maybe you mentioned her name. Which is what I think that probably happened, but that obviously implies they are listening to it. And I said, well that troubles me. And his response was, it may be troublesome, it may not be. You don't know. And of course, that's exactly the position any American citizen would be in. Did you ask him, is that something that should be happening? Should your daughter's name-- should that become information that is now in the hands of the intelligence community? You know, he didn't seem to be particularly disturbed that my daughter's name would have arisen in it. His response, essentially, is that I have to trust the government. But first of all, there were profound misunderstandings involved in our case, in my daughter and myself. And secondly, we have a history of a government that exceeds its authority and has often intruded on to people's lives such as-- even McConnell and I talked about it. When he was young, growing up in South Carolina, there were these big billboards on the side of the highway, impeach Earl Warren, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And then, it made quite an impression on him, when he got into the intelligence business to learn that the intelligence community, the FBI had actually been wiretapping the Supreme Court Justice's own telephone and other members of the supreme court and of course, Martin Luther King and civil rights activists. The history of our government's overreaching into the private lives of American citizens is really profound. It's one thing to give the power to the government to try to prevent terrorists from attacking America. I understand the thinking about that, but when you actually see it at work, you realize how flawed and human the operators are behind it. And what kinds of mistakes that they can make. They could be potentially very damaging to people's lives. I do remember when the FBI and the FDA clerk came to my office, I had a big whiteboard with names of Al Qaeda members written all over it. My book was all laid out. I had thousands and thousands of note cards with bin Laden and Zawahiri and all the members of Al Qaeda, and dozens and dozens of books and so on. Either I was an avid reporter or I was an insider in Al Qaeda. From the look on the face of the FDA clerk, it was probably the latter. He had a bead of sweat on his upper lip. He thought he must have stumbled into some den. Is your response to try to let him sweat or is your response to try to reassure him as much as possible? I thought it was the kind of absurd. Because it's one of those moments when you begin to see how it might look in another person's eyes. He worked for the Food and Drug Administration. This is not his main gig. So, suddenly he comes out, and he comes into this room, and it's just filled with Al Qaeda memorabilia and information, and so on. And I can see through his eyes, suddenly, that he must feel like, this could really be real. I was a little amused by the look in his face, but I also realized it was kind of dangerous. That level of misinterpretation could get me in trouble. Have you changed your behavior at all now that you know that your phone calls were listened to, and that the government was acting outside the law as you understood it? Has it made you change your behavior, in terms of like, what you say on the phone, how you talk to people, what you leave around the house? Alex, I've been talking to other reporters about this. You know, there's a dilemma. I was talking to some Times reporters-- they've been advised by one of their intelligence sources that they should get new cell phones. ABC had a similar kind of discussion about whether we should all change our phones, or whether we should behave like terrorists by getting disposable cell phones, have a conversation and throw it away. That's the way terrorists evade this kind of monitoring. I, so far, haven't done that. And maybe I'm being naive about it, but there are times when, if I come up on a question that might require a really confidential answer, that I've been more interested in doing it in person than on the phone. Have you had a situation where you realize that you know more about Al Qaeda than the people who are supposed to be the experts? All the time. I mean, it's pretty demoralizing when you are talking to people that are on the Al Qaeda Squad, and they can't pronounce the names of these guys. When the head of counterterrorism for the FBI testifies under oath that he doesn't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. and he thinks that's an irrelevant question. I mean, if you don't know the first thing about the enemy you're fighting, you're always going to be handicapped, blindfolded, deaf-and-dumb. And really, that's the situation that you find. It seems like, in a weird way, that is the most frustrating thing of this whole thing. If it seemed like they had more information than you do, with their heightened ability, than it would maybe make more sense. But it seems like they're doing all this, and it's still not putting them ahead of a single reporter with no special access to anybody and just his own reporting skills. I mean, is that too strong? No, it's not at all. There are some good people involved in this effort. I'm not denigrating them. But when I wrote my book, one of the heroes in my book was a native Arabic speaking FBI agent who came closer than anybody to stopping 9/11. He was one of eight Arabic speaking agents in the FBI at that time. Now, nearly seven years later, there are nine. And I'm picking on the FBI because they are open about their figures. It's true all across the intelligence community. They don't have the kind of people that really understand who these people are, where they come from, and what they're fighting for. Who's in the FBI, especially in headquarters seventh floor in Washington? Irish and Italian guys. And if you look at the history of that organization, which made its reputation fighting the mafia and, to some extent, the IRA, it's no wonder that they were successful in fighting against those communities. They came from the same neighborhoods. They spoke the same languages. They knew the culture. They don't know these people. And if you have family in the Middle East, essentially, you are not going to be a candidate to be in America's intelligence community. And that rules out almost everybody who fluently, natively speaks not just Arabic, but Farsi, Dari, Pashto, all these languages of these communities that we need to understand so vitally. We've done such a poor job of understanding, much less penetrating and disrupting that organization simply because we don't have the right people. Lawrence Wright, talking to This American Life producer Alex Blumberg. Wright is the author of the book The Looming Tower. Just a few weeks ago, he did another story about Al Qaeda for The New Yorker. You can read that story for free on the magazine's website, newyorker.com where you can find lots of great stories. During a recent visit, my father tells me that Lourdes, who cooks his meals, is on the verge of quitting. "It is something about Rosa," my father says. I look at him blankly. "Rosa?" "You found her for me," he says. "You mean they sent her from one of the agencies," I remind him. "I guess so. Anyway, can you deal with it?" As my father has aged, he's grown proficient at delegating. Some of this stems from his Parkinson's, but some of it is just my dad. Though he grew up working-class in the depression, his passions run more in the line of those of a rich, country squire: opera, fine wine, domestic servants. Gradually, he's enlisted a growing army of caretakers to minister to his needs. Lourdes arrives at his house later that afternoon. I ask her if there is anything she wants to say. "Si," she says pivoting towards my father. "I'm leaving you, Mr. Ken. There are too many people in your business. Yesterday, you couldn't find your cash. And I don't know who this Rosa is. Why does she have your ATM? I ask you two times Mr. Ken, who is this Rosa?" "It sounds like you don't trust her," I say to Lourdes. "No, she is always whispering, giggling, an ass kisser." A couple weeks later, I get a message from my dad's bookkeeper, Amy, the general of my father's army of caretakers. "I'm looking at your dad's books and there's something going on here," she says ominously. "Please, give me a call as soon as it's convenient." Amy tells me she's discovered strange charges on my dad's Visa card, huge ATM withdrawals, and fat checks signed in an unfamiliar handwriting and made out to a woman named Rosa. "I'm looking at upwards of $6,000 missing from your dad's checking accounts. And then there's $20,000 that seems to be missing from his investments," she says. "I never heard of this Rosa before. Your dad says you found her." For the rest of the day, my brother and I are on the phone with Amy getting updates on her accounting discoveries. For a long time, we kids have felt my father is pressing his luck living alone. Amy calls to say she has gone over to my father's and confronted him. Apparently, he told her it was all easily explained. He had lent Rosa money for her mortgage. Amy says, she asked to see the paperwork for the loan, and he refused. Then he said it was a gift. Then he said he didn't remember. Amy goes on, "I found these weird charges, like one at Macy's and another Victoria's Secret," she says. "Your father says, he was out with Rosa, and she saw some jewelry, and so he bought it for her. He said it was only $40. And I said, but Ken, the charge was for almost $100. And he said, oh well, maybe that was it." Then she adds, "Lourdes told me she thinks Rosa is a prostitute, because of how she acts and dresses. She says she thinks your father has fallen in love with her." Apparently, Lourdes has told Amy that she's been cleaning up a lot of dinners for two with wine glasses, which she took to be signs that Rosa was visiting him at night. I get this awful feeling. Amy tells me she has a plan. She wants to go to my father's house tomorrow morning when Rosa is scheduled to pick up my father for a dentist appointment. The plan is to confront Rosa and get to the bottom of this. Amy's husband, who happens to be a high-ranking military officer just home from Iraq, will also help. She wants me to be there too. The next morning, I drive south through the oaky hills of central California to my father's home. As I approach, the weedy medians give way to manicured landscaping, roses, carved bushes, and lawns clipped like French velvet. My father had once cultivated a similarly refined community of friends, people with multiple homes, colleagues with charitable trusts, but now that's changed. Though he still lives in the same place, his friends mostly include his caretakers and their families. A lot of them live paycheck to paycheck. He hear stories about broken hearts and broken down cars, bouts of depression and unemployment, and tells them to me. When I arrive, my father sits in the monstrous Naugahyde recliner we bought for him, a veritable throne of old age. C-SPAN is on, as it often is. "I'm glad you came," my father says. When Amy and her husband, Mike, pull up, I meet them outside. Mike is wearing crisply ironed fatigues and army boots. We enter the house, and Amy bends down to my father and hugs him. She broaches the subject of Rosa's use of his Visa over the weekend, which my father gave her to buy herself some hospital scrubs for a new job. "We're looking at nearly $700 spent at Target and Walmart," Amy says. "If it turns out she's stolen this money, do you agree to press charges?" My father looks at her, "You haven't met her. You can't just accuse someone. You don't even know her." "Ken, I don't need to know her. I have the evidence right here. What kind of services is she providing to you, Ken?" she asks. "Nothing." Her face is inches from his. "I know this is hard for you to accept that someone you care for is taking advantage of you, but what's going on is just not right." "You shouldn't accuse her. You need to talk to her first." My father bangs his hand on the arm of the chair, "God damn it. I've told you everything is all right, and it is. If you won't listen to me, you can get out of my house." His hands are shaking, but not the loose trembling that comes from neurological misfiring. It's concentrated rage. Amy stands, "You want me to leave? I'm leaving." Mike stands, holding Amy's coat for her. Amy turns to dad, "It won't break my business, losing you as a client, but it will break my heart." As she walks towards the door, I look at my father, "Dad, say something." My dad relents, "I don't really want you to go," he says. "I just don't want you yelling at this woman." We sit and wait. Finally, an old-model American car pulls up. We peer through the windows, careful not to tip her off. Then Rosa walks in. She's wearing baggy layers over a heavyset frame. Her hair is cut short. She wears no makeup. She bears no resemblance to the Victoria Secret-wearing wine-swilling seductress I had imagined. She walks into the room and kisses my father on the cheek. "How are you, Ken?" she asks. "I've been better," says my dad. Then she looks around, noticing the strange faces in the room. Amy, Mike and I introduce ourselves and shake hands with her. Mike stand sentry at the door. Amy asks her to sit down and tells her that there's money missing from Ken's accounts. We ask her about getting a loan or a gift from Ken. She looks baffled and turns to my father, "No, Ken, I earned that money. Remember, I spent 10 days here, 12 hour shifts." My father nods. I explain, "It's that he can't exactly recall how this money has been spent, but he's spending it a lot faster than he has in the past." She looks at me pleadingly, "I'm sorry," she says quietly. "I thought he was alert." Point by point, Amy goes over his suspicious expenditures. At every point, Rosa defends herself. All the hours she's been working, neither she nor Ken kept track, but she says they were extensive. The Visa use over the weekend, she bought a lot of scrubs and planned to pay my father back. Since my father gives out his ATM card to all his caretakers, she can't really be expected to explain all the withdrawals. She says the checks made out to her name were payment for more work. I don't know what to think. The relationship between my father and his caretakers is so intimate. They do stuff for him I won't do, all for a few bucks an hour. It hardly seems crazy that my father and Rosa might have had long talks over dinner, that my father would have wanted to repay her kindness, and that Rosa would have wanted to accept. Still, I can tell Amy remains unmoved. For her, the numbers tell the whole story. If I defend Rosa, dad will lose both Lourdes and Amy, and I still won't know what happened. With halfhearted logic, I decide she's crossed some professional line Even if she isn't swindling my dad, caretakers shouldn't go shopping for jewelry with their clients or use the client's ATM card to buy hundreds of dollars' worth of clothing. When I tell Rosa she can't work for Ken anymore, she looks like she doesn't know what hit her. "Can I say goodbye to him?" she asks. I watched her lean over him and whisper in his ear. I realize, if this were a movie, and I were watching this scene, I know one thing for sure. I'd hate the daughter. After it happened, we really didn't talk about it. I wondered if he was angry at us, or if he just wanted to forget the whole incident. He's 81 and tires easily. But I thought that if I could just get him to tell me what he thought happened, I could stop guessing. Well, what do you remember? I mean, do you remember giving her a loan, or do you remember giving her gifts? Yes, I gave her $1,000 because she had a $3,000 mortgage. She was divorced. She didn't have a lot of money. She was in transition from one job to another. And I helped her out. And did you feel like, did you think at some point that it was a loan or a gift? I guess originally, I thought of it as a loan, but I think as time went on, I assumed it would be a gift because she just couldn't pay it back in any reasonable time. And that was fine with me. It still was helpful to her, and I felt good about it. So, how did you feel when people started to question your judgment? Well, I didn't like it of course, because I felt like it was my own business, what I did with my money. You know, you might be heir to my money, but you don't control it now, right? Right. I feel like I've been misrepresented on the situation, that I can't take care of myself. And that I somewhat resented it, because I felt like I was in control. You know, I know these things happen, where these older people get taken. I just didn't feel like I was one of them. Even if she had taken me for every dime, it wouldn't be a big deal. It's not a lot of money. It also made me feel like, you're were kind of feeling a certain kind of sympathy. Where you were like, even if she stole several thousand bucks from me, that's not a big deal. She's struggling, she's got little kids. Right, absolutely. Absolutely, that's part of it. From what I understand, she's a good mother. She just struggles to get along. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about it. My father never used to seem like someone who lost sleep over other people's troubles, especially people radically different from him. But now I think he might. Amy the bookkeeper tells me, she's always canceling generous contributions he makes to far flung charities he's seen on late night TV. She thinks these bouts of insomniac philanthropy are a sign he's not looking out for his own best interests. But I'm not so sure. What if instead, my father is becoming the person we all want to be, someone who doesn't fixate on the bottom line, but empathizes with people in need. Then again, as I'm getting ready to go home after our interview, I hear my dad talking on the phone, making an appointment, giving out his address. When I inquire who it was, he says it was a very nice guy selling reverse mortgages. "A telemarketer," I ask, "coming to your home?" "Don't worry," he says, playing with the remote control. "I know what I'm doing." My show was produced today by our senior producer, Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Lisa Shipley, and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help Seth Lind, Odette Yousef. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks to Bob Carlson and Sarah Vowell. Our website-- www.ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management are excited for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who knocked on my door at 5:00 in the morning today, unshaved and disheveled, looking like hell. He explained it this way, "My dead mother appeared in my dream and asked me to buy her gumball. So I came here to look for change." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI Public Radio International.
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Tim wasn't always perfect at his job. A couple years ago, not long after he got the job, he heard about these two gang members who had gotten into a scuffle at a club. It began when one of them jumped in front of the other in a line of people who were going to have their pictures taken. And they got into a big fight. And one of the guys got a black eye and was kind of messed up. And he was looking for the other guy to shoot him. Which is how Tim got involved. Tim, I have to say, has one of the greatest job titles ever. In a world where job titles often obscure what the hell a person does for a living, his is remarkably direct. He's an interrupter. An interrupter means to interrupt violence, to intervene, or to mediate potential violent conflict. Years ago, Tim had been a gang member. He'd risen through the ranks, until finally he got to call the shots for his area on the West Side of Chicago. He became an interrupter when he got out of prison a few years back. So he gets these two guys together. They both knew him from the streets. They both respected him. But he was so inexperienced at being an interrupter that he held the meeting outside on a corner. And each guy brought friends. What I messed up was, I didn't have control of the environment. I mean, they was instigating. Man, you let him hit you in your eye? You should do this to him. I lost control of the mediation. I was OK as long as I had them two there, right? But when everybody else started putting input in, and everybody starts saying, he ain't going to do nothing to me. And they start up in guns, I was the only one there without a gun. And I said, man, I don't have control. They talking, and they was just about to pull it. Man, you should shoot him, man. And I was like, man, nah, don't shoot him. Man, don't shoot him. Please don't shoot that gun. And they were like, man, I ain't scared of you. I got a gun. You ain't the only one got no gun. And I was like, I ain't got nothin'. And so I was like, hey listen. Let's just get in our cars. Get in your car, get in your car. Man, get in your car. Man, the police are going to come. Get in your car. They finally got in their cars, and they pulled off. I said, this mediation ain't going right. And so about two days later, I called these same two individuals. But this time, I had them meet me at the office, individually, one-on-one. And I explained to them, man, listen, man. You don't need to make these decisions that you're making, man. You're doing well out here in the streets. You're not starving. But if you make these decisions that you're going to make, you're going to bring a lot of heat on yourself. You don't want to hurt dude, he don't want to hurt you. Y'all was both drunk that night at that party. Ain't nobody dead. You got a black eye. People get black eyes when they get into fights. But you still can salvage this, man. And he listened. He had cooled off for a while. A couple of days had passed, he cooled off. And I had already talked to the other guy. And he said, man, I don't got no problem talking to him. He the one that want to act like he want to-- we had to fight last night. He lost. What he want to do? He want to kill me now. And I ain't scared of him. I mean, if he trying to kill me, I'm trying to kill him. So we got to the table, and we talked. And we squashed it. Because they really both didn't want to hurt each other. They knew each other from school and everything, but their pride was in the way. Their reputation was in the way. What do you think they go back and tell their friends about why the fight's over? What do they say? That's what I mean about keep their reputation and their face value. They go back and say, man, I let it go, because Tim, man, you know? You know Tim stand for peace now, man. So he caught up with me, man. So I told him I'd do it for him. I gave dude a pass. And the other dude will tell his crew, I gave dude a pass for Tim, man. And so that's what they do. It's a favor to you. Yeah. They just give me some favors some time. And I stand on what I say. I'm not here to arrest you. I'm not here to talk about nothing. We're not there to put them in jail for whatever they're doing. We don't want to know nothing about your criminal activities, how you get money, how you making your money. Our component is totally to stop you from shooting each other. I met Tim through one of the contributors to our radio show, Alex Kotlowitz. He'd written about Tim and some other interrupters for The New York Times Magazine. Tim works for a group called CeaseFire, which this year has stepped in to mediate 78 potential shootings in Chicago. Tim's in his 40s. When he was in prison, he found God. When we came out, he was ordained as a minister, like his dad, actually, who has a church on the West Side. And though Tim loves the work he does now, he understands how hard it is for the guys he talks to not to take revenge. He's been tested too. Not long ago, he was in his car. He'd just dropped his son off. I was riding down Pulaski, and I was behind this young man and a woman in a car. He had to be doing like 20 miles an hour on a busy street. And he was swerving, just like listening to his music, bouncing up and down. I was kind of tired, and I wanted to get past him. And he wouldn't let me pass. Purposely, he wouldn't let me pass. He was like cutting you off when you try to go around? Yeah. So I caught myself going try to get past him, and he hit his brakes real hard and made me almost run into the back of his car. And when he jumped out, he started cussing me. MF, get away from my-- don't be riding so close to my car. I'll beat your woo, woo, woo. And I said, hey man, I just want to get past. He said, F you. Say something else and I'll slap you. And I was like, slap who? And he said, I'll slap you. Say something else. And I wanted to whoop him. I believe in my heart I could whoop this guy. I could take him. And I looked at him, I said, man, it's not that serious, man. We ain't got to go there. And he said, man, shut up. I said, shut up? I said, all right, man. I just looked at him, and he looked at me. And he seen that he had punked me, so he walked away. And then he jumped in the car, and he called me a B. And then he got in his car and pulled off. And I stayed there and just sit for a minute. And tears started welling up in my eyes, and I was thinking about going on the block and getting a couple of guys. I know the car and stuff. I wanted to go and ride back around his neighborhood and see could I find him. And I was riding that way, and I'm riding that way. I said, man, I should kill this guy. He just disrespected me like that. Nobody never disrespected me like that. And then I pulled over, started to cry a little bit. And I said, nah, I'm going home. Tim and the other interrupters are trying to do a kind of social engineering on the West Side, trying to change people's behavior on a mass scale, alter deeply ingrained social rules, make things better for everybody. And challenging as that is, it can be even more challenging to do that kind of retooling on yourself. It's hard to do a mediation on yourself. That's harder than doing a mediation for someone else. Because I was on the outside, I didn't have the emotions. When you're doing it with other people? When I'm doing it with other people, when they be mad. I had emotions that flared up in my throat. It was all up over me, it was everywhere. And I didn't know how to deal with it. And that brings us to today's program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, we have several stories of people who are trying to social engineer their own lives. Act One, we have guys who remake their lives in this way that I think very few of us would ever dare. In Act Two, a parent tries to teach a kid a simple lesson, but does it in a way that he regrets for decades later. In Act Three, a mom understands that sticks and stones will, in fact, break your bones, but is not so clear if names will ever hurt her kid. Stay with us. Act One, Choosers, Not Beggars. Gregory Deloatch and Daniel Canada met in a bookstore, and they've had the kind of long-standing friendship where, at the center of things for the last 20 years, they've had a shared goal: to write something great. But all the normal stuff got in the way of that goal, marriages, jobs. And the dream to write something great became a lower priority, something more like a hobby. When Gregory was in his 20s, he write a sci-fi novel. And in their 30s, Gregory and Daniel co-wrote a big historical novel set in ancient Babylon and a second novel together called The Noise. None of these books were published. And it wasn't until their 40s that things really started to change, and they got serious about their writing. And they did this by re-engineering their lives in a pretty unusual way. Lu Olkowski explains. It wasn't that Gregory and Daniel decided to become homeless so they'd finally get enough free time to write. They slid into homelessness gradually. Gregory was making good money as a computer tech for a Wall Street firm, but he was drinking way too much, and finally his wife walked out. He found himself living alone in an apartment in New Jersey. His best friend, Daniel, meanwhile, was between jobs and divorced. So Gregory offered his couch to Daniel, and for a long while, things were all right. Daniel would write some during the day. Gregory worked nights, until Gregory lost his job. And he'd never been unemployed before, not really, not like Daniel. He began missing rent payments and couldn't see a way to catch up, and he was freaking out. And at this point, he could have gotten another job, or gone to his family for money. But he did nothing. And then it was the day before they were going to get evicted. Here's Gregory. I'm like, dude, we're about to hit the street. And mister cool as a cucumber here was just relaxed. He wasn't stressed about anything. Daniel felt this way because he'd lived on the streets before. And then he said, that's survivable. For the first time, it didn't really key in, because you don't think you can survive the streets. When someone says, being homeless, I don't think you can do it. I'm like saying to him, where do you use the bathroom? I remember that. Where do you take a shower? How do you get clean? Where do you get new clothes? I had a million questions, and he carefully answered every last one of them. This is what you do. This is what you'll do. This is what you'll do. So that when the last day came and just before the county sheriffs came to lock me out, we left. I grabbed what clothes I had on my back and a bag, and we headed to the Port Authority. Up until he lost his apartment, the Port Authority bus station in New York was just a transfer station on Gregory's route to and from work. But on that night in May 2006, it became shelter. A few nights sleeping in the Port Authority turned into weeks. But somehow, because they had each other, being homeless in New York City didn't seem as daunting as it might have. It was kind of an adventure. Gregory and Daniel treated it like a game, spending the last of Gregory's money on going to the movies and bars. They wanted to shed the baggage and stress of their old lives, no full-time jobs, no wives, no hassle. They wanted to live a little, reevaluate things. And it was during this time that Gregory and Daniel forged a plan, an experiment. They'd use homelessness to finally get serious about their writing. Here's Daniel. We wanted to eliminate the distraction and maximize the time that we spend in pursuing this. We are devoting all our energy to it. This is our life. This is our career. This is our nine-to-five. Our particular talent is poetry, open mic, spoken word. And so Gregory and Daniel, without jobs, without homes, got to work. They had a routine. If they were writing something together, like their novel or screenplay, they'd work at the New York Public Library. Otherwise, they'd split up during the day, but meet up every morning for breakfast and every night before bed, just to check in on one another. They'd stay on each other to be productive. Daniel is more likely to wander the city, hoping to get an idea for a poem. Gregory has a laptop, so he spends most days at a Midtown Starbucks, where uses free wifi to write his blog. And a month after they went on the streets, they hit the poetry circuit. Two months in, their schedule was packed enough to include three different readings a week. Saturday's at Stark on West 43rd Street, Sundays at Smith's Bar in Times Square or at ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side, Mondays downtown at the Nightingale. On stage, Gregory became Hobo Bob, Daniel was Obsidian. They were the homeless poets. That was their schtick on the poetry circuit. Next up, please welcome our wonderful homeless poet, Hobo Bob. And this is where I first encountered them, over a year ago in 2007. It was Obsidian who knew the places they could perform, and Obsidian does most of the MCing when they're on stage together. He's the outgoing one, the one who works the room at intermission. Gregory's more thoughtful, introspective. And at the beginning it was Obsidian, you know, Daniel, who showed Gregory how to live on the street, how to keep warm on a cool night by stuffing their clothes with crumpled up newspaper, where there was a storefront in Midtown with planters that hid them from view, so they could sleep without anyone bugging them. Also how to stock up on free necessities. Here's Daniel. Go into McDonald's, and get you a handful of them. And put them in your bag or your pocket when you need napkins. Why do you need so many napkins? They're amazing. They do everything. They do everything. You'll find so many uses of just a napkin. If you use a public toilet and can't shut the door you just-- you know some of those stalls, they kind of like swing like swinging doors. The locks are broken, so you need to use it, and the door keeps running open. So you take a couple of napkins, and you just wedge them right in the door. Daniel also taught Gregory the importance of socks. Socks. Your feet go first. When you're in the street, you keep your feet in your shoe all the time. It doesn't get any air. And once it smells like hell like that, it contaminates your shoe. Now your shoe stinks. You could hold the bank up with them. You notice that if you smell an odor around a homeless person, the odor you're smelling is the feet. So you always got to constantly make sure you have a pair of socks on your feet, a pair in the bag. They get fresh socks at the Bowery Mission, which also provides new clothes and showers for the homeless. Every Tuesday, Gregory and Daniel go there, throw away the old clothes they've been wearing for a week, and each gets a whole new outfit. It matters to them that they look good. They're clean-shaven with proper haircuts, no grime under their nails, dark chinos, and button-down shirts. In other words, they pass. You wouldn't know they were homeless unless they told you. Which is not true for a lot of the homeless people they see around town, guys they've privately nicknamed Adolph, Scurvy, Coat, Buzzard, Frank 'n Beans, the Marlboro Man. They classify the bags homeless people carry from large to small into class A, B, C, or D Starfleet. Gregory has a solid class D Star Cruiser, a sensible black wheelie suitcase with a matching computer bag. The longer you're on the street, the bigger your starship tends to get, and the class A Star Destroyer is one of those giant canvas postal carts, overflowing with stuff, with more stuff tied to the sides and on poles. Well, there's three types of homeless people. There's homeless people who are just homeless, and they're trying to make the best they can. And some of them, you can't even tell they're homelessness unless you follow them around. They change their clothes. They upkeep themselves. You see them in the library reading a book or something. That's one. That's us. Then there's a Skeksis, where they'll be very dirty. Dressed in all kinds of clothes, sometimes many layers and layers of clothes. They'll wear heavy coats in the wintertime-- I'm sorry, in the summertime. You don't want to smell them when they open up those coats. And they even talk differently. Their language has devolved. They don't speak in words anymore. They speak more in sounds, more like [SCREECHING SOUNDS]. [SCREECHING SOUNDS]. Honest to God. But that's Skeksis. He's talking Skeksis. He's on his way. He's talking Skeksis. And then there's the last one, recently classified. Skels. Skels. Or Skelsis. Skelsis. Skelsi is the living dead. It's the undead. It's a person who, they're gone, mentally gone. And you'll just see them like sitting on the floor with their feet out maybe, and they're just really filthy. And they're just scratching themselves, and they're just talking to themselves loud. And they're just gone. That's it. That's the last level. That's called Skel. And Skell is the terminology that police use for homeless people. They call them Skells, which is short for skeletons. So whenever they go on the mocrophone, they say we have a Skell here. They're referring to a homeless person. They refer to all homeless people as Skells. They don't see a difference. Maybe the most remarkable thing about Gregory and Daniel is how upbeat they were about all this. It's hard to imagine being so happy living on the street. But when I first met them a year ago, they'd been on the street for a year already, and they were almost always like this. Though Gregory said there was one thing he definitely did not like about living on the street. No one told me that being homeless meant celibacy. That was the biggest thing. I didn't think about it. I didn't think about it at all. I'm like, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But you know what? Obsidian picked up some. It's the magic of Obsidian. Yeah. He had two girlfriends since he was homeless. Two. It's the Obsidian suave, suave, sua-vay, charisma. You know, he's handsome. He's young. He's got it going on. He's not afraid to say it. But I'm more rugged looking, more pie-faced, more out of shape. The two of us standing together, women are going to gravitate to him, and I'm going to be the one going to get the drinks. They squeaked by with a little money from occasional odd jobs. Gregory wrote reviews of porno films. He didn't get paid, but he got to keep the DVDs, which he sold for $2 apiece to video stores. Obsidian would take a day here and there doing small construction jobs. And Gregory's mom sent him $100 every month. And they started to make some money from poetry. When they were featured together at the East Orange Public Library in New Jersey, they got $100 each. As for food, they're eating well, gaining weight even. There's no such thing as a hungry homeless person. In this city? You can't be hungry. That's a joke. Too many places to eat. Anyone that has a sign that says, I'm hungry and haven't eaten in three days-- That's a joke. --is lying. It's a scam. It's a scam. The city is littered with soup kitchens, littered. And the quality of the food is good. They have good quality food, fresh vegetables. Incredible. It's the churches. Most of them are the churches. If it wasn't for the churches, the homeless people would starve to death. Federal programs suck. Suck. Even the quality of the food sucks at the federal program. And they give you so little bit of it. The churches, however, on the other hand, the people go out of their way to cook good food for you, serve you. They want you there. They treat you differently. They perform music for you. Breakfast there is wonderful. It's always something great. Corn beef hash, beef stew. Chicken, fish, salmon, fresh salmon, fresh whitefish. Oh man, lamb, steak, beef. They let you go around and get more. Go around as many times as you want. Knock yourself out. They give you a bag of food on the way out. Are you the person this food is meant for? You could have made a living, you're competent. Is it meant for us? I mean, do all homeless people have to be disabled? Do all homeless people have to be crazy? It's for the hungry. There are people who have jobs that eat there too. But do you think people would want to be donating to you? We're donating to these guys' experiment? Would they donate if they knew it was coming to us? No, no. Though Gregory and Daniel are the rare homeless people who got into homelessness as a lifestyle choice, there's not such a clear line dividing them from some of the more hardcore cases at the soup kitchens. After all, it was alcohol that got Gregory fired from his last job and brought him to the point that homelessness became an option. I was making 60 grand a year, 60 grand not working hard. If I wanted to push it, I could push it to 70. They want you to do overtime in Wall Street. Wall Street judges you by overtime. So yeah, I was raking it in. I was spending it just as fast on alcohol. I was downing alcohol like nobody's business. I would get up around 8:00 at night, take a shower. Have a pint of Jack Daniels on me when I got into my car and drove to work. Finished that pint by the time I got out of Port Authority. Stop, get another pint, go into work. Don't want to drink the pint, because I don't want to blast through it. Put the pint in the drawer, go to the Dakota Road House, and drink shots all night. Eight hours later, come back, grab my pint. Get off work, and go to another bar, Smith's, and drink all day until I got tired, shots. Counterintuitively, he does less drinking now that he's homeless. He doesn't have the money to keep up his rigorous Jack Daniels routine. And Gregory and Daniel don't beg. It's a rule. Begging is Skeksi. Here's Gregory. Most benefit to me of being homeless is the fact that it kept me from drinking, kept me from smoking. And that's not the only self-improvement perk homelessness gave him. Therapy, therapy. The state gives it to you. You must be nuts if you're on the street. So the state has-- So you say I'm homeless, can I have therapy, and they'll just give it to you? You're homeless, we'll give you therapy. You're homeless, we'll give you therapy. All of this is paid by Medicaid, which also pays for his eyeglasses and his prescriptions. Once he started treatment, Gregory learned that the voices he hears in his head sometimes, loud, insistent voices, which he assumed came from drinking so much, were signs that he's bipolar and schizophrenic. And now he gets meds to keep that under control, all free. So there were benefits to being on the street, including for their poetry. After a few months, Gregory and Daniel decided to start their own open mic night called "The Times Square Shout Out" at one of Gregory's old drinking haunts on Eighth Avenue. They co-hosted, and it was popular enough that they started to dream of being discovered. A lot of their poetry has to do life on the streets or the lives they left behind. Here's Obsidian. This one's entitled "Where's Daniel?" Of course, you know my real name is Daniel. Where's Daniel at? In alleyways and sleazy barbacks, on cheapened soup lines with hands in pockets against the wind. Where's Daniel at? Daniel, Obsidian, comes on stage with his poetry on scraps of newspaper and napkins. But Gregory, Hobo Bob, is the one with the computer. And he comes onstage with all the poems printed out in crisp sheets, protected in plastic. This one's, "I'm Hobo Bob." I'm Hobo Bob. And they call me that because I own nothing, insolvent, collateral-less, without liquidity. Me? Ha ha, I laugh. They say Bloomberg owns Gracie Mansion, but I don't see him out there when I'm sleeping on his lawn. I'm Hobo Bob. Neither of these guys will be the next Poet Laureate, but at their readings, and other people's too, they really stood out. They were popular, and not just because they were homeless. A lot of the readers at these amateur open mics, frankly, are pretty boring. But Gregory and Daniel are natural performers who play to the crowd. And the crowds love them. The first one's entitled "A Few of My Favorite Things." [SINGING TO THE TUNE OF "MY FAVORITE THINGS" BY RICHARD RODGERS] Waking up achy and out in the open. Guard dogs are barking before words are spoken. Wrought iron benches that causes suffering-- These are a few of my favorite things. Taking a shower with four dozen others. Moving around in a stench that could smother. Finding that you are the source of the stink. These are a few of my favorite things. When the bottle's dry-- Then about a year after they hit the street, they suffered their first big setback. The bar where they hosted the shout-out got tired of it and canceled the show, and their dream of being discovered suddenly seemed a little less realistic. And being on the street was getting old. Here's Daniel. You know what? It's getting to be tiring. At first it started off, it was kind of simple. But then, as you continue to be out there, it wears on you actually. It wears on you psychologically. It wears on you physically in various ways. So now, we're at the point where it's tiring, and we are working our way to get out of it. But now, the interesting thing about it is once you go into the streets, it's not so easy to extract yourself. It's easy to get in, but not easy to get out. It's like roach motel. And it was Daniel, Obsidian, the one with more experience on the streets, who took off. He bailed for his mom's place in South Carolina, leaving Gregory by himself. I caught up with Gregory then. This is August of last year. He looked spent and needed a haircut and fresh clothes. Yeah, I'm in Skek mode. Yeah, I'm in Skek mode. Skek mode, one step down the homeless ladder. Oh man. It's been a rough one with Obsidian leaving. We never really had a chance to sit down and talk about it because I don't really talk about a lot of things. But he packed up and had to go. I can understand, it's a tough life. It's not easy. I could tell, as we were going along, he was complaining about every little thing. There was more and more discussion about sleeping in a bed. Oh man, crawling into a bed, there's nothing like it. You need your eight hours of sleep, and it has to be contiguous. It can't be broken sleep. You have no one waking you up. You know, da-da-da-da. OK, we know this. I mean, you're preaching to the choir here. But yeah, he would go back and forth with that. And then he's like, my mother, she says she can get the internet for me, and she can do this for me, she could do that for me. So then plans were being drawn. When Daniel had been around, everything seemed hopeful. They were a team, and somehow that made the difference. And when Daniel left, Gregory felt abandoned. He was hurt. And finally, in November of 2007, alone after a year and a half on the street, Gregory found permanent shelter at a halfway house in the East Village called the Bowery Resident's Committee with the help of one of his doctors. He got his own bunk. And now he wouldn't shut up about the comforts of a warm bed, about being able to look out the window at people trudging through the cold, while he watches the morning news and eats Cheerios. BRC has been around since 1971 and screens and monitors the people staying with them. There are rules to living there. Residents have to help with chores. There are regular community meetings to attend, mandated curfew, and regular drug and alcohol testing. Any violation of the rules risks getting kicked out, which seemed fine with Gregory, even welcome. And when Daniel got bored in South Carolina and moved back to New York, he started taking construction jobs, hoping to work much more regularly, so he could finally get off the street and into an SRO, a single room occupancy hotel. And so Gregory and Daniel's experiment to use homelessness as a way to dedicate more time to their poetry is over. And just last week, I asked Daniel and Gregory if it worked. Here's Daniel. Not the way we wanted it to. Like I said at the beginning, we wanted to take this open mic venue beyond Russell Simmons or Def Poetry Jam. We thought that by now we'd be sought by television and driving around in fancy cars, be millionaires. That was success for us. We didn't know better. You're going to make a living off of being a poet? I don't think so. We were like, well hey, hard smack of reality there, you know? Being homeless, was it worth it? That's a good question. Being homeless, was it worth it? Being homeless, was it worth it? Being homeless, I would say, making the choice to spend that time doing something, which is writing poetry and getting into the poetry circuit, that was definitely worth the choice. We got, I guess you can say, the joy of being poets. Read our poetry in front of a lot of people, be heard by a lot of people, that's an adrenaline rush. And we did so well that the experiment worked. If you look back to three years ago, when you were making money, you had a real job making real money, 70 grand, and you have skills. Does it surprise you that now, three years later, you are dependent on other people to help you find housing and a job, things that you did for 40 years on your own? Three years ago, looking in, I would never believe that I would be in social services or have a committee looking for an apartment for me, because I could do all that myself. But I wasn't happy. I wasn't genuinely happy. I was going through the motions of working a job, and I didn't feel fulfilled. I'm homeless, I'm in the circuit. I'm writing poetry. This is a different life. But, to me, it's a far better life than going back to working in computers and networking and all that. I mean, I wouldn't like to go back to that lifestyle. And if it takes going through social services and all that to avoid that lifestyle, I would choose no other way. But in the last few months, something else has changed for Gregory. Having Daniel back from South Carolina, seeing Daniel drink and stay out late was a catalyst, he says. It made him question whether he should stick with a life of curfews and breathalyzers and drug testing. And two weeks ago, talking to Gregory, I learned that hanging out with Daniel has had an effect. He started drinking secretly, and planning to drink a lot more. Oh, I know I'm going to slip back into my old habits. That's a given. That's what I'm waiting for. That's the party after the war. No, I'm totally waiting for that day when I can close the door and lock it. And I don't have anyone saying, come here for a minute, I want you to blow into this tube. And then I'm going to go outside, and I'm going to buy a nice quart size-- or family size. I'm going to get the family size, which is a little bit bigger, of Jack Daniels and sneak it upstairs. And just pound on that thing for hours and hours and hours and hours. I'm going to an alcohol therapist too. She gives me insight into why I drink, and reasons why I drink, and why I shouldn't drink anymore. And I told her that basically I want a healthy relationship with alcohol, if that's possible. I want to be able to drink sociably like everyone else. And she's led me to believe that I can't. I can no longer drink like everyone else. I don't care. And it's not that I don't care. I really do care, but I can't care. This really stunned me. Just a couple of months ago, he was talking to me about the possibility of enrolling in college. I think it's easy to assume that what you or I would want for Gregory is what he would want for himself: sobriety, a full-time job. But Gregory has had full-time jobs and doesn't want them anymore. And he doesn't want to be sober either. His new dream is to have it all. A roof over his head, like he has now. A job, but only part-time so he has lots of freedom to write. And booze. And Daniel's dream is pretty much the same, though without such a serious commitment to drinking. And because Daniel and Gregory have each other, they make each other believe these dreams are possible. That's the great thing about their friendship. And maybe the worst thing. Lu Olkowski in New York. Coming up, a kid is sent off on his bike with one simple instruction, just one thing that he has to do for his own good. But can he do it? The 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. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, social engineering. We have stories of people who are trying to re-engineer their own lives. Though actually, in this half of the show, we have parents trying to engineer the lives of their children. Basically, parenting is actually one long exercise in shaping your children's lives. In this next act, for instance, which we're calling "Take My Bike, Please," Dave Dickerson recalls a particular bit of parenting that went down in his boyhood home in Arizona. He was 12. His little brother had just gotten his first bike. Now Dave was getting one too. I was really excited. This was the most money we'd ever had spent on us. And I never had dreams of biking everywhere, like doing wheelies or all the things that junior high kids, I guess, are supposed to be thrilled about. It was just-- Tucson is a sprawling town. And there's a lot of walking, and a lot of bus riding. And it would just really save time. I was really excited about that. More free time to actually play video games, or whatever it is that I wanted to do, rather than wasting all my time in transit. And at the same time, there was the implied responsibility, like you'd better not mess this up. Dad said, hop in the car. Me and my brother got in and went to this used bike store with both my parents. So it was sort of a family outing. And I got the bike. It was this nice green bike. Dad said, so do you want to put this in the back of the car and drive home? Or do you want to ride it home? And I said, oh, I want to ride it home. And he said, OK, but don't stop anywhere because we don't have a lock for this thing. And I said, OK, yeah, no problem. And I drove off while Dad was still paying. And Dana went with me, and he was walking along beside me. And we got maybe a block, two blocks, whatever, when we passed this convenience store that we'd gone to a lot of times and thought, oh my God, we have to play Asteroids, this is so cool. Because I'm kind of an adult now, and I can make decisions like this. This was sort of the way I pictured my life with this bike, where I would get my allowance and bike to the store and play this game, and so on. And I couldn't wait for that to happen. So on that basis, I went, OK, let the fun begin. But we knew we weren't supposed to stop. We didn't have a lock for the bike, but we decided we'd just take turns looking. We'd do a two player game, and when I was playing, Dana would watch. And when Dana was playing, I would watch. So I leaned the bike up against the front of the store. But what actually happened, of course, is that it's really hard to have someone playing a game right next to you, and you have to go on the second they die, and not look at the game. And then of course, you have to go, oh, be careful with the-- oh look, shields. We stopped looking. We would glance up occasionally. And when we came out, the bike was gone. And we looked at each other utterly horrified. I remember we cried. And then almost without a word, I remember we just walked home. We realized this is it. We've got to walk the same path we've walked before, but it's going to be in the dark. And I do remember thinking, we're never going to get allowance again. We had been entrusted with this great gift at great expense, and we had screwed it up before we had even gotten the bike home. The one time, the one time I stepped outside the lines, the worst calamity possible happened. As we got into our actual neighborhood, about half an hour, 45 minutes later, I just had to sort of walk toward my doom, walk toward judgment. Oh, God. We waited outside the door for a little while, gathering the courage to go in. And I opened the door, and my dad was there. So when you came in, and before you could really say much, I just said, the bike is in the back. I brought it home. Right. You had gone inside a Circle K or something and left the bike sitting out. And I decided to then make the object lesson of stealing the bike, which I just told your mother to take the car home. And I went and grabbed the bike and ran off with it. And what's more, somebody saw me do that. And they stopped me and said, why are you stealing this bike? I saw you steal that bike, they said. And then I'm talking to this stranger trying to explain why I'm stealing a bike. So you were riding my bike home? Right. I just rode your bike home. Oh my God. And this guy stopped me. And then I had to explain to him, and he didn't really buy my story. That's funny. Normally nobody pays any attention to somebody stealing a bike, right? Right. I was always bothered about that. I thought I had overdone things. Why? In what way? The issue for me was you had to come out of this store and discover the bike that you'd gotten an hour before is now gone and that you had to walk home for an hour, a mile and a half. And the regret then is just that this took away the pleasure of getting a new possession. It just sucks all the joy out of what should have been a really fun, exciting, new thing. And it just puts a black cloud over it. One of the things I learned from that was that I had been-- obviously, I was taking the bike for granted. It was that long walk home that made me realize-- I had time to think how much money I had squandered and lost by being foolish and gee, walking sucks. But I've always told people is that after that happened, I felt safe, safer than I had before. And that I realized that even if you screw up, sometimes you get a chance to-- that it's not over. You get second chances in life, even when you can't possibly imagine how they could happen. So I told my dad this on the phone, and he was surprised. It certainly wasn't what he was trying to teach me. In fact, it was the opposite of what he was trying to teach me. He was trying to demonstrate the world isn't safe. And what I learned was yes, it is. Or really I learned both things. Be careful, and sometimes you do get a second chance. Knowing what you know now, do you think it worked? Oh yeah. So are you more OK with what you did? Yeah, I'm feeling-- just as you felt safer, I'm feeling the same kind of grace, you see, towards me. Of course. You could also do what you think is a screw-up, and you get another chance, a different-- Yeah, right. Aw, I love you Dad. OK, I appreciate it. Dave Dickerson. Act Three, "Educated Guess." Amy Silverman is like most parents. She wants whatever's best for her kids. Except in her daughter Sophie's case, sometimes it is really hard to figure out what is best. Here's Amy. When Sophie was born, the nurses on the maternity ward all remarked on how mild her features were, that she barely looked like she had Down Syndrome. It means she'll be really high functioning, one of them said. And so for a long time, I held out secret hope that Sophie would be some kind of Down Syndrome genius. How sweet, I thought, when Sophie showed a particular interest in the kiddy doctor's kit someone gave her as a gift. OK, so not a surgeon, but maybe something else in the medical profession? My dream of Sophie being an over-achiever persisted, even as I signed her up for all the therapies I could find and wrote Down Syndrome and mentally retarded on countless school, medical, and insurance forms. Even so, I was unprepared for the following scene. In early February, I perched my butt on a tiny, navy blue plastic chair in Sophie's preschool classroom and faced her team, Team Sophie: the preschool teacher, speech pathologist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, principal, and school psychologist. The shrink was the first to talk. We've called you here today to ask you to sign some paperwork, so we can test Sophie. We don't think she qualifies as mentally retarded. You don't think she what? We don't think Sophie qualifies as mentally retarded, the psychologist repeated. We want to test her to find out. He shuffled a pile of paperwork. Immediately, I knew this had to do with money. Almost all of Sophie's services are paid for by the government. These days, that means two hours a week with a physical therapist, one each with speech, occupational, and music specialists, and more at school. I asked a question I knew the answer to, and what if she doesn't qualify anymore as mentally retarded? Then, he said, she'll lose her early intervention services. But why? Why wouldn't Sophie be retarded? He answered, early intervention services boosted her IQ. So here I was, sitting in front of Sophie's team of early intervention specialists while they were saying to me, we intervened in your retarded child's life so early and so well that she may no longer be retarded. And as a result, we may stop helping her. The whole thing was absurd. But I couldn't get the questions out of my head. What if Sophie somehow really isn't mentally retarded? What if? I started to worry. Maybe I'm not pushing her hard enough. Are my expectations too low? What if I'm underestimating my own kid? Could she have a much different and better life if I acted like there wasn't anything wrong with her, if I treated her like her sister? After a few weeks, Sophie's teacher emailed me to say the test results were in. Could we meet again? I emailed back, yes, I could meet. I couldn't wait, I had to ask. She still qualifies as mentally retarded, doesn't she, I wrote. I know you can't say. That's just my prediction. Services aside, of course, that will still make me a little sad. This whole thing has been a little like Flowers for Algernon. Did you ever read that story in school? Yes, she'd read the story. It made her really sad. And no, she told me, Sophie does not qualify as retarded. We scheduled the meeting, and the teacher sent home the test results. Sophie's IQ is 83. The cutoff for mentally retarded is 70. Sophie, the test said, was able to correctly identify the color of her shoes, pink, and her pants, black. When asked her age, she said four, almost five. The test said a lot more and concluded she had below average intelligence. That startled me. I was so used to seeing the word retarded, it had lost meaning. But how dare someone say my daughter was below average. Retarded you can't do anything about. It's genetics. But below average? Below average is like she's not trying. Or I'm not trying. I sat at the table facing Team Sophie and looked at the psychologist. Instead, the principal spoke first. We all know what will happen if Sophie isn't labeled as mentally retarded, she said. She'll lose her services, services we all believe got her where she is today. Then she floored me. And so you have a decision to make, she said. You tell us what to do. You can label Sophie as mildly mentally retarded, and she can keep her services. Otherwise, she'll lose them. You have to decide today. My jaw dropped. Then I clenched it, pushing back the tears. It's got to be one of the most bizarre moments in a parent's life, being offered the chance to insist, my kid is too retarded. I thought of a little girl I know who's one grade ahead of Sophie. Like Sophie, she's got Down Syndrome, and she's smart. She didn't test as mentally retarded either. That mom didn't hesitate. She was happy to lose the mentally retarded label. Will that little girl have a better life with no label and way fewer services? Would Sophie? This discussion was futile, and I knew it. For this moment in time, yes, Sophie is smart. She knows her ABCs. She can count to 20. She can even count to 10 in Spanish. But that's kindergarten stuff. Her vocabulary is good, but the low muscle tone associated with Down Syndrome makes her almost impossible to understand. And the occupational therapist isn't sure she'll ever be able to write. She hopes someday Sophie will be able to sign her name. In another year or two, I know she'll fall behind. The mild facial features she was born with will become more pronounced. She'll look more and more like what she is, a person with Down Syndrome. And whatever we decide today about whether or not to label her as mentally retarded, it won't change any of that. I signed the paperwork. The principal was nice enough to write on the forms that the team, including the mother, agonized over the decision. The psychologist left the room and edited the test results. The numbers stayed the same, but he added a part about how it was believed the results were inflated due to early intervention services. I bit my lip, wishing he could write something else. My husband, Ray, had a different reaction. Well, he said, that was a no-brainer. Sophie is retarded. I don't know, I said tentatively. I think she's pretty smart. You know how I know Sophie's retarded, he asked. Because when you play a memory game with her, she gets as excited about the last match when there are only two cards left as she does at the first. It's true. Last month, my mom took the girls and me to see the live Sesame Street show downtown. When the lights went down and the characters came on stage, Sophie was beside herself, squealing, shouting, about as excited as a human being can get. It was more fun to watch than Elmo. My mom, Annabelle, and I all grinned at each other. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, it hit me. I'll probably be taking Sophie to see Elmo when she's 20, and she'll be just as excited as she is today. I sat back, a little winded. I swear I'm not making this next part up. A moment later, I looked up. And there, in the dim light, I saw the silhouette of a short, squat, adult person. The features were unmistakable, the tiny nose, the flat head, the bent posture. The person disappeared down a row and into the crowd, but not before he or she had confirmed the future. Amy Silverman. She's the managing editor at the weekly paper Phoenix New Times in Arizona. Our show today was produced by Robyn Semien and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and Emily Youssef. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to Alex Kotlowitz, Julie Miller, Katie Rolnick, and Andrea Silenzi. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where this week we are starting a contest where you design our next t-shirt. Details at thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who says it was just one thing that he did not know was inevitably going to be part of running any big public radio station. Celibacy. That was the biggest thing. I didn't think about it. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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David says there are only two ways to see it. Either he succeeded in inviting the devil into a church camp in Wisconsin or he didn't. It was right around this time of year. David was 12. Back home in Sheboygan, he went to a religious school. It was pretty strict, fundamentalist. And one summer night around the campfire he and his friends started talking about all these supernatural things they had heard of. Not just ghost stories, but have you ever used a Ouija board? Do you believe in that stuff? And then stories of like, my friend-- Whatever it was, like oh, they were using a juice glass for the Ouija board, and it filled with smoke while they were doing it, you know? Just sort of scaring ourselves and-- Right, which is one of the best parts of camp. Right. And then the next thing I remember is we all went to sleep. And I woke up in the middle of the night. I don't know if I was half in a dream, or what. But I heard what I thought was something flying over the cabin, this sort of like, whoosh. And in my mind-- with all of the conversation that had gone on earlier in the evening-- I thought it was the devil, that all this talk had somehow opened up some door, like if you use a Ouija board you can bring spirits. And I knew my friend had a crucifix that he had brought with him, this sort of three inch metal crucifix. And I woke him up. And I said, can I have that crucifix? Somehow-- and I know you'll be shocked to hear this-- they all survived that night safely. And the next morning when they all went to the showers, David told the other guys about the sound that he had heard in the middle of the night. And they all laughed at him. And later that morning, coming back from sailing, he was going to the cabin to change out of his swimsuit right before lunch. And he sees this storm rolling in. And my mind was still full of these ideas of Ouija boards, and the supernatural, and the devil, and all that stuff. And first of all, I started imagining this storm as coming from the devil, this sort of rumbling off in the distance as coming from the devil. And for whatever reason, my reaction was to sort of challenge the devil, to sort of be like, OK, come on, bring it on. Come and fight me, or fight us, let's see what you got. I'm at a church camp. And I'm with God. And you're not. And all that. But I also remember saying, six, six, six, over and over again, which is just more like a curiosity thing to see what would happen, just this sort of childhood curiosity. Right, and taunt him a little. Yeah, yeah, yeah, taunting him. Well that seems to do the job, because right away it starts to pour. And not just pour this light summer drizzle. This was a torrential, Old Testament downpour, the kind where your clothes are immediately sopping wet, you're drenched instantaneously. David thought, OK, that worked. And he got back to his cabin, and changed his clothes for lunch. And he saw the guy who he had borrowed the crucifix from the night before, whose name was Joe. And I said to Joe, do you want me to wait for you to go to lunch? Because we would often walk to lunch together. We were buddies. And he said, no, just go ahead without me. And then I put my parka on. And I'm rushing to the mess hall. And just as I'm about to get to the mess hall, there is the loudest thunder that I'd ever heard in my entire life, just this humongous crack of thunder. And I didn't see anything. I don't remember seeing a flash or anything like that. But the next thing I know, one of our counselors comes running from behind, just white as a ghost. And he just says, they've been hit. They got hit. And about 50 yards behind me, lightning had struck. And six kids got struck in all. The six kids included Joe, who had told David not to wait up for him. As the ambulances arrived, David and all the other campers were ushered into the mess hall. And it took a few days before they were told exactly what happened. The chaplain made an announcement at services in front of everybody. And he gets up there, and sort of takes a deep breath. His hands are folded in front of him. And I think he names off all the names. He says, these six kids were struck by lightning. There was this boy named Rico who was killed instantly. And then he said, Joe survived-- and I just remember this pause. And I was thinking that he was going to say, but he's in a coma. And then he said, Joe survived-- until Friday. And I mean I just collapsed. I just collapsed on the ground. I think it would be impossible not to feel that-- especially at the age of 12-- not to feel that I had done something to make that happen. David still had the metal crucifix that Joe had given him the night before he had been hit by lightning. David knew what he had secretly asked the devil to do. And so while everybody at camp took the news really hard, he might have taken it the hardest. I had been told that you don't mess with spirits. You don't mess with that kind of stuff, because it's real. Spirits are real. And ghosts are real. And the devil is real. And I had very directly challenged the devil. And it resulted in somebody I was close to being killed. So David went to his counselor. And the counselor had him talk to the priest. And all the adults said kind of what you would expect. It wasn't David's fault. He shouldn't blame himself. Don't worry about it. But because this was a church camp, David had expected something very different. It was confusing, this reaction he was getting from the adults. When the adults told you, don't worry about it. It wasn't the devil. Did you feel like no, no, no. That's not what you taught me. Yeah, it's kind of like after I talked with the priest, I thought, don't you believe this, dude? I mean it's like here you are, a priest. And I'm telling you this very serious thing happened within the system that you advocate. And then you're just telling me to ignore it. It's almost like oh we'll drop this because it's convenient now. It's like it's more convenient to not believe this. So we'll just not do it right now. Let's just suspend it for this one circumstance. This one circumstance, the biggest thing that could possibly happen. Right. This stuff is only real as long as it's not taken really seriously. For a couple of years right after the lightning strike, David used to tell people what happened so he could see their reactions. He wasn't sure what to think-- if it was the devil at work or not-- and he wanted to gauge what other people thought. But after a while he stopped telling people. It's such an intense story that even with people who didn't believe in the devil, it seemed to contaminate how they saw him. It seemed to raise a question about him. And slowly, over the next few years, David stopped believing what he'd been taught. He stopped believing the devil exists, and is out there throwing lightning bolts at whoever he wants. I sort of wonder how much of me not believing that has to do with the fact that when I was a kid something happened that, if I continued to believe that the devil can work that way, would make me sort of a killer. There is no in between. It made it untenable to continue believing the devil is real. Are you afraid that some people are going to hear you describe this on the radio, and they'll think, well actually you've got it wrong, and in the way they see the world, you actually did call on the devil, and that's what killed your friend? I'm not afraid that that will happen. I know that that will happen. I know that people will hear this and think that I brought the devil down on my friend. And what do you want to say to them? I don't know. I don't know if I have anything to say to them. What can you say to somebody who blames you for a death that you don't think is your fault? Well today on our show, Life After Death, we have people on the show today in a situation that most of us never imagine we're going to be in. And in fact, the people on the program never thought that they would be in the situation they are in. You can't make a bigger mistake. You can't fix it once somebody is dead. These people are haunted by the role they played in somebody's death. And even in situations where everyone says they're blameless, where they seem blameless, they have a hard time feeling blameless. Stay with us. Act One, Guilty As Not Charged. Darin Strauss tells this story. It's a true story, though we've changed everybody's name but Darin's, out of consideration for the family of the girl in this story, who Darin calls Celine Zilke. Here's Darin Strauss. Half my life ago I killed a girl. It happened in 1988. I had just turned 18. And my friends and I were headed to shoot a few rounds of putt-putt golf. We had a week of high school left before graduation. I was driving. Far ahead, on the right shoulder, a pair of tiny bicyclists bent over their handlebars. It was a four lane highway. And my Oldsmobile was in the left lane, going south. I think I futzed with the radio. A song I liked had come on. Then one of the riders did something. I remember just that, a glitch up ahead. After a wobble or two, the bicyclist hopped into the road, maybe 30 feet ahead of me. My tires lapped up the distance that separated us. Then suddenly the bicyclist made a crisp turn into the left lane, just 10 feet ahead of my hurrying car. For a second, her dark blond hair appeared very clearly in my windshield. I remember a kind of mechanical curiosity about why this was happening and what it might mean. The next moment has been, for all my life, a kind of shadowy giant. I'm able-- tick by tick-- to lay out each second. Radio, friends, thoughts of bailing on mini-golf and heading to the beach, distance between car and bicycles closing. Anything could still happen. And then it's too late. My forearm hooks to protect my eyes. My friends shout. And I picture a cartoon of my foot disappearing under the dash, kicking down for the break, reaching farther than any leg can go. Yet the hood of my car met Celine Zilke at 40 miles an hour. Her head cracked the windshield. I remember the yellow reflector from her spokes flipping past us and over the roof. The car made it onto the grassy median. I must have done all the normal driverish things, put on the hazards, killed the engine. I must have stepped onto the grass. I just have no memory of how I got there. Celine Zilke, the girl I killed, was 16. And I knew her. She went to my school. She was an 11th grader. I can see her playing field hockey in blue gym shorts, settled in beside friends on the concrete benches of the court yard, scribbling notes in the public speaking class we took together. Celine had sat by the window. Now I walked to where Celine lay in the road. I didn't know who I'd hit, or even that we'd had a serious collision. I thought in terms of broken arms and getting in trouble with my parents. Then I reached her and noticed the peculiar stillness of her face, which transformed her. I didn't recognize her. Celine's eyes were open. But her gaze seemed to extend only an inch or so. A small imprinted purple horseshoe of blood was pressed in the space between her eyebrows. I think maybe she's hurt, my friend Dave said. This might seem an obvious or even a dense statement when you hear it now, but not if you were there. I could feel my breathing rev up, and that's all. A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment. I must have managed to ask about Celine's condition, because at some point the cops told me that she was unconscious but still alive. I remember talk of cardiac arrest, of a medevac helicopter on its way. I had the strangest feeling that everyone was responding appropriately to what must have been an emergency. But I still didn't have the feeling there was anything to freak out about. This was something that was being fixed. Police had suspended traffic on both sides of the highway. My friends made cameo appearances as standers, mullers, back rubbers. I thought, how strange that in normal life we touched each other so rarely. The most embarrassing memory of that day was when two teenage girls materialized from one of the stopped cars nearby. They were pretty and not from my school. I remember they were both in shorts and white sleeveless undershirts. One of them smelled strongly of suntan oil. Hey, she said, were you in that crash? Her voice was a mix of shyness, concern, and pure nosiness. Yeah, I said, I was. Having acknowledged my own sensuality and drama, and knowing the girls were still watching, I dropped to my knees and covered my head with my hands, fingers between the ears and temples, like a man winning the US Open. This movieishly emotional reaction acted out for girls I'd never see again is one more stomach-turning fact of that afternoon. Aw, the first girl said, coming over to me. I know it wasn't your fault. My father arrived. Someone must have called him. This was before cellphones. It was the sight of my dad that day, the sadness on his face, that made it finally real somehow. And when he hugged me I totally lost it, collapsed all at once into tears, as I never had before and haven't since. I got a call the next day, saying that Celine died in the hospital before her parents-- who had been on vacation-- got the chance to see her. The police, Celine's biking companion that day, and several cars of eye witnesses all said there was nothing I could have done. No charges were filed. A police detective, Paul Vitucci, later told the newspaper, quote, "for an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into the traffic portion of the street. And she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he"-- meaning me "--could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever." I thought, how could that be possible? I saw it all happen. It was hard to believe there was only one way this could have gone. It was hard to believe she had to die. Maybe I'd been distracted. Maybe I could have swerved away somehow. Maybe I hadn't felt the right amount of alarm just before the girl jumped into my lane. After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone knew. I remember coming down to breakfast and my parents showing me the article. And I remember thinking, that was it. There was no hiding from this. My parents, after offering quiet voiced assurances, encouraged me not to beat myself up about it. You should go to a movie, they said. And so a friend and I drove to Stand and Deliver. At the multiplex, the weirdness of my having gone out, of not being under house arrest, slowly sunk in. We traveled to another town. I didn't want to be seen trying to enjoy myself. I didn't want people to know that I was capable of having any emotion, but constant remorse. We left before the end of the movie. I spent the next few days behind a closed door, talking to no one in particular, a parrot in underpants and socks who kept asking, will I get over this? That Monday or Tuesday, I heard there was a school-wide memorial assembly. Celine's teachers, friends, and coaches giving tribute to her, the quote, "girl who's been so cruelly taken from us." I hadn't had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all. My friend Eric told me that near the end of that assembly, a teacher I barely knew and didn't very much like stood from the crowd and walked straight to the microphone. This was a surprise. He hadn't been designated to speak. Along with the sadness, he said-- taking the mic from the principal-- I know there's a lot of anger here. This teacher wasn't a hippie. He was given to wearing pullover Baja shirts to social studies class. I had laughed behind his back many times. Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these, he said. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community too. The reports tell us he wasn't at fault. And I'm sure we can agree, he's a good person. It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guy I didn't really know, who was decent enough to perform this simple act of kindness for a student he barely knew. I returned to class about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral. I hadn't heard what kids were saying about me. But I was met at the school's front door with a dirty look from one Steffi [? Gayheart ?], a friend of Celine's. What high schooler wouldn't glare hard at the driver who had killed her friend? I expected my day would be filled with these black looks. But in the classrooms and corridors there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviability, except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything's normal, quoting lines from Fletch and slapping my book bag, and calling me a dick. My friend Frank assured me that they also-- without my knowing it-- had started in on the high school equivalent of caucusing, push polling, of lobbying for votes. Come on, they'd say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds. Wasn't it kind of suspicious how she just turned into his car? Did you ever think of that? True friends, they'd say quietly, we have to be there for Darin too. We have to support him too. Steffi [? Gayheart, ?] at the end of that first day, approached my locker. I'm sorry I, she barely managed to say, I support you. She told it straight to my Keds. At the time, I was sure it was insincere. She'd been peer pressured into saying that. She definitely wasn't sorry. But now, I don't know. Maybe she meant it. It couldn't have been easy for her to talk with me, the kid who killed her friend. A few days after I'd gone back to school, Celine had her funeral. It was just my dad accompanying me. At the church entrance, I remember taking a breath, grabbing the door handle, then plunging into the crowd. This was and remains the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I couldn't help but be scared. But I was also kind of relieved to feel tears on my face, tears some part of me knew would look good. And they were real, these tears. I was afraid someone might stand up and yell at me, here in front of everyone. One old man looked at me like he wanted to kill me with his bare hands. And then I had to face Celine's parents. Some morticianal functionary shunted me into a back chamber where they were. Her father, a big man, moved toward me with a surprisingly light step. He didn't know what to do with his face. It was soft and jowly. And he wore glasses that gave him a Tom Bosley, Happy Days vibe. In the long moment before he found words, and as he took my hand, he settled on an expression of, I will be friendlier than you have any right to expect me to be. "You're Darin," he said. My voice and face behaved-- or prevailed upon to behave-- as if this were a regular meeting between cordial strangers. Celine's mother joined us. She attempted a smile, but without much success. Her body clenched as she steeled herself for an odious act. Then she hugged me quickly. And just as quickly, she pulled away. "I know it was not your fault. They all tell me it was not your fault." She was speaking as kindly as she could. And so her voice was dim. "But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well." She looked at me with exhausted eyes, "because you are living it for two people now. Can you promise me?" It didn't feel right. I was going to commit to something I had no control over, or even really understood. I nodded. I'd accepted her request without saying a word, as you would a benediction. Then I was standing before Celine's open coffin. I don't remember how I got there, who had taken me. I only remember the whispers at my back, the weight of 400 eyes on me. Celine's eyes were now closed. And she looked almost like herself again. Next I was hurrying from the coffin, past all the people who stared. As I approached the exit, my dad kept buzzing in my ear, keep your head up, just keep your head up. I hadn't realized I'd been slouching my head. I felt buoyed by a great respect for my father at that moment. And I wondered if I would ever know the things grownups know. And I lifted my head. About two weeks later, I graduated and left town. I didn't stay for summer break. College offered a sort of witness protection program. Everyone in my high school knew. No one at Tufts did. And while I was there, they never would. But I did make one important stop in town before I'd left, to Celine Zilke's parents' house. They had invited me to come by whenever at the funeral. So I thought they expected this visit. I went alone. I even imagined a cozy welcome. They would smile, maybe touch my cheek, we'd cry together. I knocked. My stomach shuttered up into my throat. No one seemed to be home. Leaning an ear to the door, I made out the clumps and risings of voices. After an extra swallow for courage, I knocked again. One man's voice became louder and more distinct, getting closer. The door opened. It was Celine Zilke's father. After seeing me, Mr. Zilke turned back toward the room. "Look who it is." He still wasn't facing me. "It's Darin." He said this as if he was proud of me for having showed, as if he had that very instant been defending me to someone. "He's here to say how sorry he is," he told the room, "to apologize." There were a few other people there in the Zilke's den, fellow grievers whom I didn't know, who didn't say a word. And I wondered, was I there to apologize? The Zilkes said they knew it wasn't my fault, hadn't they? Mr. Zilke gestured me to the couch and offered me an iced tea. "How are you?" I said stupidly. "OK," he said. "Yes. OK, you know." "Good," I said, "good," taking a long sip before I put the glass down. Then that was finished. The room got quiet. I couldn't believe how quiet, how quickly. So I shouldn't have come. The visit was a check cashed too soon. They didn't want me there. I didn't want to be there. Before long, Mr. Zilke shepherded me to the door with another, "no matter what, we would never blame you, Darin." I left there covered in a feeling of globby naivete. There was little chance, I thought, that I'd ever see them again. A month into my freshman year of college I got an official letter saying that Celine's parents were suing me for $1.5 million. It took five years of depositions and meetings before the case finally went away. Right before the trial, the Zilke family lawyer advised them to take a small amount of money-- go away money, my insurance company's lawyer called it-- that payment corporations give to a family when they know their client isn't at fault. There was-- they were told-- no case. At college, I dove into physics and psychology textbooks, where I discovered a weird solace in computation. If you're doing 45, and the girl with the bicycle cuts 10 feet in front of you, impact will take place in something like 700 milliseconds. Human perception time-- not only to see a hazard, but to designate one as such-- is generally accepted to consume some 220 milliseconds. Next, the purely neural job of stamping your foot on the brake adds roughly another 500 milliseconds. I was exculpated by 20 milliseconds. I'd be studying in the library, and tell myself I was going to take a bathroom break or something. And then I'd find myself in the stacks, making sure that my reassuring numbers were still there, still reassuring. In the first semester of my freshman year, I took a class called On Death and Dying, which was a lot of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I thought it would make me feel better. After I wrote a paper about my accident, the grad students who taught this touchy feely seminar suggested that I do research into Celine's side of things. I thought this was a terrible idea. But I was an obedient student. So I made blundering, unwanted intrusions into the lives of Celine's friends, the other bicyclist that day, a girl she played field hockey with, a lab partner, anyone whose number I could get. I learned that Celine had remade herself, becoming a born again in the months before her death, even though her family hadn't been particularly religious. And then I discovered something that changed how I felt about her death for years when I talked to her friend from the field hockey team. "I'm sorry to call like this," I'd said, floundering. "I just am taking this class. I need to find out more about, you know, her, because of the class." "Wasn't that diary thing weird?" the girl said. I felt my heart thump. "What diary thing?" "Oh," the girl said. She obviously felt that she'd overstepped. "I assumed you knew." It turned out that Celine had written in her journal right before the crash, "today I realized I am going to die." Celine's mother had told this field hockey friend about it. "Thank you," I'd said as I hung up. I may have even said it again after I put down the phone. "Thank you." Celine, I decided, had taken her own life. That's why she turned right in front of my car. That was how I got through my twenties and even my early thirties, believing with full certainty that she'd committed suicide, that I was no more responsible for the accident than the bullet that comes out of the gun's chamber. I wouldn't let myself think what now seems obvious, that when she wrote, "today I realized that I'm going to die," she may have just meant, today I realized I will die someday. Before the accident, I wasn't so introspective. I'd had nothing to be introspective about. And I never had anything that I hid from the world. But now I did. For years, I told pretty much no one, which seemed the only way to treat a thing I was so uncomfortable with. I didn't tell any friends. I thought it would taint how they saw me. I thought they wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? Even I didn't want to. When I went on dates, I'd be talking-- just getting to know you stuff-- and I'd wonder, when do I tell her? The few times I did tell women, it was only after I had known them a while. Even then, I hated the reaction it got. It made them feel tender. They hugged me. I felt gross for having told them, like I was using the accident to score points. Though one time-- in my earlyish twenties-- I ended up on a first date at the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer. There is a pivotal scene, where a teenager hits somebody with his car. I just couldn't watch anymore. I told my date, "we have to get out of here." This was like 20 minutes in. She didn't want to leave. And when we got outside, I told her everything. Her response surprised me. She got angry at me. "It's really selfish of you to feel bad for yourself," she said. "Don't you ever think of her?" I didn't know what to say. Of course I thought of Celine. "Yes," she said. "But do you think about her enough? How can you go on living with that?" I excused myself. And I left for the subway without walking her home. A little later, she called me to apologize. She said she'd often thought of committing suicide in high school by swerving into oncoming cars. All right, I'd said. Celine's father making up goofy songs just for her when she was a baby. Celine crying after she tripped stealing third base in little league. Celine on crunching roller skates, hurrying away from the neighbor's dog. I try to imagine her before the accident. And sometimes I try to imagine the life she would have gone on to live had it never happened. Maybe this was my way of pretending she hadn't died that day. As I got into my twenties and thirties, Celine stayed with me. I thought of her, of course, any time I drove by a bicyclist, which happens a lot more often than you'd think. I know that's not something most people even register. As I got older, she'd show up with me on job interviews. Would the prospective employer find out what I'd done? Was this an ambitious enough job for two lives? Because I'd absorbed Celine's mother's request, I had to live well enough and successfully enough for two. I thought of her at my wedding, and when my wife got pregnant. Now I'm twice as old as I was when the accident happened. And I don't know when I changed. There was no single moment. But somehow I've grown into a different way of seeing it all. Because I was alive in a certain place, Celine Zilke isn't anymore. That's all this was, a highway mathematical error. In the US there are over 40,000 traffic deaths a year. But it was me, and it was Celine. She was someone that I happened to, someone who happened to me. The police told me if I'd swerved the car differently, I might have flipped it. If that had happened-- if I had died and Celine had lived-- I think I'd like her not to remember, not to have at 18, at 23, even at 35 years old to contend with a stranger there at all her intimate moments. And I'd like her to be spared the feeling she'd traveled for two decades with a ghost. I'd be OK if she forgot me, though I can't forget her. Darin Strauss. He is the author most recently of the novel More Than It Hurts You. A reporter for Washingtonian Magazine a few years ago interviewed lots of drivers who had been in accidents and killed people. It wasn't their fault. And this article quotes a psychologist named Ed Hickling, who wrote a book about overcoming the trauma of a car accident. And he says that drivers who have done nothing wrong in an accident are actually at greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder about the accident than people who were really at fault for an accident. Quote, "someone who falls asleep at the wheel knows what they can do to prevent future accidents. Innocent drivers," Hickling says, "realize they're at the mercy of the universe." Coming up, one positive side to being incarcerated, it is a lot easier to sleep at night. 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, Life After Death. We have stories of people who are unable to stop thinking about things that they have done that may have resulted in somebody else's death. We have arrived at Act Two of our show, Soldier of Misfortune. You may have heard stories about veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then committing acts of violence here at home, sometimes against wives and other family members. There was a big New York Times series about this, which found 121 cases of vets who killed someone once they came home from those wars. But we don't often hear about this from the vet's perspective. Chris Neary talked with an Iraq war vet who has attacked people close to him. This is somebody who did three tours of duty in the Mideast in the build up and early part of the Iraq War. Here's Chris Neary. I met John in the fall of 2007. I had been hanging around the VA Hospital in Chicago, working on a story about veterans with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. John stood out. He was really well-liked at the hospital, comfortable with the other vets and the staff. He was interested in me too. He wanted to get a job in radio some day. And so, after talking to him at the hospital, we agreed to meet at his apartment for another interview. I wasn't really sure what I was after. He seemed like the kind of guy who could help me understand something about how war affects you. I met him at his apartment the day after Thanksgiving. There was an unopened package of dinner rolls and a brand new baking pan and baster that clearly hadn't been used. His apartment smelled stale. There were VA papers everywhere. He said he'd been waiting all day for me. But when I got there, he suddenly got embarrassed, and started hurriedly cleaning up his apartment. I was surprised how different he seemed from the guy I'd met at the VA. John said I shouldn't be. We have two faces. There's two faces to everybody that has been in a war. You have a face that wants to get help, an optimistic face. And then you have like the real face. And at the hospital they're like, everybody's doing well. And everybody's cool. And I'm like you really don't know that Roger can't get on the elevator with anybody. I used to not even go into stores to get food. I would pay drug addicts to go in there and get me food, because I didn't even want to go in the store. That's the stuff that really happens, what people are really acting like. I haven't left the house since like Tuesday. John and I talked about a lot of things, his family, high school, the service. Iraq, it turned out, was just one of the many traumas John had suffered during his life. He had been abused and molested as a kid, kicked around foster families. But when he was five he was basically rescued. He got adopted into a big family that was known around the neighborhood as the Huxtables. And he settled into an uneventful and happy childhood and adolescence. He had a girlfriend and a best friend, got good grades. He went to church, and played drums in his high school's marching band. If you knew him then, he says, you would probably have called him a band geek. We would all meet up in the band room. And basically we would just talk about the dullness that we all had. Most of the time, just we went over the sheet music. I'm trying to think of something, like maybe somebody stuck something in a tuba, or something. But there is really not much. John's adopted father, sister, and brother joined the military. And after high school, so did John. This was 1999. He deployed to Kuwait in early 2002. He saw heavy fighting in Iraq. And then when he got out of the military in 2005, he moved to Louisiana. He closed on a house in Gulfport, Mississippi, a month before Hurricane Katrina hit. He lost everything, his car, his home. That was sort of a final blow to his stability. He made his way back to Chicago with the last of his money. And now here he was, alone on Thanksgiving weekend, afraid to leave his messy apartment, with me. It's a bleak picture. But compared to some of the other vets at the VA with PTSD, he was doing OK. He'd been getting treatment at the VA for five months. And the people who he'd met there were optimistic about his future. He had a girlfriend. And they had a young daughter. And he'd even been venturing outside occasionally, like when he took a trip with his girlfriend to downtown Chicago. It was like I'd went to Disney World. And all I did was walk down State Street and down Michigan. Got a couple ice cream cones, piece of pizza. And it was like Disney World, because I hadn't been outside in so long. And my girl thinks that I think she's ugly or something, because I don't want to go outside. She thinks-- My girl is beautiful. I mean, for real. She could be like a model or something. And if you don't take a girl out-- a pretty girl like that-- she's like, what's going on? After our conversation, we made plans to talk again. There was more I wanted to find out. And John seemed like he enjoyed the company. We went back and forth, and finally set up a plan to meet at the VA. But when I got there, he stood me up. A couple weeks later, I got an email from his therapist at the VA, a guy named Dr. John Mundt. There had been a very ugly development, the email read. But Dr. Mundt couldn't tell me any more, because, he said, it was a criminal matter. That was in January of 2008. It took six months for Dr. Mundt to get the OK from John's lawyer to talk with me about what had happened. But finally he told me what little he knew. He said that John had been over at his girlfriend's grandmother's house. Things became heated between John and his girlfriend, Dominique. They had an argument. And at some point, he brought out this knife that he carried. And I think she asked her grandmother to take the kids out of the room. But the grandmother wanted to intervene, and wanted to stop John from hurting her granddaughter. So at that point, I think John was cutting Dominique. She was hurt. She was cut pretty badly. And John then went into the kitchen, and lay down on the floor and started crying. That I distinctly remember her telling me. I mean he had cut her a number of times, and cut the grandmother. Dominique didn't want to talk with me for this story. But the police crime report runs almost 20 pages, using interviews with Dominique, Dominique's grandmother, two witnesses, and observations of several different arresting officers to reconstruct the events of the night. According to the report, John, Dominique, and their one and a half year old daughter had been eating dinner with Dominique's three year old son from another father and Dominique's grandmother. They had all been getting along. Then around 7:00 PM, John and Dominique started arguing about bus schedules. The argument escalated to the point of violence fairly quickly. John ran into the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife, screaming, "I'm going to kill your ass." Dominique's grandmother calmed him down for a while, but then he erupted again. From the police report, quote, "John grabbed Dominique by the hair. John dragged Dominique down to the kitchen floor. John then began slamming her head into the kitchen floor repeatedly." Later, he threw Dominique's three year old son across the apartment onto a couch. He grabbed Dominique around the neck, and tried to choke her. He slashed the knife down on Dominique's hand, and then grabbed her, and held the knife to her neck. He then let her go, sat down next to the refrigerator, and begin to cut himself on the chest. That's when the police arrived. He told them, see I don't care. It doesn't hurt. Later he told the police he wished they'd shot him. It's hard to reconcile the person depicted in this police report with the person I met at the VA. I couldn't imagine this shy, friendly guy hurting anyone, let alone an elderly woman, a three year old, and his own fiancee. And I was very surprised when I'd heard the news that he'd done it. But no one else was, not Dr Mundt, John's therapist, and not John himself. I know that I was capable of it. In no way was I like, no, not me. Anytime I go outside, especially around people that I like, I try to limit the time. That's most of the time why I'm so paranoid, to keep them safe. And I've got to keep them safe from me. My producer Alex Blumberg and I visited John in jail outside Chicago. And it turns out he had a less clear idea than Dr. Mundt does about what happened that night. In fact, he says he can't really remember it at all. He's been here for seven months, during which time he hasn't been allowed to talk to Dominique. He remembers going to Dominique's grandmother's house. He remembers drinking a glass of brandy. He remembers talking to her about cleaning the bathroom. And then-- I remember waking up in here. Still bleeding. I got stitched up some. And I'm like, who cut me? They're like, well you did. When you learned what happened-- when you woke up and people told you what happened-- do you remember what your first thought was or your first emotion? Was it like-- My first thought was that I killed my daughter. I thought I killed my daughter. That was my first thought. When I go to sleep at night, I see little pieces coming back. I can see myself cutting myself. I haven't been able to see cutting Dominique. I try to concentrate on it. I don't know if it's because I don't want to remember. I used to think people would be like, oh man, I can't remember this stuff. What happened? And I'd be like, bull [BLEEP], you remember what happened. And now I know how that feels. But it's scary. To be unsure about what happened. I could have done anything. It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that he doesn't remember, because I really believe he dissociated. John's therapist, Dr. Mundt, says he has seen this happen many times. He's even seen it happen to John. John was sleeping at the VA when another vet startled him. He flew into a rage, threatened the other vet, but suddenly stopped. Mundt says it was like he shook himself awake. He seemed confused and took off running. Mundt says John and his other patients have experienced intense feelings of war, and that all they need is a taste of those feelings in civilian life to make them believe they are in a life and death situation. This break in perception is what Mundt and other therapists call a disassociative state. And unfortunately, situations where really, really strong feelings are involved. Even if all that was happening was that Dominique was maybe yelling at him or that an argument was escalating, where, in other words, she wasn't necessarily threatening him or a risk to him, he could feel it that way. If those emotions take over, it really can kick somebody into this other gear, where they dissociate. And then people can do all kinds of things that they're not going to really recall afterwards. I talked with John in the psych ward of the county jail for almost three hours. And it became clear to me how much I'd missed the first time I had talked with him, the full extent of what he described as the two faces. John had started getting violent almost a year before I met him at the VA. And when I visited him at his apartment in November, his habit of flying unprovoked into a rage was well established. One of my brothers-- my doctor brother-- we were playing Monopoly. And we were playing craps. It was with Monopoly money. Just something to pass the time until everyone got ready to play Monopoly. And he cheated me. But it's Monopoly money. That's what I say now. But once I was like, man, you cheated me, I got angry. And then I really got angry, trying to hurt my brother over some Monopoly money. Like what? Like you got into a fight? You were hitting him? Right, right, right. And most military people or veterans, we don't fight like regular people fight. We don't throw fists. It's not like a boxing match. It's like, eye gouging, putting you down on the ground, make them not be there anymore. So most of the time when I did get into a physical altercation, people thought that I was trying to kill them. And most of the time that's what it was. John had put his cousin in the hospital. He'd broken his little sister's arm. Friends, people on the street, car salesmen, he overreacted all the time. He got fired at his last job as a hotel security guard for being too aggressive with the guests. Gradually he alienated his friends and family, to the extent that when I finally met him he was almost completely alone in the city where he'd grown up. You could divide the trauma of war into two categories, the bad things that are done to you-- being shot at, gassed, ambushed-- and the bad things you do to other people. A lot of us, I think, assume that for most veterans, what sticks with them is the first category of trauma. They come back edgier, more skittish, and always afraid for their own safety. And that's true for John. But the way he's living now is just as driven by that second category of trauma, living with the consequences of what he's done. He feels guilty. And that guilt gets turned into violence. In Iraq, John fired 60 millimeter mortar rounds, which would destroy houses and buildings. It's not like you see some big Arnold Schwarzenegger built guys out there with rippling muscles, and they're coming at you with all these weapons. You see guys with some Michael Jordan gym shoes on, with the same kind of Calvin Klein shirts you got. And some of the little kids that are about 10, 11, 12 years old, these kids could be your kids. So I felt sorry. And then you'd see these little kids dead. Why-- people like me-- long distance-- blowing up a house. Then you come and see it's smoldering up. And you've got a pregnant lady there. She is dead, but the baby is still alive. And she's cooking. At first I thought that I deserved this-- not being in jail, but being tormented at night when I go to sleep. You got to pay for everything. Everything doesn't go unpunished. It would be simpler, he says, if instead of just leaving him to stew over what he did in the war, someone would just cut off his finger, give him a real punishment. Because of his guilt, John doesn't like to talk about what he did in Iraq, not with me, not with his therapist, and definitely not with strangers who find out he was in combat and ask if he killed anyone over there. That's the first thing everybody asks. If you're artillery man, what do you think? But if you know anyone that has actually hurt someone, they're not proud. That's not something that you talk about with someone. I'm not going to go up to a girl that got raped, and be like, you been raped lately? Because it's the same thing. That's how it feels. I've been raped before. That brings on the same kind of feeling. Was that when you were a kid? Right, when I was a kid. It's weird. I think that most people wouldn't make that connection, being raped and killing somebody or hurting somebody as like the same-- How do you think they are related? What's different and what's similar? The similarities are I regret both. Both were out of my power. I had no control. It's the same thing, because we don't have any control about what we do. We just do what we're told to do. And you can't forget. I have dreams that repeat over and over. I have a dream where my fiancee is sitting in a chair with her back to me, like one of those little wooden chairs. And she's like in a factory or some room. And there's an Iraqi that cuts her throat. When I go to try to save her, to try to go get him, he disappears. And I have another dream where I'm mutilating my little baby, taking her by the legs, and just smashing her against the wall, or tables, or stuff. Yep, every night. Can I ask what you're thinking about now? Same dreams. They seem real. Dr. Mundt says John is still a good candidate for rehabilitation, even after all this. The fact that he's so verbal is a big thing. He can describe what happened to him in Iraq, and talk about his guilty feelings, which means he's treatable. And he still wants the life he was heading towards back in high school, the life he would have had if he hadn't gone to war. John's lawyer is working to reach a pre-trial agreement, where John would be released from jail and put into a program that is sort of like an intense probation, where he would have to stay on his medication and stay away from alcohol. But John is nervous about that. When he was on the outside, he was paranoid. Every stranger he saw on the street, every sound he heard at night was a potential threat, someone coming to get him. He would notice people on the street and start running. I haven't slept this good since I came home, being in here. I know it sounds strange. But I can sleep. I'm locked in a room by myself, and nobody can get in. I don't feel threatened. I don't have to hear the water dripping in the faucet, or the toilet running, or the birds outside on the trees, and people outside, cars and all that. I just don't hear it. Because it starts to hurt up in your stomach, and in your back, and in your neck, because you're trying to listen all day. I'm getting nervous just thinking about going outside. I'll be getting out of here in a couple weeks. And I can feel it coming back. Just nervous. I feel a little normal while I'm in here. John says jail is a good place to practice being normal, to practice having normal conversations, where you don't talk about much. In jail, John says, he'll yell at people, and then actually go back and apologize. He says it's the first time in a long time he's talked to anyone who doesn't have a white jacket or a Ph.D. John says he's not sure what he'll say to Dominique once he's released, or how he'll explain what's happened. He says he wants to apologize, and see if she'll have him back. Chris Neary in Chicago. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free-- absolutely free-- podcasts, and where there is still time to enter our t-shirt design contest. Details and rules-- and there is a cash prize-- at 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 is sure that the devil, himself, is regularly listening to public radio. And of course, though the devil has lots of money, he never pledges. For whatever reason, my reaction was to sort of challenge the devil. Come on, bring it on. I'm Ira Glass. We'll be 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. Today our program comes to you from a club on Chicago's North Side, The Lunar Cabaret. And we're here to conduct a little radio experiment. Over the last two weeks here in Chicago, we have advertised, we have asked for people to come in here today with letters, letters they've found, letters they've been sent, letters they have sent. And what we're going to do is conduct an open mic session. Basically, let people come up and read their letters. And we've asked people to change the names in the letters to protect both the innocent and the guilty. Otherwise, the ground rule is, these letters are real. I'll be co-hosting today's show with playwright David Hauptschein. And it's David who actually created the idea of the letter show. He's done this several times around Chicago, invited people to bring in their letters and read them on stage. He's also done a diary show, where people have read from their diaries, and a true stories show, where people come up on stage, and just tell true stories. David, thank you for agreeing to try this on the radio. Well, thank you, Ira, for having me. All right. So how do we begin this? What are the rules? What do people need to know? There are a few basic rules. You see this egg timer here? My grandmother made soft-boiled eggs for me when I was eight years old using this egg timer. This egg timer will get you off the stage after five minutes. When you hear [DING] that, you must stop. If you're really nervous, I usually bring a pillow for people to rest their heads on, but tonight I have this little elephant for people to hold in case they're really-- He's holding up a-- It's a rhino. Sorry, sorry, sorry. You're holding up a six inch long, gray rhinoceros. And I will leave this up here on the podium. So if anyone gets really tense-- which is fine, you're allowed to be nervous-- just hang on to this. I hold in my hand a bowl, a silver bowl, full of pieces of paper on which members of our audience here have written their names. Please pick the first name, Ira. John Biederman. come on up. It's always a very strange and powerful thing to be first. OK, I'll read you a couple of things from Carolyn. Down the side of this, has listed a few band names, White Snake, Judas Priest, Ozzy, Led Zepplin, Motley Crue, Accept, Iron Maiden, Black Rose, Giuffria. Whatever the hell-- Hiya hon', what are you up to? I'm listening to Motley Crue, "Shout at the Devil." That's a pretty kick-ass tape. It's Joe's, but it's still a kick-ass tape. And Vince Neil is such a fox. I'd love to go backstage at a Crue concert. I'd be in total heaven, because I know what I'd do. And I'll bet you do too. Like my green marker? I think it's cool. Explain this to me. Something fishy is going on. What? I don't know. But you're acting fishy. So don't lie. And it's nothing I did. I don't act any different than before we did it. Are you trying to say that I'm acting different, or I'm slightly more insane than usual? Is that what you mean, I'm acting differently? If that's what you mean, how? I just heard Judas Priest, Dokken, and Dio. That's pretty kick-ass. Why did Chris ask for me today? And why did you guys hang up on me? That's pretty ignorant, not to mention, immature and rude. I'm listening to Motley Crue, "Bastard" again. So they are so cool. I haven't decided if I like Crue or Maiden better yet, but they're both totally kick-ass. Know what mine and Tracy's new word is? [BLEEP]. That's right. For the last two days, we've been calling every one [BLEEP]. Nice name, eh? Not as good as [BLEEP] or [BLEEP], but it's right up there. God is this note [BLEEP] dumb. It's 7:38. And I want it to be 8:38, because then I can listen to RPM, Real Precious Metal, 103.1, 831-1031-- kick-ass. "Helter Skelter," you ain't maybe a lover, but you ain't no dancer, helter skelter. Thank you very much. What happened to the NPR crowd? That's more of a college rock station there. Yeah. OK, Ira. Next reader Neal Pollack. Coming from all the way in the back, approaching the stage. Hi. I wrote-- can I hold this? Please do. Neil is holding the rhinoceros. I wrote these letters soon after I graduated from college. And I like to turn back to them, every now and then, to remind myself what an idiot I was. I believed at the time that I could get any job I wanted, anywhere, at any point. And these letters, I think, are indicative. Here's one I wrote to Tina Brown, who was then the editor of Vanity Fair magazine. Dear Ms. Brown, I'll cut to the quick. I would like to work for The New Yorker. And I imagine with the big change-over, you may need lots of editorial help. So I'm throwing my hat into the ring, and asking you to consider hiring me as an editorial assistant for your new project. I've been precociously reading The New Yorker for some time now. And I am a devotee of the current magazine, as well as of its historical heritage. Most of the writers I respect most, living and dead, have written for your magazine at some time. I'm willing to cut my journalistic and literary teeth elsewhere, if can't get a job at The New Yorker, but I'm determined not to end up anywhere else. The resume I've enclosed doesn't indicate this, but I've been working as a freelance writer since graduating two months ago. I've been doing pretty well, but I'm still waiting for the big score. Maybe you could help. I strongly encourage you to take a chance on me, but if I don't suit your needs at this time, thank you for reviewing my application. I look forward to hearing from you. About six months later, I hadn't yet heard from Tina Brown so I turned my gaze elsewhere. Here's one I wrote to Strobe Talbott, who, at the time, was an editor-at-large at Time magazine, and now, as you may or may not know, is a Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration. So here's what I wrote to Strobe. Dear Mr. Talbott, I'm a damn good editor. I'm young and gutsy, as a marine in combat. My terse, tough prose style would make Raymond Chandler weep. Somewhere, somehow, the grapevine told me that you're starting a magazine called, Globe Review. Said vine also let me know that the staff will be small, which means you're not hiring too many people. Being low man on the totem pole is fine with me. Your magazine sounds original, smart, and progressive, sophisticated but not shallow. Of course, I'm just guessing. Can you go global without me? I think so. Should you? I think not. Or at least hope not. I'll do good work as an assistant editor, copy editor, or researcher. I'll be in New York City from November 11 through 17. If you'd like to interview me, you can contact me at the Chicago address on my resume until then. Thank you for reviewing my application. And I look forward to seeing the magazine, whether I am part of it or not. Thank you. Ready for another one? Joseph Silovsky. I collect letters. These first three are ones that I found in a dumpster on Roosevelt Street. First one's July 6, 1982. Dear friends and well wishers, due to the circumstances beyond our control, the wedding which was scheduled for July 24, 1982 has been canceled. Sorry if this has inconvenienced you in the way. Respectfully, D and R. The second is from the City of Chicago Department of Police. Dear Mr. R., since the registration of your complaint, investigation has been made concerning possible misconduct by a member of our department. A complete record of the complaint and investigation is now part of our file and will be used in planning, training, and updating equipment in our continuing effort to better provide service and protection to the public. We share your concern relative to the conduct of our members and appreciate your bringing this matter to our attention. Although evidence in this case failed to justify the taking of disciplinary action against the accused member, the department as a whole has benefited by having taken a closer look at the performance of our member. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter. The third is a letter that has his apartment number written on the back, so it was obviously just dropped off at the building. Oh, it's 9/15/1984. Hey R., thank you very much for being there when I needed you last night. Rejection must be your number one priority. You have done it once more again. You told me to give my mother her keys back and come to your place a few weeks ago. And I told you, when I was ready to move in, I would. And I would let you know. I wasn't asking to move in. I was asking for a place to stay for the night. I spent last weekend down there. But this weekend and I'm not qualified. If you don't want me in your apartment anymore, then you should say so. I understand our situation, but I do have props. I am the first lady you've dealt with to become Mrs. R., therefore, I am special in your life. You may not want to admit it, but it's true. It's obvious that you are seeing somebody else, in which you are entitled. But I should have top priority. Nevertheless, I hope you and your lady that's expecting your child to be very happy. Don't worry about me and my pregnancy. I'll be just fine. I don't want to come in between anyone's happy affair. You must have let our secret out about the divorce to her, in order for you to be so comfortable to have sex with her. I thought we agreed years ago that we would remain sex partners, if nothing else. However it be, I hope your wish comes true. You are totally responsible for my unhappiness, depression, and confused state of mind that I am in. You are always doing the same thing over, and over, and over. Will you ever change? For someone to have been in love-- and still is, per you-- you sure treat the party you're supposed to be in love with cruel. As often as I've been through the same ordeal with you, I don't know why I continue to allow myself to be hurt by you. I am often hurt by the things you say to me, and your actions or ways towards me. You are my life, friend, enemy, joy, sorrow, husband, lover, and that has been taken away from me. I have not got over the shocking news of us being divorced. Being with someone for nine years is not easy to brush under the rug. You try telling yourself that it's over, and it doesn't work. I am trying to be friends with you if nothing else. And it goes on and on about that for a while. And then the end is-- I love you now and always will. You will be number one in my life, whether we're together or not. If ever you need me, just send for me, and I'm just a phone call away. Love, D. PS, inform me if you have a boy, a girl, or twins, and I will do the same. You're listening to a special edition of This American Life. We're coming to you from a theater in Chicago, a very small, intimate theater where people have come with real letters they've received, letters they've sent, letters they've found to read on stage. Our next reader, pulled from our bowl of readers. Katherine Corcoran, come on up. If you have, and return winning prize claim number, we'll say, Lucy Corcoran, you've cleared the final hurdle. You're Illinois' top winner, guaranteed a full $11 million. Your earlier entry has been received and is being processed. And now, you've been issued a specially coded, prize category tag. Break open your security pouch, Lucy Corcoran. Say for our radio listeners. Oh, I broke open the security pouch. You're breaking open the pouch right now. Silvery pouch. Yes. It was affixed to the letter. I saved it just for this moment. This extra entry is guaranteed to make you one of Illinois' top prize winners of all time, with up to $11 million, if you have and return the winning prize claim number before August 9. If your tag is specially coded with the letter A-- It is. You're holding it up. --it's coded with the letter A, you'll really want to hurry, Lucy Corcoran, because you stand to win $1 million, $75,000, or an unbelievable $11 million fortune. Here's another reason to act quickly. Over 8,000 winners from across the Prairie State have already claimed and been awarded their prizes, including Sparky Weiner of Chicago, Sparky Lawrence of Justice, Sparky Bailey of Chicago, and, category A winner, Sparky Peterson of Chicago. But time is running out, Lucy Corcoran. The exact prize you qualify for is hidden beneath the silver box on your prize category tag. So if you haven't yet scratched it off, we urge you to grab a lucky coin. I don't have one. I'm scratching it off. Oh no. I'm going to wish I had one. And do it now. And do so, now. If you uncover the code word, 11 mil-- and I did-- and your prize claim number is also the winner, we'll say, Lucy Corcoran is officially declared the biggest winner in Illinois history, and will be paid our first ever $11 million prize. You're second to none, Lucy Corcoran, in a league of your own with gigantic $366,666 prize checks pouring in, every year for 30 years, if you win. In the blink of an eye, you'd be magically transformed into a fabulously rich multimillionaire, free from money worries ever more. Would you stay in Chicago, or custom build your dream home in another part of Illinois? Would you embark on a cruise around the world, or crisscross the country in a fully loaded motor home? It may sound like a dream to you now, but it will be your dream to bring to life if you have and return the winning prize number. So hold on to your dream, Lucy Corcoran, but don't hold on to this entry. Remember, you must reply before August 9 to advance to the winner selection step. Please, don't let anything stand in your way. Hurry. And then it's cordially signed by-- oh, there's more, but-- cordially signed by, Ed McMahon, or Ed "Sparky" Jones, and Sparky Clark for American Family Publishers. Thank you. I'd go with the motor home, myself. Definitely, that's my dream. Our next reader, Adam Davidson. This is age 16. Dear Adam, I can lose my guard best when I write. No wonder I scared off S with my letters. Speaking of which, I didn't hear from him. You see, how can I ever think of hurting you like that? Let's say something starts between us. What about S? I may not like him, but maybe I do. Also, what if I'm just on the rebound from Dave? Not that I didn't like you before. Maybe I'm just free to say it now. But I might be exaggerating it, because I'm feeling a loss. Maybe we're confusing a really good friendship for love, et cetera. You know the deal. Also, let's say we do have sex. It'll be a bigger deal for you. Not that I won't take it seriously. I have seriously thought about it. But it's a big responsibility to put on me, your first time, et cetera. Now who's babbling? Anyway, I think you're a wonderful person and friend, and the last thing I want to do is screw that up. Maybe we should just see, trial run, if making out agrees with us. You never know, we might decide it doesn't feel right and keep things status quo. Or we might end up getting it on every day. Excuse the vulgar language. As that guy in English class would say, there is no pretty way to look at sex. Anyway, I love you, but I'm not sure what kind of love. Love, K. Geez, I don't even know what attracts me to you. You're so [BLEEP] perfect, I guess. And then, supplementary letter. Will things be the same once the sexual tension is gone? I think that's half the fun. It's what has kept Moonlighting on the air. Will we still be able to joke about getting married, et cetera, without feeling uncomfortable? Confusion. Is there an S in confusion? I'm even mixed up about that. We went out after that for a year. Jeff Dorchen. I read this letter a little while ago, and I might have trouble reading it, because the handwriting is weird. It's from a friend of mine. He wrote to me, this was like seven or eight years ago. Well, no. When was the Gulf War? Five years ago. It was during the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, Bush's Gulf War. It was a guy I met in Morocco. And he was in the '68 student revolt in France, in Paris, actually, in Saint-Etienne. And the stationary is from the Hotel Adriatico, where he actually wasn't staying when he wrote the letter. He stole the paper. Dear Jeff, it's a joke. Today I went to the concert against the war. Many people-- thanks to Bush, Hussein, Mitterrand, and so-- all the old chaps went out from their quiet routines, and we met again, speaking and debating like in the '70s. Hee hee. Many young people here, many people here know, as a fact, that the voice of the TV is a weapon against their liberty of thinking. Since the war is the central point of the universal propaganda, the great lie of democracy is becoming obvious. Liberty is slavery. Democracy is dictative. Left is right. Everything is true as well as its contrary. Anyway, I have bought a house, an old one in a medieval village in the mountains, at five kilometers from the city. Many things to repair. So I am a dirty owner, one to be hung. I enjoy very much to make up the arrangements of a house without referring to anyone. My new address [MUMBLING]. I do not know if I shall go to the US soon, maybe so, maybe not. Did you receive my postcard from Morocco? The page is over. Ciao, Paul. Before I choose another one, I'll read you one sentence of another letter. This is a letter that a friend of mine was given. Basically, she started to see this guy. They went out on a date or two, and nothing much was happening. And then he showed her this letter. It's one of those Christmas letters of what's going on in your life. And she only had to read a sentence or two, and decided she would never see him again. The letter begins, ho, ho, ho, these are the words I now use to describe my ex-wife. Next reader, Jenny Magnus. All right, this is a letter that I received. It's addressed to me, so my name is Jenny Magnus. And on the envelope it says, lessons for advanced beginners. And then in the back, it says, burn after reading. Dear Ms. Magnus, I can imagine how easy it must be to discover what art is all about, and then use your facile capacity to steal symbols, ideas, quotes, et cetera and combine them in an enigmatic collage-type structure, making your work seem abstruse when, in fact, it is very conventional indeed. Holstein Park. I almost fell off my chair when, during one of your pieces, you imply that you are, quote "a really good artist." After sitting there, listening to you chant, mama, mama, mama, mama, mama, which you got from Janov's book, Primal Scream-- I shop through paperbacks at thrift stores too-- then hearing you chant, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, I sat there wondering just how conventional some pretentious chick dressed in black can be. I, by the way, use chick lightly, since you are not very feminine. In fact, you are nothing but a contrived, self deceiving, selfish, not overly bright, mediocre joke. You might be able to fool the poseurs who hang around Urbis Orbis flattering your brother, pretending to know, but not me, babe. Not me, babe. I use babe, lightly. You are not a babe. You have no sensuality, no charm, no looks, et cetera. Without affectation, without deliberately taking steps to appear avant, where would you be? Nothing comes naturally to you, does it? You really have to steal, and grub, and labor. In fact, you are perusing this letter for material right now, I bet. I realized how repressed and affected you are during Losers Alias. And thank God for the fire which started, or you'd probably still be on the floor reciting your brother tripe. You are just too, too uptight, baby. You think you can act uninhibited. But why do you want to? Is it that important to you that you seem to yourself and others as if you are special? You are quite interesting. The only person with absolutely no substance I've ever met. How did you get so [BLEEP]? Give up art-- you're no good at it anyway-- and save your [BLEEP] ass. Sincerely, Mason 32 degrees. PS. Well, I've done my good deed for tonight. Jenny, clearly that person has profound hots for you. And it's somebody who was really turned on, no question about it. Coming up, more letters from everyday people in a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Most weeks on our program, we bring you stories by writers and documentary producers. But this week we're trying a little radio experiment. Playwright David Hauptschein and I have advertised, inviting people to a very intimate theater in Chicago called the Lunar Cabaret, maybe 85 or 90 people in here. And we've invited them to bring letters-- ones they have gotten, ones they have sent, ones they have found-- to read on stage. And our next reader. Joe Fosco, coming up here to read email. This is email. This guy, this is kind of a stream of consciousness thing. He's writing it from school. He's in the computer lab. And the only thing I want to mention, he keeps referring to the cluster. And that's what he's referring to, the computer lab with all the things around. You'll find out what he's upset about at the end. I'm going to start in the middle. There is this guy sitting across the row of computers from me that has his left ear pierced many, many times. I'm trying to count. There are at least five metal rings going through his ear. I'm trying not to be too obvious looking at him. Yeah, it looks like five or six, at least, all up and down his ear. You do see some interesting ones in these clusters, that's for sure. Then there is this one guy, Sparky. I don't think I have ever been in this cluster, and he wasn't here or didn't stop in for a minute. Same thing for this other girl, KGB Slut, as we call her. She's always here too. Shooter is here most of the times I am too. OK, some girl just came in who was wearing what, essentially, looks to me like a rug or a piece of carpet with some holes cut in it. She's gone now. Who else is always in this cluster? Hm, I just realized, I probably shouldn't talk about KGB Slut girl, since she'll probably see this sooner or later, or something. Ah, who cares. What's she going to do, get the geek patrol after me or something? Oh yeah, the other day I was in here, and she had the audacity to talk about my Ronald Reagan screensaver. Yeah, it definitely looks like a rug, a Mexican or southwestern type, by its colors, I guess. And it's got little rug-string things at its edges. It does kind of have a collar. Just a few short minutes ago, I walked over to the faculty dining room in Skibo. There was a physics department barbecue that was supposed to be going on. I wasn't sure if I should go. I mean, it's free food, and that can be hard to pass up. Plus, if it's a real barbecue, it'll be free beef, real food, for real people, what's for dinner, my favorite food. I was extremely disheartened by what I saw, by what these people call a barbecue. Here is my image of what a barbecue is. A bunch of people outside, standing or sitting around, beers in hand, talking informally with one another. The sizzle of meat on the grill, and the sweet smell of cooking beef fill the air, and everyone is happy and jolly, and life seems so much easier. The barbecue is sort of a tonic for the [? dour ?] of everyday life, a reminder of a sort of greater purpose than 40 hours of work a week. And yet, barbecue is not just a reminder of that purpose, but, in many ways, is that purpose. For barbecue is one of the great binding elements of the universe. That sort of metaphysical playdough that maybe can be shaped and molded but not defined. And seeing where I come from, you can understand my shock and horror at what I saw being called a barbecue this evening in the faculty dining room. Oh, I did not stay for long, no. In the scant few seconds that I did venture into this room, what I did see scared me mightily. And I did not care to see more. So this information I bring you now is likely not even complete, not a full accounting of the barbecue perversions that occurred within. I saw people seated at tables, many tables, which were organized in a regular, orderly fashion. These people were not conversing amongst themselves, not mingling, not understanding the sweet bliss that is true barbecue. There was a speaker-- yes, a speaker-- at a podium, and the assembled masses applauded him, not understanding that it is not barbecue's purpose to enlighten participants upon matters of fact or scientific knowledge. But that barbecue is inherently enlightening into matters of a more ontological nature. And there were waiters and waitresses roaming the room, serving food, for the gathered horde did not understand proper methodology of a barbecue. At these sights I fled, for I had seen enough evils, and their mere presence was nearly overpowering. My message is not one of vilification or condemnation, but rather one of information, one seeking to create awareness of what true barbecue is in its virtually boundless possibilities to create things. Albeit mostly immaterial of a whole and good nature. It is my heartfelt hope that future barbecuers will at least recognize these possibilities, and consider the ways of true barbecue through which they are achieved. For barbecue provides a light, a beacon of good for mankind. And without proper respect for and methods of true barbecue, this knowledge will be lost, and the future of mankind will be muddled and uncertain. God bless you, and God bless barbecue. David, you've done these letter shows around Chicago for a couple years. Why did you decide to do them? Well, that letter was a good example, actually. I used to host a lot of spoken word events, fiction, poetry readings. And I found the events were getting predictable. I was getting bored by a lot of the writing. I think when people write just for themselves or to one other person, they are not looking over their shoulder at literary conventions. They are not worried about what the editor is going to say. They're not worried about, a lot of times, sounding dumb. And consequently, they're much freer with their expression, both stylistically and in terms of what they're willing to talk about. For example, barbecue. A man's obsessed with barbecue, he'll write about barbecue if it's an email. But if he's going to a poetry reading, most likely he won't read about barbecue. He'll probably read a poem about apartheid or something like that, something politically important. And they are very unpredictable. And it's just-- You get material that was more raw? Yeah, it's more raw. Really, what I'm interested in, is getting inside people's heads. And I really like the letters-- this is my personal interest-- when I feel like I'm looking at someone's subconscious and seeing how they really are, whether it's a found letter, or whatever. Well, our next reader, Susan. Susan. These are correspondence from a marriage between Sparky and Nadine. There's a poem in it, which I won't take up the whole time to read. Sparky, all the words, all the thank yous could never convey the depth and scope of my love and gratitude for you. May we forever uncover, unfold, our love, our passion, our joy, and laugh our way through this great adventure. I love you, Nadine. And that was written September 12, 1992. And this next letter is written from Sparky on December 24, 1993. Dear Nadine, I love you. I love you very, very much. This Christmas has brought me many gifts that I never knew existed before. I am learning about humility, patience, and trust. And most of all, I am learning about unconditional love. Excuse me. This year, I can't give you the material Christmas that I'd like to, that you deserve. I can't even give you the card I bought for you, because I lost it. Instead I can give you some other stuff now and some material stuff later. First one, good for one really good body massage. Second one, good for one really good foot massage. The above two items may be redeemed any time and aren't really gifts, because you can have those anytime you want. Number three, good for one day of non-sarcasm. Redeem by 8:00 AM, day of use. And the fourth is good for one day of total slavery, any kind. Redeem with 24 hours advance notice to ensure proper scheduling. Merry Christmas, your love. And the last part of the correspondence. Dated January 12, 1996. To Nadine, in regard to the marriage of Sparky and Nadine. Dear Nadine, enclosed please find our proposed judgment of dissolution of marriage, for your review. Please advise me regarding changes and corrections. Sincerely, someone, an attorney. Our next reader, pulled from our bowl of readers, John S. You look like a guy who wants to hold on to the rhinoceros. Am I right about that? Cool. I found this in the undergraduate library at the University of Illinois, in the computer lab. April 7, 1994. Dear Mr. V., hello, my name is Lois. I caught all three of your appearances on Jeopardy! and was greatly impressed. You are a brilliant, serious, dignified, modest, and beautiful young man. I was sorry to see your winning streak come to an end. Those categories on the last show were silly anyway. Roots, nursery rhyme, deli? Please. And when Alex teased you about Paris, romance, and cousins, my heart nearly melted. In case you're interested, I am an attractive 21 year old brunette studying economics and political science at the University of Illinois. And I love parrots and cats, too. If you'd like, I could send you my picture. If not, have a wonderful life, and I hope to be a patient of yours some day. Au revoir. Sincerely-- and it leaves an address. The second one I found, it was posted on a bulletin board in the English building at the University of Illinois. Hello. My name is K. I am a 20 year old, single white male. I'm about five foot six, brown hair, and have a mustache and beard. My grandmother's house is up for sale, and I really want it. I realize this is superficial, but I'm seeking, preferably, a single white female, non-smoker, 18 to 35, wealthy slash gorgeous slash beautiful model-type woman for marriage. Or I want a quote unquote "sugar mommy." A sugar daddy spoils young women, so I figure a sugar mommy spoils young men. Please send a photo. I am a junior and a history major. This realty company is selling my grandmother's house for $49,900. I lived in the house for 15 years with my grandmother. Below is a photo of the house and one of me. And he gives the realty's phone number. If you are not interested, then please pass this flyer to your female friends. I'm very shy, so I haven't enclosed my phone number. And at the bottom it says, please hurry, time is running out. Wait, wait, before you go. Let's see the picture. You guys can't see this. He's a very serious looking guy in a tie. Next person. Our next reader, Kara [? Schenk ?]. My letter is written on the back of a CBGB's flyer from New York, from a guy that I met while I was in Paris. He was cycling through Europe. Dear Kara, Hey, I haven't written to you in a long time. I had been in the midst of a personal and emotional whirlwind. Whoosh, and the wind went rushing through my brain and into my body chemistry. And God spoke to me and said, get a grip, dude. Whereas you've been sitting at work wishing you were on vacation, I've been sitting in my parents' house and on the couches of several friends wishing that I had work to do. Without the stable base of my own place, it was indeed difficult to focus on anything. Socializing? Yes. Continued cycling around? Yes. Work? Absolutely no. Right now, as I write to you, I am glowing like a pregnant woman. After several weeks of trying to get in this film production company, playing my cards and doing spot jobs for the dude who runs it-- who is our age, is the son of a Time-Warner Company huge corporate executive, has access to the mass media, as well as access to, no kidding, millions of dollars-- I've emerged with, yes, a job. How fortunate for me and my wonderful temperament and abilities. He needs me to save his project, to co-rewrite the story, as well as edit the thing, a short 30 minute film-poem on the Hudson Valley of Upstate New York. He is letting me put my whole lower leg in the door, never mind my foot. I am excited and ready to begin work. I am going to do a great job for him. So now, I am slightly more sane, more filled with better cheer, and open to a little sharing and communication with several individuals. It is a pleasure to correspond with you. It was certainly a pleasure to hang out in Paris. Hoping to hear from you soon. Why not send along some writing samples, so that we may begin to fully share our literary interests and creations? Love and kisses, Sparky. PS, thank you so much for the photos. I look pretty good. I'm shocked. Next reader. Is this Miki Greenberg? Did you fill one of these out? Yes I did. Miki? Miki is running sound for us. Who's going to run sound while you are coming up here, Miki? You're invaluable. You can't be taken away from this. It's like the pilot coming back to chitchat with the passengers. OK, here we go. Let's hope the plane doesn't crash. I heard about a pilot who used to do that as a joke. Sit in the back in the regular, on those little Caribbean flights. The pilot would sit in the back in regular clothes, and then he'd wait till everyone got on, and wait about 15 minutes and say, damn it, where is that pilot? I'm going to fly this thing myself. Go up in front, and all the passengers would be like freaking out. This is a letter that comes from someone I do not know. It's from an insurance agency. It comes here to the club. I'm one of the people who runs Lunar Cabaret. And we have a band called the Dysfunctionells that play here every two or three months. The cover of the letter is a psychedelic graphic that says the words, featuring dot, dot, dot, Dysfunctionells psychedelic? Just for the record, the Dysfunctionells are a very folk-based, Bluegrass, rocking band that I love. They're not psychedelic at all. But here's what it says. Regarding survival of the fittest. Dear fine club owner, psychedelic light shows. Remember Janice, Jimmy, Jerry, Timothy? What a long, strange trip it has been. Things change. Music certainly changes. Your club featured Dysfunctionells. You have to change to survive. The current issue of Illinois Entertainer features an article titled, "The End of an Era," which describes the closing of what the magazine calls the Midwest's premiere hard rock, heavy metal club. The owner cites, quote unquote "the sky high insurance premiums," as one of the contributing factors in his decision to close the doors permanently on the club. It goes on to talk about why he's underwriting this, financially strong, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, your phone number is 312-327-6666. Ours is 708, blank, blank, blank, 3790. One way or another, let's talk. And that's to sell insurance? I think he wanted to sell us some insurance. I think he wanted to. This is the weirdest insurance letter I've ever gotten in my life. Next, David Sadowski. Letters from Bullwinkle. In 1983, at the Chicago International Film Festival, they had a tribute to Rocky and Bullwinkle. And I talked to Bill Scott and June Foray, who did the voices of Bullwinkle and Rocky, afterward. First, here's part of what they said at that event. How long did it take for you to develop the characterizations? Bill Scott-- About a minute and a half. No, as a matter of fact, the strange thing was, June got slickered into doing Rocky over a drunken martini lunch with Jay Ward. She would have agreed to anything. Can you do a flying squirrel? Oh sure, I can do a flying squirrel. I was a writer, and Jay Ward does not read. And the only way he knew what was in the script, was if I would read them to him. And I read him the voices on the way to the recording session, first one, right. And there's June, there's Paul Frees, Bill Conrad, all those wonderful people. And I said to him, who's going to read Bullwinkle? And he said, oh, I thought you were. And that's how much preparation I had for the part of Bullwinkle Moose. So afterward, I talked to them, asked them some more questions. And I got their autographs here on this ticket. It says, Hi-dee to old Dave from old Bullwinkle and Bill Scott, plus Rocky, Natasha, Nell, and June Foray. But anyway, afterward, I told Bill Scott I wanted to write a book about The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. And he said, get in line. I still have yet to see one, though. And then I told him I had a 78 RPM record of Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was a song called, "I Was Born to be Airborne." He said, there is no such thing. This record, he said, didn't exist. But then I told him that I had taped all the shows off the air, off WGN. And I had them all on videotape. And he got excited, because he had never seen most of the shows in their original form. And he had me make copies for them. So Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, paid me to make videotapes, copies of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Shows for him. So we kept up a little bit of a correspondence. And I'll just read from some of these letters. Good luck with the taping. I look forward to seeing some of the shows that I've never seen before. Here with another payment for your taping [? chores. ?] This stuff looks very good, although I am weary of the pull a rabbit out of my hat stuff. And I'm depressed at how fast and skimpy the Mr. Know-It-Alls had to be done. But the other material is very fresh and funny to me. Some of it I even remember. Though I must say that the episode of Bumbling Brothers, when Conrad breaks up at the end, was a complete surprise. I thought it was hysterical. For god's sake, please record the Hoppitys. I've never seen one of them. I wrote the Hoppity episodes, I think. Though I may have rewritten somebody else's stuff. Tell you better after I see them. I can usually recognize my own stuff. I also did the voice of Fillmore Bear, but I was in a period of relative modesty at the time, and was in favor of just taking one credit on a show, preferably the highest in the production hierarchy. I don't know that I'd do it again. And anyway, the upshot of it was, the taping project was never completed. Because shortly after receiving the fourth letter from him, Bill Scott had a heart attack and died at the age of 65. And so, while that may have been a sad thing, one thing that they did say at the festival was that-- somebody asked, why did they stop doing the show? And they said, well, you know, we had enough for syndication, but we could have gone on forever. And in syndication, they will. Who would have thought we'd have a Rocky and Bullwinkle expert here? Thank you. Andrew Fenchel. While he's taking the stage, Andrew is wearing an Iron Maiden tee-shirt. Kick ass. I found this letter in the street, in my neighborhood. I think it won't really need any other introduction except that, where the letter writer refers to Vienna, I think it's safe to assume that that's not Austria. OK. Time, 10:00 PM. June 10, '96. Dear Carla, what's up babe? How are you doing? Fine, I hope. Well, I'm in Vienna. But I didn't forget to write. Baby, I miss you. I can't wait to see you. I've been thinking about you all the time, and I can't stop. I got into a fight in here with a king, and for that, I got two weeks in the hole. Baby, I hope you're not talking to someone else. I've been waiting for your letters, but I haven't received any yet. What's up with that? Carla, I feel that you don't love me anymore. Baby, I love you more than what you could ever know. I miss making love to you, kissing you. Please, send me some pictures of you. When I get out of here, I'm going to get a job. I'll even quit gang banging if you show me you love me. Carla, what do you mean when you say, you went from 100% to 50%? I don't understand. I haven't been cheating on you. And I'll be with you all the time when I get out. Carla, I care about you a lot. You just don't know. Why is your mom going to kick you out? What have you done? Please, don't lie to me. Are you [BLEEP] around with someone else? Staying out late? What is it? I've got the feeling you are seeing someone else, but I guess I can't trip, so long as when I get out, you come back to me. What do you mean that you love me, and good luck in life? I get the first part, but not the second. Are you breaking up with me? Are you going away from me? Whatever you do, wherever you go, you'll always be in my heart, Carla. Believe that. I know you think I don't love you anymore, but you're wrong, babe. I said it before, and I'll say it again. I love you, Carla. Our program was produced today by Dolores Wilber and myself, with David Hauptschein, Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margie Rochlin. If you would like a tape of this program, it's only $10. Call us at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Again, 312-832-3380. 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. PRI Public Radio International.
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Back in 1994-- this is back in the days when people still delivered big news to each other by mail-- two women who barely knew each other, Martha Miller and Susan McDonald, got a letter from Martha's mom. Dear Martha and Sue, have you ever suspected or been told that we took home the baby that belonged to Kay and Bob McDonald and they later took home the baby that belonged to us? That's Martha reading. And the purpose of this letter is that Mrs. Miller is breaking the news-- 43 years after the fact-- to Martha and Sue that she took the wrong baby home from the hospital, that Martha and Sue were switched at birth, that she's not Martha's biological mom, she's Sue's. And part of it what makes this so strange is that this wasn't the sort of thing where Mrs. Miller figured this to her surprise after decades of wondering and pondering and painstaking detective work. No, no, no. She knew it the day she got home from the hospital in 1951 that she had the wrong baby, a baby born to a woman named Kay McDonald. And she kept it quiet all those years. Here is how Mrs. Miller explained that in the letter. The other daughter in this baby switch, Sue, who was born to Mrs. Miller, the one writing the letter, but raised by Kay McDonald, the other woman, reads. I had complete anesthesia, so was asleep when our baby was born. The nurse weighed the baby and must have left her in the delivery room until after Kay's baby was born very soon after mine. When we took our baby home, she sneezed five times in a row. Again, Martha Miller, who now goes by Marti, who once was the baby who sneezed five times in a row. I thought that was strange. Never had that happened with any of our others. We had a baby scale at home. When I weighed the baby, she weighed two and 1/2 pounds less than her birth weight. I was sure then that there had been a mix-up. I talked to Norbert about it, but he did not want to disgrace our good Dr. Deslack. A week or so after the baby's birth, I was reaching for something way back in the attic closet and started to hemorrhage, then went into convulsions. Back to the hospital for several days and despair for my life. So I dropped the mixed-up baby pursuit. As Martha grew, she did not look nor act like any other children. She was a delight to all of us, so pretty, so photogenic, so full of life. Our other children were very serious. Martha excelled in music, was a great cheerleader at school, very popular, and a blonde. Our other children had dark hair and all needed glasses for nearsightedness. Martha did not need glasses. Finally, on July 10, 1994, Norbert was willing to go to Kay and Bob McDonald's 50th wedding anniversary celebration at Prairie du Chien United Methodist Church. When he saw you, Sue, he said, I don't need a DNA test. Sue is ours. She looks just like Mary Lydia. Would make a good twin to her. That is why I wanted to write this letter. So now we are both aware of what happened 43 years ago. We love you, Martha Jane-- I'm sorry. We love you, Martha Jane, as dearly as our other six children. I think you know that you will always be our daughter. But I thought each of you should know your biological and spiritual backgrounds. And know you have mixed feelings about this revelation. I have much anguish and many tears. But I feel I must get this out in the open, so you two know how wonderful that you both are Christians and great workers in the church. Do let me hear from you. I love you both. Thanks, and Jesus lead you in this time. Happy 43rd birthday to you, Sue. And to you, Martha. Lovingly, your mom, Mary Kay Miller. So at this point, you're probably wondering, why in the world didn't Mrs. Miller straighten this out quicker? Why did she listen to her husband back in 1951? Why the big concern about disgracing the doctor over, you know, having the wrong baby? And as you heard in the letter, one thing that makes this whole thing even stranger is that the two couples knew each other. The Millers were at the McDonalds' anniversary party. They have mutual acquaintances. They lived a short drive from each other's houses in Wauzeka and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. And when Mrs. Miller finally let everybody know the truth, long after both girls were grown up with children of their own, it was disruptive. That is the kind of news nobody ever wants to hear. And when you get this kind of news as an adult, that your mom isn't really your mom or your daughter isn't really your daughter, and at the same time, you have a new mom or a new daughter, it is not so clear what you're supposed to do with this new parent or new child who's now in your life. What are you supposed to be with each other? And both Marti and Sue worried that the families they'd always thought were theirs would still want to keep them. And both mothers and daughters each had to figure it out on their own. All four women said things got very lonely for them. Today on our show, we hear what happens when somebody takes your family and throws it up in the air like a deck of cards. From WBEZ Chicago, it's "This American Life." I'm Ira Glass. We're devoting the full hour today to what happened to these two families. Jake Halpern is the reporter. And before we start, just to help you keep everybody straight in this story, a quick overview of the two families. The Millers are the bespectacled, dark-haired ones from the letter. Mrs. Miller's husband, the Reverend Norbert Miller, was an evangelical preacher, devoted to the church. And they were a bookish, serious bunch. This was a house with a lot of rules. And there were a lot of kids too. Seven kids in all. The McDonalds are the light-haired ones from the letter. And it is a much smaller family, just two kids. And the feeling in their house was very different from the feeling in the Miller's house. They were easygoing quick to laugh and joke around. Mr. McDonald ran the TV repair shop in town. Here's Jake Halpern. It was the four women at the center of all this, the two moms and the two daughters, who were affected more than anyone. So let's take them one by one, starting with Sue, Mrs. Miller's baby, who was raised by the McDonalds. Before the letter arrived, the facts of Sue's life had seemed pretty orderly. She was a married mother of three living in Michigan, where her husband worked as a chemist. She was close to her mother. She called and visited her parents regularly. She also had an older brother, Bob, named after their dad. It was all pretty straightforward. And yes, Sue was different from the rest of the family in certain ways, dark and tall and skinny in a family that was none of those. In a pretty lighthearted household, she was nervous, studious, serious. But that didn't seem so strange. In junior high, I remember my friend said to me, you must be adopted, because you do not look at all like your parents. And I said, I don't know. I asked my mother. I said, am I adopted? And she said, oh, no, no. She says, I was pregnant and you are my child. I wanted a baby, you know, and you're my baby. You were not adopted. So that convinced you. Oh, yeah. That was enough. I mean, that was right. My mom said, oh, well, you just take after great-grandpa this or aunt so-and-so. So then I just forgot about the whole thing. Years later when she got the letter that told her the truth, she was stunned. And she knew she had to break the news to the McDonalds, who'd raised her. But she didn't call them right away. Mr. McDonald had a bad heart and she didn't know what the stress would do to him. First, she wanted to be absolutely sure it was true. Blood tests were done with the Millers and they proved Mrs. Miller was right about the switch. Weeks went by and Sue began to fret. She wrote letters to her parents, but didn't send them. She worried her mother might reject her. Sue knew her mother had never been a big fan of the Millers ever since they met. And now, suddenly, it turned out Sue was one of them. It was confusing. And then after I knew that I had been switched and that I had different genes, and my parents kept talking about these people that were so odd, the Millers, because Reverend Miller, he is an evangelical preacher. He wants people to know Jesus Christ and that they would be saved. And I'm really like that too. Sometimes my mom thinks I'm a little fanatical. I'm really a Miller. What does she think of me? I mean, that's my biological family. So I did think, yeah, she's going to know that's not my daughter. And she's going to get this popular Marti, who's so fun-loving and looks like her. And then she's going to say, well, I don't need that daughter anymore. She's part of that odd family. A month after she got the letter, Sue went to see her biological mother and father. This is a videotape of that first meeting. And who are these people? Now, this-- you tell them who that is. These are my-- Is this your dad? My dad. Right there. Sue looks happy. Reverend Miller is affectionate with her, putting his arm around her waist. Everybody's smiling. Sue now had four new sisters and two new brothers. And the Millers show her pictures of her other relatives. He's a roustabout. He went to Oregon to get away from a-- he got a girl in trouble, see? Oh. There's a lot of nervous laughter and there are some awkward moments, like when Sue talks to Mrs. Miller about the fact that she never got enough breast milk as a baby. My mother didn't have enough milk for me. It's all your fault. Did you have enough? But overall, the Millers seem giddy that their daughter has finally come home. And Sue seems eager to know them. Esther. You look like her too. That's what I was thinking [INAUDIBLE]. And you look so much like Carol. Later that same day, Sue drove to the McDonalds', to the parents she'd grown up with. After dinner, she sat down and told them about Mrs. Miller's letter, told them point-blank she wasn't their child. At first, they refused to believe her, but then she told them about the blood tests. Finally, Sue handed over all the letters that she hadn't sent them in the past month, letters telling them how much she loved them and how much she wanted to stay their daughter. And like my dad said, you are my child. I changed your diaper. And my mother, nothing was going to be different between us. But it took a while for us to-- how are you going to think? Mrs. Miller has, for 43 years, been longing to see the child she'd given birth to. So she's excited about it. And my mother's like, what happened to my life? It exploded. Once things calmed down, Sue came to two conclusions. One, she wasn't going to become estranged from her mother. And two, it was her brother she might lose. My name is Bob McDonald. And I am 61 years old. I would say that Sue and I were probably not that close for whatever reason. The reason was pretty simple, actually. They have almost nothing in common. Bob is four and 1/2 years older than Sue, a sweet, jovial guy, who never got along with his broody little sister. And when Bob found out about Marti, found out that she was his biological sister, he called her right away in California. When she got on the phone, I was just totally blown away. The way she pronounced her words were identical with the way my mother talked. She could have been my aunt or my mother talking on the phone. And I knew that she had to be my sister. And I was super anxious to meet her in person. And until that time, we just talked all the time. With every phone call that we made, we opened up more to each other. And we had the same personality. And we think so much alike. My brother and Marti are just thick as thieves, you know, it seems like. And whenever Marti comes to my hometown, she stays with my brother. And they stay up till all hours of the night talking. For Sue, her brother's enthusiasm for Marti brought out every insecurity she suffered as a schoolgirl. She didn't fit in. She didn't have the social ease that came so naturally to Bob and Marti. He was popular and I wasn't. I was a serious person. Nobody would dance with me at the dances. He had a band. I was shy or I was whatever. And I wanted to be a cheerleader. I tried out for cheerleading. I just couldn't do it. I didn't get picked. As years went by, when there were family events with everyone, Sue would get anxious if Marti was there too. Occasionally, she'd break down and cry. I remember at the wedding when my nephew got married, my brother danced with everybody. He danced with Marti. And you can see, they're just having so much fun and laughing together and just dancing away. And then he danced with my cousin. He danced with my mother. He danced with everyone. He didn't dance with me. And here I am, you know, it's like I'm a teenager again and nobody dances with me. It was bad. But the good part about that was when I got home from the wedding, and my brother called me, and he said, you know what? I didn't even dance with you. And I said, who told you to say that? So he did know it too. But it just brought up feelings that you feel crummy again. And, you know, because I wonder what's going to happen when my parents are gone. Is my brother going to care to even see me anymore? This brings us to Marti, the other baby in this baby switch. Before she found out the truth about who her mother really was, Marti's life wasn't all that different from Sue's. Marti was also married, also had three kids. She'd also moved out of Wisconsin-- in her case, to Southern California. She's also religious like Sue. But that's pretty much where it ends. Marti worked all of her adult life, and still does, as a nurse. She grew up as the sixth child in a family of seven kids. Besides her, there was Mary Lydia, Faith, Ruth, Sonny, Luke, and Esther. Her mother ran a disciplined household. Everyone had to work. She remembers washing and drying all the dishes by the time she was five or six. There wasn't much money around. The five girls shared one bedroom. The church was the center of their lives. And the family never went on vacation or even to the movies. Instead, they were all taught to paint and encouraged to play music. Like Sue, though, Marti stuck out in her family. For one thing, she was the only one who joked around. She says, even now, the Millers can't tell when she's being ironic. And then there was the blondeness and the perkiness and the socializing. Marti says she felt like everything she was interested in was lost on her parents. I don't think that they ever came to watch me cheer in a game. That wasn't something that they would have done, because athletics was really not of value to them at all. I was just not ever meeting their expectation of intellectualism. And my mother has told me since then, you know, I really didn't expect that much from you, because I knew that you weren't our child. That was a hard thing to hear. Incredibly, when Marti was 21 years old, someone actually told her that she might not be a Miller. One of her older sisters, Ruth, came to visit with her husband Rudy. Rudy had a couple of beers. And after dinner, he got to talking. Then he started asking me what I knew about the McDonalds. And I really didn't know anything about the McDonalds. And then he told me that I looked like them. And he said, what would you do if I told you that they were your parents? And I was kind of stunned. It was the first I had ever heard anything about it. And he did, in fact, say some hurtful things. Because he told me, well, I don't care what anybody says. As far as I'm concerned, you're not really Ruth's sister. I thought it was just Rudy being Rudy. He just has crazy ideas and he dreams these things up. And I was just horrified. And he didn't tell me ahead of time. He just came out with it. That's Ruth. She and Faith and Mary Lydia, the older girls, had sort of always known about the possibility that Marti wasn't their biological sister. A couple of them, including Ruth, had vague memories of their parents talking about it after they brought Marti home from the hospital, about how this baby looked different from Mrs. Miller's other babies, and that maybe this baby had been switched. Then when Ruth was about 16, her older sister Faith came home from a trip on a Mississippi River boat and told Ruth she'd seen Sue McDonald on the boat, and that she looked an awful lot like them. They decided that Ruth ought to have a look too. So the two girls cooked up a reconnaissance mission. On one Sunday, they got their boyfriends to drive them 17 miles away to the McDonald's church in Prairie du Chien. Ruth sat down in a Pew near the front next to Faith. Right before the service began, she says, there's Sue walking down the center aisle. And I thought, she even walks like Mary. I was just like, wow. Wow, that could be her. That could be my sister. And yeah, I think it might be. And at any point during this time, does it cross your mind, well, why don't we just ask Mom and Dad about this? No. That's not how their family worked. They just didn't talk about these kinds of things. And as Ruth and Faith saw it, it wasn't their place to mess in their parents' affairs, which is why, when her husband Rudy blurted it out a few years later, Ruth was so shocked. And Marti refused to believe it at that point. She denied it. And she says, oh, no, no, that's not true. So then I thought, well, OK, then it's not so bad. If she still believes she's my sister, that's good. The next week, though, when Marti was visiting their mom, Mrs. Miller, she asked her about what Rudy had said. Mrs. Miller gave her a noncommittal answer, saying that once upon a time, they thought that maybe, perhaps, it might have. But even if it did happen, there was no way to prove it. So that was that. Over the years, the thought that she might be someone else's child festered in the back of Marti's mind. And much later, when she was in her mid-30s, she decided to get to the bottom of it. She was working for a group of pediatricians, which included a genetic counselor. She told the counselor her story and said she wanted to get blood tests done. The counselor asked her what the McDonalds knew about all this. And I said, I don't think they know anything about it. So she said, well, if you were to find out that these parents that you have are not your parents and the other family doesn't want to have anything to do with you, how are you going to feel? And I said, well, I don't know. I don't have any idea. And she said, you really need to consider how that's going to change your family for you and how it's going to change relationships for you. So she said, unless there's a real reason that you need to know, she said, I don't recommend that you dig into it. That sort of spooked Marti, so she left it alone. And that's where it might have ended if it hadn't been for Mrs. Miller's letter a decade later. It's hard enough to learn that your mother isn't your mother, but it's even harder when that news is delivered by someone like Mrs. Miller. Tact isn't her strong suit. In fact, she seemed to have a tin ear for the whole thing. For starters, Mrs. Miller didn't contact Marti and Sue at the same time. She first sent the letter to Sue McDonald, the daughter she barely knew, and then waited almost two weeks before mailing the letter to Marti, the daughter she'd raised. She said she wanted to call Marti first, but never managed to reach her. As a result, Marti got worried about one of the most basic facts of her life secondhand, all the while waiting to hear directly from her mother. And in the meantime, I had gotten phone calls from people I didn't even know that we're telling me, hey, I'm your brother. Hey, I was switched at birth with you. When she finally heard from Mrs. Miller, the mother she'd grown up with, not only did she get the letter, but Mrs. Miller had just been to the 50th anniversary party of the McDonalds, Marti's biological parents. And so she took one of the programs from it and she mailed it to me. And basically-- and this is going to sound like kind of a small thing, but it was a big thing to me-- she circled the names of people that were participating in the program. Like one of my uncles on the birth side, Earl Gonzalez, she circled his name, and she wrote, this is your uncle. And she circled my brother's name and said, this is your brother. Like Bob and Kay, she would circle their names and say, these are your parents. And I'm reading this thing going, what do you mean this is my uncle, this is my brother, this is my mom and dad? This is not my family. I don't even know who they are. And I took that as, OK, I'm saying as of right now, you're not our kid. You're their kid. You're in their family. Marti says her mom, Mrs. Miller, sees the world in black and white. She focused on the facts of the situation, maybe hoping she could fix things by simply setting the record straight. She wasn't malicious. She wasn't trying to be hurtful. After all those years, she was just tired of secrets. And now she wanted everyone's role to be clear. But it was hard, Marti says, to be on the receiving end of this sudden adamant truth-telling. There were a few years there, where every chance my mother got, she made it perfectly clear that I was a McDonald. For the longest time, whenever she would write to me, she would include McDonald in my name. Oh, my god. Are you serious? Just absolutely bizarre things like that. That's just how she is. There is no gray area. Actually, my mother wanted to go to court and have my name legally changed back to Sue McDonald and have Sue's name changed. That was her idea. She tells me that you're my daughter. But at the same time, when she refers to Kay, she says, well, your mother is doing such and such or your mother said this. And when I think of my mother, I think of her. During this time, it was Marti's dad, Reverend Miller, who reassured her. They started talking on the phone a lot. He explained things like why all those years ago, he refused to return to the hospital and switch back the babies. And he let Marti know that he still loved her. He did not want her to push me out of the family. He, in fact would call me and tell me, I don't care what she says, you're still our kid and I'm glad we had you. Did you feel that then after this happened a little bit closer to your dad than your mom? Yes. Yes, definitely, at that point. My dad had this horrendous guilt, because he felt like it was all his fault that he should have believed my mother for all those years. And I think he honestly never thought it was a possibility. He thought she really dreamed this up in her head and just got obsessed with it. And the other thing was that he really thought, what difference does it make? A child is a child. She's with us. She's ours now. The other problem for Marti was how to approach the McDonalds, her biological parents. They were nice enough when she spoke to them on the phone, but they weren't exactly welcoming her into the family. I remember talking to Mother about, you know, this is your blood daughter. Here's Bob McDonald, who, remember, was having these great phone calls with his newfound sister? This is the daughter that actually was in you. And I mean, I understand you didn't raise her, but she is your blood, biological daughter. And I don't know that she was as excited about it as I was. And I couldn't figure that out at the time. She was guarded. They were nice enough when she spoke to them on the phone, but they weren't exactly welcoming her into the family. From Marti's perspective, the genetic counselor's prediction from years before seemed to be coming true, and it felt like she was losing both her mothers. Marti wrote a letter to Kay and Bob McDonald, her biological parents. "I want you to know that I will accept whatever contact you choose to have with me, even if it's none at all. I promise you, I'll never try to make you think of me as your daughter. I know that Sue's your daughter and no one could ever expect you to feel otherwise." Marti eventually decided that the only way she was going to resolve this was by getting on a plane and flying out to Wisconsin to meet the McDonalds face to face and give them a real chance to get to know her. The get-together at Bob and Kay McDonald's house didn't go exactly as she wanted. From the McDonalds' perspective, Marti looked and acted remarkably like a McDonald. She got along famously with their son Bob. She even had the exact same oil painting hanging on her wall in California as they had in their living room, a landscape with trees and water. But Sue was the girl they'd brought up and they felt loyal to her, protective. I kind of felt like Bob and Kay were kind of keeping me at an arm's distance, because they weren't really sure how they felt or wanted to feel. And I don't think sue had that sense. In fact, that's true. Maybe because some of the Miller girls had suspected that she was their sister for decades and because Mrs. Miller always knew the truth, Sue was being embraced completely by the Miller clan. And so while Sue had feared everyone would choose Marti, the outgoing cheerleader, over her, it didn't work out that way. Here's Marti. In fact, it was the exact opposite. She had both families wanting to make sure that she was included in their family. The Millers wanted to incorporate her family into our family as quickly as they could. I did feel in the beginning like she was taking my place in my family. And that was odd, very odd. And sometimes I don't know exactly what her relationship is with my sisters. I honestly don't know how much they communicate, how much they're in touch. Part of me really doesn't want to know, because I think I would feel left out of something. Coming up, what it's like to be a mom and to learn at the age of 69 that your only daughter isn't actually your daughter at all, and, if that weren't bad enough, that lots of people in your town, people around you, knew years before you did. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. "This American Life." I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, Jake Halpern is telling the story this hour of two girls switched at birth. One mother, Mary Miller, knew and kept it a secret, did nothing about it, for 43 years. The other mother, Kay McDonald, had no idea. The two fathers in this story were not interviewed. Mr. McDonald's health didn't allow it. Mr. Miller died in 2000. And so in this half of the story, we hear from the mothers. Again, here's Jake Halpern. At the hospital in 1951, Kay McDonald was told that she'd given birth to a nine-pound, four-ounce baby. She didn't question that. Every day she was at the hospital, the nurses brought her the same baby girl. Nothing seemed amiss to her. And as that baby, Sue, grew up, the one thing that puzzled Kay was that Mrs. Miller, whom she knew only vaguely from church, seemed so interested in Sue. She always referred to the girls as sisters. After they were born, she had written us a Christmas letter and said she'd always liked to keep in touch with Susan, because the girls were so much like sisters. And of course, I thought that was foolish. But I went along with it, because I don't like to make waves, I guess, you might say. And so that's why I started sending them a copy of our Christmas letter. That's how Mrs. Miller kept track of Sue. Over the years, Mrs. Miller would do or say things concerning the girls, things that just seemed strange to Kay. When Kay's church was celebrating its 150th anniversary, for instance, Kay was chairperson for the event. Reverend Miller had once been pastor there, so he and Mrs. Miller were invited. And the Millers came. And I was in the hallway. And Mrs. Miller said to me, did you ever think that our girls were switched at birth? And I said, heavens, no. I thought that was such a ridiculous thing to say. And of course, I was very busy, because I was chairperson and I had so many other things to do. So I passed it off. But that's all she said. There was nothing any further. It didn't bother me, because I couldn't see any merit to it. I didn't have a doubt in my mind. And I'm not one to borrow trouble. What Kay McDonald didn't know was that there was a whole slew of people in her church community who had heard about the rumored baby switch from the beginning. Mrs. Miller and Kay McDonald were actually in different churches. Kay was a Methodist and the Millers were Evangelicals. Mrs. Miller told people in the Evangelical Church that her suspicions, friends of hers and people she hoped would keep an eye out on Sue. But later, the two churches merged. So a bunch of people from the Evangelical Church now knew who Kay McDonald was and who Sue was, and realized that this was the girl Mrs. Miller believed to be her own. And this whole crop of people knew, but never said anything to Kay McDonald. One of them was Darlene Wolfgram. She heard it first from her own mom, who heard it at church. She said everybody at church, after having seen Marti beside the rest of the family, just couldn't believe that that was their child. It was pretty concealed right within our own church. Probably the Ladies Aid, maybe, you know, the little group that got together. In fact, my mother said, well, just don't tell anybody. So we never said anything about it. Darlene Wolfgram did tell her daughter, though. And the daughter, bear with me, ended up marrying Sue's brother Bob. But even she never divulged the secret to Bob or any of the McDonalds. Here she is. Her name's also Sue. No, I didn't. Because it was always just a rumor. And I thought, well, he'll think I'm nuts. And he was very angry at first with me. And he said, why wouldn't you have told me that? And I said, would you have believed me? I mean, I'd say, gee, guess what, Bob? I don't think your sister's yours. Well, there was no DNA testing back then or anything else. So there would have been no proof. That's what most people in town seemed to feel. It wasn't their place to bring up such a thing, especially with no way to know if it was true for sure, What that meant was that after Kay McDonald finally found out the truth in 1994, people started coming up to her, in church mostly, casually mentioning that they'd known about it all along. I was surprised that nobody really ever told us, the Booms, the Tinors, the Langs, the Haisens. I just couldn't believe it. I just thought it was odd that so many people would know in a town of our size, which is like 5,500 people, when that many people were aware of it, that the news didn't get to us. Slowly, anger began to set in. Kay was angry that Mrs. Miller hadn't corrected things back in 1951, that Mrs. Miller had hijacked her life in this way. And she was angry that Mrs. Miller put Sue in the difficult position of having to break news like this to her parents. And angry that now the Millers were asking so much of Sue's time and attention. It got so bad, Kay had to go on medication for high blood pressure. Well, of course, they were really clamoring to get to know her. And I felt excluded. I felt they were trying to take her away from us. And Susan always had said to me, Mom, why didn't you have any more children after I was born? She wanted to be a part of a big family. So then she found out she has all of these brothers and sisters. And the phone calls were fewer. And of course, Marti didn't really call a whole lot. She's a very busy gal and I was not having that much communication with her. And I thought I was losing both of them. Kay McDonald began getting notes and phone calls from Reverend Miller. He told her that he thought it was God's will that this had happened. Even so, he asked her for forgiveness again and again. He's just outright-- he's just saying, can you forgive me, just like that on the telephone? Yes, and quoting scriptures all the time for me to read to console me. Because I had said that I had shed a lot of tears. And I had probably all of the emotions that you have with a death in a family. I think I went into a kind of a depression about similar to what I did when my mother died. And so, of course, he was trying to get me to say that I had forgiven them. How did you feel when he said this was God's will? What was your reaction? I couldn't believe that Because I don't have that feeling about-- I don't think God punishes us in any way. I think what we do is pretty much our own doing. But he had everybody convinced, I think, that it was God's will. But I had talked to several of our former pastors who knew about the situation and they assured me that this was not God's will. They said that was a cop-out. And so I don't think that was too well received when I mentioned that. I told Mrs. Miller I felt that it was God's will, when she realized that she might not have the right child, I think it was His will that she do something about it. She wrote that in a letter to Mrs. Miller eight years after she learned the truth. That's how long it took her to sort out her feelings. Kay McDonald and the Millers eventually reached a kind of detente. Kay is no longer angry the way she was, but she says she'll never understand why Mrs. Miller stayed silent for all those years. If I had as strong a feeling as she did that I had the wrong baby, I would have pursued it. I don't care whether my husband objected or not. I feel like I should have made a wrong into a right. I only had one daughter and she had five daughters. In fact, we weren't even sure we'd have another child. So of course, we were elated when I did get pregnant. And then to think that I didn't get to raise the one that I had wanted so much. So I never will probably understand why. I've forgiven them, but that doesn't mean that I've forgotten. I can still wonder why and probably never will know why it didn't come up any sooner. Mary Miller is 96 now. She lives by herself in the country. Her house is filled with the remnants of her and Norbert's life together in the church. They were married for 60 years. There's a large statue of an angel in her sitting room, which she's planning to put on her own grave. When I first talked to Mrs. Miller about what had happened when Mary was born, she told me pretty much the same story she told in her letter, how she knew as soon as she got home and weighed the baby that the nurses had made a mistake. Yes, I told Norbert, I think we have the wrong baby. And he said, well, I wouldn't disgrace the doctor by telling him he gave us the wrong baby. And he says, this is a nice little baby. We'll keep her. When your husband said to you, this baby's cute, let's keep it, did you agree with him immediately or was there a little bit of arguing back and forth over what to do? No, we didn't argue about that. But I kept looking for her. And I was always asking anyone who might have seen her. In fact, when I would go down and have any touch with the McDonalds-- we got introduced to them-- I tried to talk to her about it. And she told somebody that I was crazy. I was a crazy woman who thought I had her girl. It was a little surreal to hear her talk about it in this way, laughing like that, especially after hearing Kay McDonald's side of things. But then Mrs. Miller told me more her side of this story. For one thing, she explained just how sick she was after they'd gone home with Marti in 1951. She was losing blood and having spasms. She thought she was going to die. She told me that she even started calling around trying to find someone who'd be a mother to her six children. The sickness, she said, lasted for six or seven months. By the time she was well, fixing the baby switch problem was that much harder. Even if she could somehow convince everyone it was true, what would happen if you suddenly took a six-month-old away from the only mother she knew? And the family's relationship with Dr. Deslack was no small thing either. Reverend Miller had made many visits to Dr. Deslack's wife when she was sick and now Dr. Deslack refused to charge the Millers for anything. The Millers didn't have much money and they might not have been able to afford the health care otherwise. Well, of course, we felt indebted to him for doing that. This doctor had been so kind to us and good to us. And why ruin all that? That's a big consideration. Because Mrs. Miller didn't want cross her husband, all she could do was hope that maybe if she dropped enough hints, calling the girls sisters and such, Kay would eventually realize on her own what had happened. It was an odd strategy, if you can even call it that. When Sue got married, for instance, the Millers gave her a trivet Norbert had made. The card was signed, from your other possible parents. Sue dismissed it as part of the whole sister thing, which she also thought was kind of weird. Mrs. Miller's most ambitious scheme happened after the girls graduated from high school, when they were about to be 18. Mrs. Miller arranged for the McDonalds to come to dinner. She figured if she could simply get Kay to look at Marti, Kay would figure things out. The evening just ended up being kind of baffling for everyone involved, since only Mrs. Miller knew what was going on. But they didn't notice any-- I don't know why they didn't notice it that Martha looked like them and was like them. I don't know why they didn't notice that. The fact is, Mrs. Miller longed for Sue, for her biological daughter, ever since she realized the mistake back in 1951. But it seemed futile trying to convince her husband Norbert. I said, I think we-- it's not right to do that, to keep somebody else's baby. I didn't think it was right to do that. And every time I'd talk to him, he'd say, oh, it's all right. It'll be all right. And I can't tell you how hard it was, but it was hard on me all along. Were you afraid of Norbert at all? Well, no, I wasn't afraid of him. I knew there were things that I couldn't do and keep his friendship, you know, if I turned against him, like on that. I guess you can't understand. I didn't want to have a disagreement like that with him, because that would have ruined our marriage. That would have ruined it. And I didn't want it ruined. I had six little children to take care of. Was there ever a time when you thought back and thought, I should have stood my ground more with him on that? No, I guess I haven't, because I knew it wouldn't have worked. I couldn't do anything about it. Norbert and I had a good time while we were together. But Norbert should have gone back and said, this isn't our baby. And this was a bad decision. But he didn't realize what affect that would have on everybody to make a decision like that. Neither Sue nor Marti blames Mrs. Miller for going along with her husband. They say they're not angry with her. They knew Reverend Miller. They understand what their relationship was like. They understand why she didn't speak out sooner. 42 years after the switch, Reverend Miller finally laid eyes on Sue at the McDonalds' wedding anniversary party. And the moment he saw her, he knew that she was his biological daughter. She looked exactly like him. At last, Mrs. Miller felt free to act. A month and a half later, she wrote the letter. Yeah, I wanted him to agree with me. And he did. He finally did. But boy, it was a relief for me. Because that was terrible to have that hanging over you all of the time. It's sad that it happened. It took Kay an awful long time. And I'm sorry for her. One thing Mrs. Miller doesn't regret is raising Marti. She remembers Marti always lightening the mood in their house. As a kid, she was really a live wire. She always had jokes. She had jokes every day. And she'd keep us laughing. It was good for us to laugh. It was really good for us to have her around. I mean, that my kids are all so serious about their life. They are more like I am. Before when I'd asked you if you thought it was God's will, you said yes. And is the reason because Marti brought something important to your family? Yes, she did. She bought happiness. "Dear Sue, I'm writing you this short note to officially give you my welcome to this Miller family and relationship." This is Sue reading a letter she got some time ago from her newfound Miller sister, Faith. "Though there are many, many good things about our family and parents and being raised by that family, there were also some definite deficits. If you're ever curious as to what they were, I would be very willing to fill you in, so you fully appreciate the parents who raised you. Between ourselves, Ruth and me, we, or at least I, always figured you lucked out. Probably Martha with her happy-go-lucky nature could take the climate of the Miller home better. And we hope you flourished in the McDonald household." Wow. Wow. Yeah. So she's basically saying to you, you may have actually gotten a break here being in the family that-- Yeah, I lucked out. Are there times when you feel a little bit guilty about kind of having lucked out with the home that was maybe a little bit easier to grow up in? Well, sure, I guess, a little built of guilt, but it's not my fault. I didn't have anything to do with it. My sister Faith called. And she was talking about the way her mother would talk to her. And I'm thinking, how would I have survived with that kind of upbringing? And I didn't grow up like that at all. I don't know how I would have survived. But Sue says there are a lot of things she missed out on, too, by not growing up with the Millers. The family did all kinds of hobbies, painting and rock polishing and 3D photography. They had dogs and raised angora rabbits. All sorts of interesting people came to the house, guests from out of town and missionaries. It was a different way of living, one that she admires. As for Marti, she doesn't like to dwell on the notion that Sue might have been the one who lucked out. Does the thought ever cross your mind, what if the switch hadn't been made? What if the McDonalds had just taken me home and I'd grown up in the house with my biological parents and my biological brother, who would I be? Oh, that's a funny question. I really only thought about that one time. I only let myself think about it one time. It was actually right after I met them. And I was going back to my mother's house. So I left Prairie du Chien and I was driving. And it was then that I started thinking, oh, my gosh, my life would have been so different. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, you know, I can't think about this, because it'll drive me crazy if I do. And so I kind of made a promise to myself that I would just never go down that road again, that I was just not going to go there. And I really haven't, because there's no point. It's pretty rare that Marti and Sue actually meet face to face. Once every few years, they get together for a large family gathering, a wedding, a graduation, a funeral. This summer, Bob McDonald's younger son got married in Prairie du Chien. When Marti showed up at the house for brunch the day after the wedding, she couldn't have seemed more at home with the family that she didn't meet until her 40s. She teased the groom and handed Bob's older son a present for his baby. It's a little late. It's for your child. It's before kindergarten, so it's OK. He's 10 months old. Shut up. Yeah, so it's a birthday present. When Sue arrived, she slipped in quietly. This was the side of the family she was raised with, but she seemed tense, watching as Marti made the rounds, everybody laughing. Having the two of them so near each other was a little awkward. People were definitely aware whenever both women were in the same room. At one point toward the end of the party, as Sue stood nearby, Marti started talking about the room that she had grown up in in the Miller household. All the girls were in the same room. Marti shared a bed with her sister, Faith, and had to crawl through this vent to get to the bathroom at night, because Faith would block the doorway to the hall. So instead of going in the hall and going out, we would crawl through the register. Going the normal way, like most [INAUDIBLE]? Well, my sisters had this crazy thing going on when Faith was a teenager. She would push the dresser and the cedar chest against the door. In the room you were in, you mean? That's Sue. It was the first time I'd seen them talk to each other. Yeah, in the room that we slept in. So then you had to go through the register to get to the bathroom. To get to the bathroom, you had to go under the bed and crawl. That's like a dog door. Exactly. Yeah, it was like a dog door. Just out of curiosity, what was your room like? Yeah, what was your room like? You had your own room, didn't you, all to yourself? I had my own room. Yes, I did. And my own bed, too, everything. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, whatever. It was a different life. Mrs. Miller says she worries for Marti and Sue, about whether they'll ever truly get along. But there's no question, things have gotten better between the two girls and their moms. Kay McDonald is still tight with Sue, the daughter she raised, but she's also much closer with Marti. Kay and Marti both cried when Marti left the wedding for California. And things are good with Mrs. Miller too. Marti's accepted that despite some of the clumsy things that her mother said and did when she broke the news to her, she meant well. Marti calls Mrs. Miller once a week to check up on her, just like Sue does. Now that the big family questions are mostly worked out, one of the toughest things both Marti and Sue have to deal with is logistical. Having two sets of parents and two full sets of siblings and cousins is kind of a practical headache. There are birthdays and graduations and figuring out where to spend holidays. Earlier this month, Sue's daughter got married in Michigan. All the Millers were invited and all the McDonalds were too. Marti considered whether she should go. She didn't grow up with Sue, after all, and she's not actually related to her or to her kids. But in the end, she made the trip, because she's a Miller and so is Sue, and she's a McDonald and so is Sue. Jake Halpern. He's the creator of the new comic "Welcome to the New World-- The True Story of a Refugee Family from Syria," which runs weekly in the "New York Times." Since we first broadcast this story in 2008, the mom who knew about the baby switch at the time, Mary Kay Miller, has died. She was 98 years old. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Marie and myself. Our staff for today's show includes Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Seth Lind, Lisa Pollak, Robin Semien, Alissa Shipp, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer for this episode is Julie Snyder. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Thanks, especially, to the McDonald and Miller families for letting us into their homes and telling their stories. 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. You know, to run a big radio station was not always the dream job that he wanted. No, no, no. His heart was elsewhere. I tried out for cheerleading. I just couldn't do it. And I wanted to be a cheerleader. I didn't get picked. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of "This American Life."
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As early as I remember, I was afraid to go to sleep. This began when I was six. My uncle Lenny went off to Vietnam. And that opened up this chapter in my life where I was obsessed with death. I was scared that uncle Lenny was going to be killed. But more than that, his absence underscored the fact that some day, no matter what, I was going to be drafted and I'd have to go to Vietnam and I'd be killed. And there was nothing that I or anybody I knew could do to stop that. I knew I was going to be killed because I was chubby and I was terrible at sports. I could barely run half a block. On TV, wars seemed to involve a lot of running. There was crouching, there was shooting, but there was a disturbing amount of running. So I was six and I knew I was going to die and my mom and dad couldn't help me. Nobody could help me. I'll be dead forever. Galaxies would spin. Humans would travel to other worlds. And I would miss all of that. Nobody would remember me or anybody that I had ever known forever. And I would lie awake at night, scared to fall asleep, because sleep seemed no different than death. You know. You were gone, not moving, not talking, not thinking, not aware-- not aware. What could be more frightening? What could be bigger? And here was the weird part of it, I thought when I was a kid. Somehow every night all the adults, all my relatives, every teacher, everybody who I'd ever heard of headed off for bed like this was no big deal. Complete annihilation. No big deal. For those of us who fear sleep, there is a lot to fear. And that's what we're going to talk about on today's radio show. It's a survey of this altered state-- this altered state where we're vulnerable and just gone. Having dreams where anything at all can happen. Not in control of our own bodies. Listen to what happened to this woman. Denise. It wasn't until I was maybe, I don't know, eight or nine years old that one day I woke up and it was like my eyes were open. I was looking around. I just couldn't move. I couldn't move my arms or my legs. I couldn't turn my head. And I felt this, like, weight on my chest. And the first thing I thought was, oh my god. What happened to me? Was I in a car accident? It lasted for, I don't know, maybe 30 seconds to a minute. And then I just kind of snapped out of it. And I was really freaked out. And I went and told my mom, I think something is wrong with me. And my family's Mexican. And in Mexico they have this superstition that they say the devil is sitting on your chest when that happens to you. And she said, oh don't worry. That's just the devil sitting on your chest. Like that's supposed to make me feel better. As Denise got older, this paralysis has happened more and more. And sometimes when she's lying there paralyzed and awake, she hallucinates. She sees family members who aren't there or she hears them. And sometimes they're mad at her. Though the only time all this happens to Denise is when she takes a nap during the day. I've definitely avoided taking naps, no matter how tired I was. I mean, I forced myself to survive on like five or six hours of sleep-- very little sleep. It's like that movie where what's his name appears as soon as you fall asleep. Freddy Krueger. Yeah. Freddy Krueger. Right. Yeah. In college it was happening to me so regularly that I basically survived on Red Bull and not much else. Then there's Ron Vagley. He'd wake up after an hour or two of sleep and find himself, for example, still in bed, there with his wife. A couple times I had my hands around her neck,, choking her until I came out of it. She would just wake you up? Is that it? Well, yeah. She'd start screaming. And then I would kind of come out of it. Was it hard for you to see this side of yourself? You know what I mean? Like you wake up and your hands are around the throat of the person who you love. Well, yeah. It was hard. And I was worried that I was going to hurt somebody. Like hurt my kids or my wife. And I felt miserable in the day thinking about what I did. You must have dreaded going to bed? Yep. I mean you're going to sleep, tired, knowing that this is going to happen. Yeah. It wasn't much fun. Aaaah! Aaaah! We have just witnessed a vivid example of a night terror of pavor nocturnus associated with violent behavior. This episode arose abruptly from slow wave or delta sleep. Nocturnal seizures-- This from a DVD put together by Doctors Carlos Schenk and Mark Mahowald of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center. The number of adults with troubled sleep, they say, is a lot higher than you probably think. 4% of all adults have sleepwalking episodes. That's 8 million Americans. Another 2% engage in sleep related violence. People eat when they're asleep. They have sex when they're asleep. And one of the most affecting things to watch on this DVD that they assembled to educate people about various sleep disorders is a 51-year-old Japanese man who was videotaped while having a bad dream. Oooh! [SLEEP CRIES] The man later told researchers that in this dream he's fighting off snakes. And in this kind of grainy, nighttime footage you can see him swat away snakes with his arms. He kicks at one with his foot. The metal sound you're hearing is the bed frame. Finally he picks up a pillow like it's a rock and beats one away. There's something completely naked about this footage. It's very strange to watch another person at a moment when they are so totally vulnerable and alone and terrified. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, Fear of Sleep. We have five stories of people who either have a huge fear of sleep or, frankly, they should have a huge fear of sleep. Act one, Stranger in the Night, act two, Sleep's Tiniest Enemies, act three, The Bitter Fruits of Wakefulness, act four, Hollywood Induced Nightmare, act five, A Small Taste of the Big Sleep. Stay with us. Act One. Stranger in the Night. There's a poem by Raymond Carver that goes, "I woke up with a spot of blood over my eye. A scratch halfway across my forehead. But I'm sleeping alone these days. Why on earth would a man raise his hand against himself, even in sleep. It's this and similar questions I'm trying to answer this morning, as I study my face in the window." Well, that is probably about as good an introduction as you could get for this first story from Mike Birbiglia. He told it in front of a live audience at The Moth in New York. About seven years ago I started walking in my sleep. And I would have these recurring dreams that there was a hovering insect-like jackal in our bedroom. And I was living with my girlfriend at the time. And I would jump on the bed and I would strike a karate pose. I'd never taken karate, but I had the books from Book Fair. And I would say, Abby-- that was my girlfriend-- there's a jackal in the room. And she got so used to it, she could talk me down while remaining asleep. She said, "There's not a jackal in the room. Go to bed." And I would say, "Are you sure?" And she would say, "Yes, Michael. Go to bed. There's no jackal." And I would say, "OK." And I would go to bed knowing that there was a jackal. And that's trust. It was around that time I had a dream that I was in the Olympics for some kind of arbitrary event like dust-bustering. And they told me I got third place. And I stood up on the third place podium. And I'm feeling good about myself. I'm new to the sport, you know. And they say, "You know, actually we reconsidered and you got first place." And I was like, oh, that's a marvelous promotion. I got first place. And I move over to the first place podium and it starts wobbling. And it's wobbling and wobbling. And I wake up. And I'm falling off the top of our bookcase in our living room. And I land on the floor, hard, on top of our Tivo. And it broke into pieces. And I'm disoriented on the floor. It's like one of these stories where people black out drinking. And they wake up in Idaho. And they don't know where they are. And they're like, oh no. Hardee's. Or whatever is there. But it was in my own living room. I was just like, oh no. Tivo pieces. And I went to bed. And Abby woke me up in the morning and she said, "Michael, what happened to the Tivo?" And I said, "I got first place. And it's a long story." So at this point I thought, maybe I should see a doctor. And then I thought, maybe I'll eat dinner. Because that seems more convenient. But a lot of people would say this to me. My parents-- you know, my dad's a doctor. He'd say, "You know you should really see a doctor." And I remember saying, "I'm really busy." Ahhh. And thinking these people were crazy. Like, they don't know how busy I am. And so I never went to a doctor. But I did purchase a book by a doctor named Dr. Dement, which is not the most calming name for a sleep doctor. But it's called The Promise of Sleep. And I learned-- and these are in Helpful Tips-- I learned turn off cable news or the news before bed, turn off your cell phone, turn off the internet, your computer. You know, don't have big meals, that kind of thing. And I came across in the sleep disorders, a disorder that resembled symptoms of mine. And it was called REM behavior disorder. And people who have this have a dopamine deficiency. And dopamine's the chemical that's released from your brain into your body that paralyzes your body when you fall asleep so that you don't do what's in your brain. So I thought, maybe I have this. And then I thought, maybe I'll eat dinner. So I never went to see a doctor until about three years ago. I was performing in a college in Walla Walla, Washington. I'm a comedian by trade. And I was staying at a hotel called on La Quinta Inn. And some people correct me. No. No. No. It's La Kinta. That's not fair. You can't force me to speak Spanish. I'm at La Kinta Inn in Vwalla Vwalla Washington and I fell asleep watching the news. And it was sort of a story about war and something very chaotic. And I fell asleep. And I had a dream that there was a guided missile headed towards my room. And there's all these military personnel in the room with me. And I jumped out of bed and I'm like what's the plan? And they say, its come to our attention the missile coordinates are set specifically on you. And I thought, that's very bad. Because I don't have a plan for that one. So I decided to jump out the window in my dream. And as it turns out, in my life. And there are two important details. One, I was on the second floor of La Quinta Inn and two, the window was closed. So I jumped through a window like the Hulk. And I say that because that's how I described it at the emergency room in Walla Walla, Washington. I was like you know the Hulk? He just kind of jumps through stuff. So I jump through the window and I scream, aaaaahh! And what was remarkable is that people of this disorder are capable of doing things they couldn't do in their everyday life. It's like blacking out drinking where you don't feel any pain or inhibition. I jumped through a second story window and I landed on the front lawn of the hotel. I took a spill. I got back up and I kept running. And I'm running and I'm slowly realizing I'm on the front lawn of La Kinta Inn in Vwalla Vwalla, Washington in my underwear, bleeding. And I'm like, oh no. And it was one of those rare moments in your life where in retrospect you're like, what the hell? And at the time you're like, I guess I'll walk to the front desk and explain what happened. Fortunately the person working at the front desk was mildly retarded. And I say fortunately because he was completely unfazed by what had just happened. It's 3:00 in the morning. The phones are ringing off the hook from people staying at the hotel who just saw the guy jump out the window, screaming. I'm bleeding, in my underwear, and I say, "Hello." Because as it turns out, you have to start somewhere. I'm staying at the hotel-- credibility. I had an incident wherein I jumped out of my window. I am bleeding and I need to go to a hospital. And I'll never forget his reaction because he just goes, uh-unnn. And I thought, this is the best possible reaction i could receive at this juncture. And so I drove myself to the hospital. I checked myself into the emergency room. I had to explain what happened three times-- the nurse and the doctor and the front desk. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. And the doctor, God bless him, worked on me until about 5:30 in the morning. And he put 30 stitches in my arms and in my legs. And he is an emergency room doctor and even he is like, you should be dead. And I was like, no you should. I zinged him. And about 5:30 I drove back to the hotel and I checked out. And I actually paid for the window like any good window jumper would. And it was $300 for the window and about $49 for the room. And I went back to New York. And I did what I should have done in the first place when I saw the jackal. I went to a doctor who specializes in sleepwalk disorders. And now when I go to bed at night, I take a very strong pill and I sleep in a sleeping bag up to my neck. And I wear mittens so I can't open the sleeping bag. And so in closing, I think that if it weren't for denial, I wouldn't be a comedian because to be a comedian you have to go on stage those first few years and bomb. And then walk off stage and think, that went great. Because otherwise you'd never get on stage the next night. You would just think, human beings don't like me. But sometimes denial can kill you. Thank you very much. Mike Birbiglia, performing an excerpt from his one man show, "Sleepwalk With Me". He's about to embark on a national tour where he tells stories and does comedy, from Cape Cod to Los Angeles, starting in August. Catch him before he becomes too famous. He's all over to the ITunes store and the internet, Google any spelling of his name, or go to our show's website. He was recorded at The Moth, where people tell stories from their own lives on stage. They have a free podcast-- free. And a website with all kinds of stories like the one you just heard. They are at themoth.org. And OK, one last part here and I'll swear I'll stop. If you have a sleep disorder of the sort we've been talking about so far today, there is very effective treatment. See a doctor. There's a little pill called Klonopin that helps most cases, as Birbiglia said. The DVD that Dr. Carlos Schenck made explaining sleep disorders that we heard an excerpt of at the top of the show is called Sleep Runners and it is on the web at sleeprunners.com. Dr. Schenck also has this beautifully put together book about all called Paradox Lost. I talked to a woman in Baltimore with an unusual name. And she doesn't want that name linked in anyone's mind with a house full of pests. So I agreed to call her Miss M on the radio. Miss M has had some very bad nighttime experiences with roaches starting with her old place on Liberty Heights Avenue. It was about 2:00 o'clock in the morning. I was laying on the couch. And I was on the couch because all the rooms was full. And I just felt something in my ear. And so I knew exactly what it was when I felt it. And it was making this sshhusshhusshhu. And I jumped up and I started screaming. My, my [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. She came up to the room. We told everybody else in the house we were on our way to the hospital. He stuck this thing in my ear about this long. Pulled it out. It didn't take but a minute to get out. And he showed to you. And it was a roach. He showed it to me. How big was it? It was a big one. It was a big one. No little tiny one. It cost about $165 to get it out. That doctor gonna charge me. Miss M doesn't live in that place anymore. She lives in a small house in O'Donnell Heights. The house is tidy, but it's public housing and it has serious multiple infestations. The mice in Miss M's apartment have abated temporarily this week for some reason, which has left the gluey mouse traps free for armies of roaches to get stuck on. Every sticky rectangle has dozens of roaches on it, waving their doomed antennae. And yet in spite of the glue traps, the Raid, the Boric acid, there are still roaches in every drawer she pulls open for me, every cabinet, the sink. They mill by the hinges of closet doors, they saunter down the walls, absolutely unafraid. Nighttime, of course, is the worst. Miss M's daughter Brittany, without even hearing her mother's roach in ear story, told me she got a roach in her ear too, not just once. Twice. Got in my ear twice. And one had got in my boyfriend's ear. We had to go to the emergency room. Was it hard to go to sleep after they got in your ear? Was it scary? I thought of putting tissue in my ear so they can't bother me as much. But yeah, it was hard to go to sleep. They crawled on the bed. I didn't like it. Yeah, it was hard. It was very hard. Because it was a lot. A lot is exactly the problem, Miss M says. You got to have a lot of roaches in your house to get them in your ear. Because there's one or two they not going for your ear. They looking for some food. They just end up in your ear by mistake. Yeah. Yeah. By mistake. And then they can't go backwards. So they can't come out. Roaches only crawl one way. Miss M says she's not looking to move. The neighborhood's pretty safe. There's no gunfire at night. The kids can play outside. And she's not mad at the city, her landlord. She's lived with roaches for a long time. And her expectations for getting rid of them, pretty low. She's gracious letting me ask questions about how many bugs she and her family deal with every night. Is it 500? --5,000? But she also makes clear that for her the questions are beside the point. Do you have to say anything about roaches? I don't think about roaches. It's the normal thing around here. We just live with it. We just live with it. That story from Nancy Updike. And oh, we are not done. We are not done with the critters that make people scared to climb inside their own beds. These people that you're about to hear, they all live in the same apartment building. We didn't know exactly what it was, but something was biting us. But I always complained to my wife, look at this. You know what I mean. You know something biting me. We're pretty sure that they're coming from inside the walls and maybe up through the floorboards. And I told my husband, I said I seen bed bugs. This July at 349 Saint John's Place in Brooklyn, you would be able to tell that the bed bugs had returned by the amount of furniture being thrown out on the curb. If you walked down the block you'd see mattresses and bookcases spray painted with the words "Bed Bugs-- Do Not Use" in big letters to warn off neighbors who might think of taking the stuff home. Robyn Semien, another one of our producers, stopped inside. Though Stephanie agreed to talk to me, at first she didn't want to invite me inside her apartment. She and her husband and five-year-old daughter never have guests over and haven't for years because of the bed bugs. Like Miss M, she asked that we not give her real name. Her kids got to go to school and she's got to deal with moms who might hear this on the radio. So that's why I'm calling her Stephanie. Her sleep is interrupted all the time by bed bugs, by the full-grown ones that are brown and easy to spot and the babies, that are just little white specks. Waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes you'll find them and they're white and then their belly is filled with your blood. And sort of their belly is all red. And you can see it. But once I realized that there are these little white things and I was sleeping on white sheets with little blue dots. And then that's when the sheets felt like they were crawling, which is really unmistakable and so hard to sleep in a bed where you feel like the sheets are crawling. When I would wake up with bites, if I found them or didn't find them I knew more bites were coming. So the process of going back to sleep is filled with thoughts of more bugs coming. The bed bugs didn't take over the building overnight. Like many of the residents, they have been there for years, locked in a tug of war where sometimes the residents are winning and sometimes it's the bugs. When the bugs arrived, Stephanie's daughter was just two. And started waking up in the middle of the night scratching and crying. Stephanie and her husband moved her to a different room and pretty soon had to relocate themselves too, out of their own bedroom to sleep on an air mattress in the living room. This was a complete failure. The bugs followed. It turns out, Stephanie says, they'd simply moved the bugs' food source. The food source being them. And they drove her crazy. Think about in the middle of the night, there's a lot of adrenaline in the middle of the night. These like middle of the night bites and trying to figure out where they were. I mean it's not just sort of you're waking up and scratching and you're sleepy. Like I would wake up in full combat mode: Rage, rage, rage, rage. And then back to bed. It sucks. I definitely upped my coffee intake during that time. I mean I was needing to compensate for the fact that I wasn't getting a full night's sleep. I think it made me a little more twisted. I was feeling a little twisted-- dark. There's a feeling of, like, I am being assaulted and there's nothing I can do. Stephanie and her husband exterminated. They bought their own pesticides. They put all of their clothes, sheets, towels, pillows, and all of their daughter's toys in clean plastic bags and lived out of the plastic bags. They threw out half the books they owned and then vacuumed the bugs out of each page of the books they kept. Put them in plastic bags. They coated the legs of their beds in Vaseline because Stephanie read somewhere that the bed bugs couldn't climb on Vaseline. They couldn't afford to move. Lately it seems to be working. And when you visit their apartment you can't tell anything's wrong. It's clean. It's neat. And when I ask Stephanie if I might see a bed bug somewhere, she doesn't seem sure. But says we might find a stray in the couch she's sitting on. It has dark brown cushions and a dark wood frame. And it's sentimental to Stephanie and her husband, the first piece of furniture they bought when they moved in together. A few years ago to save it from the bed bugs, Stephanie's husband replaced the foam and reupholstered it himself. You want to see one. I understand. To be honest, I think I don't really want to know the full extent in the couch. Let's take a look. She squats by the couch and starts to pull at the corner of the seat cushion. Oh. Oh, no. I may actually have a little freak-out. What did you see in there? So there's a little burgeoning bed bug colony. See these folds? This is where like to-- but it's on this side. So you can take a peek, if you like. I see nothing. You will. To me it doesn't look like much, like brown dust or tobacco that's come out of a cigarette and some white powder mixed in. Oh, my god. But it hits Stephanie much harder, like here we go again. Like actually it looks mostly like grown bed bugs, with a few white-- I haven't been getting that many bites on the couch. But the fact that it's in the upholstery makes it-- there's just nothing to be done. I'll probably go and get the pesticide that we have just so these guys don't get dinner tonight. And then tomorrow I'll ask my husband to take the couch downstairs. I'm sorry. Yeah. A few years ago Stephanie decided to do an experiment to see how long the bed bugs could live without food, without feeding on her family. She found two baby bed bugs and kept them in a sealed plastic deli container on her window sill. Months passed and instead of dying, they bred. She'd grown a colony of bed bugs, in an apartment of bed bugs, in a building of bed bugs. She ended up tossing the whole thing out because she could and because she was scared they might find a way to escape. Robyn Simeon. A week or two after this story first aired on our show a year ago, the landlord of 349 Saint John's Place hired a new exterminator who now treats the building regularly. Stephanie says her apartment has been bug free since. Coming up, somebody who consciously trains himself not to fall asleep and then must suffer the consequences. 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 choose the theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today show, Fear of Sleep. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three. The Bitter Fruits of Wakefulness. We have this story from Joe Lovell. A warning before we start this story to sensitive listeners that this story acknowledges the existence of sex and sexual feelings. I've been told that the insomnia I've struggled with on and off for most of my life comes from drinking too much caffeine or eating too much sugar or sleeping on a bed that's too soft or too hard or too flat. That I don't exercise enough or that I exercise too much. Or that I exercise the right amount, but at the wrong time of day. Or that it's the result of watching TV or using a computer right before I go to bed. Though isn't that when everyone pokes around on the computer or watches TV? I've also been told that I should have more sex, which was good to hear. But then I was told I should have less. What my insomnia is really about is being afraid. I don't mean being afraid of something happening to my daughters or to my wife or to my job or whatever other adult fears. I mean it's about being afraid when I was a kid. Specifically when I was 11 years old, the year I trained myself not to sleep. It wasn't that hard. I had all the normal childhood fears to draw on. Pops Ferrara, for instance. He was on my PeeWee football team, a fifth grader just like me. Though he was the kind of fifth grader who could get the nickname Pops. He was squat, and bowlegged, and crazily muscular. And he had a raspy voice that was indistinguishable from the voice of his father, who was also called Pops. Once in practice, I reached out to slap hands with Pops, the younger. And he took hold of my wrist and turned my hand palm up. And hawked a huge loogie into the center of it. He scared the crap out of me. It wasn't just Pops, though. I was afraid of the Pawnic twins, with their fantastic breasts and the way they sat on the jungle gym smoking their parents' cigarettes. I was afraid of not doing perfectly in school and then afraid of being the kid who did perfectly in school. I was afraid of hobos. This isn't a joke. We lived on a dead-end street, next to a railroad track. And one night my father woke up and chased two of them out of our house. I was afraid of my father having a heart attack because his father had died of a heart attack when he was a kid and had been buried in the cemetery across the street from his house. And I was afraid that when my father died of his heart attack, it would be on a night when my older brother didn't come home until very late, which was happening more and more. He was 17 years old, a senior in high school, and something bad had come undone in him. He'd started going out each night and coming home at midnight and then sometimes at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Wild-eyed and belligerent, saying weird stuff that we attributed to his being drunk or high, but that much later we realized were the first signs of his schizophrenia. My father would sit in the fake leather recliner in our living room, in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, waiting for my brother to come home. And the moment my brother opened the door, the questions and shouting and occasional furniture-toppling fistfight would erupt. I stayed up those nights and watched out my window, waiting for my brother to suddenly appear beneath the streetlamp on our block. One night he stopped there and did an impromptu martial arts kata, punching and kicking the air in front of him for nearly half an hour, in the middle of the circle of white light. As soon as I saw him I'd get out of bed and go into the living room, hoping that my presence there would keep things from escalating, which occasionally it did. And so I taught myself not to go to sleep. It was mostly just a matter of queuing up the highlight reel of anxiety and letting the images flicker away inside my head. Pops Ferrara pinning me to the ground and spitting in my face. Or the hobos, who at that very moment were no doubt sitting on the tracks of above our house waiting for the lights to go out. Or my dad's weak heart and what his face would look like when it started to clinch inside his chest. I dialed up all the imaginary drama inside my head, which kept me awake, which then allowed me to dial down the very real drama that existed each night inside our house. And it worked. It worked so well in fact that almost immediately there were consequences. By training myself to fear sleep, it became y default mode. I set myself up for a lifetime of late night distress, unproductive self-probing, and troubling discoveries I'd never have made if I hadn't been awake in the middle of the night. The first and maybe the biggest came at the end of our PeeWee football season in the fall of 1977. We'd played all the local teams and won all our games. And so we were selected to play in a PeeWee sanctioned Turkey Bowl in Seaford, Long Island, seven hours away. When our coach gave us the news, all the kids on my team raised their helmets in the air and hooted like they'd seen real players do on TV. What I thought was, oh Jesus, another two weeks of dodging Pops Ferrara, great. It was worse than that though. We weren't going to bunk together in motel rooms, which would have been bad enough. We were going to stay with the families of players on the opposing team. As you might imagine, I was a kid who dreaded sleeping over at anyone's house, much less a stranger's. In part because of garden variety anxiety, and in part because I worried about what might happen in my own house if I wasn't there. I tried every excuse to get out of it, but nothing worked. And so when the time arrived, I ate breakfast in silence as my mother packed my lunch. Then rode with my father to the parking lot outside Perkins Pancake House, where I boarded our bus and sat as far away from Pops as possible. Three hundred or so miles later we arrived at another parking lot and car after car pulled up and took my teammates away. Eventually the family I'd be staying with arrived, a big square-headed man with his two sons, smaller versions of him. One a few years older than I was and the other my age. They sat silently on either side of me in the back seat of their station wagon as their father talked about football all the back to their home. Their mother greeted us on their front lawn. Her face was sweet and chubby and she wore a Fighting Irish baseball cap over her Brillo-y hair. She put her arm around my shoulders as she led me into their house. It was dark in there, all heavy furniture and curtains and there was Notre Dame paraphernalia all over the place: A Notre Dame blanket and throw pillow on the sofa. A Notre Dame latch hook rug on the dark-paneled family room wall. Notre Dame posters all over the bedroom that the brothers shared. The kid my age, the one I'd be playing the next day, he barely talked to me. And his older brother spoke only when he wanted to mock the two of us. We sat in their TV room and watched a college football game while the father, who was also an assistant coach of his son's team, unleashed an endless commentary about blocking and short pass routes and the wishbone offense. Before dinner, I stared into my plate as they said grace. We had pot roast and potatoes, which my mother cooked all the time. But this didn't taste like hers. Even their ice cubes had a weird smell to them. And after dessert and more endless football talk we played Atari, which the mother told the two brothers to include me in. She must have sensed my discomfort because before bed she looked into my eyes and said that if there was anything I wanted, they were just down the hall. That it was no bother to wake them if I needed to. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag between the two brothers' beds. They had NFL bedspreads and a Pittsburgh Steelers poster on the ceiling overhead. We talked for a few minutes about the game the next day. And the older brother went on about how my team was going to slaughter his brother's, which was kind of him. And then before long we stopped talking and they both drifted off to sleep. I don't know how much time passed. In my memory it's hours, though that can't really be the case. I started thinking of home, wondering if my parents were awake and if my brother was still out. And then I started wondering if the mother here in this house would check on us. When it was clear she wasn't going to, I got up and went to the bathroom and hoped that she'd hear me in there. I turned on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror, flushed the toilet and let the water run for awhile. I didn't know what I'd say to her, but I just wanted her to come out and comfort me in some way. Maybe give me something to drink or some more pie. Or just talk to me for a while about my parents or school or the wishbone offense for all I cared. I stepped back into the hallway and stood there in my pajamas, listening to the house. The parents were still awake in their room. A light was on. And so I walked to their door and knocked on it, thinking I'd apologize and then ask for a glass of water. I nudged the door open and there was the mother on her bed. And behind her the father, red-faced and naked. I had no idea what I was seeing, just that I shouldn't be. Her head was bent toward the sheets and she never lifted it. He looked right at me. He was pale and fat and there was a scar that ran vertically from his naval. Neither of us said a thing. I closed the door and hurried back to the boys' bedroom and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. The next morning the mother would make pancakes and bacon. And the father would come in from outdoors and tussle my hair and say it was a cold day for a football game. Neither of them would hint at what happened in the bedroom. That was all hours away though. I lay there for a while, listening to the sound of the brothers' breathing on either side of me, simultaneously trying to block out and then bring into sharper focus what I had just seen, to make sense of what it all meant. I was 11 years old. My brother, who I was closer to than anyone in the world, was turning into someone I no longer knew. I was lying on a floor in the house of complete strangers. And I'd just opened the door on a large, pale man having sex with his sweet matronly wife, the closest thing to my mother for 300 miles. You just have no idea what's going on at any moment in any family in any house. Pretty much everything in life is an absolute frigging mystery. There was still a lot of night ahead of me. Joel Lovell, he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and is an editor at GQ Magazine. Hello. Keith, it's Seth. This is the production manager of our radio show, Seth Lind, calling his uncle Keith about an incident that is actually the subject of this next act, Act Four, an incident that happened to Seth when he should have been sleeping, over 20 years ago. What I was calling about is I wanted to know if you remembered something, which was there was one night when you were staying over. And I woke up in the middle of the night and you were watching The Shining. The movie? The movie, The Shining. Uhuh. Do you remember me watching that with you? I do not. Really. I vaguely remember myself watching it. Yeah. I watched almost the whole thing with you. I was six. You were six years old? I was six. OK. I remember bits of the movie. Do you remember the elevator doors opening and blood rushing out? That I do not. Really. Because I remember that was right when I sat down and that happened. And I didn't know what was going on. And you said, "Do you know what that is?" And I said, "Is it mud?" And you said, "No. It's blood." Honestly I do not recollect. Well, that was totally unsatisfying. Yeah. I like how he wasn't sorry in the least. Yeah. Like oh, you want to watch a movie too? It's two dudes watching a movie. Seth had a very common childhood experience. He saw a film he shouldn't have seen. And it had exactly the effect you'd think. After seeing The Shining, he had trouble falling asleep and nightmares every night. And here's where it gets a little extreme, this lasted for most of two years. It lasted so long probably because the film was The Shining. A film that is not only truly scary, it starred a six-year-old boy-- the same age as Seth at the time. And if you remember The Shining, the director Stanley Kubrick is constantly shooting from the six year old's perspective. There are all those amazing shots down from kid-level height, as the little boy speeds down the hallways of this huge hotel on his big wheel. This made everything in the film seem very, very real to Seth. It just made it plausible. I think it was just a really quick decision, like I'm that kid. As simple as that. It's like oh, hey look. I'm on the TV. And there's really, really, really terrible things happening to me and my family. Mommy. I'm scared. And I think that's why it got so far under my skin. Stop it! Stop it! Over the course of a day, I would-- well, first of all I would feel this extreme pleasure in the morning when I woke up because I had gotten through the night. And it was like every day was this relief. But then as the day went on, I would start to feel this dread because I knew I was going to have to go to sleep. I knew it was going to get dark. It was like you were doomed. Yeah. It was like I knew exactly what was going to happen. And just describe, you would be lying there trying to fall asleep? I'd lie down and really quickly just one of these images would just pop in my mind. I mean the blood coming out of the elevator was huge. Also there are these twin girls who, in the movie, are sort of spectral characters that only Danny, the little kid, can see. And they are sort of shot like Diane Arbus twins, sort of spooky, standing side by side, kind of intoning straight to the camera. Exactly. And they're shot inter-cutting between them speaking and pictures of their chopped up corpses. That was the biggest one, the image that would pop into my head the most. It's interesting you talked to your parents about this on tape a couple weeks ago. Yeah. And it's clear. Like they knew that something was happening, but somehow they don't know how deep it goes. Hold on. Let me just push a button here. The protagonist was like a little boy. And I was six. And he must have been around that age or so. Was there a little girl too? Well, there were two little girls. Oh. Oh, OK. Who were twin sisters, who were murdered. Who were murdered. OK. So they were ghosts. I guess I need to see it again. And they say-- Come play with us Danny. Come play with us Danny. Come play with us forever. Forever. And ever. And ever. I love how your mom's take on this is it's so not deeply sinister, this film. There was a little girl. Didn't he have a friend? He had a playmate. It's not fair for me to expect that someone had to have the same relationship to it as me, feeling like I kind of lived inside of it in a really terrible way. For two years. For two years. My most intense memory of the after effects of all that is that I'd wake up in the morning and you'd be sleeping on the floor on the rug beside the bed, all curled up in your quilt. I remember going to my room during the day. And I would look at our bedroom and sort of prove to myself that it wasn't scary. During the day. Oh. And because I'd say, OK it's light out. This is exactly what it looks like at night. It's just dark. There's nothing different about it. But I would get this sort of dread as the day went on. And I don't remember that you shared any of that at all. I don't think I shared any of it. I mean to everyone else and throughout your growing up, I mean you were to all outward appearances a really joyful, happy child, really loving. And yet it just really shows that children have very involved inner lives that their parents might not know much about. Yeah. And why didn't you ask for help? I didn't think that anyone could help. The message of the movie is no one's going to help you little kid. The parents in the film just aren't any help to the kid. Like your parents aren't going to help you. Right. The father in the movie is trying to kill you. The mother wants to save you, but can't. You have to save yourself. Do you think one of the reasons why you didn't ask for help was because it was-- it's like because it affected your dreams. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like in a way it had gotten to a part of you where nobody can go anyway but you. Right. There's a certain point where the person who is trying to help you is going to go to sleep. And I would be left alone. Everyone sleeps alone. Seth Lind. He's not just our program's production manager, he is also in the comedy troupe, Thank You, Robot. So I started today's show by talking about how fear of sleeping for me goes hand in hand with the fear of death. And I used to be surprised that everybody didn't feel that way or regularly have that experience, these moments in bed when they felt so aware that death is really going on happen to them. And I have found that it is comforting that there are other people who do feel that. Here are some. I will be totally asleep. And it'll be about 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock in the morning. I'll just bolt upright. I'm like gasp! Then it's like a complete instant panic attack where I'm just like clutching the sheets and going oh god, oh god, oh no, oh god, oh no. And I just like kind of hang onto the bed and be like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I'm just wanting to scream. Your cornered. You're a trapped animal who's like sweating and waiting for its head to be chopped off. I can feel time whizzing by. And I'm trying to hold on to something generally. So I usually start grabbing the walls or like clinging to the pillow. And I'm like this isn't going to go away. I need to hold this. I need to hold on to time. I need to stand in this river and just not move. Like it's a kind of very primitive feeling. You have to just, like, flee from this totally horrible thing that's happening to you. But there is nowhere you can flee. And understanding at the same time that what you're fleeing and trying to run away from is the complete cessation of you. Like normally I think you go through the day and you don't really think you're going to die. Or it seems comforting. Like I'm in traffic this morning, I think, oh I might die someday. I'm like oh, what a relief. I don't have to do this anymore. But there's something about being half asleep specifically that causes the realization to actually take effect. When this wakes me up in the middle of the night it's because I'm right. Like it's going to happen. That's why. Because that's reality. And just for some reason I can see it. It's not irrational fear. It's like you understand that you're mortal. Your life is going to be over at some point. You're fighting like the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed, rolling around in your sheet covers-- in your blankets. And you're rolling around there, trying to fight death. And there's no way you can win. I cry. And I just get really sad. And I just think. I try to breath. I breath really deeply. And I just think like there's nothing I can do. Like the terror is overyaken by just sadness. I just want it to not be true. Jane Feltes, Lennard Davis, and DJ [? Ectencamp. I know that we almost never have poems on our show. And I already read one poem today, so whatever. But there's a Philip Larkin poem that is exactly about this subject that we're talking about it. It is in his Collected Poems, which is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux called "Aubade." And it begins and it's nighttime. And he writes at nighttime, you can see what's always been there, unresting death holding your now. And then I'm just going to pick up in the middle of this, where he describes what he sees. --the total emptiness forever, the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere, and soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid no trick dispels. Religion used to try, that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die, and specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear-- no sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with, the anesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, a small unfocused blur, a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, and realization of it rages out in furnace-fear when we are caught without people or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, have always known, know that we can't escape, yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring in locked-up offices, and all the uncaring intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. 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. We went through a long stretch of time with a lot of open wounds on our hands, so-- and I do remember a lot of times after a game we'd have practice the next morning and we would have to figure out a way to get our glove on because our wounds were wide open. The sweat would actually get into our wounds and burn. Hockey's changed over the years. Joe Kocur is from the days back when there were enforcers, guys whose job it was to get their hands bloody. Joe played for the Detroit Red Wings and the New York Rangers. If you don't know much about hockey, when fights erupt, it can just seem like thuggery, disorganized mayhem. But Joe says that when he would start a fight, it was anything but random. It wasn't arbitrary. Far from it. He was the law. If a guy runs your goal tender, if a guy runs your best hockey player on your team, he just did a dirty check on a friend of yours, I mean, anything that is not legal in the game and the referee may not see it, and even if the referee sees it, sometimes you have to take it into your own hands to make sure this gentleman doesn't want to do it again. Let me ask you to give an example of how this goes down. You tell a story in your book about going after Jim Kyte in one game. What did Jim Kyte do? Well, throughout the whole game, Jim Kyte was running our captain Steve Yzerman and playing, I call it dirty. He was slashing him a lot and hitting him with the stick, so I was on the ice with about three minutes left in the game. I was a young guy and Jim Kyte was on the ice and was ready to face off. And I went over to one of our veteran defenseman, Mike O'Connell and I said, "Mike, did Coach just put me out here to go after Jim Kyte?" And he said, "Joe," he says, "I don't know your job and I don't know what the coach was thinking but you know what your job is. Do what you think's right." And when the puck dropped, I went after him. Now we've got a fight, Kyte and Kocur. And Kocur [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Jimmy Kyte. I happened to catch him with a couple pretty good ones and that ended the night. I was scared when I hit him, because I'd hit him so hard and his head had hit the ice and I was worried that he may have been hurt permanently or something. Not a pretty sight, but Jimmy Kyte's a tough guy and he's getting up. Now, sometimes somebody did something during the game that would deserve retaliation, would deserve enforcing, but other stuff needed to happen during the game. The clock was running down. You didn't have time to get into a fight, and so you would kind of file that away in your head and wait until you saw them on the ice the next time. Would they know they had it coming? I think for the most part. Sometimes you didn't go after him right away, because it changed him as a hockey player. He's looking around. He's looking over his shoulder, worried about getting what's going to happen to him, and you may wait a game or two and let him just be on the ice and be unsure of what's going on. I think one of the keys to being an enforcer and intimidating other players is the unknown. If somebody did something to one of our players and you didn't get him that night, you knew he was going to have an uneasy sleep before the next game, and probably for the rest of the year for that matter. What's interesting is that the game has referees who are there to keep order, but the refs can only do so much. Kocur says that when a player acts up, the penalties that the ref gives-- two minutes in the penalty box, a $500 fine-- players shrug that stuff off. Who cares? It doesn't change their behavior. But if there's an enforcer out there and they know there's going to be some physical pain inflicted upon them for what they did, they're going to have second thoughts about doing it. At the two political conventions this summer, some commentators started comparing our nation's two vice presidential candidates to hockey enforcers. A guy in The National Ledger wrote, "Barack Obama evidently believes he needs somebody to protect him like a hockey team star, so he chose Senator Joe Biden." A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News wrote, "She calls herself a hockey mom, but now Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is jumping into a job more akin to a hockey enforcer for Senator John McCain. Almost immediately she came out swinging, going straight for Democratic Senator Barack Obama's ribs and knee caps." I think what's going on is that our politics are so rough and nobody is really refereeing that somebody's got to be the tough guy, not to bring justice exactly, but to protect their own side. Though, of course, the line between protecting your side and just being a bully can get kind of hazy. And so, today on our show, Enforcers, people who take the law into their own hands. And also, the people who are supposed to wear the sheriff's badge but sometimes have a hard time putting it on. Our show in two acts today. Act One, Hanging in Chad. In that act, some freelance self-appointed enforcers who enjoy the hell out of enforcing frontier justice on the internet. Act Two, Now You SEC Me, Now You Don't. Alex Blumberg has the story of an enforcer who refused to enforce even when pleaded with to do more to protect people from the financial turmoil that we see in the news every day. Stay with us. Act One, Hanging in Chad. Like everybody else who has email, I've gotten those messages where they say that there is $8 million sitting in a bank in Nigeria and the money is just sitting there, doing nothing. And somebody needs help getting that money out of the country. But until recently when somebody explained it to me, I never really stopped to think about how this scam actually works. If you reply to those emails, after some back and forth, they'll let you know there's a processing fee that you're going to need to pay for the courier, or the insurance, or whatever. And after you pay that, of course, they don't deliver the money. There will be some problem, some bank official who needs to be bribed or some new fee. And they're very sorry. They're sure if you just do this one more thing, you'll get your money. And so you pay that and then on and on it goes. They string you along for as long as they can. In 2007, Americans reported losing $15 million to this particular email scam. And the real number may be more like a $100 million, according to the federal government's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which says that the average loss to each victim is about $2,000. Though, and here's the reason why I'm bringing all this up, it is rare for anybody to be arrested for this. The thieves are hard to catch because, it turns out, they really are overseas in places that American law enforcement has a hard time reaching. Lots of them are actually in Nigeria, so many that one nickname for this kind of con is to call it a 4-1-9 scam. 4-1-9 is the part of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud. So into this breach, onto this lawless frontier, where traditional police work has failed, has stepped the vigilantes. Internet vigilantes. The proud. The brave. I live in the Midwest. I'm a 42-year-old software engineer. I've got four children. I will identify this man and his friends only with their nom de guerre. His is YeaWhatever and he ran the vigilante action I'm going to tell you about today alongside two of his friends. Jojo, someone below the Mason Dixon line. Yeah, I'm early 20s, single. I am an engineer. And there's Professor So And So out in a Western state. I'm 31 years old and I have a four-year-old daughter. Three of these guys met on the discussion boards of a website called 419eater.com. That 4-1-9 in the name, yes, refers to the Nigerian criminal code. This is the website where internet vigilantes like themselves compare stories, and share victories, and swap trade secrets on how to get the email scammers. And this spring and summer, these three guys ran an operation against the scammers that not only exceeded all expectations, they became kind of an internet sensation in their community, scoring more page views than anything comparable. But it also raised some interesting questions about whether these internet vigilantes, these self-appointed enforcers, go too far. Chances are you may have heard of guys who do this. They've been around for a while. They call themselves baiters, or scam baiters, because they bait the con men into doing all kinds of ridiculous things. They convince them to get funny tattoos or build pyramids out of sandbags or pose for embarrassing photos. On YouTube, you can watch some West African email scammers perform on video an old Monty Python sketch about a dead parrot. They had been told over email that they could get a pile of money, a scholarship grant, if they were any good. I wish to complain about this parrot that I bought not half an hour ago from this very shop. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. What is wrong with it? I will tell you what is wrong with it. He is dead. No. No. No. If you're wondering what good this does anybody, the idea, besides amusing yourself and your friends on the discussion boards and administering some karmic justice, is to waste the con men's time so they have fewer hours in the day to scam people. And the bait that I'm going to tell you about today wasted an astonishing amount of the con man's time, maybe more than any bait ever. It began when somebody on the discussion board got ahold of a scam email from a Nigerian whose name was supposedly Adamu. He wrote to this Adamu, pretending to be an official from a missionary church, which is a time-tested bait. Well, the way it typically worked was one of these scammers would contact the church. We would write back and say, well, unless you're a member of the church, we really can't get involved in any financial transactions with you, so if you want to become a member, great, otherwise good luck with your transaction. Then they decide that they want the money really bad. They join the church and we just plan from there. The idea, YeaWhatever says, is to get the scammer off of his script for what's going to happen and onto theirs, which worked with this guy Adamu. Well, we got him totally in a different direction. We offered him grant money to start a church in Nigeria. And how much did you offer him? $200,000. But if Adamu wanted to get the $200,000, they told him, he would have to take a trip, a long trip, from Lagos, Nigeria to a completely different country, Chad. When baiters send a con man on this kind of trip, they refer to it as a safari. It's a wild goose chase, basically, but, of course, that's not what they told Adamu. They invented an entire cast of made-up characters who started emailing and occasionally telephoning Adamu. All of them were part of this church that they had invented. There was a Reverend Benjamin who informed Adamu that, if Adamu could somehow make it to Chad, there was a missionary named Hamden there and a translator named Eric who would meet him and drive him to where he would get the $200,000. Here's Jojo. We basically said, what you need to do is you need to get a one-way ticket from Nigeria to N'Djamena, Chad, which is right on the border of Nigeria. It's about 800 or 900 miles away. You don't need to worry about clothes or food, because once you get there, everything's going to be provided for you. And we're going to send our missionary, Hamden. We're going to send him to pick you up in N'Djamena, and you're going to leave with the $200,000. You know, everything's going to be taken care of once you get to N'Djamena. To help the church representatives recognize Adamu in the town square in N'Djamena, they ask Adamu to wear a white robe and a bright pink sash, and hold a sign with a slightly obscene message about Muhammad, this in the middle of a Muslim country. Now, to give you a sense of what Chad is like, somebody posted on the scam baiter discussion board the official travel advisory for Chad that was issued by the Canadian government. It describes the entire country as unstable. Possible clashes between rebels and government troops, it says. Civil unrest and violent incidents can occur at all times, including in N'Djamena, Adamu's first stop. There are live mine fields. There are roaming armed militias. There are bandits. Yeah, it's very dangerous. And then are you trying to get him hurt or are you just trying to scare him? No, we're not trying to get him hurt. We're not trying to get him hurt, but it's really just isolating him. What we wanted to do is just isolate him, get him out there, cut off from any ability to communicate with potential real-life victims, and keep him there as long as we could. And on April 1st, they start getting emails from Adamu saying that he has arrived in Chad, but there is nobody there to meet him. They email back, explaining that Hamden's car broke down on the road halfway between N'Djamena and a town called Abeche, and that's why Hamden isn't there to pick him up. And right away, Adamu writes back to them saying his situation is pretty rough. He's traveling, by the way, with a man who he identifies as his brother, who may or may not be his real brother. This is an excerpt from something on April 3rd. "Please, I am not OK here. Since four days now, I am stranded in N'Djamena. The worst is I don't have single money with me here. Please--" [LAUGHS] You know, it's hard to read these without even laughing. "Please, for God's sake, tell Hamden to come today or latest tomorrow. No food for me. No water to drink, because of the language problem. No English, only Arabic language and Hausa. That is why I come with my brother that can speak Hausa but not Arabic. I am very, very hungry." And he writes in another email around the same time, "You call me as soon as you reach. Please. No food, no water since four days now." What do you think's really happening? Do you really believe that he has no food and no water? No. Nope. I mean, he's got money to check the internet. You know, what kind of priorities are those? These guys are used to telling lies for a living. I don't disagree that it probably is pretty bad there, but he's not as hungry as he claims. For the next few weeks, the truth of Adamu's situation, as best as they can figure, is this. He's living at the bus station, sleeping outside, still in the same clothes he arrived in. He has a little money to email them from the internet cafe, but very soon his cellphone dies. This is pretty much exactly the kind of misery that the baiters had hoped to inflict in the first place. And on the discussion boards with their peers, there's a lot of high-fiving and celebration. "Ha ha ha. I love this," somebody writes. "I almost feel sorry for him, but not really." And at this point, the baiters move to phase two of their plan. N'Djamena is bad, but now they do everything they can to convince Adamu to come to Abeche, 400 miles further from home, and 400 miles closer to a part of the world you've probably heard of, Darfur, which is just on the other side of the border between Chad and Sudan. Phase two will take him to the town of Abeche, which is still in Chad but less than 100 miles from the border. Conditions there are much more dangerous than in N'Djamena. If he hits Abeche, Professor So And So writes on the discussion board, he is more screwed than he can even imagine. To lure him there, they send him fake receipts for Western Union money transfers that he can only pick up at the Western Union office in Abeche. They try to convince him to join Hamden, whose car is supposedly still stuck halfway to Abeche. And YeaWhatever writes an email, pretending to be Eric, the church's translator, talking about how great it is all going to be once he gets to Abeche. If YeaWhatever and his buddies sound surprisingly gleeful as they talk about this, well, we'll get to that. "Brother Adamu, you'll be happy to know that Abeche is a quiet, very small town, just a couple hundred people. Unlike N'Djamena, everything in Abeche is easy to find and everyone there is far more friendly." Really not true, but-- "We live in a building exactly 20 meters to the west of the UN office. It's easy to find that building. It is the only building in the center of town that has satellite dishes all over it." We don't really know if there is such a building, but we thought it sounded nice. "Anyhow, everyone knows us in Abeche. All you need to do is ask for Hamden or me. Everyone knows us. I look forward to finally meeting you and your brother. This has taken way too long already. I'm sure that both you and your brother are looking forward to the plane ride back home." So you're trying to get him to Abeche, and at one point you actually email him saying, OK, the guy's coming today with the car. And then he doesn't answer that email fast enough, and then you email him again saying, where were you? We sent the guy with the car. We actually had the driver call him. I asked-- You had him call him? Yeah, another baiter. I asked him if he would make the call. So he had voice modulation software and software that he could add sounds, so he put a sound of, like, a busy street on and called as the driver freaking out on him about not being able to find him and waiting two hours. Wait a minute. I've been trying to call this number for two hours. I went there to pick you up, ain't nobody there. And damn it, I'm crotchety. You know what? He gave me some money to give to you. I'm on my way back now. I'm leaving. He told him he was keeping the money, and then we had to follow up and let him know exactly what happened. He missed the driver. So that's just to make him feel as bad as possible, it seems. It was his fault. Oh, right. It's to make it his fault, you know, essentially. That's one thing we like to do, is it's never anyone's-- well, it's never any of our fault. It's always their fault. It's not our fault. It's Western Union's fault. It's not our fault that you didn't get the email. The driver was there. You know, so we create this illusion that we are being so very compliant with everything they're asking for. This technique is exactly what the scammers do themselves. They tell you that they are doing everything possible to help you get your money. But there's always one more problem that prevents you from getting the big payout, one more hoop to go through. The scam baiters are like cops, taking the same tactics as the criminals. Don't they recognize the fact that you're using the same technique on them that they use on the people who they're scamming? It baffles us. You would think they would, but they don't. You would think so. Well, the obvious difference with us is we're not asking for money. We're just asking him to travel from one place to another, so maybe that's enough for them not to see it. It seems to work time and time again. And then once you get him isolated, once you get him, you know, somewhere like N'Djamena, well, they really don't have an option but to believe. You know, it's the same mentality that some of these victims have. They've sent so much, they've gone this far, that they can't really turn back at this point. In a thread on your discussion board, people talk about this victim mentality. Once you've given up some money or some time to actually believe that it's a scam, it's just too horrible to think about, and it's just easier to think, oh, this is going to work out. Right. And I think the same thing holds true with them. The guys managed to keep Adamu and his brother waiting in N'Djamena for 21 days, which is an incredibly long time for one of these scam bait safaris. Usually they just last a day or two. And they are nowhere near finished. They do manage to convince Adamu to go to Abeche, where conditions, as predicted, are much, much worse. Adamu gets there by telling a driver that he will pay the driver $500 when they arrive in Abeche. All they have to do is go to the Western Union office in Abeche, where, supposedly, money is waiting for them, sent by the church. Though, of course, when they show up, something is wrong with the paperwork at Western Union. They have no money to give the driver, who gets angry. Adamu writes increasingly desperate emails to his friends in the fake church. Each one begins with a pleading reminder that they are at the cyber cafe on Hospital Road, waiting for the church officials to finally arrive and rescue them. "My life is in great danger here because of the driver that has brought us here have not been pay and he is treating our life." Threatening, I guess. These are being read as written, so-- Yeah. "Now there is tension--" [LAUGHS] "there is tension all over my body because of the driver threating me of his money. Save me from the driver hand, because he is increase his money every day. I and my brother have been with him now for five days in Abeche." And do you think it's possible at this point that the driver is threatening them? That seems like it could be possible, right? Yes, completely. Definitely. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't doubt that one bit. I mean, it's his phone they're using. He's paying for cafe time. Now, you write underneath this on the bulletin board posting, Jojo, "These are some of the funniest emails I've ever seen." And I want to ask you about this, because on the discussion board, as you're posting this day-by-day as it's happening, people all through it are saying, "This is knee-slappingly funny stuff. I am laughing so hard at these emails." You post on the bulletin board, saying, "If the following email doesn't make you laugh out loud, then we would never have fun hanging out. This is pure poetry to me." And the email is, "I am begging you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I and my brother are still waiting for you in Abeche in the only cyber cafe along Hospital Road. We are waiting for you. We are still here since the driver is not happy about us. Please come so that we will be free from his hand. Please. Thank you. I am waiting." That's just gold. Can I ask you? I think that this is just an area where I am not going to see eye to eye on this. I don't see what's funny about this. Yeah, you've got to realize, again, these guys are overly dramatic. I understand that it is, you know, it's not the safest place in the world, but this is just a bit of drama here. Well, again, these are not nice people, you know? And if you've been dealing with people like this as long as we have, you might find some humor in this. But I guess to people who don't do what we do, this might be a bit shocking and maybe not so funny. But again, we deal with people like this all the time, and they will tell you any lie possible to get money out of you. And they want their money and they'll do whatever it takes to get it. In all, Adamu and his brother wait for the church officials to show up at the cyber cafe on Hospital Road for nearly three months, all of May, and all of June, and most of July. Meanwhile, the baiters switch tactics against them over and over. They keep sending Adamu into the Western Union office to pick up money transfers that never go through. Once, they send him in with a note written in Arabic, a language Adamu does not speak, to show the clerk. Here's what the note says. I am a criminal. Please arrest me. I hate Muhammad and Mecca is a hell hole. I love Israel. I love George Bush. I think he should invade Chad and remove this ugly country off the map. Muhammad is a demonic pedophile. I hate Muslims. I hate Chad. I hate this country and its people. I'm about to rob this place. Do you know if he actually showed this to the Western Union person? He did not show it to the Western Union person. Nothing happened. We were hoping at that point to get him arrested. I don't think he really brought it there. No way. At some point during this time in Abeche, Adamu starts saying that his brother is injured. His brother's leg was hurt, Adamu says, when they fled a rebel battle. To find out what was true and what was just another lie, I tried to contact Adamu by email and by telephone. I got some help from a Nigerian journalist in Lagos. He talked to Adamu several times, tried to convince him to come on the air, and give his side of this whole story. Adamu refused. He said he knew nothing about this, that we must have the wrong man. But back when Adamu was still in Abeche, the baiters came up with a way to intercept the emails that Adamu sent to two guys who appear to be his bosses back home in Nigeria, and also to intercept the emails that those two guys sent to him. This is one of the emails that Adamu sends to those guys back home about all this. Remember, he has no idea that the baiters are reading his private emails, so this is about as close as we ever get to seeing how bad his situation really was. Professor So And So reads. Dear CZ, we are in great danger now. Please, can you call [? Annie ?] to go and borrow money for us, because brother is in danger if he die here? All of us are in a big problem. And jump down to the next one where he's writing ND. Sure. Dear ND, ND, we are not happy with your email you send to us. I told you that we are in danger here in Chad and brother broke his leg because of the attack, the rebel attack us here. We escaped by god help and there's no one to assist us. We are sleeping outside since in the desert. Please, ND, don't let us die here because of transport money to come back home. Please. And so, do you think the brother's leg is hurt? I don't know. I don't know. I do think there might be something to that, because that is kind of a recurring theme. Well, in the last call that I had with Adamu, he was explaining about how his brother got really sick and, you know, they were having a hard time begging for medication money. And there was something in his voice when I was talking with him that I actually did believe that something happened. Yeah. He's there a total of 106 days, he's gone from home. And then when we were talking with him on the phone one day, I think he's just kind of given up hope. You know, he doesn't have money to check his email. I think he's just kind of frustrated at the way things have gone. And we end up telling him that his mother died, which was a pretty big deal. He hasn't really been in contact with home, as far as we know. At that point, we were just kind of getting bored with him. I mean, there wasn't much else we could do with him. We knew he wasn't going to travel anywhere else. I don't know. We had nothing to lose and thought, why not? Don't you think that's kind of harsh, telling somebody that their mother's dead? Yeah, that's a little creepy. I don't know. We were talking one morning and I don't remember who came up with the idea, but it didn't sit right for a minute or two, and I thought, well, why not? So we went with it. But think about the irony of this. That's one thing that's kind of funny, was the response on the forum. You know, the same people that were like, oh, this is great, this is hilarious, you sent him to Chad, oh, I can't believe you've fictitiously killed his mom. Right. That's going too far. Sending him to Chad and the border of Darfur is fine-- Which is real. --but fictitiously killing his mom, oh, that's, you know, that's harsh. Kind of struck me odd, too. Right, but it's like you're playing with his heart when you're talking about his mom. Right. Somehow that seems like it's out of the game. Like, you're sending him on a goose chase to get $200,000 that he's trying to steal from a church. OK, you know, you're sort of playing his game with him. But to tell him about his mom, that's just like-- it's so personal. I know. And I know it does sound kind of creepy at first. But again, we've been dealing with people like this for years and, I don't know, maybe we've just become jaded over time. But I don't know, it doesn't really bother me when we pull something like this on a guy, because his mom's not really dead. Every now and then in the 106 days in the discussion boards, their peers would tentatively raise questions about the ethics of what they were doing, of intentionally sending somebody like Adamu, a petty thief who all these guys see as inexperienced and naive, to the most violent place they could with no money or even a change of clothes. One poster writes, "At this point I wonder to myself, what would make me feel sorry for a lad," meaning for one of these guys. And somebody responds, "Call me a no fun lad hugger, but I reached that point early on. Yes, he is a scammer and scumwad. On the other hand, he is also, technically speaking, a human being, and I've been wincing whenever anybody gleefully expresses the possibility that he might die. Don't get me wrong. I'm laughing my head off. But I'm also feeling a little bit uneasy as I'm laughing." Somebody else writes, "He could seriously get killed. Am I bad for thinking that's pretty cool?" Right, I remember reading that. What's your reaction to that? Well, I think people come up with these hypothetical scenarios in their brain. I mean, honestly, Ira, you're in New York City, I assume, and you could get killed there. I mean, people get killed everywhere every day. I know, but you're specifically sending him to a place where there's violence and where there's warnings not to go there and you're putting him in a dangerous situation. Like, well, what if he did get killed? I mean, do you fear that? If that happened, would you feel like, oh, we went too far? Well, I understand this is not going to make me the most popular guy in the world, but it wouldn't really bother me all that much to be honest with you. These guys are pure scum as far as I'm concerned. And they don't have to go there. We just kind of put the bait out there and they went for it. These people think they're stealing from a church and stealing from humanitarian workers, so if they got killed, well, it's two less scammers in the world. And, Jojo, what do you think? You know, I don't know that I would sleep greatly at night if I knew that, but I wouldn't feel responsible. I would feel like their greed led them there, that they chose to get up and go to Abeche. But it wouldn't have-- if one of them were to get really, really hurt or killed, like, it wouldn't have happened except for you. It wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for them. You seem to be taking that out of the equation. It's their scamming, it's their falling for this and trying to rip us off that got them into it. Of course, Adamu could say exactly the same thing about his victims, about the Americans who fall for his email scams, that it's their own greed, trying to snag millions from a Nigerian bank, that gets them into it. If at this point you're wondering why this is the cause that these three guys took as their own, why they feel so strongly about this particular issue versus all the possible injustices they could be fighting, they all say they just kind of fell into it. None of these guys has personally lost money in an email scam, though they all know about people who've lost lots of money. YeaWhatever says he talked to a guy in Florida who just lost his house, was in tears, asking for help, but nothing could be done for him. Knowing that this radio story about them was going to be on the air in the last couple of days, they started talking, naturally, about the radio story on their discussion board. YeaWhatever wrote, "I'm sure that we'll be painted to look like ass [BLEEP], but I am totally OK with that. We are ass [BLEEP]." Professor So And So agreed. "Big time ass [BLEEP]." Professor So And So, by the way, is the only one of these three baiters who has ever had any second thoughts about anything they did in this bait, maybe because he's the least experienced. He's been baiting for less than a year. At first, Professor So And So says, he wasn't so sure that they should tell Adamu that his mom was dead. Well, it was interesting to really just kind of analyze as I was feeling. It's like, why does that feel like that? I mean, I knew it was something that I wanted to do, and I knew it was because it was really just-- I don't know. It was something that-- Sadistic? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it was a piece of psychological torture, that-- I think the feeling that he would have, you know, at that moment being so far and so isolated and so out of touch and, you know, at this point it was purely psychological, what we were doing. And then what made you then go ahead and do it if you had the hesitation? Well, because the hesitation wasn't stronger than, I guess, the desire to leave him with that feeling for even a short period of time. Not long after they told Adamu that his mother had died, he must have called home and learned the truth. After that, the guys say, he seemed to understand that something fishy was going on. They lost contact with him. Pretty soon he managed to get home to Nigeria, which is where he is now back in business trying to do his email scams, which we know because Jojo is still in contact with him. Jojo's got a different bait going now. Jojo's posing this time as a single dad named Pancho Villa. I just got an email from him today. He's asking for his $10,000 fee. And I told him, I said, my daughter is very sick and she's in the hospital. I said, I either have the choice to pay my daughter's hospital bills and pay for her treatment or I can send the money to you. Here's his response, "Let me advise you on the best possible things you should do. Right now, I will advise you to go to the bank, withdraw the money in there, and take it to pay for the consignment fees first. As soon as you pay this, you will use the rest of the money to pay the hospital bill." So there he is. He thinks that there's a little girl dying, and his solution is no, no, send me the $10,000, let the girl die, and everything will be OK. Jojo says that when Adamu does stuff like this, it's easy not to feel sorry for him for what they did to him in Chad. In the days since Jojo read me that email in the studio, Adamu started to suspect that Pancho Villa was a fake. He got furious and accused Pancho of being the same guy who'd screwed with him back in Chad. He wrote an email saying, "Don't ever in your life email me again because you are a fraudster, old thief. You will die a shameful death. You're a criminal from the poorest country in Africa, Chad." In other words, he thinks Jojo lives in Chad. He thinks he's an African. And although he's got that detail wrong, when it comes to Adamu's bigger point, that everything that happened to him in Chad was at the hands of somebody exactly like himself, a fellow email scammer, somebody who tricks people and strings them along, on that point he's exactly right. Coming up, the dirtiest-sounding financial thing you can do on Wall Street, and I am not talking about asset strippers. 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 and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Enforcers. You know, enforcers come in two broad categories. There are vigilantes and there are cops of one kind or another. And we're about to make a leap from one group to the other. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two, Now You SEC Me, Now You Don't. For a long time now in America, whenever there's been a financial upheaval, a big financial crisis, the three different federal agencies that deal with the financial system have to figure out which of them, who is going to be the enforcer, who is going to step in and fix things. But in the recent financial turmoil we've been going through in this country, including the news this week about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Alex Blumberg reports that one of the three guys supposedly in charge of policing our economy has been notably absent. The chairman of the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, is often referred to as Wall Street's top cop. And this past year, a year in which the global financial system seemed perpetually on the verge of collapse, a collapse due in large part to complex, unprecedented, and, as we now know, extremely risky financial products created and sold on Wall Street, you might expect to be hearing a lot from Wall Street's main enforcer. But Christopher Cox, the current chairman of the SEC, has been noticeably absent from any public house cleaning. Instead, it's been two other government officials who've done the heavy lifting, the Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, and of course, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, who's been all over television this past week talking about the most recent crisis, the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These three men have made regular and frequent appearances before various House and Senate banking and finance committees, the three horsemen of the financial apocalypse. But Christopher Cox can sometimes seem like less a third horseman and more a third wheel. Witness a June 23rd article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, titled "SEC Chief Under Fire As Fed Seeks Bigger Wall Street Role." The article starts off by describing a 5:00 AM conference call that took place in March between the country's top financial regulators. The topic of the phone call was what to do about the investment bank, Bear Stearns, which was about to collapse and possibly set in motion a global financial meltdown. The article describes the events after the phone call this way, quote, "When they were done, the Treasury Secretary informed the President. The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York called Bear Stearns. Christopher Cox, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, didn't call anyone." Though the SEC was Bear Stearns regulator, he didn't take part in the meeting. In an interview, Mr. Cox said, the time of the call changed overnight and no one told him. The article goes on to describe how the next night Cox missed the negotiations over what to do with Bear Stearns because he was at a birthday party. And how the day after that, he missed another conference call announcing the sale of Bear Stearns. The following weekend, he left town on a family vacation. So this was the backdrop in July, when the various crises gripping Wall Street and the nation's financial system suddenly took yet another turn for the worse. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac entered the stage for the first time. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite having names that a child might give to a puppy, are-- well, were-- two of the most important financial institutions in the American economy. They are involved in roughly 70% of the mortgages issued in the US today. If they collapsed, the housing market would come to an effective standstill, which is why, rather than let that happen, the government took them over last weekend. But back in July, when this story takes place, the failure of Fannie and Freddie had just started to seem like a possibility. Their stock price was tanking, had lost over 60% of its value in just one week. And so the government was trying to figure out what to do. Chairman Cox. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Senator Shelby and members of the committee for this opportunity to describe the SEC's actions to deal with the recent developments in our financial markets. This is Chairman Cox testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Now, at this meeting, he's announcing his very first emergency action of this entire economic crisis. In fact, it's the only emergency action he's taken as SEC chairman. It's his first and boldest step onto the national stage as an enforcer. On this day, he's announcing an order aimed at stopping a particular Wall Street practice, a practice with a provocative name. Today the commission will issue an order designed to enhance protections against naked short selling in the securities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. You probably don't know what naked short selling is. I certainly didn't. And to understand it, you have to understand its upstanding cousin, regular short selling. Now, regular short selling is perfectly legal and incredibly common. It's just a way of making money if you think a stock price is about to go down in value. Here's how it works. Say I think IBM is headed for a fall. I find someone who owns a whole bunch of IBM stock, and I say to that person, can I borrow 1,000 shares. The person says, fine, and lends me the shares, which I immediately sell on the market. Later, maybe a couple of hours or days or weeks, I go back on the market, buy back the 1,000 shares of IBM and return them to my lender. If I'm right and the stock has gone down, then I've made money. I sold for, say, $10 a share, but bought back at $5 a share. I pay the lender a small fee and I get to keep the difference. It's pretty straightforward, and happens millions of times a day on Wall Street. It gets confusing, as things so often do, when you get to the naked part. Everyone I talked to initially about this story explained it to me this way. Naked short selling, they said, is the same as regular short selling, except that you don't actually borrow the stock first. But that doesn't make any sense. How can I sell something that I haven't borrowed? My name is Jim Coffman. I'm retired from the Securities and Exchange Commission. I used to run investigations in the enforcement division there. And how long did you work there? 26, almost 27 years. OK. This is the thing that I think that's hard for civilians to understand, is when you short sell, you borrow the stock from somebody, you sell it at the current price, you wait for the price to go down, you buy it back, and then you give the stock back to who you borrowed it from. When you naked short sell, you haven't borrowed the stock yet. That's right. What are you selling? You're selling the stock. But you don't have the stock. It doesn't matter. It would be no different, in many respects, than selling a car that you don't own. You get the money, you put it in your pocket, and you don't deliver the car. In some circumstances that would be considered-- that is, selling an item you don't own would be considered a criminal activity. That's not true in the stock market. And why is that not true in the stock market? Uh. To paraphrase a presidential candidate, that's not in my pay grade. It turns out that naked short selling is one of those crazy corners of the financial system that when you come upon it for the first time, you can't believe it actually works that way. The whole thing started back when stocks were actual paper slips that stock boys ran back and forth across Wall Street in wheelbarrows. In those days, if I called my broker and I said I wanted to short a stock, my broker would pour himself a scotch and say, I see, old man, have you borrowed it yet? And I'd say, no, not yet, but when I do, I'll have my boy run it over in a wheelbarrow. And then my broker would say, well, fine then, old chap. I'll go ahead and sell it. Despite the fact that everything is done on computer today, that old system is still more or less in place, meaning it's still possible to call my broker and have him sell shares that I don't own and haven't borrowed and have the money still show up in my account. And whoever bought the phantom shares I sold has those shares credited to their account. Then something called the clearing and settlement system gets stuck with the headache of following up on it all. If the shares that I sold continue not to show up for three days, the settlement and clearing system declares what's called a fail to deliver. The buyer still owns the stock that never really existed, and I still keep the money from the sale of the stock that never really existed. The only one who's harangued is my broker. The clearing agent contacts the seller's broker and says, you have a fail here, and tells them that, you know, they need to settle that up in x number of days. I think it's 13 days or something like that. The broker may or may not do that. If the broker doesn't do that, they'll continue to get nasty calls and nasty letters, but that's about the size of it. And some brokers, depending on the nature of the broker and depending on the importance of the customer who has sold the shares short to that broker, may or may not bother to obtain shares and deliver them out. Here's the thing, though. Most fails, the vast majority, eventually do clear, and the ones that don't are just a tiny fraction of the total market, where over a billion shares can trade every day. In the 20-plus years that Jim Coffman worked at the SEC, he did investigate and even bring enforcement actions against naked short sellers. But it was for the most part, he says, a fringe activity that took place in the markets murkier corners. To Jim Coffman, the notion that naked short selling by itself could bring down multi-billion dollar companies, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, just doesn't make sense. Was there naked short selling in those entities? I have little doubt that there probably was, but it was far, far, far from being the primary cause for the decline in the prices of those securities. And so it was mystifying to Jim Coffman and all sorts of people who follow the SEC that several days after testifying on Capitol Hill, Chairman Cox made good on the promise to go after naked short selling, and came out with his promised emergency order preventing it. The emergency order was unusual, because instead of banning naked short selling across the board, Cox outlawed the practice only when it came to the stock of 19 specific companies, which he listed in the order. There's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and 17 banks and brokerages, like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and a bunch of other big names on Wall Street. And it was only a temporary ban lasting less than a month. Lynn Turner was a chief accountant at the SEC for over 25 years. He's retired now, but he recalls how mystified he was when he heard about the order for the first time. I recall it because I was actually over in Utah fly fishing with a bunch of other people who had been at the SEC, and I think we were all somewhat amazed by the whole situation. But certainly, it was talked a lot around the dinner table. It seemed to be strange that the SEC would be taking this particular path to trying to deal with the subprime crisis, when obviously there were other bigger issues out there. The SEC was just dealing with what seemed to be almost a sideshow of naked short selling. First of all, says Lynn, naked short selling was already basically illegal. A regulation passed in 2004 by the SEC required brokers to have a commitment to borrow shares before they sold them on the market. In addition, the SEC had the power to investigate all those fails to deliver. They could track down the people who didn't deliver the stock and prosecute them under existing law. And if you really wanted to further tighten regulations, there were much better ways of going about it. You could simply adopt a rule here that said, on the date you sell these shares short, you've got to deliver the shares, just like when you buy shares, someone has to deliver to you on that day when you go long. It is a very simple, common sense fix. And I see no reason that the SEC couldn't do it, and I think it's a lot better than all of a sudden trying to come out with exemptive orders that apply to just 19 companies. And this was the strangest thing of all. If naked short selling is bad, then presumably it's bad for everyone. Why protect just 19 companies while leaving the rest of the corporate world exposed to this alleged danger? The SEC wouldn't talk to me for this story. They directed me to an op-ed that Chairman Cox had written, trying to explain his actions to a confused and skeptical public. In it he writes this, quote "The emergency order is not a response to unbridled naked short selling, which so far has not occurred. Rather, it is intended as a preventative step to help restore market confidence at a time when that is sorely needed." In other words, he singled out 19 companies for protection from an already illegal practice that hadn't actually happened. How that's supposed to protect market confidence, he doesn't explain. Here's Lynn Turner. You've just got to wonder whether-- you know, what was the real motive here? And I think the real motive was not so much to protect the markets, and not so much to protect the average investor, but to protect particular companies. And when you've got the regulator trying to protect particular companies and deciding who can or who cannot trade, that's no longer a free market. There's another way of looking at all of this, the way, presumably, Christopher Cox is looking at it, that this is, in fact, just the help the free market needs. This is an extraordinary time, this argument goes, and it calls for extraordinary measures. These 19 companies are so central to the operation of the global financial system that they deserve special treatment. The stakes are too high to let them fail, and we can't trust the market to ensure that they won't. But the problem is that's totally inconsistent with Cox's philosophy up until this point. If Chairman Cox had wanted to step in with the power of government, the last couple of years have presented ample opportunities that arguably would have been much less intrusive and that would have had the added benefit of fixing some of the problems that got us here in the first place. For example, says Jim Coffman, the former SEC investigator, it's a basic principle of economics that the market works best when buyers and sellers have good information about what's being bought and sold. But because of accounting loopholes, companies can keep potentially damaging information off their balance sheets, hidden from investors. And the fact is there wasn't accurate and complete information in the marketplace, because the SEC didn't require them to disclose that information. So instead of requiring the disclosure of information that would remove the uncertainty from the marketplace and make it much easier for people to price securities fairly, the commission banned naked short selling. Another issue, says former SEC Chief Accountant Lynn Turner, is the credit rating agencies. OK, again, a little explanation. Credit rating agencies, as their name suggests, rate things, bonds and securities and specifically for our story, a type of security called a CDO, which is the thing that set in motion this entire financial crisis. Now, Wall Street created these CDOs, and it wanted the credit rating agencies to give them high ratings, in essence, to declare them safe for investors. The problem is, A, they weren't safe, and, B, the rating agencies were paid by the same Wall Street firms whose securities they were rating, a clear conflict of interest. So if a Wall Street firm doesn't like the rating one agency gives it, it can just switch to another agency. And during the housing bubble, when lots and lots of these securities were being created, there was a ton of money to be made, a huge incentive for the rating agencies to give high ratings. And the rating agencies were pulling in record amounts of money. In a hearing-- I believe it was the spring time-- Chairman Cox from the SEC was questioned about that by Senator Shelby from Alabama and Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island. And they asked the Chairman during the testimony, wouldn't he like to have legislation that would fix that and would give him the additional powers to be able to change those policies and procedures or demand changes in them when appropriate? And to that Chairman Cox responded, no. I think the point that you do not feel the statute gives you the authority to examine the substance of the credit ratings or the procedures and methodologies, would you want that authority given the situation we've seen in the marketplace? No, Mr. Chairman, at this juncture it's my judgment that you and the Congress have struck a sound balance. And I think it just basically astounded the two senators, and I think most people, if they were aware of that, would be astounded by it as well. They were basically saying, we will write you whatever legislation you need to go after this problem. Yes, that's exactly right. It seems to me, too, you have to have an interest that these agencies are consistently producing credit ratings with integrity. And how do you accomplish that unless you're able to go in and look at the substance of their procedures and methodologies? Well, as I say, I think that you and the Congress have struck the proper balance here, because-- Well, at least in terms of discussion, that's on the table. Yes, of course. At another point during this hearing, Senator Reed asks Chairman Cox whether he needs more money for enforcement. Again, the chairman declines. Do you feel, Mr. Chairman, that the amount that you're going to be given here is enough resources to effectively oversee the securities markets? And if not, would you share with the committee what you believe you're going to need? I think overall the nearly billion dollars that Congress has provided us in the latest budget is ample. The ranking Republican on this committee, Richard Shelby, is a recipient of the Spirit of Enterprise Award from the US Chamber of Commerce, a man very easily described as a pro-business, anti-regulation conservative. But the current financial turmoil has made those old labels a little unreliable, which in turn has made things like Senate banking subcommittee hearings very odd affairs, where you can be treated to the strange spectacle of one pro-business Republican, Richard Shelby, arguing with another pro-business Republican, Christopher Cox, about the need for stronger regulation and enforcement of the markets. It's especially strange, because the one arguing against this regulation is the chief regulator. Here's Senator Shelby laying down the law. I hope that you, in your leadership with the other commissioners, will do the job that needs to be done. We're at a crisis here. If the SEC's not going to do the job, somebody else will have to do the job. Christopher Cox, like a lot of people in government these days, has an ideological opposition to government regulation. The market, in his view, will correct itself. Credit rating agencies with bad ratings, for example, will eventually go out of business. Essentially, he trusts the market to get things right more than he trusts the government. He holds that view almost across the board, except when it comes to 19 banks and brokerages on Wall Street. But in this case, he should have trusted his instincts, because the government intervention did indeed botch the job. When Cox's emergency order expired in mid-August, the stock prices for most of the companies he was trying to protect were actually lower than when the order first went into effect. And we all know what happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Alex Blumberg. He's one of the producers of our program. His story is going to be on NPR'S new Planet Money podcast, which came about after our Global Pool of Money show, the show that Alex did on the mortgage crisis with NPR's Adam Davidson. They're doing a couple new stories a week in the spirit of that show, the Planet Money podcast. To find that, go to npr.org/money. This song, by the way, is called "I Go Chop Your Dollar," very popular, apparently, among some of the email scammers in Nigeria, which is where the song comes from. Well, our show is produced today by Robyn Semien and Nancy Updike with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, and Alissa Shipp. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and PJ Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Joe Kocur's book about life as a hockey enforcer is called The Bruise Brothers, available only at immortalinvestments.com. To read the full, incredible day-by-day account of baiting Adamu with maps and photos and audio recordings, you can go to 419eater.com, or just follow the link from our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management over sight by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia. When we forgot to pick him up to go to the Emmy awards ceremony, where we are up for five, yes, five Emmys, he called to say, I've been trying to call this number for two hours. I'm in traffic right now. I am in traffic. I'm on my way back now. I'm leaving. And damn it, I'm crotchety. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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In every low-income neighborhood in every city in the United States, there are people trying to make things better. Ministers, teachers, social workers. If you have one of those jobs, sometimes the best way to get through each day is to think small. Get this one parent off drugs. Get this one kid through the school year. Deal with stuff you can actually fix. But Geoffrey Canada grew up poor in the South Bronx raised by a single mom on welfare. Somehow he managed to make it out of the neighborhood to a good college in Maine, then off to Harvard. But he wanted to help kids like the ones he'd grown up with. So he came back to New York City, took over a community organization in Harlem. This group did a really good job. They helped a lot of kids stay in school, keep out of trouble. But after a decade in this job, Geoffrey Canada started to get frustrated. Things were getting worse in Harlem. Fewer kids were graduating high school. Incarceration rates were rising, poverty was on the rise. And that's when he decided to make a change and go big. Today on our radio show, we have three stories of people deciding that they are going to pull out all the stops. They're going to go to extreme, audacious lengths. They're going to do things that not only have they never heard of, I think nobody's ever heard of, for their communities, for their families, for the people they care for. It is This American Life, by the way, from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. In Act two of today's show, we have somebody going to really absurd lengths-- I think I can say that-- to win over a woman. In Act three, we have a daughter reaching out to her mom using means I believe anyone would find extraordinary. And let's get right to it. Act one, an act that we're calling Harlem Renaissance, we have the story of Geoffrey Canada and what happened when he decided to go big. Paul Tough tells that story. The thing that changed Geoffrey Canada's thinking about the best way to help poor children was having a child of his own. This was 10 years ago, when he was in his mid-40s. It wasn't his first time being a father. That was a whole generation earlier, when he was still in college, a poor kid from a rough neighborhood on scholarship. That first marriage didn't last long, but in his early 40s, he remarried. And a couple of years later, he and his new wife had a son they named Geoffrey Jr. Things were a lot different in his second go-around as a dad. He was no longer a struggling young father trying to make ends meet. He was now a well-educated, upper middle class guy living in a big home in the suburbs, surrounded by trees and lawns and golf courses. His life had changed in the 25 years since his first child was born. And he found out that parenting had changed too, for his neighbors at least. There was a ton of new research on the importance of stimulating your child's brain early on. And apparently every parent in the suburbs had heard about these studies because they were obsessed with preparing their infants. Baby Einstein tapes, flash cards, brain-building toys. Everyone was doing it. I just found it fascinating that since I had raised my first children, the amount of information about what we should be doing in that period of time was really quite staggering. And I thought I was a pretty good parent in the early years. But now I'm looking and thinking I was not a great parent at all if you really looked at what they said is happening in a child's developmental process between zero and three. And I found that Yvonne, my wife, and I were spending all kinds of time thinking about how to get little Geoffrey prepared for the world he was going to inherit when he became a grown man. And Geoff started to think, well, if he was overwhelmed by all this new information, what about the parents he was working with in Harlem? He turned to his staff at the organization he ran and asked them to canvas the neighborhood and find out what this new parenting revolution looked like from the streets of Harlem. There was nothing. We couldn't find one place that was teaching anything to children zero to three. And it suddenly struck me that places like Central Harlem are often left out of the science around youth development. All of us were just absorbing this. It was in magazines and on TV and on the radio. Everybody was saying, oh, yeah yeah yeah. I've got to be thinking about this child's brain. At the same time, it was skipping by Central Harlem. During this same period, Geoff's thinking was evolving in another way as well. After so many years of frustration, of saving one kid and watching 10 more slip through his fingers, he begin to wonder. What if instead of reaching 5% or 10% of the kids in Harlem, he could reach 40 or 50 or 60% of them? Maybe there was a tipping point where the whole culture of the neighborhood would start to change, where teenage pregnancy and going to prison and dropping out would be considered strange behaviors, instead of something you just expect, the normal course of events. So with all these ideas in his head, he went before his board of directors and said we have to rethink everything. In order to truly make a difference, in order to change the outcome for this community, to end the generational poverty, saving 500 kids, 1,000 kids, 1,500 kids simply was not going to make a difference. We were going to have to operate in a really different way. We had to really think big. So we were going to have to work with children in the thousands and going to 10,000 children. But we also were going to have to work with children starting from birth right through until they graduated from college. We're about to get started. You see staff around the room with green shirts on. First, I'd like to introduce to you the Assistant Director of Baby College, Mr. Abasi Clark. I'm in a cafeteria in a Central Harlem elementary school, surveying what, 10 years later, Geoffrey Canada's vision has become-- an organization called the Harlem Children's Zone. A program unlike anything else in the country. It represents a complete rethinking of the way we've been dealing with urban poverty. The scope of Geoff's ambition is huge, to reach almost every child living in 97 inner-city blocks in Central Harlem, 10,000 kids in all, and make sure they all graduate from high school and get through college. To give you a sense of what that means, 10 years ago, only a little more than half the kids in Harlem even finished high school. To make this happen, he's grown his organization to 10 times its original size, built a comprehensive system of integrated services, going from cradle to college. There are two charter schools, a health clinic, a family counseling center, even a farmer's market and free tax preparation. But first, he's concluded, he needs to get Harlem's parents on board. He wants them to rethink how to raise their kids, to show them what middle class parents are doing. And that starts right here in Baby College. All right. One, two, three. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. Scientists have concluded that the most effective time to intervene in the lives of poor kids is between the ages of zero and three, when the only people who can really give that help are the parents. And so for the last two months, a full-time team of 15 outreach workers has been roaming the streets of Harlem, going door to door in housing projects and stopping random pregnant women at the supermarket or on the subway, grabbing anyone pushing a stroller, trying to persuade them to give up nine Saturday mornings in a row to take classes on how to be a better parent. --know it, shout hooray. Hooray! If you're happy and you know it, shout hooray. Hooray! The idea of trying to mess around in the private life of a disadvantaged family is one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It's essentially telling poor parents that there's a better way to raise your kids, and we're going to tell you how. But somehow, that's not what it feels like at Baby College. It feels like a conversation, like we're on your side. Like it'll be fun. Hooray! Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Listen, listen. Usually I don't do this, but it's the first week, and I'm feeling good. I'm happy to see all you parents out today in this hot weather. So we're going to have some fun, just a little bit of fun, real quick. For the last five years, I've been writing a book about Geoffrey Canada's effort to go big. I spent this summer with the parents in Baby College. For most of these kids, if everything goes according to Geoffrey Canada's plan, this will be the beginning of a lifetime of involvement with the Harlem Children's Zone. And it's Baby College that sets the whole thing in motion, and in the process, challenges many assumptions about what is and isn't possible for a social program to tackle. [BEAT BOXING] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. After five years of reporting, I've come to believe, as Geoffrey Canada does, that there is a solution to poverty in America. And on this morning anyway, that solution sounds something like this. If you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. If you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. If you're happy and you know it, and you really want to show it, if you're happy and you know it, stomp your feet. If you're happy and you know it-- Good morning. How are you all feeling today? Good? Does everyone have their binder with them today? In a classroom down the hall from the cafeteria, a dozen expecting parents are sitting in a half circle, perched on those hard little elementary school chairs. They're listening to their instructor, Hassan. Today's class is all about brain development. And Hassan is talking about all the ways that parents can help their children's brains to grow-- singing songs, playing games, talking, and most importantly, reading to them. The more you introduce language to them, the more they grab it. So at their earliest ages, your child has a brain capacity that's way past where we are. A lot of what gets taught in Baby College-- that you should read to your kid every night, use timeouts instead of corporal punishment-- is the stuff that Geoffrey Canada discovered in the suburbs. Knowledge that over the last couple of decades has made its way into pretty much every middle and upper middle class home in America, but barely penetrated low-income neighborhoods like Harlem. The only way that they can be acquainted with all of that is that you are doing that. And that starts now. There's lots of science to back up what Hassan is saying. One research project that underlies everything that happens in Baby College was done in the 1980s in Kansas City. A pair of psychologists did a closeup study of two sets of families. One group, in which the parents were on welfare, and another, in which the parents held professional jobs. It turned out that the biggest difference between the two sets of homes was language. The kids with the professional parents heard 20 million more words in the first three years of their lives than the kids on welfare, mostly just the regular jabber-jabber of parents talking to their children. And those extra words had a huge effect on their verbal ability. It was stunning news that the biggest factor in determining a child's later success in school wasn't any of the things we always assumed to be true. It wasn't money. It wasn't parental education. It wasn't race. It was the sheer number of words your parents spoke to you as a child. Among scholars who study inequality, there is more and more evidence out there that the divide between the kids who make it and the kids who don't starts in the very first years of life. The researcher who has done the best job of pulling all this together is a man named James Heckman. Well, like many economists and students, really, of the American labor market, one is always interested in why some people earn more and do better in the labor market, do better in life than others. Heckman is an economist at the University of Chicago. In the early '90s, he was hired to study some government programs aimed at adolescents from poor neighborhoods-- all the traditional solutions to poverty we've been using for the last 40 years. Things like job training, GED programs, programs for dropouts. And much to his surprise, he found that none of these programs were actually working. Job training was supposed to be the solution to welfare. But Heckman found that for the young adults he was studying, it wasn't doing any good at all. The premise behind job training is that young people who can't find a good job are just missing one particular skill or body of knowledge. Teach them that and they'll be fine. What Heckman found is that the people in these programs had a much bigger problem. There were some very basic skills and abilities that they had never learned. And it was hard for them to absorb anything new without those skills. Things like-- --the ability to communicate, to solve simple mathematical puzzles, and to understand how to even read the newspaper. As well as the non-cognitive-- self control, motivation, ability to get out of the bed, to show up at work on time, to engage and be open to ideas. These traits were in very serious short supply for individuals that I was looking at, the disadvantaged. And so I came to ask the question, how is it that these skills get formed? As Heckman continued his research, he discovered some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that if kids don't get these very basic skills pretty early in life, ideally before reaching kindergarten, then those skills become harder and harder to acquire. If you haven't achieved basic reading fluency by eight or nine or 10, it's very hard to learn after that. And if by adolescence you haven't learned those non-cognitive skills like patience and self control, the odds are stacked against you ever learning those. But the good news was that the reverse was also true. If you can get to a poor child early on, in the first few years of life, even small interventions can have huge effects. Discipline is always a big to-do. In the course of writing my book, I went through Baby College a few times. And every time, the discipline classes were the most intense. And they were the hardest sell with the parents. That language study that discovered that well-off kids hear 20 million more words than poor kids before age three also found that the kind of language poor kids hear is different. The researchers counted the number of encouraging and discouraging remarks that children heard from their parents. And the difference between the two groups was staggering. By age three, a child of professionals hears about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. A child of parents on welfare hears almost the exact opposite, just 80,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. According to the scientists who study this stuff, physical and verbal punishment has a huge effect on a child's emotional development, and on cognitive development too. For most parents in Baby College, though, these were pretty foreign ideas. What other ways can you-- oh, now let me see. One, two, three, four. Give me another one for ways to handle discipline. Dominique's class is for parents of children under a year old. The kids are all sitting on the carpet in the middle of a circle of chairs, playing with blocks and rattles. And the kids don't know it, but Dominique is hard at work trying to keep them from getting hit, smacked, or popped by their parents, who are all sitting in a circle around the outside of the classroom. Dominique wants the parents to talk about alternatives to corporal punishment, like negotiating, timeouts, talking to a child. The parents don't seem all that convinced. One mother speaks up and says Dominique has forgotten to mention her favorite kind of discipline. Old-fashioned discipline. [SMACK] She pantomimes giving a child a smack. There's a feeling in the room that if the only tool you have to deal with your kid's acting up is to talk to them and just tell them to be good, they'll misbehave like crazy. As one mother puts it, for some children, sometimes you've just got to pop them. And popping them, you think, is going to stop that behavior for now. But what about later on? You're going to have to keep popping them? No. Well, here is, what I think, is one of the things that frustrates a lot of us who live in and work in really poor communities. Again, Geoff Canada. People telling kids sit down, shut up, get over here. Don't you make me come over there and get you. Do you hear me? And you just listen. That's a two-year-old you're talking to. Who talks to a two-year-old like that? Lots of people who really believe the parent's job is to make this child listen and become passive, so the child does whatever you want. A lot of our parents really believe that a child that looks like this is really a good child. And so you see all of this energy put into shutting a child down without the realization that that is how children's brains develop. A child's brain develops through exploring their world. It's counterintuitive for many parents, this idea that a good kid isn't necessarily a quiet, well-behaved kid. So it isn't easy to convince them that this different style of parenting might actually work. But it's one of the amazing things about Baby College. You can actually see parents change their minds as the nine weeks go on. One young mother in the class speaks up and says that she's actually having second thoughts about popping her kids, the way she's done until now. Let me tell you something. Now he thinks he's grown. Now he thinks he can hit his brother when his brother behaves bad. And why do you think-- He'll stand there and he'll go, come here, Chris. Come here. Let's go, let's go. I'm like, oh, wow. So wait a minute. Why do you think he's doing that? Because I-- that doesn't work. He hits back now. Unfortunately that's what you've taught him. Yeah. This idea that the habits of a parent are passed on to the child is not lost on anyone in the classroom. A lot of the parents are worried about imitating their own parents' behavior. Like this mother, Taisha, who said her mother's favorite form of communication is yelling. And I'm like, talk to me. If you don't like something I did in the house as far as chores, tell me so I can correct it. But she doesn't talk. Like, when I was younger, she'd smoke cigarettes. I used to wish she would just smoke a cigarette after she starts yelling because that's when she'd calm down. So I'm like six years old, like, I hope she picks up that cigarette because I'm tired of hearing her mouth. Thinking about it now, that is crazy. I would not want my son to be thinking, oh ma, pick up that cigarette or that bottle of liquor because I'm tired of hearing your mouth. I have to do it a different way. I have-- So what other ways are some of the ways you do it now, as a parent? As a parent, I haven't hit my son. Me and his father joke around, like, oh, we're going to have to hit this little boy. But I was like, let's try it the Baby College way. Let's see how this goes for a day. If their motives may not work, maybe I'll put a little of my stuff in it. But it has been working. It's tiring to keep doing the same thing over and over and over. Academics and scholars who study poor communities often talk about the cycle of poverty. And when I sat down outside of class with Taisha, I realized that she saw herself the way the academics did, as a statistic. I feel like I'm a statistic because I had a son, I was pregnant at 19. My mother was a young mother, was pregnant at 15. And I feel like every time I hold back another semester of college, it's like I'm never going to make it there. I was supposed to be the one to break that cycle. I was supposed to be the one doing right. Taisha is 20. And she and her boyfriend [? Rossi ?] have a 10-month-old son named [? Rahsaan ?]. After class I talked with them for a while to try to get a sense of how much of a difference Baby College might make in their lives. They met in high school, it turned out. Taisha was one of the best students in her class. [? Rossi ?] was mostly interested in playing basketball. But when he started falling for Taisha, he knew he needed to pull up his grades to win her heart, so he hit the books. And when he graduated, he had a B average and a steady girlfriend. Taisha started college that fall. And then in December, she found out she was pregnant. We initially planned to have an abortion. Well, I planned to have the abortion. I actually started crying when we were in the hospital, when she was about to get the abortion. So it was a hard decision. Wow, so you were that close? You were in the-- Yeah. I already convinced myself, like, this is what I'm going to do. Just go away for college and leave this in the past, leave [? Rossi ?] is the past, forget about it. But when I saw him crying, that broke me down. So I was like like, oh my God. I'm just going to do this. But the decision didn't make her feel any better. She stayed depressed, didn't know what to do, fought with [? Rossi. ?] And then last spring, Taisha read about Baby College on a poster that an outreach worker had taped up in the lobby of the housing project where she was staying with her aunt. [? Rossi ?] agreed to come with her that first day, but he figured he'd just sit in the back and be a spectator. To his surprise, though, he ended up finding a lot of the information that first day really helpful. And he hasn't missed a class since. It actually made our bond stronger with us. But it also gave us a greater bond with [? Rahsaan. ?] Just go back and tell him that, oh, you were in the Baby College when you were 10 months, seven months old. And we did that together as a family. I feel good about going there. I feel proud, actually, just doing this. Yeah, I'm proud. When I go to work, I say I just came from Baby College. I am better as a parent, if I wasn't already. It just added on to it. I read to him every single night. Every night he gets a bath since he was born. But now, I read to him every night, about two to three books a night. Two to three books a night, even when I'm tired. They obviously convinced me that it works. And I see that he's able to sit there and actually just listen to me reading a story and get amazed at the pictures and the faces. And even if it's the same book being read to him over and over, he still has this excitement because it seems like it's something new every night, even if it's the same book. It's like, oh my God, is she reading a book again? Yes. You know? When Taisha was growing up, she knew she wanted to have a different kind of life. But she didn't have anyone around her to show her what that looked like. Well, there was one family. The Huxtables. It was watching The Cosby Show when she was a kid that gave Taisha an alternate vision for what her life might be like. This family, they had a family in a brownstone, a townhouse. And the kids went to college and they had other kids. And I want that. And being that I didn't see that around too much, I'm like, everybody's doing this. And it's not helping them. So let me try another path and see where can that take me? And if I can achieve what I'm seeing on TV, if it is achievable. For most middle class kids, the path that Taisha struggled to find is so straight and well-paved that they barely even notice it's there. Geoffrey Canada knows that he probably won't be able to create a Cosby Show environment for Taisha's son [? Rahsaan ?] or for any of the thousands of other kids in his programs. But he thinks that with the help of Taisha and [? Rossi ?], he can create a pretty good substitute. It's kind of a revolutionary idea. For years, we've been trying to improve the lives of poor children by improving the lives of their parents. Getting the parents better jobs or more money or better housing. But Geoff is saying that we may be able to counter many of the effects of poverty on children without actually lifting their parents out of poverty. Just focus on the kids, get them through college, and then they can lift themselves out of poverty. The thing he invented to do this he calls the conveyor belt. In a couple of years, [? Rahsaan ?] will be eligible for the early lottery to get into one of the charter schools that the Harlem Children's Zone runs. If he gets in, his parents will have an opportunity to go through a more advanced parenting program called The Three-Year-Old Journey. The following year, [? Rahsaan ?] will have a guaranteed spot in Harlem Gems, the all-day prekindergarten. Then he'll start school. And he can stay in the same school all the way to college, with plenty of after-school programs and social supports along the way. When he graduates from high school, [? Rahsaan ?] should have in front of him the kind of opportunities that very few kids used to have in Harlem, even if his parents never managed to turn into the Huxtables. But when I sat down with Geoff to discuss [? Rossi ?] and Taisha and their young son [? Rahsaan, ?] I realized that although Geoff is committed to his choice, save the kids rather than the parents, it still involves some painful trade-offs for him. It is probably one of the tougher decisions that I have made. But our choice is to focus on [? Rahsaan. ?] What we want to do is allow, I think, this child to have an opportunity not to repeat this same set of behaviors, meaning that he ends up getting someone pregnant and having to drop out of college to take care of them. And then you end up with the same cycle going over and over and over again. It's hard, when you're just 19 or 20, to accept the idea that you're not the one who's going to make it out of poverty, that instead, your job is to make sure your kid makes it out. Taisha, especially, really struggles with that idea. Her Cosby Show dream seemed so close just a couple of years ago. But [? Rossi ?] and Taisha both say that the most important thing is to make sure the cycle that they're caught in doesn't claim [? Rahsaan ?] too. I want to break the cycle. And I want to start our own. And so he'll know that when he has his own kids that, oh, my parents were there for me. So I'm going to be there for my kids, and so forth and so forth. So it's basically starting our own generation. Well, if you can tell a parent, no no, you are getting that child ready right now. And this kid is actually going to have-- I know you don't have anything. And you don't have any money. I know you're worried about where the rent's going to come from. I know you're worried about, are you going to be able to provide for your child? Can you keep a roof over their head? But read to that child tonight. Just read to this child today. Just allow them an opportunity. You're doing as much for your child as that person in that nice, big house that you envy is doing for their child. As parents, you're exactly the same. I didn't read that much when I was younger. I watched a lot of TV. And we don't really let him watch TV like that. Maybe he watches Noggin when he gets home until it's time for him to go to bed. But if we read to him, he's going to start reading by himself. Just some little things like that, that just gets him adjusted so he could be better off. If we can get this right for him, [? Rahsaan ?], and his generations that come from this point on, will have a totally different life. And he'll be going to that family reunion as a 28-year-old thinking, there's my mom and dad. And they really struggled. And they had it rough. But look how my life has been, and the life of my own children, which is what I think we're trying to do. I feel like there are some times you can look at everything that has to happen in a poor child's life to get them to successful outcomes. And you can just say, it's just enormous. There's just a ton of work that has to be done. But then there's other days where I feel I can look at it and feel the opposite. And feel like if you just read to your kid, just a couple little things are going to make a difference. And I'm wondering which way do you tend to look at it? Do you tend to be surprised at how easy it is, or tend to be surprised by how hard it is? I am always surprised by how easy it is. It is not like decoding the human genome. You actually don't need eight supercomputers to do this. It takes people to really focus and concentrate. And I am always stunned-- well, how is it no one knows this? The reason it seems so incredibly difficult is that so few people have actually learned how to do it. All the experts I interviewed for this story, and for my book, told me the same thing. It's much easier than people think. And so far, Geoff's efforts bear that out. The experiment is working. Think of what that means. For decades, we've thought that raising large numbers of kids out of poverty was basically impossible, that the best we could possibly hope to do was to pluck a few over-achievers out of the ghetto and airlift them into the middle class. But it turns out the only reason we thought it was so impossible to pull off was because we were doing it wrong. Here's the data. Last year, the first group of kids in Geoff Canada's charter school made it to third grade, where they took their first New York state achievement tests. The results were astonishing. The class was all poor and African American, most in single-parent homes, some with parents who had been teenage mothers or high school dropouts or had trouble with the law. And they had reading scores above the New York City average. Their math scores were phenomenal, more than 95% of them on grade level. And these are kids who got to kindergarten before the conveyor belt was fully constructed. Most of them didn't attend the pre-kindergarten and their parents didn't go to Baby College. But the kids entering kindergarten now have been with the program since birth. They've been on the conveyor belt their whole lives. Which is why Geoff says that his best work is still to come. When these kids get to third grade, he says, look out. It's one of those things where it seems impossible until you see it done. It's not like we don't know how to raise a kid to succeed. We do it all the time in middle class neighborhoods. All it would take for things to change in Harlem is for us to decide that we want to do for kids there what we do for kids everywhere else. Paul Tough. He's one of the original editors of our radio show. His book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone is called Whatever It Takes. It just came out in paperback with a new afterword updating the story. And a lot has happened in that update. For starters, back when Barack Obama was running for president, he praised the Harlem Children's Zone for saving a generation of children up in Harlem. There's no reason this program should stop at the end of those blocks in Harlem. And that's why when I'm President of the United States of America, the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the country. As president, he's trying to follow through, calling his program Promise Neighborhoods, and he is is targeting 20 cities with an initial investment of $10 million for planning grants and feasibility studies. If Congress approves his 2010 budget, the first planning grants could go out as early as this fall. Coming up, when the most romantic possible thing you can do is also the least romantic possible thing you can do. That's 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Going Big. Stories of people going full out, pulling out all the stops for those they care for. We have arrived at Act Two, Lonely Hearts Club Band... of One. Not long ago, a musician named David Berkeley got a call from his booking agent, asking if he wanted to take a job that would be unlike any concert he had ever played. Berkeley is a singer-songwriter on the indie music circuit. He gets showcased at South by Southwest. He's toured with Rufus Wainwright and Billy Bragg and Ben Folds, people like that. And though he has played tons of shows all over the country, this one was different. He would fly to San Diego and play inside an apartment for just two people. And his goal would be to reunite the two as a couple. Now of course, most songwriters want to believe their music has the power to move people's hearts. But rarely does anybody test just how far that goes in such a clear-cut goal-oriented way. The guy in this couple wanted to be together. The woman, apparently, did not. Could David Berkeley sing them back together? Could this work? He wanted to believe it could. He had sent me a long email with the battle plan, which the more I read, the more absurd it seemed. The couple had either met at one of my concerts in California, or their first date. I think their first date was at one of my concerts. And he was going to do everything he could to get her back. And I think that he decided that one huge gesture was probably what it would take. And so he planned this night from start to finish, which included going to their favorite restaurant and the wine that they were going to order. And then the culmination was going to be the nightcap in their apartment, where I was going to pop through the door and sing them their concert. And then he just gave me the plan for how I was going to sneak into the apartment without them knowing, and how I was going to have to actually sneak into the garage. Which literally involved me following a car in. And trying to get through the gate before the gate closed, and then up a back elevator onto the eighth floor, where I would then knock on his apartment door. Not to ask a dumb question, but couldn't he just send you a key? Yeah, I guess that didn't cross his or my mind. But yeah, he should have. And I was actually nervous. I play a lot of concerts, and rarely have I been nervous like this. And I guess it was because I had no idea what I was walking into. And I was about to knock on the door. And I started to think about, what is she going to do when I walk in? And I guess I expected that she was, despite feeling like things weren't going well, I thought she was going to be really excited to see me. And she would, I don't know what. She would give me a hug, or she would laugh, or something like that. And in fact, I opened the door and she just sort of crumpled. She sort of collapsed. Her head fell into her hands. And I think she might have said, I can't believe you did this. He shouldn't have done this. And it was hard for me, at this point, not to take that a little personally. Because without knowing it, I had kind of joined sides with this guy. I was on his team. We were coming in to do a job. OK, so what do you do? I think I said something like, hi. I thought I might play you a few songs. And it just felt gross. Why was I even here? And the guy asked me if I wanted to sit or stand. Which I normally stand when I perform, but that seemed completely absurd to me, that I was going to stand and perform to these two people in their living room. So I said I would sit. And he pulled a chair up for me. And I was across a small coffee table from them. And they sat down on the couch. And I sat down on my chair. And I started to play. And so they're on the couch. And are they sitting close together? God, no. I think it was just a three-cushion couch and they were on the left and the right cushions. And there was a big cushion in between. Now, you have your guitar there. You and I are speaking to each other from different locations. Do you want to just play a couple lines of the song so we have a sense of what this was? Let me just tune real quick. OK. And I should stop right there. Because I got about that far in the song and glanced up. And that was enough for her to recognize the song and she started to cry, which wasn't what I had hoped would happen. [PLAYING GUITAR AND SINGING] A couple on a bridge, a stone bridge in some European town. And after all the years, I see we all fall down. The knock at the front door, the crack in the wall. [END SINGING] And right when I sang that part of the chorus-- the knock on the front door-- it seemed like suddenly I was actually singing a song that was the story of this night. Yeah, yeah. This is a song about a couple for whom things are not going very well. Yeah. And why I didn't know that and think about that before I started to play it, I don't know. But it was too late. And this happens, at times, in a performance where you recognize you've made the wrong choice of a song. And you can never really go back. I had to just barrel through. And so where do you go? What do you play next? What do you do? Well, I think I played a song that was a story song that was more lighthearted. And I got through that. But the night wasn't getting any easier. And also you have to understand that after a song finishes, two people clapping a couple of times after you finish a song sounds really, really depressing. I guess I didn't really stop to think about the fact that the song would end and they would either have to clap or not. Well, that's why this was so weird. The time in between the songs became as painful as the songs themselves. And so what do you do to try to turn the situation around? Well, let me first say that as I'm singing that song, right after I sang the first lyric, I regretted the choice. And I started thinking ahead. And when I started racing through, in my mind, the other songs that I was going to be able to play this night, I started to get really scared. Because I realized that not only might it not have been a good idea to hire a musician to come across the country and sing to get back your girl, but I was probably the wrong musician to have hired. Because of your melancholic-- Exactly. --repertoire. Exactly. And he knew this, because he knows my music. So maybe on the third or fourth song I played, the song "Straw Man," which is one of the ones that he had asked for-- and I'll play a little bit of it. [GUITAR PLAYING AND SINGING] Never quite so clean. She makes the world around me seem lavender and winter green. When we're side by side. [END SINGING] And that chorus repeats several times. And after about the second chorus, I looked up. And I felt like she softened a little bit. And it seemed like the song was doing a little bit more of its job. And by the end of the song, it really did feel like it had changed something in the room. And she was sitting up a little straighter, maybe. And she was looking at me more. And I even saw her look at him a little and give a little smile. And that was a tiny gesture, but it was so good to see. And so from there, was it better? Well, so then we got on a little bit of a roll. But with each song-- and even smaller increments, with each verse-- it seemed like they were symbolically and literally moving closer together. And in fact, by maybe song five or six, they actually were sitting next to each other. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I really didn't think there was any chance, and certainly from the beginning of the night until that point, there seemed like there was zero chance. But they started holding hands. And at one point in a song, she lay her head on his shoulder. So it's working. And I play a song thaT-- actually, they kiss. And that was a shock. And at that point, I thought this is it. We've done it. I wanted to slap the guy's hand. I felt great. But the mood had changed, but it was still painfully awkward. And if anything, more so now. Because I was now right across the coffee table from a couple who's making out as I'm singing. And now it felt totally wrong that I was there, just for different reasons. At one point they kissed and I locked eyes with her, right as they're kissing. And we both looked away immediately. But it happened. And at one point, he and I met eyes at just a really badly-timed moment, where he was giving her one of these looks like, I'm your man. And I will be there for you forever. And we'll have beautiful children together. And there I am, and he and I are looking at each other suddenly for a second, but a very, very bad second of my life. So things move from horrible to exuberant to straight out creepy, it sounds like. I think that's fair. But at least what I'm singing, I can just get lost in the fact that the music is sort of working for them. And so as I finish the concert, she hugs me and he walks me out of the apartment and down into the elevator. I get to take the main elevator down this time. And he tells me something to the effect of, you never know how things are going to work out. But I think that you may have been the tipping point tonight. And that felt great. I was so happy. Right. Your music brought these people together. Brought them together in the first place, maybe, brought them back together now. It was perfect. Even when I had tried to serenade ex-girlfriends to get them back, directly, that hadn't worked. A few months after all this, David Berkeley was back in California, doing a show in Los Angeles. And the guy emailed him, asking if David would give him two spots on the guest list. But the guy did not bring the girl. He came with a buddy. And he told David afterwards that things didn't work out. Incredibly, David says that he would do this all over again if somebody else asked him to do it. And as for the guy-- OK, after this failure, would he try another concert in his apartment? I know he would. And, in fact, I know that he would do it again with me, because he's made that clear. What? He's made it clear that if he has another girl, he hopes the situation will arise where he can have me come and do another serenade. But wait, would you go? What would be funny is that my exclusive knowledge of him is related to this other episode that we wouldn't be able to talk about, this other girl where I did the same thing. And of course, the new girl isn't going to want to know about the old girl, and is certainly not going to want to know that he did the same trick. Yeah, I was just thinking that. It definitely takes the romantic idealism off the whole thing. Yeah. Then it starts to get bizarre in a whole other way. Because now I'm sort of his guy. And I'm not sure about that. David Berkeley. His newest album is called Strange Light. Marshall Lewy helped us produce that story. Act Three, Prisoner of the Heart. So we've had parents in Harlem going all out to change the lives of their kids. We've had a guy going all out to get a girl. Now in this act, we have a daughter who goes all out, goes as far as anybody possibly could to get close to her mom. Douglas McGray tells the story. 21 years ago, Daisy Benson brought a gun to an argument. She says she didn't mean to shoot, and that may be true. But you bring a gun to an argument, a lot can go wrong. Daisy was convicted of murder, given 15 to life, and sent away to prison hundreds of miles from her home, a small, poor town in Northern California. Seven years later, her family saved up enough to visit. That's when her daughter Robin, she was in her 20s at the time, hatched a plan that sounded so crazy when Daisy first told me about it, I thought, this can't be true. But then I tracked down Robin, and they both remember it starting exactly the same way. Here's Daisy, then Robin. I'd had one visit. My ex-husband had come. He brought my daughter. And she stood with her fingers in the chicken wire, looking out over the yard. And I could see, she was just taking inventory from side to side, what she could see. And she said to me, and I'll never forget it, this wouldn't be too bad for the two of us, mom. She said, we could be here together. And I said-- She said, don't even think about. She already knew what I was thinking when I got there. Because I could see it working in her head. You can tell when kids are doing something. Don't even think about it. And what did she say? She was just solemn. She was very serious about what she was saying. She was trying to get me to look at her. And I was just looking around. Well, what where you looking around for? Were you looking to see, could I do this? Yeah. And I was like, this ain't so bad. Was life outside pretty bad then? Life outside was probably a lot worse than in there at the time. I was just in a drug life. I did drugs. I was on the street. And so I would do what I had to do. And all kinds of stuff. It was hard. So Robin was already living the kind of life that might lead to prison. She didn't care. But then suddenly, she did. She could go to jail and be with her mom. A year later, when she and her friends got hauled in for stealing, she told me she confessed to everything, even things she hadn't done. When my mom went prison, it was almost like my mom died to me. I missed her so bad, I got in trouble just to get in trouble. Because I didn't really have nothin' out there. I just got in trouble to get in trouble, and kept getting in trouble until they caught me. I told the judge, I said, I did it. He said, no wait a minute, you need representation. I said, no, I did it. I want you to sentence me. I want to go to prison. Because I wanted to go see my mom. When Daisy went away, California had one small prison for women called CIW. But longer sentences and a three strikes law helped set off a prison boom. The state had to build two more. Robin got sentenced to one of the new ones, up north-- not part of the plan. Now she had to finagle a transfer somehow. She roamed the yard, looking for advice. I started asking people, how do I get to CIW? My mom's down there. Eventually, someone told her about a prison work program that would get her shipped south where Daisy was. One day, a letter came for Daisy, postmarked from another prison. She couldn't believe what it said. And the letter had taken so long to get there, that the same day it arrived-- well, I'll let Daisy tell it. I came to the front office. And I rounded the corner, and there was my child, standing there in a muumuu. And my legs just buckled. She acted like she was going to fall apart or something. Oh my God, my baby. She acted like she was going to faint, and all kinds of stuff. It was the greatest moment, but it was the saddest moment-- ooh-- to be able to see her. But to see her in this setting was overwhelming. And I was just hanging on to her. We just locked up. She had her arms around me. And I had my arms around her. And everybody was crying. The cop was crying. Everybody around us was crying. And I know that every one of them wanted it to be their daughter. Everybody wanted-- it was the joy-- These are other prisoners? Yeah. Not to have your child in prison, but to have your arms around her. My legs were so weak. I stood back and I just asked, what the hell are you doing here? And she just grabbed me again. And she was holding on to me, loving me. She said, I need my mom. It was wonderful. Because I don't let people touch me in here. People don't hug me. People don't squeeze me. But she hugs me and squeezes me. Mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins-- they cross paths in here more than you'd think. The stories aren't always happy. A staff person told me, yeah, we had identical twins in here one time. And one of them lit herself on fire. Mother/daughter cell mates? That he'd never seen. But when Daisy asked, the administration said yes. So Robin moved in. They shared eight feet square, if that, with bunk beds. A year after she first stared out at the prison yard, Robin got her wish. Prison was a lot harsher than Robin expected, just like her mom had said it would be. I think when I first went to prison, I was going down there to protect her, but she protected me. She introduced me and pointed to everyone that was on the yard-- people, what they were there for. And stay away from that one. And then she'd introduce me to them. The ones that she told me to stay away from, she'd say, this is my daughter, and I'll kill you if you mess with her. I was probably trying to control her. I was keeping her away from the riff-raff. A lot of their time together was just fun, for prison anyway. We did pedicures. She did my toes, I did her toes. It was just girls, just girls. One time we had Thanksgiving dinner around the yard. Just come on, mom. Just lay down and I'll take you on a trip. We'll go to the river. Close your eyes. And then what? And then you would describe it? Yeah. And I'd tell her, OK, we're on the river. Can you hear the water? Do you hear the birds? Just that was enough. Even before she went to prison, Daisy had been gone a lot, working at the canneries or the turkey plant, driving a bus. Now there was none of that, no distractions. I think that that's probably some of the best times in our lives together. Because nobody could get in between us. There was nothing to interfere with the relationship of mom and daughter. They were in together for almost a year. When the time came for Robin to be released, she was ready. Daisy wasn't. There was such an emptiness when she was gone. And it was almost like a dream that she had been here. You know, like I'd dreamed the whole dang thing up. But I get another sweet and sour moment. You're so happy that it happened. But you're so sorry that they're going to go. Robin's not doing so well these days. Since her time with her mom, more than 10 years ago, she's been in and out of prison. The more time a person spends inside, the harder it is to make a life outside. I never felt like I'd be right until my mom gets out. I'm not going to be right. Here I'm 42 years old, just staying where I can, don't have a job. Nothing, nothing. I mean, I've tried to complete my GED and stuff quite a few times. And I went to beauty college and I graduated. But I didn't go to state board. And it's just like, I never think I'm going to win. Is there anything that gives you hope? Just my mom getting out. That's the only hope I've got anymore. A couple months ago, Daisy wrote me a letter that said she might be home by Thanksgiving. The parole board approved her for release, but the governor has the final say. And it's easier to say no. Earlier this year, facing a budget crisis, and a prison system that costs $10 billion a year-- five times more than Texas spends-- the governor tried to let some nonviolent offenders out early. Legislators revolted. They cut from schools instead. Daisy's 59 now. But like most of the lifers, she seems a lot older. A walker keeps her upright. A pacemaker keeps her heart going. She's lost most of her front teeth. When she laughs, she covers her mouth. Robin writes to her mother, but she's only gone back to see her once since she boarded a prison bus and drove out through the gate. Her mom told her not to look back, but she did. She does. Douglas McGray. He's an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Seth Lind is our Production Manager. Production help from P.J. Vogt and Aaron Scott. Jessica Hopper is our Music Consultant. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ Management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who tells me all the time-- I'm your man. And I will be there for you forever. And we'll have beautiful children together. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Well, it's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. And I'm recording this on Friday afternoon, October 3. It's a little after 3:00, just a couple of hours after the House of Representatives voted in favor of bailing out Wall Street. And I'm standing in Union Square in New York City, maybe a 15-minute subway ride from Wall Street. It's been a week and two days since President Bush declared that we're in a serious economic crisis. It's been two weeks and a day since the Chairman of the Federal Reserve reportedly told congressional leaders that without a bailout plan we might not have an economy. But standing here, I think maybe for most of us going about our daily lives, it doesn't feel like we're on the edge of a disaster. There are people streaming in and out of the Virgin Megastore with packages. A guy just unwrapped a cellphone that he bought in there, about three feet from me. There's a huge farmer's market going in the park. And so there's this disconnect. Even for people who have seen the value of their homes and their retirement plans drop, it's just hard to know what to believe about how bad things really are and how bad they might get. Well, a few months ago in our program, Alex Blumberg and NPR Economics Correspondent Adam Davidson put together an hour explaining-- in terms that anybody could understand-- how the subprime mortgage crisis happened in the first place. And after that aired, we were flooded with emails about that show. It was all over the internet. The New York Times wrote an article about it, how helpful it was. And so today we asked those guys to come back and explain some of the things that have happened since that first show, including how bad are things, really? And is this bailout a good idea? It's another frightening hour about the economy. Stay with us. Well, hi, fellows. Hey Ira. Hey. How's it going? Well, let's start with what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke saw that made them believe that the economy is in terrible, imminent danger. You guys did a story on All Things Considered that you've expanded to play here on our program about some events that began two weeks ago, specifically that began on Wednesday, September 17. I'll give you a sense of what government officials saw that freaked them out. A lot of it probably had to do with conversations with people like Mark Peterson, who's not on Wall Street. He's in Memphis. He has nothing to do with the subprime mortgage industry. And that week, two weeks ago, that had him shaking, almost literally. I don't know. For those of who have experienced an earthquake, some people say it's a soul-wrenching experience, because you realize there's a power out there that's doing something that you have no control over whatsoever. And it's massively moving everything. And that's last week. Last week, there was a monster that was unleashed. Now, you may be surprised to learn the name of that monster, the commercial paper market. Technically, actually, it's the freezing of the commercial paper market that was the monster. Let's explain with the commercial paper market is. It's a way for companies to borrow money, the easiest way for big companies. And here how it works. A guy like Mark Peterson-- he's the Treasurer, sort of the money manager, for ServiceMaster International, a company which owns, among other things, a lawn care company, Merry Maids, and Terminix, which will get rid of your termites. Every day, Mark comes into the office at 8:00 in the morning and asks the same question. How much money do we have? Let's just say that you have Terminix come out and treat your house. You write a check. When they deposit it in our account, they send us the information off of that check that says this person paid their bill. So every day, thousands or hundreds of thousands, or tens of thousands of Terminix customers, and other people, are writing checks. That data then get sent to you on a daily basis. And you have the position of what's our cash position now for the day in this company? Yep. Either we're going to have too much money at the end of the day or we're not going to have enough money at the end of day. Today, do you have money or do you need money? Today, our company, we have money. But tomorrow they might not. Maybe they need to buy a lot of termite poison or upgrade their fleet of termite fighting vans, for example. It's no big deal. You just borrow some more money. Every company works like this. Some days they have extra money, and some days they need to borrow extra money. And if you're a regular person and you need to borrow money, of course, you probably use your credit card. If you're a gigantic company, you use the commercial paper market, which is basically an industrial-sized IOU. We would say, I'm going to give you $1 million tomorrow if you give me $999,000 today. So tomorrow, whoever sent the $999,000 in, he's going to get an extra $1,000 tomorrow. And that's his interest rate. And so every day, treasurers all over America, and all over the world, are getting into their office at 8:00, they're surveying their data, and then they're going and they're issuing commercial paper. How much money are we talking about? It's hundreds of billions of dollars. Every day? Every single day. How do treasurers like Mark Peterson connect with the people who want to loan them money? They do it through banks on Wall Street. The treasurer of a big company, or someone on his staff, usually, calls some guy they know on Wall Street and says, hey, we need some money. Sell some commercial paper. Issue those IOUs. That is the commercial paper market. And this happens every day, the US economy could hardly function without it, and yet almost no one has heard of it. Why? It's been a relatively boring business. Your commercial paper desks, in many companies, it could be somebody down at almost a clerical level calling every single day to Merrill Lynch and saying, I need to borrow $50 million. At what rate can I borrow at? Post that rate, and let's get it done by 11:00 in the morning. The Merrill Lynch salespeople go off and sell the commercial paper to money market funds and trust departments and investors all across the world. They confirm that the money has been funded into the clerk's account. And then the clerk turns it over to the treasurer and says, your 50 million is here, by 11:00 in the morning. And it's just that straightforward? It's that straightforward. It stopped being boring some time this year? Well, as a good friend of mine, who is on Wall Street, made the comment, he said, I've never seen anything like this before. He said, there's no bid in the market for paper. There's nobody willing to transact with each other. The commercial paper market-- which is the most liquid market, probably, in the world for high-grade financial players-- basically froze up. As a person involved in the front end, I don't think I've ever been this nervous in my career. Because I think the financial system was so close to locking up, I think we were real close to the abyss, the ultimate freezing of the financial system. This is Paul Balika, another guy with a front-seat view of this credit seize up. He works at Daiwa Securities. And Alex and I spent a lot of time with Paul, and other traders like him, trying to get a sense of what that abyss looks like. Like here, at Tradition Securities. They're a commercial paper trading company in lower Manhattan near Wall Street. And I'm here to see a trader named Tom Corona. As I walk across the huge trading floor with my headset and microphone, traders are shouting out, Teasing Tom, asking about his new friend, which is me. He says he's going to do an interview for the radio, and I hear one of his buddies mutter, this won't end well. Now, most of the companies that Tom works with aren't consumer companies like ServiceMaster where Mark Peterson works. They're banks, big huge banks that you've probably heard of. The treasurer's assistants at those big banks call Tom every day. And they say, I want to borrow some money. But since about two weeks ago, that's been almost impossible. A bank will call me up in the morning and say, what are you seeing in the marketplace today? And unfortunately, at this point, I say, it's the same thing I see every day-- is the bank's trying to raise money and nobody willing to lend them money. And if you needed to get money, this is the rate you would have to pay. And even if they could get money, they could only get 50 or a $100 million. Now, I don't mean to let 50 and 100 million sound like a little, but in our market, it's nothing. It's so small. These banks normally, at that spread, could raise billions in an eye blink. And what do they say to you? Well, they're as concerned as I am. And you could sense the frustration in everybody's voice. I hear constantly on the phone now, everybody having trouble sleeping. They don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. And if it is a light they see, it's another train coming at them. OK, for those keeping track, this market freeze up has been compared, so far in our story, to an oncoming train, an abyss, a monster, and an earthquake. All we need now is a serial killer. And what made this abyss, earthquake, train, monster materialize all of a sudden? There was one event in particular that frightened the commercial paper market and made it seize up. Explaining it, I'm afraid, means using another finance term-- although this one might be a little more familiar-- the money market mutual fund. And we should say here, a money market mutual fund is just like a savings account. There's a good chance you even have one. It is, in normal times, one of the safest places to keep your money. You put $1,000 in, you know for sure you'll get $1,000 out. Maybe even $1,010. And you're happy with just that little return because you know at least your money is secure. Now one of the main things that money market managers do to get that little return is they lend money out on the commercial paper market. They give guys like Mark Peterson at ServiceMaster that $999,000. He gives them $1 million back the next day. It's an OK return, but the main thing is it's safe. Their money is safe because they're lending it to huge, trusted companies, many of which have been around for decades, reliably paying back these loans. At least that's the way it was until two weeks ago, when one of the most dreaded things happened-- at least in the world of money market managers. It's the thing they have nightmares about. One of the biggest and oldest funds, called the Reserve Fund-- that was its name. It broke the buck. What that means is, for the first time ever, it lost its depositors money. For every dollar they put in, they were left with only $0.97. It's like going to your savings account and seeing that your money's gone, but you haven't made any withdrawals. It's a big deal. Breaking the buck is sort of like having a serial killer in a high school. It causes a little bit of panic. Take a look at some of the returns. People are not concerned about getting a return on capital. They just want the return of capital. So that is panic. That is fear. That panic and fear caused an old-fashioned bank run. People, and more importantly pension funds and big endowments, called their brokers and said get me out of those funds. The government had to step in and guarantee the money market funds. And this right here, as near as we can tell, this is what freaked out Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke. Because this right here is the mortgage crisis spreading out into the rest of the world. This fund that broke the buck, they weren't investing in risky mortgages or anything related to the housing industry. They were not freewheeling Wall Street fat cats taking big risks and hoping for a windfall. They were investing in investments that those fat cats laughed at. These were fund managers doing everything possible to be totally safe, doing what they always did, buying very safe, very short-term commercial paper. It just so happened that the company they bought it from was Lehman Brothers. And the day before, Lehman had gone bankrupt, in part because of its exposure to risky mortgage products. So all the money this money market mutual fund, The Reserve Fund, had lent to Lehman was suddenly gone. And the Reserve Fund, a mutual fund that had nothing at all to do with mortgages or the housing market, was all of a sudden in trouble. That's what caused the panic. All the other money market mutual fund managers freaked out. They wondered, who's going to be next? And then like a horror movie-- at least a horror movie made for money market mutual fund managers-- another fund broke the buck. And then AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, nearly collapsed. That was it. Many fund managers decided, we're not lending any more money out to companies at all. That Wednesday and Thursday, over $100 billion flowed out of the commercial paper market. Most of it went into treasury bills, government securities. And that's why Tom Corona, the commercial paper trader, can't get any money for his clients. The people who used to lend it to them have hunkered down and stashed it in what amounts to the largest mattress in the world, the US government. The perception is, that's the only safe place to be right now. In the financial markets, perception is everything. They don't know who has losses and who doesn't have losses and who really is hiding losses, who has revealed all their losses. Nobody trusts each other anymore. So the money funds look at each bank. And everybody looks with a wary eye because they don't know who's in solid footing. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson are afraid that this situation could spread even further. It won't just be money market mutual funds who won't want to lend money. Nobody will want to lend money. Here's Paul Balika. What would happen is no one would be able to borrow money. And then, how does capitalism work if you can't borrow money? You're back to bartering pretty much. No working capital-- the extension of credit just almost came to a halt. Just ended, period. I don't mean to be histrionic, but from my perspective, if Paulson and the government didn't step in with this plan, the banks would not be able to create enough credit to make the economy function. That's all. The stakes are this-- Again, Mark Peterson at ServiceMaster International. He says, imagine a company that wants to build a new factory. Normally, they would just borrow it and pay it back over a period of time. But if they have to now wait five years before they have enough capital to build that plant, they'll delay that. You might sit back in your little-- here in Memphis, and say that doesn't really affect you. But if 20,000 treasurers and CFOs throughout the world are having that problem collectively because their banks are all frozen, what you've got is something that will affect every single person in America, ultimately. And right now, this is starting to happen. Every day there's news of companies canceling plans because they can't get loans. There were reports that McDonald's had to postpone a plan to get latte machines in its stores because it couldn't borrow the money. The company that makes Thomas the Tank Engine toys had to cancel a merger. And General Electric, the second largest US company, owner of NBC and maker of aircraft engines and nuclear power plants, saw its stock fall nearly 10% because of concerns that it couldn't borrow the money it needed to continue to function. Now, we should say, Alex, that all of these companies deny any serious problems. And there's a lot of businesses that still seem fine. Mark Peterson of ServiceMaster International says banks still lend his company money at slightly higher rates than last year, but nothing his firm can't handle. Small businesses can still get lines of credit. People can get auto loans or mortgages or credit cards. Rates might be creeping up a bit, but walking around outside, it definitely doesn't feel like the next Great Depression. For most people. And that's why for most people outside the financial sector, it's hard to grasp this dire need for a $700 billion bailout package. The doomsday scenarios are scary, but will they really happen? It turns out even if you have a seat at the epicenter of the crisis, like Tom Corona, the commercial paper trader who's seeing firsthand how credit has frozen up for all his big clients, and who has everything to lose if the situation doesn't improve, even he has conflicted feelings about it. I'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, because I'm watching the career I've chosen, and it's been very good for me, but I'm watching the whole system implode. And yes, I want the bailout to save Wall Street because this is where I work. But then I look at a bigger picture, what's better for the country and for my children. I have three boys. And I do not believe this billion dollar bailout helps out my children, or anybody's children, over the long run. People made stupid loans, and now they want the government to bail them out. And I'm sorry. At this point, it's my tax dollars. It's your tax dollars. I just think we have to say no. And did you actually call your congressman? Yes, I sent all of them emails. And my email basically said I was against any sort of bailout plan, that there were other issues to deal with, and that I was a 27-year Wall Street veteran in the institutional money markets, and if he would like to discuss it any further, I would gladly take his call. Has anybody called? Nobody has called. I don't take it personally. But to give you a sense of how fast things are changing, that tape of Tom Corona is from a week ago. And when we talked to him today, he said he does support the bailout bill now, for two reasons. There have been changes made to the law, which he likes. But also, and probably more importantly, he's a lot more scared now than he was just seven days ago. This last week has convinced him that the crisis is spreading, and that the bigger risk to his children now is doing nothing. Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson. Coming up, you want to know, we want to know, is this Wall Street bailout good or bad? That, and a whole lot more, 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today we have another frightening program about the economy. Today's show is a co-production with NPR News. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson return to our airwaves to explain what exactly all these complicated things that we hear about the current financial crisis really mean. And before we go any further, I want to say that there's so much happening each day in the financial news, that Alex and Adam and some colleagues at NPR have started a daily podcast explaining all this stuff. It's called the Planet Money podcast. You can find it by googling, or by going to the iTunes store. It is free. It is very, very helpful. Right now, though, we have arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, Out of the Hedges and Into the Woods. One way that you can tell that things are really bad in this country is that you find yourself suddenly trying to understand things that you really never cared about at all. Case in point, before we invaded Iraq, be honest, did you actually know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shias? OK, another case in point. Act one of our show today was about the commercial paper market, something I really never imagined that we'd spend much time investigating on our program. Now in act two, we have one more confusing financial product that is bringing down the global economy. And one way to think about this product is this. If bad mortgages got the financial system sick, this next thing you're about to hear about helped spread the sickness into an epidemic. These are credit default swaps. Alex explains. Like many parts of the financial system these days, credit default swaps are so complicated simple bankers couldn't have created them. They were invented by people like this guy, Gregg Berman. Actually, my formal training is in physics. So I studied experimental physics and nuclear physics before joining finance in 1993. Now normally when you think of physicists inventing scary things, atomic weapons come to mind. And in fact, credit default swaps have been called-- by no less an expert than billionaire Warren Buffett-- financial weapons of mass destruction. And just be clear, Gregg didn't actually invent these things. But he works for a company, Risk Metrics Group, which-- you won't be surprised to learn-- helps companies manage risk. And so he thinks about them a lot. And he's good at explaining what they are. Imagine, he says, you buy a bond from Ford for $100-- You're holding the bond and you are worried about Ford's credit. So you enter into an agreement with another party where you say to the other party, I will pay you some money. I'll pay you 2% a year, 3% a year, 4% a year. And what you need to do is give me protection. If Ford should go bankrupt, then I'm going to give you back this perhaps worthless bond, and you're going to give me my $100 back. In the big context of things, it looks like insurance. So it sort of looks like you bought an insurance contract, and you're paying a bit of a premium, as you would if you were buying fire insurance on your home. So insurance? That's what we're talking about here? People with bonds, which are already considered safe and boring, trying to make them even safer and more boring? Well, let's just say it didn't stay that way. I think Mae West once said it very, very well, when she said, "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." This is Satyajit Das. He just calls himself Das. And he's a risk consultant who was around when credit default swaps first appeared. Adam and I talked to him and heard stories from his 30 years working with hedge funds and bankers all over the world as a sort of financial hired gun. And he saw firsthand how what started as insurance morphed into something else entirely. In the 1990's, and probably until about 2003, 2004, when I was working with this stuff, I was a great advocate of this whole movement to manage risk better, and so forth. I've spent all my life in that area. But by about 2003, 2004, I was starting to get very nervous because what I could see was the market had gone from a very legitimate purpose to something which was much more racy and interesting, but also much more dangerous. So these clearly had stopped being insurance somewhere along the way. Oh, absolutely. It stopped being insurance. And it became gambling? Well, the line between investing and speculation, or gambling, in financial markets is always a pretty gray one. But yes. So how did we get from one of the safest activities on the planet, insurance, to one of the riskiest, gambling? Well, to understand, you have to understand the key difference between a real insurance policy and a credit default swap. Here, I'll let Gregg Berman explain. The way that I first described the credit default swap is that you own the bond, and you'd like to transfer that risk to someone else. But what if I want to buy protection, but I don't own the bond? Why would I want to buy protection-- that's like buying insurance for a house I don't own. It is exactly like buying insurance for a house you don't own. So it's like, you took out fire insurance on your home. And now, I also took out fire insurance on your home. And 1,000 other people took out fire insurance on your home. When that happens, what you're doing is you're betting on the house. So did you get that? It's like you're using an insurance policy to make a bet. Like, let's say there's a guy named Frank, and he has a life insurance policy. When he dies, the beneficiary will get $1 million. Now, imagine a whole bunch of other people saying, I want $1 million if Frank dies also. And so they all take out insurance policies on him. And then let's say Frank starts to get sick. More people might want an insurance policy on Frank. And the closer he gets to death, the more people buy insurance policies on Frank. That's basically what happens in the credit default swap market. And here's how it works. A credit default swap is what they call an over-the-counter instrument, meaning simply it's not something that's traded publicly on an exchange, like a stock. It's a private deal between two people. Those two people can be anyone. Well, anyone with more than $5 million. So that means, effectively, someone at an investment bank or a hedge fund or a big commercial bank like Citibank or Credit Suisse. They all have Credit Default Swap, or CDS, desks. So I'm sitting at a CDS desk. And there's a division-- Yes, you're one of the broker/dealers, or one of the major investment banks. And how many guys like me are there? There's like, 100, 150, 1,000? Oh, no. There wouldn't be that many. There would probably be, in the bigger desks, about, say, between 15 and 30. Now, every day this desk is getting thousands of emails and calls from people wanting to enter into credit default swap contracts. Now, sometimes those people want it for insurance. They have a bond from, say, the ABC Company. They're a little worried about the ABC Company's financial health. And so they'll call up and say, will you sell me credit default swap protection? Will you promise that if ABC Company goes down, you'll guarantee the full value of their bond? But sometimes, often, in fact, the people that are calling don't actually own the bond. They just have a hunch about ABC Company. So they want to essentially bet that ABC Company will default. So he and I agree that if ABC Company defaults, I will pay him a certain amount. And in return, he pays me some fees. Das says that during his time in the industry, the amount of credit default swaps that were used for speculation grew to dwarf the amount that were actually used for insurance. The numbers are staggering. This is Andrew Ang, a professor at Columbia Business School, who studies the credit default swap market. The corporate bond cash market's approximately $5 trillion. And the notional amount of CDS outstanding is approximately $60 trillion. In other words, there are $5 trillion worth of bonds issued in the world, but the total amount that people have bet on those bonds is $60 trillion. For every bond, there are 10 people promising to pay the full amount if the bond goes bad. Oh, and there's one more thing. All of this is unregulated, partly because they wanted it to be unregulated. One of the reasons that they wanted it to be unregulated has to do with a word you hear a lot when you talk to finance people. That word is leverage. Here, I'll show you. When you operate on leverage-- The market had become extremely driven by its lust for leverage. Part of the problem with these swap contracts, they actually have extraordinarily high leverage. See what I mean? Anyway, this is yet one more finance word out there that people who work with money understand instinctively. But the rest of us have only a vague notion of what it means. And the way finance people talk about leverage has changed a little. It used to be spoken of approvingly. Now when the mention it, it's with a little more fear. That's because leverage is one of those things that when it's going your way, it's great. But when it turns on you, it's all over. And leverage is currently wreaking havoc in the credit default swap market. Here's a very basic example of how leverage gives and how it takes away. Let's imagine I have a hedge fund with $100 million. And I want to make a killing in the credit default swap market. I start calling and emailing to all those credit default swap desks and hedge funds out there, saying, I'm selling protection, who wants to buy? Someone calls me up and says, I have a billion-dollar bond from Lehman Brothers, and I want to insure it. I say, great, I'll insure your bond for 2% of its value every year. You say fine. And we're in business. Now, let's review these numbers. 2% of $1 billion, that's 20 million, which I'm getting every year. My hedge fund, $100 million. So effectively, I've signed one piece of paper, and in five years, I'll double my money. I'm psyched, my investors are psyched. That is the upside of leverage. I'm making profits on $1 billion, even though I only have $100 million. The downside of leverage is that now I'm on the hook for up to $1 billion if their bond defaults, and I don't have $1 billion. In 2005, though, this particular bet on a Lehman Brothers bond seemed like a sure thing. The idea that Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and largest investment banks in the world, could possibly default seemed crazy. In 2008, it became scarily, unbelievably real. Just ask AIG. Now, AIG, you may remember, was the big insurance company that had to be rescued by the government two weeks ago. And they had to be rescued because they were about to go bankrupt. And they were about to go bankrupt-- as great reporting in the New York Times, among other places, has revealed-- because of exactly this scenario. They'd promised over $400 billion to people holding credit default swap agreements with them, $400 billion that they didn't have. But the fact that the biggest insurance company in the world was brought down by these unregulated securities might not even be the scariest part. Because actually, the case of AIG is anomalous. Usually, people who traded them did something different than AIG did, something which was supposed to make them safer, but might possibly have made the whole system more dangerous. They did something called netting. So let's go back to my previous example. And let's start with a whole new scenario. I'm the same hedge fund. I've got $100 million. And this time I have a hunch that Lehman Brothers is going to go down. So I go to some company, let's just say AIG. I go to AIG, and I say, I want to buy a credit default swap. I'm not selling this time. I'm buying. I say to them, I will pay you $20 million a year. And the deal is, if Lehman goes down, you will owe me $1 billion. Now, over the next few months, my hunch starts to look more likely because Lehman starts looking riskier. Their profits go down, unfavorable news reports come out about them. And when this happens, they become, basically, more expensive to insure. Just like the more traffic accidents you have, the higher your insurance premiums go. The sicker you look as a company, the more it costs to buy credit default swap protection against you. And I, now, am perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. I now go out on the market and I sell credit default swap protection. But because people are more scared about Lehman, the price is higher. I can now sell it for $40 million a year. So I'm paying 20, but taking in 40, again, a net profit of $20 million a year. But this time, my position is what they call hedged. My position is totally safe. If Lehman defaults, I will owe my buyer $1 billion, but AIG will owe me $1 billion. The trade totally nets out. And this situation, where every trade was matched on the other side with another trade, that was much more common. I would sell protection to Morgan Stanley, say, but buy it from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs would sell protection to a hedge fund, who, in turn, would buy from another hedge fund. And so on, down the line. Every party netting their position with a counter party. Again, here's Das. And the real problem is that if the chain breaks down anywhere, where one party does not actually honor their contracts, then the losses multiply very rapidly. It links everybody together in this unholy chain. And so what happens is if somebody has a problem, then everybody else has a problem. The greatest danger-- that's a tough question. This is John Zucker, who worked at a credit default swap desk at a major bank for five years. He left in 2007. And he-- like a lot of people I talked to, a lot of people in this field-- has a very mathematical mind. He thinks in probabilities, risk spreads, modeling potential outcomes. And if you ask him what the greatest danger is, after careful deliberation, he arrives at a conclusion which is basically this. If everyone in the chain knew the financial stability of everyone else in the chain, then all this would be fine. But the problem is because every deal is private, they don't know. You don't know. It's far from transparent. The notion is that I'm working here at a New York money center bank, and some small bank in Asia goes down. And suddenly it just hits the tipping point, and several other banks fail. And suddenly it's affecting me. I never had a clue. And this, lack of information, is causing huge problems. That's one reason credit is freezing up. Banks don't want to trade with each other because they don't know what bets anyone's made, and who they've made them with, and who those people have made them with. And this, in turn, becomes one reason that the government felt it had to step in with a bailout. Because all these banks are linked through these credit default swap contracts. If one bank goes down, they all could. I guess the question is, that I'm wondering about, basically I'm being affected by people doing this unregulated thing that is speculative in nature, and then things blow up, and then my tax dollars have to be used to come in and bail this out, and I'm mad. First of all, is it fair for me to be mad, and who should I be mad at? That's a great line. "Is it fair for me to be mad, and who should I be mad at?" Um, is it fair for me to be mad? Um-- In keeping with his analytical nature, Jon Zucker didn't answer this question right away. He posed hypothetical scenarios going back to the Great Depression. He talked about consequences that could have been foreseen versus consequences that could not have been foreseen. But it didn't seem, at least to me, an attempt to dodge the question so much as an attempt to formulate, right there on the spot, an objective value for my potential outrage. I guess what's going through my head is everybody wants to punish the people who made money in the past 10 years on this business. I don't care about that. I want people to be able to make money. I just don't want their mistakes to cost me. And that's all I'm asking about. So are you asking the question, can I set up a system where their mistakes will never affect you? Yeah. That's a long pause, Jon. Yeah, sorry about that. No, no. It's OK, it's OK. Look, I'm a quantitative guy. So I tend to think of the world in terms of models. And the thing that I'm trying to be evenhanded about is to say that the regulators completely screwed up. There is a lot of 20/20 hindsight review of this and saying, people should have caught all this stuff. I'm not 100% sure of that. But one thing I do know is that in terms of intent, there was no intent to regulate. And from that point of view, they should be held accountable for some of the mistakes. Well, I think the real problem is the only people who understand the system now are the technocrats at the banks, and so forth, who worked within that. Everyone I talked to agreed that someone, some regulator, someone in power, should have pushed to set up an exchange for credit default swaps, so they could be publicly traded, like options or commodity futures or all these other financial terms that you've heard of but don't understand, but that, as far as we know, are not out destabilizing the global economy. Professor Andrew Ang said that since they were essentially insurance, they should be regulated like insurance, where strict requirements are set for the companies that sell it. But everyone also seemed to think, it's a complex world. And the people who invent these financial products are making small fortunes and employ armies of people to help them, and that the regulators-- in many cases, people working at government central banks at government salaries-- will always be playing catch up. Over the last few years, I have had quite a lot to do with central banks. And the central bankers are all very earnest. They're very intelligent people and very well meaning. But the problem is they've relied heavily on the banks to tell them what's going on. And there is obviously a conflict of interest. And they have never quite got the full picture. And often when I explain to them something quite minor, like how the CDS market works, their response is, oh, I thought it was only for hedging. I didn't realize it was just purely speculative. So there is this information gap which is now having to be filled at very short notice, which is obviously extremely problematic. Can I ask you, when you think about the current global crisis, is this a credit default swap crisis? Is this a mortgage backed security crisis? Is this something bigger than all of those, and they are just symptoms? Oh, I very definitely think all of these are just symptoms. Essentially, the world just has far too much debt. What has happened over the last 30 years is essentially the amounts of debt in the financial system has exploded. And I think the problem is the amount of debt that's been created has been made extremely complicated by the financial engineers. There will be enormous, enormous losses, which will beg of belief. When economic historians come to write the history of this period, they will look at this and go, my God, how did they manage to do this? We don't even understand the actual quantum of the problem. You mean how big the problem is? Correct. To give you some perspective, less than 18 months ago, Ben Bernanke gave testimony to the effect that he thought the losses from subprime would be $50 billion, and the problems were contained. And he's not an unintelligent man. Right. In fact, he's an expert on the Great Depression. Exactly. So the fact that he could get it so wrong, that perhaps the people who think they understand and think they know perhaps know less than we think they know. The thing that everyone says about Ben Bernanke is that he runs the fed very differently than his predecessor, Alan Greenspan. He holds meetings that are much more open. Dissenting opinion is encouraged. He listens. He's learning. People have criticized him for this. But today, it might be just what we need. Act Three, Swap Cops. This last couple weeks, whenever anybody discusses what the government could have done to prevent this financial crisis from happening, it seems to instantly turn into partisan finger pointing in a way that doesn't seem to shed much light on anything. And so this week, I called around to a bunch of people who'd been federal regulators to try to sidestep that and understand what went wrong. And people talked about a lot of different examples. But the biggest single place that people pointed to, where there could have been regulations but there was just nothing, were these credit default swaps Alex has been talking about. Just last week, the chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox-- a man who, as we have reported on our program, has mostly sat on the sidelines as this crisis has grown-- went before congress. And he said, we've got to go in and regulate what he called the CDS market, Credit Default Swaps. Neither the SEC nor any regulator has authority over the CDS market, even to require minimum disclosure to the market. As the Congress considers reform of the financial system in the current crisis, I urge you to provide in statute for regulatory authority over the CDS market. In fact, lawmakers rejected this very idea, back when it could have made a difference, all the way back in 1998. In 1998, I was serving as the director of the division of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That's Michael Greenberger. Now he teaches about these markets in law school and runs the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security. But back in 1998, during the Clinton administration, he and his boss at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission noticed that these swaps were becoming more and more prevalent. And they thought the securities was pretty clear that this market should be regulated. The only question was how. And we essentially put out an extensive questionnaire to the public, including the financial services institutions, and said, we think it should be regulated. We have a lot of flexibility under our statute about how to regulate this market. And that was met with huge resistance, not only within the rest of the Clinton administration, with regard to financial regulators there, but in Congress. And a fairly lengthy battle ensued. And what was the argument against regulating them? The argument against regulating them was that these products are entered into by very sophisticated financial institutions. You can't walk in off the street and buy them. You and I couldn't buy them. But that insurance companies, endowments, pension funds, hedge funds are dealing in these products. And these people are very, very smart. And it's a mistake to let government get in their way. And essentially, on that thesis, especially, if you'll recall when we were in the middle of the dot com boom, the economy was in surplus. There was not a lot of people who sided with the position that wait, these things can be very toxic and will lead to problems. Finally, in December 2000, Congress ended the debate by passing a law that said that credit default swaps, and other swaps like them, would not be regulated. And among people who want to bash Republicans and blame this whole mess on them, the way that this bill came to the floor has become something of a little legend. The bill had been debated and passed by the House of Representatives in the middle of 2000. But by December, it still hadn't been introduced in the Senate and was considered dead. Then Senator Phil Gramm entered the story. Gramm may be a familiar name to you because, until very recently, he was John McCain's economic adviser in John McCain's presidential campaign-- until Gramm declared that our economic problems really stem from the fact that Americans are a nation of whiners. Gramm got this bill back into consideration in the last few hours before Congress went on Christmas break. And it is true that it was brought to the floor of the Senate for the first time on Friday evening, December 15, 2000, which was the last day of that lame-duck session of Congress. And it came to the floor as a 262 page rider to an 11,000 page appropriation bill. There was a debate on it. Several members of the Senate spoke. But in that environment, when the real focus was on funding the entire federal government for fiscal year 2001, there was no substantive discussion. It passed 95 to nothing, if memory serves. In other words, this cannot be laid at the feet of Phil Gramm. This was a bipartisan decision, with Clinton appointees at the Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission joining Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, all saying that credit default swaps, and things like them, should not be regulated. Quite frankly, I think at the time, anybody who opposed it was deemed to be a little bit crazy. Looking back, Greenberger thinks that regulating this market would have made a huge difference in our current situation. Back in the heyday of subprime mortgages, when an investor would buy a risky subprime mortgage backed security, it was common to also buy a credit default swap that would pay him back if that security went bad. It was like an insurance policy. It helped drive the market. But they weren't regulated like insurance policies. If an insurance company had issued this as normal insurance, state insurance regulators would have required that they have adequate capital reserves. So if there had been regulation, there would have been capital reserves. And just to be sure I understand what you're saying here, that would have helped in two ways. For one thing, there would have been money to pay back when these things went bad. They would have had capital reserves to pay out. That's right. But even more than that, the one thing financial institutions hate to do is set aside capital as a reserve. And they didn't have to do it for these instruments because it wasn't regulated. Had they had to do it, many of them would have never gotten in the business to begin with. If companies had to set aside capital for each credit default swap, it would have limited how many they could have done, and it would have made the ones that they did safer. Now this alone would not have prevented all the mess that we're in. Huge macroeconomic forces were at work, driving the global pool of investment into lousy mortgages. And if investors did not have credit default swaps, they probably would have invented something else just as opaque and risky. But this gets us to the bigger point. Nobody was even trying to restrain the investors. Regulators didn't understand many of these newfangled financial instruments, and they didn't see a problem with the rest. If your back door is open in a dangerous neighborhood, the first thing you want to do is close it. Now, you could argue that people would break windows. But the first thing you do is close the back door. And the idea that you can have $60 trillion in a financial market-- which is more than all the stock sold anywhere in the world-- and not have any oversight whatsoever, is self-evidently absurd. And we're seeing the end result of that today. Act Four, Now What? Well, we got an email on Wednesday from a listener named Will Chen. Let me just read this. Dear Ira, Alex, Adam, and gang-- I hate it when they call us gang-- you are our only hope. Please do a show that clearly explains the question, should we support the bailout. If the answer is no, what other options do we have? I'm not dumb or lazy. In addition to listening to NPR and the BBC religiously, I also read-- and then he lists all the publications that he reads. There's so much confusion out there, I really don't know who to trust. After a lot of soul searching in the last couple days, I realize there is only one source of information I trust without question. And that is This American Life. Yeah, that is a sad state of affairs. That is a really sad-- poor guy. Please help us understand this bailout. OK, so Adam? the bailout is passed. What's the answer? Is the bailout a good idea or not? All right, let me say what is crystal clear to me after spending the last several weeks doing nothing but reporting this crisis. It is a severe and scary crisis. And the more I report it, the more scared I have been. It is also clear that spending $700 billion will help. I mean, you throw $700 billion at a problem, you're going to make the problem less bad. But it's also very clear that the plan we've been hearing all about, the Paulson plan, has a lot of problems. There are a lot of things that a lot of people do not like about it. Right, and we've been hearing about that in the news. But we want to just run through some of the big points. Yeah, so some of the big things people don't like about the plan, the main thing is there's all these crappy assets that the banks don't want, and the US Government is about to buy them. And so we're about to be the proud owners of $700 billion of crap. Also, these assets have absolutely no price. That is the cause of this crisis. These assets are not moving. These are these mortgage-related investments, these mortgage-related securities that no one is willing to buy. And when you can't buy anything, you don't know what the price of it is. So by definition, the government is going to have to invent a price. And if they go too low, they're going to ruin the banks. They're going to give them too little money to save them. They're actually going to make the problem worse. If the government pays too much, well, then the taxpayer has lost out a lot of money. And the banks-- Right. Then we're just getting ripped off. Then we're just getting ripped off. So you have to find this magical price that no one knows what it is, so it's really, really complicated. So they're going to have to invent a way to do that. And it's going to be some sort of difficult process. Yes. It's a very circuitous way to solve the problem. The problem is banks don't have enough money. So they're not lending money. And that's freezing up the economy. And this is a very complicated way to get money to the banks. Now, for the last few weeks while Congress has been debating the Paulson plan and various versions of that, I understand that there has been another way to do the bailout. There's a whole different approach to doing the bailout that lots of economists say is better in a bunch of ways. Yeah. Alex and I have been surveying as many economists as we can find. We've been calling and reading. And you can never get a whole lot of economists to agree on anything. But I would say, of the economists we've surveyed-- and I mean, left wing, right wing, libertarian, more progressive-- a clear majority of the ones we've surveyed, well over half, prefer another plan. They don't like the Paulson plan as the best plan. They say there's this other thing called a stock-injection plan that is clearly better. OK, stock-injection plan. Now, how does this one work? All right, so in the Paulson plan, what we're doing is giving $700 billion to the banks. And then in return, we get all these toxic assets, these crappy assets. We take it off their hands. We take it off their hands. With the stock-injection plan, we still give something like $700 billion to the bank. But in return, we get an ownership share of the bank. We get to become stockholders, owners. The taxpayer, the government becomes stockholders and owners of the banks. And so how is that better? First of all, it's just simpler. You avoid that whole crazy pricing of mysterious, mystical asset problem because you just give $10 billion to a bank and then you get a $10 billion share in the bank. It's a much simpler mathematical problem. Also, a lot of the economists I talked to say it's just fairer. It's a better deal for the taxpayer. Because in the Paulson plan, we end up owning all these lousy assets. We don't know what they're worth. If they go down in value, we're just on the hook for all of that. In the stock-injection plan, not only on stock, we would own something called preferred stock, which means-- it's kind of complicated how it works, but basically-- the taxpayer is the last one to lose money. The shareholders of the bank would lose their money before we taxpayers would lose money. So we're more protected. We're more likely to actually make money out of this deal and less likely to lose money. So if this is better for the taxpayers, why wouldn't we do that? Who's against this? There are a bunch of people against it. One big group is conservative Republicans. They just don't fundamentally, in their guts, don't like the idea of the US government owning shares of private companies. It just smells like socialism to them. And they can't support it. But maybe more importantly, banks really, really hate this idea. Look at what happened to AIG, the big insurance giant. Because that's sort of what the government did. They bought a huge share of the bank, they all but zeroed out the value of the shares. So all the current shareholders of AIG just lost billions of dollars. Their stock is just worth-- Yeah, virtually nothing. And the government fired the chief executive of AIG, completely took it over. See, I like that. I like that these guys end up getting punished under this plan. Yeah, that's not just a moral issue or a political issue. That's an actual economic issue. An economy works better when people pay the cost for bad decisions. And the Paulson plan doesn't do that as much as a stock-injection plan. So from the banks' perspective, this is absolutely a no-brainer. Let's say I give you two options, Ira. One option is, I come, I give you $1,000 and I take all the crap out of your basement, and you get to keep the $1,000. That's the Paulson plan. The other option is, I come, I give you $1,000 and I get to move into your house. I become a co-owner of the house. I might get to kick you out of the house and take all your stuff. I mean, from the bank's perspective, from the shareholders, from the executives, it's a no-brainer. Of course they like the Paulson plan. And the bank lobby is a powerful, huge lobby. You can just imagine how powerful they are, how many strings they can pull on Capitol Hill. And they would oppose anything like that? I talked to a bank lobbyist. He told me there are over 600 professional lobbying groups, thousands of people are working hard to promote the Paulson plan and to weaken any stock-injection plan. Well, weaken-- that is, as if it were ever actually seriously considered. Well, that's what's interesting. Until last night, Thursday, I, and everyone-- all the experts I talked to, all the people on Capitol Hill-- were under the impression the stock injection plan was simply not on the table. You and I worked late last night. I was in a cab on the way home. I got a call from a guy I know who's pretty well-connected right around midnight. And he told me guess what, the stock-injection plan is in the Senate bill that was passed, and it's in the House bill. I woke up this morning, and I still could barely believe it. I've been calling around. It was kind of a dramatic morning. The first few people I called said, no, that's ridiculous. There's no way that could have gotten in. It's impossible. Over the course of the morning, I got more and more confirmation. And basically, what happened is someone, and we still don't know who, put in very subtle language, into the Senate bill, that gives this as an option to the Treasury Secretary. And so is this in the bill that got taken up in the House on Friday-- you and I are talking Friday afternoon at around 4:30 Eastern time-- and that the President just signed into law? Is it in that bill that got signed into law? That's our understanding, yeah. There's still the main plan, which is buying the crappy assets. That's still the core idea. But the Treasury Secretary has, as an option, at his discretion, the ability to do this other plan, the one that many economists prefer, the stock-injection plan. OK, so at least that's in there. But to get back to the original question, this thing has now been signed into law, how should we feel about this? It is not hyperbole to say that there is a severe financial crisis. All these dire warnings you're hearing, this is not Wall Street fat cats trying to make some money. This is serious. Alex and I have seen it. This week we saw the crisis spread to Europe, which had been saying that they were immune to it. It's already seeping out to Main Street, or whatever cliche you want. Right, in the ways that we reported earlier in the show. In the ways we've been telling you about. The majority of economists I have talked to would say the following. This crisis is severe. It's going to get worse. Something needs to be done. The original plan was not great. This plan is a lot better. This plan is probably the best we can get. And something has to happen sooner than later. Well, Adam, thank you for another frightening hour. Yeah, this one scares me a lot more than the last one. All right, well, thank you, Adam. Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg, with Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Molly Messick, Seth Lind, and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Today's show was a co-production with NPR News. Our website is thisamericanlife.org. The Planet Money podcast, you can find it on the web at npr.org/blogs/money. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains his behavior at last year's Christmas party this way. "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." I'm Ira Glass. back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Andy's grandfather ran the business, then his father ran the business. They make mousetraps. Victor brand mousetraps with a big red V on them. But also glue traps and electric traps and those humane catch-and-release things and traps that only professionals use. Andy's in charge of the part of the company that develops the new products, and the job suits him. I called him in his office. I remember coming out here on Saturdays when I was very young and seeing the mousetraps being made and just being intrigued by the business. So I understand that, because you guys are the number one mousetrap company in the world, people pitch you ideas on how to make a better mousetrap, right? All the time. Can I ask you to just talk about some ones that were especially bad? Oh, my. One that we rejected was one that is basically like a pail that, in essence, the mouse can run up the side of up a stairway and then, between one side of the bucket and the other, there's a dowel. And in the middle of it a little cup of bait. So they run across the dowel and once they get to the cup, it turns over and spills them-- Into the bucket. Into a pail of-- and since they wanted to be environmentally friendly, a pail of antifreeze that was environmentally friendly. Wait. Wait. What? Right, and I believe that the antifreeze would also keep the scent problem down of a dead rodent. You might have a whole 20 drowned mice in this thing. I mean, incredibly ingenious and very clever. So you think that actually could work? Oh, it does work. It does work, but it's not the sort of thing that you think many people are going to want to buy. Right. Right. People really don't want a pail-- to end up with-- I mean, having a dead mouse for a lot of people's a problem. Having a dead mouse in a pail of antifreeze and dumping it out-- or, in this case, having maybe six or seven-- just is not commercially, in our opinion, a great opportunity. I mean, people are incredibly creative. I mean, I've got a book of patents that were just from the late 80s to, like, 1950 and there are thousands and thousands of tanks and cages, all sorts of weird looking shaped boxes and things that look like medieval torture chambers. Can you tell me one where you totally admired the ingenuity, but you just thought, no way? Yeah, I sure will. This one is alarming in its ingenuity. A mouse went into a little box area and when it nibbled at the bait, the door shut behind them. OK, nothing too abnormal about that. But it dropped a pill into a little bit of water and the pellet dropped into water and it gave off a gas that killed them. It would die of carbon monoxide poisoning. In other words, it went into a gas chamber. And was this ever sold anywhere? In Germany. Oh, come on. I am not kidding. I'm sitting here literally stunned. As a Jewish person, I actually am stunned. I was horrified. We didn't think that had very good commercial viability in the United States. And we were kind of surprised that it was available, that people were trying to market it in Germany. So with all of these people trying to invent a better mousetrap, the dirty secret of trapping mice is mice are really easy to catch. That's why every inventor thinks that he can do it. Catching a mouse is basically playing against a casino where you always win. The regular, old-fashioned, cheap, little mousetrap, Andy says, will usually catch the mouse in 24 to 48 hours. It will kill it 88% of the time. Other traps that aren't much more expensive have 100% lethality. Mice are easy to kill because mice, unlike rats, are incredibly inquisitive animals. They investigate anything that's new, anything that's in their normal territory for the evening. And that's typically-- most people don't know this but most mice only stay within 10 feet of where they are, max. And oftentimes it's less than that. And they may investigate that area 30 times during the night. They're not just kind of going out once. Well, in a way, what you're describing is almost the ideal animal to be caught. Exactly. So the problem for the mousetrap inventor is the world doesn't need a better mousetrap. You know that old saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat its way to your door?" Not true. Andy makes a traditional mousetrap that sells two for $0.99. It does the job just fine. But most inventors never understand this. Well, they are always persistent. Whether it's letters or phone calls or stopping here, they are passionate about their idea and are so disappointed when we turn them down. Like, they can't believe it. They can't believe it. Because for them, there's the magic of the moment of invention, right? Like, they actually came up with a new idea. That's right. And it turns out that's just not enough in this cold, cold world. It's very hard. It's their baby. Again, they have nurtured this thing. Well, today on our program, we have four stories of inventions in a world that doesn't always need or want new ideas. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. We have four stories of ingenuity and heartbreak for you. Act One of our show today, "Mother of Invention," in which we look at an experimental child rearing technique, whose effectiveness you can judge for yourself. Act Two, "Financial Mousetrap," in which we return to our ongoing coverage of the economic crisis, a place where Wall Street invented all kinds of stuff and it turned out the world would have been better off without a lot of it. Act Three, "Everything Must Go," in which a man tries to solve the problem posed by big plastic bags of US currency. Act Four, "The Not-For-Profit Motive." Our own Alex Blumberg explains what happens when our government has to reinvent itself as a bank, and not necessarily a successful bank. Stay with us. Act One, "Mother of Invention." So we start with somebody inventing a new way to do something in an area of life where you might not think there could be any new ways to do anything left. Karen Sosnoski tells the story. Her son, Anton, was born with Mosaic Down Syndrome, which is this very rare form of Down Syndrome. Essentially, some of his cells have the extra chromosome that causes Down Syndrome. And the other cells don't. So as he grows, he could actually end up having all the health risks and challenges of Down Syndrome, or very few of them. There's no way to know. Some kids with MDS look totally normal, but then have all kinds of learning disabilities. Others have all the physical features of a person with Down Syndrome, but then have a high IQ. It's a diagnosis that's so vague, it can drive a parent crazy. And Karen had no idea what the diagnosis would mean for her son's future. So she started doing some research. She found a Mosaic Down Syndrome website. And on that website, she started reading about a boy named Tim. A boy who, in a bunch of different ways, was not what she was expecting. And whose mom had invented a radical way of dealing with the diagnosis, something Karen had never heard of. Here she is. Tim was 13 when I first saw his picture on the Internet. He had geeky, blunt cut bangs and a wide, innocent smile. He had the same diagnosis as my son, Anton, but he had the happy face of an ordinary boy. And when I looked at this photo, my heart raced with hope. Here was a kid I could imagine as my own. a late bloomer, his mom wrote, but so what? He had hobbies and friends. He was a book worm like I am. To be honest, Tim's bio made me feel less guilty about Anton. Part of me blamed myself for what had happened. Everyone knew advanced maternal age was a major risk factor for having a baby with Down Syndrome, and here I'd waited until 40 to have him. But maybe if I played my cards absolutely right from here on in, he could still turn out just fine. Tim's mother, Kristy, was kind of like a role model for me. She founded an international support group for parents of kids with Mosaic Down Syndrome. She wanted us to be sure the world gave them a fair shake, and I liked this. But to make this happen for her own son, she did something I could never have imagined, something that shocks people every time I tell them. For years, she kept her son's diagnosis a secret. She didn't tell his teachers, she didn't tell her neighbors, and, most incredibly, for the first 14 years of his life, she didn't tell Tim. I first heard Kristy talk about her secret at a conference. Then a couple months ago, I left my one-year-old son Anton for the first time and traveled down to Texas to find out more from Kristy and Tim. How had Tim turned out so well? How much of it was because she'd kept his diagnosis a secret? She told me she didn't start off planning to deceive anyone. When Tim started kindergarten, Kristy did what most parents do. She didn't keep his disability a secret. She explained to the teachers that he had Mosaic Down Syndrome, she asked the teachers to treat him like any other kid, and she crossed her fingers. But it didn't work out as she'd planned. This is Kristy. I know one time I went in there to visit the classroom and all the little children are sitting up in their nice little story time circle, and he's laying in the middle of the carpet, rolling around and laying around. And I asked the teacher, I said, why is he laying when everyone else is sitting down? And she said, well, he likes to do that and we just want to make him happy. And so, it was because he had Mosaic Down Syndrome. And so I knew then, maybe it's not a good idea for everybody to know because they're going to make excuses for him. And I wanted him, more than anything, to just be as normal as normal is, to have the same opportunities that everyone else had. So the next year, when school began, I didn't tell his teacher. And then we thought, you know, if he knows that he has Mosaic Down Syndrome, he's going to use that for a crutch, big time. So we decided, you know, we're just not going to tell him until he gets a little bit older. Which could get kind of complicated. She had to talk behind Tim's back and over his head. She had to tell family members never to mention Tim's condition in front of him. And it's OK if you people know it, but I don't want him to know it. I turned into a tricky person. Were there times when you were tempted to tell him? One time stands out really, really deeply in my mind. He was around 10 years old. And he had a little tree house, and all the kids would come over to be in his tree house with him. And this one little boy in our neighborhood had Down Syndrome. And I looked outside. All the kids are playing, and Tim pushed this little boy down. And I was, like, no, you don't push him down. That's not nice, you know. And I made him come inside and I said, why did you push this little boy down? And he goes, I don't like him. He looks different. That crushed me. That crushed me. And I said, well, why don't you like him? Just because he looks different? Everybody looks different. And he said, no, he talks funny. I don't like him. And I wanted so much at that point to say, don't you know that you have the same chromosomes as him. When I was a lot younger, I used to think that because I was different that made me-- because I was different, I thought maybe I was from another world. That I was an alien or something. This is Tim. He's almost 20 now but he doesn't look much older than his picture at 13. It's not super obvious that he has a medical condition, but if you're at all tuned into Down Syndrome, you could probably guess. His eyes have those extra folds and he talks in a slow, careful way like he's having to work to shape his words. Academically, though, Tim blows any stereotypes about Down Syndrome out of the water. His IQ is 110, higher than the national average. He got A's and B's with no special help at a mainstream school. But by junior high, Tim was starting to have a hard time fitting in with other kids. He would do weird things like burp, or rock on his heels in class. He'd say inappropriate things, like the time he got so excited about a slasher movie that he confused himself with the main character. "I started shooting people," he told the kids at his lunch table. As you can imagine, he didn't make a lot of friends this way. All I knew was that I was different because people were bothering me all the time. Can you give an example? Insults, being picked on, teased, hazing, if you know what that is. Tim started realizing that there was something different about him. And when Tim was around 12 years old, we were on our way to the grocery store and I was driving and Tim was sitting in the front seat next to me. And we hadn't been talking at all. I mean, the radio's going, you know. We're not talking to each other. And all of a sudden-- I asked my mom, do I have a medical problem that you don't want to tell me about because you think I'm not mature enough to handle it? We pulled over at the park and I stopped the car and I looked at him and I said, why do you want to know this? And he said, well, you know, you know, I just know that I'm different. But she couldn't bring herself to tell him the truth. She didn't know if Tim was ready and she didn't feel ready. She said nothing. I was really, really-- probably lost some sleep over it. Because I kept going back and forth with, have I done the right thing keeping this from him? But at that time I wasn't sure. No matter how hard I tried to, you know, make his world so great still kids picked on him. And so as years progressed-- one day he came home-- and he was about 14-- and he said, Mom, I feel like I'm the only person in the whole world that has the same problems as me. And it just broke my heart. My husband came home from work that night and I said, you know, we're going to have to probably pretty soon tell him. But they didn't. For another six whole months. It seemed so difficult. Here Kristy had to tell Tim that she'd kept the fundamental truth about his identity from him for most of his life. What's more, it seemed that her efforts to protect him might have actually made things worse. I think that we just worried how he was going to react. We didn't know how he was going-- we didn't know what to expect, at all, whatsoever. We didn't know if he would be happy or mad or sad or what. We just didn't know what to expect at all. And so, I think, that was our main worry. So we sat down on the couch. My husband tried to leave. And so Tim comes in from his bedroom and sits down and I said, we've got something to tell you. And he said, what? I said, remember how a while back you asked me if you had a medical problem that I didn't want you to know about? And he said, yes. And I said, do you remember when you said you felt like you're the only person in the whole world that had the problems that you had? And he said, yes. She told me I had Mosaic Down Syndrome. I don't know her exact words, but that's what she said. What came into your mind when she told you that? Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, X-Men. Why did X-Men come into your mind? Because the X-Men are mutants, genetic. They gain those genetic problems, and that's what I felt like. I felt like an X-Men. And I thought that was kind of cool. And just like that, the truth was out. Ironically, what happened next was exactly the opposite of what Kristy had feared. Tim didn't seem angry. He didn't stop trying in school. The diagnosis actually made him more conscious of his strange behaviors, like the rocking on his heels, so he could work harder at controlling them. Mostly he was relieved. He'd spent so many years feeling like there was something wrong with him that finding out there was wasn't so bad. In his junior year, Tim came out to his classmates during a presentation on genetics. After that, the kids started cutting him some slack. He wasn't the weird kid anymore. He was the kid with that Mosaic Down thing and you couldn't blame him for that. So that was a real big turning point. He got a bunch of friends, real friends. And it was our first time to have real friends. And then these three big teenage boys came back to our house to spend the night. Never had such a thing. I mean, never. And so they're going to spend the night. And so we've got all these boys and I'm going, we've got to make popcorn. We've got to watch movies. After I got them settled, I came in the bedroom and I bawled my head off. Because it was just so wonderful. I mean, it was-- in fact, it was like 10:30 at night and I'm calling my mother, I have teenage boys in the house. You would think given how things turned out Kristy might have had some regrets about waiting so long to tell Tim the truth. I kept waiting for her to crack or something during our interview, to admit she'd made a mistake, but she didn't, and frankly, I was relieved. I don't want to cast judgment on Kristy. Tim's a great kid. Whether that's because of what Kristy did or in spite of it, I don't think anyone can say. And anyway, Kristy and Tim have moved on to other issues, like teaching Tim how to balance a checkbook, how to drive, how to get ready to live on his own. And from Tim's point of view, Kristy's got her own learning to do. My mom is being a control freak right now. I'm going to be 20 this May. It's time I started to be a bit more independent. How will you have to change to be more independent? When I leave this house, I plan to never wash dishes again. Who's going to wash them? My wife. [LAUGHS] I'm kidding. I'll have the kids do it. [LAUGHS] It's funny or maybe just typical. Tim's critical of his mom, but when I ask him how he thinks I should raise Anton, his advice to me is to do just what she did. Let people get to know Anton first before you tell them anything, Tim says to me. Tell Anton when he's a teenager, when he's old enough to handle it. I know I probably won't do this. After all, Kristy's secrecy didn't protect Tim from pain, which is what I want for my son. So I'm back to square one with no trick to give Anton the perfect future, any more than I could give him those perfect chromosomes. And like any other parent, I'm waiting to see who my son becomes. Karen Sosnoski. She's working on a book called, Love in the Time of Brain Tumors. Act Two, "Financial Mousetrap." As you've probably heard by now, over the last few years the mortgage industry and the banking industry have been places that were rife with invention. People coming up with all kinds of better mousetraps, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, and novel kinds of mortgage backed securities, all of which has sent the world's economy into a tailspin these last few weeks. As part of our ongoing coverage of that mess, we now turn to the politics of all this. Last week on our radio show, we debunked an idea you hear a lot from Democrats these days. That this financial mess can be blamed entirely on Republicans deregulating financial markets. Today we take a look at the other side of the aisle. This past week it seems to have actually hardened into a point of Republican dogma that the whole financial mess can be blamed on the Democrats. On Wednesday of this past week, I attended a McCain Palin rally in Lehigh, Pennsylvania. And I was amazed that nearly every person I talked to in this Republican crowd was quite certain who the culprits were behind our whole financial mess. The liberal Democrats in the House encouraged and supported the notion that banks should be providing loans to people who couldn't afford them in inner city, wherever-- They saw McCain and Bush coming through with the regulations and they refused to do anything about it. Barney Frank said, no, it's OK. No problem. This is running great. And here we are today. In this Republican version of the bailout story, there was a pivotal moment in 2005 when Republicans could have prevented a lot of the mess that we're in now, where they tried to regulate, where they tried to fix it, but the Democrats stopped them. And the key to the whole crisis, they say, was the mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They say Fannie and Freddie are at the center of the whole thing. Here's John McCain at the second presidential debate on Tuesday. Really the match that lit this fire was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I'll bet you you may never even have heard of them before this crisis. But, you know, they're the ones that with the encouragement of Senator Obama and his cronies and his friends in Washington that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to pay back-- So let's just start with the question, did the subprime crisis start with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Absolutely not. The subprime crisis did not start with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is Charles Duhigg who covers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other parts of the subprime crisis for the New York Times. He says that it was not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but Wall Street, international investors, brokers, and banks who created and popularized subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie didn't get involved in a serious way until relatively late. This huge subprime economy had built. Wall Street came in and they said, we're going to basically buy any loan that anyone can make. And Fannie and Freddie at that point started losing a lot of their market share. So they started competing against Wall Street for worse and worse and riskier and riskier loans. And that, in turn, further fueled the growth of this thing. So what started out as a kind of small brush fire that was worrisome was fanned, over time, into a huge, huge blaze. And Fannie and Freddie were an important part of fanning that, but they didn't create the subprime economy. They weren't the single greatest input to the subprime economy. They were part of the problem. Nonetheless, Republicans say that if they'd been allowed to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2005, as they'd wanted, it would have prevented much of the current mess. I was the one-- I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis, that could have helped prevent from happening in the first place and Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. So, Charles, what are they talking about? What did Republicans try to do a couple of years ago? So in 2005, a couple of Republicans introduced legislation that would have placed greater restrictions on Fannie and Freddie. It would have empowered the regulator to basically have a tighter hold on them. Now what's important to keep in mind is John McCain didn't actually sponsor that legislation initially. He came to it kind of, you know, months and months after it had been introduced and after a big report had come out, saying that Fannie and Freddie are terrible companies. Everyone was kind of jumping on and John McCain jumped on to co-sponsor the legislation. People we've interviewed in the Senate have said that John McCain was never a big bugaboo on Fannie or Freddie, but he did co-sponsor the legislation. He deserves some credit for that. The 2005 legislation would have essentially done two things. First of all, it would have cut the number of loans that Fannie and Freddie can hold for themselves, so it would have avoided part of the problem that Freddie is having right now. And, theoretically, it might have caused Fannie and Freddie to stop buying so many risky loans, but that's not a guarantee. In fact, it would have been completely up to the regulator. And the regulator who's holding the position right now is a man named James Lockhart. In the past year-- and he was a Bush appointee. In the past year, he actually helped Fannie and Freddie buy more and more riskier loans. Because Congress, over the past year, started asking Fannie and Freddie to buy risky loans because they thought that would help the economy. Right now it's a part of a Republican orthodoxy, it seems, that if we had fixed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005, we wouldn't be in the crisis we're in today. Is that true? That's absolutely not true. So if we had fixed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005, the crisis might be different and it might be slightly less, but the crisis would absolutely still be here. Another thing that's come up as a political talking point is the question of who associated with who. And Senator McCain said in Pennsylvania this week that executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised Senator Obama. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him and he's taken their money for his campaign. In fact, he's received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them. The McCain Campaign also has an ad linking Barack Obama to an executive at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama has no background in economics. Who advises him? The Post says it's Franklin Raines for advice on mortgage and housing policy. Shocking. Under Raines, Fannie Mae committed extensive financial fraud. Raines made millions. Fannie Mae collapsed. Taxpayers? Stuck with the bill. Barack Obama. Bad advice. Bad instincts. Not ready to lead. Franklin Raines. Right. Which is based on-- apparently Barack Obama and Franklin Raines once bumped into each other at some type of get-together. What Barack Obama has said is that they had one conversation, very briefly, once. So it's a little disingenuous to say that Franklin Raines was an adviser to Barack Obama. Now that being said, if you're following the money trail, if you want to say who's taken less or more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Barack Obama-- it is absolutely true-- is the second highest recipient of lobbying dollars from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now the reason why what John McCain is saying is a little disingenuous is because his campaign manager-- John McCain's campaign manager-- a guy named Rick Davis, was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and took over $2 million from them in lobbying fees to run this group that they had put together to try and fight back against more regulation. And, in fact, although Rick Davis left his firm when he joined the McCain campaign, his firm, that he still owns a part in, was receiving payments from Freddie Mac until earlier this year. Until earlier this year or just until a month or two ago? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it ended in August. I'm not certain of exactly the date. And, in fact, I worked on the story breaking that. And what they said, the reason why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were paying Rick Davis-- John McCain's campaign manager-- is because they wanted access to John McCain. They thought that maybe he'd become President some day and so it would be good to be friends with the guy who's one of his closest aides. In general, Charles Duhigg says, it's true that Republicans have tried to rein in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for years. And it's true that, in general, Democrats have urged Fannie and Freddie to take on more loans and riskier loans and push for loose spending and low interest rates that led to the housing boom. And it's also true that Republicans fought regulation of the financial markets. But he says, none of that gets to the overall truth of what happened. To say that either party had great foresight is completely untrue. So the blame for this is bipartisan. The blame for this is absolutely bipartisan. Both parties deserve a great deal of blame for what happened with the subprime mess and to try and pin the blame on one party or the other really muddies the issue. A crisis like what's going on right now can't develop without everyone fueling it. I mean, we're looking at the biggest crisis in a century. That only happens when basically everyone drops the ball. So there's enough blame to give to both parties here. When it comes down to specific individuals, some individuals deserve a lot more blame than others. And the Times is sepending a couple weeks basically trying to point our fingers at who deserves that blame. And when you are looking at people who are especially good or especially bad, were Barack Obama and John McCain, either of them, especially great or especially terrible? No. Barack Obama cares about a whole bunch of other things than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and subprime. John McCain cares about a whole bunch of things besides Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and subprime. They spent most of their careers talking about things besides Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and subprime. This just wasn't a big issue for them. Charles Duhigg of the New York Times. On Friday, the McCain Campaign released a brand new ad that they say will run nationally linking Democrats to the financial crisis. It's along the lines that we've talked about. The ad says, "Congressional liberals fought for risky subprime loans. Congressional liberals fought against more regulation. Then the housing market collapsed, costing you billions." Regulators. We regulate any stealing of his property. We're damn good, too. But you can't be any geek off the street. You've got to be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean, to earn your keep. Regulators, mount up. Coming up, the underground economy comes up with its own plan to lose lots and lots of money and in their case it means cash money. 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, Make a Better Mousetrap. We have stories of people trying to make inventions in the face of a world that does not care, does not necessarily need or want what they're making. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, "Everything Must Go." In the early 1990s, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh was researching the underground economies in the city of Chicago. He wanted to find out how people made money in the cash economy, off the books. And he spent a lot of time in the poorer areas of the city where people were inventing ways to make their livings. He hung out with women selling food from their homes, car mechanics who ran their business from an alleyway, store owners who hosted late night gambling and dice games. None of them, of course, was reporting their income to the government. Then there was Nellie, who had a problem that not many people faced. Here's Sudhir. Nellie Thomas was a hustler who worked in and around his South Side neighborhood and over the course of his life, he was a pimp, drug dealer, car thief, extorter, jackroller, prostitute and burglar. I met Nellie because I wanted to know how people bought guns in Chicago. By the time I met him, Nellie had made a name for himself not because he sold guns, but because he sold ammunition. It's illegal to buy handguns in the city of Chicago. For guns and ammo, people usually have to trek out to the suburbs, which isn't so easy. Most gun stores are in white suburbs and the Black people in Nellie's community don't like to go there, so they buy guns in their own neighborhood for the most part. Now in the South Side where Nellie lived, if you have money and a little patience, you can probably find a gun within a few days. But it's a lot harder to find ammo. Nellie understood this and he capitalized on the demand by becoming an ammunitions trader. Nellie would drive to the suburbs or he'd hire people to go there and buy boxes of ammo for a few dollars each. Back in his own neighborhood, it might cost you $100 for a box. He sold bullets to gang members, robbers, drug dealers, prostitutes and just regular people who liked to have a weapon around. And when the gang wars heated up in the mid- to late-90s, people bought several boxes at a time and Nellie was flush with cash. "Good money. No hassle," he'd like to say. "Cops don't care much about me." When I started hanging out with Nellie, he was becoming bothered by his success. He was making so much money that he didn't know what to do with it. His needs were pretty minimal. He had a beat up old truck that he fixed himself. And his parents had long ago paid off the mortgage on the bungalow where he was born and where he still lived. The house was a kind of modest, two-story and basement and backyard design that you could see all over Chicago. Nellie was hardly a big consumer. He liked to listen to a pocket-sized radio. And although he had a fancy TV, he usually watched a little black-and-white in his bedroom. And he never traveled. For 20 years, he'd been eating at the same soul food restaurant every day. He wore the same three or four pairs of clothes. And almost every day you could see him walking or playing golf-- "Very badly," he said-- in the park next to his house. Nellie also lived in a world of cash. Like most underground traders, he couldn't take large sums of money to the bank, and for small sums he simply didn't trust banks. So he put his cash in mattresses and in large black trash bags that he hid inside his house, or that he buried outside in the backyard. But Nellie was losing sleep because he was running out of places to keep his cash. He worried because there were other people living in his home, a girlfriend and her two children, a niece, his grandmother, an aunt, and a brother with his girlfriend and two kids. Nellie was scared he'd be robbed and so he began staying up all night with a big shotgun next to his window. His anxiety grew so bad that he started taking medication and drinking more. He was restless and fidgety and he said he was yelling at his family for no good reason. Sometimes he'd call me early in the morning. We both knew many of the local gang leaders and he wanted me to tell him whether they were planning to raid his house. He also asked me strange questions, like whether squirrels could smell paper money and whether they would dig in his backyard and eat his holdings. He admitted he was going to the hospital nearly every two weeks due to panic attacks. At first I wondered why Nellie didn't just give his money away to his family, or to a charity, but it wasn't so simple for him. He said he was ashamed of how he'd earned it. He didn't want to tell people that he sold ammo to gang members for a living. I suppose Nellie could have bought some property or found a way to launder his money but that really wasn't in his character. Nellie didn't think in terms of the future, at least not in that way. And because he was very depressed and his job was so dangerous, Nellie didn't think he'd live long enough to spend his money on anything worthwhile. One morning I went to Nellie's house and found him in tears. No one was home and he was lying on his bed with his money all over the room. He kept saying he couldn't take it anymore and he wanted a way out. I noticed a few large bills but there were mostly piles and piles of one and five dollar bills crumpled up like waste paper. He was pleading with me to help him to do something with all of his money, which he estimated was about $15,000 or $20,000. He asked me, "What do your people do when they have all the stuff that they can't use?" I'm Indian, but I assumed he meant middle-class folks. "Well," I said, "when my family has a lot of stuff, we give it away or we have a garage sale." His eyes lit up. "That's it. I'm going to have a garage sale." I wasn't sure I understood what he meant. "Let me get this straight. You're going to sell your money?" He grinned, stood up, hugged me, and said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you for getting me out of this mess." So I made myself a cup of coffee, sat on the couch, and watched as Nellie put some of the money inside a television. Then he dumped a handful of bills inside a vacuum cleaner. Then he shoved bags full of cash inside his couch cushions and in a mattress. He picked up a basketball, examined it, looked over to me, and agreed when I shook my head, no. And then with my help, he dragged everything out to the front lawn. He ran into the garage and came back with a hammer, nails, and cardboard. He made several for sale signs and tacked them on to the trees and on the windshield of his car. He was so happy. He was running around like a child building a tree house. For his final gesture, Nellie ran back inside the house, grabbed two chairs and a six pack of beer and brought them outside. He told me that I couldn't tell anyone what he just did. I exchanged my coffee for a beer and sat on Nellie's well-manicured front lawn unsure of exactly what was supposed to transpire. We sat on the lawn for about 10 minutes. I was getting a little agitated. My cell phone rang. Nellie looked at me and said, "Remember. You can't say what's in them things. You can't mention the money." It was a friend of mine, Autry. He had three children and he had been looking for a job for about a year and now he was living off food stamps and was about three months late on his car and rent payments. Autry could definitely have used the money not to mention the nice TV set sitting in front of my feet. "I'm at a garage sale," I told Autry, checking with Nellie to see if that was OK. Nellie nodded approval. "You should come over," I said checking with Nellie again, who didn't nod. "Autry, listen. You should really come over and see if anything interests you." Autry asked me why the hell would I want him to come to a garage sale when I knew he didn't have any money. I kept telling him to come anyway. Nellie began shaking his head. I sank in my chair, lowered my voice and told Autry to call me if he found some cash and wanted to buy some appliances, and then I hung up. Nellie and I waited for what seemed like hours though my watch said only 20 minutes had passed. Every so often I asked him again whether he really wanted to do this. He would just stare out and tell me that he'd never been more sure about anything in his life. "I feel like the Lord gave me a sign," he said. Just then a woman came by and looked at the couch. I leaned forward as if to pounce out of my chair and I could see that Nellie was doing the same. "Nice couch," she said. "Yeah," said Nellie. "You ain't never going to find another one like it." "That's right, ma'am," I chimed in. "This is certainly a one-of-a-kind couch. You can take my word for it." "$20," she said. "For a couch?" said Nellie. "Ma'am, I need to make a little more than that." "But, sir," she said, trying to be polite, "it ain't worth more than that." "Ma'am," I said, "I think on that count you are mistaken. It is certainly worth more." "Hey, shut up," Nellie yelled at me. The woman watched as Nellie and I began bickering. "You two need help," she said, and walked away. As the morning turned to afternoon, more people came. The first successful sale was to a man pushing a shopping cart. He eyed the vacuum cleaner. "What do you want for it?" he asked. "Give me $15," said Nellie. "$15. Are you nuts?" I said. I couldn't believe Nellie would charge so little. Nellie shot me a glance and I put my head in my hands. "$15, my man, and it's all yours," Nellie said calmly. "All right. That'll work," the man said. He paid Nellie with some bills and a lot of loose change. Then he grinned and said within an hour he could sell the vacuum cleaner down at the thrift store for $30, double his take, just like that. "You might want to take it home first," I told the man as he started walking away. "Just clean it out. Put a fresh bag in. Try it out. Take it apart, maybe." "Home?" the man said, looking at me. "Boy, are you blind or something? I live out of this cart. I live under the EL tracks. Home? [BLEEP] I ain't got no home. [BLEEP] What am I going to do with a vacuum cleaner?" A Saturday morning church service must've ended because a line of black women wearing beautiful dresses and hats was coming our way. They looked at the items on the lawn and liked what they saw. One played with the television set, hitting it every so often while a few others sat on the couch. "A little soft and, well, not so even," one said to me and Nellie. "These cushions are a little old, aren't they? How old are they?" "Oh, they're fairly new," I said. "Made fresh this morning actually." "Boy," Nellie yelled at me. This time he threw some beer on me. "Don't mind him, ma'am. He's not the God-fearing sort. You understand." The woman cast a disparaging look my way and said, "Mm hm, I understand and Jesus do, too. OK, I'll take this couch. Probably throw these cushions away. The other parts are fine but I can't have people sitting on these raggedy things all day." "I would rethink that strategy," I shouted. My voice crackled and beer spilled down my shirt. "I'd probably not throw them away just yet." "What he means to say," Nellie interrupted, "is that you may want to take it home first. Don't do anything so quick. You know, take your time." "I'm not sure there's really anything to think about," a second woman said, feeling the cushions stuffed with America's legal tender. "Yunella, you could replace these for $5. Ain't no need wasting your time with these cushions. Smell like cat piss anyway. Just throw them out." "Oh, lord, I'd really think twice about that," I said, bending over in frustration. I was starting to feel delirious. "Why don't you go inside for a while," Nellie said, pushing me over and making me fall on the ground. I got up and walked toward the house. "What is wrong with that young man?" I could hear the woman ask Nellie. "Oh, nothing that a little religion couldn't fix," Nellie said. Then he told them, "Listen, the truth is, ma'am, that I'm trying to buy my family all new furniture before they get home and I really need to sell this stuff and get rid of it so that I can surprise my wife." "Oh, isn't that sweet," one of the women said. "Well, I'll take the television." "Yes," another one chimed in, "and I could use an extra bed." "I'd keep that mattress," I shouted from inside the house. "Don't throw away the mattress, please." "That is the strangest young man I have ever seen," one of the women said. "Yes," said Nellie. He twirled his finger in little circles next to his head. "He has a little bit of trouble, you know." The woman then turned to me and spoke very slowly. "You be careful now, young man. And beer probably isn't very good for your health." "Neither is throwing away that mattress, ma'am." Nellie asked the women for their address and he loaded the bed into the truck and drove off. I drank the rest of the beers and stared out into a warm blue sky. Nellie sold almost everything on the lawn that afternoon. The only thing that was left was a torn up pillow that couldn't attract anyone's interest. I tried for a while to find the people who had bought some of Nellie's furniture and appliances, but I didn't have any luck, so I'm not really sure if any of them found the cash. Nellie didn't have anymore garage sales. He was still making money by selling ammo and he still kept the money in those big black garbage bags. He just stored them all in the attic where nobody ever went. And Nellie's depression didn't end. For most people, all that money would have been a sign of success, but for Nellie it was just a bunch of paper that he couldn't get rid of. His problem was that he liked his job. He liked the fact that he worked and that he earned a living. The part he didn't like was the actual profits. They made him feel ashamed and he had to hide them from almost everyone he knew and loved. A few years later, Nellie's girlfriend left him, his kids married and moved out, and there was no one else living in his house. He started going to church to ease his depression. It wasn't really helping, he said. But he did start talking a lot about charity and how he wanted to do something good for people. And he did it in his own peculiar way. Nellie would leave a bag of money on a street corner or late at night he would quietly put some cash in front of a homeless person sleeping outside in the park. He would tell me that it was the only pure thing you can do on this earth, help people without taking credit for it. I know of only one person who actually found Nellie's money, my friend Darrell. Nellie had stuffed $800 into the bottom part of a toaster oven and he left it near a dumpster where Darrell picked it up. Darrell figured some drug dealer had hidden the money there so his wife wouldn't find it and she accidentally threw the toaster out. A day before his 45th birthday, Nellie was found dead inside his house. He'd had a massive stroke. No one was quite sure exactly how long he'd been lying there. I went to his funeral. Not many people were there and I felt sad for Nellie. I hoped that maybe the homeless man who had bought the vacuum cleaner would come pay his respects, but he didn't show up. In the middle of the room there was a casket but it was closed. Nellie's body was too decomposed for us to view. In the end, Nellie's family got all his money when they cleaned out his house. That's when I finally met them. They told me that they'd known all along the thing that Nellie was ashamed for them to find out, how he made his money. But they could never figure out a way to tell him that it didn't matter. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. His most recent book is called, Gang Leader For a Day. It tells the story of the neighborhood in and around the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. He's a professor of sociology at Columbia University. Act Four, "The Not-For-Profit Motive." In responding to the current financial crisis, our government has had to invent all kinds of better mousetraps to fix the mess. With that in mind, one quick follow up to something I have here. It was on last week's radio show. Last week NPR'S economics correspondent, Adam Davidson, reported on our program that one of these inventions, the Wall Street Bailout Bill included, buried deep inside, something called stock injection that had a number of advantages over the original bailout plan. The way it worked is that rather than buy a bank's toxic assets, stock injection would essentially buy stock in the bank. Infuse the bank with cash that way. The banking industry and government officials mostly seemed to hate this idea a week ago, but if you've followed the news of this last week, treasury officials have now declared in the last couple days that they might actually try the stock injection plan. That would be in addition to their original plan of buying toxic assets. The advantage of the stock injection is that they can do it quicker. With this action and many others recently, the government is reinventing itself, doing certain things that it has never done before. Alex Blumberg had been trying to figure out exactly what that means. Here's how the US government usually behaves. It borrows money, in the form of selling treasury bonds, and then it spends that money on stuff for the country, Black Hawk helicopters, or cancer research, an occasional bridge to nowhere, stuff in the budget. But with the passage of the bailout bill, it's going to be doing something entirely different with that money. It's going to be buying up mortgage related assets from banks. And that's not all. Just this week it announced it would start lending the money it raises directly to individual companies in something called the commercial paper market. Brad Setser is an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations and he used to work in the Treasury Department. NPR's Adam Davidson and I sat down with him a couple of days ago, and he told us that by doing all these new things, the United States has started acting like something completely different than a government. It's starting to act like a bank. It is borrowing money by selling these short term treasuries and lending to the banking system and lending to firms like GE and others that are big players in the commercial paper market. So instead of borrowing money and then building a bridge, it is borrowing money and then investing it, giving it to a company as a loan that will be paid back or something like that. That's the big change that happened today. And then in addition to doing all that, there's the $700 billion that's going to be used to buy assets that are harder to value and harder to sell and in that, it is also acting like a bank or an investment bank. But it's not acting completely like a bank, because if it was acting completely like a bank, it'd be trying to drive the hardest possible bargain so it can make the most money. The US government doesn't want to do that because making the most possible money means, in effect, buying these assets at the lowest prices possible. And there's a problem with that. The problem is that if you drive too hard of a bargain, if you're doing this is as a pure financial bet, sort of-- Go for the kill. --go for the kill, get them at the lowest possible price, the banks are bust. So it's acting like a really badly run bank. It's like, well, nobody else will pay you more than, you know, $0.20 on the dollar for those things but we'll give you $0.40. Yes. But it's doing so for a reason which is that if the banks had to sell at $0.20, they're bust. Right. Right. Right. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be doing that. It's just sort of sucks that the US government is in this position that it's not normally in, which is to try to behave half like a business and half like a government. This is what-- I mean, you all are shocked. I used to work on emerging economies. This is what happens when you have a really bad crisis. This is what happens when the banking system is on the edge of collapse. So it's just that this has happened before, it just hasn't happened to the US before. Exactly. Where has it happened? Indonesia. Thailand. Argentina. Russia. OK, let's review that list. Indonesia, leadership deposed. Argentina, leadership deposed. Thailand, leadership forced to resign. Russia, leadership returned to authoritarian roots. It's generally not good for any political system if your banks come close to collapsing. It's not a good thing. So I just don't know how to feel. Should we be very upset that they're doing this or should we be upset that the situation required them to do it but glad that they're doing it? I think you should be upset that the situation got to this point, but glad that there is an actor, namely the US government, that is still in a position to do this. The US government still has the ability to borrow and because it still has the ability to borrow, it can provide support for the banking system and the broader financial system and prevent what otherwise could be even a catastrophic run. Because in some of these other countries, the US government is right now in a position where they can borrow money essentially for free at very, very low interest rates, at 0.1%. That's the exact opposite of generally what happens when other crises happen in other countries, right? Their borrowing costs go way up. Either they have to pay exorbitant interest rates to borrow in their own currency or they can only borrow in someone else's currency, which means that you're taking on even more risk. So is there a limit to how much money the US government can borrow? Like, if they have to borrow another $700 billion in a month, and another $700 billion in a month after that, can they do it? Possibly. In some sense it depends on how much anxiety and fear there is, because the more anxiety and fear there is, the more money is leaving the banking system, leaving money markets, and the more money that's going into treasury bonds. So the more fearful everybody else is, the easier it is for the US government to borrow. In other words, people are saying, I don't want to put my money in stocks that are plunging or in bonds of companies that might go out of business or in any country that doesn't happen to have the most powerful economy on the earth. No. I want my money in the one safe place I can think to put it, US treasuries. And this is another way the US government is different from a typical business. The more it screws things up, the more it mismanages its own economy, the more people want to lend it money. Alex Blumberg is one of the producers of our show. He's also one of the people putting together NPR's daily Planet Money podcast. You can find that by Googling Planet Money or going to the iTunes store. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Thea Chaloner, Sam Hallgren, Seth Lind, and PJ Vote. Our website, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely free or sign up for our free weekly podcast, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management over sight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia who I walked in on this week in his office. And he's laying in the middle of the carpet, rolling around and laying around. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This America Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Thank you, Senator Arlen Specter. Just a great guy. Why are we all here? To support Senator John McCain and Governor Palin. Hello, Pennsylvania. John McCain spends a lot of time in Pennsylvania these days. Last week, he hit Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Moon Township, and Bensalem. The week before, he was in Montgomery County, Downingtown and Chester, and Governor Palin was in Lancaster and Scranton. Not many states get this kind of attention. Pennsylvania is the one blue state, the one state that went for John Kerry in 2004, that John McCain is vigorously campaigning in. In the last few weeks, a lot of people have been asking, why? Barack Obama has held double-digit leads over McCain in nearly every poll in the state. He's heavily outspending McCain on TV ads here, as he is everywhere. He has a bigger field operation in Pennsylvania than McCain's, more offices, more people, and they've been in place for months longer. And finally, thanks to voter registration drives, there are now 1.2 million more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. That's twice as many as in 2004. And remember, the Democratic presidential ticket won the state in 2004, just as it won in 2000, and 1996, and 1992. So why is John McCain fighting so hard for this state? Well, part of it is pure electoral college math. He needs Pennsylvania. He needs it badly, because winning Pennsylvania is the only way he'll be able to make up for red states that might go to Obama, states like Colorado or New Mexico. And apparently, McCain sees an opportunity in Pennsylvania. This is the state where Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama by nine points. And so, there are tons of working class Democrats who McCain sees as persuadable. McCain campaign officials have told The New York Times and others that their internal polls show that Obama is just seven or eight points ahead, which seems less daunting when you realize that five or six percent of the voters are still undecided and up for grabs. And in this last week, most of the polls, even the ones you read in the paper, show McCain gaining on Obama in Pennsylvania. And closing that gap is what these rallies are all about. So at this time, it is my great pleasure and high honor to introduce to you the next president and vice president of the United States, John McCain and Sarah Palin. After this rousing introduction by Congressman Charlie Dent, everybody leaps to their feet, the houselights go black, spotlights swoop and circle, and then nothing, absolutely nothing, no McCain, no Palin. After six minutes on our feet, some people start to sit down. A couple minutes later, "Eye of the Tiger" comes on the PA and everybody jumps to their feet again, but nope, false alarm, no candidates still. Finally, 43 minutes later, the Straight Talk Express bus pulls right on to the floor of the arena. Governor Palin and Senator McCain take the stage. And it's got to happen right here in the state of Pennsylvania, my friends. I'd like to give you a little straight talk. Pennsylvania will have a great role in determining the next president of the United States and vice president of the United States. I need your vote. We need to carry Pennsylvania. We need you. For the last month, our radio staff has been in Pennsylvania to try to understand what is happening on the ground in this election. We chose Pennsylvania because it's one of the true battlegrounds this year. We chose Pennsylvania because it's a microcosm of the country, with a couple big cities and sprawling rural areas and small towns and suburbs. We wanted to see firsthand what arguments were affecting undecided voters, and making decided voters change their minds. And all this hour we will be deep inside the field operations in both camps, McCain's and Obama's. And so, as we head into this last week before Election Day, we bring you the ground war in this crucial swing state. We're going to be hopping around the state throughout this hour. And so, before we start, a quick Pennsylvania electoral primer. It's pretty simple really. There are two big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, one is on the right side of the map of Pennsylvania, the other's on the left side of the map. Those are the Democratic strongholds. The reliable Republican territory is the vast area between those cities, which is farmland and small towns. James Carville once famously described the state as Philly and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. So, what's up for grabs? Well, a lot maybe. Incoming call. Incoming call. Democrats for McCain, can I help you? Now, officially, this is a citizen's for McCain office, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the northeast part of the state. But the office is run by Democrats, and the name that they have given on the phone speaks for itself. Democrats are the key to McCain's strategy in Pennsylvania, his campaign told us. This is the Hillary vote, which, as I said, was huge in this state. And McCain's campaign is unabashed about the pursuit of it, both in Pennsylvania and nationwide. Check out this ad. I'm a proud Hillary Clinton Democrat. She had the experience and judgment to be president. Now, in a first for me, I'm supporting a Republican, John McCain. I respect his maverick and independent streak, and now he's the one with the experience and judgment. A lot of democrats will vote McCain. It's OK, really. I'm John McCain and I approve this message. One of the producers of our show, Nancy Updike, spent some time in Scranton at the Democrats for McCain office. When I told an Obama supporter that I was doing a story about Democrats for John McCain and that I was on my way to interview one of them, she said, oh, so you're going to interview an ass [BLEEP]. Other names she could have used, according to the McCain Democrats I talked to, based on their previous experiences: whack job; dumb, racist KKK bitch; and a word I can't say on the radio that begins with the letter "C." Country first. Country first. Country first. These are former Hillary Clinton supporters, about 40 of them, who've ridden two-plus hours in cars and a bus from New York on a Saturday to canvass in Scranton for John McCain. They overwhelm the tiny Democrats for McCain office, and fill it up with the squeals of long-lost friends reunited, and the enthusiasm that comes from working very hard for something you believe in with all your heart, for no money. This type of commitment is not to be trifled with. After a long, tough primary, the people in this room are tenacious, experienced, organized, and very, very mad. They're also impossible to dismiss as racist KKK bitches. A lot of them are not white, including the two I ended up following as they were canvassing. It's so they can hear. Hey, you know what, they will answer the door that way. The one giving the good, long knock is Chris, a tall, courtly, 28-year-old African American policy analyst with a graduate degree in economics. The shorter one next to him, giving Chris a look like, why are you knocking so much, is his friend Jessie, a 35-year-old African American software tester who's taking a week off from work to campaign for John McCain. They met on the Hillary campaign trail. It's always this kind of a sense of like, oh, I'm the black man lurking and knocking on people's doors, will they call the police? And there always this kind of thing, like on somebody's face that's kind of like-- I'm lighter-- Who is-- --and smaller --this person at our door, especially once it starts getting dark in the winter when we're doing the primaries. Hi, how are you? We are volunteers for Democrats for John McCain. I'm here wondering if John McCain can count on your support this November. No, unfortunately you can't. No? OK, no. I'm having a difficult time trying to vote for anybody, but it won't be him. Why not, if I may ask? He just reminds too much of Bush. Really? Yeah, he even sounds like him. You know, I'll tell you-- I'm trying to be real with you. No, I hear you. No, I appreciate that. Scranton is overwhelmingly Democratic, and Chris and Jessie have been given a list of registered Democrats and Independents, so it wasn't surprising that they were encountering some McCain resistance. What was surprising was how ripe for conversion most of the supposed Obama supporters were. Take this guy, Paul [? Volpe ?]. It took Chris and Jessie about one minute to start wearing him down, and the more they talked about McCain, the more skeptical of Obama he seemed. I tell you that his record of bipartisanship is that he is more likely to vote with Democrats than he is to vote with Republicans. 55% of his legislation was passed with Democrats. Really? Yeah. He opposed Bush on how he managed the war. He opposed him on his tax cuts. Our thing is we're Democrats, and, you know-- From New York. Yeah, from New York, and we have a lot of kind of Democratic core beliefs. But I feel more comfortable knowing that John McCain, who's had years of service to this country, will be the commander in chief. And if you look back over John McCain's career, I mean, he's not afraid to get in there and be the bad guy if it means getting problems solved for people. I just wanted something different. That's why I was going for the other guy. You know what I mean? I just want something-- To change right? Yeah. Well, you know, John McCain is-- From I just wanted something different, [? Volpe ?] went on to say about Obama: Yeah, I mean, he's a real good talker, but-- Been a lot of talk. A lot of talk. I don't know what kind of a doer he is. And from that, he went to this. And I really don't know where Obama even came from either. You know, he popped out of-- I've never heard of him before this. Who is this guy? That's what I'm always saying. I'll stop. He's just the only one that's impressing me on TV. And you know what, you're right. It's not really a reason to vote for him. Can't give the guy the keys to your country because he looks great on TV, you know? Because then you give, you know-- When we left, [? Volpe ?] was still uncommitted and leaning toward Obama. But if I was a pollster, I wouldn't put him in the Obama column. He'd been a Hillary supporter just like Chris and Jessie, and for him, Obama seemed like an uncomfortable bench he'd only sat down on out of exhaustion. That's what made Chris and Jessie so persuasive. They'd left the bench, and they seemed to be thriving. Canvassing is usually a big time investment for a small return. In studies, canvassers had to talk to an average of 14 people to get one extra vote. But Chris and Jessie seemed to be doing a lot better than that. I watched them make inroads with one wavering Democrat after another. A whole family sitting on their porch: Can we ask if you're supporting John McCain for president this year? Actually, still undecided. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, hi. A young woman voting in her first presidential election, a woman with three sons who's worried about the economy and the Iraq War and Sarah Palin. Everyone was charmed and, frankly, mesmerized by Chris and Jessie. And finally, the woman with three sons said to Chris straight out: I'm a little surprised. I'm surprised that you're backing McCain and Palin. You wouldn't want to see Barack Obama be the first-- African American-- --African American president. Well, I would love to see an African American president in the White House in my lifetime. I really do. But more important than my personal desire to see an African American president is my love for this country. So I think, what does this country need most, for me to get to see an African American president in my lifetime or for somebody who has experience? Barack Obama says a lot, but what has he done? If you look at his record, you can't really-- Chris and Jessie went to 16 houses in this neighborhood in Democratic Scranton, PA, and only one was a definite Obama vote. Four were firm McCain supporters, and this was without hearing Chris and Jessie's spiel. And of the four undecided houses, Chris and Jessie flipped one to McCain and made serious headway with the other three. For these undecided Democrats, it was like they were wearing handcuffs, and Chris and Jessie were walking around with the keys, unlocking them. Suddenly, former Hillary Clinton supporters could consider voting for a Republican and against a black man and not feel racist, or dumb, or crazy. At the end of that day, I thought, John McCain really could win Pennsylvania. For anyone wondering why he's still pouring money into the state, this is it. Ambivalent Democrats live all over Pennsylvania, and with their votes, he could do it. Were you surprised at how open people who said, yeah, I'm a lifelong Democrat, how open they were to the idea of voting for John McCain, and even getting very interested in the idea of voting for John McCain, from what I saw? I'm not surprised. I mean, I think that what you were seeing are a lot of people who didn't feel a strong connection to believing that Barack Obama saw them, not just looked at them, but got it, saw them. The bottom line for Chris is this, he thinks Obama is little more than a marketing campaign, not a man of demonstrated principal or grit. And compared to all that, so what that he's a Democrat? Nancy Updike. We'll return to her in Scranton later in the program. Now, while the McCain campaign is hoping to pick up votes in territory that is normally strongly Democratic, the Obama campaign is fighting to pick up extra votes in that vast territory in the center of Pennsylvania that has always been strongly Republican. You've probably heard about the massive voter registration drives that Obama has run around the country. In Pennsylvania, a big part of that push was for young voters on college campuses, especially right in the heart of red Pennsylvania, a town called State College, smack dab in the middle of the state, where one of the biggest schools in the country is, Penn State, with 44,000 students. The John Kerry campaign had only one paid staffer in State College back in 2004, and they lost this county. Obama has seven paid staff and tons of volunteers trying to register and get out the student vote. One of our producers, Sarah Koenig, went to see how they were doing. It's September 24, 13 more days until the October 6 deadline to register voters in Pennsylvania. The registration goal for campus is to sign up roughly half the student body, 21,000 students. It's a number the campaign wouldn't allow anyone to discuss with me on the record, but it's also a number that every single person involved with voter registration on campus was talking about. On the wall of the Obama office in downtown State College, there's a drawing of a giant thermometer climbing to the ceiling, with the number 21,000 at the very top. Every day, they fill in their new registrations in red marker. As of this day, they're at about 12,000, a little more than halfway there with less than two weeks to go. Besides the Obama campaign, there are a bunch of other groups trying to register voters, all with their own goals. Hey, you guys want to hear a really cool rhyme? All you have to do is register to vote. Hi, sir, are you registered to vote? Uh-huh. Have a good day. Don't forget to vote. It's less than three weeks, the deadline, and then we won't be fine. We're running out of time. Everybody registered to vote? You registered to vote? Yes. Awesome. Thank you. Every single one of you are registered to vote at your current Penn State address? I don't believe you. They began in the summer. And when classes first started in late August, there was a rash of registrations, but it's slowed since then. And now, people are starting to get a little antsy and sick. A girl collecting registrations for MoveOn is looking miserable with a cold. The guy running a student group called PSUvote is cranky from a stomach bug. I meet Jonathan [? Burkhart ?] at a diner, a place he goes about once a week for breakfast. This is one luxury during campaigns. Jonathan was sent here by the Service Employees International Union, SEIU, with the singular task of registering 2,500 people by himself. He's getting sick, too. When I get really tired my eyes start to puff up, and I have like a tear duct, a minor tear duct infection. By the time the registration deadline came, that minor infection turned into a major infection, the worst eye infection, in fact, that I or Jonathan's doctor had ever seen. He ended up needing surgery. But right now, taking a break is out of the question. He's still less than halfway to his goal. He's got what you might call the Schindler's List syndrome. I mean there's an infinite amount of work that I can be doing all the time. You can never overdo it. Right, you could look around at all of these people and just start asking them, are you registered, are you registered, are you registered? Exactly. I mean, it's sort of-- OK, so you registered half the student body, why didn't you register all the student body? You registered all the student body, why didn't you convince every single one of them to vote for your candidate? You convince every single one of them to vote for your candidate, why weren't you in other areas where you could have been convincing other people? Like, it just keeps on going. Jonathan's worked in field politics for five years. He's 30, which gives him near-geezer status in the registration crowd. The guy in the Obama office who's running the 10-county region for the campaign is just 23. And mostly, other people doing registrations are in their teens or 20s. You have to be young to do this job. Jonathan's the guy people come to for advice. He knows all about data analysis and attacks his goal of 2,500 as scientifically as possible. He keeps a tally of every registration he gets, sorted by day, time, sex of registrant. He notes the weather, the football games. This way, he knows, or thinks he knows, the preeminent registration times, which, so far, are 1:00 to 3:00 on Tuesdays. He's figured out that a beat-up sign gets better results than a fancy one. And he's done experiments with his pitch. The thing is, is I was doing the pitch for a few weeks, and I was switching off days that I did the pitch and then days that I didn't do the pitch. And it was unfortunate from my sort of organizer's instincts that I was getting fewer registrations on the days that I did the pitch. You've thought a lot about this. This is all I do. The built-in pisser of this whole endeavor is that, as each group tries frantically to reach its goal number, the pool of non-registered students is always shrinking. It's harder and harder to find someone who isn't already registered. Hey guys, how's it going? Are you all registered to vote at your current Penn State addresses? I'm registered to vote at home. OK, let's register you here. Enter the master, Casey Miller. She's 22, a fifth-year, cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking senior, originally from Pittsburgh. She's in A Xi D, a sorority, and has a tattoo of a blue lion's paw on her left foot, the logo of the university's football team. On her MySpace page she lists the following interest: cars, Steelers-- the football team-- parties, late-night Cinemax, bottles of mousse, very large beer bongs. What's your last name? Well, I was planning on sending in my-- Don't send in an absentee ballot. Why not? Well, I'll just get right to the bottom line. Improper completion of the absentee ballot or related material, improper delivery of the absentee ballot to the county board of elections, can result in your absentee ballot being challenged and set aside by a county board of elections or a court of law. Basically, that means it's going to get thrown out if you leave like one box unchecked or anything slightly wrong-- A situation like this, where someone says he's going to vote absentee, this is where many volunteers fail to persuade or just give up. But Casey goes on for a full 40 seconds. He's still not convinced. What if the issues at home matter more to me than the issues here? Well, are you going to move back home after you graduate? You're very forceful when it comes to registering people to vote. Yes, I am. Has anybody just straight-up turned you down? Yes. And every time it's heartbreaking. At this point, the full-on flirting kicks in. Casey presses Obama stickers onto the boys' chests, uses their full names with ironic formality. Steven, what's your political party? Gregory, is that a 16803 zip code? See, I'm going to ask you for you phone number, Keith. And I'm going to print that very clearly. So if there's anything wrong with your form, we will call you and make sure that your registration goes through and that you can vote in this election. What is you phone number, Keith? Here's what you can't appreciate about Casey on the radio. She looks like a small, brunette Brigitte Bardot. Long, wavy hair swept up with a clip, thick black eyeliner painted on '60s style, huge perfect smile, knockout figure. This, in no small part, is why her registration numbers are consistently higher than anyone else's. Boys will listen to anything she has to say for however long she chooses to say it. Girls too, actually. But I'm just concerned that, like, I might be tempted to vote twice. Keith, you're just going to have to avoid temptation. There's a good chance, statistically speaking, that Keith won't vote at all. Students have a terrible track record of actually making it to the polls once they've signed up. That's just one reason this whole registration drive is something of a gamble for the Obama campaign. Even the gurus of get out the vote campaigning, two Yale political scientists named Alan Gerber and Donald Green, can't say for sure how effective registration drives are at increasing voter turnout. With a new voter, first you have to sign them up to vote, then you have to convince them to vote for your candidate, and then you have to make sure they get to the polls. The experts simply don't know if, dollar for dollar, it's worth all the time and money. Limited resources in any campaign. We are! Penn State! Thank you! You're welcome! Nine days before the deadline, there's still about 8,000 registrations to go. We're at a vast tailgate party outside Beaver Stadium before a football game. It's the largest stadium in North America. There are easily 100,000 people here, a crowd I'd characterize, overall, as drunk. Penn State is playing Illinois. Barack Obama's from Illinois, and we're going to kill Illinois! Fuck Illinois. We're going to kill Illinois. That's what they're screaming. Casey, though, is unphased, fearless in fact. And this is what makes Casey so valuable to the campaign. She fits in where other volunteers don't. Two nights running, she surreptitiously registered people in the women's bathroom of a nightclub. She registers people at frat houses, wanders uninvited into apartment parties. Just like the football games overall have been very unsuccessful for registering students. And I think it's because they stand on the corners and try to stop people, instead of approaching them at tailgates like I was just doing. And I think that that's a lot more efficient. Especially, I registered like 19 people in the line for the porta-potties at the last game. Like, do you see this line? The Obama campaign has set up a tailgate here and invited former NFL players to come sign autographs and register people. Casey's job today, besides registering people herself, is to send fans to the tailgate. She goes up to a group of friends having a party under a tent and does her pitch. We have Franco Harris, Kenny Jackson, Matt Rice, and Blair Thomas. Are those, like-- They're former Penn State players who have played for the NFL. Yeah. One of the girls gestures at a cooler, offers an alternative. I have Captain Morgan. I have Carlo Rossi. No one she tells is nearly as excited about these players as Casey is. Franco Harris is her hero. She knows all about his 1972 Hall of Fame play for the Steelers, called The Immaculate Reception. She can't wait to meet him. It's tough going here. It's really loud and a lot of people, when they're not hitting on Casey, are just obnoxious. Still, she gets some registrations. I stopped to talk to a voter for a few minutes, and when I find Casey again, she's somehow rounded up eight more. Then we hit the porta-potty line, which is good for another half dozen. After that, Casey ventured into the middle of a huge crowd of mostly men, who were circled around two shirtless guys covered in white body paint and wrestling. Hug it out. Hug it out. Hug it out. Hug it out. Hug it out. Listen. Guys, stop. Everyone, listen. We have-- Boo! --NFL-- We have NFL players-- Boo! [UNINTELLIGIBLE] over at our tailgate. Hey, what's it for? It's the Students for Barack Obama tailgate. We have Franco Harris, Immaculate Reception, a lot of other NFL players. Hey, hey, did you see this thing yet? What the fuck is this? It's hilarious. A guy shows Casey the screen of his cellphone, which plays a little video of Barack Obama's face, which then turns into a monkey's face. We need to get out of here. That's what we think of him here. That's what we think of Obama around here, they tell her. Get the [BLEEP] out of here. We hurry away, but Casey doesn't miss a beat, on to the next group. Hey, guys, are you all registered to vote at your current addresses? Awesome. You guys should swing by our tailgate. We're Students for Barack Obama. Can I just talk to you for a second about what just happened back there, that incredibly racist thing he had on his phone. Yes. Does that happen to you? Do you come across that? I haven't seen anything of that magnitude before. That is very upsetting. I immediately-- I have to, for me to stay as active and positive and with the same kind of attitude that I've been having, I need to block that out for now, or else it'll just be too discouraging. We rush back to the Obama tailgate so Casey can meet the NFL stars, but we're too late. They've all left. Wait, the guy who's your idol is-- Franco Harris, yeah. Immaculate Reception, 1972, against the Raiders. But it's all right. But there was-- Oh, Casey. You are really upset. I'm going to-- Casey turns away. She's sad about Franco Harris, but my guess is that's not why she's crying. She's kind of jangled right now. Registration is all she thinks about or cares about. She's devoting most of her time to more or less begging other people to care about it too. And mostly, they don't. Sarah Koenig. We will hop back over to her, and to the students, as they try to make their goal in State College, in a little bit. There's this speech that's been making the rounds for the last month on YouTube and the political blogs and the news. It's by the secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka. He's been traveling the country making this speech to unions. In it, he recounts a conversation that he had with a woman right here in Pennsylvania, in his hometown, a Democrat who said she couldn't bring herself to vote for Barack Obama. The woman tells Trumka that the reason that she can't is that he's a Muslim. Trumka tells her that's not true. She then says that it's because he won't wear a flag pin. Trumka points out that he isn't wearing a flag pin, neither is she. Finally, the woman says she feels like she just can't trust Barack Obama. And I said, why is that? And she drops her voice a bit, and she says, because he's black. And I said, look around this town. There's no jobs here. Our kids are moving away because there's no future here. And here's a man, Barack Obama, who's going to fight for people like us, and you want to tell me that you won't vote for him because of the color of his skin? Are you out of your ever-lovin' mind, lady? See, brothers and sisters-- --we can't tap dance around the fact that there's a lot of folks out there just like that woman. And a lot of them are good union people. They just can't get past the idea that there's something wrong with voting for a black man. Well those of us who know better can't afford to sit silently, or look the other way while it's happening. As he travels around the country making this speech to union members, Richard Trumka tells the audience, you have a responsibility to stand up about race. You have to deal with it directly. Other union leaders are saying the same thing, which is an incredible assignment to give to people. This is a subject that most people have trouble confronting and talking about honestly. There are a lot of union members in Pennsylvania. A third of all voters in 2004 came from union households, according to CNN exit polls. And we wondered if these union members were taking up the charge, talking about race. And we wondered how they did it. One of our producers, Lisa Pollak, spent the last month traveling around the state to find out. In early September, I went to a phone bank in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And I wasn't there long, maybe 15 minutes, before I saw someone right in front of me confront the same sort of racism that Richard Trumka talked about in his speech. Hi, is this Ronnie? Hi, I'm Helen. I'm calling from the union. We were in a conference room at a local union headquarters. There was a big whiteboard on the wall where someone had written, smile while you're on the phone, and, be polite, even when they're not polite to you. Helen, smiling, asked the man if he'd chosen a candidate. John McCain, he said. And can I ask why? You think he's a Muslim. You're not ready for a black man. Well, he's half white. This was not the conversation I'd imagined when I first heard Richard Trumka give that stirring address on the need to stand up to prejudice. And I don't mean Helen backed down, because she didn't. In fact, what she did next is exactly what union organizers have told me a person in her situation should do. She didn't call the man a racist. She changed the subject from race to the issues, and started trying to persuade the man that voting for Barack Obama was simply in his best interest. McCain is not union-friendly. He voted for NAFTA and CAFTA. He sides with big oil over working families, wants to privatize social security. Well, you know what, she is-- she was. She was great on our issues, and I have to tell you that, if you check out, Barack Obama's very similar, and now that she's supporting him. And especially if you're a union worker-- and Barack Obama is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. When you actually hear one of these conversations, you realize they're not always particularly eloquent or uplifting. They can be awkward and frustrating, and even a little wonky. In the end, after seven minutes on the phone with Helen, the guy who wasn't, quote, "ready to vote for a black man," had moved from John McCain to undecided. I'll put you down for undecided, sir. Nice talking with you. And even that much progress took a lot of effort, not to mention patience and confidence, and a degree of nerve not everyone has. I can't do it, one woman, a shop steward, told me, right after she heard Trumka's speech at a training. I'd be intimidated if they said they couldn't vote for someone who's black. And I've seen even the most fearless talkers hit a wall when race comes up. At the same union hall in Johnstown where I met Helen, I listened to a group of guys from the Laborers Union Local 910 work a phone bank for Obama. Incidentally, if you're one of those people who still thinks the phrase, white male union member from Pennsylvania, is a euphemism for, won't vote for the black guy, you clearly haven't been to a union phone bank lately. I listened to one of them, Barry, single-handedly convert one undecided union voter after another to his side. Well, what's the problem with Obama? Uh-huh. That tough times are scary. So why would you want to put the same thing back in there? I would think-- My bottom line is, you know, do you want four more years of Bush in there? And that's more or less what you're going to get with McCain in there, I think. Yeah. Put me down for Obama, the guy said. But a little later, Barry had a conversation that didn't end so well. I called a member, and I asked him who he was going to vote for. And he said, not Obama. And I said, why is that? And he said, I'm prejudiced. And how do I argue with that? You know? What'd you say? I didn't say anything. I said, OK, thank you. I don't think you're going to talk him out of it. I don't think I would. If I don't know them, I don't think they're going to listen to me. They won't listen to you, not at all. Ray, another guy working the phones, chimes in. They're not afraid to tell you that, so they're not going to change. Just like an old woman with abortion issues, she's not going to change. A gun nut's the same way. He ain't going to change. Those are three issues right now you aren't going to change people. So, this idea that, OK, members have to be taking on the race issue with members, unrealistic? I mean, you could try, but you're not going to get them. They're not going to turn over because you say, hey, this is the way to vote. They're going to say, hey, this is what I feel in my heart and this is what I'm sticking with. I have no idea how many people have been in Ray or Barry or Helen's shoes, confronted by somebody bold enough to admit, with little or no coaxing, that the problem with Obama is his race. I've talked to people who say they've never had this happen, and people who say they've heard it a lot. A union organizer who's traveled the state told me that one in 10 voters he talked to said something to his face about Obama's skin color, only they don't always put it in such civilized terms. Mike Harms, a bus operator with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85 in Pittsburgh, saw this firsthand while canvassing recently. I had a guy, he actually came right out and told me, I ain't voting for no effin' N-word. To tell you the truth, the way he said it, I mean, my jaw actually dropped a little bit. So yeah, the first thing I countered with was, well, you see what's going on with the economy, if George Bush and/or John McCain had their way, they'd privatize social security, and where would you be now? And then we hit on a couple pension issues and some health care stuff. And he listened? Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. He actually invited me into his home. Really? Yeah, yeah. So, after about 15 or 20 minutes of talking issues with him, he sort of came around. Now, he told me that he was going to think about it. I don't think that it actually it 100% changed his mind, but when I first approached the door, he was absolutely 100% he wasn't voting for a black person. We in this room are not going to solve the race issue in America. This is a 200-year-old wound with a 60-year scab on it, right? That's Michael Fedor, a union organizer in central Pennsylvania, teaching a training session I attended in Johnstown last month. Michael's message to union members was utterly practical: some people's minds can't be changed no matter what you tell them, and the best way to sway the others is with the facts. He cited research showing that the more union members know about Obama's record and positions, the more they like him. Unions have gone to a lot of effort and expense this year to get that message out, with all sorts of mailings and voter guides and videos that emphasize Obama's support for labor and the working class. Like this one from the building and construction trades. It's time we had a president who didn't choke saying the word "union." It's not that hard. Union. See? Nothing happens. Union. It's all right. You see, brothers and sisters, there's not a single good reason for any worker, especially any union member, to vote against Barack Obama. There's only one really bad reason to vote against him, because he's not white. This is a nonpartisan commercial from the American Federation of Government Employees. There are 100 good reasons for how you vote this year, and only one bad reason: prejudice. Let's talk about the real issues. This is a training tape from the United Steelworkers. If you closed your eyes and listen to Barack Obama, you walk away and you say, that's my guy. 98% voting record for labor on labor's issues. That's why we back him. John McCain, 15%. But for all the statistics and talking points, what I realized, listening to union members in Pennsylvania, is that when you're actually face to face with people who say they won't vote for your candidate because he's black, you're on your own. You have to muddle through and figure out your own way to do it, to navigate this touchy emotional subject, with people whose beliefs may never have been challenged before. And union members are doing this. Some have had so much practice that now they've got their response lines down cold, their own favorite combinations of issues and zingers. They try everything from, if you were drowning, wouldn't you let a black guy save you? To, white guys have messed this country up plenty, so why not give a black man a chance? I heard one union official quote a Chris Rock line, "was America ready for a black baseball player in the '40s? No, but Jackie Robinson was better than everyone." And then there was the union local president, who said he actually got out a globe to prove to an elderly relative that no less a revered figure than Jesus must have been black. Here he is, Wendell Young IV, explaining to members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, how he made that argument. It's OK for God to send a black Jesus to save your ass, but it's not OK to vote for a guy for president who's going to make sure you have health care, protect your pension, do those other things. And by the way, if I'm wrong, who's going to be able to prove it? But here's one thing, if you're a Christian and you believe in the teachings of Christ, Christ wouldn't have cared whether he was black. Wouldn't have cared. A couple people even told me that, as a last ditch effort, when they can't change the subject to the issues because race is the voter's only issue, they'll ask the person to please consider not voting for a president at all. The most intense conversations I heard about weren't between strangers on a phone line or a front porch, but face to face between coworkers and friends. In my search for people willing to share their stories from the field, I was introduced to a man named Dan, who's not from Pennsylvania but from Maryland, where he's in the Steamfitters Union. He told me about a conversation he had with a friend about the election. You know, I asked him, I say, dude, what about Barack Obama? You know what I mean? He's a union guy. You're a union guy. You've kind of got to help us out here. And Mike's going, well I'm not voting for this black guy. And the specifics were that he'd had problems. He's got young daughters, and they go to school, and he picks them up at the bus stop and he sees them playing with a lot of blacks. And that bothers him. And I said, Mike, dude, it's-- you know, he's just a racist. I mean, it's terrible. And do you remember what you said? Well, yeah. Well, Mike, I said, you've got to get past this. I said, this is crazy. If you let race get in the way of what's going to happen with your future, I said, you're just, you're being an idiot about it. And I was starting to get a little bit angry, because I've known this guy for several years, and I never knew the way that he felt. And it was offensive to me, the way that he talked about it. And you told him so. Absolutely, absolutely. And he goes, well, dude, that's the way it is. You live your life, you see things the way you do and I see things the way I do. I said, yeah, but Mike, you've got to get past this not only for this election but with your life. I mean, you know, you work with black guys, with several people that we know, and you never have a problem with them. And he goes, well, on the job I've got to work with them. I said, well, I see you, you sit there and eat lunch with them, you joke around, and play around. That's not work. You do that, you don't dislike those guys. He goes, well, he goes, I'll look at the information and everything, and we can talk about this later. But he goes, I just don't think I'm going to do it. I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to have a black man in there. He said, the next thing you know, you'll have Jesse Jackson as secretary of state and Al Sharpton in the Department of the Treasury. He thinks that Barack Obama's going to flood all his cabinets with all these black radicals. He told you that? Oh, absolutely, yes. I said, come on, Mike. You can't be serious. This is the president of the United-- This is going to be the president of the United States. It's not a game. And he goes, well, that's the way I feel about it. And I said, well, I'm sorry to hear you say that, Mike. So you didn't get anywhere with him? No, absolutely no. No, not at all. I kind of wish I hadn't of gotten into this the way that I have, because it's shown me sides of people that I've worked with and known for many years that I had no idea were like this. And it hurts me, because these people were my-- are my friends. And to finally-- I feel betrayed, honestly. I would end the story there, were it not for all the people who've insisted to me, that as disappointing as it can be, speaking up is always worth it. One of those people is John Cunnard, a machine operator and president of United Steelworkers Local 1211, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. He says he's had a lot of these conversations with his members the past few months. He's got his own favorite tactics and comebacks. And he's seen them work. I've got a few people down there that I thought would never go for Obama, but they're on my side. They're pushing Obama. John, of all people, should know voters can change. During the Pennsylvania primary, he was a fierce supporter of Hillary Clinton. But when Obama got the nomination, John joined the ranks of the undecided, worried about Obama's lack of experience, even though he knew that Hillary and Obama had much more in common than Hillary and McCain. To my surprise, John said he still might be undecided if he hadn't gone to a union meeting and heard none other than Richard Trumka bring up the subject of race. When he got up there and started talking, there was no doubt in your mind that he was talking black and white, and he wanted you to think about whether you're going to vote for this guy or not vote for him because he's black. And I started thinking about it. I'm sitting there thinking, well, damn, I really don't discriminate against anybody, but who knows. But it made me look at the whole situation. And eliminating color out of it, which one of these two would I rather have as president? So once I eliminated color, then it was Obama. Well, I just sat there and said, well, yeah, you're right. See, so a lot of people don't think about it, because everybody sits there and says, not me. John told me he's never put as much effort into pushing a candidate as he has this year. And I get the feeling that goes for a lot of union members in Pennsylvania. According to polling numbers from the AFL-CIO, Obama's lead over McCain among union households in Pennsylvania rose 11 points between mid-August and early October. That poll gave McCain 27% of those voters, and Obama, 63%. Lisa Pollak. Coming up, we take another turn around the state, and along the way we checked back in with the college students and the Democrats for McCain that we heard from earlier. 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, with a week to go before election day, we are spending the hour in one of the hottest battleground states this year, Pennsylvania, to see how the ground war is playing out there. Earlier in this hour, we heard college students who were struggling to make their voter registration goal for Barack Obama. That goal was 21,000 new student voters, and it was not going well. Sarah Koenig picks up the action where we left off, with one of the volunteers she's following, one who is incredibly skilled at getting registrations, Casey Miller. Casey basically lives in the Obama office. She's earned her own corner there. She's got a little desk with a vase of dying flowers on it, sent by her mother for her birthday. And there's her computer. Four backpacks are lying around, cigarettes, nail polish. She keeps a curling iron in the bathroom. She dropped three of her six mechanical engineering classes to do this, and she's way behind on the ones she didn't drop. She didn't plan on any of this. She's not someone who ever worked on campaigns before, but she took it pretty hard when John Kerry lost. I cried when Bush won in '04. Oh, you did? Oh yeah, yeah, all night. I just balled my eyes out. It was just awful. I called my mom crying. I couldn't believe it. And I lost a lot of faith in this country when we reelected him. I don't understand how. The fact that we made the same mistake twice, just, that's what basically turned me off from the whole politics thing. I kind of threw myself into engineering, lived in the bubble of Penn State, and really didn't worry about anything outside of school and my social life and whatever. And then, as things got progressively worse, that's when I decided, yeah, I want to start volunteering with the Obama campaign. It was probably June when I decided that I wanted to do that. I came in, in July, and haven't left. Six days before the registration deadline, the campaign throws a party for all the volunteers. Outside the room, the registration thermometer is at about 14,000, 2/3 of the way toward their goal. There's a DJ, but people are so tired and rundown, no one dances, except, briefly, Casey. Then, as some sort of scared straight motivation tool, they play them what passes for a campaign horror movie. It's a fake video of NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw announcing a McCain victory. Afterwards, stunned silence. It seems like the next logical thing is for everyone to burst into tears, but they quickly move on. Next up is Jay Paterno, son of Penn State football coach slash legend, Joe Paterno. Paterno the son is the team's quarterback coach, and he brings three football players along, two of them had to be registered on the spot. Meanwhile, he delivers a halftime locker room pep talk to roughly 50 kids listening. You've got six days left. And this is the toughest part of the election, guys. And where you guys are right now is you're in the middle of preseason practice, and preseason practice, quite frankly, sucks. Am I lying? No. It sucks. OK? Because it's all you do. And how good a football team we are in the fall depends on what we do in preseason practice. And how much Obama wins this thing by is going to be determined by what you guys do the next couple of weeks. His message is, don't stop, don't relax. And for the next six days, no one does. The workers are put in competition with each other. Prizes are announced. And everyone starts fighting everyone else to boost their own numbers. People are encroaching on other people's turf. Some registrations are getting double counted. Someone is spotted swiping completed forms from another organization's drop box. But, of course, this 11th-hour frenzy is choreographed by the campaign, because the last thing anyone wants at the end of all this is to have to admit that they didn't meet their goal. Though, in reality, the 21,000 goal has a cushion built in. It's more than Obama needs, but only people at the very top of the campaign know how much more. It's Sunday night, October 5, the night before the deadline. There's a party atmosphere in the campaign office, except everyone at the party is seriously sleep deprived, and also, working. Zack Zabel, the head of Students for Barack Obama, comes in with some forms. How many did you get? Seven, but that's like the fourth time I've done it today. You seem really, really tired. I'm all right. We should actually go out and do it on the streets right now, register voters. Keep going? Yeah. We only have like 15 hours. If you listen closely, you can hear Ben Flatgard, the regional director, singing from his office. He's doing who knows what on his computer, coughing. Then Casey comes in a few minutes before midnight. She's been at some student apartment buildings, and now she's delivering her forms for the daily count. How many did you get? I just brought back 32. Tom and I, yeah, Tom's in. He-- It's their best Sunday yet, but Casey's not comforted by this milestone. It's exciting. I mean, I'm really-- it's a little concerning because we registered 562 people today. Why weren't they registered before? Are there still people that are going to be not registered? So, I'm just going to be the last person on the streets. Casey goes back out to keep registering. It's past midnight now. She heads to a crowded below-ground bar where there's a live band playing. It's so loud I can barely record. Are are you all registered to vote at your current address? I assume she's going to want to leave, since no one can hear a word she's saying, but she stays and she gets 12 registrations. Are you registered to vote at your current State College address? Are you registered to vote at your current State College address? In the end, they didn't make their 21,000 goal, but they were close. They registered 16,904 students. And if you add in all the other groups, MoveOn, SEIU, Sierra Club, over 23,600 people were registered in the county. Casey, of course, registered more voters than anybody else, and won a prize: football tickets. As a result of all this work, Centre County now has over 100,000 voters for the first time ever. And also for the first time, Democrats outnumber Republicans in the county by 5,000 registrations. Dianne Gregg, chairwoman of the County Democrats, is pretty happy. Her county, she says, is now in a position to have an enormous impact on the outcome of this election. Dianne keeps a poster of James Carville in her office to reminder of his infamous comment, that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Alabama in between. Her goal, she said, is to make Carville regret that quote. Sarah Koenig. And, before we go, let's take one last trip around the state, and turn from Obama volunteers to McCain volunteers. Back at the beginning of this hour, we were in Scranton with our producer Nancy Updike, and the group, Democrats for McCain. If you remember, that group was going door to door, having remarkable success in nudging Democrats into the Republican column. Now we return to Scranton. The Democrats for McCain office in Scranton is run by people who give serious chunks of their lives in service to others. One woman who's been a foster parent for 22 years, another, covered in paint, who came to the McCain office straight from her stint at Habitat for Humanity, and Judy O'Connor, a 59-year-old single mother of three on a fixed income, who pared her life down to a financial minimum to help her son, a fireman and military veteran, achieve his dream of becoming a policeman. All of them lifelong Democrats, never voted for a Republican presidential candidate in their lives. We were staunch Hillary Clinton supporters. We worked Hillary's campaign. We traveled to other states with Hillary. This is Judy O'Connor. Matter of fact, we went to the DNC meeting in Washington, DC, and that's when our party, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and the DNC, what we say, threw Hillary under the bus. For Judy and everyone else here, the primary battle was not a tough fight with equally questionable maneuvers on both sides. Chris and others at the office talked about personally seeing Obama supporters at caucuses, especially Texas, keeping Hillary supporters out of caucus rooms, shouting at them, preventing them from bringing in Hillary signs, all of which, not surprisingly, they say is more egregious than any tactics used by the Clinton campaign. Challenges were filed at the Texas State Convention, but the relative unethicalness and, more important, the legality of what Chris and others saw, is hard to evaluate in the absence of a lawsuit, and no lawsuit charging caucus fraud by the Obama campaign has been filed nationally or in Texas. The question I kept asking Judy and the others was, how does a person go from supporting a pro-choice candidate who gets a grade of 100 from unions and wants to raise the capital gains tax, to a pro-life candidate who gets a zero from unions and wants to cut the capital gains tax? Everyone had his or her own answer, but no answer went without an enraged retelling of the primary fight, especially the day the Democratic National Committee divided up the delegates from Michigan and Florida, a compromise using debatable math and logic that seemed to a lot of people not just unfair but undemocratic. And we found ourselves having to decide between the two candidates left. And Hillary Clinton said, let's compare resumes, and that's exactly what we did. We compared Hillary's with John McCain. It was very impressive. We looked at Obama's and there was nothing there. I mean, he was in, what, in the Senate 143 days, and the rest of the time he spent on his campaign, working his campaign. So, I mean, there isn't experience there. I mean, even when I watch John McCain on TV, whenever he's speaking, I honestly, honestly can say I trust him and I feel the man is genuine. I truly feel he's genuine. I have tried. I'm not going to say, as a Democrat, I'm not going to say that I haven't tried to listen to Obama and be open-minded. I've tried. I do not, I do not, less and less do I trust him. And I'm worried. I'm very worried for our country if he gets elected. This was a theme with everyone I talked to. I like John McCain, but more than that, I'm worried about Obama, worse than worried, scared. In four days, I heard a lot of fear and some outlandish theories, that George Soros orchestrated the global financial crisis to give Obama a boost in the election, that Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi secretly paid for Obama's Harvard education, possibly related to a terror financing scheme, that Obama is a crypto-Marxist, a socialist who will somehow take over the world economy, and most spectacularly, Judy met someone on the campaign trail named Larry Sinclair, a man with a 27-year criminal record, a 16-year prison stint for forgery, and 13 aliases, who's been going around saying Obama is a homosexual, a crack cocaine user, and possibly, a murderer. Do you believe it? I don't know what to-- you know, I want to believe in my country. I want to believe in the people who want to be in our government. But did I question in my mind? Yes, I did. And when I went home, I got back on the internet and researched a little bit more, and everything that Larry Sinclair said to us was true. Was true according to other websites. To Larry Sinclair and other people. Is there anything you've heard about Obama, any sort of rumor that you don't believe, you feel like, ah, that's not true? I didn't want to believe that. I really didn't. I didn't want to believe that. And, like I said, to this day, I still don't know if I do or I don't, but it makes you stop and wonder. The thing all these Obama stories made me stop and think was, this reminds me of how people used to talk about the Clintons. Thieves, murderers. Hillary Clinton a lesbian, a radical, her college thesis on Saul Alinsky, her health care plan a socialist takeover. It was as though disagreeing on policy was simply not enough for some people to express just how alien the Clintons seemed. So if winning over Democrats is key to McCain winning Pennsylvania, how can we estimate the number of Democrats who are in fact turning to McCain? Until the election, all we've got to go on is, insert gagging sound here, polls. A Pew Research poll last month said only 12% of Hillary Clinton supporters nationwide said they'd vote for McCain. And a more recent Pew survey said only 4% of Democrats support McCain. Polls, of course, are frequently, and sometimes wildly wrong. Nancy Updike. Some people didn't see the sunshine the day after the Weather Underground attacked America. I'm Corbett. I had a caller yesterday who-- While spending weeks in Pennsylvania, we listened to talk radio around the state, and we close our program today with this air check from WILK-FM, 1300 AM, in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton. On October 8, their local drive time host Steve Corbett spent his whole air shift talking about Bill Ayers and Bill Ayers' association with Barack Obama. My dad was a cop. I said it before and I'll say it again. And there are other cops, who, because of the Weather Underground, founded by Bill Ayers, Barack Obama's buddy, did not see the sunshine. It's relevant. And I welcome Barack Obama supporters to call us today and defend Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. I beg them. Call me and defend, on behalf of your candidate-- Then, for the next four hours, from 3:00 in the afternoon to 7:00, he got this huge range of callers taking every position on this. One woman worried that Obama would make Bill Ayers secretary of education. A man accused Corbett of finding fault with Obama only because he, Corbett, had wanted a woman president, that is, Hillary. There was a long conversation with a guy who once lived in a house that the Weather Underground bombed. And then, towards the end of all this, there was this call. The free for all continues. Dave, caller from Wilkes-Barre, you're in the free for all. Welcome, you're on the air. How are you doing, Steve? Good. I heard earlier we are talking about Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. I mean, they talk about Bill Ayers being connected to Obama, and you would assume that it would gain a lot of traction in the media and with voters, but it just doesn't seem to be having the kind of impact that you would assume it would have. And I think it's because people look at Barack Obama, and I'm one of those people, and we say, the Barack Obama that I see isn't the Barack Obama that would be associated with these people. And I think to myself, what's the implication? Like, all along he thinks that it's OK that Bill Ayers was a bomber, and that somehow in the back of his mind he thinks that this is acceptable behavior. Because I just don't see that. I see him as an American story that is just amazing. Like, I think that he's lived a middle-class life and he's worked hard and he's raising his family. And he is a man, I think, of extraordinary moral character. And people say, well, the facts say otherwise. But a lot of times, for example, Sarah Palin, she said she's a maverick, where, in some cases, the facts are otherwise. But people, in their heart of hearts, believe that she's really a maverick. So I think so much of this stuff comes down to the impression that these guys make, because we don't really know what's in their hearts and their minds. You're absolutely right. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing, Dave. You're doing a lot of thinking. People will see what they want to see. And very often, we see the very same set of circumstances in very different ways. But you're doing exactly what you should do. I just wish more people would follow your example. Thanks. Thank you. And that's exactly right. He's trying to figure it out. And he knows, as we all know, if we think it through, it's risky. It's risky to go into that voting booth and believe in somebody. I got Ray. No, I got Les in Scranton. How are you doing, Les? Hey, Steve. How are you doing? Good. (HOST) IRA GLASS: Thanks to Steve Corbett and the folks at WILK. Well, our program was produced today by our senior producer Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. During this pledge drive that's going on right now, a woman actually tried to get him to pledge. And he said: Are you out of your ever-lovin' mind, lady? I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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I want to play you this moment that happened to get captured on tape. But to fully appreciate this moment, you need a little background. This was recorded in Hoboken, New Jersey. And Hoboken is this old city on the water with these tiny, narrow streets. And because of the way the streets are laid out, parking is just a huge issue there. It is always impossible to find a parking space. And they'll ticket you if you go just an inch or two into a no parking zone. Very strict, that is, for most people. Some people, apparently, never get tickets. And a couple years ago, this started to bother a woman named Kathy Mallow. She was outside on the sidewalk a lot walking her dogs. And she kept seeing this car belonging to this B-list character actor who's in the movies. And this car would always be parked in front of this one Italian restaurant, blatantly illegal, over and over. And when she would go to the cops about this, they did nothing, which was, of course, infuriating, and seemed so unfair. And not really knowing what else to do, she started photographing the actor's car. So she all of these photos taken over the course of months-- this car sitting there, illegal, no ticket. She became, really, kind of obsessed. Her nickname now in Hoboken is the Hoboken Hall Monitor. It's really at a point where she worries sometimes that she comes off as a crazy person. OK, that's the setup. That brings us to this tape. Hey, Ron. How are you? Good, how are you? How's everything? How's the cat? Kathy is walking down the street. And she's the kind of person who knows everybody she passes on the street. Is that Tessa? Yes. Hi, Tessa. And she's with her neighbor, Tracy. Tracy Roland is a reporter. And Tracy is rolling tape because she is asking Kathy to explain about the movie actor's car. I would see it every day at the same time because-- oh here's a parking utility guy. What's he doing? What he's doing is parking his black city SUV. This is an official vehicle, marked Hoboken Parking Utility-- that's the Hoboken parking police-- in an unmistakable no-parking yellow zone, on the Northeast corner of 1st and Bloomfield. And then, the guy, who is in uniform with a badge, gets out and walks to a bar. He's leaving his illegally-parked vehicle. Do you want to ask him about it? Yeah. Do you want to ask him about it? Yeah. OK. Hi. Do you mind answering a question about your car? I'm sorry. I can't. Do you want to tell us-- Why is your parking utility van parked so illegally, including into the pedestrian crosswalk? I'm running in there. I'm going to tell my friend something. Is that all right with you? Oh, OK. Going into Buskers to talk to a friend. Nice. Yeah, to talk to my friend. Great. We were just wondering why the parking authority is parking illegally. I didn't do nothing wrong. Oh, you don't think that's wrong to have your vehicle parked illegally like that? Not at all. It's fine. Your vehicle is fine? Your vehicle is into the pedestrian crosswalk, and your vehicle-- No, it's not. No, it's not. If you go over there and look, you're going to see it's not in the pedestrian crosswalk. And how far is it from the curb? It's fine, though. Is it blocking the crosswalk, though? Yes. And it's parked illegally. You think so. So go walk right over there and I bet you won't get [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. OK, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for taking on really conscientious responsible behavior. I really like paying your salary. You're very sarcastic, ma'am. I really like paying your salary. You really have problems with yourself. I really like paying your salary. You really have problems with yourself. Get a life. No, I think you have problems taking responsibility. Get a life. I hope you could hear that last part. After she says, I really like paying your salary, he says, get a life. See? He completely denied that he was parked illegally. Imagine that-- Well, you know-- --over and over and over again. And then, that is the same thing that I get when I've addressed it before-- get a life. Like somehow, if you notice this sort of thing and you want the rules to be enforced correctly, you're somehow supposed to get a life. And you're just not supposed to question the sense of entitlement. Yes, it's just parking. But what kills Kathy is how blatant it is. Right there on the street, this daily proof that everybody does not have to obey the same rules. Who do they think they are? Well, today on our radio show, it is an unfair world. And sometimes it makes you crazy, the things that people above you get away with. And then, something happens like, for example, a black man becomes president of the United States, just to choose an example at random. And really, you would have to have a heart of stone not to feel hopeful. And so today, in this historic week, we have stories of insiders and outsiders, the haves and the have nots, and people staring across the divide between the two groups, trying to figure it out. 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, Hard Times, we have voices from our country's past when lots of haves got turned into have nots. Act Two, we talk a little about Tuesday. Act Three, Putting the Cart Before the Porsche. In that act, reflections on a life at the top from a teenager who was there. Stay with us. Act One, Hard Times. A week ago, Studs Terkel died. He was 96. Oral histories were around before Studs started doing them, but he pretty much redefined them and did them so amazingly well that anybody who comes after can't help but be influenced. When Studs did an interview, it was history, and it was character study, and it was dramatic storytelling, and it was entertainment all rolled up into one. We all stand in his shadow, all of us who pull out tape recorders and talk to people who aren't famous or powerful or newsworthy in the normal sense. Around the country, if you've heard of Studs, it's because of his books-- Division Street, The Good War, Working. But he was a radio man. In Chicago, you could hear him on the radio for most of his career at WMFT, and in the last decade, at the radio station our show comes from, WBEZ. Today, in remembrance, we bring you some of the interviews that he collected for his book about the Great Depression, Hard Times. This historic week, when another Chicagoan made some news, it has really been a pleasure to listen to these voices from the past talking about the sweep of change that this country has gone through. These were first broadcast as a 12-part series back in 1971, though Studs had been gathering these interviews for years, preparing for his book. Anyway, here he is. In recalling an epoch some 30, 40 years ago, my colleagues experienced pain in some instances, acceleration in others. And often, it was a fusing of both. A hesitancy at first was followed by a flow of memories, long ago hurts and small triumphs, honors and humiliations. And there was an occasional laughter, too. Are they telling the truth, these oral historians? The question is as academic as the day Pontius Pilate asked it, his philosophy not quite washing out his guilt. It's the question Pa Joad asked of Preacher Casy, when the ragged man, in a tranchant camp poured out his California agony in the novel Grapes of Wrath. Pa said, "Suppose he's telling the truth, that fellow?" The preacher answered, "He's telling the truth, all right. The truth for him. He wasn't making nothing up." "How about us?" Tom Joad demanded. "Is that the truth for us?" "I don't know," said Casy. "I suspect the preacher spoke for those whose voices you hear, in their rememberings are their truths. The precise fact, or the precise date, is of small consequence. It's simply an attempt to get the story of a holocaust, known as the Great Depression, from an improvised battalion of survivors." If I say to you the Great Depression-- Oh, this suggests struggle. This suggests struggle for survival, survival just to be warm. To have bread and Karo syrup was a treat. Anything you brought in the house that was food, [SPEAKING CROATIAN] did it cost a lot? Was that a Croatian phrase? Yes. No matter what you brought in, if you brought bread and eggs and Karo syrup. I don't remember so much my going to the store and buying food. I must have been terribly proud, and felt I can't do it. But how early we all stayed away from going to the store. Because we sensed that my father didn't have the money. And so we stayed hungry. And then I can think of when the WPA, the Workman's Project Administration, came in. And my father immediately got employed on the WPA. And I remember how stark it was for me to come into training and have girls-- one of them, who lived across the hall from me at Patton Memorial, whose father was a doctor in Michigan-- I can think of people and how it struck me of their impression of the WPA. Because before I could ever say my father was employed on the WPA, discussions and bull sessions in our rooms immediately was, these lazy people that don't do a thing, the shovel-leaners. And I'd just sit there and listen to them. And then I'd look around, and I realized, sure, your father's a doctor in St. Joe, Michigan. Well, how nice. In my family, there was no respectable employment. There was no-- until I thought, you don't know what it's like. My father had a restaurant. This was where? This was in Arkansas. And when I knew the Depression had really hit with full impact, the electric lights went off. Parents could no longer pay the $1 electric bill, which had amounted to, maybe for a month or two months, $1.80 at the most. And kerosene lamps went up in the home and in the business. Over each individual table in the restaurant, there was a kerosene lamp. This did something to me. Because it let me know that my father wasn't the greatest cat in the world, and I had always thought he was, you know. But it also let me know that he could adjust to any situation. And he taught us how to adjust to situations. Now, we were fortunate compared to the situation of other people. We always had food. There was never any money, but who needed money then? The restaurant went right through the Depression. We were selling hamburgers for a nickel, Studs. My father would have a meal ticket. You could get a full-course meal-- that is, meat and three vegetables-- for $0.25. I remember distinctly feeding little snotty-nosed white kids. My father and mother just did this out of the goodness of their heart. I guess there must have been 10 white families within 50 feet of us. And I remember feeding them. I remember my parents feeding little black kids. I remember when the times got so hard, the sheriff pawned a radio to my father for $10. This was a white sheriff, a white official, who had to come to a black man to get $10. The reason he needed the $10, he had some people out of town. He wanted to bring them there to eat some chicken. Do you think a Depression of that intensity could come again? I think it could come again. But I think it would behoove the federal government not to let it come. Because you're dealing with a different breed of cattle now. See, now, if they really want anarchy, let a depression come now. My 16-year-old son is not the person I was when I was 16. He's an adult at 16. He's working in a department store and going to school, too. So he has manly responsibilities. And he doesn't want any [BLEEP]. These kids now do not want it. When I was 16, I wasn't afraid to die. But the key at 16 now is not afraid to kill. From 1935 to 1939, I worked at El Morocco. And I invented a thing which has become a pain in the neck to most people. I took photographs of the fashionable people and sent them to the papers. These were the women who dressed the best. These were the women who had the most beautiful of all jewels. These were the dream people that we all looked up to and hoped that we, or our friends, could sometimes know and be like. Do you ever talk about what happened outside? There were breadlines. There were various other things occurring, not too nice, you know. As I remember, I don't think they ever mentioned them. Never, socially. Because-- I've always had a theory. When you're out with friends, out socially, everything must be charming. And you don't allow the ugly. We don't even discuss the Negro question. What was happening around the city? Do you remember the people talk of breadlines, or Hoovervilles, or apple sellers? No, there were none of those. No. Not in New York. Never, never. There were a few beggars. New deal. New deal? Well, that was an invention of Franklin Roosevelt's that meant absolutely nothing except higher taxation. And that he did. The '30s society, a last image. It was a glamorous, glittering moment. Well, I lived off friends. I had a very good friend who cashed in all his Bonus Bonds to pay his rent. And he had an extra bed, so he let me sleep there. I finally went on relief, which was an experience I wouldn't want anybody else ever to go through in New York City. A single man going on relief, at that particular time, was just-- well, it comes as close to crucifixion as you can do it, without the actual mechanical details. Well, it was '35 or '36, in that area. It was after I lost my job with the publishing house. And I needed whatever money I could get anywhere. The interview was, to me, utterly ridiculous and mortifying. But it was questions like, well, what have you been living on? Well, I borrowed some money. Who'd you borrow it from? Friends. Who are your friends? Where have you been living? I've been living with friends. Well, I wish I could recall the whole thing. This went on for a half an hour or something. I finally turned to the young man who was interviewing me and said, I've been talking about friends. Do you happen to know what a friend is? And a little after that, I got my-- at least the interview was over. I did get certified some time later. I've been trying to remember how much they paid. It seems to me it was $9 a month. $9 a month. But the thing you remember is this humiliating experience. That's right. Well, I suppose there's some reason in the back of it. I'm a single man who was white. Why didn't I have a family? And I had sent my family West to Ohio, where they could live simply. But they asked, then, all these personal questions. It was-- well, I don't know. I came away feeling like I hadn't any business even living any longer. I was imposing on somebody's great society, or something like that. And now we come to the voice of Elsa Ponselle, who recalls her young womanhood as a schoolteacher during the Depression. My nephew, not so long ago, said to me-- in regards to the Negro problem-- ah, if they want a job, they can get it. I said, if you ever say that again, I don't care if you are damn near 40 years old, I'll slap you. I said, your father couldn't get a job during the Depression. And he wanted one. Well, of course he's forgotten. I mean, he never even knew. But I mean, I felt all that old rage coming back. I mean, like, when I was in my 20s. And somebody said, oh, if they want a job. If they really want to work, they can get it. And so the Depression was a way of life to me. I mean, consider that from the time I was 20 to the time I was 30, I lived in a Depression-oriented universe. And I thought, unconsciously, that that was the way it was going to be forever and ever and ever, that people would have trouble getting jobs, that they would be living in fear of losing their jobs. You know, that fear of losing their jobs. During the Depression, when you were poor, you weren't looking around and seeing, here is a society in which everybody has something except me. And by God, I'm going to get some. I mean, I can't blame people for feeling-- they read the papers and they watch television and everybody is so rich and has everything-- why not me? You see, that was the difference in the Depression. It wasn't only not me, but it was not you, and it was not my friends, and everybody else. And the rich had the instinct of self-preservation. They didn't throw the fact that they had money around, if you'll remember. We heard about how they didn't have the fancy debutante parties, because after all, it was not the thing to do. They're a bit more discreet about it. Indeed. They were so God damn scared they'd have a revolution. They damn near did, too, didn't they? You felt that? You felt they were scared? Oh, were they scared! What's more scary than $1 million? Which you can send over to the Swiss banks, and they're still sending it over to the Swiss banks. Well, this leads to several questions. Then, the question of status did not make itself felt, then? Because your neighbor, everybody you knew was like you. That's right. Your neighbor was losing his house. Somebody else was having their furniture taken away. And everybody was in the same boat. And in fact, I think people who were not in that boat were a little apologetic because they weren't suffering. And then, of course, the war came. And the Depression was cured by a war, which was one hell of a note. And all these kids that I had had, who were growing up, disappeared. And it was very, very quiet. The young were gone. And some of them came back, and some of them didn't. In Jefferson county, about 4/5 of the people were on relief. And there was no government relief. So this meant that they had just this $2.50 a week that the Red Cross provided them, and what they could beg, borrow, or steal. But the thing that also struck me as being so terrible was that, just the way my mother and father had this terrible feeling of shame and guilt, and there was that failure that lost all their property, these people had the same feeling of shame and guilt when they lost their jobs. And they didn't blame the Republic Steel Company or the United States Steel. They didn't blame the capitalist system. They just blamed themselves. And they thought-- well, they would say in the most apologetic way, well, you know if we hadn't bought that radio, if we hadn't bought that old secondhand car, if we'd saved our money and-- you know, they really blamed themselves. And it was this terrible feeling they had of shame that they were on relief. We just drifted back and forth. He was discontented everywhere. And then, we went back to Oklahoma the last time in January of 1929. And I had three children born there. You remember situations of how they got the families around there, too? Oh, yes. I remember several families there that lost their homes and everything they had-- their bank account and everything they had-- and had to leave there in covered wagons, for instance. Covered wagons? Covered wagons, absolutely they went out of there in covered wagons, in the '30s. Do you remember people taking part in demonstrations of any sort? My husband went to Washington. Your husband did? Well, indeed he did. He marched with that group that went to Washington. Let's see, what year was that, Peggy? The Bonus Marchers? Oh, yes, sir. Oh, your husband was a Bonus Marcher? Oh, yes, sir. He was a hellraiser. You know he was in World War I. he was a machine gunner in World War I. And he felt like that the men that fought in the war should have their bonus, especially at a time like it was then-- and then, without employment and with families to support. Mama, don't you remember when Daddy used to say, the God damn Germans gassed me. And I come home, and my own God damn government gassed me. Yes, he said that, too. Oh-- He was a machine gunner. And the God damn Germans gassed him in Germany. And he came home, and his own government stooges gassed him and run him off the country up there with water hose, half-drowned him. He was very bitter. Because he was an intelligent man. And he couldn't see why, as wealthy a country as this is-- that there was any sense in so many people practically starving to death, and living in such dire poverty, when so much of it was-- wheat and everything else-- was being poured in the ocean. And many, many things that were happening, that was taking food out of people's mouths and homes. He was very bitter. Peggy, when were you aware of the Depression? I believe, when I first started noticing the difference was when we'd come home from school in the evening, my mother'd send us to the soup line. And we were never allowed to cuss. But after we'd been going to the soup line for about a month, we'd go down there, and if you happened to be one of the first ones in line, you didn't get anything but water that was on top. So we'd ask the guy that was ladling out the soup into the buckets-- everybody had to bring their own bucket to get the soup. And he'd dip the greasy, watery stuff off the top. And so we'd ask him to please dip down so we could get some meat and potatoes from the bottom of the kettle. And he wouldn't do it. So then we learned a cuss, and we'd say dip down, God damn it! And then we'd go across the street. And one place had bread, large loaves of bread. And then, down the road, just a little piece, was a big shed. And they gave milk. And my sister and me would take two buckets each. And we'd bring one back full of soup, and one back full of milk, and two loaves of bread each. And that's what we lived on for the longest time. And I can remember-- one time, we didn't have anything to eat. And I don't know if this was before the soup line. But I remember the only thing in the house to eat was mustard. And my sister and me put so much mustard on biscuits that we got sick. And we can't stand mustard right today. You didn't feel at that time-- you and your little friends, your young friends-- a sense of shame? No. I remember it was fun. It was fun going to the soup line, because we all went down the road, and we laughed, and we played. The only thing that we felt was we were hungry, and we were going to get food. And nobody made us feel ashamed. There just wasn't any of that. Back then, I'm not sure how the rich felt. I think the rich were as contemptuous of the poor then as they are now. But at least among the people that I knew and came in contact with, we all had a sense of understanding that it wasn't our fault, that it was something that had happened to the machinery. And in fact, most people blamed Hoover. I mean, they'd cuss him up one side and down the other-- it was all his fault. Well, I'm not saying he's blameless, but I'm not saying either that it was all his fault. Because our system doesn't run just by one man, and it doesn't fall just by one man either. How much schooling do you have? Sixth grade. You had sixth grade, and then you went to work? Yeah. Then what did you do after sixth grade? You got married at 15. Yes. Well, my husband and me start traveling around. That was just kind of our background. And we just kind of continued it. We went down in the valley of Texas, where it's very beautiful. We were migrant workers down there. We picked oranges and grapefruits and lemons and limes in the Rio Grande Valley. It's really a good life if you're poor and you manage to move around. Well, how did you and your husband get around? What means of transportation? We hitchhiked. I was pregnant when we first started hitchhiking. And people were really very nice to us. Sometimes they would feed us, and then sometimes we would-- I remember, the one time we slept in a haystack. And the lady of the house came out and found us. And she says, well, this is really very bad for you, because you're going to have a baby. And she says, you need a lot of milk. So she took us up to the house. And she had a lot of rugs hanging on the clothesline. She was doing her house cleaning. And we told her we'd beat the rugs for her giving us the food. And she said, no, she didn't expect that, that she just wanted to feed us. And we said, no, that we couldn't take it unless we worked for it. So she let us beat her rugs. And I think she had a million rugs. And we cleaned them. And then we went in. And she had a beautiful table, just all full of all kind of food and milk. And then when we left, she filled a gallon bucket full of milk. And we took it with us. And you don't find that now. I think maybe if you did that now, you'd get arrested. I think somebody'd call the police. I think maybe the atmosphere since the end of the second war, because all kind of propaganda has been going on. It just seems like the minute the war ended, the propaganda started-- and making people hate each other, not just hate Russians and Chinese and Germans. It was to make us hate each other, I think. I know one thing that people have to get over-- is they have to quit hating black people. That's the first thing. Because you always see yourself as something you're not. You see yourself as better than other human beings. As long as you can hate black people, and as long as you can say, I'm better than they are, then there's somebody below you you can kick. But once you get over that, you see and you begin to understand that you're not any better off than they are. In fact, you're worse off because you're believing a lie. And in that way, they're smarter than we are, because we couldn't see that. And it was right in front of us. We'd be out in a cotton field chopping cotton. And we'd see the black people over in the next field. But never once did it occur to me that we had anything in common. Because they were black and I was white. And that made it different. You had that feeling of being superior then? Oh, yes. Your husband did, too? Yes. Down in Texas, these are Mexican people? Oh, yes. But I didn't feel any identification with them either. The men and the women, they were just spics. And they should be sent back to Mexico, because they shouldn't be over here in the first place. That was the way I felt at that time. Now, since then, I found out that that very state, we took away from them in the first place. So I feel pretty bad about that. And then, when did this other insight come to you? Any idea when? That feeling you have now. I think maybe it started in Montgomery, because we were living there when the bus boycott started. They hired a bunch of real tough guys to make the Negroes ride the buses. And I saw them pick those women up and throw them on the bus. And a couple of times, I was on the bus myself. And they'd wait until the bus stopped at the corner, and they'd throw those women on the bus. And the women'd just stand there. They wouldn't move. And then when the bus got to the next corner, they'd get off and they'd walk. They would not stay on that bus. And then my husband got in jail in Montgomery. And I went down to the jail one day to see him. And who'd they have out there, but Reverend Martin Luther King down on the sidewalk, beating him up, about 10 guys. And I felt this was wrong. I don't know why I felt it was wrong. It just bothered me. He was just a nigger to me at that point. But it really bothered me to see a gang beating up on him. And one other thing that I know really touched me was the store where I always went to buy my groceries. It was a big supermarket. And they had a little, tiny Negro woman. She didn't look like she weighed 100 pounds. And they had her putting up stock. And this great big white guy came in there and filled the shopping cart full of groceries. And then when he checked them out, she was standing there, dusting the shelves. And he says, come here and take these groceries out to my car. And so she came up there, and she started pushing the cart out the door. And he went out ahead of her. And even though she was taking his groceries-- he was a great big able-bodied man-- he let the door slam on her. He wouldn't even hold the door open for her. So I went and I held the door open. And even when it was happening, I couldn't hardly believe it was happening. And then I said to him something about great big he-men. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was really nasty, because I felt bad because he did that. It's really hard to talk about at a time like that, because it seems like a different person. When I remember those times, it's like looking into a world where another person is doing those things. And it's just so hard to relate them to myself. This may sound impossible, but do you know, if there's one thing that started me thinking, it was President Roosevelt's cuff links. I read in the paper about how many pairs of cuff links he had, and it told that some of them were rubies, and all precious stones. These were his cuff links. And I just wondered, I'll never forget. I was sitting on an old tire out in the front yard. And we were hungry. And I was wondering why it was that one man could have all those cuff links when we couldn't even have enough to eat, when we lived on gravy and biscuits. And I think, maybe, that was my first thought of wondering why. That's the first thing I remember ever wondering why. But one thing I did want to say about when my father finally got his bonus-- he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. And my dad said to us kids, all of you get in the car. I want to take you and show you something. And on the way over there, he talked about how rough life had been for us. And he said, if you think it's been rough for us, he said, I want you to see people that really had it rough. This was in Oklahoma City, and he took us to one of the Hoovervilles. And that was the most incredible thing. Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean, that was their home. There were people living in shacks made out of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. And here, this wasn't just a little section. This was an area maybe 10 miles wide and 10 miles long. People living in whatever they could jam together. And when I read Grapes of Wrath, that was like re-living my life, particularly the part in there about where they lived in this government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a government place like that, a government-owned place, in Robstown, Texas. And they came around and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn't have anything. And they helped us make-- they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night, we'd have a dance. And when I was reading Grapes of Wrath, this was just like my life. And I never was so proud of poor people before as I was after I read that book. And just reading that book has made me a better person. I think that's the worst thing that our system does to people, is to take away their pride. And it prevents them from being a human being. And they're wondering, why the Harlem, and why the Detroit? And they're talking about troops and law and order. And you'll get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings, and be able to walk in dignity. That was A Gathering of Survivors: Voices of the Great American Depression. The program was produced by Studs Terkel, with Jim Unrath and Lois Baum, of radio station WFMT Chicago. Coming up, What a Difference an Election Day Makes. 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 and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, we have stories of insiders and outsiders, haves and have nots. And of course, on Tuesday of this past week, an outsider became the biggest inside there is, President of the United States. Which brings us to Act Two. Listening this last week to those old recordings that Studs Terkel made, where people were talking about their view of this country, and of their fellow Americans, and how those views evolved over the decades, I wondered what this election would do, how much it would close the divide between people, particularly between blacks and whites. And I was especially curious about blacks who had seen this country at its worst, who lived through segregation. And looking for somebody to talk to about that here on the radio, I eventually got on the phone with Reverend Donald Sharp, who leads a Baptist Church on Chicago's South Side, Faith Tabernacle. And when I called him and asked him what his thoughts were this week, he was already on the same page that I was. When I asked him about Tuesday, he started immediately talking about things that happened to him back in the '50s, how he's found himself thinking about those things this week, like being taken as a teenager to see the body of Emmett Till, who was a Chicago kid like him, around his age, who was killed while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Donald Sharp also had relatives in Mississippi. He told me all kinds of ugly things that happened to him when he was drafted in 1960 and sent to Oklahoma. How he wasn't served food at a restaurant on the way down, even though he was in uniform. How in Oklahoma, black and white soldiers were sent to separate, but very unequal, USO dances, a nice one for the white soldiers, a USO club that was kind of a dump for the black soldiers. He saw things in Oklahoma he'd never seen in Chicago. And that made him angry. That was-- believe me, believe me, believe me, I wanted to go AWOL. I felt like, was it really worth it all? Was this country really worth dying for? I felt as though that I was just a commodity to be used by this country. And my worth to this country has not increased no more than my great-grandfather, who was a slave down in Mississippi. Only thing, I've been permitted to have a little bit more amenities. So all this is a part of who I am, not being able to eat in the restaurant, or going to a segregated dance. And so this week, when Barack Obama became president, does it make you adjust how you see this country? I see it a little bit different, but my guard is not totally down. I'm being facetious when I say this-- I'm not going to be around, out singing "We Have Overcome." I feel good for him and his family. And I'm hoping-- I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm happy but, you know-- Wait, and what's the but? That's the question. The but is my suspicion. See, I still haven't been able to shed my suspicious nature of systemic and institutional racism. Part of the problem is being black, you're living in these two different worlds, one in which you know you're a permanent citizen of, and the other, you are granted visas, shall I say. You go back and forth between these worlds. And I use the term not in a strict medical sense, but you become schizophrenic in your behavior. You're one way over here and you're another way over there. And also, at the same time, sometimes you feel like, oh, yeah, things are fine. I'm fine. And other times, you realize, like, oh, no, maybe I'm not fine. Exactly. So that feeling of being split, that doesn't end because of one election day. No. Goodness gracious, no. Not by any stretch to the imagination. And so that's my skepticism. Now, I'm quite certain that my grandchildren see it a little bit different. And I hope they would. Now, how do your grandchildren see it? They're excited. They're geeked. They're happy. They feel like, boy, it's a new day. But again, they've not experienced some of the things I've experienced. I remember telling my kids, I said, I remember when I would go downtown and we'd change the train in Memphis, I would see two water fountains. There was a sign that said, one white, one colored. And they'd start laughing. They'd say, you really saw that? That really happened? Yes, that really happened. So what I'm saying is that they've never experienced that, so they don't see things in the same prism that I see it. And so certainly they would be a little bit more excited, shall I say. But it's interesting what you're saying, because you're saying that you feel like this is one more step. But when you talk to your grandkids or the young people in your church, you're saying they feel like, OK, the job's done, pretty much. There's a little tidying up around the edges, but they say we're way further along. Oh yeah, they-- oh man, this is it. He did it. And the door is wide open. Now, do you think it's possible that they are more right and you are more wrong? I would hope they're more right, I would hope I'm more wrong, but I don't think so. Reverend Donald Sharp of the Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church in Chicago. Obama will change the world, Obama will change the world! Obama! Obama! These little kids on the West Side of Philadelphia on election day near a polling station. They made up the song themselves. Obama! Obama! Obama! Act Three, Putting the Cart Before the Porsche. We end our show about have and have nots with this story about how the other half lives, the rich half, that is. This was recorded in front of a small, live audience in a theater in New York City. We are not going to mention the performer's name. And we're actually going to beep out the name of the town she's from to protect the privacy of her family. It's a pretty honest story. So my dad has this really annoying phrase that he uses as his blanket statement for everything. And that is, it's all about choices. It's all about choices, Sarah. You get a bad grade on a test? It's all about choices. Yeah, maybe I chose to hang out with my friends as opposed to studying for the test. I get it. You got a point. But he uses it all the time, for everything. It's like, Dad, my car got stolen. It's all about choices, Sarah. I fell and I broke my tailbone. It's all about choices. Because, obviously, it's all my fault. I think this phrase-- I actually know this phrase-- was born on a weeknight, during the autumn of 1990. Now, the first 12 years of my life, I lived in a upscale neighborhood in the suburbs of Virginia. My dad, he's a lawyer with his own practice. He's got a glittery bass fishing boat, which may not mean anything to all of you, but down there, it's a big deal. He's got a beautiful housewife and four perfect children. Most perfect, right here. And the picture becomes complete because my mom and my dad both have their own Porsche. But my dad has the classic 911. My mom has the sporty, fierce 928. And my mom's license plate, of course, MOMS928. My mom was not the one to pack your lunch. She was not the one to show up at your PTA meeting. She would wear her expensive jewelry to the pool. This is how she was. But are we going to line up in our Laura Ashley dresses at the Junior Women's Cotillion Holly Ball and the Miller & Rhoads white gloves in party manner and etiquette school? Yes. Yes, we are. And we did. Now, that was what it looked like on the outside. On the inside, it was not an environment of excess, but one of constraint. Rules were very important. Etiquette, very important. And my dad's insane temper could be set off by the slightest offense. When I heard the Porsche rumble up the driveway every day when he came home, I would run into my room and hide. Because maybe today would be the day that he found the candy wrapper in the sofa cushion and make my mom spank someone. Or maybe today would be the day that he grabs me by the shoulder and yells at me for language. Because language, in my house, was very important. I mean, curse words, in my house, were extreme. We were not allowed to say gee-- golly gee-- because it sounded like you were about to say Jesus. Unacceptable, not out of a morality standpoint, but out of a, sort of like, we don't want our kids to be trash. OK? Only trash says, golly gee. What? I don't understand. But they could be very loving, very fun. I know, it's like, what? They could be fun, they could be spontaneous. But it was just all about avoiding awakening the bee's nest. So it all came to a screeching halt one night in 1990. I was 12 years old. I'm in my room. I'm rehearsing my lines for the school musical, which is an incarnation of the comic strip, Hagar the Horrible. I played the pivotal role of Viking Number Three. And my mom comes in the room, and her face is ashen. And she says, we are having a family meeting. Meet in the den. Now, we'd never had a family meeting before, OK? Family meetings were for kids whose parents were going to get divorced. That's what they were for. I watched enough TV to know. Enough kids at school-- their parents were getting divorced left and right. And kids whose parents were divorced were like they had some kind of disease. I did not want to associate with them. They were clearly-- they smelled funny, they were poor, they had to go live with their mom in [BLEEP] Park, which was the ghetto because the houses were closer together, and you couldn't have your own pool. So we go into the den, which is sort of like a men's parlour, with wood paneling and plaid furniture. It's very manly and dark. And my sister's in there. She has magically appeared from her college several hours away. So now I'm like, divorce, divorce, divorce, divorce. My dad looks really bad. Divorce, divorce, divorce, divorce. My mom speaks first. We're not getting a divorce. Like she knew. Whew, yes, I do not have to become a latchkey kid. And then she's like, but Dad-- Dad has something he wants to tell you. My dad starts to weep openly. And any elation about the non-divorce has now turned to complete dread. So he finally gets the words out. Daddy did something bad. I took money that wasn't mine. And tomorrow I'm going to turn myself in. And I don't know what's going to happen. Boom! My brother's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's like 16. He's an ass [BLEEP]. Whoa, whoa, back up, back up. You mean-- what do you mean, you took money that wasn't yours? Like stealing? My dad's like, yes, what I did was like stealing. Hey, OK, OK, OK. Was it like stealing, or was it stealing, Dad? You either stole or you didn't. So they press him. My brother presses him for more information. So he tells us that when he was first starting out in law, a young couple had a newborn child that was mentally retarded. It's just-- I'm sorry. This is, like, so intense for me to even tell you this. I've never told anybody this. This newborn child was mentally retarded, and they believed it was the hospital's fault. So my dad took the case pro bono. And he worked his butt off. He's like that ad on the subway, like, we fight for injured children. And there's a little leprechaun with boxing gloves on him. That's my dad, all right? So he gets it. And his case was so great that the hospitals decided to settle out of court. And a large sum of money was put into a trust fund for said retarded child. When you're the trustee of a trust fund, that means you can write checks out of the trust fund. AKA, you are entrusted with the money. OK? So many years after this happened, my dad decided, I'm just going to write myself a check out of this trust fund. And at first, it was just a little bit. And he thought, I'll put it back. No one will ever know. But then a little bit became a lot. And it got out of control. Because he had to pay for those Porsches and the house that goes on forever. And so he tells us all this, and he ends by saying, and we're going to start over. We are going to rebuild our lives. And I'm over here, who gives a [BLEEP]? What does this have to do with me? And how am I going to help rebuild this family? I'm 12. All right? So my mom's like, we recommend that you all stay home from school tomorrow, and we can work this out as a family. And I stood up, and I'm like, no. This is just perfect. You always make big announcements before the school play, the night before the school play. Grandaddy died the night before The Wizard of Oz. Here we go again. This always happens. Don't you people get it? When you miss school, you're not allowed to participate in the after-school activities. I hate you. I ran off. So basically, what happened, I realized, it kind of was a big deal. Everybody at school knows that my dad's a bank robber. And they're calling me one. They think that I am come from a band of thieves and I'm not to be trusted. My parents lose all their friends. We have to move to the ghetto in [BLEEP] Park, which actually is a very nice neighborhood. They didn't press charges. The family, amazingly, just said, hey, pay it back. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] My dad basically went from a lawyer to being, like, a paralegal. He was disbarred. It was terrible. My mom started doing odd jobs. She changed sheets at a nursing home and was the janitor in our Baptist Church. And it was a free-for-all in my house. Like, what was once very controlled was now like, whatever. Do what you want, Sarah. See you, we're going to go find ourselves. But my dad was instantly better. He was a better person. He was happy. He chewed gum, which didn't happen before. And he wasn't such an a-hole all the time. And Mom, her transformation was amazing. She basically, just had this deep need in herself to recognize need and suffering in other people. And one day, she just went downtown and packed some bagged lunches-- that she never packed for me-- and took them to some homeless people living under a bridge, which turned into this huge charity, and she helped thousands of people who needed her help. And she went to Rwanda during the genocide. And she even let a homeless guy named Earl live with us once. He was a fugitive. We figured it out later. But who are we to judge? I mean, who are we to judge, really? So finally, we never talked about it after that. Except once, my mom and I, about a year ago, were driving around, killing some time before her chemo treatment. And we went to the house that goes on forever. We wanted to see it. And it was very sad looking. And the grass was dead. And it was kind of crumbling. And we stopped, and I asked her, Mom-- I don't even know why I said it-- Mom, why did Dad turn himself in? And she said, well, your sister wrote him a letter from college that said she loved him and was proud of him and wanted to be a lawyer. And I came home and found him sobbing in the fetal position on the floor. And he said to me, I can't do this anymore. I've made all the wrong choices. And now I'm ready to make a right one. And then he confessed, and he told us that night. So my mom told me this, and then we sat there in silence. And I said, it's all about choices. And we laughed. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who described his philosophy of broadcasting this way. Everything must be charming. And you don't allow the ugly. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ in Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I suppose it's not enough this time of year that we eat millions of turkeys. Someone also went to the trouble to make up a song about turkeys getting the supernatural power to play baseball. We know they love Thanksgiving. Why wouldn't they enjoy our national pastime? Of course, there is no gobbling in baseball. Well, during this time of year-- the beginning of the biggest poultry consumption months in these United States-- it is a tradition here on our radio show to bring you a program full of stories about turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds. And for this year's program we have found stories about poultry and the supernatural, like turkeys playing baseball, except these stories will be true-- the ones you're about to hear. We have people trying to invest chickens with magical powers. We have birds who may be emissaries from beyond the earth. We have priests using their priestly powers on the poultry industry. And we have chickens lifted heavenward and plucked of their feathers by mysterious forces no one can fathom. It is gods and chickens today on our show. Stay with us. And we begin in a faraway place, an ancient place, the mountains of Pakistan near the border of Afghanistan. Gregory Warner was living there. The story really begins with JD, an Afghan guy I met in Kabul. The first time I met him, he tried to pretend he was from the States. He sounds really American. Let me play you this voice mail message he left me. Hey Greg. This is JD. I'm calling from Afghanistan, man. Where are you? I sent you an email. Hopefully you'll read it. Thing is, JD kind of learned his style from the US Marines. For five years, he was an interpreter for them. They also taught him how to shoot and how to dress. They even named him JD, short for Japanese Dude. Japanese, because they said he looked Asian, and dude because he's a dude. Ciao, bitch. End of message. So when I was asked to go down to the Afghan border and do a story about smugglers, the first thing I did was call up JD and hire him as my translator. He'd stopped working for the Marines by then because he'd gotten married, and his wife said it was too dangerous. He was restless and up for an adventure. A week later we were in Pakistan, driving a Toyota through the streets of his old hometown, Quetta. It's a town popular with smugglers, because it's right on the border of Afghanistan and not too far from Iran. And it's in the middle of the mountains, almost impossible to control. JD wanted me to meet his uncle, an ex-smuggler named Ali. Actually, Ali wasn't really JD's uncle, more like a distant cousin, 20 years older. Back when JD was a little kid, Ali would run operations to Turkey or Malaysia, smuggling heroin, or guns, or illegal aliens. And then a few years ago, Ali announced his retirement. The Americans are here now, he said. The game has changed. When I meet Ali, he's grocery shopping in an outdoor market, but in this really commanding way. He stands some four or five feet from each stall, points a long arm at what he wants. He says, "Five kilo rice. Three Pepsi. Two kilo raisin. Send it home to my wife." And then he turns and strides to the next push cart, his loose clothes swishing around him like Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. Ali wears dark glasses. And he lost one eye in a gun battle, an injury that looks like it pretty much definitely should have been fatal. I'm thinking that Ali's going to introduce me to some smugglers for my story. But Ali isn't so interested in that. Instead he says he's going to go shoot guns in the mountains with some friends. And we're welcome to tag along. Then Ali walks into a store. And he comes out with a cardboard box. On the outside of the box, it's stamped, Pampers. Inside the box is a live chicken. Then Ali closes the box, wraps it up in a scarf, and slings it over shoulder. We follow him and his three scruffy looking friends out of the market, past the last mud houses and into the mountains. That's how my day tracking human smugglers on the edge of a war-torn border turned into a day about a chicken. "What's with the chicken," I ask JD. And the answer is not what I expect. He tells me that Ali's old friend has been arrested and is in prison. And Ali wants to spring him out. But just in case things go wrong with the jail break, Ali has bought his friend a magic amulet called a taweez. The taweez is supposed to protect whoever wears it from bullets. Before he gives it to his friend, he wants to test the taweez to see if it works, test it on the chicken. "Wait," I say, "we're going to put the magic amulet on the chicken, and then shoot the chicken to see if it's invincible?" "Yeah," JD says, "these guys take religion really seriously." We walk up into the mountains. And it's a beautiful morning, sun drenched rocks, dark caves, dry spindly plants over everything. The path is steep. And Ali tells me that back when he was a smuggler, before he'd agree to bring someone through mountains like this, he wouldn't take just anybody. Actually, he'd screen them first for health problems. Heart problem. If they had a heart problem, say. Stomach problem. Stomach problem. We have blood problem. Blood problem. We know about all the dark things. We check the person at first. So you give him a physical? Yeah. It seems oddly responsible behavior for a smuggler, though of course he didn't want to get stuck on the side of the mountain with a half-dead guy. I ask Ali if he'd smuggle me. And he says, no. And then he starts to sing. And then he leaps on ahead over the rocks with his sack slung on his back like a one-eyed mountains sprite. After an hour or two, we stop in a little valley with a clump of bushes nearby. Ali puts down the sack. And from his shirt pocket he pulls out the amulet, the taweez. The belief in a taweez is older than Islam. Only in remote, superstitious corners of the world like this do the mullahs deal in this kind of magic. Ali got this one from a mullah. It's nothing fancy, a white scroll the size of a piece of chalk. Ali wraps it in blue plastic and ties it to the chicken's neck. The effect does not seem particularly magical. Basically, it looks like a chicken with some garbage tied to its head. But for the experiment it'll do. Ali picks up the bird with both hands, sets it down in some dirt in front of a bush, not too far away either. Imagine a tennis court. If you're standing at the baseline, the chicken is about where the net would be. And then Ali pulls out a handgun from the waistband of his pants. The gun is old looking and blackened with use. And then his three friends pull out their guns. And there is a lot of loading, and cocking, and gun prep. Ali stands up tall. And Ali is tall for an Afghan, about six feet. He holds the gun out with both hands, aims with his one eye, [GUNSHOT] and nothing happens. The next shot [GUNSHOT] hits the dirt right by the chicken's foot, pings up like in the movies. It's really close. And then Ali lifts his gun a third time. And there's just a click. And another click, click. "It's jammed," Ali says. "This never happened before." For a moment, we all take this in. Then JD says, "Are you sure?" And he says, "Yeah, I use this gun to kill rabbits." And JD says, "Rabbits?" And Ali says, "Yeah, rabbits." And JD says, "You know the Marines shoot that gun with one hand." And Ali says, "Yeah no, this gun, you have to shoot with two hands." And JD says again, "Well the Marines told me--" And Ali cuts him off saying, "Hey, how much are the Americans spending on the Marines?" And JD takes the hint, and he drops the subject. And then Ali takes his whole gun apart, laying out the pieces on a flat rock. And all this takes a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, the chicken just sits and waits. And I'm going to go out on a limb here on the radio and say that most of sentient creatures caught in gunfire would run. And I'm sending little thought waves to the chicken, like, run, run. And this chicken is so just completely overconfident in this taweez. I think that taweez is working. I say, maybe it's magic. And Ali just shakes his head like I'm crazy, like I'm the gullible one to believe too quickly in this taweez. We haven't finished our test. Maybe it made the gun jam, but Ali's got to be sure. If he's going to give this to his best friend, he's got to know it works. Finally, Ali fixes whatever was wrong with the gun. The spring got caught on something. He doesn't know why. He reassembles the gun, and then he fires again. [GUNSHOT] And then he fires a fourth time. [GUNSHOT] And the chicken is still not dead. And Ali looks surprised. "How is this possible," he says. "I still haven't hit it. Really, how is this possible?" Next, Ali's friends each take their turn. [GUNSHOTS] That's three more misses. Ali shoots one last time, [GUNSHOT] and again it pings in the dirt. Ali puts the gun down, and he asks how many bullets we've shot. "OK," he tells everybody, "the thing works." He doesn't say it in a praise God in his infinite wisdom kind of way. He says it like a mechanic closing the hood of a car. OK, it works. And then JD says, "Can I shoot one?" And Ali shrugs, like, sure, let the kid have a go. And he hands him his gun. And JD lifts the gun with one hand like the Marines taught him, straight out in front. And he aims. And he squeezes off a shot. [GUNSHOT] And all of a sudden, it looks like some invisible hand came and painted one of the chicken's feathers bright red. And then that red spot gets bigger. We all look at Ali. No one moves, not even the chicken, and it's bleeding. We watch Ali pull out his pocket knife. He strides with long steps over to the chicken, not happy at all. He grabs the chicken by the head and cuts through the blue plastic around its neck with one slice. Then he fishes out the taweez , and he chucks it into a bush. With the next stroke, he slices off the chicken's head. Later, JD tells me that Ali spent $1,700 on that little scroll. But right now, JD is excited. He's saying, "Where did it hit? Where did I hit him?" And Ali says, "The chest. You hit it in the chest." He digs out the bullet with his knife. And he says, "This bullet is come from the US government." And I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that. But it didn't sound good. JD, on the other hand, is doing a happy dance, still holding the gun. And then JD starts laughing. Then he says, "Look, he has eaten the heart." He just ate the heart? Yeah, ow. Anyway, after that, there isn't much to do but eat the chicken the regular way. We gather brush wood, make a fire in the mouth of the cave, stick the chicken on a stick, and roast it, extra crunchy. Then Ali chats with guys, like he's trying to forget the whole thing. They don't talk about amulets, or guns, or Marines. Most of the lunch he just makes fun of me. "Look, he's skinnier than I am," he says. "He's so skinny, he'll be dead in 15 days." "Look at him," he says. "He eats too fast." Sitting here in this cave, we can see out for miles. And all up and down the hills there are other clumps of men in robes like us, also sitting around fires cooking lunch, like it has probably been for centuries. It's hard to explain, but out here it's easy to feel like this is all there is and all there ever will be. And Ali's risen up about as high as you can in this world. He went from poor mountain boy, an orphan in a tiny village, to mafia don. And then, all of a sudden someone like JD shows up. And that world doesn't seem like all there is anymore. It's like you start your morning on a mystical pilgrimage with a magic amulet to rescue your best friend. And then, by the end of the afternoon, you learn it wasn't about magic at all. It was just a game of shoot the chicken-- a really expensive game of shoot the chicken-- that you lost to a cocky 23 year old who works with the Americans. Gregory Warner is a reporter based in Philadelphia. Act Two, Winged Migration. So it was Saturday, January 10, 2004. And Spalding was in our apartment in New York with our daughter, Marissa, who was 16 at the time, and Theo, who was six. This is Kathie Russo. Her husband was Spalding Gray, who is best known for delivering monologues on stage like "Monster in a Box" and "Swimming to Cambodia." Both those monologues were also filmed as movies. Spalding Gray went missing on January 10, 2004. Witnesses say they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night. His body was finally found, pulled out of the East River two months later. Our show today is about birds and the supernatural. And Kathie Russo tells this story about that last night and the days immediately after it. As she said, her husband was with two of their kids that night. She was out that night. They have a third child, Forrest, who was 11 at the time. He was in Sag Harbor, Long Island with friends and a babysitter. They had a house out there too. Spalding had dinner with the kids. And then it got to be about 7:00 PM. He said he was going to meet an old friend. And Marissa goes, "Oh that's fine. You know I'm here. I can watch Theo." And he went out. And about an hour and a half after that, he called to check in on the kids. Theo answered. And he said, how's everything going? He goes, good. He goes, well, I love you very much. And I'll be home soon. And we never saw Spalding again. The next series of events still seem like a blur to me, even five years later. But the first thing I had to do was go report Spalding missing. I did that. And then I decided to send the kids home, back to Sag Harbor to join their brother. So I stayed for two days, did whatever I could, which was pretty much nothing. And after two days, I just decided I'm going back to Sag harbor to join all the kids. So I'm driving on the Long Island Expressway back to Sag Harbor, and I get a phone call on my cell phone. And it was Theo. And he was all excited. And he said, "Mom, Mom, we came home today from school. And there was a bird, a little bird flying around the island in the kitchen." I said, "And then what did you do next?" He said, "Well we followed the bird. And Marissa followed him into the bathroom. And she tried to calm the bird. And she took a hat, and cupped it over the bird, and captured the bird, and went outside and let him out free." And I was just so dumbfounded and awestruck. The first image that came to my head when he said that there was something-- a bird in particular-- circling over this island, was I thought of Spalding, and how for the last two years he had obsessively circled around that island talking to himself, just circling in total anguish. You see, two years before that, we had been in Ireland celebrating his 60th birthday. And the second day there, Spalding and I were in a horrible car accident. Spalding suffered enormous head trauma. He was never the same. They actually had to put a titanium plate in his head. He was in and out of hospitals for two years after the accident. Doctors prescribed various cocktails of pills for him. Nothing worked, not even the 20 electric shock treatments that he had. And the second thought I had when I heard about the bird was, was this a message from Spalding? Was he trying to tell us something? We've never had a bird in our house before. And I remember the Irish have this saying that if you find a bird in your house after someone dies, and it's alive, the person's soul is free. And if you find a dead bird, the person's soul is restless. And I remember Spalding-- I'll never forget this story after his mother killed herself 35 years before. His father woke up the very next day. And next to his bed, where his slippers were on the floor, was a dead bird. And that story just stayed with me. So that night after the kids went to bed, I went around the house. And I was making sure that another bird could not get into this house, because I wasn't going to take the chance of another bird coming into the house and dying. So I checked all the windows, and I closed all the fireplaces to make sure, to guarantee that there was no way a bird could come into our house. And the next day I was at the dining room table reading the paper. And I looked up, and there was a bird across the table peering at me. And I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. So I yell out to the kids, who are in the other room. And they run in. And the bird takes off, and flies up the stairs. And we all follow it. And it goes into what's our office. And it's perched on top of this window. And I shut the door behind me. And for some reason, I held out my hands, thinking the bird might magically come to my hands. And I go, "Spalding, it's OK. You're safe now. It's OK. Come to me." And Forrest and Theo are on the other side of the door going, Mom, why are you calling the bird after dad? And the bird just sat there staring at me. And then it took off. And it flew over my hands. And in between the space in between the door and the floor, it scooted out, went past the boys, flew down the stairs-- and we had already opened up the kitchen doors-- and it flew out the kitchen doors. And it was safe. And it was gone. The next day, I'm in the kitchen. And Forrest calls out from the TV room. He was watching cartoons. He goes, "Mom, the bird's back. It's at the end of the couch." So before I even go into the room, I open up the kitchen doors, just to make sure we have an exit for the bird. And I run into the family room. And sure enough, there is the bird. And it has become a drill now. This is the third consecutive day with the bird in our house. And we follow the bird around. And this time it goes through the living room, then it comes back into the kitchen. And I actually got the camera out. And I took a picture of it. And the bird flew out, just like that. It was gone. And two months later, they found Spalding's body in the East River. I think with suicide, in particular, it's a really hard death to digest. There's a lot of guilt. You go back and back. And you get into that mode of, I should have done this. I could have done that. It's a seesaw of guilt and forgiveness. So last year was my 47th birthday. And I was feeling kind of blue. And I was really missing Spalding. And I went on this bike route that the two of us used to take together. And it ends up by the water. And just before I got to the water, I saw this little, brownish gray bird sitting on the side of the road, just like the one that we had in our house. And I passed by it on my bike. I ride pretty fast. But something told me, go back. And I did. And the bird was just sitting there. And I'd get up close to it, and it didn't fly away. So I figured the bird was hurt. And I'm looking at the bird, crouching over it, and this jogger goes by me. And he said, "Oh, that bird was there two hours ago when I started my run." So I raced back home on my bike. And I went into the house. And I collected a shoe box. And I filled it with grass and bird seed. I got some rubber gloves, and I drove back to where the bird was. And the bird was still there. It was about a mile from my house. And it's just looking up at me. So I thought it was really hurt. And I tried to scoop it into the shoe box. And it just gets up, looks at me, and flies away. There's nothing wrong with it. Wings were fine. I saw it flying off into the distance. And I thought-- it just hit me like a ton of bricks right at that moment-- there was nothing I could do to save this innocent little bird, which, in the end, he was fine. He flew away. And there was nothing I could do to save Spalding. Kathie Russo. Coming up, when men of God meet men of chickens. 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 a theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, as we enter the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the greatest poultry consumption time of the year in our country, we bring you our annual Poultry Slam. Most years on our show that means stories about fowls of all kinds. This year, we're devoting the hour to stories about birds and the supernatural. And specifically, most of these stories seem to be about chickens and God. We have arrived at act three of our program. Act Three, A Pastor and his Flock. Working in a poultry processing plant is probably one of the most unpleasant jobs you can have in this country. It's smelly, it's wet, it's dangerous. Workers get nicked and cut by small knives and scissors. They get carpal tunnel from making the same hand and arm motions over and over. A recent Wake Forest University School of Medicine study of poultry workers found an astonishing 70% of the workers at one North Carolina plant said that they had gotten sick or injured in the previous year at their jobs. The job pays badly too. And as a result, many of the people who do it are immigrants, Latinos mostly. It's also the biggest and fastest growing sector of the meat industry. Nearly a quarter million people work in poultry plants. So you would think this would be a perfect industry for unionization. But barely any poultry plants are represented by a union, especially in the South. And that's where the church comes in. The church, especially the Catholic Church, is one of the few institutions doing outreach to poultry workers, giving them space to meet, distributing information about workers' rights, speaking out about bad conditions. And sometimes organizers use the church to intervene with company management in a very, very personal way. Sarah Koenig tells the story of one company called Case Farms and a plant they have in Morganton, North Carolina, in one of the least unionized states in the country. Case Farms in Morganton has been something of a poster plant for labor problems. Worker complaints there were so notorious, so widely publicized, they're partly what prompted the secretary of labor to announce in 1996 that he would investigate the poultry industry. "Sweatshop conditions," he said, "will not be tolerated." In 1995, three young workers got mad about conditions at Case Farms. They were being denied bathroom breaks, they said. And the speed of the production line was dangerously fast. They went to talk to a manager named Ken Wilson. He told them they either had to go back to work or leave the plant. When they didn't move, he had them arrested. "We had no choice but to do what we did," he told The Charlotte Observer. The workers responded by doing what poultry workers never do, voting in a union. The company fought that union for five years-- never giving it a contract-- until finally, in 2001, the union just pulled out. Four years later in 2005, the workers tried again. And again, one of the central figures in the plant's anti-union campaign was Ken Wilson, the manager who called in the police in 1995. He was director of human resources, but even more than that, he was the public face of the plant. I've had an opportunity to meet with him at the plant itself when we were negotiating about the conditions. Francisco Risso is director of the Western North Carolina Workers' Center, which advocates for poultry workers. And I think the last meeting was talking about why they shouldn't wage this anti-union campaign if the workers wanted to have a union. But his position was very clear that the company would be willing to spend any amount of money to keep the union out. Was is it overt, like he literally would say, "We are willing to spend any amount of money to keep this union out?" Or was it more oblique than that? It was pretty overt like that. I would characterize it like what you just said. Believe or it not. Wow, so there was no reading between the lines. It was just-- No, that's pretty much what he said. We're ready to fight this until the end. When I reach Ken Wilson on the phone, he's just as direct with me as he was with Francisco. Here's what he thinks of labor unions. "They're just a competing business. To make money, they need members. And the way they get members is by convincing workers that they're being mistreated." So their job is to convince the employees that the company is doing something wrong. I personally feel that the company was looking out for the best interest of the employees. We run a safe plant. So we run a business. They run a business. And at the end of the day, we're going to do what's best for our business. Knowing Ken Wilson's attitude, Francisco turned to God. He pulled out a tactic that's being used with more and more frequency at workers' centers all over the country. Instead of just using the church to help organize the workers, he would use the church to try to get to management, to get to Ken Wilson. A coalition of tomato pickers did it in south Florida in their fight against Taco Bell. They enlisted the United Methodist Church. The head of Taco Bell's parent company was a member. Cintas commercial laundry workers have done it. It was used at a candle making company in Arkansas. In Texas, the Workers Defense Project has held prayer vigils outside employers' houses in their suburban neighborhoods. They even distributed flyers at an employer's church, telling his fellow congregants he was withholding pay from construction day laborers. They got a restaurant owner's rabbi to intervene on behalf of workers who were being paid below minimum wage. It might not sound like the toughest angle to take. But it's one of the last, best tools worker rights advocates have at this point, especially in states down south, where unions have so little influence. Instead of the usual demonstrations and legal challenges, they're playing the faith card, reminding bosses of their moral obligations to their employees. One organizer told me it's more effective than calling in the lawyers. But it doesn't always work, as Francisco discovered at Case Farms when he tried it himself just as the union vote was approaching. Somewhere around that time, I guess, we found out that he was a member of the local Episcopal church. My wife attended church there. And so through her I knew the pastor there, the priest, Revered Walker. And so I found out if he knew Ken, what the relationship was like. And then I asked him if he would be willing to speak with Ken and talk about what the church says about workers and about how we're supposed to treat the poor. Why did you think an appeal to his faith, or his belief in the Bible, or something would be more effective than a pocketbook argument? I think what I was hoping for was that he would be open to having a good discussion with the priest, and maybe to really faithfully reflect on what the situation was, and reflect on what the faith had to say about it. Not so much that he would be shamed into doing something, but that his heart would really be touched. And he would see how he's supposed to act. Was it also partly that just, frankly, the pocketbook argument wasn't working? Yeah. So from your point of view, it's like, well what else can you appeal to, really? Uh-huh. I think that that's the basic-- that's the kind of thing that if we had anything in common with our enemy, with our adversary in this, that it was that, that you have a shared, proclaimed faith. My name is Bruce Walker, and I am rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Morganton, North Carolina. Bruce Walker had come to town three years earlier knowing nothing of Case Farms or the problems there. No more than one or two Case Farms workers attended his church, which was mostly white and middle class. But Father Walker did know Ken Wilson. And he thought he was a nice man. When one of Ken's co-workers was killed in a car accident, Ken had asked Father Walker to come to the plant and do some grief counseling. And it had gone well. Through Francisco though, Father Walker was learning about the safety complaints at Case Farms. And he was sympathetic. Then Francisco asked him to come to the plant on the day of the union vote to talk to Ken. Father Walker was a little hesitant at first. I wasn't naive. I knew that doing that, the possibility of it not going well, turning out well, was there. And there would be the possibility of alienation down the road. And I didn't want that. And when I went that morning, it was pretty early. I saw Francisco. He introduced me to some of his co-workers and friends. And I did see Ken there. And I went over and spoke to Ken, and told him I was there to be supportive of this process. And I did suggest to him that if I could be helpful in mediation, I would be glad to do that. And he had told me before that he was interested too in the rights of the workers and their safety. And I told Ken, I said, I don't see there's any difference in that idea. I think everybody here wants the workers to have a safe place. I don't know that we have the same road or the same method of doing that. But he listened. And he was nice enough with me. But I could tell he was flush. All the signs were there that I 'd stepped into it big time. I got the distinct feeling that he wished I had not been there that day. I was walking out the front door of our plant, going across the street. We have another small office across the street. Ken Wilson remembers the whole thing a little differently. It was a more casual meeting. And he was walking down the street. And we just happened to run into one another. Were you surprised to see him there? Oh yeah. Ken also remembers their conversation a little differently. He says Father Walker told him he had mixed feelings about being there that day, since he had parishioners on both sides of the union issue, Ken and another guy. And that he was there to support both of them. He said that he would be willing to mediate or to do what he could to bring the groups together. And of course I explained to him that it was an election. And in an election, you would have a winner and a loser. And at the end of the day, it would be left up to our employees to make that decision. It's not so much what Father Walker said that day that bothered Ken. It's how the whole thing looked. Under the circumstances, I would rather that he not had been there. But I guess the only word that would describe it would be disappointed. What was disappointing about it? His presence. Did you read it as in support of the of the union? I would think from anyone else's perspective, they probably would have felt so, yes. Oh, you're saying that the way it looked was as if your priest had come in favor of the union. Exactly. I see. It doesn't look great for for a manager's priest to be showing up. [LAUGHING] Kind of a poor reflection on the manager, isn't it? Maybe I should up my tithe, don't you think? Did you say up your tithe? Yeah. Yeah, right. Well precisely, precisely. Do you think the church-- is there a Christian argument to be made that, look we need to fight for the poor and for human rights. And we need to be involved with this stuff. And it is our place to show up and do this work? The church has a right to do as it sees fit. My only request from any church group is to make sure they get all their facts before they take a position. From Ken's perspective, the facts were these. The workers voted to keep the union out that day, 296 to 225. From the perspective of those who wanted the union though, the no vote was the result of a long and intimidating anti-union campaign. Father Walker says his relationship with Ken Wilson pretty much ended that same day. He got the feeling that Ken just didn't think it was any of his business. Here's Father Walker. Perhaps he felt that my role was about more traditional things, like conducting worship on Sunday morning and visiting the sick. And as far as engaging in anything that was involved in injustice, that I was out of my realm. That's the feeling I got. And that's more of a feeling. And I think he alluded to kind of, what are you doing here? This isn't where you should be. But I see just the opposite. I think that's the way a lot of people feel these days about clergy. But at the same time, as a Christian I look at Jesus as an example of what we're to be about. If you note through scripture, most of the time, Jesus is out on the road, so to speak, preaching from a mountaintop or by the seashore, out in the community going from one place to the next. Rarely is he contained within a building. And maybe that's-- as people's guide, we need to be outside our confines, more out into the world. Ken Wilson says he doesn't remember quitting Grace Church exactly, at least not consciously. But that's how it seemed to Father Walker. He called Ken a couple of times after that, wrote him a reconciling note. But he says he never really saw him back in church. In any case, about a year after the union vote, the Wilsons moved to the other side of the state, near Raleigh. Did you-- afterwards, considering it didn't seem to actually go so well-- did you regret talking to him? Did you regret taking that step? Maybe a little at first, but not now. And if I have a regret, probably it's that I didn't do more to be helpful in that situation. I didn't go back to him the next day or the following day, and say, we really need to talk. Or maybe get with Francisco again, and say, how are you feeling, and how can I help you more? If I have any regrets, it's probably that I didn't do enough. Francisco doesn't think Father Walker failed. Maybe he didn't change Ken's mind that day. But who knows? In a year or two it could sink in. The Case Farms fight is still going on. The workers haven't given up. They're still talking about unionizing. Right now they say the company is trying to fire about 100 employees unfairly, including many experienced workers, in order to deny them benefits, or just get rid of people who tend to complain and organize. Francisco and a church deacon met with two newer managers at the plant recently to talk about the firings, but they didn't get anywhere. So now Francisco is trying to find out where these managers go to church to see if their priests will talk to them. Workers at Case Farms are pretty pessimistic at the moment, Francisco says. And it's easy to see why. But he himself isn't. He believes people are basically good, which means the union-busting manager is always just a conversation away from conversion. Christianity is full of examples like that, he says. Think of Saul, who persecuted Christians until a vision of Jesus blinded him on the road to Damascus. After that, he was Paul the Apostle. Sarah Koenig. She's one of the producers of our program. Act Four, Twistery Mystery. We now turn to Wayne Curtis, who has been puzzling over an unexplained phenomenon involving chickens, a riddle that is nearly two centuries old. I was researching tornadoes, leafing through 19th century newspaper accounts of the havoc they caused. And I found it was hard not to notice the sheer amount of poultry involved. It's mostly chickens, sometimes turkeys, rarely geese. The birds typically show up about 2/3 of the way into an article, after the description of entire barns being hoovered up into the sky, or bits of straw piercing a fence post. Sometimes whole flocks are ingested by the twister, and scattered lifelessly across the landscape like large snowflakes. But more often it's just a few birds. And these often attract the attention of newspapers for one reason. They're alive and clucking, but plucked cleaned as Butterballs. When I came upon the first reference to a tornado-plucked chicken, I jotted it down as a freak occurrence. But then I came across another, and another. It turns out newspapers are filled with dozens-- if not hundreds-- of similar reports of naked poultry. A few examples. Rhode Island 1838, chickens, quote, "were seen walking about in all their naked simplicity after the spout had passed on." Missouri 1877, quote, "feathers were blown from chickens." Iowa 1893, quote "chickens were found alive and completely stripped of their feathers." And the year 1878 was a notably harsh one for poultry. In North Carolina, nearly 1,200 chickens were sucked into the sky and quote, "left free of feathers and ready for the stew pot." If you were living in the 19th century and you wondered what a vengeful God looked like, a tornado would have been a pretty good representation. It had that whole finger of death thing going on, descending from the sky and randomly smiting and destroying. But this was a God given to occasional whimsy. The tornado would take a house and reduce it to splinters, but deposit a woman, still in a bathtub, atop a tree. Or it would take a chicken, strip it of its feathers, and set it free. In 1842, a pioneering meteorologist in Ohio named Elias Loomis decided that naked chickens were not just a curiosity but a key that would unlock the secrets of tornadoes. At the time, virtually nothing was known about tornadoes, what caused them, how fast their winds could go, what was going on inside of them. Loomis figured that if he could calculate the speed at which wind blew off a chicken's feathers, he would have the first scientific estimate of the wind speed inside a tornado. So he loaded a freshly killed chicken into a six pound cannon, pointed the gun skyward, lit the fuse and stood back. The cannon roared. The feathers soared to a height of 20 or 30 feet at a velocity Loomis estimated to be 341 miles per hour. He carefully examined the evidence and found the feathers had indeed been plucked clean. The only problem was with the chicken. It had been blown into small fragments quote, "only a part of which could be found," Loomis wrote. And so, no scientific conclusions could be drawn. Loomis didn't give up on chickens. He still believed they held some of the secrets to tornadoes. Another theory floating around was that the funnel of a tornado contained a pocket of astonishingly low barometric pressure. Maybe, Loomis thought, when a chicken was sucked into a tornado, the air in its hollow quills expanded so rapidly that the feathers basically exploded out of the chicken's skin. To test this, Loomis put dead chickens in vacuum jars, then sucked out the air. The experiment was no more conclusive than the cannon. The feathers remained unmoved, still attached to limp chickens. What Loomis did next was excellent news for the chickens of Ohio. He abandoned the study of tornadoes, and went on to explore theories of the aurora borealis. After that, weather researchers pretty much ignored poultry for more than a century. Then, in the 1970s, there was a minor eruption of renewed interest in tornado-plucked chickens. In part, we can thank the Atomic Energy Commission for this. They wanted to make sure that nuclear reactors were being designed to withstand the worst possible tornado. To do this, they assembled a team of civil engineers and meteorologists from Texas Tech to figure out what exactly that maximum possible tornado might be. The team decided that it would be prudent to chase down stray tornado myths-- no matter how bizarre-- to ensure that nothing inexplicable would slip by. Where did the chickens fit in? One of the myths they set out to disprove was that tornadoes could produce bizarrely high wind speeds-- as much as 800 miles per hour-- and that it was these high wind speeds that removed feathers from chickens. But the team quickly discarded this idea when they learned that chickens could start to lose their feathers in winds as little as 30 miles per hour. Then in 1975, an atmospheric scientist named Bernard Vonnegut-- the brother of writer Kurt Vonnegut-- introduced a new theory about why chickens lose their feathers during tornadoes, fear. In other words, when chickens got scared, their feathers loosened. In a paper he published entitled "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed," he said quote, "possibly this may be a mechanism for survival, leaving a predator with only a mouthful of feathers and permitting the bird to escape." It was an elegant theory. And it became a widely accepted answer to the historic question about de-feathered chickens. As a theory, it has just one downside. There doesn't seem to be a single person in the business of studying poultry who finds it even vaguely plausible. Or I couldn't find them anyway. Wayne Kuenzel is with the Center of Excellence for Poultry Science at the University of Arkansas. And he told me that the chicken industry has spent huge sums trying to figure out how to pluck chickens quickly and efficiently. If all it took was a good fright, poultry processing plants would be filled with animatronic coyotes. Plus, he pointed out, from the perspective of evolution, it doesn't make much sense for a chicken to lose its flight feathers when trying to escape predators. So basically, we're back to where we were about 1840. We still don't know why some chickens ended up running around without their feathers after tornadoes. The naked chickens have had their encounter with science. And the naked chickens have pretty much won. Wayne Curtis is a writer in New Orleans. He is the author most recently of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails." Act Five, Chicken Coop for the Soul. Shalom Auslander grew up as an Orthodox Jew, attending religious school in a community of Orthodox Jews. And he has this story to end this show about supernatural forces and chickens. When Yankel Morgenstern died and went to heaven, he was surprised to find that God was a large chicken. The chicken was about 30 feet tall and spoke perfect English. He stood before a glimmering, eternal coop made of chicken wire of shimmering gold. And behold, inside, a nest of diamonds. "No freaking way," said Morgenstern. "You know," said Chicken, "that's the first thing everyone says when they meet me. 'No freaking way.' How does that make me feel?" Morgenstern threw himself at Chicken's feet, kissing his enormous, holy claws. "Hear O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is one," Morgenstern cried out. Chicken stepped back and shrugged. "Eh," he said, bobbing his enormous head. "What?" Asked Morgenstern. "I don't know. What's that supposed to do for me? Hear O Israel?" he asked. "How's it go again?" "It's Shema," Morgenstern said with hesitation, "The prayer. We say it twice a day." Chicken stomped around in a circle before settling down in his holy nest of nests. "Yeah," he said, "I know. I've been hearing it for years. Still not sure what it means though. Hero Israel. Hero, like the sandwich?" "Not hero like the sandwich," snapped Morgenstern. He stood up, clutching his black felt hat in his hand. "Hear O Israel. It means that you are one, that you are the only, you know, God." That last word didn't come easily. "Of course I am," said Chicken. "Do you see any other chickens around here? Hey Gabe. Gabe," called Chicken. "Is it Hero Israel, like the sandwich, or Hear O Israel?" A stocky old man appeared from the clouds. He wore a pair of dirty Carhartt overalls and smoked a cigarette. "It's hero like the sandwich sir. You are quite correct." He turned his head sharply to Morgenstern. "Morgenstern?" he asked. "Yes." "Follow me." "Gabe," he said extending his hand to Morgenstern as they walked through the nothingness to the nowhere. "As in Gabriel, right?" asked Morgenstern. "Right," said Gabe. "I'm sort of the head ranch hand around here. I make sure Chicken has enough feed and water. I clean his coop. You know, general maintenance." "Couldn't the Chicken just create his own food?" asked Morgenstern. "Not the Chicken," said Gabe, "just Chicken. And no he can't create his own food. He's a chicken." Morgenstern asked Gabe where he was taking him. "Nowhere," he said, "this is what we do here. Wherever you go, there you are." "Christ," cried Morgenstern, "you're Buddhist. Damn, I knew the Buddhists were right. Always so happy and peaceful." "He's not a Buddhist," interrupted Gabe. He paused to light a cigarette, Marlboro Reds. "He's a chicken." "I need to go back to Earth," Morgenstern blurted out. "Earth, why?" Morgenstern turned to face Gabe. "Let me tell them, Gabe. Please, let me tell my family, just my family, Gabe. He's a chicken, not Hashem, the one true judge, not Adonai, the Lord Almighty. Oh, the years I wasted. Let me tell them so they don't have to jump through the hoops I did, trying to please some maniacal father who art in heaven. Nine children, Gabe. Nine full, happy, worry-free lives they should have. Let them drive on Saturday. Let them eat bacon. Let them get the lunch special at Red Lobster. McDonald's, Gabe. Do you have any of those fries up here? Do you? What does a hamburger with cheese taste like? Please, let me tell them Gabe." Gabe took a long drag from his cigarette and shook his head. "They won't listen," he said. "I've tried telling a few myself. But you want to go back to Earth? Go. Go back to Earth." Morgenstern hugged Gabe tightly. "Don't you have to clear it with the Chicken?" "Not the Chicken," said Gabe. "Just Chicken. And no, I don't. Chicken doesn't care either way." He flicked his cigarette butt off to the side. He gets his feed in the morning, and his droppings cleaned in the afternoon, and that's all he really wants to know. I'll see you in a couple of years." Morgenstern awoke. He rolled his head slowly to the side and saw his wife and daughter Hannah sitting at the table in the hospital room eating their dinner, chicken. "Don't eat," was all he could manage. His wife jumped, startled at his sudden awakening. "Bar Hashem," she clapped. "Blessed is the Lord who makes miracles happen every day. Don't shake your head, Yankel. You have tubes in your nose. Hannah come quick. Your father is alive." His daughter approached cautiously, holding a barbecued chicken drumstick in her hand. "May Hashem grant you a full and speedy recovery," she mumbled in Yiddish while staring at her shoes. She spotted a piece of barbecued God on her blouse, picked it off with her fingers, and popped into her mouth. Morgenstern groaned and passed out. Friday afternoon, he was back home in his very own bed. He had decided to put off telling his family about Chicken until he was out of the hospital. He would tell him tonight as they gathered around the Sabbath table. He would speak to them the word of Chicken, and they would be freed, maybe jump in the car afterwards, catch a movie. When the sun had finally set, and the Sabbath had finally arrived, Morgenstern pulled himself into his wheelchair, took a deep breath, and rolled himself into the dining room. His wife had set the table with the good tablecloth, the good silverware, and the good glasses. He watched her light the good Sabbath candles, covering her face with her hands and silently praying to a god who wasn't there. "Please hear my blessings," she prayed to nobody. She'd have had better luck with a handful of scratch, thought Morgenstern. Maybe some cut up apple. She turned to him with love in her eyes. "Got tsu danken," she said in Yiddish. "Thank God." She came to him, knelt beside his wheelchair, and hugged him. "I have to tell you something," he said. "I know," she sobbed into the good napkin. "I know." "I don't think you do." He rolled away from her. "When I was dead," said Morgenstern, "I met God." "We all meet God every day," said his wife, "if only we know where to look." "No, exclaimed Morgenstern, "you're not listening. How do you think I got back here?" he asked her. "Who else but the All-Merciful would send you back to me?" She replied. He could take no more. "Who?" shouted Morgenstern as he wheeled himself around to the head of the table. "I'll tell you who." The loud voices attracted the children. And they gathered slowly around the Sabbath table. "Let me tell you a little something about your All Knowing. Let me tell you a little something about your All Merciful." Morgenstern looked from Shmuel to Yonah to Meyer to Rivka to Dovid to Hannah to Deena to Leah to little Yichezkel. The children were all showered, their hair neatly combed, and dressed in their finest Sabbath clothes. She looked at his wife. She was wearing his favorite wig. "Children," he began. "God," he said, "is," he continued, "a," he added. The light from the Sabbath candles flickered in the eyes of his children. Little Meyer was wearing a brand new yarmulke and couldn't stop fidgeting with it. Shmuel held a handful of Torah notes from his rabbi he would read after the meal. And the girls would be looking forward to singing their favorite Sabbath songs. "God is a what?" Asked little Hannah. He couldn't do it. "God," Morgenstern said to his children, "is a merciful God." His wife came to his side. "He is the God of our forefathers," he continued. "Blessed is God, who in his mercy restores life to the dead." The children cheered. Morgenstern closed his eyes and hugged his children tightly. His wife bent over and kissed him gently on his forehead. "May his kindness shine down on us forever," she whispered. She smiled then, went into the kitchen, and brought out the soup. Chicken. Shalom Auslander. This story first appeared in his book, "Beware of God." Well our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from [? PJ Vote ?] and Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. And call him sentimental, call him crazy, every Thanksgiving he does the same thing. Take a chicken, strip it of its feathers, and set it free. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Maupassant didn't care much for the Eiffel Tower. And he didn't care for the food at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. But he ate lunch at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower all the time. "It is the only place in Paris," he used to say, "where I don't have to see it." That is exactly how I feel about my job. I come into work days. I come into work weekends. I stay late at night at work. At least if I'm here, I think, I'm not out worrying about all the things I'm supposed to be doing when I get here. My dad used to work days and weekends and nights when I was a kid. Now, some Saturdays, he calls me up. I'm at the office. He's at the office. A couple weeks ago, I realized two things about my job, my job producing this radio show, this one right here that you're listening to. I realized that every week as I come to grips with the fact of having to actually do the show, I go through the five stages that Elizabeth Kubler Ross says you go through to come to grips with death. Do you remember the stages? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. That was the first thing I realized. The second thing I realized was that if I'm having these feelings, I'm spending way too much time at my job. You know, I'm not here to talk about me though. I'm here to talk about you. Our show today, it's all about you. You, you work too hard. You spend too many hours at work. You spend too many hours thinking about work. And if you don't have a job, you spend too many useless hours thinking about that. Today's show, The Job That Takes Over Your Life. Act One, a guy who interviews sick people until he comes to believe that he is sick. Act Two, some teenagers who think they're signing up to be in a play find out they're joining a sort of cult instead. Act Three, guys who thrown in the slammer simply because they don't want to work in unsafe conditions. Act Four, let's not even go into what's in Act Four right now. Act One. I was hired to interview men and women in the state of Utah who receive Medicaid support for treatment of mental illnesses generally diagnosed as schizophrenia. That's Scott Carrier, who's had an on again, off again, career as a radio reporter in Salt Lake City. He was hired for this interviewing job because the director of the research project heard some of his radio stories and thought he was a good interviewer, somebody who knew how to listen. They taught Scott how to administer this test which measured mental health. It was 100 questions, each of which was scored on a scale of one to seven. It took an hour to give the test. Scott was paid $30 for each test he gave. The people he gave the test to got $5. I had little understanding of schizophrenia before I began, and I have little more understanding now. I took the job because I had no other. I took the job because I just quit my steady job, my professional job, after realizing that what I wanted more than anything was to put my boss on the floor and stand on his throat and watch him gag. Then my wife moved out, took the kids and everything. She said, "I've thought about it, and I really think it's the best thing for me at this time in my life." And so I took the job interviewing schizophrenics because it was offered to me, and because it was all there seemed to be. And it seemed somehow predestined, a karmic response that could not be avoided. It would only be temporary, something to get through the summer. And I was told that they needed someone willing to drive around the state, through the small towns searching out individuals who were often transient and prone to hiding. I like to drive. I like to travel, and I like the idea of pursuit. So I took the job and did the job, and my life will never be the same. The patient is 21 years old and has lived with his parents since his discharge from the Army. He has no friends, no recreational activities and no social life. He spends his time writing and reading, but these activities do not give him any pleasure. He has lost weight, has general anxiety and loss of libido and occasional feelings of unreality. He is worried about his unpredictable behavior. For example, getting down on all fours and chewing the grass because he was thinking what it would be like to be a cow. The patient is 25 years old and believes that she is the devil and therefore responsible for all the evil in the world. She has not been out of her house for seven days and only comes down from her room for meals. A few days ago, her mother walked into her room and found her crying. She asked her mother what was the most painful punishment that one human being could inflict upon another. The mother tried to get the reason for this question, and her daughter mumbled something about the devil having to be punished for the benefit of humanity, something about having to die for his sins. When the mother asked her if she still thought she was the devil, she answered, "Let's not get into that again. It only upsets you, and you don't believe me anyway, even when the evidence is all around you, plain for you to see." The people I interview are all so sad, so lonely with such thin souls, like ghosts and demons have invaded their hearts and are sucking their souls dry. A person's soul should be like an ocean, but a schizophrenic's soul is like a pool of rain in a parking lot. They suffer, and they are completely alone in their suffering. And there's nothing I can do, nothing anyone can do, to bring them back. I come home at night and cry. I sob like a three-year-old. Today, halfway through an interview with a man in Tooele, he says "I have a crystal in my pouch. Do you want to see it?" I say "OK," and he takes it out, a normal crystal the size of a large paper clip. And he says, "I can look through this, and it will tell me whether you're a good person or a bad person. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to look through it or not?" My first thought is to say, "Do you want to go on with the interview? Maybe when we're done, you can look through the crystal." But then, I realized that he's really asking me to take his test, just like I'm asking him to take mine. I come into his house, I ask him very personal questions, and I expect him to answer honestly. And why should he? So I say, "OK, go ahead." And he puts the crystal up to his eye, turns it clockwise and counterclockwise, back and forth, squinting, looking me up and down. And he says, "I can't tell for sure. I'm going to have to read your mind. Here, take my hand." He holds out his right hand with the crystal resting in the palm. I take his hand, and he puts his left hand over mine and squeezes it tight and shakes it and goes into a small spasm. The he lets go, and sits back like he's exhausted. He asks me if I felt anything, and I say, "Maybe a little." And he says, "I sent you a message. I put it in your mind. I told you what is wrong with me." I'm not supposed to figure out what's wrong with these people. I'm just supposed to ask the questions and score the answers from one to seven. This is partly because I'm not a doctor and might get something going that I wouldn't know how to contain. But it's mainly because my supervisors want clean data. They want all the people asking the questions to be doing it in the same way. I'm not supposed to get emotional. I'm not supposed to let the patient get emotional. The therapy part of the county mental health system is in another department. I wouldn't even know what number to call, and I've been told more than once not to worry about it. I should never have let him take the crystal out of his pouch. I drove around all day trying to find a Navajo man. He lives very close to the Four Corners, the cross where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet. It's all dirt roads, a house every five miles or so, no addresses, no phones. I stop at every house and knock on the door, but either nobody's home, or nobody will answer. I flag down every car that passes and ask directions, and the people offer complicated directions that I follow as best as possible, sometimes driving for 20 or 30 miles. But it's always the wrong place, or nobody's home, or there just isn't a house there at all. Driving around, I think about how I have some of the same problems as the people I interview. I'm angry, depressed, prone to paranoid delusions, and I worry a lot. Up to now, I thought these were common problems, and that I was more or less able to control them. But now, I don't know. I feel like I'm just faking it. Eventually, late in the afternoon, I find the man, or at least I think he's the man. I'm a third of the way through the test before I realize he's not the right guy. "When was your last visit to a mental health clinic?" "I don't go to the clinic." "When did you last see a doctor?" "I don't have a doctor." "Do you blame yourself for anything you've done or not done?" "No." "Have you felt more self-confident than usual?" "No." "Have you heard voices or other things that weren't there, or that other people couldn't hear, or have seen things that weren't there?" And he says, "I think you want to talk to my son." And I ask him what his son's name is, and he says, "Same as mine." I come back the next morning and interview the son in the kitchen. They make coffee for me on a propane camp stove as the house has no electricity. The son is 19 years old, a good looking kid, tall, healthy, says he used to run cross country in high school. He seems to be fine, but as I go through the questions, he starts to fix his eyes on mine, a direct, almost hypnotic stare straight into my head like he's trying to pull me in and trap me. I try to look back, to look just as deeply into his mind, but it's like looking into a cave. He says he hears voices, satanic voices, and that he worries a lot about his shoes, that they're not the right kind, not the kind he sees on MTV. I can't tell if he's sick, or if he's just trying to torture me. And I drive away thinking, I don't know anything about this disease, that I know even less than when I started. I spent two days driving around and I made $30. And I feel really, really, tired. The house is dark as all the windows have heavy curtains pulled nearly shut. The curtains over the big picture window in the living room are open just a bit, and the light cuts through like a laser beam and hits the red, shag carpet, throwing up small dust particles and cigarette ash. Two feet away from the light, near the television, is a slice of pizza lying upside down in the carpet. I'm interviewing a woman, a mother, and her teenage daughter is on the phone talking to her boyfriend, or rather a series of boyfriends who call and call, and all of them wanted to go out right now, but her mother won't let her. She's trying to answer my questions, trying to concentrate and be polite, but she's mainly listening to what her daughter is saying on the phone. And will suddenly switch from saying, "No, no, I've been feeling fine. I haven't had a relapse and months," to screaming out, "Is that John? I told you never to talk to him again." Or, "Who is it? Is it a boy? You can't go out. Tell him he has to come over here." I can't stop looking at the slice of pizza on the carpet. I keep looking at the slice of pizza because it's the only clue that the woman is sick. I mean she has a teenage daughter and a dirty house, and maybe she shouldn't try to wear her makeup to bed, but these are not necessarily symptoms of schizophrenia. She seems to be fine, just worn out, until I get to the question, "Have you been worrying a lot?" And she says yes she has. She's been worrying a lot that the elders of the Church, the Mormon Church, will take her daughter away from her. And I ask her why, and she says because she stopped taking her medication. And I ask her, "Why did you stop taking your medication?" And she says that the only reason she takes it is because she told her bishop that she was visited by the archangel Gabriel, and that she had had sex with him. And then, she was also visited by the archangel Michael, and that she had sex with both of them at once. And that they'd ravished her almost every night. So her bishop made her go to a doctor, and the doctor gave her some pills. And she took the pills, and the angels stopped coming. The bishop and the elders had told her that if she had sex with any more angels, they'd take her daughter away. So I asked her again why she'd stopped taking her medication. And she says, "I'm lonely. I miss them. I want them to come back." Today in a restaurant eating lunch between interviews, I decided to take the test. I answered the questions and scored myself appropriately, and at some point I realized I wasn't doing so well. I decided not to even add up the points because then I'd be left with a score, and I'd never forget it. If I were to write a report on myself, it would sound something like this. "The patient is 36 years old and lives alone since his wife left him three weeks ago. She took the kids and all the silverware, except for a large knife and a bowl and a coffee cup. The patient admits that her leaving may have had something to do with the fact that without warning, he completely gutted the house, tore out all the walls and ceilings, all the lath and plaster right down to the studs. He says he did this in order to live like a primitive. When asked if he was successful, he says it was the first step in the right direction." "The patient is a 36-year-old male who lives alone since his wife and children left him two months ago. He says there's a darkness that separates him from other people, a heavy darkness, like looking at a person from the bottom of a well. He believes that if he could say the right words, then the darkness would go away. He says he sometimes knows the right words but cannot say them. Other times, he can't even think of the words to say." "The patient is 36 years old and lives alone since his wife and children left him three months ago. Last week, he went fishing in the [? San Juans and now believes that there's no better fisherman than himself. He says, 'I can't tell you about it because talking about fishing is silly, like farting and tap dancing at the same time. All I can say is I walk around in the water, and I know the instant that fish will jump for the fly. I cut open their stomachs and squeeze out the bugs in my hand, study what they eat, how it all gets digested, even the exoskeleton and wings.' He says he was sick before, but now he's OK, and that it was the fly rod, just holding the rod in his hand, that cured him. His house is clean. The electricity is on. The walls have been sheet-rocked and painted white. He says, 'I'll have to ask her, beg her, and maybe she'll come back.'" That's Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City. Years after writing that story, it is now in print in a collection of Scott's work, which comes out in March, called Running After Antelope. Coming up, more stories about jobs that take over your life. Act Two, Tribe. Of course this is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And a couple weeks ago, coming out of The Bluebird, a bar here on Clybourn Avenue in Chicago. I was with my friend Teresa, and we're going out of the bar. And we walk, and there's this group of maybe 40 people that comes skipping. I mean that's a word you don't really use very often to describe people, adults, in front of you, but they were more or less skipping down the street, chattering, half walking, half running. And they greet us joyously and look us in the eye. And they surround us, and they seem curious and happy and alive. It seems like a group of three or four dozen people who are in love, in love, all of them. It turns out it's the cast of Hair, which is in town, or was in town then. These are mostly college kids from Cal State Fullerton who've been drafted into this road company of the show, grown long hair. One woman tells me, "I have never felt so strongly about love and peace and the war." They're not just in a play, they say, they are on a mission, a mission to spread tolerance and love. And they say things like-- 1996, we need the message of love, peace and freedom because without a small group of people that can hold onto those old values, we're in major trouble. The idea is we have to live the life so that we can continue that that life is real. They're all wearing matching necklaces with these little Native American stones hung on them, signifying that they're are members of a tribe they call the Potawatomi Tribe. They all live together in a dorm. And a couple days after this, Peter Clowney, from the staff of our radio show, decided to visit that dorm to see just how much this job, being in this play, had taken over their lives. When I arrive at the dorm, it's 1:30 in the afternoon, and most of the tribe is just getting out of bed. The show's choreographer is playing Prince on a boombox in the second floor lobby to wake everyone up. About six people dance, and late risers in towels and boxers weave their way around them on their way to the showers. Some of them stop for hugs. I collar one for questioning. So are you a happy member of the tribe? Oh, extremely happy, extremely happy. I've never been happier, ever. What does the tribe do for you? They give me so much love, love that I've never felt before in my entire. It's so scary because I called my mom on Sunday, and I told her how this has been really life-changing and everything. And I really scared her. But I mean it's just been so great. I wish it could never end. I really do. I hear this maybe a dozen times while I hang out with the tribe. Phyllis Ivy, an enthusiastic member of the tribe, listens in on my interview with Ephraim, and then she jumps in. I have a question, Ephraim. Do you differentiate the show, Hair, from the tribe, or is this a production that-- because we're going to go on. We're all going to play other roles and everything. I mean true, this is such a life-changing experience for me as well, but when you get down to it, we are actors. We are paid to play this role. This show is so different thought. True. I will never be as close to other actors as I will to this group. The original producer or Hair, Michael Butler, traveled the country for two years looking for a college production of the show that he could turn into a national touring company. He chose this group because on stage, in some undefinable way, they seem like a real tribe. They have the spirit of a real tribe, even if they aren't the greatest singers and dancers. And in the early days of rehearsals for the national tour, they had encounter sessions where it was drilled into them that this is more than just a show, that this is more than just a business, that they really are a tribe. But of course it is a business. People have jobs to do. They have to be able to sing and act and show up on time. And when the producers take the show on the road, they'll face a business problem. There's only enough money to bring about 25 of the cast members, downsizing from 38. Phyllis Ivy says it'd be understandable if they chose the best singers and performers. There are people who can't sing in this show. There are people who can't hold pitch. There are people who can't act. There are people who can't dance. If we were to audition for this show, if in New York, Michael Butler wanted to hold auditions for the world tour of Hair, there are not a lot of people in this cast who would be in that show. This sounds common sense, but within the world of this tribe, it's heresy. They've been told that everyone belongs in the tribe if they believe in it and work hard. A few cast members stand and listen to Phyllis say this with their arms crossed. And then they come over. "Can I pipe in?" one of them asks. Can we pipe in? Sure. OK, because I don't want anything negative to be-- Oh no. But you know what? We've got more heart and soul than any of these casts put together, and our show is actually pretty incredible. And I know I never would have probably had a chance because I'm not a strong singer, but with my dedication and my heart and soul involved in the show, it's been life-changing. And it's a lot more than that. Sasha is one of those people who cannot really-- she's not a vocal person. But she is a great and every bit a part of the show as you and I are. When Phyllis Ivy responds, she's trembling. I didn't want to appear like that. However, I mean we've talked about tribe, and we've talked about how we all bring in individual talents into the show. I walk downstairs, and I'm surprised to see how quickly word spreads that I saw them disagreeing. They want me to believe they get along. When I go into the rec room, where some of the guys are playing ping pong, a cast member comes looking for Nathan, one of the de facto leaders of the tribe. Hey, I have to talk to you right fast. You have to talk to me? Yeah, real quick. There's a hurried conversation around the corner. Nathan returns with a speech to make to me. I know that everybody wants the best for this show. If it goes on with the 38 people we have now, great. But if not, those people are going to obviously go through a lot of pain and a lot of hurt. But then I think that their belief in the show is going to continue to just send us energy and vibes and say, we still love you guys really and we want you to do the best that you can. Nathan is not just spinning me. He believes this. He's completely sincere. Of everyone in this group, Nathan, at 21, is the one everyone says is a real hippie. Nathan dressed like a hippie. He looked like a hippie even before he got a part in Hair. An for nine months now, he's been a peacekeeper in the group, someone whose earnestness and belief in getting along and taking care of each other has helped keep the group going. But now, while Nathan talks about love holding the cast together even when 13 people might get cut, one of the guys in the room, Rod, snorts and mutters under his breath. And then he lays into Nathan. It's [BLEEP], Nate, to say that you're not going to have animosity, and that you'd be saying good vibes. Who's going to be sending good vibes, man? OK, then maybe not for you. But wouldn't you be happy if I went on tour? Who do you know that's going to be sending good vibes when they don't get to go? Are you going to go on the tour? Probably not. I would love to, but I doubt it. I'll have to get down on my hands and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Let me go. What about ping pong man? No, I really want to go. And if I don't go, I'm going to be really miserable and really hateful. And he's honest about it too. I'm going to be-- I don't know. Nathan, you know you're going to go. I don't know that I'm going to go. The only guy with real long hair and a beard, and they're going to leave him here. Give me a break. Unintentionally over the course of nine months, the tribe has revived another part of '60's communal living along with peace and love. It's resentment, competitiveness and paranoia. I was taken aback when I asked Derek an innocent question like, "What's the tribe like?" And he responded this way. Here's the point. I'm going to tell you this. Whoever doesn't want to be Potawatomi shouldn't be Potawatomi, and they really shouldn't be in the Potawatomi tribe, which will happen. If you cannot be Potawatomi, walk. If you don't want to be a tribe, get out. If you don't like what we do, get out. It's where we are. And if you think that you can stay in and still want to put a monkey wrench in our action, you will not. We will put you out. We invite you in, and we ask you to leave. I did those interviews a few weeks ago. And for now, the cast is off-tour. Most of them are at school. No decisions have been made yet about who would tour in the spring, and so everyone is still getting along. When they run into each other at school though, members of the tribe still hug each other, just like they always have. And another student said to them recently, "When are you guys going to cut out all that love crap?" Well, coming up, guys who get thrown in jail because they refuse to work in conditions that get 320 of their coworkers blown up. 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 bring you a variety of stories around some theme. Today's theme, the job that takes over your life. We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash, Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to WOR for further development, which will be broadcast immediately as received. After Pearl Harbor, the Navy opened to blacks for the first time. But rather than get sent out on ships, one large group of African American men found themselves stationed in one of the least desirable dumps. It was literally a dump, an ammo dump called Port Chicago. This is just north of San Francisco. Now, the place is called Concord Naval Weapons Station. Their job was to load ammunition onto ships, and conditions were so unsafe that it was the site of the worst stateside disaster of the war. On July 17, 1944, two ships blew up, killing 320 men and rocking all of San Francisco in what many people thought was just an earthquake. A court of inquiry blamed the sailors. It concluded-- here's a quote, "The colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives." Well, when survivors were ordered right back to work-- the guys who had survived the whole thing, they were sent right back to work. They were told, go back to work under the same conditions. 50 of them refused, and they were sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor. Over the years since then, there have been many attempts to clear their names, including in 1944 by then civil rights attorney, Thurgood Marshall. Dan Collison spoke with five survivors of the incident about what really happened at Port Chicago. We sent everything out of there, from 30-30 rifle cartridges all the way up to 2,000 pound blockbusters, we called them. My job basically was to load ammunition with the crew, which worked in the hold of the ship. You'd be down in the hold. Here come those big bombs and things coming down the ramp-way they had built. But sometimes, they let it come down too fast. And they hit together, and they made a loud noise. You hear this all night long, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And this would almost give you a heart attack. Yeah, you would almost have a heart attack. And so we used to ask them sometimes, say, "Is there any danger of this ammunition exploding?" They'd say, "Oh no, don't worry about it. It's safe. It's not live." They said they don't have any detonators in them. We were not trained to load ammunition. We would take ammunition-- we'd take a crowbar when we had to go so high. We'd take that crowbar and push that ammunition up there because they told us it would not explode because it didn't have any detonator in it. We believed that. All of the loading crews were black. There were no white loading crews. You didn't have a lot of white people that you saw. We only had basically one officer, and he would be the only person white. Well, the white officers, they didn't have much to do with us anymore. And to stand around and supervise and see that we loaded that ammunition. It was pressure. We were told that so much had to be done that night. We had to do this so much. It was a rush race. And the division commanders push the petty officers to push the man to load as much as they could as fast as they could. But we knew they were betting, $100 or so that my division will put on more ammunition than your division. Each one would put up money that their division would out-load the other one for those particular shifts or that particular day. They had day lotteries, week, and whole ship lottery. Frequently, the urgent need for ammunition forced the depot to load two ships at the same time at the same pier. So it was on the night of July 17, 1944. The Quinault Victory and the E.A. Bryan were moored at the Naval magazine, Port Chicago. 16 cars of ammunition and bombs were spotted on the pier beside the Quinault Victory as the ship rigged to load. Bryan had been loading day and night for more than three days. 3.5 million pounds of explosives were aboard or waiting nearby on the pier. Everything was normal until 10:19. It was a Monday, a hot July day. And for some reason, the day was kind of a day that I felt a great foreboding, and I don't know why. The lights were out at 10:00. So the lights went out at 10:00. We were all returned to our bunk. I had pimples, still being a teenager. So nightly, I would go in and tidy myself up and put on Noxzema. And I got back to my locker, put my gear away, said my prayers and leaped up-- I had a top rack-- and I leaped up in the rack. And here comes the voice over the intercom system again. "Lights out. Quiet about the deck." I'm laying there with my hands behind my head looking out at the sky. And at that time, I guess a few minutes after the lights went out, the sky lit up, and it was just like the sun rose. Everything was bright. You could see all the buildings for a second. Shortly after that, here comes the second explosion, filling the sky with all kinds of lights and colors like at a fourth of July celebration. Then came the concussion. The concussion blew a hole in my body. My left arm got mutilated. Face, head, neck, shoulders and body got mutilated. That was the first explosion. The second was just a few seconds afterwards. That lifted me out of the bunk and threw me on the floor. All hell broke loose, and it was just a lot of confusion because glass was everywhere. Men were just in fear, and some had run out in their bare feet and shorts. And it was just bedlam. You could hear the people now screaming and yelling, "Get out of the barracks. It's coming down." So I myself scuffled, crawled out and took off for the outside. And when there were no other explosions, then I crawled out. But then I noticed that I couldn't see clearly. And that's when I first realized then that I was hurt. And I called to my buddy, "Hey Morris, come and get me and take me to the sick bay." And then somebody else hollered, "Well, the sick bay has been blown up." When I got outside, there were a few people outside yelling for volunteers to go down to the docks. I went up to the guy and said, "Hey, I want to volunteer." He asked me, "Did you see Percy get out of the barracks?" He didn't recognize me. He was my squad leader because my face was so mutilated from the blood and guts. The left eye was lacerated so badly that that was removed that night. And then the right was lacerated, and so consequently, the right eye-- eventually, I lost the sight in that too. So that was the beginning of the end and caused me to be a blind person. In the Pacific war, American battleships, cruisers and destroyers shelled Guam island on Sunday for the second straight day. Here at home, officials say that 337 persons are known dead or missing and presumed dead, more than 300 hundred others injured, as the result of last night's explosion of two ammunition ships at Port Chicago in upper San Francisco Bay. And now, General Electric takes you to Washington. The first thing I thought, same thing, Pearl Harbor again So that's what it was like, just like somebody dropped bombs over the whole thing. It didn't look like it was an explosion from one of the ships. It looked like a plane had come down and just bombarded the place. In the waterfront barracks and administration area, buildings crumpled like cardboard, roofs blown off, walls gone. In the vicinity of the loading piers, total destruction. Both ships broken, twisted hulks. That was a shocking thing to see those ships torn up and seeing-- I was standing watch over all those dead bodies. I had to stand watch over that. That was my duty, and you couldn't tell one from the others. Meantime, the court of inquiry was collecting testimony and exhibits. Experts in all fields were called in to study the area. The cause of the explosion could not be fixed with certainty, but it was suspected that a depth charge was accidentally detonated. I knew what it was because we were expecting it all the time. We worked with that in mind that one day, that stuff would blow up. We felt like just we were getting a raw deal because we were the ones that were doing the dirty work. We were the ones that were fooling with the ammunition. So why shouldn't we have a leave of absence to get away to get your nerves settled. But that didn't happen. I think I was in the hospital maybe all week, and I think the day after, I returned to [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. We were ordered to go to work, and I still was bandaged up, face, arms. My stitches were still there and everything. So we were lined up outside the barracks to go to work. They hadn't told us what we had to do yet, but then they said, "Forward march." I was marching on the outside. I called cadence. Something like this, Hoo left, hoo left, hoo left right left. Left 2, 3, 4, left, right, left. And I believe it was Lieutenant Delucchi He said, "Column left." And when he said, "column left," everybody stopped because "column left" meant we were going to the docks. And the docks meant loading ammunition. They gave us an ultimatum, would you load ammunition? That's the ultimatum we had. And I told them myself, I said, "I am absolutely afraid," which I was. "I'm afraid to load ammunition." "You step over there then." Then they called another one, and I think he told them the same thing. "You step over there." And when the end of the day was over, I think just about all of us had stepped over there. Then the Admiral came down and explained to us what our responsibilities were. He told us-- he said "Well, one thing I want to tell you is that you could be charged with mutiny if you don't go back to work." And he explained at that time, if we refused to go back to work, he could have us shot. It was the cue. When he said you could be shot, then the fellows went to mumbling. You know, a lot of people are afraid to die. From my upbringing, my mother taught me that if a white man threatened to hang you, he would do it at his first legal chance. And she told me about the Klan, and she was brought up in Mississippi. So I believed that they had a legal chance to shoot us, so I was afraid. So I said well, I'm not going to give them a change to shoot me. I'll go back to work. But then 50 of us decided we weren't going to go back to work. If we were going to get shot, they just had to shoot us because we weren't going to go back and load anymore ammunition. That's when we were arrested. I would say "arrested" because we were all shipped to I think it was Treasure Island. We were sent to stockade. Then we found out that we were charged with mutiny. We didn't commit any mutiny. We didn't take over any ship. We didn't take over a base. We had no weapons. We didn't even have a pen. We only refused to go back to work. Now how could that be mutiny? I didn't know anything about mutiny. I just knew that I didn't want to work under the same conditions that I did work under and advance the chance of the same thing happening again. Well, the mutiny trial-- it's just like a thing that is cut and dry. We were all sitting over here. All the white officers were over here. We weren't allowed to say anything but what they would ask us. The verdict was guilty as charged. I expected it from the way that the trial went. Of course, the length of the sentence was a surprise. The lowest sentence in there, I think, was eight years. I had 12 years. And some had 16. Well, I don't even remember crying behind it. I know I did after I got into prison, but it just seemed like it was something that was going to happen in the end after the trial. You know after you sit in the trial for a few days, then you see what was going down. 7:00 PM, Eastern Wartime. Bob Trout reporting. The Japanese have accepted our terms fully. That's the word we have just received from the White House in Washington. This, ladies and gentleman, is the end of the Second World War. The United Nations, on land, on the sea, in the air and to the four corners of the Earth, are united and are victorious. Well, when the war ended, after they had suspended our sentence, they had to release us. We got our discharge. My discharge from the Navy prevented me from receiving jobs that I would have received as a civilian. It branded me as a person incapable of following orders. I used to not be able to talk about it because it would hurt. It would hurt inside. You didn't want your friends to know that you was in the service, and you had been charged with mutiny. You didn't want people to think that you didn't like your country or something, that you'd do something like that. They're still in this country we knew about. Not even with the fellows I worked with. I didn't talk about it with my wife or children. Every time I would bring it up or even think about it, it looked like I got a hateful feeling in me. And it would just about tear me apart. I just hated the other race. And the hate was building up. It stayed with me. The hate stayed with me. Hate can really destroy a person. I could've been a better father, I believe, if I hadn't had that hate. I wouldn't abuse them or anything, but there were just things that I didn't talk about, things I held in, things I think I could have done better. We can think of ourselves as a hero because we stood up for our rights. We stood up because we knew that we did not commit mutiny. I think it was right. I don't know how heroic it is, but it was right. I was fighting for something, and if you were to ask me to put a name on it, I don't know. But things were not right, and it was my desire to make things right. I have never felt ashamed of the decisions that I made. I did what I thought was best, and I did it in the best way I knew how. Long ways back. It doesn't seem like it's been 50 years, and it still hangs over us at 50 years. Albert Williams, Freddie Meeks, Joseph Small, Percy Robinson and Robert Routh talked to Dan Collison, who produced that story. Gary Covina was the editor. Funding for the story came from the Funding Exchange. The Navy has made it a policy never to discuss the Port Chicago case, and has never exonerated the sailors who were court-martialed. In 1999, President Clinton pardoned one of the survivors, Freddie Meeks. Act Four, Orientation. Our theme today is the job that takes over your life. And of course nearly any job can do that. You don't have to be working in unsafe conditions with millions of tons of explosives to have a job dominate you. In fact, I would argue even the most innocent, innocuous office job could do the trick. I offer as evidence this story by Daniel Orozco called "Orientation." Those are the offices, and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the voicemail system answer it. This is your voicemail system manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. These are your in and out boxes. You must pace your work. What do I mean? I'm glad you asked that. We pace our work according to eight-hour workday. If you have twelve hours of work in your inbox, for example, you must compress that work into an eight-hour day. If you have one hour of work in your inbox, you must expand that to fill the eight-hour day. That was a good question. Feel free to ask questions. Ask too many questions, however, and you may be let go. Russell Nash, who sits in the cubicle to your left, is in love with Amanda Pierce, who sits in the cubicle to your right. They ride the same bus together after work. For Amanda Pierce, it's just a tedious bus ride made less tedious by the idle nattering of Russell Nash. But for Russell Nash, it's the highlight of his day, It's the highlight of his life. Russell Nash has put on 40 pounds and grows fatter with each passing month, nibbling on chips and cookies while peeking glumly over the partition at Amanda Pierce, engorging himself at home on cold pizza and ice cream while watching adult videos on TV. Amanda Pierce, in the cubicle to your right, has a six-year-old son named Jamie who's autistic. Her cubicle is plastered from top to bottom with the boy's crayon artwork, sheet after sheet of precisely drawn concentric circles and ellipsis in black and yellow. She rotates them every other Friday. Be sure to comment on them. Amanda Pierce also has a husband who's a lawyer. He subjects her to an escalating array of painful and humiliating sex games to which Amanda Pierce reluctantly submits. But we're not supposed to know any of this. Do not let on. If you let on, you may be let go. Amanda Pierce, who tolerates Russell Nash, is in love with Albert Bosch, whose office is over there. Albert Bosch, who only dimly registers Amanda Pierce's existence, has eyes for Ellie Tapper, who sits over there. Ellie Tapper, who hates Albert Bosch, would walk through fire for Curtis Lance, but Curtis Lance hates Ellie Tapper. It's the world a funny place? Not in the ha-ha sense of course. Anika Bloom in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom's left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand, told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker's wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you'll die, never talk to Anika Bloom. For your information, we have a comprehensive health plan. Any catastrophic illness, any unforeseen tragedy is completely covered. All dependents are completely covered. This is our kitchenette, and this, this is our Mr. Coffee. This is the microwave oven. You are allowed to heat food in the microwave oven. You are not, however, allowed to cook food in the microwave oven. This is the refrigerator. You may put you lunch in it. Barry Hacker, who sits over there, steals food from the refrigerator. His petty theft is an outlet for his grief. Last New Year's Eve while kissing his wife, a blood vessel burst in her brain. Barry Hacker's wife was two months pregnant at the time and lingered in a coma for a half year before dying. It was a tragic loss for Barry Hacker. He hasn't been himself since. Barry Hacker's wife was a beautiful woman. She was also completely covered. Barry Hacker did not have to pay one dime. But his dead wife haunts him. She haunts all of us. We have seen her reflected in the monitors of our computer moving past our cubicles. We've seen the dim shadow of her face in our photocopies. She pencils herself into the receptionist's appointment book with the notation, "To see Barry Hacker." She left messages in the receptionist's voicemail box, messages garbled by the electronic chirps and buzzes in the phone line, her voice echoing from an immense distance within the ambient hum. But the voice is hers, and beneath her voice, beneath the tidal whoosh of static and hiss, the gurgling and crying of a baby can be heard. In any case, if you bring a lunch, put a little something extra in it for Barry Hacker. We have four Barry's in the office. Isn't that a coincidence? This is the custodian's closet. You have no business to be in the custodian's closet. Kevin Howard sits in that cubicle over there. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for the mutilations across town. We're not supposed to know that, so do not let on. Don't worry. His compulsion inflicts itself only upon strangers, and the routine established is elaborate and unwavering. The victim must be a white male, a young adult no older than 30, heavyset with dark hair and eyes and the like. The victim must be chosen at random, before sunset, from a public place. The victim is followed home and must put up a struggle, et cetera. Kevin Howard does not let any of this interfere with his work. He is, in fact, our fastest typist. He types as if he were on fire. In any case, when Kevin Howard gets caught, act surprised. Say that he seemed like a nice person, a bit of a loner perhaps, but always quiet and polite. This is the photocopier room, and this, this is our view. It faces southwest. Enjoy this year while photocopying. If you have any problems with the photocopier, see Russell Nash. If you have any questions, ask your supervisor. If you can't find your supervisor, ask Philip Squires. He sits over there. He'll check with Clarissa Nix. She sits there. If you can't find them, feel free to ask for me. This is my cubicle. I sit in there. Daniel Orozco's story, "Orientation," appears in Best American Short Stories, 1995. At the time it was published, he was making his living as a temp in Seattle, Washington. This story was read by actor Matt Malloy. Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike and Amy Takahara. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Sarah Vowell, Jack Hitt and Margie Rockland. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our programs for absolutely 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. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who we love despite his flaws. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for the mutilations across town. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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5:30 in the afternoon, in the food court at a table near Sbarro's, Nick and Cheyenne and Natalie are just hanging around killing time, waiting to go to a movie when their buddy Chase shows up and explains the Sydney situation. Sydney is my friend at the mall who ditched me for her boyfriend. Chase had come to the mall with Sydney. But now he was here in the food court and she was with the boyfriend. In American Eagle with her boyfriend. With her boyfriend buying another girl a present. Uh oh. Her boyfriend has a lot of best girlfriends. And so he's getting like two other girls' presents while he's with his girlfriend. But he came to the mall with another girl and met up with his girlfriend. What does she think about this? She just doesn't care anymore because it's been going on for too long. And do you like her? I do not. I like another girl named Courtney. This is your ex-girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend. We dated for nine months and she broke up with me. Chase is at the mall about once a week and there's always a danger that he's going to run into Courtney since they used to come here together. But he's only seen her here once. It was right in the food court. Right near where we're sitting. It wasn't pleasant. She was with her entire cheerleading squad. They were all in uniform. Because they were doing a fundraiser car wash or something. They were definitely talking. You know, walked by, looked back. Oh my gosh, I just saw him. Like any Friday afternoon after school, lots of teenagers are in the mall today. Halfway across the food court, two high school sophomores named Colton and Chris wave to some kids at the Dairy Queen. Those are our friends. Those are our friends. Where? That's Danielle, the one in the brown. That's Lindsay and that's one of my friend's Deven. They go to my school. I met a new person today, her name's Rachel. I didn't even know her. I walked up to her and asked her if she wanted to hang out. I was walking back to the food court to get some lunch and I accidentally bumped my shoulder into her. And I said I'm sorry. Excuse me. And then she said, no, it's OK. And I asked her name and her age. And she actually goes to my school and I've never seen her before. Actually, she had lunch with me, so that was a plus. We came to the mall to see what was happening there at Christmas. When there are stories on Radio TV about the world of shopping, it's pretty much always about how much shopping we're all doing. Were this year's Thanksgiving purchases as much as last year's? What does that say about the economy? That kind of thing. But it doesn't really tell you what it feels like for the people who work at a big retail operation, like this mall right now. Or for the people who hang out at the mall. Because the mall's much more than just sales. This is just a place like if you're having troubles with family, or if you just want to have somewhere to hang out. You know, the movies is somewhere, but this place calms me down more. And what about you, is it the same for you? Like this is a place where you can get out of the house? Yeah, same thing. Get away from my brother. And why do you want to get away from your brother? Because he's like a bully. He hits me and calls me names. And there's nothing you can do about it? Nope. Because if I try to hit him, he'll hit me back even harder. So does it work coming here? Yeah. Gets away for a few hours. Then go back home and everything's back to normal. Everything just calms down. The name of this particular mall is the Cool Springs Galleria, outside Nashville. It's not the fanciest mall in the area. When we visited there was no Tiffany store or Burberry or Apple Store. But it was newly redone with big, cushy chairs everywhere, and a play area for toddlers, and all the regular Abercrombie, Aeropostale, Williams-Sonoma stores that you'd expect in a nice mall. Five department stores: Macy's, Dillard's, Belk, JCPenney and Sears. It's the kind of upscale leaning, but not snooty mall that if you needed to shoot a mall scene for a new Miley Cyrus movie, you might do it here. In fact, she did. 150 shops, 6,500 parking spaces. We were here at this time of year, mid December, exactly two weeks before Christmas two years ago in 2008. It was me and my fellow producers, Nancy Updike and Wendy Dorr. Today on our show we bring you, Scenes From a Mall. Stories of people we met and what we saw. And we'll leave this Nashville mall just once this hour for a story about a Christmas related political fight in an organization of professional Santas. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. Stay with us. "Act one, Love Line." Let's begin our tour of life at to the mall here. How did you guys meet? Here, actually, at the mall. I actually tried to sell her a phone. And she just kind of walked by one day and I tried to stop her and tried to sell her a phone and she just kind of stayed there since. He was charming, but after the second date it kind of wore off a little bit. He is a great guy though, I'll say that. Russell and Chandler are engaged. I met them at the T-Mobile kiosk on the lower level of the mall, where Russell is the number one salesman. When I wandered up and started talking to him, it was late in the day and it was just him and a co-worker, no Chandler. Russell was explaining to me that it's hard selling T-Mobile in this mall because we were in Franklin County. And Franklin County is Verizon country. Yeah, like people will come up here and be like, you know, do you know where Verizon is? And it's like, would you go into Brookstone and ask where-- Sharper Image. Would you go ask them where that is? You wouldn't do that. It just disrespectful. People feel like since Verizon is more expensive, it's better. I will tell people they can save money and they're like, but I don't care. It's galling to Russell. Because he truly believes in T-Mobile. When he talks to me about the pros and cons of his arch-rival, Verizon, and starts to lay out the facts about price and especially customer service, and how T-Mobile is the better deal, I do not feel like he's selling me. Somehow it feels like he is sharing a basic truth about the world that he has discovered and just needs to get across. He has this air of unslick sincerity to him, like he's somebody who geeked out on cellphones and knows everything, and can give you the wisdom of this nerdy obsession of his. And that is obviously a big reason that he's the number one salesman here. And when he described how he ended up in this mall, I realized, I was just the latest in a series of people who saw this quality in him. He'd been working construction and that a guy trying to sell him a phone offered him a job. Then he was secret shopped by a rival T-Mobile store who poached him away from that first store. And then he was poached from that store by his current boss. All this happened in a year. He's just 19. And compare the money you made in construction with the money you make at T-Mobile. Oh my gosh. I mean, I make less per day as far as hourly goes. But I mean, the T-Mobile, not only do I get health benefits, 401(k), but target commission for a sales rep is $14,000 a year. Say I'm better than anybody else, so I can do $20,000. So that's $40,000 right there before taxes. So that's a lot of money. How long do you think you'll stay in phones? I don't know, probably like five years. Probably till we get out of this recession that we're in right now. Unless another opportunity comes. I don't want to be a company man. I want to be an entrepreneur and own my own business. Because I think that's the only real way to get rich. I don't want to live that lifestyle where it's from paycheck to paycheck. Is that how you grew up, you family was just paycheck to paycheck? Yeah. And I just don't want to be like that. So I feel like I'm already in a better position to be 19 and pretty much making the same money their making. What do they say about that? Oh, nothing. I hardly ever talk to my dad and my mom, I mean, my mom-- I'm 19. My mom's married to a guy that's 24. We don't really hang out or talk that much. So while Russell's explaining all this, his finance Chandler strolls up to the T-Mobile booth. They don't talk, but he keeps getting text messages-- mid-interview. Till finally-- You know, all they've got to do-- Who's texting you? My fiance. She's standing right there. I know. What did you say? Can you jump in on the mike? What do you do? I actually work at Sonic. Sonic, the hamburger stand? The hamburger stand. The Sonic Drive-In, the ultimate drink stop. OK, I'm just going to cut in here and say, have you noticed she is selling. Because she is not just a waitress at the ultimate drink stop, she is the number one earner at the ultimate drink stop. She makes more money than the number one T-Mobile salesman, her fiance, Russell. Do you confirm this? Yeah, she does. It's like the tip money. I mean, the thing is she works in a small town and so she gets a lot of the same people that eat there every day. And she remembers all the people and remembers what they order. So they tip her more because they know her. And she's the only one that skates and she looks the best. The thing about the roller skates is, it's faster. So you take out more food, so you make more money. And people like it. It's old fashioned, people don't do it anymore. It is a little complicated. It's skating on concrete that's not meant to be skated on. You got a cup carrier in one hand and trying to carry all this food. And so of the two of you, who's the better salesperson? Definitely me. What do you say on that? She's more persuasive. I'm the better salesman, but she's very persuasive in talking to people. This is the kind of logic that helps people stay together for the rest of their lives. Like Russell, Chandler is estranged from her family. She got a job and took night classes so she could graduate from high school at 16 and move out. Now she's just 18. She and Russell live together. They just got a new puppy. Russell doesn't want to go to college. He doesn't see the point. He works with guys who went to college and he makes more than they do. But Chandler wants college. I really want to, but it's not the right time because I don't have the money and I don't like loans at all. I don't like being in debt. I don't like owing money. That's where my family's gotten in a lot of trouble, and that's the position that they're in right now. So she and Russell are making this future together. She wants to be a nurse. Actually, she wants to be a dermatologist, but that's going to take too long and cost too much. So she's going for nurse. He wants to convert the world to T-Mobile. Chandler signed up with Russell long before she signed up with T-Mobile, which is kind of a sore point with him. But Russell being Russell, he did not give up. There was a sale to make. He needed her to admit and enjoy the superiority of T-Mobile. I asked Chandler how many dates she went on with Russell before he stopped trying to sell her a phone. And she sighs in this way that it's clear that it went on way too long. Here, let me play you that tape. How many dates had you been on when he stopped trying to sell you the phone? Oh. Once she got T-Mobile I stopped trying to sell her the phone. But the only way I could get her to get T-Mobile is if I added a line on my plan and gave it to her. So that's what it took to get her to go to T-Mobile. Because what was she before? AT&T, the indignity. Chandler sighs and she says, no, no. She really likes T-Mobile a lot. It's really better. Sometimes she has some problems, but T-Mobile is great. Customer service, she says, out of the roof. It's really, really good. "Act two, Not Dead Yet." Back in the food court I ran into three eighth graders, best friends, who say they come here once a week for maybe four hours at a time. Well, we get in. We normally try on the ugliest dresses we can find. Yeah, prom section. Yeah, the prom section. Describe the ugliest one you saw today. It was like really, really tight and it has ruches on it and tons of sparkles. All three of us. All three of us. We all tried on it on. We all tried it on. Has the recession affected the three of you? What? The recession? What's recession mean? That's a big word. We're not the smartest people here. 14, not 40. This of course, was a minority view. Most people at the mall had heard of the recession. Two years ago this week, December 2008 when we were recording, it was near the beginning of the current recession we're in. The stores here were still doing a lot of business by putting huge amounts of stuff on sale. You still see that strategy this year. And a handful of stores actually had business increasing during the hard economic times. Like the Chick-fil-A in the food court at Cool Springs. Business was up 10% since the beginning of November said the franchise's owner, Jeannie [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. All right, Chick-fil-A sandwich, no pickle. But then she wants a side of pickles. Jeannie gets behind the register when the lines get long. She has a successful small business owner's brisk creativity. When a harried young mom starts rooting around in her purse in frustration looking for her coupon, Jeannie goes over and fishes in the trash for one. Is it the little long one? No, it's this one. She finds the coupon, washes her hands, and gets back to doling out chicken, soda, and courtesy. She calls every male customer sir. Even the teenage boys in braces ordering strawberry milk shakes. $10.49 sir. I'll have your shake coming right up. Thank you. Chick-fil-A franchise owners are responsible for their own advertising and marketing. And so Jeannie just paid for a Chick-fil-A sign in the mall elevator, which she says has boosted customers. And when the rush slows down, Jeannie walks the mall. Just seeing what's going on in the mall, seeing how the stores look. Kind of getting to know all the managers. I want to know everybody in the mall. If I can I want to be the mayor of the mall. You know, I want to know everybody. Jeannie is definitely mayoral as she walks around, welcoming newcomers. I didn't know you guys were here. How long have you been here? Poking around in stores. We're checking out your sales. A lot of good stuff. Teasing people. What you got. You getting married? And always cheerfully plotting how to bring in more customers. In that way, her business really is like running for mayor. Political candidates talk about how important it is to reach out to voters again and again, in different ways, never let them forget you. Especially your base, which for Jeannie is the people who work in the mall. People who work in the mall make up 50% of her business. The other day, Jeannie sent one of her employees to walk around inside the mall dressed in a cow suit. The cow is Chick-fil-A's mascot. His tagline is, "Eat more chicken." And that cow had his picture taken with employees at every store and every kiosk in the mall. And then when we delivered the picture back to them, so we've actually touched them two times. When we took the cow there and they got to know the cow and got their picture made, that was one time. Then when we delivered the picture that was another time. So it's just constantly keeping in touch with these people, being friendly with them, staying connected, and that's what keeps our business going. Jeannie's message, there's nothing in this economy stopping you from eating a chicken sandwich. I think a lot of store owners are feeling some version of that feeling. I was shopping last week for a Christmas present trying to decide between two things. The store owner says to me, you still have a job. Yeah, a huge percentage of the country is unemployed, but nothing has changed for you. Why can't you act like it? And not every store is surviving. Here at Cool Springs one of the stores that was about to close when we visited was Carlton Cards up on the second floor. There weren't any big signs announcing it or anything. In fact, it was kind of a weird thing to see. The store was like this cheerful, red toy box filled with fluffy little dolls and bracelets and Valentine's hearts. And then, scotch taped up with scotch tape here and there, these austere signs that the staff had printed on the store's computer on regular 8 and 1/2 by 11 paper declaring in all caps "50% OFF. STORE CLOSING. ALL SALES FINAL." I'm just putting out old stock that we have in the back room. We're cleaning out and clearing out and put it on clearance. This woman preferred not to give her name. They were selling stuff from the stock room partly because the corporate office stopped sending them new product to put on the shelves back in early November. A couple weeks before they were told that the store would close. My boss kept telling me over and over again because we stopped getting shipments. She keep saying, oh, they did this to me before at the other store that we're going to close. And I'm like, no, we're fine. Our sales aren't down, or nothing's going on. You know, why would we-- sure enough, she was right. And so are they going to relocate you somewhere else? Not this store. Right now there's no openings for me, or my boss even. This store's just done. So what happens to you? I try for something else. After 13 years I don't know what I'm going to do. I've been doing this since I was 20 years old and I have no idea. Husband's been cut in hours, family members have lost their jobs too, so I can't believe it really. Come down from Michigan where it was a dead state to come down here find jobs that are good and stuff. And then two years later, the same thing's happening. What kind of business if your husband in? He was a steel worker up in Michigan and then he came down here and started working for Penske, who supplied Saturn. And then when Saturn went out for them few months over there-- well, for the year and a half they were out over there, he lost his job from them. Now he's just working as whatever he can find. Is he finding manufacturing jobs? No. He's right now doing forklift driving. And is he making anything like the money he made when he moved here? Oh no. Just me. I came down with my salary down here. And now I'm out of that salary too. It's scary. You have kids? I don't. I don't know what I'd do then. What's the day the store closes? The 28. It's the last day of business. And so how are things here in the store, like how are you guys doing? We're sad. We're sad and it gets stressful. And for everybody to keep coming up to you going, oh, you're closing? I got a good bargain, yackity-schmackity. Just forgetting the fact that a human don't have money now. Because you got half off. Where were you beforehand to buy it at full price and maybe save my job? So the customers are saying these things and then are you guys sad? What are you guys saying to each other? What are you able to do for each other? We try not to talk about it. That's it, plain and simple. I don't want to talk about it. I'm not ready to think about it yet. Not till maybe the 26. But at least this year you don't have to go through the returns and you don't have to go through-- you know. I noticed the sign, "All sales are final." Yep. That'll be nice. Just did my 13th year here and first Christmas Eve I'll get off. So hey, that's still not a bright enough lining, but I'll take it. This year. Coming up, why Santa is mad at Santa. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. Well, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Scenes From a Mall, we've been bringing you stories recorded this month at a shopping mall, Cool Springs Galleria in Nashville. In addition to whatever happens at the North Pole, there is a Santa industry that springs up at malls all over the country every Christmas with photographers and helpers. You see Santa in parades. This year you see him at the White House. We're going to talk about the people in that business right now. Parents of small children, consider this fair notice. Decide if your child should be hearing about the side of Christmas. I'll wait. OK, only grownups left? We saw a story in the Wall Street Journal about a rift in the world of professional Santas, a fight that turned Santa against Santa. Reporter Josh Bearman looked into it for us. This is a Christmas story, a tale of two Santas. On the one side is Tim Conaghan, a full-time professional Santa with a big belly and a real flowing white beard. Tim is so dedicated to the idea of Santa Claus, his house is in a perpetual state of Christmas. There are St. Nick tapestries, a workshop with a calendar marking the days until Christmas, and a grand throne where Santa Tim receives children. It is like the North Pole, if the North Pole were in Riverside, California. As Santa Tim takes me on a tour, he is dressed in a sort of Santa casual. Red and white shirt and green pants dotted with candy canes. The Santa saturation here is such that as Santa Tim provides a lengthy detailed history on the image of Santa Claus and how best to achieve that authentic Santa look, there's still more Santa to come. A number 30 rouge for the cheeks and maybe a little touch on the nose to give him a little bit of weathered look. Forgot I got the clocks going too. No, that's fine. What's that song? What's the song? OK, the carols being sung by a choir. "Merry Christmas." The counterpart to Santa Tim is Santa Nick. That's right, his actual name is Nicholas. And he too has a belly and a real white beard, which means that he must always be prepared for Santa contingencies, even in July, even when he's out running an errand. I went to my storage facility to pick up some stuff and I pulled in in my car with my wife and my two kids. And I hadn't even gotten out of the car yet and there was these two little girls. And the one little girl about five years old, she goes, hi, Santa. I was dressed nothing at all like Santa Claus. Why I always carry a bag of little toys and stickers with me that I'm able to say, well, hello. How are you? And then I usually give them a little present. Talk to them for a little bit and say-- because the mother was gone and she told the child, leave that man alone. And I said, no, no. She's OK. She found out who I am. But the story of Santa Tim and Santa Nick is not like most Christmas parables. It is not about impoverished couples giving up their most cherished things to sacrifice for each other, or an avaricious curmudgeon finally learning to let love into his heart. This story is sort of the opposite in fact. It is a story about how these two men, Santa Tim and Santa Nick, so much alike, potential allies in a great cause, came instead to lead rival factions in the bitter Santa civil war. And came themselves to be arch enemies. Here's Nick talking about Tim. I won't say Tim's never helped another Santa, but typically when I look back now I can see where typically, wherever Tim's helped someone, it's always been to help Tim. And here's Tim on Nick. You don't want to sit there. You hate to sit there and say someone is a liar. But on one hand, you've got to say, just show us the proof. Santa Tim and Santa Nick are at the center of a political schism that's overtaken their guild, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. It all began over a decade ago before Nick and Tim ever met, when a random event thrust a group of like-minded Santa's together. Back in 1994, a German catalog assembled 10 professional Santas for a commercial shoot in Los Angeles. One Santa flipped through the catalog in his sleigh while the others bumped into each other in a gift delivery frenzy. Bob Kokol was one of those Santas. And we just had such a good time telling stories to each other during the breaks. One of the fellows, Tom Hartsfield, after it was all over he said, oh, we've got to get together after Christmas and have lunch together. And so we did. We met at the North Woods Inn there on the Santa Anna Freeway. That's the restaurant that's covered in snow? Fake snow. Yeah. All these Santas had real beards, distinguishing them from the many synthetic or designer bearded Santas who often showed up at casting calls. A Santa named Tom Hartsfield jokingly proposed that they all form a club. He suggested the name, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, quickly known by its acronym, AORBS, and organized the luncheon. And the joke sort of took hold. The Santas met again the next year, and the next. And each time more Santas showed up. And then this North Woods Inn just got too small. Sometimes we'd have 200 or 300 and they just couldn't fit all in. So then we had to go to someplace else. And then it was the Queen Mary and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then there had to be a president and a treasurer and a sergeant at arms and all these titles. By 2003, there were several hundred members. Until then, Tom Hartsfield had maintained all the administrative duties himself. Feeling overwhelmed, he was looking for help. One of the many people who joined the organization was Santa Tim Conaghan. This is the Santa Tim from the beginning of our story, the one who sang to me. Santa Tim was a well-known Santa in Southern California. He always had good gigs and under the name, the Kringle Group LLC, he ran various Santa related businesses. Including a referral service and mail order wardrobe catalog, offering boots, coats, buckles, and of course, beards made from yak fur, the preferred fake beard if you must wear fake. Which doesn't come cheap by the way. Santa Tim also had a school called the International University of Santa Claus, built around his own curriculum and textbook, Behind the Red Suit. All this meant that Santa Tim was an organizer, good on the computer with lists and events. Just what Tom thought this growing organization needed. So he asked Santa Tim to take over. When Tom asked me to coordinate the group I started restructuring it to be a dues paying organization because we'd get $15 a year dues. Really, a small amount of money. But with that, we could have a website. A bigger website with more information. We could have newsletters and a chat group, or a web location where everybody could talk with each other. I put all of those things together. Again, I was traveling around doing my school, plus coordinating the association. At that time I thought it was kind of a neat thing because we were helping each other. My business was growing, the association was growing. The association actually went from about 200 on the meeting list to almost 1,300 on the meeting list. And while I was doing all that, like I said, the Santas were saying, well, when are we all going to get together? So I put together their first Santa convention. This is video from that convention, which was called Discover Santa 2006. And what we're hearing is the sound of over 300 real bearded Santa Clauses, their associated Mrs. Clauses, and a contingent of little people dressed as elves taking to the streets, a red and white procession across downtown Branson, Missouri at 7:00 AM on a Friday morning. There were also advanced Santa panels on dealing with special needs children, and Santa Tim offered his Santa University lessons. Hello everyone, welcome back. I'm Santa Tim and we're going to move on to chapter two. These included the always popular Santa grooming practicum, covering beard, care and whitening. And simple do's and don'ts. Do smile, don't promise any specific toys. And of course-- Always remember the reindeer's names. I'm surprised that you have to ask that, but the thing is, guess what? We have Santas who forget the reindeer's names. Then there are those Santa nuances, Tim advises, that ought to be a matter of individual styling. Ho, ho, ho's are important. Some people say you've got to do three in a row. I know some Santas that just do, ho, ho, how are you? In other words, they go right from a ho, ho into a sentence. Ho, ho, hello. Instead of doing all three. There's different ways of doing it. Come up with your own little signature. Have some fun with it. Discover Santa was a success. It wasn't just the first national gathering of AORBS, it was an eye-opening experience for everyone. Being Santa Claus is a solitary job after all. As one Santa put it, "You can't just call a friend and go santaing together." But there they were, several hundred Santas, aglow with the promise of Santa fraternity. It was like their Woodstock and it raised the profile of the organization, generating all kinds of news coverage. Tim turned AORBS into an official nonprofit. He assembled an interim board and drafted bylaws cribbed from the Kiwanis club. And meanwhile, all the media attention was attracting new members. One of whom was Nick Trolli, the other embattled Santa from the beginning of the story. He'd been quietly plying his trade as a part-time Santa, unaware of the organization run by Tim. I don't remember why but one day I just did a search of Santa on the Internet and I was like, well, wow. I think I might have been looking to replace a suit. But anyway, I did a search and I came up with Santa and then I found the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. I said, well, gee, isn't that kind of cool? Nick attended a meeting in New Jersey and immediately got involved. He joined the board and volunteered to help plan the next bigger Discover Santa convention. This was all in the Spring of 2007. No one knew it then, but that was the high water mark of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. Less than a year later, the organization would descend into chaos, then split in two. The trouble began just a few months after Nick joined. When he started on the board, Nick clashed with Tim immediately. Nick accused Tim of using AORBS to profit his own Kringle Group businesses, and he started whispering to some of the other Santas about it. Then that summer, it was learned that Santa Tim had signed a contract with a small film production company that hoped to make a movie about the Santa convention and Tim's Santa school. Tim signed contracts on behalf of his school and AORBS. Both were paid $1,500 up front, with more coming if the movie ever got made. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to be considered a scandal. . The dispute hit the board and eventually, Santa Tim resigned. In the fall out, several more board members resigned in solidarity. Which meant that by order of succession, Santa Nick who had just joined that year, wound up president of AORBS. Next thing I know, all of a sudden, Tim starts attacking me every which way I turned. And not just Tim, but his cronies like this nut case, Rick Erwin. He called me brain damaged. He accused me of stealing. And he got these people all riled up and he's got the California Santas all riled up. The reason the California Santas were all riled up is that they believe Santa Nick had essentially staged a coup, beginning with his whisper campaign against Tim. To them, this was a power grab plain and simple. And to make matters worse, Santa Nick started doing some things that seemed very suspicious. He dropped the word "interim" from his title. He reincorporated the entire organization in another state. He never accounted for the treasury. And he installed another relatively new Santa, Jeff Germann, as his vice president. Which gave Jeff control over the Santa's online forum, Elf Net. Which is where dissident Santas were airing their grievances. Rick Erwin was one of those dissident Santas and he says things changed when Santa Jeff took over Elf Net. That's when the bannings began. Once the chat function had moved to his server, he controlled the chat from that moment on. And any postings that were antithetical to Nick Trolli or Jeff Germann were deleted within hours. It was like Orwell's 1984. The ministry of truth moved in and unwrote everything in the history books. From Nick and Jeff's perspective, they were the ones facing a coordinated assault coming from Tim's cabal of rabid supporters. Jeff Germann says they had to defend themselves against nonstop rumors and innuendo. And pretty soon, this meant going head to head against the guy who came up with the idea for the organization in the first place, the guy who named it the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, Santa Tom Hartsfield. Well, Tom decided to start posting on the message board publicly undermining stuff we were working on and causing dissension in the group. And so, since I was in charge of the message board, the first thing I did when he published this was I deleted the thread that he started, and then I removed his access from the message board. And let him know that this would be taken up with the board next time we meet to see about whether you get your access back or not. Well, he didn't like that. That's what made him mad about quitting. Because I had the temerity to rebuke him and discipline him on our message board. Now, rebuke is not a word you hear in conversation that often, and Jeff used it three times. All that rebuking reminds you that although Santas are self described jolly gentleman, they also divide the world into naughty and nice. By the fall of 2007, lots of santas were being labeled naughty, and a vicious cycle developed. The more Santas who criticized Nick and Jeff, the more Santas got banished. Which led to more criticism, which prompted more banishment. A siege mentality set in. Eventually, the deposed Santas started their own forums, Santa Talk, which they called a refugee camp from AORBS. Now each faction had its own mouthpiece, further fanning the flames. Each side accused the other of betraying the spirit of Santa Claus, of using the beard to line their own red velvet pockets. The conflict came to a head in January 2008, at a big AORBS meeting at Knott's Berry Farm in Beuna Park, California. This was the first time member Santas were meeting with the new board and many were looking for answers. One of those was Santa Rick, the dissident Santa you just heard comparing the situation to Orwell. At the time, he was still lodge director for the Inland Empire AORBS chapter and he planned to record the board meet and greet on video. I showed up at the hotel and I walked up, there was a Santa standing near the desk talking to a couple of kids and their mom. And so I walked up to the desk. I was going to ask where the meeting was and when he saw me, the Santa saw he, turned to me and said, hi, can I help you? And I said, where's the Santa meeting? And he kind of pointed up the stairs off the lobby and he said, why? And I said, I'm here for the meeting. Thanks. And I turned around and started up the stairs. And he said, where you going with that camera? And at that point I realized, he was either Nick Trolli or Jeff Germann. I'd never met either man personally, but I knew them online. And at that point I knew he was one or the other. So I reached down and turned on my video camera and started recording. You're not filming anything, Rick. Oh yes, I am. No you're not, Rick. I'm sorry to tell you, but this an open meeting, sir. I take it you're Jeff. No, I'm Nick. I'd like to speak with you. What's your name? I'm Nick. Nick. Oh, you're Nick Trolli. Nice to meet you, Nick. Finally, meet you after all this time. And by that time we were at the top of the stairs and headed down the hallway. And he was met by his other board members, three other. There were five Santas in the hallway. Myself and four AORBS board members. Nick Trolli and Jeff Germann stopped me. Jeff Germann actually got in front of me and stopped me in the hallway. Mr. Erwin here thinks he's going to film. No, you're not. I got news for you, Mr. Erwin's already videotaping. This is for the membership. That's fine. I represent officially two of the four chapters in Southern California. That's fine. And this is an open meeting for the membership. And I've been specifically-- Listen, I'm videotaping this meeting. No you're not. I'm already videotaping this confrontation. At this point on the tape, Santa Rick's camera is on, but dangling in his hand. So all you can see is a jerky dash for the conference room until he is stopped by that group of Santas. We get a waist level view of the large torsos gathering around Rick. Legs and round bellies, and at least one knotted wooden cane. Another pair of legs wanders into the frame wearing knee breeches, red and white striped socks, and buckled shoes. The argument continues. The whole thing lasted about 30 seconds and I said, listen, I'm not going to argue with you about this. And I turned to go on into the meeting. And as I went past Jeff German, he raised his arm and shoved me into the wall with all of my camera equipment, my tripod over my shoulder, I was carrying my camera. And he bounced me off of the hallway wall. The shove felt round the world. And at that instant, you can hear me, say, don't touch me again. You know what, don't touch me again. Yeah, he says I attacked him. He says that I beat him up at Nick's behest. This is Jeff Germann, Nick's vice president, who disputes the entire story. He said that I elbowed him. He says I laid hands on him. He says I punched him, which is obvious because when it was done he was on the floor with a broken nose and a broken leg. Just kidding. All that really happened is he pushed past me. And that's all that happened. Are you tall? I'm 6'4''. OK. So you are a big Santa? Yeah, I'm just as big as Christmas. It's impossible to tell exactly what happened from the tape because of the waist level vantage point. Although each side says it proves their point. Some kind of physical contact occurred. That much can be said from the way the camera shakes a little. But more importantly, Rick gets free and marches into the meeting. Excuse me. Hey Rick. But one Santa knocked me into the wall, the big guy. Really? Yeah. I've already been physically assaulted, but I'm not going to stop taping. On the tape, the Santa Rick sets up in the corner. You can see that the meeting hasn't started and the Santa's are milling around chatting. Then Santa Nick storms in and makes the following demand. I'm asking you one more time, please take the down camera and leave. On what authority? On the authority AORBS rent this room. I'm sorry, you're going to have to quote the bylaws and you're going to have to ask all of the members to leave. I'm here representing two of the four Southern California chapters. Rick, I represent 877 members of AORBS. That's under question quite frankly, but I officially represent-- I'm ordering you to leave our premises. I refuse to leave voluntarily. Security, escort him out please. You don't have the right to pull him. Excuse me, this man is enforcing rules that do not exist. The hotel security guard takes just a few steps before he realizes he's in over his head. It's likely his training did not prepare him to walk into a room full of angry Santa Clauses. For starters, they all look the same. It's hard to tell who's on whose side. He pauses, looks at all the big men with beards looking back at him, turns around, and goes for backup. In the stunned silence that follows, you can see a few arched white eyebrows around the room. This tyranny must end, guys. This tyranny must end. Jeff, I [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. You're Santa for God's sake. This isn't the Night of the Long Knives, guys. If you didn't quite catch it, Rick says, this isn't the Night of Long Knives. For those not up to speed on your Third Reich history, that's the day in 1934 when Adolf Hitler consolidated his control over the Nazi party by killing or jailing all of his enemies. Eventually, the Knott's Berry Farm hotel security chief shows up with two other guys and approaches Rick. I'm a supervisor of the hotel. These folks are asking you to leave. Gentleman back there is the one who booked the event. He doesn't want you here, so you need to leave. I mean I got three rules that I live life by. I won't be lied to or about, I won't be stolen from, and I will not be laid hands upon. And in my opinion, these guys violated all three of my core codes. And we went to war. The war was hard fought. Rick posted his video of the kerfuffle online sparking outrage. Some Santas renounced their membership in protest. The rhetoric escalated, especially on the Santa forums, where Rick and others accused Nick of embezzlement. And Nick accused the breakaway Santa's of sabotaging the Discover Santa 2008 convention, calling them economic terrorists. And declaring that AORBS blood is on their hands. Lawsuits were threatened back and forth on a regular basis. And Nick told various Santas he was going to lodge complaints against them with the FBI. At a certain point, lines were crossed that no Santa would have thought possible. A website appeared called Santa Check, which purports to be an independent watchdog group for parents, but appears to actually be a sub rosa propaganda campaign targeting Nick's enemies. One entry posted a still from a video of Santa Rick's birthday party. The relatively harmless video shows Santa Rick being entertained by a belly dancer and features Rick's unfortunate title, "How Santa Got his Yuletide Log Back." At the top of the web page is Santa Check's tagline, "is your child safe on this lap?" This unfair insinuation is the lowest of blows, the equivalent among Santas of the nuclear option. The hardest thing to understand about this story is how it got to this point. The allegations and counter-allegations are so outlandish, that when I first started looking into all this it wasn't just difficult to figure out which side was right, I had a hard time understanding what actually happened. I spent weeks talking to Santas and reading their discussion boards trying to sort it out. It wasn't easy. When I talked to the Santas, it was like the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Each side had its own distinct narrative about the history of the war, and the two narratives did not overlap. In the end, here's what I think probably happened. Santa Tim's businesses had profited a little from AORBS, sure. But then Santa Nick came in and he was drunk with power. Then the other side overreacted, Nick quickly turned into a Santa Stalin, and the whole thing just evolved from there. It was the same dynamic that starts real wars. The further people get drawn into a fight, the harder it is to back down. The fact that this could happen to a group of Santas just proves it could happen to anybody. By last summer, AORBS membership plummeted as several local Santa leaders filed articles of separation from AORBS, citing Nick and Jeff's persecutory atmosphere and the un-Santa-like dialogue. One Santa issued a statement calling for a Santa Claus congress in the spirit of the American Revolution. Around the country, regional groups sprang up in the vacuum. Nick and Jeff were despots in a shrinking kingdom. Soon they were the only active board members left, and the remaining members were still waiting for elections. When they eventually did hold elections, their war what the United Nations might call irregularities. Nick and Jeff formed a nominating committee, but required their own approval over the committee's selections. This is Santa Tom Irving, a board member at the time. They were looking for reasons to disqualify anybody who was nominated. There were several people nominated for president. And everyone was disqualified. Nick was the only name on the ballot. They found reasons to disqualify everybody who was up for first vice president. Only Jeff Germann was on the ballot. You know, what it reminded me of is, what was it, Robert Mugabe? Held the election in South Africa someplace and he was the only one on the ballot. To Santa Tim and his followers, AORBS no longer exists. What is called AORBS is an impostor, sidelined and irrelevant. To Nick and Jeff, AORBS is still the home of the world's A-list Santas as they like to say. And they insist they will have their day in court. Recently however, the war slowed down a bit. Mostly by virtue of seasonal logistics. All the Santas have been busy in their chairs twinkling their eyes at children and doing what Santas are supposed to do. And they don't have as much time for mischief. Which is how it should be. It was during the offseason that Santas were free to endlessly argue with each other. That's when they lost sight of the larger picture. It takes a neutral Santa, some one like Tom Irving to see that. I look at it as a real lesson in what happens when you let your own ego get in the way of things. You know, I've never been a person with a real strong ego. You've got to have a bit of that to be Santa Claus. You've got to have that kind of a personality where you're willing to step out into the world in front of people. It's like being an actor in a lot of ways. If you allow the ego to drive you, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. And that's what happened with these guys. I really believe that. Back when I first met Santa Tim at his workshop, we talked about the origins of Santa Claus. What people often don't realize is that Santa Claus was always a more complicated character than today's rosy-cheeked do-gooder. The original tradition of Saint Nicholas included a diabolical counterpart, the guy you met if you were naughty. This character goes by a lot of different names: Krampus, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], Belsnickel. And he's also in red, but with horns, a tail, and a pitch fork. Sound familiar? Santa's flip side is the devil. And it's not a coincidence that the devil is sometimes called Old Nick. The man in the red suit has always represented both sides of the coin, naughty and nice. This is what we're supposed to be reminded of during the darkest days of each year. We make mistakes and we sometimes do the wrong things, and so does Santa. And so maybe the story of AORBS is a Christmas parable after all. Josh Bearman in Los Angeles. In the two years since we first aired that story, AORBS has ceased to exist the way it was, a centralized group of Santas. The organization is still around, but 20 splinter groups have risen up. The largest of those is FORBS, the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, which is where Santa Tim Conaghan ended up. "Act four, Job Security." Back in a part of the mall that shoppers never go is an area that feels a lot like the backstage of a theater. The walls are made of plywood. You wind around these hallways that are two stories high with doors that lead into the backs of the stores. Turn a corner and you arrive at the security office. There's a snug little room here with 43 TV screens, one for each of the cameras in the hallways and the parking lots, the roof and the loading dock. The room is dark. Beverly Robertson watches the cameras and she likes it dark. She tells me and my co-producer Wendy Dorr, that two or three times a day, her job includes helping people find their parked cars in the vast lots that surround the mall. Usually though when they come to me, my car has been stolen. It's not where I parked it. But usually, they have just forgot where they've parked. About once a week, somebody who can't find their car actually accuses security of getting into the car and moving it to a different lot. We do have a lot of that, well, you've just moved my car. I mean, like we have nothing better to do than go out and move your car. It's like we have everybody's sets of keys in our office. Oh, well, this one's parked here. Let's go move it for them. No, we don't do that. I go and wander around the mall with Beverly's boss, the head of security, Doug [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and one of the officers, Gary. Doug tells me about all the cases they get where a husband gets separated from his wife in the mall and then comes to security for help finding her. That's when the descriptions don't match anything they say. They don't know what their wives look like. They don't know what kind of hair they've got, haircut. You can say, is it down to their shoulders or is it up? What color is it? How tall is she? And don't ask them what they've got on. They could just say, she's wearing a blue coat. And then they'll be wrong. They'll be wrong about that. While Doug and Gary and I were talking, Wendy hung back in the security office with Beverly. They were watching us on the various TV monitors. Though, I didn't know that at the time. For about 45 minutes we've been tracking them on the lower level, and it was surprisingly easy. I see my boss, my lieutenant, and Ira. And they're pointing in-- they're coming up the south end escalator. You can see the top of their heads. I mean you could zoom in. Let's just say you zoomed in till you could literally see the freckles on top of your boss's head. Yes, I mean you can if you want to. But it's just being funny. Beverly's been working at the mall for 11 years. And for the last five years she's been here in dispatch, sitting at a desk, a foot away from the 43 little TV screens. She can tilt the cameras up and down, or turn them left and right. Or zoom in using her keyboard and joystick. She's looking for kids who stray away from their parents, or play on the escalators, for groups of rowdy teens, for people who've fallen down. For anything on the floor that someone could trip over, for anything out of the ordinary. Or anything that could lead to a lawsuit. Most the time it's fun. You see stuff that you really sometimes don't want to see. Like what do you mean? We watched this guy one day, we had a kiosk that was upstairs, and this guy was standing there. The whole time that he was standing there he was picking his nose and wiping his boogers on the counter. And we were sitting back here laughing so hard that we couldn't stand it. But after the guy left and everything, we called the guy at the kiosk and told him, you need to get some sanitizer and kind of sanitize that desk. And he's like, why? And I said, well, he just wiped boogers all over your tables. This guy got really disgusted and threw up and it was just funny. But you do see some of the funniest stuff. She told me that when she gets home from work, she has to let her eyes rest for a few hours. So she can't watch much TV. Beverly works 10 hour shifts, 5 days a week, from 7:00 AM to 5:00. And when she's working, she doesn't like to take a break. Is it hard to not shop? No, I hate to shop. I'm not a big shopper at all. I've never been. I don't like shops. It's not very hard for me at all. Not hard at all. Are you getting your kids presents and stuff this Christmas? Yes, but not here. I usually get mine like at Walmart, or Kmart, stores like that. There are a few stores in here that I would go to, but there's a lot of high end stores that-- I work all the time, so I don't have any clothes anymore because I never go anywhere. I'm always at work and at home with my kids. I don't buy clothes and shoes and stuff. I have uniforms and that's it. The best part of my day is going home and getting into a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt. I mean that's just the best part of the day because you get out of the uniform. Beverly likes it when it's busy, when the phone's ringing with people who need her help. The toughest part of the job seems to be fighting off boredom. We used to have a spider that would get on our cameras on the outside. It would get on the lens and you could zoom until you went straight through it. You zoomed out so much that it just goes right through it. I mean you can't see the spider anymore, but you know it's there. We do all kinds of things in here when we get bored. Beverly's leaving early today. She lives in Spring Hill, which is about 20 minutes away. But it takes her about an hour because she goes home at rush hour. Last night when the snow started, she accidentally drove her truck into a ditch. She didn't get hurt, but she banged up her truck badly enough that she couldn't drive it today. So she's leaving early to catch a ride with a coworker. That's it. I go home. She clocks out by sticking her hand in some kind of a scanner, opens the doors to the loading dock, and walks outside. So what's the first thing you're going to do when you get home? The first thing I'll do is put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. The second thing is me and my kids go to Walmart or something. She always has to have something on Friday, so that's where I go. Bye. Wendy Dorr. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder. Production help from Shawn Wen. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. A personal note, before This American Life I spent a year reporting at a public elementary school on Chicago's West Side, Washington Irving Elementary. The principal who was at that school when I was there, Madeleine Maraldi, passed away this week. I was an education reporter for years and spent time in dozens of schools. She was the best principal I ever saw. She had incredible savvy about which education programs would work for her school, but like all great principals, she was a great politician. To achieve things that few public schools ever achieve. And of course, she was wonderful with kids. She'll be missed by everybody who had contact with Washington Irving. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. This is what he declared this year while standing under the mistletoe. I mean, I got three rules that I live life by. I won't be lied to or about. I won't be stolen from and I will not be laid hands upon. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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This was not the most important speech Barack Obama gave in November. It didn't get much press coverage. In fact, it wasn't even important enough for Barack Obama to show up in person to deliver. He pre-taped a video. But for the people who saw this speech, it was a big, big deal. This was at the opening session of an international conference on global warming that had been convened in Los Angeles by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mary Nichols is in charge of creating California's climate change policies and is close to some people in the Obama camp. So she was one of the few people attending who knew that the video was on the program. Barack Obama had just been elected two weeks before. A lot of us were still kind of absorbing the reality that we actually were going to have a new president. And I really wasn't expecting much more than a welcome, and congratulations, and I'm so glad you're doing this, kind of message. I really wasn't expecting anything of substance. So we're in this gigantic ballroom. And there's hundreds of people from all over the world. --from, I believe, over 50 states, provinces, and countries. This is Anthony Eggert, a senior policy adviser for the California Air Resources Board. Governor Schwarzenegger basically introduced the conference, welcomed the delegates-- --want to welcome you all to the Governor's Global Climate Summit. This is a historic-- --and then said we have a welcome message from our president-elect. --introduce a video from our President-elect Barack Obama, just to show to you-- And then the video comes up. There's Barack Obama just facing the camera and starting to talk. When I heard him come on it was really shocking. Lucia Green-Weiskel works promoting low-carbon policies in China. And she attended the conference with the Chinese delegation. Because I had been listening really carefully throughout the entire campaign about his position on climate change and frankly hadn't heard a whole lot of very specific commitments. Yeah. It was a bit frustrating. And he didn't spend a lot of time on it, from my perspective. And I wanted him to say, this is the most important thing. And he didn't say that. But then all of a sudden, he seemed to be saying that. Few challenges facing America, and the world, are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Did you have any reaction when he said, "the science is beyond dispute?" I thought some people in the Bush White House might be like, hey, wait a minute. That's not what we were saying. In fact, everything about the way the speech was heard had to do with the last eight years and President Bush. President Bush, of course, did not acknowledge that human beings had anything to do with global warming until 2005, his second term. And even then, he didn't do much to fix the problem. In fact, his administration tried to block others from taking action. When California policymakers like Mary Nichols created regulations to curb greenhouse gases in their own state, the Bush administration went out of its way to strike down those state laws. And all of this informed how everybody in this room heard this speech. I think there was a huge amount of pent-up frustration and anger. And now it was actually OK to say, it really is over. And once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change. Now's the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Part of what's striking about this video is he is very emphatic. He says, now is the time to confront this. He says, delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an option. When he was saying those things, what did you feel? Well, it was amazement. Because I never thought that I would hear someone who was the elected president of the United States saying those words. It was pretty emotional and pretty stunning in a lot of ways. And especially in the context of being among this Chinese delegation, I felt, wow, we elected this guy. And I'm proud. If I remember correctly, I may have actually done a fist pump. You did a fist pump to a video, a pre-taped video? I have to admit that I did, yes. Again, this was really a watershed moment in my career. As a professional, I had never felt that way. Because I've only been working as an environmentalist under Bush. There were people crying. I had tears in my eyes, too. I can't deny it. Really? I have to say, you're a former federal official. I mean, you're a hard-boiled government-- I am. Yeah, well, I don't know how hard-boiled. But it's true. We don't do a lot of crying in public. But this was a very emotional moment. There's no question about it. It was just a ray of hope. We clapped. And they you have to stop really fast. Because it's a video. And he keeps talking. And then, you also want to hear what he's going to say. So it was kind of awkward applause-- very enthusiastic, but then very short. Barack Obama even laid out, in more detail than they'd ever heard, specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases. And he concluded with just kind of a simple thanks. Thank you. And there was a pause. And then everybody just stood up and gave this standing ovation which again, is also, I guess, intriguing. Because this is a video address. Right. He's on videotape. He doesn't know that you're standing up and clapping. Exactly, exactly. But I think it was just everybody was just so enthusiastic they couldn't help themselves. All of a sudden, the world seemed like a place where countries could come together and be productive again. In general, people who are drawn to working in the environment are not usually optimistic. They're used to thinking about all the bad things that are going to happen, and fighting for every bit of ground. So this is one of those rare opportunities. To hear somebody who has the youth and the eloquence of Obama taking on this issue so clearly and strongly was just overwhelming. There are lots of people waiting for very specific things from Barack Obama. And since November, I think a lot of them have had moments like this one, where they realize, oh my God, this new guy really is president. And things might change. And of course, there are other people who do not welcome that change at all. And so today, the weekend before Barack Obama's inauguration as president, we have collected voices from all over the country, people talking about what's going to happen next with this new president who has raised so many hopes. Where are we heading together, you and me and everybody else in our country, after this January 20? Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. We have many, many people speaking about this today. The show is jam packed. Stay with us. Act One, All Your Base are Belong to Him. So there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who aren't just getting a new president on Tuesday. People who work for the federal government, people in the military, are also getting a new boss. The newspaper Military Times did a survey of about 2,000 active-duty servicemen and women, which asked about the coming change. A third of the respondents said that they were optimistic about Barack Obama as Commander in Chief. Another third were uncertain. About 25% were pessimistic. Presented with the statement, as president, Barack Obama will have my best interests at heart, 36% agreed with the statement. 43% disagreed. President Bush, by the way, does modestly better than Barack Obama on that one. 49% agree that he is their best interests at heart, versus Obama's 36%. Reporter Peter Biello dropped in on the Pro Cuts Barber Shop in Jacksonville, North Carolina, just across the highway from the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune. Peter talked to some of the Marines who were getting their hair trimmed. At first, I was a little concerned. I'm very conservative in nature. My father's very conservative, as I am, but my sisters and my mothers are all about the change. So they're pretty up for it. So for a while there, it was pretty rough. Election night wasn't a good night in the family. There were a lot of arguments and stuff like that. But it was more on my part. I was upset about them voting for him. But I'm reading his book, and I'm kind of getting a better grasp of what he's really about. And it's a lot more promising than the media made it out to be. So-- Most Marines are against him, just because of the whole Don't Ask, Don't Tell thing that's coming out. But it's his choice so I'll go with it. He's my boss, well, soon to be my boss. But I really hope he does well for us. I've been to Iraq three times and Afghanistan once. I was in Afghanistan in 2002. And I was in Iraq in 2003, 2005 and 2007. And through the deployments, I've seen tons of changes, as far as our equipment. 2003, when we were over there, we had no armored vehicles. That's for the initial assault all the way up to Baghdad, no armor on anything. And 2005, we started to get armor kits put onto our existing vehicles. And when we were over there in 2007, now the vehicles are coming up armored. So they're not as cumbersome-- trying to put 5,000 pounds of armor on a vehicle that's not meant to take it. And there have been advances. I think that those will continue to happen. And I don't think that he really has-- if he cuts defense budgeting, I think that money will still flow towards those avenues. Politicians can say a lot of different things. And it just-- they don't really have as much control as they think they do. That was Corporal David Weiss, and before him, Corporal Courtney Godsoe, and Corey Williamson, who is a Lance Corporal, all of them in the Marine Corps. We also visited with some military people who have direct contact with policymakers and hope to be dealing with the new White House. Nancy Updike went to the office of a veterans organization called IAVA, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. It was started by a small group of Iraq war vets back in 2004, partly to lobby for body armor and other safety equipment for deploying service members. Now they take on a range of veterans issues, and they've been fiercely opposed to some of the Bush administration's policies, though the organization is nonpartisan and it's politically diverse, with a core of active and former military service members. Here's Nancy. Everyone inside this tiny office is under 35, for instance, Todd Bowers, the Director of Government Affairs, who's 29. I have a lot of friends that are Republicans. Myself, I'm a Republican. Eight years ago, Todd volunteered for the McCain campaign. He's a staff sergeant with the Marine Corps Reserves. He'll be heading to Afghanistan in March. He described the extensive conversations he had with his dad-- Both my father and I tend to lean to the right. --all through the election, right up to election night. He would say, who is this Obama guy? Like, I don't understand how this is even a competition. What's going on here? And I remember speaking to him on election night, after Obama was elected. And I called my dad, and I said, hey man, what's going on? And he said, well, I got to tell you the people have spoken. And my dad is the most right wing guy that's out there. I mean, he's got assault rifles, lifetime NRA membership. My dad hasn't been won over by any means. I'm not going to say that. But he is definitely stepping back and just going to watch now. He's not going to yell and scream. That sounds like that's a different stance for your dad, that if it had been somebody else, he wouldn't have even given a chance to sit back and watch. No, he definitely would be clobbering it and saying, everything's going to fall apart. It's done. Like, I can't believe this guy got elected. He's going to screw it all up. He's not doing that. Todd is willing to go even further than his dad. He's hopeful about the incoming administration, to his own surprise. But after two tours in Iraq, and almost two years lobbying for veterans issues, he's also got a list of things he wants to see get done fast. Number one-- Mental health injuries. If I get shot in the field, which I have been, you put a bandage on it. And you heal from your injuries. Mental health is the same thing. Todd's challenge to the Obama administration is for them to set up mandatory, face-to-face, mental health counseling for all military service members before and after deployment, by the time he gets back from his deployment in December. And mental health in the military is not just some abstract policy issue in this office. Patrick Campbell sits behind Todd, a few feet away. When I came home from Iraq, I didn't know I had a problem. And it was only after I lost a couple friends and a couple other, better friends said to me, if you don't get counseling, I'm never going to talk to you again. And since I've come home, two of my fellow service members have committed suicide. Patrick is a 31-year-old combat medic with the DC National Guard, also the chief legislative counsel for IAVA. He did a yearlong stint in Iraq. He's actually been tapped to be on sick call during the inauguration for the national guardsmen who will be working security. After the inauguration, he has a big decision to make. I actually have to decide if I'm going to reenlist. And if I do reenlist, I have to go back to Iraq in March. When are you going to decide? I'm going to wait a couple days. I've been doing a lot of praying about it, talking to family, and just waiting for the path to become clear. Before Patrick's possible next deployment in March, President-elect Obama will face his first major test with IAVA and other veterans organizations. He will submit a budget. Tom Tarantino is a policy associate at IAVA and a former army captain who served for 10 years, and got through college on an ROTC scholarship. Tom gets his health care through the Veterans Administration, like a lot of his friends. I have several friends who have traumatic brain injuries. And the VA is going to be dealing with a very large population of men and women who were injured very early on in their life, and are going to need not just adequate care, but they're going to need to have excellent care for maybe the next 50 or 60 years. Tom wants to see Obama continue full funding for the VA. It's been fully funded for the last two years, but those are the only two years the VA has been fully funded in its entire history. But besides what the Obama administration does, Tom will be paying close attention to how they work with veterans organizations. He said he's already seeing changes from the way things worked with the Bush administration. For the last four years, it's been a fight to get anything on their agenda, on the table, get them to support anything. I can't think of one VSO-- or, I'm sorry Veteran Service Organization-- that regularly worked with the White House on any issues. Really? Yeah. I know that the White House had called the VFW a couple times, because they were opposed to the GI bill, and tried to get the VFW to back their position. But no. I think that's one of the things that we're all-- and I think, and I would say it's a pretty safe assumption that the veteran community, the VSO community, as a whole-- we're not going to fight with the administration for the next four years. Right away, the transition team reached out to the Veteran Service Organizations, and asked, hey, who are the 35 people you guys would like to see appointed to the VA? Which, of course, we almost did a collective spit-take when we got that phone call. Like, really? God. Which is a complete 180 from the way things have been working. This administration is looking very engaged. They're hungry. They're hungry to do things, and actually get down to work, which actually far exceeded, I think, at least my expectations. No one is going to use cautious optimism as their campaign slogan. It lacks the inspirational grandeur of hope. It's not a crowd pleaser. But when the crowd goes home, and everyone's back to their day-to-day work and worries, cautious optimism is where people settle down and wait to see what happens. Nancy Updike, from Washington DC. Act Two, Playground Politics. About a week after the election, the kids who show up after school for homework help and writing projects at the literacy group, 826 Valencia in San Francisco, were so hyped up, still, about the elections, that one of the adults who works there suggested that maybe they should all write letters to the new president, with their questions and their advice and their thoughts, and they would publish it in a little homemade book. Well, this idea took off. And sister groups in six other cities did the same, resulting in a brand new book called Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country. We asked some of the kids to read their letters now. Dear Barack Obama, one thing you could fix is the economy. Something happened to me. I went out to lunch at Starbucks and I wanted to buy a cup of whipped cream. And normally, it's $0.43, but now, it's $0.74. The price raised $0.31 for no reason. So you should probably try to change things like that from happening. You should keep an eye out for things like that. I wish you good luck. PS, I love whipped cream. Love, Alexis Feliciano, age nine, Brooklyn. My name's Chatham Singh. I'm nine years old. I live in Los Angeles. I want to say to President Obama that could you help my family to get house-cleaning jobs? If I were president, I would help all nations, even Hawaii. President Obama, I think you could help the world. Hi. My name is Bushra Habbas-Nimer. And I'm eight years old. And I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dear Obama, you are going to be a great president. My whole religion voted for you. I wanted to tell you that I am Arabic, and I heard that you were halfway Arabic. I think that you deserve to be the president because you are going to do smart and good stuff. From Bushra. Dear President Obama, here is a list of the first 10 things you should do as president. One, fly to the White House in a helicopter. Two, walk in. Three, wipe feet. Four, walk to the Oval Office. Five, sit down in a chair. Six, put hand-sanitizer on hands. Seven, enjoy moment. Eight, get up. Nine, get in car. 10, go to the dog pound. Please enjoy your experience as president. Sincerely, Chandler Brown, age 12, Chicago. Thanks to the 826 literacy groups in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, and Seattle. The book, again, is Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country. You can find it at the website of McSweeney's Magazine, mcsweeneys.net. We have more of the kids reading their letters at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Act Three, Lions and Lambs. When Barack Obama chose Rick Warren of Saddleback Church to give a prayer at his inauguration, gay and lesbian groups, of course, cried foul because of Warren's past remarks about homosexuality and gay marriage. But Rick Warren's constituents also got angry. Pro-life groups, like Human Life International and Operation Rescue, condemned the move. When David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network asked for comments, he was flooded with angry emails about Warren from Christian conservatives. Here's a call to conservative talk show host Mike Gallagher. George, you're on the Mike Gallagher Show. Hi. Thanks for having me on. You bet. Number one, I don't expect much out of Obama. I mean, the guy's calculating. But I've got to tell you something. And I'm going to use a harsh word against Pastor Warren. I'm going to call him a hypocrite. Because I'm a conservative Christian, and for a man who stands upon a pulpit in front of many people, and sells all these books based on his core values, I just believe he's compromising them for the wrong reasons. Yep. I'm with you. I mean, personally, I wouldn't compromise in any way on the issue of life. I wouldn't give a speech at Planned Parenthood. Back in August, Barack Obama chose as a different pastor, Dr. Joel Hunter, to give the benediction at the Democratic National Convention, and it caused a similar storm among evangelicals. Hunter is the Senior Pastor at the 12,000-member Northland Church in Florida. He's author of the book A New Kind of Conservative. And just to get this out of the way, on the hot-button issues, he is pro-life, and against gay marriage. And he said, watching the reaction to Rick Warren the last few weeks, he's definitely had a sense of deja vu. Well, they were calling me a traitor. They were saying, that you are being duped, you are being used. Somehow, you are so naive, you're giving strength to those who want to end babies' lives. And this is the most radically-left presidential candidate we've ever had, and so on and so forth. And so did you end up losing parishioners over this? Absolutely. But we also ended up gaining parishioners. And did you find yourself engaged in pretty heated conversations with people you're very close to? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the toughest part of it. Because people that I've known for years, literally just got up and walked out of the church. I have friends that I was shocked when they left. They listened to all of this stuff about Obama. And so I think many people are still frightened or very skeptical about President-elect Obama. But it was more, you're getting out of the category here. Christians are Republicans. And you're weakening our chances of winning an election. What about this idea? It seems like their premise is that it's damaging for you to even talk to anybody on the other side. What do you think of that? Well, I think that it's very harmful to our country. It's very harmful to the faith that we say we believe in. Because that kind of very narrow, very negative, very combative approach, first of all, does not give a good image to the one we represent. That was not Jesus-style. Secondly, if you're ever to make progress as a country, or even as a faith, the very ones you want to talk to are the ones who don't agree with you. Well, it seems like a lot of the difference in the way people see this depends on whether or not they see President-elect Obama reaching out as a cynical act or as a sincere act. And I take it that you obviously see it as a sincere act, of reaching out. I do. Just from my time with him, this is who he is. I'm sure there's a political awareness, because he's very politically savvy. But I think this is how he sees the world. And this is how some of the rest of us see the world also. Yeah, let's talk more about that. Presumably, where you're heading with this is that there would be areas of common ground. Now, I know that one area that Barack Obama has pointed out as an area of possible common ground is he says look, there are two sides here that disagree about abortion rights, but probably agree that it's a good thing to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions. And so can we work together on that? Do you think that that's something where evangelicals would be open to working together? Very much so. Very much so. There are a number of solutions to this, all the way from sex education-- including abstinence-- to contraception to supporting adoption. So absolutely. Let's work the full spectrum. Now, when you talk to friends, and read around what other people are saying, what's your sense of things? President-elect Obama reached out to you, and is reaching out to Rick Warren, as a way to reach out to evangelicals partly, and say, come on, let's have this conversation, let's see what we can work together on. Is that working? To what degree is he winning some people over? It is working. It is working slowly. This is going to be a long-term thing. You've got to realize that there are organizations that profit from polarization. That's where they get their audience. That's where they get their money. That's where they get their popularity. And they're not just religious organizations. You can take talk radio or television shows that are made to incite battle, combat. But in a way, this gets to the heart of what Barack Obama was campaigning on. He was saying, well, let's do a new kind of politics. And in a way, you're saying the same kind of thing. Exactly. Exactly. Can I ask you, Barack Obama announced this week that he's also, in addition to Rick Warren, he's chosen an openly-gay Episcopal bishop to also give a prayer at the inauguration. What's your take on that? This isn't a religious service. And so I would be surprised if he didn't include a very broad spectrum of religious leaders. And it sounds like you see that as a positive thing too. Well, yeah. It's in the nature of the occasion itself. This is about our country. This isn't about who's right theologically. This is about our country and including all the citizens of our country. So the picture I get from you is that I sort of picture you, and a couple people, and right now, Rick Warren, are all in the same position, dragging evangelical friends and neighbors towards the middle, and President-elect Obama dragging non-evangelicals towards the middle, all of them very reluctant, on both sides. Well, let me phrase it a little bit differently. I'm going to give you a different picture. There's an old saying that you could always tell the scout on a wagon train because he was the one with all the arrows in him. And I hope I'm not going out of bounds there, being politically incorrect. But anytime you try to go to new ground, anytime you try to go to territory that you've not been in before, you're going to have resistance. But there's a whole line of people behind you that are kind of hoping you make it. And I think that's what we're seeing right now. There are people who are just waiting to get permission to think that way, to get permission to love that way, to get permission to walk out their faith that way. And I think that's what our hope is, this growing constituency of people who want to be cooperative. Dr. Joel Hunter. His book, again, is A New Kind of Conservative. Act Four, Punching the Clock in the Enthusiasm Factory. Well, over two years ago, long before the country chose Barack Obama, a company called Tigereye Design in Greenville, Ohio chose the man. The owners liked Obama as a candidate. And they approached him, and they asked if they could make buttons and posters and yard signs-- all that kind of stuff-- for the campaign, and for the campaign's online store, which opened for business the day Obama announced his candidacy. Well, that turned out to be a very smart business move. If Barack Obama could do for the economy what he did for Tigereye, we would all be very, very lucky in these coming years. The company has been around for decades making promotional materials, mostly for Democratic candidates and for unions. But this turned out to be way bigger than anything they had ever gotten involved in. With the inauguration a week away, they are still cranking out merch. Lisa Pollak dropped by to watch them do it. This is the sound of hope. Or at least, the sound of hope being printed out on paper, cut into little circles, and stamped onto metal disks with pins on the back. These buttons that you're making looks like a presidential seal? Yeah. These are some of our new ones. And it says, I was there, 56th Presidential Inauguration, January 20. These are all going to Washington. This is Lisa Bergman. She's one of about a half dozen women cranking out buttons this afternoon. They're in a room that looks more like a crowded basement workshop than a high-volume assembly line for presidential swag. The process of making the buttons is surprisingly low-tech. The workers load the button parts into the machine-- printed fronts, metal backs, clear, plastic coating-- and then they hit a foot pedal. The machine stamps the parts together, and flips the finished buttons into a box. It all happens fast, hundreds of times an hour. The only thing that changes from day to day is the button's message. And lately, even that only changes so much. Truckers for Obama, Mohawks for Obama, cat lovers for Obama, bird watchers-- In the last two years, Lisa and her co-workers have made more than 10 million Obama buttons. They've supplied the campaign's online store and they company's own website. --surfers for Obama, oil tycoons for Obama. Now, wait. Did you sell any of those? Oil tycoons? Not many, no. We really didn't. Motorcycles for Obama, scooters-- When I ask people here to share their views on Barack Obama, the candidate, I heard everything from passionate support to complete indifference. Several people told me they supported Obama, and that that was a plus on the job. But they also said they'd have no problem making buttons for McCain. --snake lovers for Obama, totally sweet clowns for Obama, there's cheerleaders for Obama, skaters for Obama, muscle-- Nobody's ever been this excited about a presidential candidate ever. I'm in the printing room now with Justin Hemminger, the company's head of online retail and a guy who measures excitement partly through button sales. We actually used the popularity of Obama merchandise to move a lot of the other stuff that we had from previous presidential elections that was in our warehouse. We had thousands of buttons from John Kerry, Al Gore, Clinton '96. We put one Obama button in a bag of 50 buttons with all the others on there, and people would buy them. We didn't actually start doing that until after the election. Because we didn't think anybody was going to be buying any of that stuff. Any of that stuff meaning the Kerry and Gore and-- Anything, actually, at all, after the election. We were pretty much sure that the bottom was going to drop out on November 5. And as it turns out, that was, like, the biggest day we had all year. Barack Obama's popularity translated into sales in all sorts of ways that caught Tigereye by surprise. When the campaign started, the company had 30 employees. But last fall, at the peak of business, it hired close to 500, many of them temps. And they were running three shifts a day. They moved to a bigger building, built a few additions, and had to get a second warehouse for packing and shipping. But after the post-election boom, orders slowed down. The new hires were mostly let go. They're down to a staff of 50 now. And even with the inauguration a week away, the office is a lot quieter than it used to be. And with the economy the way is, it could be scary to know that your livelihood is, in some ways, tied to a nation's faith in a candidate. I'm kind of scared of the day that I'd come and might not see his face being printed on a shirt. I mean, that might be selfish, but it is job security. And I know there's a lot of people out there who don't have a job right now. This is Sandy Dehart. She's worked at the company five years. Do you wear the stuff? No. I work here. What does that mean? That means my paycheck pays my bills. I can't buy Barack Obama shirts. We're not banking on this being an income source for too much longer. Again, Justin Hemminger. You have to expect at some point the honeymoon's going to be over. There's definitely that element like, you got elected. You told me a lot of things that you were going to do. And now it's time to work. Yeah, what's the button for that? Yeah, exactly. It's like buying a t-shirt for a band. You buy the t-shirt of the tour that they're on. And it's the one that you want to see, because you're excited to see them. You don't buy the t-shirt of them making the record. Justin says the company's in a transition, trying to branch out beyond political work, and expand their pool of clients. They've ridden the wave of hope, just like Barack Obama. And now, just like Obama, they have to figure out what to do next. Lisa Pollak is one of the producers of our show. She has sworn holy vengeance on all computers, and hers, in particular. Tigereye's website is democraticstuff.com. Coming up, a man who's been working on the Obama campaign the last, oh, 76 years. That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. Well, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And today on our program, with just a few days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, we wanted to get a sense of how people are feeling around the country, about Obama and his coming presidency. And we have arrived at Act Five of our show. Act Five, On the Court with the Clock Running Down. Well, Barack Obama's transition team made it clear this week that the incoming president plans to order the closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp on his first full day in office. It's also likely, they say, that he will immediately suspend the military commissions held there. These are the special courts that the military has set up in Guantanamo that have been widely criticized as being unfair to the detainees. Sarah Koenig talked to one of the lawyers currently defending a Guantanamo detainee about all this, what's going on in Guantanamo, and what should happen next. One of the first things that Bill Keebler learned when he was sent to Guantanamo as a military lawyer was that whatever he was doing there, it couldn't accurately be called practicing law. Because as a lawyer, you're used to practicing law. I mean, when you make an argument, or you make a motion, you think that you're going to get a fair hearing from a judge, that the judge is going to rule based on the law and the facts. And when you realize that you are perceived as-- and the right word is, a prop in a show, or a theater performance it is frustrating. Keebler doesn't relish saying things like this. He's a military man, a Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander William Keebler, not one of those lefty ACLU lawyers who's gone down to Cuba pro bono. Keebler describes himself as a conservative. He voted for President Bush twice. And when he volunteered to work as a defense attorney in the military commissions, he thought they were legitimate. But on his very first visit to Guantanamo, he began to realize how hopelessly stacked the system was against the detainees. His first client was a Saudi guy named Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi. al-Sharbi didn't want to be represented by Keebler, or any other lawyer, as a protest against the proceedings. He wanted to represent himself. In a regular courtroom, he'd have the right to do that. And it was Keebler's ethical duty as a lawyer to help al-Sharbi get that from the judge. In a regular court, or a real court, when a detainee represents himself, the judge has to go through what's called a Faretta inquiry. He basically asks the accused, or the defendant, a series of questions that are designed to ensure that he understands that he is giving up his right to counsel knowingly and voluntarily, and he understands what he's doing. And he answered all the questions perfectly. He was a fluent English speaker, very well educated, smart guy, and said all the right things. And the judge basically excused us, and said, go back and talk to Commander Keebler-- or then, Lieutenant Keebler. Make sure you know what you're doing, and come back in here. And we'll finish. And we did that. We went back in, and the judge basically said, well, you know, I find this, I find that. Ah, but I find that the rules don't let you represent yourself. So your request is denied. In other words, in the military commissions, unlike in real courts, there was a rule saying defendants could never represent themselves. You know, the judge went through this pretend Faretta inquiry, this complete hoax that was designed to make the thing look legitimate. It was a sham. It was a show. And when realize that-- But who was the show for? Were there people in the courtroom observing who wouldn't have known the difference? I mean, was there press there? Yeah. The media was there. And the press was there. Oh, the press is there. I see. I see. Sure, and they're reporting on this stuff. And from the perspective of the outside observer, it looks like something is happening that's not really happening. And that's-- And so were you sitting there thinking, what is the judge doing? I mean-- I thought we were about to win the issue. Oh, you believed it too? Yeah. I mean, I was shocked. Oh, I was snowed. Oh, really. And I was. I mean, I was snowed. And that really was, I think, the moment that just did it for me. That whole self-representation issue, or a question of forced representation, was a metaphor for the unfairness and really the hollowness of this process. That it so lacked legitimacy, that we had to basically force people to participate in it so that it would appear legitimate to the outside world. A year and a half ago, Keebler got his second assignment, to defend Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen. You might have heard about Khadr's case. It's gotten a lot of press. He was accused, among other things, of murdering an American soldier, a medic, by throwing a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan. He was just 15 years old, and badly wounded, when he was captured. But unlike other kids at Guantanamo, Khadr was never given special treatment, as required both by international law and Guantanamo's own rules. Instead, Keebler says, he was tortured. He was at Bagram and Guantanamo during what Keebler calls the heyday of detainee abuse in both places. Keebler thinks the government saw Omar Khadr as a potentially great source of intelligence. Khadr's father was an enthusiastic supporter of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and they all lived in the same compound as the Bin Ladens for a while. So Khadr's American captors treated him like an adult, and that was one problem. The other, says Keebler, is that he believes that almost every aspect of the government's story about Khadr's supposed crimes is not true. So in a proceeding in December, Keebler wanted to introduce photos, photos that show Khadr buried in rubble from a fallen roof at the same time the government says the grenade was thrown, which he says proves Khadr couldn't have killed that medic. I wanted to use the photographs legitimately, in connection with an argument, for why we needed a particular witness to be produced in Guantanamo Bay at trial. And I was going to use the photographs with the military judge to illustrate what this witness would say, how the photographs would fit into his testimony. I got up to make that argument, and the judge said, I don't need to see the photographs. And then we proceeded to get into this debate, or this colloquy, about my need to use the photographs and his desire not to let me show the photographs, and his making arguments to the effect of, well, we don't know that the photographs are going to come into evidence yet. Well, that's the argument-- that's why you don't show things to a jury. But there's no jury sitting there. The only thing that's there is, there are reporters behind the bar who might see this information, and might realize this kid's been illegitimately held for the last five years. And so it's this use of quasi-legal arguments and quasi-legal rationales to basically facilitate a cover-up. And eventually, at some point, I said, Judge, can I at least look at them on my screen? Because the way the courtroom down there works, you've got screens at the podium, and screens at the individual counsel tables, and for the judge. And then when it's published, it goes up on a big screen that everybody can see. And I said, well, can I at least show it on my screen so that I can make my argument and kind of walk through the photos verbally? And he said, sure, and then realized that the photos had come up on the prosecutor's screens, and that the reporters were peering over the bar to see if they could see the photos, and quickly said, no, no, I'll just give you witness. I'll just grant the motion so you don't have to show these photographs. And that prosecutors were literally stumbling all over themselves like Keystone Cops to shut off the monitor so that the press couldn't see. And the court personnel were getting up and fumbling all over themselves to unplug the monitor so the photographs didn't come up. I mean if it wasn't so consequential, it would have been farcical. For months, Keebler says, the Bush administration had been pushing these cases forward, hoping to make it impossible for the next administration to stop them. Khadr's trial is supposed to begin just six days after Obama is sworn in. And there are pretrial hearings scheduled for the days just before and after Inauguration Day. Keebler flew down to Guantanamo the morning after I spoke to him to begin preparing for his trial, even though he anticipates the new president will pull the plug on the military commissions before it can start. He's betting Barack Obama doesn't want to preside over the world's first war crimes trial of a child soldier. Still, if the Bush administration wants to keep the show going for another few days, Keebler will keep doing his job as a prop. We do have to continue to go through the motions. I mean, it's unfortunate. You would hope that the outgoing administration could sort of see the handwriting on the wall and say, there's no reason to spend time and money and move dozens of people to Guantanamo and disrupt lives for the purpose of having a trial that's never going to happen. But the policymakers on that side of things have not done a very good job over the last eight years. So I don't know that they would suddenly start making intelligent decisions in the final week. Keebler says there a lot more people in uniform than we might think who want Guantanamo and the military commissions to end, who want to get out of the business of holding and prosecuting these people, who want things to go back to normal. And it's not just defense attorneys. A handful of military prosecutors assigned to cases in Guantanamo have resigned in protest. One of them, Morris Davis, was the chief prosecutor there, and has now agreed to help in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called 9/11 mastermind. Morris said he'd testify for the defense. And just this week, Susan Crawford, a retired judge in charge of referring cases for prosecution at Guantanamo, became the first senior Bush administration official to say publicly that detainees were tortured there. It feels like the whole thing's unraveling. If Keebler could offer President Obama one piece of advice, it would be this. Make a clean break as quickly as possible. There's nothing extreme or controversial about saying that we as Americans are going to provide fair trials for people in our custody accused of crimes. Barack Obama recently floated the idea that it could take a year to close Guantanamo, which annoyed a lot of human rights' advocates, including lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who wrote a recent report laying out how you could do it in three months. And even if the new president does close Guantanamo, we still don't know what he'll do about the CIA black sites, about secret prisons, about the prison at Bagram Air Force Base. There's more to Guantanamo than just Guantanamo. Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. Seven years after the creation of Guantanamo, there are still 248 prisoners there. Act Six, Vox Obamali. Last week at the shoeshine stand outside of Sandy's Bar in New Orleans, some guys were talking about what an Obama presidency is going to be like. And they got onto the subject of that dog that he's going to adopt for his daughters. Mister Arthur, what's the dog's name? I don't know. No, they don't have a dog yet. The dog hasn't made it to the show yet. He got it. But he ought to let the public name the dog. He ought to let the country name the dog. Let everybody put it, go online-- But you know, the dog is not that important. Well, it's important for the children. The businesses, though, are important. Where are we going with this country? Yeah, what's going on with the country? The most powerful place-- Is that pothole going to be at-- --in the world? --Ursuline and Robinson for the next 20 years? Is that pothole still going to be at Ursuline and Robinson for the next 20 years, or what? Well, that's not his job, though. Well, it trickles down from him. That's the people who's in charge here. All that comes from him, and it trickles down. That's from the mayor, up there at City Hall. Listen at me. That comes from the president. It trickles down to the mayor. They give them that money to take care of their cities and their states, right? It's not clear exactly what people are expecting from an Obama presidency. We know from polling data that about 2/3 of all Americans say they think he's going to do a good job. 2/3 also agree that he's very likely, or at least fairly likely, to bring real change in direction to the country. 77% say they like him. All those numbers from an NBC News, Wall Street Journal poll, by the way. But to get a better sense of what people are thinking, we asked reporters all over the country to go out with microphones and talk to people. From the dozens of hours they recorded, here's some of the voices. I thought this day would never come. I didn't think he had a shot in Hell. No, I never expected to see a black man be elected president. I didn't think the country was ready for a black man. I live in Whitesburg, Kentucky. And my name is Tommy Anderson, and I'm 18 years old. And what's your political affiliation, Tommy? I'm registered Democrat. Very good. But you know what some people say about that? I got this friend who said that he voted Democrat but he registered Republican. And he said somehow that gives the Democrats the advantage. Kevin Howard said that. He said he just want to make the Republicans look bad, that a registered Republican voted for a Democrat. I voted for Barack Obama. I think there are people in the world that, in general, sort of are untrusting of politicians. God, it's just so hard to say some things. I mean, especially when it's someone who is black. Because there are not a lot of black people around here. And in this county, I don't know of any politician that's black. You go to the courthouse in Whitesburg and every seat is filled with a white person. I honestly think people just aren't used to that. My name is Ice Life. How old are you, Ice? 26. I just turned 26. And what do you do for a living? I'm an educator and an artist. I own an educational firm, here in Oakland. I think what Obama achieved is exciting. He's been elected the first black president of the United States. I think he's also become the president of the worst thing that ever happened to black people. So he'll become leader of 2 million black men in the penitentiary. He'll become leader of police brutality. Did you vote for him? Yes. Do you feel happy about that vote? I voted for Obama because I feel like I'd be hating on him if I didn't. It's the same reason I buy DVDs from a cat at the gas station. But I didn't vote thinking I'm going to change the world with this vote. Is a black man whose father was from Africa that had a baby with a white woman from here, going to an Ivy League college, and then becoming president of the United States the same as Marcus Garvey organizing 6 million Africans around the world? Is it equivalent to Martin Luther King at 25 years old leading bus boycotts? Is it the same? And they keep playing this like that. It's not the same thing. It is not. And really what I feel bad about, man, is all the black folks who I think are going to be disappointed as time goes on. They'll be like, what's going to happen with this thing and what is he able to do? My name is Jordan. I'm 17 years old. I think him being president, it makes me feel like I could do whatever. I could accomplish any goal that I set my mind to. I don't have to be like the way other people see us, as a girl in a video, or on a corner, or something. Is he a little bit of a superhero? Or is he a man in your minds? He's a superhero man. He's a superhuman, like Chris Brown. He's a superhuman. I'm Stetson Kennedy. And I'm in Jacksonville, Florida, where I was born in 1916. And you were a journalist. I think you're probably best known for going undercover with the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, I did that, and perhaps a score of other homegrown terrorist groups. Stetson Kennedy was speaking at civil rights rallies and writing letters and signing petitions and going to civil rights meetings starting in the '30s and '40s, when Jacksonville was pretty backwards. He told me that during the 1930s, he worked on the WPA's Federal Writers Project in Jacksonville, with the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And one of the things she said was that it was Jacksonville that taught me I was just a little colored girl. Jacksonville was a popular meeting ground for the Ku Klux Klan, for example. Whenever the US Supreme Court would occasionally had down a ruling in support of civil rights, our Jacksonville city fathers would basically convene an executive session to overrule the Supreme Court, just as a spite measure, I suppose you'd call it. So it was very much that kind of town. And so what was it like when Barack Obama came to Jacksonville to campaign? Yes, well, it was unbelievable. I'm still having difficulty believing it, you know? Something like 20,000 people filled the park where he made his address, Memorial Park. There were another 8,000 shuttled off to a nearby park, and stood in the mud. And the very idea that there was that many people anywhere, on the entire peninsula, supportive of the idea of not only an African American in the White House, but all the progressive policies, the democratic things he stood for, I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. What do you make of that? Well, I'm glad I lived so long. It was a far cry. The Obama gathering was a good antidote for all the Klan meetings which have taken place locally. And I said to myself that I started working on the Obama campaign about 1932, and worked on it ever since. I thought of my grandfather a lot. About how he never thought he'd see a black man get this close, you know? I think it was a beautiful thing. I'm happy I saw it in my lifetime. I don't think my grandparents would quite believe it. Like the walk on the moon, they'd say, I don't think so. That really didn't happen. I feel that we, as always, no matter who it is, need to make sure that we are praying for whoever it is that's going in to be the leader of our country. I am Katie Dullar Howard, and 41 and holding, for right now. And where are you from, Katie? Kingdom Come Creek, Kentucky. So I feel concerned yet optimistic. And there have been a lot of things out there floating in this world. And so I pray that I find out that those were lies and that Obama shows me something that I can be very happy and respect him with. If he tried to change this country into a country founded on Muslim issues, I fear that. And I won't deny it. I'm Mike Comstock. And I'm 48 years old. I was originally born in Seattle, came out here after a couple years at the University of Washington, decided to go to Montana State University. I'm a software engineer at a local firm. I don't belong to any party, but I tend to strongly believe in less government, so I suppose I'd say I tend to lean conservative. Man, we're in for a tough next three or four years. Even now, we see the Israelis invading Gaza, and Barack hasn't said anything in a week. And people are worried, like, this is making you look bad. You don't even have an opinion on the subject. And already, there's investigations. What, Bill Richardson stepped down yesterday. There's still the Rezko thing. There's already scandals. And the guy hasn't even been sworn into office. So to me, these are big red flags. I'm going, oh my gosh, this is scary. Now, to the average person, they're going, oh, but look, here's pictures of him on the beach in Hawaii. And he's so inspirational. And the press just loves him. He must be a great guy. Could be. But we'll see how long that love affair really lasts. Well, it wasn't my choice to have it go like it did. And I keep hearing different, different, different. But the cabinet he's putting together doesn't look very different to me. It looks very old school. When, in political discourse, have we assumed that someone who emerged from Chicago politics was a great guy? I don't see him pulling troops. As far as I'm concerned, they could come home tomorrow. I don't have big hopes. And I don't have any fears, because I think it's going to be exactly what it's always been. I'm Adam Marsh. I'm with a company called Empire Capital Partners. My name is Thomas Graff. I'm a vice president at Northmark Capital. I would consider myself to be a left-leaning Republican. And what about you, Tom? I'm a Republican. I think the Wall Street people behind the scenes are scared to death. I think that as the government continues to take over the economy, there's a wholesale takeover of the private sector, a plan that Obama has-- we're going to have a -- I'll tell you. --government owning a substantial portion of major industries? Is that what's going to come as an outcome of this? What's going to happen in its place, is it's going to go back to more of the way, I would imagine, the World War II generation lived-- living within your means, being able to put 30, 40% down on a house, buying a home only when you can afford a home. That's in and of itself a scary thought. Because that whole generation was one week away from being out on the street. There was no safety net. There was no savings. Are we going back to that? Well, but is it a safe method also where middle America's been living on their credit cards, and their home equity? And so I think that everybody will be re-conditioned from the highest earners to the lowest earners in terms of being able to live within your means. Look, I've got a-- That's a scary thought that the government is going to try to condition us. That in and of itself is socialistic Orwellian type of speak that's scaring me now. But he's-- I'm scared that they're going to condition me to want to drive a hybrid, that they're going to condition me to use organic toilet paper. Next year, they're going to make you hand out eco-friendly candy, too, on trick or treat. Of course, I know you wouldn't normally give candy out to kids, but-- With all due respect, Adam is saying, basically, if I recall correctly, he said, people should live within their means and not spend money they don't have, I believe is what he was saying. And you're taking issue with that. Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with using credit. There's no fun in living within your means. Look, we're going into, I believe-- and again, it's just one person's view-- I believe we're in unchartered territory. We're in a pretty dark, in a pretty bad place. And how could you not root for somebody, Democratic, Republican, how could you root against a president? My name's Jack Halsted. I'm a 64-year-old, well, I guess I could say, retired. I have a very small social security allotment that I'm trying to learn to live on. I voted for Obama. And I've been learning how to belch the president-elect's name. Now, there are two ways I can do it. I can either say Barack with one belch and Obama with another. Or if I really dig deep, I can say both words-- I want to go for both words. The whole word. All right. [BREATHING] I'm close. Don't distract me with your laughter. [INHALES] Barack Obama. Maybe we could get him in for three terms. He did it, he did it, he did it. I was just so proud of him. How do I feel about him? I love him. I just love him. I really, really, really love him. The interviews for our Vox Obamali were conducted by Davy Rothbart in Central Michigan, Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices in Helena, Montana, Mia Frederick in WMMT in Eastern Kentucky, Glynn Washington of snapjudgmentradio.org in Oakland, California, Katie Reckdahl and Eve Abrams in New Orleans, Michael Olson in Austin, Texas, and Bryan Parras with Nuestra Palabra in Houston. Well, our inaugural show was produced by Alex Bloomberg and me, with Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Andy Dixon and P.J. Vogt. Today is our very last show with our very capable intern P.J. Vogt, who we are very sorry to see go. P.J., we all wish you the best. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, 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 told me that he heard that Barack Obama is going to quadruple the size of public radio. And he has a good source for that. Torey has a totally good source. Kevin Howard said that. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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When Dave got his job at the homeless shelter, it was one of the lowest level jobs they had. And he didn't think of advancing up the ladder because he really liked his job. He liked talking with the residents. He helped make meals, did bed checks, rented movies for movie night, got urine samples for drug testing. One guy had scabies and Dave would put lotion on the scabies. He didn't even mind that. On his weekend shift, he'd pick of all kinds of cake mixes and special ingredients that he would blend together into these crazy cakes for the 200 residents. That was my rep. When I would walk in, people would get excited because they knew that an incredible cake was just hours away. So you were good at the job? Yeah. I mean, I thought it was fun. One of my favorite things to do was with the urine samples. Because you'd take like a Dixie cup. The supervisor would ask you to go do this. He would say, would you, you know, go get a urine sample, and so he gave me the cup and then the container to put the urine sample in. I would go do it and then this one time he hadn't come back to his desk yet so I had the urine sample and I got another Dixie cup and ran into the kitchen and filled it with apple juice. So he said, oh, you got the urine sample? I said, yeah, you know, and I acted like, yeah, I did a great job. I got the urine. Here you go. You know, and I'm like, can you get me another vial because I have left over urine. I couldn't fit all the urine into the vial you gave me so I have this cup of urine still. You could see like already the horror was setting in, like, no, that's fine. I just need the one vial. I don't need two vials of urine. And I said, well, I need another vial because I have this urine. What am I going to do with this urine? And he was just like, ah, get it out of here. Throw it out. What are you--? And I just acted really flustered and then finally, you know, drank it, because I thought, you know, there's nothing else I could possibly do with this urine. And it was apple juice. Yeah, it was apple juice but, I mean-- And his reaction? He was just completely horrified as were the, you know, probably 5 or 10 witnesses to this. And it was really a proud moment for me. I was really happy about it. And did you then have to explain, no, no, it was apple juice? After a while. Eventually I did. I mean, I let it-- I milked the moment for all it was worth. And there were some of the residents standing around watching it happen. They must have loved you. Yeah, I tried to keep things light. So after about a year into this job, Dave was asked if he wanted to fill in as a supervisor for an upcoming Friday night shift. You know, I was excited. I thought I was being rewarded for, you know, the great job that I had been doing all this time. So I was like, oh, wow. Someone believes in me. I can be a supervisor. I felt really good about it. I'd never been supervisor of anything. Well, today's radio show, it's This American Life, by the way. I'm Ira Glass. Our show is from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International. Today's show, on this week when there's a new boss in Washington D.C., is all about what happens when somebody becomes the new boss. We've got a story about a guy taking over a town where people dislike him so much, they won't even talk to him. And we've got a story from our crack economics team about the dead British guy who's about to take over the US economy. But in Dave's case at this homeless shelter, becoming a boss really meant something to him, because he was pretty young still, and growing up, he'd never been seen as very responsible. And so I showed up for my shift which was an 11 to 7-- 11 at night to 7 in the morning shift. I showed up a little early just to gear up, you know. And what does it mean? Like suddenly you're the boss. Like, what do you do as the new boss? You have keys to everything, which I was excited about. It was like a big chain of keys, like, you know, like if you were a superintendent of an apartment. I was looking forward to that. And you tell people when to do bed checks. Everything was going smoothly. I was walking around with my keys. It was sort of a nice feeling. I sort of threw my shoulders back a little bit, you know. You know, I don't think I was getting power mad. I tried to be, you know, as benevolent of a supervisor as I could. But, you know, everything I'm saying, I'm talking about like 45 minutes into it. Oh, really? 45 minutes into it. Everything I've just said is really just the first 45 minutes on the job-- all of these things that went through my mind and all these things that happened and didn't happen. So it's about one in the morning on my inaugural supervisor shift. And the weekend cook comes in, and I had worked with him many times before and, you know, was very friendly with him. And so he came in. And he said, hey, Dave, can I borrow the keys? He's like, I just want to get some meat out of the freezer. And it didn't seem strange to me, because this is a guy who prepares several meals for a couple hundred people a day, you know. Oh, you thought he just needed to defrost some meat for the next day. Yeah, it didn't seem weird. I thought, oh, he's just getting a jump on things, you know. So I said, sure, here's the keys. He disappeared for 10 or 15 minutes and then came back and said, thanks, Dave, here you go. And he gave me the keys back. And I went home and I thought great, like, you know, my first supervisor shift went pretty well. And I walked in the next day and the security guard was sitting there. I said, hey, Al, how's it going? And he said, good. Hey, did you hear what happened, you know, with the cook last night? I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, oh, he stole 300 pounds of beef last night. And, you know, I pretended not to have any idea how that might happen. I was like, what? You're kidding. What are you talking about? And he's like, yeah, apparently he got keys to the freezer and went down there and took out 300 pounds of meat. He took it all out and threw it over the fence to his buddy. And I was going like, what? Why would anyone have a need for 300 pounds of meat at 1 AM on a Friday? And he's like, well, to sell it. I'm like, why would anyone-- what do you mean, sell it? He's like, sell it on the street for crack. None of this was making any sense to me and he's like, he's a crack head. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, well, yeah, he's a crack addict. He was like a recovering crack-- well, now he's, I guess, full on back to being a crack head, but he was working there as a recovering crack addict. And then he starts going down the line and he's like, well, yeah, this guy's a crack addict, this guy's a crack addict. Like program aids, supervisors, security guards. People who have your job. Yeah. And he was just going down the line. He's like, yeah, he's a crack addict. And then he starts explaining. He's like, don't you remember when he didn't show up for work that one day. Yeah, they found her, you know, turning tricks down the block for crack. And, you know, there was another guy I noticed just didn't work there anymore and they're like, yeah, they found him in the basement smoking crack on his shift. And he's just going down the line, naming all these people, and breaking it down for me on my coworkers. And finally he's like, I'm a crack head. I mean, he's not currently, but he's like-- And it was just like what? I felt foolish and I felt kind of betrayed and then sort of wondering what was going to happen. Like, am I in turn going to have to score 300 pounds of meat to make things right? You know? I just sold the movie rights to this story when I made that twist, actually. And now he must score 300 pounds of meat, using any means he can. Boom. If only you could find some, like, retired thief who's just willing to do one last score with you. I told you, Dave, I'm out of the game. What'd you say? Actually it sounds like it might be kind of fun. Tell you what, I got the itch. I've been looking to get a taste of that frozen meat action for a while now. Glad you called. And so how long did you last as the new supervisor? That was it. I was never asked to be supervisor again. Did you feel bad, like oh, you let people down? Yeah, yeah, totally. I felt really bad about it, because 300 pounds of meat, that's a lot of-- any way you slice it, that's a lot of meat to lose. So I felt bad about that because it's a homeless shelter. I definitely cost them money. I was embarrassed about it and knowing that people knew, I thought that people must look at me differently there. Or maybe they looked to me exactly as they always had, which was maybe worse. It simply confirmed what they-- Yeah, yeah. Dave Hill. These days he is the star of a late night TV talk show that doesn't actually air on television but on stage at the UCB Theatre in New York City. It is called the Dave Hill Explosion. His website, davehillonline.com. Act Two, A Trust Without Trust. You may have heard of Warren Jeffs. Back in 2006 he was all over the news, a religious leader running from the law. "Prophet on the lamb," one Arizona newspaper called him. Jeffs was the head of a fringe group of Mormons called the FLDS, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Unlike regular Mormons, FLDS members practice polygamy, which has been technically illegal since 1878, but it's a crime that's rarely prosecuted. For a century, the group lived in relative anonymity out in the Utah desert but then Jeffs came to power and everything went haywire. Jeffs is accused of excommunicating members at whim, sexually abusing young children, and marrying off young girls to older men. He has followers in enclaves all over North America, including that polygamist compound in Texas that was all over the news this spring. Jeffs was caught after a year on the run, put on trial as an accomplice to rape, and sentenced to 10 years to life in prison. When he was arrested in 2005, he's said to have had over 100 wives. But after Jeffs was locked up, a much thornier issue presented itself, what to do with all the property owned by the church that he led, the FLDS. It is not a small matter. For over 70 years, FLDS members had given huge chunks of their income and all their houses, businesses, farms, animals-- all their assets-- to this church trust, which is called the United Effort Plan, the UEP. Total value of the UEP? Over $112 million. And Warren Jeffs was the person who managed that money. But when Jeffs became a fugitive, he started to liquidate land in the trust, putting it up for sale at a fraction of its real cost to fund the things that he was doing, and the Utah Attorney General stepped in. The state decided to put the UEP in the hands of a regular old accountant, somebody who had nothing to do with the FLDS, somebody legally qualified to manage the trust in the way that most trusts are managed, in the best interests of the members who paid into it in the first place. And that is how Bruce Wisan got the job. He was the trust's new boss, suddenly managing the money of a community full of people who did not want him managing their money. Claire Hoffman tells what happened. Bruce didn't quite know what he was getting into when he took this job in 2005, but he was used to people not liking him. Bruce runs a large accounting firm in Salt Lake City but he has a side career in rescuing distressed assets. It's like being a repo man on a bigger scale. The state of Utah has hired him to manage all kinds of businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. He ran a motel, a bowling alley, a warehouse, a Subway sandwich shop. At one point, he took over a bankrupt bar and ran that, even though he doesn't drink. But the UEP was going to be a lot harder. The Attorney General's office said, we really don't have any blueprint for you. This is uncharted territory. You're going in to manage the real estate of thousands of people that are going to look at this as a government takeover, that it's going to be hostile. And they're not going to like you. We don't know what kind of reaction they're going to give you. I mean, there are just a lot of unknowns and uncertainties. Unknowns and uncertainties is an understatement. The community of Short Creek had fallen apart. For years, Warren Jeffs had predicted the end of the world every six months and so people had stopped construction on their homes and stopped fixing things when they broke. Businesses moved out of town. In addition, there was a rising tide of litigation against Warren Jeffs and the church by underage brides and other former FLDS members. If they won their lawsuits, they could be awarded millions of dollars in damages and that money could come out of the UEP trust. People's homes in Short Creek would have to be sold off to pay for that. So it was Bruce's job to fight to protect the assets of the trust from these kinds of judgments. He had to convince the courts that even if what Jeffs had done was wrong, awards shouldn't be paid out of the trust. And if all that weren't daunting enough, Bruce had to get past the first hurdle. Their leader, Warren Jeffs, told the people to literally ignore me, that I didn't exist. If I knock on their doors, they're not going to open the doors. We'd put letters in every post office box in town and the post office would often say that the floor would be littered with my correspondence because they were told not to even read anything that I said. So I didn't have a lot of opportunity to meet the average member. On Bruce's early trips to Short Creek, women would grab their children and rush inside to avoid him. They wouldn't serve him in the ice cream shop. He would often be tailed by law enforcement. The local police were still tools of the FLDS. Being a mainstream Mormon himself, Bruce had always heard about the fundamentalist polygamists living out in the desert. And like most mainstream Mormons, he didn't think too highly of them. But now he wanted to help, especially when it came to people's homes. No one in Short Creek had a deed to their own home. Their houses were communal property owned by the church. In fact, this was the biggest part of the UEP trust, people's homes. But without deeds to their own homes, everyone lived at the whim of church leaders who could decide in a day whether you were entitled to live in your own house or not. When Warren Jeffs came into power, there were a lot of families that were disrupted. He moved a lot of people from house to house. He expelled a lot of men, reassigned their wives and children to other men. I spoke with a young girl that left the community. She was on one of those moving crews and she said that they could go into a house at night-- usually 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning-- and they would move the whole house in less than an hour. And they would go in and Saran wrap the dressers and desks and whatever. Things weren't packed in boxes. Even the next door neighbors wouldn't know until the next morning that somebody new was living in the house. Many of the people Warren Jeffs excommunicated from the church still live in the area. They were the first ones to open their doors to Bruce, offering help and advice. Bruce has hired several of them to help him, like Jethro Barlow. A trained accountant, Jethro has lived here his whole life and was a member of the FLDS for most of it until a few years ago, when he was excommunicated. Then his house was taken from him and the church ordered both his wives to leave him. I'm in a situation right now where I have children that I haven't seen or spoken to in years. One of them lives right across the street, kitty corner from me, and I haven't spoken to him since I moved back to the community. My mother is in one of these big walled compounds over here. I can't visit her. Jethro says he was one of the first of the 200 men to be expelled from the FLDS under Warren Jeffs. He doesn't know why. At that point, Warren Jeffs was kicking men out because of the tiniest of infractions. By the end, if Jeffs had a bad dream and the dream showed you not to be righteous, that was enough to get you evicted. And so without warning or explanation, Jethro was expected to leave his community and the life he knew. Like a Taliban coming into Afghanistan, there was just every week another fatwa that was issued about color of hair, what you could eat, what color you could wear, meetings that had to be attended to, et cetera, et cetera. Then the church became more and more intrusive into people's lives. And as those few people who dissented or resisted or had a different opinion-- in fact, the entire older generation. Over 200 heads of families have been dispatched from the community and sent away. One time I was down in the community. We were in Jethro's truck. Again, Bruce Wisan. Just driving slowly in a pickup truck. And a young mother with two small children were walking on a sidewalk and she smiled and gave a casual wave to us as we drove by. We were only driving like 10 or 15 miles an hour. And she didn't really look at us. She didn't know who we were. And I commented to Jethro. I said, oh, isn't that nice? And he stopped the truck and put his hands over the steering wheel and put his head down. And he said, that was one of my daughters and those were two of my grandchildren that I've never met. And I said, Jethro, go back. Why don't you go back and talk to her and see them then? And he said, oh, I would give anything to do that, but it would cause so many problems that I don't think I should. And it wasn't that it would cause problems for him. It would cause problems for her if she were to be seen speaking with an apostate, even though it's her father and even though those grandkids had never seen or visited with their grandfather. And those are tragic, tragic situations. Fixing these tragic situations would seem to be beyond the power of an accountant, but incredibly, Bruce Wisan thinks it isn't. And so early on, he decided the best thing he could do for Jethro and everyone else here was to give them their homes. The houses would no longer be owned by the trust. Bruce and the Utah court saw this as simple justice. For decades, people like Jethro paid a hefty chunk of their income to the trust. Now they get the titles to their houses in return. The 15% of the community Bruce estimates are excommunicated would finally have real independence from the church, which they've wanted. But for everyone else, the families who are still in the FLDS, it would have a side effect the courts and Bruce don't like to talk about much or advertise. A side effect that FLDS families find frightening and threatening to their way of life. It would give the church less control over them. So in a way, owning a home is a way for them to disentangle themselves from the tentacles of Warren Jeffs. Yes, it is a way if somebody wants to, as you say, untangle themselves from Warren Jeffs and some of the strange doctrine that he's preached. Yeah, this would be the time to do it and this would be the way to do it. So this is really the main part of town. The police station and city hall for Colorado City is right there. Bruce takes me down to Short Creek for a tour. Short Creek is made up of the twin cities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah. Driving around, the lack of color, signs, advertising is shocking. Everything is gray and white and brown. It doesn't look like America, or at least not America in this century. Part of that is because Warren Jeffs got really into banishing things, all sorts of things, like the color red. He outlawed stripes and dogs, killing off hundreds, movies, books, TV. He dismantled the library. We pass a four-wheel motorcycle with five teenage girls piled on, in ornate old fashioned hairdos and prairie dresses driving down the road. It's hard not to stare but then again, in this area, our car is a spectacle. And they know we're outsiders because I have short sleeves and your hair isn't done up in the normal way. This is an odd place. The homes are massive. They have to be to house all those wives and those dozens of children. This is where Warren Jeffs lived. Warren Jeffs's compound takes up a city block and it was there that allegedly he lived with over 100 of his wives. But many of their homes around town are unfinished, missing roofs, walls, windows. This is the construction that never got completed because of all those predictions of the apocalypse. Most of the streets were dirt. When Bruce took over, the trust owed almost $2 million in back property taxes, which he started paying off. Then he pushed the city government to make long needed repairs to community property, like paving the roads, getting fire hydrants installed, improving the water and sewer system, renovating the town park. Even here there was resistance, because his overall agenda was clear to everyone. He wanted to make the town government, the police, the utilities all function the way they function in other towns, as secular neutral institutions no longer under church control. They battled me, the cities especially-- the city councils, the city water people, city engineers, all of those people covertly opposed what I'm doing. They don't argue with me. They don't debate with me. They just tell me they're going to do something and then don't do it, or tell me that I can't do something because of some new requirement that they've just thought up. He has destroyed and attempted to destroy every good thing in the community. That's Willie Jessop. With Warren Jeffs in prison, it's not exactly clear who's running the FLDS now, but Willie Jessop has emerged and taken the spotlight as spokesman and point person for the FLDS, standing up against the outsiders, the feds, and the state. And no one seems to disgust Jessop more than Bruce. There is not words in the English language that I have found that can describe what Bruce Wisan has done to this community. There isn't words to describe the harm that he has done to people. He launched a full set attack, with this judge's help, on our police department, on our city governments, our water companies, our municipalities. He'll have to be accountable to someone a lot greater than us for what he's done. To Jessop, Bruce is a bad man who's out to destroy the polygamists' faith. He tells me that Bruce first came into the community proclaiming himself the state appointed bishop. Since then, Jessop says, Bruce has tried to take apart every bit of structure their community has and to profit mightily along the way. I think he made his stand very quick by the people he employed and he only reached out publicly. He'd show up to the city hall meeting and tell everybody how he only wanted to reach out to the community, but then he would only seek the interest of those that were hateful, known hateful against us. What I was going to say when you started the town hall meetings, his point is, I had town hall meetings. Nobody showed up and the only people who showed up were the people who were kicked out. So those are the people who engaged with me. And that would be his explanation. Well, how could anybody say-- well, if nobody shows up and you're supposed to be helping them, something must not be right. But rather than fix it, he just kept doing it. And then the more he can say how uncooperative it is, he can justify larger lawyer bills to pay himself and bigger accounting fees to pay himself. There's a huge conflict of interest. Does he really want to solve the problems when he gets every penny of the problem that he generates? Come on. Bruce's fees are a source of real bitterness here. They've totaled more than $600,000. In addition, to protect the trust's assets from being seized in lawsuits against Warren Jeffs, Bruce has spent over $1 million on lawyers. To pay for all that, he's selling off trust property, including an office building and some plots of land. He's also asked every Short Creek resident to pay $100 every month to fund city improvements and the administration of the trust. The way Jessop sees it, that's just stealing from FLDS members. But of all the things that Bruce has tried to do, nothing angers Jessop more than his attempt to privatize the land and create individual home ownership. If I want my home to be held in the way that I believe, which is that we put our homes and we pull them together in a united order, that's how we got them. That's how we built them. That's how we consecrated them. And if somebody comes and says, I'm going to break your church up and give you your home and I don't want him to, what is he doing it for? Why do you want to give me a title to something that I believe belongs to the community and to heavenly father and to us as a whole? Why do that? Why force me to do that? Why do you think he wants to do that? Psychological and sociological warfare against the FLDS. And he's got the state of Utah giving him the authority to do it. This point's the impossibility of Bruce's job. Bruce insists that he's just an accountant looking after the assets of the trust with no other agenda, but the simple fact that he's telling the church to divide its communal property and give away houses is stepping on how people here want to practice their religion. Again, here's Willie. It's a little bit like saying, I want to go and give everybody their brick out of a church. Well, if nobody wants the brick, why would he tear down their church? Why would somebody force me to take it? Is there anyone in the community that said, hey, I want my property subdivided in this? Any? Have you heard of any? I ask him about the one group in Short Creek who definitely want their houses back from the trust, and that's the people who have been excommunicated from the church. And he surprises me by denying that anybody was kicked out of the church. Meanwhile, Bruce points out that regardless of their standing in the church, all these FLDS and former FLDS members are also American citizens, which means that when they paid into the trust, it gave them certain rights to their property, including owning their homes. He wants every FLDS member to know that they have that right. Since most of them have been in the church since the day they were born, it will be the first chance they ever get to exercise it. I've been told even by FLDS-- an occasional FLDS person-- if titles are passed to the individuals, that maybe 30% of the FLDS will keep the title to their houses. So these are people that are not quite as staunch and may want this opportunity to establish some security for themselves. Mostly, Bruce is tired and ready for this case to be over, and frustrated at all the battles that haven't gone his way. My only ambition is to get out of this case. It's been three and a half years. My attorney and I are just exhausted and it's affected my CPA practice a lot. I probably spend 50% of my time on this case and it represents 10% of my billing. I'm spending 50% of my time on 10% of my income. That's not a very smart thing to do. And so, frankly, I would really like to see this resolved. Whoa. Now where's the police station? I'm supposed to park at the police station. I think the police station is-- It's on a Friday morning this past November that Bruce is driving to the county courthouse in Saint George, Utah. We turn the corner to the street of the courthouse and are greeted by hundreds and hundreds of polygamists in pastel prairie dresses and denim work clothes crammed on the sidewalks that surround the courthouse. They're eerily quiet, like something out of a movie. They're waiting for Bruce. Bruce drives briskly past as if this happens every day. Then he spots a cop on the corner and rolls down his window. Where's the police station? The police station is right across from the courthouse. A police escort has been arranged to lead Bruce into court through the back door of the building to avoid the crowd. It's been four years that Bruce has run the UEP trust, and with all the infighting, he doesn't have much to show for it except nearly a dozen lawsuits filed against him. But today, one of them has generated a huge crowd. The church has contested Bruce's right to sell off a plot of farmland on the outskirts of town. He has to do it, he says, in order to pay the costs of running the trust. The FLDS flock is up in arms, saying the land was sacred and the future site of a temple. Today's hearing is an opportunity to make a show of force, to demonstrate just how opposed to Bruce they are. And they've come en masse. After an hour of closed door deliberations, the judge tells the two parties she won't make a ruling for 30 days and that for now the land won't be sold. It's a rare win for the FLDS. Outside, the huge crowds smile and whisper thanks to their heavenly father for conquering Bruce. God has blessed me so much. The heavenly father will win. It's very possible that someday soon, when Bruce gets deeds to their homes into the hands of all these people gathered here, church leaders will convince all of them, every last family, to hand their homes right back over to the church and a brand new trust. If that happens, Bruce says, at least they'll have had a fair chance to get what's rightly theirs. At least he'll have opened a door. He can't make them walk through it. Claire Hoffman lives in Los Angeles. Coming up, sex lives of the world's great economists, or of one of them, anyway. 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 and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The New Boss. And before we go any further, I just want to say something about the new boss in Washington D.C., Barack Obama. And before I say this, I want to be absolutely clear with you that what you are about to hear is not the viewpoint of this public radio station, of Public Radio International, National Public Radio, or anybody else in public radio but the staff of This American Life. OK? This is something that came up at one of our editorial meetings and it is now the official editorial policy of This American Life when it comes to the Obama presidency. Don't force him to quit smoking. Our senior producer, Julie Snyder, agreed to come into the studio to discuss this. The smoking is his one flaw, basically, the one sort of release valve that he has of being not perfect and not always in control and not totally responsible. Let the guy have like one moment where he doesn't have to be on stage in his life. And so controlled and so responsible. If he doesn't have this, if we shut down this, then I'm afraid he's going to have an affair. And that's horrible and awful. You know, you would hate him. I would hate him. Everyone would hate him, justifiably so. You think that that's where it goes? Yeah. And I know everyone's all like, oh but, you know, oh, he and Michelle and they bring romance back to the White House and they love each other so much. I totally agree. I don't think that he would have an affair because he's unhappy. I don't think it would have anything to do with Michelle. He would just have an affair because he needs like the one vice that reminds him that he is not superhuman and that he's not always just like the President, you know. And it's not like he'd ever let himself be photographed smoking, too. That's like the thing. I know. Totally. Because I know everyone's, oh, he's like a role model and stuff like that. Like the guy's hardly going to be like boozing it up and smoking in pictures and stuff. There's no way he's going to be caught smoking. Julie Snyder is the senior producer of our program. And this brings us to Act Four of our program. Act Four, The $15 trillion Dismal Science Project. Of course, a new boss comes in with a new plan for how things should be run and one of the big parts of Barack Obama's new plan is the economic stimulus package that was passed in the House this week. It's going to be debated next week in the Senate. He's been talking about this stimulus a lot. Thank you. Thank you. This is from the big speech he gave a couple weeks ago where he explained the economic package. The House's version will cost the government over $800 billion, $800 billion of spending and tax cuts that Barack Obama says is the only thing that can help our economy right now. It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the cycle that are crippling our economy, where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending, where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit. His plan would rebuild roads and bridges, double the production of alternative energy, expand access to the internet, and do all kinds of other things. It's a plan that represents not just new policy, but a whole new approach to meeting our most urgent challenges. In fact, much of the President's plan comes straight out of a very old playbook, a playbook developed before World War II, in fact, in the depths of the Great Depression by a foul-mouthed, slutty British elitist, who was called arrogant, supercilious, unbearably boorish. And that's by his friends. His enemies, man, they really hated him. He's one of the great economists of the 20th century and you've probably heard his name, John Maynard Keynes. The team that brings us our economic stories here on This American Life-- that's our producer, Alex Blumberg, and NPR economics correspondent, Adam Davidson-- have this story about him and his playbook. Keynes published his big theory-- the theory underpinning President Obama's fiscal stimulus-- in 1936. And many would argue that 73-year-old theory is being tested right now for the very first time. And Adam, you've been carrying around Keynes's 1,000 page biography for weeks now getting ready for this story. Yeah, it's the abridged version, I should tell you. Yeah, it's huge. It's by this guy Lord Robert Skidelsky and it is such a great read because Keynes is totally fascinating. Every few pages I'm flipping between thinking he's an amazing, charming, genius and then that he's a narrow-minded jerk. I keep thinking that there are at least two movies you could make about Keynes. In one, you'd see Keynes as the statesman advising presidents and prime ministers and furiously writing up these papers that change the direction of modern intellectual thought. I can see the montage right now. The paper writing montage. Yeah, the paper writing montage. It's exciting. And then you'd zoom in on him coming up with the plan that some say save the free world from communist takeover after World War II. So that's one movie you could make. Another movie would pretty much be a gay porno. Well, why don't you tell us more about that one then. He ran with the Bloomsbury Group, you know, like Virginia Woolf and all those painters and poets. They were into free love and raunchy language and they used to complain in letters to each other that Keynes was just way too dirty for them. So he was out there. In the early 1900s, he was an openly gay figure. He would take his boyfriends to fancy dinner parties. People referred to them as married. And then suddenly in 1925, after sleeping with a lot of his students at Cambridge and many other men in the Bloomsbury orbit, he married a woman and was by all accounts quite happy with her and faithful. You get this sense of a guy who did and said whatever he wanted. And that's just as true in his economics as in his private life. He loved hurling himself on the public stage with all these shocking, outrageous opinions. And the opinions were all over the place. Sometimes he's almost a socialist, then he's fanatically defending free markets. Reading Keynes is kind of like reading the Bible. You could probably find a passage written sometime that justifies just about any position. But there is this common thread in what he wrote. Sort of an elitist common thread. Yes, he generally felt that almost any problem could be solved by getting together a bunch of young men who had gone to Cambridge and asking them to run things. Every once in awhile, he might be OK with an Oxford man, but really Cambridge was best. He even wanted Cambridge men to run America. He didn't think anyone in the US was smart enough. He also, by the way, didn't like Jews, the French, the working class. Yeah, and he had the sense that these Cambridge-led government boards should sort of run everything from individual companies to determining how many babies should be born and, he wrote cryptically, of what quality. He was, after all, on the board of directors of the British Eugenics Society. So here we are in modern day America, millions of working men and women in peril, and this is the guy we're turning to? A bigoted Americaphobe who hates working men and women? Well, yes, and it's all because of this book he wrote in the 1930s. His prescription for how to get out of the global depression. It was his masterpiece, published in 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. I've read The General Theory about five times, I would guess. I think the first time I read it I was maybe 18. Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and he's been very publicly reading Keynes's masterwork again, this time writing notes and conducting a discussion on his blog, Marginal Revolution. He says it's no easier the sixth time around. Here is a sample sentence. "But it is a grave objection to this definition for such a purpose that the community's output of goods and services is a non-homogeneous complex which cannot be measured, strictly speaking, except in certain special cases as, for example, when all the items of one output are included in the same proportions in another output." And that's without looking. That was a purely random passage. And that was like page what? That was page 38. Yeah, so it's hard to imagine too many people getting to page 39. If you do make it through The General Theory, you learn that Keynes was correcting what he saw as a fundamental error in the economics that had come before. Under classical economics, if there's a downturn, the economy will sort itself out. If people aren't buying enough, prices will drop to where people start spending. Keynes's radical insight was to look out the window in the 1930s and see that sometimes things don't right themselves. And the economy goes into a downward spiral. Everything just gets worse and worse. And it looked, in the 1930s, as if that's what was happening. And to some extent, it was. A failure of effective demand, he called it. This is another economist, Alan Blinder at Princeton, who was an economic adviser to President Clinton. A failure of effective demand, he says, is basically that people aren't spending enough money. Maybe they don't have any or they got laid off or they're afraid they're going to get laid off. And if people aren't spending enough money, there's no way for the economy to automatically adjust. And in the 1930s, nobody else had figured out how to get people spending again. The Keynesian prescription is if all else fails, the government can spend the money. So normally we don't say in a free market economy, well, the government. We say, well, people and businesses should do it, but Keynes's idea, which was revolutionary at the time, is if the private sector won't do it, then the public sector can do it as a fill-in, a stop gap. Blinder, like lots of Keynesians says that's basically what happened. Government spending got us out of the depression, but not in the way we learned in school. You know, I learned that FDR, inspired by Keynes, spent his way out of the depression. FDR did expand the government spending. He started the WPA and the Tennessee Valley Authority and a whole alphabet soup of other programs, but he never spent as much money as Keynes said he should have. And he did all sorts of things that Keynes opposed, like raising taxes and trying to balance the budget, which Keynes said would just cancel out any positive effect from the spending. FDR sort of drove Keynes crazy, actually, and prompted at least one scolding letter. But then geopolitical events took over and forced FDR to spend as much money as Keynes wanted. The huge dose of massive Keynesian stimulus came in the buildup to World War II. We started spending titanic amounts of money. And was the way we ended the depression Keynesian? Was it-- Yeah, it was Keynesian, but it was not for that reason. I mean, it was to fight Hitler and to fight Tojo, but it was Keynesian. Keynes had a heart attack and died in early 1946, which left economists to basically fight over his ideas right through today. One of the first fights, did Keynes get us out of the depression? On one side, people like Alan Blinder, who still believes that a Keynesian dose of massive military spending did the job. On the other side, folks like Tyler Cowen. I don't agree with that at all. World War II was a time of economic misery. There was low consumption. There was rationing. Times were tough. It was a continuation of the Great Depression. The numbers for GDP were high because we were making tanks, but it didn't make people better off. And unemployment was low because people were fighting a war. But they were being killed. It was terrible. So the numbers are, in a way, phony, even though they look good. So in that sense, the war made the depression worse. In terms of standard of living. In terms of real standard of living. Back in the 1940s, nobody was listening to that argument. For about 30 years after World War II, Keynesianism was mainstream economic theory, but during that time Keynes's theory morphed into something that Keynes himself wouldn't have recognized. Keynes's mantra was always uncertainty, what he once called the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. But his disciples came to believe that his theories could be used in a much more precise way to control the economy than Keynes ever believed. So Keynes's disciples thought if the economy needs a little boost, you cut just enough taxes and increase just enough spending. If the economy is heating up, you do the opposite. You raise taxes by a couple of percentage points and cut government spending. Alan Blinder, the Keynesian economist at Princeton, says that there was a triumphant sense among Keynesians, that by carefully tweaking taxes and spending this way, they could overcome booms and busts. They could permanently eliminate recessions. There was a view that developed in the 1960s-- and developed excessively, one must admit in retrospect-- that we could steer the national economy pretty well. Not perfectly, but pretty well. If you pick up Walter Heller's book that was written in the 1960s-- Walter Heller was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers for Kennedy. The amount of optimism exuded there seems almost laughable. This was a watch we were repairing. One way the economy is not like a watch, when you repair a watch, politicians aren't involved. Politicians took the Keynesian message that government spending can be good and they kind of went nuts. They paid for the war on poverty, the Vietnam war, they sent a man to the moon, all the time running up the federal deficit, convinced that Keynes gave them a free pass. For Keynesians this is always a problem. Prescribing Keynesianism to some politicians is like prescribing crack to a coke addict. They like it a little too much. And in the 1970s, the patient hit rock bottom. We had high unemployment and the Keynesian solution stopped working. We spent and spent and unemployment got worse and we got inflation, something Keynesians had no answer for. After that, it was the Keynesians' turn to walk in the wilderness. When I took macroeconomics in the 1980s and early 1990s, the textbooks explained the basic Keynesian system but then spent a few chapters showing why the Keynesian system did not work. This is economist Chris Edwards with the avowedly anti-Keynesian Cato Institute, a think tank founded in 1977 near Keynesianism's lowest point. I thought the debate was settled in the 80s and I thought we all agreed that Keynesianism doesn't work. But now with the new stimulus package before Congress all these Keynesians have come out of the woodwork. Did you know there were Keynesians around? Sure, but I thought the sort of kindergarten Keynesianism, as I call it-- the simple idea that the government could spend more money to grow the economy. I thought that really sort of simple Keynesian idea had died in the 1970s, but I was wrong. Edwards is part of the school of thought that replaced Keynsianism. There are a bunch different groups in this school, the monitorists, the Chicago school, supply side economics. And they use a different set of tools to steer the economy than the Keynesians. The Keynesians, remember, like to use taxes and government deficits. These anti-Keynesians said, never use those tools. All you have to do is have the central bank, the Fed, carefully control interest rates. If the economy overheats, raise rates. If it starts to sputter, lower them. This is why you've heard so many newscasts in the last two decades about Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke raising or lowering interest rates. The Central Bank raised its federal funds rate by half a point. The Federal Reserve Board's interest rate setting arm announced a quarter of a percent cut in a key overnight bank lending rate today. The Federal Reserve raised the short-term interest rate today by a quarter percentage point to 4.75%. The Keynesians and anti-Keynesians fought some bitter battles through the 1980s, but by the Clinton administration, most economists agreed on the basics. Some of Keynes's ideas are useful, but we're in a post-Keynesian world. The interest rate is the tool we use. This view held pretty much until exactly one month ago, December 16th, 2008, to be precise. There was a surprise move at the Federal Reserve today. The Fed was expected to cut interest rates by a half point. Instead, the Fed cut the key lending rate by as much as a full point to zero. That's the lowest federal funds rate on record. That's the day the Fed tried to stabilize the economy by lowering interest rates all the way down to 0%. It can't go lower. But the economy kept getting worse. Their main tool seemed to have stopped working. So economists and policy makers started looking around for some other way to fix things and they found that there's one guy in particular who'd given a lot of thought about how to get out of a situation like this. OK, so here's the way Keynes would have done it. So you measure here output. We're in Alan Blinder's office at Princeton, which conveniently has a blackboard. And he's up there applying Keynes's formula-- it's pretty straightforward-- for how to get out of a mess like the one we're in. You start with some estimates. First, you guess what the economy would be producing if all the people and factories and businesses were working at full capacity. Blinders guess, that's around $15 trillion. And then you look at what the economy is actually producing. Let's put that at $14 trillion. So do you know those numbers on-- You don't know any of these numbers. You estimate all of them. So the economy should be producing $15 trillion, but it's only producing $14 trillion. There's $1 trillion shortfall. So the theory says that if the government spends money, or gives us money to spend through tax cuts, that will increase everybody's spending and get the economy back to where it should be. The government doesn't have to spend the whole $1 trillion shortfall, though, because of something called the Keynesian multiplier. Every dollar the government spends produces more than a dollar in spending throughout the economy. If they pay you to build a bridge, you spend your paycheck on rent and food and so on, and then those people have money to spend on other stuff. So, according to Keynes, there's a clear answer to how much Mr. Obama's administration should spend. To raise the GDP by $1 trillion. Suppose your multiplier was around one and a half, so that would lead you to conclude that you needed about $650 billion as a stimulus. Voila. That's the kind of number they're talking about right now. You see it in the newspapers every day, a number in that range. Have you done this more rigorously for yourself? I have not, but I hope they have. Right now, a lot of economists are supporting the idea of a stimulus package. There are people you'd expect, like Paul Krugman, a proud Keynesian at The New York Times, and there are some surprises like President Reagan's Chief Economic Adviser Martin Feldstein. When I talked to economists, I found a lot are in the middle, not convinced it'll work, but in the absence of anything else, they figure let's give it a try. But the frightening thing about a stimulus package is that no matter which economists you talk to-- the ones who want the Keynesian stimulus and the ones who think it's the worst idea ever-- are looking at exactly the same data. They're just coming to utterly opposite conclusions about it. This, even economists like Alan Blinder will tell you, is the problem with economics. The biggest problem with learning things in economics is the inability to do controlled experiments. So we don't have-- unlike what is the case in many but not all sciences-- the definitive experiment. Right? This experiment they did in the 1920s proved that Einstein was right about the perturbation of mercury. It proved it. We can never do that in economics. The best you can have is a really good theory. The best you can have is a real good theory. It's not going to work perfectly in a textbook manner all the time. For Tyler Cowen, though, this is about as good as it gets for testing Keynes's theory. Remember, he like a lot of anti-Keynesians, doesn't think Keynes got us out of the depression. He doesn't support Barack Obama's stimulus plan. He thinks Keynes was probably wrong. But if we do the stimulus and the economy quickly recovers-- That would prove that Blinder is right and I am wrong. Definitively? Well, no test is definitive, but it would be strong evidence. If we spend $700 billion and the economy recovers within a year or a year and a half, I would take that as serious evidence that my view is wrong. I don't think it will happen, but I would take it seriously. So, this just happens to be-- just the elements that have come together right now have just accidentally created the perfect conditions for this test. Near perfect. I view this, if we decide to, as the first test of Keynesian fiscal policy as a formula for getting out of a depression. The very first test. It's one reason why I don't want to do it, because in my opinion, the idea's untested. So to spend, say, $1 trillion on an untested idea, in my view, is a mistake. There are lots of economists who think a Keynesian stimulus would be a mistake for all sorts of reasons. Some say you don't need a stimulus to fix the recession because a recession isn't a disease that needs a cure. It is the cure. A recession brings down prices from a falsely inflated high. A recession is what makes houses affordable again. Others say a stimulus package might end the recession but then we'll have worse problems later on: vicious inflation, a bigger, less efficient government, and $1 trillion more in debt to pay off. The Obama administration is betting that none of this will happen. They're trusting a different theory. They're trusting Keynes. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. You can hear them do economics coverage in normal human language several times a week at the Planet Money podcast. To find that, google Planet Money. I told you, I'm out of the game. What'd you say? Actually it sounds like it might be kind of fun. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life. P R I, Public Radio International.
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OK, so a couple of physicists walk into a bar. Just kidding. They're not at a bar. They're at a school. Scientists in training. I'm sure this story seems strange to you, but to me, it was just-- you know, this was just like another day in the physics world. David Kestenbaum used to live in physics world. These days he lives in our world. You can hear him in our world as part of NPR'S Planet Money team, reporting on economics. But at the time of the story, he was getting a PhD in high-energy particle physics at, um-- there's no way to avoid the name-droppy-ness of what I'm about to say-- at Harvard University. But to paraphrase Us Magazine, Harvard physicists, in certain ways around the office, they're just like us. There was always a time of day when someone made a pot of very strong coffee, and afterwards, everyone drank the coffee and then didn't quite want to work yet. And so we all stood around and talked about various things. You know, and there was a blackboard or a whiteboard or something there. And we were talking about how nobody really had girlfriends. So, this being physics world, the next logical thing to do was to employ the power of mathematics to estimate the likelihood of finding a girlfriend. And so they start jotting down a calculation. I guess it's sort of a variation on-- you know this thing called the Drake equation? No. That is a way to estimate how many planets are out there that have intelligent life on them. OK, so in this Drake equation, apparently you start with how many stars are in the universe. That is, all the places where there might be life. And then you subtract out all the stars that don't have planets around them, right? Because there can't be life there. And then you subtract out all the planets that are too far from the sun or too close to the sun to support life. And so on and so on-- you get the idea-- until finally, you come up with the likelihood of a planet with life evolved to the point of intelligence. OK. They ran the same kind of math now, except-- and I realize this is going to sound a little strange. It says they replaced intelligent life with girlfriends. So we started to do the calculation on the board. And, uh-- can you look up what the population in Boston is? Now David is asking me to look this up because at this point in our interview, I actually made him run the math for me, with real numbers that we got from the internet. So he started with the population of Boston, because he and his fellow physics students wanted girlfriends in Boston, where they all live. Population of Boston, I found online, was a little under 600,000. So you start with 600,000, which sounds great, except that half of them are guys, right? And I'm only interested in girls. OK, so it's 300,000. And then I want people-- let's be honest, probably within 10 years of my age or something, right? OK, so 10 years on either side, so that means-- I'm actually looking at some numbers here. Looks like-- looks like if you go from 20 to 40, you're talking-- that's still like 35% of the population, a third or something. So that means that out of 300,000 women, that leaves 100,000 in his age range. These being doctoral students, they wanted girlfriends who were college grads. Well, OK, about 25% of Americans over 25 years old have graduated from college. That knocks out roughly 3/4 of these women. Ouch. So you're down to-- we were at 100,000. So you're down to 25,000. Then you start applying stuff like, you know, how often are they single? Yeah. Let's say half of them are single. So now you're down to 12,500. Yeah, see? It's getting scary now, right? And then of course you get to how many people are actually attractive to you. And even if you give a really high percentage, like one in five, OK, that knocks your pool of candidates down from 12,500 to 2,500. In the whole city of Boston, right? Yeah. That's just like a needle in a haystack. And that 2,500 is before you get to anything personal, like your religion or how you see the world. What's your sense of humor? So David and his fellow students are talking about this, these rather kind of depressing numbers. And one of the professors comes in. She's not married, either. And so we start to draw it for her, and then we started to say, well OK, half of them are men, so we'd circle half. And then we'd say, well, what's the age group you're interested in? And then we'd sort of circle a smaller subset. And then she had all these other requirements, like the guy had to be taller than her. And she's pretty tall. That really limited things. And then she said he had to be smarter than her. You know, and she's a Harvard physics professor, so that was even smaller. And basically, we got down to there being nobody. She's alone. During this period of your life when you would think about these numbers, were you sure the entire time that there was somebody out there? Yeah. I don't know why. But you know, at the beginning of every mathematical proof, people often write, "Assume that there exists X." Assume we have an infinite surface bound by something, or whatever. Right. It's like, assume there exists some girlfriend. There's totally that act of faith underneath it, yeah. But I had a more scientific view, which is that there are people out there who might be right for me, not just one person. Like that seemed like in a silly novel or something. You know. Yeah. I don't believe there's just one. If there were just one person out there, good luck. They could speak Chinese, you know? And they probably do, right? What are the odds you're going to find them and a translator? You got to believe there's more than one person. But if you do believe that there is more than one person for you, you really might want to keep that belief to yourself sometimes. This may be one of those ideas that you don't want to take out of the classroom and bring into the real world. Case in point. It was definitely early on in our relationship. And I think it was our first big fight. This is somebody else from the immediate word of our radio show-- Alex Blumberg, one of our producers. A while ago, he and his then future wife, Nazanin, were out on a date. And because they were newly in love, the topic of conversation was-- How great it was that we were in love. [LAUGHS] And how happy we were to have found each other. And it felt so fated, you know? And she asked, do you really think that we were the only one for each other? And I said, I don't know if you're the only one for me, but I think that you have to be at least one in 100,000, is what I said. Which I thought was-- in retrospect, now that I'm telling this story, that sounds really bad. I was kind of holding my tongue over here, actually. Yeah. At the time, I thought it was a romantic statement. Because one out of 100,000-- what is there, like 6 or 7 billion people on the planet? Sure. He picked 100,000, which probably doesn't make any scientific sense and also made me feel bad. So if Alex thought that saying that there are 100,000 other women that he could love was simply another way of saying how rare love is-- 100,000 seemed like a small number to Alex. Nazanin did not see it that way. I know it's ridiculous to think that there's one person out there for everybody, but it definitely feels that way, right? When you're, like, falling in love. And it's not like I actually expect him to believe it, but he wouldn't even say it. [LAUGHS] Wait, he wouldn't say-- Like he wouldn't even just say I was the only person for him. Like he couldn't even-- He had to get all scientific. Yeah, exactly. He had to get all scientific. Like he couldn't just lie for a second. It's just like a fundamental difference, you know? Like to me, it makes me feel good to think that we're the only ones out there for each other. And to him, I think it makes him feel bad. I think it freaks him out. I think the idea that, like, I'm it, in the whole world, makes him feel really-- I don't know. It just seems impossible and stupid, and not-- and also, just like, it's a lot of pressure. Yeah. It's a lot of pressure. There's a saying that goes something like, "How terrible to love what can perish." You know? Right. Right. Exactly. But like, you know, there's like 100,000 people. It's not that terrible to love something that can perish. [LAUGHS] Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today on our show, stories of people looking for and finding the one person out there who is just for them, even if it is just a pleasant lie that there is just one person out there for each of us. Stay with us. This romance begins with a man named Bao Gong, a strong, masculine man. An incorruptible judge. Bao Gong was a famous character in Beijing Opera. And In 1995, he was played, briefly, by a 6'3" 250-pound white guy from the Midwest named Eric Hayot. And then there was the really-- there was this fast part where he's reading the scroll. It was like-- [SINGING] Oh, now I'm not going to remember the rest. I don't know where it goes. I thought I could handle it. But it's something like that. Eric didn't really set out to sing the part of Bao Gong. He was 23 years old at the time and on an exchange program in Tianjin, learning Chinese. He took an opera class on a lark, and after a couple of months of baffling rehearsals, found himself on stage dressed in a heavy silken and velvet robe, head shaved, face completely covered in black, red, and white makeup, and hanging down like a thick curtain from his chin, a perfectly straight, two-foot-long black beard. To prepare for this moment, Eric's teacher had given him a cassette tape of the part, singing the entire thing and even imitating the instruments so Eric would know his cues. And I had no idea what those sounds referred to. I'd actually never heard the objects that made those sounds. And then on the tape, there'd be this-- "Tsung, xie, xie, tsung, xie, xie, tsung." And then I was supposed to start singing, right? He would also sing, like, "Nong-er, ning-er, ning-er, nong. A-long, dong, dinger dong." And so all this stuff. And I was like, I don't know what that is, but OK. And I knew I wasn't supposed to sing it, right? But I kind of-- so then we walk in, and there's an instrument going-- not exactly "Nong-er, nong-er, ning-er, nong," but something like it. The sound was coming from a jing erhu, a two-stringed instrument that's played upright with a horsehair bow. And playing it across the rehearsal room from Eric that day was a 19-year-old musician named Yuanyuan Di. I mean I remember-- I just could not stop looking at her. And it was incredibly intense. I remember, I couldn't stop staring at her. And I mean, this is a ridiculous thing to remember. Her back was very, very, very straight. Just something about her posture was incredibly compelling to me. And she just looked very beautiful, and she was incredibly beautiful. And so I was sitting on the other side of the room, trying to figure out how I was going to get to meet her, knowing that my Chinese was not adequate to the task of actually having a conversation with her. I'm going to go ahead and kill the suspense right here and tell you that Eric gets the girl. So of course, they did meet. Yuanyuan's teacher introduced them. Here's Yuanyuan. I'm not used to seeing such a tall and a big person in my life, so I felt a little intimidated by having to look up all the time. So yeah, it's the first time in talking to a foreign-looking and a foreign-speaking person. I was a little nervous, yeah. Somehow they agreed to meet outside rehearsal. Neither remembers much about that first encounter, except that it was pleasant and proper, and there was a dictionary in constant use. Their first real date was for lunch. Yuanyuan invited him to a fancy restaurant. It was her first time ever eating at such an expensive place. They both tried hard to be sophisticated, but the culture divide nearly defeated them. She was doing this very Chinese thing, which is to order crazy amounts of food, just crazy amounts of food. I mean, like 10 dishes for two people. I mean like an enormous amount of food. And also, the weirder and more exotic stuff is, the more kind of you're showing your hospitality. And I ordered something, some kind of a bird, either a pigeon or even smaller bird, that is maybe deep-fried with every part on the table? And for Chinese people, lot of people do eat every part. The feet, the head, the eyes, and so on. And so I was just eating stuff, and I had no idea what I was eating. And so at one point, I put this thing in my mouth. And he just casually carry on the conversation and put the head into his mouth. And I bite down, and it's hard. And I think, oh, no. Like, what is this thing? And then I thought, well maybe it's like an M&M, and if I suck on it, it'll disintegrate. You know, because I had no idea, right? So I kind of, you know-- [SUCKING NOISE]-- suck on it for a while. I was thinking, wow, he must really like it. I don't eat head. I know my mom eats, but I absolutely hate it. I don't even want to look at it. And so I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to take this out of my mouth. And you know, that's not great. And so I take it out of my mouth and I put it on the plate, and I point at the dish it came from. And I say to Yuanyuan, "What is that?" And she says, "Oh, it's blah, blah, blah," right? This word that I had never heard. And I say, well, what's that? And she says the word or the thing that it is. And at precisely the instant which I grasped that word, I have this kind of total epiphanic clarity of the object on the plate in front of me, which is the head, with beak and eye, of a bird. Right? Like this just terrifying thing that I had sucked on, let me just say. So like, whatever brains were in the bird, I ate those, right? And so, like, all of that came to me. And I freak out. Just saying over and over, in a really high-pitched, kind of squealy, frightened voice, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," in English. "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," many, many times, repeatedly, one after the other. And his hands just sprung up in the air and down. And I didn't know what was happening. I was just thinking, why was he so dramatically upset with the bird head? I had no idea. So if you don't eat it, you just don't put it in your mouth. But why so scared? They had a couple more dates, even though they both knew it couldn't possibly go anywhere. Eric was leaving China in two weeks. They spent a day in Beijing, where he almost lost her in a crowded train station. And she invited him to an opera performance. But Tianjin flooded that day, and it took him hours to reach her, slogging through the filthy water in bare feet. And I remember, at the time, that she was not nearly impressed enough by my having walked through the flood. I remember thinking-- like, she saw me, and she was like, oh, hey, how are you doing? And I'd been trying for literally two hours to get to her, right? And she was just like, oh, good to see you. But that desperation of, like, needing to find the person. I remember that twice, really intensely, both on the day of the flood and the day of the train station, just the sense that you have to find this person. And you know, that kind of is overwhelming. I'm teaching Proust this week, and so there's this moment in Proust where Swann is falling in love with Odette. But the way he realizes that he's falling in love with her is he goes to the party that he's supposed to meet her at, and she's already gone. And then he drives his carriage through Paris, and he's going in and out of all these restaurants, and stuff. And it's all about how the act of looking for her causes him, in some sense, not only to recognize that he's in love with her, but also actually to kind of really fall in love with her. Eric wasn't in love with Yuanyuan, exactly, but he was in serious crush. And then he went home to America and more or less let it go. She wrote a letter and he answered it, and she wrote again, and he never even read the second letter. It was just too much work deciphering the Chinese. So that was that. Yuanyuan went off to conservatory in Beijing to study the jing erhu and opera, and didn't think too much about Eric, either. After all, they hadn't kissed or anything. Hadn't even held hands. But two years later, in 1997, Eric decided to go back to China to study, this time for a year. He started thinking about Yuanyuan again. I certainly had kind of dreamed, imagined, fantasized, whatever, about getting together with her. I also knew that, you know, it was two years, and that we hadn't talked. Did you feel like you even knew her, considering the language barrier and the cultural barrier? Do you know what I mean? Did you feel like you had a sense of who she was, even? You know, that's a really good question. You know, I don't know. No. I mean, I guess looking back now, no, right? I don't think that-- if you'd asked me that at the time, I would have denied it vociferously. But I mean, what could I know? I mean, what did I know? I knew her smile. I knew, like, the angle of her back. But I honestly hadn't really thought it out too much. I was pretty focused on finding her and hadn't really thought past the finding her. And so I had her phone number. So I called that number, and I got a "this number's been disconnected" message. Right? Though I barely understood, so I had to actually call three or four times to listen to the message, the person speaking. And so then I was lost, right? I had no way to find her. And so I guess I decided I would go and look for her. This is an insanely ambitious proposition. Beijing is a city of roughly 15 million people. There are probably more than 100 universities there. And all Eric's got is her name, her picture, and the fact that she plays the jing erhu. There's no phone book, no internet. But he doesn't think any of that matters. So a few days after he arrives in Beijing, he simply asks around for the name of a university with a good music department. Then he gets in a cab, shows the driver the address. His Chinese is terrible at this point, but he remembers the word for office, and so finds his way to the music department and asks about Yuanyuan Di. A nice older lady informs him that Yuanyuan isn't a student there, but why doesn't he try another place, an opera school? So he gets in another cab, which gets lost and then finally finds it. And Eric goes to the office of the second music school. It's a middle and high school, but Eric doesn't know that. And I start explaining, you know, who I am. So I'm like, excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you. And there's like four or five people there, and they're all smoking. They're all drinking tea. It's kind of classic Chinese afternoon, no one's working, kind of thing. And one person's kind of dealing with me, but everyone's just totally paying attention, because it's weird. And I have the photo, and I have Yuanyuan's name. And I'm explaining that I met this young woman a couple years ago in Tianjin, and I was singing Chinese opera. And like, oh, you sing Chinese opera? I was like, well, a little bit, and I'm not very good at it. And they all laugh. And this is like part of my trick. Eric's trick, what he was banking on, was his erstwhile stardom. Two years earlier, when he had sung the part of Bao Gong, the famous judge, he had become momentarily famous. He was all over the radio and on TV, talking and singing. Even Yuanyuan's grandparents had seen his picture in the papers. So when faced with any difficult situation in China, he knew he had this secret power, which he could deploy at will. Apparently, Chinese people really like seeing foreigners do Chinese stuff. Kung fu, calligraphy-- And they really, really like seeing foreigners sing Chinese songs, to the point that there was a show on television every year called Foreigners Sing Chinese Songs. Like a special? Like a special, yeah. Like the once-a-year special, Foreigners Sing Chinese Songs. And, you know, there's no equivalent of that in the United States. And so there's this fascination, and the fascination is two-fold, right? The fascination, first, comes from a sense of a kind of cultural inferiority, especially at the time, which any Western investment in things Chinese was taken to be a sign of respect. And then, but also very clearly a sense of, like, watch the monkey sing a song. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter how well the monkey sings. Because if the monkey's singing a song, that's already impressive, because it's a monkey and it's a song, right? So knowing what I did about how much Chinese love Peking opera, and these people I'd never seen-- so I figured if I could make this happen. And I end up singing for them. Again, here's that fast part. It works. Everybody claps. Everyone's happy. He ends up hanging out with the staff for two hours. And finally, someone calls someone else, and it turns out Yuanyuan's former teacher happens to be at the high school that day. And all of a sudden, Eric gets news. Yuanyuan has graduated from the conservatory, which anyway is in a different building, a half hour away. But he's got her beeper number. And then it takes three days where to figure out how to beep her properly. And meanwhile, Yuanyuan has stopped responding to the beep. She thinks maybe a friend is playing a trick on her. But finally, they connect on the phone. Yuanyuan is stunned. He said his name. I thought, couldn't be. But how could he know my phone number? How could he even call me? That's impossible. I tried to ask all these questions, but he clearly lost almost all his Chinese language. So he couldn't really explain things. So he said, could you meet me? I said yes, when? He said, tomorrow? I said, sure. She's more than an hour late, and sure he'll be gone by the time she arrives. But he isn't. He's sitting there, waiting. He looks different to her. He's got hair on his head and his face. And she looks different to him, too. Not as luminous as she'd been in his imagination. But they have a nice walk, and now that he's got a whole year in China, they start spending time together. A lot of time. And as the weeks go by, Eric is trying to figure out how to kiss her-- Surprisingly difficult. She just did not help me, like, at all. I mean like at all, at all. And so I would try to do these things that were like-- OK, so this is a perfect example of why things were confusing. So we're walking down a street. I nudge her with my shoulder, the way that you do, like, when you're flirting with someone, right? She-- I only find this out later, because we talked about it. She thinks, oh, like, he's kind of a clumsy walker. I should move further away from him. I nudge her again. She thinks, oh, maybe he's trying to tell me I should walk on the other side of him, and she switches sides. So she's, like, totally incapable of reading the codes. I mean, just like last week, we were watching a movie where some guy nudged some woman, and I was like, hey, see that? See that? That's how it works. That's how you know, right? But she had just no capacity. I sensed that he wanted to kiss me, but I was not ready, or shy, or just tried to shy away. So I just tried to pretend I didn't pick up the signal, I guess. Had you kissed another boy before then? No. So that was your first kiss. Yeah. Eventually Yuanyuan heard all the details of how Eric tracked her down. He was hoping she would think it was romantic, how he searched for her, and her alone, in a city of so many millions. Nope. First thing came to mind was crazy. I wouldn't do the same. Yeah. I thought, why would you go through all this trouble? Because people are everywhere. Why do you want to go through the trouble just to find one particular person? If this is a-- reverse the story, I was in Eric's position, I wouldn't do the same at all. Still, it's kind of a puzzle to me. [LAUGHS] I wouldn't go to a huge city trying to track down one person. I just think that's too much work. He's more romantic than I am. I'm more practical. More practical, and also more Chinese. I think there's a saying in Chinese. It's [CHINESE]. It means what is meant to be is meant to be. You don't have to look really hard, especially when it comes to relationships. There's a specific time and location that are meant for the two of you to meet to get together, and you just have to wait for your turn. And that's something you cannot request, basically. After Eric left China that year, Yuanyuan came to the States on a 90-day fiancee visa, meaning if they didn't get married within 90 days, she'd have to leave, and probably not be able to return. So they did get married. But neither of them was really ready at the time. And in the first few years, Eric says it was really hard. The novelty had worn off, and the framework of their entire relationship was an ocean away. And now here they were, realizing they didn't actually know each other all that well. During that time, they often found themselves telling people the story of how they met and fell in love. And I think we lived on that, and it helped us. And it helped us be brave. You know, and reinforced to us, to each other, this sense of the magic of our relationship, and the sort of fairytale nature of it. And I think that we needed that more. Right? Like you think, like, oh, you know, a story that starts that way, how could it end up badly? After going through those rough years, when they even considered splitting up, the story of how they met came to feel less and less important, and they didn't talk about it as much. Now they have a different story. Which is the story of struggle, and pain passed through and fought through and overcome. And you know, that's a story that you don't tell in public. Because no one ever asks, how did you two stay together? Everyone always asks, how did you two meet? Minus the singing, and the long black beard, and the jing erhu, and the beeper, and all the rest of it, Eric and Yuanyuan had to make that same transition that all couples do, from the crazy-in-love stage to the other thing. The hard part of love. And it's when you're in that struggle that you most need the story of how you're meant to be. Because the alternative, that the person you're with could be any one of hundreds or thousands of other people-- well, if that's true, then why even try? Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show. Coming up-- OK, if you found the one, the one for you, the one you've been looking for, how can you still be number two? Answers in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. When I was a senior in high school, I had my first girlfriend, Amanda. And this was a big deal for me, because it was that first time you fall in love, where you're like, oh, there is someone for me. You know, this is it. I've found her. And she was great. She was so beautiful, and she played tennis, and she wrote for the newspaper, and she was a bad girl. And I was a kind of dorky nerd, kind of an outcast. This was at a boarding school that I didn't board at. I was only there because my family lived nearby. And she had major street cred. She had been expelled from her previous school for dealing acid. I remember at one point, she said it was totally messed up, because it was actually this other girl who was dealing acid, and I was framed. And I was like, awesome. I thought it was one of those things where we were opposites, and we knew it, and that made it more exciting. Like, where she wanted to be a writer and in student government, and I wanted to know what it was like to be cool. Well, I find that when you fall in love, you tend to overlook certain red flags. One of them was that she was a liar. And I don't mean that in an offensive way. At boarding school, lying is something of a way of life. I remember, there was this one guy in my class. He was a legendary liar. His name was Keith Robbins. And he used to lick his fingers like a bookie. He would go, "Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Nice." And he would lie about things that weren't important. Like he'd be like, "Yeah. Yeah. Nice. My uncle's Tony Robbins, motivational speaker. Yeah. Nice." And I found out later that that wasn't even true. But even if it were, it wouldn't be that impressive, you know? And so you didn't bother protesting it. You'd just go, "Oh, OK, Keith." The other red flag was that Amanda used to say really mean stuff to me, and then she'd say, "Only kidding." She'd be like, "You're not good at anything. Only kidding." "Nobody likes you at all. Only kidding." The final red flag was that she told me not to tell anyone she was my girlfriend. She had another boyfriend at home that she was in the process of breaking up with. And it was over, but if it got back to him, you know, it would be bad. So she would go home every weekend and visit him. And at one point she said she had to go home more frequently because his parents were sick, so she had to console him in that. And I thought, well, you know, the guy's parents are dying, so I ought to be understanding. I also put up with it because I couldn't believe how lucky I was just to be with her. Like in retrospect, I understand how selfish she was. But at the time, I didn't know that. When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's like this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club, and you don't even know what the club is. You just know you want to stay in it. We'd been going out two months, and we went on Christmas break. And she invited me to meet her parents in New Hampshire. And this was very exciting. This was going to be my big moment. It would vindicate me and legitimize me as the main boyfriend. And so I drive my mom's Volvo station wagon from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. And I meet her parents, and it's going really well. And then this guy shows up, and his name is Scott. And then the three of us are hanging out. And it dawns on me that I'm hanging out with my girlfriend's boyfriend. And it's going OK? He seemed like a good guy. He was an all-state wrestler. And he was remarkably nice. I could totally see what she saw in him. And there was some consolation, because every time he would go to the bathroom or go into the other room, she would be very affectionate towards me. She'd kiss my neck, or say something in her sweet voice. But then there was a moment where I was in the bathroom. And I thought, what's happening in the other room? The date took a strange turn when Scott suggests that we go hang out at his house. And so we go, and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing, meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry, for obvious reasons, and then part of you still wants to make a good impression. As a side note, they seemed in perfect health. I drive home, defeated. And I sort of knew that at this point, this was her life, and I was like her secret life, like on Maury Povich. So I was like, this is it. I'm gonna stick up for myself. It's either him or me. And I convinced myself that given that choice, she would go with me, because what we had was so special. So when we got back to school, I called her and I said, "We need to talk. Let's meet at the hockey game." And she says, "Great." So I go to the hockey game, and she's not there. Hockey game ends, still no sign. I have that pit in my stomach, you know, like, this was going to be my moment. And I was going to tell her that she had to pick me, or that's it. And so I start walking around the school, to the library, the cafeteria, the places she might be. And I ask people where she is, and finally someone says, "I saw her with Keith Robbins down at the tennis courts." I remembered earlier that day at lunch, Keith had said to me, "I'm sleeping with your girlfriend. You know that, right?" And I thought, well, first of all, I hadn't even slept with my girlfriend, so that would be insane. And second of all, he's a liar, so he must be lying. I remember I said to him, yeah, I know. But at this moment, it dawns on me that Keith was her new second boyfriend, and I was done. And it was that horrible lonely feeling where you're walking around someplace, and there are people all around, and there's only one person you want to be with, no matter how mean they've been to you. I just wanted to hear that "Only kidding." I remember people were coming up to me, and I couldn't even hear them. I couldn't even tell them what had happened. Because even though I was being dropped, the relationship itself was based on a secret. And that spring, I graduated. Keith was expelled for making fake IDs in his dorm room. He had built a life-sized license from Arkansas that people stuck their face in. And he would photo it and then laminate it. He later took a job at Goldman Sachs. That detail seems made-up. It's actually true. And Amanda was expelled the next year for dealing Ritalin. At boarding school, you can't go to the graduation if you're expelled. It's one of the shames of being expelled. And it's very strict. And I found out later that Amanda actually did show up to the graduation in a disguise. She wore a wig and sunglasses. My friends laughed about this, the way that friends do to make you feel better when you've had your heart broken. But I could relate to her doing that. Because sometimes when you want to be in a place so badly, you'll do anything. Mike Birbiglia. That story is part of a book that he's putting together called Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Stories. And then on the tape, there'd be this-- "Tsung, xie, xie, tsung, xie, xie, tsung." I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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The news has gotten kind of confusing. I don't know if I'm allowed to admit that as a person who talks here on the public radio. It's confusing to me, especially all this stuff about the trouble the banks are in. You know, you turn on The Today Show at random. And you can find yourself watching something like this. As of this date, this is a static date, all these large banks exceed regulatory standards for being well capitalized. So, for right now, they're fine. That's the chairman of the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair. And this is mainstream network television, in the morning. God help you if you accidentally flip over to CNBC. So many of these banks, the stocks are telling you, the underlying equity value is zero or maybe a little bit above zero. Wouldn't mark to market accounting, a hiatus from mark to market, do that exact same thing? OK. I'm just going to stop the tape right there. I mean, come on. That's not even trying to help us understand. Even the Obama Administration, whose very jobs depend on us understanding what they're doing to try to fix the economy, who are actually trying to explain this stuff to us, even they have these moments. Those institutions that need additional capital will be able to access a new funding mechanism that uses capital from the Treasury as a bridge to private capital. This is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, on Capitol Hill, explaining his plan to fix our banking system. The capital will come with conditions to help ensure that every dollar of taxpayer assistance is being used to generate a level of lending greater than what would have been possible in the absence of government support. And this assistance will come with terms-- Forget it. Here's what I understand, what I think most of us understand, the stock market's way down. It seems to be dropping. Banks aren't lending, even though the government has given them hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to help them start lending again. And my life, your life, the entire economic fate of our country and the world, for the next decade, depends on whether or not the United States can fix its banking system. And maybe you're on the verge of just giving up, of figuring that this is just going to be one of those news stories that you're just going to kind of sit out. You know? I sat out Kosovo. I'm not proud about that fact, but I did. Well, if that's your situation, I have good news for you. The team that put together our show explaining the mortgage crisis last year, that so many of you wrote to us to let us know that you found so helpful-- This is the team Adam Davidson, from NPR News, the NPR economics correspondent and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg. They are back. They are back today. And in the next hour, they are going to explain everything you need to know to understand the US banking system and how it might or might not be fixed. And I've got to say, they've been working on this all week. I've heard the thing. It is awesome. It is awesome. And at the end of it, you will actually be able to have an opinion. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Today's show is another collaboration between us and NPR News. The collapse of the US banking system explained in just 59 minutes. Stay with us. And with that, I turn things over into the capable hands of Adam and Alex. If you want to understand this crisis right now, this banking crisis, you need to understand this one thing. And it's one thing, Adam, that the mainstream media is afraid to touch. They're afraid because they think it's really boring. Right. Right. Because what the central thing is, this thing that we need to discuss right now, is a bank balance sheet. But please do not despair, because we think we've come up with a way to explain this to you. And we actually think it'll be pretty enjoyable. So to begin, let's imagine the simplest bank in the world. I would like to call it Adam's Bank. How come you're always the bank owner in these imaginary scenarios? I mean, Alex, I just think of myself as more like a bank owner and you more like a bank customer. I see. OK, Mr. Fancy Pants, go ahead. OK. So I have $10 of my own money that I'm going to start my bank with. So I take these $10, and I open for business. I start accepting deposits. And I go to my good friend and colleague Alex Blumberg. And I say hey, Alex, you want to open a savings deposit with my bank? I'll give you 3% interest a year. I say, that sounds great. I actually have $90, right here, that I'm saving for a rainy day. And so I will hand it over to you. Here you go. $80, $90. There you go. All right. OK. So now I have $100 in my bank, $10 of which is mine, $90 I got from Alex. All right. And so right now this is a lousy business. I'm losing money because I'm paying Alex 3% interest. And I'm not getting anything coming in. I need to make some profit. And that requires one other person. Hi guys. Oh hey, Caitlin. Hey, Caitlin. This is Caitlin Kenny, she's a Planet Money producer. Hey what's up? What's going on? I need to borrow $100. For what? To buy a house. You can get a house for $100? It's a dollhouse. Oh, actually, this is perfect. So I can give you, Caitlin, the $100 I have in my bank, but on one condition. You have to pay me back at a higher interest rate than what I'm paying Alex. So that way I can make some money. So let's say 6%. Sounds good. OK. Here you go. All right, that's $100. Awesome. Later. Wait. Remember, you've go to pay me 6% a year. Huh? The mortgage, you have to-- I've got to go. Yeah. Sure. Got it. No problem. All right. Yeah. I'm in business. This is great. I'm getting 6% from Caitlin. I pay 3% to Alex. I get to keep the difference. OK. And at a fundamental level, banking is really this simple. You pay your depositors, in this case me, a low rate. And then, you lend out money at a higher rate. You keep the difference. In fact, there's even an old banking joke. Banking is a three, six, three business. You take in money at 3%. You lend it out at 6%. You're on the golf course by 3:00 in the afternoon. [FORCED LAUGHTER] Oh, Bankers. Oh, bankers. And this brings us to-- --the subject of today's radio drama. Correct. So what we have here, right now, is the world's simplest bank balance sheet. Picture a piece of paper with a line drawn down the middle. On the right side is my $10, the $10 I started the bank with, and the $90 I got from Alex. On the left side is the $100 I gave to Caitlin. If you notice, both sides are equal. $90 plus $10 on the right side equals $100 on the left side. And that's why they call it a balance sheet. Both sides have to balance. OK. Now, some jargon. Adam's $10, that's called the bank's capital. The people who own the bank, that is what they own. And when Adam makes his profit every year, you know, the difference between what he's getting from Caitlin and he's giving to me, that profit is added to the capital. So year over year, if the bank is well run, the capital gets bigger, Adam gets richer. But now, the jargon gets completely confusing and backwards, because most of us aren't used to thinking like a bank. The $90 that I deposited in Adam's bank, that also has a name. And it's called Adam's liabilities. And to me, of course, it's not a liability. It's a deposit. It's my savings. But to Adam it's a liability because, if you think about it, he owes me that $90. He's liable to me for that money. I can withdraw it at any time. And he needs to pay me interest on it. To him, it's like a loan I gave him. And I think we should introduce another piece of jargon. Sure. That $100 that I gave to Caitlin, that's called my asset. Huh? Well, you have to pay me some money every month. So I think of Caitlin's dollhouse mortgage-- I think of it like an investment. I give you $100 up front. You pay me back 6% a year for 30 years or however long your dollhouse mortgage is. That is my asset, because you pay me that nice return every year. Right? Huh? You're going to pay me 6% a year, right? Oh, I said that? Yes. You have a mortgage. Oh, OK. Excellent work guys. That was very nicely illustrated. OK. So the point is, every single balance sheet looks this way. You've got on the one side, on the left side, you have assets. And on the right side you have liabilities plus capital. And they always balance out. This is true from this very simple, hypothetical bank in a world with one depositor and one dollhouse to the largest and most complicated bank that has ever existed, Citibank, whose balance sheet I have right here. And, Alex, you did not like secretly break into the corporate offices of Citibank, right? That's something that you can just print up off the Internet. Right. And it says here what they have. Instead of $100 in assets, of course, they have a little bit more, specifically $1.95 trillion in assets. That's a lot of dollhouses. Yeah, it is. And I'm reading it right here. It says assets, total assets, $1.95 trillion. And then, on the other side, liabilities, $1.8 trillion. Capital, $150 billion. And that also equals $1.95 trillion. It all adds up. Assets equal liabilities plus capital. Both sides of the balance sheet balance. So here's where things get interesting. And here's why we're explaining bank balance sheets on the radio and why you are, we hope, listening with rapt attention. Alex, I really hope they're still with us. Me too. I hope you're out there. OK. It's getting interesting. It all has to do with Caitlin. Hey, Adam. Hey, Caitlin. I can't pay my mortgage. What the? I lost my job. I mean, you didn't ask me about my job in the first place, but now I don't have one. So that money, it's not coming. Oh, my God. Well, I mean, for a few years there, you bankers were giving out loans to all sorts of deadbeats like Caitlin-- Hey. Sorry, Caitlin. --without checking to see if they had jobs first. All right. I'm going to kick you out and take the dollhouse. But my baby, my baby. Where will my baby sleep? Caitlin, it's a doll baby. Get out. Fine. OK. So now, Adam's bank owns Caitlin's dollhouse. And he wants to sell it. But it's a down market in dollhouses. And all the dollhouses out there, just like Caitlin's are only selling for $95, which is a problem for your balance sheet, Adam. Because now it looks like this: liabilities, $90, that you owe me, $10 of your own dollars equals $100. But on the other side, assets, one dollhouse worth $95. Your balance sheet is out of balance. So I'm a good banker. I know, obviously, the balance sheet has to balance. So that $90, that's Alex's money, Alex's deposit, that can't change, because if he wants to withdraw it at a moment's notice, I have to be ready to give him $90 at any time. The only thing that can change on that side of the balance sheet is my capital, the $10 of my own money I started out with. So now my balance sheet looks like this: on the asset side, one dollhouse worth $95. On the liability side, $90 deposit from Alex, my liability. $5 dollars in capital, my money. So both sides equal $95. They're back in balance. But with the stroke of an accountant's pen, I've lost five of my own dollars. I've lost half of my money. This really sucks. And this situation I'm in with Caitlin, this is the situation a lot of our biggest banks are in right now. But much worse. Right. Because instead of one Caitlin, there are millions of them. And they all bought dollhouses at the height of a dollhouse mania. And dollhouses have lost not 5% percent of their value, but 10%, 20%, sometimes 50%, depending on where they live. They've gone from being assets to toxic assets. That's probably another term you've heard. So if Caitlin's dollhouse is, in fact, a toxic asset, if her dollhouse has dropped in price-- let's say by 50%-- let's go back to our balance sheet. If the bank, you Adam, takes over Caitlin's dollhouse in this situation, and can sell it for only 50% of its value, then your balance sheet looks very bad. A $50 loss on the left side of the balance sheet, which has to be matched on the right side. So my $10, my capital, that's totally gone. And $40 of my $90 is now gone as well. So not only is my bank wiped out, but I can't even pay back my creditors, in this case my good friend and colleague Mr. Alex Blumberg. And this is, of course, a bad thing. I lose half my savings. Adam loses his bank. And it's all because of Caitlin and her stupid dollhouse. Oops. [LAUGHTER] Is that all you have to say? Sorry. All right. There might be a way out. Yeah. I don't want this whole scenario to happen. And so I come up with a plan. I'm not going to sell Caitlyn's dollhouse. But what about my money? Isn't it only worth half of what she paid for it? You have to sell it. I need to get something back, right? Hey, Alex, don't worry about that. Your money is totally safe in my bank, because, let me tell you something, the dollhouse market is coming back. And all I have to do is just keep Caitlin's dollhouse on my balance sheet for more or less its original value, somewhere around $100. And I have a simple claim. The market for dollhouses is illiquid right now. In other words, I am not able to sell the dollhouse into this market. So there's no way to determine a market price. We're fine. We just have to assume the market is going to come back, and I can sell it for $100 down the road. But that's a crazy assumption. We're entering maybe the worst recession in decades. People are losing their jobs all over the place. Everyone says things are probably going to get worse in the short term, not better. Shh, shh. Alex, I've chosen to believe that this house will be worth more one day. Can you let me have my dream? If we just assume the dollhouse hasn't gone down in value, everything is OK. It's funny. I talked to a professor at Columbia Business School. He's an expert in bank crises and a former banker himself. David Beim's his name. He told me you'd say that. Most often, the bankers say, well, it's not as bad as that. For example, in the current crisis, many banks hold these so-called toxic assets, whose quoted prices are down around 20% or 30% of their face value. And the bankers say, look, I'm just sure it's worth more than that. I don't want a mark it to market. OK. That last phrase that he just said, let's listen again. I don't want to mark it to market. David Beim is saying you don't want to mark it to market. Mark to market, that's another phrase you might have heard. And it applies to exactly the situation Adam is in right now. He's got a dollhouse on his books for $100. But if he had to sell it now, he could only get $50. That's the market price, what he could get right now. Marking it to market means Adam would have to enter the market price, $50 or $20 or whatever it really is, into his books. And the bankers have all been saying, please, don't make me do that. Because if you do, I'll be declaring bankruptcy. If I show all those as a reduction from $100 all the way down to $20, you've just wiped out my entire capital and more. I'm going to have to go to the government and say, close me down. I'm broke. And bankers find that very hard to do. And furthermore, regulators don't really want that to happen to all the banks at once, certainly not all the big ones. Now obviously, in the real world, the assets that banks have on their books are more complicated than dollhouses. But if the banks had to sell them now, in today's market, they'd almost certainly take a huge loss, a loss big enough to wipe out their capital and shut them down. And it's not just a few banks. Banking experts estimate that more than 1,000 banks are either facing this situation right now, or they will soon. And that includes-- and this is the crucial point-- many of America's largest banks. They owe more money than they have. And there's a word for this: insolvent. You don't have to take our word for it. One of our colleagues on the Planet Money team, David Kestenbaum, talked to Jeremy Siegel, who is, it's true, called the Wizard of Wharton. Wharton, of course, being that famous business school. How many of the banks, right now, do you think would be insolvent if someone, as you said, hard headed went in and valued what they actually have? Well, I don't know how many. But I think there might be, on a current market value-- and again, the market may be over discounting some of these. But probably, I wouldn't be surprised if Citi and Bank America, really, at current value of their assets, don't cover the depositors and the bondholders and would wipe out shareholders equity. And there could be others too. All right. Let's just pause there for one moment. When they talk about the banking crisis, this is what they mean. This is it. Siegel is saying two of the biggest banks in the United States, their assets are too small to cover their liabilities. The losses wipe out the capital. And there's still not enough left to pay for all the depositors and other people who lent the banks money. That is just huge. Yeah. This quote really makes me nervous. Though, I do want to be clear about something. Normal people, depositors like Alex with a regular savings account, they would not lose any money under any scenario, because the government guarantees their deposits up to $250,000. But big banks get a lot of their money from big investors who lend them millions or billions of dollars. And that money is not protected. If the banks go down, these investors could lose their money. And the consequences of that will ripple around the world. Of course, Citibank and Bank of America dispute the claim that they're insolvent. They both say they have more than enough capital. And there's no need to worry. And we should say, the Treasury Department and federal regulators say that's true, that they have more than enough capital. But it seems that the market does not believe this story. Consider this fact: Citibank claims on its balance sheet that it's worth, its own capital, is more than $150 billion. But if you add up all the stock out there, which is how you find out what the market thinks Citibank is worth-- Here I am just going to type C into Google. That's the code for Citibank'a stock. And wow. OK. As of Friday morning, when we're recording it, Citibank's total value, according to the stock market, the world's investors, is less than $10 billion. That's actually about the size of the Heineken beer company. Less than the size of the Heineken beer company. And Citibank, historically, has been one of the largest companies in the world. So what you see here is two stories: what the banks are saying about their balance sheets, and what people outside the banks are saying. The government, by the way, is siding with the banks for now. They believe that the dollhouse value will come back. They believe that if we just wait a little while, the banks will be fine. Right. Which is important to know because what you do about the banking crisis depends on which version of the truth you believe. And the Secretary of the Treasury and the Federal Government say, now anyway, that Citibank and all the other major banks are well capitalized, and they just need a little cushion for insurance. All right. So this is the situation our country is in. If the Wizard of Wharton and the stock market are right, two of our largest banks are either insolvent or really, really close, and probably lots of others as well. Those two banks, Citibank and Bank of America alone, have over a quarter of all of the money in the US banking system. 90% of all the money anybody has on deposit in the US is just in the 20 largest banks. So if they start falling, the US economy, the world economy are basically done for a while. So what do we do? There are two options that have been discussed a lot. One option was the one that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson originally proposed: the first TARP. Which you'll remember, stood for Troubled Asset Relief Program. And now, that word might make a little bit more sense. The idea there is pretty simple. You take Caitlin's dollhouse as a typical troubled asset. It's selling right now for only $50. Under this plan, the government agrees with Adam that someday the market will pay a lot more for that dollhouse. And so it buys it from Adam for a higher price than he could get right now. Let's say $92. OK. I'd still take a hit to my capital. I'd lose a lot of my money. I'd lose $8 of my $10. But I'd get to keep my bank. And I'd keep my depositors, like you Alex, whole. But we, the taxpayers, get stuck with a $50 dollhouse that we paid almost $100 for. And if dollhouse prices don't go up, the government turns out to be a pretty big sucker. And this plan bails out people like Adam, even though he's the guy who got us into this crisis by making unbelievably stupid loans to deadbeats like Caitlin. Easy pal. Easy, easy. Sorry guys. I got carried away. Anyway, the government can't pay less for the dollhouse, it can't get a better deal, because if it gets a good deal, if it only pays what the market would pay, that wouldn't save the banks. That would defeat the whole purpose. Now, I just want to say that I, as a banker, I love this plan. I think it's brilliant, because sure, I'll lose some money. But I'm still in business. I'm solvent. And you know what? It's not just me. All my banker friends think this plan is brilliant. I talked to Simon Johnson. He's an economist. He used to be with the International Monetary Fund. Now he's with the Peterson Institute. And he found a good example of another banker giving the hard sell for this plan. So you brought us this piece of paper today. This is having you laugh. Can you tell me what this is? Well, it's a note from Deutsche Bank. It's part of their US Daily Economic Notes series. This is some staff economists there that send this out every day. That's right. And they send these around to clients and to people that they want to have conversations with. And if course, it goes to government. These are very influential, these kinds of things. This research note-- Can I just plunge in to say what's in it? Yeah. The title is eye catching. It's called "Falling Short colon, The Government Needs to Buy Toxic Assets." So it's a very straight statement. It obviously speaks to the issues of the week. And the paragraph-- It's a one pager. And the paragraph that, the bolded text-- they bolded it-- that really struck me, and I think summarizes the tone of it is it says, "ultimately the taxpayer will pay, one way or another, either through greatly diminished job prospects and/or significantly higher taxes down the line. We think the government should do the following: Estimate the highest price it can pay for the various toxic assets residing on financial institution balance sheets which would still return the principal to taxpayers." Now, if I can cut through the-- If I can translate that, this is-- You have a phrase for this note. This is a robbery note. It's saying, guys, either you'll have 20% unemployment or the national debt will go up to these dangerous levels, unless you buy toxic assets, not for what they're worth, not for what the market price is, as much as you can pay. Wow. So it is saying-- I mean, the key line here is "the taxpayer will pay one way or another." I had a landlord. I don't think he was in the mafia, but he tried to cultivate the image. And he would, you know, he'd say things like, there's an easy way and there's a hard way. And I can just hear him saying that you're going to pay one way or another. And so basically, what this note is saying is look guys, you're going to hurt either way. Give us the money now. We'll try and make it easy for you. My first reaction was, it's a spoof. My second reaction was, oh, my God. We figured Simon should argue it out with the Deutsche Bank guy, Joe LaVorgna. Joe LaVorgna. Hey, Joe. It's Adam Davidson from NPR. Hi. Hi. So I'm on the line with Simon Johnson. Your note today, did you write it? Or you wrote it with your staff? Me. You wrote it. Right. Yep. I wrote it. Simon was actually really nervous about calling Joe. He thought he'd get all mad at us for saying this was a robbery note. But Joe was cool. I think the bottom line is simply, someone has to pay for the mess that's been created. And, there's no escaping, the taxpayer is on the hook. And let me just say, Joe LaVorgna is finally coming out and saying something that every other bank and lots of government people have avoided saying. They've been playing this game, saying there's some magical recipe where the government bails out the banks. The banks do better. The taxpayers end up making money. Everyone wins. And this note is saying what we keep hearing from economists. That probably can't happen. Someone is going to lose. And Joe is saying he knows exactly who that's going to be. You and me and everybody who pays taxes. I think Joe-- I found it refreshingly honest. But it also kind of took my breath away. And the reaction-- So I put it out there. And I asked people what they thought on my blog. I didn't use names. I just put out this key paragraph that you were just discussing and the key issue, the taxpayer will pay one way or another. So one guy said quote-- he's sort of paraphrasing how he read the note. He said, "that sure is a nice global economy you've got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it." And Joe, I've got to say, what I love about your note, if we-- Do you mind if we call it a ransom note. I wouldn't prefer to-- [LAUGHTER] If I was on my own, I would say fine. But I wouldn't say a ransom note. I would say a reality check. I mean, the thing is, I think Simon's exactly right. And this is the issue. We're delaying the pain. And you've got to just deal with the problem. And I guess the issue is just dealing with the problem. What we've done to this point has just simply not been aggressive enough. So whatever the approach is, let's just get there. So let's talk about a second way the government could address this whole mess. The government could say to bankers like me, OK dude, get real. I would have to recognize my loss on Caitlin's dollhouse. So I'd just have to say, yes, I am $50 in the hole. So my capital is wiped out. And I owe my depositor, you know Alex, $40. But then, under this second plan, the government comes in, on the other side of my balance sheet, and covers my losses. It gives $40 for Alex. And it replaces the $10 dollars in capital that got wiped out, that I lost. Now, the problem here is that if the government puts in that much capital, then the government now owns the bank, my bank. And I want to say, as a bank owner, I do not like this plan, because I would lose my money. I'd lose my job. And you know, I'm a banker. I don't like this kind of government takeover of private industry. Its nationalization. I hate nationalization. This seems like socialism to me. Yeah. But at least this way I, as a taxpayer, have an ownership stake in a bank, not some crappy overvalued dollhouse. And the government won't just own it forever. It'll clean the bank up. Sell it to someone else down the road. And maybe we'll get some of our money back. And frankly, I like the fact that you lose your job. You got us into this mess. Hey. Oh, now I hurt your feelings. I'm sorry. OK. I wish you could keep your job. But don't you understand what I'm saying? You know, I'm mad. We're all mad. And this is the traditional way governments usually fix banks. For the last 20 years, Simon Johnson has worked on banking crises all over the world. He used to be the chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, an organization that's stepped in over and over around the globe to fix just the kind of crisis we're in right now. And the IMF, with the United States, pushed countries in similar situations to do what? To nationalize their banks temporarily. Indonesia '97, Korea '97, '98, Russia, every couple of years, Argentina 2002. What would the US tell the IMF to do if this were any country other than the US? If you covered up the name of the country, and just show me the numbers, just show me the problems, just talk to me a little bit about the politics in a generic way, I know what we would do. I know what the advice would be. And that would be take over the banking system, clean it up, reprivatize it as soon as you can. So then, the logical follow up question is, why? Why is the United States not taking it's own advice? That is a great question, the huge question. My take is that it's too political. The politics are awkward. Remember, so cleaning up banking systems, in my view, technically, is not that difficult. But when you clean up a banking system, and you do it properly, some powerful people lose. They lose their bonuses. They lose their banks. They lose their access. So who's going to lose? Who's going to decide who's in and who's out? I don't think the people at the top are yet ready to have that conversation. One of the reasons they might not be ready to have that conversation has to do with the practical challenges of taking over the banks. Columbia Business School professor David Beim knows about this. He has experience himself taking over American banks, assisting the US government. This was back during our last banking crisis, the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s. When that crisis hit, he started advising the FDIC on the problem, which was big. Every large bank in Texas and Oklahoma failed in that era, every one of them. It was the biggest banking crisis America had faced since the Great Depression, and compared to now, it was nothing. What I faced in the '80s was a regional crisis. So that the FDIC was willing to shut every major bank in Texas and Oklahoma, cleanse them of their bad loans, relaunch them with new management and new shareholders. That was the best practice of the day. And they did it very well. And they got through the mess and got through it elegantly. It's harder to do that for the nation. It's harder to say all the big banks in the country should now be closed. That is kind of awesome. I mean, you would not want to do that all at once. This crisis has advanced so fast and so globally. It's not just the United States, of course. Banks are crashing all over Europe. The banks of Europe are actually in worse shape than those of the United States, even those that never touched a mortgage backed security. This is a global crisis. It's absolutely everywhere. And under those circumstances, it's harder to advocate closing down all the banks. But I'm trying to understand. What is the difficulty? Is it simply you need somebody to sell the assets to, and if you're taking over the largest banks in the country, like there's nobody to sell assets to? Is that what it is? Yeah. You can sell one bank. I'm sure you could put some buyers together. There's private equity funds and others who could, I'm sure, be found to buy one bank. But to buy the banking system of the globe is sort of a tall order. There's another practical challenge to taking over all of our insolvent banks. The government might just not have enough people to do it. The one time the FDIC actually fully nationalized a US bank-- which was Continental Illinois in 1984-- it took more than 100 government regulators. Citibank alone is 20 times bigger. And the banking system is far more complicated now than it was then. One expert told me we might be talking about thousands of people needed for each bank we take over. A second problem, nationalizations are kind of like potato chips. It's hard to have just one. You'd have to come out with a plan for all of them, or all the big banks. And you'd probably have to do the whole thing in one day, at one time. Because if you just take over one big bank, people with money at the other banks will start worrying that their bank will be nationalized next. And that will cause investors to panic. And they'll just pull all their money out of the bank. Now to be fair, there's debate about these logistical arguments. Simon Johnson, the economists who worked at the IMF, says he heard very practical arguments against nationalization in every country he went into. And there are ways to deal with all of it: the timing, the staffing. He said it might be possible, for example, for the government to hold on to the banks for just a few hours before turning it back over to private investors. And so when bankers like me tell Simon that there's all these practical reasons we can't do this in America, he has an answer. I'm sure they're all sensible, Adam. But let me speak as if I were the IMF, acting on the behalf and with the support of the US government back in the 1990s. Adam, stop with the whining. You know it's got to be done. Just do it. The longer you wait, the more you prevaricate, the more it's going to cost you. This is the US Government we're talking about. These people, when they get organized, when they get focused, they get things done. This is the greatest country ever on the face of the Earth. We have plenty of talent. There's no shortage of brainpower. Just do it. Now, you might have noticed that the government is not doing either of these options. Instead, they're doing sort of halfway versions of both. They have not committed to buying up all the dollhouses and other toxic assets at something closer to their full price. But they have created a new trial program that allows the government to help subsidize private investors who, they hope, will buy a lot of these assets. And when it comes to option two, the government is not forcing the banks to sell their assets or value them at what they could get on the market right now. The government is not taking over the banks. They're not nationalizing them. In fact, the government has gone out of its way to give banks money without taking control. They've given banks over $240 billion, including $45 billion to Citibank alone. But the government structured the deal in a special way, specifically designed so it was not a nationalization. And this week, when Citibank's troubles got worse, the government had to go through these amazing contortions to help the bank without becoming its owner. Because the government-- and all of them, from President Bush and Henry Paulson to President Obama and Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke-- they all say the same thing. They don't want the government owning banks. Now Alex, I always think that there is another option. The government could just let the banking system sort things out on its own. If banks made bad bets, then they go out of business. It's not our problem. Well, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, dismissed this option when he told Congress in a private briefing that it actually is our problem. He was quoted as saying, "If we let the banking system fail, no one will talk about the Great Depression anymore, because this will be so much worse." So we need banks, which Columbia Business School professor David Beim says is why governments always protect them. The year 37, in ancient Rome, there was a bank run. They had a very sophisticated banking system. And there was a run on those banks in AD 37. Some number of ships didn't come in with their cargo or something happened. And the emperor was out of Rome. And how did he deal with it? He did just what Ben Bernanke would do. He came galloping back into Rome with bags full of coin and distributed them to the banks. It's been happening as long as there have been banks. Governments must protect banks. So if the government won't let these banks fail, and also won't take them over, it means that Citibank, Bank of America, throw in JP Morgan Chase, and three or four others, they have us over a barrel. We can't let them just fail. And it's going to cost us, one way or another, to keep them alive. And this sucks. I feel that. You feel that. Congress definitely feels that. Or at least, constituents are communicating those feelings to Congress. And this frustration leads to a lot of lashing out about almost exactly the wrong thing. Here's Massachusetts Congressman Mike Capuano yelling at the banks. Start loaning the money that we gave you. Get it on the street. This might be a reasonable expectation for healthy banks. But for insolvent banks, it can be a disaster. And the reason all goes back to our balance sheet. When a bank is insolvent, it doesn't have the capital to cover its losses. In that situation, banks would actually be doing the right thing by keeping the bailout money that we're giving them. They need to hold on to their capital. And that's how they fix their balance sheets. If they loaned the money away, they'd be returning to the situation we are trying to rescue them from. In other words, saving the banking system means that the banks that are worse off should loan less, not more. But beyond the balance sheet, David Beim has a much more profound reason why banks shouldn't lend. He shows me something on his computer. OK. So here is a picture. OK. This is a graphic. We're in his office. And we're looking at a graph, which is basically a measure of how much debt we, the citizens of America, are in, how much we all owe on our mortgages and credit cards and auto loans, compared to the economy as a whole, the GDP. And for most of history, the amount we, as Americans, owed was a lot smaller than the economy as a whole. This ratio, household debt to GDP, bounces along between 30% and 50% for most of the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s. It breaks through 50% in the '80s. And then-- From 2000 to 2008 it just goes-- it like almost a hockey stick. It goes dramatically upward. Like a rocket. It hits 100% of GDP. That is to say, currently, consumers owe $13 trillion when the GDP is $13 trillion. That's a 100% of GDP owed by individuals. That is a ton. And I'm going to ask you a leading question, because I'm looking at the graph right now. Tell me, professor, has there ever been a time in history when we've owed that much before? Why, I'm glad you asked me that. And guess what? The earlier peak, way off on the left part of the chart, is 100% of GDP in 1929. This is a map of twin peaks, one in 1929, one in 2007. Does that chart scare you? Yes. That chart is the most striking piece of evidence that I have that what is happening to us is something that goes way beyond toxic assets in banks. It's something that has little to do with the mechanics of mortgage securitization or ethics on Wall Street or anything else. It says the problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us. We have over borrowed. We've been living very high on the hog. Our standard of living has been rising dramatically in the last 25 years. And we have been borrowing much of the money needed to make that prosperity happen. And so when you see Congress sort of saying, like, we need to make sure that there are strings attached to this money. We need to make sure that the banks are lending it out. That doesn't make any sense. It makes not only no sense, it makes reverse sense. It's nonsense, because what the banks have done is already lend too much. The name of this problem is too much debt. I really think that's the heart of what's wrong with us, is that we have over borrowed. And we've done that over many, many decades. And now, it's reached just an unbearable peak where people, on average, cannot repay the debts they've got. In the face of that, it is no solution to try and lend more. All right. So, Alex, our little radio drama is over. We've laughed a little. Cried a little. And we hope now that you will be able to understand the news. Now, let's just talk here, at the end, about what the government is actually doing this week. It's been a pretty dramatic week. On Wednesday, the government revealed the details of its plan to save the banks. Now remember, we said that there are people out there who are saying the government has to act quickly to acknowledge the problems on bank balance sheets, declare insolvent banks insolvent, and step in aggressively to fix it all. One person who believes that, Simon Johnson, that former IMF official. Yeah. I think there's a level of deceit here. Right? On the part of the banks. And I think the government is going along with it far too much. One of my colleagues nicely articulates what should be the principle now, which is no new lies. Right? The balance sheet at these banks is, as far as we know, a huge lie. Right? They don't want to show you and tell themselves what this stuff is really worth. And we're saying, deal with it now. Deal with it seriously. Confront the problems of the banking system openly. Or there will be hell to pay. Simon Johnson says, every day we delay taking over insolvent banks, the economy gets weaker, and the solution gets more difficult. Well, according to the plan the Obama Administration revealed this week, they have a different view. They think it's best to go about things a bit more deliberately. They announced on Wednesday, they are going to take two months to figure out how healthy the banks are-- that's the stress test you've heard a lot about-- and another six months to give some money to the banks that need it. And they've said to the media and to Congress that they're pretty sure they know what those stress tests are going to find: that America's biggest banks are healthy. The government will never need to take them over. In other words, given a choice between Simon's option, a scary and unprecedented, for this country at least, takeover of the nation's largest banks and much smaller measures where they keep the banks afloat, don't challenge them too much on the truthfulness of their balance sheets, and hope that, in time, things will sort themselves out, they're going with time. But their public statements did leave them plenty of wiggle room. And of course, if they were planning to take over the banking system, they wouldn't announce it beforehand. They'd probably say exactly what they're saying right now, at least until they got everything set up, until they hired enough people, put all their plans in order. And then, one Friday evening, they'd make an announcement and nationalize the banks over the weekend. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. In addition to their radio jobs, they do a blog and a podcast three times a week, where they explain the latest economic news in normal language that anybody can understand. This is the Planet Money podcast. It's at npr.org/money. Coming up, after the break, we go on a field trip to visit a toxic asset in its natural environment, which in this case, turns out to be suburban New Jersey. 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. We've arrived at ACT 2 of our show. The first time I meet the guys who actually want more toxic assets in their lives is in a diner in New Jersey. Raj Bhatia is sitting at a corner booth with two other guys. My fellow Ivy League MBAs think I'm nuts because I'm going to get dirty. I'm going to have to get dirty now, you know? Raj graduated from Columbia Business School in the mid '90s. And for years, he ran a hedge fund. And by getting dirty he means he's actually going to be getting out in the world, instead of sitting behind a desk. He's convinced he can make money buying home mortgages that aren't being paid back. Raj has teamed up with Albert Behin to buy pools of these mortgages. And we got together and basically said, you know, there's going to be some tremendous opportunities in buying some of this residential debt that I basically helped create over the past six, seven, eight years. Albert started selling mortgages in 2000, just as housing prices began to skyrocket, and saw a lot of the abuses and terrible lending practices. He steered clear of most of that. And now, as those mortgages are starting to go bad, Albert and Raj are looking to buy them up at a discount. And they're meeting in diners like these with potential investors like this guy, Benek Oster, who's made millions in finance over the years. Hypothetically, I've got $5 million I'd like to put in. How many loans are you getting for $5 million in this-- I'm going to make it-- No, I'm going to make it very easy for you. Average loan, figure $300,000 to $350,000. Figure one third of the price of that is one third-- I'm in a car with Raj, Albert, and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg. We're driving to a town in New Jersey called Wayne. The business pitch at the diner worked. Albert and Raj have a couple investors at this point. And they're getting ready to buy some mortgages. Here's how it works. Banks have given lots and lots of mortgages to people who have stopped paying. To get them off their books, the banks have sold them at huge discounts. And they do it in massive numbers, thousands of mortgages at a time, to hedge funds and other large investment funds. These funds are sometimes called vulture funds. They don't actually want to keep these mortgages. They just want to buy from the banks low, mark up the price a little, and sell to guys like Albert and Raj for a profit, which is why we're on this trip. Albert and Raj are thinking of buying the mortgages for 40 houses from one of these funds, all homes in New Jersey. And they want to go see what they're buying. They've made more than a dozen of these trips so far to look at different homes. And sometimes it feels a little weird, like they're spying or something. I'll tell you a story. One of the first times Raj came out to see houses-- I've seen a couple-- I went out a couple times already. And we're just snapping a picture of the subject property. And Raj is like, there's a cop. I'm like, we're not doing anything wrong. We're just snapping a picture of a house. [LAUGHTER] So this is totally new for you then, Raj. Like, you're not-- It's new for everybody though. Well, that's another good point. Nobody has done this. Yes, big funds have bought a lot of product. But to actually go home to home and reprice the mortgages and talk to homeowners, this is all very, very, very new. Raj and Albert know certain things about this group of loans. They know that 90% of the houses are in foreclosure. They know the balances on all the mortgages. They know when the borrowers stopped making payments. They know what the borrowers claimed in income on their original loan documents. Although, they also know enough not to believe those numbers too strongly. But there's lots of things the mortgage documents can't tell you. For instance, Albert and Raj don't even know if someone's living in the house they're about to go look at. New Jersey's unusually slow to kick someone out of a house. Even on loans that are 15 months delinquent, people can still be there, waiting to be evicted. And they want to know other things. How does the neighborhood feel? And so far, this neighborhood feels good. Nice neighborhood. You can imagine what this looks like in the summertime with all the canopy of trees. It's an established area. I really am impressed with this. I mean, this is a nice home. This is-- I would grow up and raise a family in this neighborhood. This is great. And Albert notices another good sign. The thing we look for is there's really no for sale signs around, which is great. So there's not that much product out there in this neighborhood. This is great. I've not seen a for sale sign. You'll see one or two coming up I'm sure, but not yet. Which means the market's not glutted. If they take over the house, they can sell it. And that's another thing they're doing, looking at how houses similar to the ones in their pool have sold recently. We drive up to one house on a corner that recently got bought. Albert pulls out a digital camera and takes a photo. OK. Run, run, run, go. No, I'm kidding. Then, we drive around the corner, to the house whose mortgage Albert and Raj are looking to own. This is it right here. All right. That's it on the right hand side. Raj parks the car. The house is a red, old style colonial on a suburban street. Albert notices that there are little stickers in the window alerting firefighters that children live here. The lawn is well manicured. There's a fenced in backyard. According to Albert's paperwork, the house's appraised value, back in the fall of 2007, was $635,000. Now, it's down to $440,000, which is pretty bad if you consider that what they owe on the house is $475,000. They're underwater. They owe more than their house is worth. And they haven't made a mortgage payment in 16 months, since October of 2007. But you'd never know by looking at it. You can see that there's kids there. There's obviously kids there. This is a neighborhood where you grow up a family. There's a backyard. This house is generally in good condition. You can definitely tell that there's someone still lives here. You know, some of the houses no one lives in at all. The loan documents don't tell you any of that. Albert and Raj say they're not actually allowed, by law, to talk to the people living here. But once they close the deal and take possession of the mortgage, they can. And in fact, the better deal Raj and Albert get, the better it might be for the homeowner. Raj explains it this way. Say the mortgage is worth $400,000. But they get it at $200,000. They can approach the homeowner and say, we can cut you a new deal, rewrite your mortgage. And then, for the homeowner-- The numbers are very different. Their monthly payments can go down from $1,300 to $500 a month. And we are making an incredibly good return on our money. And you can do that because you've bought it at such a discount. Yeah. It's really not that we're using creative rocket science finance. We've bought the mortgage at a reduction. And somebody has taken a hit on that. And we have the ability to restructure that mortgage now. But Albert says so far, in their experience, even with this kind of reduction, 3/4 of the homeowners can't afford to make the payments. So Raj says there's a second option. If they absolutely can't do something, then you proceed with the foreclosure. And right now, we're in discussions to rent back the homes to the homeowners. Where they've lived there. They stay there. But they're renting the home now. They don't own it. And lots of times, you would think that they would be resistant to that. They're not. It's really-- You know, it becomes almost a relief in a certain way. Let's pretend you-- To understand that relief, imagine the family in this house. They owe about $475,000 to the bank. Since the house is worth $440,000, even after they sold it, they'd still owe the bank $35,000. Albert and Raj would let them stay in the house, rent it at a reduced rent, and they'd wipe out all that debt. For Albert and Raj, this is a business. They aren't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to make money. They're buying homes in the process of foreclosure. That process can draw out for months, which can be costly to Albert and Raj if the occupants aren't paying anything. So if Albert and Raj can't sell the house to the occupants for a lower price or get them to rent, they at least want them out. And in that situation, Raj has a simple pitch to the homeowners. Why don't we help you by writing you a check $5,000 to $7,000. Every home is different, depends on percentages. And we'll help you move. And you just give us the keys, and we'll take over the home. Albert and Raj have already brokered a couple of pools of mortgages for other investors. Raj says the best case scenario is the home owners are willing to talk to them and renegotiate the loan. Worst case scenario really isn't worst case. It's that we're not getting any communication from the homeowner. We try to call. We try to send letters. We really haven't encountered, you know, a homeowner coming out with a shotgun saying get off my property. And see, but it strikes me, looking at what you guys are doing right now-- So if this works, you buy this pool. You get the house price to what it needs to be, basically. And you get the homeowner into either a mortgage that they can afford. Or they're able to sort of rent it. Or you pay them a little bit so they can move somewhere else. You know, it's not great. Nothing about this process is great. But it actually sounds like what we're talking about here is a free market solution to the problem. Right? Or not? That's exactly what it is. It is. But I don't think this alone either will-- I think that there's got to be some sort of government help along with this to-- But why is that? I mean, you did this without government help. Or did you not? I'll tell you why. It's a simple answer. There's not enough of us out there to absorb what's out there. In other words, if we had unlimited funds, if Mortgage Strategies had unlimited funds-- That's the name of your company. That's the name of the company. We could ramp up very quickly. And we could be putting away hundreds of millions of dollars of this type of product and working through it. I mean, we could do that. We would have a staff. And we'd be out there. And we'd do it. And that would, maybe, make a little bit of a dent here in the New York metro area. You've got to remember there's trillions of dollars of product out there right now. No, no there's even a bigger issue out here. What we're seeing is that a lot of banks don't want to get rid of this product, because I think they can't afford to get rid of it at the prices that the market is saying, this is market. Like in other words, if they sell you these pools of loans at the prices you need to be able to make money and actually do the work you're doing here, they'd go bankrupt. Yeah. They'd be insolvent. Yes. I think so. That's exactly what I'm saying. Here's another problem. Albert and Raj, as hard as they're working and as complicated as it seems, are actually dealing with the simplest assets out there: simple home loans between a bank and a person. They're not dealing in the complex world of mortgage backed securities, where mortgages were bundled, sliced, and sold to thousands of investors, and where it's difficult to trace ownership and almost impossible to figure out what you're actually buying and who you're buying it from. They're not dealing in any of the exotic financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations. Essentially, Albert and Raj are buying the least toxic of the toxic assets on banks' balance sheets. Now, we just need someone to buy the rest. Lisa Chow is a reporter for public radio station WNYC in New York. That sure is a nice global economy you've got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK, I've been happily gabbing away with Harold Wilshinsky for maybe 15 minutes when he suddenly came out with this warning. You start an insurance man talking, you're out of luck. This seemed to refer to a body of folk wisdom about the ways of insurance men that I had never heard of, but I kept my mouth shut about that because Harold is the kind of person I don't run into much. Harold is a dapper, cufflinks-wearing, 79-year-old and he gives advice to people for a living-- insurance advice, estate planning advice. And I had asked him to come into the studio to tell the story of this piece of advice that he gave over 15 years ago to his own daughter and son-in-law. Back then, they'd invested all their money with this guy who ran this great hedge fund. And it was all their money, which Harold was not happy with. He says that violates one of the basic rules of investment. Diversification. And I said I don't care how good this guy is. I don't care if he's God himself. You just don't put all your money with one person. I mean, 20, 25% of your money, fine, but how do you put all your-- all with someone named Madoff? Madoff, of course, was Bernie Madoff, who just this week pleaded guilty to 11 felony charges and went to jail for what prosecutors say was a $65 billion-- that's billion with a B-- Ponzi scheme. But back in 1993 or so when all this happened-- I didn't know Madoff from a hole in the wall. The son-in-law, whose name is Merrill, had given to Madoff his entire pension fund. It was maybe half a million dollars. And he gave Madoff this money because his father and two of his brothers had those given everything they had to Madoff. Like all of Madoff's clients, on paper they were doing great, earning 15, 20% on their money each and every year-- a huge rate of return. But when Harold asked, how does he get that great return, Merrill had no idea. None of Madoff's clients did. Madoff wouldn't tell them how he made the money. It was proprietary. And did it seem suspicious to you? No. No. I'd love to be able to answer you and say oh yeah, I knew. I had it figured. Because I would be one of the few geniuses in that field. No. He just thought that it was bad throw all your money into one hedge fund. And he made this very, very clear-- abundantly clear-- to his daughter Pam and to Merril. And I'm not exactly shy about stating my beliefs on things. Yes. Yes, he loves to give advice, especially to me. This is Pam, and with her, Merrill. Child rearing, advice on relationships, marital. And he heard that all of that money was in one fund and he always believed in diversification. And he was very emotional. He felt very strongly that we were making a huge mistake and we needed to fix it right away. And he made me so nervous that then, after he left, my husband and I had an entire discussion, let's say. And I said, you'd better get your money out of there tomorrow. I don't care about what your brothers say, because I figured they would be upset, which they were. She and Merrill were so frantic that Merrill didn't just diversify like Harold was suggesting. He pulled all their money out of Madoff's hedge fund. Her father got me so nervous. I would've bit your head off if you would've left in anything. And then something kind of unfortunate happened to them. For the next 16 years, Merrill had to watch his brothers and his father make a fortune with Madoff. Their money doubled every three or four years until they had millions. And this wasn't just on paper. Merrill's dad was retired and his account was set up to send him a check every month to live off of. He felt so strongly about Madoff that on his deathbed, he actually urged Merrill to please, please, just one thing, please go back to Madoff. And so for sixteen years, Harold's advice to leave Madoff really seemed like the worst advice Merrill had ever been given. I was very upset with him for 16 years. He was very angry. And then every so often, he would rant and rave. "Your big mouth stupid father. Cost me all this money. Why didn't he keep his big mouth--" He would never say a word to my father. I would hear about my stupid father. And my daughter never missed an opportunity. God bless her. To let me know about-- she was like his spokesperson. Merrill thinks, Merrill doesn't-- [LAUGHS] And what would she say to you? You know, I don't think Merrill will ever get over what you did when you told him to take his money out. I would say to him, you're such a know it all. Why didn't you keep your mouth shut if you didn't know about this Madoff? I said, Pam, I didn't tell him to take his money out. I told him he should diversify. She didn't want to know. And let me ask you, did you, at some point, start to regret that advice? That's an excellent question. No. That's amazing, now that you mention it. No. And then finally, after 16 years of family strife about this-- 16 years on the wrong side of history-- Harold found himself vindicated. This fall, Madoff was arrested. The truth came out about his con. The news broke, if I'm not mistaken, on a Thursday. And Friday night, I get a call from Merrill. Now, Merrill seldom calls me unless he had something specific. And he is just waxing poetic. My God, you'd think I represented the second coming. All these geniuses didn't have this figured. You knew and you had it figured and you understood this and-- And I said, Merrill, all I said was diversify. The oldest trick in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he didn't want to know. He I thought that I was an absolute genius and I knew. Finally, I said, Merrill, my God, the last time someone spoke to me this way was my late mother. Well, so then what happened when you finally saw your daughter again? A word was never spoken and I didn't bring it up. If she wasn't saying it, I wasn't saying it. And that's the way it's been. it's nice to be 80 years old and to be able to say-- whether you say it or not-- I told you so. I'm the smart one. You're the idiot. I told you. Did he say that? No. No. No, he didn't say that. You've never been tempted to say I told you so? Nope. Nope. Gee, that sounds pretty good, you know? I'm impressed with myself now. No, I didn't. It's just a matter of dealing with people and especially your kids. You don't play gotcha. Pam says that there's another reason that her dad never said I told you so. And that's that they know people who lost all their savings to Bernie Madoff. Two of Merrill's brothers took huge hits. Merrill's stepmom lost her retirement money. In the face of that, Pam and Merrill don't much feel like celebrating. And her dad doesn't feel like gloating. Sometimes it's hard to feel good about being on the right side of history because you know so many people who are on the wrong side, which brings us to today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, The Wrong Side of History. We have four stories of people who find themselves on the losing side of big historical trends. In Act One, NPR economics correspondent Adam Davidson is back on our show and he is worried that one of his own relatives-- somebody he's close to-- is trying to defy the world economy. Act Two, we have a story of a man cast out by a political campaign. Act Three, some advice for everybody living in the 14th century. Act Four, Alex Kotlowitz on a man who is going down in history as something everybody who knows him says he wasn't for most of his life. Stay with us. Act One, Hey Mister DJ. And we're joined right now by one of our regular contributors, Planet Money correspondent, NPR economics correspondent, Adam Davidson. And Adam, you are here today on a mission. I am on a mission. And that mission is to save my cousin DJ's life-- to make his life better. Wow. Yeah, and I want to say I love DJ. He's like my awesome little brother. He's really smart. He's really, really funny. And I feel like he has made a horrible decision. He has literally made the decision that puts him on the wrong side of our economy. So he's in the wrong side of the economy, he is on the wrong side of history, it in what way? He dropped out of college. He did the one thing-- let me explain why I get so upset about this. And I am. I'm feeling myself angry at DJ right now while we're talking. So I am international business and economics correspondent for NPR, which basically means I spend much of my time talking to leading experts, studying the role of the US in the global economy. And there is one thing I've learned with absolute certainty, which is that the competitive advantage of the United States and our citizens, the way we will succeed in this global economy going forward, is through skills, education, knowledge. In other words, stay in school. Get a college degree. And you'll be in a much better position. In the global economy. In the global economy. And if you drop out of college, then you have, basically, consciously decided to just not partake in the economic growth and possibilities of the coming decades. And it's going to get worse and worse and worse, that 10 years from now and then 30 years from now and 40 years from now, you will make less money, you have less opportunity. OK, and so as I understand it, you've tried to convince DJ of this, you have been completely unsuccessful. And so you have now enlisted some help. Yes, I have a friend, Pietra Rivoli. She's a professor of economics at Georgetown University. So I thought, well, DJ won't listen to me. Maybe he will listen to a qualified expert-- a professor of economics. All right, so I'm going to bow out now and you're going to speak to both of them. They are both on the line. Good luck. DJ, let's start with you. What are you, 25? How old? Yeah, getting up there. You graduated high school and then you went to Quinsigamond Community College right there in Worcester, right? That's right. And what happened then? I went for about two weeks and decided it was time to tell my father that I'd never wanted to go in the first place and I don't want to be here now, so I'm going to have to drop out. Now you told me that you actually wished you had dropped out earlier in your life? Yeah, if I had more time to work and make money then, I would rather have done that. You mean not gone to high school and made money from 14 or 15? Yeah, but still, the high school experience was definitely worth it, but-- Because you were a big football star and all the girls loved you. Yeah, that's part of it. What do you think your life is going to be like as a guy with a high school degree but no advanced education? I'm going to work a hands-on construction job for the rest of my life and have sore body parts every day. What are you doing now? I work for Henkels & McCoy. We do telecommunications. It's pretty much outside construction. I'd call you a ditch digger. Yeah, I dig ditches by hand. Now before that, you were a bodyguard or a bouncer at a strip club? Yeah, we don't have to go into details, but yes, I did a little of that. What is it, Crazy Girls? What's the name? No, it's Centerfold's. Centerfold's, right. And what you think? When you look at our uncles, for example, they didn't go to college and they've done pretty well, right? Kenny's a truck driver. And Phil is a connoisseur. A connoisseur. If you knew him, that would be really funny. That's very funny. I'm just saying, from where you're sitting if you looked around our family-- and our grandfather, Pepe. He didn't go to college. He had a good life. He owned his own house, he had a car, he had a vacation home, or at least a vacation-- Trailer. Trailer, yeah. And he was a truck dispatcher. But here's what I want to say to you. I think that you don't understand that the world has changed from the world that our uncles and grandparents lived in and that your future will be much worse if you don't go to college. And I want Pietra to tell me if I'm right. You know, Adam, I'm not sure you are after I've listened to DJ and hear a little about all he's done in his 25 years. A lot of people, historically, didn't go to college, worked in low-skill manufacturing jobs. And in the global economy today, those are exactly the jobs that have disappeared, or some people say moved, to China and Mexico and so forth. So if you worked in one of those old textile factories in Massachusetts and the textile factory closed, then you're kind of out of luck without a college degree. But if you listen to DJ's history, let's see, he was a bouncer at a strip club, he's putting up telecom equipment, he works on construction sites. These are all careers or jobs that we would say are-- well, t the technical term would be they're non-tradable. So in other words, that bouncer job is not moving to China. And, in fact, the strippers inside, their job's not moving to China either. And the work he's doing setting up telecom lines or what have you. Digging ditches. That can't move. The ditch digging can't move. And if I listen to some of your family history, there's a lot of jobs in that history that aren't moving too. Truck drivers-- those aren't going to China, for example. These jobs aren't going to disappear. And it sounds like DJ's developing a number of those. Thanks. Well, I'm very frustrated because I thought-- In your face, Adam. I thought that Pietra and I would beat up on DJ. Now the two of you are siding up against me. All right. There's a couple thoughts I have. My thought was that the global economy needs me more, but I guess you're saying that's not necessarily true. Do you know how hard it is? You know how many lawyers within probably two miles of my house? I don't know how many people I have-- I've got thousands of lawyers and I don't think I have a single person that I'd trust the wiring in my house to. And if somebody on that construction site that DJ is working is going to work their way up to supervisor and foreman and so forth and so on. And some will not. Yeah, I do have more to offer. I can do landscaping. I can do electrical work. What else? Woodwork. I can do cabinets. And you're really good people person. Yeah. I feel like I could see you as a leader. I'm a social butterfly. These are great skills in any economy. The guys I worry about, actually, are not people who sound like DJ. The guys I worry about are the guys who have worked in that same plant doing more or less the same job in the auto factory for 30 years and now the plant closes and now what have they got? That, I think, is a bigger challenge. They're much more at risk in this global economy. Before we talked, I was thinking about our family. And I was thinking the people who went to college, I feel like there's-- Very successful. But more anxious, also. DJ has a pretty awesome life, right? I mean, it's stable, it's fun, you leave your work at the workplace and you're off and you're having a good time. Oh yeah. I never talk about work when I'm not working. I make an exception for you, though. All right. Thanks. Well, my brother quit high school. And he has a very nice life. He lives on a boat in Florida. And he does marine carpentry and on any given day, if you looked at the two of us, I think it would look like he's having a better time. I thought what we were going to learn in this conversation-- and it turns out I was totally wrong. What I thought they were going to learn is-- That I was wrong? That DJ's wrong, I'm right, and he should go to college. And that's just obvious and his life is going to get worse and worse. That is clearly not what we've learned. Good. But that's because you and I have these snotty biases. Right. Ooh. That's true. Right? No, I share them. Yeah Everyone does. It's no big deal. I can't wait to see DJ and treat him with my newfound respect. Nice. Maybe we should-- yeah, we should just talk every couple years and-- Yeah, and follow his progress. I'd like to do that. That would be really nice. And ours, Adam. Right, and ours. Right, when my job is outsourced and DJ has a really good construction gig and I'm trying really hard to get him to hire me. You're already hired. Thanks, man. Adam Davidson is learning new things about the economy all the time and telling the world on NPR News and on the Planet Money podcast. Act Two, Does This Suit Make Me Look Terrorist to You? My name is Rany Jazayerli. I'm a doctor. I'm a physician here in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm a dermatologist. Which is to say that Rany Jazayerli is not in politics. He's not a pundit. He's not a public figure. But this past fall, during the 2008 election, something happened to a friend of his, something that made Rany feel like he and his friend were swimming against the tide of history. And in his frustration, Rany wrote an essay that ended up in the election coverage at this website that was a favorite for political junkies-- FiveThirtyEight.com Even though the election is passed, the essay still seemed relevant today and we invited him in to read it. Basically, what happened is that candidate, Barack Obama, hired Randy's friend Mazen Asbahi to be the campaign's national coordinator for Muslim-American affairs. And then, after just 10 days in this job, The Wall Street Journal ran a story that stated uncritically all kinds of rumors against Asbahi and explained that because of these rumors, Mazen Asbahi was resigning from the campaign. Here's what Rany wrote. Mazen Asbahi is one of my best friends. Our kids play together and we dine together at least once a month. We're close. And now, thanks to the work of some racist jerkwads, his reputation has been sullied from coast to coast. So I'm crushed for him as a friend, but I'm furious as a Muslim because what has happened is that Mazen was forced to resign because of a smear campaign that targeted him for the sin of being Muslim. Nothing more, nothing less. Let's parse the original Wall Street Journal column, if you don't mind. It says, quote, "In 2000, Mr. Asbahi briefly served on the board of Allied Asset Advisors Fund. Its other board members at the time included Jamal Said, the imam at a fundamentalist-controlled mosque in Illinois." Quote, 'I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board,' Mr. Asbahi said in his resignation letter. 'Since concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change'." Where do I start? Let's start with Jamal Said, the imam at a fundamentalist-controlled mosque. The consensus of the vast majority of Muslims in Chicago is that the mosque is not a fundamentalist anything, which is why it has such a large membership. Some of the mosque's more recent projects include donating a riverfront garden to the City of Chicago-- there's a picture of Mayor Richard Daley at the ribbon cutting ceremony-- and becoming the first mosque in the country to run on solar power. Said has never been convicted of any crime nor arrested for any crime nor indicted for any crime. He has been accused of supporting Hamas but has never been found guilty of anything. I'm not here to defend Said. I don't know him. But the point is that Said is not a convicted criminal or a mafia don that walks the streets while people cower in fear. What he is is the imam of the largest mosque in the Chicago area. Mazen is an active member of the Muslim community here in Chicago. It would be almost impossible for him to be active and not have some contact with Said. So Mazen that happened to serve on the board of an investment fund with Said until he learned about allegations that Said had been involved in raising funds for Hamas, at which time he quit the board. In 2000, before 9-11, before Iraq, before the US government shut down Muslim charities after accusing them of funneling money to Hamas and other designated terrorist groups. But in 2000, before our own government felt that these charitable activities were illegal, Mazen decided to dissociate himself from even the hint of impropriety. That doesn't support accusations that he's a terrorist sympathizer. It refutes them. The Wall Street Journal column continues, quote, "The Justice Department named Mr. Said an unindicted co-conspirator in the racketeering trial last year of several alleged Hamas fundraisers, which ended in a mistrial," unquote. Pardon my Arabic, but what the [BLEEP] is an unindicted co-conspirator and why is our government using this phrase? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? And whatever happened to the notion that indictment is just the first step towards a guilty verdict? A prosecutor is supposed to be able to indict a ham sandwich. So what does it say that they've never been able to indict Said? In that racketeering trial, which again, ended in a mistrial, the government listed close to 300 Muslim organizations as unindicted co-conspirators, which is tantamount to saying, we think some of them are terrorists and since we don't know who, we'll just blame them all. So much for innocent until proven guilty. This isn't even guilty until proven innocent. It's guilty with no recourse to prove you're innocent. How can you defend yourself against an indictment which doesn't exist? Said is guilty by association, which makes Mazen, apparently guilty by association with someone who's guilty by association. It's McCarthyism, squared. Oh, and you know who else is associated with Said? As Jake Tapper of ABC News pointed out, the board that Mazen and Said both sat on was the Allied Asset Advisor Funds, a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT. NAIT is an adviser to the Dow Jones Islamic Fund-- Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story that forced Mazen's resignation. We're officially through the looking glass, people. I'm so angry I don't know where to direct my anger. What The Wall Street Journal is saying is that Mazen Asbahi has a link to people suspected of terrorism. What I'll tell you is this-- Mazen is not a terrorist. He's not a fundamentalist. He's not an Islamist. The only thing he is guilty of is being a Muslim and being an active member of the Muslim community. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have been qualified for the position in the first place. As Ahmed Rehab put it in today's Chicago Tribune, the headline should read, Muslim Liaison for Presidential Campaign Resigns After Connections to Muslim Community Are Found. If Mazen Asbahi is a terrorist, than I am a terrorist. And if I were named to the same position, I'm sure they would have found a way to label me a terrorist as well. And that's what this is about. The same people who claim there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim will do everything in their power to slander people like Mazen Asbahi-- the epitome of a moderate, modern, integrated, tolerant, patriotic, American Muslim-- as an extremist, they will set their sights on any Muslim who seeks to be a part of the political process and will pick them off one by one until there are no more targets left. If Obama won't stand up to the flimsiest of accusations linking someone in his campaign to terrorists, however remotely and ridiculously, I'm not sure what he'll stand up against. The world is at war right now, but it's not a war of Christian versus Muslim. It's a war of moderates versus extremists and the two groups are battling it out in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But they're also battling here in America. This week, the extremists won. Rany Jazayerli. In the many weeks since he wrote that essay, first, the Obama campaign hired another coordinator for Muslim-American outreach and the same exact thing happened to her. She was accused of meeting with Muslim leaders who were suspected of terrorist sympathies with no proof of those sympathies. It didn't actually get to the point where she had to resign, but seeing it happen again did make Rany a little more understanding of what the Obama campaign was up against and a little less mad at them. After that, as perhaps you've heard, the Obama campaign won the presidency. Rany's friend Mazen is hoping that he may end up getting a job with the Obama administration. Act Three, Family Feudalism. All right, ready cue trumpets? Cue trumpets. Welcome to America's favorite game show. It's time to make your phone call to the 14th century. I'm your host, Chip McMartin. What information will our three lucky contestants share with the people of the Middle Ages? Let's find out. Your first contestant, ladies and gentlemen, Gregory [? Palcapo. ?] Hi, Greg. Hi, Chip. Welcome to Phone Call to the 14th Century. Says here on the card that you want to be a race car driver. I do but I can't. OK, well, you know the rules. This phone is connected to a phone in a hut somewhere in the 14th century. You've got 30 seconds to impart as much useful information as you can to the people back then. What are you going to tell them? I think I'm going to focus on hygiene and stuff. Good luck. Ready, phone call, begin. Hi, this is Gregory [? Palcapo, ?] talking machines from the 21st century. Don't be scared, OK? Write everything down. Wash your hands. Boil your water. There's no such thing as witches. Everybody floats. Monkeys are cousins of God. Pass. Monkeys are cousins of humans. The finches had different beaks to pick up stuff. A fish walked out of the water. He could talk. That means there's no God. Dig up oil. it's a black syrup in the ground. Light it on fire. Make a motorcycle. Make a factory. Don't throw away the middle of the donut. You can sell it. Go to Egypt. There's a bunch of mummies and gold. It's yours for the taking. Some of the popes are evil. Some of the popes are evil. Some of the popes are evil indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, let's see what our judges say about that. And they're going to give you 12 and a half major concepts. That puts you in good standing. Let's meet our first challenger. Please welcome Blaine Cardoza. Hi, Blaine. Hi. You ready to make your phone call to the 14th century? Oh yeah. You think you can beat Greg? I have a secret weapon, Chip. Oh you do? You want to give us a hint? Let's just say it rhymes with piddle pinglish. OK. Ready, phone call, begin. Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The global warming hath perced to the roote And bathed the omega-3 fatty acids in the flour, When Zephyrus eek with his antibiotics, such as penicillin Hath in every holt and heeth The plug-in hybrid, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe Five seconds, Blaine. halfe-- half hour pizza delivery or your money back. Time's up. Blaine Cardoza, that was incredible. Are you sure you didn't just make that up? No, I'm fluent in Middle English. Then how would you say hi mom? Hi, [? eh-- mummy? OK, well, what do our judges say? And they say that's correct. They're going to give you nine and a half major concepts. Another incredible score. Ladies and gentlemen, what will it take from your final challenger? Let's meet him, Donald Darndy. Hi, Don. Hi, Chip. What are you going to tell the people of the 14th century? I'm just going to focus on being a teacher like I am right here on earth. Well, it's the same planet, Don, just a different century. Ready, phone call, begin. This is Don Darndy, teacher from the future. OK, first of all, always believe in yourself. Never give up your dreams or they'll give up on you. The bubonic plague-- it might seem bad now, but you'll look back on it and laugh. You're losing, Don. OK, forget it. I want you to do something for me now. Get some coins, a suit of armor, any old books you don't want, any tapestries, anything with a unicorn on it. Put it in a box and write my name on it-- Donald Darndy. Give the the box to Christopher Columbus. Tell Columbus to give it to Lewis and Clark. Have them leave the box at the Elks Lodge in Modesto, California. Oh, Don. You told them to send you a bunch of stuff from the Middle Ages? It'll get here. Wouldn't it have gotten here already. Oh, yeah. Let's see what our judges say, and they're going to give you 0.023 major concepts. It's not enough to beat Greg, who becomes our new champion and millionaire. Congratulations. And ladies and gentlemen, come see use next week when we make our Phone Call to the 14th Century. That was the San Francisco comedy group Kasper Hauser. Their latest book, Weddings of the Times, a parody of the New York Times wedding pages, comes out this May. You can find more of their comedy online at www.kasperhauser.com. Coming up, it takes 61 years to build up a reputation and, when you are on the wrong side of history, just seven weeks to destroy it. 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, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, stories of people who think they are stuck on the wrong side of history. We've arrived at Act Four of our show. Act Four, The Other Guy. If you've never lived in Chicago, chances are you don't have much idea about what Harold Washington meant to the city. Washington became the city's first black mayor in 1983. And it caused a historic change. Before Harold-- and everybody called him Harold-- even basic city services like garbage collection were worse in black neighborhoods. Chicago was the city where race relations were so bad Martin Luther King give up on it back in the 1960s. Barack Obama moved to Chicago after Harold took office, and in his book, Dreams from My Father, Obama writes about how people talked about their new black mayor, quote, "with a familiarity and affection normally reserved for a relative." "Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to this city," an old timer tells Obama. "Before Harold, seems like we'd always been second-class citizens-- plantation politics, police brutality rampant." Harold set things so that for the first time, white and black citizens were treated the same by the city government, but is remembered just as much for his charisma. He was eloquent, he was personable, he did not mince words. You pick up a local paper and these guys just wax so eloquently. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. They don't have the slightest idea about the phenomena, don't understand the history, don't understand the mindset, don't understand what push people. All they say is, gee, black folks must be angry. Gee, black folks vote for black folks. They must hate white folks. Ain't got nothing to do with nothing. Nothing. Crazy stuff. So Harold was this historic figure for the city. The big library downtown and a college are named after him. One of the first hour-long stories we ever did on our program was about him. So imagine for a second what it was like to be the guy who he ran against and who he beat in an historic election back in the 1980s. Well, that guy was a Republican named Bernie Epton. And for anybody who actually remembers him, Epton is known not just for being the white opponent for the city's first black mayor, he's also remembered for the way his campaign was fought. It was not pretty. The campaign did not quash the racial tension in the city. It unleashed it in all its fury. Reporter Alex Kotlowitz, who lives in Chicago, found himself recently revisiting the Epton story. One of Epton's political peers once called Epton The Accidental Racist, though as Alex points out, there's more to him that the way the most Chicagoans think of him. I thought of Bernie Epton this past October while watching John McCain. The parallels with the Epton-Washington race were eerie-- a white Republican with a reputation as a principled guy waging an increasingly bitter fight against a charismatic black opponent. The details of the two races were widely different-- different men, different eras. But both candidates seem like actors miscast as the heavy and then surprised to find themselves stuck in that role. Epton, like McCain, was his own man. He was an iconoclast, not afraid to poke fun at himself. Mr. Epton-- Thank you. --Republican candidates are supposedly low profile in Chicago, but it was pointed out to me that there was a feature piece done on you in People Magazine, I guess, this is week or-- that might be the most exposure any Republican's ever had in Chicago. Well, actually, I think that they got lost. They didn't realize I was Republican until they finished. Otherwise, I'm sure they wouldn't have gone ahead with it. There's a reason people might not have known Epton was a Republican. He was this unusually progressive guy, an early opponent of McCarthyism. And when he served in the state legislature, one of his law partners says that he was so pro-consumer that it ticked off some of their law clients-- insurance companies. And on the race question, he was clear about where he stood. He marched in Memphis with the sanitation workers after Dr. King's assassination. He sat on this board of an old age home for African-American women. And as a state rep for 14 years, he fought redlining. Even in his personal life, his principles guided him. His son Jeff went to Hyde Park High School, where he was one of only a handful of white students in his freshman class. For years, we'd watched people move out of the neighborhood to the North Side or to the suburbs to get their children away from what was becoming a majority black school district. Dad never did that. This stuff mattered to him absolutely and he believed that if you moved out of the city-- if white, middle-class families left-- it was a betrayal. Bernie Epton did not set out to oppose the first serious black mayoral candidate in Chicago's history. In fact, when he got the Republican nomination, the Democratic primary was still up in the air. It was a three-way race among Harold Washington, Jane Byrne, and Richard Daley. He thought he'd be running against either Byrne or Daley and he knew we didn't have much of a chance. Chicago, for decades, has been a thoroughly Democratic city. In the previous mayoral election in 1979, the Democratic candidate received 82% of the vote, so Epton knew he didn't stand a chance. And that was OK. This was the ritual, that a Republican candidate would run their perfunctory campaign and use it, maybe, as a chance to raise some issues. Does it matter to you what happens tonight in the Democratic primary? Not at all. I think any one of the three will be extremely difficult to defeat. But on primary night, everything suddenly changed. As it became increasingly clear that Harold Washington-- not Byrne or Daley-- would be Upton's Democratic opponent. So many people are saying if Harold Washington wins, the white people will be afraid and they will then vote for you and that improves your chances. Well, I resent that very much. I think that Harold Washington and I, if he is a winner, I am positive that we will come out with a joint statement, perhaps speak together to repudiate it. I don't want to be elected because I'm white and Harold doesn't want to be elected because he's black. I want to be elected because I'm the best qualified. Epton sounds certain about how he's going to run his campaign-- with honor, with principles. But once it became clear that Washington, a black man, was his opponent, everyone-- and I mean everyone, people in the neighborhoods to the operatives in the national republican party to Bernie Epton himself-- instinctually knew that now Epton actually had a chance to win. One of the people working on his campaign was his daughter, Dale. She was there when national Republican operatives showed up in Chicago from Washington with money and ideas. As much as they were supposedly working for us, as soon as the people from D.C. came down, we had a new campaign slogan, which we got a lot of flak for. And that slogan was, Epton for mayor before it's too late. This slogan-- "before it's too late"-- became infamous, not only in Chicago but around the country. Its meaning seemed transparent, but not to Epton. Epton insisted, both in public and in private, that "before it's too late" plainly refer to Chicago's financial problems. And we thought "Upton-- before it's too late," because of a fiscal situation, you know, we didn't see anything else with that slogan. Apparently a lot of other people did. They felt it was a racist saying that we were saying, before an Afro-American would be elected mayor, that it was intended to show that my father was white and Harold was black. Dale, do you think that the people from Washington who came in and came up with the slogan-- do you think they believed that as well, or do you think they-- No, I think that they knew that it might be misconstrued. The slogan set a tone for the campaign-- the very tone Epton said he didn't want. Now, it was going to be whites versus blacks, with Epton as the white savior. And soon, anonymous leaflets popped up in white neighborhoods all over the city. One of them read, "Your vote for Mr. Epton will stop contamination of the city hall by a Mr. Baboon." Around town, Epton supporters donned various buttons. One depicted a watermelon with a slash through it. Another button had nothing on it at all. It was just white. None of these were being distributed by Upton's campaign, but it was all being done in his name. One day, my mom and my father and I were walking somewhere. And I remember someone coming up and saying to me, "I'm going to vote for your father because he's white." And I said, "Don't bother. Please, we don't want your vote." And my mom said, "Dale, you just have to realize that some people feel this way." I never saw my father recoil from-- I never saw him show any issues with getting support for the wrong reasons, unlike myself. He had been in politics a long time and he was willing to accept a vote for a vote. Thank you. Thank you all so much. We have some other meetings to go to. Believe me, I'd much rather stay here with you. I don't think there's any meeting that can compete with you. I've found a fountain of youth. Being with you, your enthusiasm-- The rallies energized Epton. In just a few weeks, he'd gone from being a pretty obscure but principled state legislator to a man who was now drawing crowds of 10,000. Bernie, you look tired. Actually, I love it. I don't often get this kind of exposure. It's really a pleasure. Are you having a good time? Much better than I expected, especially now. And most places he went, hordes of people chanted his name-- Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. It was uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable for a whole bunch of people. Don Siegel was one of Epton's law partners. It was always interesting to me when I would watch on television and he would if he would go out to the Southwest Side where the Republican votes were-- and certainly the anti-Washington votes. And it was Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. And I remember thinking, nobody calls him Bernie unless you really knew him well. And yet, here are these strangers, with whom he would probably not want to sit down and have a cup of coffee because they were so different from him politically and emotionally and every other way, now saying Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. But that was not him. Ladies and gentlemen, the next mayor of the city of Chicago, Bernie Epton. When I started this campaign a long time ago, it was, Bernie who? Today, I have an identity and that I owe entirely to all of you. Very quickly, Epton's candidacy sparked a mass defection from the Democratic party. It was unprecedented. Some of the most prominent white Democratic politicians in the city-- these longtime party hacks-- in a town where party loyalty was everything, were now turning their back on their own mayoral candidate because he happened to be black. And Epton got caught up in that fervor and the possibility of winning. It was blinding. But one of Epton's campaign workers-- his policy director, Haskel Levy, began having qualms. He'd already confronted Epton over the slogan and Epton, even while defending the slogan, told him, "Haskel, stay with me. If we win this election, I'll get rid of all these Republican operatives and opportunistic Democrats and we'll do good work once we get in." And so Haskel stayed. But then, one afternoon at campaign headquarters, Haskel noticed a pile of papers by the front door. They were hundreds of copies of an op-ed piece written by William Safire, conservative columnist for the New York Times. It basically claimed the following-- if blacks can vote for blacks because they're blacks, whites can vote for whites because they're whites. And I looked at it and I just hit the roof. And I took the whole pile and threw it into the garbage can. It's a shallow-- it's a stupid way of looking at the world. It's just false. Right, but also, it was in the context of what had been going on in that campaign. In some ways, the campaign was using it to justify-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] incendiary-- an incendiary thing. It was being passed out-- people were coming in to collect them to give out in the neighborhoods. When blacks get screwed because they're blacks, they're a legitimate interest group. What is the white interest group? I can understand a Pole voting for a Pole, a Czech voting for a Czech, but why would a white vote for another white? The only thing, in this particular circumstance, they have in common is that they don't like blacks. And so it was after that that you went and talked to Bernie Epton the second time. This was the second time and I said that I'd had it. I said, do you realize what's happening? I said, you have to repudiate the racist campaign. You've got to repudiate any people that are supporting out of racist reasons. And if you don't, I'm gone. And if you don't, I'm voting for Harold Washington. And Bernie said his argument is correct-- Safire's argument is correct. And I said, that's it Bernie. And that's when he got pissed off. And he picked up my coat and jacket and briefcase and he ostentatiously threw it out of his office. And he literally said, get that [BLEEP] out. And he threw me out of the office. And I left. That was the end of it. Washington and Epton had served together in the state legislature and they knew each other well. In fact, during the campaign, Washington at one point told a friend, that's not Bernie. That's not the Bernie I know. Chicago's Democratic candidate for mayor, Harold Washington, and Democratic presidential front runner Walter Mondale, were run out of a white neighborhood in Chicago today. And then it happened, an incident so sour that the whole nation took notice. This is a report from NBC National News. It's Palm Sunday at Saint Pascal's church on the North Side, and the streets are lined with white people holding Epton for Mayor signs. The Washington-Mondale motorcade stopped a block short of the church. The two candidates walked the rest of the way through an angry crowd, encountering the most open racial hostility of this racially-tense campaign. 95% of the blacks vote for Washington. They are more racist than we are. Who the hell are they trying to kid? Within minutes, Washington decided to cancel this appearance. Someone had scrawled on the church in huge letters, "nigger die". Epton had to respond, and he did. I am appalled that any people in any community would interfere with the worship by any religious denomination. And like you, I reject any of that antagonism or racism or bias or call it what you will. But the damage been done. The amazing, and perhaps frightening, thing about it is, Epton almost won. He lost the election by a mere 3% of the vote. It was frightening not because Epton might not have been a good mayor, but rather because it was clear that the only reason he might have won-- a relatively unknown Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city-- was because he was white. And this is the moment, right after he lost, where Bernie Epton could have saved his reputation. He could have made a brave, difficult speech to try to heal a divided and bitter city-- a speech where he reminded everyone why they liked him in the first place, which is precisely what John McCain did in November. In his concession speech, McCain was generous, dignified, humble. He acknowledged this incredible moment in history and urged everyone to bridge their differences. He stepped outside of his own personal defeat at the moment when it must've been the hardest thing to do. Epton missed his moment, his moment to rise above it all, to congratulate the new mayor, to call for the city to come together, to reclaim himself. Early the next morning, the Wednesday after the Tuesday election-- Don Siegel again, Epton's law partner. I received a call from someone very high up in the Washington campaign saying that they're going to have a unity breakfast and that it was going to be important for the city that everybody get together as quickly as possible to show that the city, in fact, is going to be relatively united and we're not going to have any major problems. And so he said, "I've been trying to reach Bernie." This was early in the morning, "and I haven't been able to reach him." And he said, "I assume, Don, you've got a number that you can reach him." And of course I did. Bernie's wife, Audrey answered. And I said, "can I talk to Bernie? And she said, "I don't think so, Don. We're leaving to Florida and we're just getting ready to leave." I said, "Well, this is important." And she said, "I don't think so." I said, "Well, could you just tell him that I'm on the phone and I got a call from the Washington office and they have a breakfast and they would want him to attend, of course." And she said, "Bernie, it's Don. There's a unity breakfast. You want to talk to him?" And then she came back and she said, "No, we're going to Florida. And that's it. I'm sorry, Don. I'm sure you understand." And that was it. And there's no question in my mind he was just so devastated by those events-- But devastated by the fact that he lost or devastated by how the campaign-- It was the culmination-- everything coming together-- when he woke up that morning and just realized, now I'm not mayor and-- and again, this is a little psychoanalytical-- and maybe just realizing, and maybe people are going to remember me for some of the wrong reasons. He's got a legacy that he wasn't going to be proud of. I think he just wanted to get away. Wanted to disappear. Absolutely. In that time after the election, in its wake, there was one person who was both close to Bernie Epton and yet had some perspective-- someone who still is trying to make sense of what happened to Epton, not just during the campaign but afterwards. And that's Epton's son, Jeff, who I had met years earlier. While his dad was running for mayor in Chicago as a Republican, Jeff was running for city council in Ann Arbor, Michigan, far to the left of his dad, as a Democratic Socialist. Their relationship had been strained for years, mainly over their political differences. I interviewed Jeff for NPR's Morning Edition in 1983, a week before his dad lost the election. It's a different question, but if you lived in Chicago, would you vote for your dad? I think that there's a line I have to draw here. My father's perhaps the man that I have the deepest love and respect for of anyone I know. There are, like I said, those political differences. How I would resolve the contradiction between those differences and my deep affection for him, I think, has to remain my private business. When Bernie Epton, in the thick of his losing campaign, heard what his son said, he stopped talking to him. Then, several months after the election, Jeff got a phone call from his dad pretty much out of the blue. His dad said nothing about not having spoken in months and invited Jeff to a White Sox game in Chicago. We go to Comiskey Park-- the old Comiskey-- and it's before the first pitch. The crowd's really pumped. When my dad walks into the stadium, he's an instantly recognizable guy. He's got all this celebrity from the campaign a few months earlier. He's completely familiar looking to people. And as we're walking to our seats, people start recognizing dad and they come up to him to shake his hand. And after a while, people start chanting Bernie, Bernie. Now, it's not the whole stadium, but it feels like a lot people. And the crowd's all white. There are certainly not black voters going Bernie, Bernie. And it suddenly starts feeling wrong to me. And I can feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck-- Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. And I'm thinking, they don't know you. They don't know who you were. They don't know what you stand for. And they love you for bad reasons. Those bad reasons being? Because you represented us in the fight to save Chicago before it was too late. But it's also, you can see the power, the transforming effect it has on my father. He is so happy and this is washing over him. He is just delighted and smiling and waving and talking to people and standing a little straighter and just energized. That small moment of euphoria didn't last. Strangers at baseball games cheered Epton, but he became an outsider in his own city. He lost friends, his law firm began to collapse. He became more and more withdrawn he didn't even talk with anyone about the campaign, not his daughter Dale or his son Jeff. On those few occasions after the election when he gave an interview or spoke publicly, Epton blamed the media for getting him wrong. He always felt abused by the process himself. He could never separate his sense of being a victim from the feeling that he had a responsibility there, as well, that he might have failed. And then, in 1987, there was the final blow. Bernie Epton had heard that Harold Washington was thinking of appointing him to a commission. But the day before Thanksgiving, Washington died of a heart attack. And the way Jeff sees it, his dad, who had battled depression in the past, lost what he saw as his last chance of any kind of public redemption. Three weeks later, Epton went to Ann Arbor to visit Jeff. I went out with him the night before he died. And it was clear he didn't want to live anymore. We had been intending to go out to dinner and go to a movie. We ended up going to McDonald's and he didn't eat and then he asked to be taken home-- not home, the hotel he was staying in. He was broke. His reputation was in tatters. He was in bad shape, and he died that night. People suggested that it was probably heart failure. I have my own thoughts about how things proceeded. Jeff didn't want to say any more about that. The very first sentence of Bernie Epton's obituary in The New York Times describes him as the man who came close to wrecking Harold Washington's 1983 effort to become the first black mayor of Chicago. It would be glib to say that Epton couldn't escape that characterization. Maybe he could have. It's what Jeff hopes, that maybe, somehow, he still can. Alex Kotlowitz it is the author of many books, including Never a City So Real, which is about Chicago. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and me with Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder. Production help from [? Andi Dixon. ?] Seth Lind's our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] Our website-- www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. I've actually got him on the line. Torey, why don't you say a few words about your difficult, difficult job? I never talk about work when I'm not working. I make an exception for you, though. Thanks, Torey. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.
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There is a mini-industry inside journalism right now, one of the few parts of the journalism business that's actually thriving, I think. A reporter's finding unusual signs of the recession all over the place. But that did not prepare me to hear about this side of the recession from a dentist, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], outside Washington, DC. The biggest thing I've been seeing is broken teeth. I spoke with a buddy of mine who's a dentist up in New York. He's like, man, everybody's cracking teeth. And I said, yeah, I know. Really acutely I've seen it in the last three or four months. Nightly grinding, clenching. And typically what happens with clenching and grinding, it's transient. It'll come and go, be on and off. But in times of high stress, whether it's in a personal life or in, right now with the economy, everybody's under a lot more stress. You see a lot more people having jaw pain and broken teeth. On the day we interviewed Dr. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], of 10 patients, two had cracked teeth and one needed a night guard for grinding teeth in their sleep. As for around the country, urologists in New York and Cleveland have reported a rise in vasectomies. Traffic delays dropped by 1/3 last year. Two women in Pennsylvania, in separate incidents, according to newspapers, robbed banks and then immediately went out with the money and bought cashier's checks with the money they had stolen, cashier's checks to pay their rent. Porn video sales are down 10% to 30%, depending on how you measure it. And shark attacks, yes, shark attacks, are at their lowest point in five years, thanks to the recession. That figure according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. Fewer people on vacation apparently means fewer people getting bit by sharks. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, scenes from the recession, including tips on what not to say to somebody who is working at a store that is being liquidated. And we go on a government raid, a government raid on a bad bank. Stay with us. Act 1, Is the Condo Half Empty, or is the Condo Half Full? We've all heard about these suburbs in Florida and California and Las Vegas where lots of people took out subprime mortgages just before the housing bubble burst, suburbs where today you have entire neighborhoods where most of the houses are empty. But you hear less about how this is playing out in big cities. And in big cities, the boom and bust took a different form. In Chicago, for instance, you don't see entire neighborhoods vacated, but you also see lots of empty apartment buildings, and half-empty ones, like 1633 W. Farwell in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. Classic old courtyard building. Then at the end of the housing boom, it's being converted into condos, condos with granite countertops and beautiful stainless steel appliances. Until the Chicago housing market collapsed in late 2007, leaving 19 of its 39 units empty. We had had an issue with a squatter in the building. We had a couple of those guys, and I thought it might have just been somebody trying to get back into the unit and camp out and sleep. This is Jon Miller, who lives in a first-floor unit, where for days he and his wife would hear this noise, this noise coming from this vacant apartment upstairs from theirs. Then, they'd be lying in bed, and they would hear the sound of crumbling rocks and drywall coming from inside the walls and ceiling. Until finally, the culprit actually came through a big hole in the utility closet and they spotted it, a cat. It was black and it was feral, and it ran back up the hole. So, I set a trap, which was just a small plate of tuna set 3/4 of the way over the edge of the countertop. And that way I knew, once he jumps up, he starts eating the tuna, he knocks the plate over, it breaks the plate, it wakes me up, I come out, and I've got him. Wait, and so then it's you and your wife running around your apartment here, trying to chase a feral cat. Yes. We were just digging out clothing, trying to get up under our dressers, trying to get him out from under the bed. And finally, I just was able to grab him. Were you frightened? By a cat? No. Did it bite you? Yeah, it scratched me pretty good. A pretty good deep one in the leg and a couple on my arm. So to review, the housing market collapsed in Chicago, and as a result, Jon got scratched by a feral cat. He and the other people in this building have done nothing wrong. They didn't take out crazy loans that they couldn't afford. They played by the rules. They've paid their mortgage payments. And yet, they find themselves in an increasingly difficult situation. A month after Jon moved in, winter arrived in Chicago in earnest. And with two empty apartments above his, apartments that had no heat because the developer stopped renovations, pipes froze. And so, water poured out all over my kitchen floor and basically ruined my kitchen floor. It's wobbly and kind of warped. You can walk across it for yourself. Two other frozen pipes in the building damaged another guy's kitchen, and pretty much destroyed a ground-level apartment across the courtyard from Jon. Now, if Jon sounds unsurprisingly calm about all this, there are two reasons. One, he practices meditation regularly, which, by the way, he'll be glad to tell you about. It's changed my life forever for the better. It'll do the same for you. Swear to God it will. But also, he is in the real estate business. And what it means to be in the real estate business these days is that he is a mortgage broker who has seen his own income drop in half, and that has forced a kind of Zen attitude on him. Jon has run some numbers to try to understand exactly what happened with the developer of this building, a small-time operator who moved to Chicago from Bosnia back in 1994, named Haso Meseljevic, who's currently unreachable, at least by us or anybody in 1633 Farwell. Though more about that in a bit. Public records show that Meseljevic and his son took out a loan of $5.1 million to buy and rehab this building, and that by 2007, he still owed $2.9 million to the bank for the unsold units. Which means, Jon calculates, that Meseljevic was paying the bank at least $20,000 a month on that debt. So, back in October 2007, Jon bought the last unit sold in this building, right as the market was turning. But then right after I closed, November, December, January rolled by, and I don't think he closed any units within those three months. And I more or less would guess that's what put him under. You know, when you're trying to carry a $20,000 expense month-to-month and you're not a very well-known, highly capitalized developer like some of these guys are, it's just not having a sale in three or four months is enough to put you under. So that's essentially my guess as to what happened. Even before the housing crisis and the recession, residents say this is a developer who seemed to cut corners and do the bare minimum. His business seemed perpetually strapped for cash, even though he and his family drove around in a yellow Hummer. And this right here is where the ugliness of the recessions intersects with the normal, everyday seediness of a lot of real estate development in a particularly toxic way. Residents had all kinds of problems they couldn't get him to fix, problems that go way, way beyond the normal kinds of final details you need a builder to repair when you move into a place. Shortly after staying here, we started seeing things like this column here separated from the ceiling and collapsed into the ground. Jen and Peter Benedetto have a ground-floor unit that is jammed with musical gear and DJ equipment and the stuff that he uses to publish a quarterly journal of goth art. They show me how the floor is sinking away from the walls and the walls are separating from the ceiling of the unit, because there's nothing underneath the thin floor boards. There's no concrete slab, just dirt. Right here is one of the worst spots, where the walls are separating from the ceiling. And it changes daily. You can see it getting worse every single day. Also when they moved in, the whole condo smelled like sewage. When they would drain the bathtub, little bubbles of sewage gas would come up in the toilet. At first, the developer told them that he had no money to fix this. He told him that he was using all of the money that they had paid for their condo to rehab the other units in the building. But then Jen and Peter but a big handmade sign in the window facing the street, saying that their apartment smelled like sewage and the developer wouldn't fix it, which is the kind of thing that could keep somebody from buying a condo unit in the building, so the developer decided to send out some relatives to fix this. First of all, they come in and they say, well, you're going to have to show us how these bubbles come up the toilet. So I fill up the bathtub and I pull the plug out, and the minute I let the water out, he's like, nothing's happening, nothing's happening. And he's getting all excited that he's disproving us. And then I'm like, just give it a second. And then, sure enough, the bubbles start coming up. And then he starts laughing. He calls his friend, come look at this. And he's all excited and happy. And I'm like, what's so funny? He's like, I've never seen this before. So then they take the toilet off, and then the guy that he called in starts laughing again. And I'm like, you guys, what's so funny? And he's like, oh, you bought a place without even concrete under the floor. They gave you dirt. Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho. I never would have bought this place. Dirt, dirt, you live on dirt. Ho, ho, ho, ho. So there's not even concrete under our floor, which is why we're sinking in like that. It's loose dirt. It's not even packed. We also had, because of the sewage backup we had maggots, fly eggs in the sewage. And in the spring, we have flies procreating in our plumbing and inhabiting our-- Yeah, I've never seen so many flies. We had fly traps up and they were just covered in flies. It was really nasty. Hundreds, hundreds of dead flies hanging on fly tape in our bathroom. Remember, this is a condo building with granite countertops and brand new hardwood floors. But Jen and Peter say that, underneath the surface, everything's fake. When they brought out an independent plumber about the sewage smell, this plumber informed them that the entire building's plumbing needed to be redone. Part of the problem is that so much building and condo conversion was going on during the boom that the city of Chicago did not have enough inspectors to keep up. And two residents in this building told me stories about the developer making cosmetic changes the day the inspector finally did show up and then ripping out the changes once he left. And in the months after they moved in, residents went to the developer with a list of pretty urgent repairs, but by the spring of 2008, the developer stopped returning their phone calls. Then things deteriorated further. In June, the electric company posted notices that the power was going to be shut off because of the developer's nonpayment of bills, then the water company did the same, then the garbage collection service. The insurance coverage for the building lapsed in July. And none of this, I learned, is unusual. So this-- do you want me to start? OK. So this is a foreclosure. Boarded-up windows, boarded-up basement, boarded-up front door, empty, like, get it, foreclosure. So here's another one. It's a two-flat. And here's another one. This is a for-sale-by-owner going into foreclosure. Brian White, the executive director of a community group that deals with housing issues, called Lakeside Community Development Corporation, takes me on a driving tour of the neighborhood. Before the housing bubble, Rogers Park was 80% renters, a shabby neighborhood where students and seniors and young families could get an affordable place. Then developers threw a lot of money in, hoping that it would be the next gentrified neighborhood of Chicago's north side. A survey that Brian's group did back in 2006 showed that 15% of the housing stock, about 1,000 units, were being turned into condos, all at the same time. And it didn't work, partly because the developers were building for higher income people who simply did not want to move to corners like this one, at Touhy and Rogers. So, this building that we're looking at right here, this is a project that's been sitting empty for three years. It was advertised as an 18-unit unit luxury condo property. I noticed the air quotes around the word luxury. Well, I mean, this is what I was going to say is one of the challenges. Right across the street from this building is another building. Seven of the nine units are in foreclosure. Directly next to that is a garage where they park ice cream trucks. It's a very beat-up building. Merely down the block from that are some two-flats that are pretty old. If you're a consumer who has a luxury dollar to spend, chances are you're not going to be spending it at this particular intersection. And so, there's just a pattern of developers coming in and buying up buildings and all trying to market them as these luxury developments in a neighborhood that really is not a luxury neighborhood, and the building has failed. And now it's just-- Boarded up on the ground floor. Boarded up on the ground floor, broken windows, a little bit of graffiti. And it's not-- The city of Chicago and groups like Brian's tried to convince developers to include some moderately priced units in the mix. And there were government subsidies available to help them do that. But Brian says, understandably, people wanted to make a killing. Some had taken the money out of the stock market and put it into real estate during the boom, figuring that it was going to be more lucrative. And as a result, every block or two in Rogers Park today, we drive by uninhabited or barely habited buildings, with signs advertising brand new condos with depressingly similar lists of super deluxe amenities. Yes, granite counters, stainless steel appliances. But it's the sexy on the outside, crappy on the inside kind of rehab work that also the associations are now struggling with. They bought for the granite countertops and the stainless steel. Nobody bothered to check and see if the wiring and the plumbing was done properly, or if the foundation was intact. But that's pretty common. At the corner of Seeley and Birchwood, the sign advertises all the usual amenities, plus one more, a 42-inch plasma TV with each unit. I don't know. One of the things I've seen here as I walk around the neighborhood at nighttime, you can sometimes see when buildings-- you see the foreclosed buildings or the struggling buildings, because you'll have, like, a building where half the building is completely dark. And then there'll be, like, one unit where the light's on and there's a big plasma screen TV. And that's kind of the symbol of the lonely person. He's got his plasma screen TV. He has no neighbors, but he's got his plasma screen, and he's there. But what difference does it make if I'm living in this building and I've got no neighbors and I'm just going to have to wait three or four years before anybody else moves in? You're going to be dealing with things like frozen water pipes. You're going to be dealing with things like mold from moisture. If there's heat left on and there's moisture in the apartment, it will start to spread mold. You're going to be dealing with things like vermin. And then the other one, and the biggest one, is the difficulty raising the kind of cash to pay the water bill, the gas bill, the insurance costs, pay for the garbage to be hauled away. If there's no money coming in, you can't sustain those costs. And we have buildings now where you've got an individual unit owner who's paid the water bill, for example. Well, water bill on one building we were dealing with on the south side, she had a $3,000 water bill that she had to pay out of her own pocket to keep the water on, because there were no other unit owners to pay assessments to pay the water bill. Wait, it was one person in a building with how much water? How many units? She had a eight-unit building. The other units were all in foreclosure, and the developer had never paid the water bill. So she was stuck paying the water bill for the entire building. And in fact, most of that is starting to happen at 1633 W. Farwell. There's nobody to fix the building's roof, which they'd been told was brand-new when they moved in, but which leaks, ruining drywall in some units. One estimate put the repair job at $56,000. There's no money to redo the building's plumbing. There's no money to put in a buzzer and intercom system, or to pay the liens on the building from contractors who were never paid. Those liens total at least $175,000. Because this is a condo building, the way it's supposed to work is that all the condo owners pay each month into a maintenance and repair fund. But there's a catch. In Illinois, until 75% of the units are sold, that fund is controlled by the developer, the guy who disappeared. In this case, supposedly back to Bosnia. And all that money seems to be gone, too. Brian says this is not unusual. It is so not unusual that a move is underway to change the laws to make it easier for condo owners to control that money. Brian's take on all this, by the way, is very different from the real estate guy who lives at 1633 Farwell, Jon Miller. Brian says that lots of developers have vanished. Well, some of them are still around, but a lot of them have disappeared. And when people have fled, are you thinking that they fled and they're bankrupt and they've got nothing, or they fled and they're walking away with huge piles of money and defaulting on their buildings and just hoping nobody catches them? The latter. They walked away with big piles of money. We have people who bought properties with mortgages, took cash out from the mortgage by refinancing, or in some cases, took cash out at closing, and then went and bought property in other countries, where they are now wealthy people in those countries because they've left these foreclosures here. I tried to get the developer-- again, his name is Haso Meseljevic-- to come on the air and tell his side of the story. He never answered at the phone number listed for him. His son, Samel Meseljevic, who was his business partner in developing this particular building, is the one who said in a quick phone conversation that his father has moved back to Bosnia. I repeatedly tried to get Samel to agree to a real conversation about what happened on tape. He invited me to his house, gave me his address, and then didn't show up. When I tried to reschedule, he insisted that the next morning he was going to be going out of the country for a week, though he didn't seem to leave Chicago. And I say that because he picked up his phone the next afternoon when I called. One time that I raised the possibility of an interview, Samel simply hung up on me. The lawyer working for him and his dad, whose name is Hugh Howard, and who has a downtown office in Chicago on Monroe Street, didn't return calls. And once, when somebody in his office accidentally picked up the phone when I called and identified myself, that person hung up on me as well. All right, we are all here, so there are St. Patty's Day beers in the fridge and cupcakes for later. In a top-floor apartment, the five elected officers of the condo association, and a black-and-white cat named Checkers, are at the condo association's regular meeting. If this meeting is typical, I think it is safe to say that a year of trying to fix all the problems in this half-empty building is taking some very nice, very responsible people, and driving them all slowly crazy. They are in an impossible legal limbo. The bank was scheduled to finally foreclose on the developer's 19 units in March, and then the bank pushed it to April. And they'll probably push it back again and again. Banks don't want to take these properties onto their books, and they put it off as long as possible. And it is only when the bank finally does foreclose that, from a legal perspective, these units will finally have an owner. The owner will be the bank, and the building will be 100% sold, which means that this group will finally be a real condo association and will finally have the power to address their problems in the way that any normal condo association does. They can make residents pay monthly fees and use those fees to do maintenance and repairs. And then the issue for them will be, will the bank, as owner of 19 units, kick in its share of the maintenance and repair fees like all the other owners? Often it doesn't. As you might imagine, the repairs, the legal complications, the money problems, the meetings, the worry of owning property in a half-empty building that is deteriorating and not insured, has taken its toll on everybody here, stressed them out. Of course, they could walk away. Jen and Peter, the couple with the sewage smell and the sinking floor, pay exactly the same to live here that they used to pay in rent, $1,100 a month. If they defaulted on their mortgage and moved out now, all they would lose is the $3,000 down that they paid back when they bought. Jen would have bad credit for seven years, since her name is on the mortgage, but Peter wouldn't. But for now, they're staying put. They've all been organizing and fighting for over a year now, and it's sort of become their identity. They see themselves as the responsible ones. In a world of irresponsible developers and bankers, they're the people who won't renege on their obligations. It's now a point of pride. Karen Webber lives in a top-floor unit. To me it's a very black-and-white situation, because I signed a contract, I have an ability to pay, and as long as there are blood in my veins I will do my part to honor my word. On the other hand, Maria Hadden, who runs the condo association, says she sometimes wonders if it really matters if she defaults. So she'd lose maybe $10,000 that she's put into her place, have bad credit for seven years. She could stop paying her mortgage for a few months, save up her cash, and then when she got kicked out, rent a nice place, cheap. Does it matter to you, your credit score? No. So you could basically be out of here, wash your hands of this. Instead of paying $1,800-something a month, you could be paying, like, $1,000 and have an incredibly beautiful apartment somewhere nearby. Uh-huh, yeah. That's true. So it doesn't really-- I don't understand how it makes so much sense to stay. What would happen if everybody left? Then you all would be happier. If I leave and foreclose, and then Jon leaves, and Jim and Rick leave, then the people that are left are left even more up a creek than they were before. Right, then they're carrying the cost of the roof and they're carrying the cost of the buzzer system. Yeah, it becomes impossible. It's kind of like we're in this together. We're all going to do this or we're not going to do this at all, because it's not going to work unless we all do it. So it's kind of like staying here. Lately, the developer's family has tried to move some renters into the vacant units, to raise a little money, possibly to stall the bank from foreclosing. True to form, one woman moved here from England in the middle of a Chicago winter to find her unit had no heat or hot water. Another renter, somebody on a Section 8 public housing voucher, was put into a unit which didn't even have a toilet. Coming up, real-life secret agents who work for the government and are out on the front lines to save our economy. 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, we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, scenes from the recession. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, Unbreaking the Bank. In an office park in Irvine, California, in a conference room with fluorescent lights, wheelie chairs, a whiteboard, something totally unrecession-like is taking place, new employee orientation. OK, can I get everybody's attention again, please? 32 new employees arranged in three long rows. These are the FDIC's newest recruits. The FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, not only insures the money that you and I keep in the bank, it's also the agency that closes down banks when they fail. Since banks fail almost every weekend now-- yes, a bank fails every weekend; and in fact, most weekends, lately it's two banks-- the FDIC needs help. These people here are only 32 of 600 people the agency is hiring for this regional office, 600 new agents to train about bank failures, 600 new computer accounts. Log in, and then on the left-hand side, type in no fear and hit ENTER. Got that? No fear, then ENTER. The FDIC's mission is to ensure stability in the banking system. What that means, actually, when a bank fails, is something pretty dramatic. The government rolls in unannounced, shuts the bank down, and takes it over as a way to protect our deposits. The whole thing is planned like a SWAT team, if SWAT teams had accountants in them. And then reason that they do it this way is that if the public found out that the bank was failing before the government actually stepped in, people might pull their deposits out and cause a run on the bank. Also, if the people working at the bank knew that the government was going to be seizing the bank, they might steal, they might destroy paperwork. The government believes that this is the best way to protect depositors, you and me. This is Tom Murray, one of the FDIC bosses here. So, some of you may go to a bank closing this weekend. Don't tell your significant other where you're going or what you're doing. Don't talk in a conversation that can be overheard. Don't check in at the hotel and say, oh, well, I'm here for this event. You are on a secret mission. Today we take you on that secret mission, when the FDIC takes over. Chana Jaffe-Walt talked to all kinds of people involved in one bank failure, a place called the Bank of Clark County in southwest Washington State. Long before most of the Bank of Clark County employees knew their bank was dead, the FDIC was planning its demise. They'd been having meetings, contacting other banks in the region, trying to find one that would take over the Bank of Clark County's assets after it failed. All of these negotiations were top secret. And then the time came. Thursday, January 15, 2009, the operation begins. 80 FDIC agents pull into Vancouver, Washington. Their rental cars are generic. Their arrival times staggered. One by one, the agents check into the hotel, each quietly offering a fake name to the guy at the desk. 9:00 PM, the FDIC calls the CEO of another bank nearby, Umpqua Bank. Your bank, they tell him, has been selected to take over the Bank of Clark County. You can't tell anyone. Come to a meeting tomorrow at noon. The FDIC will tell you everything you need to know. And so, Friday morning, the Bank of Clark County employees get up, go to work, turn on the lights and go about their day. And Ric Carey, a vice president from Umpqua Bank, sits down with the FDIC and begins to plan. We actually met with the FDIC beginning at about 12:30 on Friday, and they were in a hotel, under a different name. We made sure that there was no one from outside of our two organizations there. Does it feel like a spy movie? It almost does. They know what they're doing. They've done this before. Quite a production. My name is Todd Zalk, Bank of Clark County, the best community business bank, because we've changed the game in business banking. And we were winning. Often, when I would go to a networking meeting or event, I would introduce myself that way. Todd Zalk is what you call a team player, total bank loyalist to the end, beyond the end. Four weeks after the failure, Todd's still wearing his Bank of Clark County name tag. still passing out his bank business cards, always with a warm handshake, constant eye contact, inserting your name whenever possible. Friday, as Ric Carey snuck into the nondescript FDIC secret location, Todd was playing for the team. Most of the day I had spent out meeting with businesses. I had a couple networking events, and then I came back to the bank, and-- Wait, so you were still bringing business in that Friday. I actually was. I had people that wanted to open accounts. In fact, Chana, in the fourth quarter, I opened over 55 accounts for Bank of Clark County. Todd and his coworkers had no idea the bank was about to be taken over. He knew they were going through a rough time. Just last week the CEO had called a staff meeting about it. But the CEO was clear. Things were under control. He used this analogy that we were the ship, and we've gone through a storm and that we were a little bit tattered, but we were still weathering it well, and that we maybe were taking on a little bit of water. And we were looking for someone to maybe buy the bank, and had a few buyers that were very interested. And within the next 60 days, we should know who the new face of the bank would be. So that's what I had thought. Many, many Bank of Clark County employees told me about the ship meeting. Mostly it made sense to them. The CEO said they were doing OK, they were doing OK. But in fact, things had been changing at the bank since 2005. That's when they went big into commercial and real estate loans. They were a young bank. They felt they had to be aggressive. And sometimes that meant making loans other banks wouldn't have made, loans that ended up killing them. Washington State regulators audit every bank several times a year, and they noted the Bank of Clark County's declining health. Its capital reserves were getting low, so low the bank was in danger of not being able to cover its debts and obligations. And then, you know the story, housing prices dropped, developers couldn't make payments. The story finally ends Friday, January 16, 5:01 PM. Two FDIC agents and a Washington State regulator enter the Bank of Clark County. Casual, head straight for the CEO's office. There, behind closed doors, they deliver the news. They tell him his bank is under-capitalized. It has failed. 5:03 PM, an agent positioned by the CEO's office door types this news into a BlackBerry. It's received by everyone on the FDIC takeover team. 5:05 PM, FDIC agents begin closing in on the bank. A few are already inside, quietly and discreetly securing the cash in the vaults. Todd Zalk, oblivious to all this, heads back into the office after a long day of work. I could tell that the mood at the bank seemed odd. And I thought, well, hmmm, I wonder if they found a buyer, and kind of people have heard, because I was gone most of the day. And so, I went in and asked, and they said that there was going to be a meeting at 6 o'clock and that there might be an announcement as to who the buyer might be or what that would look like. Todd hung around, said hello to some customers, did some banking. By this time, it was quarter to 6:00, and I went up to someone that was an executive or senior vice president of the bank. And I said, how are you doing? And they said, oh, I'm doing all right. And I could tell something was going on and they didn't want to say. And we looked across to the other side of the bank, and there was two employees adjusting pictures on the wall. And he looked over at that, and I saw his gaze go over to the wall, and so I looked over at the wall. He kind of laughed and he said, wow, he says, that reminds me of adjusting the chairs on the Titanic before it sank. And that really told me something was going down. People started to gather, and there was just this real sense of this isn't good and we're not sure what it is, but it's not good. Well, then it was probably very close, just a minute or two after 6 o'clock, and Mike Worthy, our CEO, came out, and he stood up and said, well, I've used the analogy that we were a ship that was taking on some water and we needed to pull up next to a bigger ship and see if they wouldn't take us on and our crew, and we thought we had a few buyers for that. But now the biggest ship that sails the seas has come alongside us and they are going to be taking us over, and that is essentially the federal government. I would like to introduce the State of Washington regulators. And he sat down, and the State of Washington stood up and said, we are now taking possession of the bank, of all of its assets, and we are turning them over to the receivership of the FDIC. 6:03 PM, down the street from the bank, where he's been told by the FDIC to wait in his car, Ric Carey with Umpqua Bank hears his phone vibrate. At that point in time, a signal was given to myself, and basically-- What kind of a signal? It was an email. What did the message say when you got it on your BlackBerry? Oh, just, it's time. It's time. Yeah, it's time. Come in. 6:05, Ric gets out of the car and starts walking toward the bank. Inside, a woman from the FDIC takes the stage. She said, within the next 10 minutes there will be 80 FDIC employees coming into the bank. And I looked out there, and it was dark, so I couldn't really see, and then all these people, mostly in suits and professional clothing with attorney-type briefcases, started entering the bank, just flooding into the bank. And I was so awestruck at them coming in and so many of them coming into the bank that I turned around and looked over there and just kept watching them, and they just continued to come. I mean, 80? I mean, our bank had, like, 100 employees. And at this time, it was dark outside, and a flash flashed out in the parking lot. The flash was The Columbian newspaper taking a picture for Saturday morning's front page news that the bank had failed. All of this happened, Chana, in just a matter of minutes. So, things are going through my mind like I just lost almost $25,000 worth of stock I bought four months ago in Bank of Clark County, in my bank. I mean, I'm investing in my bank. And most of the employees were shareholders. And so, for me, there was a sense of, gosh, I think I just lost all my stock. And I looked around the bank. I saw some people crying. I saw some people with just a white face, blank stare on their face, just in shock. Some people had their hand on their face, just were like, I can't believe this, like, oh my gosh. 6:10 PM, Ric Carey from Umpqua Bank is introduced to the confused employees of the bank he now owns. They have a whole bunch of questions running through their heads. First among them, do we get to keep our jobs? Ric can't answer that. Umpqua will only need about 1/3 of the Clark County staff, people who actually deal with customers in the branches. Most of the support staff and administration will be let go. But it's too soon to let each person know whether he or she has a job. Ric is put in charge of supervising a full-on manual hand count of all the bank's cash. A couple of his staff grab the cash and begin to count. The Bank of Clark County people watch Umpqua. The FDIC watches them both. This takes three hours. Meanwhile, Bank of Clark County staff come up to Ric to introduce themselves, tell him how important they are at the bank. They're worried for their jobs. And Ric has other things on his mind. He bought the bank from the FDIC for a pretty good price, and he only has to take the good parts, the insured deposits and the actual branch buildings. The FDIC will keep all the bad stuff, the problem loans. But there's still a lot to think about. You know, I have to be open in three days. What do I want that store to look like? I remember that one of the first things we did that evening was contact their plants provider and make sure that they were arranged to have 25 large plants taken out of the facility. We have a very clean operating environment at Umpqua, and plants aren't part of our MO, and so those were to be removed immediately. And we were looking at signage. So I basically was making a note of what signs that we needed to change, replace, how quickly we wanted to do that. We wanted to make it look like Umpqua as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, FDIC agents have already secured the vaults and the cash. They've grabbed a couple hard drives. Now they need to inventory the entire bank. Every account needs to be transferred to Umpqua. The bank has to open its doors Tuesday morning. Monday was Martin Luther King Day, bank holiday. To get all this done, the FDIC needs the Bank of Clark County staff to help them, to show them where the files are, who the customers are, how to get to the bathroom. And so, at 6:15 PM, the FDIC makes an announcement: we need you all to sign in on this sheet of paper, everyone. As of right now, for the weekend, you're all temporary employees of the FDIC. We're going to need you to stay late tonight, work through the weekend. You will be paid for your time. We'll feed you. We need your help. Ken Moody was vice president of information systems at the Bank of Clark County. Again, most of us were planning on leaving at the end of the day. And so, after that announcement was made, we had phone calls to make, call our families. My daughter had a seventh birthday that we were going to go to. Take your time. Sorry. I didn't anticipate being this emotional about it. Kind of silly. 6:20 PM, agents take over offices, storage rooms, hallways, any space available. They tape handmade signs to the doors, written on 8.5 x 11 sheets of printer paper, saying things like, audit, security, investigations. It's a little chaotic. The FDIC moves room to room. They go through files, transfer accounts, they change the website, they check the safe deposit boxes, make sure everything that's supposed to be in there is in there. They go through desk drawers. They toss out bank letterhead. Once agents have scanned a room for all critical information, they place a green dot on its door frame. Then they take all that paperwork, all the hard drives, all the files, and the FDIC has to reconstruct the bank's entire balance sheet. It has to know what it's selling to Umpqua, what's actually there. Any account with a balance up to $250,000 is fully insured by the FDIC. If the bank doesn't have the money to cover the balance, the government will pay it out. But some people have more than $250,000, and there are business accounts and loans, and it gets complicated. Some is covered, some is not. The FDIC now sorts all that out. Things started happening very quickly and with what seemed to be a lot of precision. 6:25 PM, in the IT department, three agents approach Ken Moody, the IT guy. They hand him a thumb drive. Please plug this in, they say. It has all the software to change your computer systems over to Umpqua Bank. That was kind of a fascinating part about it. So it was almost like, on one hand, it's very sad, you have the death of a loved one. But at the same time, it was like watching an autopsy being performed by a really skillful surgeon. They just came in and just sliced and diced and broke the bank up into different pieces and threw them into different buckets and did it with great efficiency. An autopsy of the work that you'd been doing. Yeah. Well, yeah, an autopsy of everything that we'd been creating over the last 10 years. At the Bank of Clark County, everyone I talked to said this one thing about the FDIC that stuck with me, something you don't often hear about a government agency, that it did a really good job, that the agents were kind, courteous, and efficient. In fact, everything is ordered, structured. Everything, even how and when to grieve. Here's Lisa Stapleton. She was an assistant loan officer with the bank. So many of the people who came in from the FDIC got to where they were because they were part of a bank that failed. And they were all like, you know what? We've been where you are, and we understand, and it's going to be fine. So they were really nice. The Bank of Clark County had 100 employees and assets of $446 million, which, if you're not used to bank numbers, is a really small bank. But it took 80 FDIC agents, about 50 Bank of Clark County employees, and 100 Umpqua employees working around the clock for three days to take it over and have it reopened for business. Most of the largest banks in trouble right now, Citibank, Bank of America, are about 6,000 times the size of Bank of Clark County, not to mention much, much more complicated. So the Secretary of Treasury's latest plan to save the banks does everything it can to avoid using this process on those big banks. When you do this to a little bank, it's called receivership. When you do it to a big bank, people start to throw around the word nationalization. Every week, FDIC agents get more experience taking over banks. In the 10 weeks since they took over the Bank of Clark County, 18 more banks have failed, bringing us to a grand total of 20 failures since the start of this year, before this weekend, that is, when most likely they'll add a few more to that list. Chana Joffe-Walt in Seattle. She's a regular contributor to the Planet Money podcast, which you can hear at npr.org/money. Act three, Short-Circuit City. Among the big chain stores that have gone out of business in this recession, Circuit City, the second biggest electronics store in the country, shutting down after 60 years. Earlier this month, the Chicago Tribune described the atmosphere in a Chicago Circuit City outlet the week before it shut down as funereal. Quote, "employees, wearing sullen faces, who, when asked if a display model Sony VAIO laptop missing nine keys is still $623.99, answer with a mechanical, leave me the hell alone, 'yep.'" It's not as if they object to helping, but they're also texting while ringing up customers at the checkout line. Because, really, what are they going to do? Fire them? The day after that was published in the paper, the reporter who wrote that story-- his name is Kevin Pang-- got an email from one of that store's employees. First, let me say that I enjoyed your article. That's Jonathan Mullens. We invited him here to read his email. Second, there's a better-than-average chance that I am the leave-me-the-hell-alone-yep guy from your article. Let me tell you why the morale in the store is the way that it is. At this point, we all want it to be over with. I cannot name a single person here who wishes this hell to continue. Our attitude is a direct result of the customers who have come into the store during this liquidation. Many of them are rude and complain to us about everything. Why does this cost so much? Why isn't this discounted more? That's all I get off? How much are you hiding in the back? I can get it cheaper at Best Buy. If I hear that last one again, I might choke the person that says it. I now view Circuit City as a sickly old relative who you just want to die so the suffering can stop and you don't have to deal with it anymore. Again, I enjoyed your article and found the humor in it. We are not bad people here. We are just tired and beaten. 34,000 people lost their jobs in the liquidation. Some of them had worked at Circuit City for years. In January, when the stores began selling off their last merchandise, the website Gizmodo invited Circuit City employees to write in and describe what it was like in the trenches of liquidation. Gizmodo published their emails in a story called, "Their Final Words as Grunts of Circuit City." And what you're going to hear now are excerpts from those dispatches, along with other emails that we solicited from Circuit City employees in stores around the country, Peoria, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania. The way that it worked is that special liquidation companies came in to run the stores during the last few weeks, to sell off the final merchandise, as much of it as possible, because the more money they brought in the door, the more they could pay off creditors and, not incidentally, the more profit the liquidation companies got to keep themselves. Which explains why one of the very first things they did in most stores was raise prices. The day after we learned we were closing, a liquidator showed up at our store in Peoria. His name was Chip. He worked for one of the liquidation companies, which meant he was in charge of our store now. One of my coworkers would only refer to Chip as The A-hole, but to me he seemed like a decent enough guy. Then he gave us the new rules. First, on Sunday, most of our prices were being raised-- yes, I said raised-- to MSRP, manufacturer's suggested retail price. Most items would start off at 10% off MSRP. Also, we no longer accepted checks, the price guarantee was gone, all sales were final, and we would no longer take the Circuit City credit card. We had a huge influx of customers who'd been waiting for us to go under so that they could get the store closing prices, only to discover that the prices were now higher than they were before. The amazing thing is that it worked. People were buying things at a higher price than they would have before liquidation. In the first three days of liquidation, we'd made more money than we had in a week. When the doors opened on the first day of liquidation, it was obvious that we were severely understaffed. When customers complained that they couldn't find help, I explained that we weren't staffed for the rush because we'd only found out we were going out of business the day before. That's why you're going out of business, one woman sneered. You don't plan ahead. "That's why you're going out of business" became the customers' mantra. It never came after something intelligent like, "the one-price promise was one of the stupidest campaigns in the history of retail, and that's why you're going out of business." Or, "two years ago, your company laid off 3,400 seasoned employees for making too much money and replaced them with young and inexperienced people, and that's why you're going out of business." I was working loss prevention at the door one evening, and a guy came in and said, hey, has anyone found a wallet? I think I left it at the cart. I haven't heard anything. Let me ask over the walkie. No, I'm sorry, we haven't found a wallet. He made a disgusted face and walked away, then turned and yelled, no wonder you guys are going out of business. I yelled back, yes, sir, 34,000 people are losing their jobs because you lost your wallet. Thanks for clarifying. I really don't know where all the anger comes from. I'm sorry I can't sell you a GPS for 70% off. I'm sorry we don't have any Wiis. I'm sorry I can't sell you that flat screen TV for $300. I'm sorry I can't take your check or Circuit City credit card as a payment. I'm sorry. I was simply a car stereo installer. I'm doing the best I can to help you. If my best isn't enough, I'm sorry. The best way to describe a liquidation sale is what I call anti-retail. In regular retail, the more you sell and the better you do, the more likely you are to keep your job. In anti-retail, the more you sell and the better you do, the faster you lose your job. Store morale really started falling when we began emptying whole sections and roping them off with yellow caution tape, like at a CSI crime scene. But the mood hit an all-time low when we had to put up the big 10-days-to-close sign. At least then we could finally answer the customer's number-one question, when is your last day? with, I'll be fired on Sunday, March 8. Only a few weeks into liquidation, XM Radio cut the signal to our store. Without music the place was eerily quiet. Then Canteen Vending pulled the soda and candy machines out of the break room. One of the drivers told me that the company was afraid they wouldn't get their money. I'm not sure what that means since you have to put money in the machine before it gives you something. I asked the driver what we were supposed to do now for soda, and he just shrugged his shoulders as he strapped the machine down for transport. Recruiters stopped by the store to advertise jobs. There had been at least two Amway-like sales companies and three auto parts stores. A coworker told me that he had an interview with one of these stores, and that they pay just slightly more than minimum wage. Of course, the armed services had made their presence felt, too. Anytime one of the younger kids sees someone in the store in full military dress, it's suddenly time for their break. Our liquidation manager puts on a good front of being nice, asking how our job applications are coming, and greeting us energetically when he sees us. But he, just like everyone else, is looking out for himself. Early in the liquidation process, he hinted that we would be allowed to stash things, hide stuff that we wanted to buy in the warehouse, until the last day, when we'd receive the best possible discount. Customers also tried stashing things under our shelving to come back and dig up later. We searched weekly, often turning up new merchandise to put right back out for sale. The liquidation manager promised to look the other way for our stashed items, but a month later he reneged on the deal. Incidentally, about a week before we closed, the newspaper reported that the liquidator, while working at our sister store, was arrested and charged with stealing merchandise. With two days left, we were down to 17 laptop computers, 33 CDs, eight cameras, and a few printers. Basically, everything in the store that wasn't nailed down, and some things that were, had or would be sold, including a case of tampons for the vending machine in the women's restroom and a 12-foot circular rug covered in Circuit City logos. One of our associates was vacuuming when a customer walked up and offered to buy the vacuum right out of his hands. He was told to come back on the last day. The employees were actually in a great mood. We realized we made it to the end, and it was kind of a badge of honor to stick it out. The liquidator bought us lunch and the customers were well-behaved and courteous. The cashiers set up a tip jar at the register, and it was pretty full by the end of the day. Too bad they didn't think of it sooner. At 4:46 on March 8, the next-to-to-last cash register was closed. The only cashier still working was Brenda, the same person who had rung up Peoria's very first transaction when the store opened in 1994. Brenda was one of the six people from our store, and one of 3,400 nationwide, who got terminated two years ago when the CEO, Phil Schoonover, got the bright idea that some of our experienced staff made too much money. But she'd gotten permission from our manager to be there at the end. At 5:10, Brenda rang up our last sale, a single USB printer cable, originally priced at $33.99, sold for $2.16 including tax. Someone who watches way too much ER called out, call it, time of death, 5:11 PM. Another associate and I read the closing instructions. We went through the store and cut off most of the breakers for power. We cleaned up, clocked out for the last time, and went home. The next day, the store managers would make the final cash deposit and ship off any remaining merchandise. They'd turn off all the lights, lock the door, and mail the last key off to corporate. Companies often motivate associates by telling them how one person can make a difference. The closing of Circuit City shows how far from reality that truly is. We busted our butts to make Circuit City store number 3167 a success, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter. It was like the corporate executives took us for a ride, then dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. Every bit of hard work that I did, every extended warranty that I sold, if I hadn't done any of that, I'd still be in the same position I am today. I'm out of a job, and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Those were all former Circuit City employees. Only one of the five, James Armitage in Florida, has found another job. Allen in North Carolina, the car stereo installer, is planning to go to school this summer to become either a nurse or an electrician. People always need nurses and electricity, he wrote us. John Gallagher, Chris Evans, and Jonathan Mullens are still looking. [RAP SONG] Starting lineup. D. Baxter, B. Smith, J. Milligan, baby. 4506, yeah. Where you go to get your gifts in time? Circuit City up, Best Buy down. You want gifts? Then you better come around. Circuit City up, Best Buy down. Well, this song was actually written and performed by employees of Circuit City store number 4506 in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Our program was produced today by Robyn Semien and me, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Andy Dixon. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Dirt, dirt, you live on dirt. Ho, ho, ho, ho. 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, and the theme of today's show is, This I Used to Believe. And I have to admit this is just a knockoff of this series that's been running on NPR News called, This I Believe, which in turn, actually is a knockoff of the This I Believe Series that Edward R. Murrow did in the 1950s. Maybe you've heard some of these on the radio. These are short essays, three minutes long, by famous people and not so famous people very often, about what life has taught them. The NPR series actually invited listeners from all over the world to write in with their own short essays about what they believe in. And 65,000 people responded. 65,000. I was talking to Jay Allison, who heads the team that sorted through the essays and edited the ones that ended up on the radio, and he he told me that while only 200 of the essays actually ended up on the air, all 65,000 went on to this website that they set up. You know, if you go to the website, you can type in any word. I'd started typing in words. I typed like, squid. 11 essays mention squid. Car bomb, 20. Death, 7,000 and some. Wait, what were the squid ones? People didn't believe in squid, right? Squid was just an ancillary prop. Squid, squid came in-- We were having squid and I realized--? Well, one of the ones I read, was the guy was writing it and had recorded it in a deep sea submersible. He was working, I think, for Greenpeace and he was in the Arctic ocean. And he was looking out the window and seeing squid and writing his essay. That guy, of course, wrote about how he believed in cocktail sauce. Not really. The big things that came up over and over in the essays that people sent in were really exactly what you would expect. People believe in kindness, and the Golden Rule, tolerance, social justice, love, hard work, humility. By the fourth year of the This I Believe series, it got a lot harder to get on the air-- if you believed in kindness. Now, I don't want you to get mean about people. Are there some where you and your team read the essays and you just wonder like, "Wow, what were they thinking?" There've been some written by people of-- who are very advantaged. And they've written about why they deserve their advantages. And those are somewhat shocking to me. And-- And who would write this kind of thing? Teenagers with money sometimes write about how they deserve it. I was searching for one actually today, and I remembered that they'd mentioned like a BMW, I think in it. So I just did a search on BMW, but then I started scanning them, and a lot of people wrote about a belief in their car. In the brand of car they had. Those essays take me aback a little bit. One of the essays about cars, the person said, "I believe in having a car as cute as I am." And she believed she was much cuter than her car, her current car. And so she believed that-- I forget whether it was a BMW or an Audi-- but that was the car that she-- She thought would be as cute as her? Yeah. Yeah? Jay says that it's become a popular thing to assign This I Believe essays to kids in high school. There's a whole curriculum around it. And it is clear a lot of the kids do not want to do the essays. Some of them just seem to look around the room and just pick something-- "I believe in pencils,"-- and then start writing. There are schools all over this country who are using This I Believe. There is a generation of children who are going to curse our names. That's right. They're hearing you on the radio right now. They're sitting in the backseat of the car and then, "Oh, my God. That's the guy! Oh, I hate that guy." I know. I hate that show, I can't even believe. We had a kid writing about how he thought he was too cool. He thought everybody, all his friends, were too cool. They were too cool to be, like, courteous. They were too cool to like things. They just wanted to be critical. And he said-- but secretly he didn't want to be like that. And he said, "And the way I'm going to start stopping to be like that is, I'm going to write this essay. Because it's not cool to do." NPR News is going to run its last This I Believe later this month. They run the series for four years, which is the same length as the original Murrow series. A lot of the best This I Believes, a lot of the ones that I like the best, are actually This I Used to Believes. These are people basically talking about how they have changed and what's made them change. Like there's one by a nurse practitioner named Courtney Davis who talked about how early in her career, when patients would go through something really horrible and sad, she was one of those nurses who would try to keep things upbeat. She would keep her voice upbeat. And she would actually try to stay cheerful. And even when her own mom, she writes in this essay, was dying in the hospital, she continued that way. Saying goodbye to her mom in that cheery nurse voice that she practiced her whole life. I didn't know then that I could have climbed into bed and held her. That I should have wailed when she was gone. I no longer comfort others with false cheer. So, I'm wondering you work in radio, and I work in radio. How come we haven't heard from you on what you believe? How come you haven't done an essay for us? Well, actually I mean it's funny. I think that I don't-- I say this and it's going to sound a little more dramatic than I mean it. But I'm not sure I believe anything, in that way, that would make for an essay. But did you ever, did you ever sit down-- or do you just sort of ask yourself rhetorically from time to time? I ask myself whenever I hear the series. I hear you on the radio and I think, how come I'm not on Jay's series? Like, how come I'm not doing This I Believe? Are you sure you're not just giving up too easily though? I don't know. I think I'm one of those people where like, I had a lot of really strong beliefs about stuff when I was a kid, and I like had a religious phase, and then I had a very strong, like, atheist phase and then I had a very political phase. And I was like politically correct for years. I mean the kind of politically correct where like, when I was in my 20s I went to Nicaragua and I called it Nikh-a-RAH-hua. And you know what I mean? Like, I was horrible. And-- Did you call it Nikh-a-Rah-hua on the radio, too? Ah no. I knew better than that. At least I knew better than that. But you know I mean? Like, and then, just like, I got older and I saw that things seemed more complicated than the way that I'd believed them. And when I poll myself, I'm like, what do I believe in? Well I believe that listening to the radio in the car is the best place to listen to the radio. I've got that. But that doesn't seem like it's worthy of your series. I think it's true. I can defend it, but--. How about if something bad happened? Is there something you'd cling to? You mean in terms of a belief? Mm-hmm. I mean, I take comfort in the thought that when things seem really sad it's a comfort to me that well, everybody's going to go through this. Everybody's gone through this. And the problem is that, like, it's too much of a set of truisms to actually be good enough for your series. But your show is always looking for a conflict, and something to happen, and for something to change. I mean, maybe even this show is going to be about how something changes. So, possibly you're not interested in things that are static and enduring. No, I think that's true. It's funny like I think that's why I like This I Used to Believe. I'm much more attracted to that than to This I Believe because it just has the feeling of like, people are changing. And for me, drama is more interesting than ideas in a way. It's funny, I didn't even know I thought that until now I'm saying, that but I think it's true. Maybe you believe in that. And there's my essay. You are the master. I'm just an editor, man. Well, today on our program as I said before, This I Used to Believe. Our show today in four acts. Act One. Scrambled Nest Egg. About a kid, his parents, and their constant companion. Yes, the US economy. Act Two. Team Spirit in the Sky. A Texas football coach gets called out on an unusual mission. Act Three. Me Thinks Thou Doth Protest Too Much. In this case, the me of Me thinks is a teenage girl. And the one doing the protesting is her mom. Act Four. Pants Pants Revelation. In which we ask the question-- Can two people destroy their chances at love with one pair of pants? Stay with us. Act One. Scrambled Nest Egg. Sometimes you don't even realize you believe something until circumstances change in a way that destroys that belief. Alex French went to visit his parents in Massachusetts for a couple days last month. We'll go to Cumberland Farms. We're going to buy some lottery tickets. Big jackpot tonight. How much? Oh, over two hundred million. It's sort of a cheap way of buying a dream. The French family bailout? Yeah, exactly the French family stimulus. So--. One afternoon in early January my mother called me in the middle of the day. I was just laid off, she told me. I could tell she was on her cellphone calling from the car. For the past nine years she'd worked behind the counter of an upscale jewelry store in a mall about 20 minutes outside of Boston. All of the sudden, the recession was very, very real. Still, I could hear in her voice that she was relieved. She'd never admit it, but she hated her job. So long as your father keeps his job, she reassured me, we're going to be just fine. Less than an hour later my phone rang again. It was my mother. She took a deep breath and then spoke. Your father has just been laid off, too. Sometimes when I think about it, it seems like something of biblical proportions. It's like, it's crazy. I don't know that much about the Bible, but I think there was somebody who had boils, and pestilence, and all kinds of things. What are you talking about? Talking about how I feel some days. That everything just happened at once. It was like anything bad that could happen to me or anybody I knew happened. So. I used to believe that recessions only affected people in faraway places like Detroit, Sacramento. I used to believe that my father would work until the day he turned 65 and then stop. There'd be some sort of retirement party and then the next day my parents would move to Clearwater, Florida. Where Dad would play golf and Mom would power walk. I never imagined that they could be so vulnerable. I never thought I might have to support my parents. It was inconceivable that they might someday have to move in with me because they could no longer pay their mortgage. All that changed when my mom called. My parents were both 59 years old and for 30 years they've done everything right. Saved money and paid the mortgage on time. When I went back to check on them, everything looked the same. They still have their house and their cars, but there's a sense of danger looming. A sense that if this thing goes on for much longer, my parents' lives might change drastically. You know, I talked to some people about actually going short term over to Iraq. My father has always worked as an engineer. Civil, environmental, hazardous materials, you name it. Tom French has done at all. Go to a mall in the Northeast and there's a pretty good chance that my father helped build it. And when the economy collapsed, the market for shopping centers and high rises went with it, along with my dad's job. I told myself during the train ride up there to stay positive. They'll be fine. You're going there for moral support. But when it came down to talking to my dad about going to Iraq, he ended up comforting me. I've talked to some people who know people who've gone over there and done it. And it's not near as bad as you think it is. Would you really consider doing that? I mean is it that bad that--? Well, I don't want to go to work with a helmet and a bulletproof vest on, but I'd consider it. Being laid off has affected both my parents so differently. My father, with his lifelong career, can't imagine doing anything but engineering. He'd go all the way to Iraq or even Afghanistan to keep doing it. But my mom, on the verge of 60, as worried as she is, also sees this as her chance. Anything seems possible. Massage therapy. TSA training. Jewelry making. I'm considering maybe guidance counseling. The other thing I'm considering would be flower arranging. Which, since I love to garden, that's an option. And-- well, we're contemplating a children's book. And I'm hoping to work on a project about Versailles, and what I always want to see is what they don't take you to see. The rooms that have not been rehabilitated or refinished. And I would eventually like to go and take a look, and photograph it, and write about it. Growing up, my parents were never the types that needed to be parented. Our roles were well established. They were the parents. I was the kid. Even for this visit, for example, my father insisted that I make the short trip by train when I wanted to drive, but I didn't argue. Now that I'm here, for the first time in my life I feel like the roles are reversed. I wanted to weigh in on everything from Iraq to the dinner menu. Tom, do me a favor. Go on the other side and get me a container of goat cheese. Goat cheese? Yeah. Goat cheese. Isn't that a little-- kind of a little bit of a luxury item for two unemployed folks? Yeah, but you know it lasts for a few weeks. It's OK. It sort of makes-- we don't eat out at all, so it makes staying in pleasurable. And so, buying a $4.50 container of something is a lot cheaper than going out and buying and having an $8.00 salad. What do you feel like eating this week? Soup. Soup. Gruel? Day-old bakery. They're joking around, but the most shocking thing that I noticed during my visit was how little food there was in the house. Growing up, it was such a comfort, a feeling of plenty when you opened the refrigerator. Now, it's not quite like a bachelor pad refrigerator, with just an empty bottle of ketchup. But it's not far from that, either. Yeah. No seriously, though. I mean, we're still eating pretty good. But if this thing goes on for an extended period, we're going to have to cut back even more. If this thing goes like four months or something and we're really ripping into savings to do that we're-- it's going to get cut back even more than it is already. My parents are handling this as well as they can. It's easy to see that the worry is getting the best of my father. He tells me he's having trouble sleeping. Lays there in the dark, staring at the ceiling 'til 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM, wondering how much longer he's going to be able to pay the bills. The unemployment benefits my parents receive barely cover expenses. Or when he and my mom are going to have to start digging into their savings. You know we went to take a little one-hour seminar down at unemployment to talk about the benefits and about looking for jobs. I mean is there part of you that feels like-- I mean if you did qualify for something like welfare or for food stamps, I mean, is that something that you would do? Or is there a part of you that feels like, no like I'm-- I mean do you have too much pride for that, or--? No I don't think so. I mean it's like the stimulus. I mean, anyway my attitude is, is with unemployment and the stimulus and all these other things. I mean, I paid a lot of money into the system over the years. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that've paid more in than I have who've never taken anything out. But I mean, I've paid a lot of money into this system for a lot of years so, I'm in a situation, I didn't do anything wrong. I'm in a situation where I need some of that back now to get me through a tough spot. And if I'm entitled to something by the law, then I'll take it. Why not? When you say I didn't do anything wrong, what do you mean by that? I didn't do anything wrong. I went to work every day. I worked hard. I did a good job. Obeyed the law. I paid my taxes. I did everything I was supposed to do. I didn't do anything wrong. This is a painful process we're going through now, but it will be over. We decided we would tell people that we were retired. And when we go back to work, we'll tell them, well we didn't think retirement was so great, so we thought we could go back to work. At this point, they don't need me to step in and say anything. I should stay calm, offer support, shut up. I don't tell them that I'm also losing sleep worrying about them. All weekend it's hard to know what to pay for. I don't even try to step in and pay at the grocery store. But they let me take them out for dinner and two lunches, and I pick up some odds and ends for them at the Family Dollar. I buy their lottery tickets, too. Alex French in New York. Act Two. Team Spirit in the Sky. Just before Christmas the coach of a high school football team in Texas did something that football coaches pretty much never do. He urged half the parents at his school one Friday night to root for the other team. And they did it. His school was a Christian high school called Grapevine Faith. The other team was made of juvenile offenders from the high school at a state penitentiary. Kids whose families never came out to games. Lots of people in these kids' lives had given up on them. But this one night, hundreds of parents and kids learned their names and rooted for them when they made their plays, and actually rooted against their own team. These kids from the penitentiary ran onto the field through a spirit line. You know that thing where there are two lines of fans? They had cheerleaders cheering for them. This clip is from a TV story done by the NBC affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth. I want you all to line up in line, they're making a spirit line. I like say, what cousin, what'd you say? Can you repeat that? When I ran through this like I felt like it was just like something like angels or something that's all I felt cause I was just running through as fast as I can I just feel the wind rushing my face. That feeling of being unleashed lasted throughout the game and so did the cheers. I remember when was making like a play, I made a tackle and people yelling my name, I'm like, I don't even know these people. This story became one of those things that people linked to all over the internet, talked about on discussion boards, that thousands of moms forwarded to thousands of grown kids all over this country. And it got lots of press. The coach from the Christian school was on ESPN and the 700 Club, and all kinds of radio and TV. The NFL Commissioner invited him to be his guest at the Super Bowl. And on Christmas morning, a woman named Trisha Sebastian saw a link and read about it in Rick Reilly's ESPN column online. She was alone. Her family was on the other side of the country. She was in an apartment in New York filled with her own moving boxes, in the kind of mood where this just got to her. One of the details from the story that just really killed me was that when they go back to the school, they got to be shackled when they get into the bus. That they had to go into handcuffs when they get on the bus. Handcuffs, when they get back into the bus. And so she decided to write an email to the coach at this Christian school who organized this nice thing for these kids. A guy named Chris Hogan. And I said, Dear Mr. Chris Hogan. Thank you for being a good inspirational leader to your players and to your players' fans by encouraging them to think of those who are less fortunate than they. I'm a very lapsed Catholic, leaning towards agnosticism, who has seen too many people who claim to be Christians behaving in a very un-Christian way. You are one of those bright few who embody what being Christian means. And I'm glad that you're in a place where you can show young children an example of being a good Christian. Thank you. Now there's a time stamp on that because it's an email. What time did you send that? 6:32 in the morning, on Christmas day. And that afternoon, much to her wondering eyes did appear a reply, time stamped 12:09 PM. So he wrote to me, and this is what he said, "Thank you so much for your kind words. Trisha, I've received literally hundreds of emails over the past few days. And yours is the first I've responded to. Yours reached out of my computer and gripped my heart. When I read it, my spirit was pressed to answer you first, when I'd read that you were leaning towards agnosticism because of the actions of Christians. "Let me encourage you to not make a judgment about God, based on the actions of men. My heart is heavy to think of you walking away from a God who loves you so much. Trisha, would you consider speaking, even if it's by email, about the idea of God? I do not think your sending me the email was coincidence. I expect to hear back from you, young lady. Thanks again for your exhortation. Bless you." It's interesting that at the end he gets all-- right back to me young lady, like you're one of the kids in his program. Yeah, I know. Which I thought was kind of cute. She wasn't really sure, though, if she wanted to hear his pitch about Christianity. But she thought that at least she owed him the courtesy of a reply. So she wrote back. Mainly to clarify that she hadn't become agnostic because she'd met hypocritical Christians. She didn't think so badly of Christians. She told him that she'd been raised Catholic and she really did used to believe in God. But she started questioning her faith three years ago, when a close friend of hers named Kelly, who was just 32, was diagnosed and very quickly died of colon cancer. Tricia wrote this long heartfelt email explaining all this, in which she politely declined the coach's offer and closed with quote, "Thank you again for being such a good man and a good Christian." And that was that. Until three weeks later, Coach Hogan wrote to her again. "I know we had finished our conversation," he said. And he'd been fine with that. But there was a snag. God kept waking him up in the middle of the night, putting her very sincere emails into his head. "I have tried to ignore it for several weeks," he wrote. "But I need some sleep. In prayer this morning, I decided this isn't going away until I make contact with you. I know God has put something on my heart to tell you." Trisha did not know what to do. ever since her friend died, her religious beliefs were set. I'd pretty much thought like-- come to the conclusion that there's no God out there. Things happen. This thing happened, and is nothing special. And you didn't want to get into it. I didn't really-- didn't want to get into it. It's like part of what made life after Kelly's death a little more bearable was knowing that it just happened. That there was no reason why. And was part of it this guy saying to you, OK God has been talking to me about you and he's waking me up in the middle of the night, and was there part of you thinking like, oh no, like what if that's real? Like, what if this is actually the way that God is trying to get to me? Yeah, I mean like a lot of it's like, oh crap, what's he going to say? Here's this guy who is a stranger, who's telling me, "God has something to say to you." OK, you can sometimes ignore your friends, but like not this. This is kind of weird, you know? What was especially weird is that Coach Hogan was basically just this random guy from the news. Trisha said that it was like, as if Captain "Sully", who landed that US Air flight on the Hudson, suddenly called her up to say God told him to especially save her. And finally, Trisha decides that she's going to do it. And asked Coach Hogan if he would be willing to let her tape this conversation, and maybe play a little bit of it here on the radio. The coach feels that it's his mission to witness for God wherever he can. He sees his work in the high school as part of that. He teaches Sunday school. He talks about God with people all the time, he says. So he had no problem with that all. So, these two people with very different beliefs got on the phone together. This is Chris Hogan. Chris Hi! This is Trisha, how do you doing? Hey Trisha how are you? I'm OK. So, the reason why I really wanted to talk to you is because you had mentioned that God was speaking to you and telling you that you needed to talk to me. I'm just wondering what you think God's message to me right now is. OK. Well, it's interesting because your email, as soon as I read it, my gut just turned over and I could just feel pressed in my spirit. And later that night, in the middle of the night, I had this really strange dream. And I woke up and there was your email in my head, and I thought well, that's strange. So I go back to sleep and it happens about three hours later. He continued to wake me up and what's interesting? He kept waking me up at the exact same time. Wait, what time? He kept waking me up every single night at 1:30. Every single night. And the interesting thing is when I would ignore it, he'd wake me up again at 4:04 in the morning. OK that's kind of weird because for the last couple of weeks, I've been waking up at 3:00 in the morning for no reason at all. Yeah. It's interesting because the longer I prayed about it, I felt like that he was trying to get me to tell you that everybody has faith in something. And if you don't have faith in like the biblical idea of God, then you must have faith in something else that you think, well then this is true. And I think my spirit is just telling me to tell you, don't settle for that. For the next hour, Coach Hogan tried to convince Trisha that God exists using all kinds of arguments. The first and second laws of thermodynamics. And arguing against the Big Bang, and evolution. It was the kind of conversation that led, sort of inevitably, to questions like why does God give us free will to believe in him or not? Or this snippet will capture some of the tone of things for you. They're talking about whether the Bible is right when it says that some things are objectively good, and some things are objectively true, and other things are objectively evil. Some things are just wrong. If you say good is only people's opinion. It stems from our own-- you define true for you and I define true for me, then how do you reconcile that with Hitler saying it is true that if we can eliminate Jews and other people on the planet that it'll be a better planet because we're a superior race. And of course he gets his worldview from Charles Darwin. Right, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So if Mother Teresa gets to choose good and Hitler gets to choose good, who's right? I'm sitting here listening to you. Up until you brought out Hitler I was completely with you all the way, and all of a sudden you're throwing Hitler out, and I'm all-- and I'm thinking to myself, where is he going with this? How can I-- Well, and you know how I brought Hitler out? I'm just using your logic. Yeah, but did you have to go all the way out there? And I'm trying to demonstrate that what you're saying doesn't work. When you take it to its logical conclusion, what you're saying doesn't work. When Trisha tries to talk about her friend Kelly, and how her faith changed when Kelly got cancer, Coach Hogan tells her about his Aunt Gina, who had faith. And when she got cervical cancer, it miraculously went away. Somehow, a lady who was "over 90% dead", quote unquote, now has not one ounce of cancer. OK, so my question is why did your aunt survive and my friend die? OK. Now let me tell you this, Trisha. Do not, for an instance, believe anybody who can tell you why that is. Including me, any pastor, any priest, anybody, because that is an area designed for God. But there were a lot of things that, when we found out that Kelly had cancer, I prayed. I prayed so hard. I prayed for-- I prayed like I've never prayed before. Because I was taught growing up, that if you prayed to God, God would answer your prayers. Did you know that's false? Let me give you a for instance. Suppose I prayed today to win the lottery. He might not answer that prayer, and it might be for my own good. He is God. He knows everything, he's all powerful, he's all good, he's all knowing, he's omniscient. Obviously, he's superior to some Texas high school football coach, right? When they finally do get off the phone, they're both friendly. But they both also seem a little disappointed. Trisha and I sit down to talk about how she thinks it went. It was totally not what I expected. I was thinking, OK, here is my chance to speak to a man who really believes in God and find out the answers to these burning questions I have. You know, I've been struggling with this grief that I feel over my friend's death. And I thought that he would be able to counsel me and console me. And what happened instead was he basically brought out argument after argument, like he was saying that the theory of evolution is contradicted by a seventh grader's text book, and just-- Oh, I see. He was trying to argue with you about the existence of God instead of trying to comfort you. Yeah. I think that was it. There were times when I'd completely warmed up to him, and then he says stuff like what he said earlier about how Hitler and truth-- One of the jokes that a lot of my friends have is that the minute you pull Hitler out in any argument, you automatically lose. And that completely turned me off towards him. And now I'm still left with all these questions. Is there any small part of you that thought he might be able to put the religious message in some way that would finally make sense to you? Like he would say to you-- I was-- yeah. You did hope that? I really did hope that. Deep down, and I've said this to so many friends of mine, I really want to believe again. So you did want him to bring you back to God? Maybe. Possibly. Most likely. But just the way he was doing it wasn't a way that really talked to you? No. no. I wonder if the problem with that was just the way he was going about it and the arguments he was using. Or I wonder if really there's nothing anybody could actually say to make you believe this thing that now you find yourself not believing? I don't know. If someone were to just tell me, this is why Kelly died and they were able to relate it back to God, I would probably respond to that better. And then when you asked him this, what did he say? We never got to that point. We never got to that point. I couldn't get him there. I couldn't ask him the questions I really wanted to ask. But what if it's as simple as, for people who believe in God, God takes different people at different times. And that doesn't mean that God doesn't have some plan for you, you know? See that makes more sense to me than anything he ever said in our conversation. Well that's very sad, because I actually don't believe in God. Because her main question wasn't really discussed very much in that first conversation, she set up another call with Coach Hogan. And she asked him if this time I could get on the line with them, mainly just be sure that everything stayed focused and she got the actual answers that she wanted. Again, the coach was fine with that. So the reason why we're calling is because after you talked to Trisha last time, Trisha said to me that the main thing she felt like she wanted an answer to, somehow it didn't really come up. And really it comes down to her friend Kelly. Sure. It doesn't make any sense for someone like me to still be here when someone like Kelly, who was such a good person and who spread so much good throughout the world in her small, own little way. It just doesn't make sense. Sure. This is the most common question that folks who are anti-God ask. I don't know if you guys know that or not, but this is the most common objection to God. Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? You have to understand that sin entered the world through one person, Adam. Now, if you read what the Bible says happened as a result of sin, every single person who's ever been born is born into sin. Do you understand the Garden of Eden and the condition we have now are two different scenarios. One was pre-sin, one is because of sin. So I'm sorry to break this into a blunt way. So you're saying that cancer is caused by sin? I'm saying anything on this Earth-- all the diseases, all the bad things that are here-- are a result of sin. That's what the Bible teaches. Your friend Kelly, I'm not saying that she sinned to get cancer, I'm saying we're in a fallen world. All through Trisha's conversations with the coach, I felt like I was hearing over and over why it is so hard for religious and nonreligious people to communicate sometimes. The premises are just so far from each other. When the coach says we live in a fallen world, that explanation is a comfort to him. It's comforting to think that he doesn't have to make sense about every injustice and every terrible thing that happens on this Earth. It's messy on this Earth. Things will be better in heaven. But because God understands the details of why one person with cancer lives and another person with cancer dies, he doesn't have to. And the coach has a hard time, I think, seeing why this explanation isn't a comfort to Trisha. As soon as he understood that what Trisha wanted was an explanation for Kelly's death that would help her feel better about that death, this is what he said to her. Well I can tell you this. Your friend Kelly, Trisha, didn't do anything necessarily to deserve that. I'm not saying that in the least. But I am saying she lives in a fallen world. Well I think we all do. There's no question. There's a fallen world. And the world has fallen, because people have chosen evil. And so, as a result, sin entered the world, and with sin comes a lot of things. And they're going to affect people. But the great thing is, this is not where eternity rests. Trisha is that helpful to you? A little bit. I'm getting an answer. And it's the answer that he agrees and believes in. But it's-- I don't think I'm there yet. Coach Hogan told us that he was going to feel really sad when he got off this phone call. But in the weeks that have followed, he has accomplished this-- Trisha has been thinking about God a lot more, she says. She doesn't really believe just yet, but she says she's open to it. Coming up. What happens when you learn that the thing that you believe is the source of your personal power and magnetism is pretty much the opposite. 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 theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's Show-- This I Used I Believe. We have stories today about people doing that all too uncommon thing of reexamining their beliefs and coming to new conclusions. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. You know, parents have an advantage over their children when it comes to inculcating them with a set of beliefs. With their set of beliefs. Let's be honest. They're taller, first of all. And they're adults, capable of argument. Persuasive argument, hopefully. But if none of that works, they also control allowances, weekends, basically everything in the kid's life. Molly Antopol was 13 when she confronted the full strength of this power imbalance. When I was in seventh grade, my social studies teacher led our class in a rousing debate over Roe v. Wade. I had never heard of abortion. I barely knew what sex was. And my immediate emotional reaction, and the position I backed enthusiastically in the debate, was that it seemed to me like murder. That night over dinner, when my mother asked what I'd done in school I told her about the class discussion, and about my stirring defense of the pro-life position. My mother, a longtime liberal and women's rights advocate, had never looked so crushed. "Murder?", she said. And when I said yes, she repeated it again and again like a mantra. Then she set down her fork and stared at me, as if really noticing her daughter for the first time. "You're saying a woman shouldn't be allowed to decide what she does with her own body? With her own fetus?" "Exactly," I said. I had no clue what a fetus was. "And you're saying that if a woman's raped, or molested, or whatever she shouldn't have the right to terminate the pregnancy?" As my mother continued to lecture, she wouldn't even look at me. She seemed to be staring straight past me at some indeterminate blank spot on the wall. And I truly understood, for the first time, what it meant to disappoint her. I swallowed a pain in my throat, but it came back up again. And finally she stood up and dumped her dishes in the sink. Then she faced me and said, "Go to Siberia for half an hour and think about what you just said." "Siberia" was my bedroom closet. It was where I was sent for timeouts when my mother thought I needed to think things over. My mother was not the type to respectfully agree to disagree. She came from a long, steady line of organizers, who broke the law in an effort to change minds, starting with her great-grandparents, Trotskyites in Ukraine. That night in Siberia, squeezed between coats and old board games and camping gear, I did think about abortion. And it still seemed to me like murder. But I knew my mother would never let this go. And I knew it was up to to me to end it for both of us. If I let her win, I could crawl up on the sofa and watch Kristi Yamaguchi skate in the Olympics. That was all I wanted to do that winter. But when I returned to the kitchen, my mother was replacing the Indian takeout menu on the refrigerator with a bumper sticker that read, "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries." "What are rosaries?," I said. "Christian prayer beads," she said. "What are ovaries?" "The part of a woman's body that makes eggs." "Why would someone put rosaries on their ovaries?" "It's a metaphor," she said. "For Christian fundamentalists who try to force their views on other people." "Like you are?," I said. I spent the next half hour back in Siberia. And so the re-education began. Over the course of that winter my mother made me wear buttons to school-- "No Mandatory Motherhood. Pro-child. Pro-choice." which I removed and slipped into my backpack as I walked into class. She pulled feminist paperbacks off our cinder block and plywood shelves, and read from them aloud. My mother even took me across town one early February morning where we, along with other members of her women's group, helped escort pregnant women into an abortion clinic. Together, we marched toward pro-life protesters who sat outside the building in lawn chairs clutching their own signs, one depicting a baby that looked more alien than human. Tiny and shriveled and blue. "I hate that sign," my mother said quietly. I looked at my mother and she looked back. At that moment she seemed more tired than anything else and I wanted to cut her a break. "You were right," I blurted. She stopped walking. "Right about what?" "About abortion," I said. "About everything, OK?" "Say it then." "Abortion should be safe and legal," I said. I could tell she didn't believe me. "Say it again," she said. And I did. I had hoped that by giving in, things would return to normal. And they did for a few days. My mother went to work. I went to school. And in the evenings, we sat up late eating takeout and watching recaps of the Olympics. Then came my birthday. For months I'd been begging for a pair of Riedell figure skates. I pictured myself impressing the skinny, dark-haired guy behind the snack stand at the ice rink with my triple salchows. I'd pointed the skates out to my mother at the mall, and on every female Olympian we saw on TV. But when my mother strode into the living room with my present, I felt my heart cave. There was no way those skates could fit inside the thin manila envelope she handed me. I tore it open and found a letter from the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project thanking me for my generous donation. "What is this?," I said. "An abortion," she said. "For a 13-year-old girl who was gang-raped downtown, paid for in your name." She said it with a hint of pride in her voice. "Happy birthday." I stared at her. This was my present? She hadn't even bought me the abortion. "This girl doesn't have anything," my mother continued, "No home, no money, no supportive, wonderful mother who understands that the last thing she needs in her life is a baby. And this organization gives her the chance to change things for herself." "Terrific," I said. "I didn't know Hallmark made a Happy Abortion card." I stuffed an entire cup cake in my mouth, knowing this was just the beginning. I was right. Three days later a letter arrived from Amy, the girl whose abortion I had funded, thanking me for making her life a little easier. To this day I don't believe the organization would have allowed us to have contact, or encouraged her to give up her anonymity. And no matter how many times she denies it, I still think it was my mother who typed up that letter. But that evening, I was too stunned to argue. "Write her back and then show me the letter," my mother said. And when I told her, "I don't know what to say," she sent me to Siberia with a notepad until I came up with something. It was Friday night. And as I crawled into my closet, I envisioned my friends at the ice rink and resented that I had to write Amy. As if she were my pen pal, or a child in Africa whose meals I was funding for $0.10 a day. "I wish you all the best," I scribbled. But that felt as if I were signing some stranger's yearbook. What difference did it make what I thought? I hated that my mother was so bent on drafting me to her side when, at 13, I knew my views didn't matter. But the thing is, they did matter. To her. What I realized spending every weekend for an entire winter with my mother, was how upsetting it must be for her to be this single mother, living in a tiny one-bedroom stucco apartment. Working two jobs to support a daughter who didn't even get where she was coming from, who maybe didn't understand her at all. So I tore off a new page. "You should really be thanking my mother," I finally wrote. It still felt like the fakest thing on Earth to correspond with a girl I didn't know, and who probably didn't even exist. But even then I knew who this letter was really for. I continued, "She's the one who taught me that the denial of safe abortions can threaten your health. And that your reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right. " Fundamental felt too businesslike, so I crossed it out and tried again. And as I sat back and worked through the next line, I wondered if any of these thoughts would begin to feel like my own. They didn't yet, but I was just getting started. Molly Antopol. she teaches creative writing at Stanford University, and she's working on a book of short stories and a novel. Act Four. Pants Pants Revelation. Well, we end our program today with a love story about two people with very different, opposing beliefs. Beliefs, I believe, that could never be reconciled. One of them was for, one was against. One was pro. One was con. This story begins in 1990. Joel and Kate were both working in a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. From the moment they met, Joel liked Kate, Kate liked Joel, but it took them awhile to kind of figure that out. And while that was happening, Kate spent a lot of time thinking about how to get in good with Joel. I mean the embarrassing thing is that basically I would check the schedule at the hospital each week and look ahead to the seven days and find shifts when I was working with Joel. And then plan my outfits accordingly, because I really wanted to look cute. And one of the things that I always relied on was that I had this pair of jeans that I thought looked really good on me. And I would purposely save the jeans after laundry to the day when I knew I was going to be working with Joel so that I would look real fine in front of Joel. She did have this one pair of pants that I wasn't totally crazy about. The pants seemed not in fitting with the rest of her. And so it always sort of threw me for a moment. Describe the pants please. Well, they were acid-washed. They were awesome. I loved them. They were acid-washed denim. Sort of speckly white. Tapered at the bottom at the ankle. And a little bit, not balloonish, but a little puffy. And they ballooned out in the thighs in a sort of jodhpur-y kind of way. And the sort of really crazy part was what happened up near the top. They had this fold over front area? The feature of the pants that I thought made them really amazing is that they had at the top-- you have to try to picture this-- they kind of came up pretty high on your waist. Like a good, gosh, four inches above your belly button? But at the very top of them in the front, they rolled over into this flap. This big flap. And they were just, they were very cool. There was a lot going on in these jeans. You know, I don't want to pretend like I'm some incredible fashion maven. I'm not. But these were not a good-looking pair of pants. What was the original context of these pants? I'm picturing a Boy George concert. Maybe The Cure? Exactly. Yeah, you got the timing right. I think I bought them-- I remember now, I bought them at a store in Boston. Bought them probably late '80s or '87 something like that, in this store that was very kind of just '80s Boston clothes. It's just a certain look. I mean, it's definitely got a little of the Bananarama thing going on, a little bit of Boy George. Yeah? But I'm still dragging them out at this point, because I'm thinking they look so good on me and I like them so much. So, one of my strategies was I'd see if we were working an evening shift together, because an evening shift meant we were more likely as a group of people to go out for a beer after. And that was like, that would be a golden opportunity to wear the pants. Because you'd wear them and then you're going to be out afterwards, in a bar. Just like I've got a whole evening of these pants at that point, and I know I'm going to be just gold, you know? Do you remember any key dates where you wore the pants? A key date? The first night when it became apparent that Joel was interested me, was a night we had an evening shift and then a bunch of us went to this bar. And the group started dwindling and dwindling and dwindling, until it was left with just me and Joel. And I was wearing-- I was wearing the pants that night. And it was a very successful night because that was the night when he kind of, sort of was making eyes at me, and I could tell this is going to go somewhere. He's going to ask me out. Really? So the actual night that you turned the corner with your husband and the father of your child, you were wearing the pants? I-- Yes, I was. Yes, I was. That's right. That was the pivotal night in which your life turned from what it was to what it is? That's right. That's right. Well said. Joel and I began dating. And I'm just very, very happy at this point, because he's just a wonderful person, and I can't believe it's worked out, and we start dating. So, we're going along, and we're working together and dating. And it's reached, I'd say we're at about four months at this point. So we've been dating for about four months, but it's at that point where relationships get where I think it's kind of like, you know that-- I mean it's not super serious yet, but you know that this is going to keep going and this has a lot of potential. You're both clearly very into each other. So we're at that point, about four months, and Joel was actually over at my apartment. Kate's in her bedroom, at her apartment going through her clothes and figuring out which ones she should keep and which ones she should give to Salvation Army. And I opened up my drawer where I keep my pants and lifted the stone-washed pants out of the drawer, not at all because I was considering sending them to Salvation Army, but only because I had to move them to find the pants on the bottom of the drawer that of course I might send to Salvation Army. And as I pull the pants out of the drawer, Joel, sitting on the bed, kind of sat there a minute and cleared his throat and said-- Um, you sure you want to keep those pants? And she sort of stops and looks at me and says, "Well, you know. Yeah, I-- of course, I mean I, I think I do, why?" And so I say, "Well, you know those-- I just think those pants are maybe a little bit out of style now." He said, "Well, do you think maybe, do you think maybe they're just not in so much style anymore?" And as the words are coming out, I see Kate's face flushing. Becoming pinker, and then red. And I was like-- WHAT? She's sort of holding them in her hand and looking at them, and looking at me, and looking back down at them. And I realize these aren't just another pair of pants. These were the-- these were the special pants. And then I-- it's a very uncomfortable situation for me because, a, again, I'm not a particularly fashionable guy myself so I probably don't have any right saying this to anybody. But then, b, this is the woman who I've really fallen in love with and this is like one of the first moments when I've had to say to her, there's something about you or-- there's something connected to you that I don't like. I couldn't believe it. That these pants that had like, I've been purposely wearing in front of him for so many times, and I thought had done such a good job for me, and he was now saying I should put them in a bag and put them on the curb, basically. You thought that the pants had actually done a job on him? You thought the pants were part of your arsenal and part of your power over him? They were-- yeah, arsenal. Exactly. They gave me confidence, which gave me some, I think, some degree maybe of attractiveness to this person who ultimately I was trying to attract. Because clearly, when I was walking around in those pants, I was feeling pretty confident. I thought I looked great. Do you think you could have gotten Joel without the pants? Wow. Gosh. I hate to even have to think about it, Ira. I don't know. You think the pants were that big of a factor? I don't know! I don't know. I mean, it's been 11 years, but maybe those pants had something to do with it. You know, I'd have have to ask him. I'd have to ask him. I would have fallen for her if she were showing up in Garanimals every day, say, or leisure suits or something. I mean, as anybody knows who's ever fallen in love, you idolize the person you're falling in love with. And they can, in those early days particularly, they feel perfect to you. And then you start asking yourself all sorts of questions. All sorts of insecurities come up. Why would this perfect person necessarily fall for me, and accept me and want to be with me? But then when you discover a chink in that person's perfection, when you find a flaw-- in this case Kate had bad taste at least in this one pair of pants-- then it somehow makes you feel a little bit more comfortable. You feel like, well, maybe I do have a chance here because, God, I mean those pants had a chance with her. Joel Lovell and Kate Porterfield. Since that story originally broadcast on our program in 2001, their family has grown to three kids, two adults, no acid-washed jeans. Well, our program is produced today by Lisa Pollak and me, with Alex Bloomberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our Senior Producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Andy Dixon. Seth Lind is our Production Manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to Judy Hoffman, Andrew Solomon, and Simon Johnson. And thanks today to the staff at This I Believe, especially Viki Merrick John Gregory and Dan Gediman. The old 1950s-era This I Believes are going to be running now on Bob Edwards' weekend show. And there's a podcast and all 65,000 essays at this thisibelieve.org. Jay Allison, who I talked with the top of this show, is moving from This I Believe to producing a brand new show for Public Radio, The Moth Radio Hour, which is going to be like The Moth story-telling podcasts that we've excerpted a number of times here on our show, but a whole hour this fall. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. And we are just days away from our one-time only live cinema event, where we are doing our show onstage with Dan Savage, Mike Birbiglia, Joss Whedon, Starlee Kine and others and sending it out live to movie theaters all across the country, this Thursday, April 23. You don't have much time. Tickets at thisamericanlife.org. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who really does not care if public broadcasting collapses in the current economic environment. He's got bigger plans. I'm considering maybe guidance counseling. The other thing I'm considering would be flower arranging. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio-- Public-- Radio International. --Radio International. One more time. It's not enough, some guys say, to have the right boots and the right 19th century authenticated gun and the right uniform made from the right fabric with the right buttons and no zippers, of course, because they had no zippers back during the Civil War. No, it is not enough. But what is enough? Some guys come to Civil War reenactments and bring sodas and coolers and Band-Aids. There are guys who wear wristwatches and contact lenses. The thing about recreating the Civil War is that everyone draws the line somewhere else. It's better if I walk in than if I drive in. I don't wear no underwear. I don't carry pears or bananas or anything like that. Where are they going to get bananas during the Civil War? I eat raw meat. We have people here who believe that their impression's more authentic than somebody else's because they have fleas. A Chinese man came to me and wanted to join the unit. There were no Chinese in the 100th. My unit, I would prefer to have just plain old Caucasian males. This tape is from a documentary by Jessica Yu called Men of Reenaction. And she found out that when men stage Civil War reenactments, sure, there is some tension between the Union and the Confederate forces. But the real battle is the one within the ranks over who is properly authentic and who is not. And like any conflict that's big enough and important enough to people, this conflict has spawned its own vocabulary. The guys who do these reenactments call themselves either hard-cores or farbs. You can guess what the hard-cores are. Those are the guys who really want to be authentic. Farbs, well, farb is short for far be it from me, as in "far be it from me to judge what that person is doing right over there." A farb? A farb is someone who is not as authentic as you think of yourself. That's the easiest way I put it. A farb is anyone who would wear tennis shoes or would wear modern eye glasses or would wear cotton instead of wool. When I see someone in line and he's got modern glasses, that takes away from my event. It might not affect his event, but it takes away from mine. I'm in this for fun. I'm not really in the Army. And so if I want to have an ice chest hidden in a wooden box that only I know is there, then I will do that. I draw the line at what the public sees and perceives. You know, it is hard to imagine people in other countries-- English and French citizens reenacting the Norman conquest or North and South Vietnamese recreating their bloody civil war. The question here is why do Americans devote so much emotional energy to restaging the past? Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme, and invite various writers, performers, documentary producers to take a whack at that theme. Our program today, Simulated Worlds. We visit wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle, and other recreated worlds that thrive all across our great land. The Italian writer Umberto Eco wrote an essay a few years ago in which he argued that this urge to create miniature simulated worlds is a particularly American impulse, a significant American aesthetic and one that is not talked about very often. Eco traveled the United States from Disneyland to Las Vegas to re-creations of old New York in museums. After a visit to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, where he saw a full, life-size re-creation of the Oval Office using the same materials as the original, Eco wrote, "Is this the taste of America? Certainly it is not the taste of Frank Lloyd Wright, of the Seagram Building, of the skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe. But the American imagination demands the real thing, and to attain it must fabricate the absolute fake." On today's program, Act One, a quick national tour. Act Two, writer Jack Hitt on simulated dinosaur worlds. Act Three, we get Medieval on you. Well, we take a Medieval scholar from the University of Chicago-- a guy with an actual British accent, so you can tell he's for real-- with us to Medieval Times, a suburban castle cum restaurant cum jousting arena. Act Four, how Morning Edition fakes reality every day on the radio and why we fall for it. Stay with us. Act One, Travels in Hyperreality. Now, back to Jesus. The following description is alleged to be derived from an ancient manuscript sent by Publius Lentulus, president of Judea, to the Senate of Rome. It reads, "There lives at this time in Judea a man of singular virtue whose name is Jesus." Where are we? A wax museum in San Francisco in front of 13 life-size wax statues recreating Leonardo da Vinci's painting, The Last Supper. In this act of our program, rather than use the Michelin guide to tour America, we're using Umberto Eco's essay, "Travels in Hyperreality." And in researching that essay, Eco visited no fewer than seven-- that's right, seven-- wax versions of The Last Supper between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Eco was fascinated with American wax museums, partly because he said that unlike wax museum in other countries, he says, "American wax museums try to reconstruct entire worlds with a kind of maniacal, chilling attention to detail." This museum, for example, runs 85 different soundtracks in its different rooms. There are scenes of wax figures bathing waist deep in real pools of water. There's a full-scale reconstruction of King Tut's tomb. There are three-dimensional life-size wax versions of a dozen of the world's most famous paintings. A typical exhibit in the World Religion section of the museum, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on a rocky slope, eerie red light with flashes of white lightning. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other god before me." Eco had a name for these over-the-top production values. He called it "reconstructive neurosis." My name is Rodney Fong. I'm actually the grandson of the gentleman who opened this museum in 1963. That's my grandfather Thomas Fong. Rodney's family owns the largest wax museum in North America, which is in Los Angeles, and the second largest, which is this museum at Fisherman's Wharf. His family owned three wax museums visited by Umberto Eco when Umberto Eco wrote his essay. Rodney himself is an easygoing, friendly sort who grew up working in the museum's shop after school, now 30 years old and the general manager of the place. And you might think that growing up in a wax museum would be kind of a fun thing for a kid. But he said that was not his experience. Actually, I was terrified to go into the museum because my father always used the museum as a threat. If we were not good, we'd have to spend a night in the Chamber of Horrors. So actually to this day, I still get the heebie jeebies walking through by myself. Rodney tells me we have to rush through the museum because there is so much to see. Over 300 statues, historical figures like Neil Armstrong and Geronimo, right next to fictional characters like Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland. The juxtaposition is actually kind of dizzying. And Umberto Eco talks about this odd feeling you get in a place like this as "a spatial, temporal haze, where centuries get confused." One room, for example, depicts a dozen people at an outdoor cafe. Mark Twain-- Smoking a pipe, looking very stern. Rembrandt, Caruso, Andy Warhol-- In a leather jacket. Whistler, Beethoven, Toulouse-Lautrec. Who else is down here? Hemingway's off by himself. And Mozart, Beethoven, and Whistler are sitting at a table together. And there's a can of Campbell's tomato soup on there. And you get the feeling that Andy Warhol reached over-- Right. And put that on there. Umberto Eco writes, "When you see Tom Sawyer immediately after Mozart, or you enter the cave of the Planet of the Apes after having just witnessed the Sermon on the Mount with Jesus and the Apostles, the logical distinction between real world and possible worlds has been definitively undermined." There is something so strange about combining figures from different historical moments together. Really, part of that is because of space. I mean, we keep adding figures year after year. We have to start categorizing them and putting them together. Eco says that one reason Americans have an urge to build elaborate wax museums, to reenact the Civil War, to construct full-size, fake Colonial towns, is that we just don't have as strong a sense of history as Europeans have. And so it's like we're seeking to ground ourselves in some vivid sense of history. And these are the tools that we use. Rodney and I turn a corner, and we see this combination of historical figures. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Galileo, and Bill Gates, in a sweater, holding a copy of Windows 95. That's just down the hallway from a room called "Wickedest Ladies," where the plaques read, "Jezebel, biblical siren," "Salome, biblical siren," "Lucrezia Borgia, siren of the Renaissance," and then there's Mata Hari, who, for some reason, is a dead ringer-- I'm not kidding-- for Barbra Streisand. There's also a room with figures that are very mysteriously grouped. They are Boy George, Lawrence Welk, Danny Thomas, John Travolta. What is the theme of this room, OK? Performers you suspect are gay? Scientologists? Has-beens? Rodney has no answers. He takes me to stand in front of a room with just one lone figure, wielding a gun. Chuck Norris. Now, why is it that Chuck Norris gets his own room and Nelson Mandela has to share a room with four other people? If we had other action figures, they'd be in this room also. But for now, Chuck Norris not only gets his own room, he gets a full movie set. That's what it's like. There's a beach with a blown-up car and pieces all around him plus that semiautomatic weapon. The point of all this obsessively reconstructed detail, Umberto Eco says, is partly to reassure people that no expense has been spared. "This," he says, "is what Americans want. An insane abundance, like at those supposedly classy American restaurants, all darkness and wood paneling, dotted with soft red lights that offer the customer, as evidence of his own affluence, steaks four inches thick and lobster and baked potato and sour cream and melted butter and grilled tomato and horseradish sauce, so that the customer will have more and more and can wish nothing further." The logical outcome of this desire is places like the Madonna Inn, a hotel in California that Eco describes this way. "The poor words with which human natural speech is provided can not suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. Let us say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Goudy swallowed an over-generous dose of LSD, and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry. Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace accompanied by the Marine Band No, that still isn't right. "Let's try talking about the restrooms. They are an immense underground cavern, something like Altamira and Luray, with Byzantine columns supporting plaster baroque cherubs. The basins are big imitation mother-of-pearl shells. The urinal is a fireplace carved from the rock, but when the jet of urine-- sorry, but I do have to explain here-- touches the bottom, water comes down from the wall of the hood in a flushing cascade, something like the caves of the Planet Mongo. "Then there are the bedrooms, about 200 of them, each with a different theme. For a reasonable price-- which includes an enormous bed, king or queen size if you are on your honeymoon-- you can have the Prehistoric Room, all cavern and stalactites, the Safari Room, zebra walls and bed shaped like a Bantu idol, the Kona Rock Room, Hawaiian, the California Poppy, the Old-Fashioned Honeymoon, the Irish Hills, the William Tell, the Tall and Short, for mates of different lengths, with the bed in an irregular polygon form. There's the Imperial Family, there's the Old Mill. "The Madonna Inn is the poor man's Hearst castle. It has no artistic or philological pretensions. It appeals to the savage taste for the amazing, the overstuffed, and the absolute sumptuous. At a low price, it says to its visitors, 'You can have the incredible, just like a millionaire.'" OK, OK, OK. We've changed scene. Maybe you've figured that out. Now we're in a coal mine, a fake coal mine. In fact, we're faking being in a fake coal mine. That's just how fake this is. I'm just sitting in a radio studio playing you a tape. You know, simulated worlds actually are so abundant, within a half-hour drive of where I sit right now here in Chicago, where we broadcast our radio show from, right now, I can jump in the car and visit-- OK, I'm just going to list quickly-- a re-creation of an Al Capone speakeasy, a Medieval castle, a 3-D IMAX movie theater which attempts to recreate three-dimensionality, a store called Nike Town, which essentially puts you into the world of a Nike commercial. And at the Museum of Science and Industry, a fake human heart big enough to walk through, an actual 727 airplane, an entire airplane inside the museum, a real German U-boat captured during World War II, and, built directly into the museum, a fake coal mine. Now, the first bell will indicate that we are arriving, and the second bell will indicate that we have arrived. Please feel free to touch the coal. It has been laminated, therefore it isn't harmful to you or your clothing. A couple years ago, historian Frances FitzGerald wrote this book called Cities on a Hill, where she argued that one of the defining qualities of America is the number of people here who try to shed the past, completely shed it, start over tabula rasa, and create a new way of life for themselves, in new communities unlike communities that had existed before. From the survivalists in Montana to the gay community in San Francisco to the Mormons in Utah. Looked at in this way, creating new worlds is what this country is. It is what we do. And so when we create these little small, simulated worlds for recreation, wax museums and Medieval castles and technicolor movies, for that matter, we're just doing in miniature, for recreation, what we do for real, as a whole, in our culture. Act Two, Dinosaur Exhibit. Well, all this hour, we're talking about simulated realities, simulated worlds, wax museums, Civil War reenactments, fake coal mines. You know, one thing you can say about all those worlds is that anybody can tell that they're fake. When you go to a wax museum, when you go to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, this huge pyramid with a full-scale replica of the Sphinx out in front, you do not stand there and wonder, "Did I wake up this morning in Cairo?" You know where you are. The world of dinosaurs presents a different problem, and that's because of the veneer of science. When you go to a natural history museum and you see a dinosaur exhibit, the impression that you get is that what you're seeing is not conjecture, not theory, but settled, scientific fact. But as our contributing editor Jack Hitt recently discovered, the world of the dinosaurs turns out to be a man-made world made up of a pile of bones. And like most other things that are man-made, our picture of the dinosaurs has been flawed and imperfect. And it changes. Not long ago, I attended a lecture by dinosaur revisionist Jack Horner. He's a notorious troublemaker, a hippie without a formal degree who turns dinosaur thinking upside-down. He's a tall, skinny thing in jeans and boots, tangled gray hair and a generous beard. Horner's speech was entitled, "Would Tyrannosaurus Rex Eat a Lawyer?" The reference, of course, is that scene in Jurassic Park when the lawyer gets yanked right off the john by an enraged T. rex. Naturally, we all thought the answer to his semi-rhetorical question was, sure. Of course. T. rex could eat a lawyer anytime, anyplace. But Horner was there to prove that T. rex could only have eaten the lawyer if the lawyer were already dead. T. rex, he said, was not a mighty, roaring predator, not king of the dinosaurs, not Godzilla, but a slow, putzy scavenger who wandered from carcass to carcass half-blind, snacking on rotting scraps. No one in the room quite wanted to believe it. Little kids just sat silent in incredulous awe, as if he had said that sharks only ate plankton. But Horner piled on the logic. Typically, predators, he said, like lions and tigers, have powerful front arms to hold their catch while they rip out the jugular. T. rex has no arms, really. Just those dainty claw-ettes, comparable to having a few fingers growing out of your shoulders. Interesting, but not exactly threatening. T. rex also had big, muscular legs, usually interpreted to mean he could run fast. But Horner asked, how swift are weight lifters? In nature, sprinters tend to have long calves and short thighs for leverage, like ostriches. Animals with stout, muscular legs tend to be walkers, typically slow, usually not too coordinated. Horner was making sense. There were lots of shifting of chairs and coughing. And then there was more. CAT scans of T. rex skulls have revealed a sense of smell more elaborate than any other species except the turkey vulture, a handy adaptation if you're pursuing stinking corpses. Also, his eyesight was poor, not good for predators, who tend to hunt at twilight. At last, Horner said, T. rex didn't even walk the way every book and National Geographic magazine and Spielberg movie has shown us, standing up, constantly roaring, front claws poised to strike. No, instead, he walked about like a sandpiper, a bird, head down, tail straight out, body parallel to the ground, but with all the agility of a penguin. It was a strange feeling in that room, as we all experienced a kind of reverse epiphany, when something you are absolutely certain to be true turns out to be completely false. But you know, once you hear the evidence, it just seems obvious. I mean, those tiny claws. Come on. Weren't they always a tip off? But after a while, I no longer cared about the new T. rex as much as I wanted to know where that older figment, the marauding predator, had come from. We invented him, of course, constructed him from just a few bones. But why? From his office in Montana, Horner told me that the old T. rex was, in part, the creation of a kind of arms race. Cope and Marsh. It was a competition. Edward Cope and O. C. Marsh, the two Indiana Joneses of the turn of the century. Cope was associated with the University of Pennsylvania, Marsh with Yale. They were called the bone warriors. Two men who hated each other's guts, and every year pursued larger pots of money to fund more elaborate excursions, to find even bigger bones. It was during the time of P. T. Barnum. It was during the time when you put up your most fantastic stuff in your museum or your circus or whatever it is you happen to have. And you draw people in. And you're competing with everyone else. So a lot of T. rex's original persona came not from science but just good old American hucksterism. That's why they forced T. rex to stand unnaturally upright, on his hind legs. Although there was one other reason. It's because people made dinosaur halls with very high ceilings, and they had to fill up that extra space with something. But I mean it's hard to tell what it was. I mean, they wanted these animals to look ferocious, so they made them as tall as possible. And to make it as tall as possible, they had to bend the tale of T. rex, and worse. They broke skeletons. They removed parts. It's funny. I mean, early on, they actually found evidence that animals didn't drag their tails. But in some cases, they actually removed the evidence so they could get the tail on the floor. Does it get any more rigged than that? But it isn't just that most of what we thought we knew about dinosaurs was wrong. It turns out that in the century or so since dinosaurs entered human consciousness, they've passed through discernible fashions, changing, not as often as skirts or haircuts, but at a slower pace, like men's lapels, about every 10 to 15 years. They've served as a kind of national psychic Erector Set, which we've put together in different ways depending on our mood. To compile a comprehensive list of dinosaur fashions, I drove back to the first great hall of dinosaurs, New York's Museum of Natural History. Earlier this year, they assembled their dinosaur bones into a new, more so-called "accurate" display. Appropriately enough, before the visitor even gets to see the new exhibit, one has to walk through a tall chamber housing the old standards, the twin icons of dinosaur myth. It was good to see them again. Here was T. rex, head bowed in his new humble position. And across the aisle with his long, gracious neck and frisky, five-ton tail was the old friendly Brontosaurus. I know he has some new name, but I can never remember what it is. Anyway, Brontosaurus and T. rex stand in a room all by themselves these days, obsolete models parked next door to the hipper, newer displays. In other words, dinosaurs of dinosaurs. I was shown around by Philip Fraley, a mounting expert. He's the man who does the actual work of making these bones assume the positions they do. We sat beneath the rear end of the Brontosaurus. Philip tried to take me back to the first decade of the century, when even seeing a dinosaur meant getting on a train and coming to one of the few museums that Cope or Marsh had stocked. Given Fraley's occupation, he wanted me to appreciate something else. The beauty of the armature itself. By armature, Philip means the steel frame that holds the bones up. And I did come to appreciate its beauty. T-joints and unions, and they've been threaded. Our pelvis weighs 2,000 pounds. So to lift that up and to have 2,000 pounds supported on inch-and-a-half pieces of steel requires a lot of engineering. The tensile strength of the steel, the cantilever weight-- This was high tech for its time. These creatures had slept forever, and now they were upright for the first time in 100 million years. What had put them back on their feet, literally, was the wrought-iron strength of Pittsburgh steel, the American Industrial Revolution. But the exact dates are also timely. The Brontosaurus went up in 1906 and the T. rex in 1912, just before World War I, when the slumbering giant of America awoke. To the Europeans, we were still a friendly, dumb rube of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. But we were about to prove ourselves as international warriors. The crowds that flooded through New York's museum saw two images, the affable but dim Brontosaurus, and across the aisle, the berserker rage of T. rex, friendly until agitated, then fury, which is how the world came to see us, an amiable, joshing hick who, if provoked, will kick your ass. By World War II, T. rex had become important enough to our nation that, incredibly, there were contingency plans to protect the skeleton the same way we protect the president and the original copy of the Constitution. The country felt there was a likelihood that the museum could come under attack by the German Army or the German Navy. And in order to preserve the specimens, they contacted the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. So T. rex was shipped off to Pittsburgh, presumably where the Germans would never go. By the '50s and '60s, technology forever changed the dinosaur, and we came into post-war dinosaur fashion. Where the beast once was made from the T-joints of Bessemer steel, a new substance gave him an improved flexibility. Plastics. That's right, Benjamin. Plastics. Now any museum could have a perfect reproduction of New York's or Yale's bones. A plaster cast could be reproduced endlessly. But this took interpretation out of the hands of paleontologists and put it directly in the hands of museum curators. What they allowed people to do was to put them into some outrageous poses. So now dinosaurs could be jimmied into action poses, locked into face to face combat like two upright grizzly bears or reared back ready to assault. This was the '50s dinosaur, the dinosaur of kitsch. They were no longer held up by steel but animated by plastic, the essence of America at that time, a substance and a future entirely of our own making. These plasticized dinosaurs continued until the cutthroat '80s, the decade of Michael Milken. In this era, no longer was the dinosaur a big, dim monster. Now he was a sleek, swift, calculating hunter, the Velociraptor, a six-foot tall predatory entrepreneur who learned and adapted quickly. He was the perfect dinosaur for global capitalism, who'd eventually star in a bestselling book and movie, Jurassic Park. They're lethal at eight months. And I do mean lethal. Do they show intelligence? Even problem-solving intelligence. When she looks at you, you can see she's working things out. They remember. T. rex is so strange in that movie. He comes across like the elderly member of the family. His big scene is when he eats the lawyer. But T. rex is clearly second banana to our new star. His appearance is like Robert Mitchum's cameo in the updated Cape Fear, a wink at the audience from the grizzled original. Now, the '90s dinosaur. Philip and I walked into the new dino display, where T. rex and the Brontosaurus hardly seem relevant. We see dinosaur eggs and baby dinosaurs. The ambiance is largely about parenting. The scenes are more ecological and holistic. We are meant to see these animals as part of the natural ecosystem of their time, eggs, babies, parents, death, bones. This is a story about the cycles of life, a warmer tale, a greener tale. This is a story of dinosaurs not as George Patton would see them, but as Al Gore would, emblems of a proper view of the environment. The Eco-saur, who's seen the light of family values and the beauty of biodiversity. And in an era when America's role in the world is uncertain, when solutions to many of its problems are unclear, our nation's dinosaur exhibits speak directly to our time in bright yellow stickers attached directly to the display cases. That message, "We just don't know." Like, look at this one right here. Look at this sign. There's a big yellow sign. And it says, "These are all intriguing hypotheses, but the fossils do not give us enough evidence to test whether any of them are correct. The mystery remains unresolved." Well, right. I mean, I think that what we're saying is believe what you want to believe. Still, after you've passed by every display, it's possible to sense a coherent thesis among the hedging plaques and timid explanations. I honestly couldn't put my finger on it at first, but Philip did. Dinosaurs were the most successful life form that ever lived on this planet, and they became extinct. And extinction is a real part of life. And it's not so bad. Well, sure, if you're a fungus or a bug. You know, it was only 100 years ago that dinosaurs signaled the beginning of American greatness. What progress we've made. When the dinosaurs died out, the world went on and other species were created. One of those species happened to be the human form. I think that in all likelihood, our species one day will become extinct. And when that happens, that's probably not a bad thing. I'm reminded of a Gary Larson cartoon. An auditorium of dinosaurs are assembled. They're seated in their chairs, their long necks and little pin heads looking quizzically at the dinosaur speaking on the stage. He's showing a big map of the world, poking at it with a pointer. And he's saying, "Folks, the news is bad. Another ice age is coming, food is growing scarce, and we've got brains the size of walnuts." Jonathan Richman. And before that, Jack Hitt, a This American Life contributing editor and a writer who lives in New Haven. Well, coming up, we go back in time only 900 years with another simulated world. That's in a minute, from Public Radio International, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's show, Simulated Worlds. And we have arrived at Act Three of our program. I'm just going to describe where we are. We're heading out on Interstate 90 here, just north of Chicago, towards the northwest suburbs. And it's just basically your basic industrial parks. There's a building called Intergraph. But we're looking for the Middle Ages. We're on a quest for Medieval authenticity, because we're going to Medieval Times. Medieval Times is a chain of seven fake castles across the United States. For about $35 per person, you get a jousting tournament and Medieval dinner. Drinks, commemorative photos, and a trip to the dungeon cost extra. To judge the authenticity and meaning of the experience, I asked Michael Camille to come with me. He's a Medieval scholar at the University of Chicago. And he's actually made it his hobby to visit Medieval re-creations and tourist sites wherever he can find them. He had never been to Medieval Times before, but he had been to several re-creations of the Middle Ages in Europe, where they do them in real castles. There's one called the Canterbury Pilgrims' Way in Canterbury in England, where you literally go into a space where everything, the sound and even the smell of the Middle Ages, is supposedly re-created. They say, see the sights, smell the smells. So you smell the farmyard where the peasants are milking the cows. And they had wax figures? And they had waxwork figures for the individual. And did they smell? They smelled. They smelled. The wax figures smelled. Michael says he notices an upsurge in interest in the Middle Ages, in Medieval fairs, in Medieval re-creations. He thinks it's because most people see the Middle Ages as a time when life was orderly and simple, when knights were knights and peasants were peasants and people knew where they stood. Or that's what people think anyway. Then there are the people who are attracted to the Gothic horror of the period, gargoyles, dungeons. It's the same thing. It's finding an ideal. Except the ideal's exactly the opposite. It's disorder, not order. It's monstrosity, not pageantry. Do you think that the impulse that draws people to a place like Medieval Times and to places like Medieval fairs, do you believe that that impulse that pulls people towards those things is similar to the impulse that makes you a historian of this period? People have different reasons for the time traveling-- is what we're doing now. Some people time travel now to really enter another world and to escape, ultimately. For our great-grandparents who liked Medieval things, I think it seemed very safe, the Middle Ages. If you were religious, it was a nice, sacred time. If you were interested in chivalry, it was a chivalric time and concepts of honor were crucial. My interest, I suppose, is more-- I see it as a time of enormous other-ness to us today. I think of it as incredibly different from today. And it's that difference that excites me. It was a world in which you could get married when you were 12 years old, and when you could be burned at the stake for thinking certain things. I mean, it's a world of such difference. That's what fascinates me. See, I wonder, in fact, if they're going to emphasize an other-ness, or if we'll feel any other-ness, or if everything will be-- Well, that's the interesting-- let's see. That will be interesting. We continue driving past industrial parks and suburban sprawl until finally, just past the corporate campus of one of the most high-tech companies in America, Motorola, Michael and This American Life producer, Nancy Updike, and I see the sign. Medieval Times, next right. OK, now keep your eyes peeled. See the flags over there? I bet they're underneath-- do you see it? Oh, my goodness. There it is. It's a wonderful-- look at the marvelous crenulation, with three flags, the American flag-- I can't see, it's too far away to see what other flag. And of course, that, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] have a problem. The American flag flying over a Medieval castle. A 14th-century castle, Michael says. A late 14th-century castle combined with a McDonald's. Picture, if you will, a low, square, industrial warehouse with turrets and castle towers stuck on here and there. As we pull up closer, we see that the whole building is made of this kind of plastic-y cement with lines carved on it to imitate stones. Michael marvels at what he keeps calling the heraldry, the huge, multi-colored shields hanging high on the wall facing the parking lot. They are authentic, he says. In the parking lot, we encounter an unpleasant smell, but we are unable to determine if it is authentic Middle Ages or not. And then-- If you would, proceed through the doorway. You should be meeting with the royal couple, His Grace the Count and the Lady Contessa. We're barely in the door and people in bright, velvety costumes are count and contessa-ing us. And we're quickly ushered before a man in a crown and a cape who looks a lot like the post-James Bond pre-Rising Sun Sean Connery and a woman in a glittery princess dress. It's not really the costumes that get to you in Medieval Times. Walking around, you realize the sheer power of language. Everyone is calling you m'lord and m'lady and it is hard to know how to respond. Everyone in our little group gets very awkward. For some reason, I find that I stop using contractions, as if no one around me speaks English as a first language. We do not understand that. We can not all go together. Nancy, meanwhile, completely freaks out. I'm going to play you this piece of tape. And what you need to know is that when it starts, she's sticking a big boom microphone in the count's face. I'm not familiar with that term, "radio." What is that? She's pointing a strange weapon at us, m'lady. I know not what that is. It's some kind of a mace, I believe. All of a sudden, without warning, she bows. We mean you no harm. Oh, is that right? Thank you. I am glad to hear that. Our photo is taken with the royals. Those photos are for sale later in the evening. And we are each handed a black-and-white paper crown. Everyone acts like there is no question whether or not we will, in fact, where these crowns. Tonight you shall be cheering for the holy and pious warrior priest, the black and white knight. Your mortal enemy for this evening's tournament is the red and yellow knight. Michael, our Medieval scholar, is loving this. And I mean, loving it. He loves how they try to get the audience involved in the experience. He loves the fact that everyone is divided into six different teams, each rooting for a different region of Spain, each rooting for a different knight. He loves the fact that we were introduced to the lords of this castle. This is just wonderful. This is so much more exciting than I imagined. This is a really wonderful experience. Well, what are you seeing that you're liking so far? Well, I think that's very nice to be welcomed by the lord and lady of the castle. Hospitality was a crucial aspect of the Medieval tournament. Really? Its whole point was you were being hospitable. You were bringing people into your-- and giving them a little largesse. Because we're here as members of the media, we're soon taken aside to be greeted by the real lord of this particular castle. His name is Leslie Davies and he is not wearing a velvet cape, but rather a well-cut, expensive looking, dark blue suit. I'm the man that cuts that fish. In other words, I sign the paychecks. So yes, I am the lord. Mr. Davies is the general manager here. He says that Medieval Times started in Spain. Its owners are Spanish. And so the tournament we're about to see is a re-creation of a Spanish-style tournament in the year 1093. He says the main difference between the two European castles owned by the firm and the seven in the States is that the crowds in the United States are less inhibited when they root for their knights. It is, by his account, a very profitable little kingdom they run. How much does one of these buildings cost you to put up? Between $15 and $20 million. How many people do you serve here a year? About 300,000. Marketing manager Steve Davidson pipes in. That's 300,000 appetizers, 300,000 bowls of soup, 300,000 chickens, 600,000 glasses of Pepsi. It's rather involved. Now, to get a perspective on exactly what these numbers mean, I think we actually have to leave the scene in the castle for a moment. Let me get this sound out of here. OK, there. And now, well, let's do the numbers. Medieval Times in Chicago serves 300,000 people a year. 300,000 is also the size of the audience of Chicago's public radio station, where I work. Now let us consider staff size. Size of National Public Radio's entire network news division, that's all of Morning Edition all of All Things Considered all of National Public Radio's reporters all over the globe is 195 people. Medieval Times has 250 full-time employees at this one castle. Remember there are six others in addition. Medieval Times has an annual budget that is millions of dollars larger than National Public Radio. And all of this data may not mean all that much to you. But from where I sit, I feel that it forces me to this disturbing conclusion. And that is that I work for a radio network that is less popular than jousting, a sport that has been dead for 400 years. All the way around, please, to the very last green section. The audience now files into an arena that seats around 1,400. It looks like a medium-sized professional hockey rink, partly because they have those Plexiglas screens around the edges of the oval to protect you, to divide you from the performers who are down there in the center. Instead of ice, of course, in the center there's sand. And the tiered seats that rise up steeply on all sides of this oval have tables in front of them for dinner. And the seats are color-coded. Everyone rooting for our knight, the black and white knight, sits together in a group. Michael notices the music. As these people are processing in, we have Gregorian chant religious music, beautiful, piped, liturgical music going on in the background. Which is very strange at a tournament. Strange and inaccurate? But again, I don't like using that word, "inaccurate." You can't measure an experience like this through accuracy, because I just don't think that's the right criteria to say this isn't right, because I think it's how it feels. But that doesn't feel quite right to you? The priest might do a blessing, or something. But you're not going to have monks singing part of the holy liturgy before a tournament. It turns out the entire evening is scored with music. It's like a movie. During the horse exhibition section of the evening, there's a kind of disco, horsey music. Nancy swears she heard Carmen at one point during the evening. But most of the music sounds like the soundtrack of a movie whose images and values, when you get right down to it, come straight from the Middle Ages. Doesn't this sound like the theme to Star Wars? Good evening, my lords and lady, and welcome to Medieval Times. My name is Jim and I'll be your serf tonight. Jim brings us each a Medieval appetizer, a kind of faux pizza, a Medieval roasted chicken, which is conveniently pre-sliced-- which is important because we're given no silverware and have to tear it apart with our hands-- and our Medieval Pepsis. Nancy and Michael find the food hateful, but I kind of like it. Are you a wench. Yes, I am a wench. Are you a drinks wench, or a-- I am a photo wench. We're informed that "wench" is an actual job title here, that it's on the application. We wonder if people put it on their resumes once they've worked here. Cocktail wenches, server wenches. Michael says the whole wench thing, the whole idea of it, is just complete bunk. In the real Middle Ages, women actually never served food to nobles, who were the only people who attended tournaments like this. And in fact, even the word "wench" did not exist until much, much later. So "wench" is-- you know, "ye olde wench," is a modern construction. That's a construction that's something to do with London pubs of the 18th century. It's not to do with the Middle Ages. Soon, another anachronism. All the serfs and wenches traipse out into the central arena. My lords and ladies, show your appreciation for your hard-working serfs and wenches. Oh. The serfs and wenches are out now. But you see, you'd never have serfs and wenches out on the tournament field. Because they're too lowly? They're too lowly. They're absolutely lowly. But this is America after all, where any serf or wench can grow up to be president. And so it is no surprise that commoners end up on the playing field with the nobles. And it is the nobles who star in the show. Six knights and six squires, all of them with long hair and fake chain-mail that gives them a look that's part Middle Ages and part Jon Bon Jovi. They start by doing these complicated dressage demonstrations with their horses. They have these beautiful Andalusian stallions. And the horses have been trained to side step and bow and weave in and out in complicated patterns. The knights then do these various kinds of target practice on horseback. The capture flags, they hit bullseyes, they spear tiny brass rings with their lances. None of this, Michael says, would have been part of a real Medieval tournament. This would be practice, practice stuff you do beforehand. Then the arena begins to fill with smoke. Fog machines pump out so much mist you cannot see the floor. There's eerie purple light and a hooded figure with a lantern. Oh, no. No, in the arena. This does not bode well, Your Grace. I shall summon forth your court sorcerer at once. Through this mist walks Lord [? Gallenon ?], high priest of the Druids. High priest of the Jews? Did he say high priest of the Jews? The Druid. The Druid. Druid. Now, this is a funny mixture. There were no Druids in 1119, Spain. The Druids were in England. And they vanished 600 years before tournaments like this. They built Stonehenge. This was the one moment at Medieval Times when Michael seemed truly disappointed. I think they're trying to evoke Mer-- why didn't they use Merlin, or something. Like, Merlin the magician, that would be more apt. So it's to bring in a feeling of magic. I suppose this is a New Age-y bit of it. After this, there are more impressive horse maneuvers. We're told that we're supposed to boo every time the green knight appears. The green knight is set up as the evil knight in this pageant. Michael says that particular color choice is not the best. He says that in the Middle Ages, green was the color of goodness, it was the color of godliness. Think Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Black, he says, would have been a more accurate color to represent an evil knight in the Middle Ages, but black representing evil probably would not fly in multicultural, modern America. Finally, target practice is finished, and the main event's about to begin. Jousting. You're holding a couch lance. That's the lance that you're holding under your right shoulder. And the whole point in the joust itself is to unhorse your opponent. So wait a second. These guys are going to charge against each other? I mean, it's just occurred to me, the reality of what's going to happen here. They're going to charge at each other and try to hit each other off of a horse with a big stick? That's what a joust is. How can you survive that? Women and girls in the audience give handkerchiefs to the various knights to carry into battle, a historically correct moment that Michael likes a lot. And then the jousting begins. Over the course of the evening, we've learned next to no facts or history about the Middle Ages. But Medieval Times does stage a great fight. It's complicated. It's cinematic. As I said earlier, there's music through everything that happens on this arena. It's totally choreographed. It lasts a long time. And it involves no fewer than 14 people and six horses. Green knocked yellow off the horse. Now the green guy is coming at him with a-- ooh! What is that? That's a mace. It's a ball on a chain on a stick. Ooh, that's-- And now the yellow guy is staggering around, holding a knife. Green knight. Hold. Stand fast. You have lost your weapon and therefore lost the honor of horseback. I say dismount and continue the fight on foot. So the green-- the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] knight is getting down now. Now, wait. Now, would that happen in a real tournament? They'd tell the guy to get off the horse? Yes. Because often tournaments would-- in fact, this is a misconception about knights. Even when knights went into battle in the battlefield, they got off their horses to fight. The English became the great warriors of the late Middle Ages by getting off their horses just like this and fighting on the ground. Because you couldn't do much on a horse. You could do the lance thing, but you couldn't kill someone up close. By the end of the evening, everybody's been killed except for the evil green knight, who gets sent to the dungeon and one other knight, our knight, the black and white knight. Later, we were told the whole thing's fixed. And they put us on the black and white team, because they knew he was going to win. Michael points out that the whole idea that these knights would try to kill each other is not historically accurate. Most tournaments were not intended as a fight to the finish. But despite this, he liked Medieval Times. In the car on the way home, he said that it was Medieval in spirit, anyway. It was spectacle, it was circus, it was populace, it was lowbrow in the best possible sense. There were hundreds of things in there I could have said were inaccurate, inauthentic, in terms of costume, design, action. But I think that's the wrong way to think about it. If that was an accurate representation of a Medieval tournament, people would be bored stiff. They wouldn't go to it. They wouldn't get anybody to it, because they lasted for six days. And they were like conventions of aristocrats. It wasn't the kind of experience that is going to be entertaining to people. So if they were being truly authentic, it would be very boring for us. When we driving out to Medieval Times earlier, Michael had said that the thing that appealed to him most about the Middle Ages was this other-ness, the fact that it did not seem like our world at all. And in the car home, I suggested to him that Medieval Times did not create that feeling at all. It was mostly familiar images from movies and storybooks. But he disagreed. It was weird enough in all the mixtures of strange things in it. I mean, the odd mixture of the modern building and the castle's structure and the long-haired hunky knights that looked like centerfolds from Playgirl with the ways that the things were mixed together. To me, in a strange way, it was Medieval. Because obviously, the Middle Ages is incredibly hybrid and confused. And again, that's what attracts me about it. It's certainly not the age of order and systematic piety that everyone thinks. But the strangeness that you're describing is not the strangeness of the Middle Ages. It's the strangeness of America. Exactly. Exactly, Michael said. In fact, as far as he's concerned, America is a very Medieval country, far more Medieval than Western Europe. In the Middle Ages, it was a pioneer culture. They were just beginning to create things. There was a sense of newness moving forward, evangelical, full of weird and wonderful mixtures, ultra-religious, and yet at the same time, ultra-decadent. I think that's one of the reasons why we're so fascinated in America with the Middle Ages. Because we're living it. In the commemorative photo they took of us at Medieval Times, the distinguished scholar from the University of Chicago is grinning happily, a paper crown on his head. The little mock frame they put the photo inside says in typeface at the bottom, "Your Knight to Remember." That's knight, K-N-I-G-H-T. Act Four, simulated worlds on the radio. I worked for National Public Radio's network headquarters in Washington starting when I was 19 years old, a long time ago. And I would like to talk for a minute about how reality is simulated, is constructed on programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, programs I love, programs I worked on. Consider Morning Edition. Bob Edwards, the host of the show, says hello and he mentions a few stories coming up today. And then he says, "First, this news from Carl Kasell." Why does he do that? Well, presumably, Carl is closer to reality. He's closer to the truth, he's closer to the thing being simulated in this simulated world on the radio. And then Carl starts in with the first story. Carl says, today in Russia, somebody did whatever. And then he hands off to a reporter. And again, why does he hand off to the reporter? Well, presumably, the reporter is closer to reality, to the truth, to the thing being simulated in this simulated world. And then the reporter comes on. And the reporter says, OK, today the Russian president said whatever. And then the reporter goes on, at some point during their story, to some piece of tape that they're going to play us. And that piece of tape is maybe 12 seconds, maybe 14 seconds, 17 seconds long. And it's like one long sentence, or maybe two sentences of somebody, some Russian, saying something about something, right? And at that point, we're there. We've gone as far as we can go. We are actually at the real. We're hearing a tape recording made out in the world. This is the real. We have arrived. And it's interesting that the word for that piece of tape in radio journalism is the "actuality." Like, it's this precious piece of the actual world on the radio. Like you have this whole apparatus, and then finally you get to what's real. And what's funny about it is how puny it usually is. Like a sentence or two, you know? That's how much reality you get. That's how much actuality you get. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Peter Clowney. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Music help today from Stuart Rosenberg. In the years since we first broadcast today's program, Michael Camille, who was that wonderful Medieval scholar from the University of Chicago, who you heard in that last story, a guy, I have to say, who shocked us all by loving Medieval Times instead of looking down on it, Michael passed away at the age of 44, very, very young. You can read more about him if you want, at our website. The web address is www.thisamericanlife.org. At the website, you can also listen to our programs for free, 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 for our show by Torey Malatia, who reminds you-- Our species one day will become extinct. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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A couple years ago I interviewed this cop about something that happened to him when he was still a rookie on the force. He and his partner had gotten called out to this suburban house to do something about this squirrel that was running around the attic of the house. And by the time they were done an hour after that, they had accidentally injured the owner of the house. The squirrel had not only evaded capture, he had run through a fireplace, setting himself on fire and then setting a couch on fire. The house was full of smoke. It was a fiasco. And just recently, it occurred to me, why have we never had that guy back on the show? Something else interesting must have happened to him in his years on the force. It is August. I remember it being really hot and thunderstorming. And the sun had just gone down. And the call came over for auto accident, van overturned, possible injuries at scene. So I arrive, there's a lot of people in the street, there are some fire trucks there already, and there's a van on its side. And standing next to the van is a man, late 50s, kind of disheveled. I guess he just rolled around in a van. And then standing next to the man at his hip and holding his hand was a chimpanzee. Three feet, four feet tall, dressed in a red sweatshirt and jeans and shoes like a person. And they're standing there and being yelled at by the homeowner whose lawn the van came to rest on. They had knocked over fire hydrants. They had damaged his lawn and some trees. So it was a little bit chaotic scene-- lots of lights, lots of people. And I thought this was going to be pretty good show. After ascertaining that nobody was injured at the scene, the cop, whose name is [? Sean, ?] goes over to the officer who's taken charge of this situation and listens to him interviewing the driver of the van. It seems that the driver of the van has this business where he dress the chimp up and goes out to birthday parties and Bar Mitzvahs and the chimp performs. And they had been coming home from a gig just like that. The man's driving, the chimp's in the passenger seat, wearing a seat belt, just like a passenger. And there's lightning and thunder from these storms and the chimpanzee gets a little rattled. And then they have a close lightning strike. Crack. Big, loud boom. And the chimpanzee gets very frightened and comes out of the seat, grabs the driver and yanks him out of the driver's seat and just throws him to the back of the van. Yeah. So then he took the wheel. The chimpanzee was standing between the two seats and is taking the wheel. The man said he was doing really well and then he lost control of the van. And I'm like, the chimpanzee lost control of the van? At what point was the chimpanzee really in charge of this thing? But though he described was, "listen, it's not my fault. The chimpanzee had the accident." So the officer in charge explains to this guy that from the point of view of the law, he was the driver, not the chimp. And he's the one who is going to get charged and the guy's not too happy about that. He leaves the chimp with [? Sean, ?] holding [? Sean's ?] hand, and he walks over to the squad car to sit for a minute inside, just to rest. And the officer in charge notices the guy seems sort of unsteady on his feet. And he tells the guy he wants to bring him into the station for a breathalyzer test. This all happened 20 years ago. They couldn't do those kinds of things right there on the side of the road. And the guy starts to raise his voice a little. And the officer in charge just a little testy. It starts to get a little personal between them. The officer informs him that no, he is under arrest until they do this alcohol test. And the guy gets even hotter. Then he raises his voice and he gets upset and he starts to yell. "This is [BLEEP]. I'm not going to do this. My chimpanzee could be hurt." Blah blah blah. So everybody turns and faces him and the chimpanzee, now his master, is upset. And he's being threatened. And from the back of the crowd, somebody goes, "A chimpanzee can tear a man apart with his bare hands," just from out of the crowd. What? Yeah. "A chimpanzee. Look out for the chimpanzee. It could tear a man apart with its bare hands." Very quickly, the chimpanzee pulls his hand out from my hand and walks pretty forcefully through some people to the back of the car and stands-- squats, rather-- right in front of his owner in the back of the police car with the door open. And we ask the guy, what's the best way to secure him and what can you tell him to make sure that he's OK with this? And the guy's like, "look, nothing. I have never been away from this animal. We've never really been separated. He's not going to react well to this. He could get very excited." And now everybody but myself and the other cop are walking backwards with an eye on the chimp. When they put the handcuffs on, he was saying, "She is not going to like that. She is not going to like that." And I think the tone of his voice, the chimpanzee started to really not like that. And he turned to display to the chimpanzee that he was in handcuffs. So at this point, the officer in charge asks [? Sean ?] to get emergency services on the radio. They are the ones who have been trained to get an animal under control. And if all else fails, they have a tranquilizer gun. So I changed radio frequencies, get them on the air. "Yeah, can you respond up here?" And they're like, "Well, what kind of job is it?" They have all sorts of different tools in the truck and they need to know what to be prepared for too. And I said, "Well, we have a possible DWI, auto accident, and we need you to secure a chimpanzee." And there's just dead silence. And then they just go, no. Because they know me and I think I'm goofing around with them. He tries again on a land line-- this is before the age of cell phones-- and they hang up again. He has his dispatcher try from the police station's phone. Still no. So now Sean and the other officers on the scene are in this situation where they really have no map at all for what they're supposed to do. It's like a lot of police work, Sean says. You just make it up you go along. You have to. And now the guy's in handcuffs in the back of the squad car. And the chimpanzee is angry now and kind of bouncing around and shrieking, like chimpanzees-- like Daktari, if you remember the Daktari-- shrieking and running back and forth. And people are running away from the chimpanzee. And I go to the cop, "Look, they're not coming. And you what are you going to do, set this chimp loose on this village?" It could happen. Something could happen. We could end up having to shoot a chimpanzee dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans with shoes on-- a pet-- in a village in front of a hundred people because we think that this guy may have had something to drink. It's a lose-lose, no matter what happens. So he was reluctant because I think he had gotten into a little bit personally with the driver. You know, "You're under arrest and I say you're under arrest." So in the interest of justice and maintaining order, we both kind of decided we're going to un-arrest the guy. Poof, you're un-arrested. So they uncuffred the guy and he calms the chimpanzee down. And they're putting him into a car that's going to take him home. At which point the chimpanzee goes back to the other officer's car, who he didn't like. Opens the door, climbs inside. Underneath his jeans, he has a diaper on. So he takes his diaper off inside the back of the police car where his owner had been. And he smears the diaper all over the inside of the car in full view of the crowd. And it's like purposeful salute from this chimpanzee to the cop. The cop is furious but can do nothing. He's un-arrested somebody that he's arrested. That never happens. A chimpanzee got the last word on a cop. That never happens. The world is upside down. But [? Sean ?] says, what are you going to do? Police work is improvisation. You're put in situations. You have to do something. You're the police. You can't just go home. The people, it's what they're paying you for. So you make it up as you're going along, mostly. Well, today on our show, situations where capable people find themselves with no map, no precedents they can rely on, no idea how to handle what it is that they're supposed to handle. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. Our show today in two acts-- one in the work world, one at home. Stay with us. Act One, The Mod Squad. We're in the middle of a historic moment where millions of people are losing their homes and the numbers continue to rise. Last month, there were 342,038 foreclosure filings, which is the highest that it's been so far in this recession. And this has left bankers in this situation that they never imagined was going to happen, where they are not entirely clear what to do, and struggling along without any kind of map to handle this situation. They are apparently foreclosing on a lot more people than they need to. This next number I'm going to tell you is kind of astounding. Some economists, including mainstream academics and Wall Street guys like a chief economist at Moody's, the Wall Street ratings agency, estimate that half-- yes, half-- of all the six million possible foreclosures that we're facing over the next three years don't need to happen. That even the banks would be better off, they would make more money, they would come out richer if they didn't foreclose. Reporter Chris Arnold explains how this could possibly be. To illustrate the paradox of this crisis, here's this couple. I met them at a foreclosure prevention event. The foreclosure mess is now so huge that these events are happening all over the country. My name is Alex [? Alicea. ?] I am a truck driver for [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Slab and Marble Company in Bridgeport. And I don't know what to do. This is my last alternative, coming here. Every eight seconds, another house gets foreclosed in the US. So banks and nonprofits hold big events like this. This one was at a hotel in Connecticut. Thousands of people showed up. There's about a hundred housing counselors with laptop computers spread out across this big convention hall at little tables. All right, what I'm going to do right now, Alex, is that I'm going to pull your credit report. Alex isn't one of these people who bought a house that he couldn't afford. He says he's had steady work as a truck driver for 15 years, but he refinanced a couple of times, pulled out some money to fix up the house and pay some bills. Then his wife lost her job and now they can't afford their monthly payments. On top of that, their house has lost value. They owe $230,000 on their home loan and their house is only worth 180,000. It's not worth staying in the house. If the house is only going to be worth 180 and I'm going to be paying a mortgage of $230,000? Alex is underwater. Sometimes it's called upside down. You hear those terms a lot nowadays and, in fact, you'll hear them again before this story's over. Somewhere between 15-20% of all homeowners are in the situation. They owe more than their house is worth. Alex is so stressed out that he's taking medication and having trouble sleeping. He's the first person in his family to own a home and now he's about to lose it. And here's what's so strange. Alex shouldn't be losing his house. Not out of some doe-eyed feeling of charity, not because hard-working people deserve homes, but for a simple economic reason. The bank doesn't want his house-- or whoever owns his mortgage. If they take his house back, they'd have to sell it for a big loss. It makes much more financial sense to cut him a deal. And this is the thing-- this is the crazy thing about this whole foreclosure mess. In a lot of cases, it would be a win-win to cut people deals, that is, to lower their payments and keep them in their homes. Then the lender would keep getting payments and it would have the added benefit of helping the housing market and possibly saving the economy. But it's not happening. The system isn't working right. In some ways, the system was designed to work on autopilot. That's Mark Pearce. He's North Carolina's deputy banking commissioner. And he says it's a huge problem. Mark Pearce has been meeting with executives at all the major banks and mortgage companies. And he's been getting the industry's own data on foreclosures. And what he's seeing is huge numbers of people in roughly the situation that Alex [? Alicea ?] is in. They're facing foreclosure even though they have jobs and could make some kind of reasonable payments. And it would be in everyone's interest just to rewrite their terms. But so far, that's not happening. Unfortunately, only 5-10% of the people that probably need the help are actually getting something that's going to enable them to stay in their home. The other 90-95% of homeowners, the way the system has worked has simply been to push those homeowners into foreclosure. And rather than making any deal at all, the system drives them to lose their home. There are so far today almost 3,000 calls-- have come in just to home retention. It's 3:30. Danny Shapone is a manager at a call center run by a company named Ocwen. And I came here to find out, basically, what the hell's going on. Why, when the industry is presented with-- let's be honest-- a rare case of an actual win-win, why is everybody still losing? Thank you, and the phone call may be recorded. This isn't an attempt to collect a debt-- This is ground zero of the foreclosure crisis-- right here. If you own a house and you send in your mortgage payment, it comes to a company like this one. They're called a loan servicer. You may not know that. Most people have never heard of a loan servicer. You think you're writing a check and it goes to the bank that loaned the money. But these days, there's the person who gave you the mortgage, then often, they sold it to somebody else and then they sold it to somebody else. And so the person who eventually gets your money, you have no idea. It turns out Ocwen does. They're the middleman between you and the person that you owe. They're are also the people that you call when you can't pay. Or they'll call you. They're a debt collector It's a big room-- lots of cubicles, call center workers with headsets. Ocwen's got 300 people taking calls-- twice as many as two years ago. All day, they talk to people who are about to lose their homes. It's their job to figure out if it makes sense to modify their loans, lower their payments to avoid a foreclosure. Ocwen agreed to talk to us probably because they're different than a lot of loan servicers in one important way. When you have trouble with your loan and call Ocwen, they might actually help you out. They modify a lot of mortgages. They say when a borrower can't pay, 75% of the time, they work out a deal that keeps them in their homes. In other words, they do loan modifications for three times as many people as they are foreclosing on. Margery Rotundo is a vice president who's in charge of the call center. She shows us Ocwen's computer system. This is where they crunch the numbers that allow them to be nice to people. So here's the other financial information that we gather, your monthly food, electric, cable. Basically, every borrower is in a database. And when they call asking for a modification, it's as simple as plugging in a few numbers. Ocwen finds out what their income is and how much they owe. And then based on those two things, Ocwen figures what the homeowner can afford to pay. Then they try to rework the loan terms to match that number. They can reduce the interest, which is sometimes as high as 11 or 12% to as low as 2%. And just like that, this can cut a person's monthly payment in half. Sometimes-- and this is more rare, just 16% of the time-- Ocwen even reduces the actual amount that the person owes. Ocwen can do all this because if they did nothing and allowed the foreclosure process to run its course, it would cost even more. Margery points to a computer screen that actually calculates how much money would be lost in a foreclosure for one of their loans. The software knows what the average repair costs are for foreclosed properties in any given neighborhood. It calculates the legal fees. Your broker fees, once you sell it, is going to be $6,300. The closing costs, 1,837. What's the repair? On the repairs, $2,500 on a single family home. And then the legal fees and costs associated with taking completing a foreclosure, $275 in legal fees and $975 in legal costs. The argument for making a deal with the homeowner looks even better when you consider how much value the house has lost. That's huge. Say I'm the bank and a borrower owes me $400,000 on a mortgage. But it now turns out that the house is only worth half that. If I foreclose, I own a house that I can only sell for $200,000. I've lost at least half my money. So even if I cut the homeowner an incredible deal-- I tell them forget about $50,000 or even $100,000 of that 400 that he owes me-- I still come out ahead. I've lost less money. It's all there in the numbers on Margery's computer screen. I hit calculate and in less than one second, it ran the net present values. When you see Margery's database, it looks very straightforward and mathematical. But out in the call center, it gets very messy and human and complicated pretty fast. My producer Alex Blumberg and I talked to Danny Shapone and another manager, Doug [? Donegan ?] They say they hear all kinds of heartbreaking stories from people-- a lost job or an unexpected medical cost, victims of a mortgage scam. Then there are the non-heartbreaking ones. We had somebody who had all the money in the world, the ability to pay, sent in their bank statements, we were looking at it. And I think it was about eight cash withdrawals at the Hard Rock Casino down the road here in a three-day period. So this is somebody who was there-- Casino ATM with a $10 fee, I mean-- Eight times in three days. So you're there, you lose it, you go to the money machine, you get more, several times in one day. But you're not, in the back of your head, thinking, I'm going to have trouble making my mortgage payment. So ultimately, I think she told us, she's like, "Yeah, I have a gambling problem. I'm going to get help." But that's not the norm. Most borrowers aren't like, oh yeah, I have a gambling problem. But it is a prioritization of finances. We have people that tell us how desperate and how they have no money and no ability. And we look at their bank statements and they're going to P.F. Chang's and Ruby Tuesdays and, yeah, Starbucks, 7-11. Like Danny's mentioned, you go to 7-11 a couple times a week. That adds up to $50 really fast, but nobody's thinking about that. They're not changing their habits to adjust to the reduction in income. Instead of changing habits, they're changing paying. Ocwen is just one company, just one loan servicer that's gotten [? religion ?] about doing a lot of these workouts. The problem is there are dozens of other loan servicers. The biggest ones are owned by the big banks-- Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Chase-- the same banks that are getting bailed out by the government right now. They all have big servicing divisions. We sat down with the top executives at Ocwen-- president Ron Faris and executive vice president Paul Koches-- in their modest conference room. They said those bigger companies, the big banks, it turns out they were just not set up to deal with this problem. But let me give you a story here-- happened actually right here in this very room. And unfortunately, I think it's probably not appropriate for me to say the name. But one of the largest servicers and commercial banks in the country came down to visit and sat in this very room. And this was probably back in about mid-2007 when, clearly, people were starting to see signs that trouble was ahead. And what they said to us was, "the reason we're here today is because we know that delinquencies are rising. We know that we're are not going to be able to hire enough experienced collectors. And to compound that, we don't have any real loss mitigation type technology. We have just the basic, core servicing technology that collects in a payment each month and sends out a statement. And it works really well when people make a payment every day. But we don't have all of that mathematical stuff that you're talking about-- the models or whatever. And we're not sure what to do because we're pretty sure that by the time we get it implemented, it'll be too late." So they sat here and were literally like, "we're not sure what to do and we want to talk to you about how could you possibly help us?" That's the kind of situation that we we're dealing with them and I'm talking about one of the largest banks in the world sat here in this room and told us that story. Was that surprising for you to hear? Here you are servicing a few hundred thousand loans. One of the largest banks in the country that's dealing with millions of loans at a time when this foreclosure crisis is mounting, and they're basically saying, well, if everybody pays on time, everything's great, but we really don't have the systems in place to deal with it if people stop paying. It was eye-opening to hear them actually acknowledge it and say it and say that they have a problem and they weren't sure what to do. Ocwen, on the other hand, has been doing this for a while. For their entire history, they've specialized in so-called distressed debt, which means that they're the industry's problem loan guys. They were like the messed up loan foreclosure specialists. Before this crisis, that was a tiny part of the market. Now it is the market. Vice president Paul Koches says he was at a meeting in Washington recently. The industry was batting around the notion of a celebrity campaign. This was their big idea, to get celebrities to go on TV and tell people at risk of foreclosure to call up their lenders and ask about loan workouts. And this is very well attended-- all the usual suspects, all the the big banks-- and there was one person who, on behalf of a very large bank, almost in an excited sort of utterance just blurted, he said, "well, you can't do that. If you're successful in drumming up all this interest on the part of the homeowners who need help, we won't be able to handle the volume." The level of the market disruption just caught many servicers by surprise. And indeed, we're still getting our systems in order in order to be able to handle the massive levels of defaults. That's Rod Alba, the vice president for mortgage finance at the American Bankers Association, which represents banks around the country. I called him up and he basically agrees with all of this, that a lot more loan modifications would make good business sense. But still, two years into this mess, many big loan servicers haven't figured out how to make that happen. And there are a lot of other reasons that the big banks, which are also the biggest loan servicers, aren't modifying more mortgages. Because of the way accounting rules work, if they do a loan modification, they basically rewrite the terms of the loan, which means that then they have to admit that they have a problem on their hands. And if I engage in an actual modification, now I have a distressed assets. And if I have a distressed asset, then that gives me a knock to the capital base. That is proving to be one of the problems in this area. It's a problem because the bank has to take a short-term loss. If they don't modify the loan and put the house in foreclosure, they still take a loss-- and probably a bigger loss-- but it might be as much as a year under accounting rules before that law shows up on their books. They still lose money, but they don't lose it now. And it's now that the banks are worried about. And then and there are those conflicts of interest. Some top people in the mortgage business think those are a big problem. Well, it closely resembles, in some ways, the fox guarding the hen house. This is Scott Simon. He's not the NPR host and he's not a consumer advocate or an anti-bank activist. He's a big time money guy. He's a managing director at Pimco. It's an investment firm that holds more than $500 billion worth of home mortgages in the form of mortgage backed securities. Simon manages all of that. He says often the banks are servicing loans that are owned by investors like him. And the banks are supposed to make sure that the investors get paid. And they're supposed to decide if a loan modification makes good business sense. Simon thinks they should be making more loan modifications but he believes that the banks are wearing too many hats and they can't do that job right. So take an example. You have a $300,000 house that's only worth $260,000 and it might make all the sense in the world to modify that loan. It's good for the investor, good for the homeowner. But it turns out that the bank that services the loan has also lent the person $25,000 on a home equity line of credit. A home equity line of credit is, of course, a second mortgage. You borrow another, say, $25,000 to redo your kitchen, buy a car or just pay off your credit cards with your house as collateral. The problem becomes that the bank has much more interest in their $25,000 line of credit and helping the homeowner or the investor, in this case. Simon says legally, it can be tough to modify your mortgage without basically wiping out your home equity loan. And some of the nation's biggest banks are each on the hook for more than $100 billion of those little home equity loans. And so he says the bank is a big incentive to avoid doing a modification. And so it doesn't happen. Everybody is trying to protect their own self-interest. And ultimately, the conflicts keep it from happening. The servicers enable this to occur or can essentially veto this from occurring. And so what's in their interest really is dominating the day. You just look at it and say, hey why can't we just fix this? We talked to several of the biggest banks but none of them would let us come do interviews at their loan servicing operations. In prepared statements, the banks point to all the loan adjustments that they are making right now. And these are on the rise and most loan modifications now do result in lower monthly payments. But as Mark Pearce, the deputy banking regulator said earlier, only one in 10 of the people who need loan modifications are getting them. And when the banks and big loan servicers do modify loans, regulators say that too often, they're not taking the dramatic steps that actually keep people in their houses-- the things that Ocwen does, slashing interest rates or lowering the overall amount of loans. And because the big banks don't take those steps, 46% of the modified loans have ended up in trouble again. Of course, the scale of this problem is just by its very nature overwhelming. And you can see that at the call center at Ocwen. I'm not saying that you haven't been trying, but the last payment that we received that's been applied to your account was in October of '08. Call center worker Tammy White has been going around and around trying to do something that sounds like it should be pretty simple-- get a copy of an old tax return from a homeowner who's looking to get her payments lowered. Look, I didn't say I didn't receive it. I said it wasn't signed. And that could have been what got you in the situation that you're in today. Thank you. Bye bye. Can we talk about that call for a second? What's the story there? She was asking why we need all this because she didn't have to provide any of it when she got her loan. And I was trying to explain to her that's why she's probably in this bad situation. So this conversation takes half an hour to try to get one homeowner to sign and mail in one document. This is the conversation that has to happen millions of times if we're going to sort all this out. That's not an easy thing. But the people here at Ocwen say it's definitely doable. The Obama administration has a new plan to try to get a lot more loan modifications happening. But for now, we're still in the middle of this giant foreclosure mess. People are losing their houses at a faster rate every month, another one every eight seconds. Chris Arnold is a reporter for NPR News. His story is part of Planet Money, which is a co-production that our show is doing with NPR News. You can have the economy explained to you in normal human language. They're even funny on their podcast thrice weekly at www.npr.org/money. Coming up, parenting stumpers. Match your wits against some very well-intentioned parents. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. Well, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, No Map. Stories of people struggling through situations where there are no guideposts or precedents. We've arrived Act Two of our show. Act Two, Where's King Solomon When You Need Him? It's not like there's not a map for how to handle being a parent. Our culture's actually awash with how-to parenting guides. It's actually kind of comforting. If any jackass can have a kid, I can have a kid. Anything that comes up, somebody has already dealt with. You'll be able to get advice. Unless you're a guy in this story, Mike Nyberg. Over the course of four years, he got into a series of situations and faced a series of parenting decisions in adopting a child that were so unusual, so difficult, that it really seems that he was lost at sea in almost uncharted parenting territory. Ted Gesing tells us what happened. Mike and Kari Nyberg already had two sons. They're Mormon, or LDS-- Latter Day Saints. And when they decided to adopt, they begin to look at children from Samoa, a small Pacific island that has a large LDS population. Mike remembers the first picture he saw of the three year old they would eventually name Elleia. I saw a cute little girl with a pair of pants that seemed to be cut off at about the knees. She didn't have a shirt on. Her bangs were trimmed really short. Looked like kind of a hack job. What was your understanding of some of these kids' situations? Did they have families or no? We were told that they did have families and that their families we're giving them up because of their financial circumstance-- that they wanted a better life for their child, they were not able to provide food for their children. Elleia was the youngest of eight kids. The adoption agency Mike and Kari chose in Salt Lake City, called Focus on Children, told them that Elleia had been living for the past nine months in the agency's nanny house where a Samoan couple took care of the children. But when the time came for them to go pick her up, Mike and Kari were told that Samoa and the nanny house were off limits because of a recent hurricane. They would have to meet the girl at the closest major airport in New Zealand. They flew there and waited for Elleia's flight. We picked Elleia up at the airport at one o'clock in the morning. And we waited and waited. Everybody came off the airplane. And finally, here came this little girl in a little blue dress, little straps on his shoulders, and she was holding a little orange basketball. And she just looked so sad, but we were so excited. I had the camcorder going. She kept repeating the words [SPEAKING SAMOAN]. Not knowing Samoan-- not knowing any Samoan at all-- we had no idea what she was saying, couldn't communicate with her. They took her back to their hotel and did what the adoption agency had instructed them, which was to rub her down with a lotion that would kill off scabies. So here we have this little girl who hasn't reached her fourth birthday quite yet and these two white people, we've stripped her down to nothing and we're rubbing this lotion all over her body, into her hair, into her scalp, and she's just scared to death. And I never forget sitting in that love seat and rocking her while she said that, [SPEAKING SAMOAN], not knowing what she was saying, and she finally fell asleep. So our goal the following day was to go out and find somebody that spoke Samoan. We finally found out that one of the waiters in the restaurant in the hotel we were staying was from Samoa. And so he talked to her a little bit. And he proceeded to tell us that [SPEAKING SAMOAN] means I want Tupu. Tupu was her mother. And so she was merely saying, I want my mom. And who wouldn't? She would hold my hand as we walked down the street, but she I think she really felt like what we were going to do is we were going to take her back where she came from, because she always wanted to go. She would actually pick up that little basketball that she had and she would walk over and squat down next to the door and just wait like we were getting ready to leave. Within days, they were back in Utah, and Elleia begin to settle into her new life. She was doing well, Mike said, and she picked up English incredibly quickly. It only took her about a month. And that's when things begin to change for the Nybergs. She started to tell us about her parents. And she would name them and she would talk about these different names. And so we wrote all these names down that she would say and tried to spell them the best we knew how. Well, come to find out these were her siblings and her parents that were sleeping together on the floor of the fale. Fale is a word for house. So immediately, when she starts talking about sleeping with her family on the floor in the fale, we had the question come up, well, why would a little girl who was supposed to have been in foster care in the nanny house for almost nine months prior to us adopting her-- that put her just barely over three years old-- why would she be still talking about her parents? Why wouldn't she be referring to the nanny and the nanny's husband? There were other clues that something wasn't right. They dug up a photo the adoption agency had sent, supposedly taken of Elleia at the nanny house, and discovered it didn't match the photos of the nanny house that were on the internet. Mike and Kari were realizing they'd been lied to in little ways, and they wondered if they were being lied to in big ways. So they started digging around. A friend's brother-in-law was working with the LDS church in Samoa and agreed to help them. He got a translator and tried to track down Elleia's birth parents-- the [? Soes ?] in the remote jungle village listed on Elleia's birth certificate. They headed out past where maps could take them and eventually found some of Elleia's relatives. Not Tupu, her mother, but Ama, Elleia's oldest sister, and her husband Tovea who spoke English. [? Tovea explained that the girl had always lived with them, not in the nanny house, and that the [? Soe ?] family had a very different understanding of what they had signed their girl up for. It was this. Elleia was going to be here in the United States until she was 18 years old. She would be getting an American education and that we, the American family, were supposed to be sending money to the birth family during that time span while she's here in the United States. Then when she turned 18, of course, she would return to Samoa with that education and be able to support the family or whatever they saw fit. The [? Soes ?] seemed to believe this was a study abroad program and that they'd be receiving updates, photos, letters, and gifts. Of course, this was not at all what the adoption agency had told Mike and Kari, which is that this girl was left it a nanny house nine months earlier by a family they couldn't afford to feed her, and that it was a traditional closed adoption, where the birth family would have no claim to their child. The [? Soes, ?] it turned out, were farmers with plenty to eat and more to sell at market. And worst of all was the story of the [? Soes ?] last interaction with their daughter. Someone from the adoption agency came by one evening to get the girl and told the [? Soes ?] that she was just spending a night in the nanny house to get used to being away from home. The man told them Elleia would be back the next day. Instead, that same night she was taken straight to the airport and put on a flight to New Zealand. So we were getting this little girl, unbeknownst to us, that had been with her parents two hours earlier, not knowing that they were fully planning on seeing her the next day, but never to see her again. And once they figured out she wasn't coming back, imagine how terrified they were. To understand why the [? Soes ?] would even agree in the first place to a deal like the one they described, it helps to know that in Samoa, there is no tradition of relinquishing your legal rights to a child. There are no orphanages there. There is no such thing as adoption. Samoans generally have large families, and it's not unusual to send a child for a time to other family members or friends who can better afford to raise him or her. To them, it just becomes an extended family. So to the [? Soes, ?] the idea of sending a child off to be taken care of and educated in the US didn't seem all that odd. After hearing all of this from their man in Samoa, the Nybergs took a huge step. They went to the authorities. They told what they'd found to the State Department agent, who had processed their application to adopt, and to an agent from immigration and customs. Both agents were shocked. Mike and Kari knew that the case would escalate, but they had no idea what would happen to their family. They'd had Elleia for almost six months. Did you think about whether you would have to give her back at that stage? Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I thought, well, if this adoption isn't supposed to be, then is this child really ours? Whose family does she belong to? It was scary. What did this do to your relationship with Elleia herself? How do you react to that? Well, I didn't allow it to-- and not that I was consciously making a choice-- I continued to bond with her. I treated her normally. I think my wife kind of went the other direction. She probably had some concerns and so I think she kind of became standoffish. Knowing that maybe this adoption is fraudulent and we won't get to keep this little girl, how can I let myself get attached to her? Kari didn't want to speak to us for this story. She did send me an email answering some of my questions but didn't address this particular point. So we only have Mike's perspective on this. The government started its investigation, interviewing dozens of families in America and in Samoa. And for a long time, there was nothing Mike and Kari could do except wait. Finally, they decided to fly to Samoa themselves with Elleia to meet her family, the [? Soes. ?] At this point, Mike and Kari had been raising Elleia as their daughter for almost two years. The two families arranged to meet at an LDS temple in Apia, the capital. Elleia recognized her parents immediately and they picked her up and hugged her and cried. You're all standing there meeting for the first time. And it's immediate, it's apparent that this is their girl and she wants to be with them? No, not necessarily. It's a very strange situation because she was hesitant going to them because she'd been away from them for a while. She really didn't want to stay with them. Right after that, we loaded up into a vehicle and headed to their village and spent time out there. It took her time to readjust back into her family. They very much loved their daughter. You could absolutely tell. But she was really bonded to me and when I was there, she didn't seem to want anything to do with anybody else-- wanted to sit on daddy's lap. And seeing where she was from, you come around a corner and you see this building with palm leaves on the roof and no outside walls, just poles holding the roof up. And then to start looking around and see how dirty it is, how filthy the kids' clothes were that lived there, just living amidst all the mud and dirt and lava rock, and we all sit on the floor. Everybody pretty much sits in a big circle. The kids kind of run around. That have one little light bulb-- about a sixty-watt light bulb in the ceiling there, and that's their light. It was hard to communicate. More than just a language barrier, there was a cultural barrier. It wasn't clear what to talk about. Mike says they didn't seem to want to discuss what had happened or why it happened. All they really wanted to know was what would happen next. Initially, that's the first thing they ask is, OK, what's the program? And that was their way of asking us, why are you here? What are we doing? Is Elleia coming back to live with us or is she going back home with you? They know that we love her and they know that we are taking care of her and they can see that she's in good hands and they appreciate that and they want us to make the decision. It wasn't up to them, it was up to us to decide what to do. It was dark when Mike and Kari left the village to drive back to their hotel. In the car, they struggled to figure out what would be best. We're talking about a human life-- a little girl-- and to treat it like it's a box of bananas it seemed unreasonable and unfathomable to me because now I have to decide what to do with her and I love her to death. She was just like my own flesh and blood. But it also gave me a taste of how her own parents really felt not having her and not being able to be with her. I think I felt the same love they felt for their daughter. When I asked Kari about this in an email, she said she also felt for Elleia's parents. She'd lost a child-- a two- month old-- and she said knowing there was another mother out there who lost her child broker her heart. "There was no way I would put another mother through that pain," she wrote. Mike and Kari decided to leave Elleia with her birth family. It's a decision Mike describes as the right one, but he still plays it over and over in his mind. His biggest consideration, he says, was his wife's relationship with Elleia. Let's put it this way, Ted. If it was just me that had made that choice, there's a lot higher possibility that she wouldn't have stayed there. Maybe because I'm selfish. I don't know. Maybe it's a little strong to say that I would definitely have not left her there, but I think I wanted Elleia a little bit more than what my wife did. The fact that she hadn't bonded with Elleia, it wasn't as difficult for her to make that choice. But as a couple, you decide what would be best for the entire situation. In the end, Mike took comfort in the only thing that seemed like solid footing-- the idea that he could remedy an injustice by returning Elleia. The middle ground that I kept standing on was that she was given to us on false pretenses. And we were lied to. They were lied to. Maybe she just isn't supposed to be with us. Did you worry that Elleia would suffer? Did you feel like you were abandoning her in any way? I absolutely did. The night that we left, we were getting ready to go to the airport, standing in the village, and I could not peel her off of me. She was crying and we were talking to her, trying to let her know that it would all be OK and that she was going to be able to stay with Tupu and Isea. And she just bawled and bawled. And she clung to my neck and would not let go. And her mom tried to take her. And her mom couldn't get her off of me. Her dad couldn't get her off of me. And finally her brother, he was able to peel her off my neck. We found out that she cried herself to sleep for several weeks after that. Mike and Kari returned to Utah alone. Mike says the house was strange without her. They kept her room the same-- her girly bed, some clothes that no longer fit. Her little bike was still in the garage. Every couple of weeks, they would call Samoa just to check in. And that went on for, oh gosh, it'd been about five, six months. And they had the ability to call us from their cell phones also. And they called us one day and they said, "we know that you love Elleia, and if you would like to have her back, you can have her." For weeks, I called the [? Soes ?] to hear their side of this, but it always went straight to voicemail. The one time I did get through, I spoke with Elleia's sister-in-law, who said they didn't have any minutes on the phone card and couldn't talk. If it seems hard to believe that they'd give Elleia back again, Mike says it's really pretty straightforward. He believes the [? Soes ?] had come to trust him and Kari and now thought of them as extended family. And her parents knew, if they sent Elleia back, she'd have all the advantages they wanted for her in America, and they'd still get to see her and be part of her life. They could feel it. They knew that she was in a good situation, probably the situation that they had dreamed for her. Honestly, for me, I felt joy. I thought, really? OK. Well, that's neat. Did you think that Elleia had been unhappy there and wanted to come back or would benefit from coming back? Well, I knew that she had been unhappy in the initial month because of hearing about how she cried herself to sleep every night. And, of course, I was very concerned about that-- very concerned that maybe having gone through as much as she's gone through, it was detrimental to her mental and spiritual well-being. And now I can kind of keep an eye on her and I can make sure she's provided for and I don't have to wonder how she's doing. They went back to Samoa to pick up a Elleia. That week in Samoa was a wonderful reunion for everybody. We made sure that most of her family was able to go to the airport to see her off. And when we went to get on the airplane, some of her family were in tears but she wasn't in tears and she wasn't fighting to stay with them. I think more Elleia is resolved to, oh, well, this is just the way life is. This is what I do. I go back and forth. Back in Utah, Elleia was soon at home again, sleeping in her old room, playing with her two brothers. She started up school in the fall. And mike said he was so hopeful about the whole thing that his wife would come to feel as close to Elleia as he did. But things didn't really improve. In June was when she came back. In October, my wife asked me for a divorce. The past three and a half years had been rough on Mike and Kari's marriage. The stress of adopting and then giving Elleia back was huge in itself, but on top of that was the investigation into the adoption agency, Focus on Children. The Nybergs were in constant contact with various law enforcement agencies. The case had sort of taken over their lives. It was exhausting. The day after they decided to split up, Mike called the [? Soes ?] to let them know. Now he was asking them what they wanted to do-- leave Elleia with him or take her back. Well, I knew full well that their idea for their daughter was to be here with an LDS family in the United States, but the key word there is family, and an operative family where there's a mother and a father, not a divorce situation. So I called them the next day, the [? Soes, ?] and presented to them what was happening and asked them what they would like to do. And they chose to have Elleia come back to Samoa. And when they did, they said, if you and Kari ever get back together again, you can have Elleia again. What did you tell her-- Elleia? Just told her that she was going to go back to live with her family in Samoa. And at that age, you can't really tell her a whole lot. We certainly didn't tell her we were getting divorced. And I'm not sure that Elleia knows why she was going back and forth. So we got to the airport and put her on an Air New Zealand flight that goes straight to Apia, Samoa. Wow. I'll never forget that day. And I really didn't feel comfortable with it. They called her name-- they usually let the children on first-- and they came to get her, and so we walked her right to the ramp. And she held the lady's hand and walked down the ramp and got on the plane and that's the last we saw of her at that point. Mike still wonders about all of this-- every step. And when he does, he comes back to this weird balance where he believes he did the right thing, but he can't exactly explain why it was right, even to himself. I know a lot of this probably is hard to understand. Every decision I made in this process was through prayer and I can't explain to you why I received the answers that I did, but I can tell you that now, sometimes the answers don't seem reasonable or they just don't make sense. After more than three years of remarkable efforts, I am pleased to be here to discuss what I refer to as the thoughtful resolution of the most difficult and unique case that we've seen in this office in a long time. In resolving this case with guilty pleas-- On February 25th, Brett Tolman, the US Attorney for Utah, spoke to the press about the sentencing of the owners and staff of the adoption agency Focus on Children. Two years earlier, he had filed his indictment-- 135 counts involving 37 families. But in the end, owner Scott and Karen Banks pled guilty to much reduced charges. They admitted to some false statements made in the adoption paperwork but not a lot more. They didn't admit to intentional deception or fraud. The judge required them to pay into a fund for counseling for some of the children and to help the US and Samoan families keep in touch, although the court isn't forcing the US families to initiate contact. Most important, the judge banned Scott and Karen Banks and all their employees from the adoption business for life. International adoption fraud cases like this have almost never made it into US courts. There's only been one other instance so far. So adoption advocates all over the country were watching closely. And when they heard the plea deal-- no jail time, not even probation-- they were outraged. Tolman knew this and wearily explained why the case ended as it did. He clearly had struggled-- just like Mike Nyberg-- to make sense of the whole thing. We do not pretend-- I do not pretend to have the perfect answer or the perfect approach. At the heart of this case has always been the children. When the choice became the welfare, future, and lives of the children versus the amount of jail time and sheer punishment of the defendants, I chose the children and avoiding further innocents from suffering. What that meant in practice was that Tolman and his team didn't want to drag the adoptive families through a trial, which many of the families feared could attract too much attention from the Samoan government or immigration and customs-- anyone who might question their right to keep their adopted children. There could still be civil suits. A custody fight. At least one Samoan father is actively trying to get his child back, but that's unusual. Prosecutors say that most of the Samoan families are not seeking their children's return. In interviews, they told investigators they just wanted to make sure their kids were safe. They wanted to do what's best for them. And none of the other American families involved wanted to do what the Nybergs did-- return their children to Samoa. As the prosecution team realized this, the meaning of justice in this case changed. Jonathan Lines handled the case for immigration and customs. He said a couple of his investigators were unusually disturbed by what they learned. As parents, they couldn't quite draw enough distance. And by now, neither Lines nor anyone else is prepared to argue that the kids should be returned to Samoa. The only perspective I can give you is from my own human perspective. I don't know that I could give a child back. This is an absolute conundrum and it's something that I don't know will be easily resolved. That's why the investigation and a resolution that would seek real and true justice, I don't know that that's ever possible in a scenario like this. As for the other families in this case, most of them say they wish Mike had never gone to the feds at all, that there'd never been an indictment. They've been angry with Mike and they thought he was crazy to give back his daughter. Rod Young was one of three parents who spoke at the sentencing. He testified in defense of Focus on Children, who brought him his son, [? Tawni. ?] Rod loves [? Tawni ?] so much he gets choked up just talking about him. And he makes the same argument the Bankses themselves made in their own defense. They did so much good in adoptions worldwide. They brought so much aid to poor communities. Plus, these kids are better off here. And if the Bankses cut a few corners in their business, that's only a tiny part of the whole picture. I spoke to Rod Young right after the sentencing. I don't know if you heard, but they've done over a thousand adoptions. And today's event was focused on 39 of them, of which we only heard from two that were really, really angry and I believe that those were the ones that started the whole thing. There was nothing wrong with our adoption. Do you feel that this case puts your family at risk? Potentially. That's the biggest fear. And hopefully, today, what I was able to do a little bit and what I said was in speaking out was to say, hey look, these children are here. They're already so much more advantaged by a thousand percent from where they come from. And we love the Samoan culture, but if I had a nickel for every person that touched my son and said lucky baby, just to reach out and touch him as we were going through the markets-- the people that would take him and hold him and say lucky baby, lucky baby, and then give him back to us because they know what he was coming back to as opposed to what was there. It's a wonderful life, but there's nothing there for the children. Mike Nyberg can understand why other parents haven't done what he did. He gets that his extraordinary decision might never be repeated by other families. Why don't they want to give the children back if you did and you knew it was the right thing? Are all these people not doing the right thing? I can't speak for them. I know how I feel about Elleia and I know how difficult it is and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. It is a decision that nobody should ever have to make. So these are questions that nobody's ever had to answer before. And there are no answers to those questions of what's right and what's wrong. Because if they send all the kids back to Samoa, you're doing essentially the same thing happened to those children to begin with-- ripping them out of their homes. But do they really belong to these families? That's God's call. But you know what? I don't think he's going to tell us. I think we just have to make the right choice. Since February 2007, when Mike and Kari said goodbye to Elleia at the airport, Mike has gone back to Samoa once for a visit. He brought his two sons so they could really see where she was. Mike said they never understood it before just looking at the globe, at a tiny dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Mike's dream is to one day have enough money to bring Elleia over here for extended visits every year or two. And in Samoa, not too long after Elleia's return, one of her older sisters had a baby boy. She named him Mike. A few months after that, another sister gave birth to another boy. They named this one Nyberg. Ted Gesing is a TV documentary producer. A chimpanzee can tear a man apart with his bare hands. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.
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When Madison Nguyen was elected to the San Jose City Council, she was just 30 and was a really big deal. There is a huge Vietnamese community in San Jose, but no Vietnamese had ever made it to the city council. The Vietnamese-American community was just beside themselves with having the very first Vietnamese-American elected official there. My Thuan Tran is the reporter who covers California's Vietnamese communities for the Los Angeles Times. They really saw her as the beloved daughter, as a golden child. There was a lot of celebrations. And she won and her face was all over different magazines. She was interviewed by all the Vietnamese press. People were following her every move. They wanted to know what she was up to. But within two years, mainly because of one issue. One issue. Lots of people were furious with Madison Nguyen. People started protesting in front of City Hall every single Tuesday. And they would hold banners that had a slash across her face. They wrote Madison Nguyen is a traitor. There was one protest that drew thousands of people, not only from San Jose but from the neighboring cities in the Bay Area, and also people who came from as far as Orange County or Houston. Also there was a hunger striker? Yes, there was. He was camped out in a tent for 29 days in front of City Hall and he was flanked by a lot of his supporters. And the main issue that turned so many people against Madison Nguyen? That eventually led to a special recall election for the golden child? Well, there's a area of San Jose just a couple blocks long on Story Road, with lots of Vietnamese stores, and restaurants, and businesses. And one of the first things that Madison Nguyen did on the City Council was convince her colleagues they should do to economic development there, and designate that area with a special name. Several possible names were discussed. Most Vietnamese Americans who cared enough to come out to those meetings preferred Little Saigon, but Madison Nguyen chose the name Saigon Business District. That's it. That's the whole controversy. Little Saigon versus Saigon Business District. I think the issue, it's a very subtle one. And I guess for a lot of non-Vietnamese, it was very difficult for them to understand, because they felt what's the difference? It's just Little Saigon versus Saigon Business District, but for many Vietnamese refugees, it just invoked everything that they had lived through in their lives. Of Vietnam and coming over here. Specifically, the name Little Saigon had taken on huge significance. That's what some other Vietnamese exile communities like this big one that is down in Orange County had called themselves, partly as a political statement. These communities, you got to remember, were full of people who had fought the Communists during the Vietnam War and then fled the Communists after the war. The name Little Saigon was seen as an act of defiance against people who had taken over the city of Saigon and renamed it. Renamed it, actually, after the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party-- Ho Chi Minh City. The name that she did not choose, the name Little Saigon had just become such a symbol for them. It became a symbol for them of why they fled Vietnam, of why they fought for South Vietnam, of what hardships and pain that their family went through. And when she didn't choose that name, they felt like she wasn't listening to their stories, or to their history. Anything that wasn't Little Saigon, it's just seen as an insult. Me, on a personal level, I like the name Vietnam Town. Because we have Chinatown, we have Japantown, but obviously I guess what I liked didn't really matter. This is Councilwoman Madison Nguyen. The San Jose politician at the center of all this controversy. She says that although a vocal portion of her Vietnamese constituents definitely preferred Little Saigon, Vietnamese-Americans only make up a third of her district. Non-Vietnamese people and businesses in the district wanted other names. And she thought it would be better to avoid a name that was so political. So she chose what she thought was a compromise. And so I thought, OK, well both names have the name Saigon in it, and this is a business district designation. Why don't we just called it Saigon Business District and hopefully that will make everyone happy. I want to play you a recording from this six and a half hour City Council meeting about this. And it's many people standing up, saying that they don't want this name. And here's one man and-- there's a point in the tape where he says if Madison wins, what he means is if you get your way and the community is not called Little Saigon. Here let me play this for you. -Before 1975, I was Ranger Commander in Vietnam. I was in jail nine year. Tonight I come here to request only one vote from you for Little Saigon. I strongly support you from the beginning. But if Madison win, we stay away from her, because she's pro-Communist. Thank you. What's your reaction to that kind of thing? It was torture to have all these people, who are pretty much at the age of my parents or grandparents, coming up and looking you, staring you in the face, in your eyes and said we no longer trust you. You're not one of us. We regret that we ever supported you. To hear that over, and over, and over, and over again. I mean it's painful. Then there's the fact that she was being called a Communist, widely. The first time I heard it, I was very hurt. I felt that-- I came here as a boat child back in the late 1970s. I escaped Communism in Vietnam and I came here. We pretty much risked our lives to come to this great country. And to have this particular group of people in the Vietnamese community label me as a Communist sympathizer, I thought was really beyond absurd. Madison is convinced that if she had been a non-Vietnamese City Councilperson suggesting the exact same name, Saigon Business District, it never would have gone this far. No protest. Nobody would have been labeled a Communist. People felt betrayed, she says, because she was one of them. They expected her to do what they wanted. And they couldn't believe it when she didn't. To them, she was a turn coat. What strikes deeper than that? Well today on our show, we have two other stories of turncoats. It's This American Life from WBEZ in Chicago distributed by Public Radio International. We'll get to those in a bit. In Madison Nguyen's case, things are ugly. Things happened pretty fast. If you listen to Vietnamese radio during that time period, a lot of people would come out and say they believe she was a Communist. Again, reporter My Thuan Tran. I just felt that it was a really interesting case because it kind of showed the challenges of being a Vietnamese-American politician. That you kind of had to navigate among all these lingering emotions from this war that had ended 34 years ago. Yeah, you wrote, "The rules of politics are different for a Vietnamese-American politician. Even business owners, reporters, and pop singers carefully tiptoe around inferences and innuendo that can cast a person as being soft on Communism. A misstep can launch vocal protests and accusations. Reputations can be tarnished. People must bow to the pressure." Right. I think it's a surprise for many people who are kind of unfamiliar with the Vietnamese-American community how much this name-calling and suspicion still resonates. I think some people feel like it looks like out of the McCarthy era when they view the Vietnamese-American community. There are tons of examples of this kind of red-baiting. The first Vietnamese Superintendent of Schools in the Westminster School District in Orange County was removed a week after she was appointed, she says, because an activist lobbied school board members, saying she was a Communist. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, when a Catholic bishop visited from Vietnam, he asked that not be photograph with anything political. So his Vietnamese- American host in Minnesota, a man named Tuan Pham, took down the flag of the old country of South Vietnam which was in many exile communities. Tuan Pham was vilified as a pro-Communist because of that. Protests at his store were so intense that customers stopped coming. His business went bankrupt. Tuan Pham not only battled the Communists as a soldier during the war, but was held in one of their prison camps for two years. There's another interesting example I wanted to bring up. There was a Vietnamese-American pop singer named Tommy Ngo. And in one of the posters for a concert, he's wearing a belt with the word L-O-V-E on it. And the O has a star in it. And the word "LOVE" is in red and the star is white, but on the poster it kind of looked like the star was yellow. And a yellow star on a red background is actually the symbol of the official Vietnamese flag, which is known as the Communist flag. So, even that concert was protested against, and Tommy Ngo was protested against. And a lot of people didn't end up going to the concert. Even one of the contributors to our radio show, Thanh Tan, who is a reporter from Boise Public Television, has watched as her dad, who runs a Vietnamese community organization in Olympia, Washington, has been red-baited. It's particularly galling to her, she says, because she spent her childhood resenting how much time her dad spent at anti-Communist demonstrations. It's just really upsetting to hear these accusations against somebody who-- his idea of fun with the family was to take us to a protest in Seattle, and to wave around the old nationalist flag, the yellow flag with the three stripes. You mean an anti-Communist protest? Yeah. Like, I grew up on that. I have pictures of me when I was like, six years old, holding a sign that says Ho Chi Minh is a criminal. Thanh's dad has now won a defamation against the activists who called him a Communist sympathizer. The Thurston County Court awarded him and his organization $310,000. But Thanh says that the stress of all this has hurt her parents' marriage and her dad's health. And somehow her family doesn't feel a sense of victory after all this. You know, I don't just because like right after the trial, like within a week, I saw a television, like a Vietnamese television report where the defendants were interviewed. And the main guy, he said that my dad-- he said something along the lines of Communists don't wear their badge on their chest. And to me that just said going through this whole trial, three week trial was not enough to prove to him that my dad apparently is not a Communist. And that really was pretty upsetting. I mean my mother, she calls me, and she just said Thanh, what do we do? Like, what we do? Like, the Vietnamese media is still reporting that your dad could be a Communist. Like, I don't know what to do. I understand that there's a Vietnamese phrase for red-baiting that's used here in the States. Mm-hmm. It's called "chup mu." And what does it mean literally? It literally means to put the Communist hat on someone. The City Councilwoman in San Jose, Madison Nguyen, faced a recall election and she won. Mainly, she's just tired of the red-baiting. At the height of all the protests she wondered, is this why we came to this country? So we could fight over who's a Communist? Even now, which is really sad, but I'll share with you anyways. My in-laws, they're still living in Vietnam right now, and I was recently married. And my father-in-law had a stroke about two months ago. And so, I wanted to have the opportunity to go back. But I can't, because I know that if I go back now, imagine what's going to happen when I come back here to San Jose. You can't say you're visiting a relative? Yeah, good luck. Why? What will they say? I mean, I really-- and when I tell people, I tell my friends that, they're like, there's no way you can go because if you go, the first thing that's going to happen when you come back is that, oh look! She's going back there. She's probably trying to connect with the Vietnamese government, or get in some kind of relationship. And so it's just-- and so, here I am thinking like, am I ready to put up another fight? She says she doesn't want to put her supporters through all that again. So she's careful. But she wants to be in politics, she says. With so many people ready to see her as a traitor. And that's just how it's got to be. Act Two, My Way or the FBI Way. On the morning of September 3, 2008, the day Sarah Palin would address the Republican National Convention, a SWAT team broke down the door of a home in downtown Saint Paul. Local TV news had this story. -Two Texas man are now charged with plotting to attack police with molotov cocktails during the Republican National Convention. -Police say David McKay and Bradley Crowder are both associated with the radical Austin Affinity Group. If convicted, McKay and Crowder could face up to 10 years in prison. Two men who'd been arrested were young, in their early 20s. The RNC was their first big protest. And they'd been nabbed in an elaborate sting operation. Word spread around the country among activists that there was an informant in their midst. And it had to be somebody big. But who? And why? The rumors started circulating about one guy. A guy who'd been notorious even before this. Michael May tells what happened. Four months after the Republican National Convention, Brandon Darby posted a letter on Indymedia, a website used by activists worldwide from Chiapas to London to Seattle. "To all concerned," he wrote. There are currently allegations in the media that I have worked undercover for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The allegations seemed ludicrous. Everybody knew Brandon Darby hated cops. He talked openly about overthrowing the US government. One of his friends, a sort of living legend among anarchists, had posted his own earlier letter on Indymedia saying, "The idea of Brandon working for the FBI was absurd. It would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus as a child." You can see where this is going. The simple truth is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many of you went against my wishes and spoke publicly in defense of me. I really did mean it when I said I didn't want to discuss it, and that I didn't want folks addressing the allegations. I'm looking forward to open dialogue and debate regarding the motivations and experiences I've had, and the ethical questions they pose. What followed wasn't debate and dialogue. It was vitriol. People were shocked. Brandon Darby was one of the best-known radical activists in the South. In Austin, Texas, where he lives, posters with Brandon's face went up on bulletin boards, at coffee shops, and stores around town. The poster said, "BEWARE! BRANDON DARBY, FBI INFORMANT RAT LOOSE IN AUSTIN!" Brandon still has some loyalists in activist community, but for the most part he's hated. I've interviewed probably 20 people who know or worked with Brandon, and their feelings about him now are pretty extreme. I first met Brandon two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. I did a story about him for our local radio station in Austin. And Brandon had this crazy, true story to tell. He bought a boat and drove from Austin to New Orleans after the storm to find his friend, a former Black Panther named Robert King Wilkerson, who lived in a flooded neighborhood. Brandon couldn't get the boat into the city, so he decided to wade in. At the time, he told the story like that was the only reasonable thing to do. I came under an overpass and there are law enforcement officers on the overpass. And they stopped me and they told me to wait there. That I didn't have a reason to be there or right to be there and asked me who I was. And I told them I was going to get my friend. And they said you can't do that. And I said, well, I don't mean to be rude, but you're on an overpass and I'm down here. And so I really don't see how you're going to stop me from getting my friend. So Brandon literally swam into the fetid water. And when he couldn't reach his friend's house on his own, he somehow, while stranded on a fence pole, badgered the Coast Guard into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became famous among activists in New Orleans. And it sums up Brandon pretty well-- a mixture of heroism, recklessness, and arrogance. Brandon Darby looks a little like an action hero. Six-foot-plus, stubble, he's got some muscle. Good looking in a rugged movie star sort of way, down to the cleft chin. And he didn't become a political activist after taking a Marxist theory class. He didn't go to college. He was a smart guy from a crappy Gulf Coast refinery town who spent a lot of his teenage years running away from home. He lived on the streets of Houston, and was in and out of group homes and treatment centers. By the time he hit 20 with an eighth grade education and GED, he learned what he took as the central lesson of his life. People in power lie and take advantage of people weaker than themselves. And when he moved to Austin, he discovered radical politics. He showed up at the Anarchist Bookstore, read up, and started channeling his anger towards the US government. And it all came to a head after Hurricane Katrina. I believed for years that the government was out of control and that it didn't have any concern for the average person. And then Katrina happened, and it reinforced it 500%. I was very dedicated and sure that it would be a huge error on my part to spend any time trying to work with or change our government. And that they just were so rotten to the core, I needed to do something about it. And that maybe I needed to become a revolutionary who believed in overthrowing the state. So he moved to New Orleans. And post-Katrina New Orleans was the perfect place for someone who believed sincerely and literally in the overthrow of the US government. A wasteland with no functioning central authority is a paradise for anarchists. It was a chance to prove what Brandon and others already believed. Government sucks. We can create a better world without it. So he and three other more experienced activists started up a relief organization with $50.00 and named it Common Ground. -In the vast plain of devastation that is the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, there's a little blue house. It shines in the sun like a wild flower amid the wreckage. And it was here, at the little blue house on Desland Street that we found something rare in New Orleans. A real success story. An American success story. It's called Common Ground. That's from Nightline. Common Ground might have been heralded as an American success story and a wild flower by the time the mainstream media found them a year later. But at the beginning, it was a bunch of outraged radicals. Anarchists promising to deliver relief by any means necessary. They were the only relief group here in the upper Ninth Ward. Ken Gaspard grew up in the Ninth Ward. Red Cross was handing out food in uptown New Orleans where no damage was happening. You couldn't find Red Cross down here in the Ninth Ward. To this day, I will not give Red Cross a dollar of my money for that reason. Within weeks after Katrina, Common Ground, with Brandon leading the Ninth Ward effort, became a force. Providing meals, health care, and help with gutting houses, all for free. They didn't have permits or anything. They just did it, and police did not like it. Common Ground was being run out of the house of a former Black Panther name Malik Rahim. And Brandon says it quickly became a target. The police would show up every night at Common Ground at Mailk's house and they would find some means of intimidating the hell out of us. Specifically what would they say? Arrest everybody for things. Like, I almost got arrested because I didn't have proof that my car was registered. And I was like, well look at my sticker. And they go, yeah, but do you have a receipt for it? And I was like, I don't think I need a receipt. They're like, well Mr. Darby if you don't have a receipt, I'm going to arrest you. And it's like, well, OK, I guess you're going to arrest me, because I don't this-- like really find infractions to arrest us with. We did have a hard early going. Major John Bryson with the New Orleans Police Department was in command of the Ninth Ward. One of the first people that I ran into on the streets was Brandon Darby. I invited Darby and his staff over to the Fifth District police station where we met in a trailer, of all things. That's what we were actually working out of, temporary trailers. And it was a very interesting first meeting. Brandon kept interrupting what I was telling him, what was expected of them. And he laid some expectations down on police. He kept saying that you don't understand, I'm an activist. I said yes, Mr. Darby, I know you're an activist, and I'm just being just as polite as I could be. But Brandon was at my throat. He kept saying that you don't understand, we're going to be videotaping you, we're going to be audiotaping you. I mean he was-- very aggressive meeting, I would say, on his part. But over the coming days and weeks and months of watching them do what they did. Bringing in, my God, doctors and feeding people. It was just a work of art. And I'm not saying this is what they said. I'm telling you what I saw. And we were scratching our heads trying to figure out, well, where's the government? At the same time Bryson was changing his mind about Common Ground, Brandon began changing his mind about Bryson. It started when he got a call from Bryson. He said, hey Brandon. I was driving around my district, thinking of how much I dislike you and what you stand for. And I was like, I was just thinking about how much I dislike you, too. And he was like, but I came across all these youngsters who said that you had given them medicine to deliver to elderly residents. A lot of them I know. And I said yeah, that's what we do. And he goes, well I'm having a hard time disliking you when you're doing stuff like that. And I said well, I'm having a hard time disliking you when you're talking to me like this. And that was the start of an interesting friendship. Brandon, to his surprise, started thinking that maybe he and some of the police in New Orleans were actually on the same side, trying to do the same thing. Fix a crippled city. Meanwhile, Brandon found himself in an organization with hundreds of volunteers and no clear hierarchy. Others at Common Ground wanted to run the organization by consensus, where everyone gets a say and no one walks around telling other people what to do. But Brandon came to believe that the volunteers did need someone telling them what to do. And what not to do. Folks would take over the kitchen and decide because they were the kitchen now, and they wouldn't tell you this before they took over the kitchen responsibilities, but then once they took over the kitchen responsibilities, it became a vegan kitchen. That's like, well, A, we're relying on handouts here. Like we don't have money to buy food ourselves to feed people. And, B, the people we're serving don't want vegan food. They might not like ginger noodles every day. And like, well our kitchen has decided-- that we as the kitchen crew have decided through our process that we're not going to serve oppression. And I was like, well, then I've decided that you're not going to work in the kitchen. A lot of people were mad because, well I don't consense on working in a church because churches are patriarchal, and churches are-- And I say, well, then don't work in a church, but we're working in the church. Thankfully there's like 20 other areas of the city that are open for leadership. Why don't you go talk to Malik and ask Malik if you can take that area and run that area how you see fit. Brandon had rebelled against authority his entire life. He didn't trust authority figures. Now he was the authority figure. And this was one of many ways that Brandon was finding himself out of sync with the anarchists at Common Ground. Brandon yelled at people. He ate meat. He slept with a lot of women. Plenty of them Common Ground volunteers. He owned guns. A lot of people thought he was a bully, including the other people who created Common Ground-- Scott Crowe, Malik Rahim, and Lisa Fithian. He didn't ask a lot of times. He just assumed that nobody knew what they were doing. And he was going to do it, even though he'd never organized anything, never organized, never organized anything. Zero. You know, Common Ground wouldn't be, I know we wouldn't be around now if Brandon would still be here because of the chaos that he started and he perpetuated. It was all about him if Brandon's all about the community, he's all about community if he gets to be the savior. A documentary on YouTube shows Brandon at his desk when he was in charge of Common Ground. He sits in front of a boarded-up window with a sign on it that says "Stop police corruption. Call Brandon Darby." In the video, he launches into one of his signature political rants that manages to connect Katrina to just about any other historical injustice he can think of. -Yes, the same people that decided, you know, inject black men with syphilis in Tuskegee and, and decided to drop an atomic bomb that caused cancer in millions and millions of people. We have these people deciding when it is or is not appropriate to deliver humanitarian aid. But the more Brandon talked to the residents in New Orleans, the people he was trying to help and trying to sell them on his politics, the less he could avoid yet another unsettling conclusion. As much as I might want revolution, the residents don't. For instance, Brandon had a plan that he was excited about. When the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, made a grandstanding offer to help New Orleans after Katrina, Brandon wanted to take him up on it. Initially, a lot of residents were cool. They're like, I don't care who helps us. But after a while a lot of them weren't. And it was like, yeah, but we can get money and they can build trailers for you, like Chavez trailers. If the FEMA is not going to give you trailers like they're supposed to by law, we'll get Chavez trailers. And then the US government will look at that and go, gee, this is embarrassing. We better build FEMA trailers for them. And there were like, no, bro. I love my country. It ain't about that for me. My kid's in the military, man. I support my kid in the military. I just want my house, and I want my kids to come back, and I want my grandma's house next door to get fixed. That's all I want. I don't want the Ayatollah buying me any houses. That's OK. I'd rather be homeless. See, these people in the Ninth Ward ain't activists, bro. They ain't going to be activists. Ken Gaspard again. The Ninth Ward resident. You know, at one point, they wanted me to come with them to protest the closing, tearing down of one of the low-income projects. I asked him are you [BLEEP] crazy? 'Cause you know what? They'll look at you and go like, hmm, he ain't from here. But me? I'll be the first one they cart off to jail. But in spite of residents' objections, Brandon went to Venezuela. He and a group of activists flew to Caracas. And Brandon met with an official in the Chavez government to ask for money for Common Ground. And that's when things got weird. So we're in his office and I was just like in heaven, I was like, wow. I'm in this revolutionary country for the people of the United States who are oppressed. And over a period of time, the conversation turned into, would I go with him to Colombia to meet with FARC? The FARC is a communist guerrilla group that's been at war with the Colombian government for more than 40 years, and sometimes kidnaps people. Brandon started to get panicky. What if these guys are working with the FARC and want to kidnap an American with resources, or what if-- I didn't know what the heck was going on. But these guys began to pressure me, and over a number of days and over about a week, they were really laying it on me to go with them to Colombia. What was it they were telling you? Why did they want you to? They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana. And I was like, I don't think so. I don't think I'm going to do that, thank you. And what-- Aren't you a revolutionary? Aren't you a revolutionary? Then what do you care about the danger? Come with us, come-- you should meet these people. I was like, yeah-- Not going to do it, you know? Brandon, it turned out, was not a revolutionary. When push came to shove, he didn't want the violent overthrow of the US government. When Brandon returned from Venezuela, he went back to Common Ground, but it didn't end well. The group was in chaos and having money troubles. Brandon it took over officially as director of the whole operation. And his blunt methods in contempt for consensus led to a mutiny. Around 10 coordinators at Common Ground resigned in protest. Brandon managed to stay in charge and fix some things in the organization. But within six months, he left Common Ground and never went back. Politics. It's politics, you know? We were no more morally correct than the political system of the US government. It was a big realization for me that I was on the wrong track. I didn't see Brandon for three and a half years after Katrina. And so it's strange, to say the least, to meet the former revolutionary in his hotel room in Minneapolis, where he showed me what he was planning to wear to testify against one of the activists he'd informed on for the FBI. This is my suit and underwear. I didn't bring my slacks over. The FBI did not recruit Brandon. He wasn't a criminal they'd convinced to snitch in exchange for a lower sentence. He went to them, but not right away. Coming up. How a revolutionary becomes a spy. 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 on our program of course, we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Turncoats. And we return to Michael May's story about the political activist, Brandon Darby. When Brandon left Common Ground and went back to Austin in the beginning of 2007, he turned toward something quite exotic to him. Ordinary life. He bought a house. His daughter was born. He tended his garden. I just tried to fit back into normalcy. Not being in New Orleans. Not being in the situation I was in in New Orleans. I think at the time, I was having a very difficult time making sense of my views, I guess. Brandon also missed the intensity of Common Ground, and the moral certainty. He had idea for an organization called Critical Response, where he would lead medics into war zones to help civilians caught in the crossfire. They'd go to Lebanon, or maybe Darfur. But instead, one of the acquaintances he made while planning Critical Response, an older man who ran a Palestinian charity, came to him with a very different plan. An idea to put explosives on motorcycles so that they could go through the barricades that were meant for vehicles. Where? In Israel. And I didn't agree with it. And that person went further to ask me to help them funnel money to Hezbollah and Hamas. And I was like, no, I'm not doing this, man. Brandon was going to let it go. But the man started asking other people to do it. People Brandon knew. So he went to the one cop he trusted. Major Bryson of the New Orleans Police Department. His onetime adversary, now ally. It was Bryson who suggested that Brandon tell the FBI. So how do you do that? You just walk into the FBI office? No, you don't-- you could just walk in if you wanted to, I suppose. They'd probably talk with you. But a meeting was set up. He gave me a phone number. I called the number. And then that man brought another agent with him. And we met and had a cup of coffee and talked. And I left, and I drove back to Austin. And It was just a strange experience. And I was really bothered by the fact that I had met with the FBI. I felt like I had done something that I would never be able to tell anybody about. And then ultimately, it began bother me. I was like, well, wait a minute. I just did something that probably prevented people from getting blown up. Who are the people I associate with that if I said, hey, I tried to stop violence, they would be upset with me? And the more Brandon thought about it, the more he remembered how many times he'd come close to violent political action himself. Over the years, he'd been asked by friends to get together and rob an armored car for the revolution. He'd been invited to train to do eco-terrorism. He'd had long, serious talks about committing arson to fight gentrification. He never did any of that. But now, maybe because he'd gotten older and less angry, or because of his experiences at Common Ground and in Venezuela, he decided he needed to take a stand against it. He called the FBI back and volunteered to become an informant. And in my interviews with him, I asked him over and over-- Why go that far? I could see why he'd gone to the FBI in the first place, but to become an informant? To go undercover? Not many people would choose that option. Especially people who just bought a house and had a kid. I ran one theory by him and he didn't react well. My desire is to be a hero. Like that's a really, I feel a kind of a negative way to portray that. I don't think that's a fair analysis, you know? Why is that-- I don't think I want to be a hero anymore than someone who's a firefighter. Are they firefighters because they want to be a hero? Yes. I don't think so. How would you call it, then? I mean you put it like-- I think some people feel a natural desire to stick up for others. Why is this up to you? 'Cause it's in my lap. It's in my lap, you know? That's the deal. Is some people-- But Katrina wasn't in your lap. Well it kinda was in my lap though, that's the thing. Because-- it was in my lap because I had access to buy a boat. And I knew that I had just the right mentality that I was going to go and get my friend. And I knew that nobody was going to tell me I wasn't. And so I did it. That's what I did. And that's kind of been how I've always done things. That's what my brain naturally does, you know? Some people are really good with numbers and they're accountants. My brain thinks of ways to fix things I think are wrong. It was during this conversation, roughly our 17th, that I finally understood. Brandon kept using this analogy. He'd say, if you walked by an alley and saw someone getting beat up, wouldn't you try and stop it? And I thought, well yeah. But how often does that happen? Brandon is always walking by that alley. There some words I get sensitive about, like hero complex. But I kind of think all of us as activists have some degree of that. I definitely know I do, you know? But I think more than that the thing that doesn't feel good is when you could have saved someone and you don't. That sucks. When you can fix something and you don't. When you can't hold people accountable, and you don't. So Brandon's work as an undercover informant for the FBI began. Brandon met David McKay and Brad Crowder, the two guys who were convicted of making molotov cocktails, at a meeting in Austin at the Monkey Wrench Bookstore in February of 2008. A group called the RNC Welcoming Committee was recruiting protesters for the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul. The goal was to shut down the event with swarms of activists, including some using black bloc anarchist tactics. Protesters you've probably seen with black bandanas covering their faces, making human chains, pushing dumpsters into the street, breaking glass. The FBI sent Brandon to the RNC Welcoming Committee meeting to check it out. Brandon thought spying on them was a waste of time, but he says when he got there the group used a phrase that alarmed him. They talked about protests involving "a diversity of tactics." It's a common term used in radical leftist circles in relation to arson. And Brandon says from that moment, it seemed possible to him that something violent might happen at the convention. Not likely, but possible. I think ultimately, there's a lot of bark and no bite with a lot of people. I think you have a lot of people who are very reasonable and rational, as much as I might not agree with the way they do think sometimes, pretty reasonable people. But the thing is, there are always someone who will do it, when the space is created for him to do so and the support network is set up for him to do so. I felt like there would probably be some who would do something crazy even though the majority wouldn't. For the next six months, Brandon spied on guys who were essentially younger versions of himself. Two Texas activists in their early 20s who didn't have college degrees and turned to leftist politics to help them make sense of the world. Brandon identified with them, especially Brad. I related to him a lot. And I related to David McKay somewhat, too. I thought he was probably a pretty decent guy who was getting caught up in some stuff that I would have hoped he wouldn't have got caught up in. My initial reaction to he and to Brad was like I should try to find a way to just get these guys and tell them the people they're associating with it are being idiots. But again that's not the role I was playing. The FBI told Brandon that the role he was playing was to be accepted by the group but not to be the leader. But Brandon had an odd way of trying to pull that off. He became a sort of caricature of his former hardcore activist self. In Brandon's own FBI reports entered in David McKay's trial, he talked about berating David and Brad as tofu eaters who needed to bulk up, saying he was going to the RNC to shut the [BLEEP] down. And bragging that any group I go with will be successful. Brad Crowder wouldn't agree to an interview. But David McKay remembers the meetings with Brandon. We had a lot of discussions about how we need to be-- how he was criticizing us about our physical-- where we were physically. He gave Brad a lot of flack about that because Brad's a very skinny individual. He's not very athletic and stuff like that. And he always, like, put him in a choke hold out of nowhere one time, just to test what Brad would do. And like things like that. Like comments about how Brad specifically, and me too, were kind of like weaklings. Why did you put up with us? Well, we really didn't want to. We really didn't. And we really didn't feel very comfortable about Brandon for a long time, but it always came into play that we had never done anything like this, ever. We didn't want to just be these guys who just showed up without any, like, credentials, or any kind of credit. And like, that's everything that Brandon was. He was the activist guy from Austin. And like with him, we felt like we were legitimate. Being a revolutionary instead of an activist was kind of what he made the situation feel like. That we weren't just going here to protest, but we were coming here to fight for our beliefs. Not just to voice our opinion, but to actually fight. Brandon says that if he was busting their chops, it was because he was trying to discourage them without stepping out of character. In other words, the very things that David says egged him on are the things Brandon says were supposed to stop him. When they talked about their willingness to go to prison, then what I did was begin to tease them about the fact that they weren't prepared to go to prison and probably weren't prepared to make those kind of decisions for themselves. Saying like, you guys have no muscle mass. You would get killed in prison. So yes, I did say things to try to discourage them from doing stuff. And I felt the pull between my role as a person working with law enforcement and my role as just an older person who had some realizations in my life and wanted to discourage people. Was a huge dilemma for me the entire time. It was something that I struggled with the entire time. In August 2008, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Brandon traveled to Minneapolis with David, Brad and a few others in a van dragging a trailer full of homemade shields and other protest equipment. Brandon tipped off the FBI. And as soon as the group parked the U-Haul, the cops raided it and took the shields and everyone else's stuff. David and Brad were angry about the shields. And they didn't want to show up at the protest empty-handed. So David McKay says they made eight molotov cocktails in about 15 minutes with supplies they bought from a Minneapolis Walmart. It was just gasoline in a bottle with little bit of oil and then he duct taped the top. And that's it. Where did you do it? In the bathroom, in the tub. Yeah. No, it is incredibly easy. The fumes were really strong, so right after we went outside. And by that time it was nighttime and we kind of just sat up on the roof and-- He going to get mad at me that I'm going to tell you this but, we talked about-- before we talked to anybody and we were like, I said to him I hope this isn't one of those "when keeping it real goes wrong" scenarios. And we kind of laughed and. No, we were very light-hearted about the whole situation. When word got out to the rest of the activists about the molotovs, they weren't so light-hearted. In fact, they were angry. When we found like, how the group felt about the situation, that impacted us a lot because we're like, well we're going to bring something to the group of people that we'll be able to use and implement. We'll be doing another good thing. We'll be helping them out. When we heard from them, you know, what you're doing is ridiculous, stupid, and dangerous. That made us feel like, well, we need to rethink this. What follows is a depressing series of events, no matter whom you believe. David and Brad never used the molotov cocktails. They left them stuffed in bags in a basement while they went out to protest. But Brandon, on behalf of the FBI, asked David what he planned to do with the molotov cocktails. David now says he didn't want to lose face with Brandon, so he made up a plan. He suggested that he and Brandon use the molotovs that night on a parking lot filled with cop cars next to a checkpoint. If David wasn't serious about doing it, as he testified, he made a terrible mistake by telling an FBI informer that's what he was planning. I didn't want him to think that I was scared. Scared of what was going to happen. Or afraid of him. Brandon, for his part, says he did everything he could to stop David. But again, the way he did it seems as much like goading as discouragement. I told him a lot of times, a number of times that I didn't think it was a good idea. If he wanted to back out, I wouldn't tell anybody. Nobody would know. I did say I'm a revolutionary and if you want to do this, I'll do it with you. But as a revolutionary, I think people should probably wait 'til they're 30 before they make decisions that could put them in prison for two decades. That's what I said to him. I said it over and over again. That he's not old enough to make that decision. And I'm glad I didn't make decisions like that in my 20s I think people should wait 'til their 30. He got very adamant and angry that he was going to do it whether it helped him or not, and I was like fine. And at a point, I let it go. David and Brandon agreed to meet at 2:00 AM. But when the time rolled around, David blew it off. And then he stopped responding to Brandon's calls. At 4:30 AM, David was awoken by a police officer pointing a rifle at him. He was asleep next to a girl he'd met in Saint Paul. It was around an hour before he was going to the airport to fly back to Austin. Since then, both Brad and David have pled guilty to the possession of unregistered firearms, which is what the law calls molotov cocktails. Here's a good one. You're a whore. A few months later, Brandon is sitting at his desk reading emails. Brandon, was curious how much money the FBI compensated you for being a sewer rat. Why didn't you advise and guide your friends towards nonviolence? Why not? Because you must be a brainless, heartless FBI whore. Congratulations on your brilliant career of whoring your soul. I'm kind of envious. Does it pay well to be a whore? It didn't pay well actually, Brandon got a total of $12,750 from the FBI, plus $3,028 in expenses. As a result of his informing, he's been skewered in the alternative press and shunned by many friends. He's gotten death threats. You feel 100% certain that law enforcement was right way to go with this? No, I don't feel 100% certain of anything. It depends on you ask me. You know? It depends when you ask. Sometimes I feel bad enough for them that I don't go to sleep. They made their choices. I made my choices, and we both have things to live with. Here's what Brandon has to live with, as I see it. In one of the first emails he wrote to the FBI after meeting Brad and David. He worried that they might end up as quote "some strange form of collateral damage." I don't think this means Brandon somehow encouraged Brad and David to make the molotov cocktails, as David's lawyer argued, and as activists all over the country now believe. But I do think that if Brad and David had met Brandon as he actually was, not in character, not playing a role for the FBI, but as an older activist and a natural leader who was profoundly regretful over the extremism of his past views. He would have stopped them from making molotov cocktails. And Brad and David wouldn't be facing years in prison. Michael May in Austin Texas. Brad Crowder was sentenced to two years in prison for making and possessing molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention. David McKay was just sentenced this week. Four years. Act Three. "If the Shoe Fits." Well, we end our program today with this story of somebody trying not to be a turn coat. From Etgar Keret, who lives in Israel. I'm going to a mention that so you don't wonder, why is this story happening in Israel? It's read for us by actor Matt Malloy. On Holocaust Commemoration Day, our teacher Sarah took us on the number 57 bus to the Vohlin Memorial Museum and I felt really important. All the kids in my class had families that came from Iraq except me and my cousin, and one other kid, Druckman. And I was the only one whose grandfather died in the Holocaust. The Vohlin Memorial Museum is a really fancy building, all covered in expensive-looking black marble. It had a lot of sad pictures in black and white, and lists of people and countries and victims. We paired up and walk along the wall from one picture to the next. And the teacher said not to touch, but I did. I touched one of them. A cardboard photograph of a pale and skinny man who was crying and holding a sandwich. The tears running down his cheeks were like the stripes on an asphalt street. And Orit Salem, the girl I was paired up with, said she'd tell the teacher on me. I said as far as I was concerned, she could tell everyone, even the principal. I didn't care. That was my grandfather. And I could touch whatever I wanted. After the pictures, they took us into a big hall and showed us a movie about little kids being loaded onto a truck. They all choked on gas in the end. After that this skinny old guy came up on stage and told us how the Nazis were scum and murderers. And how I got back at them, and even strangled a soldier to death with his bare hands. Jerabi, who was sitting next to me, said the old man was lying. And from the looks of him, there wasn't a soldier in the world he could beat up. But I looked into the old man's eyes and I believed him. There were so much anger in them that all the attacks of all the hot shot punks in the world seem like small change by comparison. In the end, after he was finished telling us about what he'd done in the Holocaust, the old man said that everything we'd heard was important. Not just for the past, but for what was happening now, too. Because the Germans were still living, and they still had a country. The old man said he'd never forgive them and he hoped we wouldn't either. And that we should never, ever go visit their country, God forbid. Because when he and his parents had arrived in Germany 50 years ago, everything looked really nice. And it ended in hell. People have short memories sometimes, he says. Especially for bad things. They prefer to forget, but don't you forget. Every time you see a German, remember what I told you. And every time you see anything that was made in Germany, even if it's a TV, always remember that the picture tube and the other parts underneath the pretty wrapping were made out of the bones, and skin, and flesh of dead Jews. On our way out, Jerabi said again and if that old man had strangled so much as a cucumber, he'd eat his t-shirt. And I thought it was lucky our fridge was made in Israel, 'cause who needs trouble? Two weeks later, my parents came back from abroad and brought me a pair of sneakers. My older brother told my mother that's what I wanted. And she bought the best ones. Mom smiled when she handed them to me. She was sure I didn't know what was in the bag. But I could tell right away by the Adidas logo. I took the shoe box out of the bag and said thank you. The box was rectangular. Like a coffin. And inside it lay two white shoes with three blue stripes on them. And on the side it said Adidas Rom. I didn't have to open the box to know that. Let's try them on, Mom said, pulling the paper out. See if they fit. She was smiling the whole time. She didn't realize what was happening. They're from Germany, you know?, I told her and squeezed her hand hard. Of course I know, Mom smiled, Adidas is the best make the world. Grandpa was from Germany, too, I tried hinting. Grandpa was from Poland, Mom corrected me. She grew sad for a moment. But it passed right away, and she put one of the shoes on my foot and started lacing it up. I didn't say anything. I knew by then it was no use. Mom was clueless. She never been to the Vohlin Memorial Museum. Nobody had ever explained it to her. And for her, shoes were just shoes. And Germany was really Poland. So I let her put them on my feet and I didn't say anything. There was no point in telling her. It would just make her sadder. After I said thank you one more time and gave her a kiss on the cheek, I said I was going out to play. Watch it, eh? Dad kidded from his armchair in the living room. Don't you go wearing down the soles in a single afternoon. I took another look at the pale leather shoes on my feet. And thought back about all the things the old man who strangled the soldier said we should remember. I touched the Adidas stripes again, and remembered my Grandpa in the cardboard photograph. Are the shoes comfortable? Mom asked. Of course they're comfortable, my brother answered instead of me. Those shoes aren't just some cheap local brand. They're the very same shoe that Pele used to wear. I tiptoed slowly towards the door, trying to put as little weight on them as possible. I kept walking that way towards Ben Gurion Park. Outside, the kids from Borouchoff Elementary were forming three soccer teams-- Holland, Argentina, and Brazil. The Holland group was one player short, so they agreed to let me join even though they usually never took anyone who didn't go to Borouchoff. When the game started, I still remembered to be careful not to kick with a tip, so I wouldn't hurt Grandpa. But as it continued, I forgot. Just like the old man at the Vohlin Memorial Museum said people do. And I even scored the tiebreaker with a volley kick. After the game was over, I remembered and looked down at them. They were so comfortable all of a sudden. And springier, too. Much more than they'd seemed when they were still in the box. What a volley that was, eh? I'm reminded Grandpa on our way home. The goalie didn't even know what hit him. Grandpa didn't say anything. But from the bounce in my step, I could tell he was happy, too. Matt Malloy, reading the story "Shoes" from Etgar Keret's collection of short fiction that's titled, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, and Other Stories. Our program is produced today by Sarah Keonig and me. With Alex Blumberg. Jane Geltes, publicist. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Andy Dixon. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help by Jessica Hopper. I don't, I don't, I don't want the Ayatollah buying me any houses. That's OK. I'd rather be homeless. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories from This American Life.
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Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches, among other things, the question: How do entrepreneurs get created? And somebody noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you bravely head off on your own. You write a business plan. You start in your own garage. And that garage, by the way, is not a metaphor. Hewlett-Packard started in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Mattel Toy Company, the Wham-O Toy Company. It is about big dreams and humble beginnings and success in the face of adversity and doubters, and also the idea that regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are, you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard. And that was the point in time at which I got interested in the story of the garage as a myth. A garage is a place of possibilities. It's a place where things can get invented and a place where entrepreneurs begin. This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world. In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage. Professor Audia doesn't argue with any of this. But he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else, making contacts, learning the business. So this is a very robust finding, which tells us that actually if you want to become an entrepreneur, the obvious thing to do is to first go get a job in an industry you're interested in and learn, and then eventually, later try to create a company. Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn't own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job's garage. And, for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people, because they introduced him to investors. Pino Audia has tried to find mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much. He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody. The Apple and Hewlett-Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories like it. Google, for example. They did not start in a garage. The founders began working on their search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford. They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998. They already had investors, and they were just in the garage for five months. But in 2006, Google bought the garage as a company landmark. It's like, no one wants to hear the story of the rich, well-connected guys who meet up at the Marriott conference room to hatch a business plan. There's no romance in that. Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company magazine. He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true. For instance, when eBay began, a story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiancee could buy and collect Pez dispensers more easily. Not true. One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005, where two of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, shot some video and then tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then. Now, that is, at a minimum, an exaggerated tale. In fact, there's a third founder of YouTube who claims the dinner party never happened. And Steve Chen later admitted in TIME Magazine that the dinner party was embellished to provide a better founding myth. And I do want to say that while it feels like a little bit of a letdown to realize that this dinner party story is not the whole truth, I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. I mean, here's this incredible site, and in some sense, that's not enough for us. We want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of everyday experience. It's like it's not enough to have the value of their work. We also want there to be a really compelling story that started it. Now, in the article that you wrote for Fast Company, you point out that our attachment to these kinds of mythic creation stories is so strong that we have even exaggerated the Christopher Columbus story. Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his crazy theory that the Earth was round. And, in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the Earth, and they almost mutinied. So there's a guy named James Loewen, a professor at University of Vermont, who has pointed out that virtually every element of this story is false. That, in fact, we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going. There's a lot of disagreement among historians that even Columbus' best-known biographer isn't totally sure where he was headed. And furthermore, there was no element of is the Earth round or flat here. Most people at that time already knew that the Earth was round. The evidence was there for them to see. They noticed that, if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first, and then the mast later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play. And again, here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent, and yet, we want more from this guy. We want him to be having hand-to-hand combat with his crew en route. We just crave the drama. We crave the obstacles. For today on our show: origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. And so today on our show, we bring you three origin stories, true ones. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act One of our show today: Mad Man. Act Two: The Secret Life of Secrets. Act Three: Wait Wait-- Don't Film Me. Act Four: Bill Clinton's 7-Year-Old Brother. Stay with us. Act One. Well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas, a fight over who really came up with those ideas. Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad Julian. All my life, I've heard the hallmarks of my father's achievements. I invented thumb wrestling. That was in 1936 when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock for boys. They already had arm wrestling for the boys and leg wrestling. But we needed another wrestling, and I invented thumb wrestling with the same rules as a hockey puck face-off. One, two, three, go! It just came to you, like just a stroke? Oh, we should use our thumbs? Yeah, it was just a devastating moment. The discoveries kept coming. Shrimp, for instance. I wanted to popularize shrimp in America. In 1941, my father, a shrimp lover, was discouraged that there were only two places on Broadway in New York where you could get shrimp. So then in Biloxi, Mississippi-- and bear with me here, because this story barely makes any sense. So he's in Biloxi, on his way to Mexico with some buddies, and he sees this government boat about to go out to track the migratory path of shrimp. And he talks his way onto the boat by explaining that he loves shrimp apparently, and he goes out on this boat, and they find the shrimp breeding grounds or some such. The rest, of course, is history. Then back in New York, I patrolled Broadway and [UNINTELLIGIBLE], asking for shrimp, shrimp, shrimp! More! And in this way, talking it up, I popularized shrimp. No question about it. That seems like really, really thin evidence that you popularized shrimp in New York. Well, I'm not making any claim on the industry. My dad does make a claim on the word "character," that he came up with the idea to use it to mean a person of unusual or eccentric qualities. You have a character in a play, of course, but it wasn't in common usage as he's a character. And what made you-- do you remember why you started using it? I just shifted it, adopted it. Though Norman Mailer thinks that he developed it, I take precedence. According to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling. Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor. Because as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for boys. And that's the rub. You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff, and it's annoying when people like Norman Mailer take credit. My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling. But he's not going to make a stink if they don't. His real legacy, though, in advertising, that's another story. That, he's willing to fight for, and he has been fighting for it for decades. My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote "Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking." He named Earth Day "Earth Day." It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily. The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. The Marlboro Man is on it and the Energizer Bunny, "Good to the Last Drop" from Maxwell House and the "Keep America Beautiful" crying Indian. But the number-one ad, the top of the 100 list? "Think Small." That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beetle in 1959, and my father wrote it. A picture of a tiny car on a big, white page and some amused self-deprecating copy. That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic it made it onto the TV show Mad Men, the show set in 1960 about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times. In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad. I don't know what I hate about it the most, the ad or the car. You know, they did one last year, same kind of smirk. Remember "Think Small?" It was a half-page ad at a full-page buy. You could barely see the product. I don't get it. At the time, these ads were revolutionary. "In the beginning, there was Volkswagen," another famous New York ad man wrote. "That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born." Here's another scene from Mad Men when Don Draper, the agency's creative director, interviews some new talent. After he looks at their portfolio, he hands it back to them with this line. It's Julian Koenig [PRONOUNCES KOENIG AS KAY-NIG] actually. My father. And what has irritated him for so long is not that he's not recognized for his talent. I mean, the people who write Mad Men clearly know who he is. It's that some of his best work has been claimed by someone else. In my instance, the greatest predator of my work was my one-time partner George Lois, who is a most heralded and talented art director/designer, and his talent is only exceeded by his omnivorous ego. So where it once would've been accepted that the word would be "we" did it, regardless of who originated the work, the word "we" evaporated from George's vocabulary and it became "my." If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois. He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s, like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian. But before that, George Lois worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach, and so did my father. In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy, Fred Papert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL: Papert, Koenig and Lois. George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. "I'm not going to get into a sophomoric [BLEEP] fight with a disgruntled ex-partner," he wrote in an email. I can't say I blame him. I've had mixed feelings about this fight. Of course I want to stick up for my father, take his side. But I've also thought there's something inherently undignified about the whole thing, like it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lois is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962, so I never really paid attention to the details. Until now. Lately, it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly, so I started asking questions. According to my father, it all started with the Harvey Probber account. Harvey Probber made elegant modern furniture, and my dad says he came up with the ad, a beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg, and the line: "If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor," and a piece of copy that went with it that he thought was very good. And a year or so later or a couple of years later, Ron Holland, a friend of mine, came running into my office to say, George is upstairs with a Japanese editorial writer. They're doing an interview with him, and he's claiming your Harvey Probber chair ad, that he wrote it. So I called George down to my office and remonstrated-- that's what men do frequently-- with him. And he says, I never said that. I would never say that. And he went back to his office. And a little while later, Ron comes bursting into my office, saying, George said I told that son-of-a-gun where to get off. Meaning you. Meaning he had told you? Yeah, told me where to get off. So that was really the start of it. In 1972, George Lois published a book, the first of many, about his career called George, Be Careful. In it, he describes going to the Harvey Probber furniture factory in Massachusetts with my dad. "Each chair was placed on an electronic test platform to be sure it was absolutely level," Lois wrote. "'Got a book of matches?' I asked Julian, a heavy smoker. He handed me a matchbook, and I slid it under one leg of the chair on the test platform. 'I've got the ad,' I said. 'If your Harvey Probber chair is crooked, straighten your floor.' Julian scowled and shot back: 'Ass [BLEEP]! If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor.' That was the way the ad ran, and that was the way we built the first red-hot creative agency." And none of that ever happened, as described by George. He didn't ask me for a matchbook. He didn't slide it under the leg of a chair and say, I've got the ad. None of it is true. But his makes a better story. His is a marvelous story. George is a talented storyteller with a vivid imagination. The only thing that could exceed it would be the truth. There were other instances also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. A campaign for the New York Herald Tribune: "Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?" Some famous Xerox commercials showing a little girl operating a copy machine, and later, a chimpanzee doing it, ads several people who worked on the account have complained that George literally had nothing to do with. Then there's the ad for Coldene cough medicine. The page is entirely black with just two quotes at different heights meant to show a couple talking in bed. "John, is that Billy coughing?" says the wife. "Get up and give him some Coldene," the husband replies. In an interview 20 years later, George Lois said, "The idea for the ad hit me like a brainstorm. This was the first time there would be no copy, no package design, no trademark," he said. "It was really the beginning of a new creative revolution. It was one of those ads that made history, effectively." Again, my dad is adamant that the whole ad, copy and design were his. There are many possibilities here of what's going on. George Lois could be lying. Or George Lois could have convinced himself in some way that what he's saying about all this stuff is true. Or my dad could be doing the same thing, remembering stuff that happened when it didn't happen. Or, I suppose, my dad could be lying. I'd worry about those latter options more if my father was the only one disputing George Lois' version of history. But he's not. There's the photographer Carl Fischer, who worked with George Lois for more than 30 years and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers. Carl Fischer says George is taking credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's and talked in detail about certain photo shoots, like about flying to Las Vegas to shoot the boxer Sonny Liston as Santa, and even placing the Santa cap on Liston's head. Or rushing Italian actress Virna Lisi into a photo shoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face. But Fischer says George wasn't there for either shoot. In fact, the Lisi shoot happened in Rome, and he still has the receipts to prove it. And then there's Shelly Zalaznick, the first editor of New York magazine. George once told a reporter, quote: "My hand on the Bible, I, George Lois, created New York magazine." Mr. Zalaznick says that's simply not true. He himself remembers making the first dummy front page one hot August night in 1963. Not only that, he's never met George Lois. As for George's version, he told me, I'm a loss. I don't know why grownups do things like this. But the story my father objects to the most isn't about ad copy at all. It's personal. Papert, Koenig and Lois had gotten the Dutch Masters cigar account, and their TV spokesman at the time was this famous comedian Ernie Kovacs. So my dad flew out to LA to meet him, and they hit it off. And Ernie and I spent the day together, driving around and lunched together, ended the afternoon in the lobby of the hotel I was staying in at the Beverly Hilton. He was not allowed past the lobby because he had short pants on. And then he went off to go to a party that night. And on his way home, it began to rain. His car skidded and went into a pole, and Ernie killed himself. I was on a plane back to New York and learned about it the next morning. So, unfortunate incident, but certainly memorable to me. And lo and behold-- Lo and behold, in his 2005 book $elebrities, which is spelled with a dollar sign instead of a "C" at the beginning, George tells the story of his lovely lunch with Ernie, his car ride to the airport with Ernie, his red-eye flight back to New York, and his learning the following morning from a stack of still-bound newspapers that Ernie had been killed in a car crash. My father has tried to fight back, aggressively at times. For instance, after the Ernie Kovacs story appeared in $elebrities, my dad retaliated in the medium he knows best. He wrote an ad. I wrote an ad: "Low, Lower, Lois." That's Lois, L-O-I-S. And I wanted to print it in the New York Times and say: "A book review. A public service book review." The Times didn't run it, but it did run in Adweek, though toward the back of the magazine, and it got no response. Over the years, he and some of his former colleagues have written to reporters at the New York Times and other places trying to correct the record, but their letters have mostly been ignored. Just last year, a Times story about an exhibit of George Lois' Esquire covers credited him in the very first paragraph with "Think Small," the Xerox ads with the chimp, and a couple of other campaigns people say George either didn't originate or didn't even work on. Finally, the Times printed a short correction, giving "Think Small" back to my dad, but it was a small victory three weeks after the fact. In the mid '80s, my dad wrote a letter to George directly, threatening to sue, it seems, and received a letter back calling him a sad, tortured and tragic figure. All in all, my father's efforts haven't really done the damage he's hoped or really any damage at all. He's an indignant Basset Hound, nipping at the heels of the media's Great Dane. George Lois is a good talker with an engaging personality, and he's become something of a spokesman for the advertising industry. There are quotes in the newspaper and magazine profiles, exhibits, books. Errors printed once are repeated and repeated. So if you look up "Think Small" on the internet, for instance, you'll find it attributed to Julian Koenig, but you're also likely to learn that George Lois wrote it. I like the way he took credit for accounts he never had anything to do with, because that made it almost comical. All the Xerox stuff, Xerox stuff in the account that I got, was done by Sam Scali and I think Mike Chappell, and George at the end started taking credit for that, too. That's Fred Papert, the P of PKL. He was the guy who recruited Lois and Koenig to make a new agency in 1960. Now he's one of the guys responsible for redeveloping Times Square as president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation. He knows the stories all too well: Xerox, Harvey Probber, Coldene, Ernie Kovacs even. It's nuts. I think he's really got a screw loose. I think George truly doesn't know what he's doing. But it's nutty on both sides. Fred's in my dad's camp insofar as he knows and believes my dad is telling the truth. But his support more or less stops there. And he's categorical on this point, that my dad is himself acting like a nut, wasting his time. They've talked about this on rides to and from the racetrack. The reason that Julian should not be fussing about this stuff at this stage is A, nobody gives a [BLEEP]. B, anybody that would give a [BLEEP] knows already what it's about because this is what George does. It's George's thing. They've just got to put a lid on it. But I've had this conversation with him 100 times, and he gets really pissed off, so I know he's got a screw loose, too. Your father can be a pain in the ass, you know. And even be testy if you say to him, Julian, [BLEEP] off already. We've heard this story, and we know about the wobbling chair or the wobbling floor. I've forgotten which one. You have no idea how many letters we wrote to the New York Times, to Advertising Age, to this and that. This is a dialogue between old farts. Julian's in another world from these kinds of things. Julian is one of the great thinkers and creators in the advertising business. If some nutcase claims credit, who cares? And he doesn't even really like me very much. You have to understand that that's where we start. Well, it's true. I think he goes to the races with me because I have a car. My father recognizes that there are only about four people left on Earth who care about this stuff. It's just that he happens to be one of them, and he cannot let it go. I assume if I had a different personality, I would I say I know what I've done. And those dear and near to me know what I have done or not done, and I'm OK with that. But I'm a fallible fellow, obviously with ego of his own, and I resent being burgled. The odd thing about all this, as my older brother John points out, is that my father has never exactly been a champion of advertising. And he never believed he didn't have a-- he wasn't a true believer in the business. I mean, I remember him saying to me as a kid, you know, if you don't find something you want to do and really work at it, you're going to end up like me: a writer of short sentences. That's verbatim. And so, it's a little ironic, you know? Because he didn't care. That's the thing, Sarah. You know, all those years he didn't care, because I think he thought it was beneath him. And the business in some ways was not beneath him but was not serious enough to care that much about. And now he does. I understand why he cares. He's 88 years old now, so his legacy, understandably, is on his mind. And even though he did campaigns for all sorts of good causes-- gun control, nuclear proliferation, Robert Kennedy's senatorial and presidential campaigns-- my father's not quite satisfied with his life's work. Advertising is built on puffery, and, at heart, deception, and I don't think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, even though no matter how well they do it. You're not necessarily proud that you had a career in the field of advertising and that's your legacy, but you are proud that you were the best in the business at the thing you chose to do. I couldn't have said it better myself. If he could go back, choose another career, my father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind, which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did: naming Earth Day. It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it. Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our program. Coming up, a dead man's kid versus the US Supreme Court. That's in a minute. 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, we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show: origin stories, where we go back to figure out where things came from. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, The Secret Life of Secrets. This week, when the Attorney General appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he told them that any day now, he'll be delivering the Administration take on how to change the state secrets privilege. And I don't know about you, but for me, every time this comes up in the news, I have to be reminded what the hell the state secrets privilege actually is in the first place. And every time I read about it and relearn it, I think to myself, oh, right. That's one of those legal things that anybody can understand. Basically, it's this: If you are suing the US Government, the Government can claim that taking your case to court would reveal sensitive national security information. If they do that, simply by making that claim, they can get your case thrown out of court. The judge won't even usually look at the evidence to see if the Government is fibbing. Democrat and Republican presidents have both used this to get all kinds of cases dismissed. Under the Bush administration, this increased dramatically. They got judges to throw out lawsuits regarding the torture and rendition of detainees in the War on Terror, over Guantanamo, over the wiretapping of American citizens. Yeah, well, the state secrets privilege came about as a result of a 1953 Supreme Court decision, US v. Reynolds. This is Barry Siegel, a reporter who wrote about the true story of US v. Reynolds for the LA Times and later in a book called Claim of Privilege. It is very possible that if we could somehow send his book back in time to the year 1953 and let the Supreme Court justices read what really happened in US v. Reynolds, they would have decided the case differently. Some important facts have come to light in the last half century about the case. As a public service right now, in case any of you hearing my voice do someday get teleported back to the year 1953, we present now the true origin of US v. Reynolds. A US Air Force B-29 in October 1948 took off in Georgia to test an experimental navigation system, radar system. Three civilian engineers from RCA were onboard as part of the test team. The plane engines caught fire. The plane crashed over Waycross, Georgia, October 6, 1948. The widows of the three civilian engineers onboard sued the Government: negligence. During discovery process, the widows asked for the Air Force accident report. The Government wouldn't turn it over, wouldn't turn over the accident report. A Federal District judge, a very brave one, William Kirkpatrick, who was hearing the case, ordered the Government to produce the document. He said you can just turn it over to me in private. I'll look at it in chambers. The Government wouldn't hand it over even to the judge to look at in private in chambers. Because the Government would not comply with his order to turn over the accident report, the judge declares the widows the winners in this case by default. An appeals court agrees. It gets to the Supreme Court, whose decision you already know. It overturns the lower two courts, finds in favor of the Government, says the Government does not have to hand over the accident report once it claims that this would reveal state secrets. But understand what happens next. There's an important thing you need to keep in mind about this Supreme Court decision. Keep in mind, in 1953, the Supreme Court in ruling for the Government never itself asked to see the accident report. It voted in 1953 to believe the Government when it said it contained state secrets. And that's the foundation for the whole state secrets privilege in US v. Reynolds. It says that we have to trust the Government. If they can convince us that national security is at risk, then you don't have to even ask for the documents. So they never saw it. No one ever saw the accident report back then. So 50 years passed. The families of these three civilians who had perished in the plane, they tried for years to find out more of what happened on that plane. They never could. The children of the engineers, who really never knew their fathers, always wondered who they were and what had happened to them. One of them particularly, Judy Loether, she was seven weeks old when her father Al Palya died. I knew my father had died in a plane crash, and I knew it was an Air Force plane, and I knew that there was a secret project. This is Judy Loether. Now, of course, she's grown. She lives in a town not far from Boston. The biggest question I had was what secret project were they doing on that plane? I mean, you know, what did my father die for? Over the years, she'd go into little spurts of looking into this. She exchanged letters with a man who had survived the crash. She went through her father's old papers and technical manuals. And then in the late 1990s, she got a computer and started searching the internet. She learned all about B-29s and about the bomb site device that her dad worked on as an engineer. It made her feel closer to him to see pictures of these things that he had made. She printed stuff out. She kept it in a notebook. And then one night in February 2000, she sat down at a computer. And again, my cursor was on that blank box. And I said, well, what do I want to look up tonight? And for the first time, I typed in the combination of B-29 plus accident, and I had never done that before. And the first hit was accidentreport.com. And this page comes up. Accident reports from military crashes from 1918 through 1955. All of these reports had been declassified in the 1990s. And I remember looking at those words and reading them like three times and thinking 1948. Wow! This place is going to have the report of that plane crash? Now, at the time, did you know that this report had been the subject of a lawsuit and that the Government refused to give your mom and the other widows this very accident report that suddenly you're actually able to get from this guy for $60-something? I hadn't a clue. I knew there had been a lawsuit, but that's all I knew. And did you know that the lawsuit turned into this famous Supreme Court precedent? No. I had no idea. Two weeks later, Judy Loether gets mail from him, this accident report that her mom and the other widows had vainly sought 50 years before. And what's interesting about this is that she's kind of disappointed when she pulls out the accident report because she's not looking for the cause of the accident. What she really wants to know is what the secret thing was that her dad was doing on that plane. It was just a way to get to know about her dad. And to her great frustration, when she pulls out the accident report and reads it is that there's no reference at all to the secret project her father was working on. There was nothing in there about the secret equipment or the secret mission of the plane other than the mention that there was secret equipment on the plane. And that, of course, was in the newspapers. Instead of that stuff, what was in the accident report was a stark, very detailed account of Air Force negligence. There was a lot of negligence. This particular B-29 had a history of trouble: fuel leaks, faulty engines. It had been repeatedly grounded. The engines on all B-29s had a tendency to overheat and were supposed to get special heat shields installed to fix that, but this plane never got them. On this flight, the engines caught fire, and the pilot made some errors that compounded that problem and sent the plane into a spin. Disturbed and saddened, Judy thought that she should share this document with other families from the crash, and from newspaper clippings, she learned of another woman whose father died that day: Susan Brauner. When she met Brauner, it was Brauner who told her about the Supreme Court decision. Within a half an hour of when I got home, I was reading that decision. And it was that moment, as I'm reading through the decision and it's all hinging on this accident report which I have, and I'm reading it, and the justices are saying in their decision it's a reasonable assumption that this accident report talks about the secret equipment and the secret mission, and I'm saying no. No, it doesn't talk about that at all. I couldn't understand it. It just really upset me. And then I think the fact that Reynolds was being used over and over again by the Government, it was such an important case, and it was based on this lie. In his reporting, Barry Siegel lists some of the other kinds of cases that have fallen under the state secrets privilege since this precedent was set. "In 1990," he writes, "families of 37 crew members who were killed by Iraqi missiles hitting the USS Stark sued the contractors responsible for the ship's antimissile system. The Government said trying the case would reveal state secrets, and this got it thrown out of court. In 2000, a CIA employee sued the agency for gender discrimination. The Government said trying the case would reveal state secrets, and this got it thrown out of court. In 2003, a senior engineer said a Defense contractor had submitted false test results on an antimissile vehicle. The Government said trying this case would reveal state secrets and got that thrown out of court." And so, Siegel says, "Its disturbing that in the case that made all this possible-- US v. Reynolds-- the Government said that it couldn't turn over an accident report because this would reveal state secrets. But there seemed to be no state secrets at all in the accident report. At that point, it wasn't even a secret that B-29s were having these terrible mechanical problems. It's really interesting, US v. Reynolds based on a lie. The very case that establishes the right of the state secrets privilege is a perfect example of why the Government shouldn't have that privilege. As for Judy, the more she thought about it, the more she was bothered by the fact that the Government's lawyers back in the 1950s must have read the accident report themselves, so they must have known that the Air Force was negligent. But when the lower courts found them negligent and awarded the widows some money, these Government lawyers kept appealing that decision, all the way up to the Supreme Court. That again is disturbing to me, because it's not like they were some corporation. These were three widows whose husbands were dead because of their negligence, but they were going to get their precedent at our cost. So Judy and two other families from the crash went back to the Philadelphia law firm that had originally represented her mom and the other widows back in 1953. And together, they filed a new petition in the Supreme Court. Not asking that US v. Reynolds cease to be a precedent. Too many other cases had agreed with the finding in Reynolds that that wasn't really an option. And the goal wasn't to overturn the state secrets privilege. Instead, they wanted the court to acknowledge that the Government had lied about the contents of the accident report, that the Government had committed fraud before the Supreme Court, and they wanted the court to award monetary damages that should have gone to the widows back then. This gets a little technical into the legal, but the Supreme Court invited the Solicitor General-- The Solicitor General, of course, the administration's lawyer who deals with the Supreme Court. --to respond to this petition. And the Solicitor General's argument essentially said we are not in a position now, us sitting here 50 years later, to know why the Air Force made a state secrets claim. We're not experts, and we can't know what their reasons were 50 years before. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So even though the Supreme Court refused to take this case, can their petition have an effect on the law in some way? Can it be cited? Has it been cited? Yes. That's exactly what their legacy is. I think that they didn't prevail in the Supreme Court. They prevailed in the two ways that they probably most were seeking some effect. First of all, they sure got their story out. And the other thing that they did is that lawyers now involved in litigation with the Government have started to talk about the origins of the US v. Reynolds decision. Now when the Government waives the state secrets flag in court, the other side can get up and say, well, wait a second. And it has happened. I can tell you there was a recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which finally-- one of the few rare ones, which did limit a Government state secrets claim. The court said, in this case, that they wouldn't just take the Government's word about whether there were secrets in the documents being discussed. The Government would have to show the documents to the judges, one by one, in private. In this decision in the Ninth Circuit, which just came out in the last few weeks, there was a footnote in which these appellate judges cited what you and I are talking about today. They cited the fact that US v. Reynolds-- it said the dubious origins of US v. Reynolds. In 2008, Judy Loether testified before Congress. And when Senators Edward Kennedy and then Republican Arlen Specter introduced a bill to regulate the state secrets privilege once and for all, a bill that would tell judges not just to take the Government's word when it claims that a state secret is involved in the case, but actually look at the evidence to be sure that it's true, they cited what happened in Reynolds. This is from the press release, quote: "Recently declassified information about the Supreme Court's leading decision on the state secrets privilege-- US v. Reynolds-- provides an early example of executive abuse of the privilege. That kind of abuse will no longer be possible under the State Secrets Protection Act." A version of the bill came out of a House subcommittee this week. The bill's on the schedule to be marked up next week by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Act Three. Wait Wait-- Don't Film Me. Now, this origin story. Our colleague at WBEZ and the host of the public radio show Wait Wait-- Don't Tell Me!, Mr. Peter Sagal, used to be a playwright. And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright, his most successful play, he says, was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court. And so it was all intellectual arguments and drama and involved the Holocaust and questions of the First Amendment law. And it came to the attention of this producer Lawrence Bender, who is most well known for being Quentin Tarantino's producer. So he produced, among many other movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so on and so forth. Back in the '90s when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie. And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever. I mean, I think in the year 1992, my annual income was $10,000. Yeah, this was the phone call that you wait for. So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15 had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened. Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance, growing-up film, half politics about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the '50s. And I had no-- I didn't know anything about the Cuban Revolution. But one of the things I found out was that everybody involved with it was incredibly young. Castro himself was only 29. They were all 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, these guys up in the mountains with him. And one of the things that actually happened was almost as soon as they took over, the Cuban Revolution, these wonderful young Democrats, freedom-loving rebels from the mountains, started executing people on television. And in my original conception, there were two parallel stories. There was Maria, who I called the central character, who had a rebellious-- more typically adolescent rebellion going against her own parents. And then there was her romantic interest, a character named Josefo, who was a Cuban and was sort of a third-column rebel underground guy, living and working in Havana to undermine the regime, sometimes through violence. And eventually this film did get made and-- It did. It did. It finally got made a bit later, and I'm just going to play a clip here from it. Oh God! I love dancing with him. Did it ever occur to you that that boy might be using you? A nice American girl-- No. -- who can be his ticket out. Please, no. That's not true. You may love dancing with that boy, but there are more important factors here like your family and your future! Why does it have to be either/or? Just because you gave up your passion, why should I? [SLAP] So that's a clip from the film. You want to just let people know the title of the film? The title of the film is Dirty Dancing 2-- colon-- Havana Nights. Now, I have to say, I watched the movie last night. I watched Dirty Dancing 2-- The whole thing? Yeah. There is not a single line of dialogue in that movie that I wrote. So how does a film go from political coming-of-age drama to Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story. Peter writes his film. He turns it in. They ask him to make it more like-- oh, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing? Innocent girl with a semi-dangerous guy? And sometimes I think back on the experience, and I say, you know, I should have said to them, hey, if that's what you want, I'm really not the guy for it. He says each draft got worse and worse. Even he didn't like it. Finally, it was shelved. Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film Dirty Dancing teamed up with Lawrence Bender to make a sequel, and somebody thought of Peter's old script. All the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where, really, unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure at the climax of the dance contest. And then later in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba. I'm just saying that-- What? that I might have to leave? Could happen. But they wouldn't do that. Not if the whole idea is to give people their freedom. Can I ask you what it was like for you to watch the film? For you to sit in a theater and watch the film? It was fine. It was really fine. Because-- Oh, honey. No, no, no. I mean this. Let me put it this way. Before I got that call, this experience had been a failure. I mean, I remember at that time just lying in bed, going, well, I had my shot and I blew it. All I ever wanted was a shot. I got my shot and it failed. I did a bad job. And so then when I got the phone call, it's like, oh, it's going to be made, and it's going to be Dirty Dancing 2. That's a happy ending. That's a much better ending than the ending I thought I had, which was that it was just a disaster. Act Four. Bill Clinton's 7-Year-Old Brother. Reporter Mary Wiltenburg is in the middle of this yearlong series that she's writing for The Christian Science Monitor about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and then resettled in Georgia two and a half years ago. Many of her stories are focused on the older brother, nine-year-old Bill Clinton Hadam. His dad is a big fan of the former president. After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seems to have settled in now, but his little brother Igey is still struggling to understand his own origin story to get his seven-year-old brain around who he is and where he came from. At this point, Mary has spent so much time with these two boys that she is more than a reporter. She's like a member of the family. Here's Mary. Igey calls me on the phone almost every day. Sometimes he leaves messages. First unheard message. Hello, Mary. This is me, Igey, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE] says Bill is going to summer school and I'm not going to summer school. OK, this is me, Igey. OK, bye! In between the messages, we have long chats. I tape most of our conversations because I'm writing these articles about him and his family. And the conversations always seem to start with one of two questions: When can I come to your house? Or when are you coming to my house? Hello. Mary? You almost here? Oh, I'm going to be there soon. I'm in the car right now, driving to you, and there's a little bit of traffic. You're driving now? I'm driving right now. You're coming to take us, though, right? I am, yes. So you know I'm crazy about this kid. He's sweet, nosy, funny. He's been to my house a bunch since I started doing these stories. But the first time he came over, six months ago, he announced to me and my husband and his brother Bill Clinton that from now on, the first grader, formerly known as Igey, would be going by his middle name: John. I'd already known something was up, because that afternoon my husband took Igey to the park. Igey was up on the jungle gym when a girl about the same age called over from the swing set and asked his name, and he got all weird and wouldn't answer her. She thought he hadn't heard her, so she hopped off the swing, came over to the jungle gym, and asked him again, What's your name? Igey got this kind of cornered look and said, I don't know my name. But by later that night, he seemed to have made a decision. He was now John. In our living room, he struggled to type his new name into a video game. J- O- wait, was it J? Or G? Then Bill offered to help. Igey said, I know how to spell my own name. Igey picked up English first and best of anyone in his family. But his teachers say Igey's more confused about where he's from and who he is than other seven-year-olds they've seen. And the charter school Igey and Bill attend is about half refugees, so you think they'd see a lot of this. Teachers say no. Little kids usually realize pretty fast that most people who ask where are you from, they don't want the whole story. And it doesn't really matter if you say you're from Burma, where your parents were from, or Thailand, where you lived in a camp. In first grade, you just pick one and get on with your day. But for Igey, where are you from has never felt that simple. All winter he seemed to be revising his story. First he denied the camp he'd lived in his whole life, hated the word "refugee." Then he started saying he wasn't from Congo, his nationality, or Tanzania, where he was born, or Africa at all. He'd say, I'm from here, or, America. Watching TV, he'd point to rich, white kids and say, That's me. At home, he threw tantrums. At school, he sometimes seemed almost catatonic. He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't meet people's eyes. His parents, his teachers, everyone felt helpless. They didn't know what set him off or how to reach him. And he seemed to regress. If you were sitting on the couch, he'd snuggle up or take my hand. The slightest things made him cry. He seemed lost. One night on the phone, I reminded him where he was born: in Tanzania. I'm from Tanzania?, he said. I'm from Tanzania? Uh-huh. I am? Well, that's where you were born. Yeah, but where am I from? Well, you were born in Tanzania. And your dad came from Congo. He did? And your mom came from Rwanda. So your family has a lot of places where you're from. 'kay. Bye. Bye! Igey's parents didn't mind calling him John. They were just kind of puzzled. The idea that you could hate your name seemed like one more baffling thing about America. They just had no idea what Igey was going through, and it made Igey feel more distant from them. A while back, I was riding with Igey and his parents in their car when he said to me, I don't want to live with my mom. I thought it was a setup for one of his jokes, so I said, You don't want to live with your mom? Why? He said, I want to live with you. I said, No, you don't want to live with me. But then Igey got all serious and said, But what if I forget my language? I said, What do you mean? And he said, If I forget my language, I can't live with them, because they won't understand me. Later on the phone, we talked about what it's like for him talking with his mom. When you speak English, does she understand you? No. So maybe you're learning faster, huh? I just forget it right now. Swahili? Yes. Like what do you forget? Everything. And then at some point this spring, Igey just went back to being Igey. A lot of things happened for him at once. His green card arrived. His reading took off. It took me a while to notice that John had vanished. His teachers don't remember either exactly when he stopped correcting them. But by the last month of school, he was taking his turn in the semicircle with everyone else. No drama, just my name is Igey and I'm from Congo. And suddenly, he was volunteering details about his life in the camp: games he played, his mud brick house. Igey seemed to be making peace with his past and his name, and he moved on to other burning seven-year-old questions. What's bingo nights mean? You know how you play bingo at school? Yeah. It's like a night when a bunch of adults get together, maybe kids, too, and they play a game that's like that, only with numbers instead of words. OK, I'm ready for you. Oh, OK. I'll see you soon. 'kay, bye. Bye. And just when it seemed like Igey had finally accepted his own name, the other shoe dropped. The last week of school, Igey asked me, um, what does gay mean? I told him gay can mean happy, or it can mean when a man loves another man. Igey started sobbing. We were in his kitchen, and he just collapsed against the fridge. Finally, he choked out what was wrong, and it turned out that some second graders had been taunting him: Igey, you're gay. And he told them, that's not a word. It's just one more strike against that name. But for now, John hasn't reappeared. Igey's sticking with Igey. The other day, when we were riding in the car, I said some offhand thing about needing to call my mom. Igey said, You have a mom? I said, Yeah, of course. He could not believe it. How had he not known about this before? This year, it's been hard enough for Igey to put together his own story. The idea that I-- wait, everybody comes from somewhere? It kinda blew his mind. Mary Wiltenburg of The Christian Science Monitor. She's working on a book about Igey, Bill Clinton and their family. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Our production help Randy Dixon. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Thanks today to Bob Folkenflik, Matt Holtzman and Hank Rosenfeld. Pino Audia's research paper about garages and entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show was done with Christopher Rider. Dan Heath, who we also talked to at the top of the show is the co-author of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Barry Siegel's book from Act Two of our show is just out in paperback. Claim of Privilege is what it's called. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International WBEZ. Management oversight for a program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week and says, "I never said that. I would never say that." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI: Public Radio International.
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The prosecutor from a district attorney's office in Boston recently told one of the producers or our radio show that from what he's seen, criminals do not take the fall for each other. He said, nobody willingly goes to prison for a crime to help a buddy. There's too much at stake, he said. The circumstances would have to be extraordinary. So I ran this by this guy named Rich Farrell who's spent a lot of time around the Boston mob while co-writing a book with this mobster named Patrick Nee. And who also wrote a book about his own years committing petty crimes and doing heroin. And Rich Farrell did not agree. He said guys take the fall for each other all the time. He told me about two mobsters, and one of them is a buddy of his. He's convinced both did time for murders they didn't commit. It's believable to him because he's taken the fall. This was back when he was on the streets in the 1980s in Lowell, Massachusetts. He says, one time there was this kid. There was a kid that was a real scumbag. Listen to me, we were scumbags too. But there's different level of scumbags on the streets. We were drug addicts. We weren't going to rob from old ladies, from kids, from people that weren't engaged in the type of stuff we were. And this kid was known for this coming out of the projects down there. They would run over and they would grab the old lady's pocketbook right out of their arms. And just rip it off them and run. So this kid does this to Rich's aunt. And later, the kid is found beat up, badly beat up. And the police accuse Rich of doing it. So the cops must have thought I had cause to do this, but it was actually one of my best friends that I grew up with. He's dead now, Tommy Sparks. I was taken in for it and it came down to my father's friend who was my attorney. He said, to me, Richie, they made a deal. Basically, I had to agree to it. I said, but Gene, I didn't do it. I frigging wasn't even there. The things weren't even there. And he said, hey, Richie-- I'll never forget this-- he said, Richie, did you ever do anything and get away with it? And I smiled and I said, of course. So it was one of those things. The one thing he never would have done he says, is tell them that his friend Tommy did it. That would have been unthinkable. We had that code, that Irish code, that just said, you're not a rat. You don't tell on people. You just take it. It's principle. And I learned it early on. When I was in the seventh grade, 13. I look back, I was 13 years old. We're at a YMCA dance in downtown Lowell. And around 11 o'clock we're cutting back across the city to the Acre, the Irish section, St. Patrick's School was there where we attended school, all the Irish kids. And door's open and Billy Burns had to go to the bathroom. So he went up to the second floor and we went up and Billy had taken one of the urinal pucks and he had put it into the toilet and flushed it. Those little cakes from the urinal? Yeah, those little cakes. And there was water coming out. And we said, let's get out of here. Well, we went home thinking, OK, we're going to make it. No problem. Didn't think anything. The cops came to my door. Wow. That's a real response for urinal cakes down a pipe. Yeah, they came to my door and they said that I was the one who threw the puck down. And so I looked up my father standing there and I knew I was in a lot of trouble. My father had a belt that his father had given him from Ireland, and he used to give us what he called, zebra stripes, because it left these red marks. So he called them zebra stripes. I knew I was in trouble. But I also knew by my father's eye something I was taught early on, there's like this Irish code, unwritten, that you just do not tell on anybody. If you get caught at something, if you're involved in something, you just suck it up. That's part of being a man. So I looked at him and of course I said, well, I didn't do it. But I wasn't going to say who did it and I didn't say Billy Burns was lying. I got a beating that night anyway. And then the next day in school, the nuns took us all in and was questioning us. And I could-- it would have been easy for me to say, I didn't do it. It was Billy. But instead, I sucked it up because I knew if I thought that those zebra stripes were bad, the beaten I would have received from my dad would have been triple-- giving people up. So I was expelled from school, and that was my first lesson in being the fall guy, taking the rap for something I didn't do. Well, today on our program, the Fall Guy, stories of people who take the fall out of principle, and people who take the fall because they just can't figure out any way to get out of it. In other words, willing and unwilling fall guys. Our program today in four acts. Act one, Beat It. Act two, Be Careful Who You Love. Act three, Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough. Act four, Man in the Mirror. In this four acts, it's Mike Birbiglia, Philip Gourevitch, the Planet Money guys and Shalom Auslander. Stay with us. "Act one, Beat It." Sometimes things start happening to you, and then they keep happening to you, and it's only once days and weeks have passed that you realize exactly what it is that's going on. That's what happened to Mike Birbiglia. He recorded this story in front of an audience in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I was a freshman in high school I went to an all boys' Catholic school called St. John's in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. And the first few weeks of school are pretty overwhelming because there are kids from all different towns: Shrewsbury, Worcester, Sutton, Oxford, Milford, Leominster, Milford. One of the things about all boys' schools is that homophobia is almost a religion as opposed to usually where it's just an integral part of a religion. We were constantly calling each other gay. A common conversation would be like, you're gay. No, you are. No, you are. And that would go on for like an hour. And every day when we walked down the hill to soccer practice there was a back and forth between the soccer and football teams that the other team was in fact, gay. And what developed was this kind of all out you're gay war. I found out later that one of my you're gay grenades hit a guy named Joey [? Grigione ?]. Now I didn't know Joey [? Grigione ?], but he was from Worcester. He was tough. He liked to fight. This is going to sound like I'm making this up, but he was like a cross between a white Allen Iverson and a velociraptor. So one day I'm walking down the hill to soccer practice and I'm hit by what feels like a rock on the back of my head. I later found out that it was a fist. Forgot to mention this detail: Joey had rock-like fists. The impact of this immediately knocks me to the ground and I'm on the ground. I'm being hit by these rock fists. And finally, I'm like, I need to run away. I don't even consider fighting back. I'm just like, I need to leave here. This is going terribly. This is the worst walk ever. So he hits me about four or five times. Mind you, he's in full football gear and I am in nylon shorts and shin guards. So if he had wanted to beat the crap out of my shins, no dice. But really, anywhere else on my body is fair game. Particularly my head, which he seemed focused on. I run down the hill and he shouts, now who's gay? And he was right. In that context between me and him, I was definitely the one who was gay. But it's at this point that I realize that Joey [? Grigione ?] actually cared that someone had called him gay. That's what confused me. It never occurred to me that it had any meaning to call anything, anyone gay. I mean, we called everything gay. The football team, some of our teachers, the water fountain, geometry, tuna fish sandwiches. I mean, anything. Anyway I go to practice and I tried to go on business as usual. And that day in the middle of sprints, I start crying. You know, I can't control it. And the coach asked me, what happened and I tell him. And so at this point there's an investigation. And I assume Joey [? Grigione ?] will be punished in some way. I don't know, but maybe suspended. Maybe even expelled from school. But he isn't. He's suspended for one football game. There are things that kids do to each other in high school that if you did them as adults, you would go to jail for sure. If I walked up here and I said to this guy, like, you're gay, and he takes my head and smashes it on the stage, he would go to jail. Not at St. John's. One football game. Which I thought was nothing, but apparently Joey was furious about this. So he sends some other bullies after me because they're watching him at this point. And one day I'm walking back from soccer practice and this guy named Tom [? Bocatti ?] walks up to me and he gets in my face. But there's nothing really to argue about. Because the original fight was based on nothing. It was like, you're never going to call Joey [? Grigione ?] gay again or I'll kill you. And I was like, absolutely. You have my word, fine sir. One day I'm at my locker and this guy Bill Murphy goes, hey, Mike. And I look over and he punches me in the face. Not really hard, but hard enough that it made the punch in the face noise, which is pride swallowing. And he goes, that's for Joey [? Grigione ?]. And I'm like, what! Wait a minute, this guy is smaller than me. And what's sad is I don't even fight back. I'm like, I guess this is what my life is like now. And the next day I'm in the computer lab and I'm writing an article for the school paper about the aviation club and this guy walks in and he goes, Dave Kilroy's looking for you and he's going to kill you. And I'm like, I don't even know who Dave Kilroy is. That's how bad my situation was. I'm the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called, "Aviation Club Soars Into Orbit." And a bully I have never heard of is sending out envoys. One more thing that made this entirely strange, and this might just be funny for me, but there was a dress code at the school. And so in the middle of all this violence everyone is wearing a coat and tie. So these bullies, they look like these low rent child mobsters sent in to discipline people on bad loans. Well, I make it through the winter and I decide that I'm going to stick it out. Like all great underdogs, I'd been knocked down, but I was going to make a place for myself. So I run for class president. And I lose by a lot. And then, I try out for the tennis team. And I don't make it-- by a lot. St. John's just didn't want to participate in my life. And at the end of the year I came up with a different idea, which was to quit. And I ran this by all the adults in my life: my teachers, my parents, my guidance counselor. And what's surprising is that no one tried to talk me out of it. They didn't say those things that you hear in the after school specials. Like, hey, buddy, don't give up. And stick it out champ. Or, don't let them get the best of you, ace. The best of me was off the table, and everyone knew it. Somehow I'd become the fall guy for the entire ninth grade class. I symbolized a certain kind of kid, the kind of kid who everyone hates. So I left. And at my new school, those first few weeks where everyone's getting to know each other, where you're from, what do you like to do, I decided to omit the fact that at my previous school for a year I had been picked on so badly that I left the school. And here's the truth about life that they never tell you in those after school specials. Running away works. Because you know what? The kids at my new school, they never found out. Mike Birbiglia, who starts a national tour in August, going through the Fall from Cape Cod to Los Angeles. Search the Internet for his name for details. "Act two, Be Careful Who You Love." We now turn to a political fall guy, somebody who got blamed all over the world for certain US policies. Somebody that you definitely heard of, but who hasn't made much of a case for herself. Journalist Philip Gourevitch tells her story. There's no law of nature, or even of storytelling that says a fall guy has to be admirable. Just because the wrong person is blamed for something doesn't mean that person's otherwise blameless. I mean, as a rule, a fall guy is not going to be someone who's made all the right choices. Private First Class Lynndie England was 20 years old when she was sent to Iraq in 2003 in the first summer of the war. She was a West Virginia girl, a reservist with the 372nd Military Police Company. At first, the unit was sent to the city of Al Hilla where they had a pretty good time. Al Hilla was calm. They could walk the streets, meet Iraqis, do some tourism. The word was that they'd be going home after a couple months. But then they get sent instead to Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad. Nobody in the 372nd had any training as military prison guards, but that's the work that most of Lynndie England's best buddies were given. England herself was luckier, she was in administration. Officially she wasn't even allowed on the cell blocks. Her job was in-processing. American combat troops were rounding up Iraqis by the hundreds every day and dumping them in Abu Ghraib. England took their fingerprints. She did their retina scans and looked after their paperwork. In-processing had been her job in the unit back in the states too. The year before when the company was on a drill weekend, getting ready to be activated and sent to Iraq, a new guy joined up, Corporal Charles Graner. An ex marine, he'd served in the first Gulf War. England took his papers and in-processed him. Beyond that, she says, she hardly noticed Graner at first. But then she realized he noticed her. He would follow me around he said. Like I smoked and he didn't. He started smoking, so he could get out there in the little smokers group. So he could talk to me. England wasn't used that kind of attention. And looking back, she said, he played me. He courted her with Bluegrass music, her favorite. He bought her clothes and drinks and meals. He taught her how to drive a stick shift. She'd never seen the ocean before, so Graner took her to Virginia Beach. The thing was, Lynndie England was married. That held her back for a while, but she felt stress and disconnection at home. And everything in her marriage was made worse by the fact that she was about to be deployed to Iraq. She talked to Graner about it and he listened. She'd say, I don't need this. And he'd say, well, no, you don't. She'd say of her husband, we're just friends. And Graner would say it back to her. When she said, we're not really compatible as husband and wife, Graner would return it as, you're not really compatible as husband and wife. And England found this steady echo persuasive. Graner, she said, he's really charming. And I was what? 20 years old when I met him. He was 34. When they got together, she didn't mind that he took pictures of her all the time. Even, when he insisted, naked pictures. England filed for separation from her husband and told him she wanted a divorce. It was a heady spring for England with the invasion on TV, waiting to go to war, and love. England and Graner had been a couple for six months when they arrived at Abu Ghraib. Graner documented their whole romance on his digital camera. After the first Gulf War, he told her, nobody had believed his war stories. And this time he was going to have proof. He was never without his camera and that's what he told everyone. He was collecting proof. At Abu Ghraib, Graner was the guard in charge of the night shift on the cell blocks reserved for so-called high value prisoners who were being interrogated by military intelligence and the CIA. While he was there, he wound up taking many photographs of American soldiers abusing their Iraqi wards. Graner posed in a lot of those photographs himself, and he posed England in a lot of them. There were hundreds of photographs from Abu Ghraib. But the pictures that became instantly iconic were the ones that showed naked prisoners in the same frame with American servicewomen. Most famously, or infamously, they were the shots of Lynndie England holding what looked like a leash at the end of which crawled a naked Iraqi man. And the shots from another night, of England pointing and grinning at a naked and hooded prisoner who'd been made to masturbate in front of her. These scenes had obviously been staged for the camera. England, staring flatly in the lens, or giving a thumbs up, is clearly posing for the photographer. The Abu Ghraib photographs eventually exposed the Bush administration's torture policy to the world. But the repellent, kinky weirdness of the images, of Lynndie England and her naked captives, created an immediate and powerful distraction. Lynndie England was portrayed in the press as a sadist, a masochist, an Appalachian hillbilly slut, mentally retarded, you name it. Everybody had an opinion about her. But there was one thing missing from the discussion: her voice. The army placed all the soldiers who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs in custody, then sent to courts marshal. These were the only people ever to be convicted and imprisoned for the president's torture program, and none of them was of high rank than staff sergeant. They never had the opportunity to speak for themselves in public until they began to be released a year, or two, or three later. That's when the filmmaker, Errol Morris, started interviewing them for a documentary movie. And I joined him to write a book from the same material. Lynndie England spoke for nearly nine hours over two days. She didn't feel guilty. In fact, she didn't think she'd done anything wrong. She kept saying, everything we did was just what we were told to do. It was true. The MPs weren't only instructed and encouraged to harm the prisoners in the ways they recorded in pictures, they were commended for it. There were senior commanders coming through the cell blocks pretty much every night to watch the MPs do their dirty work. As Graner took photos of what was going on, he showed them to his superior officers at the prison. Their response was, good job. He even got that in writing from his captain after he knocked one prisoner's head into the wall. So hard that eight stitches were required to staunch the bleeding. Again and again, the MPs were told, these prisoners are the worst of the worst. And as England kept saying, the stuff you see in the photographs is not the real torture that was happening at the prison. What you see is just humiliation, she said, and harassment. That same Fall at Abu Ghraib, soldiers were shooting prisoners who protested the rotten food and overcrowding at Abu Ghraib. Shooting them with live rounds. In some cases, shooting them dead. A prisoner was killed during a CIA interrogation in the shower and Graner and his team were enlisted to help cover it up. There was a night when England heard a prisoner screaming in that shower, a scream so horribly piercing that she was sure he was being killed. So she couldn't get too worked up about the photographs, and she expressed no remorse for her conduct at Abu Ghraib. She was just a bystander there, the night watchman's girlfriend, just lending him a hand with his chores. That's how she saw it. And it made it tough to feel sympathy for her. England fit nobody's political narrative. Not the left's, not the right's. It wasn't even clear that she disapproved of the policy for which she had taken the fall. Take, for instance, the picture which showed her with a naked prisoner on a leash. It wasn't actually a dog leash, it was a cargo tie down strap that Graner used to coax a belligerent prisoner out of an isolation cell. And Graner had handed it to her for all of 30 seconds so he could photograph her with it. Here's what England said when she looked at the photograph. I don't see the infamous picture from the Iraqi War. I just see me. It's just the picture. The first thing that comes up in my mind is just, that's me. And yeah, that happened at the prison when I was in Iraq and that was one of the pictures taken. As far as she was concerned, it wasn't a snapshot of her relationship to the prisoner, it was a snapshot of her relationship with Graner. It's showing that he has power over me. And he wanted to demonstrate that power. At Abu Ghraib, Charles Graner had become Lynndie England's chain of command. Whatever he asked me to do, she said, I'd do it. For her, this story isn't about torture, it's a love story. In the end, Graner moved on from England while they were still at Abu Ghraib. This was a month or two before she found out she was pregnant with his baby. He cut her loose and took up instead with another soldier from the unit, Megan Ambuhl. They're married now, Chuck and Megan Graner. Although he's still in custody serving a 10 year sentence. When England looks at how it all turned out between them, she understands that she was duped by a government that made torture its policy and then punished those who let themselves be seen doing it. Just like a decoy she said. But mostly, she sees herself as duped by Graner. The moment that changed me was meeting Graner. If I wasn't involved with Graner I wouldn't probably be here. I wouldn't have been in that situation. I probably would have been doing admin work. Therefore, I wouldn't have been in the pictures. I wouldn't have been involved in any of that. I probably would have know it was going on, but I wouldn't have been involved and I wouldn't have therefore, went to prison. Or been the poster girl for this war. How do people see me as the villain? I mean, yeah, I was in pictures that showed me holding a leash around the guy's neck. But that's all I did. I was in a picture. I never actually did anything to them. I was convicted of being in a picture. Lynndie England's living back with her mom and her stepdad now with no income and with her three year old boy Carter, whose only relationship to his father is that he looks more like Graner every day. I just want to go on with life. Get a job, raise my son. It's going to be hard for me to get a job because now I have a felony on my record. Plus that people don't want the publicity. I don't think I have a lot of choices. The way I feel right now in my own country to walk down the street is, I'm still scared. Because there's just people that hate me. They feel like we shouldn't have been doing that or we were being inhumane, or whatever their opinion is. At least when I was in Iraq I knew who the enemy was. Here I don't. I mean I go out. I go to Walmart, I go shopping. But it's like I'm always watching my back. I don't like to walk in public. I don't like to walk down the street. I don't like to walk into a room that's crowded because it feels like everyone's staring at me. And people do. They stare me when I'm shopping for food, or something. I got my son with me and I'm concentrating on him. But I know people are staring at me. They know it's me. All I did was what I was told to do. I didn't make the war. I can't end the war. It just doesn't make sense. The government is just putting the blame on me because they can, and they have. I'm over it. I'm fine. You know, I'm not fine with it, but whatever. She doesn't like to remember Abu Ghraib, but it's hard work forgetting. When a memory comes over her she says she thinks about something else, reads a book, watches a movie Sometimes she has nightmares. I don't even talk to my psychiatrist about them. Really? No. Because if I don't think about it, then guess what? Thoughts cause emotions. If I don't think about it, I'm not going to relive it. I'm only going to feel what I feel then. I'm not going to feel anything. So that's what I do, I don't think about anything. I don't want to relive or feel. If I think about it, I mean, it's overwhelming. It's too much to think about. It's why I take medicine, so I don't have the nightmares. Anti-depression, anxiety pills. That and usually my son wears me out. I'm usually exhausted and go to sleep. On the rare occasion that I forget to take my medicine, I usually have nightmares. When that guy was screaming in the shower, I'll hear that in the middle of the night. It'll wake me up and freak me out. I mean, the way he was screaming. It sounded like they were killing him. Just death scream I guess you could call it. Sorry? Like a death scream, I don't know. It was horrible. He was just screaming at the top of his lungs constantly. And you're right like in the next room. It's like it's vibrating your whole body it's so loud. I don't think I'll ever get that out of my head. In spite of the nightmares, when she spoke of the lessons she took away from Abu Ghraib, England went right back to Graner. Learn from your mistakes. I learned from mine. It's like, I don't need a man to survive. Forget him. This is what makes Lynndie England such a frustrating fall guy, her inability to see Abu Ghraib as anything more than the place where she met her own private fate. Yet, the more she talked, the more I came to see her point. She'd gone off to war, proud to be a soldier, and she returned a figure of disgrace on a scale that is really utterly incomprehensible. Her buddies from Abu Ghraib had also been scapegoated. But Lynndie England was the household name. Politicians denounced her, newscasters sneered at her, she got hate mail blaming her for the fact that Americans were being beheaded by Iraqi insurgents. And around the world, her picture holding the leash was splashed on the walls of mosques, stenciled on protest t-shirts, hoisted on signs that bobbed over angry mobs from Tehran to Jakarta. So she couldn't make sense of what all this had to do with her. Can you blame her? I mean, at one level, she's right. Philip Gourevitch. His book about what happened in that prison and in those photos is called, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. Errol Morris's film with the actual interviews with England and the other US personnel from the prison is just really this incredible piece of filmmaking. I cannot recommend it enough. View movies are as ambitious and eye-opening. It's called, Standard Operating Procedure. Coming up, grandma takes the fall. Or that's what a little grandkid wants anyway. 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 we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, the Fall Guy. We have stories of people who are taking the rap for things they were not responsible for, willingly or unwillingly. We have arrived at act three of our show. "Act three, Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough." Our current economic crisis has moved into the beginning of a lawsuit phase. I don't know if that's good or bad. But we're in a situation where people are trying to get somebody else to take the blame, take the fall, and pay up for our financial misdeeds in the last few years. Our economics correspondents on our program, Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson have been looking into this and they have counted so far 196 lawsuits that are simply banks suing other banks. And they have brought some of their findings here into the studio. So, Ira, as you can see, I have a huge pile of documents in front of me. These are just a handful of the lawsuits that are going. There's big, white binders full of boring looking papers. Yes, and this one right here that I took out my stack, this is M&T Bank Corp versus Gemstone CDO VII and Deutsche Bank Securities, and a handful of other people. This focuses on one CDO, one of these toxic asset-- Collateralized debt obligations. Exactly. But what they're saying is that Deutsche Bank lied. That's the allegation. They had made the original mortgage loans, and then they had created these toxic products made up of all these bundled mortgage loans. They knew that a lot of people weren't paying their mortgages. A lot of people weren't even paying the first month the mortgage was due. So M&T's allegation is Deutsche Bank knew that-- And lied to the credit agency. And lied to the credit agencies, and lied to their clients. And lied to M&T. Now has Deutsche Bank responded? They have. They asked a judge to dismiss this out of hand saying let's not even hear the case. And actually, this is one of the only cases out of the hundreds of securities law cases that the judge did not dismiss. It's really hard to get one of these through. So M&T bank is trying to say that Deutsche Bank should be the fall guy for this $82 million? And I understand that there's another lawsuit that you guys have been looking into, which involves Citigroup. Yeah, this is the big one. And in the case of Citigroup, it isn't another bank suing Citigroup. Right, it's the Citigroup shareholders suing the bank that they own shares in. And specifically, it's not all shareholders, it's a subset of shareholders. Specifically, people who bought these shares between 2004 and 2009 in that five year period. And what they're saying basically is, they wouldn't have bought them for the price they paid if Citigroup had been more honest about its financial situation. So they're saying basically, they got tricked into buying Citigroup shares at a higher price than they should have paid for them. And what's the substance of their suit against their own company? At the heart of this complaint is that Citigroup had all these toxic assets. And it's actually the opposite of the M&T lawsuit. In the M&T lawsuit, they're saying Deutsche Bank had a crappy, toxic asset that wasn't worth anything and sold it to M&T. They cheated M&T. This lawsuit is saying Citigroup had these crappy, toxic assets and they kept them. Because they couldn't sell them. And so what they did is they kept them on their own books and then kept on, basically doing this activity for almost a year, where they would appear to sell them, but they weren't actually selling them. They were just sort of creating an off balance sheet company that they would sell these assets to, but Citigroup still had the exposure to these assets. They would create an off balance sheet company? In other words, they would create a company and then pretend to sell it to that separate company. Well, they would sell it to that company, but they owned that company. Right. What they didn't tell people is that they were still responsible for that company. Allegedly. If that company went down, they had to come and take on all of its assets. Allegedly. So that's the allegation anyway. Yeah. This document, which sums up their complaint is 534 pages, and it's just one of many, many documents we have on this lawsuit. I got to say, as far as tables of contents go, I find this one really interesting. It sort of tells the whole story in pretty inflammatory and not very legalistic language. Right. So it starts off, CDOs. What CDOS are. Then it says, defaults inevitable. It goes into schemes. How to make $25 billion of subprime exposure and risks parentheses, "appear to disappear." CDO Ponzi schemes. Wait, wait, wait. These are the stockholders accusing their own company of running a Ponzi scheme? Yeah. OK, so Citigroup CDO Ponzi schemes. Case one, case two, case three. And then it has the continuation and culmination of the Ponzi scheme, citigroup's falsely hedged CDOs. So it's basically alleging that they made these CDOs and then they pretended to hedge them. In other words, pretended to like, basically get insurance against them if they went wrong. But the suit alleges they didn't actually get insurance against these CDOs, so they weren't protected. Citigroup's disclosures were materially false and misleading, omitted material information, precluded any independent assessment of Citigroup's exposure to potential risks. Wow, these people hate Citigroup. Exactly. I mean this is just page three I think. It goes on for another five pages of the table of content. Of the table of contents. Right, exactly. Citigroup's November 2007 disclosures and valuations were still false and misleading. Still is in italics. Then this is one. Citigroup's pre-November 2007, super senior-- that's a type of bond. Super senior valuations were simplistic, solipsistic, and reckless reliance on credit ratings. Quote-- Whoa, whoa, whoa. What was solipsistic? Their pre-November 2007 valuations of these bonds that they had. Were solipsistic? And then there's the whole second part of the sentence, and this is all in italics. Read this in italics. Despite the fact that CDO prospectuses authored by Citigroup stated that such ratings were not reliable indicators of CDO value. So in other words, they relied on the very things that they were saying were not reliable. Don't get these people mad. Yeah, exactly. So when you look at the M&T lawsuit, it's something familiar to us. That's something we can understand. They're lying to somebody about-- They're lying to someone. They're cheating. The Citigroup lawsuit is actually much stranger. But it turns out, much more important. The shareholders' lawsuit to Citigroup is not that you defrauded someone else, it's that you defrauded yourself. That you brought yourself down. This by the way, is part of Citigroup's defense. In their legal documents they say, wait a second. Why in the world would we defraud ourselves? Willingly. Willingly, knowingly, purposefully. Now the argument is the managers, the people they're suing, get a bonus every year. So late 2006, early 2007, they're seeing the collapse coming. But if they put it off a while, they get a little more bonus. Maybe, just maybe, they'll get a lucky break and it won't be that bad, and nobody will ever know that they had all this junk on their books. In fact, in a way, you could say that the lawsuit against Citigroup is, you failed to defraud enough people that you were the sucker. You should have found other suckers to sell this junk to. Wait, I feel like you just lost me. Because you're saying that there was this crappy stuff on the books and somehow the manager should have found a way to sell it to somebody else, so they wouldn't get stuck with it? They should get it off their books. Now, they could get it off their books in a legitimate way. But obviously, they weren't able to sell this stuff. Nobody wanted it. At least anywhere near the price they were willing to sell it for. So a reasonable presumption seems to be that the shareholders would have been perfectly happy. In fact, thrilled, if Citigroup had managed to get rid of this. Right. And then maybe those other people would be suing you, but we wouldn't be suing you. It'd be some other bank's shareholders probably, but not our problem. And what I find really interesting is, if Citigroup had managed to sell some of the stuff off of its balance sheet and sell it to other people, make other people the suckers, it might not have been as bad for the system and for the rest of us as a whole. Wow. You're saying that if Citigroup had been more of a bastard, the economy would be better? I am saying that. I don't think that's even controversial, actually. So here's the way the argument goes. Citigroup was the largest bank, financial institution in the country. It is hugely important to the system as a whole. So if Citigroup goes down, it brings down the rest of the global financial system with it. I mean Lehman almost brought down the global financial system. Citigroup is far, far larger than Lehman brothers and far more systemically important. So that's A. B, they were on the brink of bringing the entire global economy down with them. And the way they got themselves to that position was because of these CDOs that the lawsuit is talking about. So it took all these crappy mortgages, and it took all these like crappy, toxic assets, and it sort of assembled them into one place, which was the Citigroup balance sheet. Which also happened to be sort of the central node of the global financial system. Instead of spreading the risk around the globe, it concentrated it all in the place where it could do the most damage. And of course, we don't know anything, right? I mean, obviously this is allegations in a lawsuit. We're just saying it's really interesting. And these lawsuits are one of the only avenues we have to try and understand what happened. Because the congressional hearings have frankly, not really yet revealed much of substance about what was going on inside the banks. The banks themselves haven't told us an awful lot. Right. And one of the things that seems like out there is there's this sense that surely, something criminal must have been going on. That something this bad doesn't just happen by accident or by random sort of mistake. And so there must have been somebody at the heart of this who knew, I'm doing a bad thing. And these lawsuits are sort of like one of the things that's going to help us figure out if that was actually true. Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg. Their reporting on the economy is a co-production of our show and NPR News. They'r thrice weekly podcast, Planet Money, is at npr.org/money. "Act four, Man in the Mirror." You know how in big families there's often one kid who's the default to get blamed and take the fall when something happens? Shalom Auslander came from a small family, so in his family who would take the fall was usually up for grabs. And he very much did not want it to be him. I was not a brave child. I was scared of heights. I was scared of non-Jews. I was scared of Nazis. I was scared of Arabs. I was scared of ET, the extraterrestrial. I was scared of the black people who lived in the town to the left of us, and I was scared of the Hasidic Jews who lived in the town to the right of us. I was scared of my father. I was scared of God. I was scared of the dark. I was not a brave child. I was eight years old and had a downstairs bedroom and I was afraid to come out at night. The bathroom lay on the far side of the den. And though the agony in my loins was often unbearable, I would rather have died of a burst bladder, then fall prey to the non-Jews, Nazis, Arabs, black people, extraterrestrials, and Hasidic Jews, who were lying in wait beneath the sofa bed next door. And so I spent my nights in the fetal position, in torment, waiting for my kidneys to fail. And wondering what would happen when they did. One day I came home from school to find my mother in the den, opening the sofa bed, and putting on fresh sheets. Grandma Ida is going to be living with us for a while she said. Why? Grandma Ida had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few months earlier. And as the disease was progressing rapidly, she was no longer able to take care of herself. She needs our help said, my mother. Grandma Ida was my father's mother, 4 feet and 10 inches of compressed fury and discontent, wound as tightly as the silver hair bun on the top of her head. She came to our house and scowled. She scowled at me, and she scowled at my brother. She scowled at the food my mother cooked. And she scowled at my father for scowling at the very same food she had just scowled at. I had a recurring dream about her. It is Sukkot, the Jewish feast of Tabernacles. Grandma is sitting next to me. She looks at me and scowls. Why don't you finish your meat, she says. I'm not hungry, I reply. Your mother worked hard to make that. How come you're not eating it then, I ask. And with that, Grandma scoops me up in her arms, carries me away from the table, and throws me down the stairs. You can come back up, she says, when you learn some respect. I had a dream about her, I said to my mother. Oh, she said, pulling on the pillow cases. She threw me down the stairs. Why? Because I didn't finish my dinner. Stop being ridiculous, said my mother. Your grandmother, she added unconvincingly, loves you. Noodles looked up and growled. That dog, my mother said, is a ticking time bomb. Noodles was my white, curly-haired poodle-something mix. I was the only one in the family that understood Noodles, and he was the only one who understood me. I loved Noodles not just because of who he was, but because of who he hated. Noodles hated my father. My father was a frightening man, with broad shoulders, thick fingers, and a short temper. But Noodles didn't care. Noodles growled when my father came home. He growled when my father walked across the room. He growled when my father got up to go to bed. Lousy mutt, said my father, closing his bedroom door behind him. Good boy, I whispered. That dog, said my mother, is a ticking time bomb. One week later, Grandma Ida moved in. My mother had explained to me that Alzheimer's is a degenerative disease, which affected parts of the brain. Grandma couldn't remember my name, or the name of my siblings, and she was wearing a diaper because she was losing control of her bowels. She looked even smaller than I remembered, and as I watched her struggle up the front steps of the house, my fear of her was replaced with sorrow and pity. Hi, Grandma, I said, giving her a hug. Don't hi me, said Grandma. And stop pulling. Whatever parts of my grandmother's brain the Alzheimer's was affecting, it clearly hadn't yet spread to her scowl lobe, or her central anger cortex. She scowled when she saw her room, scowled when she learned that I would be sleeping next door. A strange man like that, she complained. And scowled when my mother served dinner. How are you feeling, Grandma?, I asked passing her the potatoes. Laugh now, she said, you'll die soon too. Then we'll see who's laughing. That night I had a dream about her. It is Sukkot, the Jewish feast of Tabernacles. Grandma is sitting next to me. She looks at me and scowls. Then comes the scooping, then the carrying, then the throwing me down the stairs. I woke up. It was late and my heart was racing. And as usual, my bladder was bursting. I tip-toed to my bedroom door and looked across the darkened room to the bathroom that lay beyond. I thought for a moment that I would be safe crossing the room with Grandma there. But it took her five minutes to get out of bed and the Nazis would be finished with me in just one. Perhaps it was the opening of my door, perhaps it was a breeze coming from the window, but as I was turning to go back to bed I noticed a faint pee smell. She was, I thought to myself, an old woman. Accidents, I realized, happen. A little extra pee I figured, wouldn't hurt anyone. And so as Grandma Ida lay sleeping just 10 feet away, I stood at the edge of my bedroom, pulled down my pajama bottoms and peed on the orange shag rug that covered the den floor. I was not a brave child. I woke the following morning to a soft hissing sound coming from next door. Watch where you step said my mother. She was emptying a can of Glade air freshener into the air. There was a pail of water on the rug beside the spot where I had peed the night before, along with an old scrub brush and some rags. What happened?, I asked. Your grandmother had a little accident, she said. That's all. What kind of an accident? An accident, that's what Kind Get some breakfast, you'll be late for school. She took off her rubber gloves and followed me upstairs. Grandma was in the kitchen scowling at her oatmeal. Good morning, Grandma, I said. Says you, said Grandma. Noodles growled. That dog, said my mother, is a ticking time bomb. I was deliberate. I was careful. I never peed on the same spot two nights in a row. I peed as far away from my bedroom door and as close to Grandma's bed as possible. Every so often, I simply stood at my door and swiveled my hips, sprinkler style, so that the location of the pee could never be accurately identified. This whole house smells like a god damn toilet, said my mother. She's an old woman, I said. She bought some air fresheners with names like lavender meadow and orchard nectar Carpet Fresh, and spent Sunday morning cleaning, and scrubbing, and blotting, and dabbing. But the house still smelled like a toilet. It smelled like a toilet someone had stuffed with flowers. She bought my grandmother new diapers. Now with elasticized legs, said the box. For greater comfort and security. And she covered the mattress with an absorbent deodorizing mattress pad. I began to enjoy the peeing. It wasn't just that it was the perfect crime, it's that it was the perfect justified crime. My father was violent, my grandmother was bitter, my mother was manipulative, and I had a weak bladder. Peeing on our house felt good. It felt right. I'd wanted to pee on our house for some time, and it soon occurred to me that there was really no reason I couldn't pee in other rooms too. Grandma wasn't restricted to the den. I could pee anywhere she went. And so I did. During breakfast, during dinner, while they were downstairs watching TV. I peed in my sister's room, I peed in my parents' room, and I peed in the dining room. To avoid suspicions, I even peed in my own bedroom a couple of times. The house may have smelled like a toilet, but for the first time, in a long time, I felt happy. And then one day, less than a month after Grandma arrived, I came home from school to find my mother waiting for me in my bedroom. We need to talk, she said. About what?, I asked. About Noodles. Noodles always met me at the door when I came home from school. And looking around, I noticed he was missing. Where is he? I asked. Your father took him. Took him? That dog, said my mother, was a ticking time bomb. Took him where? He's been peeing on the floor, said my mother. He has not. Who was it then? It was Grandma, I said. Grandma wears diapers, said my mother. It was Noodles. And he nipped your father again. Where did he take him? I demanded, my eyes beginning to fill with tears. He took him to the pound, she said. He'll find a new home and we'll find a new dog. I don't want a new dog, I shouted. It was Grandma. I threw myself on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and cried. Noodles, I wailed. Noodles. My grandmother stopped at my door and I looked up at her, tears running down my cheeks. What is that racket, she said. why is this [? meshugana making such a racket? He misses his dogs, said my mother. Grandma waved her hand as she shuffled away. Filthy animals, she said. I watched her go and a powerful rage grew inside me. OK, I thought. Now it's personal. It wasn't just that they had punished the wrong person, it was that they had punished the wrong, wrong person. Sure, OK, yes. I was peeing on the floor. But Grandma was peeing in her pants. The only one not peeing where he wasn't supposed to was Noodles, and now he was gone. I drank. I drank water, I drank soda, I drank lemonade, I drank tea. I peed in the den, I peed in the kitchen, I peed in the foyer, I peed on the carpeted stairs. For the first few days my parents still blamed Noodles. That damn dog, my mother said. Scrubbing her way down the stairs. You see what he did to this house? But when new pee spots continued to appear, it was clear to everyone that a grave miscarriage of justice had been done. The peer was still in the house. I drank and I peed, and I drank and I peed. And then, one day, I came home from school and Grandma was gone. We need to talk, said my mother. About what, I asked. About Grandma. My mother's sighed and explained that they found Grandma a home where she could get the care and attention she needed. Can we get Noodles back? I asked. It's in Brooklyn, said my mother. Nice of you to ask. Can we get Noodles back? It's not that simple, she said. And then she explained what happens at the pound to dogs that get returned. And to dogs that nip. And what the expression "put down" means. And I felt the strength drain out of my legs and I sank onto the couch and buried my face in my hands. Hey, she said rubbing my shoulder, we'll get another dog. What had started with pee on the carpet had ended with blood on my hands. I was angry at Grandma, but I didn't want them to put her down too. I thought about being brave, about owning up to what I had done. But I wasn't brave. I knew my father would kill me, and then there'd be three dead bodies. And so I took a deep breath, told my mother I wanted to get a big dog this time. And together, we went upstairs for dinner. Shalom Auslander is the author of several books, including most recently, Foreskin's Lament. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help of [? Andy Dixon. ?] Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who swears that he will not take the fall. It was not him who stole the plagiarism copy of Car Talk's Greatest Hits. But I didn't do it. I frigging wasn't even there. The things weren't even there. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories on This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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There's an old saying that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. And not many lawyers actually try it, but people like you and me apparently do, lots of us non-lawyers. The number's actually kind of shocking. In New York State alone, 1.8 million people represent themselves in court in a typical year. It's nine out of ten litigants in Housing Court, three out of four litigants in Family Court. So many amateurs gumming up the system that, years ago, the State decided to open up help centers, 23 of them all over the state, like this one in a courthouse in downtown Manhattan. That's one of the three law school interns who are here giving advice today. And if you heard him say that and you thought to yourself, I don't know what summary judgment means either, I just want to say to you me too. Which is kind of the point. These are amateurs being sent in to do something that is technical, and full of jargon, and totally intimidating. In criminal cases, you can get a free court-appointed attorney, but any other kind of case, housing, family law, credit issues, small claims, bankruptcy, civil cases of all kinds, you are on your own. And the reason that most people represent themselves is they just can't afford an attorney. So the number's been increasing as the economy's gotten worse. At this particular help center, which specializes in housing court cases, people wait in long lines and a big government room with green linoleum floors. One guy is so confused that he thinks that he's here to get a free lawyer to take his case. He fills out a form and then he takes it to the receptionist. One of the attending court attorneys here, one named Ruth Sharfman, told one of our producers, Sean Cole, that, understandably, people have a lot of misconceptions about what is in the law. I mean, some of them are almost-- well, they can't evict me, it's winter, you know? You don't throw people out New Year's Eve, but yeah, they can't evict me, I have a baby. It's like, watch them. They have to give me six months' more time to move out. No. They don't have to. And then there are the people who come in terrified because they get a notice and think the Marshall's going to throw them out that afternoon. They don't realize they can't do it. They have to take you to court. You know, but they come in thinking well, don't I have the right to a lawyer? And the answer is yeah, you have the right to a lawyer. What you don't have is the right to one you don't pay for. As you might expect, some lawyers and judges hate these amateur lawyers. Imagine being a surgeon and having somebody in the operating room in a key position who doesn't know the names of the instruments or what they can do. The legal term for representing yourself in court is a Latin phrase, pro se, which means on behalf of himself. And so today, on our radio show, we have four very dramatic stories of pro se people, people brave enough-- or desperate enough, actually, in most of these cases-- to become their own advocates. One of them does that in a courtroom, the others do it out in the world. From WBEZ, Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Act 1 of our show today, Psycho Dabble. Jon Ronson has the tale of a teenager who simply has to outwit professional psychiatrists, and a lot of them. Act 2, Disorder in the Court, in which I talk to a prosecutor who has lost to an amateur who was defending himself. Act 3, Swak Down, in that act a brother does what he has to to help his sister. Act 4, Underling Gets An Underling. Stay with us. Act 1, Psycho Dabble. Jon Ronson, in London, has this story of a guy named Tony who has spent years representing himself trying to prove a case with some people who think he's crazy. Literally. I first heard of Tony three months ago when I was having lunch with a Scientologist called Brian Daniels. Brian runs the British office of an international network of Scientologists called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. They're determined to prove to the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped. Brian and I shared a mistrust of psychiatry. Admittedly, his loathing was deep and abiding and I'd only had mine for a few days, but it gave us something to talk about over lunch. When dessert came, he put down his spoon and he said, "You should meet Tony." "Who's Tony?" I asked. "Tony's in Broadmoor." said Brian. I put down my spoon. Broadmoor is Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital. It was once known as Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. This is where they sent Ian Brady, the "Moors Murderer," who killed five children in Manchester in the 1960s. And Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women in the 1970s. And the Stockwell Strangler, who murdered seven elderly people in 1986. Broadmoor is where they sentence the serial killers, and the pedophiles, and the child murderers, the ones who couldn't help themselves. "What did Tony do?" I asked Brian. "Tony," said Brian, "is completely sane. He faked his way in there, and now he's stuck. Nobody will believe he's sane." "What do you mean?" I asked. "He was arrested years ago for something." said Brian. "I think he beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. So they sent him to Broadmoor, and now he's stuck. The more he tries to convince the psychiatrists he's not crazy, the more they take it as evidence that he is. Do you want me to get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?" I automatically started thinking about what I'd do if I had to prove I was sane. I'd like to think that just being my regular, sane self would be evidence enough. But I'd probably behave in such an overly polite, and helpful, and competent manner, I'd come across like a mad butler with panic in his eyes. Plus it turns out that when I'm placed in an insane situation, I tend to get crazier. Recently, I was mid-air on a plane with no leg room. And it was so packed and claustrophobic, I let out a loud, involuntary yelp. I shouted, "Eww!" I didn't know that such mysterious, crazy noises existed within me. Did I want to meet Tony? I looked at Brian. "OK." I said. My mistrust of psychiatrists began the previous Monday when I was at a friend's house and I happened to notice on her shelf a book called, DSM-IV-TR. I've been told that many Americans have heard of this book, but it was new to me. My friend explained that it was the psychiatrist's manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. It was huge, some 900 pages. And I later found out that it sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and it lists every known mental disorder. While flipping through it, I instantly diagnosed myself with 12 different disorders including, but not limited to: Disorder of Written Expression, which is poor handwriting; Arithmetic Learning Disorder, which has luckily been cured since I bought a calculator; and Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being pursued or declared a failure. All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street whilst yelling, "You're a failure!" I closed the manual. I never realized how unbelievably nuts I was. Or maybe I wasn't nuts at all. Maybe the American Psychiatric Association were the nutty ones. I wanted to find a critic of psychiatry, someone who'd studied its irrationalities, so I could test this new theory. So I did a Google search and found Brian and the CCHR. And that's how, two Saturdays later, I ended up in a car with Brian heading towards Broadmoor in Crowthorne, a village to the west of London. Although Brian's group had been quietly helping Tony with his various legal tribunals to try and get him out of Broadmoor, they hadn't yet introduced him to a journalist. I was to be the first. The visitor's center, housed behind high security fence, after fence, after fence, was painted in the calming hues of a letter complex: peaches, and pinks, and pine. The prints on the wall were pastel paintings of French doors opening onto beaches at sunrise. The building was called The Wellness Center. Brian said the attorney would be a minute because it's a bit of a walk from the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder unit. I looked at Brian. "Is Tony in the part of Broadmoor that houses the most dangerous people?" I asked. "Crazy, isn't it?" laughed Brian. Patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been nailed to the ground. They all looked quite similar to each other: quite docile and sad-eyed, overweight, and wearing loose T-shirts and sweat pants. I suppose there's not much to do in here but eat. They drank tea and ate chocolate bars from the dispenser with their parents. I wondered if any of them were famous. "Oh, here's Tony now." said Brian. I looked across the room. A man, who looked to be in his late 20s, was walking towards us. He wasn't shuffling like the others had, he was sauntering. His arm was outstretched. He wasn't wearing sweat pants, he was wearing a pinstriped jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, like someone on The Apprentice, a man who wants to show everyone that he was very, very sane. And, of course, as I watched him approach our table, I wondered if the pinstripe was a clue that he was sane, or a clue that he wasn't. He shook my hand and sat down. "So Brian says you faked your way in here." I said. "That's exactly right." said Tony. He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man. "I'd committed GBH," he said, "grievous bodily harm. After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, I'm looking at five to seven years. So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, 'Easy. Tell them you're mad. They'll put you in a county hospital. You'll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.' "But they didn't send me to some cushy hospital. They sent me to bloody Broadmoor." "How long ago was this?" I asked. "12 years ago." said Tony. I involuntarily grinned. Tony grinned back. I wasn't allowed to tape Tony, which is why you're not hearing his voice. But I've had several long conversations with him now, in person and over the phone. I didn't want this story to cause him any more trouble with the authorities, so I decided to change Tony's name. I asked him to choose a name, and we decided on Tony. Tony said faking madness to get in was the easy part, especially when you're 17, and you take drugs, and you watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know how authentically crazy people behave, you just plagiarize the character that Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist that he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter is a bullet from a gun. And if you receive a love letter from him, you'll go straight to Hell. As more psychiatrists began visiting Tony's cell, he broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange, and the David Cronenberg movie Crash, in which people get sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes. He even told one psychiatrist that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal, a tidbit he got from the book about the serial killer, Ted Bundy, that he found in the prison library. As Tony told me his story, Brian sat next to us chuckling, dryly, at the lunacy of psychiatrists. I didn't know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients all around us, Tony did seem completely ordinary and sane. "They took my word for everything." Tony said. Tony said that the day he arrived at Broadmoor, he took one look at the place and realized he'd make a spectacularly bad decision. He urgently asked to speak to the psychiatrists. "I am not mentally ill," he told them. Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them that you're crazy. He found that when you try and act sane in front of people who believe that you aren't, you get self-conscious. Your smile seems too wide. Psychiatrists like to scrutinize body movements, so he had to calculate how to walk like a sane person, even how to dress like one. He said that he was fully aware that when he decided to wear pinstripe to meet me, he was taking a risk. The look could go either way. "I thought the best way to seem normal," he said, "was to talk to people normally about normal things like football and what's on TV." So that's what he did at first, but in Broadmoor everything is open to interpretation. One time, quite early on, he happened to tell a ward nurse, "Did you know that the US military is training bumble bees to sniff out explosives?" Tony had seen an article about this in New Scientist Magazine. Later, when he read his medical notes, he saw that someone had written, "thinks bees can sniff out explosives." At the time, Tony thought that being helpful and polite and volunteering to do things like weeding the hospital garden would be his ticket out of there. But the tactic failed. "They saw how well-behaved I was." he told me, "and they decided that I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital. And this proved I was mad." I instinctively didn't believe Tony about this. It seemed too absurd. But later on, he sent me one of his psychiatric reports and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is cheerful and friendly," the report stated. "His detention in hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition." It even mentioned weeding the garden. So, after a while, Tony stopped being well-behaved. In any case, he really wasn't fond of hanging around rapists, and pedophiles, and child murderers. It was unsavory and also quite frightening. "I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and the Tiptoe Through the Tulips Rapist on the other." he said. The Stockwell Strangler, his name is Kenneth Erskine. "Kenny's OK." said Tony. "He's-- well, I was about to say he's a harmless character but, clearly, he's not." Tony smiled. "One time I grabbed him from behind and put my arm around his neck, and I said, 'This makes a change, doesn't it, Kenny? You're not often on this side of the fence, are you mate?' Anyway, they didn't like that at all. They said I had no understanding that, that wasn't a funny joke." Tony started withdrawing to his room a lot to avoid his criminally insane neighbors. He said on the outside this would be a perfectly understandable position, but on the inside, it demonstrates that you're withdrawn and aloof and you have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, not wanting to hang out with pedophiles is a sign of madness. Eventually Tony devised a radical scheme. He realized that if you engage with the therapy, it's an indication that you're getting better. And if you're getting better, they have a legal right to detain you. So Tony deduced that if he took no therapy at all, he couldn't get better. He'd be deemed officially untreatable so they'd have to let him go. The problem was that, at Broadmoor, if a nurse sits next to you at lunch and makes small talk, and you make small talk back, that's considered engaging with therapy. So Tony had to tell them all, will you sit at another table? And that's when they decided he was really going nuts. The patient's behavior is getting worse at Broadmoor, said one report. He does not engage. And his tactical refusal to engage showed him to be cunning and manipulative. To top it off, he was suffering from cognitive distortion because he didn't believe he was mad. Tony was funny for most of my two hours with him, but towards the end he got sadder. "I arrived here when I was 17." he said. "I'm 29 now. I've grown up in Broadmoor, wandering the wards of Broadmoor. This is supposed to be the best years of your life. I've seen suicides. I saw a man take another man's eye out." Tony said just being here can be enough to turn someone crazy. Then one of the guards called out a word. It might have been time. And with barely a goodbye, Tony immediately shot from our table and across the room to the door that led back to his block. All the patients did the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute, good behavior. Brian's organization, the CCHR, has a museum on Sunset Boulevard called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. One of their spokespeople is the former Cheers star, Kirstie Alley. The DVD, which I watched when I got home, reveals a catalog of unbelievably horrible abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists throughout history. -After slavery was abolished, psychiatric racism not only persisted, it intensified. At the outset, it was very convincing. Here's the American physician, Samuel Cartright, identifying in 1851, a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom of this disorder was the desire to run away from slavery. The cure was whipping the devil out of them as a preventative measure. Here is archive of the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient's eye socket sometime during the 1950s. Freeman would travel America in his loboto-mobile, it's a sort of camper van, enthusiastically lobotomizing wherever he was allowed. -Hacking apart his patient's brains on stage or sometimes right there in the vehicle. Here's a psychiatrist actually electrocuting a kitten. Well, you see black and white footage of a kitten being electrocuted. And the inference is that the pair of hands responsible belongs to a psychiatrist. By this point in the DVD, I wouldn't put anything past those bastards. -Psychiatrists commit one third of the sex-related offenses committed by doctors. The DVD, eventually, spirals into a big, anti-psychiatry conspiracy theory. Psychiatry is responsible for 9/11, The Holocaust, Columbine, and its ultimate secret master plan is to enslave the world. The commentary says in every city, every state, every country, you will find psychiatrists committing rape, sexual abuse, murder and fraud. A few days passed. Then a letter arrived from Tony. This place is awful at nighttime, John, he wrote. Words cannot express the atmosphere. I noticed that the wild daffodils were in bloom this morning. I felt like running through them, as I used to in my childhood with my mom. This is when I got to see Tony's files. It included them in the package. They confirmed all the crazy stories he'd told the psychiatrists back in '98 when he was trying to get out of a prison sentence. It also included a description of the crime he'd committed. The victim was a homeless man, an alcoholic, who happened to be passing. He apparently made an inappropriate comment about one of Tony's friends. Tony, who was drunk, and stoned, and 17, kicked him seven or eight times in the stomach and groin. He left him, walked back to his friends and had another drink. He then returned to the man, who still lying motionless on the floor, and he head butted him and kicked him again. He kicked him again, in the face, and walked away. I felt the ground shift slightly under my feet. I remember that list of the movies Tony plagiarized to demonstrate that he was mentally ill. One was A Clockwork Orange, which begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he was on the floor. My phone rang. I recognized the number. It was Tony. I didn't answer it. A month passed. Then an email I'd been waiting for arrived. It was from Professor Anthony Maden, he's the head clinician at Tony's unit. Tony had given me his name. Anthony Maden wouldn't agree to go on tape, but he was happy to answer my questions in writing. Tony, the email read, did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison. I felt a huge surge of relief and warmer towards Tony again. But next line in the email wasn't so great. It said, most psychiatrists who've assessed him, and there have been a lot, have concluded that he is not mentally ill, but suffers from a psychopathic personality disorder. I looked at the email. Tony's a psychopath, I thought. Tony rang again. I didn't answer. I emailed Professor Maden. Isn't that like that scene in the movie, Ghost, when Whoopi Goldberg pretends to be a psychic, and then it turns out that she actually can talk to the dead? No, he emailed back. It isn't like that Whoopi Goldberg scene at all. Tony faked mental illness. Mental illness can include symptoms like hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn't come and go. That is how the person is. I wondered what the difference was between a psychopath and a sociopath. And the answer is, there isn't really one. The terms are, pretty much, used interchangeably. A psychopath is someone who doesn't have the part of the brain that provides conscience, and empathy, and remorse. Professor Maden said faking mental illness to try to get a cushy hospital sentence is the, typically, deceitful act of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was the act of someone whose brain had gone wrong. He wrote, of course, you can always argue, as with any mental disorder, that the very concept is invalid. But if one accepts that there is such an entity, Tony has it. He added that if Tony had just agreed to have treatment, he'd have been out years ago. But, he said, claiming you're untreatable in order to get out is typical of a psychopath. Tony swears he isn't a psychopath. He says he feels lots of remorse for what he did, but when he expresses remorse, psychiatrists claim it's part of a psychopath's make up to say they're remorseful when they're not. He says when he faked mental illness back in 1980, he must have stupidly included some fake psychopathic stuff in there too. He says trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill. But I didn't feel quite so persuaded by Tony now. His story didn't seem like such a darkly absurd catch-22 situation anymore. I felt I persuaded by Professor Maden instead. And I think I would have continued feeling that way about Tony if I hadn't spoken to Professor Sashi Sashidharan. If you give me just a second, John, I will just look at what I wrote down at the time. Professor Sashidharan is an independent consultant psychiatrist who's met Tony lots of times. Brian put us together. And when I phone him, he seemed quite reluctant to talk at first. "Are you a Scientologist?" he asked me. He sounded a bit tongue-tied. "No." I said, equally tongue-tied. "Are you?" "No." he said. We both relaxed. Professor Sashidharan told tell me that, at one point, Tony was seen as one of the most dangerous men in Broadmoor. But Professor Sashidharan said he wasn't surprised that a young man would behave this way. In fact, the diagnosis of personality disorder should not be made in somebody who is as young as 16 or 17 because, you know, it's too early to say. Unfortunately, in Tony's case, the other reason why he attracted a diagnosis of personality disorder so quickly was that there was no longer any evidence of the mental illness doctors thought that he had once he came to Broadmoor. He was not getting treatment for any mental illness. The original symptoms, that the doctors thought they had identified when he was in prison, had all melted away. So they could no longer argue that he had a mental illness, therefore, he should be in hospital. So personality disorder diagnosis is quickly available to then justify his detention in a psychiatric hospital. And that's an honestly held view, it just happens to be the wrong view, in my opinion. Would you have a message for somebody who's just committed some grievous bodily harm and they're thinking, maybe I should fake mental illness because I bet it'll be more cushy in a hospital than in a prison. What would you recommend they do? Unfortunately, it's a far too common occurrence for young people to claim-- well, not just young people, many people-- in my experience with speaking with these individuals, without exception, all of them will regret it, getting into a psychiatric hospital, because it's very easy to get into these places, but much, much more difficult to get out of those places. Brian and I visit Tony one more time. Brian says he has a question he wants to ask him. Tony's not wearing the pinstripe this time, but he's still dressed a lot better than the other patients. He sits down. Brian leans forward. "Do you feel remorse?" he asks Tony. "My remorse," Tony immediately replies, "is that I've not just screwed up my victim's life, but also my own life, and my family's life. And that's my remorse. All the things that could have been done in my life, I feel bad about that every day." At this moment, Tony does sound to me like a man with remorse. And I decide, on the spot, that I will not talk to any more psychiatrists because I don't want them changing my mind about him again. Brian says Tony's story demonstrates that no two psychiatrists can agree on anything, and they, basically, just make it up as they go along. I think his story demonstrates that it's a huge mistake to screw with psychiatrists. And you should be careful not to tell people you're crazy because you might turn out to be way too convincing about it. Tony's life might be about to get better. Professor Maden emailed to say Tony's been in Broadmoor far too long for a crime that was not the most serious. And he's hoping to move him down to a nicer, medium-security unit. And then, maybe, even a community placement. I thought Tony would be happy about this, but when I ask him, he says he'll believe it when he sees it, and they've been talking about this kind of thing for years. And then a guard calls time. And with barely a goodbye, Tony obediently rushes across the Wellness Center and is gone. Jon Ronson, he's putting together this story and others into a new book that'll probably be called The Psychopath Test. Another of his books, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is about to be released as a movie starring George Clooney. Act 2, Disorder In The Court. So there are tons of non-lawyers representing themselves in court, everywhere. But the one area where nearly everybody uses a lawyer is criminal cases. So it's rare for a non-lawyer to defend himself in a criminal matter, and it's even more rare for him to win. Well, back in April, a man named Jorge Cruz went into court on a drug charge: possession with intent to distribute. He admitted to the jury that he was a heroin addict. He fumbled around. He swore in court, and he won. He was up against an experienced and capable prosecutor who has won over 500 cases in the last five years, an Assistant District Attorney in Albany, New York named Francisco Calderon. When we called Calderon to invite him onto the radio show to talk about the case, he laughed and asked why couldn't we have him speak about one of the many cases that he's actually won? But he was game to come on the air and discuss what happened in this case. We weren't able to reach Jorge Cruz. Francisco Calderon says, initially, he was pretty confident about winning this case. Initially, you would think that this is going to be a slam dunk, and it became a little more uncomfortable as we went along. Now, let me ask you to review the evidence against Jorge Cruz. What'd you have? Certainly. Basically, the police had received a call for a woman being held against her will. Upon arriving at that address, they found the woman, who was there voluntarily. But at same time, they encountered two men that were there with her, Juan Cruz and a Jorge Cruz. Upon entering the room, they observed what they believed to be drug paraphernalia. At that point in time, they secured all the parties, went and applied for a search warrant, and then executed a search warrant on the hotel room. This is a Motel 6. Underneath one of the mattresses, they discovered in excess of four ounces of cocaine and a couple bags of heroin. What was the street value of the drugs? Wholesale, you're talking about maybe $5,000. If you broke it down to individual doses, you could go easily up to $10,000 to $15,000. When this went to court, early in the case, Juan Cruz-- who is Jorge's brother, by the way-- and the woman from the hotel room, both, pled guilty. And that left Jorge Cruz, who declared that he would be defending himself, which suddenly made it a harder case for the prosecutor. When it was all three of them together, the prosecutor could argue that all three of them possessed the drugs together and convict them that way. But now Jorge Cruz could get up and say it was the other two, it wasn't him. His defense was that listen, I'm a user. I could never afford that amount of cocaine. I was just there to party, and not for the cocaine, but for the heroine. And so, basically, it was more of a sympathy, feel sorry for me, type of approach: that he had no money, he had no transportation, so he could never have possessed that amount of cocaine. He was going to spend time with his grandkids that morning. And I'm not a lawyer, I'm just here because I want to tell you my story. Now he cursed while he was serving as his own lawyer? Sure. I mean, there were times where the police had tried to link different pieces of evidence to him, and his attitude was like, that's bull [BLEEP]. Oh, excuse me. Sorry about that. We can beep that out. [LAUGHS] Sorry about that. Holy cow. I've read that, in cases like this, the pro se lawyer often turns to the prosecution for guidance. And I wondered if there was any point where he turned to you for guidance, or where you found yourself coaching him on the right way to do something? No. Not at all. In this particular case, the judge had an attorney sit with him. And did that person actually give him a lot of advice? I don't know if he gave him a lot of advice. He gave some pointers as to what to do at different points in time of the trial. But I believe that Jorge Cruz had in his mind what his defense was going to be and, basically, he just flopped around. And my goal was to try to keep him intact, as much as possible, within the bounds of the law. What do you mean it was your goal to keep him intact? Explain that. Well, there's certain things you can and cannot do in the courtroom. If a person is representing themselves, they're not going to abide by the rules of evidence. And my goal was to try to make sure that he didn't say things that would prejudice the case. What were some of the things that he started to say that were improper that you had to stop him on? Well, he would ask, like, one of the co-defendant witnesses, "Do you think I'm guilty?" or "You knew that I wasn't using drugs." So you can't phrase questions that way or talk to the guilt or innocence of his standing. When it's time for you to tell your portion of the story, it's when you're actually testifying, not when other witnesses are testifying, which he did throughout the whole trial, basically. So how many times did you have to say objection? Oh, easily 50 times. I mean, there's only so much that you can do without being the bully. Obviously I don't want to give the impression to the jury that I'm trying to push this guy around. And this really gets to the heart of your problem in prosecuting the case. You don't want to seem like an ass cutting this guy off all the time, over and over, to the jury because that'll lose the jury's sympathy. No question about it. And it's a fine line. I tried to explain to the jurors that I'm not trying to prevent Mr. Cruz from telling his story, but there's a way that you can tell it. Damn. Like a prime example of one thing that stands out to me that he said was, "You know, I'm going to have to do 10 years in prison for this." That never comes out at a trial, the amount of time or exposure that someone may get for the commission of a crime. Right. It's a separate part of a trial. First you determine guilt or innocence, and then you figure out the sentence. That is correct. But when a defendant, while testifying, blurts out that I could do 10 years for this crime, it has an effect upon a jury. You cannot un-ring a bell. Was there any particular moment where you just thought, oh man. Suddenly where you thought, I might not win this, this is going bad? There was a moment, and it wasn't until after closing arguments that-- I wasn't sure if I had connected with the jury in the manner that I was used to connecting with them. And as soon as I sat down and the judge began to give his instructions, I felt it. There's a feeling, and it's very difficult to put in words and explain. No. No. I understand. You feel like you have their attention. You can tell they're with you. No question about it. And there is something, there is a connection that you're able to form. Whereas, in this particular case, I felt that there was a lack of connection with the jury that I've had in the past. Do you think if Cruz had a lawyer, it would have been easier to convict him? Absolutely. Absolutely, because I don't think there would have been that stigma of the DA pushing and pushing. When you have an opposing counsel, it's expected that there is going to be give and take. Right. If you're up against another lawyer, it's like watching two boxers box each other. And, like I indicated, there's expected to be give and take. And in this instance, there really was not, and there's nothing sympathetic about what I'm doing here. Did you know what the court-appointed attorney was going to do as his defense? Did he talk to you about it afterwards? I'm sure it would have been along the same lines, they just would not have taken the same approach. I think he would have been a little more cautious in trying to limit Mr. Cruz from testifying, I think. Wait. You're saying that a professional defense attorney would have not wanted him to talk too much because he wouldn't have wanted him to seem like a big drug addict or something? Correct. And that turned out to be the thing that probably won him the case. Well, again, had it been with an attorney representing him and he took the stand, he would not have been able to testify throughout the trial as he did. Well, in a way, he won exactly the only way that he could win. He won based on a personal appeal, by just winning people over with his personal story. Yeah, but that's the part that's so troubling here, because I don't view him as a person that would win someone over. So that's a troubling part of this whole case in that he didn't have that warm personality that could make a juror want to gravitate towards him. And maybe some of the jurors could maybe relate to him, but that's the most difficult part of this case for me in that I didn't find him to be a sympathetic figure. I just still haven't fully grasped that. Was it galling to you that you could be beaten by an amateur? Well, certainly. I mean, I have a great deal of pride in what I do, so to say that I wasn't a little miffed at it or unhappy would be an understatement. Certainly, I was not very happy about it, and to this day I'm not happy about it. Francisco Calderon is an Assistant District Attorney in Albany, New York. Coming up, a student teacher decides to forgo all the rules and administer frontier justice that he invents on the fly. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This is This American Life from Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we feature a theme. We bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, pro se: stories of people representing themselves in all kinds of troubles in court and out of court. We've arrived at Act 3 of our program. Act 3, Swak Down. This is a story recorded on stage by Jeff Simmermon at the storytelling series The Moth. We're going to hear the story, and then Jeff Simmermon's going to come into the studio with me. A warning to listeners: there's nothing dirty or anything in the story, but some of the content might not be right for little kids. So it's some time in college, and I'm going through that first big break-up that everybody goes through, that sort of marks their transition into adulthood. And I'm just sitting there on my bed. And I've got my face in my hands and I'm listening to The Smiths over and over again and just torturing myself and just going, "ooooh." And my little sister comes into my room and sits down on the bed next to me. And she just gives me this huge hug. She puts her arms around me, and she takes a Kleenex out, and dabs my tears, and said, "Jeff, listen. Bitches gonna come and bitches gonna go. But you've been there for me since the day I was born, and that kind of love, that's forever. I'm gonna love you till after you are dead, and I am not lying." For real. And then, she continues and says, "And I just wanted you to know that I have always hated that bitch. And if you want, I'll be happy, more than happy, to go around to her crib and whip her ass with a dog chain one time. You just say the word." I just took the hug. What you need to understand is that we have the same parents. We grew up in the same home. She was in the 9th grade. Because while I was off at college studying art and listening to Sonic Youth, she and her friends were on another track. And she was invited to join a gang, but we've never been into group things, she just freelanced. And she and her friends used to break into rich people's houses. And they would drink 40s, and take pictures of it, and leave the 40s and whatever, and just leave. And her boyfriend at the time, his winter coat and his mustache had this inversely proportional size relationship where his coat, sort of, advertised a faraway hockey team and he had this nasty little weasel penis draped across his top lip. And just something in his eyes was that dangerous combination of weak and predatory. And so I was working as an art teacher at her high school as a practicum thing in order to graduate. And I'm walking down the hall one day, and I hear the laughter that I was very accustomed to hearing from back when I was in high school. And I see her boyfriend and some of his similarly parka'd friends shoving somebody into a locker. And they're just shoving him, and laughing, and shoving him, and laughing. And I get up to them, and I'm just kind of sheep-dogging kids off to class. And I'm like, what is this bull [BLEEP]. Go on! Go to class! Go! Go! Go! And I look, and the kid that they're shoving up against the locker is my little sister. And she has that look on her face, that I know so well, where her jaw is really set and her eyes are huge and wet. And she is definitely not crying. She is fine. And having been responsible for that look in the past, I know what it takes to provoke that. And I was like, are you OK? Are you OK? Do you need me to do something? And she's like, "I'm fine! [BLEEP] I gotta go! [BLEEP]!" and then just leaves. And I just, instantly, burn with a white-hot rage. And I have all sorts of elaborate and horrific revenge fantasies that involve roping the dude to the back of my bumper and dragging him up and down the highway. Or covering him with gas and setting him on fire, whatever. And it's very difficult to teach that day. And I don't know what to do, but this aggression will not stand, man. I gotta do something. And then I'm coming back from my planning bell, and I'm coming up the stairs, and I see him standing there on the stairwell. And the window is open, and he's looking out the window. And he's got this dopey little smile on his open mouth. And the breeze is playfully ruffling his mullet off of his shoulders. And I get up to him, and I just drop my hand on his shoulder, and I spin him around and I say, "Hey, man! I saw you in the hall with my sister." And then I run out of plan. Because I've been spending all day daydreaming about all this awesome, cinematic stuff I want to do and not really figuring out what would happen if I actually got to confront him, which is weird since we're in the same building all day. And I can't think of anything. I'm just pulling him in closer. And I look him in the eye, I was like, "I saw you in the hall with my sister." And I want to bite his lips off and just spit them on the floor. And I can't exactly do that, so I just give him a big, long kiss right on the mouth. And I keep my eyes open, and I lock eyes with him. And I can feel his mustache against my back lip. And the whole time I'm thinking, dominate and intimidate. And I pushed him back. And I was like, "Um, look, it's cool." I can't think of anything to say. And I was just like, "You can come over whenever you want. I look forward to seeing you around. Goodbye." And split. And I just kind of go home. And later that night, my sister came home. And they had met up after school and had a big fight. And they'd broken up. But she looked at me, she said, "Mother [BLEEP], are you out of your rabid-ass mind? What were you even thinking?" And I said, "Jess, bitches gonna come and bitches gonna go, but you have been there for me since the day you were born. And that kind of love, that is real, and it is lifelong. And I'm gonna love you till after you are dead. And I am not even lying, for real." So Jeff, for a minute, joins me in the studio. Jeff, your story raises some important questions, and I want to go through those with you right now. First of all, why the kiss? It was all that I could think of at the time. I was very limited in what I could do, you know? Had I pursued violence-- this is the kind of guy, he rolled around with a crew. Drive-bys happened in my hometown a lot. And had I beaten him up like I wanted to-- I don't really know how to beat people up-- he could have come back later with some sort of drive-by scenario. Or he could have taken his bruises, or whatever, to the administration, I could never teach again. So I had to do something that was completely off the map. Could we talk about the moment after you kiss him? Sure. Were you just as surprised as he was? Yes. Possibly more so. Did you know you had this in you? No. And how did you feel after you did it? Did you feel like, yes, score? No. I felt terrified. I felt that I am past the point of no return right now. And whatever happens, there's no counsel for me. If you had to summarize in a sentence your message to him with that kiss, like why you chose the kiss, what would you say? You've opened the lid on forces that nobody knows how to deal with. Close the box and step away. So with this kid, you decide you're going to take the law into your own hands. You're going to be the one to fix this. You're going to set this right. What if you had tried to protect her in a more traditional way? You know, go to one of the other teachers, or the principal, and just get him suspended or expelled or something? Because it wouldn't have worked. He wouldn't have cared. He didn't come to school enough for a suspension to be a meaningful change in his life one way or the other. I think he wouldn't have gotten the message. I don't think he would've gotten it. I think life would have continued unabated. He may have continued dating my sister, or may have continued shoving her around. Nothing would have stopped. Nothing would have changed. There had to be change. Jeff Simmermon, he does other stories on his blog, andiamnotlying.com. That's and I am not lying, all one word. Thanks, as always, to The Moth, which uses personal stories told live in front of an audience. For more Moth stories, check out the Moth's great, free, weekly podcast at themoth.org. And The Moth is starting its own radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, which will be coming to many public radio stations this August. Act 4, Underling Gets An Underling. This is the story of somebody in a job that sounds like the kind of thing that would be, sort of, exciting. Stef Willen worked on a bunch of reality TV shows, but she was a production assistant, a PA, which is the lowest rung on the ladder. She did a lot of emptying trash cans. I remember running around town with the weirdest lists of stuff to get, like toilet paper with a specific pattern on it. I've had one boss, she would do things like ask me to hang curtains in her office. And I was like, "Oh, but your wall is made of concrete." And she was like, "Oh, you can do it." You know? Stuff like that. I would be given these bizarre tasks, and if you didn't do them right, there was always this sense of are you stupid? And so the way understand it is that towards the end you came up with a plan. Can I ask you to just describe the plan that you came up with? I just thought it would be hilarious if I came in the next day with an eager young person who was my production assistant. Oh. So you would be a PA and you would have your own PA. Exactly. Which is really unnecessary. It's a gopher with a gopher, so I don't know. I wanted to make a point. It'd just be like a little sweet revenge, you know? Right. I don't know. No. No. I understand. You'd be upsetting the natural order. Right. Totally. It's like, if you can get someone under you, it's simple math, but you are not at the bottom. I just knew that I was somehow taking control over what was happening in my life if I could put someone just right under me. So, OK. So you're a PA hiring a PA. How'd you go about it? I wrote up a Craigslist seeking a production assistant on a popular reality TV show. For the ability, I said must possess a medium work ethic, the ability to take out trash, and then sit for hours and work for free. And 21 people responded. 21 people. I was amazed. I ended up going with this guy, I'll call him Adam. It was interesting, I hired him because I actually felt like he might be slightly delinquent. When we had our, quote, unquote, "interview," he never turned down his car radio. And it was that kind of thing. And I'm like, OK. Well, we're going to meet at the coffee shop and we're going to drive to set. "OK." I'm like, "Do you want to get out a pen and a paper and write this down?" "Oh, OK." Oh, wow. So he's really a real beginner. Like, he really was not necessarily ready for the responsibility of a-- Of a phone conversation. Yeah. Or a job. Yeah. I met him at a coffee shop. And he was this nice looking young guy. And he was wearing this argyle sweater and this scarf and a beret. And I was like, "Oh, my gosh. What did I just do?" A beret? A beret. Yeah. He followed me in his car to set, and I was getting a little nervous because I actually hadn't planned anything past this point. The first person we see is the line producer, and she was frantic, as always. You know, "Come on. Come on. We've got a big day. We've got to get going." And I said, "Oh, well you'll be glad to know I have some help. This is Adam, and he is my production assistant for today." And she just sort of stopped and looked at me. And she goes, "Well, good. We need the extra help." And there was no Stef is a genius. Or, oh look what Steff did. It was, literally, like oh, thank you. Oh, we need the help. How did you get him to work for free? And so you did introduce him to your bosses? Yeah. I introduced him to everybody. I mean, I don't know why I thought that they would learn something from it, but I totally underestimated I guess, the joke, but also their need for workers. They were in production mode. They're not stopping to look at what I'm trying to say. They're like, OK. Well, we're 10 minutes behind. We can use Adam over here in hair and makeup. So you were hoping that they would get the lesson of, you see, this whole system you have is so arbitrary? And, we're not just cogs in a machine. Like, I could be a boss. And the lesson they took was not only are you all cogs in a machine, but you're such a cog, we can't even see that you're talking. Like you're not even an animal making noise here. Like, OK. Now, hand me that other animal over there. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, oh, two cogs for one. Awesome. We'll take this one, you know? I went from his boss to his sidekick to, I don't know, his buddy? I'd be like, oh, I got this trash can. So it would be really gross and disgusting, and I'm like, oh, I don't want to mess up his scarf. I made sure he ate first. Like, he got his lunch before me. At one point, we were all sitting around the table. We'd been sitting staring at each other for about two hours, because they were filming, with nothing to do. And I looked over at Adam, and he had taken his beret off and it was on his knee. And he was, sort of, slouched down, and he was moving M&M's across his plate, one by one, with his index finger. And I think he said, "I have never not done anything for this long a time." And I was like, "Well, you know, it did say in my ad the ability to sit for hours." And he laughed. But shortly after, I told him to go. I was like, "Well, you know, you did a great job today. Definitely send me your resume." He kept in touch, like, he would email, do you know so-and-so? Or just little questions, you know? And then, at one point, he stopped asking me questions. And I got this text from him at 8:26 AM, and it said, "I want you." Period. "I want your body." Period. "Right now." Period. And I was like, OK. What did that say to you? That he had not taken me seriously at all. So you got him into your life because nobody else took you seriously, and then even he doesn't take you seriously. Right. It just, sort of, made me laugh. I thought, OK. Well, he wants my body right now, which, 8:26 AM, that wasn't a good time for me. Stef Willen, she has quit her PA jobs. She starred in the independent film, M, which won last year's Seattle International Film Festival, and she's writing a book. Well, the program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our Senior Producer is Julie Snyder. Our production help from Andy Dixon and Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our Production Manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. And this is our last show with our very precocious intern, Andi Dixon, who we all wish the best to, whether she ends up in grad school, or a job, or what's most likely, both. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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The way that I always heard the story was that Van Halen had something in the contract that they used when they toured that said that everywhere that they went-- in every city, in every dressing room on their tour-- there had to be a bowl of M&Ms, and that the brown M&Ms had to be removed. It's kind of a well-known story, I think. And the way that I understood it is that it showed what divas rock stars could be, that any whim that they had would have to be met, no matter how petty. You hate brown M&Ms? Poof, they will cease to exist in your world. And then a couple of years ago we had this band, They Might Be Giants, on our radio show. And by the way, you're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. Anyway, we had this band on the show. And I got to know them a little bit. And I had never talked to a touring rock musician about that story. And I remember John Flansburgh saying to me, no, no, no, no, no. I had the meaning of the story totally wrong. I think there was only one no, Ira. This is John. I asked him to come and talk about this with me again today, here on the radio. He told me that the music industry name for what we were discussing was the contract rider. The thing that the average rock fan doesn't realize is that in the itinerant life of somebody in a rock band, they're relying on a promoter-- probably a different promoter every day-- to give them everything. And a contract rider is, basically, the entire show from beginning to end. I mean, you're talking about personnel. You're talking about the PA. So a lot of it is very prosaic stuff. People really focus on the dressing room stuff. But actually most of it is just making sure that there's, literally, enough electricity in the venue so that the show doesn't end after 10 minutes. And this, Flansburgh says, was what was so ingenious about the brown M&Ms. Van Halen had this huge setup with lots of gear. And if the local promoter didn't carefully read the contract rider, stuff could collapse. It could be dangerous. So the brown M&Ms were like the canary in the coal mine. The contract rider said that brown M&Ms were not supposed to be there. If they were there, look out. It was a very clever way to make sure that all the specifics of his contract rider were going to be met, including technical requirements, safety requirements, all the things that David Lee Roth is probably more worried about than his actual M&Ms needs. Yeah, actually in his autobiography he writes this. I found this on snopes.com. He explains the M&Ms this way. David Lee Roth writes, "Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into third level markets." Tertiary markets is the word we use. Tertiary markets. "We'd pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks full of gear in places where the standard was three trucks max. And there were many, many technical errors, whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese yellow pages, because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in Article number 126 in the middle of nowhere was, quote, 'there will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area upon pain of forfeiture of the show with full compensation,' end quote." So he writes, "When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, line check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to destroy the whole show. Sometimes, literally, life threatening." Wow. Now when I e-mailed you to see if you wanted to come on the radio and talk about this, you said, oh, that's really a coincidence. Because you had just spent your whole day yesterday working on your contract rider? Yeah, we're going out on tour for two months in the fall. And basically a couple of days ago, I was looking at the contract rider, which was 25 pages long, this crazy, Frankenstein document that-- there was some really odd vestigial stuff. I actually found we have all these personnel requirements for loaders, and electricians, and fly riggers, and all these people. There are 30 people that the promoter is going to hire on our behalf. And they have very specific job descriptions. But in only half of them did we require that they be sober. Wait, your contract for some of them says specifically they have to be sober? It was such a hodge-podge that in some cases-- what had happened is we had had a bunch of loaders that had come in from another show the night before that had ended at 5:00 in the morning. And they came into our show at 7:00 in the morning to, literally, do another show. And they all got drunk in the couple of hours in between. So in our contract rider we said, the loaders have to be sober. But unfortunately, the way a contract reads, it looks like you're kind of implying that everybody else can be drunk. And no one had ever thought to cross it out. Is there an M&Ms clause in your contract? It's such a personal thing. It's like asking somebody what's in their medicine chest. There are no M&Ms on our-- We have like hummus, and tabbouleh, and like a lot-- I mean, you would think it was Sarah McLachlan the way our contract rider reads. I mean more is there an M&Ms clause, is there a thing in your contract that you put in there to be sure that people read the contract? I think the first line of our contract is, "The promoter needs to call our tour manager when he gets this rider." That's basically-- just getting good communication going-- rather than bullying and threshold tests-- is the way we do it. And so if you don't get the call you know, all right. Yeah. And believe it or not, oftentimes they don't call. They've got other things to do. Well today on our radio show we have stories of the fine print. We dive into the fine print, in places where the fine print really, really matters. Act one of our show, Side Effects May Include-- Nancy Updike has the story of fine print happening at a place you might never suspect it. Act two, Occupancy May Be Revoked Without Notice. In that story, David Rakoff brings us the fine print that could fix what therapy fails to. Act three, Restrictions May Apply. We visit the place that is like a factory for our nation's most notorious fine print. Act four, May Be Hazardous To Children. Susan Burton rereads the fine print that changed her childhood. Stay with us. Act one, Side Effects May Include-- A confession is not supposed to have fine print. It's supposed to state this is what happened, this is what I did, all very straightforward. But of course, all kinds of confessions come with asterisks attached. This first story is about a confession that was given in Iran in the Fall of 2004, when things were actually a bit freer than they are right now. Nancy Updike tells what happened. At 30 years old, Omid Memarian, a journalist in Iran, went where he wanted, talked to whomever he felt like talking to. Reformists, hardliners, foreigners, the vice president of the world bank, why not? Political debate in Iran was robust. Omid's view was, he lived in a country that had problems. And he was a critic of those problems. But it also had a constitution, elections, some independent newspapers. Iran wasn't North Korea. It wasn't Myanmar. In October of 2004, Omid was arrested at his office by government men in plainclothes. Didn't have badges, did have guns. And within a few hours, Omid was sitting in an interrogation room at a prison whose name and location he didn't know. After a while, a man walked in. Like 55 years old with a very short beard, and kind of calm. And I felt that this guy might be a nice guy. But when I said hi to this guy, then he just started beating me. And I was sitting next to the wall and on a chair. And the guy took my head, and was hitting my head to the wall. And he was doing that. And at one point I remember, the guy was asking me about my travel to the US. In 2004, I was invited to come here to the US and give a speech. So I got my visa. I went to Frankfurt Airport, and then somebody called my name. So they told me that my name was on the No Fly List, a list that I think Osama Bin Laden probably is on the top. So I took the first flight. And I went back home. So the interrogator was asking me what happened in Washington, DC. And I said, hi, I didn't go there. I was on the No Fly List. Probably you guys are there. We are all on this list. And the guy said, no, we have tapes of those meetings that you had in Washington, DC. We have all the documents. And I said, dude, I have not been there. Look at my passport. It doesn't show anything. There is no stamp on my passport. At that moment I learned that they really-- Americans-- they bluff. They just bluff. And once you figured out that part of what they were doing was bluffing, was that a relief? Or was that more terrifying? Did that make you feel like, I have no idea what to do? When they bluffed, at the beginning I thought, oh, there is nothing here. But the thing was, when you have to talk about something that never happened, this was much harder than to talk about something that happened. Because when nothing was there, it was really hard to imagine that kind of incidence. I mean, this guy was beating me, and at one point, I was on the floor. He was hitting my stomach with his leg. In that case, I threw up. And I just couldn't accept that, because I'd never been to the US. Forced confessions are not a new phenomenon, more like eternal. And Omid got the standard treatment-- beatings and solitary. But every government that forces confessions has its own variation on the process, its own way of building up its library of confessions. He gave me a kind of notebook and a pen, and asked me to start writing everything you have done over the past seven years. And so I thought, that's fine. I can write everything. I don't have any secret. And there's nothing to be worried about. So he was there. I was sitting on a chair. And I started writing. There was a table there too. And every five minutes he asked me to see my writing. Every five minutes. And then when he saw what I was writing, he screamed at me and said, no, this is not what I want. This is not what I want from you. You should tell me the truth. And I said, this is the truth. And he said, no, you're hiding the truth. Tell me what happened behind the doors. I had no idea what he wanted me to write for them. I had no idea, because I said in many cases that this is exactly what happened. This is exactly the people I met. Actually, I wrote a biography of myself for them. It was a very honest biography. I even talked about things I never talked to my mom, or my dad, or my friends. They asked about my girlfriends. In Iran you can not have a girlfriend when you are not married. The guy asked me to confess about my sexual relationship. Tell me how you started. Do you use condom? Did you use porn? Did you watch porn? I start crying. I begged him. I begged him, please, do not ask that. Please do not ask that. I can not do that. And I was like, oh my God. Where are you going from here? And he forced me to write that. They told me all the time, you're going to stay here for six months, a year, two years. You're not going to go home. Forget it. And I was so devastated. I felt so hopeless. And I said, God, please help me. These people are doing this with me with your name, you know, reading Koran, praying five times a day. The guy was beating me, and sometimes stopped beating me to pray on time. And the thing is, I remember once I watched a movie. Its name is Irreversible. It was in my mind all the time, that there is a point in everybody's life that your life separates to before that event and after that. So for me, I knew that there's a point that I can not take more pressure. I knew people who stayed for a long time in prison, and they never be able to come back to their normal life. They never become normal persons. They never recovered. They never recovered. And I knew those people. I talked to those people. I didn't want to be those people at the age of 30. And at one point when their pressure was so high, I thought I was entering to the irreversible part. In the third week, he gave in. I said, OK, what do you want me to write for you? And they said, so these are the names, these are the topics. I drafted my story. It was the only unpaid story I have written in my life. I'm always paid. But anyways. The only unpaid story you've ever written in your life was your false confession? Yes. I drafted my story. I gave it to my interrogator. And then he was like my editor. He changed some of the names. And he just changed the order. And then he gave me a few pages analysis. And I had to include those approaches-- those lines-- in my confessions. Your interrogator is literally writing on your draft? He's making notes in the margins, and crossing things out, and adding things like an editor? Exactly like that. He gave me directions. For example, I said I wrote for this newspaper or that newspaper. I went to these countries. I met these people. So in their version it was, with the suggestion of that politician, I went to this country. And I was a part of a plan. It was a big plan. And I had to say that I intentionally-- and sometimes, unintentionally-- I have cooperated with them through my writings, through my blog, through my travels, through my talks, and that kind of things. Were there specific words he wanted you to use? Definitely I had to use velvet revolution. And how do you say velvet revolution in Farsi? And he wanted you to put those exact words in? Exact words. Confessions in Iran are sometimes broadcast on TV. They show up in the evenings on the state-run news programs. Transcripts of confessions are also posted on government websites. And watching, reading, and hearing about one Iranian confession after another, it's impossible not to notice a distinct and unchanging editorial vision at work here. Because the fact is, people in Iran who have never met each other have nevertheless been confessing to a lot of the same things, in a lot of the same ways, for at least 10 years. In these video clips from this summer following the disputed election, one ordinary Iranian after another is confessing to having been manipulated by the BBC and Voice of America to cause mayhem or undermine the regime. And here's another confession. There's no tape. But we've got a transcript. It's a TV confession from a few weeks ago. Maziar Bahari, a documentary filmmaker and reporter for Newsweek in Iran, was arrested after the election. And he's still in custody. His confession is a classic of the genre. It's so crammed with buzz phrases and bullet points that in some parts it gets hard to understand. It says quote, "I, as a journalist, and as part of the huge capitalist machinery of the West, sometimes blindly, and sometimes intentionally, positioned myself on the side that was suggesting that a color revolution was underway. According to the models of color and velvet revolutions, we can consider the incidents in recent weeks as classic but defeated examples of a color revolution because it has the same properties as a color revolution." When Omid heard that a transcript of this guy Maziar's confession was going to be released, he bet a friend who'd also been imprisoned in Iran that they could guess what would show up in Maziar's confession. So they wrote down their guesses. When they read the confession, they were stunned at how right they were. Because what Maziar Bahari said, this was not Maziar's language. Everybody who knows Maziar, everybody who knows the other guy, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I mean [UNINTELLIGIBLE] used to work in the same newspaper. Nice guy. They didn't talk with their language. It was the interrogator's language. It's the security forces language. What he said was kind of analysis. I read that analysis inside the prison. It was the same. The narrative was very clear. The foreigners, they are influencing society. They want to change the society. Velvet revolution. Another recurring part of the narrative is the inclusion of the names of foreign people and institutions whenever possible, hopefully famous ones. The BBC, CNN, Newsweek, The New York Times, George Soros, President Clinton, UCLA, Princeton, all have appeared in various confessions. I talked to one former student activist arrested in 2000, Ali Afshari, who confessed to intentionally criticizing the supreme leader, and unintentionally trying to overthrow the regime. Ali's interrogator tried to get him to write into his confession that former CIA director George Tenet had personally guided the overthrowing plan. Of course, the CIA did famously orchestrate an overthrow in Iran in 1953, a truth that for many Iranians, no doubt, makes anything seem possible. But for Ali, the idea that he, as a student activist, had been a lackey for George Tenet was absurd and insulting. It was as though his confession was a historical novel. And his editor kept trying to get him to beef up the realness by sprinkling in actual historical figures. By now, Iranian political confessions have become so repetitive and recognizable that one of Iran's most famous political satirists, Ebrahim Nabavi, recently posted a fake one on YouTube. The comedian is dressed in prison stripes, and identifies himself as Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice president of Iran. If that seems like part of the joke, it isn't. Abtahi is one of the hundreds of people who've been in prison since the election. In the spoof, the comedian looks sheepishly at the camera and says, "I confess that when I travelled to holy Mecca, I met with one of the agents from the frightening CIA. He called me, and offered me to do a velvet revolution." There are obvious edits in the satire video. And over the course of the story, the comedian's face gets covered in more and more Band-Aids. As he continues, he admits that he eventually agreed to do the velvet revolution, as long as he could do it his way. "I imported a few bolts of green velvet fabrics from Israel and England. During this time-- in addition to millions of dollars of funding that was handed to me by Christiane Amanpour-- I also started the green velvet fabric business." Later in the story, he suggests to one of his co-conspirators that they should change their revolution to focus on a cheaper fabric than velvet. The comedian, by the way, was himself forced to confess years ago. He no longer lives in Iran. These confessions, for all their heavy-handedness, have been crushingly effective. They've ended careers, driven people out of the country, and kept others looking over their shoulder for the rest of their lives. Because the bargain is, confess and there's a good chance you'll be released. Probably. Eventually. But the state could decide to bring a case against you afterward anyway. Or they could go after your friends and family. Or with all the personal details you've confessed along with the political ones, the security services could blackmail you into working for them as a propagandist, an informant. Meanwhile, many Iranians, even today, believe the confessions are genuine, or at least could be. For those who get their news mostly from the state-run TV channels, the confessions seem as real as anything else on the news. Even Omid, before he was arrested, sometimes wondered if the stories he'd heard about torture and forced confessions were exaggerations, or even made up all together. Like I said, very effective. I really understood at one point that it's not all about me. They are gathering information about the reformists. I mean, for example, they gave me names at one point. And I said, I have never seen these people. I know these people, I have never seen these people. And I can not say that I have met them, or they have directed me, or they have guided me. And they told me that it's OK. When you confess and when you use their names in your confession, it will be so alarming for them. So they wanted to intimidate those people, those reformists, as well. They didn't care that I didn't meet any of those people. So the people who are in prison now, ranking reformists, they had been after them like for five, six years. They just didn't decide to arrest them [UNINTELLIGIBLE] after the election. They had been planning for this for years. Omid wrote six drafts for his interrogator by his own estimate. And out of that, they shaped a 5,000 word version and a shorter 2,000 word op-ed style version. Excerpts were printed in several newspapers. And then he had to confess on TV. And they told me, my interrogator said, this is the last part of the game. You should be on TV, and it's over. Don't screw us. Some TV confessions in Iran are the stark, looking straight at the camera confession you're probably imagining. But with other people-- journalists, or politicians, or big activists-- often it's staged as an informal interview-- in a room set up with chairs, a table, maybe some flowers-- as though, they're sitting down for a chat with Matt Lauer. It was a beautiful room decorated beautifully with curtain, flowers, chairs, orange juice. But the thing was I wanted to make it more unprofessional. So they had to cut all the time. Saying, cut. Again. Omid, what are you doing? A few times I cried. It was unintentional and also intentional. Both. I didn't want to make it very easy for them. And was your chief interrogator there behind the camera saying, you know, you did it wrong. Do it again? Yes, he was there. And he asked me to stop. And I had to start again. So it took four hours to finish half an hour confession. After Omid was released in December of 2004, he leaked to Human Rights Watch that he and about 19 others who'd been arrested around the same time had been coerced into confessing. And the shocking thing was, many top government officials-- when they heard what had happened to Omid and the others-- were shocked. Officials like the president, moderate reformist Mohammed Khatami, and his ministers. It caused an uproar. And eventually Omid and another young journalist met with the head of the judiciary, the Grand Ayatollah Shahroudi. He's still the head of the judiciary today. He's the Iranian equivalent of the attorney general. And Omid learned that the security force's standard procedure with the confessions was to make copies, and send them along to government officials and top ayatollahs as proof that there were Iranian citizens bent on undermining and plotting against the state. And because the interrogators took so much care to make the confessions look unforced-- with the flowers and the vase, and the chatty interviewer, the confessing person not looking beat up or emaciated-- apparently the videos were pretty convincing. When Omid and the other journalist told the head of the judiciary everything that had led up to their confessions, it was clear to Omid that he was hearing these things for the first time. I really trusted this guy. I felt that he was very honest. He had a very honest reaction. I could see in his face he was so angry. And he was saying all the time, [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]. You know, people use it when they do not believe something, or something's very astounding for them. But for all the shock, and outrage, and the promises to look into what had happened and take action, nothing changed. Not because the head of the judiciary, or anyone else, was insincere, Omid thinks. They just weren't, and possibly aren't, strong enough to fight what was happening. Many people, they are not happy, even in the conservative camp, even among Ahmadinejad supporters. They are really mad at what is going on. In my case, I remember that many people on the judiciary and in the government-- conservatives, that I had a chance to talk to them-- they told me that they are so stunned at how these guys are brutal, and why they are doing this, and how they are not responsible. Last week, the lieutenant commander of Iran's Basij militia was quoted saying, "There are now so many confessions obtained from rioters that even if all the media mobilized for a long time to broadcast them, they still couldn't get all the information out to the people." A few days before that story came out, one of the most senior ayatollahs in Iran, the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, said in a translation on the Middle East Media Research Institute Website, "The proud people of Iran know very well exactly how authentic the detainees' confessions are. They are like confessions obtained by fascist and communist regimes. The nation knows that the false confessions and televised interviews were obtained from its imprisoned sons with threats and torture, and that their aim is to cover up the oppression and injustice, and to present a distorted image of the people's peaceful and legal protest." Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, the fine print that keeps mom in her place. 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 we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Fine Print. Usually, most of us try to just skip the fine print. You know, we don't read the rental car agreements or the software license end user agreements. We just click I Agree. Today on our show we have stories where the fine print has real consequences. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, Occupancy May Be Revoked Without Notice. This next bit of fine print was brought to us by David Rakoff. The following shall constitute the binding agreement between Mr. Gregory [? Stolzenberg ?] of Yonkers, New York, hereafter known as owner, and his mother, Mrs. Barbara [? Stolzenberg ?] of Tenafly, New Jersey, hereafter known as mother, in regards to the third floor bedroom of number 41 old [? Alewive's ?] Lane, Yonkers, New York. One. Upon completion of chemotherapy and surgery at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mother shall take occupancy for an as yet undetermined period of time, hereafter known as convalescent period, not to exceed four weeks in duration. Two. A front door key will be left underneath the stone frog near the rhododendron. Mother agrees to return said key to its hiding place, for once. Three. Mother acknowledges herewith that she is aware that as a converted attic, the third floor and its bedroom are accessible by a retractable ladder. Subparagraph one. Mother hereby waives any and all recourse to the Americans with Disabilities Act and to any liability on the owner's part in the event of any injury. Subparagraph two. Included in mother's accommodation, she shall be given 24 hour access to the bathroom on the second floor. Four. Per mother's previous request, she shall occupy the lower bunk of the third floor bedroom while owner's eight-year-old son, Robbie [? Stolzenberg, ?] shall occupy the top bunk. Five. Mother may take breakfast and supper with the family-- please see attached appendix detailing the meal plan-- and agrees that upon finishing eating, she will quote, "make herself scarce." As has been previously and frequently discussed, quote, "sitting quietly with a magazine, and not saying a word even if you begged me to say something," unquote, differs wholly in spirit, letter, and intention from making oneself scarce. Mother further agrees not to do quote, "that thing with the chewing and the breathing." Subparagraph one. Further to the matter of quote, "making oneself scarce," unquote-- and it is herein that this subparagraph not be construed as belaboring a matter to the point of obsession-- but mother further concedes herein that both owner and his wife have been medically assessed to be of excellent to above average hearing. And as such, any and all comments-- even those spoken at a whisper-- are perfectly audible. Further, owner's wife as a Mexican born Catholic, and therefore not possessed of a formal Yiddish education, is well aware that the word curva has entered common English usage to mean whore. And the use of said word, even when muttered, is heard, and emphatically not appreciated. Six. Mother may make daily use of the public rooms on the main floor, such as the living room from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM, or until Robbie [? Stolzenberg ?] returns home from school, whichever happens sooner, at which time mother must relinquish the television remote and quote, "make herself scarce," unquote. See paragraph five. Mother may receive visitors, no more than two a day. Although under no circumstances may mother receive her daughter, the omniscient and perfect-- it is acknowledged that both adjectives are being employed ironically-- Mrs. Marla [? Stolzenberg ?] Burns of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey for reasons that have been previously and frequently discussed. If Mrs. [? Stolzenberg ?] Burns's eagerness to see her mother is deemed as so overwhelming, then perhaps the entire location of the convalescent period can be reassessed. Just say the word. Go on, say it. Say it. Say it. Subparagraph one. Mention is made hereby that in the matter of the husband of the omniscient and perfect Mrs. Marla [? Stolzenberg ?] Burns, the owner's brother-in-law, Dr. Howard Burns of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. Mother further agrees that there is a material difference between a dermatologist and God almighty, and that there are, indeed, many things that the former does not know regardless of how much he pulls down annually. Seven. All efforts have been made herein to draft an impartial agreement with malice and favor towards none. This document is to serve as a mutual protection to both parties. And the full execution of which, it is hoped, will avert any future difficulties that might in any way resemble events of Thanksgiving 2005, 2006, 2007, or August 2008 at the beach. David Rakoff is the author of several books, including Don't Get Too Comfortable. Act three, Restrictions May Apply. At this point even die hard news consumers have to admit this sad truth about the health care debate. It's usually really, really boring. I ask you, is there any writer in the English language gifted enough to compose an interesting sentence involving the long-term financial health of Medicare? No, there is not. But a month ago, a House subcommittee held a hearing where a handful of congresspeople could tear into witnesses with the zeal of starving men eating their first real meal in months. They found a corner of the health care crisis that anybody could understand, that would make anybody mad, that anybody would want to get in there and fix. It didn't get much coverage, this hearing. It was the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. And here is its chairman Bart Stupak of Michigan, reviewing the fine print of an insurance application with Don Hamm, who's the head of the insurance company that issued it, Assurant Health. What the congressman is trying to figure out in this first clip I'm going to play you is, are these insurance application forms intentionally difficult, so an average person would make mistakes filling them out? Mistakes that would later let the insurance company deny them benefits, or cancel their policy. As you said, your Assurant Health questionnaires are simple, easy to understand, straightforward language, so people can easily and accurately report their medical history. So let me ask you this. In your policy, Mr. Hamm, it states in question number 14, "Within the last 10 years, has any proposed insured had any diagnosis, received treatment for, or consulted with a physician concerning phlebitis, TIA, [? cystitis, ?] lymphadenopathy, or glandular disorder?" So tell me, what is TIA? I am not aware. I believe-- If you don't know what it is, how would anyone filling out your application know what it is? So there's grounds to deny them right there. You don't even know what it is, either do I. How about phlebitis or lymphadenopathy? How about lymphadenopathy, what's that? I don't know the answer to those questions. Do you sincerely believe that an average applicant would know what these words mean, if you don't know and I don't know? Sir, I believe that is an application that is not currently used at this time. I would like to-- It's last year's application. Last year's application. Have you changed the application in the last year? I'm not aware if we have changed that application. His hearing was the culmination of a year-long investigation by the subcommittee into the fine print of our nation's insurance policies, and specifically, into something called rescission, for people who have their own, individual insurance. This doesn't apply to people get insurance through their jobs or group insurance policies. For people who have individual insurance, rescission is what happens when an insurance company decides that you lied when you applied for a policy with them-- you pretended that you were healthier than you really were, or you concealed a serious and expensive illness, or you simply made a mistake without intending to, and omitted something about your health that they might want to know. And so they cancel your policy. They rescind it. The problem according to the subcommittee's investigation is that so many people get kicked off who weren't trying to deceive the insurance companies at all. They found that if you get an illness-- especially an expensive illness-- the insurance companies go looking for a way to kick you off. The subcommittee found a guy in Virginia who lost his coverage because the insurance agent who sold him the policy incorrectly wrote down the guy's weight on a form, and then never showed it to the guy to double check. A patient in Utah who needed surgery lost their insurance because of a mistake, an omission, on their spouse's application. I got a chance to talk with one of the lawmakers on the subcommittee, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a democrat form Illinois. And she told me that even somebody like her, who has worked on health care issues for decades, was surprised to find out that this could happen. I hadn't even heard of it before, that you could actually be paying premiums, and then exactly when you really need the health insurance, they go back and deny it. And listening to this hearing, it seems like this was one of those cases where all of you really seemed really, truly angry. Really, truly, angry. Yes. In a very emotional and personal way. This wasn't just another issue. And explain why. The very idea that a woman who has been diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, who was insured, was suddenly told, we're not going to pay for this. My name is Robin Beaton. I'm 59 years old. I was a registered nurse for 30 years. In June 2008, I was diagnosed with invasive HER2 genetic breast cancer, a very aggressive form of this cancer. I needed a double mastectomy immediately. The Friday before I was to have my double mastectomy, Blue Cross and Blue Shield called me by telephone and told me that my chart was red flagged. And what does that mean? They said that due to the dermatologist's report-- There was something on her chart earlier about a dermatitis that they took to mean pre-cancerous. And even though the dermatologist called and said, please, this is acne. Do not deny her her breast cancer treatment. They said, no. They said no. He said please don't hold up her cancer surgery for this. He begged them. He was the nicest man. Anyway, they said that I would not be able to have my surgery on Monday. And they launched a medical investigation into my medical history. I was frantic. I didn't know how to pay for my surgery. The hospital wanted a $30,000 deposit. Can you imagine having to walk around with cancer growing in your body with no insurance? And it took her months to finally get the surgery that she needed, by which time the tumor had doubled. And at the hearing, we took a break for five minutes while she composed herself. I mean, she was clearly ill. And that was so dramatic and moving to every member on the committee. I go to a cancer support group every week. Four girls in my cancer support group have had their insurance cancelled. It is very difficult for me to speak out. My insurance could be canceled again. I live in fear every day of my insurance company. Looking at the face of a woman who had fast-moving breast cancer that could take her life, I just could not understand how the people who were testifying for the insurance industry could sleep at night. As people, as individuals, how could they defend this policy? I remember there was one moment in the hearing where somebody on the panel actually asked, does it bother you that people are going to die because of these policies? Doesn't it bother you that people are going to die because you insist on reviewing a policy that somebody took out in good faith and forgot to tell you that they were being treated for acne? Doesn't that bother you? Yes sir, it does. And we regret the necessity that that has to occur even a single time. There were three heads of insurance companies at this hearing. Don Hamm of Assurant Health, Richard Collins of UnitedHealth's Golden Rule Insurance Company, and Brian Sassi of WellPoint. And it seemed like they'd all been advised-- like a lot of corporate guys are in situations like this-- not to give an inch on anything. They would not admit, for instance, the premise of the hearing, that they go looking for people to throw off their rolls in order to save money. At one point in the hearing, Congressman Stupak pulled out a list of 1,400 medical conditions that, if you have an individual policy with WellPoint insurance, trigger WellPoint to investigate you, looking for some way to cancel your policy. Diseases ranging from heart disease and high blood pressure to diabetes and even pregnancy. So what do these conditions have in common that would cause you to investigate patients with these conditions for a possible rescission? I would say there's no common theme other than these are conditions that had the applicant disclosed their knowledge of a condition at the time of initial underwriting, we may have taken a different underwriting action. So in the 1,400 different areas they lie? The applicants lie? Or is it really a cost issue? These are 1,400 expensive areas, aren't they? Rescission is not about cost. According to the subcommittee's investigation, between the years 2003 and 2007, these three companies saved at least $300 million through the use of rescission. The insurance companies' defense of rescission came down, basically, to two ideas. They have to fight fraud if they're going to give decent benefits to everybody else. And rescission is rare. Rescission affects less than one half of 1% of the people we cover. During 2008, we rescinded only 1/10 of 1% of individual policies that year. Our use of rescission is rare. Less than one half of 1% of all individual insurance policies. Here's what those percentages mean in practice. The subcommittee's official report notes that at least 19,776 policies were rescinded between the years 2003 and 2007 by these three companies. They say at least in the report, because UnitedHealth failed to provide data for two years and WellPoint wouldn't provide data from all of its subsidiaries. Toward the end of the three and a half hour hearing, after lawmakers made these three executives sit and listen to people who used to be their own customers, who their own companies had rescinded policies for, even though those people never tried to deceive the insurance companies about their health-- like Robin Beaton, the woman with cancer-- Congressman Bart Stupak boiled everything down to one simple inquiry. Let me ask each of our CEOs this question, starting with you, Mr. Hamm. Would you commit today that your company will never rescind another policy unless there was intentional fraudulent misrepresentation in the application? I would not commit to that. How about you, Mr. Collins. Would you commit to not to rescind any policy unless there was an intentional fraudulent misrepresentation? No, sir. We follow the state laws and regulations. And we would not stipulate to that. What he's saying is, state laws allow us to do it this way. And we're good with that. How about you, Mr. Sassi? No, I can't commit to that. The intentional standard is not the law of the land in the majority of states. Can I ask, were you surprised that none of them would commit to this? Oh no, I wasn't surprised. It doesn't surprise me one, that they would say, well, the law is on our side. And when you guys go into these kinds of hearings, do you go into them hoping to get the companies to go on the record and say in a moment like this that they're going to change their policies, or do you just want to get them on the record being obstinate and unsympathetic? Well, I guess the answer really is that such a heartless policy of these companies does need to be put on the record and contrasted with the real people who are hurt so badly by those. And so the idea is, let's get these guys up here, and get them to show America that they're not going to change unless we push them? Exactly. There came a point where one of the republicans on the panel, Representative Michael Burgess from Texas, who is a doctor, said to the companies, look, I'm on your side. I'd like to help you guys. But I can't help you out if this is how you're going to be. And I would urge you to think creatively about this problem, because this is the difficulty that leads us to where we are here today. And I can't help you-- OK, questions or speeches are over. --if you're not willing to move on this issue. Do you feel any sense of hope that the companies will come around and want to work with you? Have you had any moment privately talking to the companies where you have thought, OK, well, maybe? No. I think that we just have to make it against the law for them to do it. They've had their way with us for decades. And here we are in this terrible mess, where they want to insure only healthy people. And if you're unlucky enough to get a serious disease or have an accident, then good luck. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. She went straight from our interview to a mark up of the House health bill. She told me that she believes that rescission is something that is so hard to defend, something that is so clear cut, that she thinks it's one of the things that Congress is going to be able to outlaw in whatever kind of health reform we end up with. Act Four, May Be Hazardous to Children. Well, we close today's show with a bit of fine print that codified and made irrevocable some other bigger changes in the life of Susan Burton and her family. When I was 13 my parents got divorced. And my mother, and my sister, and I moved from Michigan to Colorado. Like the pioneers, we settled in Indian territory, on a new street in a subdivision called Arapaho Ridge. Our house was the color of sand. It had vaulted ceilings, a sunken family room, and the thing we found most offensive, a wet bar. The wet bar, with its ugly brass fittings and diamond paned glass, seemed to symbolize all that was wrong with our newly constructed lives. We were no longer the perfect family of four, worthy of a tasteful colonial. We were two latch-key kids and a single parent. And we'd been relocated to a tract house. My mother displaced her anger about this onto the wet bar by refusing to use it for its intended function. The wet bar became our junk drawer. Instead of alcohol she kept files in there-- checkbook registers, coffee maker instructions, and my report cards, which since moving to Colorado, had begun to show lower grades than I'd ever gotten. One day I was looking for my standardized test scores. There was no reason except that it was clear to me I was becoming stupid. And I liked to be reminded that I'd once been smart. But instead, I found something unexpected, a big green hanging folder filled with documents labeled divorce. There was a moment of deciding whether or not to open it. Then cautiously, as if I might set off an alarm, I cracked the folder and began to read my parents' divorce agreement. There was nothing dramatic. No secret half siblings. Not even a custody battle. To anyone else the agreement would have read like what it was, a standard legal document. But my parents' divorce was the biggest thing in my life. I dwelled on it to the point of obsession, to the point of melodrama. As far as I was concerned, it was the most important fact about me. Discovering the agreement was like finding that a new story had somehow been bound into a book I'd already read a thousand times. And like a favorite story, the agreement became something I returned to a couple of times a year all throughout my teens. Their names were on the cover page, my mother, the plaintiff, versus my father, the defendant. There was the horrible wrongness of that v that divided them. My mother was represented by a lawyer named Bruce Barnhart. To him, these agreements were probably just divorce Mad Libs. He'd sit at his big desk with my mother across from him and fill in blanks. Debts, $2,400 Cascade Country Club. Vehicles, 1986 Volkswagen Jetta. Bank accounts, Merrill Lynch. But when I read the agreement it didn't seem formulaic. These details were precious to me. And I was grateful they'd been so painstakingly recorded. It made me feel important that somebody took an interest, set down our story like that. Even if the writer was just a lawyer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had been paid to do it. Sometimes I would copy stuff down from the agreement, as if the information contained in it could get lost just as easily as our family. On one page I found the phone number of a house in which I'd briefly lived with my father when my parents first got separated. My father always had good phone numbers. He got them by telling the operator he had a retarded child who needed something easy to memorize. Not easy enough apparently. I'd forgotten this one. I copied the number down on a little Post-it note I saved for years, as if someday they might introduce a calling plan for dialing the past. My parents had joint legal custody, but my mother had physical custody. This was divorced kid rank and serial number. And I was glad to know the exact terms. Child support would be deducted from my father's paychecks and sent directly to my mother through a program called Friend of the Court. For a second I wondered if they were saying my father was a guy who couldn't be trusted to send the money himself. I knew it wasn't true. But it had never occurred to me before. Going through the folder always brought a rush of different feelings. There was the fear I'd be caught or that I'd find something disturbing, that my parents had done bad things, or were bad people. But even the smallest thing could move me, something as simple as seeing my parents' initials together on the bottom right-hand corner of each page of a legal document. One afternoon, I found a document that stopped me cold. The hearing that was to set my parents' divorce in motion was only days away. But in this note Mr. Barnhart had written, "Dear Nancy, this will confirm or telephone conference. I have adjourned the hearing date from January 30, 1987 to February 27, 1987. I wish you well in your efforts to resolve your marital difficulties. I sat before the wet bar for a beat. I was a scholar of my parents' divorce who had just found the primary document of my dreams. Here was a suggestion that my parents had tried to stay together. I ached that they hadn't been able to reconcile. It has been almost 20 years since I lived in that house. And I haven't looked at the agreement since, until recently. I asked my mother for the folder. And after she gave it to me, it took me a couple of days to open it. I was worried that the agreement wouldn't give me the same feeling. Maybe the story of my family's disintegration had lost its hold over me. It was possible that, like the music of Bon Jovi, I'd be mystified by its former appeal. But the agreement held up better than I'd expected. I'd forgotten that a divorce agreement is like a murder mystery, where the murder happens on the first page. The opening language is brutal. "There has been a breakdown in the marriage relationship to the extent that the objects of matrimony have been destroyed. And there remains no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved. Now therefore, it is ordered and adjudged that this marriage is hereby dissolved." I felt the same way reading these words at my desk as an adult as I had on the floor at 14. Back then these words knocked the wind out of me. To me this wasn't legalese. I wasn't old enough ever to have signed a contract for a rental or to have read the terms and conditions of a credit card agreement. To me this was the language of proclamations and founding documents. It was commensurate with my experience of my parents' divorce as an event that had changed the world. The weight I felt inside was matched by the weight of these words. At the end of those summer afternoons, I'd return the divorce agreement to the wet bar as reverently as if I were replacing the Constitution in its marble shrine. Susan Burton lives in New York. Well our program was produced today by Sean Cole and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Our music consultant each week is Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support for This American Life it provided by Fox Searchlight Pictures, presenting the new comedy 500 Days of Summer featuring 500 days of rooftop parties, broken hearts, kissing in the copy room, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Now playing in select theaters. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who follows me around the office trying to always get me to say the letter L, which he knows I can't say. He especially loves it when I say Lillian Hellman. Go on, say it. Say it. Say it. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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OK. I think we all can agree, this sounds really, really bad. Four guys from Newburgh, New York plant explosives at a synagogue and a Jewish community center in the Bronx. And they're arrested-- this is three months ago, they were arrested in May. They also, it turns out, had plans to fire Stinger surface-to-air missiles at military planes. On the face of it, this case looks like a pretty shocking criminal act. Aziz Huq writes about the government's legal strategy in the war on terror. He's also the lawyer defending prisoners in a couple of these kinds of cases. And he says that, when you dig into the details of this particular case, it starts to look different. Basically, what you have here is the most recent in a series of cases in which a alleged terrorism conspiracy is initiated, and pushed along, by a government informant. An older man, somebody in his 40s, who's wealthy coming to a mosque-- This is the informant? This is an informant. Coming to a mosque, finding people who are on the periphery of crime, and encouraging them and walking them toward somewhat an act of terrorist violence. And so the informant in this case, when he came upon these men, did they have this plan to attack the synagogue? As far as anyone can tell, no. In other words, he wasn't stumbling upon an active terror cell? Well, no. What we know is that, on the one hand, here you have a case where a group of people have done something, clearly reprehensible, clearly criminal. On the other hand, it's not clear whether absent this tremendous amount of money and time that is coming out of the government's coffers, there would have been any crime in the first place. The plastic explosives used in the bombing were actually provided by the government, through the informant, and they were fakes. The Stinger missile came through the informant, and it was incapable of firing. And the informant also drove them to the bombing. The perpetrators, meanwhile, are described in press accounts as sad sack petty criminals, whose previous crimes were snatching purses and trying to sell drugs to undercover cops, that kind of thing. One is described as being addicted to crack and coke for years. Another took medication for schizophrenia and was reported to keep bottles of his own urine in his apartment. None of them seem to have ties to any known terrorist organizations. And this case is not unique. It comes out of a strategy that our government developed after September 11. The government wanted, understandably, to stop terrorists before they attacked. But, of course-- think about that for a second. What a difficult job. How can you find somebody and stop them and lock them up for something before they actually do it? Well, what the government decided to do was go after people who seemed like they might someday get involved in a terrorist conspiracy. With any charges that it could make stick. At least it would get those people off the street. And sometimes that meant sending in an informant, to nudge suspicious people into doing something, like what those men in Newburgh did. Well, today on our program we have the amazing story of one of the first cases after 9/11 that did this. The justice department went after a guy who hadn't done anything wrong. An informant helped him commit a crime, and they convicted him. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. This is a story that takes place in the world of international illegal arms sales. The world of wiretaps, and informants, and prosecutors. You are going to be hearing FBI surveillance tape. You'll hear from the man who got put away, and from the US Attorney who led the team that put him away. Petra Bartosiewicz has the story, which we are devoting our whole show to today. This originally ran on our program in 2005, right after the trial. 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 lending material support, attempting to lend material support to terrorists, money laundering, smuggling, illegal brokering of weapons. Today is a triumph for the Justice Department in 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. 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 they think they are going to do? They think that terrorism is going to stop? I have nothing to do with terrorism. I am not Muslim. I am not a part of Al Qaeda, or Hamas or of Hamas or anything. And what do I want against 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 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. And 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've got 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-- 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 preventive 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 open 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'd had no success-- he was wanted in, I believe, at least two or three judicial districts. And he was already indicted. All we needed to do was 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 then 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 awhile, he tracked down Lee, who, by then, had returned to the US and asked him if he could do DEA cases in the states. And they started working together again on drug cases. Lee also recommended him to the FBI, to use an informant on terrorism cases. But Lee says Habib wasn't on top of his game. 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. 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, that'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. There were other disappointments. Lee started a rice importing business with Habib. 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 off other people 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'd learned, and delivered it to Habib's FBI handler. Sometime after that the FBI deactivated Habib as one of its informants. But then, after 9/11, things changed at the FBI. Though the agency had been warned how unreliable Habib could be, his 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 don't know. It went through my mind, I wonder how they can 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 that 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 cases. Habib knew an Indian gangster, a suspected terrorist named Abdul Kayum. Kayum also knew Lakhani. Here's US attorney Chris Christie. The ties that Lakhani was claiming to have to us, to the terrorist whose last 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 with someone like Kayum. 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 Habib, the informant, who Kayum knows only as a rich businessman. Just to clear up a confusing thing about the tape you're about to hear, Habib's full name is Mohamed Habib Rahman, and the government refers to him as Rahman. But his nickname is Haji, a term of respect for a Muslim who has made the Haj, the pilgrim's trip to Mecca. So other people call him Haji. So what happened was is that Kayum said that Haji is a very powerful man in America. He's worth himself but a few hundred million dollars. And maybe he can help you. Speak to him. So I say, oh, hi, Mr. Haji, hello. And then he tells me that, I believe that you are 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, Rahman 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 Rahman 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. Meal ticket. Dupe. Patsy. Rahman is everything Lakhani is not. He's smart, he's savvy. When Rahman 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 Mujahideen, 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 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 Rahman 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 Rahman. They're in a room at the Gateway Hilton, overlooking Newark airport. And clearly, Rahman 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. Rahman'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 are 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 are 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 listing 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 the 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? It is 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 that 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 Rahman initially made about Lakhani checked out. Not one of them. Not that 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 is Indian [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I was the richest man. This was Lakhani in those days. When I used to get down at the airport, there was a red carpet for Lakhani. Red carpet. 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 an [INAUDIBLE], 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 Moammar 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 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 Rahman about who he was. Or maybe Rahman 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, get me a brochure on the Stinger missile, and see if you can fax it to me. Just because I'm doing this program, and if you could get it for me. You know, I wouldn't know the first place to start. Where do I get a brochure on a Stinger missile? Or on a 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 aboveboard. 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 Rahman 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 Rahman 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, Rahman tells him 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, Rahman says. If you ask Lakhani 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 are interrupting me. You were interrupting me. Why-- 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 are 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? How did he get to you? You were very worldly, you know many people, you've done these deals before. How is it 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 is no object in my life. But he induced me. Somehow he made some kind of magic on me, and I could not say no. Or 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. Five past 10, 5:11, 5:20. Three hundred telephone calls he has made. What about these? What about that? He just annoyed you into it? Not annoyed, but, you know, 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 dislikes 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 globe trotting. And I think that, more than anything else, is what drove him. Here was someone coming the 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 seemed 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 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'm 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's weirdly candid about what he thought his first meeting with Rahman was going to be about. Lakhani is speaking first here. When you first met me, did you have any idea that you'll 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 were 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. 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. You're thinking, like, this inane idiot is 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 is 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. It's This 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 Mohamed Habib Rahman. Again here's Petra Bartosiewicz. It did seem Lakhani would say anything to please Rahman. Whatever item Rahman requested: anti-aircraft weapons, land mines, radioactive suitcase bombs, his answer was always the same. It is available. Here's Lakhani in the second meeting, promising to get Rahman 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 Rahman the deal is nearly done, in fact, there is no deal. Month after month after month, he puts Rahman off and Rahman, 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 is 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, 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 that just goes on and on and on. Lakhani's one, and possibly only, weapons contact was the Ukrainian state controlled arms manufacturer. A company called Uker Spitz Export. This was the company the Lakhani got the armored personnel carriers from in the Angola deal. He showed Rahman 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 the 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 was that the American government had spirited the phony missile onto an airplane. They eventually delivered it to Rahman'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. Yes. That's why I said, that's it. I see the box lying exactly in the middle of the sofa. The big one. Not the two side one, but the middle one. I said. "He's a guest of you?" Like-- 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. Haji." That's what I told him. And then he wanted to open it. And I said, no, don't open it, because I'm scared. But I don't know how do you 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 weapon sales faux pas even your mother wouldn't make. Earlier in 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 Shantilal Lakhani. But here's my favorite. Rahman 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 have 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 Rahman 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? 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 say, "Look, I only know JFK airport. I don't know, I've never traveled within American. So I can't tell you anything." He said, "No, no. 10 airport. And what is the best time?" I said, "The best time is-- the busiest time is either 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 is the busiest time, and he's talking clearly about shooting down a commercial airplane. Who started this? September 17, he said, that I am buying this for the purpose of shooting civil airlines. What did you think of this purpose? Did you think that was a good idea? Not at all. Well I thought he was joking. Sitting in jail, Lakhani went on to say that he had thought the weapons were to be used in Africa, in some 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, Rahman 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 Rahman 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, Lakhani 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, 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 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 the 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. But did he try for 22 months and then get one? After offering all this-- millions of dollars. And he couldn't get a missile? No, he wasn't going to never get no missile. And they knew he wasn't going to get one, either. That's why they bought it. And set it right there in his lap. They just-- from day one, I just can't understand it. They came in and they sit down and they say, 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. Just go 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 tried to make themselves heard. Voices started to rise so 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 Virginia. 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, the man not guilty. Now, ain't nobody going to 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 said, oh, what the hell? He don't mean nothing to me, the man guilty. But I know it was wrong. It wasn't right for them to do that man like that. It wasn't right. But it's over now. Are you saying you regret your decision, to find him guilty? I, uh-- 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'd 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 or may not be capable of getting involved in Jihad, whoever they are. On the streets of Ramallah, on 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's 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 of that policy. Ask Christy 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 is 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. But 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 Lekhani. Lakhani would have done next. So the question is, confronted with those realities, as an American law enforcement, what do we do? Do we ignore it, because we say, eh, 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, yeah, if I could get a missile and I'd sell it to whoever if 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, you know, 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. 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. But what's so hard to figure out is whether the government's methods are actually working. In 2005, President Bush said that over 400 people had 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 an 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. Petra Bartosiewicz. She's writing a book about terrorism trials since 9/11 called The Best Terrorists We Could Find. Her story was first broadcast in 2005. These are the cases that are propelling public debate, right? These are the cases where you have the Attorney General, the Mayor of New York, standing up and, if not thumping the table, then saying in a loud and declarative voice, there continues to be a significant, domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Is there any kind of sense that the new administration, the Obama administration, is going to discourage these kind of cases. Or are they just chugging right along with this? The Obama administration hasn't changed, I think, as much as its supporters either hoped or thought it would. I think it's very unlikely that we will see significant change under the Holder Justice Department. If you were to redirect the way all that Justice Department force is being applied, what would you do? Where would you send them? I think that the way that informants are used in the United States is, at the end of the day, counterproductive. The FBI and state and local law enforcement, have been using informants for decades. Take that very successful tactic that's been used in the drug context, been used in the organized crime context, transplant it into the terrorism context, and what happens? Well, you start sending out your informants. Those informants are under considerable pressure to find conspiracies. And it's just not easy. It's not easy to do that in the way that it's straightforward to do in the organized crime context, and the drug context. There just aren't as many terrorists as there are drug runners or mafia kingpins in the United States, right? And, in addition, if you are actually part of a sleeper cell, why are you going to talk to this bozo who drives up in his Mercedes, and seems like he looks just like a government informant? I know in the Newburgh case, the assistant Imam of one the mosques told the press, we all just, we thought the guy in the nice car, we assumed he was a government informant. The use of informants, as we see from the Lakhani case, as we see from the Newburgh case, is not going to target the smart terrorist. It's going to target individuals who are marginal, who are vulnerable to suggestion. It's going to target, quite frankly, people who are a little dim. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Seth Lind is our production manager. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Laura Bellows and Aaron Scott. Our music consultant each week is Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for a program, by our boss, 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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Some kids are at a rest stop parking lot in the middle of August, waiting to get back in the car-- Logan, William, and Kieran. A reporter approaches them. I couldn't help but notice that there's three of you guys. So the first question that pops into my head is, who's going to have to ride in the middle? Unfortunately, me. And how come you're the guy who has to ride in-- Because those two, um, basically-- I don't know. They fight when they're in the middle. He doesn't even want to sit next to him. Ow. Stop that! He's pinching your cheek right now. Pressure pointing, actually. So do you feel like this is going to be-- this is always going to be your job? As you guys get older, you're always going to be the brother sitting in the middle, brokering the peace? Yeah. And basically, I'm the mediator. How do you mean? I'm not sure what you're talking about. How do you mean you're the mediator? I'm actually not sure what mediator means. I just felt like saying it. I think it means a guy who keeps peace. Like, keeping them from killing each other. They can use a guy like you in the Middle East maybe. One of the little brothers signals for the microphone. Get it? Middle East. Because he's in the middle, and he's out east. Get it? Middle East. There's nothing particularly notable about this rest stop. It's one of thousands all over the country, the kind of place we'd stop for 10 minutes on a holiday weekend, run inside, use the restroom, buy a burger or a coffee, head back out on the road. But if you stayed for more than 10 minutes, you might end up talking to one of these kids or to one of the couples who are dropping off children at college, like this reporter did. --the last kid off to school, so now we're the new empty nesters right now. I know. How do you feel about that? I'm cooking things that I've never tried. Yeah, and I'm eating things that I've never tried. There's some folks on the way back from a family reunion, might complain about the traffic. And suddenly a clown truck filled with clowns cut us off. Or there's this guy, whose entertainment on his weekly four-hour drive isn't the radio or the CD player. Well, truthfully, so none of the police folk out there are listening, I usually read the newspaper on the way up, or a book. Are you kidding me? Here and there on the way up. And you've been doing it for six or seven years, and you've not had an accident? No. That seems to me to be pure luck. There's a family driving six hours to visit their dad in prison; a young couple looking for a place to have their wedding; two brothers on the way to compete in the rodeo; a 16-year-old standing inside the rest stop nursing a tea, taking a break from her own family. She's on an eight-hour car trip with her dad, her grandma, her sister, and a couple of brothers. She explains to a reporter. Well, it's very noisy, you could say that. Because everybody's arguing or talking about sports. We were just having an argument on who's better, Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson? And Mike Tyson won. So my dad nearly stopped the car to argue and say, no, Mike Tyson is better. So it was just very hectic. Coincidentally, a little later, Mike Tyson's name comes up again, in conversation with the prep cook named Ozzy, who works at the rest stop. Sometimes I see movie stars. I see Tyson in person. Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson was here. He has a tiny voice. How are you doing, man? Can I get ice cream? You know? So I see Mario Cuomo. I see this old lady who got a lot of plastic surgeries. Joan Rivers. Yes, she was here, too. Poor Joan Rivers. The two strangers can get her name across simply by saying, "the old lady who got a lot of plastic surgery." Nine of us came to this rest stop with tape recorders on a weekend in the middle of August, all the way back in 2009. Today's show is a rerun. It was two weeks before Labor Day, the time of year when over 10,000 people pass through this rest stop each day. We thought that, for once, we would not leave after just 10 minutes. Stick around and find out who all these people are, where they're going, what they're thinking about. We found love stories, and hardcore partiers, and inexplicably angry people, and all kinds of others. We bring you those stories in this special hour of our show for this holiday weekend when so many of us are on the road. WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. The name of this particular rest stop is the Plattekill Travel Plaza. It's on the New York Thruway, I-87, about an hour and a half north of New York City on the northbound side of the highway. It's shiny and recently renovated with five restaurants in the food court-- Nathan's Hot Dog, Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips, Roy Rogers, a Canadian sandwich shop called Brioche Duree, and a Starbucks-- plus a travel mart that sells sodas, and chips and gum, and stuff like that. All these concessions and the cleaning crews and everything else are run by a company called HMS Host, which does this kind of thing in airports and travel plazas across the country. They have 120 employees here, and a half dozen managers, and a general manager. I think we have a very strong weekend as we get into the end of summer. This is the general manager, Robert Woodill, a friendly, upbeat guy who carries a folded piece of paper that he pulls out and unfolds and refers to constantly through the day, which has a list of sales figures for every half hour of the day. All it simply is, is it's my half hour reports of last year on this day, so I can compare my sales the last year and see where we're at. And we do it usually at, like, 11 o'clock, and then every hour or so, we take a quick reading just to see where we're at. And explain when is the crazy time. Today, it'll be probably from, like, 12 o'clock till 7 o'clock, very solid and steady. And then tomorrow morning, it'll pick up again. And I think as we're getting to the end of summer, there's a big race in Saratoga this week. People have booked their rooms for Lake George, and it's the end of summer. People want to go and go on vacation. So I think we're going to have a good weekend. We did our taping on Friday and Saturday, two weeks before Labor Day, because those are the biggest days and the biggest month here. In August, the rest stop makes a fourth of its money for the whole year. And it's crucial that Robert makes his goals this weekend because it's built into the rest stop business that there are a couple months every year when he just breaks even or loses money. Also, he wants to do better than his rival-- his rival, a rest stop in Maine, run by a guy named Andy Tucci. Kennebunk North, usually, and I are neck and neck. And we never place any wagers, but you know, they're Red Sox fans, we're Yankee fans. And we go back and forth on that, as well as discussing who's going to have the record sales for the day. Who won last weekend? Andy. Andy beat me red like a lobster, if you want. That's what I told him. He beat me both days, but I think I'm going to get it back this weekend, so. I hope this week, the Yankees sweep the Red Sox, and then he'll be really quiet. Robert was fully staffed for the rush. He had his best cashiers on. And now, he just needed the crowds, the big summer weekend crowds. We chose this particular rest stop because, a couple years ago, I came here on the way to a wedding, and I noticed that a couple of the college students working at the Starbucks were speaking Polish. When I asked, they said, yeah, they were from Poland, here for the summer, on a special visa program called the J-1 program, where they live in the United States and work for three months at the rest stop and then get to travel for a month in America before flying home. And it seemed like such a crazy thing to fly all the way to America and then be stuck behind a counter in the middle of nowhere for the summer. I wondered if they felt cheated. I wanted to come back and find out. I'm Sandy, and I'm from Taiwan. And I work at Starbucks in Plattekill Travel Plaza. There are no Polish students this summer. It's mostly Taiwanese and Ukrainians working in Plattekill. Sandy's name back home is Moche Cho. She's a college junior and English major. This is her second year doing this summer work program. Last year, she was one of hundreds of foreign students who got jobs at Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. But this year, she wanted to see a different part of the country and signed up for this location because of two magic words-- New York. I love New York. Last year, I went to New York City just three days. So this time, I want to stay in New York City more. And then when you got here, were you surprised how far it was from New York City? Yes, very surprised. Yeah. So actually, I'm a little regret about I choose this place, yeah. She knew the rest stop wasn't in New York City. She just thought it would be a little closer and easier to get to. Without a car, everything's a hassle. So she hasn't seen New York at all this summer. The only place she's gone is some outlet stores. When she's not at work, she hangs around the apartment with five other students, all women who came over from Asia this summer to work at the rest stop. When we have day off, we will go to a supermarket to buy grocery. Yeah. That's it? Maybe go to a restaurant to eat something. What's the best thing that's happened this summer on your trip? This summer? So far, I didn't make happiness in this trip. So far, no. Wait, you haven't had much that's been so good this trip? No, so far. So this seemed, frankly, a little sad. A bunch of students quietly tolerating their summers, counting the days until they could finally travel the country. Cooking food they don't eat, like hamburgers, and drinks they'd never heard of before arriving here, like frappucinos, all for people who have cars at a place that's all about cars on the side of the highway, but without cars of their own. I felt bad for them. And then I started talking to the Ukrainian students. And how's it going? Very good. I think that I really get a very big, huge experience here because I like this place, and I want to come back here. It's really true. I'm happy that I'm here. Evgenia Trekasa goes by the name Jane or Angelina here in the States. She's 18, entering her junior year of college. It's her first time away so long from her parents, and she misses them terribly, but it's also very exciting. She says that in the first week or two in Plattekill, she and the other Ukrainians felt stranded, same as the girls from Taiwan and Hong Kong felt. Because that we don't have a car, we can't drive. We just can take a bus, so that's why. But then we find friends that, like, when we have a day off, they always can take us. Like, all the guys, it's OK. We will show you beautiful places. So when we have a day off, we always go to somewhere. We never stay at home. What happened is that the Ukrainians befriended a couple of the American teenagers who work at the rest stop, and those teenagers introduced them to other young people. And before they knew it, they had rides to the mall, to Six Flags Amusement Park, to New York City. My name is Adelaide Giron. I'm 19. I work at Roy Rogers. Adelaide is a big, cheerful, fun-loving guy and probably the American who's gotten closest to the Ukrainians. In two years working at the Roy Rogers at the rest stop, he's seen lots of foreign students come through. I think this group has definitely, by far, been my favorite. Why? I felt like the other groups before, I've gotten attached to them. But this group, I think it's since I'm in college and they're in college. And we drink, and I drink, and they drink. And it's a fun experience. I just recently got my license about two years ago-- actually, a year and a half ago. Before that, I was driving illegally, so I really couldn't drive all over the place. But now that I got my license, so, like, [BLEEP] I'm driving everywhere. So I hang out with them. I take them shopping. At night, we go, like, swimming at this lake, trespassing. Who cares, though? Just having a good time. We're young. The cops showed up one time. We had alcohol on us. It was a pretty bad story. For a while, he says he was going over to their apartment three times a week-- Fridays, Saturdays, and Wednesdays for parties-- parties he taught them how to throw. Here's one of his students in this matter, Peter Molov, one of the Ukrainians. What's your favorite thing that you've done so far since you've been here? Favorite thing? Probably the parties. Parties. They're a lot different than in our country. If we want to have parties, we just go to the club in our country, in Ukraine. Go to the club, loud music and stuff, you know. But since we came here, we get to know other Americans, and they said, let's have a party. Well, OK, let's go to the club. Why to the club? Let's do it at home. OK. We go to home. They showed us games they play. Beer pong. Introduced them to my beer funnel-- they'd never seen that before. We showed them flip cup. We showed them how to play flip cup, and-- I don't even know what that is. Really? It's a good buzz-getter. It is fun. A lot of people play, so it's really fun. And you didn't have beer pong back in Ukraine? No. I never knew. Will you be taking that back to show your friends back home? Oh, yeah. We even want to buy a beer pong table, you know? Special for it. I'm not sure they call it a beer pong table. They're pretty good for not knowing what beer pong is. Like, we just introduced them to beer pong two months ago, and yet, they're better than me. So yeah, we actually have, like, tournaments going on sometimes, and the Ukrainians end up on top most of the time. So yeah. It's impossible to drink so much as Americans do. Americans really drink very much. This is Dasha, another 19-year-old from Ukraine. She said most of the parties here in America in their apartment or out by the lake went until dawn. At 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM. And then the most fun is then when you work from 9:00 AM and you don't sleep at all. Like, one day, I just slept 30 minutes. I woke up and went to work. That was the most fun? Yeah. As for me, I was dying at work. Fortunately, she works at a Starbucks. The Plattekill Rest Stop has employed foreign students for nearly a decade. They're hard workers and easier to schedule into shifts than American teenagers, who are always needing time off for family vacations, and sports practice, and other activities. There's a group in the summer and then smaller groups in the winter and spring. And the Plattekill Rest Stop is a close knit enough place that people cry when they leave. One of the managers told me how she still emails kids from Brazil and Peru who worked here years ago. At least one marriage has come out of this, between an American worker and a Bulgarian girl. Though all the managers of the rest stop agreed that they like the Ukrainians, they're good kids, but the Ukrainians are the rowdiest group with the most issues they have ever had, hands down. Probably because the Ukrainians are the first group that were friends back in their home country. They came to Plattekill for a summer adventure. They're having too much fun, one manager told me. Fireworks after 2:00 AM, complaints from neighbors. The police have come out a few times, because of the noise. Robert, the general manager, has no idea where he's going to find them housing if their landlord evicts them. It's been a little bit of a rough summer with them. They're enjoying it. They're college kids. And I think the thing is they forget that they're not living in the dorms. They live in an apartment complex, where there's families, and kids, and little kids. So they just have to be more respectful at times. It's not like we don't want them have a good time. You got to make sure you draw the line someplace and say, OK, maybe 1 o'clock is late enough. Or the people are going to work because it's a Tuesday, and you just got to kind of be good neighbors. As it turned out, everything came to a head the night before we arrived to record with an all-night party that Adelaide says was their craziest ever-- a party that was not thrown by the Ukrainians. It was the very first party thrown by the girls from Taiwan, total turnaround for them. Adelaide says before this, he and the Ukrainians had only invited them to one party. And they really don't drink, so they got drunk off a couple of beers. And we just-- they couldn't hang, so we just didn't invite them anymore. But now they threw this party, a goodbye party for one of the girls who was leaving early, and they partied with the best of them, everybody dancing and making noise. After the second beer run, there was a late night beer fight with people pouring their drinks on each other. As usual, all this bothering the neighbors. Then what was it, they complained to the landlord? Yeah. The landlord doesn't like me or my other friends hanging around there. He actually refers to me as a big crazy Mexican that walks around, but. So I don't know. I don't think I'm a big crazy Mexican at all. I'm a gentle giant, really. And so then Robert had a talk with everybody? Yeah. He had a talk with everybody. And it was kind of time to play the heavy-handed dad and just to make sure that they get the full message that this can't go on. That we shouldn't have any more parties here. We should be quiet because if there will be one more party, they will send us home. They will, like, break our contract with Plaza, and then there will be no more students in Plaza the next year. And what do you think of that? I don't know. Just, I don't really care they will have any other students next summer. Because I won't be there. The American kids also got a warning from their boss. Again, here's Adelaide. You know, just to stop going over there. The landlord doesn't want me on his property. He sees me or my car, it's getting towed at my expense. I'm going to get charged for trespassing. And so what are you going to do? Well, I'll probably still go over. [BLEEP] it. There's really nothing-- I mean, if they say anything, I'll just be like, oh, OK. It won't happen again, officer. And of course it'll happen again, but. And do you worry that you could get the Ukrainians in trouble in a way that they'd get sent back early? I hope not, but if they do, it's all a good time. And I told them if anything happens, I'm deeply sorry, but whatever happens happens. There's nothing we can do. And that, everybody says, was the last big party of the year. But no matter. It was still a great summer. I asked Evgenia if she ever felt jealous of all the travelers she saw pass through the rest stop, people on the way to vacations while she was stuck working. And she said never. She'd come so far to get here. They should be jealous of me, because I'm here. Inside the rest stop, right when you enter the lobby, between the bathroom and the food court, is this room full of racks of brochures. Lisa Pollak is one of the gang of nine reporters that we had at Plattekill. You know those brochures you'll see in the lobby of a discount hotel, the ones advertising local attractions that inevitably, no matter where in the country you are, include a water park and an underground cavern tour? It's that, floor to ceiling. This is the New York State Information Center. It confusingly is run not by New York State, but by a private company that charges businesses to display their pamphlets here. The manager of the center is a guy named Lenny Wheat. He also stands behind a counter offering travel advice to the lost. When I talk to Lenny, he gets this look on his face, almost like he feels a little sorry for me. Because I think I'm in the middle of nowhere, and he thinks I have no idea what I'm missing. Right here, the next exit alone, you have best rock climbing in the country here. Oh, seriously? Yeah. It's the Napa Valley of the east around here. We have the oldest vineyards, the oldest winery, one of the best wineries. You have the best hotel resort spa in the United States in the area here, too. Wait, how do you know it's the best in the-- That's according to Mobil Travel Guide and Day Spa Magazine. I got one of the best dude ranches in the country up here by New Paltz, too. No, you don't. Yes, Rocking Horse Ranch Resort. Yeah, great place to take a family. By the time Lenny tells me about something called the Catamount Adventure Park-- largest adventure park in North America, according to the brochure-- There's 120 things to do there. --I am so overwhelmed by superlatives that I just take his word for it. Lenny knows this area. He's a local, lives eight minutes away. And he used to drive for a messenger service so he's an expert at getting directions. I found it especially impressive when he told travelers the exact number of miles between highway exits by memory. But Lenny actually ended up in this job by accident. His neighbor used to work here, and Lenny would visit him from time to time to help out. And he was feeling ill one day, and I was like-- he says, you think you can stay here and do this? And I'm like, sure, why not? I mean, I know my way around. I know the roads, so. And he had some issues and stuff, diabetes and stuff, and wound up taking time out and stuff. He recently passed away and stuff. I'm so sorry. So but kind of like sometimes you feel like what you've done in your life is-- and it comes together, that it's like you were meant to do something, you know? So you're saying it kind of seemed like it was meant to be? Sometimes it feels that way. I hung out with Lenny for a couple hours. I saw him cheerfully field dozens of information requests, everything from where to buy beer-- nowhere at the rest stop, but try New Paltz, there's a lot of college kids there-- to how to get to Maryland. A crucial first step-- turn around. Maryland is south of here. You are headed north. When anyone wanders in to browse, Lenny pounces. What's your destination of today? Lake George, the guy says. OK. Can I get you anything for Lake George? We just got in the fall events guide, too. Sure, if you want to. Anything for Washington County on the other side of the lake? Anything on hiking? No. Waterways? Whitewater rafting? Waterways. Waterways, OK. Even though all these places are paying to advertise here, Lenny gets genuinely excited when he's pitching them. If he doesn't believe the Plattekill Rest Stop is the gateway to vacation gold, he sure fooled me. And if he didn't know it, in Karo, there's bear statues all around the village, and there's a treasure hunt going on with that, OK? Here's another one. And that is also the best concert facility in the world. Loggins and Messina's playing tonight. Who? Loggins and Messina. Oh. Messina, the comedian? No. No. And one more. And the world's largest kaleidoscope there, too. Oh, beautiful. Yes. At a time when people plan their trips on computers and drive to them using GPS, it's a little surprising that a place like this even exists. I actually watched Lenny pull out a magnifying glass for a guy having trouble seeing a map. By the time I left, Lenny had me almost convinced that what he has to offer is better than the internet. You can sit here in 10, 15 minutes, flip through the pages, and seen most everything every county might have to offer you. You know how long it would take you to find all that on the internet? You turn the page, you got shopping. You turn the page, you got your fishing, your antiquing. How're you doing, guys? Where are you going to? You know, you don't really go on a long car trip with strangers. Usually you're with people who you know really, really well. And being confined in the car together in a tiny space, staring ahead at the road, that's one of the nicest places to talk, have a long, long talk. One woman told us that she actually plans things to discuss with her husband and her kids when she knows that they're going to be in the car for hours. Another woman, this mom named Elizabeth McMann, was driving from DC to Albany with her 9-year-old. It's a long drive. And the son decided that he was going to use the time to get to the bottom of some things. He's been on this whole Q&A thing, where, Mom, who do you like better, your sister or your brother? Uncle Jenny or Uncle Chad? Or how long would you cry if I died? Or would you rather be married to your old boyfriend or to Daddy, who's-- we're divorced. He's been kind of weird. So that stimulates some conversation. He just asked, for example, Mom, are you really Santa Claus? The reporter who talked to that woman was Jonathan Goldstein. He mostly stationed himself outside the rest stop in the parking lot by the picnic benches. Somehow, everybody Jonathan talked to seemed to be enjoying their time on the road to the max. Stan is sitting on the bench in front of the parking lot. Unlike everyone else you see-- people looking to eat, looking to get to a washroom-- Stan looks perfectly at home, smoking a cigar like he's got the world on a string. Like hanging out at a rest stop is the best part of any vacation. He's waiting for his girlfriend, who he likes to call-- The War Department. And by which you mean? It's my girlfriend. The War Department, or the wife, is the War Department. Get with it, baby. Let's go, baby. It's always sort of the sky is very clear and blue today. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not clear. Have you guys been arguing a lot in the car? No, we never argue. She told me to say that. This is me. See this, under the thumb? Yes, dear. Yes, dear. That's me, right there. Yes, dear. And yet, in spite of Stan's take on couplehood-- one perhaps modeled on Warner Brothers cartoons of the '50s-- it looks like there's still a never ending line of people all too eager to sign up. Case in point-- a group of four women come striding across the parking lot in the midst of a bachelorette party. Oh. It's a surprise because it's a bachelorette party. We're taking her away somewhere she's never been before. And how do you feel about that? I feel like I need to know where I'm going pretty soon. Do you even know in what direction you're heading? North. And that's it? That's all you know? Well, the only thing I know is that I need flip-flops, a whistle, and something else. Yeah, flip-flops and a whistle. Now does that really come into play, or are you just messing with her mind at this point? It's very important. It's very important to the whole evening. Flip-flops and a whistle, I'm thinking some-- And comfortable clothes. All right, now I'm going to ask you guys-- I'll ask you to step over there. I'm going to ask these guys what they've got planned. And I won't tell anything, and by the time this airs, it won't make a difference. So you're just going to go stand over there, I'm sorry. Because now I'm going to get this scoop. All right, just crowd in here. All right, so flip-flops and a whistle, what's that all about? It's all crap. It's complete crap. We're making the whole thing up. My name's Jack, man. And where are you coming from? I'm coming from mother [BLEEP] Boston, heading to West Virginia. What's your last name? I ain't getting into that right now. No last names on this. I've been drinking. As it turns out, Jack is not the one driving. He's traveling with a couple friends back from mother [BLEEP] Boston, where he's dropped off his four-year-old, who he spent the summer with in West Virginia. Jack has four kids in three different states. Each of their names are tattooed across his upper torso. Jack is on his way home. Got lost a couple times, so it took us, like, 12 hours. So how long was he with you? Probably, like, three, four months. And you only get to see him during the summer? Nah, I get him for Christmas. You know how the women are. They don't want to pay for all the Christmas presents and stuff. You know what I mean? They all make sure the kids are with me for Christmas. And you saw his mom, too, when you pick him up and drop him off? Oh, yeah. I still got the big red marks on my back where she tried to beat me up. Are you kidding? Nah, man. I'm for real. Hey, don't bring your new girlfriend to your ex-wife's house. That's all I got to say. That baby's mama drama stuff, you know. Seeing how she's on crutches, and she broke her leg a few weeks ago, she tried to beat me up with her crutches. Your new girlfriend's in the car with you now? Yeah, man, yes. That's the pretty blonde over there in that black car. You walk over there, you'd be surprised, though. Her and my buddy driving, we call him Hot Wheels. He's a handicapped kid in a wheelchair, so you know what I mean? We nicknamed his ass Hot Wheels. I walk across the parking lot to a big black rusty car. Jack told me they call you Hot Wheels. Yeah, 'cause I'm always in a wheelchair. Tore my foot off. How did that happen? A car crash back in 2006. Hit a wall at about 100. What do you expect? You don't expect to walk away from something like that. And you are-- you're in the back seat here. Krissy. You're also from West Virginia? Yes. And how old are you guys? I'm 21. And Krissy? 24. Do you do much traveling? No, not at all. I'm a stay-at-home mom, so. How old are your kids? I have one. He's nine. So you don't get a chance to travel very much. Right. It's been a long trip. Is this the furthest you've been? Yes. I went to New Jersey once before, but other than that, this is definitely the farthest and longest. And have you been in a lot of, like, parking lots like this, a lot of rest stops? Actually, no. I think this is probably the first, like, rest stop I've ever come to. Not in your life? Yes. Really? Yes. I don't just live in West Virginia. I live in West Virginia, and I don't ever go anywhere. Coming up, love in the middle of the night, and much more. 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 show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Rest Stop. Nine of us stayed for two days in the middle of August at the Plattekill Travel Plaza on the northbound side of I-87 in New York State. This was back in 2009 that we did this. Today's show is a rerun. We were talking with the people passing through, most of them on vacation, and of course, with the people who stay at the rest stop, working. I'm still waiting for Andy's report back. Let me see if he sent anything back. 3 o'clock, Friday. Robert, the general manager at the rest stop, checks his BlackBerry for an email from his rival in Maine, Andy Tucci. Noon to 3:00 was supposed to be some of the busiest hours of the year for Robert, but he does not look happy. He's not hitting the half hourly goals on that piece of paper that he carries around with him. I am down a bunch from last year, about $3,300 behind last year and $600 behind last week, which is not a normal thing. And so it's a little cause for concern right now. So right now, we're not sure why. There doesn't seem to be a lot of traffic problems. We can make it up. In an hour and a half, we can make it all back and be right where we're supposed to be, so. Every couple hours when I check with Robert, this is what he says. We can still make it up. The rush still can come. Robert is optimistic, mostly. I wonder how it's going in Maine. I haven't emailed Andy yet, but I'm afraid to email Andy right now. I'm sure it's going very well. But maybe that's a good thing I haven't heard back from Andy. Now it's starting to get a little overcast outside. So what, are you wishing for rain here? Actually, he tells me, rain isn't always bad. If it rains at the right time, people get backed up in traffic, then they gotta stop. 'Cause now they've been in traffic a little longer, so perfect timed rainstorms will be nice, and maybe not too hard. I think that'll be good because people will get out of their car and walk in a light rain, but they don't want to walk in a downpour. If it's a downpour, they don't come out of the car. We'll keep our fingers crossed. Still got a lot of night to go, so. Fingers crossed. You're killing me, man. Within 25 minutes, the skies literally blacken. And it is the wrong kind of rain, the kind that includes tornado warnings one county over, the kind where you do not run from your car across the parking lot to buy a nice sandwich or a hot coffee from Robert. The kind that I figured would just please one person on this earth, and that person was in Maine. I would say probably by his last email, we're probably right in the same boat, right in the same area. Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Tucci, Roberts' rival, general manager of the Kennebunkport Travel Plazas. And his day actually wasn't going great either yet. Yeah, I just shot him an email, letting him know that we'd be busy later on after the Red Sox game. Oh, I see. Oh, you think you can make it up later. I think so. There'll be a lot of people on the road later on celebrating. Well, these Boston fans will be. Celebrating, huh? Celebrating, absolutely. Now later on, does he have anything going on? I don't really believe he has a whole lot going on down here tonight, you know, the Yankees being on the road. So it's looking pretty bad for him. I would say so. At one point, finally, one of the concession stands, Nathan's Hot Dog, does get a real rush with a line that extends to the middle of the food court. This is where speed becomes crucial. Robert says that if people walk into the rest stop and see a line, if the line doesn't seem like it's moving, they'll walk out without buying. So his staff has to pour it on during the rush if they're going to make their goals and, of course, beat Maine. Sean Cole went behind the Nathan's counter to watch the action. Every now and then during the rush, Nathan's runs out of food. Wow, there's only one corn dog. Heather Rafertee's working one of three cash registers. One corn dog is a problem since a customer has been waiting a long time for two. They prepare as well as they can here, but there's only so much food you can cook in advance. Heather has to grab parts of other people's orders just to keep the flow going. I'm taking one of your large fries. You're waiting on nuggets anyway. It's like putting together a puzzle where a lot of the pieces are exactly the same shape. And it'd be easy if it wasn't so hard. People are fanatical about Nathan's, and workers joke about it. They feel like saying, you know, Roy Rogers has food, too. Luckily, Heather's break is imminent. I've got four minutes. Four long minutes. Four long minutes later, she clocks out and sneaks through the maze-y hallway in the back. On her way out the back door for a smoke, she walks up to another worker-- Alex. --and gives him a quick passing smooch, which made me feel like I was really behind the scenes. Alex is Heather's boyfriend. About four months ago, they had a kid, a little boy. I ask what it's like to live and work together, but Heather says they don't. She lives with her parents right now and the baby. And Alex lives with his family. We're still together, definitely, but we plan on moving in together at some point. It's just that right now, money's tight, and this was kind of-- as much as I love my son, he was kind of like a surprise, so. Yeah, so. But eventually down the road, me and Alex will move in with each other. And you're thinking of getting married and-- I'm hoping so. We've been together for two years now, so I'm definitely considering it. But he's 20 years old. He just turned 20 in June, so he's kind of still young, so. And how old are you? I'm 21. Heather and Alex are a mixed couple. She works at Nathan's, he works at Brioche Duree, the pastry and sandwich shop at the rest stop. This has led to a little inter-restaurant tension in the relationship. He's like, well, I worked this shift. I'm like, well, I worked this shift, and it was busy like this. And he's like, well, it was like this. And you know, we get into debates. Over who is more busy. Yeah. And which one's more crazier and which one's more harder, so. I've not been privy to these debates, and I don't work at the rest stop, but no one's fanatical about Brioche Duree. Nathan's is way harder. Across the lobby, all the way across on the other side from Nathan's, over in the travel mart, another one of our reporting team, Gregory Warner, was there when cashier Clara Dragon started her shift. First thing Clara does on her shift, before she rings up a sale or even opens her register, she picks up a three-foot cardboard display of Purell hand sanitizer and sets it down on one side of the cashier's counter. It's a simple maneuver that blocks and redirects the flow of customers. Without it, she'd get bombarded from both sides. Because they'll come over here ahead of the other people, and it causes an argument. So I barricade it so that they know they gotta go over there. This stack of two-ounce Purell-- Keeps them from standing here and cutting the people off. Everyone says I'm crazy, but I do it immediately when I come in. Plus, it saves arguments. You don't want to rile them up more than they already are. Clara grew up in a rough part of Astoria, Queens and spent her youth staying out of the way of trouble. At Plattekill, she's worked nine years as waitress and then cashier. I was a waitress in Bob's Big Boy. And when they shut that down, they opened this, and I jumped in here. So, um-- Ask her if she voted for Barack Obama and if she thinks he's a good president or is he a [BLEEP]? A tall guy with a sunburn and a pink polo shirt wags a Butterfinger bar. Ask her. She'll tell you. Do you think Obama's going to give you free health care, and do you think you deserve it? Clara looks up at the angry man. She wears bifocals and shimmery eyeshadow. She doesn't say anything. She just smiles. It's a smile so genuine that the man can't help himself. He smiles back. Well, I don't like the Democrats in general. The guy continues talking politics, but less belligerently. Clara still doesn't say a word. And by the time he collects his change, he's halfway apologizing. Clara hasn't spoken. You know what? We were stuck in New York, man. Bad traffic. You have a good day. Excuse my language. That's an example of what we deal with, and you've got to smile. That's an example of what you deal with? Yeah. Not all the time, but sometimes. They're battling the roads or this heat or traffic, especially. They're coming in fuming. They're even rough with their families. So you just say, oh, I'm sorry. I rush to get them out so that they don't have to be on you longer than possible. I only had one run-in with someone a while back who got on my goat, and I yelled back at him, which we're not supposed to do, but he just got me. I was doing a fax for a truck driver. There's a fax machine under the cash register. And my head is down. And all of a sudden, I hear, you're very rude. I pick my head up, and he says, you're very rude. He says, you're doing whatever you're doing down there. He says, you're not paying attention to me. I said, I'm doing a fax for someone. It's important. No, it's not, he says. I don't give a heck what you're doing down there. I'm going to report you, he says, and it's going to make my day. I couldn't take it. I said, you do that if it makes you happy. That's it. That's the one time she yelled at a customer. You have a good night. After midnight, only a few businesses are still left open in the rest stop. There's a gate blocking that room with all the New York State pamphlets, but a promotional video plays inside, in the room, behind the gate, all night long. New York welcomes you to the Catskills. Two people from our team of reporters, Jay Allison and Nancy Updike, stayed up for the midnight to 8:00 AM shift. Here's Nancy first. Between midnight and 8:00 AM, the first question isn't where are you going, but why? Why are you awake at a rest stop when it's-- 2:00 AM. Or even-- What, 4:00 AM, I believe? Yeah, 4:00 AM in the morning, so. Notice they're both laughing. It's funny, but seriously. Is this where you intended to be at 2:00 AM? We had no idea what time we would be here, actually. We didn't make any plans, actually. We figured we would drive until we got tired and then hopefully find a place. We'll call those people the non-planners. And then there are the planners. That's the way my son liked to drive, with no lot of traffic on the road. So that's why we're on the road this time in the morning. And then there are the people Jay's talking to, the bad planners. Over at one of the tables, Sebastian and John are getting their last hot meal before they switch to granola. They're headed into the Adirondacks to start hiking at dawn. And they're in a good mood, laughing a lot and talking, maybe a little nervously, about bears. Bear bell? I'm all right. Dinner bell. Yeah, dinner bell for them. I'm here. Yeah. I'm here, come by. Are you worried about bears? Well, they say they're pretty active up there, so. You see them all over, especially when you have food around you. They come visiting, definitely. Yeah. You gotta watch out for that. Can't keep no food. That reminds me, I forgot the bear canister at home. Wait, so you forgot to bring the thing that you put the food in-- Yeah. It's a bear canister. You put all your food in, anything with odors. You seal it up, and you stick it, like, about 100 yards from your tent. That's a good idea. Where is that, in your apartment? Yeah. Out in the parking lot, Tony and Debbie Longo are lost, and it's Tony's fault. The thing about Tony is he's not supposed to get lost. He's a New York City homicide detective. I don't know how I missed that exit. I don't know how I missed it. Big sign, Tappan Zee Bridge. There it was. When you're a cop, you're not supposed to make mistakes. Yeah, not the direction. The direction thing has to be down pat. I lost control. I really hate my whole family right now. They didn't want to leave in the morning. God forbid we leave in the morning. Next time you'll leave in the morning. Oh, we'll leave in the morning next time. Next time, I'm not coming. It's after 3:00 in the morning, and they've been lost for hours. And Debbie Longo says she's not a happy camper. But you can tell she is. There's no soft serve, and it's not taking my money. I don't care anymore. I don't care. I'm going to get fat, and I don't care. I'm going to blow up like a balloon. And you're going to have a big fat wife. That's OK. But we stay happy. Isn't there some truism about if you want to test your relationship, go on a long drive together? What I'm saying is, I'm expecting a lot of grouchiness here at the rest stop during the graveyard shift-- scowls, sniping, mutual recrimination. Instead, I keep seeing couple after couple walk up to the glass doors of the rest stop and reach for each other's hands right before they walk through. Instinctively, like, here we go, you and me. Couples of every age-- 20s, 40s, 60s. What are your names? Edetta. And I'm Peter. Edetta and Peter are on a five-hour drive to pick up their kids from summer camp, their first time at camp. In other words, a Parenting 101 trip-- unexciting, long, and happening at an inconvenient time. But listen to them laughing. Did the kids want to go, or did you say, "You're going?" We kind of made them go. And our oldest left for college exactly for the same time, so it works well. Free time for ourselves, and they have free time for themselves. It's at this point that I blurt out the most obvious and inappropriate question. What did you do with your free time? Which they handle admirably. We really had time to connect. Had some romantic dinners and spend time together. When was the last time you had time to do that before this? Oh, 20 years ago. Oh, I remember back then. And there's more giddiness inside the rest stop. Another couple, Lisa and Marcus. Did you see me giving him little kisses and telling him how cute he was when he walked in? Lisa and Marcus, as you can tell, are in deep. They're looking at a map on the wall of this half-closed rest stop on their way up to Lake Champlain to go camping. It's the middle of the night. They've gotten lost already, not sure where they're going to sleep. But the two of them cannot stop smiling. I can feel endorphins radiating from them in waves. They met salsa dancing less than a year ago, and love is making them ambitious. We're planning on maybe moving to Argentina. And we started already dancing tango here in Philadelphia. So we want to become professional tango dancers. No, that's a joke. No, it's not. Outside the rest stop, Katarina and Johnny are sitting next to each other on a bench. Not a bench in a beautiful park, a bench looking out on a highway and a parking lot. Of course they don't care. In fact, they seem not to have noticed at all. We're going to Montreal, Canada. You're going to Montreal? Mm-hmm. Yeah, we're coming from New York, and we're going to Montreal. Right, yeah. Johnny is finishing up his residency, but he's not sure he even wants to be a doctor. 35 years old with more than $200,000 in school debt. But he doesn't want to talk about that. He's on a road trip with his girl. He brushes off my questions, leans into the microphone, and steers us back to what we should be talking about. (SINGING) Love me tender, love me true, never let me go. Oh my god. But even at a rest stop that's fizzy with love, there is heartache. As I'm standing outside, a man asks what I'm doing. So I ask what he's doing. We end up talking for a while. His name is Dan. He's driving back to upstate New York after a day in New York City. Spent some time with my boys. How old are they? 19 and 20-- oh my god-- 23. How often do you see them? Not often enough. I'm trying to make it more regular 'cause I just got divorced, like, a year or so ago, and so. They're staying with their mom, so I'm seeing less of them. Try to get to see them, like, once a month. How is the divorce for them? I don't really know. It seems to be OK for them, you know? It's a little weird still, but we still try to do things together and-- You and your ex-wife and the kids? No, I don't do things with her anymore. Last year, my son's 18th birthday, we went skydiving together. All four of you. Yeah, all four of us. Like, she wanted her boyfriend to come. And I was like-- I actually called him and said, don't come. You called him? Yeah. I called him, left him a message. It was a very polite message. And I was like, Michael, please don't come. You know him. You have his number. Yeah. I knew him, yeah. So. It was a tough thing. She wanted him to come and, like, go on my son's 18th birthday. And it was like, really, it was just too weird. It's a very weird thing, trying to be friends with your ex, and then you can't really be friends. And then you have this other girlfriend, and then it's just like it's such a difficult thing. She didn't want me to go to the house to pick the boys up. And then one week, we're having a good conversation, and next week, something like that comes up. And you're like-- you have the thing. You want to call that person, and yell at them, and talk to them about it. But you don't have that relationship anymore. That's a hard moment, when you realize, right, we don't have that relationship anymore. Try to go to counseling and stuff and try to get her to come back. She didn't want to go to counseling? She went with me one time, but then she wouldn't stop seeing this guy, this other guy she was seeing. So I mean, that kind of-- I made her pay the copay and we left. This other guy, Michael. Yeah. I had actually met him. I had met him at a party and her and him had become friends. And they just became more and more intimate. And instead of trying to work stuff out with me, she was trying to work stuff out with him, so-- I just think about it a lot. I beat myself up for where did I go wrong as a father, as a husband or whatever. And I'm basically 45 years old, and I figure half my life is over. And I'm really trying to figure out what to do with the next half. I know this is just a rest stop, but really, some kind of love force field is in effect here tonight. Because guess what? Dan has a new girlfriend. She's at the rest stop with him, just doesn't want to talk into a microphone. They met through a singles group, and they've been together long enough that they've started meeting each other's kids. It's still complicated, but wow, it feels great. I just told her tonight. I said I don't know what I would do with somebody else in my life. I mean, this is-- I found a woman that really loves me. And I'm, like, so over bowled by that, you know? It's just, it's-- It's like a miracle. Yeah, it is. I'm optimistic about the future. Very optimistic. In the parking lot, when I first saw Stevie G from a distance, I thought he was naked. And right now, I'm de-kinking the muscles in my buttock. Then he kicked one leg in the air above his head, and I saw he was wearing little white gym shoes. Oh, it opens up the Fountain of Youth in the front of the hip joint. And then he jumped into a pool of light, and I saw he actually had on some tiny black nylon shorts. Stevie G teaches bodywork, pilates, yoga, massage, and such. And he stopped at this rest stop to stretch and move. It's hard not to notice, though, that while Stevie is working out in the parking lot, he's simultaneously smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. That's what I am, you know? Unfortunately, I'm polluting my lungs, but they're doing well. I clean them out on a daily basis. How do you clean them out? Usually a mixture of running, and steaming, and meditational breathing, and not swallowing what I cough up. I always spit it out. Like, I have a little cup. I can spit out all-- I don't never swallow it. Our conversation, by the way, is happening next to Stevie's vehicle, which figures largely in his life. It's an old yellow school bus he got up in Woodstock to start a volunteer service program. Picking up the drunk people, like, going into the bars and finding the ones and say, all right, who looks really bombed? Offer them a free ride home. But now Stevie G has a larger vision for the bus. He wants to build a health center made of school buses. Before he leaves the rest stop, Stevie G gets out a big foam roller and takes it to his favorite spot for a final stretch. All right, we got all the big 18 wheeler trucks on one side. We've got all the smaller cars over here on the other. We are on 87 highway. This is where I think it's the cleanest. You just got to watch out to see if the dogs have been here. Abracadabra, scoop that belly, burn the jelly, America. You gotta get off your fat one and do something good, something good like the solid oak wood. Get out there and help others. And especially help yourself to be your best, so that you are not a cranky old fool. Now we all got to pull up the hill. Stevie rolls all around the sidewalk, with truckers looking down at him from their cabs. He doesn't notice. When he's all loosened up, he picks up his roller and heads back to his vehicle. Oh, it sounds good. That's my baby. Take care. Take it easy. Stevie G coughs up some phlegm, spits it out, and heads off for Woodstock. It's morning. English sparrows are congregating like crazy in the trees just outside the rest stop doors. Standing out in the parking lot, nine-year-old Brian Belco looks kind of like a bird, actually. His eyes are bright. His arms are stiff at his sides and held out a bit like wings. And when he speaks into the microphone, he bobs his head forward, like he's pecking at it. We're going fishing up in Swanton's Mine. Yeah, what are you going to catch? Bass, pike, pickerel, perch. Wow, it sounds like you've done this before. Yep. But the tradition started with my family. It started with my great grandfather. Is that right? My great grandfather was a great fisherman. He really liked fishing, so he went up to Lake Champlain. And some of the cabins were built right over the historic battlefield of the war in 1842, the Battle of Lake Champlain. You're a student. This is my first radio interview ever. Really? Yep. You did great. I know. I'm really, really excited. Say goodbye. Bye. Bye. Have a great vacation. Thanks. And with the new day here, we have just the time for one final note before we go. Final tallies from the battle between the rest stops in Plattekill and Maine. At the end of the afternoon, after our two days in Plattekill, I can report to you that business never really picked up for either rest stop. And after two days on Saturday afternoon, Robert told me he only had one consolation for the weekend-- he beat Andy. I'm the king for the day. I beat Andy, and the Red Sox got smacked around and massacred by the Yankees. The unfortunate thing is being king for the day when you miss your sales by seven grand isn't so good. And everybody was down. So it was a bad day for everybody. Maine-- Andy sent out a quick note, not hitting his numbers at all. But you know, we're ready for next weekend. We still got two more weekends to go. I still think they're coming. I mean, yeah, in this business, you've got to be positive. When I left, he was around $12,000 down for two days, 7% or 8% lower than where he needed to be. But all this rain, he said, could make for really beautiful leaves upstate come the fall. A lot of people could get on the roads for that to look at those leaves. He could still turn this around. Today's show was reported in 2009. In the years since, Robert, the general manager, has been promoted several times. He's now a senior director of Motorways, overseeing travel plazas in the New York Thruway, the main turnpike, and a few Starbucks in Massachusetts-- which means, of course, that the competition between Plattekill and Andy in Kennebunkport came to an end. Though, Robert says, they do still argue about baseball. You can still find Lenny Wheat dispensing travel advice and Clara Dragon behind the register at Plattekill, though they've stopped using J-1 visas to bring in foreign students. Well, our program was produced today by Sean Cole and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alyssa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Additional production on today's rerun from Jessica Lussenhop, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Morgan Hook, from former New York Governor David Patterson's office, to the New York State Thruway Authority, and to Shelia McGee at HMS Host. 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 says do not believe his reputation. Do not believe what people say about him. It's not true. I don't think I'm a big crazy Mexican at all. I'm a gentle giant, really. 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. We had both been dating the same person, and she had been dating him for a while, and then broken it off. And then I had met him, and so he and I were dating. And then he started talking about her. Oh, Julie, she's just this fantastic artist, and she lives in a trailer in the woods. And I go out there and drink wine with her and listen to fabulous music, and we just have deep intellectual conversations, that kind of stuff. And it turned out that he was seeing both of us at the same time. It took a while to figure that out, though. And in the meantime, this guy had the sheer nerve to introduce the two women to each other, Erin and Julie. And they became friends. And things kind of exploded with the guy and they stayed friends, at first with him, and then after that, with each other, in this emotional purgatory that I think most of us would never put up with after our 20s, which is exactly how old they were. It was just kind of a weird, close friendship because it revolved around us not liking this guy, and that's kind of what it was based on at first. Even though we both knew that we kind of didn't like each other either. Because we both really secretly did like this guy, and wanted him to like us. And we just resented each other for even being in the picture. I don't know. That was Erin. Here's Julie. I believed that we just happened to have a bad beginning, and that if we had met under different circumstances-- and she said the same thing-- if we'd met under different circumstances, we probably wouldn't have created all that bad history, this like push me, pull you kind of relationship. And they continued this way, as frenemies, having fun together now and then, but also getting into these huge, horrible fights all the time for four years. Long after they both stopped talking to the guy. And the real question is, when you're in this kind of situation-- and who among us has not been in this situation where you have some friend, where the thought of hanging out with his friend totally stresses you out. And you think, are we really friends then? The question is, why don't you cut it off? And it turns out this is a question that science has actually looked into. Science done by a psychologist named Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues. Well, of course, our guiding question was, well if these relationships are potentially detrimental, why would people keep them? Julianne Holt-Lunstad has done a number of studies on ambivalent and frustrating friendships. In one of them, she had people rate their friends and their family members. How supportive they are, how much stress they cause, on and on. And she found that half, half of our relationships, on average, are with people that we care a lot about, we feel positive towards, and we also have real conflicts and negative feelings about as well. People talk about friends that are tons of fun, but can be really competitive. A friend that is really great when they're around, but are incredibly unreliable, or can be really insensitive at times. I recall one person even saying, "I stick around for those few times that she is good to me and is nice. But most of time it's not good." When Hold-Lunstad and a colleague began their examination of why we don't just break up with these friends, they had a hypothesis. They thought, there must be external factors that made ditching these friends really, really hard. Like they're friends with all your other friends, or your kids are close, or you're part of the same church. Or they're your next door neighbor. What are you going to do, move? You basically run in the same social circles, and so it may be very difficult to avoid this person. And so you've got these barriers to ending that relationship. But to their surprise, they found this is not why people stay in these troubling friendships. People stay, they found, for reasons that they impose on themselves. Either they tell themselves things like, I'm not the kind of person who just gives up on somebody. I stay friends. Or they tell themselves that the good times outweigh the bad. Like with these two women, Erin and Julie. They stayed frenemies for years because they got something from it. They got caught up in this competitive thing where Julie would give Erin advice, and Erin would like the advice, or not like the advice. And somehow neither of them could let that go. I guess we are both attracted to defending our own honor. And we liked to write, so a lot of the time we would write long emails about-- no, no, no. This is why you suck. This is not actually what happened and let me point out to you this. So her logic in the emails just seemed so flawed, I just wanted to like, no, no. No, that's not how things went down. I just wanted to defend myself to her. And then, I guess we both thought that the other person should be the one to cut it off. I don't know why I feel like it would be horrible for me to say, OK, we're done with this. And now let's kind of go on our separate ways. In another study, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues wired people up to take their blood pressure every time they interacted with another person for three full days and found that friends that we feel ambivalently about raise our blood pressure more, cause more anxiety and stress than people that we actively dislike. In other words, frenemies are bad for our health. And they're all around us, 50% of our relationships. And today on our radio show, we examine them in all of their nefarious forms. The ones that we can only blame ourselves for having, the ones who simply cause agita without meaning any harm against us, and of course, the very few who actively scheme against us like characters on a TV soap opera. Smiling to our faces and then quietly going off and doing things that we do not like from friends or anybody else. We hear all these types today, our show in four acts. Act one, Chasing Amy. What do you do when you're not sure but you think maybe your sister is starting to act like your frenemy? Act two, I am Here to Make Frenemies. In which we head into what we believe might be the world capital of frenemy behavior. Act three, Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace. David Rakoff in that act, and an impossible wedding toast, in rhyme. Act four, The Case of the Long Lost Frenemy, in which a childhood friend mysteriously shows up after years for reasons that are revealed over time. Stay with us. "Act one, Chasing Amy." Family members can so easily be frenemies because you're stuck with them and you love them, and they sometimes do things that make you feel very weird. Jeanne Darst tells this story about herself and her sister. Amy's estrangement went undiagnosed for some time. Because in our family, someone retreating in anger is hardly a bacon cooler. People are always suddenly putting on their coats and requesting a ride to the Metro North Station, and my therapist said no contact for six months, and you can't come if you're drinking, and I won't come if he's there. And I'll come, but don't sit me next to her. I always picture a sweaty John Madden frantically scribbling our Thanksgiving plays on a blackboard. So it took some time to notice, but maybe estrangement is by definition a matter of time. This is how it went. Our white Volvo sulks through the traffic up the West Side Highway. My brother-in-law, Henry, is driving and I'm in the back seat behind him. His wife, my sister Liz, is in the passenger seat, and behind her is her four-year-old, Luisa, in her car seat. We're like two car fractions. Henry and Liz being the numerators, Luisa and I, the denominators. We're on our way to Jersey City to meet our sister, Amy's, new husband, a Muslim from Tunis she met in an Arab chat room, moved in with, and married at the City Hall in Philadelphia in just under six weeks, [? Waleed. ?] My mother called me as soon as she got the news. Apparently they met in a chat room, she tells me, whatever the hell that means. And he cooked her a lot of Tunisian dishes, and then he whisked her off and married her. Wow. I wouldn't mind seeing what he's putting in those dishes, I say. Oh, I think a lot of coriander. Probably cumin, garlic. That would be my guess. Now let me ask you something, Jeanne. Don't you think it's just a little peculiar getting married so fast? We haven't even met this [? Waleed ?] character. Well, this is the same woman who went on a second date to Chile I point out. That's right. What was she thinking? She could have been murdered. The guy went to Dalton, Mom. That doesn't mean anything, what about the preppy murderer? Robert Chambers didn't go to Dalton. Oh, for God's sakes, Jeanne. Be serious. Now, did you ever see the movie Green Card with Andie MacDowell? All right, well she plays an American woman who meets a Frenchman. Mom, I know what a green card situation is. Well, all right, [? dolly. ?] I didn't think you knew what these people do. I'm highly upset over here. My mother has a few stock phrases. Highly upset is a big one. I don't know that she's ever been regular upset. She prefers to head straight to highly. I'm not so much supportive of Amy's hasty act as I am invigorated. Just the idea of having dinner with that kind of recklessness has perked my spirits up. What is with this traffic, Henry says. Liz has thrown my big, black scarf over Luisa's head to block the sunlight so she can nap. We giggle when we see the effect the scarf creates, which is that of a burqa. Cover her ankles, Liz jokes. This day doesn't feel unfamiliar. Beginning with Amy's first boyfriend, my parents were "highly upset." J.J. was a mechanic from Tuckahoe, the next town over from ours. He listened to Van Halen, didn't plan on going to college, and reeked of Polo cologne. I'd be smoking, drinking some stolen warm beers up in my room, chatting on the phone, when a waft of that signature Ralph Lauren scent would hit me. Soon enough, our older sister, Liz, would fly in and shut my door. Sheesh, the front hall smells like the ground floor of Bloomingdale's. God. My parents had strategy sessions about J.J., held late at night in their bedroom after they'd both had quite a bit of red wine with dinner and a couple scotches. I'd be coming up from the kitchen and they'd trap me for a night cap interrogation. Oh, Jeanne, Doris would yell from her bed throne. Come here for a minute my mother would say, casually, as if she were not asking you to make a quick betrayal of your sister before hitting the sack. We want to talk to you about this J.J. character, Jeanne [? Jo. ?] Even by his fourth child, my dad was still tinkering with his father persona. I sat on the gold satin divan, shut my eyes, and stretched my legs, as if I were merely there to maintain my base tan. Dammit, Jeanne [? Jo ?], your mother's talking to you. Is he a thug, my mother repeated. Well, what's the strict definition of a-- Someone who's having sex with Amy, my mother blurted. All right, let's all settle down my father said. We're way off track here. Now how well do you know J.J.? I don't. He seems a bit wayward. Is that your impression? I think Amy's smoking pot, my mother added. You can smell it a mile away. My father paused for a moment. Maybe that's why he wears so much cologne. Steve, please, my mother yelled, putting out one of the two lit cigarettes she had going in the ashtray. Can I go to bed? I asked. Yes, yes. We're not going to solve anything tonight, my dad said. You just couldn't outlast these two, long distance meddlers. They could go on forever. Amy and I were the close ones when we were younger. As little kids, when we had no money to go to the movies, we'd get a basket and go up to fancy houses on Egypt Lane, cutting people's flowers out front, putting them in the basket, and then ringing their doorbell and selling them their own flowers. Those people thought we were frigging adorable, and we made some decent money. We drank, we smoked around the house, we snickered at curfews and poo-pooed the law. Amy took my road test for me when I was 16. But at some point, after college I guess, Amy started to seem less rebellious and fun, and more bitter and suspicious. I remember more than once being on the subway with her, and her glaring at me to keep it down when I'd been talking about, say, whether we should get pizza or burritos for dinner. Jesus, Jeanne, keep it down, she'd whisper. She never cleaned. When I'd visit her place and see the dishes piled up, her sheets sort of half on, half off, I was often tempted to ask, what band is living here with you? When the shower broke in her apartment, instead of having it fixed she told me, I just shower at the gym now. Which was confusing because she didn't work out. She seemed to still see the world from a teenager's perspective. If you commented on her Don King hair she might snap, everyone in this family is so totally judgmental and superficial. And she was probably right, but by 30 it was a slightly stale pose to strike. Her relationships, romantic or otherwise, tended to end badly, and it was invariably the other person's fault. One day when I asked how Mark, her filmmaker boyfriend at NYU, was, she said matter-of-factly-- past tense-- he claims I tried to strangle him at the Lion's Head last weekend and now he won't return my calls. Total psycho. She disliked everyone more and more. And at some point, that included me. One night I was drunk and flirting with the man who was about to take her to Chile for their second date. And I said to him, you should take me to Chile, I'm a lot more fun. Truly jerky thing to say, and I apologized more than once, but apologies have never impressed Amy. I was banished to some otherness, a place where suburban a-holes and parents who didn't approve of blue collar boyfriends went. And there seemed to be no getting back in. As we drive around looking for Amy's new house, I realize I do know something about [? Waleed. ?] Amy called me a couple weeks after they met and said she was seeing this new guy and that he had a really big-- you know. But when the phone call came on Easter Sunday that Amy had run off and married some Muslim from Tunis no one had met, I didn't think, everybody stay calm, I talked to Amy about this guy two weeks ago, he's got a big penis, would quiet my parents' concerns. After she first got married, I called Amy and asked how things were going. Fantastic. Marriage is great. I highly recommend it, Jeanne. Amy, the happily married woman. I like it. It seems like magic. What time is it, Amy asks. 3 o'clock. You've got to be kidding me. 3 o'clock, she yells, I'm at the farmer's market waiting for [? Waleed. ?] We're supposed to be buying vegetables for a special Tunisian curry, and I've been here for an hour. An hour. Do you believe this guy? I swear to God, some people have no regard for other people. You ever notice that, she explodes. A stretch of silence on the line. Also, he's obsessed with cleanliness. He said my apartment on Sackett Street wasn't clean. Longer pause. OK, scratch everything I just said. Things are fantastic. I love being married. [? Waleed ?] and I just have some, you know, cultural differences. He's very, umm, driven. He's always following up with things. Like if I say I'm going to go get my driver's license renewed, he'll ask me later how the DMV was. You know, he assumes if you say you're going to do something, you're actually going to do it. He can be very funny, Jeanne. That's funny, I say. How can I stop my sister from blowing this, I think, without actually saying the words, don't blow this Amy? And she doesn't. Instead we've been invited to their new home for dinner. We find her building and ring the buzzer. Amy comes down to the door in a floral apron. They have curtains. Her new apartment is smoke free. Lots of sunlight, and clean bedding on the bed, which boasts a headboard and pillows of all different sizes. Her hair is combed. Apparently, they don't drink. Her bathroom seems to say, hello, I'm here for you. Look, my toilet flushes, and there's plenty of toilet paper. Should your scarf accidentally fall on the floor, there's no need to throw it away when you get home. Simply pick it up and put it back around your neck. Back in the living room, you're greeted by smells of-- is that salmon in the oven? Excuse me? Oh, Tunisian salmon, with roasted vegetables, fresh tuna croquettes, chopped Tunisian salad. You're then greeted by the chef, your new brother-in-law. He's slightly petite, very handsome with black hair and olive skin, and a smile that makes you hungry. He's [? Waleed. ?] And you, like everyone else, instantly like him. Our oldest sister, Caroline, who drove in from Connecticut with her husband, Jim, and their two boys, talks of her son's summer plans. He's taking a course at the local nature preserve called CSI: New Canaan. Isn't that cute? They investigate crimes in nature. Jeanne Darst. She's just finishing up her first book, Fiction Ruined My Family. It has no publisher yet. "Act two, I Am Here to Make Frenemies." And now we head into the natural habitat of frenemies. The ecosystem where they are perfectly adapted, where they thrive, and are rewarded as in no other place. I'm referring to the world of television. Especially those shows where frenemies are just built into the basic DNA of the drama that unfolds. And let's get past the whole Gossip Girl, The Hills, soap opera type program and go straight to reality television. Rich Juzwiak is a full-time blogger for VH1. And in his spare time, if that weren't enough, he has his own personal pop culture blog, which means that his days and nights are filled with watching, dissecting, and interviewing the people on reality TV. So he has given it a lot of thought. And last year he noticed something about the frenemy friendships that happen on reality TV. Reality TV finds its charm in repetition. Especially the shows where people compete. It's like sports. The game stays the same, and the fun is watching how different people play. And the same phrases pop up, whether it's chefs, models, or Bret Michael's groupies. Thrown under the bus. Not here for the right reasons. We could leave at any time. I want it the most. This isn't the last you've heard of me. This is not a game. We're in an alliance. You broke our alliance. Now I need a new alliance. But there is one oft repeated phrase that stands out above the rest, a battle cry that defines the philosophy underpinning all of competition reality TV. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I mean, I don't want to be a cliche, but I'm not here to make friends. Those are clips from, I Know My Kid's a Star, Forever Eden, The Bachelor, Hell's Kitchen, The Pickup Artist, and Top Chef. I made this last year and posted it on Youtube, a super-cut of every iteration of, "I'm not here to make friends," that I could dig up. 55 clips, 3 minutes and 20 seconds of self-centered goodness. You guys are not my friends. I'm not here to make friends with you. I'm not here to make friends. When I'm watching an episode where this phrase pops up, my response is always, now it's on. Now it's a reality show, a place where an aggressive declaration of incivility is not just acceptable, it's inevitable. I'm not here to make friends. And what makes, "I'm not here to make friends" quintessential reality TV is that it's impossible to imagine ever saying it in real life. If you're in a situation where you actually don't want to make friends, sitting for hours next to a stranger on a plane, joining a pickup game of basketball, what would you gain by announcing to everyone-- I'm not here to make friends with you guys. I could care less. As far as I can determine, I'm not here to make friends was first said back in the pleistocene era of reality TV, the very first season of Survivor by runner-up Kelly Wiglesworth. I keep telling myself, oh, I have enough friends. I didn't come here to make friends. You know, da, da, da. And the truth is, I like these people. Note that, "I'm not here to make friends" like reality TV itself, was in its infancy back then-- wistful, innocent, sweet even. The fangs came out and the phrase settled into dogma thanks to The Apprentice's Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the godmother of reality supervillains, who justified her ruthlessness with the simple brush off. I didn't come here to make friends. I said that from day one. It snowballed from there, not here to make friends. And let's call it NHTMF for short, became the calling card of what's often the most important character on the show: the one we love to hate. The catalyst for the heaping portion of unpleasantness we're about to enjoy. I ain't here to make no friends. And enjoy it we do. It's particularly funny when the cuddlier types on reality shows are taken to task by the not here to make frienders. As though politeness is what's truly offensive in this reality world. This happened during one season of The Bachelor when one woman spat out with disgust to another contestant-- Are you here to make friends? Because I'm not here to make friends? No, I'm not here to make friends. I'm not saying that. Can you hear how eager the woman she's talking to is to make clear that she is definitely not here to make friends either? As Jade Cole colorfully reminded us on America's Next Top Model-- This is a competition. This is not America's Next Top Best Friend. See also Pumpkin from Flavor of Love. This is Flavor of Love, not Flavor of Friendship. There are no friends on reality TV, only frenemies you haven't discovered yet. Maybe we could kind of be buddies? Girl, no. I'm not here to be friends, girl. NHTMF works so well as a plot point, one contestant I know told a journalist she was coached by the show's producers to say it. But plenty of contestants just pull it out on their own. It's as though the savvier ones are saying, if I'm going to be spun or edited to look bad anyway, I'm going to take control of this. Because-- I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win. I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win. I didn't come on the show to make friends, I came on to win. The thing is, they don't. Most of the people who say this phrase don't go on to win their respective shows. The winner is usually the person who flies under the radar, or whose victory makes the most uplifting story arc. Or in the rarest of instances, the person who's actually the best chef or the best designer. Ain't no friend of mine here. I don't need no friends. I will step on the back of their neck to get to the top any time I feel it's necessary. Though of course, there's winning, and then there's winning. If you spend any time talking to your typical reality star, you come to realize that the greatest reward of all is camera time. And the easiest way to achieve that, barring any real skill, is to tap into your id and simply unleash. And it works. We remember Omarosa, but can you even recall the name of the first winner of The Apprentice, much less a single sentence he uttered? I'm not here to make friends. Yeah, whatever. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to win fights. I'm not here to make friends with anybody. I'm here for Bret. I'm not here to make friends. I'm not going to apologize for how I feel. I didn't say nothing bad. I'm not here to make friends, and if I'm not making any enemies. Rich Juzwiak. His blog, where you can watch both of his, "I'm not here to make friends" videos is fourfourtypepad.com. That's four four, write out the word each time. F-O-U-R. fourfour.typepad.com. Coming up, David Rakoff and how to make a wedding toast for people that you have never wanted to see married. And what are you doing at their wedding anyway? 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 we chose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Frenemies. And if the word frenemy just seemed to show up in your life, arrive in your life a couple years ago unannounced, I think that is how pretty much everybody feels. Though, its first appearance in the world that anybody can find is all the way back in 1953. Gossip columnist, Walter Winchell, says in one of his column's, "Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?" Didn't catch on. Lexicographer, Erin McKean agreed to research this a little for us. She used to edit The New Oxford American Dictionary and now runs the online dictionary, Wordnik. She says the next citation of frenemy seems to be 24 years after Winchell, 1977 by the writer, Jessica Mitford. When she was talking about her sister and her sister's frenemy, and said they played together constantly and all the time disliking each other heartily. Mitford said that she and her sisters used the words as kids and they thought they made it up. It still doesn't catch on. The next citation is 15 years after that, 1992, in a book of word games. And that author also thinks that she is inventing the word. It's not until the late 1990s that it shows up and the people using the word seem to believe that any other people have ever used it before them. It's in a hit song by the New Radicals, "You Get What You Give" in 1998. And then it was on Sex and the City in 2000, late 2000. Is that the turning point? I think so. After that, she says, it starts showing up all over the place. You get the executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, declaring that Google is one of those companies The New York Times quote, "refers to as a frenemy," end quote. In 2008, it's put into the online Oxford English Dictionary. In 2009-- just two months ago-- it enters Merriam-Webster's dictionary. But Erin McKean found it in one place much, much more than any other: young adult novels, targeted at teen girls, starting at around 2006. But a lot of these words are just forcing their way to the surface of English. They just need to be made. And I think frenemy is a word like that. Really? Yeah. I mean, well, think about it. So the sounds fit together really well. You know, friend and enemy. They have a matching sound that you can blend together. So it's a blend word. And people love the juxtaposition of two opposites. Wait, are there other words like this where they sound alike and then they get smashed together into one word? Oh, it happens like all the time. Like guesstimate. And that's from 1936. Do you have another? I love this one, and people say this one all the time with a little thrill of thinking they're the first person ever to say it. You know, that someone is entering their anecdotage. Oh, I've never heard that. So it's like you get old and then you start telling your anecdotes, and that's it? Right. And I think the essential part is you start telling the same anecdotes over and over again. Right. You got another? Lots of people say that they are the first person to create the word linner. Linner? Linner is that meal you must have between lunch and dinner. That just makes me feel mad at somebody hearing that. You're like, oh for God's sake, wipe that look off your face. Right. And a lot of people who come and talk to lexicographers think they're being really clever when they use the word slanguage. So, slang plus language. But you do not find that clever? I just don't use it very much myself. Does the fact that there's a word for this phenomenon, frenemy, indicate that it's a common thing to happen in the world? Oh, no. Because there are words for all sorts of crazy and unusual things that are fairly rare. I mean there are lots of things that we talk about that we don't have single words for in English. When we don't have a single word for something in English that we think we should have a word for, it's called a lexical gap. Well, like what's an example of that? Pretty much the most famous example of a lexical gap is that we have a word for people who've lost their parents. You know, we call them orphans. But we don't have a single word for parents who have lost a child. So there are lots of people who have made suggestions. None of which I can remember right now because none of them have stuck. Right. That sounds like some sad contest on public radio on the weekend where they'd have people write in to make up that word. Right. It's worth noting that while Erin found tons of citations referring to girl frenemies, she only found a couple in which men were each other's frenemies. NASCAR driver, Dale Earnhardt, is described in a book as being frenemies with Michael Waltrip on his team. And the most random citation? It linked to the word with Hindu scripture from two millennia ago. Someone was trying to refer to the Bhagavad Gita, and there's some line in it that says, "Self is the friend of self. Self is the enemy of self." And then they say, so you can talk about yourself as your frenemy. So there's like this total abrupt shift of tone from self is the friend of self to self is your frenemy. Self is your frenemy. That sentence just proves that while we have all come to learn the word frenemy sometime during the last decade, any sentence with the word frenemy is probably not a sentence you want to try to get profound with. Frenemy's here. It's on the scene. It's here to stay as a word. But it is still not ready for the heavy lifting. "Act three, Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace." Being not friend friends can get you into some very confusing situations. Take this example from David Rakoff. Nathan at one of the outlying tables, his feet tangled up in the disc jockey's cables, surveyed the room as unseen as a ghost, while he mulled over what he might say for his toast. That the couple had asked him for this benediction seemed at odds with them parking him here by the kitchen. That he'd shown up at all was still a surprise. And not just to him, it was there in the eyes of the guests who had seen a mirage and drew near, and then covered their shock with a, "Nathan, you're here." And then, silence. They had nothing to say beyond that. A few of the braver souls lingered to chat. They all knew it was neither a secret nor a mystery that he and the couple had quite an odd history. Their bonds were a tangle of friendship and sex. Josh, his best pal once, and Patty, his ex. For a while he could barely go out in the city without being a punchline or object of pity. Poor Nathan had virtually become his new name, and so he showed up just to show he was game. Though his invite was late, a forgotten addendum. For Nate there could be no more clear referendum that he need but endure through this evening. And then, he would likely not see Josh and Patty again. Josh's sister was speaking, a princess in peach. Nathan dug in his pocket to study his speech. He had poured over Bartlett's for couplets to filch. He'd stayed up until 3:00, still came up with zilch. Except for instructions he'd underscored twice. Just two words in length, and those words were, be nice. Too often he thought our emotions betray us and reason departs once were up on the dais. He'd witnessed uncomfortable moments where others had lost their way quickly, where sisters and brothers had gotten too prickly, and peppered their babbling with stories of benders or lesbian dabbling, or spot on impressions of mothers-in-law Which true, Nathan thought, always garnered guffaws. But the price seemed too high, with the laugh seldom cloaking. Hostility masquerading as joking. No, he'd swallow his rage and he'd bank all his fire. He knew that in his case the bar was set higher. Folks were just waiting for him to erupt. They'd be hungry for blood even though they had supped. They'd want tears, or some other unsightly reaction, and Nathan would not give them that satisfaction. Though Patty a harlot and Josh was a lout, at least Nathan knew what he'd not talk about. I won't wish them divorce, that they wither and sicken, or tonight that they choke on their salmon or chicken. I won't mention that time when the cottage lost power in that storm on the Cape and they left for an hour. And they thought it was just the cleverest ruse to pretend it took that long to switch out the fuse. Or that time Josh advised me with so much insistence that I should grant Patty a little more distance. That the worst I could do was to hamper and crowd her. That if Patty felt stifled she'd just take a powder. That a plant needs its space just as much as its water. And I shouldn't give Patty that ring that I'd bought her. Which in retrospect, only elicits a, gosh, I hardly deserved a friend like you, Josh. No, I won't spill those beans, or make myself foolish, to satisfy appetites venal and ghoulish. I will not be the blot on this hellish affair. And with that, Nathan pushed out and rose from his chair. And just by the tapping of knife against crystal, all eyes turned his way, like he'd fired off a pistol. Joshua, Patricia, dear family and friends, a few words, if you will, before everything ends. You've promised to honor, to love and obey. We've quaffed our champagne and been cleansed by sorbet, all in endorsement of your hers-and-his-dom. So now let me add my two cents' worth of wisdom. I was racking my brain sitting here at this table until I remembered this suitable fable that gets at a truth, though it may well distort us. So here with the tale of the scorpion and tortoise. The scorpion was hamstrung, his tail all aquiver, just how would he manage to get cross the river? The water's so deep, he observed with a sigh, which pricked at the ears of the tortoise nearby. Well, why don't you swim, asked the slow-moving fellow. Unless you're afraid, I mean, what are you, yellow? It isn't a matter of fear or of whim, said the scorpion, but that I don't know how to swim. Ah, forgive me, I didn't mean to be glib when I said that. I figured you were an amphibian. No offense taken, the scorpion replied. But how bout you help me to reach the far side? You swim like a dream and you have what I lack. Let's say you take me across on your back. I'm really not sure that's the best thing to do, said the tortoise, now that I see that it's you. You've a less than ideal reputation preceding. There's talk of your victims all poisoned and bleeding. You're the scorpion, and how can I say this, but well, I just don't feel safe with you riding my shell. The scorpion replied, what would killing you prove? We'd both drown. So tell me, how would that behoove me to basically die at my very own hand, when all I desire is to be on dry land? The tortoise considered the scorpion's defense. When he gave it some thought, it made perfect sense. The niggling voice in his mind he ignored, and he swam to the bank and called out, climb aboard. But just a few moments from when they set sail, the scorpion lashed out with his venomous tail. The tortoise, too late, understood that he'd blundered when he felt his flesh stabbed and his carapace sundered. As he fought for his life he said, tell me why you have done this for now we will surely both die? I don't know, cried the scorpion. You never should trust a creature like me because poison I must. I'd claim some remorse or at least some compunction, but I just can't help it, my form is my function. You thought I'd behave like my cousin the crab, but unlike him it is but my nature to stab. The tortoise expired with one final quiver, and then both of them sank, swallowed up by the river. The tortoise was wrong to ignore all his doubts, because in the end, friends, our natures will out. Nathan paused, cleared his throat, took a sip of his drink. He needed these extra few seconds to think. The room had gone frosty, the tension was growing. Folks wondered precisely where Nathan was going. The prospects of skirting fiasco seemed dim, but what he said next surprised even him. So what can we learn from their watery ends? Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living, a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact. Regardless of whether we kiss or we wound, still we must come together. Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more, since it beats staying dry, but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open, while knowing full well it's essentially saying, please, come pierce my shell. Silence doesn't paint the depth of quiet in that room. There was no clinking stemware toasting to the bride or groom. You could have heard a petal as it landed on the floor. And in that stillness Nathan turned and walked right out the door. David Rakoff is the author of several books, most recently, Don't Get Too Comfortable. "Act four, The Case of the Long Lost Frenemy." Did you ever get into one of those situations with somebody where you can't really tell, you actually can't tell, wait, are we friends, are we not friends? What do you want from me exactly? Elle Smith found herself in that situation with a woman that here on the radio we're calling Jennifer, who Elle Smith knew in high school. And who got in touch with Elle Smith out of the blue by email. And then they slowly began an email correspondence. I hadn't heard anything from her in over 35 years. Our parting had been so monumentally final and kind of dramatic. And you say monumental, monumental and bad it sounds like? Monumental and bad, yeah. Absolutely. We'd had this really, really intense friendship. Very, very tight, told each other everything, at sort of the white hot phase of adolescence. And then it ended when she basically wrote this very formal letter disowning me, saying that our friendship was over, she would have nothing to do further with me. And that was the end. And so it was just really dissonant to get this chirpy, hey you, kind of email. You forwarded a couple of these emails and the very first one from her, she writes in her email, "Is it too strange to write and catch up? Is that you, [? Elpie?" Yes. "Cheers." And then she signs her name. Yes. And it was weird and strange. So she called me by my childhood nickname, which I haven't heard or seen in decades. So that was just kind of like one of those things where she was googling around and saw that my name had come up. And this correspondence sort of unfolds over several months. And so I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Oh, because after this first initial exchange of two emails, nobody brings it up. Nobody brings up, oh, by the way, about that letter you wrote me cutting me off forever. That doesn't come up? Not directly. At first I thought, well, she's just pretending not to remember and she just wants us to be all nice nice. And then as things kind of continued I realized, oh, she has absolutely and genuinely no recollection. There's something else going on here. And so what happened as you corresponded more? So as we correspond, we start talking about our families a little bit. She has daughters, and she talks about what her daughters are doing. And what becomes very striking is that one of her daughters, she's very, very serious about her music, like sort of a talented, obsessive musician. This is exactly where I was when I was at exactly this age. So this daughter is 14 years old. There's this very, very strong parallel between what her daughter's like now and what I was like then. Including, and this is where things started to get kind of crazy, this very, very close relationship between her daughter and her music-- the daughter's music teacher. Sort of the hair stood up on the back of my neck, kind of when she started talking about it. An older male, very charismatic, and sort of reading between the lines I could tell you that Jennifer was somewhat uneasy with this relationship. But as she expressed it, my daughter's privacy is so very precious to me and I would never dream of interfering. Did the daughter have a crush on the teacher? Yes. So the daughter seemed to be, in Jennifer's view, almost too close to the music teacher. She was having private lessons with him, and apparently also had a very, very intense internet relationship with him. So they were corresponding over the phone and corresponding over the internet, and then also having private lessons. And I could smell it. I know the sort of the danger signs in that kind of relationship. And talk about your own experience when it came to that kind of thing. OK, so when I was a kid I had a difficult family situation, and I was, I think, at the same age, really looking for acceptance, and authority figures were very attractive to me. And I respected my teachers and just loved them. And then what happened to me was that right at that point I came into contact with a music teacher who a normal person would not violate that kind of relationship, but this guy was a complete predator. And I was molested and raped at the age of 13 by this guy. Totally traumatized, huge fallout from it. Destroyed my life in certain ways for a long time. Took me a long, long time to kind of put it together from that. And Jennifer was one of the, I think, two people that I told. On the one hand, we were in this completely parallel situation where we both had crushes on these teachers. And then suddenly-- Oh, she also at that time when you're in high school, she had a crush on a teacher? Yes, huge crush on her teacher. And we would get together and giggle and talk about how wonderful these teachers were, and how fascinating everything that they did was, and all this kind of stuff. And then we got to this moment where, in my instance, this guy just completely took it, and it was like I fell off a cliff with it. Because he was a pedophile. And whereas her teacher was-- it continued on in this kind of storybook teenagery, giggly thing. So I was kind of off on my own in this whole different, horrible world. And Jennifer was still in her childhood in a sense. And then eventually did your parents find out and authorities find out, and was action taken against this guy? No, no action was ever taken. My family-- I tried approaching my parents about it. And they just weren't that interested. And, in fact, their explicit position was, some things really ought to be private. And so at that point I kind of realized, oh. They're not going to be a help? They're not going to be a help. And certainly, they're not going to call in any kind of authority. So you told Jennifer and one other friend? Yeah. And Jennifer's family was extremely loving in this situation. I don't think she ever actually told them what had happened to me, but it was clear that I was really troubled, and really depressed, and completely kind of feral. And so they became like another family to me. So I would go and I would stay with them. And I think it was a way of kind of pretending that my childhood also was continuing. And they really kind of were a refuge for me during the very worst period. And you said before that at some point she cut you off. Was that part of this? Yeah, so kind of about six to eight months after this guy raped me, Jennifer and this other friend wrote this letter basically saying, you're not one of us anymore. We reject you, and we don't want to have anything to do with you further. Wait, wait, wait. Was there a problem with you that you somehow seemed different than them now that you had this experience, or were they blaming you for what had happened? Were they saying that you had like bad character that this happened? I think a bit of both. Maybe in terms of Jennifer's perspective, this could have been her. So I think on some level what she was doing was saying, I'm not you and you're not me. But the irony is that-- and this comes out in these emails 35 years later. In fact, she went on to marry her high school teacher. Wait, to marry that same teacher? Not the same one, a different one. Literally within two years she marries another teacher. And what's interesting is that in the emails she points to that as being a reason why we quote, "lost touch." So she said, oh, I lost touch with so many of my friends as a result of that relationship. And I'm thinking, huh, OK. Well, that's weird. Then she divorces him and marries-- it sounds like a really, really nice guy. And that's the guy with whom she has the kids. And so this is your history with her, and then you find yourself 35 years later emailing with her about her daughter and her daughter's crush on her teacher. And she doesn't seem to remember any of that? None of it. Not a single detail. Yeah. And then when it became clear that her daughter was like in this really, really perilous situation, and recognizing that Jennifer wasn't seeing the train coming on the tracks. At that point, I said, look, I know that you respect your daughter's privacy, but this doesn't sound right, and I think you ought to contact the authorities. And did she? She did. And what was kind of interesting about it was that there was a long kind of lull. So there are about two weeks where there's like complete radio silence between us. And I'm thinking to myself, oh I pushed too hard. Because I thought about it very, very carefully before I suggested that to her. Because I thought, am I pushing somebody to violate their relationship with their child? Am I so blinded by my own personal history that this, in fact, is perfectly fine as a relationship? Blah, blah, blah. And then I get this email from her, and I was totally blown away because she just went in and took care of business in a really impressive way. So she got in touch with a counselor, the counselor put her in touch with the police. The police moved on this. The daughter's cell phone and computer were seized. This guy was known to the police. Known to the police like he had had previous incidents? Yeah. I really felt like I had inadvertently participated in this important salvation for this young girl that I didn't know. So it was dramatic and entirely fabulous as an outcome. And after all that happened, did she remember or acknowledge any of these things from your past? Nothing. Not a single peep. It ended kind of like it began with, gee, everything's great now. I'm so glad I did that. And thanks for pushing me on that. And everything's fine now. And have a good Thanksgiving, basically was how it ended. And never heard from her since. That was it. That was our last contact. How do you know that she didn't remember? What convinced you of that? I think knowing her family. There was no room in that family for this kind of thing. I remember getting her chirpy emails and thinking, sheesh, she has totally become her mother, the world's most repressed happy person. Yeah, I do think that she genuinely in her conscious mind did not remember. But I also think that the timing speaks to a totally different logic. So I think that some part of her knew it. In one of the emails she mentions how strange that I should reach out to you at such a critical time. She's very smart. She knew that there was some link between our history and the timing. And I think in some sense she was sort of subconsciously counting on my doing something that she couldn't do. God, people do so many things without knowing that they're doing them. Yes. There was like one person in the entire universe she knew that she could talk to about it who would get her to do the right thing. And to be able to actually do something about it. I feel like it resolved something for me, no question. Well, I understand. It's funny because I feel like it resolves each of the things that had been so disturbing. It resolved the rift between you and her, which seems sort of horrible. And then it lets you fix the situation for a girl who's sort of a stand-in for you at the same age as you were. Yeah. At that age, I was really devastated by her action. That was like another watershed during a really ugly period of my life. And so to be able to not need to rub her nose in it as an adult, but to be able to resolve it in the way that we did, which is kind of like, I think, this charming lack of acknowledgment of what was actually going on, on both ends. I mean with hindsight now, I'm kind of putting it together and I feel like, oh, well, that's just completely OK. Neither of us needs to continue this relationship. This relationship is done now, finally, 35 years later. Yeah, rest in peace. Yeah. Well, our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who says that he doesn't care what we say about it him here at the end of the program every week for one important reason-- I'm not here to make friends. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Every Monday, John, and Thax, and Ericka get together at John's apartment to watch Dark Shadows. You know, Dark Shadows, surely you've heard of it. It was the most popular thing in the whole world, at one point. No. It was. John used to watch four or five hours of Dark Shadows every day, back in January when he was unemployed. Now he only watches four hours a week and only with his friends. And, in no way, is as hardcore about it as when he used to watch with his friend Catherine. Well, when Catherine was here she insisted that we watch it. And it would be like hard to get her to stop, actually. I mean, honestly, it would. It would be like 12:00 midnight. And she'd go, please, one more, one more episode. And I'm like, you know, I've got to get up for work tomorrow. She's like, please, just one more. She'd be begging. It got really sad. Dark Shadows is slow. The sets are cheap. The writing is bad. The acting is stilted. It's a Gothic horror soap opera, produced five days a week from 1966 to '71. And, of course, it is not scary. It is never scary. Though when John was a kid, he was so scared of Dark Shadows, he'd get scared of the actresses lipstick, even the lipstick could do it. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, and it is the special Halloween edition of our program. Today we bring you stories of things that are supposed to be scary but are not. Act one, Dark Shadows. Act two, Scientist in a Haunted House. Act three, Vampire Girl. Act four, Discovering Evil. Act five, Gang Girl. And Act six, Screams. Those are your screams, your screams as left on our voicemail. I'm your ghost, I mean host, Ira Glass. Stay with us. What I learned at John's apartment about Dark Shadows is that the main point of it, the main pleasure of it, is watching things mess up. It's like watching car races for the car crashes. If the car crashes came every 10 minutes and nobody got hurt. This American Life producer Nancy Updike and I were in John's apartment for, I don't know, 10 minutes when a werewolf exited a scene, and through the open door, we could all witness this figure. Not a shadowy, mysterious figure from the year 1896, but instead-- Oh, did you see the prop guy? Did you see the prop guy? Wait. Here look. Oh yeah. A prop guy. There's a lot of rewinding and replaying this video, which John taped off the Sci-Fi Channel. John, and Thax, and Ericka have watched actors forget lines, they've seen scripts left on beds, they've seen props fall over and smash. Periodically, there's an offstage cough. And what Thax describes as the sound of a giant zipper, mysterious, inexplicable, and not part of any story. When the vampire, Barnabas Collins, enters the foyer of Collinswood Manner, he closes the door behind him, and a moment later it swings open again. Oh, there goes the door. Yeah, uh huh. There's something wrong with the lock on it. And it's always swinging open after somebody closes it. This is the kind of moment they live for. Giant tears in the fabric of the show's fantasy. John says that modern TV shows and movies are way too slick. What he likes are things that are either old, or imperfect, or both. His house is filled with huge sofa-like paintings that he's picked up at garage sales, and recordings where you can hear things fall over in the studio. A fast paced, modern film like Independence Day exhausts him with its relentlessly high production values. Dark Shadows is more human scale. Like you notice the littlest things you wouldn't notice in a regular show. We noticed tonight that people have stopped knocking on the door three times. They're now knocking on the door four times. I'll go out the back way. No, no you won't. You'll stay right here. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] they'll make me go back if they find-- [FOUR KNOCKS] [FOUR KNOCKS] So John thinks they had a lengthy meeting deciding that you have to have four knocks instead of three, to spice up the plot a little bit. It's more exciting. Like the new director said, we've got to get rid of the old ways. Things are going to change around here. No more of this three knock stuff. John is also sort of obsessed with trying to figure out exactly when the episodes were filmed. He claims that there is a point, in the 1969 episodes when, suddenly, all the characters started saying, groovy and freaky. By his calculations, the episodes that we're watching this night, were probably filmed in February 1969. One clue-- Because in the summer, when it's summer, you can hear the air conditioner running. Yeah, and you see the flies. And you see the flies. And I've never-- There's a lot of flies. I mean, it's like the studio is next to an alley that had big garbage dumpsters, because there's always flies on the set. It's like the thing that's so amazing. There are scenes where flies are sitting all over people's faces, and they're pretending that they're not there. It's kind of a character study, which actors decide to shoo the flies away, and which ones ignore them and continue bravely through the scenes. But the classic fly scene is like, when somebody was doing an exorcism, and the fly just went right into his mouth. So he just went [BLOWING SOUND] like that to get rid of it. What's interesting about all this is that not only does it defy the way you're supposed to watch horror films, it defies the way you're supposed to watch drama. They do not suspend disbelief for one second. Instead, they construct elaborate fantasies, not about the characters, but about the actors who play the characters. There's like a real vulnerability to all the characters. And even people that you don't like on the show, like the Chris Jennings character, he's this horrible actor, and that Beth character, she's like a horrible actress, but after a while you get really attached to them. Because you feel like you could just see her going off stage and going, oh my god. And people going, oh, you did really well today. There's a life behind it. What's the matter? Jewell was murdered at school last night. What? --from her teacher. Torn apart by a wild beast. Yes, it does seem a rather hideous way to die. I mean, I think Dark Shadows has a lot of Ed Wood to it. There's a lot of that sort of putting things together at the last minute. And putting your heart into something even though it's not very good, because I mean, it really does-- I've worked on really bad projects. You work just as hard on a bad project as you do on a good project. [SOUNDS OF TERROR] It's so pointless. It's happening again. [SMALL MOTOR REVVING IN IMITATION OF WOLF GROWL] No. No. No. Don't come near me. [SCREAMS AND MOTOR SOUNDS/GROWLING] John's favorite actress is Grayson Hall, who plays Magda and Julia, and who, inexplicably, enters a lot of scenes sniffing the air, as if there is some bad odor that's never discussed or explained. I know nothing about her. I know absolutely nothing about this woman as an actress except for what she does. But I have this whole sense of what she does after the show. I have this whole world that I've built up around her. Yeah, me too. What does she do after the show? Well, I just think she sits in a bar and drinks and smokes cigarettes. She's just like one of these people-- All right. I was angry. I put the curse on you. I said it would be a terrible curse. Yeah, she's got the most incredible facial expressions of any actress I've ever seen. I don't think I've ever seen anybody who's face fascinates me more than Grayson Hall. I don't know. She should have been a huge star. You mean, she's good? Well, no that's just it. See-- Somewhere during the second episode of the night, I realized that, not only are these stories convoluted and hard to follow, they're incredibly boring, boring in a way that invites speculation and embroidery by the audience. For instance, the reliable father figure in this program is Barnabas Collins. And he's supposed to be this really great guy, and everybody loves him, and he's always jumping in and saving people. So why is he a vampire? Thax says it can be sort of disconcerting at times. Like you love Barnabas, and they just casually mention how he kills village girls to get his blood. It's like you're supposed just go, oh-- Oh, that Barnabas, right. I mean, every so often he goes into the village. Doesn't everybody go in the village once in a while, and-- It takes a village. Pretty soon after this, John declares that he has a Dark Shadows bloopers reel, full of funny accidents from the show. He spends the next hour searching among maybe 50 badly labeled tapes for it, popping in one obscure video after another. At one point he shows us a video that he made of a macrame clown sort of dancing in a darkened room to a mysterious song. He never finds the bloopers reel. And, at a certain point, I realize the entire evening has come to resemble a Dark Shadows episode itself, slow moving, full of accidents, convoluted, but really kind of fun. Thax flips to the Polish videos channel and talks about the Polish Beatles movie he once saw. And John explains his plan to attend his first Dark Shadows convention in a month or two. It's strange, John says, how a TV show that once seemed like the biggest thing in the world could be so obscure now. It makes you think about Madonna, and ER, and The X Files, and what anyone's going to remember 30 years from now. I know what the last line of Dark Shadows is. And I think they were going to go back and do another werewolf plot line or something like that, and then they got canceled. And the last line is, the marks on such and so's neck were discovered to be just an animal, and not anything having to do with the supernatural. And I was talking to this guy, and he was like completely into Dark Shadows when he was young. And he told me this story about when him and his brother used to just watch Dark Shadows religiously. And it was the last show, and they say the line about, everyone lives happily ever after, and then they're showing the credits. And then the announcer comes on and says, next Monday at this time, stay tuned for Password with Allen Ludden. And he said, his brother screamed at the screen. You bastard! You bastard! In a certain sense, things that are scary have a lot in common really with things that are funny. A, they both produce a physical reaction. And B, if something that is supposed to be scary fails to be scary, it's way more funny than something that's trying to be funny, if that makes sense. It sort of goes without saying, but this is our Halloween show, so I'm going to say this anyway, that for John, and for Thax, and for Ericka, nothing about Dark Shadows has anything to do with things that are scary, with ghouls or spooks or Halloween. They could care less about Halloween. So what are you guys doing for Halloween? Well, Halloween's my birthday, so I don't like to dress up. That's Thax. Here's Ericka. What am I going to do on Halloween? I don't know. Probably nothing. I painted a pumpkin so far, but that's probably about it. And finally, John, who hates Halloween, because it's a day when you're expected to be creative. I have my monkey hair cape. I wore that last year. Do you know what monkey hair-- it's made out of monkeys. And I guess like in the '40s, they outlawed it, because they were killing monkeys to make these coats. And they're beautiful coats. I mean, they're insane. And they were real popular in the '20s, and if you-- Act Two, Haunted House. You know can't do a Halloween show without at least one truly spooky story. And this one we have fits the bill pretty well. But, of course, in keeping with our pledge that everything that is supposed to be scary about Halloween will be rendered harmless during our program today, what we are bringing you is a spooky story that happens to somebody who is completely unafraid, totally unafraid, could care less. A woman named Carol Estler moved into an old house in Massachusetts in the 1970s. And in this story you're going to hear her and her daughter describe what happened. At first they noticed these patches of wavy air, like when you see heat rise off a barbecue grill. And they heard sounds, people walking, stuff clattering around, when there was nobody around. Once Carol was walking to the barn, and suddenly she says, there was a just a wall in front of her, just this force, this force blocking her way. And she said she waited, and eventually it went away. And she didn't tell anybody about it. And a few days later, her daughter ran into the kitchen and said she was walking to the barn, and an invisible wall blocked her way. Carol Estler was a professional scientist, and she tried to find other explanations for what was happening other than ghosts. But the data all started to point in one direction. One night, I was lying in my bed, and I was just about ready to fall asleep. And the strangest thing was that I suddenly felt my body start to move. It was like, if you could imagine your body was magnetic, and someone was taking a magnet and sort of moving it slowly around your body, and was pulling in kind of a broad gentle way, one way and then the other. It really felt like my body was being pulled from the outside. And I'm a scientist, so I watched. And I watched, and I got wide awake. And I watched that for almost two hours as my body was sort of pulled one way, then pulled the other way, really a very strange feeling. And I was getting really, really tired. Somehow that pulling was just making me so tired. So I thought I'd try an experiment. And I said, out loud, look I'm really, really tired. Will you please stop? And it stopped. Now I don't know that I ever really talked to anything. I don't really know what was there. It was just a very strange experience. But still, we kept trying to find other explanations. And for me, I stopped trying to find other explanations when, one night, I woke up, I don't know why, and I just looked across the room, and there was a woman standing there. And she was just standing. She was looking around at things. She wasn't looking at me. She wasn't looking at anything that seemed to be in the room. She seemed to be looking far off. And then she turned, and she walked out of the room, right through the closed door. I thought about that for a while, quite a while. And I think I've pretty much accepted now that I live in a house where there are ghosts, leftover pieces of other people who don't really see me, because the woman didn't seem to see me or anything in the room. Sometimes, I can see them. Sometimes they can move things and move me in ways that I can feel or see. Sometimes they can make noises. They certainly don't seem to be trying to bother us. I suppose, maybe, even they experience us as ghosts, because we probably look invisible to them, the way she couldn't see me. It's a very interesting house to live in. The important one I haven't mentioned yet is the crying baby. I have not experienced the crying baby, although she is said to spend a lot of time in my room. The first time someone experienced it, they were sleeping in the small room off of mine. It was a guest. And there were no children in the house that night. And the next morning he said, where was the child crying all night long? I heard a child crying all night long. There's an old foundation on the back part of the property, which is supposed to have dated back from a house in Revolutionary times or earlier, which had burnt here and, supposedly, burnt in it was a woman and a child. Certainly, I had no training in anything like that. I come from three generations of scientists, and ghosts just don't fit. But if you're a real scientist, into research, then one of the most basic parts of you is the principle that everything you know is wrong. Every theory, every model, somehow breaks down. And it doesn't matter whether it's quantum mechanics, or nuclear physics, or super conductivity, in some way or other, the model is incomplete. In some way or the other, the model is wrong. And the way you learn, in science, is to keep pushing your models until you find out where they're wrong. And I think, living here in this house, I've got some new models in my science. Well, this song is Barnabas Collins himself, the friendly, fatherly vampire, as played by Jonathan Frid, from the Dark Shadows album. Act Three, Vampire Girl. My character is Lady Cassandra, and Lady Cassandra is a vampire. The Lady Cassandra is basically walking, talking sex. It's not just that fear is close to laughter, it's also close to sex. Shawna Kennedy plays Lady Cassandra at Haunted Verdun Manor, this huge, annual haunted house and more in Terrell, Texas, about 30 miles outside Dallas. Like Carol Estler, that woman who lives in a haunted house, Shawna is also a scientist, who found a new model for looking at the world. And Shawna Kennedy was always sort of shy. She didn't like scary movies. She didn't like horror novels. She'd never been to a haunted house until last year. And last year, she made a big, big turnaround. Now, every night, she goes out to Haunted Verdun Manor to-- Roam the grounds, looking for victims. And we basically try to physically and psychologically torment the people waiting in line to get into the house. Like how? Oh, we stalk them. We will look at the crowd and try to pick the one most likely to give a good fear reaction. And we try to get that person's attention, from a good distance. And then, very, very slowly creep up on them, maintaining eye contact, never breaking the stare. And this is usually enough to give us a good scream, or squeal, or at least a break and run out of the line. And are you shooting for a break and run? That's always good. It's very entertaining for everyone else in the line. A scream is also good. We like a good scream. What do you wear? [LAUGHS] I wear a skintight, black velvet dress, with a slit almost all the way up one leg. What do you say to men and women when you walk up to them. I don't say anything. You don't talk at all. I talk as little as possible. How come? Because people in power don't need to say a lot. So if you say as little as possible, it gives people the impression that you are more powerful than they might necessarily feel. And how does this compare to who you are when you're not playing Cassandra? Oh, I'm a science geek. I work in a laboratory. I play with DNA. I'm just as happy being in the back corner of the lab, by myself, doing whatever. Wardrobe of your daily life? What do you wear in the daytime? Jeans and a sweatshirt. At night, my clothing will get more flamboyant. Also I'm a belly dancer, so my costuming for that is pretty flamboyant. Why do you like scaring people? It's an amazing feeling of power to know that, here you are, somebody that generally, in my geek girl uniform, and my glasses, and my hair pulled back in a little top knot, I wouldn't make anybody look twice at me. But as Cassandra, not only are they looking twice at me, but some of them are actually running from me. And I like that. That's fun. This is a question I'm not sure how exactly to ask. But I want to ask it, and I'm sure it's something that you might have thought about, given the way that you're costumed when you do this. What is a connection between sex and Halloween, between sex and scaring people? The sexual response and the fear response in human beings is similar-- increased heart rate and respiratory rate. See, now you're sounding like the science geek. Similarities in the way your body responds to both fear and sex. Also, some of the images that we have in Western culture of things that are horrific are also basically sexual. Like what? The werewolf is the beast within. And, basically, vampirism is just sex from the neck up. You're penetrating a passive person. It really is a very sexual sort of monster. So when you're wandering the grounds, do you feel like it's one intense little seduction after another? Absolutely. Compare the sexuality of doing Cassandra to the sexuality of doing belly dancing. The sexuality of Cassandra is dark. She always will have that underlying element of, I could have sex with you or I could kill you. With belly dancing, it is a joyful thing. It is, this is my body, and this is how moves, and isn't it great that it moves this way? Aren't you enjoying this? Are they equally sexual experiences to perform? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's incredible. Absolutely. Shawna says that she hated scary stuff until a few years ago, when she read this Stephen King book, Dance Macabre. Which makes the case that everybody needs a good scare now and then, and that all cultures have some version of ghost stories to do this. And reading that set her on this path that eventually led to her playing Lady Cassandra. And she says that playing Lady Cassandra sped up this process that she thinks would have happened anyway in her adult life, of learning to be more assertive. She says it's also given her a more complicated picture of herself than she had when she was a kid. I saw myself before as being a good Baptist girl, a complete creature of goodness, who was going to be tormented by the powers of darkness. Afterwards, I see myself as a creature of both light and dark. I have both elements in me. And I sort of got the idea that I really wasn't going to go to Hell for it, for having a dark side. It was no longer threatening to me. And this brings us to our next story. This is a story about another Texas girl discovering her dark side. We have arrived at Act [? Three ?] of our program, The Evil Within. And we are pleased to welcome back to This American Life, writer Julie Showalter. I was raised a Baptist, a Southern Baptist in west Texas. So I always knew that I was a sinner. But it wasn't until Halloween day in the fourth grade that I thought of myself as a sinful being. Before that, sin was something that could be overcome through hard work, prayer, reading the Bible, and thinking of a way out of coveting Tommy Sue Bailey's new Madame Alexander doll. Afterwards, I knew sin was part of me, in every molecule of my body, and I could never get rid of it. I was very excited about going to school on Halloween day. Mother had decided I could look like Daisy Mae Yokum, Lil' Abner's wife in the funny papers. She cut off and fringed a pair of old jeans. She found a peasant blouse, which we ripped, then pinned together with a diaper pin. She put my hair in pigtails and painted freckles on my nose. When she finished, she said, you look so cute. Let's take a picture to send your daddy. Daddy lived 80 miles away in Amarillo. He visited pretty often now, and he and mother wrote letters. I smiled my best smile for the picture, a smile that would show daddy what a good, pretty girl I was and, make him want to come home to stay. The next day, I went to school bare-legged, bare-footed, bare-shouldered, knowing that about half my friends would have ripped up one of their father's old dress shirts and come as bums, and the other half would have dug out old cowboy guns and cowboy hats and called that a costume. I thought I had a chance at the prize. I imagined my teacher's reaction. Janice, you're just the cutest thing, she'd say, and so clever. Maybe she'd hug me, like she did sometimes. Mrs. Wells was the first teacher I idolized. She was young and pretty, sweet and vivacious. She dressed in pastels and smelled like cotton candy. She had just married, and her husband was a part-time football coach and a part-time Baptist minister. For a while, I wished my mother would die and she'd adopt me, but I realized that was a sinful thought. So I wished there was some kind of big sister organization, and she'd be my big sister, and maybe my mother would decide I should live with her, because she lived closer to church or something. On Halloween, I stopped just inside the classroom door, waiting for her to see me, posing a little, excited for her reaction. When she turned, her mouth dropped open. Janice Ray Hopewell, what are you thinking of? That outfit is indecent, it's obscene. You look like a little temptress. Why, you're practically naked. A temptress? Naked? I didn't know I was naked. Then I thought of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they didn't know they were naked. I looked down at my feet and legs and saw them as the feet and legs of a naked temptress. While Mrs. Wells talked to me, she pulled Ernesto Rodriguez's chair to the back. Janice, sit down in the corner. No, not at your desk. It's right in front where anyone walking by can see you. Sit in the back here. Patsy, get the blanket out of the closet. She can cover herself with that. Leon, go get the principal, tell him it's an emergency. Cover up Janice, you'll cause sinful thoughts. I wrapped the blanket around myself. I remembered asking my Sunday school teacher, how could it've been all bad for Adam and Eve to eat the apple, since they got knowledge of good and evil, not just evil? And she said, they really just got knowledge of evil, everything had been good up to then. I pulled my feet up under the blanket. The principal came in with Leon Anderson right behind him. What is it, Mrs. Wells? Is one of the children hurt? Mrs. Wells blushed. I guess it's not really an urgent emergency. I just felt we had to do something right away. Janice show him your costume. I couldn't believe it. She'd said I was naked, and now she wanted me to show the principal and the whole class. Janice Ray, take that blanket off. I stood up and put the blanket on the chair behind me. I looked at the floor. After a minute, the principal said, well, there is a requirement that children wear shoes to school for health reasons, but if she stays off the playground, I don't think anything will happen in just one day. Janice, you tell your mother that your costume next year has to include shoes. Mrs. Wells grabbed his arm. Can I talk to you in the hall. I could see them talking outside the door as I put the blanket back around me. At first the principal looked like something was funny. But Mrs. Wells didn't calm down. Then he looked mad and did the rest of the talking. When Mrs. Wells came back in, she walked over to me and jerked the blanket away. Janice, give me the blanket. It seems I have overreacted. Her face was red, and she sounded like she was reciting a lesson. She didn't look at me. There's nothing inappropriate about your costume, although bare feet are extremely unhygienic. Go to your regular seat. Can I keep the blanket? No, you may not keep the blanket. There's absolutely nothing wrong with your costume. In fact, I think you should stand up in front of the class, so we'll all have a chance to look at it. It will be good for all of us to see what's acceptable, so we don't overreact again. For 15 minutes, she made me stand there, while the other kids looked at me and giggled behind their hands. I thought about all the temptresses I knew, about Bathsheba, and Delilah, and about Salome who danced nearly naked so they'd cut off John the Baptist's head. I thought of the movie ads with Carol Baker in baby-doll pajamas sucking her thumb, that all the preachers were mad about. And I thought about Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up, looking happy. And how everyone said, Joe DiMaggio had divorced her because her skirt blew up. And if part of me was excited that I could be a temptress like Eve, and Bathsheba, and Delilah, and Salome, and Carol Baker, and Marilyn Monroe, and maybe even like Elizabeth Taylor, most of me was horrified that I was sinful, and causing sin in others without even knowing how or why. It was just something I was, not something I did or even thought. I thought of Daddy seeing the picture of me, nearly naked, and I knew I had ruined everything. He wouldn't think I was a good sweet girl anymore. No one who knew about the costume would ever think I was a good girl again. I got to spend the whole day at school bare-legged, bare-footed, bare-shouldered, feeling totally naked. At recess and lunch, I rushed to the bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and pulled my feet up so their nakedness wouldn't show. The next time Daddy came to see us, I was embarrassed and stayed in my room. And six months later, when Jimmy [? Rigga ?] pulled me into an alley and kissed me, I let him, even though I liked Leon Anderson. And the next day, I saw Jimmy whispering to Leon and knew they were talking about me. And two years later, when the principal at my new school got the sixth grade girls alone in the closet and rubbed all up and down our fronts, I was the only one who didn't tell her mother. Because he was a deacon at the First Baptist Church, and I was a temptress. Julie Showalter's short story first appeared in Other Voices, a literary journal published by the University of Illinois in Chicago. She's the author of the forthcoming novel, Needle Work. Coming up, what really scares people today, really, and your screams. It's in a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, and invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that theme with short stories, monologues, mini documentaries, whatever they can think of. And it is the Halloween edition of our program. And our theme is, things that are supposedly scary, but are not really scary. We are at Act [? Four. ?] And I actually got the idea to play you this next interview, the interview that will make up most of Act Four, when Shawna Kennedy, that Texas woman who dresses up as vampire, said the following thing to me, about her and her colleagues at Haunted Verdun Manor. They all take a real joy in doing mean things to perfectly nice people. What's the pleasure in doing mean things to perfectly nice people? You can do it. You have the power to. This picture of power reminded me of interviews I've done with Chicago gang members. And, in a certain way, gang members are perfect for a Halloween program. After all, what are most people really afraid of? Not goblins, not ghosts, most people are scared of armed urban teenagers who just don't care. They just don't care. And I would make the case, I believe that this fear, like the other fears in our program, is not totally justified. But you can judge for yourself. This is an interview with a young woman who was a gang member for years, who now counsels girls in Chicago gangs. I was 12. I was 74 pounds, maybe four foot in all. My mother thought I was her little angel. My grades were decent, my teachers liked me. I didn't get in very many fights at school. It was when I was out in my other neighborhood, this is where I became this big, bad, super person. And this is where I did all my damage. And why? Because I could. How did you get rank in the gang? Me and a girlfriend went into a school, broke into a school, kind of destroyed some stuff. And we got recognized for it. Did they tell you, here's what you're going to do? Here's your mission? No, there's kind of-- see, what happened was this. There was a teacher who was bothering somebody else. And what we were to do was go and scare this teacher. So what we did was we waited till everybody was gone and everything. And we broke inside the school. Then we went to her room and tore it up. And that was enough. Did you put gang signs on the wall so everyone would know who did it? On the chalkboard in-- In chalk? In chalk, because the pen wouldn't write on it. And we didn't have no spray paint. In chalk, and we did do a couple markers on the walls and stuff. And on her desk, we did a nice big one, to let her know like where it came from. Because he threatened her, and we were his threat backup. So she left him alone after that. So I guess it got our point across. This poor old lady, she didn't know anything. And she wasn't hassling him because she just wanted to hassle him. She was hassling him because he deserved it. Especially now that I work with children, I see that she was hassling him because he deserved to be hassled, because he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing. And yet, we just rocked her world. I mean, she was afraid for-- lord knows-- maybe years after that. She was? She was. She was very scared. Because I went to that same school. And she was very afraid. When we went in that Monday, she was very afraid. I mean, we had tore everything up that was hers, everything. And it was cruel, real cruel. I think a lot of things we did were real cruel. When we were there, it wasn't like, shh, be quiet. No, it was like, throw everything, scream, laugh about it. See, this is the thing. I don't know how to even capture it or explain it on the radio. And that is the difference in reality, if you're in the gang, versus the way you see it if you're not in. I mean the way that you all saw what you were doing was, it's kind of fun. You guys laugh about it. It was a power trip. It's power. When you're 13, and you can walk down the street, and everybody looks at you like, there goes the Pope, that's a power trip. When you're on the street, some people can just walk up to somebody and just smack them, just smack the hell out of them. That would be it. But I was more like, what, you said something about me? You got something to do about that? I would lead it on. I could get my anger up, before I could muster up my courage, talk to them, argue with them, get your momentum up, get your anger. Get that nice wild flush in your face or something, and then like the nice crowd that's behind you saying, kick her ass, hit her, all this. And then you get this bold stance on you, and then you can hit someone. And you get all your nice anger out. But I couldn't just walk up and smack somebody. And the girls who you see now? The girls who I see now are lost. They're so lost, they're like that all the time. They think they know everything. And they don't need know reason because they know everything. So all they need to do is go up there and do it. And one time my cousin said, well I just went up there and I clocked her. I said, you clocked her? You just clocked her? You didn't even say anything to her? She said, no, I didn't need to say anything to her. All I had to do was walk up and clock her. I said, so you walked up to her, you clocked her in the face, and that was it? She says yeah. And I'm like, what were you thinking, when you walked-- She goes, I wasn't. I don't like some of what I did because when I try to reach out, and I try to tell the kids, you shouldn't do this because it's bad, and you'll hurt people. And they'll say, you did it. Yeah, but I would think actually that could work to your advantage. You'd say, yeah I did it. And I'm sorry. For some of them it does. For some of them it doesn't, because they can't get past-- because I can say to some of them, yes, I did. And this is how I feel about it now, and I regret it. But some of them, they can't get past the fact that I did do it, so that makes it correct. And every time you turn around they say, but you did it, but you did it. And it's not the fact that I did it, it's the fact that I did it, I regret it, and I got out. That's what I want to pass, that I got out, and I regret it. See, but what they're saying to you, in a way, is even more interesting. What they're saying to you is, I'm not so bad. I'm not so bad. Look, what I'm doing isn't so bad, because, look, you did it, everybody does it. You're telling me that I'm bad. You're telling me the way I am is wrong. But I know in my heart that I'm not that wrong. See, that's like, when I was doing all this. There was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong. I mean, so what? So I went in there and I wrecked a classroom. So what? So I hit somebody in the head or the ear, they shouldn't have been messing with me. So what? Even as you say it, your whole face turns into like a 14-year-old. I mean, you like shake your head, and like you kind of swagger. It's just like your whole personality just transforms. That's why, in a way, it's hard for me to talk about this, because I do, I change. And I start the, so what, and I don't care. We lived on the corner of Beech and Spalding, right there, where they would kill people and hang them from the light post. They hung people from light post? They hung one person. And what it was, it was around Halloween. And what they did is they put jogging pants and filled it with newspaper, and they put a hood, and they put a banana hanging out of his [? virtuous ?] place. And they hung him from the lightpole. And nobody knew, because it looked like a dummy hanging there. But it was a human being? It was a human being. Dead? Dead. Not alive anymore. See that was from a whole big war. And that was our victory or whatever with this person. And he had certain colors on, certain color jogging pants, certain color jogging shirt that he had on, certain color gloves, fingers bent down on the glove and all that stuff to represent. In death, they pushed his fingers into his gang sign? No, no, I didn't say his gang sign. They just had the gloves on it, and they had the glove taped down, holding upward our gang sign, not his. Not his-- ours up. Our you one of the people who did that? No. I was too young. But you saw them do it? I didn't see them do it. I just knew about it. People must have laughed about it. It was hilarious. I mean, to them. I was too young. I was maybe eight. I remember seeing it. I remember it there. I remember asking my mother why he's there. What did she say? She said that she don't know, and she don't want to know. And what did you think of it at eight? At age eight, I just kind of wondered why it was there, and how they got it up there. That was my whole big thing. I think that, as a child, you wonder those things. And I just kept wondering, how did they get it up there? And I just thought it was newspaper. And it was a person. And how long was it up there? It was up there a couple days. It was up there a couple days. Because it was like stenching, it smelled, and they cut it down. The police came, and they cut it down. And the banana had already fell off. And that was it. And nobody said anything. Nothing went out. There was no screams. There was no nothing. There was just somebody come, cut it down, picked it up, put it in a truck. Police came, scanned the area, came back once. That's it. Nothing was ever mentioned, nothing. Now we move to Act Six, Screams. Well, a few months ago we introduced you to Dr. Greg Whitehead, of the Institute for Scream Studies, who has been collecting screams from around the world. And his thesis is this. He says that we tend to think of the scream as a kind of monochromatic, sort of binary unit of information. Someone either screams or they don't. They express a kind of scream-ness, or they do not. Whitehead says that is very simplistic. That there are hundreds of different kinds of screams, and there's meaning to divine from screams. And we have to divine that meaning. And he invited your screams, yours, for his collection, for his analysis. And dozens of you called and left your screams on voicemail. And I felt, what would a Halloween program be without screams? [BEEP] Please enter your mailbox-- [BEEPS] Your mailbox is almost full. Hi, my name is Oliver, and I'm going to leave my scream. [SCREAM] [SCREAM] I never really thought much about screams, but it is rather purging. I just got off, and I am completely frustrated with a fellow employee. [SCREAM] The message will be saved. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I work at a company that works six days a week, 12 hours a day. I'm so sick of it, that I want to scream. [SCREAM] Hi, I'm the lead singer in a band called Hatewave in Chicago. And I heard a little bit about your studies, and it reminded me of the music I play in this band. The lyrics are all screaming, and screaming is a really great thing. And it's a lot of fun to listen to. So I'll give you the first verse from a song called "Vodun Goat". [SCREAM] Sometimes when I'm depressed, I go by myself into a closet and I scream like crazy. [SCREAM] I think screaming is a release, but I don't have that much to release, because I think it's kind of funny, after listening to your message. So I'm just going to scream a little, OK? Here I go. [SCREAM] Yes, hi. I think this a very interesting proposition, because I think screams reveal a lot of subtleties of character. And I've always liked sounds, sound for its own sake. So I think this is really interesting. And when I was growing up, I was not allowed to scream. I was a very, very quiet, good child, so for me to scream, at all, in public is really unusual. So here I go. [SCREAM] Hi, I'm eight. One thing that makes me scream is-- when I go on a roller coaster, I scream because I'm having fun. [SCREAM] I think I'd feel dumb if I screamed, so I'll just hang up. Hello, I was listening to the radio the other night, and I heard abou the scream line. And I just thought I'd kind of leave a little story on how I scream, and where I do my screaming. Right now, I'm calling you from a car phone. I work in Sacramento, California, and I live in the San Francisco Bay area. And I make a drive of 109 miles, not every day, but at least three times a week, back and forth. And so I'm dealing with customers at my job, and I also have to deal with the other participants in this commute. So what I do is, when I'm in the car, and I reach about, well, it's about this point in the drive-- I guess, I'm about 75 miles into the drive-- I always, get all my anger, and stress, anxieties, and everything else with a good old scream. I really didn't know anybody else did anything like this until I heard your radio show. So here's my scream, and this is what I do. [SCREAM] And I really do feel much better after I do that. It clears my lungs. I actually can see better. Even though I wear glasses, I actually can see better. [SCREAM] Thank you. Hello, I was just feeling like screaming, so I figured this was the place to call. And it's hard to think of actually doing it. It would be nice to-- I thought when I was going to call this number that maybe it would be requested to scream or encouraged to scream. But it's so hard to do here in the city. And I'm out in a bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago. And the neighbors are probably about four to, I don't know, six feet away, or maybe 12 feet away with some walls in between. And I just feel like it wouldn't be appropriate to scream. So I wish I could be someone who could scream. When I was living in the mountains in California, I could sing my screams, and just do it. It was great. It was a wonderful way to express myself and to release a lot of things that I was holding in. But I can't do it in the city. So that's what I wanted to say. Maybe I'll call back another time and say stuff too. OK, thank you, bye bye. On the count of three. One, two, three. [SCREAM] There's our power yell from the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. [APPLAUSE] The message will be-- [WHISPERING] I'm in the library right now, so I can't scream very loud. [SCREAM] Thank you, I feel better. To end the session-- [BEEP] Good bye. That radio experiment from Dr. Greg Whitehead in Massachusetts. Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, and, and, and, what, what's coming up next? Stay tuned for Password with Allen Ludden. And he said, his brother screamed at the screen. You bastard! You bastard! I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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So, Adam, where are we? I recorded this at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It's a black tie dinner. This was about a year and a half ago. And you, by the way, are part of the Planet Money team of economics reporters who did stories here on our program and on the NPR news shows. That's right. I was there for my job. And this was spring 2008. We already knew the economy was heading downward. The subprime mortgage crisis was well underway. And so what was this dinner? It was like the Oscars, but for a small group of specialized financial experts on Wall Street. They were giving out awards to the people who actually invented and created all these financial securities, including the kind that was already, back then, destabilizing the global financial system. At this time, I'd like to ask all of our stars to please assemble over here on the left side of the stage. This guy is a legend. He's a granddaddy of our industry. I was sitting at the dinner with Jim Finkel. He was really nervous because he was up for CDO of the year. It was for a CDO he created. Now, CDOs, we already knew back then when we were having this dinner, were the one financial product, more than any other, that had led to this subprime mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis that had already begun. That is so crazy that they're giving each other awards for this. Now, I do want to say it that they did know that there was a certain irony here, that they were giving out awards to each other for what was already clearly one of the most spectacularly unsuccessful financial instruments in human history. It was costing them a lot of money. It was costing the world a lot of money. Jim Finkel was doing this math while we were sitting there, and he was estimating how much money had been lost by the people in that room right there. And he said the products they had created, just the people in that room, had already lost $300 billion in value. Wow. But he said-- and, again, this was April of 2008-- he said that the good thing was the worst was over. People are, I think, have already turned the corner a little bit. Spring has sprung. People are sensing some positive motion in the equities markets, and people are starting to realize a lot of these problems have been put behind us already. A lot of the losses have been taken. A lot of the downsizing and the shifts in the banks have happened. And everyone's starting to say, OK, the dust has settled. So I'm just going to take a wild guess here. When he said that 18 months ago, that didn't turn out to be true? No. Look, we all got it wrong. Nobody saw what was coming. Almost nobody. But yes, when Jim Finkel said that, he was so totally, shockingly, completely wrong. The dust had not settled. The problems were not put behind us. In fact, it was five months after this dinner, after he said those words, that Lehman Brothers collapsed. In fact, the federal government had to step in and basically bail out the entire US financial system. Still in the future, the stock market was going to plunge. It lost more than half of its value eventually. The debt markets were going to freeze. And for Jim personally, his company, before the crisis started, was managing more than $5 billion in investments. And by the time of the awards dinner, those investments had already lost about 30% of their value. Now, I caught up with him recently, and I asked him, how are things now? I'd say we've probably lost 60%, probably 3 billion. And in retrospect, doing the transactions we did were not a good idea. That's just a fact. A humbling fact. And it's made him reevaluate the business he's in and the very basics of how Wall Street works. And we'll get to that later in today's program. This month is the one-year anniversary of Wall Street's biggest crisis since 1929. Lots of news outlets are looking back in various ways, and we thought that we would do it here on our show by going back to one of the most popular programs that we have ever put on the air, a show that tells the story of how the crisis started, step by step. We called that show "The Giant Pool of Money." And today on our program, in the first half of the show, we're going to play you a lot of that original report, where we hear from the bankers and the mortgage dealers and the investment managers and the homeowners, who together, without meaning to, created the economic disaster we're in today. And in the report, they explained what the hell they were thinking when they did all the things that brought down the global economy. And then in the second half of the show, Adam, you and your partner in this reporting, Alex Blumberg, one of our This American Life producers-- And also part of Planet Money. Right. Track down the people who were in your original story-- now, I guess a year and a half later-- to find out, how did the crisis that they helped bring on, how did it change them? And so from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show is a co-production that we're doing with NPR News. And let me just turn things over to the two of you, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. Alex is going to kick things off. This investigation began when Alex heard about something. It was a home loan that just didn't make any sense to him. The thing that got me interested in all this was something called a NINA loan. Back when the housing crisis was still a housing bubble, a guy on the phone told me that a NINA loan stands for "no income, no asset," as in, someone will lend you a bunch of money without first checking to see if you have any income or any assets. And it was an official loan product, like you could walk into a mortgage broker's office, and they would say, well, we can give you a 30-year fixed rate, or we can put you in a NINA. He said there were lots of loans like this, where the bank didn't actually check your income, which I found confusing. And it turns out even the people who got them found them confusing. For example, a guy I met named Clarence Nathan, he worked three part-time, not very steady jobs, and made a total of $45,000 a year, roughly. He got himself into trouble and needed money, so he took out a loan against his house, a big one. Call it 540 for round figures. You basically borrowed $540,000 from the bank, and they didn't check your income? Right. It's a no income verification loan. They don't call me up and say, how much money? They don't do that. It's almost like you pass a guy in the street and say, will you loan me $540,000? He said, well, what do you do? I ain't got a job. OK. It seems as if it's that casual. Even though there are a lot of papers that get filled out and stuff flies all over with the faxes and the emails and all like that, essentially, that's the process. Would you have loaned you the money? I wouldn't have loaned me the money, and nobody that I know would have loaned me money. I know guys who are criminals that wouldn't lend me that money, and they'd break your kneecaps. Yeah, I don't know why the bank did it. I'm serious. They gave $540,000 to a person with bad credit. As it turns out, Clarence's friends, acquaintances, and shadowy criminal contacts would have been right not to lend him the money. At the time I talked to him, Clarence hadn't made a payment in almost a year, and his house was in the process of foreclosure. But stories like this have been in the news for months, and they often feature an innocent homeowner who's duped by a lying, greedy mortgage banker. Or if you're more of a Wall Street Journal editorial page type, an innocent mortgage banker who was duped by a lying, greedy homeowner. And no doubt both categories exist. But Clarence's case is more nuanced and much more common. Nobody came and told me a lie and told me story and said, oh, just close your eyes and all your problems will go away. That wasn't the situation. The situation was that I needed the money. And I'm not trying to absolve myself of anything. I had a situation, and I thought that I could do this and then get out of it within six to nine months. The six to nine month plan didn't work, so I'm stuck. But if somebody had told me, you couldn't borrow the money, I probably would have had to do something else more drastic and dramatic and not be in this situation now. The bank made an imprudent loan. I made an imprudent loan. So the bank and I are partners in this deal. This imprudent partnership is new, and it's at the heart of the current housing crisis. For most of the history of banking, bankers wouldn't have loaned Clarence their money, either. They didn't let people like Clarence near their money, in fact, people with part-time employment and unpaid debts in their past. And then suddenly, in the early 2000s, everything changed. Banking turned on its head and went out looking for partnerships with people like Clarence, loaning him half a million dollars without even checking to see if he had a job. What happened? Well, to help explain what happened, here's my partner for the hour, Adam Davidson. Hey, Adam. Hey, Alex. How's it going? Good. Good. So I guess the first thing we have to do is talk about the global pool of money, right? Right. The global pool of money, that's where our story begins. Most people don't think about it, but there's this huge pool of money out there which is basically all the money the world is saving now: insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the Central Bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, all the world savings. A lot of money. It's about 70 trillion. That's the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want to figure out how much money is in the world. So, first off, how do we pronounce your name? That would probably take, if this goes on air, probably that would take two minutes, at least. It's Pazarbasioglu, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu. Jay-luh Puh-zar-buh-sho-loh. I'm very impressed. And by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that that $70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said. Let's put $70 trillion in perspective. Do this: Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world, everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought and all the rice sold in China and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea. All the money spent in every country on earth in a year, that is less than 70 trillion, less than the global pool of money. Wow. We're talking about a lot of money. That is a lot of money. And that money comes along with armies of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money. Investment managers, they don't want to lose a penny of that. They don't want to lose any of that money, and even more so, they want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in. So most of modern history, what they did was they bought really safe, and frankly really boring, investments, like treasuries and municipal bonds, boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed. Something happened to that global pool of money. This number doubled since 2000. In 2000, this was about $36 trillion. So it took several hundred years for the world to get to 36 trillion, and then it took six years to get another 36 trillion? Yeah. There has been a very sharp increase. How does the world get twice as much money to invest? There are lots of things that happen, but the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil. China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses, real math geniuses, looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this new money. There's twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments. So that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing: a nice, low-risk investment that paid some return. But then something happened that makes matters worse. At this precise moment, one guy took one of that army's favorite investments and made it a lot less attractive. This is where we have to talk about Alan Greenspan, right? Yeah. We have to. All right. But I'm just going to promise people that this is the only time you're going to hear Alan Greenspan in this story, so bear with us. Here's one of his speeches that really drove that army of investment managers crazy. The FOMC stands prepared to maintain a highly accommodative stance of policy for as long as needed to promote satisfactory economic performance. You may not believe me, but that little statement, that is central banker speak for, hey, global pool of money, screw you. Come on. That's not what he said. It is. I speak central banker. Believe me, that's what he said. What he's technically saying is he's going to keep the fed funds rate-- that's when you hear the fed interest rate-- at the absurdly low level of 1%. And that sends a message to every investor in the world: You are not going to make any money at all on US treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else. We can't help you. And so the global pool of money, which does speak central banker, they understood what he was saying. They looked around for some low-risk, high-return investment. And among the many things they put their money into, there's this one thing that they fell in love with. To get it, they called Wall Street, a guy like this. My name is Mike Francis. During the beginning of the mortgage implosion, I was an employee, an executive director at Morgan Stanley, on the residential mortgage trading desk. Mike was one link in a chain that connected the global pool of money to its new favorite investment: residential mortgages, the US housing market, and guys like Clarence Nathan. Think how attractive a mortgage loan is to that $70 trillion pool of money. Remember, they're desperate to get any interest return. They want to beat that miserable 1% interest Greenspan is offering them. And here are these homeowners paying 5%, 9% to borrow money from some bank. So what if the global pool could get in on that action? There are problems. Individual mortgages are too big a hassle for the global pool of money. They don't want to get mixed up with actual people and their catastrophic health problems and their divorces and all the reasons that might stop them from paying their mortgages. So what Mike and his peers on Wall Street did was to figure out a way to give the global pool of money all the benefits of a mortgage-- basically higher yield-- without all the hassle and risk. So picture the whole chain. You have Clarence. He gets a mortgage from a broker. The broker sells the mortgage to a small bank. The small bank sells the mortgage to a guy like Mike at a big investment firm on Wall Street. Then Mike takes a few thousand mortgages he's bought this way, he puts them in one big pile. Now he's got thousands of mortgage checks coming to him every month. It's a huge monthly stream of money, which is expected to come in for the next 30 years, the life of a mortgage. And he then sells shares of that monthly income to investors. Those shares are called mortgage-backed securities. And the $70 trillion global pool of money loved them. It was unbelievable. We almost couldn't produce enough to keep the appetite of our investors happy. More people wanted bonds than we could actually produce. That was our difficult task, was trying to produce enough. They would call and say, we're looking for more fixed rate. What have you got? Do you have anything coming? What's going on? Tell us what you're trying to do. From our standpoint, it's like, there's a guy out there with a lot of money, and we have to find a way to become his sole provider of mortgage bonds to fill his appetite. And his appetite's massive. The problem was, to make a mortgage-backed security, you needed mortgages, lots of them. So for Mike Francis to satisfy this demand and take his quite hefty fee from the global pool of money, he needed to buy up as many mortgages as possible. And to do that, he called a guy one link below him on this mortgage-backed security chain, a guy named Mike Garner, who worked at the largest private mortgage bank in Nevada called Silver State Mortgage. And to give you a sense of how fast this business was growing, Mike Garner got into the mortgage business straight from his previous job as a bartender. One of my regulars, he actually hired me from the bar. He just said he needed some guys, and if I was interested in working for him. And then we started talking about how much I made and that, and he beat what I was making, so. I didn't know anything about the mortgage business. I was as green as you could be. Mike Garner's job, the guy in Nevada, was to buy up individual mortgages, mainly from brokers, bundle 200 or 300 of them together, and then sell them up the chain to Wall Street, to guys like Mike Francis. There's just too many Mikes here. I know. So many Mikes. There's actually just two Mikes. There was Mike Francis, the guy on Wall Street, and Mike Garner, the guy we're talking about now. He's in Nevada. He's in Nevada, right. And in the beginning, he'd only buy mortgages that were pretty standard and pretty safe, mortgages where people had come up with a down payment and proven that they had a steady income and money in the bank. And they sold so many of these mortgages that there came a point in 2003 where just about everybody who wanted a mortgage and was qualified to get one had gotten one. But the pool of money had just gotten started. They wanted more mortgage-backed securities. So Wall Street had to find more people to take out mortgages, which meant lending to people who never would have qualified before. And so Mike Garner in Nevada noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser. Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant that people didn't have to provide a paycheck stub or W-2 form to get a loan, as they had in the past. They could simply state their income, as long as they showed that they had money in the bank. The next guideline lower is just stated income, stated assets. That came out. So then you basically state what you make, and then you state what's in your bank account. They call and make sure that you work where you say you work, and then an accountant has to say that, for your field, it is possible to make what you say you make. But they don't say what you make. They just say, it's possible that he could make that. And loan officers would have an accountant that they could call up and say, oh, can you write a statement saying that a truck driver can make this much money? Or whatever. Then the next one came along, and it was no income, verified asset. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don't have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state that you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then the next one that came out is just no income, no asset. So you don't have to state anything. You just have to have a credit score and a pulse. Actually, that pulse thing, also optional, like this case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages. An interesting fact here: Mike Garner's bank did not care all that much how risky these mortgages were. This was a new era. Banks did not have to hold onto these mortgages for 30 years like they used to. They didn't have to wait and see if they'd be paid back. Banks like Garner's would just own the mortgages for a month or two, and then they sold them on to Wall Street. And then Wall Street would sell them on to the global pool of money. Which is how we get half million dollar, no income, no asset loans. And loans to dead people. So there's this whole other thing going on, as well. Housing prices were rising fast. I think we all remember that. Lots of people in the mortgage industry had this faith that housing prices in the US simply never go down. So from the bank's perspective, even if the worst happens and someone defaults, the bank would then own a house which is now worth even more than what they gave out in the loan. So all Mike cared about was whether or not his customers, the Wall Street investment banks, would buy those mortgages from him. And he was under pressure to approve more and more loans. Because other guys in his company, the actual guys cruising strip malls all across Nevada buying mortgages from brokers, their commission depended on selling more loans. And occasionally, those guys would hear about some loan that some other mortgage company offered that they weren't allowed to offer. And they'd complain to Mike. Three of them would show up at your door first thing in the morning and say, I lost ten deals last week to Meridias Bank. And they've got this loan. Look at the guidelines for this loan. Is there any way we can do this? Because we're losing deals left and right. And either they would find out who they're selling it to, or I'd get on the phone and start calling on all these street firms or Countrywide and say, would you buy this loan? And finally, you'd find out who was actually buying them, and they would say, yes. So like Merrill Lynch would say, no, and Goldman Sachs would say, no, and then you'd finally hit on somebody. And they would be like, yeah, we'll buy that loan. Yeah. And then once I got a hit, then I called the other peoples back and say, listen, Bear Stearns is buying this loan, and I would like to give you the opportunity to buy these loans, too. And once one person buys them, usually, all the rest follow suit. So what were you thinking when you're turning around and you're selling those to Wall Street? Were you ever thinking to yourself like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. And my boss had been in the business for 25 years, and he hated those loans. He hated them. And he used to rant and just say, it makes me sick to my stomach, the kind of loans that we do. And he fought the owners and the sales force tooth and neck about these guidelines, and we got the same answer every time: Nope, other people are offering it, and we're going to offer it, too. And we're going to get more market share this way. House prices are booming. Everything's going to be good. And the company was just rolling in the cash. The owners and the production staff were just raking it in. At the height, I was making between 75 and 100 grand a month. This is Glen Pizzolorusso, who was an area sales manager at an outfit called WMC Mortgage in Upstate New York. And just to repeat, he said 75 to 100 grand a month. That's over a million dollars a year. Glen was just out of college. His job was a lot like Mike Garner's. He's the same link in the chain. And Glen loved his job. What was that movie, Boiler Room? You ever see that movie? That's what it was like. It was the coolest thing ever, just cubicle, cubicle, cubicle for 150,000 square feet. The ceilings were probably 25-, 30-feet ceilings. The elevator had this big graffiti painting on it that was awesome. A graffiti painting that had been there since before you guys moved in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had not done any amenities to this place? There wasn't-- No, no, no. It was just a big, open space, and it was awesome. We lived mortgage. That's what we did. That's all we did. All of us, we just lived it. This deal, that deal, what's going on here? How are we going to get this one funded? What's the problem with this one? You get there, and that's all everybody's talking about. And when Glen wasn't working, he was doing his next-favorite thing, spending. Preferably in the company of-- and this is his term-- B-list celebrities. We would roll up to Marquis at midnight with a line 500 people deep out front, walk right up to the door, and, give me my table. We were sitting next to Tara Reid and a couple of her friends. Christina Aguilera was doing whatever, like, I'm Christina Aguilera, and I'm going to get up and sing. So Christina Aguilera and all her people are there. Who else was there? Cuba Gooding and that kid from Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive. What was that kid's name? Fabian? I don't remember. We order probably three or four bottles of Cristal at $1,000 a bottle. They bring it out. They're walking through the crowd. They hold the bottles over their head. There's firecrackers and the sparklers. The little cocktail waitresses. So you order four bottles of those. They're walking through the crowd of people. Everybody's like, whoa, who's the cool guys? Well, we were the cool guys. You know what I mean? They gave me a black card, this little card with my name on it. There's probably 10 of them in existence. And that meant that I just spent way too much money there. Glen had five cars, a $1.5 million vacation house in Connecticut, and a penthouse that he rented in Manhattan. And he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people with bad credit. Loans we were doing, we looked at loans, these people didn't have a pot to piss in. They could barely make their car payment, and now we're giving them a $300,000 to $400,000 house. But Glen didn't worry about whether these loans were good, either. That was someone else's problem. And this way of thinking thrived at every step of this mortgage security chain. A guy like Mike Francis from Morgan Stanley, he told me he bought loans, lots of loans, from Glen's company. And he knew in his gut that they were bad loans, like these NINA loans. No income, no asset loans, that's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us, effectively. We're hoping you don't lie, but-- tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we're not going to actually verify it? We're setting you up to lie. Something about that transaction feels very wrong. It felt very wrong way back when, and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened, we did it because everybody else was doing it. It's easy to ignore your gut fear when you're making a fortune in commissions. But Mike had other help in rationalizing what he was doing, technological help. Mike sat at a desk with six computer screens connected to millions of dollars worth of fancy analytic software, designed by brilliant Ivy League graduates hired by his firm. And the software analyzed all the loans in all the pools that Mike bought and then sold. And the software, the data, didn't seem worried at all. All the data that we had to review, to look at, on loans that were in production that were years old was positive. They performed very well. All those factors, when you look at all the pieces and parts and you say, well, a 90% no-income loan three years ago is performing amazingly well. It has a little bit of risk. Instead of defaulting 1.5% of the time, it defaults 3.5% of the time, well, that's not so bad. If I'm an investor buying that, if I get a little bit of additional return, I'm fine. Wait, Alex. I want to step in here, because this is a very important piece of tape. A big part of this whole story, this whole crisis, is that a lot of really smart people, people who knew better, fooled themselves with this data. It was the triumph of data over common sense. Can you play that tape again? Yeah, sure. Here you go. All the data that we had to review, to look at, on loans that were in production that were years old, was positive. As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that the foreclosure rate is generally below 2%. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate might go to 8 or 10 or even 12%. But the problem with that is that there were all these new kinds of mortgages given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools today are expected to go beyond 50% foreclosure rates. And then things got even worse. The thing that took this problem and turned it into a crisis was something else that was new, something called a collateralized debt obligation, a CDO. And that brings us back to the guy we met at the awards dinner in the beginning, Jim Finkel. Well, we're heading to the trading floor of Dynamic Credit, where we have all of our mortgage and CEO analysts, our head trader, our CIO. Jim Finkel runs this CDO shop, Dynamic Credit. It takes up three modified apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The trading room is like a factory floor for CDOs. It's where they make the things. But what is a CDO? He shows us on a computer screen. I'm going to show you. Here's our deal, Monterey. To start with, every CDO has its own name. Finkel loves his country house in the Berkshires, so he always names CDOs after towns in western Mass, like Monterey. Monterey CDO limited. We had 189 assets in Monterey, 189 tranches of different mortgage-backed pools. Let's translate some of that. A mortgage-backed security, remember, is a pool of thousands of different mortgages. These are all put together and divided into different slices. Jimmy used the word "tranche." "Tranche" is just French for "slice." Some of these slices are risky, and some are not. A CDO is a pool of these tranches, a pool of pools. And Jim and most companies like his weren't buying the top-rated tranches, the safest ones, the triple-As. They were buying the lower-rated stuff, the high-risk stuff. There's another term the industry uses. This is not a joke. They call these lower-rated tranches "toxic waste." They're so high-risk, they're toxic. And so basically, Adam, a CDO is a financial alchemy, right? Right. Jim takes this toxic stuff, these low-rated, high-risk tranches, puts them all together, re-tranches them, and presto, he has a CDO whose top tranche is rated triple-A, rock-solid, good as money. Now, if this seems too good to be true to you, you're in good company. Guys like billionaire investor Warren Buffett said the very logic was ridiculous. But back in 2005, 2006, the global pool of money, they couldn't get enough of these things. And the CDO industry was facing the same pressures everyone else was at every other step of this chain, to loosen their standards, to make CDOs out of lower and lower-rated rated tranches. This is Jim's partner, Tonko Gast. Actually, in 2005 already, we had an internal debate here. Because there were two banks coming to us saying, why don't you do a deal with us of triple-B securities, and you get paid a million bucks in management fees per year? Very clear, just like that. In 2005. And we declined those deals. We said, we just don't believe that those triple-B ARM assets are money-good. We don't think they're well underwritten, and we think if we do CDO of those, that's going to blow up completely. We were a little early in '05 by not wanting to do those deals, and people were laughing at us, to be honest, to say, well, you're crazy, you're hurting your business. Why don't you want to make-- per deal, you could make a million dollars a year. Did someone do that deal? Absolutely. Everybody. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people did. Let's go back all the way to the other end of this mortgage chain and meet one of those people in one of these poorly underwritten mortgages that Tonko Gast just referred to, that the global pool of money was eagerly buying up. This guy's name is Richard, and we met him at a foreclosure prevention conference in Brooklyn. He's a Marine, a big guy, over six feet tall. And when he came back from Iraq a few years ago, he bought a house with one of those fancy new mortgages with an adjustable rate. Recently, his rate reset. His mortgage payments have gone up by more than $2,000 a month, and he's falling behind. It got to the point where my son had $7,000 in a CD, and I had to break it. That really hurt, because I was saving up money for his college. I put $2,000 back, but-- it was like you can't have a future. They put you in a situation where, after a while, you're going to fail. And if you don't have anything saved, you can't do anything. It's hard. Richard, like more than 4 million Americans at this point, is fighting to keep his home. And we actually tagged along with him one day as he did that. How's it going? Kerry Campbell. Nice to meet you. Good, how you doing, sir? The offices of NACA, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America in Newark, New Jersey, were short on frills. Kerry Campbell, who's helping Richard today, is a counselor here. Kerry shows Richard the loan documents he filled out when he bought the house by his original broker. And Richard's pretty surprised when he sees the numbers that his mortgage broker filled in on the forms. Here it's saying your base employment income was $16,250 a month. What? $16,250 a month, which means your salary on a yearly basis, you're making just under $200,000, 195, to be exact. I wish. In 2005, right-- are they using my 2005 taxes?-- I was making $37,000 a year. Did you know that number until now? No. So he stated $16,000 a month? To me, that is shocking. To you, it's not that shocking? Oh, that's outrageous, but it's a common thing. It's worlds apart from the reality and what's on a lot of these documents. Another thing the papers reveal? How much that creative broker made: $18,500. As Kerry says, that's 18,000 reasons to falsify Richard's mortgage documents and to put him in a house he can't afford. Coming up, we travel in time from May 2008, when this was all recorded, to the present, to answer what happened to Richard? Did he keep his house? And when the economy collapsed, which of these other guys kept their houses? In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our show, we choose some theme, some topic, and bring you stories on that topic. Today, we return to the giant pool of money. In the first half of our program today, we heard a story first broadcast in May 2008, before the worst of the economic crisis. And over just the last few weeks, Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg have been checking in with various people in that story to see what has happened to them, what has changed for them in the last 18 months. And to find out how they see things now, here's Alex. Let's start with some good news. Richard Campbell, the Marine we spoke to, a year and a half ago, he wasn't sure if he was going to keep his house. And he was working with NACA, a housing advocacy group, to see if they could convince the bank to lower his mortgage payments. With the help of NACA, the payments were cut in half. It's very manageable now. So that's the good news. He went from paying nearly six grand a month to just under three grand. But the bad news is, it's taken up most of the last year and a half to get this done. The problem was, Richard, like a lot of people, bought his house with two mortgages, and the second mortgage, NACA couldn't help him with. And so Richard has spent a year and a half battling his mortgage servicing companies, waiting on hold, getting transferred to different supervisors. He says he got within two days of getting foreclosed on. And it's taken its toll. Your body just goes through weird things. I didn't know stress was so powerful. Your body goes through a lot. Wait, wait, wait. You fought in Iraq as a Marine, and this was more stressful? Yeah. Believe it or not, yeah. It was. It's a lot harder to deal with than shooting at people and having people shoot back at you, believe it or not. It's hard to believe. Having come back from Iraq, I'm sure you would've thought, well, that was the most stressful thing I'll ever do, right? Yes. I definitely thought, once I had beat that, I could beat anything. But it's a different type of feeling. Because they train you for combat in the military. Nobody trains you for this type of stress, no one. And it's different when, in this situation, I felt totally alone. I had no one to turn to, so that's a totally different feeling. Richard's luck started to change, actually, while he was watching one of those local morning shows, Good Day New York. They were doing a segment on President Obama's mortgage relief plan. Richard realized, hey, they're talking about me. I have a mortgage I can't afford. I have a history of trying to pay but not being able to because of a ridiculously high interest rate. I qualify for that plan. But even after that, it was still months trying to convince his mortgage company that he actually qualified, months of arguing with people on the phone and sending in different documents. Until finally, one day, he got a call from a guy named Peter at his mortgage servicing company. They said, Mr. Campbell, we have good news. We're able to modify your loan, and these are the terms. And they started telling me the terms. Tears started coming to my eyes when he said, we're going to go from 11 and 1/4 down to 3%. And then I said, is it fixed, or will it still balloon? He said, there's no balloon. It'll be fixed for the life of the loan. You pay this mortgage for 30 years, the house is yours. When I talk about it now, I still get that warm and fuzzy. What'd you do? Did you call your fiance, or how did you-- Oh, yeah. I ran around the living room. And then I went and I grabbed her and I picked her up. And she was like, what's going on? And then I told her. And then we started jumping up and down. It was a beautiful feeling, beautiful feeling. Simply, the situation is the same. Inexplicably, the situation is the same. This is Clarence Nathan. He's the guy from the beginning of the program who got that $540,000 loan that he wouldn't have given himself. You remember him. It's almost like you pass a guy in the street. Will you loan me $540,000? He said, well, what do you do? I ain't got a job. OK. When we met Clarence in March of 2008, he was living in that house, the one that he'd gotten the loan on, and he hadn't paid a mortgage payment in about a year. When we caught up with him last week, he wasn't so eager to call attention to his situation. So current living situation? Is the same as it was at the time of the last program and our initial interview. The same house? The same house, the same conditions. And at that point, you hadn't paid a mortgage bill in a while, and you just didn't know what was going to happen. Right. Still don't. And still haven't paid? Right. Wow. That's very mysterious, isn't it? Yeah. Like I said, nobody's made any efforts to negotiate it out. This is something we hear about a lot. There's so many more mortgages in default right now, it's overwhelming the system. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that there are 1.2 million homeowners with seriously delinquent mortgages where the lender has made no effort to start foreclosure. In July of this year, there were more than 200,000 mortgages where borrowers hadn't made a payment in over a year, and the lender still hadn't started to foreclose. And so homeowners like Clarence are actually benefiting from the fact that the economy is doing so badly, that this crisis is so big. If it was just Clarence in trouble, the bank would probably have taken his house by now. But since there're so many people like him flooding the system, he's gotten a reprieve. Looked at one way, this hasn't gone so badly for Clarence. He's lived in a house for free for nearly three years. But on the other hand, he's 64 years old, and the bank could come for the house at any moment. He told us he doesn't think it's likely he'll ever get out of the debt he got into in this crisis. Now, what about the guys who made it so easy for Clarence and Richard to get into these bad mortgages, the guys who took those mortgages and lots of other mortgages like them, packaged them up, and sold them to the giant pool of money? Take Jim Finkel, the guy at the CDO factory. Intellectually, he knew that he was making his CDOs out of loans to people like Clarence. But it took him a long time, even after this huge crisis hit, to really understand what that meant. I always like to say that the people in our world, which is this narrow world within Wall Street, the people that are involved in derivatives, with complex financial engineering, they work in a very narrow, focused area. And I like to sometimes call them bark watchers. They don't just miss the forest for the trees. They miss the tree, they're looking at things so closely. And I think that was the problem. It was incredibly hard for people in the structure of finance world to step back far enough to see what was really going on out there. What was really going on out there was a lot of loans to people like Clarence. But by the time those loans got to Jim, they were just numbers and data in a spreadsheet, credit scores and appraisal values and down payment amounts. Which is why Jim Finkel believed that the CDOs he was making were good investments, investments that he himself wanted in on. We put three years of all of our profits as investments in the riskiest parts of our own deals. Why would we do that if we didn't believe they'd work? Where's that money now? We wrote all that money off. It's gone. It's gone. And we've had to completely rebuild. There's certainly a perception that, oh, the guys who created all this mess are now making lots of money. And you're saying you've lost lots of money. Are you typical of the guys who created CDOs, or are there guys who found a way to somehow profit from this period? Well, I think you have to distinguish between the investment banks and the capital markets people and the investment managers. And just to explain, investment managers like Jim are subcontractors to the investment banks on Wall Street. A big Wall Street firm like Merrill Lynch would come to Jim and say, we have some people who want to buy a CDO, can you put one together for us? And then Jim and his company would go about buying up various mortgage-related securities and putting them together into the CDO. But those investment bankers who hired him to put those deals together, they got paid in fees. Every deal would get a 1 or 2% fee. So let's just keep doing billions of dollars of deals, and that'll rack up the tens and twenties of millions of dollars in fees. Those guys took a lot of upfront fees of those deals, and they took bonuses out of those upfront fees. And even though their banks went belly-up, those bonuses were never called back. A lot of people made enormous amounts of money and moved on. Some of the mentors I've had who are more experienced and older than me, they all tried to convince me all the time that people on Wall Street were bad. I started my career, pretty much, on Wall Street. And I thought all the colleagues around me-- no one seemed to be bad. Everyone seemed to be trying their hardest. And this set of events did convince me that people on Wall Street generally are bad, and that the customer does not come first. And it's not a client-driven business. It is a business driven much more for the bank. Because I saw how quickly the banks turned on their customers, including how the banks have turned on us. How they withdrew their credit lines, how they traded against us. They've done anything they can. And that was dispiriting. And it just proved that my mentors were correct, and I was overly idealistic. Of all the people we caught up with, Glen Pizzolorusso was the most transformed. Remember, he was the guy who used to party with B-list celebrities like Tara Reid, with all the cars and houses. When we last spoke to him in spring of 2008, the company he worked for had gone out of business, and he'd lost almost everything. He had one house left, but his loan on that house was for a lot more than the house itself was now worth. I was way upside-down on the house, not able to make the payments. And we let the house foreclose. It made no sense to fight it. In other words, both of the guys in our story who got home loans that they couldn't pay back, Richard and Clarence, they're still living in their houses. And the guy who made millions making loans like the ones that they got, he's the one who lost his house. Glen says he can't afford to rent, so he and his wife and three kids ARE living now in a place that his dad owns. Actually, where I grew up. Well, I lived there till I was nine years old. It's crazy. I send my kids to timeout, and it's the same place that I got sent to timeout. So it's actually really cool. I know where everything goes. I didn't have to really think about where to put things. My wife asked me where to put things, and I said, well, it was there when I was growing up, so let's put it there. If it sounds like Glen is doing strangely OK, he is. Losing a few million dollars has actually made his life better, in ways we'll get to in a minute. But first, things got a lot worse. For starters, he became a villain on the internet. People who heard our original story singled him out as someone to blame. Which seemed unfair to us, because Glen was certainly not responsible for this crisis. We've interviewed dozens of people who made much more money than Glen did and played much bigger roles. Glen was just more honest than anybody else we talked to, and he was honest about things that he knew would make him look bad. But he says we didn't help him any, either. There was one line in particular, the one where I said he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people. I think that maybe in the in the vein of the story, that statement got a little carried away. Right. I think it came across as that you and everybody out there was out there preying on poor people. Right. There was no malice, and I never set out to hurt anyone. I just did what I saw everyone else doing. Talking to Glen now, he seems like a guy in the early stages of a major life change. He's going back to college. He loves school now. He used to always hate it. In fact, he does a lot of things he never used to do, like listen to the news and read books. He spends a lot of time with his kids now, no time at all with B-list celebrities. He wants to get his degree in theology and law and then go into politics. He says he really wants to do some good in the world. But he points out, his big life change, at first, anyway, it was not his choice. I have been humbled. I've been forced to be humbled. I used to look at mortgage applications, and the people, their income was $2,500 a month, $3,000 a month. And I used to think, how can people live on that? And I would welcome it now. I would be able to live on it so comfortably. I'm driving a car that has no payment on it. It's a piece of junk. And I used to think that it mattered. But it doesn't. I'm picturing an alternative Glen, the Glen from the world where there was no bubble bursting, where the Glen who's still making $100,000 a month, who still has that lifestyle. And I am picturing meeting that Glen today, and I feel like I like this Glen a lot more. Without a doubt. Well, because, how do I explain this, other than that Glen was about Glen. And this Glen is about what I can bring to-- trying not to sound cliche-- to society, what I can bring to my family, what I can do to make sure that we don't keep creating that Glen? I feel like you're really emotional talking about this now. Why? I don't know why. I think part of it is shame that I let the money take me over. I should've helped people when I was making that money. I should've done things that I could sit here and be proud of with it. And I didn't. I didn't do anything that I can really be proud of with it. So another character in our story that we wanted to check in on is the giant pool of money itself, all that money global investors have that they're looking to invest somewhere. When we last met the giant pool of money before the financial collapse, it was big, $70 trillion. And it was growing fast. It had doubled in six years. So we checked back in. We called the International Monetary Fund and found out a few interesting things. One, that 70 trillion number, that was wrong. The IMF had underestimated how much money there is and how fast it had grown. Back in 2007, that number really should have been almost $80 trillion. And today, two years later, we talked to the very same person, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu. Very nicely done. Thank you. After nearly two years of recession, the collapse of housing prices all over the world, the giant pool of money has, according to her, grown. The IMF thinks it is now about $84 trillion. Now, we were shocked that it grew at all. Of course. But here's the context. The bursting of the housing bubble did do some damage to the giant pool of money. The IMF thinks investors in subprime securities and the like lost at least $3 trillion. That's like losing all the money spent in a year in Russia and Canada combined. So given all that, how did the giant pool of money get bigger? Well, two major things happened. One, investors pulled money out of stock markets all around the world and added it to the giant pool of money. Two, government stepped in. The Federal Reserve and central banks all over the world actually created trillions of new dollars and euros and yen. It's more new money than ever before, and much of that has made its way into the giant pool. In other words, the giant pool of money would probably have shrunk by a good amount, except the world's governments and the world's central banks have been pumping out trillions of dollars to keep the world economy from complete collapse. But while the size of the giant pool of money has gotten bigger, its attitude has gotten a lot smaller. Remember that army of investment managers? The nervous guys? Yeah. Well, two years ago, there wasn't anything in the world they wouldn't throw money at. They'd take any risk for a bit of return. Now, they're terrified. They want to invest in solid, safe, boring, low-interest government bonds. The safer, the better. One of the hottest items out there right now, one-month treasury bills, paying effectively 0% interest. Meanwhile, as you've probably noticed, credit is tight everywhere. People with great credit scores and a lot of money in the bank have a hard time getting approved for home loans. Businesses can't convince anyone to lend them money to build new factories. Cities can't borrow money to build schools and hospitals. That's a big part of why we've been stuck in this recession. The world's governments have tried to step in to supplement the giant pool of money, but the annual budgets of all the world's governments combined is less than $15 trillion. That's less than one fifth the size of the world's investments. It turns out, there's just not enough government in the world to replace the lending the giant pool of money used to do. And that is the reason nobody can say with certainty when the economy will get better again. Because we're waiting for investors everywhere to feel safe to invest again. We're all waiting on the giant pool of money. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. It was after they did the first giant pool of money broadcast that our show and NPR News decided that lots of economics reporting like this might be a good idea as we headed into tough economic times. And we started this project, Planet Money. If you liked today's program, check out their thrice-weekly podcast-- you're going to be getting this three times a week-- and their blog at www.npr.org/money. Alex Blumberg produced today's show with Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer was Julie Snyder. Our special guest editor for today's show was Les Cook of NPR News. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, Emily Youssef, and Aaron Scott. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Our website, where you can listen to our show for absolutely free or sign up for our free weekly podcast, or you can also listen to any of the shows-- there's almost a half-dozen now that we've done with the Planet Money team explaining all aspects of the economy-- www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. He and I, we like to go out at night together sometimes. He's pretty chill. Torey describes it like this. Everybody's like, whoa, who's the cool guys? Well, we were the cool guys. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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I was in the kitchen cooking some food for my dog, which I don't say with pride. I don't even approve of people cooking for their dogs, but he's got health problems and without boring you with a lot of details, there's no getting around it. And I was listening to Marketplace, which is actually the point of this story I'm telling you. I was listening to the radio on Marketplace and I heard this commentary by one of the regular commentators, this conservative commentator, David Frum, who said that new numbers had just been released by the government. Showing that when you look at family incomes-- and what happened to family incomes during the Bush presidency. George W. Bush has the worst economic performance of any two-term president since the numbers were collected. Jimmy Carter did worse, but he only had one term. I asked Frum to come onto our show to talk about this finding. This is a little painful. I was part of the Bush administration. In fact, I was part of the Bush administration's economic team. So I take this a little personally. But Frum says, and this was his point on Marketplace, that it's important to understand why Bush's performance was so bad. Frum says that over those eight years what employers actually paid for each worker rose. And it rose a lot: 25%. But-- Employees received none of that money. The median American worker was earning less in the year 2007 than that worker was earning adjusting for inflation in the 2000. And yet, his employer was paying 25% more. So where did that money go? And the answer is, it all went to pay the rising cost of health care. The average cost of a health insurance policy for a family of four between 2000 and 2007 more than doubled, from $6,000 to $13,000. A $7,000 climb. Coincidentally, during the boom years of President Clinton, when Americans did so well, family incomes rose about that same amount, $6,500. This is just how quickly health care costs are rising in this country. If you take into account health care, George W. Bush stops being the worst two-term president in the modern America era for family incomes. If you were to compare, say, President Bush's performance to Harry Truman's or the Ford-Carter years, it looks good. If you compare it to the Clinton years, the Reagan years, or the Johnson years, it doesn't look so good. So basically he's somewhere in the middle? He's kind of like-- No, I would say the lower part of the middle. I don't want to oversell the record. Rising health care costs are affecting everything in the economy. Rising health care costs are the thing that's driving our health care system off the rails. It's what's led so many people to being uninsured. It's making it hard for US businesses to compete. It's gobbling up more and more of all spending in the United States. I saw this number recently that said that at the current rate of growth, in just 9 years, the amount that the average American family is going to spend on health care each year is going to be $38,000. $38,000. That's more than half of what family income will be that year. What was striking about that was that this isn't one of those projections that the government does looking at health care costs 75 years from now, showing how grim it's going to be far in the future. This is nine years from now at the current rate of growth. Basically, this is going to happen. Half of our incomes are going to be going to health care very, very soon, unless somebody does something. At this point, we, Americans, spend 50% more on health care than any country in the world, and the money isn't buying us better health. If you look at the numbers, when it comes to infant mortality compared to other countries, we are 45th. Worse than Cuba. When it comes to life expectancy, we're 50th. Behind, by the way, Bosnia and South Korea. And so today we ask the question, why is this happening? What's going on in health care that makes it so impossible to hold costs down? We're tackling these questions now, this week, as health care is being debated in Washington. Because fixing our health care system means fixing two different things: getting more people covered by insurance and slowing the increases in health care costs. And the bills on Capitol Hill right now seem much more about solving the insurance problem than about controlling costs. So we're going to do something we've never done. We're going to two shows about this, this week and next week. This is a co-production we're doing with NPR News. Next week, the most entertaining hour, I guarantee, that you're ever going to hear on the insurance industry. This week, we ask why costs keep rising. 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, Dartmouth Atlas Shrugged, in which we examine whether doctors are the ones to blame for rising costs. Act two, Every Cat Scan has Nine Lives, in which we wonder if patients are the problem. Act three, Who Would Win in a Fight Between a Polar Bear and an Insurance Company? Is the problem the insurance companies? And act four, Now What? In which we learn what the new health care bills do to fix all this, if they do anything. Stay with us. Act one: Dartmouth Atlas Shrugged. There are all kinds of reasons that health care costs have risen so quickly over the last few decades. We have higher administrative costs than other countries because our health care system with its insurers and providers is so complicated. We use more expensive high tech gear, our drugs cost more. But there's a whole school of thought that blames a lot of the rising costs on doctors. Prescribing drugs that people don't really need, doing too many procedures. And the reason people think this all goes back to the work of one person, a health researcher named Jack Wennberg. NPR science correspondent, Alix Spiegel, explains what that's all about. To understand the work of Jack Wennberg, let's start with one patient and one medical problem, a young woman with a sharp pain in her lower uterus. I was having a lot of problem, just a constant ache right here that never went away. And my boss kept saying, you should go get that checked. You should go get that checked. Because I was like doubling right over. It was like a really, really deep ache all the time. In 1974, Roxanne Tremblay was 29 years old. A single mom living in a small apartment in Lewiston, Maine. Because Roxanne was the only one supporting her young daughter, she had to be able to work, and the pain was getting in the way. The pain was a problem. So Roxanne went to see her gynecologist, a nice man who did a short exam, and then kindly explained that Roxanne would need an operation. Three weeks later, Tremblay had her uterus and ovaries removed, a total hysterectomy. It was what he called the seed of cancer. It wasn't cancer, but it had the potential of developing into it. Now Roxanne didn't mind losing her uterus. She never planned to get married or have kids again. But she was slightly surprised that her doctor had been so quick, and before surgery hadn't taken any x-rays or anything. No pictures. No. He just felt you were-- And based on what I told him that it should come out. 29 years old is pretty young for a hysterectomy. But in the mid '70s in Lewiston, Maine, lots of women were getting them. Roxanne, herself, knew a bunch. My boss that I had when I worked at Kmart, she had one shortly after I did. One of my friends that I've had since I was six years old, she lives right five minutes from here, she had one. Just about anybody you talked to would say, oh, I had a hysterectomy. Oh, yeah. So I did. So and so did mine. Our I just remember there was a lot of them. I do remember that. Now most Lewiston women, including Roxanne, weren't suspicious about the hysterectomies. And this is where Jack Wennberg's research comes in. Until Jack Wennberg made Lewiston and its hysterectomies famous, no one had even noticed. But in the late '70s, Wennberg published a paper, "A Study of Health Care in Maine." And in it he showed that an unusually large number of women in Lewiston were having their uterus removed. He projected that 70% would have a hysterectomy by age 70. While a couple towns over, the number was much smaller-- 25%. That paper was one of a series of studies of Maine and Vermont published by Wennberg in the '70s and '80s. Studies which ultimately, completely transformed our understanding of what's going on in health care in this country. Which is how come I ended up in Wennberg's dining room. Hello. Hello. This is me trying to set the levels on my recording equipment. To do this I asked Wennberg what I ask most people, "could you say a little something?" This is what I got. 19th century German poetry. Apparently, for fun in college, Wennberg committed foreign verse to memory. Wennberg's that kind of guy. The kind of guy whose side projects tend to be unusually rigorous. This was certainly the case in health care. You see, when Wennberg started out in the late '60s, what he was trying to do was improve medicine in the state of Vermont, get better medical services to rural communities. He'd gotten a grant to overhaul Vermont's health care system. But because Wennberg is such a thorough type of fellow, he made a pretty extreme decision. He decided he'd try to collect information about every medical transaction of every person in every town in the whole state. That way he'd know what was going on. What was going on in home health agencies, what was going on in nursing homes, hospitals, doctors' offices. And we need to know for each patient what their diagnosis is, what their treatment was, how much money was spent, and what the outcomes were insofar as we could actually measure them. Now to collect these records, Wennberg hired a bunch of researchers, people dubbed the Pit Crew, who year after year were sent out to medical records rooms to collect records. It was a massive undertaking. Every medical transaction in the state of Vermont. It took two years of road trips just to collect the records for 1969. But once he had all the information, Wennberg began to slice it and dice it in all kinds of ways. And what immediately jumped out was that medicine from town to town in Vermont was practiced in entirely different ways. As soon as we set out to do the analyses, we began to see these extraordinary differences. In one town, say 50% of the men would have a prostate procedure. But in another town only 30 miles away, only 15% would. Ditto with mastectomies, hemorrhoid removal, back surgery. Basically, town after town was a version of Lewiston, Maine, in the sense that some procedures might be incredibly numerous, or conversely, incredibly rare. It just didn't make sense. We lived right on the boundary between Stowe and Waterbury Center, Vermont. And if my kids had been going to the school system in Stowe, they would have had a 75% chance of getting their tonsils out. If they'd gone to the Waterbury School-- where they actually did-- it was about 20%. So what was going on? Why the differences? Well, there are two possible explanations. The first explanation is that it was the doctors. Doctor behavior was somehow to blame. The second was that it was the patients. That people in some areas were just much sicker than people in other areas. Or maybe they just wanted more services for some reason. Which brings us back to the city of Lewiston, Maine, and yet another woman who had a hysterectomy. My little dogs are freaking here. Oh, hi there, little dogs. Come in. You found me. A couple miles down the way from Roxanne Tremblay, on a quiet Lewiston street, is the home of Carol Bradford. Carol is another Lewiston woman who had her uterus removed in the 1970s. She had fibroids. And like Roxanne, she's happy with the result. But when I asked, Bradford had a theory about the high hysterectomy rate in Lewiston back then. Lewiston, she explained, is mostly Catholic. Some women were having too many children. There are families here with 10, 12 children. It's a possibility that women came to the point where they just really couldn't deal with any more children, and were begging the doctors to do something about it. That's my personal opinion. Not just her opinion. Most people assume that when you go into a doctor's office, the doctor is simply responding. Responding to sickness in your body, responding to the needs and concerns you have. But in the studies he did in Vermont and Maine, Wennberg demonstrated that it's a lot more complicated than this. The women of Lewiston weren't having more hysterectomies because more of them were Catholic or because more of them were sick. Wennberg showed that in terms of sickness and demographics, the populations of the communities in states like Maine and Vermont were actually incredibly homogeneous. Which according to Jack Wennberg could mean just one thing: it wasn't the patients. It wasn't true. It wasn't correct. Because we could easily see that it wasn't that patients were different between regions. So it wasn't illness that was driving this. This must be coming from the provider side. The provider side, the doctors. That was the first insight. That it was doctors not patients that drove medical consumption. And that there are all kinds of things that influenced the decisions a doctor makes when you go into his office. Sickness plays a role, but a much smaller role than we originally thought. So, what are the things that influence doctor decisions? To answer this question, I went back to Maine to talk to doctors themselves. Doctors who explained that the work of Jack Wennberg inspired a small revolution in the state. You see, after Wennberg published a paper on his early discoveries, a small group of Maine doctors gathered to take action. They decided that physicians in Maine should, and could, themselves figure out why these strange geographical variations in care were taking place. And the best way to do that this group figured, was to get all the doctors in Maine to sit down together on a regular basis, look at Maine city by city, and then hash out together why the care they were giving was so different. Bob Keller is a back doctor who worked on this project. And he told me that in the beginning there was only one small problem with the plan: many of the doctors in Maine hated it. Number one, they were insulted. They were angry. Their judgment was being challenged. That was not allowed. There were variable responses. In some cases they just didn't believe it, and they would try to find holes in the data. One of the classics. Oh, we have more workers' compensation here. We have more heavy industry here. And we were able to work through most of those things and demonstrate that wasn't the case. But they would-- our population's older. More of them need prostatectomies. Well, we adjust for age, so that's not an argument anymore. And some doctors never could deal with that. And they would leave the study groups. They just said, this is baloney; we're not going along with this. But in time, says Keller, many doctors did warm to these ideas. They began to accept the data and they began to accept that indeed, different physicians were using different thought processes or decision-making processes in dealing with patients. And so in the state of Maine, for years there was this incredible experiment. Four or five times a year each medical specialty got together for a kind of Talmudic dissection of doctor choice conducted by the doctors themselves. They wanted to look at all of the geographical differences, figure out why they existed, and then try to bring their medical decisions in line with one another. They figured that by doing this they could eliminate unnecessary care. Now, when talking in these groups, the Maine doctors usually seemed to agree on what criteria they would use for making treatment decisions. So for instance, everyone agreed that you only operate on a back after there'd been three months of pain. But when they went back to the data, it showed that in the privacy of their own offices, many doctors were doing something completely different. Why? One possible reason was fear of lawsuits. Some doctors felt that, criteria be damned, if they didn't do every possible thing they might get sued. Another was temperament. Some doctors were just much more eager to take action. Then there was the role of medical culture. In some communities it had evolved over time that, let's say, when a kid got a temperature of 102, he was sent to the hospital. Well, in the next town over, kids with that temperature were advised to just stay home. And then there was the number of doctors in a community. One of the many doctors I talked to while I was in Maine was this eye specialist named Frank Read. He's another doc who participated in these groups. And he told me this story. My old partner that I joined here in 1971 was asked by a friend of his, you know, at what level of vision do you do a cataract operation? And he said, well, if there's one ophthalmologist in town, it's 2200. 2200 is pretty bad vision. If there are two ophthalmologists in town, it's 2080. Not so bad vision. If there are three ophthalmologists in town, it's 2040. Pretty good vision. In other words, the criteria easily shifts. According to later work done by Jack Wennberg, the number of doctors in an area can influence the amount of medical services consumed. The more doctors, the more appointments, the more procedures, the more money spent. You could actually see this dynamic especially clearly during the '70s. Because to drive down costs in medicine, the federal government created a program to send more people to medical school. The theory was that when there were more doctors, doctors would be forced to drop their prices to compete for patients. Basic economics. But that's not what happened. The doctors just adjusted their criteria for doing stuff and had the patients they had come in more often. Because in health care, supply drives demand. So when the supply of doctors and clinics increases, the demand for medical services goes up. Often, Frank Read says, for a completely innocent reason. I don't want to be sitting on my thumbs all the time. I want to be busy. And that may unconsciously loosen my criteria for doing a particular procedure. Which brings us, finally, to the subject, which incredibly, was never ever discussed during the nearly 20 years the doctors met: money. Specifically, the idea that doctors might be prescribing more visits and more procedures so that they could make more money. Frank Read and Bob Keller told me that this subject was completely verboten. We didn't want to talk about money. That's something that we wouldn't want to acknowledge because it would have been a show stopper. I mean it would have then gone right to the question of greed. And you're not going to keep a doc at the table if you say you're greedy. Doctors are uncomfortable acknowledging the role of money, but every doctor I talked to admitted, it affects medical decision-making. Including Gordon Smith, head of the Maine Medical Association. Of course it does. That's just common sense. That's human nature. The payment system is an important influence. You see, the majority of doctors in this country are not on salary, but are paid for each thing they do: a la carte. That's what they mean when they say, fee for service. A phrase you've probably heard a lot. And the way fee for service affects doctor behavior is clear. Gordon Smith. If you pay people more the more things they do, they're going to do more things. Bob Keller points to his own specialty-- he's a back doctor-- and says one of the most popular operations among back doctors these days is this complicated procedure called an instrumented fusion. When a patient has a back problem, the doctor can go in and insert metal rods. Keller says in the old days the doctor used a much simpler and safer operation, but the new, more complicated one costs more. Surgeons could charge more because they were doing these complicated procedures, and so they were putting the screws in. They billed for putting the screws. They were putting the plates in, they billed for putting the plates in. Doing all these things. In the old days a fusion was very much a simpler operation with no external devices. It was all done with the patient's own tissues and bone. So you had a whole new high-tech procedure that was enormously attractive to spine surgeons. And it literally took off in this country. At the same time, as most good spine surgeons will admit, they had no research to support what they were doing. In fact, says Keller, the one high quality study that did exist wasn't so positive. It showed that it isn't so great actually, as people thought it was. And they also showed that interestingly enough, that the old fashioned non-instrumented fusion was as successful as the instrumented fusion. Which was a real blow. And here in miniature is one of the big problems with the way our current system is set up. It's a problem some call, more is not better. Doctors exist in a system that encourages-- and really because of their fear of malpractice suits-- actually forces them to do more. More surgery, more tests, more stuff of every kind. And while most Americans just assume that more care is good, it turns out that more isn't always better for patients. Because every time you get a medical procedure, you risk the possibility of complications and doctor error. In 2003, there was this enormous landmark study published by a Jack Wennberg protege named Elliott Fisher. He compared areas throughout the United States. Areas where elderly people got relatively small amounts of health care services to areas where elderly people got a lot of health care services. A lot. Here's Fisher. The patients in the high spending regions were getting about 60% more care. So 60% more days in the hospital, twice as many specialist visits. And yet, when we followed patients for up to five years, the mortality rate whether you were poor or rich, urban or rural, if you lived in one of these higher intensity communities, your survival was certainly no better. And in many cases, worse. After Wennberg's original work in Vermont and Maine, a group of health care researchers set up a shop at Dartmouth College and created something called the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Basically, a countrywide version of what Wennberg did in New England. The huge warehouse of data compiled by these researchers has led to a lot of insights about our system. Including this very disturbing statistic that you sometimes hear in the health care debate. They've estimated that about one-third of the medical care delivered in this country is unnecessary. One-third. Doctors and hospitals doing things to you and me that we don't need. Stuff that doesn't make us any more healthy. Care delivered by a system that pushes doctors to do more when less is probably better. Alix Spiegel. Coming Up, patients are told that they should do with less. That the test or procedure that they want for themselves is unnecessary. And surprise, they are not too happy about it. 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "More is Less." This is the first of two shows that we're going to be doing, this week and next, explaining the health care system, or parts of it anyway. Today we're asking the question, why are health care costs rising so much that they threaten our entire economy? We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two: Every Cat Scan Has Nine Lives. This summer at a press conference, President Obama described how he wants to slow the increase in health care costs. He's going to do it by having patients everywhere adjust a bit. They're going to have to give up paying for things that don't make them healthier. Why would we want to pay for things that don't work? Of course when he says it that way it sounds like it could not be easier. According to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health, as you've just heard before the break, one-third of medical spending is on treatments and tests that are not actually necessary. And in some cases, may actually harm us. And President Obama's stimulus package devotes a billion dollars to studying and determining which procedures those are. So, let's just eliminate the stuff that doesn't work, right? Well, one of our producers, Lisa Pollak, explains why, in practice, that is not so easy to do. In the spirit of the president's advice, here's a story about what happened at one hospital when one doctor tried to resist ordering a test for a patient. The patient was a teenage girl who'd been in a minor car wreck. As a precaution she was brought into the ER on a backboard with one of those collars around her neck. The doctor was Jerome Hoffman. He's a professor of emergency medicine at UCLA. And the first thing he needed to do was rule out the risk of an injury to the girl's cervical spine. He was able to do this without taking an x-ray. Because when he examined the girl, her condition matched this list of five criteria. For instance, she had no tenderness in the middle of the back of her neck that indicate to doctors when a fracture is extremely unlikely. Hoffman told the girl's mother that her daughter was fine, no need for an x-ray, and the mother seemed OK with this. But a couple minutes later, the dad showed up. Dr. Hoffman. And the dad was a very tall, very powerful figure, who was very upset and spoke very loudly. And he also happened to mention that he was a lawyer and that there would be consequences for any error that we made. And he said that he wanted to get not just an x-ray, but a CAT scan of her neck. A CAT scan. Which is not only more expensive than an x-ray, but uses much more radiation. So I tried to explain to him that a, she didn't really need the x-ray, or the cat scan. And b, that there was some harm with it. In fact, if you do a thousand CAT scans to a young woman like this, there's a pretty good chance that some small number-- one, two, something like that-- may have harm from it. And the harm is not trivial harm, it's important harm. She could get a cancer of her thyroid that in 15, 20 years might actually be fatal. So while I can't say with 100% certainty that her neck was fine, I was pretty sure-- 99.9% at least, in my judgment, it would be more harmful than beneficial to her to do the test for her. So I tried to explain this to the dad and I tried to be really nice and patient, but he was having none of it. He said things like, you will do a CAT scan. And then I said to him something that, actually I had long known, but it never crystallized for me exactly in this way until that moment. I said to him, you know, for me it really is the right thing to do the CAT scan. I said, you know, if I don't do the CAT scan, you're probably going to lodge a complaint about me. If I do the CAT scan, you're going to be really happy with me. I said, in addition, I'm almost certain that your daughter is fine. But there's maybe a one in a million chance that she isn't. That there really is a hidden fracture and I'm missing it. And if that's the case, the CAT scan will save my butt. And on the other hand, if I do the CAT scan and your daughter gets a cancer 20 years from now, no one will blame me. I said, in addition, I'm spending a lot of time talking to you here that I need to be going doing other things. If I get the CAT scan, I could do it in a second. It would be done with. It would be easy. And I said, finally, the really strange thing is that I'll get paid more if I do the CAT scan. Because the way that bills are made, you get paid more for more complex patients. And the insurance companies of the world think that it proves that the patient was more complex and more difficult if you had to do a CAT scan. So everything about this was pushing me to do the CAT scan. I said that to him. And I said, there's only one problem, which is that when I decided to become a doctor, I made a pledge. And the pledge was that I would put my patient's interest in front of my own interest. And in this case, my judgment was that it was not in my patient's interest to do the CAT scan. And therefore, I can't do it. And it was really strange. It was interesting because this big guy, very powerful guy who had been really yelling and angry and screaming, his jaw dropped and he was silent. He didn't know what to say. And you didn't do the CAT scan? Oh no. That was the end of the story. I hope it's the end of the story. It's been over a year now and I haven't gotten that famous embossed letter with the lawsuit, so I'm assuming that everything turned out fine. Hoffman told me this story is not an isolated example. Things like this happen all the time in his department. Whether it's people wanting antibiotics for illnesses that antibiotics have been proven not to help, or tests such as x-rays and CAT scans. Where a patient thinks, well, don't I need to be sure that I don't have appendicitis? Or this, that, or the other thing. And really, the right thing for the doctor to do is to think. And in many cases, not to do any tests. At least not right now. There's a place for tests and there's a place for interventions. But not in every case. And yet, the incentive to the doctor is often, just do everything. And the truth is, a lot of us like it that way. It's hard to understand how doing everything could be bad for us. We think, better safe than sorry. Do everything possible. In a study published earlier this year, half the public believes someone's getting unnecessary health care. But only 16% thought it was them. We're so wired to think that more health care is better that when someone suggests we might be better off with less, it's upsetting. Even daring to raise the question, is this device or test or pill really making us healthier, can send people into a panic. Consider the PSA test, the blood test used to screen men for prostate cancer. The question of whether the benefits of this test outweigh the risks is one of the most controversial issues in medicine. Some doctors worry that the test is leading to unnecessary treatment. Because it catches many prostate cancers that are so slow growing they would never be harmful if left alone. In 2002, two medical journal editors, both doctors, made this point in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle. Gavin Yamey and Michael Wilkes wrote that since early detection hadn't been proven through randomized control trials to reduce a man's risk of dying from prostate cancer, getting the test might not be right for every man. Their op-ed, published under the headline, "Prostate Cancer Screening: Is It Worth the Pain," did not go over so well. Lots of people wished that we would die. That's Gavin Yamey. Since many of the readers believed the PSA test had saved their lives, they didn't appreciate being told that the test wasn't effective. Lots of people wished we would have a very slow death from a nasty cancer. People accused us of having the deaths of thousands of men on our hands for writing this piece. Of geriatricide. Michael Wilkes, Yamey's co-author. People wrote both to us and to our bosses accusing us of being sort of like the Nazis. And specifically, accusing us of being like Mengele. Others accusing us of truly being men-haters and wanting to wipe out the male population. When the president says we can cut health care costs by eliminating things that don't work, things for which there's no evidence, it sidesteps the fact that in medicine the evidence isn't always so clear cut. And that's true with the PSA test. There's a lot more evidence about PSA now than there was when Yamey and Wilkes wrote their op-ed. In fact, two long-awaited studies came out this Spring. One showed that the PSA test did not reduce a man's risk of dying from prostate cancer. The other showed it reduced prostate cancer deaths by 20%. But it also showed that for every life saved because of PSA screening, 48 other men were diagnosed and treated. In other words, for each prostate cancer death prevented, dozens of men endured surgery or radiation, risking serious side effects, like impotence and incontinence. Doctors interpret this evidence differently. Some I talked to said it's proof that the test saves lives. Others said it shows we might be hurting more men than we're helping. Because the evidence is ambiguous and the balance of risks and benefits is really a judgment call, most national guidelines say that doctors should let men know the pros and cons of PSA testing, and let them decide whether to have it. But most of the time this is not what happens. Studies show that the majority of men get the test without any discussion at all. It's automatic, a no-brainer. And honestly, it's not hard to see why. To question whether the test is necessary, a doctor is flying in the face of all sorts of cultural forces. Like the idea that if you can find cancer early, you always should. Not to mention all the billboards and free PSA screening events and celebrities in TV ads telling men to get tested. Want to do something really special for your man this Christmas? Call his doctor and schedule his prostate exam. Prostate exams save lives and prostates. Here's another from the NFL. So get screened and don't let prostate cancer take you out of the game. And of course, Larry King. Men over 40, take your PSA test. It's a simple, little blood test. You get the result in a couple days. A few doctors I talked to mentioned another reason that physicians might be wary of bucking the PSA trend. They told me what happened to a doctor named Dan Merenstein. Merenstein was trained in evidence-based medicine, and about 10 years ago, when he was a family practice resident, a 53-year-old man came to him for a routine physical. Merenstein says he followed the guidelines. Talked to the patient about the benefits and risks of getting the PSA test. And the man chose not to have it. Then, a year and a half later, the man went to another doctor. That doctor tested the man's blood without discussing it with him. His PSA level was extremely high and a biopsy found an aggressive, incurable cancer. Now there is was proof that having an earlier PSA test would have changed the man's fate. But Merenstein and his residency program were sued for malpractice. At the trial, the patient's attorney argued that Merenstein shouldn't have given the man a choice to have the PSA test, no matter what the national guideline said. The attorney put other family doctors on the stand. And they said, you know, we don't talk to patients. This is Dr. Merenstein. That's what they do in ivory towers. You know, I order tests. Patients come to me for me to order the test. I'm the one that went to medical school. And these are the tests we order. And if Dr. Merenstein had ordered this-- they said this straight under oath. And if Dr. Merenstein had ordered a PSA, this patient would live a long, productive life. But because Dr. Merenstein failed to, this patient is going to die surely. Merenstein was exonerated, but his residency program was found liable for a million dollars. The jury, just like the doctors on the stand, rejected the idea of following the guidelines based on evidence. To them, the best care meant doing everything you can. I should have just ordered it. There should have been no discussion. It shouldn't have been up to the patient. So that was the approach they took. And they took this approach that this thing called evidence-based medicine is just a way to save money, just a way to ration care. After the trial, like a lot of doctors who had been sued, Merenstein found it hard not to see patients as potential plaintiffs. I think you view people differently after that and you look at patients and you say, this mole, which a thousand times before I would say I'm pretty confident on how to evaluate moles and which ones I need to take off myself, and which ones I think are fine to stay, and which ones need to go. You know, I think I started sending more moles to dermatologists to remove and sending more people with what I was pretty confident was irritable bowel or something like that to GI doctors to get scoped and things like that more than I should have. It sort of just didn't feel right. It didn't feel right, he said, because it didn't feel like he was doing what was best for the patients. These days, when it comes to the PSA test, Merenstein starts by following the evidence. He still tells his patients the pros and cons, but then he gives them a little nudge and adds something he never used to. "Most people," he tells his patients, "get the test." Lisa Pollak. If you're a man and you heard this story and you want to know more about the pros and cons of getting the PSA test, there's a good summary at the Mayo Clinic web site. Those people really know what they're doing. Act 3, Who Would Win in a Fight Between a Polar Bear and an Insurance Company? So if doctors aren't going to keep costs down and patients aren't going to keep costs down, how about insurance companies? Out of everybody in the health care system, you would think that this would be the one group most interested in keeping costs down because they are the ones who actually make the payments to doctors and hospitals, and every dollar they save is basically a dollar they get to keep. A dollar that goes into their profits. Or, if you want to get very technical about this, it's a dollar less that they could charge you and me in premiums. Well, we looked into this and it turns out that there are a lot of reasons that insurance companies have a hard time holding down health care costs. But they all boil down to one thing. Insurance companies are not always as powerful as you would think. The way that insurance works is that each insurance company makes its own contract, its own deal, with each local hospital group or health provider system. And that deal spells out how much the insurance company is going to reimburse for every different kind of procedure and test. And even in cities where a company is the biggest insurer in the market, even then, it does not necessarily have the power to boss hospitals around and push down costs and bargain down prices. Take, as an example, the pricing showdown between Blue Cross of California-- huge insurance company-- and this big network of hospitals and clinics called Sutter Health. Sarah Koenig, another one of our producers, tells what happened. Back in 2000, Sutter was demanding huge rate increases from Blue Cross, averaging something like 30% or 35%. That was a shocker. Blue Cross was the biggest insurer in the state, which meant it was used to getting cheaper rates from hospitals than the smaller guys. But Sutter was enormous too. It had more than a hundred health care facilities all over Northern California, including more than two dozen hospitals. Sutter had what's called a geographic lock on the Bay Area. So of the several hundred thousand Blue Cross customers there-- Almost everybody received, or knew, or went to Sutter for their medical care. That's Michael Chee. At the time, he was spokesman for Blue Cross of California. And Blue Cross's position was that Sutter's demands were out of line. They weren't justified by the medical costs and inflation data Blue Cross had researched. So Blue Cross offered a lower figure. Sutter rejected it, saying Blue Cross had been underpaying them for years. It got contentious. Blue Cross still refused to pay. So Sutter said, if you don't, you can tell your members to go elsewhere, find other doctors, go to other hospitals. The brinksmanship that kind of occurred was, well, if we close our doors, all these people-- hundreds of thousands of them-- are going to be forced to travel an extra 30 minutes, an extra 10 miles, and that was not acceptable to the membership. So the membership began to express its opinion in the negotiations. Blue Cross got dozens, sometimes hundreds of phone calls a day, all thanks to a new pressure tactic used by Sutter. Sutter urged its patients to call Blue Cross's customer service line and complain. Michael Chee and his bosses started seeing news stories about the dispute, stories that favored Sutter. In response, Blue Cross launched a major marketing push of its own to try to convince customers everything would be OK if they would just find different doctors. Michael Chee did interviews with reporters. He sent tens of thousands of letters to Blue Cross members saying things like, "We are saddened and disappointed that Sutter has put its energy into instigating members like you to contact us." Blue Cross bought ads in local newspapers, publishing lists of non-Sutter care centers, explaining who all the doctors were and what they specialized in. And pointing out that those facilities weren't much farther than Sutter's. So you guys sort of mounted this campaign to try to convince your membership, we can do this, we can live without Sutter? They came back to you and said-- And said, I can't live without Sutter. You know, we want what we want. I've been with my doctor here at this location for many years, and I don't want to have to look for somebody new. I don't want to have to make any extra effort. I mean did you explain, as a company also, like this is potentially going to cost you guys more because your premiums are going to go up? Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things we tried to tell members and employers was, this is our job. Our job is to control health care costs, so that your premiums don't constantly go up. So that you're not constantly paying more. And one of the ways we do that is by these negotiations. None of this worked. Customers didn't budge. Neither did anybody else. State lawmakers got dragged into the fight to mediate. Finally, because they couldn't live without each other, Sutter and Blue Cross worked out a compromise. Sutter didn't get all the money it asked for. It wasn't a 30% increase. The actual number wasn't made public. But they got enough that it resulted in hiked up premiums. That's one reason medical costs in San Francisco, where Sutter is totally dominant, are still more expensive than cities nearby, like Oakland and San Jose, where Sutter isn't quite as strong. So that now a family of four in San Francisco pays $45 more per month to Blue Cross than it would pay in San Jose for exactly the same coverage. Michael Chee is still sort of baffled that it worked out this way. That people don't respond to bottom line reasoning when it comes to where and how they get care. He says costs will keep rising until we consumers start sacrificing a little, making different health care choices. Based on knowledge, based on facts, not based on our feelings, not based on what we want. Without those kinds of sacrifices, we're always going to be stuck in this argument of, I want what I want, and what I want can be very expensive and not the most cost effective thing. As it happened, I interviewed Michael Chee from the hospital. He'd had an accident involving one of those jet ski things and suffered a head trauma. Natasha Richardson had a very similar injury to mine. Mine was probably actually more severe. Quite honestly, I shouldn't be talking to you right now. I should be dead. Michael Chee lives in Burbank, California, near Los Angeles. But he had the accident on the Colorado River in Nevada and was airlifted to Las Vegas for treatment. For his two week rehab, he wanted to go home to LA, and had been arguing about that with his insurance company. Which happens to be Blue Cross. There are providers that I have a preference for closer to home, closer to where I live, that I wanted to go to for my care because I know them, I trust them. But my insurance would not accommodate my medical transport from here to there because those rehab services were available right here without having to move me. But Wait, weren't you just making the exact opposite argument before, that patients should be willing to sacrifice for lower costs and quality care? So here I am, away from home for two weeks getting my rehabilitation done. Yes. I mean when you're injured and you have the kind of injury that I have, you want to be close friends and family because it's just more comforting. That doesn't mean that's a smart medical decision. That just means that's what I want emotionally. I know, I know. But hearing this, you completely-- your sympathies are completely with the patient. You just think, of course you want to go home and be around your friends and family. And you've had this traumatic thing happen and it's totally upsetting, and probably very frightening. And of course, you want to go home. You know what I mean? I think it's a real dilemma. It is a dilemma. And I felt that. And I went through that entire emotional process. Do you think Blue Cross has made the right decision in your case? I think so. From a cost standpoint, yes. We probably can all agree that Blue Cross made the right choice in trying to save money on Michael Chee. But we agree only in the cold light of day. And that's what I mean by the dilemma. As patients, we don't usually consider things in the cold light of day. It's no wonder we don't respond to pocketbook arguments about how to save money on our own care. And that's partly what makes us, the patients, a secret weapon in these negotiations. At least for the doctors and hospitals. Because we side with them every time. Because we like our doctors. We trust them. We basically hate our insurers, even though the insurers are paid to represent us in negotiating the price of our own care. And we unwittingly side with the doctors in another battle we don't even know is going on between doctors and insurers. The one about eliminating unnecessary medical services and procedures. As you heard earlier in the show, the Dartmouth Health Atlas estimates about a third of every health care dollar we spend is wasted on tests and treatment we don't need. So if health insurance companies know they're shelling out all that money on stuff that isn't necessary, why can't they do something about it? I put this to Jack Rowe, the former CEO of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers in the country. When he was in charge, he watched Aetna's expenses and its profits very, very carefully. Why doesn't an insurance company go, I want that 30% to 40%? You know what I mean? It seems like this is a lot of money sitting there that you guys could profit from. Is there any way to get at that percentage? Insurance companies are trying very hard to develop approaches, which will not only improve quality but reduce overuse. So they're trying, and it's true, Aetna has all kinds of programs. Good, money-saving programs to promote cheaper drugs, to make sure diabetics and cardiac patients do all the preventative things to keep them out of the emergency room. Plus Aetna, like all insurance companies, has guidelines for new technologies they will and won't cover. And all the scientific studies that back up that policy. But the fact is, if companies like Aetna say no too often, they risk losing customers. So there's great sensitivity over that because physicians say that the insurance companies are practicing medicine. And who are they to tell me whether or not this patient needs this operation? As you recall, that's one of the things that led to the great pushback. The great pushback, also known in the insurance industry as the backlash. He's talking about HMOs. Back in the 1980s, employers went to insurance companies and pleaded with them to keep down costs. And that's when the HMO came into vogue. By the mid '90s, most employers used HMOs to cover their employees. And it pretty much worked. Health care costs stopped rising for the first time in a long time. One year they even fell. But a big part of keeping costs down was tightly controlling which doctors patients could see, and denying coverage for procedures that doctors argued were necessary. Insurance companies were inundated with complaints. From physicians, and hospitals, also from patients who were getting complaints from physicians about their insurers. Politicians. Also we're getting complaints from doctors, and hospitals, and patients. There were dramatic stories in the press about people who'd been denied lifesaving operations. There were class action lawsuits, legislation to limit their powers. Then there was that Helen Hunt movie. Remember, As Good As It Gets, where she plays the mother of this poor asthmatic boy who needed some tests he didn't get. They said my plan didn't cover it and that it wasn't necessary anyways. Why, should they have? Well. [BLEEP] HMO, bastard pieces of [BLEEP] OK, I'm sorry. It's OK. Actually, I think that's their technical name. Jack Rowe was one of two insurance executives I talked to who mentioned that movie. It left a big impression on the insurance industry. Because when people saw it in the theaters, they reportedly broke into applause. As a result of those years of opposition, insurance companies will only fight doctors and patients to a point. They don't want to go back to the days of the HMOs, of being the hard-asses telling everyone no. Even though they did successfully hold down costs back then. And they did it without making people sicker. There were anecdotal horror stories for sure. But overall, as a country, our medical care didn't suffer. We were just as healthy. But that's not how we remember it. And now you always hear, no one should stand between you and your doctor. This is Uwe Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton university. You know what that means? That means no one should ever control utilization, even if it's unnecessary. If your doctor thinks it's necessary, no one should ever say no. And almost anyone who's looked at the data says, oh yes, somebody should. According to Reinhardt, the fact that insurers can't completely crack down on unnecessary procedures is just one of a whole host of reasons why the insurance industry really can't control costs in the American health care system right now. Do insurance companies actually have an incentive to keep costs down? I've often asked myself that question. Obviously, when you compete against another insurers, it's good to have lower premiums. But the insurance industry as a whole, basically, their profits tend to be 3% to 5% of whatever money flows through their books. So the more money flows through the books, the more profit they make. Suppose a guard waved a magic wand and said, OK, now health care costs in America are half of what they are now. Then the insurance industry's book of business would be half of what it is now, and therefore, their profits would be half of what it is now. It's not totally clear to me the insurance industry would love that. As it stands, insurance companies are doing pretty well. They don't make anything close to the 30% profits of, say, Microsoft, or Merck Pharmaceuticals. Or even the 10% profits of Exxon Mobil, but Fortune magazine lists the health insurance industry as the 35th most profitable industry in the country based on 2008 revenue. What's the 34th most profitable industry you ask, just above the insurers? That would be medical facilities. Sarah Koenig. Act Now What? OK, so far this hour we've illustrated just some of the main things that are driving up health care costs. And truthfully, putting this show together over the last few months, it's been hard not to get sort of depressed. Not only do the problems seem like they're built into the very foundation of our health care system, but the health reform debate that's going on right now in Washington doesn't seem to be about cutting costs at all. Democrats and republicans are arguing over who's going to get insurance, and public option, and how it's paid for. Not to mention death panels and abortion. There's really not much discussion about how to fix the health care system as a whole to slow the runaway costs that threaten our entire economy. The stuff we've been talking about all this hour. And so to end our hour, we invited somebody who's been following this very closely in Washington, DC, Susan Dentzer. She's been reporting on the politics and economics of health care since the 1980s for Newsweek, and then later for US News & World Report. She's seen HMOs come and go, she's seen Hillary Clinton's health care plan come and go, and now she's monitoring the latest attempt to remake the health care system as the editor of a policy journal called Health Affairs. And I'll be frank, when I sat down with her to talk about what is actually in the bills, she totally blew my mind. We'll get that part in a minute, but first, the actual detail of the bills when it comes to cutting costs. There is some stuff in these bills that addresses rising costs. If you are a glass half full kind of person, you look at it this way. There are some measures in the bills that would give the secretary of health and human services, among others, enormous authority to experiment with new ways to deliver health care. This doesn't mean that little, experimental projects Dentzer says. The head of HHS will have czar like powers to change very basic things in how the system works by changing how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals. And so for example, Medicare could stop paying fee for service. That system where doctors get money for every procedure that they do. They could bundle doctors and patients into groups to cut inefficiency and waste. The bills also set up a Medicare commission, which could do the kind of restructuring and cutting that would be too hot politically for Congress to do itself. Now the weaknesses of these bills, Dentzer says, is that they don't force the head of HHS or anybody in the government to make any changes at all. There are no deadlines. And the amount that's going to get saved if everything goes perfectly, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is much smaller than health care costs are going to rise. But the idea is that Medicare is such a huge part of the health care system, it pays for a fourth of all the health care in the country. It's the biggest insurer in America. Changes made in Medicare would be adopted by others. So the notion is to really create a platform for gradual change. And is part of the impulse behind this basically to say, we are not going to agree in the Senate and the House on the exact ways to cut costs and exactly which things to do? And so let's just agree, somebody's going to do that. It's going to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services and some of these other things that you're saying. But let's not discuss that here. Yes, that's part of it. And the other realistic piece of this is if you tried to build all of this into the bill right now. If you said, we're going to make sweeping changes in the system. We're going to completely pay you in a totally different way. We're going to take you doctors who've been out in the hinterlands collecting your fee for service monies and basically restructure the system in such a way that you might have to live your life really differently. Just try putting that into a bill that gets everybody to accept it. You can't. Susan Dentzer told me that there are people in the administration who are deeply involved in the details of how to cut health care costs, and she talks to them. But she says they don't talk about this stuff much publicly for similar reasons. It's a political loser. It's a tough sell to say to people, not only will you get less health care, you'll be better off. OK, now I'm going to tell you the thing that Susan Dentzer says that totally shocked me. She told me that for the first time since she's been covering health care decades ago, all the major players in health care-- the hospitals, the insurance companies, the doctors-- she says they are all for the first time agreeing that something has to change. And she says this is the biggest political achievement made in health reform so far. Almost all the stakeholders in health care have been at the table and are talking about all of this. They know that the system cannot persist the way it is. That we've got to do things differently. We have got to get more value out of the dollars spent on health care. How recent is that agreement? Is that because of Obama and his people like saying, OK, here's what we're going to do? Not really. We would probably be at this juncture no matter who had been elected president. Because of what was happening to the cost over the course of this decade. Right, there's this growing consensus, like it's going up so fast. Well, health insurance premiums went up 130% from the year 2000 to now. Two years ago I was talking to an insurance executive from one of the leading insurance companies and I said, OK, so what's the situation like, and draw me the analogy with the threat alert system. You know, red alert, orange, green, whatever. He said, we're on red alert. We're on red alert. The system is falling apart. The insurance companies? Yes. I'm just surprised to hear the insurance companies are on red alert because they are still making nice profits. But they can see the handwriting on the wall. They see the system crumbling. They understand the pressures that will ensue if things get really out of hand. Just imagine if we had had 100 million people uninsured, what kind of pressures there would have been for, say, a single payer system. They know that. They think the only solution now for preserving any part of the system as a private system is to stop the bleeding now. And so in addition to the health care reform happening in Washington, Susan Dentzer says there's a second reform that's happening right now all over the country. Hospitals and health care providers and state legislatures coming up with their own ways to restructure and contain costs. That's what gives her hope. That things are so hopeless for every player across the board that a consensus is actually taking hold that things can't continue as they have. And she sees people and organizations taking action. Alix Spiegel is going to be doing more stories on this subject on NPR News. You can find those in the coming days at npr.org/health. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who says, you know, you think people get upset when you mess with their health care. Try changing the broadcast time of Car Talk. Lots of people wish that we would die. And lots of people wished that we would have a very slow death from a nasty cancer. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with the second hour we're doing on health care. The Planet Money team takes on the insurance business right here on This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Here's how it works. You're a doctor, you help some patient, and you want to get paid for it. So you have to choose a code that describes what you did to put on the insurance form. And it's an arcane language of its own, with tens of thousands of codes. And just make things more confusing, every insurance company interprets the codes differently. So even a simple procedure, the simplest procedure, giving somebody a shot, can become fantastically complex if you want to be reimbursed for it by insurance. Take the new swine flu vaccine. The American Academy of Family Physicians put out a guide for physicians on how to code this. CIGNA uses a new G9141 code, but Aetna wants you to use codes that indicate the age of the patient, 90465 to 90468 for kids, 90471 to 90474 for adults. The vaccine itself is free, but United Health Care wants you to say it costs $0.01 because its computers won't recognize a 0. And if you're giving somebody the swine flu shot at the same time as the regular flu shot, well then you do a 90470 plus the other codes. Though if you used the 90470, you shouldn't use any codes written since the 2010 code book came out. Lost yet? There are things daily that are hard to code. People, when they come into your office, they come in with my arms feel weak. Well, there is no code for that. Rob Lamberts is a doctor in suburban Georgia. He also writes a blog called, "Musings of a Distractible Mind." I mean, when you think about it, we have four physicians in our practice and two mid-levels. And we have, I think, four full-time billing staff to help us figure out this whole process. Well, that's a lot of percent of money of our practice that's going towards just making sure our billing is working well. I suppose it helps the recession to have this complexity because it hires more people to do coding. It's a growing part of the economy. Yeah, unfortunately. There is no joke. There are schools to teach you medical coding. There are conferences whose seminars have titles like, "Keep Your 99214 and 99215 Use on the Up and Up." The American Association of Professional Coders-- and yes, there is such a thing-- says there are now 200,000 medical coders in the United States. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics says these jobs are on the rise. They're going to rise 18% in a decade. Quote, "faster than the average for all occupations." Dr. Lamberts estimates that he and his partner spend 20% to 25% of their revenue on the billing department, and on codes that don't go through. When they send in a wrong code, write 401 instead of 401.0, or we've got a modifier, or don't realize that they've changed the codes, the insurance company doesn't pay. He points out that you and I are paying for these armies of coders, who work with doctors and hospitals on one side, and insurance companies on the other. All this money spent that doesn't make anybody healthier. And by the way, doesn't go to doctors. What I'm being paid per visit has not really changed. If anything, it's dropped a little bit. Well today on our program we bring you the second of two hours that we're doing on health care in America. The first was last week. Today we look at the crazy Rube Goldberg system that we have for insurance in this country, where there's a code for an injury involving spacecraft, E845, but not one for weak arms. We look at how our insurance system affects everything else in our health care system. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in four acts. We guarantee you the most entertaining hour you're ever going to hear on the insurance industry. Stay with us. "Act One, One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill." Today's show by the way, is a co-production with NPR News. We have three stories today from the Planet Money team of economics reporters. One thing that makes our insurance system so hard to understand is that so much of it is invisible to us. We get these insurance statements that are nearly incomprehensible with those insurance codes and prices that make no sense, and some things get covered, and some don't. As President Obama's put it, "If we knew more about our health care choices, we'd choose better." If there's a blue pill and red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price? Thing is, the fight over red pills and blue pills is decades old. It's one of those things that our insurance companies are deeply involved in that we are barely aware of. Planet Money reporter Chana Joffe-Walt tells more. Ted Sarah is in the middle of a war. It's been going on for many years and involves billions of dollars. A lot of us are in this war, and like Ted, we don't even know it. He stumbled onto the battlefield because he's got pimples. Pimples and a card. It is called the SOLODYN Patient Access Card. What's it look like? It looks like a little credit card. It's white and blue. The SOLODYN Patient Access Card is just the latest weapon in this war. It's an arms race, really, that's been escalating for decades. There have been moves and counter-moves before. This war, it is a war over drug copayments. If you don't, say, run an insurance company, you probably hate copays. They're a way to make you pay for your drugs at the pharmacy, even though you're insured. Which seems kind of evil, right? But I tracked down an evil insurance VP, Eileen Wood, who actually was pretty personable. And she said, no, no, no. Copays are an insurers special little way of yelling at us. There are drugs that cost $1,000, there are drugs that cost $5. When you're insured, you don't care. You don't even know. So the insurers put a $30 copay on one and $10 copay on the other. They're giving you a hint that there is a difference in the drug's total cost. And the consumer doesn't see that, and so we struggle to try to shine the light on that and get called the bad guy. You do get called the bad guy a lot? Yeah, we do. So copays were basically a bad guy's way of doing something good for everyone. That's the way Eileen sees it, except for the bad guy thing. Because if insurers could discourage us from buying expensive drugs, it's not just that they would save money, we would save money. They could charge us less in premiums, which we all want. By the 1990s, insurance companies had it down. Copays were working really well. The insurers felt like they were winning the war, which was pretty gratifying to people like Eileen Wood. She had watched for years as drug companies came out with slightly tweaked versions of existing generics and sold them for 10 times the cost. Our doctors told us there was a drug to help us, we went out and got it, brand name, generic, whatever, and no one cared. No one cared because no one saw it. No one but Eileen. Let's look at Kapidex-- oh, that's this one. I love this one. That's the Minocin, but this company-- this is the original Minocin-- Eileen works in a tidy office park in Albany, New York, for an insurance company called Capital Districts Physicians Health Plan, CDPHP. And in her file cabinets, she's got plastic zipped-up pouches of her least favorite brand name drugs. She collects them. Minocin, that one she's talking about, there's a generic version that costs about $50 a month. Minocin PAC, which Eileen is now waving in my face is a newer brand name drug. It costs $668. So what's different? It has a couple little extra items that are not prescription items in there. It has this lovely calming wipe, so that when your skin's all red and you can pat this on and it's supposed to bring the redness down. It's not a prescription item. Calming serum and a calming mask. It's basically stuff you could buy over the counter. But behind the scenes, it's-- $668. Yeah. And the only difference in this is that it has wipes? It has these. That's it. That's the only difference. You could probably buy them for $10. So those three products are added to the Minocin PAC and I guess that must be what costs the extra $600, I'm not sure. It's very slick. Eileen has dozens of stories like this, that do seem ridiculous. An acne medication that comes with green tea swabs? It's kind of like a prescription for Viagra that comes with a Hustler magazine that costs an extra $500. Now, not all brand names are like this. There are brands that are better than existing generic options that are the only thing that work for some people. And with copays, you can still get the brands, it's just the more expensive choice. You want the green tea swabs? You pay $40 of the $668 for it. If you just want Minocin generic, you pay $10 of the $50. The copay strategy worked so well that in 2003, generics passed the 50% mark. Meaning more than 50% of the drugs people went and picked up from pharmacies were generics. It was probably around then that it happened. The drug companies, they noticed. People like Sally Beatty at Pfizer. That's the company that makes, among other things, the world's most popular drug, Lipitor. Sally, not a fan of copays. The issue with that is that we want treatment decisions to be made based on what the physician feels is medically best for the patient not just the cost to the patient, or what another player may decide is in their interest. Another player like Eileen Wood and her insurance industry buddies with their copays that were hurting the drug companies. Lipitor was facing major competition from generics. In July 2007, sales were down 13%. Now, there is no approved generic for Lipitor. Sally Beatty from Pfizer will say this three times in 15 minutes. And what that means is that there is no drug that is chemically identical to Lipitor. What there are, are generic drugs in the same class of cholesterol reducing drugs. That's what Lipitor does, reduce cholesterol. And those generics are effective for most people. But there are some people who respond better to Lipitor. And for some of those patients, a $40 copay stops them from getting the medication. And so in 2007, the pharmaceutical industry marshaled its counterattack, that mysterious card you heard at the beginning of this story, their central weapon-- coupons, a whole bunch of coupons. OK, so I've always sort of had a little bit of acne. Enter: Ted Sarah, the paralegal with the card and the pimples. Pimples that just a few months ago were in need of drugs. Yeah, it sort of comes and goes, and it generally-- when I'm sort of going through more periods of stress, either at work or just as a course of life, it sort of gets worse. Ted walked into the doctor's office. She poked at him with gloved hands and told him, OK, we're going to put you on a couple topical creams and some antibiotics, a drug called Solodyn. Ted was tentative, but he mentioned he'd been on a generic before, worked pretty well, called minocycline. And the doc said, yeah, that's great. Basically that's the same as Solodyn, but Solodyn is time release. That means, as opposed to minocycline, which you have to remember to take in the morning and in the evening, you only have to take Solodyn once a day. It didn't really sound that big of a deal to me, but it is, I guess, to anyone, slightly easier to take one pill per day instead of two, so I went with it. And I asked, in terms of the cost of it, just to pay the extra money to take it once a day, if that was going to be a big difference. It wouldn't really be something I'd be interested in. And then she presented this card. You remember the card. It is called the Solodyn patient access card. It's actually called Solo-DINE not Solo-DIN. Who knows where they come up with these names? Point is, this is the moment, the moment that the drug makers weapon makes its way into the hands of its oblivious soldier, Ted. Ted was going to get a deal. The doctor explained that this card, it's a coupon. Give it to the pharmacist and it should make your copay very affordable. Which is exactly what happened. Without the card Ted's copay would have been $154.28. But when Ted got to the pharmacy, he presented his card. They went to ring it up at the register and when it came up the price was $10. $10. $10. That's pretty good for drugs. Yeah, it was great. Solodyn access achieved. Ted's insurance company was then charged $655 a month for Ted's once-a-day Solodyn. For reasons too complicated to go into here, they only paid $514. Minocycline, the one that you have to take twice a day costs $109 a month, total. $514, $109. Ted never saw those numbers. So you think, OK, well Ted used a coupon because he didn't really know any better. He thought he was getting a deal. Who wouldn't go for that, right? But the doctor, what was up with the doctor handing out these cards? Luckily, Dr. Elena Allbritton, was generous enough to answer some questions. Do you know the price difference between those two drugs? I don't. Like Ted, and the majority of Americans, Dr. Allbritton has no idea what drugs actually cost. Not because she's lazy, but because these numbers are really hard to find out. The insurance companies, they all individually negotiate with drug companies. And they each pay a slightly different amount. So no, Dr. Allbritton is not thinking about prices when prescribing, she's thinking, what is the best thing available for this patient? Solodyn is better. It's easier to take a pill once a day instead of twice. It's easier for Dr. Allbritton to get the dosage just right. And Dr. Allbritton wants her patients to have the best. I think if I can get a discount for most patients, I think it's great because the cost of medications can be very high. It's like a free gift to them. Dr. Allbritton just wants it to be easy for patients to access the drugs she thinks they need. Truthfully, she doesn't really want to keep track of all the prices. That's not her job. I just don't think that it's realistic to have that responsibility fall on the physician. I mean then are you going to start saying, well, should I really do this biopsy because I'm not really sure that it's really that significant of a difference in that mole and it might cost you $1,200 in the end if this doesn't get covered. I mean you don't want to start thinking about price tags with everything. Actually, when people talk about how to reform health care in our country, this is one of the things they talk about changing. That doctors should know the prices of things, and at least play some role in deciding whether a time release version of a pill is worth $400 more to everyone. The maker of Solodyn is Medicis. They wouldn't talk to me. By the way, in the month since Ted started taking Solodyn, a generic version has come out. And, the war has escalated. Another tactical maneuver. Drug makers used to just give cards to doctors. Now, they distribute them to patients too. But pharmaceuticals did not announce their counterattack to insurers. Eileen Wood at CDPHP, she had to figure it out by putting much of her staff on a hunt, reporting back to her on what cards are out there, who put them out, and how people are getting them. Because they're like everywhere. You can go online and get these. You can open up a women's magazine and get these. I mean they're everywhere. So this little purple card, is their way of saying, fine, you're going to put a $30 copay on us. Take that. Yes, that's exactly what's happening. They're trying to say, fine, you're promoting generic, CDPHP. We've got to do something about this. We're going to waive our copay. We'll fix you. We'll be zero copay. We'll be cheaper than you and we'll keep our market share. Eileen sounds a little crazy when she starts to talk like this. Like multibillion dollar companies are setting out to punish her, personally, Eileen Wood, for her copays. But when you think about it from her perspective, she is the only one who sees this stuff. We don't. We see a deal. And like Ted, we like deals. I can't argue with that argument, except to say there is a consequence for that. Because what will you have to do if everybody gets the more expensive drug? We'd have to raise premiums. I think there is no question about that. It would have an impact on him and everybody that sits next to him. At work. At work and their families and so forth. Yes. I don't want to pay more in premiums next year. I don't want everyone around me to have to either. Do you think your coworkers are going to hear this and go, well, thanks a lot, Ted? You and your fancy acne medicine. Probably. But there I was sitting in the dermatologist's office and I have no idea. Again, like I had never heard of this medicine, had no idea how much it costs. I know it's brand name, but I certainly never would have dreamed that it would have cost $655 sticker price. Looking at this war laid out like this, it's a view of a health care system that is comprised of enormous insurance companies throwing their weight around, just as enormous drug companies striking back, and then all these idiots in the middle-- us. You, me, and our doctors. Pesky interlopers who don't even know the price of the pills we're buying. President Obama wants us to choose the blue pill and not the red pill. Because the blue is just as effective, but half the price. But with these cards, which one is the blue one? We have no idea. Chana Joffe-Walt. Act Two, Let's Take Your Medical History. If you think about it, it's very strange how we do insurance in our country. Including, for example, the fact that most of us do not buy our own insurance. Our employers buy it for us. Whatever we're doing, it's not working so great. Health costs are rising so fast that they're threatening our entire economy. A third of all health care is waste, unnecessary procedures and tests, according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health. How did we get here? Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson have been looking into that. The more you study the roots of our modern health care system, the more you realize that nobody ever planned for it to be this way. What we have right now is the result of lots of historical accidents over the last hundred years. So let's start at the beginning, at the turn of the last century, and get a sense of what health care looked like, let's say, circa 1900. In a lot of ways the world then was starting to look like the one we have today. There were electric lights going up in cities. Henry Ford produced the first car made in Detroit. The Boston Marathon was already four years old. But health care, health care was still basically stuck in the Middle Ages. Some doctors in the US were still using leeches and bleeding people. There were medicines to mask your symptoms and relieve your pain, but there was nothing that could actually cure you. And hospitals, at least what we would think of as a hospital, they didn't really even exist. There were things by that name, but they were basically poor houses for the sick. Dark, dirty places where the indigent went to die. But you know, there was a big plus side. Health care was cheap. It was really, really cheap. They might kill you, but they didn't charge you very much to do it. The average person spent $5 a year on health care. Even back then that wasn't very much. That's less than $100 a year in today's dollars. So, how do we get from that system, that pre-modern system, to our current health care system? We got there in four simple steps. Step one: start curing some illnesses. This year is the 100th anniversary of a remarkable discovery. 1909, the very first drug ever to actually cure an illness. It was something called Salvarsan, a treatment for syphilis. And it was different from the usual potions and nostrums. With Salvarsan, you took a pill and then you weren't sick anymore. More of these medicines followed and once health care actually starts to work, it launches a revolution. In the 1910s and the 1920s, people start expecting their doctors to actually know how to cure them. To actually have an education from some decent medical school. Maybe even to have a medical license. Melissa Thomasson is an economic historian at Miami University in Ohio. She focuses on the history of modern health care and she says, the medical revolution was especially apparent in hospitals. Hospitals have a radical transformation in the early part of the 20th century. So that instead of being these poor houses, these alms houses where unwed mothers and people with no family go, hospitals are actually marketing themselves as places to have babies, do appendectomies, take your tonsils out. They're focusing on, generally things with happy outcomes. Painting themselves as clean and full of sunshine. And not a dark, Victorian place for poor people to die. Exactly. So two points. All these clean hospitals with educated doctors and effective medicines, they cost more. Also, since they actually work, more and more people start using them. The cost to provide health care is increasing, the demand for health care is increasing. All of which means health care is now more expensive. A lot more. Which brings us to step two of how you get to our modern health care system. Step two: have a great depression. It's hard to imagine what our modern health care system would be like if it wasn't for the Great Depression. By the 1920s, even before the crash, the cost of health care had gotten so high that a lot of people stopped going to the hospital unless they were so sick they had no choice. An official at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas, Texas, noticed that most of their hospital beds were going empty every night because of that high cost. But he also noticed that Americans, on average, were spending more on cosmetics than on medical care. He said specifically-- I have the quote right here, "We spend a dollar or so at a time for cosmetics and do not notice the high cost. The ribbon counter clerk can pay $0.50, $0.75, or $1.00 a month, yet it would take about 20 years to set aside a large hospital bill." So Baylor Hospital wanted to figure out how to get ribbon counter clerks and anyone else they could find in Dallas to pay for health care like they pay for lipstick, a tiny bit every month. Baylor started small. They offered a deal to a group of public school teachers in Dallas. They told them, you pay us $6 a year. That's just $0.50 a month, cheaper than rouge, and we'll give you up to 21 days of hospital visits a year. The math was simple. In any given year, only a few of the teachers would need a hospital visit. A few hospitals copied the Baylor approach, and then the Depression hit. Almost every hospital in the country saw their patient load disappear. All their patients were broke. So the Baylor idea became hugely popular. And eventually, it got a name: Blue Cross. Again, Melissa Thomasson. The genius in marketing this by Blue Cross is marketing it to groups of workers. You know, when I actually started studying this stuff, I got interested in it because I wondered why we have an employment-based health insurance plan. It doesn't seem very logical. But it comes right out of Blue Cross selling insurance to groups of people who probably wouldn't need it. That is, people who were healthy enough to work. I see. So how did that work? Blue Cross representatives went around to factories and what did they do? Right. Exactly. They went around to factories. Here, give your employees this benefit. And it appealed to corporations then because the '20s and the '30s is the great period of corporate welfare capitalism too. Employers want to improve their workers' lives. They're starting to offer other benefits, like pensions and group life insurance at this time too. The Baylor plan, this Blue Cross plan, fulfilled two goals. They got people spending their money on health care, and it also got them to use health care more. To visit the hospital, to see it as a place where you go even if you weren't at death's door. By the middle of the Depression, there are Blue Cross programs in most states. So by the start of World War II, this employer-based health insurance is spreading. But still only around 9% of Americans have it. It's still pretty obscure. It's nothing like our modern system. To get to our modern system you need another step. Step three: go to war. If the Great Depression inadvertently inspired employer-based health insurance, World War II accidentally spread the idea everywhere. Again, economic historian, Melissa Thomasson. The war economy is an entirely different ball game. Think of government rationing on all levels. And so what they tell people is you legally cannot raise prices. You can't raise wages. At the same time, lots of people are joining the military and labor is scarce. So you can't find workers. Can you imagine in today's environment, you can't find workers who can work for you. You can't lure them by increasing wages. And at the same time, you need to produce enormous amounts of stuff for the war effort? Exactly. So what's a poor employer to do? They turn to fringe benefits. And they just started offering more and more generous health insurance plans, and pensions, and everything else actually. So you would say, Rosie, come work at my riveting factory because I can offer you this boutique insurance package versus-- Exactly. The war sets the stage for step four, the final step in the transformation to the health care system we have today. This step plays out over a number of years and it starts, like all the other steps, almost completely by accident, in a bureaucrat's office at the Internal Revenue Service. Now, this bureaucrat is one of the key figures, it turns out, in our American health insurance saga. But his or her name has been lost to history. What we do know is in 1943, this bureaucrat, or possibly a panel of bureaucrats-- we don't even know that-- made a routine ruling. Possibly in response to a question from an accountant at some company. The ruling was, at least in some cases, employers don't have to pay taxes on health insurance premiums for their workers. Now this ruling, it was actually vaguely worded and pretty confusing. But the response was huge. Because what it seemed to imply was, you get a huge tax break for offering health insurance to your workers. Now I want to jump in here and really focus on this. Because this is such a perfect case study in how we get a health care system that nobody ever planned for. Accountants notice that they can get their firms a tax break, so more and more employers get in on the deal. Soon they start demanding the government set it into law. And in 1954, Congress does just that. They pass the Updated Internal Revenue Code, which clearly and unambiguously states employers don't have to pay taxes on health insurance premiums. And if you don't think a tax law change can have a huge impact on health care, Melissa Thomasson has some data for you, pal. Just look at how the number of people with employer-based health insurance changes over time. You start from 9% of the population in 1940 to 63% of the population in 1953. Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows like gangbusters. And by the 1960s, roughly 70% of the population is covered by some kind of private-- what the AMA would say, "voluntary health insurance plan." So employer-based health insurance, which only started because Baylor University was able to sell to teachers in Texas, and which spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, that became our system. Employer-based insurance is a horrible system. I mean, why would you want your employer buying your health insurance? Why on earth would you want your employer buying your groceries? You certainly wouldn't want that. Just imagine it. Your employer has a contract with a grocery store. You go in, you pay your $20 copay, and then you get to take whatever you want. You'd probably go home with a lot more groceries, and you wouldn't skimp on the luxuries. Why get hot dogs when you can have lobster? And from the grocery store's point of view, it would have no incentive to keep prices down. Your plan is paying the bill. Pretty soon they might get so high that people without employer provided food plans could no longer afford to eat. They'd call Congress, demand universal food coverage. To economists like Thomasson, that's exactly the system we have with health. We, the consumers, are totally separated from the cost of what we're consuming. We get tests and procedures we don't need because, well, why not? We're not paying for it a la carte. Our employer's paying for part of it. Our government is paying for part of it through those tax incentives. Melissa Thomasson says that what we have combines the worst of the market and the worst of government. Markets are usually really good at controlling costs. When they work best, products come into existence, like cellphones, or stockings. They start expensive and then they get cheaper and better. But markets don't guarantee that everyone can afford the things they need. Government can be good at that, ensuring universal access. But when you're paying for everybody, it's hard to control costs. For Melissa Thomasson, she says that either extreme, a competitive market system where consumers know what price they're paying, what they're getting, which would probably drive the price of health care down, or a government run system, which would cover everyone would be better than the accidental mixture that we have today. A really expensive system that doesn't cover us all. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson from the Planet Money team. Coming up, a journey to the very frontier of health insurance. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, Someone Else's Money. Stories about the insurance industry and how it shapes everybody's health care. This is the second of two programs that we're doing explaining health care in America. And both are co-productions with NPR News. If you missed last week's show, you can hear it on the Internet for free. We've arrived at act three of our program. "Act Three, Insurance? Ruh Roh!" We have a story for you know about the newest frontier for health insurance, a place where it's just starting out, although you can hear it right there. There it is. Here's Dave Kestenbaum from the NPR Planet Money team. If you can't tell from all the beeps, this is an operating room. On the table, one of the millions of this country's uninsured. The patient lies motionless connected by tubes and wires to various machines. The surgeon is about to make a cut just below the knee. The operation this patient's having done is one I've had done, or close to it. We both tore the interior cruciate ligament that holds the knee together. Actually, I've had two operations, both knees, and this is his second also. There's one big difference though, he's a dog. The bill for the surgery? About $3,500 per knee. Looking around this veterinary hospital, you realize pet health care, more and more, is looking a lot like human health care. This is Chesapeake Veterinary Surgical Specialists in Annapolis, Maryland. In the next room, a weimaraner has been knocked out and is being prepped for surgery. Actually, he's being vacuumed. It turns out, when a dog is unconscious, you can vacuum it. Down the hall, dogs with cancer are getting chemotherapy. The knee surgeon, Dr. Daran Roa, says not long ago, places like this just did not exist. The numbers of surgeons and internists and cardiologists and large mega practices like this across the country has gotten astronomical. 25 years ago, you couldn't find a surgeon but at a university. And then, if you were lucky. But now there's thousands of them. And so pet health care is now crossing a magic threshold, one human health care crossed long ago. It's getting good and it's getting expensive. Expensive enough that people start thinking, wouldn't it be nice if someone else paid for this? Wouldn't it be nice to have insurance? Only a handful of pet owners that come here have pet insurance. Nationwide it's a few percent or so. But the business is growing rapidly at a pace of 15% or 20% a year. And you wonder if pet health care is about to import one of the major problems with human health care. My name is Dennis Drent and I'm the president and CEO of Veterinary Pet Insurance Company. And you're the largest pet insurance company in the United States, right? We are, yes. By a lot. By a lot. Knock wood we stay that way. Veterinary Pet Insurance, VPI, is a subsidiary of Nationwide Insurance. And Dennis Drent comes from the car insurance, house insurance world. Do you have pet? I have two. I have two miniature dachshunds. They're 10 years old, Willie and Charlie. And, are they insured? Absolutely. And I'll tell you why. The veterinarians have something called stop treatment, which is a concept where they actually measure how much will somebody spend on medical procedures until they'll say it's too much and we're just going to put the pet down. So I was talking with my wife one night saying, OK, Susan, how much would you spend? What's your stop treatment point? And we got to $10,000 and she wasn't even close to stopping treatment. And I know, being in this business now, that you can run up bills over $10,000 pretty easily. So at that point our dogs have been insured ever since. Let's just back up there. That idea of stop treatment level, how much would you pay to save your cat or your dog? That is the hardest question you can ask a pet owner. But let's face it, most people have a number. And it's a number that the industry measures. In 1997, it was $576. In 2007, just 10 years later, it more than doubled to $1,451. Insurance for a dog per month is something like $35. Dennis Drent sees pet insurance as a win-win. Actually, a win-win-win. Pets' lives get saved, the insurance company makes a little money, and the vets also make more money. But that win-win-win in the human health care world, it creates big problems. Doctors feel free to order more tests, patients don't care because they're not paying the bill. Everyone is so busy winning the system wastes money. I found a report that was refreshingly blunt about the money that veterinarians can make from all this. It was put together by the National Commission on Veterinary Economic Affairs. It's hard to imagine the American Medical Association putting out something like this for doctors. The report says on page four that with pet insurance, clients quote, "likely will use your services even more often and opt for more advanced medical procedures." It points out that insurance can reduce quote, "price resistance on the part of the client." Quote, "with cost concerns removed, clients become more engaged and more responsive." I read that part of the report to Dennis Drent, who said, "yeah, that's right." Historically, veterinarians haven't made as much money as, for example, doctors. So we're trying to make them help them understand that through insurance they can make more money. And by making more money, they can afford better procedures, better equipment, and provide better care for the animals. So again, I keep getting back to this win-win all around. Ready for me to go? A big fat thank-you from me and VPI for all you do for pets and their peeps every day. This is Susan Markham, who also works for VPI, the pet insurance company. I tagged along when she made her pitch to a veterinary hospital outside of Atlanta. The staff sat around listening politely, some in scrubs, eating barbecue that the pet insurance company had paid for. Now in a lot of markets, you could just make the pitch, this will make you a lot of money, and that would work really well. But it turns out, animal doctors, like people doctors, don't like thinking that money matters to them. Their job after all, is supposed to be about something bigger: saving lives. And Susan Markham's pitch has nothing to do with profit. She has a much more powerful weapon: kittens. A particular kitten named Minnie. A young mother and her 8-year-old son brought Minnie in. He was crying; he'd stepped on Minnie's leg and it was fractured. And Dr. McCarthy said, good news. She'll go home with you tomorrow. You won't notice that anything has happened to her six months from now. She'll heal up and be just fine. But sadly that young mother declined that treatment. Who can tell me why she might have done that? The story has a bad ending. The owner felt she couldn't afford to get Minnie's leg fixed. And overnight, she took Minnie to be euthanized. So Minnie's mom spent much more to have a very upset family and son, and a dead kitten than she would have had she had pet insurance. And she would have had a well kitten. Veterinarians are animal people. And one thing they hate possibly more than anything else is having to kill an animal they can fix. Which of course, is the upside to insurance. It saves lives. Veterinarians have been wary of pet insurance though. They're afraid it will become more like human health care. In particular, they're afraid of three letters: HMO. Managed care. They don't want an insurance company telling them how to practice medicine. But these kind of presentations do seem to work. So I've got these for you. Susan leaves a pile of pet insurance brochures and giveaway pens on the table. And prizes. And I'm going to leave you another one in case you want that to be in reception or if you want to give it to a client or-- Win, win, win. So if you're trying to decide how you feel about this whole thing, whether insurance is distorting pet health care, sending us into a world where lots of dogs will be getting $7,000 knee surgeries, or whether it's meeting a need, or both. I think it's time to meet someone who actually has pet insurance. We first noticed that something was up with Harriet in March. This is Kristen Zorbini Bongard, she lives in Janesville, Wisconsin. I started doing some snuggle time with Harriet and noticed that she had a lump. Before we go any further into the surgeries and the tests, I have to tell you that Harriet is a hedgehog. A hedgehog with health insurance. If that seems crazy to you, you do not know Kristen, and you do not know hedgehogs. One of the many great things about hedgehogs, she says, is that they can roll up into little balls. It's adorable. It's a very wonderful thing to see. When you turn them over on their backs, all of a sudden, all you see is quills. And it's a wonderful defense mechanism. That's what it is. But then all of sudden, you see a nose pop out, and two eyes, and maybe the front two paws. And then some ears. It's a very cute thing to watch. Dogs will trust just about anyone, she says, but hedgehogs, you have to earn their trust. And she likes that. So Harriet had a lump and Kristin brought her into the vet. A test showed the lump was cancerous. The vet, she says, told her this in a calm, factual way. And Kristen scheduled a date for surgery. The anesthesia that they give is a gas anesthesia. They put a little mask over the nose? Usually what they do is they put a giant mask over the entire hedgehog. I see. Yeah, it's rather funny to watch. The lump came right out, but there were complications. It seems like she had a reaction to the sutures and she has ripped open the sutures a couple times. Had to be stapled shut. And we actually ended up going in and doing the full surgical suite to see if there was anything left in there that was bothering her. She did end up healing, but continues to scrape at it infrequently. And so we've had to do some experimenting on her. She's on some hedgehog-- and I say "hedgehog" loosely-- anti-psychotics. Meaning they weren't developed for hedgehogs? Oh no. And as far as we know, we don't actually know that any other hedgehogs have ever been prescribed anti-psychotics. So Harriet gets 0.06 milliliters of medicine twice a day, and she's back to her snugly self? Yeah, she is very snugly. She's very snugly. So how much did that cost? Do you actually have the bill? I do. In the beginning the bills were relatively low. You know, $374, $150, $366. And VPI paid 70% of the first bill, 60% of the second bill, 43% of the third bill. VPI is the pet insurance? Yes. Health insurance for a hedgehog costs about $80 a year. And in the end, VPI put out $802 for Harriet's care. Kristen and her husband had to pay the rest, $1,911.20 of their own money. Kristen says she's not rich. She says things are actually kind of tough for her and her husband. She says, like a lot of people, they've been scaling back. And at the same time, she says having insurance did make her spend more on Harriet than she would have without insurance. On the other hand, it saved Harriet's life. I wish you had Harriet there, you could bring her up to the phone. Oh yeah. I can mimic the noise she would make. Go ahead. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] That's pretty much it. I asked Kristen about the downside of insurance, that it can lead to all kinds of unnecessary tests and procedures. And she agreed that could be a problem for certain pets. That's an interesting argument. I can see how that could be, especially for dogs or cats. How come? Hey, you know, we have this new vaccine, why don't we try it on Rover? Hey, sure. Why not? No skin off my back. It's covered by my insurance. But I guess for me, as a hedgehog owner, there's just not that much to do. Harriet is on anti-psychotics? Yes. Yeah, she is. That's not covered by insurance, though. We pay for that out of pocket. I know she's on anti-psychotics. Oh my gosh, I know. Can you tell she's less psychotic? How can you tell if a hedgehog is psychotic? Oh my God. I was curious to know what an actual economist made of all this, so I called up Tim Harford. Hi, David, how are you? Tim writes a column for The Financial Times called, "Dear Economist," where people write in with all kinds of crazy questions. OK, dear economist, I have a letter I wrote out here to you. Sure. Dear economist, is health insurance for pets good or bad? That's it. That's the whole question. Like any good economist, I'm going to say yes and no. How's that? Harford was a little shocked by the whole hedgehog thing. He's not an animal lover. He says his parents cats used to spray his books. But when I explained how pet insurance worked, he actually got excited. From an economic perspective, he says, we've set up a better system for our pets than we have for ourselves. One that could actually contain costs. He likes that owners have to pay part of say, pet surgery. More than that $20 copay some of us have to cough up when we go to the doctor. He says that forces people who have insurance to think about how much things cost. He also likes that pet insurance is not bundled with our jobs. People can comparison shop, buy it on the open market, find the plan that gives them exactly what they need. You're making me very hopeful actually, David. I now have a vision that people are going to see pet insurance, maybe they'll see that there's a better way. Maybe pet insurance is going to be the beacon that inspires us to reform human health care insurance. The real downside, he says, is that pet insurance, human health insurance, they're all insurance. And insurance fundamentally, is a lousy way to pay for things. It separates people from the money they're spending. Which inevitably leads to us winding up with tests and drugs and procedures we don't really need, just to be safe. But there's one important difference between health insurance for pets and health insurance for us. With pets, I think we're used to the idea that they're going to die at some point. We all have that stop treatment level. And that alone will probably keep spending from getting too out of hand. But if my wife gets in a car accident, or my kids, my stop treatment level? It doesn't exist. I want that insurance company to meet me at the hospital loading dock with a truck full of money. Lots and lots of money. David Kestenbaum. "Act Four, Sorry Johnny, It's Only Business." Last week on our show, one of our producers, Sarah Koenig, did a story about the insurance industry and health care costs, where she talked to some of the people who run the insurance company, Aetna, and to an economist who studies all this. And she found out some things about the economics of the insurance industry that were so illuminating and counter-intuitive that we asked her to put together another story about what she learned, starting with Aetna. Back in 2001, Aetna was a company on the verge of collapse. It had bought up three other big companies to become the biggest health insurer in the country. It covered 21 million people. But its cash flow problem was so dire it had to cut costs or go under. And the thing it did to stay solvent has been making the rounds of left leaning media lately. Because on its face it's kind of shocking. Wendell Potter, a former health insurance executive for Cigna, talked about it on Bill Moyers. They shed eight million members. Eight million policyholders? Eight million people. Men, women, and children. Yes. Potter quit the insurance business last year and is now spreading the word pretty effectively about all the tactics insurance companies use to avoid paying for sick people's treatment, so they can boost their own profits. They intentionally had this program to purge these accounts. Eight million fewer people were enrolled in Aetna's plans. Many of them, undoubtedly, joined the ranks of the uninsured because their employers had been purged. So what happened to Aetna's stock? Went up. Not only did the stock go up, it quadrupled in value. And the story of Aetna's turnaround became something of a Wall Street legend. Potter also used Aetna as an example when he spoke to a US senate committee in June. The implication of course, is that Aetna singled out its sickest and therefore, most expensive patients, and dumped them. It sounds really bad. It's the kind of story we've gotten used to hearing about insurance companies. But the truth of this story is a little more complicated, a little less Machiavellian, and tells you a lot about how the insurance industry works. If you ask Jack Rowe, the Aetna CEO who engineered the turnaround, Aetna's main problem in 2001, was that it simply wasn't charging enough for its health plans. Customers weren't paying enough in premiums to cover what Aetna was paying out for their medical claims. The entire year of 2001, Aetna wound up losing a million dollars a day. So his solution, or at least a big part of it, was to raise premiums on those accounts by 10%, 20%, 30%. In some cases, they shot up by more than 50%. Many, many customers who couldn't pay the increased rates dropped Aetna's insurance. And Aetna did one other thing, something he says you have to do if you're in this situation. What you do is you get out of the markets that you cannot effectively price your products in. And what were those markets for you guys? Well, the most important characteristic, what did they have in common, Jack? The answer is that they were in markets in which we did not have very significant presence. So that the contracts that we had with the doctors and the hospitals were not as favorable as that of our competitors. This is the heart of how Jack Rowe explains what happened back in 2001. Contrary to what his critics allege, Jack Rowe says Aetna did not drop customers because they were sick. It dropped them because they were expensive. You're assuming that the patients are more expensive because they're sick. And the fact is the patients were more expensive because we were paying the doctors and the hospitals more for the same services than our competitors were. So Aetna simply folded in places where it was, say, fourth or fifth in the market and couldn't hack it against the bigger guys. But taking a former CEO's word for all this didn't seem wise. So I ran Jack Rowe's explanation by Uwe Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton University. When he's talking about, we didn't have good contracts with hospitals, does that ring true to you? Oh, yes. The insurance market is quite fragmented, which means that in a market, unless you have a large market share, you really don't have any market power in bargaining with doctors and hospital over prices. In other words, in a market where everyone can cut their own deal, the big insurer who brings a hospital a lot of patients, say, 75,000 a year, has a lot of leverage. It can demand discounted rates from the hospital. Because the hospital can't survive without those 75,000 sick people. But to cover all its costs, the hospital's overhead, the hospital has to make up for that money it's not getting from the discounted guys. So it sticks higher prices to the littler insurers who have no leverage. Because the hospital can live without their, say, 600 patients. The little guy either has to eat the higher costs or pull out of that market. This is called the cost shift in the business. And that is what happens in spades in the private insurance industry. It is a constant game of shifting costs from one payer to the other. So that's one thing, the more competitors you have in this insurance industry, the weaker each will be in bargaining with doctors and hospitals. So in the health insurance world, more competition does not necessarily equal lower prices for consumers. This is one of the many things Reinhardt told me that blew my mind. That ran counter to everything I assumed about how the free market is supposed to work. Another thing he told me was that there was a period when insurers were able to successfully bargain hospital prices down. It was in the mid '90s when big insurance companies got a lot tougher about cutting costs, and started ramming contracts down hospitals' throats. Contracts hospitals found it hard to live by. So in response, hospitals and other health care providers beefed up and consolidated, forming these huge health care systems that could effectively fight back against the large insurers. And the argument was always beautifully put. The consolidation was to have more coordinated patient care. This it was all just bullshine. What they really wanted is to have a powerful block to negotiate with the insurer. Most health economists will tell you, the hospital sector probably is too consolidated, too powerful. What that means is that big insurers are less and less able to resist rate hikes demanded by big providers. Plus the very act of negotiating all these rates with all these different hospitals is expensive. Imagine now, Aetna has a huge number of people who all year long go around bargaining over prices with each hospital and doctor. And out comes a pricing system that is simply laughable. Why should, for example, in California, if you look at WellPoint, as an insurer, for an appendectomy for some hospitals they pay them maybe $1,500. In other hospitals, they pay $13,000. Explain to me where that could possibly make any sense at all. And that is why I just say the insurance industry is congenitally weak in bargaining with the supply side of the American health sector. And the result has been that we're spending twice as much per capita on health care than most countries without, however, the commensurate benefits that go with that. Now pick your favorite theory. A, Americans are really dumb, or B, American suppliers are unbelievably clever. This isn't at all the picture we got from President Obama's big health care speech in September. When he characterized the lack of competition among insurance companies as the problem. Without competition, the price of insurance goes up, and quality goes down. And it makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly. That's the foundation for his argument for a public insurance option. That more competition will keep the big guys in check. An additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not for profit public option available in the insurance exchange. Has he got this picture right? I don't think he does. I wish I had a half hour with him to explain it to him. If you pit hundreds of little insurers against each other, what makes any one think that each of them has enough market clout to bargain successfully with a hospital? So I don't think this public health plan, adding yet one more competitor, is going to bring costs down at all. I don't think many economists would actually buy that argument. Reinhardt says if the public health plan was able to get low rates, Medicare-style rates from doctors and hospitals, one result could be that the hospitals would just shift their costs over to the private insurers, who would either absorb them, or in some cases, pass them on to customers in the form of higher premiums. There's a lot of disagreement about that right now. About how or if the public option would affect cost shifting. In any case, Reinhardt thinks we should consider a whole other way. What the president at some point-- maybe not now, he's busy. But at some point, needs to talk about is the virtue of an all payer system, like Maryland. Look to Maryland as where America ought to be. In Maryland, for the past 30-plus years, a state commission has set prices for all procedures at all hospitals. There's no cost shifting. So that every single person who ends up in the hospital, regardless of whether they've got private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or no insurance at all, gets the same price. Beth Sammis is a deputy commissioner at the Maryland Insurance Administration. So the bill is just, you came in, you had an appendectomy. The price of the appendectomy is x amount, and that's the bill that goes out. Everyone is treated fairly. So, regardless of their market share, no insurance company gets a discount. And no insurance company gets screwed. I mean we think that one of the strengths of our system is that they are not competing on hospital prices. And thus, in order to be able to differentiate themselves within the marketplace, they have to pay more attention to things that are within their own control. Care management and how efficient they are in delivering the benefits. So wait, the crazy commies in Maryland think insurance companies should compete on quality, not quantity? But Maryland is just one state. If the whole country operated like Maryland, Aetna might not have had to drop 8 million customers back in 2001. Instead, for the former CEO, Jack Rowe, it was the only solution that made practical sense. And that strategy was a big success. Things haven't been as heady since then. This past July, Aetna released its second quarter earnings and the company's profits were down 28%. Aetna's chief executives assured Wall Street they'd right the ship in the next year by cracking down on excessive claims. And by turning to their old standby, pretty much every company's standby, raising premiums. An analyst for Barclays estimates Aetna will lose 600,000 members in the next year to meet its profit goals. It's the same strategy they used in 2001. Aetna's options haven't changed because our health care system hasn't changed. Uwe Reinhardt, the health care economist, says we shouldn't blame insurance companies for how this business works. Insurance executives are not evil people. If you ever had a brew with Jack Rowe, you would find that. They're not evil people, but this is the game into which they are thrust. For them, given the thin margins they work on, this is all they can really do. In fact, I once wrote a paper bringing out the worst in an otherwise good people. It was a paper delivered to the insurance industry. And I said, you're all good guys. You go to church and synagogue, but you do some awfully mean things. And you do them because you're in a structure that makes you do these things. That story from Sarah Koenig. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes and myself with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Planet Money is a co-production of our program and NPR News. If you like the kind of stories you heard today, you can hear jargon free explanations just like it about what's going on in the economy and in the health care system. You can hear them three times a week on their podcasts, www.npr.org/money. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, when you roll him into a little ball he makes the most adorable noise. Seriously, it sounds like this. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] So snugly. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with a program that will not mention health care at all on This American Life.
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This spring, sometime after South Carolina governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife, which was just after the Elizabeth Edwards book tour where she talked about the child that her husband allegedly had with a woman who was not her, which was, of course, right on the heels of Jon and Kate splitting up after reports that he had an affair, which was all before Nevada senator John Ensign admitted paying $96,000 in cash to his former mistress and her husband, after her husband found out about their relationship, a writer named Jessica Pressler noticed something going on in the weddings pages of the New York Times, what the paper calls their Vows section. She saw that there were couples getting married who cheerfully told the newspaper, in the little write up that they do there, as part of their "meet cute" story, that the way they got together was that one of them cheated on a spouse or longtime partner. I believe one of them says-- the headline on it is something like, it took awhile but they finally got together, and you're like, because he was having a three-year relationship with another person in the meantime. Jessica Pressler wrote up her discovery on the New York magazine blog, "Daily Intel." She noted that there was a kind of code language in all these wedding articles. They always say, like, their road to finding each other was a bumpy road. Or, they had a difficult time, many ups and downs. They encountered some obstacles along the way. And it's like, no, those are people. Those are other lives. They're not speed bumps. Take, for instance, the married women who, according to a romantic write up on the Vows page of the New York Times, flew to Paris to see another man and stayed with him in a hotel in the Latin quarter for two weeks where they quote "reveled in their Vie Boheme" before she flew back to the US and moved out of the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband. I mean, it's just weird because Vows is something that you have to try to get into. You have to lobby to get into that column. So it's like, Mark Sanford, he had to speak publicly about his affair. Most people don't have to go around telling everybody about it. See, but that's what's so strange about it. Is that somehow, some part of them doesn't think, I shouldn't talk about this. Somehow the notion, I had an affair, is so just nothing to them. Right. I think it's probably just people, when they cheat on other people, tell themselves that they're doing it because they have to, because fate is involved. And whatever happened, you're better off and probably the person that you broke up with is better off. And this is the way it was meant to be. This is fate. As for the cheated on ex-partner, when the story appears in the newspaper on the wedding pages, it's almost as if the newspaper is siding with the cheating couple. The ex-partner is just collateral damage on the way to their wedding. They don't get to say anything for the themselves. It's not their story anymore. It's somebody else's love story. But that's the thing, if it were any other section of the newspaper, the reporter would go to them too for a comment. To get their side. I think they should do that. But because it's the wedding section, it's just like, well, it's not really their story. Right. Yeah, they have no say for themselves. They're done. This had nothing to do with them. It's very bizarre. It raises all kinds of questions for me. As a reader, I'm very distracted by it. Well, today on our radio program, we go where the newspaper marriage columns fear to tread. We hear from all parties to the affair, the cheated on, as well as the cheaters, and their different takes on what happened. And, no surprise, they are very different from one another's. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show: "Infidelity." Stay with us. "Let me kiss your stiff upper lip." We begin with this story from England, which, if you've read any 19th century literature, seems to be an island that is filled entirely with people who are full of submerged and often misplaced passions for other people. Here's Ruby Wright. Andrew, you've always lived in Dorset? Yeah. But why did you end up in this part of Dorset? I was looking for a house for myself and my two daughters, somewhere to live. I always wanted to live in the countryside, having always lived in the towns in Dorset. And I saw it in the paper. It's as simple as that. And you didn't know anyone around here? No. So how did you know about us? I was at the pub. And this couple walks in, and the bloke was wearing a leopard-skinned pillbox hat and I thought, I've got to get to know this person. And he had a very attractive wife, I think that was-- I just saw them in the pub and thought, I must know these people. This guy, Andrew, moved to the village. And he'd met us both together, at the same time, in the pub. And I would say that we both had a closeness to Andrew. My closeness to Andrew was very much about talking about how I felt and how he felt. And he would have various unsuitable girlfriends. He'd have flings with people. And I'd say, come on, then Andrew, tell me about it. I liked it, he was very candid. I was a single parent at the time, and it just seemed an idyllic situation. A beautiful old cottage with this couple, and their daughter living in it. And it was a home from home, became a home from home for me. And you became a very good friend. And I remember, you'd come up a lot, and we'd come down and see you. And you were always a very cozy person to have around. It was always a delight when you used to come up and see us. Yes. I would argue that I'd fallen in love with the whole family. Including you and Ed, indeed, at that point. When I started to fall in love with Andrew, it was like my falling in love with him was a direct parallel of my father dying. So as my father was dying at home of cancer, I was falling deeper and deeper in love with this man Andrew. And Andrew would talk to me about my father dying because he'd been with his mother, who died of a brain tumor. He'd actually been beside her bed with her, as she died, and during that period. And I think I valued being with someone. Because George's parents were both still very much alive at that point. I think, for me, it was sort of-- I felt he had an understanding of what it was like. And it was very hard for me not to fall in love with him. Did you think something was always going to happen? No. I was convinced nothing would happen. I had fallen in love with her, so probably over the summer after her father's death, I was single at the time, just living with Tams, my younger daughter. And I didn't really want a partner at the time. So falling in love with Lal, I thought, that's OK. I can love somebody from afar, and I don't need to love anyone else. And it had never occurred to me that she might even dream of falling in love with me. It just didn't occur to me that Lal might look at anyone other than George. How did I know? Well, I'd come back from this trip, and it was Christmas. And Lal said, "We're going to spend Christmas with Andrew." And I was delighted, because I couldn't think of anybody nicer to spend Christmas with. And I remember Andrew coming up the evening I got back. I was going off to get the present for him that I'd bought. I thought, that's odd, Lal and Andrew are not talking to each other. There's silence in the kitchen. And when he left, he kissed her on the back of the head. And I just-- something, I don't know, maybe I was-- one part of me was expecting something to happen one of these days. It was confirmed, because mum has left her diary lying around. And I read it, and there it was. So it was like she wanted you to find out without having to say it. I think, yes. And you actually had to tell me. Were you going to tell me together? Yes. We were going to tell you-- I don't think we'd even discussed telling you. But what happened was, you had been away on a holiday and had come home. And I picked you up, I think. And you said to me, "Where is mum?" And I thought, what am I going to tell Ruby? I have probably half a minute to decide. Am I going to tell her the truth or am I going to make up some story? And I thought-- I just said to you, "Well, I think she's down at Andrew's." And I didn't have to say any more. You seemed to know. You were very angry with me, quite rightly. And I think up until that point, we had always had a very close relationship. And your anger manifested itself mostly by you just refusing to see me. I think people were very shocked by what happened. And I was very shocked. And Dad was very shocked. Were you surprised at yourself? Or were you surprised at the force of your own attraction and actions? I am shocked now at how incredibly selfishly I acted. And how oblivious I was to your pain and George's pain and Ed's pain. Almost like I deserved this thing, I was on this track and I was heading off on it and nothing was going to deter me. But as to say, almost as if I deserved it. Almost as if I was owed it. George was tipped off. And I felt-- as soon as I knew, I felt I had to go and face him. So I walked up to Manitoba and I can remember standing outside, in the bottom field, for a good half an hour, summoning up the courage to go and say to George, "This is true." I'd expected, quite literally expected him to hit me or bloody my nose or something like that. Or at least shout at me, or rave. I knocked on the door, he said, "Oh, Andrew. Andrew, come in. Come in. Have a glass of wine." Five minutes later I was in floods of tears, and George wasn't. It's just very odd. It was all kind of wrong. But what he said to me stayed with me, until now really, he said, "Andrew, I've lost my partner. I don't want to lose my best friend." I know I have a real problem with anger. I mean, I don't tend to get angry. I find it a very hard emotion to express. But I was angry at that point. I was very angry. I remember standing at the sink doing the drying up and somehow the plates ended up being smashed on the floor. The emotions were very, very odd because I was terribly, terribly fond of Andrew and he was very concerned about my well-being. At that point I still believed, strongly, that we would all become friends again. I'm looking back and it's all terribly naive, really. But that's what I felt at the time, so I wanted to keep some kind of relationship with George for this future, blissful time when we were all friends again. I think in my fantasy world, I would have carried on having a passionate, physical, sexual relationship with Andrew and a fond relationship with George. And the two would have somehow run together. I think some couples, through all their anger or hatred or battles, there's this incredible chemistry that still comes back. To your irritation, you can't get rid of this-- and I think with George somehow for me the chemistry disappeared quite early on. I mean, the one thing we haven't discussed in all of this, you know, the question of sex. I mean, that was really at the heart of our split up. That mum did not-- she was not satisfied in that department. And I knew that I had a part in this. That there was an aspect of our relationship, namely the sexual part of it, that I wasn't facing up to. That I had a responsibility in it. I wasn't an innocent victim, as it were. You could say that George loved Lal, he could understand me loving Lal. And whilst that was contrary to his needs or wishes or whatever, he could understand it. In a sense, I think he never blamed me. I think he blamed Lal and not me. It got very complicated because George and Andrew, far from becoming rivals and having a duel at dawn-- far from George challenging Andrew to a duel at dawn, George kind of welcomed Andrew into the fold, and Andrew became a kind of member of my family, but without me there. And there would be Sunday lunches and Saturday suppers and dances in Evershot. He was part of that. And, of course, I felt like I was living in exile. I felt like I'd been exiled to this foreign country, albeit a beautiful one and it was six miles away. But I felt I couldn't have been further away. And Andrew was welcomed into the bosom of the family. And I think that caused enormous resentment for me. I know it did. And I don't know whether Andrew ever understood that, what it was like, on a Sunday, to know that he was having lunch with my daughter and my son my ex-partner. And I was here. What then happened was that mum's relationship with Andrew didn't last. And I still continued to see Andrew because he lived just around the corner. And I know that she found that incredibly hard. That when, despite the fact that she wasn't seeing Andrew, that I still was his friend. And she felt excluded from my new life. I didn't think she had much right. I've heard people say that it's impossible to have a relationship. You can't say with the person you leave your family for, because there's too much guilt and emotion. Do you think the fact that you left George for Andrew ultimately meant that you couldn't continue this relationship with him? Yes, I do. I don't think it's impossible. But I think it was, if not inevitable, it was quite likely that those seeds of destruction that were laid right at the beginning, and blame did, in the end, undermine our relationship. Do you wish that you could turn the clock back? No, because, at that point, I think I was still completely obsessed with Andrew. This idea that love being a madness. So I don't think at that point I did wish I could -- I think it was much later, I would wake, in the night, with the window on the wrong side of the room, sometime around dawn or before dawn, I think. I'd just think, what am I doing in this place? How have I got here? And it was as if I'd sleepwalked out of my other life, with no explanation, and I'd woken up and here I was. And it was truly terrifying. And I think that, as long as I was damaging you lot, I was really not aware. But it was when I came to damage myself, that was when I really woke up. Because I lost you. Effectively, I lost you between the ages of 13 and 18. So my biggest loss was losing you for five years. At puberty. You were 13, you were just about to have your first period. You went off with George to Africa. You came back and you looked different. And, actually, with maternal intuition-- which I obviously didn't have much of-- I remember looking at you and thinking, she's changed. She started her period. She's becoming a young woman. And, sure enough, you told me. And I though, God, George was there for that. Her dad was there for that. Why wasn't I there for that? And I think during that whole time, we didn't really talk about how we felt, did we? No. I don't think so. Ruby Wright. She does a music show called Ruby's Chicky Boil-Ups. It airs every other Sunday on radionowhere.org. Her website is rubywright-- that's W-R-I-G-H-T-- dot com. Coming up, what to say to your parents about the rich, married guy who set you up in an apartment when you're 22 years old. And what to say to yourself. And other dilemmas of cheaters and the cheated on. In a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. I am sitting on my suitcase in the main train station in Rome next to my girlfriend, Susan, who's sitting on hers. And we're rifling through our Let's Go: Europe, trying to agree on the next destination of our vacation. Susan grew up in Germany, so she'll go basically anyplace. As long as it's sunny. But I need to go to the right place. And I have a pathological terror of going to the wrong place. So, whenever Susan suggests someplace in particular, I suggest someplace else. Because I can see something wrong with every place. And this is a gift I bring to every area of my life, notably my relationship with Susan. We've been together for about seven years since college, and every time she brings up the subject of commitment-- maybe it's a good time to get married-- I say, I think I need a little more time just to make sure that what we're doing is right. So, as a result, all of the lights on the arrivals and departures board are blinking. And the man on the public address system keeps saying departione over and over and over again. And Susan is up on her feet, screaming at me, "Make up your mind before all the trains pull out." While I am kind of hypnotized by the hem of this flower print dress, it's about 10 feet away, fluttering in the breeze each time a train pulls in or out of the station. Which, at this point, is frequently. Which is hanging off what may be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, who is standing next to her beautiful friend. When Susan says, "Are you looking at those women?" And I say, "Where?" And she says, "Right there, in the flower print dresses." And I say, "You mean them?" And she says, "Yes. They look interesting, don't they? Like maybe they're going someplace interesting we might want to go. You know what? I think I'll ask them." And before I can tell her what a bad idea that is, she's over there talking to them in French. And they're pointing at me, and a few minutes later she's introducing them to me. Isabel is the beautiful one and her sister is a gloriously beautiful woman named Franz, who has a face off of one of those French go to war, buy war bonds posters that makes you want to invade. So I'm just staring at her as Susan says, "Guess what, James? They're going to Positano." Which is one of the numerous fishing villages we debated going to. "What do you say we all travel together?" And two minutes later Franz and I are on the same vacation. Sitting on a train to Naples, and then on a hydrofoil to Positano, and then checking into the same hotel, into adjacent rooms where we're going to change into our swimsuits and meet on the beach. Now, I haven't been in a swimsuit for years, since the last time I was on the beach. And I'm looking in the mirror in the hotel and things have changed since then. A little Italian bakery opened up around the corner from my office. And I'd been going there every workday, having apricot bear claws. And now I have two apricot bear claws hanging off the sides of my waist, bubbling up over my swimsuit. And it's one thing to decay in front of your girlfriend, there is a kind of mutual decay contract, where you are all going to atrophy at more or less the same rate. But I don't have that deal with Franz. And there's no way she's seeing my bear claws. So when we meet on the beach, the girls are in French bikinis. And I'm in my shorts and my button down shirt from the train ride, like I forgot to undress half myself. And after a couple hours of them swimming, Franz comes over to me and says, "Do you not swim?" And I say, "Indoors. I burn easily." And she hands me her bottle of sunblock. And I start to shake my head sadly, and point to one of the ingredients, and I say, "I'm allergic." There are six more days to go. So, the next morning, after an all nighter with Let's Go: Europe, I have a comprehensive understanding of all the cultural high points within a 30-mile radius of the city of Positano. None of which include the beach. There is Mount Vesuvius and the Grottoes of Capri and the Hanging Gardens at Ravenna. And we can go to a beach anywhere, but there's only so many places you can see this kind of culture. That's the position I'm taking. And the French love culture. And the Germans admire the French. So six days later, we're all just about as pasty as when we stepped off the hydrofoil. My secret waist is still a secret. And I make it to the last night, we have a little farewell dinner at a seaside restaurant and we're walking on the beach one last time, for old time's sake. Saying our goodbyes. Everyone is a little misty. Except me. I can't wait to go home in the morning. When Franz says, "Does anyone want to go swimming?" And her relatively more modest sister says, "We don't have suits." And fearless, guileless, dramatic Susan says, "That's OK with me." And a couple of minutes later, they're standing on the beach in panties and bras. Which are very different than bikinis. And Franz's are chocolate brown lace. Her skin is the color of milk. She looks like a profiterole. My favorite dessert. It is agony to keep my eyes open, but I can't close them. And the three of them run into the water, laughing and splashing, and then finally disappearing underneath the surface. So everything is quiet for a moment and then one, two, three, they pop up and start calling at me, like sirens. Who actually lived in Positano 3,000 years ago. "James, come in. It's wonderful." I haven't been swimming one time, and it's dark. So I make a decision. I'm going to take off my shoes and socks and pants and I put them on a beach chair. And I unbutton my shirt and thread out my arms so that it's just hanging there like a little poncho. And when Franz disappears into the water again, it goes off on the back of a beach chair and I'm in. But I've waited so long to make up my mind that Susan's cold. Franz's sister is ready to go back as well. But Franz is fine, and I just got in, and we're all vacation buddies. So Susan and the sister go back to the hotel, leaving Franz and I, for first time, alone. In the dark, in our underwear, in the Mediterranean, where they invented the word "philander." And, where it occurs to me, we can have sex without her seeing my body. So I swim around for a little bit, and trying to figure out what's the personal space in the Mediterranean. How close can you swim before you can't swim away? And whatever that distance is, Franz swims right to the edge of it and says, "The water makes me feel so free." It's not having that effect on me. I got bear claws to hide and promises to keep. And I am so tense that I can't breathe normally, which makes me look abnormal. Which leads Franz to say, "Is everything OK? Maybe we should go back." And she gets out of the water, and stands on the beach dripping in the moonlight, dabbing at herself with her dress. So I've got one eye on her, and the other on my shirt, which is fluttering off the back of this chair. And I get closer and closer, spreading my legs wider and wider, so that only my head is visible. Like an alligator. It looks like I'm in about six feet of water, but really it's about 18 inches. My thighs are in agony, and I can't hold out much longer, when Franz lifts her dress, over her head and I spring up on the beach and behind the chair and I am wet but covered when her head pops through the dress hole and steps back in surprise and lets out a little French vowel, "Ah." And we get dressed and we're walking across the cobblestones, back to the hotel, which are slightly uneven, so the backs of our hands brush. And she takes mine in hers. Which I've read in the Let's Go: Europe is a friendly and warm gesture among European women. Don't get any ideas. So I'm feeling friendly and warm, trying not to have any ideas. When Franz says, "Susan is very lucky to have you." And I say, "Well, thank you very much, but I'm very lucky to have her." Trying to regain a shred of dignity while holding onto this woman's hand. And Franz smiles the smile of the boyfriendless and yet supremely confident goddess and says, "Why?" And there are all sorts of reasons I'm lucky to have Susan, but I can't think of any of them at the moment. Because my mind is blank. And I say, "Well, why are you friends?" And Franz looks at me and says, "Because she pursued me." And our hips bump at the base of the stairs of the mountain to the hotel, and she puts her arm around my waist. Right above the bear claw. And all I can think is to hunch down, like I've got osteoporosis, so that her arm slides up my rib cage. But, with each step up the stairs, it slides back down. And then it hits. And she starts laughing, this bubbly French laugh. And she says, "What softage." I don't speak French, and I don't know want to know that means anyway. So I keep walking. And she says it again. "What softage. You have a life preserver. It's so cute." And she keeps her hand right there. Like a girlfriend. Up the stairs and into the lobby of the hotel and into the elevator, which is too bright and too small to be touching. It's a tiny little hotel, tiny little elevator. So she's in one corner and I'm in the other, when the doors close and the floors start ringing off one by one. And we just look at each other. And there's not much more time to go. And then the doors open before I can make up my mind what to do and we're standing there, in front of our rooms, and she just looks at me with the most beautiful face I have ever been swimming with, and one that I have never wanted to kiss more. But I just can't do it to Susan. So I kiss Franz on the cheek, three times, which I've learned that week. Which allows you to change your mind, potentially. But I make it into my room, and I close the door behind me and Susan's up in bed reading Let's Go: Europe, in anticipation of the debate that's probably going to happen tomorrow morning over where to go. And she looks up and says, "How was it?" And I say, "It was hard, Susan. It was really hard." And she looks right at me and says, "I know." Like she does know. Like she really understands why I've avoided the beach for a week, on the beach vacation. And she accepts it. So I take off my shirt, and get in bed next to her, and turn my back. And suddenly I start crying, these weepy little hide them in your hotel room pillow tears. Which is not the kind of guy I am. I'm a poker-faced, poker-bodied, magical thinker. I've been eating bear claws for a year and thinking I'm in shape. And that I can be faithful and philander at the same time. And it's an overwhelmingly sad and yet strangely comforting relief to lie there and know that I can't. And that I've actually made a choice, that after seven days-- seven years, really most of my adult life-- to lie there, next to Susan, and right or wrong, finally, be me. Thank you. James Braly. He's touring the country with a one-man show called Life in a Marital Institution, which he's also turning into a book. His website, jamesbraly-- that's B-R-A-L-Y-- dot com. Thanks, as always, to The Moth, which features personal stories told live in front of an audience. For more Moth stories, check out The Moth's great free weekly podcasts at themoth.org. And The Moth has started its own radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, which we welcome onto the scene, now on public radio stations around the country. Here, in no particular order, are some things Lenny told me. That he and his wife didn't sleep in the same bed. That they haven't had a real marriage in years. That she was undergoing electroshock treatment in a clinic outside Philadelphia. That he had cancer and had to fly to Houston three days a week for chemotherapy. That his youngest daughter, age three, had a rare form of childhood leukemia. That he could not get a divorce for all of the above reasons. That he was heartbroken that he could not leave his wife and marry me. For a long time I believed him, with every bone in my body I trusted that Lenny Klein was telling me the truth. When we talked about it, his jaw would tighten and his big brown eyes would fill with tears. His voice would quaver with pent-up, complex feelings that I couldn't possibly begin to understand. Poor Lenny. I marveled that so many bad things could happen to one person. And I vowed to take care of him. I exhorted myself to be a real woman, one who could step up to the plate and be good to her man in his moment of crisis. Years later, I hold Lenny's lies up to the light and examine my own reasons for believing what, in retrospect, seems preposterous. I reread my old journals and noticed the way my girlish handwriting deteriorated into a scrawl as I wrote, "I have to be there for Lenny, he needs me, and he's going through so much. I don't know if I can handle it, but I have to be strong." I try to remember that Lenny was a trial lawyer, that he built an international reputation based on his own pathology. That he lied with an almost evangelical conviction. He prided himself on being able to convince anyone of anything. The lies had small beginnings. Lenny called me from a business trip and told me he was at Montreal airport, waiting to catch a flight to Calgary. I checked with the airline and found out that the flight would take approximately five hours, so when Lenny called an hour later to say he had landed in Calgary, I very calmly asked him where he really was. "Calgary," he said. "No, Lenny. Really." He stuck to his story. In the time that I knew him, he never, ever changed his story midstream. I hung up on him and called his family's house in Westchester. When the maid answered the phone, I asked to speak with Mr. Klein. And when he picked up the extension, and I heard his rough, craggy, "Hello," I screamed so hard into his ear that he dropped the receiver. He raced into the city, he let himself into my apartment and found me curled up in bed. He scooped me up and held me to his chest. His wife wasn't home, he told me. She was having shock treatment. And someone had to take care of his daughter. He hadn't wanted to tell me because he wanted to spare me, to protect me from the horror of his life. Surely I understood. "Shush, sweetheart," he murmured into the top of my head as I wept, my face beet red like a little girl's. "So many people need me," he said. "But I love you best of all." Two years have passed, and something has gone wrong, terribly wrong with my life. I don't, in fact, think of my life as my life, but rather as a series of random events that have no logical connection. I'm no longer a student. I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after my junior year, supposedly to pursue acting. And I'm actually doing a pretty good imitation of an actress. But I'm doing an even better imitation of a mistress. Lenny's been busy buying me things. I don't particularly want these things, but they seem to be what Lenny is offering in lieu of himself. So quite suddenly, overnight really, I find myself driving a black Mercedes convertible. And just in case I might be mistaken for anything other than a kept woman, I wear a mink coat, a Cartier watch, a Bulgari necklace with an ancient coin at its center. The Mercedes is a step down from the first car Lenny gave me, when we had been going out for a month. A leased Ferrari. I don't know how to drive a stick shift, so the Ferrari was a bit of a problem. What I must have looked like, a 20-year-old blonde, dressed like Ivana Trump, stalled in traffic, grinding gears, trying to find the point on the clutch to hold that ridiculous car in place. Lenny rented an apartment on a pretty little street in Greenwich Village. A furnished triplex with a garden, a fireplace, and a bedroom with a four-poster bed. He called it "our house," as if he didn't have another home with a whole family in it an hour north of the city. He kept half a dozen suits in the bedroom closet, and a brand new silk robe hung behind the bathroom door. There was an entire floor we didn't use, a large airy children's nursery. My parents knew that something was up. They knew I was going out with somebody, but they had no idea who. I was drifting away from them, and they were letting me go. One night I invited them over for dinner. I pushed all traces of Lenny out of sight, but, of course, there were clues. A glossy brochure for Italian yachts. A humidor in the center of the coffee table. I cooked up a storm and the place was filled with homey smells. Garlic, basil, coriander. It was winter, and the snow was piled up on the sills. Spotlights in the backyard shone on the landscaped garden, the redwood table, the Adirondack chairs. I had my father's favorite music, Dvorak's Symphony for the New World, playing on the stereo system. My parents rang the doorbell. They looked so solid standing on my front stoop, their cold, red noses poking out from above their mufflers. If nothing else, they looked like they belonged together. They were elegant and rangy, similarly proportioned. Unlike Lenny and me. Lenny as thick as a linebacker, and I had become so delicate, the wind could have picked me up and blown me away. My mother strode into the brownstone as if it wasn't the weirdest thing in the world to be visiting her daughter in a lavish apartment with no name on the outside buzzer. My father trailed behind her wearily, as if setting foot on another planet. My mother entered the living room, flung her arms wide, and did an impromptu dance to Dvorak. "Tra-la-la-la," she trilled. My father and I hung back and watched, our faces crumpled into awkward smiles. It didn't occur to me that she was frightened. That this was a lot for her to take in, her college dropout daughter living in the lap of luxury. All I could see was her outsized self, twirling around my living room in her fur coat and boots. I wanted a drink. I poured two glasses of chardonnay for my parents and a large vodka for myself. I figured that if the vodka was in a water glass they wouldn't know the difference, especially if I drank it like it was water. My drinking had taken on a new urgency in the past few months. It was no longer a question of desire, but of need. I could not get through an evening like this without the armor of booze. I handed them their wine and directed them to the couch. On the coffee table, I had put out a plate crudites and a bowl of olives. "Quite a place," my mother said brightly, her gaze darting around the room at the white brick fireplace with its wrought iron tools, the glass wall overlooking the garden, the soaring ceiling. My father stared at the fringe of the rug, glassy eyed. He needed to be as numbed as I did to get through this night. "Thanks," I murmured, as if she was paying me a compliment. I checked on dinner, using the opportunity to gulp some wine from the open bottle in the fridge. Vodka and white wine was a combination I knew worked for me. If I stuck with the formula, things shouldn't be too bad in the morning. Especially if I wasn't eating, and I couldn't see myself eating. The music had stopped by the time we all sat at the dining room table, but I didn't notice then. If I had I would certainly have changed the tape, filled the air with something other than the tinny, lonely sound of our three forks scraping against plates. I pushed my chicken from one side of my plate to the other. My stomach clenched and growled in protest. It seemed that my parents and I, after 22 years in each other's company, had run out of things to say. I already knew their views on the political situation in Israel, and we couldn't discuss my school work, I was no longer in school. My father pressed a corner of his napkin to his lips and murmured something about the food being delicious. My mother agreed. "My wonderful daughter," she said, shaking her head. "You've turned into such a little homemaker." I looked at my parents across the table. Is that what they really thought? How could they just sit there? Some small piece of me wanted my father to fling me over his shoulder and carry me kicking and screaming to the car he had parked outside. I secretly wished that they would drive me home, deposit me in my childhood bedroom, and feed me chicken soup and Saltines. I wanted to start my life over again, but I didn't know how. In the face of the most tangible proof that Lenny had been lying to me all these years, I remained with him. "My little girl is dying," he would say whenever I noticed the discrepancies in his stories. Or "My children's mother is having electroshock therapy." When I couldn't take my own confusion anymore-- Was Lenny lying to me? Was I going crazy?-- I decided to hire a detective to get to the bottom of it. By this time, my parents knew all about me and Lenny in theory, but it wasn't something we could talk about. When I think back to my younger self rifling through the New York City yellow pages in search of a private investigator, I feel like I'm watching a movie about someone else. A girl so clueless she really didn't know that her desire to hire a detective was all the answer she needed. I chose a detective agency based on nothing more than its good address, in the East 60s, a neighborhood filled with private schools and shrinks. "This isn't what you think," I told the detective. "I'm in a relationship with a married man, and I want you to find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife." At this, his eyebrows shot up. "Come again?" "He claims his wife is in a mental hospital. He told me he hasn't been with her in years." "And you think he might be lying?" said the investigator. Did I see the laughter behind his eyes or is my memory supplying it now? Because I simply cannot imagine a middle-aged man listening to an earnest, over-dressed 22-year-old girl tell them that she thinks her boyfriend might still be sleeping with his wife. "Yes," I said. Days later, I got the proof about Lenny's lies. In tears, I called my mother. "Oh, darling. I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?" "I don't think so." A pause. "Do you want to me to call his wife?" My mother and Mrs. Klein had met each other at a few school functions back when none of this could have struck anyone as a remote possibility. "Yes," I said. "Call her." "I'll do it right now," my mother said. I sat by the phone and watched the minutes tick by. I pictured Lenny's wife answering the phone with a chirpy hello, and my mother's slow, steady explanation of why she was calling. I had set in motion a chain of events which was now unstoppable. More than 20 minutes passed before my mother called me back. "Well, I did it," she said. "You talked to her?" The world felt unreal, hallucinatory. "Yes. She called me a liar. She told me she has a happy marriage to a man who travels a lot. That he's on his way to California. And I said, 'No, he's on his way to see my daughter.'" My mother sounded proud of herself, immersed in the drama of the moment. "How did she seem?" I asked. "What do you mean?" "Lenny's wife, was she angry?" "No," my mother said slowly. "She just didn't believe me, Dani." I spent the rest of that day in a state of awful excitement. Something was going to happen. And when Lenny showed up that evening at the apartment we were still sharing in the West Village, I was ready. He put his bags down and gave me a hug. The phone rang. My mother had given Mrs. Klein the number at the apartment and suggested she find out for herself what her husband was up to. Lenny picked up the phone on the kitchen well. "Hello?" I watched him. And for the first and only time in the years I knew him, he looked genuinely surprised. He didn't say a word. He just listened for a few minutes, then hung up the phone. "That was my wife," he said. I was silent. "How did she get this number?" I shrugged. "I have to go." "I'd imagine," I said faintly. When Lenny slammed out of the apartment, I was certain I would never see him again. I knew the truth now. It was staring me in the face in the concrete form of flight lists and photos. And he knew that I knew. And besides, the whistle was blown. What could he possibly tell his wife? This was it, I told myself. Absolutely, positively the end. It wasn't the end. Lenny still called 10, 12 times a day. He left messages on my answering machine. "Hello?" His voice filled my bedroom. "Fox, are you there?" Sometimes he didn't say a word. He would stay on the line for as long as five minutes, just breathing. Eventually he did get to me again. And for the next year that we were together, three days here, four days there, my life became unrecognizable to me. I idly wondered what it would take to get me to leave him. I wondered about this over bottles of chilled white wine, or heavy glasses half-filled with scotch. I was still wondering about it when I went to stay for a while at a health spa in California. The phone rang in my room one day. There had been a car crash on a snowy highway. My mother had 80 broken bones. My father was in a coma. They were lying in hospital 3,000 miles away. And suddenly, in ways I could not have imagined seconds earlier, nothing else mattered. As I packed my bags, I remembered my mother twirling, dancing to Dvorak, through the doors of Lenny's brownstone. And the glassy look in my father's eyes. I prayed that my father wouldn't die disappointed in me, and I knew then what I had to do. Dani Shapiro. That story is in her memoir, Slow Motion. She has another book, Devotion, coming out in February. The man who knew what I about to say sat next to me on the plane, a stupid smile plastered across his face. That's what's so nerve wracking about him. Smart, he wasn't. Or sensitive either. But still, he knew those lines and managed to say them. All the lines I meant to say, three seconds before me. "Do you sell Guerlain Mystique?" he asked the flight attendant, a minute before I could. And she gave him an orthodontic smile and said, "There's just one last bottle left." "My wife goes crazy for that perfume," he said. "She's positively addicted. If I come back from a trip without a bottle of Mystique from the duty free, she says I don't love her anymore. If I dare come into the house without at least one of these, I'm in deep [BLEEP]." That was supposed to be my line, but the man who knew what I was about to say stole it from me, without missing a beat. As soon as the wheels touched the ground, he switched on his mobile, a second before I did, and called his wife. "I just landed," he told her. "I'm sorry. I know it was supposed to be yesterday, flight was canceled. You don't believe me? Check it out yourself. Call Eric. I know you don't. I can give his number right now." I also have a travel agent call Eric. He'd lie for me, too. When the plane reached the gate he was still talking on his mobile, giving all the answers I would have given, without a trace of emotion. Like a parrot in a world where time flows backwards, repeating whatever is about to be said instead of what's been said already. His answers were the best ones, under the circumstances. His circumstances weren't too hot, not too hot at all. Mine weren't either. Nobody was answering my call. But just listening to the man who knew what I was about to say made me stop trying. Just listening to him, I could tell that this was a hole that even if I dug my way out of, it would be to a different reality. She'd never forgive me. She'd never trust me. Ever. All my coming trips would be hell on earth, and the time in between would be even worse. He went on talking and talking and talking. All those sentences that I'd thought up and hasn't said yet. It just kept flowing. He stepped it up, changing the intonation, like a drowning man struggling desperately to stay afloat. People began getting off. He got up, still talking, scooped up his laptop in the other hand and headed for the exit. I could see him forgetting it behind, the bag he had put in the overhead compartment. I could see him forgetting it. I didn't say anything. I just stayed put. Gradually everyone walked out, till the only ones still there were an overweight religious woman with a million children and me. I got up and opened the overhead compartment above me, as if nothing. I took out the duty free bag like it had always been mine. Inside were the receipt and the bottle of Guerlain Mystique. My wife goes crazy for that perfume. She's positively addicted. If I come back from a trip without a bottle of Mystique from the duty free, she says I don't love her anymore. Matt Malloy, reading a story by Etgar Keret, who is the author of several books of very, very short stories, most recently The Girl on the Fridge. Our program is produced daily by Nancy Updike and our senior producer Julie Snyder with Alex Blumberg, James Pupta, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, and Augusa Shipp. Production help from Erin Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to The Moth and to Paul Tough. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ for our program by our boss Torey Malatia. I'm a happily married man, so does it mean anything when he swims over to me at the company retreat and says things like, "The water makes me feel so free." I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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Back when Cliff worked as a room service waiter at Holiday Inn, so many guests ordered in pizza delivery to avoid the lousy room service. But sometimes the food and beverage manager, who was this tightly-wound guy and immigrant from Algeria, would stake out the lobby and try to catch the pizza delivery guys and kick them out before they made it to the elevators. Then one day this food and beverage manager came up with a better plan-- to trick the guests. The hotel got some cardboard pizza boxes and takeout menus that looked like they could've come from any delivery places you've ever seen. Each of them had a cartoon of an Italian chef with a moustache and a big hat. He was holding his fingers to his lips in the classic kind of "Mama mia, that's delicious" sort of pose. This pizza place had a name-- Giorgio's-- but the menus didn't list any address. They did list a phone number. And the phone number was not an extension in the hotel phone system. It wasn't a room service number. It rang at this red telephone, an outside line that they installed on the basement wall right near the big institutional hotel switchboard that the room service operators normally use to take orders. And to complete illusion, we were given stacks of-- you know those green checks that you get in diners, the waitress just fills it out by hand? This is Cliff. So we were supposed to fill one of those out and tape it onto the box for just that finishing touch of verisimilitude. And so how would it work? Somebody would call the number, and then did you have to answer the phone and say "Giorgio's"? Yeah. We soon realized that being an outside line, we were relieved from the standards of ordinary hotel courtesy. So it was all this, "Giorgio pizza!" It was like a platform for improv. Use these ridiculous sort of Vaudeville Italian accents. "What's the matter for you? Hey Louie, where's the driver?" I want to apologize to any Italian-American listeners right now on behalf of Public Radio in general. Absolutely unforgivable on any level. A room service waiter named Kevin had a character named Luigi that he would play on the one. The captain of the room service waiters, Brandon, been a loyal company man until all this absurdity began. And he could do a really excellent sort of Sylvester Stallone croak, which I cannot. And he could also do Brando doing The Godfather, which he loved to do. And, you know, mumbling-- And so, all right. So if I'm calling for a pizza and I say, like, hi, I want to get like a-- You're getting a serious runaround, is what you're getting. There were two flaws in the deceit, and they were pretty big flaws, Cliff says. One was the pizzas themselves. They were frozen, and they were the size of room service pizzas, not real pizzas from a pizzeria. Smallest just nine inches. A large was the size of an old vinyl LP. The other flaw was the delivery outfit. Conceivably, the room service waiters could have just changed out of their polyester tux jackets and bow ties back into street clothes and then pretended to be pizza delivery guys. Or they could have stayed in uniform and told the guests that they had intercepted the pizza on the way up. Instead of either of those options, though, the food and beverage manager chose-- A very strange garment, the like I've never seen before or since, which was sort of a kind of peppermint-striped apron. White with vertical red stripes. And it was huge. It was enormous. I was absolutely, you know, lost in this bizarre garment. And it came with a floppy hat made of the same basic fabric. None of it looked like anything any pizza delivery guy in this hemisphere had ever worn. And all sort of protested that this is a terrible flaw in your illusion. Because we had just been in the room. The waiter, you'd go up and you'd deliver a six pack of beer. And then 20 minutes later, you'd be back with the same face-- To the same room? But dressed as this-- I always thought of it as a rodeo clown costume. If you'd send me in as a rodeo clown when I'd just been there as a room service waiter, it's going to stimulate suspicion. Plus, it was humiliating to wear this ridiculous getup. And then it was so stupid. It was just done so badly. No matter if it was done badly. It was done just well enough, with just enough of the details right, the menus, the outside phone line, that it made lots of money, right from the start. Did guests ever say anything indicating that they were onto the scam? People gave you weird looks. But only once did somebody completely tip their hand, and did somebody ask me. The guy, he's busy signing his name on the check. And he says, "So." And he sort of gives me a smile. He's not being confrontational. He's being sort of sardonic. And he says, "So just exactly where is Giorgio's Pizza, anyway?" From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, bait and switch. We have four stories. In some of these stories are people running the scam running the bait and switch, are unrepentant. In some they feel guilty, they feel contrite. But in all of theses scams, once you know it's a scam, you can't believe people try to pull it off with a straight face. Our four acts involve a car, a fake valentine, a fake girlfriend, and treating people for the Lord Almighty. Stay with us. Mark Douglas Ledford is 39 years old and plays in several punk rock bands. But don't let that give you the wrong impression. He's a Good Samaritan kind of guy. A tattoo across his chest reads, "To whom much is given, much is required." He owns his own home and has a day job. November 29, 2007 started off like any other work day. It was a Thursday morning. I went to work. I came home, I pulled into the driveway, and there was a car parked on the curb near my driveway. I noticed that the windows were down, and the doors were unlocked, and the keys were in the ignition, and it was kind of a big dangly keychain. Like it looked like a girl's keychain. It had a bunch of stuff hanging off of it. Something was off. Mark lives a few miles north of downtown in a ranch home that sits on a corner of a quiet street with only one house nearby. The only people who park on this stretch are Mark's bandmates when they come over to practice. And so I immediately walked across the street to my neighbor Sarah's house. And I knocked on the door, and I said, hey, do you have company over? I think they left the keys in the ignition over there. And she said, I don't know whose car that is. And when I went back by and looked at it again, it looked to me like something had happened. Like someone left their car abruptly. And I thought it was suspicious enough, I went in and I dialed 911. It was not even like 10 minutes, and there was a knock at the door, and it was a police officer. They said, did you report this car? And I said, yeah, isn't that crazy? And they said, well, what's the problem? It's legally parked. And I said, well, the windows are down and the key's in ignition. And they said, well, you know, you'd be surprised what we see out here. And I was just like, are you kidding me? And so my thought was, OK. Well, maybe it doesn't seem strange to you, but it seems strange to me. Can you contact the owner or can you do something? Because they seemed just reluctant to do anything. And the officers' response at that time was, well, you know. People, they buy these cars and they don't get them registered properly. I guess I could do a cross check on it. And at that point, I was frustrated. And I said, listen. I don't know what your procedure is. They say if you see suspicious things in your neighborhood, report them. I'm reporting it. And there you go. And the officer went back to their car and drove off. There's women's clothing in the backseat. And not just like women's, but like, a women's, like-- they looked like stripper clothes, and then men's work boots and rope. This is Mark's girlfriend at the time, Asia Ward. She's younger than Mark, 21. A cute gothy girl with a thing for zombie movies. Likes to read books about serial killers. They both started to imagine all sorts of sinister scenarios. Like some poor little stripper lady was taken from her work and like murdered, and this is her car. Because if that cop walked by, even if they weren't going to do anything about it, they could have at least been like, oh, yeah. Get right on that. And like, made us feel better about it, you know? Or said that they were going to investigate it, or looked at it, been like, yeah, this does seem kind of weird. Because it does! Like, if you think that that doesn't seem weird then there's something wrong with you! You know? That's a fishy situation right there. By the next day, Friday, neighbors are trying to worry, too, about the car. Sarah, the woman who lives across the street, even calls the cops again and sends Mark a text to let him know she's on the case. That night, Mark goes to play a gig in San Antonio. And when he and Asia roll back home around midnight, there's the car, still just sitting there with the keys dangling from the ignition. So when I came home Saturday night, I expected the car to be gone. I expected them to have towed it away. And at that point, I was just like-- I had it. I was like, OK. We're going to figure out what's going on with this car. That's it. And I was like, well, there has to be insurance papers, business card, something in the car that'll let us know who the car belongs to, and maybe we can call them and tell them, your car's parked here. And at this point we're thinking, there might be a dead body, someone bound and gagged, it's a crime scene. And I'm like, well, I don't want to put my fingerprints all over a situation like that. So I put some gloves on. I consciously go, I'm going to put gloves on so I don't leave fingerprints. And they're black knit gloves, and they have like a little skeleton screenprint on them. So I get the gloves, and I open the door, and I start going through the glove box. And I didn't see anything. And I was talking to Asia. She's standing on the sidewalk. And I'm saying, there's nothing in the glove box. I go through the console. And then I would get out of the car and close the door. And then we were talking, well, should I go in the truck? OK, go in the trunk. And so I'd open the door again, and I'd go back in the car, and I got the keys out of the ignition. And I tried to open the trunk, and it was like when I'd stick the key in, it was like there's something jammed in the lock. And I was like, listen. I'm going to get a screwdriver. I'm going to open the trunk. If I break somebody's lock, I'll pay them back. You know, whatever. We're just going to get to the bottom of what's going on here. And you know, I mean, I don't know what to do. I just stuck the flat blade screwdriver in the keyhole tried to turn it, and it wouldn't do anything. So he puts the screwdriver down and gets back into the car, and is digging through the center console. And he looks out the window, and he's just like, hey, Asia, is that a cop? And Asia was like, no. And I go, that sure looks like a cop. And right about the time I say, I don't think so, out of nowhere-- Get on the ground! OK, sure. Get on the ground now! No. Get on it! Get on the ground! No. Suddenly they were surrounded by cop cars. Hey, we live right here. Get on the ground! Asia, get on the ground. And they tell me to get on the ground and I said no, and Mark is just like, get on the ground! Like, Asia, you need to get on the ground. Because I was so shocked! Like, I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was trying to help them out because they didn't want to do their job, is the way I was thinking, right? And I was like, get on the ground! They will shoot. You know? Like, get on the ground. And so she laid down on the ground. And it wasn't long. There were like six cops there, just like that. Don't move, don't talk! And one of the police officers is like, you thought you'd go for a joyride! And then throws me in the cop car. And I'm like, dude, they thought we took the car? Like, they thought we stole this car and drove it around? And I'm freaking out. Mark and Asia are handcuffed and put into separate cop cars, still with no idea what's going on, and told to wait for a detective to show up and interview them. Finally, he arrives. Detective John Spillers. And he starts asking questions. And he asks, he says, do you mind if I record this? And he's like, you have the right not to say anything. And I was like, yeah, I don't care. I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Like, I haven't done anything wrong. I'm not hiding anything. Like, I'll tell you whatever. So he's like OK. And I was like, I don't need a lawyer or anything. So he turns on his recorder, and I tell him exactly what happened. Thursday night I was coming to visit him, and I was walking from the bus stop to his house, and I saw the car outside, and I was like, hey, is somebody here? And he's like, oh, no, the car's been there since, I guess, that morning? And he said that he had called the cops and a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] officers did come out, but say the car wasn't reported stolen or anything and there was nothing they could do about it. They said that they were going to have to talk with some witnesses about me going in the car. And I said, you don't need to talk to any witnesses. I'm telling you, I went in the car. I mean, if you find out who owns it, you know, I would gladly pay for the repair of the lock. What I think we're going to do tonight is, I'm going to verify some things from the office. What I will probably end up doing is examine the photos suspects for you and her. That way-- In case you didn't catch that, Detective Spillers is calling them suspects and talking about interviewing witnesses. He says a neighbor reported them breaking into the car. [INAUDIBLE] who the witness was? Well, the person who calls in saying there's people out here. Oh. Well, yeah, we were out there! I mean, as investigator, I have to do my job. Oh, OK. Well, I mean, you don't even have to have a lineup. I'll tell you [UNINTELLIGIBLE] out here. Finally, after a few hours of talking with Mark and Asia, who explain everything, including the calls to 911, and after talking with Sarah across the street, the cops leave without arresting anyone. Asia said they even shook hands. Yeah. All right, great. Well, thank you. Thank you, ma'am. But there's one thing the cops didn't tell them-- a crucial detail that made the whole thing make sense. The police had put the car there themselves. There were no witnesses, no neighbors who saw them break into the car, and for that matter, no victims. The car is what's known as the bait vehicle, and it was out with surveillance cameras and microphones assigned to lure and catch car thieves. The gear was in the truck, which is why Mark couldn't get in it with the key. Police departments across the country use bait cars. It's even funded by major insurance companies. And that's because it's effective. The police can sit back and wait for someone to take the car. Then the suspect comes in for booking, complete with their crime preserved on videotape. If this sounds like a setup, legally, bait cars are not considered entrapment. Just like it's not entrapment for an undercover cop to stand on a street corner dressed as a hooker. For it to be entrapment, the cop would have to egg you on, would have to suggest that you pay for sex or steal the car, and that's not what they're doing here. The Austin Police made 70 arrests last year using bait cars, and Mark and Asia were about to become another statistic. Around two weeks later, on December 17, Asia's birthday, the couple is woken up at 6 AM. There are flashlights being beamed into Mark's bedroom window. I had stayed the night at Mark's house and then we hear banging on his door in the morning. And we wake up, and he goes and he answers the door, and it's two police officers. And he is just assuming that they're going to ask him more questions about the car, but they actually say, we have warrant for your arrest and we're going to take you to jail. And he's like, are you kidding me? I felt really upset, you know? Like you're going in jail for what? And plus, it's early in the morning, so I'm just like, you're going to jail, like, what? They asked me if anybody else was in the house and I said, well, yeah, my girlfriend Asia. And they go, well, we have a warrant for her arrest, too. We were about to go get her, too. And I was like, what? The officers show them arrest warrants for burglary of a vehicle, a charge that could land them in jail for up to a year. They're confused, arrested for something they didn't do, and they still don't know it's a bait car. In the waiting room at the jail, Mark whispers "happy birthday" across the room to Asia. It's against the rules, and he gets thrown in solitary confinement. He's in there half the day, and he doesn't exactly handle it like a hardened criminal. I mean, they put me in some little isolation room for a while. And I was like, are you kidding me? But yeah. And I kind of lost my mind in the cell. They took all my clothes, and they gave me this jumpsuit, and they stuck me in a cell. And they had these slippers, and when I would walk, they would go, [SQUEAKING]. And I thought that there was a cat somewhere in maybe the violation duct, and I was like, how did you get in there, little guy? Are you OK? I was, like, [BLEEP] losing it. And it was weird, because he would only meow whatever I walked around in the cell. Then I'd sit down, he'd get real quiet, and I'd be like, are you OK, little guy? I didn't realize until they like, they go, you're going to be released, and I was walking down the hallway, and I could hear the little [SQUEAKING] of the slippers. Yeah. I was tripping. To be fair, Mark and Asia's case is very unusual. Bait cars are usually played in high crime areas to trap people who already have criminal records. In this case, it was part on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, just blocks from a high school, right where dozens of kids walk by each day. The police were less likely to catch a hardened car thief and more likely to snare someone drunk or high or broke or bored who'd walk by and see the car just sitting there with the keys in it. Case in point. Turns out Mark and Asia weren't the only ones on their block snared by the bait car. The boyfriend of their neighbor Sarah, who had no criminal record, drove the car on Friday night around one in the morning. He drove down the block, turned it around, and parked it in the exact same spot. He was caught on video, laughing hysterically as he rolls down the block, with Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" cranked up on the stereo. He was charged with a felony. After spending the day in jail, Mark and Asia are released, and right away they get a lawyer and start trying to get to the bottom of this whole mess. That's when they finally learn it's a bait car. That meant that when Mark called 911, the officer who answered the call went so far as to deceive him at his own home. He was furious. And a lot of things ran through my head at that point. I was like, you know, even at best, they've just planted something to lure a criminal element 15 feet away from my bedroom window. You know? And then secondly, the conversation with the officer jumped to mind. I'm like, that cop knew exactly that that was a bait car, and sat there and lied to me that, oh, what's the problem, oh, you'd be surprised what we see around here, oh, these people don't register these cars, right? All of that was a lie, and they knew. Yeah. I mean, how about the night you were detained? They didn't-- did that change the way you were thinking about their conversation when they said they had a tip, and someone had reported you at the car? Yeah. Which once again was a lie. I was pissed, yeah. I was pissed. I repeatedly asked the police and prosecutors to explain their actions, but they refused to go on record. But Travis County attorney David Escamilla told a newspaper that nobody thinks Mark wanted to steal the car, but quote, "It's not appropriate to go out and jimmy the lock on the trunk of a car that doesn't belong to you." Detective Spiller's affidavit also focuses on the fact that Mark tried to break into the trunk with a screwdriver, and even wore gloves like a real criminal. And there are couple important details Detective Spillers has left out of the affidavit. He doesn't mention that the car was parked in front of Mark's home, nor that Mark had called 911 as soon as he saw the car, or that Sarah had also called, or that there is surveillance video of Mark milling around, looking through papers in the glove compartment for 20 minutes. No. Instead, Detective Spillers concludes that he, quote, "believes this section constitutes more than mere curiosity or trying to locate the owner's information." The prosecutors were put in a tough spot with this one, given all the evidence of the couple's innocence. They almost immediately offered a deal. If Mark and Asia stayed out of trouble for a year, the prosecutors would completely drop the charges. So we were going to take that offer, but then the other little small print of the offer was that you signed a guilty confession. And I refused to do that. I said no, and Mark did too. Both of us were like, we are not signing guilty confessions, because we didn't do this. And what we did do, we believe we were in the right for doing. So I mean, we're not signing a guilty confession. And I said no, you know? We'll just go ahead and go to trial. And I think if six of my peers here this story and apply any sort of level of common sense, no one's going to find me guilty of burglarizing a vehicle. So instead, Mark and Asia demand a jury trial. But like everything leading up to this point, it's not so simple. For more than a year and a half, they regularly show up for court ready for the trial, and for one reason or another, are repeatedly told it's being postponed. Finally, out of desperation, they decide to talk to the media-- me. I wrote a story for the daily paper, the Austin American-Statesman, and the next week, prosecutors call with a much better offer. Asia's case would be dismissed outright, since she never technically entered the vehicle. Mark could plead no contest to criminal mischief, a class C misdemeanor, same as a traffic ticket. And if he stayed out of trouble for a month, the charge would be dismissed. He takes the deal. I don't know. There's a lot of things about the whole situation that just really piss me off, you know? And I try not to-- I try to keep it funny, because at times, I can get really angry about the situation. Mark and Asia paid a pretty high price. Asia wants to work with kids, and for the past two years, she couldn't even get a volunteer position because of the burglary charge on her record. It's cost them $3,000 for lawyers and to get their records expunged. But there are less tangible effects, as well. Asia works at a toy store, and a few months ago, someone left a cell phone on the floor. At first, Asia didn't touch it, just let it sit there, ringing and ringing and ringing. She was thinking, it's not mine. Could be a trap. Is it worth the risk? Eventually, she picked up the phone. Michael May. When he's not chasing parked cars, he is books and culture editor at the Texas Observer. Coming up-- a message from Madonna on your home answering machine, and other really scary bait and switch techniques from people who feel they have no choice 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 show we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- Bait and Switch. There was a flyer taped to the wall by the water fountain in the English department at Penn State this week. It says, "Raw," and then underneath it in bigger letters it says, "Sex," then underneath that, "Everything you need to know." And then under that, a website, rawsex.psu.org, and then under that, an address and time for a meeting of some sort. And then under that, at the very bottom, in teenie-weenie little type, you have to look very closely, it says, "Hosted by Orthodox Christian Fellowship, a ministry of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church." This flyer, yes, is a not-very-disguised bait and switch for Jesus. Which means us to the next act of our show, Act Two, Raw Sex, in which there will be no sex, but there will be a bunch of Jesus. One of our contributors, Dave Dickerson, was raised as an evangelical, and he says baiting and switching was just taken as a given. After all, being an evangelical comes with a huge responsibility to bring nonbelievers to God. You have to. You know, Jesus actually said, go out into all the world and preach the gospel. And at the same time, we're also told, and they're going to hate you, just like they hated me. And so you have this kind of Biblical imperative to spread the word to people who don't want to hear it. And Paul at one point says, "Be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents." And so, you know, a little bit of trickery to sort of like help the medicine go down seems like a reasonable thing to do. So what would you do? Well, when I was with Campus Crusade for Christ, who was famous for doing a lot of these things, one time we went out to California-- I was, you know, originally in Tucson. And we went up two people on the beach and said, hey, we're going to have like this luau party tonight! You know, come! We had flyers to hand out. And then it said, there's going to be music and food and drinks! It said "drinks." It didn't say "non-alcoholic" drinks. It just said "drinks." And it was almost shameless. Because, of course, the women who would go out-- this was spring break-- they were in bikinis, and they were very attractive. And so we could see, they would go up to guys, and of course the guys would take the flyer. And they were going to go to this luau. And there was no real tip-off. It didn't say "Campus Crusade for Christ" at the bottom or anything like that. And when we actually had the actual presentation-- Wait, the presentation, you mean the luau? Yes. The "luau," in quotes, was kind of a skit show. You had the Diet Coke and whatever, and the pretzels. But the entertainment was, oh, you know, they would lip sync to Journey. There was an air guitar contrast. It was silly stuff that was wholesome and not at all like the wet T-shirt contest stuff they were maybe expecting. And then every two or three episodes, someone would come out and say, you know, I just want to point out that Jesus Christ has made a huge difference in my life. And if you have any questions about that, you can talk to some people over here, and we've got literature, blah, blah, blah. And now back to your program. And as this happened, after about the second or third of these sort of commercial interruptions, I could see-- I mean, I was cringing anyway. I knew this was wrong way to go. But you could see people looking at each other. Like, guys would go, oh. They would look around, and you could see them sort of thinking, these women are not on the market. You know, this is like the almost exact opposite of what we were promised! And so you would see this a lot. And you would always feel kind of strange about it. Right. I felt like there must be something kind of inherently flawed with the system. I got trained once in doing something-- and this is another classic-- to do a survey, a spiritual survey of people, to walk up and say, hey, we're doing a survey of religious attitudes. So do you believe in God? What sort of God do you believe in? And that kind of thing. And it would just ask a series of questions that would eventually lead them to, by the way, do you belong to a church? Hey, would you like to join ours? That kind of thing. And we got put into pairs. And this friend of mine and I started at one end of the campus. And while we were walking down this thing, I had all these ideas in my head, thinking, OK. What if they ask, like, who's sponsoring the survey? Or what statistical model are you using? You know, we were in college enough to know that there's a survey, and then there's a survey. And we hit a statistics major, we're in trouble. And one woman came by, and my friend said, I don't know. She looks kind of busy or angry, so let's avoid that. And this other guy came by, and he said, this doesn't seem right. And we kept talking each other out of confronting people. We're like halfway down the campus, and finally we just looked at each other and said, we just can't do this, can we? But is the thing that bothered you the fact that you're going to have to walk up to strangers, or is the thing that bothered you that you were walking up to strangers under a false pretense? Oh. Well, it was both. But clearly the false pretense was supposed to make it easier, was supposed to give us cover so that we didn't seem religious. And it wasn't fooling us. So it seemed both false and didn't really help. There's a big debate among evangelicals about how to better reach out to non-believers. You'll find shelves of books on this at Christian bookstores. One of the evangelicals who's trying to change some of the old tactics is a guy named Jim Henderson. And he's tried all kinds of things to reach non-believers. When a guy named Hement Mehta offered his own soul for sale on eBay to the highest bidder, it was Jim Henderson who won the auction with a $504 bid, which is, you know, cheap for a soul. And what he we did with that money was he simply asked Mehta to attend a few churches with him and tell them what was persuasive and what put him off. This project led to a book. Henderson has another book called Evangelism Without Additives. He says in his decades as a pastor trying to convert people, he noticed that sinners like Jesus, but they don't like Jesus's people. Which led Henderson to completely rethink how he was approaching non-believers. It was not an epiphany. It dawned on me slowly that I was tired of feeling bad. I was tired of thinking about you as a project instead of you as a person. And so I didn't like that. And then I also noticed that in spite of all the preaching I did about this to get other people to do it, they just wouldn't do it. I mean, they're just Christians, ordinary Christians, vote with their [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and they just do not participate in these programs. In the programs to evangelize, you mean? They wouldn't evangelize? Yeah. I mean, you can push them for a few days like a diet or something like that, and then it's like, are we done with this now? Can we go back to our normal life of thinking about ourselves? So-- Usually it doesn't work. No, it doesn't work. It doesn't work for the same reasons it doesn't work for normal humans. We don't like being pitched. We don't like being treated that way. I don't like being invited to a party to kibbitz and chat, and then find out you have a pitch you want to give me. You know, we can smell a sell coming. And by the way, most of the ways you have observed evangelism being done as it's being marketed are ineffective. The large rallies-- all that stuff. The statistics are just abysmal about the number of converts that actually stick. It does not result in what the church wants. The church wants disciples. Jesus actually didn't say, go out and make converts. He said, go make disciples. Which is a completely different project. So the founder of our movement, Jesus, did not model this behavior. You never had to lower himself to a bait and switch. So this has been an adoption of sort of American consumerism that we've adopted as a church. And it's really largely based on sales. The way of getting people to join. I mean, quite frankly, I want people to follow Jesus. I believe Jesus is God and all that stuff. But I am completely done with the whole evangelism as a sales model deal. I'm done with it. So walk me through what is that you're advocating. You have this thing called doable evangelism. Evangelism that actually normal people can do without feeling weird about it. So give me the steps of it. Like what do I do if I want to do it? Doable evangelism does not concern itself with converting people. It's not about sales. It's about connecting. So the paradigm is about connecting with people. The way we connect, there's three what we call spiritual practices for connecting with people. Number one, notice people. Practice the art of noticing. Sit and watch. Sit in the mall and watch people go by and ask yourself, I wonder what's going on with that person. Just reflect. The second one is, pray for people behind their backs. You know, Christians like to pray for people. And we believe prayer matters. So pray for them behind their backs. Unauthorized prayers. You don't need their permission. You can pray. But pray for these people. It's fine. It's not going to hurt them. It's not going to hurt you. Maybe something good will happen. Who knows. The third thing is to go to someone and actually listen. And the way you listen, usually you say something like, how are you? And then you listen. And the person will be amazed when you don't interrupt them with your own story of how you are not doing yourself. So you would send people out. You say, I want you to listen to people, I want you to notice people. And then does this work in bringing people to Jesus? Or is that just like the first step? So that's a question, of course, Christians ask us. They want to know about numbers and results. But I feel like that's a fair question. Because you're saying, like, well, this is a kind of doable evangelism. So all right. I can go out and listen to people. That part I can do. So where's the part where they come to Jesus? You have to keep in mind, our mission, our goal is to not to get converts. Our goal is to get Christians out connecting with non-Christians. Our goal is to get Christians learning how not to be jerks. Our goal is to help Christians learn to be normal. And what happens, over a period of time, is they start befriending people, and they get in people's social circles, and yes. Naturally, just like if you were interested in something and I knew you from some length of time, the likelihood of me going to the school you're recommending, buying the car you recommended increases, because we're in proximity to each other. The way it happens is just through relationships. That's how human beings actually change, when you and I like each other. My saying is, when people like each other, the rules change. Is it possible that your tactic just leads to nothing? Like I think about my own circle of friends. And for whatever reasons now, I have a bunch of friends, my wife and I have a bunch of friends, who are very devout religious people. And we hang out with them, and we share our lives with them, but they are no influence at all in pulling us towards Christianity away from our staunch atheism, and vice versa. That would be what my ideological enemies within evangelicalism would accuse me of. That this will lead to nothing. And so the alternative is for me, then, to imagine your social circle. What are your alternatives, then? To begin to intentionally try and persuade each other. You know, I have this one chance to try and get Ira Glass saved, so here I go. And then what happens as a result of that, typically, is that's the end of our relationship, and we go our separate ways. And so now I have zero influence in your life, and I'm not going to be able to be influenced by you, as well. When you describe it-- and I'm not saying this to be critical, I'm just observing-- what you're replacing bait and switch with is-- it's all bait. And then there's no switch at all! Honestly, you're just assuming that at some point, like, something will happen, and maybe it'll be good. And hopefully it'll be good. Right? Because the bait was pretty good. And so let's just go with that. Now, that doesn't offend me in the least. I kind of like that. All bait, no switch. I might use that. I admit, I could be wrong, maybe I'm living a delusion, whatever, but this is one that I prefer over the alternatives. And I'm happy with that. Again, our goal is to get Christians engaged in the process. We're not concerned about results. The average amount of time it takes to be a Christian, before you actually make a decision, is about four years. So I'm much more concerned about the starting like of faith. Why don't we try and get them across the starting line instead of the finish line? Jim Henderson. He records his thoughts in books and at two websites, offthemap.com and doableevangelism.com. Dave Dickerson, who we heard before him, has a book of his own called House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions. It was Saturday night, and I was walking around alone in the city, and I stopped at the shop to get some water. People were hanging out on benches in front, eating dinner, playing with a little girl. A woman in a yellow dress called out to me, "Hey Obruni," white lady, "what do you want?" That's how I met Marion. I liked her right away. She seemed genuine, direct. We ended up spending the rest of the evening sitting on the wooden bench together, eating beans and rice and talking. Her husband was in Italy, and my boyfriend was in the U.S., so we bonded over that. She said she would be my friend, and I really needed one. And she warned me. She told me I should be more careful around Ghanaians, that they would try to cheat me. Now, this isn't the first time I'd heard about Ghanaians scamming foreigners. Who doesn't get those fake e-mails from West Africa? But here in Ghana, they call it "sakawa," which some say comes from a word in the Hausa language that means to put something into something else. Like, I put the stolen credit card number into the order form. Or more metaphorically, I scammed those people so well, I've got them in my pocket. A lot of sakawa scams start on internet dating sites. The scammers are usually young men. They're known as sakawa boys. They pretend to be women online, and start chatting with guys overseas, hoping to hook one of them in a relationship. Marion told me her friends and cousins do this all the time. When we were talking on the bench, she leaned in closer, and she told me in a low voice that she was right in the middle of a sakawa scam. She was the bait. Her friends and cousins, sakawa boys, had asked her to talk to a foreigner they were scamming. They wanted her to talk to him on the phone and pretend to be the girl he'd been chatting with online. I asked if I could interview her about it, so later we sat down and talked. So the first time they asked you, your cousins, what did they ask you? OK. They told me to tell the man, my parents are dead. That no one looks after me. So I spoke to the man. I told him, yeah, it's true. My parents are dead. No one looks after me. So I needed money to start something. He said, oh, no problem. The white man said, no problem. Marion played an important role in the scam, but according to her, she wasn't on the inside. She was the bait, not an official partner. So not entitled to a cut of the money. Instead, it was more like she was helping her cousin out so he would be more inclined to return the favor later, and give her money when she asked him for it. But only however much he chose to give her. So how much money did your cousin receive from this man? Thousands of dollars. He gets money. So much. My cousin, he's not the only person. There are many who collect money from the whites, who spend the whites' money. Marion's cousins recruited her to talk to a man she called Mr. Johnson from New York. We chat, OK. Sometimes we talk about love. Because he is in love. So we talk about love, sex. Having sex on the phone. I make him feel good about me so that when I need anything, he can send me. And how long do you talk on the phone? More than four hours. We talk, we talk. We talk, sometimes midnight he calls me. We chat, we chat. He makes me laugh. Sometimes he entertains me. We're jovial. We joke, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But Mr. Jones could be my grandfather. He's very old. Yes. About 72 years. He's old. But when he talks, he's bold. He talks to me. We talk about love. But I pity him. Because he sends my cousin money so much. Marion says that after two conversations with Mr. Johnson, she couldn't stand the deception anymore, and she told him the truth-- that he was being conned. She said she told him not to send any more money. She says that he thanked her, and that her cousins don't know she's the one who busted up their scam. But I couldn't verify anything she was telling me. I asked her for Mr. Johnson's phone number, but she didn't get it from her cousin's phone for me, even though she swore she would. And I couldn't talk to her cousins without getting her in trouble. And somehow, during the interview, the more we talked about the scam, the more confused I got. The details kept getting murkier. First she said she only helped scam Mr. Johnson, then she mentioned others. And the timeline of what happened with Mr. Johnson became less and less clear. At one point, she said she hadn't talked to Mr. Johnson or seen any of her sakawa friends since she got married. So this was all before you became married? Yes. Since I got married. And so you've been married since-- 2007. But you were speaking to Mr. Johnson even this year. I said that because when we first met, she said she was talking to Mr. Johnson then. That was only a few months ago. When I reminded her, Marion said-- No. This year, let me see. No, I don't actually remember. I don't remember. And then the interview took a different turn. She hinted I should give her money. She needed a job, she said, and she had a lot of stories to tell. She told me she was broke, which I wasn't sure I believed. There are a lot of poor people in Ghana, but Marion doesn't seem to be one of them. Her mom owns a hair salon and a grocery store. Her husband has a new TV and kitchen appliances. But she said her mom is sick of giving her money on the time, and her husband ran into immigration problems in Italy. We went back and forth a while, and it kept coming down to the same thing. She said she wants foreigners to give her money like they give the sakawa boys, but she doesn't want to defraud anyone. Yeah, I want the same thing, but I don't want it in a fraud way. I wouldn't lie to them, men, stealing from them. Because what they are doing is stealing. I can't do that. One thing is, I don't lie. Even if I would lie, not because the way you approach to me, you are like a sister, you see? That's why I don't want to lie to you. That's why I told you everything. I don't want to lie to you. I'm telling the true facts. Sakawa is about setting up a basic transaction. You find what the other person wants, like a girlfriend, a radio story, and you use it as bait. I believe Marion did see me as a friend, but also as an opportunity. Frankly, that's how I saw her too. We hung out a couple of times as friends beside the interview. We ate lunch-- some spicy Ghanaian food-- and played with her cute little baby. A few days later, I called her to press for Mr. Johnson's phone number, but as soon as we decided talking, she yelled that I was only interested in her as a story. I wasn't interested in being a real friend. Then she hung up on me. In her version of the story, I'm the opportunist. Anna Boiko-Weyrauch reports for Voice of America and other radio programs from Ghana. February 14, 2008. Annie, my girlfriend of ten years, comes in the house and says in a tone not entirely free of suspicion, "Look who got a valentine." She holds a pink, squarish envelope hand-addressed to me just out of my reach. "I see your secret admirer was too modest include a return address," Annie says. My secret admirer was also too modest to use a stamp. The envelope had been posted by bulk rate meter. "So what's her name?" Annie says. I open it. "Friendly Card Services," I say. "Dear Mr. Cotter, Your account is currently four months past due. Please pay $19,243.53 immediately, or we will be forced to deliver your account to a third party for more aggressive collection efforts. Sincerely, Friendly Customer Appreciation Department." I have long since stopped entering calls from the many, many collectors coming after my many, many wholly unmeetable obligations. These calls, which routinely number 200 every day, start exactly at eight in the morning, and they end exactly at nine o'clock at night. In the beginning, identifying a collector was easy. The area codes were almost always something numerologically unclean combination of sixes and eights. Then one day I get a call from my own area code. I listen to the message. "Yo, hey, Bill. This is Cherry. What's up? I haven't heard from you for ages." Whoa. Do I know a Cherry? I Google the number. My old friend Cherry apparently lives at the I Love America Financial Recovery Resolution and Outstanding Account Consolidation and Settlementations Response Center, LLC, with offices in Los Angeles and Guckeen, Minnesota. Variants on this gambit abound. Citibank sometimes sends their threats express mail. Such letters usually start, "Dear debtor, you're probably wondering why we just paid to overnight you just one sheet of paper." I always do wonder, but they never explain. They simply go on to itemize the ways in which you've disappointed them, and conclude with a demand for payment in full, just like their not overnighted letters. Other lenders disguise their collection notices inside and out as surprisingly convincing U.S. treasury checks. Discover's method is to simply send one letter a day. April 25, 2008. My bankruptcy attorney, Mr. H., during our first meeting, charges me with many tasks, the most demanding and subjective of which is evaluating my assets. For most objects, there are guidelines. Clothes-- 10% of retail. Cars-- Blue Book value. Buffalo nickel collection-- whatever you can get on eBay. But occasionally an object occurs whose worth is subjective. We acquired our housecat in the fall of '04. In all respects, he underperforms as a pet. He won't pounce or chase a laser dot. On every page of his vet file are big fluorescent stickers that say, "Will Bite." He's taught himself to frown. So under "Animals" on page 14 of the Bankruptcy Questionnaire, I generously evaluate him at $0.50. "What's a Vinnie?" asks Mr. H. "A cat," I say. "That cat?" "Yes, sir," I say. "$10," he says, and then wipes out my figure and enters his own. This is frustrating, because the job of a bankruptcy attorney is to assign as small a value as possible to each of my objects. "How about $3?" I suggest. "Why don't you just give the beast away, then?" he asks. "Just drop it off behind a chicken restaurant." I look at him, trying to decide what to say. If you can't bare a shameful truth to your attorney, then to whom? "Well," I admit, "I like him." "$10, then. Next item." September 28, 2008. Bait and switching now starts in earnest. A neighbor leaves a Post-it note on my door saying she's just gotten a call from someone trying to find me, that the caller said it was an emergency, and to have me call this 866 number immediately. My parents, sisters, and former employees call me. "Billy, some angry dude who will not identify himself or his business is looking for you." The subterfuge isn't just from collectors. Envelopes arrive with absolutely no markings at all, demanding to be opened. These contain letters from law firms offering to defend me. Similar envelopes arrive from debt consolidation companies posing as law firms offering to defend me. Somehow mailed threats aren't that worrisome. Not like calls. Like a voicemail I received dialed from a spooky telephone number made of nothing but zeros, and consisting only of the Madonna song "Open Your Heart" played in its entirety. Among the lyrics is this provocative passage. I follow you around but you can't see/ You're too wrapped up in yourself to notice/ So you choose to look the other way/ Well, I've got something to say/ Don't try to run, I can keep up with you... October 10, 2008. By now, I've learned not only to never answer the telephone, but also to ignore knocks at the door. But one afternoon, I'm expecting an interesting rare book restoration job to be delivered by UPS. I checked the tracking number, which indicated that my package was On Vehicle For Delivery. Hark! The downshift of a grumpy diesel engine. I peek out the blinds. There, parked under a beautiful, spreading pecan tree, my beautiful, brown delivery truck. Hark again! A firm, authority-backed rap. I answer. Standing before me is a diminutive woman wearing not a penny-brown UPS uniform, but a tan polo shirt and khakis. Just as I was about say, "Hey, what's with the merry new uniform?" and "Where's my parcel?" I see the UPS truck driving away. I notice a pistol at her waste. She announces that she's from the Travis County Constable's Office, precinct five, and that she's here to deliver a citation initiated by Citibank South Dakota N.A. She hands me a sheaf of papers. I have been officially sued. Annie, my girlfriend, in her customarily disarming fashion, invites the deputy inside for a cup of coffee. Annie asks the deputy if she would like cream and sugar. The deputy begins to cry. Annie sits her down on the couch. We listen as Dana Perry, the deputy, confesses how much she hates her hypocritical job. She's in some pretty bad debt herself. And how all she really wants to do is go back to school and play with her baby and start an organic lavender farm. Annie gives her to-go coffee and some rubber tawdries left over from a cashed pinata to give to the baby. And, just in case, Mr. H.'s business card. October 22, 2009. Finally, case number 091263-CAG, my bankruptcy, is officially filed. My creditors will get $4,911 worth of rare book inventory, $750 worth of archival letter and paper, and $40.45 in cash. I don't have enough rare book inventory left to start fresh as a bookseller, but luckily, I do still have restoration tools and materials, so bookbinding is the direction I'll go. I hope I'll never have to go through other bankruptcy, though that's about as meaningless as someone recovering from a car wreck saying they don't plan to ever crash again. Still, it's unlikely, as one must be in debt to go bankrupt. As it stands now, I will not qualify for any kind of meaningful credit for seven years. I won't qualify for almost any home, school, or car loans, nor for many jobs. And I won't be able to rent anywhere that has an application process, which leaves those cash-only motel-like tenements out by the airport. With such options, I'm hardly in danger of crashing. I'd never be able to build up enough speed. And that, I suppose, is the point. Bill Cotter. He's the author of the novel Fever Chart. His story about bankruptcy first appeared on the McSweeney's site at mcsweeneys.net. Our program is produced today by Lisa Pollak and our senior producer, Julie Snyder, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ manager and oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, people always ask me, what did he sound like before he got on the radio? I have a recording. "What's the matter for you? Hey, Louie, where's the driver?" I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life.
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When I was in my 20s, I worked as a temp typist on the overnight shift. And it was one of my favorite jobs I ever had. I showed up at work at midnight. Downtown was completely dark. Nobody on the streets at all. And I'd take the elevator to the, you know, 20th floor or whatever it was. And it would be all lit up and bustling with activity, dozens of people rushing around. Usually we were hustling out some kind of legal brief or exhibit for court the next day. I loved being up when the rest of the world was asleep. And the next morning, when I would walk to the subway as the sun was coming up, I loved knowing that everybody else on the street was dragging themselves to their jobs and I was done for the day. It was like I was part of a secret society that's alive in the middle of the night. OK. Everybody, go home. We're about to start this. It's a regular thing for Austin and his high school friends at night. The pile into a Honda Odyssey minivan. They remove the backseats and drive around the Northern California suburbs, fake-kidnapping their buddies. 15 of them. Open the door! Open the door! Did you get him? Get in the back. Everybody in? Opa! The fake kidnapping is all part of a tradition that they've made up. They call it "going out living" or "living a little." It's not the weekend. The whole point of this is do this on a boring Monday or Tuesday or Thursday night. A school night when other people aren't out having fun. There's no destination. It's basically just glorified cruising. They drive around for hours, talking about whatever, singing along to the music. [SINGING] They bring their minivan to the top of a hill and put it in neutral, and then they all rock back and forth inside the van in unison until finally it rolls down the hill. Whoa! And then sometime after 1 AM, Ian, the driver, pulls out the soundtrack to the Disneyland ride Space Mountain. He's worked out a way to drive in sync with the soundtrack, to simulate the actual ride. Yeah. We're in the car driving very slowly up this dark hill. This is Austin. The headlights are very low. This kind of eerie music. Everyone's a little bit nervous, because you're about to do something-- probably the most dangerous thing we do. Launch control, LV. Go ahead. All video recorders off. Roger. At this point he flips on his emergency lights and starts speeding up a little bit up the hill, turns the car around. Lets the car roll down the hill, accelerating all the way. His lights are turning on and off, on and off, on and off. Driving very, very quickly, at this point, around turns. So basically, you're going down a hill? Yeah. We're going down a very steep, windy hill. It's remote enough, by the way, that in a year of doing this, they have never even seen another car. None of this would be fun during the daytime, Austin says. At night, nobody sees you. You can do anything. Late at night is kind of the whole fun of the event. People don't really pay attention to who's doing what at night. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, we spend an hour with the secret society that is up in the middle of the night. All the people doing things that they would never do during the daytime, and the people doing things that they might be during the day that just feel different when you do them at night. Moving products, and hauling across a war zone, and caring for sick kids, and just wandering the streets to get out of the house. Everything is different at night. We witness how in five acts. Stay with us. Eddie One-Way needs some pears. His name is actually Edward Joseph. They call him "Eddie One-Way" because he wants prices to go one way-- down. He's a buyer, one of thousands of guys who show up here every night. And they're buying for pretty much every grocery store, restaurant, corner market in the northeast. If you have ever bought a Golden Delicious apple or ate a salad in a restaurant between Philly and Boston, chances are it came through here. And it is nothing like when you or I buy a salad at a restaurant. There are no posted prices. It us pure supply and demand. And right now, demand-- that's Eddie One-Way, the buyer-- is looking for supply. Let's see here, where's my salesman? Oh, Mr. Timmy? Timmy is a salesman at one of the wholesalers here, to Rigo Brothers. He's close by. I think he's in one of these refrigerators. This place here is a stadium. I think you need GPS to get around here. It would help. Eventually, Eddie One-Way finds Timmy, and they enter into a ritual that will happen thousands of times throughout the night. They try to negotiate a price. Eddie thinks $15 for a box of pears seems fair. Timmy doesn't. No way. We could do it-- I told you 20 yesterday. Yesterday's gone. Today's a new day. $20 yesterday, 18 today. That's it. Stay close, Timmy. Timmy offers Eddie a different kind of pear for $15, which to me looked exactly the same. $15 on these, $18 on them. But Eddie One-Way knows things about pears that I will never know, and he ignores that ridiculous offer. Why do you want to pay $15? Why is 18--? I'd like to pay 13, but I'm being generous. All right. That's it, brother. That's it, man. 18 is the right number. You know it's what they're worth. The night's still young. Eventually Eddie One-Way walks away. The night is still young. At this hour the sellers, guys like Timmy, feel like they are in control. They don't want to give anything away too cheap yet. There's lots more buyers still to come. But Eddie, the buyer, is hoping that if he comes back later in the night, Timmy won't have sold that much. He'll be desperate to get rid of his pears, and will accept a lower price. But Eddie's really taking a risk here. I know. I actually saw this risk play out with carrots, and it was really stressful. Jeff Steinberg is a buyer like Eddie, and he was looking for this one particular kind of carrot. A fancy one. Loose California. And I followed him around, walking the aisles, one seller to another. And at first, everyone has the carrots, but Jeff is offended-- or at least acts offended-- by the high prices. And then an hour passes. And now nobody has Loose Californias anymore. Jeff can't find the carrots he needs at any price. So he's thinking he may have to settle for something inferior-- Loose Canadians. Eugh. Jeff asks a seller named Carlos how much for the Loose Canadians. Carlos tells him eight bucks a box. I'll be right back, then. What's he doing now? Going to look at something that he's going to come back and tell me he doesn't like. What does it mean that he's not going to like it? Probably because they're not good enough for his customers. He's fairly picky, so you have to give the right people the right stuff. And sure enough, Jeff comes out of the warehouse, shaking his head. No good. No good? And where are you going to look for carrots next? That's a good question, because I've pretty much looked all over the place. So it's 11:30 at night, and carrots are your problem at the moment. At the moment. It's coming down to that hour where I'm probably going to have to pay what they wanted, what I don't want to pay. Around midnight, it starts to get hectic. Buyers fill the streets. Sellers wave their arms and yell into faces and cell phones. There's a lot of sweating. And as the minutes pass, all these little stories emerge. Midnight, the big story-- tomatoes. They're on fire. Yesterday they were selling for $15. Now they're $25. Everyone is buying. Also breaking this hour-- leafy greens from California. They're huge, because as everyone says, they have weather out there. There's not enough leafy greens coming to satisfy the demand. It's around this time that we meet Angela Poricelli. Angela is the only woman we see the entire night. She says she knows of only one other woman who works here alongside something like 7,000 men. Her booth is decorated with pictures. She has a big cross. She brings in fresh flowers every week. She offered me candy. And hanging out with her, we learned that it's not all business here in the middle of the night. We keep seeing her next door neighbor, Henry Polio, stopping by on all sorts of dubious missions. Right now he's looking for a fork. Hello. Do you have a fork? Yes, I do. She's the loveliest woman in the market. Believe me, she's the most wonderful person in the world. I know who her family is. Our family, grandfathers know grandfathers, fathers knew fathers. Wonderful woman. Thank you, Henry. All right. Bye. When you buy a few hundred pounds of fruit or vegetables, there is so much you don't know. What's the quality? How long has it been on the truck? Is the price reasonable? And it's true-- sellers and buyers who don't know each other that well, they lie to each other all the time. So with all this uncertainty, there is tremendous economic value in long-term, trusting relationships. Hey Adam? You're overthinking it it's so much simpler than that. I followed Henry from Angela's back to his booth. You kind of have a crush on Angela? No, I do, since I'm a kid. But she always said no. Really? Yeah. I want to take her upstairs and she don't to. Have you ever asked her out? No, no, no. Does she know that you're interested? Oh, she knows. I tell her. You've worked next door to her for all these years and you're never been out with her? No! And I ain't going to. Why? Because It's not the right thing to do. She's my sister. She's not your sister. Well, she's close to it. You're not with anybody. Who, me? Yeah, I got a wife. Actually, I followed up. Henry doesn't have a wife. He did, but his marriage fell apart. And he blames the night shift for that. They never saw each other. He says all these guys here have wives they never see, kids never see. So I go back to Angela's, and turns out she's also divorced. She raised two boys on her own. And she says, yeah. The night shift definitely gets in the way of life. I remember my father. There's a lot of things he couldn't make it. On Sundays, if there was a wedding, he couldn't go. Sundays, work. My graduation, too, was on a Friday, and he couldn't come. Really? Yeah. But that's OK. I understood. So Henry, he said you'll never go out with them because you think of him as a brother. Yes. I agree with him there. That I do. Plus, I'm engaged to someone right now. His name is Wayne. He's a Green Bay Packer fan. Does he work in the market? No. Does he work days? Days, yes. How is it? It's hard to start a relationship. Very hard, very hard. It's just Friday and Saturday, really, that we see each other. Can I check back in with you? Yeah, go ahead. It's one o'clock in the morning, and I'm with Henry again. He's taking a quick break. I ordered lunch, I've got Guido here, and that makes tonight. It's one o'clock in the morning and you just ordered lunch. Yes, yes. So everything is going smooth. Tomatoes are on fire. Still? Yeah. We're sold out and they didn't come off the truck. This is the point in the night where the market really changes. There are none of those people buying fancy stuff for high-end restaurants and specialty Manhattan stores. They're all gone. There's no more high-end guys like Jeff inspecting every carrot. A whole new group of buyers enters the market now. And they're buying for not-so-fancy places-- bodegas and grocery stores in working class neighborhoods, pushcart vendors. They're not quite as concerned with getting the best possible quality. They want a good price. It's in this second phase that the dynamic between sellers and buyers starts to shift. Remember early in the night, when Eddie One-Way had to go searching for someone to sell him pears? Over the next couple hours, it's the reverse. The sellers are looking for the buyers. And this, says a warehouse man named Thomas Kilgaren-- Nickname Killer-- Is the time to see who is a great salesman and who's not. There's some guys down here that couldn't sell life insurance to the Kennedys. Know what I mean? But there's some that are pretty good. If you could sell something that somebody doesn't want, that's a good salesman. I come down here looking for lettuce, you sell me lettuce-- any moron could do that. Sell me something that I don't want-- you know what? That's a salesman. Selling something that no one wants? That is exactly what a guy named Mike Sack, Big Mike, is trying to do right now. We catch up with him toward the end of the night. Earlier in the night, buyers were begging Big Mike to lower his prices, and he didn't. He refused. And it worked out pretty well for him. He sold a lot of Red Globe grapes and mangoes, and he made a killing in persimmons. But now that daylight's approaching, he's got piles and piles of oranges from Chile, and he's the one begging. He's pleading with one of his regular carports, a guy named Amerigo Perrera, to buy some of those oranges. Amerigo is pretty clear about his wishes. No oranges. You've got to give in, Amerigo, today. You've got to be nice. What part of no oranges don't you understand? I'll give you one pallet. No! Stop playing. Be nice today. Be nice in front of the camera. There's a lady present. Shut up already. Can I give you one for $18? No, Mike, no. Just be nice. No. Why? I don't need it today. One skid only. Stop it, stop it, stop it. This stuff is being recorded, you understand? Yeah, but they just want to see, you know, and I've give you one skid. Be nice for the microphone, Amerigo. Amerigo, one skid. How about a 56. Why don't you stop playing around already? No. How about a 56? Amerigo! No! At around 4 AM, all of the sellers in the market find themselves pretty much in the same situation as Big Mike. Tired and with too many oranges. Listen to Henry-- so tired. Oranges. Oranges are moving slow, so you know, you try to give everybody some oranges. Even if they don't want it, they're taking them. You know what I mean? Poor couple. This is, like, what time do you go to bed at night? What time I go to bed? Probably like 11. So this is like your nine o'clock. You know? I hate the day. Wait, you hate the day? Oh, I hate it. What do you hate about the day? I don't know. The sun, everything. I get a headache. How are you, my friend? I just don't like the sun. I don't like it. I mean, I like it, but you know, like now, if the sun came up, I hate it. The morning, I ain't into. I like the dark. At 5 AM, Henry heads home. He rakes some leaves in the front yard, and then heads to sleep just as the sun comes out. And later that day, a fancy grocery store in Greenwich, Connecticut might have some very nice, but kind of pricey, tomatoes. A high-end restaurant in Manhattan may be offering the chef's tomato bisque. But further out, in poorer neighborhoods in South Boston, Brooklyn, Queens, tomatoes will be very hard to come by. Oranges, though, will be very cheap. And there will be lots of them. Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson of Planet Money, which is a co-production of our radio show and NPR news. You can hear them three times a week speaking in language anybody can understand about the human drama that's part of all kinds of economic systems at their podcast at www.npr.org/money. I reached over and secretly undid my seatbelt. And when his foot hit the break at the red light, I flung open the door and I ran. I had no shoes on. I was crying. I had no wallet. But I was OK, because I had my cigarettes. When you live with someone who has a temper, a very bad temper, a very, very bad temper, you learn to play around that. You learn, this time I'll play possum, and next time I'll just be real nice, or I'll say yes to everything, or you make yourself scarce, or you run. And this was one of the times when you just run. And as I was running, I thought, this was a great place to jump out. Because there were big lawns and there were cul-de-sacs, and sometimes he would come after me, and drive, and yell stuff at me to get back in, get back in, and I was like, no. I'm out of here. This is great. And I went and hid behind a cabana and he left. And I started to walk in this beautiful neighborhood. It was 10:30 at night. And there was no sound except for sprinklers. Ch, ch, ch, ch, brrrrr. Ch, ch, ch, ch, brrrr. And I was enjoying myself, and enjoying the absence of anger, and enjoying these few hours I knew I'd have of freedom. And just to perfect it, I thought, I'll have a smoke. And then it occurred to me, with horrifying speed, I don't have a light! Just then, as if in answer, I see a figure up ahead. Who is that? It's not him, OK. They don't have a dog. Who is that? What are they doing out on this suburban street? And the person comes closer, and I can see it's a woman. And then I can see she has her hands in her face. Oh, she's crying. And then she sees me, and she composes herself, and she gets closer, and I see she has no shoes on. And just as she passes me, she says, you got a cigarette? And I say, you got a light? And she says, damn, I hope so. And then first she digs into our cutoffs in the front-- nothing. And then digs in the back, and then she has this vest on that has 50 million little pockets on it. She's checking and checking, and it's looking bad. She digs back in the front again-- deep, deep-- and she pulls out a pack of matches that have been laundered at least once. We open it up and there is one match inside. OK. Oh my god. This takes on-- it's like Nassau. Now we've got to like, how are we going to do it? OK. And we hunker down. We crouch on the ground. And where's the wind coming from? We're stopping. I take out my cigarettes. Let's get the cigarettes ready. Oh, my brand, she says. And we both have our cigarettes at the ready. She strikes once, nothing. She strikes again-- yes, fire! Puff, inhale. Mm, sweet kiss of that cigarette. And we sit there, and we're loving the nicotine, and we both need this right now. Immediately we start to reminisce about our 30 second relationship. "I didn't think that was going to happen!" "Me neither!" "Oh, man, that was close!" "Oh, I'm so lucky I saw you!" "Yeah!' Then she surprises me by saying, "What was the fight about?" And I say, "What are they all about?" And she said, "I know what you mean." She said, "Was it a bad one?" And I said, "You know, like medium." She said, "Oh." And we start to trade stories about our lives. We're both from up north. We're both kind of newish to the neighborhood. This is in Florida. We both went to college. Not great colleges, but man, we graduated. And I'm actually finding myself a little jealous of her, because she has this really cool job washing dogs. She had horses back home, and she really loved animals, and she wants to be a vet, and I'm like, man, you're halfway there! I'm a waitress at an ice cream parlor. So I don't know where I want to be, but I know it's not that. And then it gets a little deeper, and we share some other stuff about what our lives are like. Things that I can't ever tell people at home. This girl-- I can tell her the really ugly stuff, and she still understands how it can still be pretty. She understands, like, how nice he's going to be when I get home, and how sweet that'll be. We are chain smoking off each other. Oh, that's almost out, come on! And we go through this entire pack until it's gone, and then I say, "You know what? This is a little funny, but you're going to have to show me the way to get home. Because although I'm 23 years old, I don't have my driver's license yet, and I just jumped out right when I needed to." And she says, "Well, why don't you come back to my house and I'll give you a ride?" I say, "OK, great," and we start walking. And we get to this-- lots of lights. And the roads are getting wider and wider, and there's more cars, and I see lots of stores. You know, laundromats, and dollar stores, and EmergiCenters. Then we cross over U.S. 1, and she leads me to someplace, and I think, no! But yes. Carl's Efficiency Apartments. This girl lives there. And it's horrible, and it's lit up so bright, just to illuminate the horribleness of it. It's the kind of place where you drive your car right up, and the door's right there, and there's 50 million cigarette butts outside, and there's like doors one through seven, and you know behind every single door there's some horrible misery going on. There's someone crying or drunk or lonely or cruel. And I think, oh, God. She lives here. How awful. We go to the door, door number four, and she very, very quietly keys in. As soon as the door opens, I hear the blare of television come out, and on the blue light of the television, the smoke of a hundred cigarettes in that little crack of light. And I hear the man, and he says, "Where were you?" And she says," "Never mind, I'm back." And he says, "You all right?" And she says, "Yeah, I'm all right." And then she turns me and says, "You want a beer?" And he says, "Who the [BLEEP] is that?" And she pulls me over, and he sees me, and he says, "Oh, hey." I'm not a threat. Just then he takes a drag of his cigarette and I follow the cigarette down. And I'm surprised when I see, int he crook of his arm, a little boy, sleeping. A toddler. And I think, [GASP]. And just then, the girl reaches underneath the bed and takes out a carton, and she taps out the last pack of cigarettes in there. And on the way up, she kisses the little boy, and then she kisses the man. And the man says again, "You all right?" And she says, "Yeah. I'm just going to go out and smoke with her." And so we go outside and sit amongst the cigarette butts and smoke. And I say, "Wow, that's your little boy?" And she says, "Yeah, isn't he beautiful?" And I say, "Yeah, he is. He is beautiful." "He's my light. He keeps me going," she says. We finish our cigarettes. She finishes her beer. I don't have a beer, because I can't go home with beer on my breath. And she goes inside to get the keys. She takes too long in there getting the keys, and I think something must be wrong. And she comes out and she says, "Look, I'm really sorry. But um, like we don't have any gas in the car, it's already on E, and he needs to get to work in the morning, and um, you know, I'm going to walk to work as it is. So what I did was, though, here, look, I drew out this map for you. And you really, you're like a mile and a half from home, and um, if you walk three streets over, you'll be back on that pretty street, and you just take that, and you'll be fine." And she also has wrapped up in toilet paper seven cigarettes for me. A third of her pack, I note. And a new pack of matches. And she tells me, "Goodbye!", and "That was great to meet you," and "How lucky," and "That was fun," and you know, "Let's be friends." And I say, "Yeah, OK!" and I walk away. But I kind of know we're not going to be friends. I might not ever see her again. And I kind of know, I don't think she's ever going to be a vet. And I cross, and I walk away. And maybe this would have seemed like a visit from my possible future and scary, but it kind of does the opposite. On the walk home I'm like, man. That was really grim over there. And I'm going home now to my nice boyfriend, and he's going to be so extra happy to see me. And we have a one-bedroom apartment, and we have two trees, and there's a yard. And we have this jar in the kitchen where there's like loose money that we can use for anything. Like we would never, ever run out of gas. And I don't have a baby, you know? So I can leave whenever I want. I smoked all seven cigarettes on the way home. And people who have never smoked cigarettes just think ick, disgusting and poison. But unless you've had them, and held them dear, you don't know how great they can be, and what friends and comfort and kinship they can bring. It took me a long time to quit that the boyfriend, and then to quit smoking. And sometimes I still miss the smoking. Jenifer Hixson at The Moth. You can here more stories like this on The Moth's free weekly podcast at themoth.org. They also have a new weekly radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, that's on many public radio stations around the country. Coming up, the time of night in Iraq when you can fool yourself into thinking that you're not in Iraq at all. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. OK. It's about nine o'clock. Shaina's trying to set up the tent right now. I would totally help her, but I'm busy reporting. How's it going, Shaina? Good. I think we put this into here, and then we can-- this is where I don't get-- how does this bend? Again, I would help, if I could, but I can't. I'm busy reporting. Can we interview you? What do you want to know about? Do you know how to set up tents? Yeah, actually I set that tent up. Do you know how to set up our tent? Yeah, I can set up your tent. That'd be awesome. The DJ will be shutting down about 11:30. At that time, most of the folks will sleep, and at roughly 4:30 in the morning, the DJ comes back, and we wake them up. It becomes a family-friendly event. Especially in the summer, you'll see whole families out here. So you'll see a whole list of rules about, you know, no drinking, and certain behavior. There's lots of dance contests. It's 11:23. We're sitting here in the parking lot across from Chick-Fil-A, just to see it from afar, I guess. I'm going to sit closer to you, if you're comfortable with that. Yeah, that's fine. I think we should describe what we see. Well, we're pretty much in like a regular strip mall parking lot. There's a Blockbuster. There's that that rib place that we ate earlier that I'm kind of regretting. Yeah. And basically, there's a lot of tents up. Easily the most tents I've ever seen in a fast food restaurant parking lot in my lifetime. It's weird with radio. You've got to fill in the blanks. The visuals. We should we should go get some celery and break it, like old time radio. So people will be like, what is that noise? Oh. I just broke my arm in two for no apparent reason. Hello? Hello? Hi. I'm Dave. I'm Ken Perkins. I'm Ann. But I call her Hanusha. Hanusha? Hanusha, in Ukrainian, is Ann. Oh, I like that. How long have you guys been married? We aren't married. We were married to somebody else. But he died, and she died. I think he gave her mushrooms or something. No! Poison mushrooms. No. My wife died of Alzheimer's just a little over a year ago. And then and her husband died two years ago. Three. She was lonesome, and I was lonesome, so we got our lonesomes together. Was it love at first sight for you guys? For me it was. But he didn't-- Not for me, not for me. I learned to love her. It took me a while. Why, why? This one, I'm going wild for this one, and I've only been been here like three minutes. Are you married? Well, we're like, no. We're not married. How would you say, as long as we're on the topic, how do you think we're doing as a couple? Like just from vibes, just work off of vibes. Go with your gut. You are a lovely couple. I think you're charming Really? Just me charming, or together charming? You should have beautiful children together. That's why we brought the tent. No, I'm just kidding. I'm going to play it slow. Oh, we're not really a couple. Taco Bell? That's my favorite. Taco Bell's your favorite? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. What is your name? John. No, not that name. The cool one. Veggie Oil Man, Clearwater, Florida. That's a pretty long nickname. Veggie OIl Man, Clearwater-- Florida. What about such Vegman300? Do you love Chick-Fil-A? I kind of do Been to about 32 grand openings. 32? Now, wouldn't the thing to do, rather than spend the money on all that travelling, is just save that money and put that money towards the chicken? Travel's free. I got a Mercedes that runs on used cooking oil for free. You have a what? I got a Mercedes, a diesel Mercedes. An '83 station wagon that runs on used cooking oil for free. That's what you drove here tonight in? Yeah. That's what I go to the grand openings in. Do you think anything crazy's going to happen in the middle of the night? I don't know. This is a bad neighborhood. Is it? Yeah. As long as you stay in the parking lot, you'd be OK. But I wouldn't go out walking around outside. Is there a lot of riffraff around here? Yeah. Is there a lot of riffraff here? They said the hood is right across the street a couple blocks. The hood? Yeah. What do you mean, the hood? You know. And across the street over the other way is the redneck trailer park. What what goes on over there? I don't know, but we've seen a lot of people over there earlier today. Oh, you went over to the redneck trailer park? No, we seen them when we got our food at the drive-through. They were hanging out over there drinking beer on the porch. I'm going to sleep. Hello? OK. What's your name? My name's Cole Naismith. And what time is it? Do you know what time it is? It's probably about 1:15. Is it like what you expected? I didn't know what to expect. I looked around and I thought, there's definitely a type here. And you're probably going to ask follow up questions about what that means. Because I feel like-- I feel like I don't want to be the type. What is the type? I feel like most of the people that I've seen here seem to be a little bit twiddling their thumbs in life, not just for 24 hours? Something as ridiculous as sitting out in front of a Chick-Fil-A makes you ask questions about, am I wasting my life? I don't want to look around and seem like I'm judging others' actions. But it definitely has caused me to be introspective about my own. Oh hey. This is Dave. It's about 4:15 AM and there's not much action going on right now. Shaina's back in the tent. Not sure what she's doing. Probably thinking about me, I guess. Tension's been-- not a bad tension. Just excitement, I guess, between us. It's been pretty incredible. It's now 4:15, and everybody is sleeping, for the most part. I think it's going pretty well. I like Dave. He's so nice. Wish I could figure out if he was straight or gay. I can't really figure it out. But if I figured out if he was straight or gay, then I would totally set him up with someone. Just have to figure out what his type is, you know? OK. Check this out. Have you ever looked with love in your heart? This guy, it's like five in the morning. And this guy just came from out of nowhere and is screaming and preaching. Have you ever stolen anything? Yes! Well, the Bible says that all thieves will end up in hell. I'm going to hell. Now folks, have you ever used God's name in a curse word? I want you to think about it like that. You don't curse Hitler's name. You don't curse bin Laden's name. But you use the name of God who gave you life and breath, who has allowed Chick-Fil-A to give away free meals, and you curse his name! Jesus Christ out on the cross! He paid-- Excuse me--oh. For your sins and my sins! Folks, did you know the Bible says that God sees hatred as murder? A lot of you right now hate me this morning for coming out here and sharing the gospel with you, therefore committed murder in your hearts! Excuse me. All the sins of the world were placed upon Jesus Christ. Oh, excuse me. Can I interview you? Sure. Um, what brings you to Chick-Fil-A? To preach the gospel. How did you know to come now? Did you come because, were you just driving by? No, because I knew there was a crowd. Oh, OK. I'm Jason, by the way. Oh, hey. Oh, yeah, I saw the name tag. I'm Dave. Nice to meet you, Dave. Is this your first Chick-Fil-A opening? Yes. I woke them up for sure. Yeah. That was kind of funny. I'm always a little loud. Do you do this sort of thing often? Like go to, doesn't have to be a fast food restaurant, but like in public, yelling? Well, I try not to make it look like I'm yelling. I'm trying to preach. Well, not yelling. You're just making it so people can hear your voice in a loud way. I woke up my wife this morning. I said, babe, I'm going to Chick-Fil-A, and I'll be back right before I've got to go to work. And she was like, all right. I'm going back to bed. She's like, what? Yeah. Then she went back to bed. OK. It is now 5:40 in the morning, and people are lined up to get their 52 coupons. And everyone is looking really, incredibly jazzed. When I say count, we're going to count down from five, all right? Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Eat more chicken! Hey Shaina, let's sing the song we wrote. Ready? Yeah. All right. Here we go. Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. If you like chicken, go to-- Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. If you like chicken, why not-- Go to Chick-Fil-A! Waffle fries and lemonade. These are just a couple of the items that they have available at Chick-Fil-A. And at first that carrot and raisin salad is a little bit suspicious. But you know what, I've tried it. And as it turns out-- Quite delicious. That's right. Chick-Fil-A, Chick-Fil-A... Dave Hill and Shaina Feinberg. It's a pretty amazing scene. I mean, especially when I'm like the front truck, and I can see this line of lights behind me, because we're so tightly compact within our convoy that we brighten up that whole night road. I always think of it that we're stringing through Iraq like Christmas tree lights. A bunch of white, big, bright lights snaking through the dark desert. And we usually are the biggest light out there, because not many local nationals like to drive at night. You're saying local national, Iraqis? Right. And sometimes they're out there. There are not too many of them. And if we do see them, they're usually a lot nearer their own types of Iraqi rest stops, which are like their kind of markets or whatever. So that's the side of the road. Or a fuel station, which can be a tanker truck with a hose hooked onto it with a little kid ready to fuel up to make money for the day, and markets along the back of it. You'll just see these on the side of the road as you're driving? Yeah, exactly. They're just out in the middle of the desert, sometimes in the middle of nowhere. They're usually to the side of the road. It's their version a Starbucks or whatnot. In the email you sent to us, you said that the night convoys were part of an agreement between the U.S. military and the Iraqis. Explain that. We conduct our operations at night. It's just our agreement so that we don't interrupt their life as much. Just because we are a really long and big convoy. So I mean, that is kind of a big deal, and that is kind of an interrupter, I guess you could say. And they don't like us, and you can tell that. Because some traffic, if we're headed northbound, you know, they'll be going both ways in the southbound lane. So basically, they would rather cram traffic going in two directions into one lane rather than try to share the lane that your convoy's in. Right, exactly. They don't want to be near us. Because we have big cruiser weapons on our vehicles. We have bright lights. We try to be nice and try to turn off the left side or something, so we dim the lights for them. So you're not kind of blinding other drivers. Right, exactly. But usually they just don't like being near us, so they'll pull off the road completely and just turn their flashers on and wait for us to pass. How many of these convoys have you done? Probably 20 or 30. I mean, it can get pretty mundane. Now on eight hour missions, they're like a quickie, you know, really fast. Because how long are the long ones? The longest we've had is about 15 hours. It seems very, very long and drawn out, and your legs get pretty tired staying in that one position for a long time when you only have one stop throughout those 15 to 16 hours, you know. But for the most part, we are pretty energy drink fulfilled, with a cooler next to our gunner's turret, and we just reach behind him, and grab our energy drinks. And I think I drink probably about three energy drinks in one convoy. Which is not good, you know. Not good for you. But it helps. Especially on the boring convoys, and the long, long drawn out convoys. I mean, we always usually have at least one or two breakdowns of our third country national supply trucks. I think one convoy, our 15 hour convoy, what we had probably about seven or eight breakdowns. It was ridiculous. Is there ever a time, when you're driving or you're stopped, that you almost forget where you are? Oh yeah, for sure. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving in, you know, the desert of the U.S., like Arizona or something like that. You know, it looks like a normal highway within the States. Because A, it's dark, and B, it's just a normal paved road. Yeah, it's not as kept up as well as how the states keep it up, and half the road isn't even painted where the stripes are supposed to be, but for the most part, it reminds you of a normal highway. And so sometimes I feel like I'm on a long roadtrip. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving a big freight truck, like if I was a truck driver back home, you know. It's usually a pretty quick feeling, because you can be brought back pretty fast. There's tires everywhere. They line the road. I mean, I'm not even kidding when I say that. Most Iraqis, they run out their tires until they're completely destroyed to smithereens, and so they'll just leave those pieces on the side of the road. There's no type of cleanup crew to come clean up the trash on the road. There's no type of officer to come pick up the destroyed tire that's in the right lane. So that's usually just what seems to bring me back to being in Iraq. And then, you know, sometimes I look down-- wait, I have my body armor on. I'm in still in Iraq. Specialist Lindsay Freeland of Alpha Company 141 with the Organ National Guard in Iraq, talking with Nancy Updike. This night, a lot of adults wanted to go out, so my mom volunteered to babysit about seven of us kids altogether. And all the kids' bunks were upstairs in this old, old log cabin, and the staircase to get upstairs had no railing. It was just kind of, shoots out into the middle of the room. And I remember we all got our pajamas on, and we all ran upstairs. And I'm not exactly sure if you slipped or got bumped by the herd of children running up the stairs-- This is my mom. But you were falling. And I managed to grab your ankle as your head smashed into the concrete floor. From about eight feet up. And everybody, all the kids were just frozen on the stairs. And-- ugh, this is creepy. So I had to do something. So I'm trying to comfort you, and then you'd be crying and crying-- I mean, like, screaming. And then you'd say, oh, I'm so sleepy. You'd get really calm and still, and kind of go limp a little bit. And then you'd start screaming again. My part, embarrassingly, was I was drinking at Pine Stump Junction. You remember the name of it? Pine Stump Junction. Everybody knows that place. So that's my dad. My mom somehow piled seven kids into a car that wasn't even hers, that was sitting in the driveway, and drove us all to the bar. And she didn't know how to get there, but an eight year old in the car did, so he instructed her. And my mom and my dad, and me and my brother-- we just drove to the nearest hospital, which was in Newberry, which was a really, really tiny town in the Upper Peninsula. And you weren't quite unconscious, but you weren't conscious. And you weren't responsive or alert. And when we got down to Newberry, it was after hours in the clinic, and night was following, and the only guy there, physician, was some retired part-time guy. Older fellow. So I had just started practicing dentistry, and the things that were just fresh in my mind from the medical school aspect of my education-- so it was very, very scary. wait, Wait, what kind of stuff? Well, like when you're looking at a patient, and they're kind of alert, and they're kind of talking, and then one of their eyes dilates, and they start to slow down and slur a little bit, and then the other eye dilates, and they're gone. And was it happening? No. Oh. No, no. But I was checking every five minutes. And I would snap my fingers and see if you were-- just because you were just listless. You just were a little while lump. So they told my dad that they weren't even going to call a radiologist until the morning to do X-rays. And they wanted to just keep me there, overnight, like, sitting there. And I just-- I couldn't believe that I was hearing this. That he was going to make us wait until eight or nine o'clock the next morning before we even called the radiologist. This was up in the middle of BFE, and it was at night. And I thought, this is bad. Because she could be gone by morning. And I can't do nothing overnight. So I called the nurse in, and your mother and I talked about it a little bit, and then we called him in and said, we're taking her. And I remember thinking, we're going to be out in the middle of the UP now. Nowhere near a hospital. In a car with a sick little girl and another little boy. And we have something like a five and a half hour drive to get home. Home, at the time, was Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my dad went to school and where they knew there was a trauma center where if, you know, worst case scenario was happening, something could be done about it. And I remember very little from that night, but just coming to in little flashes in the first hospital, and in the car. And I remember everything looked like I was in that movie Tron. You know, it was all very, like, black, and the edges of everything kind of glowed bright neon colors. And I wasn't walking, and I wasn't really moving much, except to throw up. The first leg of the trip was really-- actually scary to me. Because the UP in the middle of the night-- there's no lights. There's nobody there. It's desolate. And you kind of look for lights in houses. Kind of trying to get an idea of the time. You know, our car at the time didn't have a clock in it. Oh really? Oh yeah. Cars didn't use to have clocks on the dashboard, and I didn't use to wear a watch. So I didn't really even know what time it was. So you'd kind of watch the windows and see if there's people up. Of course there was no traffic. I don't think we stopped. If we did, we stopped for fuel. That's kind of a long trip. So I know we had to have stopped for fuel. But we didn't really need-- anything. Didn't need anything. There was no need to stop. It was still really scary. I remember wondering if you were going to be trapped, somehow. Like that same little girl would be trapped with a brain injury. I mean, you couldn't walk at that point because you were so dizzy. But of course, in my mind, I'm connecting that with you can't walk. You know? Things aren't going to work anymore. And I don't think your dad and I talked about any of that on the way home. I worried that there was an undiagnosed spinal injury, and that you would have to fight with a wheelchair your whole life. I worried that you'd have migraines and puke all your life. Which you do. That's true. That was one of the main lasting effects of the accident. We got to the hospital, and they did a CT scan, and found that I had what's called a contrecoup lesion in my brain. And I wasn't really able to walk for a couple of weeks. And then I didn't get back to school regularly-- I think I was out for like a month. So that first night driving home after the accident just led to hundreds and hundreds of nights like that, where I was up all night sick. I started getting really bad migraines. I would always get them, like, two, three, four in the morning. I would wake up and I'd see these sparkly lights kind of around the edge of my field of vision. Then there's a little bit of, like, TV v static that gets bigger and bigger over the course of an hour until I'm blind. And then it's like worst-- pain so bad that it makes you throw up. And that whole thing is like a big cluster [BLEEP]. Because you'd come in the bedroom and bend over me and say, I'm seeing those lights, Mom, I'm seeing those lights. I do remember, as a mom, in the middle of the night when you would wake me up about that, feeling like a good mom. Because I just got up. You know? And I just remember as a kid when I was sick, a lot of times people didn't have time for that. What do you mean? Here's a blanket. You know? Go get a puke bowl. And kind of being sick by myself. So I know I do remember feeling good that I wasn't going to be that kind of mom. It was nice of them to get up with me like that. But after a while, it just started to seem pointless, because there wasn't really anything that they could do to make me feel better. My mom says when you do get up to take care of kids in the middle of the night, it can feel like you're the only people awake in the whole world. And that was true the first night, when we drove through the Upper Peninsula. And it was true for all the nights my mom got up with me. And it's true now that I have to deal with it all by myself. Jane Feltes. Our program was produced today by Robyn Semien with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sara Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who comes to me every week as I'm preparing the credits of the program and pleads with me-- nice today. Be nice for the microphone. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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OK, Sarah. So it's ten to 1:00 on a Friday night in November, and we're sitting on your porch. And it seems pretty quiet. It's not that bad. One of the producers of our radio show, Sarah Koenig, moved to a college town because her husband got a job teaching there. And by day, her neighborhood is like a college town that you would see in an old Hollywood film. Beautiful professors' homes built in the '20s and '30s. Tree-lined streets. Gardens. But by night, we'd been on her porch for five minutes when-- They seem drunk. These kids seem drunk. This couple here, they're sort of staggering a bit. I think he's like holding her up or something. It's nine students walking down the middle of the street. Happens all the time. It's noisy, right? It's like it doesn't occur to them at all, I think, that there are people just in these houses trying to sleep. And I kind of remember being that way in college, too, actually. Yeah, I do too. Six minutes later, there's another group of drunk students. One tosses something onto a lawn. Can you guys pick up your trash, please? Can you pick up your plate, your pizza plate, please? People live here. They pay no attention. Five minutes after that, we hear this clattering from the alley that runs next to Sarah's house. Whoa, what was that? Actually, I'd kind of like to know what that was. What's going on? We run down the alley. Two college boys run away as they see us coming. Don't go back there, you could get raped, they yell to Sarah. See, OK. They get threw somebody's trashcan, or like drop kicked it up in the air. 12 minutes after that, from the other direction, we hear a scraping and a loud rumbling, I guess. That's somebody's property. That might have been a sign, actually. I don't know how many street signs you need to hear dragged through your neighborhood before you can recognize the sound it makes from all the way around the corner, but apparently my colleague Sarah has seen whatever that number is. We go to investigate and find two guys. So just describe what you've got here. A stop sign. Nice big pole on it. A stop sign. That's kind of a big thing when you see it up close, isn't it? Sorry. Where did you find that? Like, where does it belong? I don't know. That is a good question. We just found it on a lawn. We found it on a lawn. Oh, you found it on someone's lawn. It was already ripped off. Yeah, it was already [BLEEP]. We just decided, hey, why not make use of it and take it? Of course, this story makes no sense at all. I inform the two guys that I don't need to know their names. Well, in that case, we took it from the corner right there. Which one? Where that car just turned. Pretty sure. Pulled it out of the ground? Yeah, it was cemented in pretty well. Just get a little rocking back and forth between two people, comes right up. Did you guys come from like a house party somewhere? No. We were just hanging out with a bunch of friends, just drinking. Taking some shots. Seems like kind of an academic distinction to me, but. With that, the other guy starts running with the street sign toward Garner Street, which is hard, because it's attached to a seven foot metal pole, and it's heavy. Sarah and I go back around the corner to her front yard. The evening is not over at all. Just in time to spot another student, this one coming out of a garden. Sarah assumes from the bushes back there. I didn't pee. Really? Really? I was just sitting down. He goes. And it's not a minute later that Sara points toward the alley, where there are three girls in miniskirts, under a streetlight, fully visible. Peeing, peeing, peeing, peeing, peeing. [INAUDIBLE] One girl hikes up her skirt. Get back, get back, get back. But they're peeing in my yard. They're peeing in my yard. That's my car, OK, and three feet back is a girl's white ass, peeing. She saw we saw her. She stopped. She stopped. You know, that might be why the plants grow really, really well in that spot, I'm just realizing. Sarah's caught other groups of girls peeing in that same spot. Once she heard a girl say, "This is a good place. I go here all the time." They're so embarrassed. There's like, muffled giggling happening across the street. The college town that Sarah lives in is State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, which this year was named the number one party school in the country by the people who name the number one party school, the Princeton Review. And this is apparently what it means to be the number one party school. From the moment that Sarah and I turned on the tape recorder to the moment that she sent those girls looking for somebody else's yard to pee in, it's only been 34 minutes. It's 1:30 in the morning. The fact that we saw that much mayhem sort of going on, at one corner-- so that means it's, multiply that by, you know, this entire neighborhood and other neighborhoods around-- people are peeing everywhere, garbage cans are getting kicked, stop signs are getting pulled out of the road, people are littering. You know. The Princeton Review chooses the number one party school from online student surveys. 120,000 students at 371 schools around the country answered these questions. "How widely used are beer, alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs at your school?" "How big is frat life at your school?" And finally, "How many hours do you study each day?" Students aren't randomly selected, so it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific survey. But the last two years, Penn State has done very well. It was the number three party school last year, number six the year before that, and nobody argues it is not a very big school for partying. Well, look. We've never said we don't want our students to have fun. The University's president, Graham Spanier, discussed the number one ranking in a faculty senate meeting this fall. The only recording that exist is from a webcast Penn State did at the meeting, so you hear the audio is little sketchy. But still fine. I mean, when people talk about oh, Penn State's a party school, I'm not-- it doesn't bother me at all, actually. I wish we weren't ranked number one. You know why we're ranked number one? Have we talked about this? You know why we're ranked number one? The students vote! It's not like somebody came in here and did an assessment of the place. It's an online, web-based thing. And whenever there's an online, web-based thing, Penn State always wins. We have the best mascot in the country. We probably do. But I guarantee that any online voting for the best mascot in the country, we're going to win that. You know? We're the number one university on Facebook. We're the number one university with Twitter. So when these party school things, some of our students get online and vote? Of course they want to be voted number one. Yeah, Penn State. Then I have to clean up the mess after the votes are in. Because I got all the donors and alumni, and the media I'm calling for comment. The amount of drinking at the school does concern Spanier. He told the faculty that when people ask him what's the biggest problem at Penn State, they always expect him to say money, but the answer for a long time has been alcohol. And he said it's a problem that's bigger than Penn State. Nearly a third of high school seniors across the country binge drink. So it's a bit of a problem that we inherit. But we also have a cultural environment here, an atmosphere that fosters it. Well, today we devote our entire show to the nation's number one party school. Not because it's number one and what happens here is unusual, but because it's not unusual at all. Lots of schools, especially a lot of big state schools, do this much partying. Five of us from our staff went down to State College where Sarah lives to record one football weekend in November. What we bring you today is a travelogue from this place where the rules and norms are probably very different from where you live right now. Its own rituals, its own jargon, its own native dress. We wanted to see what it was all about. Our show today, in four acts. Only three of them actually pre-soaked in vodka. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. This song, by the way, was playing everywhere we went in State College. Thanks, Miley. Act One. I'm Not As Think As You Drunk I Am. Let's start with the drinking, which is epic. The Harvard School of Public Health did a study of what schools tend to have the heaviest drinking, and Penn State actually hits all the criteria that they found. It's located in the northeast, and it has a large undergraduate population-- that would be, in this case, 44,000 students-- a large fraternity system, a nationally-known football team. Now, the fact is that it probably doesn't hurt it's isolated. State College is in a valley nestled between two mountain ridges in a state forest. People here call it "Happy Valley." It's surrounded by farms. You're in the middle of nowhere, a few people said, without much to do but drink. And to talk about this drinking, I'm joined now in the studio by Sarah Koenig. Because Sarah, you recorded these first couple clips of tape. Right. A couple of weeks before you guys came to State College, there was this huge freak snowstorm, and they had to cancel tailgating for the first time anyone could remember because the conditions were so dangerous by the field. But it didn't stop anyone. I saw people tailgating in their yards, on their front lawns. Even in my neighborhood, I saw people under, like, these building underpasses. I went into a parking garage and found all these people on the fourth floor. There's dirty cars everywhere. Concrete floor. It's cold, it's dark. At the end of one row of cars, there were these two tables pushed together in an L-shape tablecloths, and all kinds of food, and a couple of birthday cakes. Whose birthday is this? It's my birthday! It's my birthday! My 21st birthday. Happy birthday! Thank you! And what are you doing on the fourth floor of a parking garage? I'm getting drunk and tailgating. Describe your headgear there. It's a crown with a 21 that's on fire, and it says "Where is the bar?" So who brought all this food? My mom and dad, because they love me, and they're the best. About a half dozen older people were there, too. Her parents and some of their friends. And there were a bunch of other tailgates happening around us, and one couple was having their 40th wedding anniversary. Wow. In the garage? In the garage, yeah. At one point, a women probably in her 50s walked up and handed the birthday girl a red plastic cup. Aw, thank you! What is this? [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Lemonade. Is there alcohol in it? Most definitely. Oh my God! This is the strongest drink I've ever had in my life. They just brought me a really strong alcoholic lemonade. Is that your daughter, are you the mom? No, no. Oh. What's your--? We're parked over there. You just saw that this is happening. Yes. We've got to keep ourselves entertained somehow, right? Watch the 21 year old get plastered, that's the entertainment? Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much for the drink! At tailgate parties, you see just how deeply embedded drinking is in life at Penn State. It's entire families. It's several generations together. It's outdoor, public drinking, which gives you the feeling, when you're there, that the whole world is drinking. Probably because there's so much of it. Penn State now has the largest stadium in North America. It holds over 100,000 people. The tailgates are these huge masses of humanity, spread out as far as you can see, all around the stadium. Starting at eight in the morning, starting really early, which is when these alums got here. They talked to one of our producers, Aaron Scott. So you went to bed, three or four, you got up, and you're drinking again? Hells, yeah. Is it ever too early to drink? Never. Eight in the morning means, by the way, that if it's a night game, they will tailgate for 12 hours, in the cold, in the freezing cold sometimes, before kickoff. I talked to a bunch of alums at a tailgate about what would happen if they weren't allowed to drink at all. : I think there would be a revolt. I think there would be a huge, huge pushback from the alumni that donate a lot of money to this school to say that you can't have alcohol at a tailgate. That's Mark Johnson, class of 1977. : It's just part of the culture. I mean, that's why this school sells 110,000 tickets for every-- you know, just, it's a part of it. It's just part of that tradition. Usually pounding down drinks at eight in the morning can be kind of, I don't know, bad. But the main thing about this kind of drinking, where it's tied in with tradition, and football, and family, and overwhelming sense of school spirit, is that it feels incredibly wholesome. The whole campus feels like a Chevy commercial. Welcoming, people friendly. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] The sense that drinking together is what we do spills over from the football games into the whole weekend. Into the week, too, actually. It's Friday night, it's the night before the football game, outside East Hall, the big freshman dorms. Dozens of kids are lined up for free shuttle buses that are going to take them across campus to the frats and parties on the other side. Two of our producers, Jane Feltes and Lisa Pollak, noticed that all the girls wore these ratty-looking hoodies and jackets over their dressup clothes. Somebody else told them support for this is "fracket," and wanted some girls to confirm that. Have you guys heard of something called "frackets"? Oh, yeah, that's what we're wearing. A fracket, by definition, is a jacket made for frats. It's basically a crappy jacket that's cheap and you don't care about. : Yeah. Because like, they get lost. They get, like, puked on. You don't want that back. You don't want it back. Just lose it. Yeah. Jane rode on the bus with the freshmen. She joins me now. So the reason that they needed the fracket in the first place, is it was really cold that night, and they're wearing next to nothing. All the girls had on pretty much the same thing. Like some version of a mini, mini, mini tube dress, bare legs, and super high platform heels. They all look like cocktail waitresses at a strip club. Did you guys dress like this in high school. Uh, no. We just got slutty after we got into college. : My dress-- yeah, it's pretty short. It like barely covers my, like, tuckus, so. That girl, her name's Chuy, She's from Saudi Arabia. Guess that's the word they use for that over there. Yeah, right. When I met her and her friend Megna, they were already on their second loop around campus. They were kind of drunk and they'd missed their stop the first time. And on this bus, everyone keeps breaking into song. What is happening? This is the drunk bus. Good timing. : Oh my God. Is this the same stop where we found out that we were late? Penn State's administration does a pretty thorough job surveying students to track how much they're drinking. The surveys show that every Friday and every Saturday night, 75% of the school drinks. That's over 30,000 people, an average of four and a half drinks per person. And the students drink those drinks in about three hours average. To put those numbers in perspective, binge drinking, or as it's being re-branded lately, high risk or dangerous drinking, defined as four drinks for a woman or five drinks for a man consumed in just two hours. When you get down into the details of Penn State's numbers, it works out to over half the students regularly binge drinking, which is just a little bit above the national average for college students. The routine at Penn State on weekend nights is that you pregame or preload. That's what they call it when you drink at your apartment or your dorm room before going out. It's way cheaper than buying drinks at a bar. Also in winter, keeps you warm. We heard lots of people use the phrase "beer jacket." And if you went to college long ago, you definitely noticed mostly hard liquor here, not beer. Various sugary vodka drinks of various kinds. Red bull and vodka, one of them. So everybody gets a lot more drunk. To living single, to seeing double. Oh. And what's the triple? Early on one night, I went to an apartment with a bunch of seniors. And they were getting ready and pregaming. They said they usually do five shots in five minutes before they leave the house. There were empties everywhere. That's not bad. Oh, yum. What's in your fridge? Um, water, lemonade, tequila, Malibu, vodka, margarita mix, and cheese. But college students are underage, so a lot, maybe most, of drinking at Penn State is underage drinking. The bars in State College are actually very strict about under 21 drinking. You have to show a student ID. In lots of places they scan the ID. But there are other ways to get drunk. Everybody told us if you're too young for a bar, you go to a frat party. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up, three steps. Why should we let you in this party? Thursday night. This is the front door of a fraternity that asked that I not use their name. Under Penn State rules, nobody is supposed to get into a frat party except members of other fraternities and sororities, and guys on an official university list of potential pledges. There's supposed to be a guest list with names at the door. But in practice, it seems like pretty much any cute girl can get onto that guest list on the spot. Which is one reason they all wear the miniskirts, one girl told us. To help with that. So he has to come with me because I'm wearing his jacket. This particular girl, though, had a guy with her that the brothers did not want to let in. He's important. No, no, no. Are you serious? You're going to leave him all alone? Look at him. He's so innocent. Look at his face. Is he in a frat? Yeah! What frat, though? He's one of my best friends! Come on. What frat is he in? He's my best friend. He's not in a frat, so under school rules, he should not be let in. But the guys at the door are no match for this girl. Yo, dude, sorry. You can go in. Go in, just go in, dude. And another young drinker finds haven. Inside the windows are taped over with plastic trash bags, which gives the whole place the feeling of a seedy underground club. One big room is dark with a DJ and a big sound system, dancing. Another room has booze. The floor of this room is slippery with a layer of muck that is part beer, part dirt, part, you know. There's a lot of flirting. Much of it ineffective. I walked up to one couple who told me they'd been talking for half an hour. Did you know this guy before you came? No. It's not weird. And I'm not trying to get away from him. Why all the people I meet here are weird. Really? Like him. He's really awkward. I don't know. This is kind of awkward. I'm just trying to get her drunk so I can take advantage of her later. That's awkward! I know. I'm working on it. The whole time we were at Penn State, I found myself looking back and forth between two opposite feelings about all the drinking I saw going on. Sometimes it seemed really extreme. Other times it seemed like, so what. Kids drink at college. Most of them get through it. Lots of students said something that was hard argue with. When else are they going to get a chance to do this? Like I was talking to a senior by the back door of the fraternity about this and that. So what's the wildest thing you've seen at a party at this school? Wildest thing? At a party? Somebody stripping completely naked and pretending to throw monkey feces as they were doing it. And--that was me. That was you? That was me. When was that? Last week. Last week? Somebody I was like, yeah, I dare you to get naked. I'm just like, I'll get naked. It was really fun. I mean, you can only do that stuff now, when you're in college. You know? I wouldn't be able to do it six months from now. [BLEEP] it. You know, it's college. It's also not hard to find students who talk about the darker side of all this partying. A senior named Dan was out late one of these weekend nights, not drinking, but watching drunk people and taking notes for a paper that he's writing. He decided to quit his fraternity after his sophomore year because he was falling so far behind in the school work. His frat threw parties not two, not three, but four nights a week, which is typical here. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, huge parties. Something every Wednesday. And then all the other days, something going on. You know, come in from a day of class, and you know, my three or four best friends are all playing beer pong, for instance. It got to the point where I was like, this isn't a good place for me to be to achieve. You know, there are nights that I'd have to wear my headphones to try to study because it would be so loud, and just live in the library most of the time. You know, I've had to cut the circuit breaker on people's rooms before, because it's four AM and they won't turn off their music. And you see fights. You know, I've seen people sent to the hospital for things as petty as, you knocked my drink out of my hand. I saw a kid stop breathing from alcohol poisoning. It's all-- it's amazing, the things that go on there. That it operates legally, I find, is incredible. In the surveys of students done by the school, a fourth of Penn State students say that drinking has caused them to miss class get behind with their school work. 15% say they've been pushed, hit, or assaulted. 7% said drinking lead to an unwanted sexual experience. 6% said they'd gotten into what you would call a real, physical fight. And there are crimes that you never hear of unless you live in a place like State College. Our daughter came into the kitchen while we were in the midst of hurriedly getting everything done and said something to the effect of, Mommy, I want to play in my room. Can you please get that man out of my bed? And I remember having said something to the effect of, there's no man in your bed. And she actually went away and came back a few minutes later. So I guess she went up to check, and she comes down. There is a man in my bed, and I want to play in my room. Would you please get him out of there? This is a long time State College resident named Nina White. And the man on the bed, of course, was a college student who committed a surprisingly common crime in this town. He came to her house drunk, found a comfortable place, and fell asleep. Because of incidents like this, the population at Penn State who seem the most exercised about student drinking right now is local residents who live near the students. They've been organizing and trying to pass new laws. Some of them admit that dealing with so many drunk kids so many months in a row has turned them into something that they are not proud to be. One neighbor, Laird Jones, told me he knows it's driving him a little batty. I don't know if you heard when you came in, but I have motion sensors out there. So I can hear an alarm, and I know which point in the yard they came in, so I can just see what's going on. Glaird lives right in the middle of the fraternities, right on the same block. And he puts up with so much noise, and so many kids kicking in his fence, and drenching his yard with pee, and so many incidents with bloody kids, injured kids, kids who are high, parties next door with hundreds of kids that wouldn't end, then he delivered these all like a series of the macabre one-liners in the most disturbing stand-up act ever. Sample? One of the things you learn here in your yard is if you see a tampon, you have to get a stick and find the condom. That is so gross. I think I'm a lot more callous about human suffering, and I've sort of taken this attitude that the only way they're going to learn is to get hurt. I mean, I was walking home with my son on Sunday, past the frat house up the street. And for fun, they were throwing furniture off the roof. Which is actually kind of fun. It's just, when it all hit the ground, they got out lighter fluid and soaked it and lit it on fire. In a yard full of dry leaves ten feet away from a parked car. And I thought to myself, you know, should I call? Or should I just get my son out of the way let them learn? That buzzing, of course, was the motion-activated sensors pointed at his yard. For now, anyway, most of the students seem to go to classes, get an education, and drink pretty happily. And the people who are learning something, and changing, and making resolutions because of the drinking so far mostly seem to be the neighbors. Coming up-- why delivery guys don't like to deliver Buffalo wings in State College, Pennsylvania. Also-- Thank you, mountain lion. Have we mentioned that the name of the football team is the Nittany Lions? I know a lot of you knew that anyway. 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "#1 Party School." We spent a football weekend at Penn State University to see life at one of the big partying state schools. We have now arrived at Act Two. Act Two. "If God Isn't a Penn State Fan, Then Why is The Sky Blue and White." All of our names today, by the way, are things seen on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and shot glasses in the State College area. One of the ways that the town of State College is actually an unusual, special place, its own little kind of cultural ecosystem, like a little microclimate in the middle of Pennsylvania, is that because of the University, it is in only county in the state whose GDP grew in 2008. It also has the lowest unemployment rate of any county in the state. Part of this prosperity is because the University is growing. Enrollment is up, even during the recession. But one member of our staff, Nancy Updike, spent a few days going around to area businesses, and she found that they have adapted to the very specialized needs of the nation's number one party school. Here's what you learned. Here are six tips for running a business in State College, PA. Six tips, all kinds of businesses, with supporting illustrations. Tip one. Keep up. This is McLanahan's, a sprawling Hearst Castle of a store. It's your basic drugstore- deli- produce market- hardware- underwear- beer pong- stationary- grocery- Penn State merchandise emporium, which over the years has acquired and absorbed the stores that used to be next to it to the point where it's bought up everything it can, and the only way left to expand is to cram more stuff everywhere. And there's always something clamoring for more space. McLanahan's owner Ray Agostinelli says that over and over again, he's had to stock way up on some usually sleepy object that has suddenly become a crazy hot seller. Well, it happened one time with marshmallows. And all of a sudden, all the marshmallows were gone. And here what it was, is that they'd take them to the football games, and they were throwing marshmallows. You said people were throwing marshmallows onto the field? Oh yeah, they were getting pretty dangerous with them. This wasn't too good. And they got outlawed. But the kids would come in and buy all the marshmallows, and we said, wait a minute. We never sold them any marshmallows. What? But just whatever the crazes are, you have to keep up with and be there. And then there are the crazes that never go away. Sex. One of the McLanahan's many frank and non-judgmental offerings is its display right out front that is condoms on top, lubricant in the middle, pregnancy tests on the bottom. Ray takes me into one of the two Penn State merchandise sections of the store. It's a full sensory experience. That's a CD of the school's band in the background. There seven different kinds of car air fresheners with the Penn State logo, pacifiers, a steering wheel cover. Ray, are you ever amazed at something, you never knew that the Penn State logo could be put on it? I just saw a remote control, a TV remote. You put it on here and it will sell. You put it on your microphone, it will sell. In the almost 50 years Ray has been working at McLanahan's-- he bought it from Bob McLanahan 40 years ago-- Ray has seen the Penn State merchandise in his store go from almost an afterthought, maybe one rack of sweatshirts, to being a third of his business. The only downside is-- If Penn State would have a losing season, sales drop dramatically. Oh, is that true? Oh my gosh. You can't imagine. You can't imagine. Ray says if Penn State loses one football game, sales of Penn State merch at McLanahan's go down 20%. Not for a day, for a week. And sometimes even longer, until the next winning game. Which brings us to Marrara's, the dry cleaner up the street. Just about every business owner and employee I talked to said business was significantly down because of Penn State's loss to Ohio State the week before. But at the dry cleaner, no mention of this. Parties happen every weekend, win or lose, and that means some people will end up talking to Roberta at Marrara's, who after 18 years at the store is functionally psychic. You know, if they've thrown up or something like that, they're not going to admit that that's what has happened. Do you have a way of telling if it's-- you're nodding. Yes, I have ways. What is-- Well, if they put it in a plastic bag, the garment's in a plastic bag, and they don't want to open it, I don't want to open it, either. Is that what you tell them, literally? If you don't want to take it out, I don't want to take it out? Right. We won't clean anything that has vomit or animal urine or anything like that on it. In case anyone's wondering, women students usually bring the vomit, male students the urine, animal or otherwise. So second tip. Apply the smell test. Third tip. When it's late, simplify. Every Friday and Saturday night after midnight, when the drink specials at the bars are over, Canyon Pizza starts getting a loud, amped-up line of students down the block. The business model at Canyon Pizza is straight-up, no-frills genius. Slices are a dollar a piece. After 11 PM, it's cheese only. And every time the pretty women behind the counter get a tip, they hit a giant tip gong. Canyon Pizza also delivers until four in the morning on weekends, and the deliveries are a whole separate world, deserving their own business tip. So tip four-- be aware of fists and wings. One of the delivery guys is Alex Moore. He's going on a run in his black Saturn Ion, which was new when he started doing deliveries almost three years ago, but it's taking some abuse after being parked in front of Canyon Pizza and its nighttime crowds weekend after weekend. I'm actually working on a Canyon Pizza video game. Yeah, I'm serious. It's called "30 Minutes or Less." The point to deliver a pizza through all sorts of obstacles? Yep. The point is deliver pizza. You know, you have to avoid all the drunk people, and when they do stuff to your car and stuff, you've got to pay for it. All kinds of-- very realistic delivery driving game. People throw ranch all over my car. I have footprints on the back of my car right now because some kid was jumping up and down on it. You say ranch, like ranch dressing? Yeah. It rots the paint off your car. And people spit all over my car pretty much every night. And yeah. Someone kicked in this window, so it doesn't roll down correctly anymore. Recently some kid broke my jaw. Oh my God, Alex! Yeah. His friend was punching dents in one of the other delivery' driver's cars and I went to chase him down. Some random kid broke my jaw on the way. So I had to have my jaw wired shut for two months. Oh my God. Yeah. So I got stories. One second. Alex stops to deliver a pizza. Actually two extra larges and pepperoni rolls. He says he's never had a drink in his life. Just not interested. Alex is 22. He's studying game simulation and computer programming at DeVry online. Look closely at his hoodie. It's Pac-Man. Pizza delivery has been a good job while he's finishing up his degree. The only food Alex says he doesn't like to deliver is wings. Canyon Pizza has a sister store, Canyon Wings, and Alex says that mysteriously, people don't tip for wings. He says most of the time he gets a dollar or nothing at all. Just stiffed. Which is a bummer. On wings. Yeah. And the only reason I say that is because I had a friend who worked at Damons who delivered wings too, and he got the same thing. A dollar or stiffed. I don't know. It must just be a thing with wings. I really don't know. Tip five. Keep it cheap. In Pennsylvania, beer is only sold in certain stores. It's not sold in grocery stores, and it's not sold in the places that sell liquor and wine. This is just how Pennsylvania does things. It's been this way since the end of Prohibition. So Paul Pletcher owns Pletcher's, one of the beer stores in State College. It's a family business. Paul's father lured him away from teaching middle school math. And over the last 15 years or so, Paul has witnessed a strange trend in student drinking-- the ascendance, and eventual dominance, of light beer. As Paul remembers it, it went from Coors Light to Miller Lite to Bud Light and now-- The most popular beer in State College right now I believe is Natural Light. It's inexpensive and very popular among the students. Natural Light, aka Natty Light, is way beyond "very popular" among Penn State students. It laps every other beer. Even though apparently no one likes it, including the students at Pletcher's who are buying it. It's pretty bad. But you have three cases of it. Well, it's not for me. It's for my friends. Only in college can you show up with a beer your friends know is bad and still be a hero. Natty Light's sole virtue-- this is according to its own customers-- is that it's cheap. $16.50 a case at Pletcher's. No one, not a single person I talked to, liked the taste. It's terrible. This group of students said that at their party and tailgate, they would have the six cases of Natty Light they were buying, plus another favorite drink, Jungle Juice, which is also-- Oh, it's horrible. It's like a lot of Hawaiian Punch, orange juice, pineapple juice, and then two handles of Vladimir Vodka, which is the worst vodka you can possibly get. That's what I lived on freshman year. It's terrible. So basically I'm getting a picture of Penn State that you spend 70% of your time drinking things that you find absolutely repulsive. Yeah. We like the way they make us feel. If there was a drunk button- Did you catch that? He said, if there was a drunk button-- If there was a drunk button, I would buy one. Press the button. Just for the record, if it'd been available, I would have used the drunk button in college. Tip six. Like your customers. There's a bar just up the street from Canyon Pizza called The Brewery. It's a dive. Literally. It's in a basement. The main owner is Ray Rocky who grew up in Pennsylvania and went to Penn State undergrad and grad school. He started tending bar as a student. When I got the business like 17, 18 years ago, we were probably 80%, 85% beer in sales over the bar. Now we're probably 80% to 90% liquor. It's completely shifted. Yeah. Ray says there are many reasons for this tectonic change in student drinking habits. He says beer is at a disadvantage at the University generally since Penn State banned kegs at fraternities, dorms, and tailgates. And Ray says in his experience, promotional reps for liquors like Bacardi or Captain Morgan do a lot more on-site promotions, giving away T-shirts and such, than beer labels do. And the promotions work. They push sales toward liquor. There's also lots of liquor now that's flavored-- more fruit punch than bourbon. And Ray says the 21 year olds he sees in his bar seem to come in already much more used to drinking liquor than beer. It mixes well with soda or red bull, and it's easier to hide. You know, you get a flask of Captain Morgan, you get the bottles, the plastic bottles, I don't know if you've seen them, they're shaped like a flask. You could put one of them in your pocket. You can't carry a case of beer in your pocket. The result of more liquor and less beer, according to Ray? Before, I'd say, 15 years ago, there were more people that got drunk. But now there are less people getting drunk, but of the ones that get drunk, they're a lot worse. So Ray does see students getting what he calls "stupid drunk." But most don't do that, he says. Like a lot of the business owners I talked to, Ray likes that the students are having a good time. He likes the students, period. They're fun to be around. You know? I mean, they're all young. The energy level. You can't help but be in a good mood when you come in and everybody is-- you know, these people don't really have what I would call real problems, you know, in the real world problems, or outside the bubble that is State College. You go into a bar, and people have real issues. You know, they're going through divorces, they're going through problems at work. I mean, talk to any college kid, they figure they've got their life ahead of them, they're going to make big money, they're going to change the world, they're going to do everything they want. The world hasn't kicked them in the ass yet. They haven't been beaten down, whatever you want to call it. Will they get a little mouthier than they should? Sure. But I'd rather have a student that has a little bit of an edge to him than a bunch of people that hate the world, and they're just not happy. Nancy Updike. Act Three. Talk to the Paw. In 2009, the same year Penn State was ranked the number one party school in the country, the town of State College was ranked the safest metropolitan area in the country by Congressional Quarterly. Murder and other serious crimes are almost nonexistent. But as you've heard, of course, that doesn't mean that the streets are quiet. There's so much activity that 47% of the town's budget go into police services, which is high for a town this size. On the Saturday night that we were in town, 24 officers were on duty patrolling in cars, on bikes, on foot. And that's just to cover the town. The University has its own police force patrolling the campus. One of our producers, Aaron Scott, rode along with one of the town's officers for the night shift. Officer Martin Hanes tells me the job's all about repetition. From 10 to 12, students start flooding the streets. From 12 to 2, he deals with loud parties, fake IDs, and underage drinking. 2 to 3 is usually when you get a lot of the DUIs, because the bars have just closed, and a lot more fights. Then 3 on is, I always say it's our victim hour. It's when we go to the hospital, a lot of times. And usually at 4 after is when get our drunk kid in the house. Drunk kid in the house. That's what you heard about earlier on the show, where some drunken student stumbles into, if not breaks into, a stranger's house. Center county 30 to 61. Arrest for public drunkenness and underage drinking have increased 5% this fall. Officer Hanes blames the number one party school ranking, at least in part. Students see it as a national title they have to defend. People are proud, like sports teams are proud. We're number one. The number one drinking school. Let's show them what it's like. So it's 12:30, and the bouncer outside Indigo, the town's biggest dance club, flags us down. He says a guy tried to pass off a license that wasn't his, and then fled into a hotel two doors down. As soon as you pulled up, he took off. The bouncer leads us into the hotel and up the stairs to a bar. He checks the bathroom and says the guy's inside. We all go in and find him standing alone at a urinal. You have ID on you? Why are you trying to pass off somebody else's ID? Sir, I have one ID on me. You saying this gentleman's lying? Yeah. I have one-- I have two IDs. All right. Do me a favor. Put your hands behind your back. We're going to place you under arrest, OK? Are you serious? I'm dead serious. Officer Hanes is generally pretty nice to the students, but because the kid ran and is now lying, he switched over to hardass cop. OK, let's go. OK. For what reason? Presenting a fake ID. Sir, I don't have a fake ID. Now you're lying to me. Officer Hanes takes him out of the hotel and puts him in the car. Then, because the cop car sometimes riles up the crowd in front of the club, Officer Hanes drives down the block and pulls into a parking lot to write up the guy. I'll call them Nick. He's skinny, clean cut, and despite his initial denial, he caves quickly and cooperates. You're not a student at all? No. I'm visiting my cousin. You've visiting your cousin? Where's he at? She is out and about. In the middle of writing the citation, Officer Hanes looks up and stops. That guy right there? Wait a second. A guy in a hoodie just walked into a parking lot on the other side of the alley. To your right here, in about two seconds, someone's going to be peeing in public. Officer Hanes has been at this for three and a half years. He knows where the drunk kids go to pee, where they'll run if they think he's chasing them, the tricks they'll use to hide their open containers. He's like a biologist who's catalogued this species' full range of behavior. And it's an oddly biological job. His arrests revolve around alcohol going into the body, alcohol's effects on the body, and the resulting liquids coming out. With Nick in the back of the car, we drive down the alley and pull into a parking lot on the other side. In the back corner is a large green generator. He's behind the generator. We get out of the car and sure enough, as we approach, a splashing sound. And then Officer Hanes pulls a hunched student from behind the generator. He tells the public urinator to sit by the wall while he returns to the car to finish Nick's paperwork. Since Nick is only one month shy of 21 and cooperative, Officer Hanes says he'll change the charge to disorderly conduct, which means Nick won't lose his license, but will still have to pay a fine. Do you know how much the fine will be, or no? It's set by the judge, but it's between $25 to $300. Can you put any input in there? I can. Would you like to throw a 25 only? Well, that's going to have to take place at the court. I'm on a budget. All right, man. Can I get that ID back? No, you can't. As Nick leaves, he tries to shake hands. Thank you very much, sir. I know. Take it easy, all right? Did you use the bathroom up there and did you wash your hands? Of course I washed my hands. Of course I was faking going to pee. Sorry about that. Hanes tells me avoiding questionable handshakes is a regular hazard of the job. The public urinator also offered his. Sorry, but if you were just caught urinating, I'm not shaking your hands. I think I scared him enough that he splashed himself, and probably splashed his hand. There's a bottle of Purell in the driver's door compartment. But not everyone deals with is so civil. Maybe it's because they're drunk. But you know that deferential respect and anxiety most people feel when dealing with cops? That gets chucked out the window more than you think. A few months back, Officer Hanes was pulling out of a parking deck to answer a call when three girls stopped him, waving their arms and screaming for help. And I said, do you need help or something? Is anything going on? They said, we need a ride. Can you give us a ride? I said, no, I'm not a taxi. I can't give you a ride. You need to call a taxicab. And they started yelling at me, you know, Why can't you give me a ride? Quite being a, you know, a-hole and all that. And then one girl started climbing in through the window. So I yelled at her to get out of car or she was going to be arrested, she got mad and she went to the back of my car when I started pulling in. I heard a loud thump. She punched me around the side. I got out of the car, and she started trying to run away, and her two friends got in front of me and started pushing me back, telling her to run. Center county, 3261. 10-8. By 4 AM, the streets are empty. All in all, State College police issued 80 citations this weekend, including 17 for underage drinking. Not many, if you consider there were tens of thousands of underaged students drinking at Penn State. Officer Hanes told me he only goes after underage drinkers if they give them a reason, like fighting, carrying an open container, or being just sloppy drunk. For a football weekend, it was pretty slow, which Officer Hanes chalks up to the team's relatively poor showing this fall. His job ebbs and flows with the success of the Nittany Lion, which puts him, as an alum and a fan, in an awkward position. He used to root for national championship. Now he prefers a one-loss team. He says it keeps the streets quieter. Aaron Scott. Act Four. A Drinking School With A Football Problem. The big reason anybody worries about all the drinking at Penn State, of course, is it's dangerous. Every year, 1,700 college students across the country die of alcohol-related injuries. The average amount of alcohol in college students' blood when they come into the local emergency room in State College is steadily rising each year. It's now at 0.252, three times the legal limit at which you can drive a car. The head of the emergency department told me that it's a level that normal drinkers can't even usually get to because they'd throw up, fall asleep first. What's interesting, if you ask Penn State administrators about what they're doing to deal with all the student drinking, they're not defensive. I met the head of University Relations with the school, the guy who's responsible for making the school look good to the public, and he was right upfront about it. Yeah, he said, drinking is a terrible problem, and we have tried everything we can think of to fix it, twice. Which is actually more or less true. The school has spent millions attacking this problem. They've tried to teach the students, in all kinds of ways, about safer drinking. They created alcohol-free halls and dorms, they created a task force, there have been town-gown commissions, they've mounted a huge program of alcohol-free late night activities. The weekend we were there, that included comedian Patton Oswalt for free for students, free movies, a Halo tournament. Obviously this hadn't gotten the job done. Sarah Koenig explains why this problem is just so hard for university administrators to fix. The first university president in the country to take on excessive drinking in a very public way was Graham Spanier when he arrived at Penn State 15 years ago. At a time when most schools didn't want to talk about it, he was relentless. Here he is in his 1998 State of the University speech. To put it succinctly, let me say to all high school students. If you are interested in Penn State because of the attraction of binge drinking, please go somewhere else. The message didn't always go down well. A month after this speech, Spanier was booed by students at a football game. A local bar ran an ad depicting him as Hitler, speaking with a German accent and sending storm troopers to raid a fraternity. He got pushback from alumni, a University trustee, even the local ACLU, who all said this wasn't an issue for a university president. After 1998, he stopped hammering the topic so publicly, he says, in favor of working on it more behind the scenes. Ask the people behind the scenes today how it's going, and they'll tell you they're losing ground. Linda Lasalle is the administrator in charge of educating Penn State students about the dangers of alcohol. Some of her work happens in the classroom. And I talk about how our data shows that most of our students actually have five or fewer when they drink. Or we had data they showed that a few years back. And students would laugh at me! They would say, oh, you know, none of my friends drink that little. We're all drinking eight, nine, ten. So this higher level of consumption to them is the norm. For ten years, Linda Lasalle's office has taught kids about blood alcohol levels and alcohol poisoning. They administer a mandatory online alcohol education program for incoming freshman called AlcoholEdu. They did a social norms media campaign aimed at changing students' behavior by teaching them that most students drink less than they think. Lasalle heard the plastic drinking cups they handed out became popular for beer pong. No real success. We're seeing some tremendous knowledge gains from students who participate in the program. Our preliminary data shows that there's no significant behavior change, however. So armed with all these facts about what alcohol can do to you, students here seem to drink just as much as they always did. It's just, it must feel so defeating. It does. It feels very defeating. I have very conflicting feelings about it. Because I feel like there's not very much we can do, that there are so many things that contribute to this problem that are out of our control. And you know, at the same time, I also feel like I want to be able to do something. No college student should ever die because they simply had too much to drink. So I guess I don't have a good answer. I don't know what would really make a difference, especially in this campus. Is that hard for you to say, as someone who has your job? Yeah. It's very difficult to say. This worst case scenario, a student dying, was on everyone's mind this fall, because it happened in September, just a month after school started. Maintenance workers found the body of Joe Dado at the bottom of an outdoor stairwell. Dado had been missing for a couple of days after he left a frat party alone at 3:30 in the morning. It seems he'd been climbing on top of a wall between two classroom buildings and fallen on his head. He was a freshman, just 18 years old. At other schools, the administration has sometimes used these sorts of deaths to push for change. In 2004, after a 19 year old sophomore at Colorado State named Samantha Spady was found dead of alcohol poisoning at the Sigma Pi frat house. The frat house was shut down, and all other fraternities banned alcohol. Alcohol sales were banned inside the football stadium, and her parents started a foundation in her name. MIT, Indiana University, University of Virginia all reacted with sweeping changes after alcohol deaths. Here, the immediate reaction to Dado's death from senior administration was remarkable for its gentleness. Nobody hollered at the students to quit drinking so much. Rather, the message was, if you're going to get plastered, do it more responsibility. Graham Spanier issued a statement telling students to, quote, "Remember our commitment to one another's safety." Damon Simms, vice president of Student Affairs, told students at a meeting that he hoped the entire student body would double their efforts in watching out for each other. Maybe they figured this message had a better chance of sticking, and it did stick. The lesson students have taken is not that Dado drank too much, but that he would be alive today if only he hadn't been alone. My colleague Lisa Pollak talked to freshmen at the student union here. We've become more responsible. Nobody goes home alone anymore. We call each other, make sure we're doing OK. My friends, we all try to stay together a lot more, and don't leave anybody out by themselves late at night. Like even if they say they're fine, you're like, no. You're not fine. OK. This might sound like a really silly question, but did any of you think to say, well, why don't we just not drink anymore? No, we didn't say that. But yeah. It seems to be the perennial lesson of these accidents. After a drunk girl fell from a sixth story window in 1997, this was the story in the local newspaper. Quote, "The death of a Penn State student at a party a week ago may prompt partygoers to keep a closer eye on each other's safety, students say. But, they add, the accident probably won't change their drinking behavior." Penn state students also fell to their deaths in 1993, 1987, 1984, 1983. The averageness of what killed freshman Joe Dado is exactly why this is such a challenge for administrators. To Penn State students, the amount Dado drank that night is completely normal. After questioning his friends, police reported that Dado drank several shots of vodka and mixed drinks in his dorm, the whole pregaming thing, and then got on the shuttle bus with his friends. They went to a frat called ATO, played beer pong, drank four or five cans of Natural Light each. Then they went to Fiji, another frat, where Dado did a couple shots of whiskey. By the end of it, his blood alcohol level was high, but not crazy high. It was a third less than the average for kids brought to the emergency room for alcohol. It was just a normal night. It wasn't like overindulgence. It wasn't like a ridiculous, wild party. The last person to talk to Dado that night was Jack Townsend, a 21 year old junior. He gave Dado those shots of whiskey at Fiji, and he's been criminally charged with providing alcohol to a minor, along with the frat. Townsend was a friend of Dado's. He played soccer with him in high school. He took one of his sisters to the prom. He told producer Lisa Pollak that when he looks back at that night, it's hard for them to reconcile that something so ordinary led to something so terrible. So I thought, you know, nothing of it that night. You know, it's just a friendly drink. Based on the things I heard from the entire timeline of that night, I mean, it reminded me of my freshman days. The same thing, you know? And that you drank even before you go out? Yeah, yeah. I mean, none of that was shocking to me. None of that was really surprising to me. It was typical weekend night for a freshman. I have thought about how, like, how didn't I realize how dangerous some of this stuff could have been before it happened. Because it hadn't really struck you before? Yeah. Because nothing ever really bad ever came from it until now. Joe Dado's case fits neatly into a variety of depressing data sets. Researchers know, for instance, that the bingiest of the binge drinkers are white male freshmen, and even if he wasn't binging, there's the fact that most bad things happened early on in the school year. The alcohol ER admissions here for September are much higher than for the rest of the year, for instance. He drank Vladimir vodka that night, the most widely sold liquor in State College, and was hanging out with fraternity members, who tend to drink more than non-Greek students. Bob Saltz, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, says here's what's counterintuitive about managing drinking on college campuses and why so few are having success. He says that while your heaviest drinkers are of course at the highest risk of getting hurt or hurting somebody else, there aren't that many of them. So you really also need to be worrying about the light and moderate drinkers, who vastly outnumber the heavy drinkers. Kids like Joe Dado, who might only overdo it once in a while. Even though at any given time, most of the students are going to have an easy time of it, no one's going to get hurt, we just don't know who it is who's going to get hurt over a large population. But the concern many administrators have, and some students as well, is that it seems somehow wrong to impose a strategy that's universal, because again, the holdover concept that we really should be only focusing on the heaviest drinkers. Saltz's strategy for reducing risk to the biggest population of students is so simple that I missed it the first time he said it. You reduce risk by limiting kids' access to alcohol. The less alcohol is available, the less kids drink. The less they drink, the fewer bad things happen. In practice, what this means is a police crackdown, and just as importantly, the perception of one. The problem with this strategy has been that there was hardly any campus-wide research to back it up, until now. Saltz is about to publish the results of an NIH-funded study he did at 14 California campuses. At half of them, cops went on party patrols, broke up large off-campus parties. They stepped up DUI enforcement and enforced laws against sales to minors at bars. And most important, they heavily publicized this stepped-up enforcement to students so they would start self-policing, rather than risk getting busted. By the end of the study, Saltz found that fewer kids were getting drunk. The campuses where they cracked down reported 6,000 fewer drunk students coming from off-campus parties, and 4,000 fewer coming from bars. And we were able to show that increased controls on off-campus drinking did not lead to any displacement of those problems somewhere else, which is what people assume, is that if you do a better job at off-campus parties, that students will just go to a park, or back to the dorms, or some other place, and that the level of problems will stay the same. And I was happy to see that that did not happen in our case. Saltz says sprawling university bureaucracies usually aren't well-suited to this kind of tough guy strategy. For one thing, they're run by educators, who tend to think they can simply teach kids to drink less. But when I asked him if there's any university out there that's having real, on-the-ground, sustained success, he immediately says yes. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Their drinking reduction stats are the envy of the student affairs world. Starting in 1998, the school teamed up with the city of Lincoln and declared an all-out war on out of control drinking-- a data-driven, goal-oriented war. Not only did they do the kind of police crackdown Saltz advocates, they attacked the problem from every possible angle, enlisting of bar owners, state legislators, liberal arts students, business students, high school principals. They lobbied to digitize Nebraska's driver's license to stop rampant fake IDs. They tried to knock down the average number of drinks on a student's 21st birthday from 14 to 7. Linda Major, Assistant to the Vice Chancellor at UNL, was the general in this war from the beginning. She says breaking up wild parties in residential neighborhoods was one of the most controversial things they did early on. Also, one of the most effective. And over the course of time, the wild party patrol really went out very few weekends, but people believed that it could happen any weekend, and so behavior was naturally curbed. Major sensed the place felt different, and every statistical indicator backed up that feeling. There were far fewer neighbor complaints about parties. Students reported studying more, getting more sleep. Fewer people dropped out, and there were fewer reports of unwanted sex or driving drunk. Way more freshmen were abstaining from alcohol. And binge drinking numbers sank from 63% of students in 1997 down to 42% in 2007. The frustration for Penn State is that it follows the same research as UNL, and does a lot of the same things. It has as many alcohol programs and interventions as any university in the country. But one researcher told me that the problem is almost no colleges, Penn State included, properly evaluate what they're doing, so they really don't know what works and what doesn't. This work is tricky. There's so many variables that just because something works at one school doesn't mean it'll work the same way someplace else. Still, it's clear Penn State has not done what UNL did-- joined with the town and declared total war. At least not recently. There's no shortage of complaints about the university's efforts. Why won't it ban alcohol from the dorms, or take on the widespread underage drinking, or punish students more harshly, expel them, even, when they break the law? We need to do things differently. Everything that once upon a time was not open to reconsideration needs to be open to reconsideration. Luckily, the one person at Penn State agitating for a complete overhaul of the University's drinking reduction strategy happens to be the guy in charge of them-- Damon Simms. He's the new vice president for Student Affairs, and he's not messing around. When he rattled off a list of recent meetings he's had on the topic, it was almost comical in its scope. The town manager, the editor of the local newspaper, the borough council, student government, town and university police, faculty, fraternity leaders, on and on. Simms thinks being named number one party school and the death of Joe Dado have pushed the issue to some kind of tipping point, and he plans to capitalize on it. He's working on a list of ideas. When we met, it was 72 items long. And there are some sacred cows that need to be reconsidered, too. He says that includes grade inflation, troublesome fraternities, and out-of-control tailgating. Simms will be proposing a bunch of new initiatives early next September, including new sanctions for students who break alcohol laws. Already fraternities have new rules. No more Wednesday night parties. On other nights, photo ID required for entry, and professional bouncers at the door. But what you hear all the time around here, off the record, from local residents, from faculty, from other administrators, is that Spanier really can't, or won't, do anything more draconian about the drinking problem here. Make fraternities dry, say, or curb tailgating. Because politically, he simply cannot risk alienating those secret cows Simms is talking about. Especially alumni and athletics, meaning football, which brings in enormous money. Tens of thousands of alumni come to football games, rent skyboxes-- the only places in the stadium where you can drink, by the way. They arrange their lives around the season. It's a big part of why they give money to the school. Last year, alums and other donors gave $182 million. I asked Spanier if there was something he needed to be careful about here in terms of the connection between football and donors and booze. No. I don't buy that at all. That's just speculation that you hear from people like, oh, that must be part of the issue. They would never go after the alumni. The fact is, what happens with six or seven home games is not the heart of this issue here. We're talking about weekend in, weekend out, every day of the week, throughout the year kind of issues. When this comes up, it's sort of like, well, someone will say, why don't they just make tailgating dry, you know, no alcohol on university property? Is that kind of thing ever even brought up as like a, we just want to signal a culture change? We're just going to make a big bold move and say, we're going to become a different kind of school now? Is that ever on the table? No, I don't think so. I can't envision telling alumni of legal age that they can't drink on a football weekend, and seeing that that's going to change the problem of alcohol consumption among underage students on college campuses. I don't think those two things are really tied together. One bright spot Spanier sees is that there's been a shift at Penn State since he started talking about this 15 years ago. Now for the first time academic deans and faculty leaders and student leaders are wanting to talk about this, saying they want to help. That is a sea change from what we saw in an earlier era. Do you feel optimistic? No. I wouldn't say I feel optimistic. I feel like we just have to keep working on it. Joe Dado's death, he said, won't have any meaning to next year's freshmen. That's what makes universities like any other enterprise. Every year, the student body turns over by the thousands, so every year, he and his staff have to start all over again. Sarah Koenig. Here's something else you need to know before we close this hour. People love Penn State. Students were spontaneously telling all of us how much they love the school, how they never want to college experience to end. They chant the school chant, "We are Penn State," not just in the football stadium-- in the student union, shuttle bus, out of the blue. They say "we are Penn State" in conversation, to make a point. They're part of this club that they're really excited to be part of. This feeling gets its purest expression at football games, where they're a hundred thousand strong, screaming together, but it permeates the school. I went to the game when we were there with two juniors, Megan Koch and Zach Fliegel. Megan's Nittany Lions memories include the night of her high school homecoming, which was also the 2005 Michigan game. She was all dressed up. Her dad was on the cell phone. He was calling me, telling me, you know, play by play what was going on. And he's like, you're not going to believe this, but Michigan just scored and we lost with two seconds left on the clock. And I remember I just hung up the phone and I was like, oh my gosh. I started like crying. For Zach, it's also about the past and the future. On our way to the stadium, we passed some little boys in the tailgate. I used to be that kid, throwing the football around in between cars and stuff. Lions played, Lions won. It was the last home game of the year, and seniors down in the first row were crying. Zach said even a bad game, being in the stadium, in the student section, was worth it. I live for this. I'll probably be coming here until I'm old and wrinkled. Really? So like 50 years from now, where will you be sitting? Point to the spot. Hopefully in WC, WD on the 30, 40 yard line, maybe? Show me the seats where you want? And he pointed a third of the way up, 30 yard line. I went around to his friends in the student section. Nobody hesitated. 50 yard line, skybox, 30 yard line. Look for them. 2059. They all want to come back. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and me with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Aaron Scott, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who never could have gotten into the frat party, except that girl insisted. Look at him! He's so innocent! Look at his face. 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. It was like taking kids out to the jungles of Vietnam and dropping them off, knowing they were going to be shot at. It was as if winning was a foreign thing to them. It's as if it had been bred into them that they could never, ever win. What we're talking about here is football-- high school football. After two seasons, this fall Leo Paur stepped down as head coach of the team at Carbon High School, a couple hours outside Salt Lake City. They have the longest losing streak in the state of Utah. 25 games, nearly three full years of losses. This year they scored only three touchdowns. Last year half the team quit during the season. The team's so bad they're mocked in the hallways of their own school. Yeah. We're definitely-- we got a joke every day, every day in class. Yeah. We're not, like, looked upon. We're more like-- Laughed about. Running back Andrew Salazar, linebacker Damien Olson, and defensive guard Max Meisner have all played on the team three years. That is, they've all been there on the worst team in the state though this entire losing streak. There's a lot of kids out there that think it's funny to make fun of the team instead of support us. Yeah, they tease us. They tease you, what do they say? Just joking around against our rivals and saying, like, how many points are you going to beat us by and stuff. Why do you guys even try, because you're going to lose, no matter what you do. Makes you kind of feel like an outcast. I don't know. Just because you get picked on. Just so I have a sense of what they were like to watch on the field, tell me about some of their worst moments. Tell me about a particularly bad player, bad moment that you remember. Last year against [? Althemont ?] School. Much smaller than Carbon. We would punt the ball. The wind took it naturally. it landed behind my punter. I mean, we lost yardage on a punt. Against Juan Diego last year, we had played ten minutes. And Juan Diego, who were the state champions that year, had not scored against us. That was a great time. And my brother, who was helping me coach at the time, came up and said, this would be the first time we've gone an entire quarter without being scored on. And I said, well, there's two minutes left. They went and they scored four touchdowns in two minutes. It was very disheartening. Four? Four. Yep. Two offensive and two intersections. Ran back. So I told my brother not to open his mouth again when that happens. The real question when you're down this far is, how to keep getting up and going out there, game after game? What do you say to yourself? How do you keep going? How do you keep a team going? For Coach Paur, the answer could not be more straightforward. I always, always had to make them believe the they could win. It was hard. Especially after two years of losing every game. But yeah. I had to make them believe that miracles do happen. That the movies you watch where the young man or the young woman overcomes all of the odds, that that is possible. Even though it's a long shot. Wouldn't it be better, I asked the coach, in a game where the team is totally outmatched, to set a goal that they could actually make? Like let's just get one touchdown on the board in the first half. Something like that. That made no sense to him at all. You have to believe you'll win, he said. And teams do come from behind. Impossible miracle victories happen. Like remember last year's Kentucky Derby? The horse that won was such a long shot that the Sports Illustrated writer assigned to the race never even bothered to find out about him before the race. He'd lost 31 of his previous 32 races. At 50 to 1 odd, he was the longest long shot ever to win the Derby in over a century. Newsday published a preview of the race where it told this horse to just stay in the barn. As the field turns for home, top of the stretch, it's still Join In The Dance with a tenuous lead-- If you watch this race on YouTube-- and you should, it's incredible-- the horse that's going to win is called Mine That Bird. And he is so far behind that halfway through the race, you see all the other horses-- they're in a pack-- and then this huge empty space, and then way behind that space is Mine That Bird. Then he picks up speed, he catches up to the pack, and it's not until the final stretch that he passes every other horse and gets out in front. It all happens so fast that the announcer doesn't even have time to say his name until it's nearly over. Mine That Bird now comes out to take the lead as they come down to the finish. And it's spectacular! Spectacular upset! Mine That Bird has won the Kentucky Derby, that impossible result here! That's how he did it. The jockey, Calvin Borel, said, I road him like a good horse. Coach Paur believes in that, too. Well, that is very applicable. You have to make the kids believe that they can win. So when you do that, and you tell the team that they can win, and then they lose, is the disappointment worse, because they had--? Absolutely not. I mean, what should I tell them? Look, go out and do a good job losing? Go on out, lose, and then you'll feel happier when the game's over? Absolutely not. I'd never do that. I'd be a fool to do it. It works so well, Couch Paur even convinces himself. At the start of his second season he told a reporter, quote, "This is going to be an outrageous thing for me to say, and I'm really cautious, because we lost every game by an average of 37 points last year, and the year before that we only won two games, and the year before that, I don't even know that they won any games. But I think I can contend for the region championship. I really do." Yep. I said that. I believed it at the time. Would you go into each game thinking, like, OK, this could be the one where we would turn it around? Yeah. Yeah, I've always thought that. Yeah. And did you guys have in your head this fantasy of, like, here's what it would be, like, if you would win a game, and here's what would happen? Every day, every day. I actually had one about ALA, when we went into the half. Going into halftime against ALA, Carbon was having their best game of the season. They were just one touchdown behind. You know, I pictured it, you know, we're going to come out fired up, and we're just going to kick the ball, and we'll go down there and stop them, probably cause a fumble down there at our, like, 20, and I'm running it in, you know? And then kicking it off again, and stopping them, forcing a punt. Throwing a nice long ball to somebody down in the end zone, and give a 30 yard pass for a touchdown, and then we'd be up, so then we'd go for two, and we'd get it, and then we'd just keep increasing the points like that. I've always pictured, like, the students walking in the halls, you know, patting you on the back, being like hey, you know, nice win. Yeah, good game. Saying good job, you know, or whatever. Today on our show, stories of long shots. We have two stories where somebody is up against very bad odds. And each of these stories raises the question, are you really better off believing that you're the miracle team who's going to come out from behind, that you're going to defy all predictions, that you are Mind That Bird? Act one is about somebody battling the biggest state in the country and its governor. Act two is about somebody battling a house and his own father, which in a certain way is a lot harder. Stay with us. I met Don Cronk inside San Quentin State Prison. He was serving 25 years to life with the possibility of parole for first degree murder. By the time I met him, Don had been in prison for 27 years, and had already gone before the parole board six times. Each time the board turned him down and declared that he was unsuitable for parole because of the seriousness of his crime. The commissioners even commended him for his accomplishments and his perfect record in prison, but they denied him parole. That was until his seventh parole hearing. OK, Commissioner Eng, we're back on record. This is tape from Don's parole board hearing. On November 18, 2007, the commissioners found Don suitable for parole. --is suitable for parole, and was not-- I didn't know that she had said it. Don Cronk was stunned. That's right where they usually say "not suitable." And when she said it so quickly, I didn't hear that she said "suitable." And she's reading on and on, and no indication in it. So I looked at my attorney to see if-- you know, I expected to look at him and he'd have thumbs up and smiling, and he was flabbergasted. And so I couldn't get any indication from him what she said. And so she went on to read for several minutes. And then when she got done with that part, she went on to speak about my suitability and what was going to happen next. And that's when it hit me, and I just broke down. I just sobbed. The officers got me a box of Kleenex. You know, for almost 27 years, I've been waiting for this. And it's kind of unbelievable. So I was in shock, essentially. I didn't really hear anything else she said. And then it was over, and I was leaving. I was walking out the door. Almost a free man. The operative word here being "almost." In California, after the parole board recommends for release, there's a 120 day period. During that time, the parole board staff in the state capital verifies everything in the inmate's record, their behavior while they've been in prison, and where they would work and life if they get out on parole. On the 121st day, their file goes to the governor's desk. The governor then has 30 days to either approve or overturn the board's recommendation. For Don, that meant he would learn his fate on April 11, 2008. It was hard to get a read on Don's chances. On the one hand, he'd been the very definition of a model prisoner. He'd taken college classes and earned an associate's degree. He was enrolled in a program to become a certified drug and alcohol abuse counselor. He worked in the chapel and didn't have any writeups from violence or bad behavior, and he had a positive psychiatric report. Even one writeup for smoking a cigarette just one time in three decades can keep you from getting parole in California. On the other hand, the statistics we're not on Don's side, and he knew it, Of the 6,000 lifers that go before the parole board each year, Don was one of only 3%, about 200 prisoners, found suitable for parole. Of those 200, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would reverse 75% of the parole board decisions. So in the end, only 50 prisoners a year would actually be released. Schwarzenegger's predecessor, Governor Gray Davis, was even more severe. He overturned 99% of all paroles recommended by the board. Don had seen other lifers who had been found suitable by the parole board, guys whose records were as clean as his, get their hopes up only to have their parole denied on the last day by the governor. I recorded this next conversation inside San Quentin in early January, two months after the parole board found him suitable to be released. Don's a white guy in his earl 50s, neatly kept with a close-cropped beard, receding hairline, and wire-rimmed glasses. I'm fully aware that the governor, you know, this doesn't mean I'm going in April. And I'm aware of that. And so you, again, it's kind of like going to the hearings. You keep that hope, you keep that prayer, but you temper it with reality. You look at the statistics, and they're not good. They're not good. And so you're trying to balance all that, and then carry on your normal routine, your normal life. The first maybe even two weeks, it hadn't even sunk in. But I'd be in my cell now, and I'd be watching television, and I wouldn't be having a thought about it, really. And then I'd see something, and it would trigger that, and it was almost like I was given a shock. And I was like, oh. I could be doing that. I could be doing that soon. Does it make it any more difficult to be incarcerated once you know somebody's found you suitable? What I've noticed, the biggest thing I've noticed is, and it was almost like turning on a light-- I've become intolerant now. For some reason, the meals I've been eating for all these years, and the noise, and the smell, and the lines, and all that-- suddenly, I've just become aware that this is crap. This is no way to-- how in the hell have I been doing this all these years? Some of the things that happen in prison is just mean or ridiculous, doesn't make sense. Terrible. It's terrible. I don't know how I've lived like this. And it's not over yet. I understand that if the governor denies me, it's not personal. He doesn't know me. He himself isn't saying, well, that Don Cronk, I'm not letting him go. It's not. I'm just a number and a statistics on a piece of paper. And whatever the political wind is that day, I'm either denying him or I'm letting him go. That's really it. And even if it's a denial, he doesn't know. It's, I'm a life inmate. I committed a murder. We're either releasing him today, or we're not. The governor assesses each of these cases individually. This is Justice Peter Siggins. He was Governor Schwarzenegger's legal affairs secretary from 2003 three to 2005, and he counseled the governor on hundreds of these parole decisions. I ran past him Don's theory that these decisions have nothing to do with the merits of the cases, that they're political decisions. When I was legal affairs secretary, and people used to say to me, well, the governor is responding politically, and you are being political about a decision to keep a prisoner in prison-- part of a governor's job is to be responsive to the constituents who elected him. The fact that the governor thinks a lot of people would be upset if this person got out of prison-- it is a governor paying attention to the preference of a large constituency of California. And that's what governors do. We generally did parole consideration matters every couple of weeks. I'd meet with him once every couple of weeks for that purpose. And a typical calendar would be anywhere between 12 and 20 cases at each sitting. And he and I would sit down and discuss every case, yes. I can say that I don't think Governor Schwarzenegger, and certainly I didn't, I don't think we entered upon the responsibility with a predetermined inclination to go one way or the other with these decisions. The governor was given the power to overturn parole board decisions in 1988 by California voters. It was the same year as the Willy Horton controversy, where the governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, was blamed for a convicted murderer getting out of prison on a furlough program and committing assault, armed robbery, and rape. California's law was intended to hold the governor accountable in this kind of high profile case. It later became a constitutional amendment, though no one knew how often the governor would reverse a parole order. I don't know that anybody gave that much thought, seriously. I don't remember a huge concern over the passage of the law at the time. Jeanne Woodford worked at San Quentin when the law went into effect, and became warden of the prison in 1999. In 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger made her the head of the California prison system, which she did for two years. You know, I don't know that inmates believed, or even practitioners believed, that the governor would reject as many cases as they did when it initially passed. I remember some concern, but still people believing that there would be a fair process. It just didn't turn out that way. It ended up where governors were turning down just every case. Woodford agrees with the prisoners on this issue. She thinks the governor should listen to his parole board. It costs the state over $100 million a year for the parole board to thoroughly review each case, and it finds very few lifers suitable for release. So should we be afraid of Don Cronk? How bad was his crime? In 1980, Don was 25 years old, and a pretty normal guy. He was living in Sacramento and working as a service manager in a furniture store. What I did-- I was a young man and I was introduced to cocaine. And I liked it a lot. I liked it a real lot. Now, I say that because I had tried almost every other kind of drug. I'm allergic to marijuana. I don't like alcohol. I'll drink it, a few beers, but I do not like that drunk feeling. Crank is too intense. Heroin makes you sick. LSD is a recreational thing once in a while when you were a kid going to concerts with Mickey Mouse ears. Other than that, I didn't really have any fascination with addiction, so I thought I was fine. When I was introduced to cocaine, I instantly fell in love with it. And, because at that time, cocaine was very expensive, and guess who was doing it the most? Wealthy people. So I associated it with the Porsches and the people like my boss, millionaires, doctors. That's who was doing it. And so I thought, this is great. Then I was told it wasn't addicting. Then I started dealing it, and getting deeper away from the beautiful people into the ugly people. And I met some associates, like-minded. Two of them were ex-felons. I wasn't an ex-felon. But they were charismatic. They were just not bad guys, really. Long story short, we ended up using more than we were selling. Now we owe the connections and the dealers. And that's not good. And so my new found friends had done armed robberies in the past, and so hey, we could do some robberies. So we did a couple robberies. And no one was hurt. We got some money and all that. And then the night of the crime that I'm here for, it was to be a robbery. And we had some inside information, there would be a lot of money and jewels. And long story short is, we were going to this man's home. Wait for him. He would come in. We'd tie him up, take his briefcase and the money and leave. We had the masks, we had the tape, we had the whole nine yards. Well, we were going to have the element of surprise and surprised him as he came in. But it didn't work that way. He got in, and when I walked out of the kitchen and saw Mr. Allen standing in the open door, my mind was going, how the hell did he get in here? Because we had a warning system that was supposed to give us the alert so we could hide and get in position. He's standing there, and while my mind is like-- I'm shot. It was that he emptied the gun that quickly. And next thing I know, I'm on the floor. I'm in the corner. And I reached in my pocket, and shot right through my coat. He died instantly. Unbelievable. I couldn't do that again. I couldn't re-enact that. Seconds. it all took place in a few seconds. And you can't undo it. It's just horrible, addicted thinking, immature thinking, selfish thinking, greedy thinking. Nobody else mattered but us. But was the intent or in my mind to murder somebody? No. Even in that state, I wouldn't have willfully or deliberately gone that far. And so it's just a horribly unfortunate turn of events that I'm responsible for. I caused it. I'd love to have the governor's ear for 20 minutes. I really think if he sat down across from me and we could just talk, and he could question me, and he could see the change-- you know, they look at us on paper, black and white. Well, it's just like reading the newspaper. You wake up this morning, you look at the news, and there was a crime committed. Oh, a shooting in Oakland, someone died. And it may tell about it, and you think, oh, that's horrible. That's terrible. They ought to catch that guy and put him away. Well, that's what my newspaper read 27 years ago, but today they're reading it and it's just like it just happened. Oh, this guy did that thing. Oh, he shouldn't be released. But it was 27 years ago. I've paid. I've done all I can. I can't change those facts. As the 150 days of review pass and Don gets closer to his April 11 date, his anxiety grows. He tells me he has hallucination-like dreams where he wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of a phone ringing, imagining it's the phone call telling him he's been approved for release. He sees it as just another sign from the universe that he's getting out. He tries relaxation and breathing techniques to fight the constant tension. Throughout all of this, Don's main support is his girlfriend, Kathleen. We started out as friends, and it evolved into a deeper, deeper, deeper relationship. Kathleen met Don 18 years ago while visiting a friend in San Quentin. Since then, her continuous presence in Don's life actually strengthens Don's case as a candidate for parole. The review process takes into account stable relationships, and Kathleen has even written a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger on Don's behalf to show he has a place to live and emotional support if paroled Like everyone in Don's life' Kathleen knows the odds are against the governor letting him out. But she can't stop herself from imagining what his first week on the outside would be like. I'm going to have a bunch of food. I'm going to ask him many questions. I'm saying, dinner's ready, whatever. You know? Did you have a particular thing you want to eat fine? Otherwise-- in other words, I think he's going to be so overwhelmed that I'm not really giving-- I'm not asking him what do you want to eat, or what do you want to do. I'm just telling him. That way it's one less thing that he has to do. He's going to be overwhelmed enough. I'm going to say-- you know, it's like somebody's on rote. I'm going to say, OK, no. You sit here. Come on. We're having this. And then as he calms down and gets used to everything, then he can say, you know, I really want some barbecued chicken. Great! On Don's 149th day of waiting, the day before the governor issues his decision about Don's parole, I visit Don in the chapel. He's visibly excited and nervous. 27 plus years of prison could be just over with the signing of a pen. Just like that. So you go from here, and they just-- now you're there. That quick. You know, there was like a 12 year period when no one was going. No one was going. Didn't matter who you were, what you were. But now this last, I'd say, 18 months, almost every guy I know is gone. I don't know. I'm spiritual. I believe God's hand has been on all this. And this is, I don't know. This is, I think it's going to happen. I just think it's going to happen. It's just this sense that I'm going to go. And we'll find out tomorrow. The next day, Friday, April 11, 2008, I drive to San Quentin. An assistant to the warden, Lieutenant Sam Robinson, is the one who gets the faxes from the governor's office, and he's the one who delivers the news to the prisoners, good or bad. He's waiting for me in the warden's office, and I notice some papers turned face-down on his desk. How you doing? You want to know or you want to be surprised? Oh my God. You got it. Did it just come? Mmhm. About an hour ago we received the notification from the warden in regards to Mr. Cronk's board parole hearing in which the board granted him parole. The governor has reversed the board's decision, and at this time we'll be going inside and delivering the news to Mr. Cronk. God. I don't know. My face is not a good face. I don't lie well. I know. That's why I was saying. Do you want me to let you know, or? Well, first just your voice sounded a little optimistic, and I thought maybe, maybe. that there was something in the tone of your voice. Think they're all listening and waiting? Yeah. The guys were calling me earlier today saying, hey, you heard any word on Cronk? You know, with the hope that one of their brethren is going home. We're walking down to 371 North, which is Mr. Cronk's cell. Hello? Mr. Cronk? Yes? How are you? Well, I don't know. I've been sick to my stomach all day. Well, here's the word. I can tell because it's too thick. I can tell because it's too thick, he says. If he were to be released, Lieutenant Robinson would just be holding one sheet of paper, not a half dozen, like he is. Yeah. What can you do, you know? But I thank you for coming by. Nancy, how are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm disappointed. Very disappointed. But what are you going to do. You know? It's just been-- if I'd have found out early this morning it would have been-- but we've just been all but throwing up all day. You know? And the later it got, the worse they knew the news was, so. But it's been, I'm exhausted. I'm drained. And I just got to shut down for a minute. I just want to be left alone, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I really just want to be left alone. A week later, I ask to go back inside San Quentin to see how Don is doing. He no longer looks like a man about to be free. He looks like a man in prison. He's gray, deflated. He tells me he can't believe how high he let his hopes get in the last few weeks against his better judgment. I was feeling almost giddy. Like, hey, this may really happen. This could really-- it should happen. You know? There's no reason why it shouldn't happen. You know. Then you add the governor. It's his last go-around. The state's in budget crisis. You know, overcrowding, the Feds are knocking on the door. I mean, you look at all these elements and you think, you'd be a fool not to let a guy go that the board's saying go! You know, save them 40 grand a year, or whatever. But so I talked myself into it, that I was going home. I knew better. But I set myself probably the last three weeks. I wanted to believe it that I felt that I was going to go. And then Kathleen. You know, I just-- my main concern was her. And so even though, like, she wanted to go buy things and get things prepared and ready, I would always say, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't do that yet. Let's wait and see. You know, the odds are way against me. So she didn't go too far out there. But in her heart, of course, she was already seeing the next day, you know, in our future. But when we were able to get together and see each other-- I called the visiting room and I told the visiting room officer what had happened. I had said, you know, listen, by the way, I was denied parole by the governor. And I said, look. If Kathleen comes, if she breaks down, or if I break down, if we're crying or if she's a little clingy for a few minutes, there's nothing wrong. It's just this news. And sure enough, when Kathleen came, as soon as she got in, as soon as I took her in my arms, she just, I had to hold her up. She just broke. She just sobbed. But I really thought that was a kind act. They could've said, well, we don't care. The rules are the rules and you get two seconds and that's it. Don says that back in 1984, when he first got to San Quentin, he could barely hold it together. San Quentin, he says, was like Vietnam back then. It was violent, with stabbings and shotguns going off all the time, and he didn't see how he'd last. But emotionally, he says, this year was harder. it wasn't easy for him to get and keep a perfect disciplinary record, never to have one fight, or even one incident, in 27 years. He followed the rules. He did everything they said he should. Why put him through the charade of doing that, he asked? Why put him in front of a parole board over and over, having them examine his record, if this is where it leads? Why have the board? Why have those experts trained in law enforcement and all different sectors put their best effort forward? They don't grant parole often. So for them to do so, this must be an exceptional case. And then the governor takes it and denies it. So what's the point? You know? Well, then, what was all that about? Why don't we just go to the governor? Normally for lifers like Don, the next step is simply to wait, go before the parole board again, and hope for a better outcome the next time. But Don got amazingly lucky. In August 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of another lifer, Sandra Lawrence, saying that the governor could not deny parole to someone simply because his or her original crime was so terrible. Life with the possibility of parole, the court said, means exactly that. There has to be a real possibility for parole if a prisoner can show he or she has been rehabilitated. Don's case was like Sandra Lawrence's. The governor had written that he was reversing Don's parole because of the seriousness of his crime. In January of 2009, Don was brought to a courthouse in Sacramento, the county of his original crime, where a superior court judge said his case was exactly like the Lawrence case. She read the law and said, "This man fits this perfectly." And then the attorney general just said, the woman, Heather Heckler's her name, and she just started to make a case, and she just said, "We don't have anything." The attorney general admitted, had to admit to her, we don't have anything. The governor had nothing and we don't have anything either. And the judge said, well, why are we here then? Because we just disagree with Lawrence. And she goes, so you're here because you disagree with current law. And she said, yes. The judge said, well, I'd like to close this hearing. It was over! It was over. And we won. Three months later, April 13, 2009, a year and two days after the governor reversed the parole board decision, Don was released from San Quentin. In January 2010, Don's been out for eight months. He and Kathleen are living together and seem happy. He was doing construction work at a mausoleum near San Quentin and his commute every day took him over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. At a certain point at the top of the arched bridge, he could see the prison where he lived more than half of his life. It was always emotional. "My family in there," he told me one day when we took the drive together. "They're still in there." Nancy Mullane. She's writing a book called Life After Murder and putting together a two-hour radio documentary on other lifers in Don's situation. Her reporting was funded by the Soros Justice Media Fellowship. She and we repeatedly contacted Governor Schwarzenegger's office, inviting his comments for this story, but didn't get a response. Coming up-- a story where no one is going to mention the Vietnam War in some random, passing reference. I know we're two for two stories so far. We've got one more shot in today's show. We can do it! We can do a Vietnam reference-free story, I swear. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. Several years ago, while I was walking through my father's kitchen, I noticed a beetle dying on the countertop. "Hey," I said to my father, who was sitting a few feet away at the kitchen table, doing something on his computer, "there's a beetle dying here. "Mmhm," he said, without taking his eyes off the screen. I walked by again later and noticed that ants were streaming out of a dark little groove in the windowsill above the kitchen sink. "Hey, it looks like you've got some ants living in your windowsill," I said. "Might want to caulk that up or something." "Yep," he said again. A few hours passed, and then I noticed that the ants were trooping down past the sink and over the Formica to where the dead beetle lay. Before long, the ants had dismantled it entirely and were carrying the beetle piecemeal back into the windowsill "OK Dad," I said. "Now the ants have chopped up the beetle and they're toting it into your wall." "See?" he said, without looking up. "The system works." In the years my father has owned this house, a small brick ranch in central North Carolina with small, lightless rooms, entropy has been his handyman and groundskeeper. When my family first moved here 30 years ago, the surrounding acres held a horse pasture, a flourishing orchard, a scuppernong arbor, a vegetable garden, and a large, healthy lawn. The average person would have been pleased to luck into a piece of land so well-tended. But according to my father's philosophy, the garden and the rest of it were troublesome. They required mowing, pruning, fertilizing. So my father worked his "system" on these difficulties, And in time vines strangled the fruit trees, the grape arbor rotted and collapsed, and the pasture became a forest of scrub saplings. The burden of their maintenance was unshouldered for good. My father's campaign of deliberate neglect got into full swing after my parents divorced when I was six years old. He stopped mowing the lawn. He cancelled garbage collection, preferring to burn the household refuse in the driveway. Nonflammable junk, derelict hibachis, spent brake shoes, crates of rusted wood screws filled the garage so densely that you wouldn't want to set foot in there without knowing the date of your most recent tetanus booster. On summers home from college, my brother and I would try living in the house, usually with girlfriends, in the hope of making the place feel like a home. Our relationships usually ended after these little experiments in cohabitation, and Dan and I learned that it was fruitless to hope too grandly about transforming the place. And also that it was best to be careful about whom we exposed to the house. After Dan and I left home for good, the house decayed speedily. The brush grew denser. The furnace broke and my father declined to repair it for the better part of a decade. Year round, a stack of pine logs stood in the center of the living room floor, shedding bark and teeming with insect life. I stored a couch at the house one time, and when I went back to retrieve it nine months later, a skein of ivy had crept in through the window and wrapped itself around the armrest. Once I stopped by the place and saw what appeared to be a family of minnows swimming in the toilet. The house's decline was so depressing to my brother and me we began avoiding the place entirely. In my 31st year, after a decade of moving from place to place, I decided to go back to live in my hometown. For years I'd nourished a fantasy of building a home of my own, and my mother, who owned a couple dozen acres across town, had agreed to sell me a sizable plot. It was to be the opposite of my father's house. A timber frame post and beam house with cathedral ceilings, plenty of windows and skylights, and a minimum of interior walls. But it would be many months in the building, and my father, who was teaching in Europe at the time, suggested that I move into his house in the interim. My father had remarried and for the last five years, he'd been living with my stepmother 45 minutes away. I didn't relish the idea of living at the old house, but it would only be for a few months. "And when you get back," I told my father, "maybe we can work on fixing up the house." "Yes," he said. "I'd like that." I'd seen the place in worse shape. The wood pile was now gone from the living room and the furnace had been replaced, though the garage was still impassable. My first week back, I ventured out there, and a possum spring from behind a pile of garbage and hissed at me. I scampered back into the house. The first time I ran the bathroom faucet, a moth fluttered from the drain. The grass needed mowing though the yard was a good deal smaller than it used to be. Much of what had once been lawn had become a young forest of junk trees-- sweetgum and rangy loblolly pines-- were, in turn, being choked to death by a rapacious wisteria infestation that spanned a good half acre. The weeds rose past my knee. The'd evidently gotten the best of my father's lawnmower, which was resting in the shade of a holly bush. I went to the hardware store bought a new one, a shiny Briggs & Stratton with an earnest red finish. Mowing was slow, unrewarding work. I could make only a foot or two of progress at a time before the weeds wound around the blade and choked the engine off. Rotten tree limbs lay buried in the thatch. I plunged the mower into tussocks of thistle, hip-high. I tangled with great bullwarks of honeysuckle. Sometimes the mower would shriek and shutter, which meant I'd found some forgotten artifact in the lawn. I laid bare bricks, axe heads, an old rusted ratchet set, a rotting telephone pole, shreds of T-shirts, shards of a jelly jar I remembered drinking from as a kid. The lower blades flung a constant hail of found object shrapnel in my face. I shut my eyes and loathed the lawn and loathed myself for coming back to this place. A few days later, my brother stopped by the house to show me his new pickup truck. "It's a bad ass truck," he said. "Four wheel drive. It's got a carriage-welded class four trailer hitch." He repeated this phrase like an incantation. "Carriage-welded, class four, trailer hitch." We opened a couple of beers and walked around the house. I was already slipping into the old trap of imagining the house's potential, and I made the mistake of mentioning this to my brother. "Think about what you could do with this place," I said. "All you would have to do is knock down about 60% of the walls and put in some new windows. Maybe make an addition out of the garage. This could be a fantastic place to live." My brother nodded. "Yep," he said. "I guess the first thing you probably want to do is go ahead and drop a nuclear bomb on it, for starters. You know, when dad dies, we're going to have to haul a huge dumpster out here and basically throw the whole place away. What you really need to do is bulldoze it, subdivided it, run a cul-de-sac through here. It'd be a cash cow." Then we went and sat in my brother's old bedroom, which was crowded with mail crates full of extension cords and dead tennis balls. He said, "I sure do hate this place, but I guess, in a way, that's a good thing. I mean, it was hating this house so much that made me go out and get houses of my own." My brother is a real estate lawyer. He owns a nice craftsman bungalow in an adjacent town. He also owns a big Edwardian mansion with leaded glass windows and a slate roof. He also owns a couple dozen other houses, and he's always buying more. He talked a while longer about how much he disliked the house, then he paused and looked up at the ceiling, which was covered with adhesive, glow-in-the-dark stars. "I put those there," he said, as though it surprised him that there'd ever been a time when he cared enough about this house to lavish glow-in-the-dark stars on it. He got a contemplative look, and I waited for him to say something heartfelt or hopeful. But he looked me in the eye and said, "I just don't think anybody has any business owning a vehicle that doesn't have a carriage-welded class four trailer hitch." Strange that my brother should've mentioned the possibility of my father's dying, because five days after he stopped by, I got a grim email from my father, who was still in Europe. The subject line read, "The cancer appears to be back." Four years earlier, my father had learned he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which he had been able to beat into remission after six unpleasant months of chemotherapy. We'd been hoping he was rid of it forever, but the day before I got the email, he checked himself into a hospital in Croatia because he was vomiting blood, and the doctor noticed a suspicious obstruction in his stomach. At the house, spring was deepening into summer, and this was already a bumper year for bugs. I was pulling deer ticks off me about as often as I was brushing my teeth. I was funding them between my toes, behind my ears, all over my head, and worse places. I feared for my father's weakened immune system, and I thought the yard would need more beating back if you wanted to walk across it without risking a snake bite or Lyme disease. I decided to hold a work day. I called up my stepfather. We used to fight a good deal in my teenage days, sometimes physically and spectacularly, but since then we've come to understand each other better, and now he's someone I love and respect as much as anyone in the world. He's the kind of person who doesn't think twice about helping somebody out, even if that person happens to be his wife's ex-husband. When I asked him if he'd come and spend a day hacking vines at my father's house, he said, "Sure. What time?" Then I called my brother "Man, I really hate going over there," he said. "I'll just have one of my guys do it." I said, "OK." But then he said, "no, I'll be there. But let's start early. Like 7 AM." My stepdad showed up first, at few minutes after eight o'clock. He got to work scraping the ivy off the house with a putty knife. My brother arrived at 2 PM, seven hours late. First he filled the chainsaw's oil tank with gasoline, and it took another hour to flush the engine out and get it running again. Then he sawed into a ruined 40-foot cherry tree so firmly swaddled in the vine canopy that even when he'd severed the trunk, the tree just hung there like a toothpick in a spider's web. He hooked a rope to it and tied the other end to his carriage-welded class four trailer hitch. The tree came down with a satisfying thud. I fired up my weed eater, which I'd outfitted with a big metal blade and charged to the vines. Some grew in braids as big around as my waist. I slashed at them. I hacked into rooms of vine, hearts of vine, giant, ventricular chambers, and then I hacked my way back out. The complexes of vine and leafage were huge, and I was tiny in their midst. I felt like a one-man cancer waging a vicious assault against this mammoth organism. My father had returned to town a few days earlier, but I'd explained that the house wasn't quite safe for him to visit. I went out that night to meet him and his wife for dinner. He was leaving the following morning to begin treatment at a hospital in Houston. I told them about the battle we'd waged on his yard that day, and he said, "Don't do anything too drastic with those vines. They provide a nice buffer from the road." Then my stepmother, who grew up in the Midwest, said, "I know that for Southern men, the home place is a big deal. Do you think of a house that way? As your home place?" I'd had a few beers at this point, and I permitted myself to say, "I don't see as a home place as much as a kind of mausoleum of embalmed grief over my parents' failed marriage." It was a cruel, self-serving thing to say, and hardly true, seeing as both my mother and father considered the divorce to be one of the best things that ever happened to them. My father looked very sad when I said it. But I wasn't sorry. I was simply angry at his house and at his illness, because now that the cancer was back, the dream of the two of us fixing up the place was pretty much wrecked. Here's a superficial inventory of repairs and improvements I undertook at my father's house. Replaced mailbox. Scattered fresh gravel on driveway. Replaced toilet. Replaced stove. Fixed refrigerator. Replumbed waste drain under kitchen sink. Bought large pickup truck and hauled about 35 truckloads of garbage to the landfill. Purged garage entirely, washed everything off, and then put everything back that wasn't broken junk. Paid over the ground laminate walls in the living room. Installed two small skylights. Chased black snake from attic. Killed black widow spider. Dragged enormous gob of hair from bath drain. Chopped a cherry tree into firewood. Chased bird from living room. Cleaned gutters. Caulked hole in the windowsill where the ants had stashed the beetle parts years back. My girlfriend at the time called me one day to ask what I was up to, and I talked to her about my father's house. The walls I wanted to rip down, the plan I had for raising the ceilings, and how tinted stucco would probably be a nice way to cover up the ugly brick exterior. She said she got the whole project was a bad idea. Then she got sort of angry and said, "What about the house you were going to build? I think it's unhealthy for you to be putting all this energy into a house that's not even yours. That house is making you crazy." Then I got angry in return, and I said that unless she'd grown up in a house like this one, she couldn't possibly understand what working on it meant to me. Nobody had ever cared about the house. It was a dead place. And if I could bring it back to life, it would mean vanquishing a sorrow I'd carried with me for a long time. This, I told her, was way more important to me than building a house of my own. I got fierce and sincere about it, and finally she said, OK, OK, I understand. I flew to Houston to take care of my father for a couple of weeks. He was well into a six month chemotherapy regimen. His hair and eyebrows had fallen out, and he walked very slowly because the cancer was eating his bones. I helped him move into the apartment where he was to live between hospital stays. One afternoon, he asked me how things had been going in my life. I told him I'd been getting a lot of satisfaction out of working on his house, that there was a great deal more I'd like to do. He nodded. "Perhaps the sensible thing would simply be for you take it over," he said. I thought he might say this, and when he did, I felt a warmth in my chest. I told him that I hoped he'd get better soon, and that we'd still have many years together working on the place. The idea seemed to cheer him. He rose gingerly and walked to the window. A storm was just departing, and rumpled, greenish clouds were sliding east over the Houston skyline. He watched them go and said absently, "Being alive sure beats being dead." After I got back from Houston, I had a carpenter friend over, and together we walked the premises while dreamed to him about the house. "What if we put in exposed beams and then a sunroom off the garage, fruit trees in the yard, a new tin roof, wrap-around around porches, throw in a patio, put up a grape arbor for shade?" He said, "Yeah. This place could be a little palace if somebody wanted to give a damn about it." I called my brother and told him what Dad and I had in mind. My taking over the house and fixing it up right. He went silent for a long time, and he said, "Yeah, I don't really see myself letting you do that." He said the house was his, too, his birthright. He reminded me that the house was on valuable land, and he couldn't comprehend why I wanted to ruin a perfectly good investment opportunity. I said I didn't want an investment opportunity. I wanted a place to live. Then I pleaded with him, then I shouted at him, then we both hung up. He called a week later and said, "The only thing I've been able to think about for about the past week is how good it would feel to beat your face in with a baseball bat." I told him I'd been having thoughts along the same lines, only mine involved a machete. He said, "Look. I thought it over, and if you want the house, it's yours. Take it. It's just not worth it to me. I'd rather have a brother than a piece of property." I asked him if he meant it, and he said he did. "But before you start throwing yourself into fixing it up," he said, "I do think you ought to ask yourself, if Dad passes on, do you really want to be in that house, living with all that old junk, trapped in the house you grew up in?" I rocked back in my chair and looked out the window. I'd washed it only last week, but already, hammocks of spiderweb were drooping in the corners of the pane. The dusk was coming on. Outside the sunlight sifted through the walls of vine and lay on the lawn in a million golden shards. "Just talking to you as a friend," he said. "Take the house if you want to. But I'd think you'd be a lot happier if you just got out of there. If you started fresh in your own place." My room was going dark, and I felt a sadness rise, because I knew my brother was probably right. On a frigid morning four days into my father's bone marrow transplant, some appraisers came by to assess the value of Dad's house for the purpose of squaring away estate in the event of his death. There were two of them-- a short, pudgy man with glasses wearing an Australian bush hat and a woman with a kind, dithering manner. I followed them around the house as they tapped the walls and jotted down the vintages of the appliances. The woman noted the wisteria jungle, which was now a brittle, leafless tangle. "It's a constant battle with that stuff, isn't it?" she said. The man gazed up at the gable end, where paint was flaking off. "Well," he said in a tone of forced optimism, "it's a great location, at least." They tried to take a few more measurements, which was impossible in this particular spot, because a line of scrub bushes was growing against the wall. "So what are they going to do with it?" the man asked me, as though my father were already dead. "Sell it, I guess? Split it up? The land's sure worth something." I had a strong temptation to say something unpleasant to the man, but instead I said, "We'll see." I stood and watched the appraisers leave. On his way back to the driveway, the man stopped in his tracks to examine something half-buried in the lawn-- a rusted tire iron stuck in the frozen soil. "Will you look at that," he said to his colleague. He bent over and started trying to pry it loose with his pink fingers, attempting a little improvement of his own. The moment gave off a rather excessive sort of significance, the wind rustling the dry vines, the winter sky the color of old bone, and the appraiser, whose valuation would come in surprisingly low, straining and grunting over this piece of humble treasure. The tire iron wasn't coming free easily, and the sight of the appraiser's efforts wearied me, so I headed back inside and left him to his work. Wells Tower. A version of his enjoy ran in the Washington Post a couple of years back. He's the author of the book of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It;s out in hardcover and comes out in paperback next month. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Our website, where you can hear all of our old shows for free, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for or program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who explains why he is sticking with Nyquil. Lots and lots of Nyquil. I'm allergic to marijuana. I don't like alcohol. Crank is too intense. Heroin makes you sick. LSD is a recreational thing once in a while when you were a kid going to concerts with Mickey Mouse ears. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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Last resort letters aren't exactly a secret, but most of us haven't heard of them. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum came across them because he's got a Google alert that brings him any news story with the phrase "World War III" in it. He's written about nuclear war on and off for decades. And news came across the Google about a BBC documentary that details what these last resort letters are all about. Ron explained. On every British nuclear submarine, there's a safe. And then within that safe is another safe, and within that safe, the inner safe, is a letter from the British prime minister. And every new prime minister that comes into office is required to handwrite this letter and seal it. And the letter instructs the submarine commander what to do when the homeland has been wiped out by a nuclear attack. In other words, Britain's destroyed. And maybe it's better if you hear this in a British accent. This is from the BBC documentary. The letter tells the sub commander-- --whether to retaliate or not if Britain is already a smoking, irradiated ruin, and they're dead. It's a system peculiar to the British, and emulated by no other nuclear nations. You write, with all due respect for our British cousins, this seems, well, insane. The old-fashioned pen and ink on paper quality of it all somehow makes the system seem like it emanated from a 19th century madhouse. It's so absurd. It's Kubrick territory. It's Dr. Strangelove territory. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, someone writing, "Dear Mr. Submarine commander, I'm dead. Everyone you know is dead. We're all radioactive ashes. Here's what I'd like you to do. Number one,--" Rosenbaum says that the letter poses some immediate practical questions. If the whole country was just destroyed, how would the sub commander know who killed them and where to target his bomb? Does the sub commander have to show his letter to anybody else? If he's the only one reading the letter, what's to stop him from substituting his own judgement for what's on the paper? And it raises a few broader questions. If the purpose of a nuclear deterrent is to convince your enemies that if they destroy you, you're going to destroy them, doesn't it undermine the whole point of having nuclear weapons in the first place to publicize the fact that there's a secret letter that very well might say no, don't retaliate? Which, Rosenbaum says, gets to the moral paradox that is at the heart of all nuclear doctrines. If your nation has been wiped out by a nuclear strike, is there any point in retaliating and killing tens, hundreds of millions of innocent people when the threat to retaliate has already failed? Right. You've been annihilated. Yeah. Your nation's been annihilated. Is there any point in killing millions out of pique, vengeance, or is it justice? You know, I was at this conference of generals and admirals in July, and I actually made a point of asking them, what's the point of retaliation? And they all recognized that this was a difficult question, but they all said that well, to talk about it invites attack. Because you're undermining the threat of retaliation by even discussing your Hamlet-like doubts and dithering about whether you'd retaliate. And so then why have a letter? Why let people know there's a handwritten letter that might say, oh, don't launch the missiles? It doesn't make any sense. Why did they make the existence of this letter known? Ron Rosenbaum contacted the British Defense Ministry and was told essentially that the letter was a fail-safe, almost a formality. If Britain were destroyed, somebody was going to need to issue an order to launch those nuclear missiles. The letter is that order. But of course, this is what they would have to say, even if it's not true, to make the threat seem credible. And you really need all the theatrics of the two safes and the personal handwritten note for all that, you know? And remember, no one knows what's in the letter. It's sealed. Or-- maybe this is something that's maybe better to hear in a British accent. As the BBC puts it-- History will never find out, because nobody knows what's in the prime minister's letters of last resort, and they're destroyed unread by the cabinet office when the premiership changes. Rosenbaum believes that most people, faced with the choice of ordering genocide after the threat of genocide has failed, would not launch the missiles. And one of the few people who've had their finger on Britain's nuclear button, have ever talked about this publicly, a former defense minister named Dennis Healy, says in the BBC documentary-- I realize I would find it very, very difficult indeed to agree to use a nuclear weapon, and I think most people would. Because most of the people you've killed will be innocent civilians. Which brings us back to the question, why do it this way? What's the advantage of a secret that's inside a safe, inside another safe, deep below the surface of the ocean? A secret sealed away where nobody can get to it? Well, Rosenbaum found himself asking a very similar question while researching a very different subject years ago. He spent ten years writing a book about Adolf Hitler. And he said that when he was researching that, some of the evidence that he's heard about-- there was stories, for example, of a hypnotherapist report on Adolf Hitler from when Adolf Hitler was in a sanitarium after the first World War-- that supposedly explained why Hitler wanted to conquer the world. And this was, supposedly, again, sealed away in a safe deposit box in Switzerland. And Rosenbaum has a theory about the appeal of that kind of thing. It allows us to believe that certain truths do exist. There's an explanation for Hitler, but it's locked away in some safe deposit box beyond our grasp. So it gives us a feeling that this is not some numinous, irretrievable mystery. We could explain Hitler, if only we had found the right safe deposit box. To follow your logic, then the advantage of having this letter with the order locked away in a box inside another box-- what it does is that you don't want your enemy to know that you're not going to launch those missiles, but you don't want to think for yourself that you are. So it lets you believe both things. It lets two truths exist at the same time. Yes, I suppose that's true. It allows us to have it both ways. From WEBZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, Contents Unknown. Stories of truths, big and small, that are locked away. Sometimes the most exciting thing about these truths is knowing that they're out there, the answer exists, but you don't know it. Our show today in three acts. Act one is about the truths contained in America's mini storage lockers. No kidding. Act two is about the truth of an entire empire 1,400 years ago. Act three is about truth wiped away from inside someone's head. Stay with us. Act one. Needle in a crap sack. Self storage units. There's a lot of them. 2.35 billion with a B square feet in the United States, according to the Self Storage Association. That, in case you're wondering, is 7.4 square feet of self storage for every man, woman, and child in this country, meaning all of us, all of us, could stand inside self storage at the same time. And when people do not pay their self storage bills after the facility tries to collect through all the normal means and fails, often the contents of the storage lockers get auctioned off. Jon Mooallem went to some of those auctions in Northern California. They're a big exercise in guessing at the unknown. This morning, a little after nine, a crowd of a few dozen prospectors is already waiting in the fog outside Bridgehead Self Storage, an hour east of San Francisco. The auctioneer, a guy with the briskly mustache named John Cardoza, runs a company called Storage Auction Experts. Today he'll go to six different storage places in three different towns and auction off upwards of 50 units. The crowd will follow him for nine hours. Hey Ricky? Go ahead and open up this one too, please. We've got two of them open. Here's how it works. A unit's door is rolled open. No one's allowed to step inside or open any boxes or touch anything at all. The mob just stands there, sweeping their flashlights around, making educated guesses about what's inside. They crane their necks, contort their bodies, or step up on little folding stools they brought for a better look into the nooks and corners. "You gotta get all up in there, like a proctologist," one guy explains. I spoke to a giddy-looking woman in the crowd about what she saw. There is an unusual-shaped box that is behind these old mattresses that are leaned up, and the mattresses did not lean all the way up against the wall. So I kind of was really trying to look behind there and see. So that's what drew my attention to it, right there. So hopefully it is what I'm thinking it might be. What are you thinking it might be? I don't know yet, but I have something in my head, yeah. I couldn't get her to even say it out loud. She didn't want to jinx it. Locker number A80, the one out here. The one out here. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. How many dollars? Can I get $50 start it? It's informal. The auctioneer stands right in front of the open locker. People raise their hands to bid. Most of them are regulars. They all know each other and are here to make a modest second income. They resell what they buy on eBay or at flea markets. They have their niches. One guy does antiques. Several are into tools. One loves anything military. But they all know the stories of blockbuster hauls, too. The hippies who, for $225, bought the unit of a Sacramento rail yard heir several years ago and found a stockpile of silver coins inside. In 2007, a guy in Southern California bought Paris Hilton's storage locker when she fell $200 behind on the rent. He resold it to another guy who set up a website called Paris Exposed and charged $39.97 for a virtual tour of the contents. There were topless photos in there, ones people hadn't seen yet. A more common scenario, though, goes like this. You spend several hundred dollars on what turns out to be cheap halogen lamps, cassette singles by Heavy D & the Boyz, and a couple of bent mattresses. Then you've got to spend the rest of your day shoveling all that crap to the dump, which charges you more money to throw it out. People think you find, like, diamond rings and stuff, and everybody's doing this for a decade. That's Christine. She's here with her friend Lois. They say for every good score, there are plenty of disappointments. All you find is other people's porno, stuff that goes along with that, nasty clothes that smell like mildew, dead rats. Oh, definitely dead rats. And you know how long it's been there, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. With such a great likelihood of failure, you have to give yourself an edge. And everybody's got their own arsenal of tricks. What do you look for when the door opens? Cobwebs. Seriously, cobwebs. That stuff hasn't been moved in a long time, so you know no one's gone through it. Cobwebs tell you the renters didn't have a chance to whisk away their valuables before the manager locked them out. When it looks like a unit's been churned over, you see upside down furniture, boxes crushed on boxes. It just indicates either low quality, or they took what they wanted out of there before they knew they were losing it. So you're not going to get anything. That's Dave Lewis, a stick-thin guy with a beard. He's wearing a denim work jacket that's way too big for him. He looks like a precocious kid in a smock. Dave's been going to auctions off and on for most of his life. But you know, you see a unit that's neatly stacked and organized, thought went into it, certain brand names or a tendency for a lot of the items in there to be brand or quality items versus, say, just generics or that kind of thing-- so people tend to print really nicely, and just the level of organization goes into some of them lets you know, hey. Somebody took the time as value here. And the kinds of boxes matter, too. Crisp, brand new moving boxes, good. Rat-bitten old diaper boxes, not good. A plasma TV box is almost guaranteed not to have a plasma TV in it, but it tells you something about the income bracket you're dealing with. No unit's a sure thing, Lois tells me. Every once in a while, one breaks your heart. I know one guy, a story I heard a few years ago. This guy-- they opened a huge unit, and it was all boxes packed neatly, and they all said "Fragile Crystal" on the side. He bid up to $500 or $600 or something on that. And when he emptied it, it was all just a bunch of garbage that belonged to someone named Crystal. I haven't seen him for a while either, come to think of it. Still, the game is the same for everyone. You're trying to analyze what you can see to get a sense of what you can't. Dave makes it sound a little mystical, even. As soon as the door opens, he starts building a profile of the renter in his head, really trying to get to know the person. This looks to me like somebody who did in-home daycare. Beanbags, a number of individual tubs that have crayons, chalk-- you know, not enough for one kid, about enough for 20. So it probably, in my estimation, this should not go anywhere over a hundred. Although there is some Star Wars sheets right there, so you might have the fanatic collector who notices that or something. You never know. You can see if a lot of people are interested in it, see how long it's taking them to look. They're trying to find something to draw themselves into buying it. Something to say, buy me. That's Mike DeHaas. He's not like Dave at all. He's not like anyone else here. Mike doesn't fantasize or make projections about what can't be seen. The stacks of anonymous boxes, the big, enticing furniture shapes draped over with blankets. To some bidders, these just mean more chances to win. To Mike, they're traps, a mirage. His strategy is the anti-strategy. He just bids on what's visible. When the door rolls up, Mike quickly tallies up the value of everything he can see and definitively identify in the unit, and then bids based on that and only that. It could be a piece of art, it could be a coin, it could be a baseball card, it could be a toy, it could be an old military item, it could be a piece of clothing. You just never know. So I look at everything realistically. I've just had a rough life and I've been through a lot of things that most people shouldn't, so I don't see things like, you know, I see it for what it is. Two plus two is four. That's how I describe everything, and that's how I see it. So I don't do this with a lot of hope. I do it realistically. Mike's buying at auctions and reselling at flea markets around the state full time, just barely supporting his girlfriend and two little kids. I keep noticing Mike far away from the rest of the crowd, staring at the ground with his hood pulled over his head and a Maglite flung through his belt. Mike's got a history with these storage places. He tells me his parents did a lot of drugs his whole childhood. And he got to the point where we ended up homeless and put everything into a storage unit. And instead of trying to save our storage unit, they spent all the money they had on more drugs, and kept repeating that process, so we lost our unit. I've had a whole 10 by 30 just gone one day. My whole life up until the age of 15. Everything before my parents lost because of their drug habit. So it was rather disappointing and things like that. And that's why what I try to do is make sure like anything personal, especially baby photos, baby books, things of that nature, I try to put it all in a box and give it back to the office, and they will return it to the people. Because it makes me feel a little better. We got to get to the next one because there's bad parking. Where is this? On San Miguel. When we reach the sixth and final storage facility of the day, San Miguel Mini Storage, a short, barrel-chested Asian guy shows up, turning heads. Darren, someone whispers. Well, I came back here because I scored last time, so I'm going to come back again, see if I can score again. Last time Darren came to an auction at this place, he found a big box of jewelry buried in the back of a unit. He made 40 grand from it, or 400 grand, maybe. The number changes as the story gets told and retold and passes into legend. This helps explain why, when we get here, the crowd's suddenly tripled in size. There's close to 100 people here now, because word's gotten around that San Miguel Mini Storage is the kind of place where Darrens happen. But not today. There were 27 units to auction here, and one after the other, the doors went up, and none looked even remotely like a Darren-maker. Last chance today. Here we go now, locker-- To be honest, the afternoon has blurred together in a model of obsolete computer monitors, dusty sweatpants, vacuums, and bingo cards. I remember seeing a black bedazzled sombrero somewhere, the kind that Three Amigos wore. I remember a big box of snack food-- "Chicken Ranch Flavor-Blasted Goldfish," they were called. Those are starting to feel like really fun memories now. The sun's set. The temperature's dropped. The hardcore veterans are all feeling crappy and disappointed. And then-- Oh, [BLEEP] [BLEEP] This last unit, a 10 by 25, is a cartoonish mound of junk. It's such a jumbled, ridiculous end of the long day that all the jaded old-timers have perked up. They're almost enjoying it. Oh my God. Shopping carts? Was this a family? Is that a shrunken head right there? Wow, what's in the back? I ask Mike if he sees anything here worth bidding on. Everyone's just baffled. Oh, there's nothing to describe here. I don't even know what to use as a word. An abomination. It's like a wall, right? It's like a wall of stuff with something behind it. It's a wall of-- somebody was really desperate, and in a big hurry to unload wherever, their garage, their house, whatever, they shoved it all in. And when they opened the door, stuff just spilled out of the bottom. A bunch of books and a camping chair. There's a pizza stone. There's books about U-boats, boxes. It looks as though someone had a bulldozer inside the unit and just pushed everything all the way to the front. And behind there, people are saying they see a giant Santa Claus. Someone shouts out the name of a bar to head to. A man tells his girlfriend, "Go use the bathroom. Let's get out of here." The auctioneer starts the bidding. Some people are actually raising their hands. Now 325 now 350 new blood now 375. Now 400. It gets competitive. Now 425. 400, 425, now 450. Anybody else? 450? Sold them out. 425. The winner turns out to be Dave and his girlfriend Linda for $425 plus fees. They own his giant pile of tetanus now. And the weird thing is, they're thrilled. Behind this could be anything. Wait, wait, wait. We have to get a full explanation on this. Because you understand that this was very controversial unit. So you knew right away you wanted this one? I did, as soon as I knew that there was a hollow spot behind there. That could be-- could be nothing. They could have been just idiots. And Dave says they took the good stuff out. But who's going to pay $225 on a unit every month to store this? There could be motorcycles, jet skis, a car. Could be anything. It could be nothing. We could've just flushed $485 down the toilet. So we'll see. You want to just climb over the-- I do, I do. But I don't have a flashlight. I think I can-- Dave clambers up, sidestepping a not totally empty jar of Red Raspberry Smuckers and an electric carving knife. Holy moly. What is it? Uh-- OK, I don't-- there's nothing like a motorcycle, or-- but for everyone that thought the back half of this unit was empty, they were absolutely dead wrong. This thing is about four feet deep and going all the way about 15 feet back. In fact, I see three more shopping carts, books, boxes, bags, a seven foot tall Santa-- oh, I'm telling you. There's no telling here. This is one huge heap. No motorcycle? Boo! If he feels defeated, though, he's trying not to let on. He and Linda start freeing things from the mass, including bags of recyclable bottles. And Dave especially is trying to put a good spin on whatever they find. Yeah, this is, I don't think it's any kind of a special wine. It looks like Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon 2001. OK, see, we found two bottles of one unopened wine, a 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon, a 2005 something else. So we may have somebody's wine collection in here, too. See now, this is the kind of stuff I like to see. This offset seeing those recyclables. Gradually, though, the bad omens stack up. I almost hate to comment on this, but I know what it is. Methamphetamine. Not the actual stuff, but this is what people do when they're on meth. Can you describe what it is? I guess somebody thought they would improve on the wheel. Yeah, it's a bicycle that somebody thought that they could try to take coat hangers and make a bunch of spokes out of, and then wrap it around the tire, it looks like to try to keep the tire on the rim. And I just, somebody's got to be on drugs to do this. I've seen it way too many times. You come across something like this where you see somebody's done something to it that absolutely makes no sense. I mean, they've basically made the bike unrideable doing what they tried to do to it. So I would be willing to bet that this person had a drug problem. And that's how I leave them, scrabbling through the unit in a floodlight in the cold. Maybe they lost. Maybe it was a draw. Dave says it'll take a week to sort everything out. Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for New York Times Magazine. Coming up-- when you lose your memory in India and you're searching for whatever clues you can find to reconstruct who you are. What's the protocol they use to help you? And yes, incredibly, this happens enough that there is an informal protocol of sorts, in some places. That's in the second half of our show from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. This American Life from Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program-- Contents Unknown. Stories of people having to guess at the mystery of what is inside all sorts of various things. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two. He Shapes Ship Shapes By the Seashore. All right. I'm going to say two words to you now. Byzantine Empire. Quick! When? Who? Where? What? Yeah, me neither. But I look it up. The Byzantine Empire is basically the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which broke off. It existed from around 300 AD to the 1400s. And archaeologists thought they knew most of the big things that you'd want to know about the Byzantine Empire decades ago. So much so that by the 1950s, they'd bulldozed Byzantine sites to get at stuff that seemed more interesting underneath it, Greek and Roman stuff. And then everything changed. Our whole understanding of the Byzantines changed. And the way we got to this new understanding starts with one shipwreck. Adam Davidson tells what happened. Fred van Doorninck does not do anything on a lark. Except one thing, once. In 1961, when he was in archaeology grad school, he took a break and went to Turkey, put on some scuba gear, and checked out a 1,400 year old shipwreck off the coast of the tiny island of Yassiada. At the very beginning, I just thought this was a summer of adventure. But slowly-- well, not too slowly. I think by the second year, I was hooked. Hooked on Yassiada? Yes. Because this ship was a great mystery, you know? It needed to be put back together, and it all needed to be explained. It was surprising that Fred, of all people, took this on, since Fred, by his on admission, is not a water guy. I have a throat that when one little drop of liquid hits it, it closes. And I never enjoyed diving one minute. Fred used to come up from almost every dive with blood in his mask. That's George Bass, Fred's research partner in what would become a 50 year exploration of this one Byzantine ship. Speaking of the Byzantines, George remembers a grad school trip to Greece this way. I didn't even get out of the bus at Byzantine churches. I just found them so boring. I found everything about the Byzantine period just awful. So a guy who hates diving meets a guy bored by the Byzantine Empire. Naturally, an academic buddy movie ensues in which two men find that the path to happiness lies in diving and studying the Byzantines. And along the way, they create an entire new field-- underwater archaeology. Because they were the first archaeologists to thoroughly excavate a ship on the seafloor. George remembers diving and seeing Yassiada for the first time. It was a mound of jars, amphoras, two-handle jars, we call them amphoras, and it stood maybe three feet high, something like that. So there's no ship, there's no--? No ship. In the Mediterranean, in fact, most of the oceans of the world are filled with shipworms, or marine borers, mollusks that eat wood. Like water termites? Like water termites, exactly. You guys must hate those water termites more than anything in the world. Oh, yes, very. We yet only the part of the ship that's sunk down into the sand. So we're always hoping that a ship that we excavate has fallen onto one side, that we will learn more about it. Ships are symmetrical. You find one side safely buried in the sand, you know what the other side looks like. Now remember, these are the first diving archaeologists. Scuba had only been invented in the 1940s. It was so new they could only stay on the seafloor for 20 minutes at a time. Imagine trying to excavate some ancient pyramid or something, and you can only go there and work for 20 minutes, and then you have to leave. And in those 20 minutes, George and Fred had to solve problems nobody ever faced before. An ancient hole on the seabed, the wood is very fragmentary. And so if you sweep with your hand to get the sand away, a little piece of wood, not bigger than two playing cards put together, for example, that's just going to float away. So we had to figure out some way to keep it all intact while we mapped it. I thought of knitting needles. I couldn't find any. A Turkish colleague suggested bicycle spokes. We ended up buying more than a thousand bicycle spokes, sharpening one end of each one, turning with the other end over so we could pin to the seabed every little fragment of wood we found. Oh my God. So at the end we have, like a butterfly on a piece of cardboard all pinned down, we have thousands of sharpened bicycle spokes driven through every wood fragment all the wreck, holding it down while we map it. This bicycle spoke thing became standard practice, although now they have higher tech ways of doing it. A lot of stuff George and Fred figured out along the way became standard. Another thing they were the first to do? Reconstruct an entire ship from its fragments on the ocean floor. At that time, nobody knew what Byzantine ships look like. I asked Fred about this. I mean, frankly, even though you've done it, it still seems impossible to me. Well, it almost was impossible. I'm fond of saying, if they had been one less fragment of the ship down there on the seabed, I wouldn't have been able to put the pieces together. There was just barely enough evidence to reconstruct the shape and dimensions of the ship. And another part of this was that when this ship sank, it came down on bedrock, and then slid further down the slope, and the stern end of the ship came into sand and made an impression of itself into the sand. Incredibly that impression, held in place by some wood fragments, stayed intact for nearly 1,400 years. In order to figure out what the hull looked like, Fred had to invent a way to measure the dent in the sand. He built this contraption using a protractor, some string, and a flashbulb. Seriously. Again, that's a technique still used, although in much improved form, today. So huge triumph. 1967. Fred's figured it out. He knows what the ship looks like, and he writes it up, understandably proud, as his PhD thesis. Except a few years later, a friend sees it, someone who knows more about ships, and says-- You know, Fred, your ship would never have gotten out of the harbor. It's simply hydrodynamically unsound. Fred's mistake? Although he had the back half of the ship almost perfect-- that's where most of the wood fragments came from-- he had just extended the lines forward to estimate the front of the ship. But since he didn't know anything about ship engineering, he got it wrong. Working with a colleague who built scale models, it took Fred 15 more years to get the drawings right and ready for publication. Since Fred's not one to brag, here's George. What Fred did did not just allow to see what the ship looked like. It actually revolutionized all of our ideas about ancient ship construction. I mean, it was incredibly important. It wasn't just saying, this is what it looked like. Because he found out that the ship was built in an ancient manner below the waterline and in a modern matter above the waterline. In other words, it's a transitional ship in a transitional period, between the ancient and modern world. By the way, this is the George and Fred partnership. Fred does the endless, meticulous scholarship. George is certainly also a scholar, but he's the better diver and the better salesman. George traveled the world talking up Fred's work, spreading the gospel of nautical archaeology, and raising money to keep Fred hunched over tiny fragments of wood and pottery for 50 years. The partnership worked. By 1982, Fred figured the ship out. As far as he could tell, the wreck was a routine merchant ship. A bit ho-hum, he called it. It was time to move on. He was wrapping things up at the site in Turkey. But just as Rush Hour was followed by Rush Hour 2, just as Lethal Weapon 2 led to Lethal Weapon 3, the Fred and George franchise was not over yet. Right when they thought they'd retire, they got pulled back in for one last caper-- their biggest caper yet. Fred got surprise news from some of his interns. Oh, Fred, you have to come and see what's been discovered. And I'm taken to this store room where there were some Turkish college student interns in there, cleaning these amphoras. And they were discovering graffiti on them, inscriptions on them. And you thought there weren't any, right? No. And we had looked for inscriptions on them. But the growth, marine growth on them, had concealed these inscriptions. The inscriptions were cryptic. Just some initials in Greek and some symbols. To figure out what they signified, Fred went on what would become his very last dive. He went down and brought up hundreds of amphoras, those jars. And this led to a series of discoveries that changed how scholars understand the Byzantine Empire. For starters, they realize that the amphoras were made in uniform sizes, with uniform-sized mouths and uniform-sized stoppers. This showed that the Byzantines were using sophisticated mass production techniques more than a thousand years before the Industrial Revolution. They were way more advanced than anyone realized. The parts were uniform so that different components could be made all over the empire at different factories. And then Fred cracked the inscriptions, which revealed something surprising. We finally realize from an inscription that the captain of the ship was a priest. And in the seventh century, there were a lot of priest sea captains, because the church owned a lot of ships. So it's a ship owned by the Christian church, transporting supplies for the military. What Fred thought was a ho-hum merchant vessel turned out to be the key to understanding that the Byzantine church and the Byzantine army were far more intertwined than anyone knew. In fact, Fred believes, on the day they ship sank in 626 AD, the church had lent the ship to the military to get supplies to troops who were fighting the Persian empire. It was the final year of one of the longest and most exhausting wars in the ancient world. The church's involvement and those mass production factories were part of this remarkable military supply chain that Fred helped uncover. In part because of that industrial sophistication, the Byzantines, who controlled much of modern day Turkey, Eastern Europe, parts of Italy, all the way to Spain, defeated the Persians, who ruled over present-day Iran and most of the Middle East. And at the very moment Yassiada sank, Muhammad was forming the armies that would, a few years later, lead to the Muslim takeover of much of the weakened Persians' territory. Then those Muslim armies started fighting the Byzantines, Christians, in wars that would continue for centuries, and of course feel pretty relevant today. By the time he was done, Fred had figured out not just what the ship looked like, and who owned it, and what it carried, and what it was doing the day it sank, but how that ship fit into the global politics of the day. That's right. And that took 50 years. Well, I guess, yeah. That's right. That's pretty depressing. I mean, I will spend some time today working on finishing, solving that puzzle. You're working on Yassiada today, 50 years later. Yes. Every day I spend a little time on that project. The interview was over. I left the studio. And then Fred turned to George while the tape was still rolling. Didn't seem like 50 years, anyway. Adam Davidson is part of the Planet Money team at www.npr.org/money. Act Three. The Answer to the Riddle is Me. We close our show today with this true story from David MacLean. On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India with no passport and no idea who I was or why I was in India. I lost my memory. I lost it along with Fred Flintstone, Marge Simpson, Jack Bauer's wife in the first season of 24, Saleem Sinai in the late middle sections of Midnight's Children, Guy Pearce in Memento, Geena Davis in A Long Kiss Goodnight, Jason Bourne, and scores of sitcom characters who were bonked on the head, only to regain everything with another sizeable bonk. I went to India as a Fulbright scholar. I worked out of university of Hyderabad. I had a small rooftop flat right next to the elevator engine. At first I thought it was a hell of a score, but these apartments are all over the city, and they're illegal, not included in the original building plan. It was incredibly hot, and the elevator engine squeaked and screamed as it lugged people up and down the building. But I did have the entire roof to myself, and could sit out there and watch kids all over the neighborhood flying kites from other rooftops. I was settling down to do my work. I became a member of a library. It had a friend named Veda, a local grad student, and we had dinner together nearly every night. I was taking my anti-malarial drug, Lariam, every Thursday, just like my doctors told me. One weekend in early October, I got really sick. Veda brought a doctor over to my flat. The doctor took my temperature, my blood pressure, palpated my stomach, gave me three injections. I asked the doctor what was in the injections, and he said, "medicine." I spent the next two days thrashing in my damp bed in fever dreams. Veda called me in the morning of October 12. He had nicknamed me hero. "Hello, Hero. Are you up for some dinner or something?" I had no idea who he was. He spent the next five minutes trying to draw my memory, but as far as I knew, he was a stranger. I explained to him that he had the wrong number, and then hung up. On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad with no passport and no idea who I was. When I say that I woke up, I don't mean I was on a bench passed out and woozily came to. I mean all of a sudden, I was aware of my surroundings. I was standing on the train platform staring at a monitor. People were pushing past me. Train announcements in another language were coming out of static-filled speakers. There were crowds of women in burkas standing near a stall where a man was making omelets. Massive trains would sound their massive horns before they trundled out of the station. And I suddenly was in the midst of all of this. At that moment, staring at the monitors, I was a blank sheet that had just been rolled in the typewriter. No backstory, no motivation, no distinguishing characteristics, no real idea what I even looked like. A man came up to me. He was wearing a uniform. He had a peaked cap and carried a long stick. He wanted to know if anything was wrong. I panned down from the monitor to his face. He was a little older than I was, but not much. His moustache was new and seemed uncertain if it would stay. Mostly, though, his face was kind. I said to him, I have no idea who I am. Some chamber of emotion was unlocked in me and I started to cry. Blubber, really. The policeman pulled a little away from me. He spent a moment considering his strategy, and finally decided on "There, there. Please calm down. I'm used to this situation. You foreigners come here to my country and do your drugs. I've seen this before many times." He pointed to a patch on his shoulder. "I'm here for you. I'm a tourist officer. Now, do you have a passport?" I shook my sobbing head. "I think I slept in a room with monkeys last night." "OK. Now do you have in your possession a wallet?" I reached to my back pocket and pulled out a leather wallet stamped with an image of a cowboy with guns drawn. I was delirious with happiness. I open the wallet and there was my New Mexico driver's license. "That's me!" I shrieked as I shoved my finger on the square inch picture. The officer took my wallet and put it in his pocket. "OK," he said. "Let's get you somewhere else." I don't remember what happened next. My memory of that day and the next is a string of Christmas lights where only a few are lit. There's no sense to be made of which lights are lit, and you can flick at the dead bulbs as long as you want. They're not coming back on. The officer told me his name was Rajesh, but I could call him Josh. He explained that it would be easier for me, since I was an American, to call him that. I thanked him. We went through my wallet and found an internet cafe membership card. We went into a cafe that had the same logo. We got into my Hotmail account. By what means I was able to remember my internet address and password, I can't answer. All I know is that I send an email to my parents that contained the following information. One. I was sorry for being a drug addict and for being such a terrible son. Two. I was in trouble, but I should be OK soon, since the police were helping me. Three. I would be home soon, and would work really hard to be a better person and earn their respect back. Josh took me to a guesthouse which the police use as a safehouse for troubled foreigners. A Chinese woman ran the place, and she was known for being good with lost sheep tourists. The three of us sat down in our living room. White marble tile, creaking wooden furniture, and a shrine in the corner with a young man's picture on it. She gave me a glass of flat Sprite and she told me her story. Her son had been traveling in Singapore when some bad men had injected him with drugs. He overdosed. She never got to see his body. They sent his ashes to her in a cardboard box. She wept as she told me this. "You do not understand what you are doing to your mother when you put these drugs into your body." She grabbed my hands and squeezed hard. I cried right back at her. I was a drug addict, and I was breaking my mother's heart. I swallowed the narratives that they had given me. My brain was empty and famished. I'd taken anything. Josh, the woman and I sat down and tried to remember my parents' phone number, which hasn't changed since 1977. It took six hours for me to remember the first phone number I'd never learned. The woman dialed and handed me the phone when it was ringing. My mother answered. I started crying at the sound of her voice. I recognized it. I couldn't picture her, but that voice I knew. "I'm so sorry, mom. I didn't mean to do this to you." "David, you didn't do anything. We got your email. Are you safe?" "I'm in a guesthouse. Josh and this woman are helping me. I don't have my passport, but I'm going to get to Delhi and come home. Can I come home?" "Of course you can come home. You said there's a woman helping you? Let me talk to her." "I'm so sorry I've been out of touch for so long. I've been a terrible person, an awful son." "David, we talked last Tuesday. What's the woman's name?" "She wants to know your name." "Mrs. Lee," the woman said. "Is that your mother? Let me speak with her." Mom worked at a software company in Marion, Ohio, and one of her coworkers was married to a woman from Hyderabad. Mom told Mrs. Lee that she was going to get the phone number for this coworker's family and have them come over to help. I was put to bed before the sun set. I didn't sleep. The room begin to twist. It didn't behave. One corner of the ceiling would be too close. Another would be miles away. The blankets itched. I was afraid to drink the Sprite. Birds flew onto the balcony and looked at me dismissively. I knew suddenly that if I left the room, I would walk into a wide, pink kitchen, and there were crackers on the cupboard, and if I went into that kitchen and pulled the crackers down from the cupboard and said something, said something specific, a sentence, something that was totally, feignlessly me, then I'd be all right. I knew that as soon as I said it, all of my loved ones would flood up from the basement and the other rooms where they'd been hiding. They would grab me and celebrate me and hold me in their arms. I stood at the door of the small room in this guesthouse in Secunderabad and was ready to enter into the arms of all of those people who loved me and knew me. I just needed to remember what I was supposed to say. It was right on the tip of my tongue. I stood at the doorway for over an hour trying to remember. I would open the door a crack and peer out, looking for where all my loved ones were hidden, then bang the door closed. I did this enough times for Mrs. Lee to get freaked out and call my mom's coworker's family. I lay back down and tried to remember. The room was getting worse. There were voices. I flipped the mattress over to find where they were coming from. They alternated between giving me hints as to the phrase I was supposed to say and mocking me for not knowing it already. "Isn't that just like you?" they'd scold. I was sweating. I'd wet myself. Two men walked into my room. I'd never seen them before. They were both in their early 60s. One man had a silver beard and a Pompadour. The other had a thick mustache and jet black hair and an overgrown Beatles mop top. They both had dark South Indian complexions. "I'm Mr. Desappa and this is Mr. Sampson. Your mother summoned us here to help you." I looked at the two men looming over me. "This isn't going well at all," I said. Sampson helped me up while Desappa flipped the mattress back over. They laid me down and knelt on the floor beside me. "You'll be OK. Jesus loves you." They began to pray. The men stayed all night, praying and laying their hands on me as they prayed. I'm not sure when they called the ambulance. The next day I came to again. Bruises on my wrists from the restraints. I was in the mental institution, Greenlands Mental Facility. Dirty walls, small table, glass of water, drawn cloth curtain. A doctor with a receding hair line sat at the edge of my bed making notes in a file with a pen that wasn't cooperating. He kept scribbling in the margins to get the ink to flow. The doctors put me on Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic, so my hallucinations slowed, and I quieted enough to be unstrapped. I was doped up on enough Valium that I was able to have visitors. Veda rounded up every American he knew, figuring I'd be more comfortable surrounded by them. These visitors acted like they knew me. They called me Dave, so I played along. They brought me newspapers and cigarettes. I had never smoked a day in my life, but I started chain smoking in the mental institution. The the only thing I would consume other than cigarettes was curd rice. The nurses brought it to me in heaping platefuls. The Valium and Haloperidol made me affable. The nurses claimed I was the most entertaining psychotic they'd ever had. At this point, you know more about me than I did at that moment. Those days where I was fed heavy meds through an IV, people treated me a certain way, and I became the kind of person who is treated like that. All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people around me. I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others. The truth, or at least what my family, the State Department, the Fulbright Organization, and I have determined as the truth is that the psychotic break, the hallucinations, the amnesia-- it all was an extreme side effect of the Larium, the anti-malarial drug that was a prescription of choice in those days. It's got a reputation for doing things like what happened to me, as well as much worse. I started taking the drug a month before leaving, as prescribed. My mother says that she could tell I wasn't acting normally before I left, but she chalked it up to the stress of preparing for a year in India When my parents walked into my room in the asylum, a motor spun inside my brain. I recognized them, and through them, I recognized myself. I wasn't sure of the details of my life, but my parents defined the broad particulars. We hugged, the three of us making a tent over the bed with our bodies. I told my mom that I was sorry. She told me that she was sorry. My dad pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. My sister Betsy had put together a box for me. In it were two dozen cookies and an array of pictures of me from different times of my life. Me in a kilt, me at the beach, me with a dog, me standing on a station wagon smoking a cigar, me with my sisters, me with my arms around different women. Whoever I was, I couldn't keep a straight face for a photograph. My parents told me where they were saying. They said it was too nice for them, but the restaurant was good and didn't serve them anything too spicy for breakfast. They said I needed to stay for another night at Greenlands, and then I'd go home with them to their hotel, and then we'd get on a plane for the U.S. They said that Sally was excited to see me and that Ann was planning on coming to Ohio for a visit. These names mean as much to you as they did to me. My parents said them like they were people I knew and loved, so I nodded and said I was excited to see them. They checked me out the next day. My dad hailed a rickshaw and the three of us piled into the backseat, me in between the two of them. In Ohio I met Sally, who was my dog. I talked to Ann, my girlfriend, on the phone. I recognized the dog, but not Ann's voice. We hadn't been dating for very long, and my parents didn't have any pictures of her. I had no idea what she looked like. She seemed nice. She seemed like she cared about me. Those days spent in my parents' house, I mostly stared at pictures, trying to recapture anything of who I was. I developed a system. I would look at the picture and imagine this character of me. Then I would place this character I had developed into these settings. I would imagine the jokes that were told. I would imagine how the character of me would feel. I was gathering information on this character of me all the time. Ann came out on Halloween weekend, and even when I picked her up at the airport, even when she kissed me, I wasn't sure I had the right woman. We spent the weekend hiking with my parents. We had sex that first night of her visit, and she was still a stranger. I could not remember her or any details of our relationship. It was wiped clear. She was in love with me. I tried the memory trick of placing the character of me in a relationship with her, and it didn't fit. I couldn't conceive of myself loving her. Sometimes I think that forgetting her with the cruelest thing I've ever done to a person. I called her a week later and broke up with her. Ann isn't her real name, by the way. She asked me to change it for this story. I flew back to India on November 20, a little more than a month after the incident. I wasn't entirely stable yet, but I was terrified that the Fulbright Organization would pull my funding if I gave them too much time to mull my psychological condition. I figured the best way back to health was to act like I was healthy. I put on a placid professional exterior while inside I was a full martini glass placed on a rubber ball. It wasn't until I was on the connecting flight into Hyderabad that I realized I had no idea of where I lived. I panicked as we were touching down. I figured I'd get a cab. I just had no idea where to tell the driver to go. Instead, Veda was waiting for me at the airport. I didn't recognize him, but by that time, I recognized the look of someone recognizing me. It was a skill I had developed in Ohio. I'd forgotten that I had emailed him my flight details. He clapped me on my back and said, "The hero returns!" He gave me a bag full of toothpaste, ramen, and milk. "Enough to last you for a day," he said. We drove through the city. It was 4 AM and silent. We made turn after turn until we ended up in front of a tall building that looked like all of the other apartment complexes. Veda took me up the elevator and then up a short flight of stairs. He handed me a keyring. "OK then, hero. I will be off. I can get some sleep before the kids start causing terror." "You have kids?" "I will call you on your mobile, and we can go for some dinner at your favorite place." I grabbed him, and I learned that Veda didn't like to be hugged. I opened the door. Nothing. The road, the building, and now my apartment. Nothing was jogged, jostled, or loosened in my memory. I was alone, and lonelier than I thought it could be in a room filled with things that I'd selected. There were books. I opened them and found my handwriting in the margins. Still nothing. I had read these books. Now I had to read them again. But why bother? If I lost my memory again, all that work would be futile. The city started to wake up, and the sounds of bicycles, car horns, and newspaper wallahs rose up to me on the roof. I lit up a cigarette to fight the tension building in my chest. If it was going to happen again, I would throw myself off the roof. I stubbed out the cigarette and opened the door to an apartment furnished with the possessions of a stranger. David MacLean fully recovered all his memory, except for the year proceeding his illness. The story is an excerpt from a book of essays that he's writing about losing his memory and memory loss. He's looking for a publisher. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semian, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Brian Reed. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, at the WBEZ offices in Chicago, there's a safe within a safe, and inside that, written by hand, some programming ideas Torey has for our show for the year 2111. I'm dead. Everyone you know is dead. Here's what I'd like you to do. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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The thing about Hawaii is that before you go all anybody will say to you is, it's paradise. This is literally the word that people use. You tell a friend, I'm going to Hawaii, and then it's like you watch the word enter their brain. And the sensate thinking part of them goes away, and their eyes start to glaze. And then, as if in a dream, like a scene from The Manchurian Candidate, they say the word. It's paradise. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme and invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that team. Today's program, Nightmare Vacations, stories by Sandra Tsing Loh and David Sedaris and this question, if an American family can't get along in paradise, what hope is there? So my sisters and nephews fly in from California. My parents fly in from the east coast. I take an early-morning plane from O'Hare. I went mainly because I wanted to spend some time with my parents. My dad was just out of the hospital. He'd had emergency surgery, nearly died. And I wanted to hang out with them, try to get along better, feel closer, which, in my family, as in many, is not so easy. I brought the pictures of my trip to show you. This one, this is the condo we stayed in. You can see palm trees through the windows. That's my sister Karen on the couch with a Diet Coke. Good Morning America, which I view as the clattering, vapid noise of Satan, is on the television. But that's what my parents like, and I wanted to do what they wanted to do. My parents' Hawaii was not a romantic place of ramshackle bungalows and beaches lit by torchlight. In fact, it was a suburban-looking condo with overstuffed pastel furniture and pastel hotel art prints framed on the wall in a timeshare community with tennis courts and easy parking and a mall and a grocery store. In short, this was the least exotic possible setting. But when we arrived, my mom got out of the car, looked around the parking lot at the neatly trimmed lawns, and she said the word. Paradise. This picture, this is my dad making cereal in the condo. My parents brought their favorite breakfast cereals with them, 10,000 miles to Hawaii. They like the familiar comforts of home, like many people do. In fact, in all sorts of stressful situations-- I hadn't actually quite put this together. I realized on this trip that in all sorts of stressful situations, what my parents do is that they make themselves comfortable by focusing on creating a comfortable, personal space. When my sisters and I moved away to college, my parents comforted themselves by building a new house. When my mom got breast cancer five years ago, they decided to start a major rehab on the house. And in Hawaii, with the stress of having to deal with the children and the grandchildren, they spent a lot of time obsessing on the condo and what they saw as its many shortcomings. The sliding glass doors weren't the heavy, nice kind, my mom thought. The bathrooms' tiles and floors didn't have the quality that my mother would prefer. And rather than spend more time with their family, which was the point of the whole vacation, she would vanish for hours at the time. She would vanish for the whole afternoon. It'd be like, mom, where would she be? And she would have been out, checking out other condos and hotel accommodations, comparing. Let me see what else I got here. This is me snorkeling. At one point I talked everybody into renting snorkeling equipment. And we all went to one of these coves where they say it's really nice snorkeling. And when we got there, I could not get anybody to come in the water with me. It turned out that none of the things that you would expect that people would actually want to do in Hawaii were things that my parents, especially, were willing to do. They don't snorkel or swim. They don't like the ocean or the sun. They won't go to look at volcanoes. They don't want to see hula dancers. They don't want to drink fruity tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. My sisters and I, we couldn't even talk them into staying up late and playing cards with us. It begs the question, the central problem, the problem of the family vacation, what can people do that will make them feel closer? The activities offered by Hawaii seem so puny in comparison to the mountain that the average family presents. About 20 minutes after this picture was taken, I got out of the water, and we all kind of went our separate ways for the day. My mom went off to look at condos again. And I just did not want to go look at condos. Me, I did not believe that finding a place with heavier sliding glass doors and nicer towels in the bathroom was going to bring us any closer as a family. But it's not like I had any better ideas about how to get close. C.S. Lewis once wrote-- and I don't know if this is original to him, but anyway, it's in one of his books-- that there's no such thing as a heaven or hell. He says what happens after you die is that you simply continue to be the person who you are but for eternity. So you become more and more like yourself forever. And for some people, that's heaven. And for others, it's hell. I bring this up because I think paradise shares this quality with the afterlife. For some people, a vacation in paradise is paradise. But for others of us, it's much more difficult. Act Two. My mother was an optimist. No, I mean really an optimist. This was a woman who, in 1969, planned a family summer vacation to Ethiopia. Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, and composer. She's a columnist for Buzz Magazine in Los Angeles. This story is from her one-woman show Aliens in America, which is largely about her mother and her father. In all fairness, Ethiopia was not her first choice. Given her druthers, she would have hopped on a luxury ocean liner to Hawaii while young men in tight pants served her peach schnapps on a silver tray. "Peach schnapps, it is the most elegant drink," she used to tell us girls. My mother stood 5'11", a fast-talking German brunette given to wearing bright red lipstick, big amber beads, polka dot dresses. My sister, Kaitlin, and I thought she was the most elegant person we'd ever seen. Of course, we were ages nine and six. "Peach schnapps, we used to drink it all the time in Danzig before the war, when your mother and Tante Thea used to waltz to Strauss's Blue Danube, thank you very much, at the glittering ballroom in Sopot, built right over the sea, Mit Rosen Gardenin. And of course, you know your mother's dance card was saw from empty in those days. There was Hans Heinlich, Karl Obst, Dieter Fischer-Kucher." My mother was a nonstop talker. She would not stop talking. That's why she was so sure her Hawaii pitch would work. "Palm trees, pineapples. [SINGING] Bali Hai. Bali Hai, Bali Hai, Bali Hai." But my father never took to the idea of spending money for the sole purpose of fun. Vacations, birthdays, swimming lessons, Christmas-- these were concepts that didn't really work for him. "It is not that I do not like to spend money," he'd say. "Oh, no. Spend, spend, spend. That's just all I do. It is just that I do not like to throw it away on nothing." Hawaii, of course, was nothing, a horror of sunny beaches, fruity drinks, laughing, happy people. "Why would we want to go there? Where is the educational value?" My father, by contrast, was fascinated with Uruguay. Why? He had a friend there we could stay with for free. But it was more than that. "The people of Uruguay are very, very sensible and hardworking. The agrarian farm workers face a fascinating challenge with the combines and the technological hurdles that they--" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You might wonder how such opposite people as my parents got together in the first place. I blame it on Buick. When my mother first saw my father in the mid '50s, he was sitting behind the wheel of a shiny new '56 Buick. I guess a man looks better than he ought in a Buick, especially when it's surrounded by southern California in the '50s, a palm-fringed, swimming-pool-dotted utopia lit by a sun so bright, you actually start to hallucinate. You believe you are in fact quite similar to a person. After all, one, both of you are new immigrants, recently escaped from bad circumstances in your home countries. My father was orphaned by age 12 in Shanghai, lived in poverty. My mother went through World War II, ran from soldiers, heard bombs drop around her. Of course, my mother hated stories of such grim, Zolaesque realism. Her favorite after-dinner stories were either goofy or schmaltzy, ending hopefully with a glass of peach schnapps and a singalong of some kind. When American friends at dinner parties asked her about hardship in Danzig, World War II, Polish occupation, she'd cut them off at the path. "But enough of me. We are all of us travelers, nicht wahr? Foreign people in a foreign land. And we all of us miss home. Let us sing. [SINGING] Edelweiss, Edelweiss, you look happy to see me." Similarity number two between my parents, nothing, except, I guess, that both had come to America, a place where miserable yesterdays could be traded in for joyous visions of tomorrow. And why not? It was the '60s, a great time for America. Jackie O was in the White House. Apollo rockets were in the sky. The future was made flesh at eye-popping World's Fairs featuring whizzing monorails above. Below, pavilions of happy, dancing third-world people joining hands and singing, [SINGING] "It's a small world after all. It's a small world after all." So what if my parents had nothing in common. Never mind. My mother would make this work. In 1969, after many disagreements, she had learned to be crafty. She dropped the idea of Hawaii or Florida or Disneyland. All she was suggesting was a four-day trip to Massawa, Pearl of the Red Sea, which lay on a little known, remote part of Ethiopia. It was the last adventure my parents would ever agree on. "Ethiopia?" My father, of course, had been immediately interested. And why not? Ethiopia was notoriously backward, wretched poor. At that time, too, they were recovering from some sort of bloody civil war, leaving its countryside bleak, its peoples desperate. No one in the world would want to go on vacation in Ethiopia, which my father saw could be turned to our advantage. "After all," my father asked, "if no one else is going, think how far the American dollar will go." "He thinks a vacation should cost one American dollar," Kaitlin and I plead with my mom. "He's cheap and mean." We were onto him, even them. "He just doesn't want us to have any fun. Please, Mom. We don't want to go to Ethiopia." "Ethiopia?" she asked. "Where is that? Oh, you mean E-th-o-p-ia!" She sang it as though it were Rogers and Hammerstein musical, like "Oklahoma." "E-th-o-p-ia! You mean home of the fabulous little town of Massawa, Pearl of the Red Sea, with its beautiful beaches and luxurious resort hotel with its glittering ballroom built right over the sea, Mit Rosen Gardenin, just like in Sopot?" "Really?" we asked. "Naturilich! It's all right here in my kleine deutsche Reisebuch. Father does not know it yet. He'll probably be quite angry. But once we get there, we will run away from your father and swim on the beach." "Swim on the beach" was the kind of word my mother would use to describe anything that was too wonderful to be possible and therefore would never come to pass. Swim on the beach with the Pearl of the Red Sea. Who knew? Air Ethiopia was not a good airline. A plunging, four-hour ride on a shuttering gray plane brought us to a town with a suspiciously gay name of Lalibella. "Lalibella!" my mother exclaimed in mock dismay as its airport, a manure field, rose up to meet us. The hotel Lalibella seemed made entirely of peat, and peat which had taken its kicks and beatings from the desert wind for a long time. Thick woven carpets with ominous symbols hung everywhere, exuding a faint hay smell. Kaitlin and I were given sour glasses of lemonade to drink as we perched on the family suitcases, watching scrawny sheep graze outside a big picture window. All at once, the sheep screamed and scattered. A man in a galabia was running after them with an ax. I turned from this weird spectacle to contemplate yet another. There stood my mother with four German tourists, large and blond and gleaming in their sweat-streaked khaki, expensive cameras and voluptuous leather travel bags draped around them like fresh kill. Apparently there was no place in Africa so miserable some German tourist did not want to see it. [SPEAKING GERMAN] my mother cried out, raising her hands imploringly, a beat. And then all five adult fell into a group hug. There was laughter, sighing, a rapid German exchange. [SPEAKING GERMAN] Danzig?" was the startled query. Emphatic nodding. "Ach ja. Ach ja." So they all originally hailed from my mother's hometown. Photos were coming out of purses and bags now, chocolates, maps of where they had gone, of where they were going. And now here's where the Massawa, Pearl of the Red Sea, magic really clicked in. By incredible coincidence, Ilsa, Franz-Joseph, and the fat couple were headed too to Massawa, Pearl of the Red Sea. It would be a party. Maybe Kaitlin and I would even get to swim on the beach. With a wave of my mother's hand, the whole group sat down to a surprisingly festive Ethiopian dinner of bread and peas and potatoes and, of course, fresh mutton that Kaitlin and I had watched nibble its last blades of grass just hours earlier. The adult buzz was growing to a roar. "Hoohoo-hoo-hoo!" There was much slapping of thighs and lifting of glasses. Even my father was having fun. Franz-Joseph had just announced that he was picking up the dinner tab. "Du ferrukten Deutschen," my father guffawed in his terrible German, reaching over and goosing Ilsa on the rear. She was big-hearted enough to laugh it off. I think the Germans were amused by my Chinese father, as though he were a small attack dog. But even as they were drinking, my mother told us later, she knew that something was kaput. Because while the Deutschen were indeed headed to Massawa, they were planning to fly. My father, of course, had just gotten tickets for the bus. Although, back at the Addis Ababa Airport, there had been some question of safety about the bus, never quite explained. "Please," one travel official in a shabby blue suit had plead with my parents. "You are wealthy Americans. I beg of you. The people of the bus, they are not good." But my father stood firm. Why ride in a plane for an hour when you could sit on a bus for nine and save almost $30 for four people? "Besides," he insisted, "we are not stupid tourists. We will go the way the natives go. It will be so much more educational." But, of course, our new German friends would not buy that. My mother was stuck, so she fudged the truth just a little. "But have you heard about the fabulous bus?" she asked the group over that festive Ethiopian dinner. She herself looked fabulous that night, her crisp, dark hair set off by a fire-engine red dress and big, amber beads. "The scenery is absolutely stunning. You will miss it all by plane. Everyone takes the bus. It is what is done. Perhaps a bit rustic, but sehr gemutlich in its own way. It is the one place where adventure und economy meet. Please, my friends, you must take the bus with us. Please. Life is too short, too short. Because we are, all of us, travelers, nicht wahr? Foreign people in a foreign land." There was a hush, then an explosion of hugging and weeping and something being spilled. So the mood is bright, if somewhat hung over, the next morning when we all reconnoiter at the bus station, yet another manure field. "Guten morgen!" my mother calls out. "Guten morgen!" the Germans cry back. They supervises as a small Ethiopian hefts their fabulous leather luggage on top of the bus, tying it all down with skeins of twine. The many Ethiopian peasants, the women in black muslin and the men in work shirts and wrinkled corduroys, pretty much ignore us, busy lifting their own chicken coops and lentil baskets. "A small detail," as my mother liked to put it later when she'd retell the story-- "a small detail" is that there's not one but two buses heading out towards Massawa this day. We and the Germans are all assigned to the first bus. Our family is further subdivided into three seats together at the front, ours, and one way, way at the back, among the chicken coops, my father's. Good. But here's the wrinkle. Our seats are right over the wheel. The floor rises in a hump under our feet. We can't stretch our legs out. For nine hours. And, as I've told you, my mother is 5'11". But the bus officials seem oddly opposed to us changing our seats. Why? The first bus is full, and for some odd reason, they do not want to put us on the second. But my mother insists. "But we cannot sit there. We cannot. Mein Gott! It is intolerable. We are not animals." And then, in with the haymaker. "I will go to the American consulate." Bingo. Without a word, three of us are moved to the second bus, far from anyone we know. The buses navigate their way down treacherous mountains. The mountains are beautiful, if threatening in their jagged blueness. Occasionally a small peasant child in a soiled galabia runs by the side of the road, waving. His small shout fades off in the distance. "Ahhhhh!" The road zigzags, zigzags. At the end of each hairpin turn is a lone white cross. I drop off to sleep. Popping, like the sound of a truck backfiring, jolts me awake. All around us, Ethiopian peasants are dropping to the floor. There are shouts. Then, all at once, like a congregation, the Ethiopians rise and file down the aisle, fingers laced on top of their heads. My mother does not say two words to us. She kneels swiftly. Her hands fly over our bags. She stuffs all of our family's passports and traveler's checks under Kaitlin's and my blouses, smoothing our waistbands to hold them in place. "Are we there yet?" I ask. My mother claps her hand over my mouth and pushes me towards the door. When I get there, I see what the twin forces of adventure and economy have brought us to. Not a pavilion of happy, dancing people, but Eritrean terrorists clad in military fatigues, firing machine guns randomly into the air. Ahead of us, an Ethiopian peasant woman's cheap black purse is cut from her arm. Obedient as Ethiopian sheep, we file down the stairs and form ourselves into what appears, sickeningly, to be firing squad formation. All around us is the blankness of the Eritrean desert. Ahead of us, the road stretches out towards Massawa, Pearl of the Red Sea, pitted an empty. "Oh, God," I think. "Oh, God." Now I look up into the wide blue sky. The great blue depth is mesmerizing, oddly peaceful. "So, this is it," I think, "the end of my life, right here." No more sour lemonade. No more hay smell. I will never grow up to be 20." We wait. But the bullets do not come. It gradually dawns on us that the terrorists' real interest is in the first bus, not the second. 50 yards up the road, Ilsa, Franz-Joseph, and the fat couple have become the center of attention. They stand helplessly in their sumptuous safari outfits, hands in the air. The leader shouts at them. My eye slides down the line of first bus passengers. And there, towards the end, is my father. With a small body, dark coloring, and worn rag sweater, he actually kind of blends in. And I realize in that moment with a kind of savvy world traveler's instinct that my father will not be shot that day. And in some small way, I am glad. Franz-Joseph, Ilsa, and the fat couple, on the other hand, are being marched off towards the low brown hills as hostages. "Ethiopia!" my mother cries out. It is five years later. She is back in our dining room in southern California, finishing the Pearl of the Red Sea story for yet another group of mesmerized dinner guests. "But how?" someone asked. "But naturilich! The bus company set it all up. It was totally corrupt. They put all the foreigners on the first bus to make it easy. Had it not been for the wheel, the wheel, I and the putzenlinchins would've been marched off as hostages as well. Our Deutschen friends were released two weeks later, but their passports, cameras, traveler's checks, they never got back. At that point, they may had wished they'd flown, but then they would not have saved that $30. Who needed to see the Pearl of the Red Sea anyway? Not us. That night we dined on hot dogs und chocolate milk at the American military base in Massawa. We slept on metal beds. It was so elegant. Morgan fruh, we were chauffeured straight back to Lalibella via military convoy, which was fine with me, I said, as long as I don't have to sit over the wheel." Everyone applauds and laughs, and so do I, wanting the story to go on and on. But as the years go by, my mother gets more and more tired of telling it because the Ethiopian vacation comes to be the story of her marriage, a compromise between two opposites that can never be made to work. Eventually my parents spend all their time alone screaming and fighting. And then they stop talking at all, live together in silence, two strangers under one roof. What my mother will do sometimes after a dinner party is slip into the garage. Still in her amber beads and fire-engine red dress, she sits alone in my father's '56 Buick, puts the radio on, smokes a cigarette. Because the true mirage turns out to be not the Pearl of the Red Sea but that Buick. When my mother had first seen it on that magical day in the '50s, it was the car of a true American, a man who had put his sorry past behind. But that Buick would turn out to be an anomaly in my father's life, a youthful extravagance from which he would never quite recover. As the years went by, it would make my father sick for anyone even to drive it, to waste money on gas. So, while my mother left her World War II behind, he could not forget his Shanghai. He has brought it with him, and this is where they live, not in America but in his Shanghai. So in his home, it is she who remains the perpetual traveller, a foreign person always in a foreign land. Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of the book Depth Takes a Holiday. Coming up, David Sedaris travels without his family. In a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program we choose a topic, bring you stories from a variety of writers and performers. Today's show, Vacations. We've arrived at Act Three. While Sandra Tsing Loh's story represents a kind of a limit case, the ultimate scenario of a nightmare family vacation, traveling without your family has its own little problems. David Sedaris has this story about awakening to all the possibilities of just hitting the road alone. David is the author of the book Barrel Fever, a sometimes commentator on NPR'S Morning Edition, and a frequent contributor to This American Life. It started innocently enough the year I began the ninth grade and attended an all-day Planet of the Apes marathon at a budget theater a mile or so from my parents' house. I had seen the original movie nine times, waiting always for Vera to ask, "What will he find out there in the forbidden zone, Dr. Zaius?" followed by Charlton Heston's heartfelt, "Damn you! Damn you all to hell!" when he discovers he's been on his home planet throughout the course of the entire movie. I had entered the theater on a bright, humid morning, but when I came out, dazed and candy-bloated, it was dark and raining. I thought of calling for a ride, but my mother was off enduring my older sister's flute recital. That left my father, and he was out of the question. "I'll be there in 10 minutes," he'd say. In the background, I would hear nothing, which meant he was holed up in his bedroom watching a golf tournament on TV. Golf involved hours of dead time interrupted every so often by the announcer, who would whisper, "Butler is obviously thinking about last week's disastrous seventh hole at Glistening Sands." I'd call back an hour later, and my father would answer, saying, "I'm on my way out the door right this minute. Jesus, give me a second, will you?" On the television, one of the pros would pace the fairway, hitching up his lime-green slacks. "It's bogey or nothing if Snead wants to come in at par 72." You could outgrow your clothing waiting for my father to pick you up. I left the theater and held out my thumb. It was just that easy. My father was in the habit of picking up hitchhikers. We would be packed into the station wagon on our way to the pool or the grocery store, and he would pull over, instructing us to make room for company. It was exciting to have a stranger in the car. My father, his cocktail tinkling between his thighs, was always gracious but at the same time suspicious, behaving as though he were in on some big secret and could pinpoint the lies these people told. "OK, Rudy, I'll be happy to take you to your grandmother's house so you can pick up your laundry." [LAUGHS] He would shake his head and chuckle to himself, but the hitchhikers didn't seem to mind. I noticed, though, that he only stopped for young people. We would spot some stooped and weathered man standing beside a beat-up suitcase and call out for my father to stop. "Dad, look," but he drove right on by as if they were painted cutouts advertising a restaurant named Tramp's or Hobo's. I held out my thumb, figuring that someone like my father would pick me up, but instead it was an old woman, her helmet of hair protected by a plastic rain cap. She rolled down her window and shouted, "Damn you. Get your sorrowful butt into this car." She wore a pale blue uniform, the outfit issued to the cashiers at the local supermarket chain. "I got a grandson out there about your age, and if I ever caught him hitching a ride, I'd stick my foot so far up his butt, I'd lose my shoe. What do you think you're doing out there? Where are your people?" I told her that my father was a POW in Vietnam, and my mother, she's a long-haul truck driver on a run to Kansas City. "Right," the woman said, stubbing out her cigarette, "and I breast-feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it." She pulled up in front of my parents' house. "Truck driver my pretty pink keister. Now you get in that house, and you stay there before someone carves you up. You were lucky this time, but if I ever catch you out here again, I'll run you down just to spare you the misery." I started hitchhiking on a regular basis. Aside from the convenience, I liked the fact that these people didn't know anything about me. I could reinvent myself every time I opened a car door, trying on whichever personality happened to suit my mood. Some people pulled up as if if they were expecting me hours ago, while others slowed down to study me before coming to a complete stop. There were black ministers and retired locksmiths, lifeguards, college students, and floor sanders, and they were usually alone. Raleigh wasn't that big of a town, and most people didn't mind going a mile or two out of their way. I never hitchhiked beyond the city limits until I was sent off to college and met a girl named Ronnie. Her mother had died in the living room while confined to an iron lung, and her father had remarried twice within the last four years, dragging her through two sets of stepfamilies. Ronnie was tough and independent in a way I'd never known. She'd had a secret sleepover boyfriend at the age of 15 and was well-instructed in the arts of cigarette rolling, camping, breaking and entering, and hair care. Our campus was isolated in the mountains of western North Carolina, far from anything one might label a point of interest, but Ronnie took charge, initiating hitchhiking trips to Asheville and Gatlinburg, to Nashville and Raleigh and Washington. At the end of the school year, I transferred to Kent State, and Ronnie packed off to San Francisco, where her brother arranged a job for her at a movie theater. I lasted a year in Ohio before deciding to join her. I'd never hitchhiked that far, much less alone. Allowing fear to get the best of me, I made the mistake of teaming up with Dale Knowles, a freshman I'd met at a dorm party. Dale was creating his own major in beat literature. That was the first warning sign. When shaking hands, he tended to position his palm as if he were returning a volleyball. His prominent gums accommodated teeth the size of Chiclets, and he wore a safari hat decorated with buttons and pins promoting everything from the concept of world peace to the legalization of polygamy. What I disliked more than anything else was his laugh, which was prolonged and phlegmy, like a cat tossing up a hairball. And he carried a guitar. We hadn't even gotten our first ride before he pulled it out and began composing one of his appalling ballads. [SINGING] Standing on the highway, thumb up in the air. People passing by, pretending not to care. I'd sooner pick up someone waving a pistol than holding a guitar. He'd lie barefoot on the side of the road with this head propped up on his knapsack, exercising his toes and wondering why we weren't getting any rides. The guy just didn't get it. We were outside of Indianapolis when we were picked up by two young men in a Jeep who introduced themselves as Starsky and Hutch, names borrowed from the brazen, cultish heroes of a popular television show. They were wired and loopy, washing down over-the-counter amphetamines with quarts of malt liquor that rolled back and forth the floorboards beneath the front seat. When asked where they were from, Starsky made a gagging gesture. "That's code for Delaware," Hutch said. Starsky gave the finger to the driver of a boot-shaped Gremlin. "State bird," Hutch said. He took a swallow of his warm malt liquor and belched. "State motto," Starsky said. Noticing the tank was low, they pulled into a service station, where I offered them some gas money, hoping that, like most people, they might view my generosity as payment enough. Starsky said he had it covered, adding that he could sure use some fudge. "Do you have a taste for it? Well, I do. Run on into the store there and see if they have some." It always made sense for one person to stay with the car in case your driver decided to take off with your pack, so Dale stayed behind, which worked out well for him, seeing as he would rather swallow flashlight batteries than shell out a few dollars for some idiot's fudge. He sat in the backseat while I went into the store and bought a block of something fudge-like and a small bag of potato chips which I might offer as a snack to our next driver. When I got back to the car, Starsky replaced the gas cap and pushed me into the backseat. The attendant headed our way, a roll of bills in his hand, ready to accept payment, and he reached the bumper just as Starsky peeled out of the station, driving over the concrete embankment and onto the interstate. "I'm not sure how cool this is," Dale said. "What about the police?" "Police?" Starsky said. "Police? Hey, ho, buddy, we can outrun the damn police, no problem." He stood upon the gas pedal, and the Jeep advanced, much like a plane moments before taking to the air. Starsky had upon his face the expression of a comic book bombardier preparing to destroy a village of unsuspecting peasants. He yelled out for Hutch to hold the wheel he opened the package of fudge, and the Jeep swerved into the other lane, barely missing an oncoming refrigerated truck. Horns blared, and brakes squealed. And for the first time in my life, I thought, this is how people die. This is exactly how it happens. Dale's hat blew out the window, which meant that at least one of us would go with a smile on his face. Had the wind taken his guitar, I might have embraced death with open arms, shouting the word hallelujah and beating a tambourine. Starsky and Hutch seemed to enjoy our pathetic displays of fear, jiggling the steering wheel and cutting off other drivers just so they could watch us cower and pray. We covered an enormous amount of ground in an hour before Starsky pulled over to relieve himself behind a billboard, and Dale and I jumped out, hugging our packs. "This is is great," I said. "Really, this is exactly where we wanted to go. Terrific." Dale used the downtime as an opportunity to compose a few new songs. [SINGING] I'm well aware they were from Delaware. Days later he was asking for a word that might rhyme with Utah. That'll keep you up all night. I know from experience. We reach San Francisco where Ronnie had gotten me a room at a residence hotel on Market Street. Dale stayed for a week, leaving by bus the day after I walked in on him standing naked before a full length mirror singing [SINGING] "San Francisco, you stole my heart. Now that I found you, I'll never part. California's stirring in my blood." His privates were covered by the guitar, but his pale, spotted rear end was more than I could bear. Ronnie and I stayed on for three months before taking off to pick pears in Oregon. She was the perfect traveling companion, as a boy and girl together have much better luck than two guys. We got rides with single women and truck drivers who claimed they needed company and then never said a word. We slept in abandoned houses and open fields, under bridges and behind barbed-wire fences. After the pears were finished, we picked apples and then headed up to Canada, back to California, and across the country, arriving in western North Carolina in mid-November. Ronnie thought she might stay awhile, and I decided to visit a former college roommate in Ohio, the longest trip I'd ever taken alone. I got an interminable ride with a pantyhose salesman who spent six hours saying, "You just take and take, don't you? Don't you? Out there with your thumb in the air, not a care in the world, grabbing whatever you can get. Yes, sir, you take and you take until you're ready to burst. But what about giving? Did you ever think about that? Of course not. You're too busy taking. Me, I'm what you call a taxpayer. Tax, it's a tariff that working people have to pay so that someone like you can enjoy a life of leisure. I give, and I give until I've got nothing left. Then I turn right around, and I give some more. I give and give to all of Uncle Sam's little takers. And I've been thinking that maybe it's about time I get a little something in return. Yes, indeed, maybe it's time we try that shoe on the other foot for a change. You, my young friend, are going to wash my car inside and out, and you're going to pay for it." He exited the interstate and headed for a car wash, the roof of which supported three cheerful seals buffing a limousine with their motorized fins. The man stood beside the bumper, supervising me as I shampooed and waxed his car. "That's right, put a little muscle into it. Next I want you to empty those ashtrays and vacuum the interior top to bottom. Come on, speedy. Let's get cracking." I had no problem with the work, but he was driving me out of my mind. "How does it feel to be giving for a change? Not much fun, is it? Hurry up now and buff those hubcaps. Let me see you buff." He had me polish everything from the antenna to the license plate before handing me my pack and driving away. I got a ride back to the interstate and another that landed me 20 miles beyond Charleston, West Virginia. It was around 4 o'clock, and I hoped I might catch a long ride that would take me through to Ohio. It was cold, and my hands were chapped from watching that lunatic's car. My fingernails shone from the wax. I waited 10 minutes before someone slowed down and stopped 20 yards up the road. It was a pickup truck advertising an air conditioning and refrigeration company. The man's shirt introduced him as T.W. His fingers were soiled with grease, and the cab of his truck was littered with candy wrappers and soda cans. I asked him what T.W. stood for, and he told me it stood for T.W. and that his last name started with an A, so if you put it all together, it had a nice ring to it. He had an open, sincere face, the features set into a gesture of wonder as if he had spent the last 10 years in a coma, and everything was new and sensational to him. When I told him I was headed to Ohio to study medicine, he said, "Really? Be a doctor and operate? On people? You must be some kind of smart to be a doctor. Operate on brains, you say?" I told him I'd already done it a few times, and it wasn't as hard as it looks. I was hitchhiking because I'd made a bet with a friend that I could get from Duke to Kent State in 18 hours. I didn't need the money. It was just something medical students to blow off steam. "Well, I'll see that you win that bet," T.W. said. He explained that he had cut out of work early and would be happy to take me all the way to Ohio, seeing as he was a night owl. And he hadn't spoken to a doctor since his foot had been crushed by an air conditioner a few years back. "Look at me," he said, brushing the candy wrappers onto the floor, "riding with a brain doctor." We could get started as soon as he dropped some papers off to a friend. That's what he told me. He drove off the interstate and onto a series of highways and country roads before stopping at a tavern. It was a cinder block building lit with signs advertising brands of beer and the existence of a pool table. He asks would I like to come in, but I was under age and had not yet developed a thirst for alcohol. It was dusk by this time, the sun fading behind the surrounding mountains. I waited an hour, two hours, three. It had gotten too dark to leave, as I had no idea where I was, and hardly any cars passed along the road. There were no streetlights, and I could hear threatening dogs barking off in the distance. When it began to rain, I took my pack from the bed of the truck and carried it up front, rooting around for an extra sweater and a pair of socks I could wear on my hands. I stared at the lights of the bar, wondering who might choose to live in such a town. It was pretty enough. You might pass through and admire the mountains, but wouldn't a person then move on to somewhere more important? Travel is supposed to broaden your mind, but it had a way of depressing me. The more places I went, the more people I saw, the more I realized I didn't matter to anyone except the family I'd left behind. And who knew them outside from their friends and neighbors in a town just as pointless as this one? It brought me down to think about it, so I turned on my transistor radio and listened to a local call-in show. T.W. staggered out of the bar at around 10 o'clock. He had his arms around a skinny, long-faced man and obese woman who held her pocketbook over her head in protection against the rain. She said something, and the men doubled over laughing. I was in a pretty bad mood, but when you're hitchhiking, it's best to keep it to yourself, as you don't really have a right to complain. Even before he got into the truck, I understood that T.W. was drunk. He waved goodbye to the man and woman and proceeded to start the engine, jabbing the key here and there as though the ignition might have moved during his absence and could be anywhere by now. "Those are my friends," he said. "I've been knowing them all my life, and they're fun people. You got that?" His face had lost that innocent quality and become stern and dogmatic. "Friends," he shouted. "Personal, private friends." He repeated the word several times, pounding his chest with his fist as if he were training an ape to speak. "My friends." Something told me we wouldn't be driving to Ohio anytime soon. We reached the interstate, and I offered to get out, but he wouldn't hear of it. "You're coming with me," he said. "Home to my house with me. I've got a place fixed up nice with rugs and toasters and a lot of things like that. My house. Mine. No way are you going out on a night like this. Forget all that other crap with school and college. It doesn't matter for stinking squat." I pictured his house as resembling the tavern and hoped it was located on a brightly lit street with a decent amount of traffic. Once there, I could probably make a run for it. "Big brain doctor, are you? Like to stick your fat little fingers in other people's skulls and tinker around? Is that what you like to do? I'll give you plenty to tinker with, hot shot." I was looking out at the wet road and didn't see it coming. He grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head down onto the seat, holding me there with one hand while he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. The truck skidded and swerved onto the gravel shoulder before he grabbed the wheel and righted it. The gun felt just the way I always knew it would. He held it against the side of my face, the barrel butting against my jaw. I now imagined his home stacked with bodies, as this seemed to be the exact place where something like this might happen. Maybe he'd used his job skills and built a refrigeration chamber to prevent decay. Or maybe he'd bury me beneath some tool shed, and they'd have to identify me through dental records. When had I last been to the dentist? Why wasn't I there now, my mother smoking in the waiting room and copying recipes from the magazines? My dentist would probably say I was asking for it. His dentist would show up on TV, blinking into the camera to testify. "He was such a nice man. We had no idea." I felt the car slow down and take a turn. We were off the interstate now, probably on an exit ramp. He raised the gun to steady the wheel, and I opened the door and jumped, thinking all the while of the many television detectives who seemed to do this on a weekly basis. "Jump and roll," I told myself. "Jump and roll like Mannix, like Barnaby Jones." I hit the gravel shoulder and tumbled into a muddy ditch filled with trash and brambles. My pack had fallen out with me, so I snatched it up and ran. Behind me, I heard the truck pull off the road, the door slam, someone coming through the thicket. I thought I should climb a tree, but that's what you do for bears. No, bears will climb after you, small bears, won't they? But he's not a bear. But still, I can't climb with socks on my hands. He'll only shoot me down or shoot me now in the back maybe, in the head, in the arm, blow my arm off at the shoulder. What I needed was a gun or a knife. The Indians made knives and spears. Even now you'd see them in the souvenir shops. But how did they do it? It took days probably, maybe even weeks. I turned my head to look behind me and fell into a knot of thorny bushes. I thought to get up and run, but he was too close now. I could see him through the trees, his truck lights shining in the distance. "Idiot," he called. "Hey, you, get back in this truck." He looked off to my right, and I understood that he couldn't see me. "I'm not going to hurt you. Get back here. I was only joking. Hey, you-- hey, it's not even loaded. Look." He pulled the trigger, and the gun made a puny clicking noise. "Come on out. Hey, kid, I swear, I was only joking." I watched as he returned to his truck. "Get your ass back here. Hey, dopey, I'm talking to you." He lit a cigarette and tapped on the horn, behaving as though I wanted to come back but had lost the way. He rolled down the window and drove off slowly, the door ajar and the cab lights on, whistling as if for a lost dog. I waited until I could no longer see the taillights, and then I ran down the exit ramp and into the middle of the interstate, waving my arms and begging someone to stop. The first two cars just missed hitting me, but the third pulled over. Three students headed to Cleveland for an upcoming concert. I told them what had happened, my voice high-pitched and breathy, and the driver turned to me, saying, "Sounds like you're a faggot yourself." This was not the sympathetic reaction I was hoping for. They had picked me up hoping I had some dope, and they were right. We smoked it, and they popped in an 8-track of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. That was my punishment. My reward was that they never said another word until dropping me off somewhere outside of Akron. I continued to hitchhike for the next few years, but after the incident with T.W., something seemed to have changed. It felt as though I had been marked somehow. I had always counted upon people to trust me, but now I no longer quite trusted them. By this time I was certainly old enough to own my own car but still not weathered enough to appear dangerous. People began picking me up with the idea I had more to offer than my gratitude. Drugs were the easy part. I carried them as a courtesy and offered them whenever asked. It was the sexual advances that got to me. I had never been much to look at, but that never seemed to matter, as neither were they. When I though of sex, I pictured someone standing before me crying, "I love you so much that I don't even know who I am anymore." He was no particular age or race. All that mattered is that he was crazy about me. This thing with drivers wasn't what I had in mind at all. I got the idea they were married with children. "You fool around much when hitchhike?" they'd ask, the question always fast like that and always phrasing it in such a way that they could follow it up with, "I'm only kidding. Jeez. What's your problem?" I studied myself in the mirror, trying to figure out what had changed, but all I saw was the same old me, wanting to be someone else. I had an unpleasant experience with a married couple outside of Atlanta, a middle-aged man and woman driving a Cadillac nude at 2:00 AM. A few days later in Fayetteville, I was led down a dark dirt road by a man who promised to crush my skull like a peanut. The second time you find yourself cowering in the bushes, you know it's time to ask yourself some tough questions. I got on a bus and never hitchhiked again. To this day, I still haven't learned to drive a car. It seems much too dangerous, and besides that, I'm just not the type to fill out insurance forms. I moved to cities with decent public transportation systems, Chicago and then New York, which is even better. You hold out your hand for a ride but fold the thumb and pinky against your palm. The drivers don't speak English, which comes as a relief. You have to pay, but then again, you always do. Every so often, I'll find myself in a car driven by a friend, and we'll pass someone by the side of the road. He's young, and the force of traffic has disheveled his hair. He looks into your eyes, pretending to expect nothing, and his lips are moving, practicing the story he plans to tell. "Pull over," I say. "I think I know that person." David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever and the forthcoming book Naked. And I know what you're thinking. Every time you turn on the public radio, it's the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Yeah, whatever that means. Our program was produced today but Peter Clowney, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and myself. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Some songs today were provided by Steve Cushing and the Blues Before Sunrise radio network. But not this one. If you would like a copy of this radio program, it's only $10. You can call us at WBEZ in Chicago to get it. 312-832-3380 is the number. 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I'm Ira Glass. What will he find out there in the forbidden zone, Dr. Zaius? Damn you! Damn you all to hell! Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International. Here's the dream, expressed as concisely, I think, as anybody ever has expressed it. I hold in my hand a handwritten sign that was photocopied and pasted up around the San Francisco area. In big letters at the top it says, "Play guitar for $5." There are two underlines underneath that. Then, in smaller letters underneath, it says, "I don't give guitar lessons. I give one lesson. In that lesson, I will teach you three chords for 5 bucks. Ever see those mindless junkies up on stage banging out that pre-adolescent bull, waving their hair around, getting free drinks and other favors? Know why they're better than you? Because they know three chords, and you don't. So for a quarter of what you'd spend getting drunk and watching their crappy band, I'll teach you all you need to know. If you're sick of talking and want to start rocking, give me a call and give me a five, and I'll show you how." And then, underneath, the guy's name, Michael Dean, punk rock and roll fantasy camp, then his phone number, and the important words which follow, "Call at noon only." Underlined "only." Why I bring it up here-- by the way, from WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. I bring it up here because this is the dream, this right here. This sums it up, the dream of what we want when we start taking classes. Our dream is it's going to be easy, it's going to be quick, it's going to be cheap, and that we're going to be transformed by someone who is completely confident of that fact. He's just going to give it to us, and then it's just going to happen. And then we're going to be done. This is the dream that we carry with us into any kind of lessons of any sort, guitar, dancing, tennis, meditation, pottery, screenplay writing. Well, we are back here on our program for another week documenting everyday life in these United States. Each week, as you know, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers and documentary producers to take a whack at that theme. Today's theme is Lessons. Act One, Ski Lessons. And in that act, we are pleased to bring you Spalding Gray, a man who is sometimes called the premier teller of monologues in America. Act Two, Swimming Lesson. That'll be a story from our own Scott Carrier. Act Three, How To Fire a Potato in a Graceful Arc 450 Feet in the Air, a lesson on that. Act Four, we'll just get to Act Four when we do. Stick around and learn, OK? Yeah, you can tell we're having the big star on today because we're using the big movie music. Klieg light sweeping across the studio ceiling. I wish you could see it in here. I've got to turn this music off. Hold on for a second. I'm just going to take that out. Let me switch to another song here. Yeah, that'll do. As I was saying, it's a great pleasure to welcome Spalding Gray to our program. Gray's probably best known for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, which was made into a feature film a few years back. He's travelled the country for years with various monologues, Monster in a Box, Gray's Anatomy. If you haven't seen him, what he does is he basically just sits on stage with a table and a glass of water and some notes in the most nondescript clothes possible, clothes that make no statement at all. And he tells these stories. It's interesting, actually, for those of us who have followed Spalding Gray's work, this monologue-- it's called It's a Slippery Slope-- because unlike some of them, it's a story in which he's really transformed. At the end of the story, he is really a different person than he is at the beginning in two ways. That transformation takes two parts. One, he leaves his long-term relationship-- this woman who he's just been with for years and years and years-- for another woman and has a baby with this other woman. And the other thing is, he learns to ski. We're going to play you a long excerpt of the skiing stories he tells. Spalding Gray tells the audience that he hates lessons and school of all types, does miserably in any kind of formal learning setting. But somehow, he gets it in his head that what he wants to do is he wants to ski. Skiers just seem glorious and athletic. And he and his longtime companion, Renee, decide to take a lesson. So there we are, standing there on a beautiful, clear, cloudless spring day. And our ski professor, the instructor, comes out and announces that he used to be a heart surgeon. Now he's retired and doing what he's always really wanted to do, ski instructing. "And aren't you lucky to be here on one of the most beautiful slopes in America," so he says, "standing on 150 inches of packed powder under a cloudless, blue sky, looking out over the edge of the Grand Canyon, the rim." And so we were, and so it was spectacular. And we began to do the first moves, the snow plow. And we start down. It's a bit awkward, but I am staying balanced. The skis aren't splitting me too much, and Renee and everyone else in the class is doing fine. And we go into the turns for the traverse. And people are going right, left, and I find that for some reason-- I never have found out why-- I only could turn left. But I was doing that fine. I was doing these great traverses left, and snow plow down, and take the lift up, and left, and down and left. Hi, left, left. I couldn't come around right. I thought I had to think my way around into it. And Renee now has finished the lesson, is up on the porch saying, "Let's get going. We're going to miss our plane." I said, "Renee, I don't think I can go. I have to turn right on skis. I'm going to do it like you. I've got to do it." "Spald, come, there'll be another time." "What if there isn't?" In the car, I am completely dejected, depressed. She's driving. I'm in a big slough. I'm in a slump, going "Oh no, failed again." We get to the Phoenix airport, and we go in. And we're just checking on the bags, and something seizes me. I just freeze up and go, "I can't. I'm not going. I can't. Wait, wait. No, no. I've got to turn right on skis. It's as simple as that. Excuse me, ma'am. Wait, no, you put the bags. Wait, ma'am. Wait, there's a motel up there, isn't there? Up at that ski slope?" "Mr. Gray, I am here to check you on for the Newark flight. I'm not a travel agent. Are you or are you not flying with us?" "I can't-- wait a minute, Renee. You go ahead. I'm going to go up there, and maybe I can go back to Davis. I don't-- oh wait, wait, wait, oh Jesus Christ. I can't--" She's going over to talk to the head stewardess saying, "I think there's someone here that should not be flying with us today." Renee leads me over meanwhile, and she saying, "What is going on?" And I said, "Renee, listen, I'm tired of being a vicarian. I want to live a life, not tell it. I don't want to do a monologue about not being able to turn right on skis. I want to just do it. I got oh--" She goes, "Time for intervention. I'm calling your brother." She calls my brother, Rocky, in Saint Louis and says, "I'm here in the Phoenix airport. Spald won't get on the plane because he can't turn right on skis. I'll put him on. All right." "Hi, Rock, I'm doing well turning left. I know I could be a skier. Yeah, I can't turn right." "Well, don't you have a hard life." Well, as this story goes, Spalding Gray does in fact get on the plane and does return to New York City. But he remains obsessed with this idea that he is going to learn to ski, and he is going to finally turn right. And so obsessed with it, in fact, he says at one point he actually starts to watch skiing videos. They're unbelievable. They're like porn films. I mean similar exhibitionistic gymnastics, similar music, similar vicarious, "god, I feel lonely, I wished I was in the center of that" feeling. Eventually, Spalding Gray does finally get to ski with an acquaintance named Barney on this picture perfect day out on a mountain in California. DayGlo tape is pulled. Barney and I start up with all of the locals. And we begin to ski, and I find I'm only going left. I'm going left into the bushes, coming out the other side with branches in my mouth like a Botticelli. And I say, I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't bother you. I know I have to do this on my own. You go ski. I'm going over to Meadow. I go over to Meadow, the green slope. And I am inspired that day when I see what I see. It's the adaptive ski school. And they are taking quadriplegics out of wheelchairs and putting them in gondolas with those little ski runners. And they have poles with skis on them, and I think, Spalding, if you can't turn right on this slope today, give it up. Now, I have no instructor. I'm trying to do this on my own. And I begin, and I'm left in crashing. And yard sale, all stuff is all over, picking up my stuff. But you know what I'm impressed by is how wildly I can crash and still get up without anything broken. And it's left and crash, and left and crash. And then it happens. It's ineffable. I can't tell you how it happens. All the time, I think I had to think myself around. It was just a shift of weight, and I never experienced this in my life except in 1946 on Thanksgiving Day when I first learned how to pump on a swing. I suddenly turned right, or something turned me right. And then left, right, left, boom, down. But I was up again, left, right, left. People would ski by me real fast. I'd crash. People would ski by me and fall. I'd crash. I was in such empathy. Or I'd be skiing and thinking, you're doing it. You're skiing. Crash. It was so beautiful. It was like zen, but not as subtle. If you weren't present, you crashed, and the mountain hit you. And I realized at that point that all my life I'd been doing a kind of subtle suicide to myself. I'd always be somewhere else in my head. I was always thinking, oh, I could be there. Or I could be there. I could be there. Or I wish I was there. But now when I'm skiing, I don't have that as long as I'm skiing. And I'm so excited I get down to lunch to join Barney, and we go over to the blue slope. And I'm going to ski with him, and now it's a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] day. It is a perfect day that reminds me of the old days, the Thornton Burgess books my father used to read to me, The West Wind Stories when you see the cloud with a face and a wind puffing out of its lips. That's how the clouds looked. Only there wasn't wind. It was these long chains of snow flurries. And then the clouds would pass, and the bright California sun would light the packed snow. And there were furrows where other people had skied, and we were hopping through the furrows in other people's rhythm. And we were riding up. We were dancing in the day. I was with a man, and we weren't talking. We were skiing together, and I couldn't stop. At the end of the day, they had to restrain me. I tried to bribe the lift operator for another run. Barney said, "Easy, easy, easy. You've been skiing for seven hours." I'd never done anything for seven hours in my life. I never thought of death once. We went back to the condo. Barney was driving. I was flat-lining. Whoa, not an anxious thought in my head. Oh, boy, unwind in front of the gas log. Have a couple of beers and watch the weather channel. Whatever. Deep, deep dreamers, oblivion, sleep. The following day, I woke up and I thought, oh, my god. Now there's skiing, and there's life. And I don't want to live anymore. I don't want to come down from this mountain. I want to figure out how to stay up here, how to make a living up here, how to just ski. I had a mission. I never felt a mission in my life, a quest. I wanted to ski across America to New England. I saw myself like John Cheever's story, "The Swimmer." Burt Lancaster did the film. Swimming his way back to that deserted house through backyard swimming pools, only I was going to do it on ski slopes and use my monologue as a vehicle and begin booking them by ski areas. And I did. I booked Gray's Anatomy first of all where I had to conquer the big master, Ajax in Aspen. And I booked the Wheeler Opera House, and they gave me a condo, a free ski lesson, and passes to ski and some money. It was a very good deal. It was. And basically in Aspen, there are two mountains. You've got Ajax, the big, giant father figure. And then you've got Buttermilk, which is like the reclining lady. You can ski over her breasts and through her thighs, no problem. At the end of the day, go over and get beat up by the father, you see. The ticket is interchangeable. So I am having my ski lesson on Buttermilk, of course, on the lady. And I am hanging out, waiting for the ski instructor to come out. I have nothing to do, so I'm reading whatever I can get my hands on. I'm reading the back of my ski ticket. I will never do that again. "Skiing is inherently a dangerous sport, which can result in personal injury, including catastrophic injury, death or property damage." God forbid property damage. "If you are not willing to assume the risks set forth in this warning, please do not ski in this area." Sign it. Sign the ticket. Sign for the skis, little stubby 160s so I can turn easily. Sign, sign, sign. Sign my life away and wait for my ski instructor to come out. And he skis out, says, "Hi, guy. OK, let's begin. Sterling, is it all right if I call you Sterling? Let's begin with a little joke, Sterling. Do you know the difference between a snowboard and a vacuum cleaner?" "No, I don't." "Depends on where you attach the dirt bag. OK, slight bend in the knees. Corresponding bend in the hip joint, great. OK, crouch and lift at the same time, good. Parallel skis, flat on the snow. Skis slightly edged, all right? Now, using turns on each traverse, we can go down the mountain at any speed we so desire. Now weight, 90% of the weight on the downhill ski, good. Weight forward, don't sit back. Nothing natural about this posture, Sterling, nothing natural about it. Hey, don't cave in. All right, flex your elbows. Weight over the balls of your feet. Please don't stick your butt out. Now, your basic traverse stance is often referred to as that of a banana. Banana arching, skin on the banana. Still think of your ski-suit as a banana skin if that's going to help. Now, you're really falling down the mountain, Sterling." Another snowboarder shoots between us. "That little [BLEEP]. I'm just waiting for one of them to hit me, and I'm going to cash in on his HMO and retire. OK, parallel skis. Upper ski is slightly leading in front of the downhill ski. Shift your weight and let the upper ski lead out. All right, facing down the fall line. Basically, you're falling down the mountain, OK? Point your belly button down the hill. Banana arching, OK? You stand and watch while I traverse down the mountain, and then you follow." I stood there like a frozen banana and ended up going down to the Wheeler Opera House to perform Gray's Anatomy. My ironic, hypochondriacal voice made all the exhausted skiers laugh. The following day, I was determined to set skis on Ajax, even though my guide books said under no circumstances should a beginner go on this mountain. And on the way to Ajax, I was recollecting my Greek history. Ajax, hero of the Trojan Wars, who mistook a flock of sheep for warriors, hallucinated, killed them, and then killed himself out of humiliation. That's Ajax. So I arrive, and I get the map. And I'm choosing what trail I should go on based on the name. And I choose Dipsy-Doodle and Pussyfoot. So I'm standing on Dipsy-Doodle, talking to myself. Skis parallel and slightly apart. Slightly. Slightly means slightly. Relax arms, flex elbows, flex elbows. Why did I let him call me Sterling? Crouch and lift at the same time. Weight over the balls of your feet. Now look, I never knew my feet had balls. I've heard the expression, but I have never contacted them. Basically, I felt like a bad geometry class. I felt all fragmented. I couldn't really get it all together and boogie. And these these other skiers are going by me full speed, doing that little Austrian wiggle, that tight ass little bunny hop, the skis close together. [BUMPING SOUNDS] They go by. With their nose up in the air, they go, "On your left." I mean you're not allowed to fall on Ajax. If you fall, they go by and go, "On your left." At Buttermilk, they say, "Are you all right, guy? Can I help you up?" But I'm skiing. I'm skiing, and I'm going down. I haven't got any inner cheerleader voice, no voice in me saying, you're doing great. But you know what I don't have anymore? I don't have the self-deprecating, "you're [BLEEP] you're no good, you'll never master this" voice because the mountain's knocking the [BLEEP] out of me. It's hitting me. It took that voice away. It's such a whoa that beats you up. It's a plummeting. It's like the father I never wrestled with. I'm down, boom. And I'm up again. And I'm surviving it. And I'm skiing, and I experience a zen miracle. I'm hungry without looking at my watch. And I ski on down. I don't ski the whole mountain. It's just halfway down to the little gourmet restaurant, Bonnie's. Hey, I feel like a skier now. I can eat with them on the deck. Take my skis off, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] in the snow, clomp on down like a man on the moon, big ski boots crouching on the deck. Order a well-done hamburger to avoid E. coli. And sit out in the sun. Oh, my god. I've got to pinch myself. The fat lady hasn't sung yet. Is this really happening to me? Is this Spuddy Gray, great failure of Barrington, Rhode Island, skiing in Aspen alone, able to be alone? It occurred to me that this was a moment I was having for myself. I was doing this. I didn't even know what that meant, never had the experience in my life. And I'm saying, this is really cool. I like this. And oh, I see three people coming toward me. Uh-oh, it's all over. These people have probably seen my show. I can tell by the way the woman's smiling. And they come over, though I like them. They're locals. The first woman's name is Maggie. She's a mail-woman, a letter carrier. She's on a long lunch break. And her boyfriend, Jake, who is a a contractor, and then Martha, a friend of theirs who is a ski instructor for the blind actually over at Buttermilk. And they're all taking the day off to ski. And they want to ski with me. And I say, "Oh, no, no, I'm not really a skier. I'm just a faller, really. I'm up here falling down. Don't, don't, don't. I'm having a good time alone. It's fine." No, no, they're not interested. They've skied the mountain hundreds of times. And Jake's trying to give me this line that pack skiing is how I will really learn, skiing in a group. He's got this theory, the Balinese dance masters, he's telling me. That's how they teach their students kinetically so they're dancing right. "All right, I'll give it a try." So we go over, and damn it all if those skis don't feel too big. They always do when I put them on at first. I feel like a two-year-old trying to walk again. They're crossing. I'm flopping around. I fall down. They're waiting. They're laughing. They're doing fine. But damn it, Jake is right. The actor-mimic in me is able, for some reason, to connect with him and begin to ski like him, to emulate him. So my skis are more parallel. I'm getting up more speed. In fact, I'm almost-- not crashing into him, but becoming one with him until I try to get back to myself and I crash because I don't know how to make the transition. But something's happening that is right. And Maggie is the provocateur. She keeps passing over a snuffed out marijuana joint that she wants to re-light every time we're on the lift. "Oh no, no, thanks. Really, that stuff just makes me think. I don't-- Well, actually think is the word. I'd be a scholar if that was the case. It just makes me grind my gears, junk-head, around and around, garbage, nothing productive. Really, I mean if I was dancing all night at a club or something, I'd take it. But--" "Oh," Maggie says, "really, Spalding, skiing is like dancing in the day. It's like dancing in the light. Don't say no. Just say maybe." So next time around, Maggie and I are alone on a double lift. And she just lights it and passes it over. And I don't think about it. I just go [INHALING SOUNDS]. Pass it back. And I begin to think. I begin to think so hard that I don't get off the lift, and it goes around. They stop it. I'm hanging up there. He goes, "Hey, rock and roll. Hey, man, having a good day?" They're helping me down, and the skis are falling off. They are too big, I'm thinking. And the marijuana is making them seem too big. But I have to say, in defense of the hemp, it really does loosen up my hips. Not that you're supposed to have loose hips when you're skiing, but boogie on down. I'm skiing with Jake now, and I like that, this new male thing, because usually I always felt I had to talk to a guy. We're just skiing together, and I'm up at the top of the mountain waiting for Martha and Maggie to come up. And Jake says, "I want to show you something." Oh, god no. He's going to try to teach me something. Suddenly, I feel like a frozen banana. "No," he says, "don't freeze up. You're doing fine in your turns. But you know what? After you turn, you're sliding down the mountain. You're sliding down the mountain because you're not edging. Just watch me for a minute. And I look over. Oh, wow, I'm able to see it. I'm able to take it in. He rolls his skis in just slightly into the mountain and edges . And oh, yes, I'm behind him, and what a difference an edge makes. We are skiing now down Ruthie's Run, a terrain that was so steep, I was simply crashing down it before. And now, I am realizing that you have to be out of control to be in control. For a second, you have to be falling down that fall line and then catch yourself. And you have to have the leap of faith, and I never had faith in my life until that day. You've got to believe you're going to turn right in order to turn right, and it's a leap of faith and around. Wow, I doubted everything until this moment. And a leap of faith, and I'm around. And I'm falling into the light. And I can feel the gravity pulling me, the earth, the mother. And leap of faith, and I'm around. And leap of faith, I'm around. And leap of faith, I'm around. And Maggie shoots behind me with stereo earphones on, yelling "Think of it as a white wall of death." And I'm able to keep my balance in the face of this, and I know where she gets her kicks. And I know she's hoping I'll do a monologue about this, and she will be in it. We have a wonderful afternoon. It's timeless. It's so energized. It's so-- oh, it's so-- and they bid farewell. They say, "It's almost 4 o'clock. We've got to run the mountain. You download." I said, "No, I want to ski down with you guys." "Spalding, you know what? It's really not safe. There's only one way down the mountain. At the end of the trail, it's Spa Gulch. And the locals refer to that often as the valley of the shadow of death. It's icy. It's dark. The shadow comes in. Maggie blew her ACL tendons out last year. You could hear them pop up the gulch like hot spaghetti. You don't want to do it." "I do." "It's your choice." So I opt-- my plan is that I'm going to follow Martha, the blind ski instructor. I hadn't skied with her yet. Ski instructor for the blind. She was like a sleek weasel, really, really, smooth, fast, confident. And I'm right behind her. And what's exciting now is that we're running the whole mountain, so the rhythm starts to build. And before, we were just skiing around at the top. And we're starting down, and there's all this new terrain. And then, as we get closer to Spa Gulch, I can see what they mean. The conversion, it's like a LA freeway. All the trails are going into that one place. And behind me, I can hear snowboarders shredding. And all of a sudden, Martha goes straight up the edge of the gulch and hops around and comes down. And I'm behind her. I don't know who's doing this. Are the skis skiing me? And I go up, and all of a sudden, I see a cobalt blue sky, a new moon, and I'm around. I see amber, bright sun on snow and dark shadow. And down and up and around, and down and up and around. And up and down and up. Pow, born out of the thighs of Ajax. And Jake comes over and gives me a big high five, my first. And I say, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for skiing with me today." And I bid them farewell and go in to turn my equipment into the rental place. And the guy says, "Hey, man, you should either be dead or in the hospital." I said, "What are you talking about? You hear I skied the gulch?" "No, you stole some lawyer's 195s at lunch. He had a $125 lesson he had to take. He had to take on your stubby little 160s. He's looking for you, man. I mean, you skied on the wrong bindings all afternoon. It's a wonder you didn't break your leg. You're [BLEEP] blessed, man." And with his blessings, I felt initiated. I skied Ajax, skied Spa Gulch and graduated in one day from 160s to 195. Spalding Gray, an excerpt from his monologue, It's a Slippery Slope. We recorded Spalding Gray at the world premiere of his monologue at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Coming up, swimming lessons, shooting potatoes 450 feet in the air, instructions on how to have an affair, and more, in a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme with monologues, short fiction, mini-documentaries, found tape, whatever they can think of. Our theme today is Lessons. We are at Act Two of our program, Swimming Lesson. You know, some lessons-- I think the best classes-- always teach more than concrete skills. They help overcome fears. They change people in more profound ways. This next story comes from Scott Carrier, who lives in Salt Lake City. My wife, Hillary, is a beautiful swimmer, relaxed, graceful. She just sort of slimmers around on top of the water. I didn't know this about her when I met her. I knew she grew up on a lake in New Hampshire, but I'd never seen her swim until this summer when we spent a few weeks at the lake visiting her parents. She liked to swim at night, go far out in the darkness and then turn around and swim back to the light on her parents' house. So this summer, we were there at the lake, and my wife and her mother decided it was time for our three and a half-year-old daughter to take swimming lessons. I said, "No, she's too young." And my wife said, "Mr. Switzer likes to start them at three and a half." I said, "Who's Mr. Switzer?" And my mother-in-law said, "He gives lessons in the pool next to his house. It's a nice pool. He taught Hillary to swim. He taught all my kids to swim. He went to Harvard and then coached at a private school with a good reputation." I said, "Oh, well, then of course." And my wife said, "Monday morning. We've already signed her up. You can come with us and see for yourself. He's a good teacher." So Monday morning, we drove to Al and Betsy Switzer's Aquatic School in Center Sandwich. The pool was dark blue, the color of glacial ice, 60 feet long and nearly ringed by mothers sitting in white, plastic lawn chairs. There were about 18 kids in the pool, a couple of pretty college girls teaching the intermediate and advanced swimmers, and Mr. Switzer, deep tan, square jaw, big muscles, in the pool at the shallow end with the beginners, three boys and three girls hanging on to the edge, crying and shivering. Or actually, it was just the three boys who were crying. One of them tried to climb out of the pool, and Mr. Switzer pulled him back in saying, "You stay there. You stay right there and don't move from that spot." That, of course, made the other two boys freak out even more, and one of them was crying for his mom to come get him. And Mr. Switzer pointed to the mom and then pointed to the gate. And she popped right up and walked out. Head down. In the lesson, Mr. Switzer took the kids one by one and stood over them, moving their arms and legs through the water. He did this even to the kids who were nearly hysterical. Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. Then he had them go under the water, keeping their eyes open to look and grab his fingers. Then he had them get out and walk over to the edge where the water was deeper. They were all standing there shaking, holding their little hands over their little hearts. He was going to make them jump. Now listen, everybody, what you're going to do is you're going to jump to me, and I'm going to catch you. All right? I'm going to catch everybody. Stand up, Alice. First, he told my daughter to jump, and she did and just about landed on his head. She was kind of screwing around and having too much fun. Next, the other two girls, and they jumped pretty easily too. But then, the boys, and the boys were afraid. They were just little kids who hadn't learned to hide their fear, what looked like true fear, not some sudden fright caused by a bad dream or a monster movie, but scared, silly panic, their bodies quivering like jello, their faces filled with grief. Ready. I'll catch you. Come on. Go. Jump, jump. Go. Jump. Come on. But they did it, or at least two of them summoned their courage, leaned into their fear, and jumped. For them, it was as wild and as real as it gets. But the other little one just couldn't do it, so they pushed him. What did I tell you? What did I tell you? What did I tell you? What did I say? I'd catch you. Yeah, and I said I'd catch you. Did I catch you? Yeah. Yeah. After the lesson, I introduced myself to Mr. Switzer and asked him about his methods. As soon as we start working the arms with a three and a half-year-old, we're basically working with the arms the way we want them to work later on. And you saw today, a couple of the real criers, they don't know what they're in for. But then they find I'm a good guy. They find that if I say I'm going to catch them or I'm going to do something, I'm not going to fool them. See, the classes you're watching this afternoon, some of those Beginner One classes, by the end of this week, they'll all go off in the deep end. And most of them will go off from the diving board, which is one meter up. And they'll swim to the ladder. Now most of them will not have anywhere near perfect arm stroke. Many of them will just kick to the ladder, but what that does is gives them-- with the head in the water again-- it gives them that confidence that if they should fall off a dock, they can look around underwater and kick or somehow get to the point of safety. The second day, there was less crying. And by the second week, things had calmed down to the point where I started paying attention to the intermediate and advanced swimmers, kids mainly 8 to 12 years old swimming laps, all practicing the same slow stroke, reaching far out ahead and pulling slowly back, relaxed, breathing rhythmically, relaxed. They were learning to swim gracefully, gliding across the pool like schoolgirls walking with books on their heads. They were all learning to swim exactly like my wife. He was strict. He was a strict teacher, but he's not mean. I mean, he used to say things like, "If you don't relax your hand, I'm going to break it with a hammer." But you knew that he wasn't being mean. That's just what he would say. He has a sense of humor, and as a kid, you know that. I think probably the most important thing about his teaching is that he does expect you to do it. And kids know what you expect of them. If you don't really expect them to listen to you, they know that. Steven, I want you to fly. I want you to fly. Are you ready? Fly. Come on. Come on. The final part of the final lesson, Mr. Switzer took his beginning class to the diving board for them to jump and swim to the ladder. This is the mostest of the funnest. [CRYING] I don't want to. You want to do this, don't you? This is the fun. You want to do this, don't you? I don't want to. Colin, you want to do this, don't you? I don't want to. Ready, one, two, three, jump. And they all jumped, and they all swam. And then it was over. All right? You did a nice job. Now our daughter Alice has a card saying she's passed the Beginner One level at the Switzer Aquatic School. Next thing I know, she'll be swimming far out into the lake at night. This is Scott Carrier. Act Three, Shooting Lesson. Well, my sister Randi has two kids, both boys. And she's the kind of mom who declared early on, no guns in the house. She thought it taught the wrong values. She's still your basic liberal soccer mom. As long as that phrase has come up in our national debate, that's my sister, soccer mom. But by the time each nephew, Ben and Sam, turned two years old, it became clear that the drive to play with guns, for whatever reason, was more powerful than one mom could stop. They would make guns out of anything. They'd make guns out of sticks. They'd make guns out of crayons. Once, we were having a spaghetti dinner, and I saw Benny make a gun out of a noodle. He tried to shoot someone with a noodle. Boys and guns, boys and guns. Well, Kitty Felde is a reporter who's best known to public radio audiences for her coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, but not long ago, she headed out into the hills above Berkeley with her cousin's husband, a guy whose name is Jim Gray. And as you'd expect from a Berkeley area family, Jim Gray is the kind of liberal who would not go out with a big rifle on weekends shooting at game. He's not killing little rabbits and squirrels and stuff to feed the family or anything. He doesn't march on Washington to preserve our rights to assault weapons. He's not a member of the NRA. But even this liberal guy in liberal Berkeley, even he found a gun to love. And it turned out that it was a very particular kind of gun. It was a kind of gun that every time he showed it to another man, the reaction was always the same. The guy always said, "I want one of those too." It was a potato gun. In his front yard, overlooking sparsely populated hills, he gave Kitty a lesson in its operation. Everybody in the neighborhood is making these? Everybody in the neighborhood. This is my spud gun, a homemade spud gun made out of ABS sewer pipe. It's a piece of inch and a half ABS to a reducer that goes to a three inch ABS combustion chamber, female coupling and a male plug. The propellant is hairspray, which is the amazing part. We'll get to that in a minute. Now this is-- who thought this up? It was shown to me actually by a guy who's almost quasi-militia. His buddy showed it to him. They like to fire it at night for the blue flame. And I made one here. And instantly, all my neighbors had to have one. My neighbor right next door built one. But anyway, it has potatoes as ammunition. Cram the potato down the barrel It's actually a potato musket, also referred to as a potato cannon, but I call it the spud gun. You didn't use all of the potato there. Well, only that will fit in the inch and a half pipe. You have to use a potato that's bigger than the inch and a half pipe so that you totally fill the pipe up. And now you're using this long dowelling. Yes, it's a ramrod, just as musket people use, pushing the wadding down into the barrel. The next step is three, one-second blasts of Aqua Net hairspray into the combustion chamber. Quickly putting the male plug in. He's screwing on the end to this plastic piping device. Now watch this direction. Oh wait, this is going to be really loud, isn't it? I've got to get back. This is too loud for my ears. Explain how you're igniting it. Yeah, how are you igniting this? This is a Coleman lantern igniter. You spin the gnarled end, and you get a spark on the inside. Wait, I've got to back up. OK. Oh, and now the spud has taken a lovely arc, about 100 feet away, and has dropped behind the trees over there. And that is totally useless. We just wasted a potato. Now what are you doing? Well, I'm using the vice grips to unfasten-- It looks like a giant pair of pliers, about a three-inch wide end on the pair of pliers. You're unscrewing the coupling? That's true. To reload? To reload. It's a slow process. If you were being attacked by an army, you'd be dead by now. I would think the liability problems of having spuds landing in people's yards, perhaps on their bodies, would be a problem. Yes, that's why we sort of do it secretly. Oh, a good one, a good one actually. I can't even see it. Yeah, that was about 450 feet, something like that. That was a long one. So none of the neighbors have complained about this? They've just asked, "How can I make one myself?" That's pretty much been the-- usually, it's a guy thing. It's a guy thing. And usually, I show it to the guys, and they instantly want me to either make one for them or show them how to make one. And I'd say there are at least half a dozen spud guns that have sprung from the original here. The legality of the thing is a little bit questionable. I've actually asked police, and the police wanted me to show them how to build one when I described it to them. If I can just jump in here for a second. So Kitty stands out there with her cousin's husband, and at some point a neighbor comes over. And they get to talking about all the improvements they're making in the spud gun. And as they talk, you start to realize the boy desire for gun and gun-ness is so powerful that these guys are gradually reinventing the gun. They are slowly turning the spud gun into a real gun. Well, as soon as I showed it to my neighbors, they decided to do design improvements. They tried increasing the size of the combustion chamber. They tried decreasing the size of the combustion chamber. They tried putting a valve in so they could inject pure propane as opposed to the hair spray to get a more explosive mixture. They tried different materials for the gun itself. And here comes Tom with a couple of version two with a longer barrel. Let's go talk to Tom. So, Tom, this is the Mach 2 version? Yeah. We've decided that the longer barrels don't really make any difference. Both Jim and I have tried shooting next to each other. Both have about the same range. We've also used propane as opposed to hairspray. That doesn't seem to matter either. Whoa, that had nice arc to it. Very nice arc. I took it to job site, and the roofer was up on the roof, roofing. And I fired it off, kaboom. We were up on a hillside. It arced way out there, and the roofer poked his head over and said, "You've either got to make me one or show me how to make one." So is there a name for this loose-knit organization of spud gun owners? Well, not yet. We're actually trying to avoid any-- we're hoping not to be considered a group. We don't want the attention of any law enforcement agencies that might track us down and consider us militia or some other weird-- I mean there's no unifying political. There is absolutely no unifying political. No, this cuts across the spectrum from liberal to conservative, nothing unifying politically at all about these things. It's a guy thing. That's all there is. Kitty Felde. Act Four, Found Tape. Well, our program today is about lessons. And when we turn to John Connors, a guy who helps us find music for our program, for songs, when we ask him for songs, he said that it turns out that there are lots of records that are lessons of various types. In fact, I've got a whole big bunch of them here that he gave us. Here's one on wine from a guy-- "How do I know which wine to serve at dinner, Mr. Seashell? Which is a vintage wine, and what is the difference between vintage and non-vintage?" Well, this record right here answers the questions on that. Here's Bazaar's "Secret formula for a beautiful new you." But I have to say, the favorite of our little radio staff is one that defies all normal description. Let's just go to it, shall we? Hello, I'm Helen Gurley Brown, and I wrote a book called Sex and the Single Girl. I had so many things left over to say, not necessarily to single girls, but to married girls and men, that I'm putting some of them on this record. There's so much to cover, really, that I think we'll just move right along. Let's start with some advice to men on how to have an affair. Now, I'm not for promiscuity, but I think it's ridiculous to pretend that it doesn't exist. And I think there's far less hurt and more joy for everybody if certain rules are followed. The way not to have an affair start, in my opinion, you're a married man, is to run to the girl and say, "Honey, my wife's taken the kids to the country. The coast is clear for you and me." The fact that this is a convenient time for you has absolutely nothing to do with the situation, It certainly isn't any aphrodisiac. It might even be more flattering to the girl if your wife were in town. Another thought, on the first date, don't suggest that obscure little lobster house 50 miles up the coast, which you think is delightfully quaint. She knows what you're doing. You're hiding her out. In the beginning at least, be sure you go first class. All right, let's say the affair is on. How do you keep her happy? Never assume the physical relationship is the all out rewarding thing for her that it for you. It just isn't. Even if she does enjoy your beautiful, bronzed body-- and you know she does-- this is America. She's a nice girl. She's this product of what her mother and her grandmother told her, and they probably told her never to do what she's doing with you. Also, her body needs to have a baby. A lot of men offer her sex, not your superior brand of course, but what she'd really like to hear from somebody is an offer of marriage. Presents take the pressure off, so do give them. Money is a perfectly wonderful present. You know, it isn't half as insulting as you'd like to think. A nice share of General Motors, or a US E bond, tucked in with a bottle of Arpage, really are very hard to take offense at. Don't expect your girl to share your wish not to be seen or to keep the lipstick off your collar. That's your responsibility. Maybe it sounds perverse, but a girl may actually take a certain offbeat pride in being seen with somebody else's attractive husband. If you do run into friends of the family, don't try to burrow your way to China. Just smile and be gracious and introduce everybody all around if you're trapped. No explanations and no apologies. Never drink up her booze without replacing it. You really ought to bring a lot more than you consume. Never, never, never let her spend her birthday alone, even if you have to lie your way into purgatory to get out of the house. Never lie to her about little things. The big lie you're living, that someday the two of you are going to be married, is going to be hard enough to explain when the time comes. Be sure she can trust you in smaller matters. Treat your girl with great dignity, like a princess. Never, never cheat on her with anyone but your wife. The record is called Lessons in Love, Helen Gurley Brown. Some of the other little sections on here, "How to love a man if you aren't pretty, black magic for non-glamour girls." "It works too," it says. "Unfaithful wives' tales, how they out-cheat their unsuspecting mates." "How to love a boss, ways a girl can make herself invaluable, keeping him happy and her fire-proof." "How to talk to a man in bed." And let's see, "Little man, you'll have a busy day. You can be especially successful with women if you're short." And here's this one. Now I want to talk about secretaries. A secretary offers the only kind of polygamy we recognize in this country, the chance to have a second wife at the same time you have your first one and not go to jail. If you select her carefully, she can be the loveliest of all fringe benefits. And to think, the company pays for her. Turning your secretary into a girlfriend has one big advantage. You know where she is most of the time. If that's what you want, then I suggest you just follow the preceding rules about getting any other girl to the brink and keeping her happy after she's there. However, I'm inclined to go along with the Broadway musical number that says a secretary is not a toy. Why not let one of the other guys at the office hire the gorgeous girl for a secretary, and then you borrow her for whatever you had in mind. And that way, you can keep your own secretary to do more important things like running your life and bolstering your ego and protecting you and mothering you and covering for you and sending out for sandwiches. If the the girl who should be doing all that is a ravishing redhead that you're off your rocker about, you'll wind up doing those things for her. Besides, all romances end, or they end in marriage, and you'd soon be out of a secretary again. If you want to play it smart and have your secretary love you and stay with you a long, long time, then follow these rules. Bring her presents from your trips, a baby-- All right, all right. Let's see. Let's move on, shall we, in our little collection here? We sincerely hope this record will be helpful in teaching your parakeet to talk. Remember that your bird is an imitator and learns to talk by listening to what you say, not only words and sounds, but inflections. Don't say, "Good morning." Say, [INFLECTING] "Good morning." The beautiful thing about this particular record is that it is so much more than just practical how-to. It doesn't just give you the important advice like, be diligent, pick a time every day to speak to your bird, make sure you're not trying to talk to your bird when he's eating, drinking or playing. It encourages you. It tells you how to take the right tone. And then it offers proof. There are people who still doubt that a parakeet can actually talk. So we have recorded here the voice of one Chicago parakeet conversing with his owner. He is six years old and has a 400-word vocabulary. Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. What is your name? Peter. Peter talk. Where do you live, darling? 1400 Lakeshore Drive, Chicago. I think you're wonderful. Do you want some breakfast? Yes, sir. It's really just amazing what they can get animals to do today. Well, that's from our little collection. Well, our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and myself, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and the fabulous Margy Rochlin. Production help from Jorge Just, Julie Snyder, [? Amy Takahara, ?] Sylvia Lemus, Todd Bachmann, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. To buy a cassette of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Well, you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at www.thislife.org. Thanks to Elizabeth Meister, who runs the site. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who recorded this at a recent staff meeting. It's the mostest of the funnest. I don't want to. You want to do this. I'm Ira Glass, back next week, if we have the courage, 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. Hello? Hey, dad? Hi. Let me pick this up on another phone. I can barely hear you. About a year ago, this thing happened to me when I took the train down to visit my dad in Baltimore. And when this thing happened, he said to me, you know, this could be a story on your show. So this week, I called him up to have him and my stepmom tell the story. You remember what happened with the business with the train and your suit? You left it on the train. It was in a hanging bag, and you left it on the compartment over your set by mistake. So I said, "Well, what are you going to do?" And you said, "Well--" I said, well, apparently you can go to Amtrak and they'll retrieve your luggage at the train's next stop and throw it onto the next Amtrak that's headed back to you. But the problem was my dad had tickets to the Baltimore Symphony that night, and train that was hopefully going to arrive with my suit, that is, if everything went perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, that train would arrive-- I think 6:30, as I remember, or quarter of 7, and the symphony was at 8 o'clock. So of course, this was very, very worrisome. And before I go any further in this story, I should say, this is the 400th episode one of our radio show. There are eight of us who make the show, working together really closely, finding stories and shaping them. And for years, as we made those 399 other episodes, all those years, family members have approached us at weddings, holidays, with all kinds of ideas for the show. Most of them never made it onto the air, because-- i'll be frank-- they were not so great. And this week we thought, OK. It's our 400th show. We should do something we've never done before. Something so difficult we've never dared do it before. And we thought, you know, after tackling all the subjects we have over the years-- productions of Peter Pan gone awry, and investigations into Guantanamo, and trying to make the history of mortgage-backed securities into entertaining radio-- what would be the greatest challenge? What would be the greatest challenge that we could possibly attempt for our 400th show? And the answer? Obviously, let's do all of those stories pitched to us by our parents. Stories where it's not even clear whether it's humanly possible to make them into listenable stories on the radio. So hence this story with the suit. OK, you remember where we are? OK. We're worried about the train and the suit. And we were mulling around about what to do about it, and meanwhile eating some late lunch. And it was at lunch that my stepmom, Sandy, got an idea. Let's buy a cheap suit at Marshalls just in case the train doesn't come in. Marshalls is nearby. I've seen a lot of suits there that were a really good price. Sometimes a hundred dollars. And you know, it could work. And your plan was, we're going to buy a suit. Let's try to get a suit for like a hundred bucks with the thought that if I don't wear it, you'll just return it the next day. That's right. We didn't have much time, so we hustled over to Marshalls, where we learned that Marshalls actually doesn't sell many suits. They literally have two suits in the store. Miraculously, one fits. But another obstacle. The pants. The pants need hemming. Though if we hem them, of course, we wouldn't be able to return to suit. What to do? What do we do? And I said, uh, scotch tape. Scotch tape it. So that was the plan. It went off like a great bank heist. Like The Sting. Like Ocean's 11. I got the suit at Marshalls. The train came in. It had my real suit. I change into the real student at the back of the train station. We go to the Baltimore Symphony, which was, by the way, fantastic. They got this new conductor. We went home, removed the scotch tape from the suit, and returned it on Monday. Everything came out great. And it was just like a normal visit from you, Ira. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, sometimes things like this happen. Wait, what do you mean? What kinds of things? You know, it's always excitement when you come to Baltimore. Are you saying that this thing that happens every time I come is that there's some kind of unnecessary chaos? I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. No? No. Now, you know, usually, a story on the show, for it to work, it needs to kind of have some bigger idea, or some bigger universal thing that it drives towards. Do you think there is something like that with this story? No, not at all. Well, at least he could tell. Today, for our 400th show, each of us who work on the radio show went to our parents, got them to pitch the story-- or repitched one that they had pitched in the past-- and then the idea was, we each had to make the story they pitched. But there is more. Musical transition, please? So we're gathered here, not in our studio, which actually isn't big enough for all of us to fit, but in our office, in the room where we have our weekly story meetings. So it's nine of us sitting here with microphones and looking around the room. It's Robyn Semien-- Hi. Jane Feltes-- Hi. Alissa Shipp-- Present. Seth Lind-- Yeah. That's our production manager, Seth Lind. Sarah Koenig-- Hello. Alex Blumberg-- Hello. Hello. That would be Lisa Pollak, jumping the gun. And finally, our senior producer, Julie Snyder. Hello. Nervous. One of our producers, Nancy Updike, was called away and isn't here. But we're gathered here together today because not only are all of you attempting to execute some of the most difficult stories you ever have-- if that were not hard enough, we're going to make it a contest. The ground rules are these. We're going to play each producer's story. We'll all listen together. And then at the end of the show, we're going to come back on the air together and decide which story was best. Not only will this determined once and for all who is the greatest producer in radio, there's a prize that we all decided on together at our real story meaning. I forgot what the prize is. Is it that the winning parent gets a plane ticket to come visit their child producer? And that's how I refer to all of you, as child producers. But we also acknowledge that maybe we have no perspective on these stories, because who has perspective on their own family and their ideas? And so we also want to turn to you, everybody listening over the radio. You will all hear these stories. At the end of the program, go to our website and vote for your favorite. And if you listeners vote for a different winter than we choose amongst ourselves, then a second parent will get a trip to see their kid. Wow. Oh, nice! All right. And so let the games begin. Our first story is from Lisa Pollak. It's funny what your parents forget to tell you until you're recording them for national broadcast. Here's what my mom said when I asked her for a story idea. What if you get the story on planning your funerals before you die? Because that's what we're doing now. She explained that she and my dad had recently bought their cemetery plots. Apparently all their friends were making plans for eternity, and they got they should jump on the bandwagon, too. I wasn't really sure why she was laughing, but she seemed convinced there was a funny idea in here, somewhere. There's got to be funny stories about death, and they've never done that on your show. Yeah, we have. We have. What do you mean, a funny story about death? Yeah. Not death, but dying and, you know, the burial things. Well, have you been to any funny funerals? I went to one hysterical funeral. I started laughing. And dad was laughing. You know when you start to laugh and then you're trying to stifle it because you're at a funeral? I was busting a gut. I was laughing so hard. And dad too. What was so funny? What was so funny Mitch? It with the whole-- I don't know what. It was just fabulous! It was the best funeral I've ever been to. So this is the idea. Find funny stories about funerals. Stories kind of like my mom's, only actually explaining the funny parts. I started looking, and the first thing I found was a New York Times story from January 1902. Clearly I wasn't the first reporter whose mother had this idea. The headline read, "Humors of Funerals: The Funny Side of a Gruesome Subject As Seen by Clergymen." Or, as I like to imagine a clergyman would say it in 1902-- "The Funny Side of a Gruesome Subject, As Seen By Clergymen." The story was a collection of anonymous anecdotes, gets like this one. The first Sunday after I had been installed in my first church, I discovered there was to be a funeral, and was asked to officiate. On asking who was dead, I learned it was a child of seven days whose mother had died in the county poorhouse, and the accident of whose advent into the world was in defiance of at least one item of the decalogue. I thought, of course there would be no mourners. OK. So the setup's a little dark. But then, to the clergyman's surprise, a whole crowd of mourners show up. They bring food-- And a real picnic scene outspread itself around the church. It was the sexton who, on seeing my surprise, explained in all seriousness, "You see, parson, there has been neither a lynching nor a wedding in this section for so long, that the people have to make the most they can out of a funeral." OK, that didn't work. So I turned to a more contemporary source, a book called The Funny Side of Death, published in 2008. The author is a retired funeral home owner who says his sense of humor helped him cope with the job. On page 97, for example, he explains how dead people's hip replacements, which are metal and stay intact after cremation, can be, quote, "shined up and presented to friends as letter openers." At this point, I started making phone calls, first to the National Funeral Director's Association. I told them what I was looking for, and they said they had the perfect person to help me. And next thing I knew, I was on hold, waiting to talk to a funeral director in Decatur, Illinois named Randy Earl. You know, nothing puts me in the mood for a humorous anecdote like the stuff they play when on hold at the funeral home. At Brintlinger and Earl Funeral Homes, we wanted to let you know about pre-arrangement planning. It's an easy way for you to take the worry of your burial or cremation needs away from your loved ones during the very difficult time-- Hello, this is Randy. Randy said he'd been expecting my call, and that he had a great story. It was about a man who came in one day to make prearrangements for his funeral. The man had his kids with him, and one of the things they all talked about was what music to play at the man's service. I said, what's your favorite song? And he said, well, "Silent Night." And the kids laughed. They sort of laughed at him. And even the daughter, she said, well, Dad, what is it with "Silent Night"? And he said, well, it was at the end of the war, and they had just declared the war over. And I was sitting in a foxhole. The first song I heard was "Silent Night," and that's my favorite song. And I said, well, Bob, we'll use that at your funeral service. As fate would have it, the man died in July. And at the church where the service was supposed to be, the whole "Silent Night" idea wasn't going over so well. The church organist calls me. And he said, that's not even in our liturgy. And he said, I'm not playing "Silent Night" when you're exiting a church. So I sat there for a minute and I said, well, I might have to get another organist. But I promised him that we're going to do this, and somehow, I am going to do this. So we go to church. We have the funeral mass. And the priest told the story. Bob requested that this song be played, because it was his favorite song. And he was in a foxhole when he heard that the war was over, and this was the song he heard played right after that. And it's the middle of July. He played that very softly as we exited the church, and they started singing very quietly. And it was the most moving, powerful thing that I've experienced in a long, long time. But not a funny story? No, no! It's not a funny story. It's not a funny story. It's a real story. If you're looking for funny, I'm probably not your guy. Because I'm not a funny guy with my work. Even if I did have something in my repertoire, I would not put it out on the radio. I just wouldn't do it. It turns out that in the funeral business, humor can be a touchy subject. As Ron Hast, publisher of Mortuary Management Magazine, told me-- There's always people who are trying to make fun. Oh, I understood that everyone's dying to come to you. Ha, ha, ha. I've heard it 5,000 times, and they think it's so funny, and they laugh, and whatever. Well, it's just stupid, is what it is. It's not funny. It's not funny. Ron spent so much time warning me about the pitfalls of this story idea-- how funny things don't really happen that often in his business, how outsiders like me tend to exaggerate and embellish, that when he actually gave me exactly what I was looking for, I was afraid to react. Instead of laughing, I asked a dumb question that killed his whole punchline. There was a lady who was sitting at a funeral, and she had had her father's funeral in the same funeral home about a month before. And she happened to notice that the funeral director there, doing this funeral, that was another person, that he was wearing her father's tie. And what had happened was, she realized that when he went and shut the casket down, out of the view of the family, he liked the tie too, and took it off, and closed the lid, and kept it for himself. They went so far as to have the grave open to prove that he had taken it, and sued him. And he lost, I'm guessing? I don't know what the outcome is. But you know, you don't follow all that stuff through. At this point, I gave on funeral directors and called a Lutheran minister I know. His name is Duke Fries. Pastor Fries told me a story about the time he finished doing a funeral service and made this dignified exit in front of a room full of people, only to realize-- That I had chosen the wrong door, that I was now in a closet. And I wasn't sure whether to step back out with all these people watching, or just stay in this closet until I heard them moving around, which is, in fact, what I did. Finally, I was getting somewhere. I kept at it, and before long, I had more stories than I knew what to do with. There was the overzealous mourner who fell into the grave during the funeral, a woman who wanted to be buried topless to show off her breast job, and a funeral home worker who lifted a woman out of her bed only realize that her husband, in the next bed over, was the dead one. But I wasn't so sure any of these were what my mom was looking for. None of them were like that funeral she went to, where-- I was busting a gut! I was laughing so hard. I was just about to give up looking when our intern, Brian Reed, told me I had to call his friend Rob. So I did. And after that, I made one last call. Hello? Hi, mom. Hi, Li. So you know how I've been looking for funny funeral stories? Uh huh. I have one I want to play for you. Um, what's that in the background? I'm taking something out of the oven. Oh. So there's going to be two people telling the story. Their names are Rob and Andrea. They're married, the funeral is for Andrea's grandmother. It takes place in a Ukrainian church, and they don't totally know what's going on, because the priest is speaking Ukrainian. And the first thing that got us silly was that the priest looks exactly like Bill Murray. Like, exactly. Like Bill Murray circa Meatballs, with the hair sticking up and the-- so they started the service, and it's all in Ukrainian. I mean, they're not speaking any English whatsoever. So the priest decides he's going to start speaking in a little bit of English, and he's reading-- apparently it's custom in the Ukrainian church, if someone passes away, you give a donation to the church in that person's name. So he literally is listing off the people's names and how much they gave to the church. And it was a good amount, he kind of smiles, he's like, "Maister Zeslinsky, $50." He gives a little smile. And if it was like a low amount, he's like, you know, "The Zogrokskis, five dollar." And he gives like a disappointing look, like oh, not good, you know? And he's doing this whole list, over and over, he goes through this whole list of money, and you know, people are adding up the money in their head. So then he decides he's going to do a little bit of a eulogy. Yeah. He does a eulogy in English, for us, because he knows that we really don't speak Ukrainian. So he comes right in front of us, and he says-- And Andrea's maiden name is Drobish, D R O B I S H. And that was my grandmother's name, was Barbara Drobish. So he comes right in front of us, and he says-- He says, "Barbara Drobish was a good lay! Dee!" And that just killed us! "She tried so hard to be a good lay-- dee!" So then Andrea's sister and her, they start to laugh, and they're shaking when they're laughing, and they're trembling. And I think people, especially the people in the Ukrainian church, thought they were literally crying, like, weeping very hard. So the people from the Ukrainian church are now coming and surrounding them, and hugging them. "Oh, the poor grandchildren!" And they're crying, which is making us laugh. Everyone is crying except us, who are laughing hysterically, and trying to hide the fact that we're laughing, and trying not to mock the Ukrainian church. So that's our-- And that's the funny story. I like it! You like it? I think it's funny. It reminded me of a Seinfeld. So she didn't bust a gut. But maybe for my mom, that only happens at funerals. Really funny! Wait, I don't get the final line. The last line was, she didn't bust a gut, but she only does that at funerals. But she did bust a gut. No, she didn't bust a gut. That's the problem. She laughed! I feel like you guys are dwelling on the last one. That was amazing. That was great. I wasn't dwelling. I just, there was a moment I was confused. I'm nervous. Yeah, I know! Beat that. I know! You reported the crap out of it. That was what made it so amazing. I thought we were supposed to. No. I did some reporting, but I thought that was going to be my strong suit. I was like, well, my story sucks, but I did some reporting. But I didn't do as much reporting as you did. All right. Well, our next story is from Nancy Updike, who recorded this story, but couldn't be here with us. I talked to my dad. He pitched me this idea a year ago, actually. Kind of caught me off-guard with this one. The Erie Canal. What about the Erie Canal? Well, you know, it's a famous old waterway, dug with a lot of brutal labor, manual labor, a lot of it, and it was a tremendous feat of engineering, and generated lots of songs, and there was traffic that went along it, and things like that. But it didn't last very long. I mean, the railroads came, and then the trucks came, and water transport went out of fashion. You know. And the question is kind of, what's become of it? And before I answer that question, I just want to quickly remind our listeners of everything they, of course, already know about the Canal. Longest canal in the U.S., when it was built. 363 miles. Linking Lake Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic via the Hudson River, dug by hand, with travels and pre-industrial tools, before our country was even 50 years old. And it was our first big success in physically uniting the United States by connecting the built-up east coast with the midwest. This is Craig Williams, curator at the New York State Museum. It must have been tremendously exciting. They were doing something unprecedented. They were building a canal to the moon. And it must've been tremendously confidence-building for a society that was still an incredibly young republic that they could pull something like this off. So I did find out what became of the canal, and some things you just cannot express in words alone. The canal is too big, so I wrote a song with my friend, Dave Hill. [SINGING] Give it to me, woman. Easy, easy! They were building a canal to the moon. A canal to the moon. [SINGING] What do you do with a canal to the moon, when the railroad gets to there a lot more soon? You'd rather drive your car, anyway. And you don't want to go from Buffalo to Albany. But let's say you're a nuclear power plant, and you need massive concrete containers for your spent fuel rods. You could do a lot worse than shipping via the Erie Canal. It's still in use. [SINGING] So you call up Rob Goldman at the New York Sate Marines Transportation Authority, because-- If you want to go from New York to Montreal, it could save you a thousand miles. True. It could save you a thousand miles. He already said that. [SINGING] But what do you do with a canal to the moon when your town or your city has passed its industrial boom? No more million of tons of cargo floating by. [SPEAKING] More like thousands. Better than nothing, but still. How about this, though? You could hike, you could bike. The trail is now being completed across the state. [SINGING] He's talking about a 360 mile trail alongside the canal system that's two-thirds complete. Quite a feat! And don't forget-- In many places, the locks are parks, so you could just go and have a cookout. There are tables there. You could read a book, take a nap, go to a restaurant, bring your kids, feed the ducks. Ducks? Everyone likes ducks. I like ducks. It just goes on and on. [SINGING] And on and on and on and on and on and on and on. What do you do with a canal to the moon when some people, maybe you, complain three, four times a year, in op-ed, up in Rochester, saying-- Why are we spending all this money for rich people to take their yachts from Florida to Lake Erie? [SINGING] But here's what you do with a canal to the moon. Put a canoe in it, or a tire, or a kayak-- Or like a floaty lawn chair. Go ice fishing. Play hockey. It's water. This one guy was telling me the canal was makeout city. [SINGING] That's what you do with a canal to the moon. [SPEAKING] It was the eighth wonder of the world when it was built. You're not just going to fill it with concrete. We nailed it. Well everybody, what do you think? Nancy Updike, with Dave Hill, by the way. Yay! Very inventive. I think it's great. I don't know, I mean, I know kind of a little more about the Erie Canal, but I still can't picture the-- Yeah, I agree. I feel like I don't really know anything, actually, about the Erie Canal. I think you guys are missing the point of this story. That was kickass! She wrote a song! And performed it! All right. Well, our next story is from Alex Blumberg. My dad doesn't watch much TV. He hates sports. He's an atheist. His main pastime is reading. Books on Buddhism, philosophy. He loves William Blake and science books and left-leaning blogs. And his story ideas, they're generally big and abstract. For example, when I called them for this project the other night, one idea he thought I should do a story about is the idea of coming out of the closet. This idea has been so key, he said, in advancing the cause of gay rights, and he wanted me to do a story about how other groups should adopt the tactics of coming out in order to seek mainstream acceptance. What other groups? Atheists. Also, people who don't like sports. His other idea, at least initially, seemed equally as unpromising. The fact that law treats corporations as if they were people. He'd been thinking about the idea of corporate personhood for years, but it was especially on his mind during the conversation I had with him, which took place just a couple of days after that Supreme Court decision overturning large parts of campaign finance law. That decision, the Citizens United case, basically said there is no distinction between a corporation spending a lot of money on campaign ads and a regular person doing it. In the eyes of the law, the corporation can buy as many ads as it wants. To my dad, that seems crazy and dangerous. We've kind of created these Goliaths, these Godzillas, parading around as if they were people. But in fact, they have a kind of power that no individual person could ever begin to amass. Right. So there is this entity called Exxon Corporation, and you read newspaper stories about Exxon says, or Exxon was furious. You've never read a sentence that said "Exxon was furious." Have you? Well, Exxon was upset. So who should I talk to, though? Well, I think that's the story idea. Is who do you talk to? Who becomes the voice of Exxon? So the idea would be, I would call-- I would try-- it would be in search of Exxon. In search of Exxon. Who is this? We treat them as a person. And who do they think they are? Who do you think you are! All right. I will try to do that. I'll try to find out who Exxon thinks they are. I'm not going to lie. This didn't go well. I called Exxon, spoke to a media relations person there, told her about how my dad and I had this conversation, and I wanted to find out who Exxon thought it was. The lady was very nice, but she said she didn't see any reason Exxon would ever want to talk to me about this. In this way, Exxon is just like a lot of people. If they don't want to talk to the media, you can't really make them. I called around to other multinational corporations. Same answer. Then I tried the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the trade group for most of American business. The guy there was a little bit more receptive, and he called me back with the name-- Eugene Volokh. He's the guy you should talk to. Although when I reached Eugene Volokh, he couldn't explain why the Chamber of Commerce sent me to him. You know, I am not sure. I think somebody at the Chamber of Commerce reads my blog. So Eugene Volokh turns out not to be a spokesman for corporate America in any way. He's a charming libertarian-leaning law professor at UCLA. He runs a popular blog called the Volokh Conspiracy, though he's written a lot about constitutional issues in the Citizens United case. And the more we talked, the more I had to let go of my Michael Moore dreams-- asking stunty questions designed to expose the fallacy of corporate personhood, such as, what's Exxon's favorite color? Or what does Exxon want for Christmas? Or who's Exxon's favorite Beatle? That line of questioning, Eugene Volokh told me in so many words, is stupid. Corporations are generally seen as having many constitutional rights, but it's not because somehow they're metaphysically persons. It's because restricting corporations in various ways restricts the rights of persons. It restricts the rights of their owners, and it restricts, perhaps, the rights of others. Others being, for example, people who want to hear what the corporation has to say. All right. I'm just going to stop here and say, by the time I got to this point in my conversation with Eugene Volokh, I already knew that the story my dad wanted me to do was in trouble. So Dad, if you don't mind, I took up a different question. The question I took up is this. How worried should he be about the Citizens United case? OK. A little background on the idea of corporations as people. When it comes to property rights, corporations are basically the same as you and I. The government can't take away their property without due process. That's protected under the fourteenth amendment. But when it comes to something the fifth amendment, which says, you can't be forced to incriminate yourself in a court of law, corporations are not covered. All those TV dramas and congressional hearings where people plead the fifth? Exxon can't do that. So corporations are legally like people in some respects, and unlike them in others. And it's in this context that the issue of corporate spending on campaigns comes up. The Supreme Court has dealt with this issue a handful of times over the last century-- OK. Stop the tape. Stop the tape. OK. I'm just going to point out what's going on here. Paul, our engineer, with all due respect, briefly fell asleep. Alex, meanwhile, had to leave to go to a meeting for his other-- he works on Planet Money, and they had a big meeting, so he's not even here to defend himself. I just, I stopped-- yeah. I went somewhere else. Well, I know, no. And we did an edit on it the other day and I said, in this section, like, I didn't follow it at all. And then Ira said that that was because-- He said it was because we were girls. That was a joke! I just want to say that I really did like that he took his dad's idea and said it didn't work, I'm going to redirect, do my own idea. I thought that was a very clever-- I did think he's a good son to take it on. So. They should be proud that he just did such a boring-- All right. So it's looking very, very bad for Alex in our competition. Coming up-- more stories pitched by our parents, who by the way, we all love very, very, very much. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. When I asked my dad to think of an idea he'd like to pitch, he took it to mean one thing. A clear opportunity to tell his favorite story. Believe it or not, this is all the way back in 1950. That's right. 1950. So this is before-- It's like before the invention of fire, Dad. You're making this sound like-- This story usually takes him a little over an hour to tell. it's about how he souped up a car when he was 20. But before he tells you about that car, he always tells you about another car, his starter car, a 1953 Oldsmobile. When he was growing up in Richmond, California, which is near Oakland, there was a fad among teens to take some chrome off a car and paint primer where the chrome used to be. My dad took the trend a step further. He took the door handles off his car-- that's right, the door handles-- and painted circles of gray primer where the handles used to be. That would have been cool. There wasn't a whole lot of people running around that had cars that didn't have door handles on them, and naturally, they'd want to know, how do you open the door? You'd open the door, or my dad would open the door, by pressing the button he'd hidden in the chrome trim of the car. It was an electric button that triggered a solenoid which released the door latch. My dad was obsessed with electronics, and wondered what else in the car he could trick out. The radio, the lights. One day, I don't know why. It just came to me-- well, sure would be nice if there was only one switch. If I had one switch to control all of this. And just as fast, it came to me, now, how could you possibly have one switch to do everything? That's impossible. And so just as fast as the idea came up, the idea went way. Because I said, that's impossible. Don't make any sense. After a while, my dad bought about another car-- a used '56 Lincoln Premiere convertible. And the attraction was that everything in the car was electric. Power seats, power windows, the convertible top. It was a perfect laboratory for my dad. His job at the time was at a place where they were manufacturing parts for CB radios, and these particular CB radios had rotary dials on them, like on a telephone, connected to a switch inside. And it was at work one day, inspecting those rotary dials, when it hit him. He had his Thomas Edison moment. If you dial three to switch it, it moves three times. If you dial six [? digits, ?] it moves six times. And I looked at that, and it just came back to me. I said, there's my switch. There is my switch. For the next eight months, my dad locked himself in his room. His plan was this. He'd attach all of the car's power circuits to a metal box using hundreds of relays, all controlled by a rotary dial from an old Princess phone, the kind which had a little light behind it. This was the star of the show, and needed a prime location-- the center of the steering wheel. So I guess the reward for doing all of that was the day when it was finally finished, and I put it in the car. And I call your grandfather out, and he came out and sat in the car. And so he was sitting over on the passenger side, and he was leaning up, had his arm on the window. And I said, well, this is what I was doing. An he kind of looked at it like, what were you doing? And my hand reached for the steering wheel, towards the princess dial, and he saw the light turn on as my hand reach for it. It was a cute little trick. I had a switch underneath my brake pedal, on the floor, that put power to the dial. I could not have power to the dial at all times. Anybody could play around with that switch and make all that stuff happen. They may not know what's going on. So when I reached for it, the light turned on, which powered it. And I dial one, I dial twice, I dial three times. And when I dial the fourth time and the engine started-- and then I saw his eyes kind of-- no, that didn't just happen. But before he had a chance to really recover from that, I dialed three more numbers real quick, and all of a sudden, the windows started coming up, moving his arm off the side of the door. And I dialed three more numbers, and the other window came up, and I dialed three more numbers, and the top started coming up. And so I just kind of flooded. I kept dialing, dial after dial after dial, real fast, to make all these things operate, before he ever had a chance to think about it at all. So you did it. I did it. One switch. And my daughters, they never knew about it. I didn't talk too much about it. They were around it all of their life, growing up. That's my sister Shaun and me laughing in the background. My dad really thinks we don't know that story. Shaun, how many times do you think you've heard the car story? Probably a couple of times a year for like, as long as I can remember. So I don't know. 30, 50, something like that. I've heard the story at least as many times as my sister. My uncle Rocky, who was 16 when my dad built the Lincoln, probably heard it the most. Oh God! At least a hundred times. My friends Ellen and Anya have both heard it, separately. My boyfriend Damien. Yeah, I've heard it. In detail, probably twice. But loosely six or seven times. In fact, the night my dad pitched me the car story, my niece Alexis, who is 15, was listening. Alexis also had a story idea, but we never got to it, because when my dad started on the car story, she couldn't outlast him. And I got like really tired, and I just knew that it probably was just going to keep going like that. So I decided that I should probably get some sleep. The whole thing that got me was the-- and just as quickly as the idea came, it went away! Because I knew that can't be the end of the story. Obviously there's a whole other section. Right. You know he's just, like, ramping up. Exactly. My nephew Jamison, who's 11, also heard that story that same night. My dad says Jamison's the lucky grandchild who will inherit the box and dial. Jamison's take on the story? Um-- if I were, like, more patient, then it would have sounded like a good story. When we were young, there was a lesson attached to this story-- that when you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. But when I asked my dad today why this is the story he tells over and over, what's the point of the story, he says he's just proud that he had an idea that nobody else did. I point out to my dad that his invention was completely impractical. It's way harder to dial a secret code than to just push the button that opens the window. He says that's not the point. It was cool. It made him stand out. And if anyone wanted the window down, or the radio on, they had to go through him. Nice. That was so nice. That was amazing. I love your dad. Well, that worked so well, because it was about him. Like, it wasn't outside of him. But not just that, but you made it not the story, but about the fact of it-- yeah, that was cool. OK. So this is a good place to say that two of our producers put together stories that didn't work out so well. Alissa Shipp, one of our producers, called her mom, and got into this pretty heavy conversation. And the most air-able part of it was this one moment that they got talking about this moment with her grandmother in the hospital. And it's 16 seconds long. Bubbe on her deathbed, actually, last time I visited her, and she was kind of whispering something. And we bent down to listen to her, and she said, I'm bored. Does anyone else think that's funny? I think that's funny. I feel like it's like my nightmare. That's exactly how I imagine it being, too. And then our next story is from Sarah Koenig. Also a shortie. So my mom's story idea wasn't, strictly speaking, a story, or, strictly speaking, an idea. It was about a conversation she's had dozens of times with my daughter Ava, who's six. My granddaughter always me why I celebrate Christmas. Well, why do you do Christmas? You're Jewish. Well, I said, my parents did it, and it's a big tradition in our family, and we liked it, and I wanted to carry on the tradition. And she said, but you're Jewish! Why do you do it? She's never content with my answer. I figured maybe there was some cognitive reason for Ava's confusion, like that at her age, she simply could not compute the contradiction that somebody Jewish would do something not Jewish. So I talked to a couple of child psychologists, and they told me I was right. That this question is taxing Ava's prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain where we store information about rule-governed behavior, like how we're supposed to act. And they said it might take a couple of years for Ava's prefrontal cortex to get it. This is Karen Bierman. She's written books about child development. Your daughter's right at that cusp. She's got a category, she's got a clear category of what it means to be Jewish, and her grandmother doesn't fit that category in any way that she can see. So that's a more challenging cognition. Anyhow, none of this felt very, um, gripping. So to sum up, I wrote a little daddy about Ava's situation with her grandmother, who she calls Yaya. The tune is borrowed, by the way. [SINGING] When your Yaya gets a tree, and you know that it shouldn't be, look her straight in the eye, ask why. [SINGING] Ask why-- Ask why-- Ask why-- Ask why-- Don't you eat that Christmas stew. You're a Jew. You're a Jew-- You're a Jew-- You're a Jew-- You're a Jew-- Me too-- Me too-- [GIGGLES] That's it. More songs! I like it. I would have ended the song a little earlier. I had enough of the cuteness. I was ready for it to end, like, 20 seconds earlier. But the giggle? Give me a break. The giggle's pretty good. You just hate children and Jews. It's true. We never have any kids. We never have any Jews. All right. Well, our last story today comes from Jane Feltes. I called my dad, and obviously he was super stoked to help me with this project. Here's the thing. It's pretty boring these days, and especially here in sunny Michigan. But if you want ideas, here's some stuff. That was my dad's attempt at modesty. Turns out he's kind of a pitching machine. The stuff I could do stories about range from, Can you believe GM is bringing 800 jobs to Michigan, rather than moving them out? Or, why you guys follow up on that story you did a few years ago about some vigilante border patrol guys down on the Mexican border? I want to know if they're still there, and if they finally got guns. Then somehow we got on the topic of how to make solar energy efficient, which led to the wave particle duality of photons, and not led to-- So does the particle aspect come in regular intervals, brrrr, like a machine gun? Or if they go pop, like popcorn? Right. And then naturally-- You know, like how big does a planet have to be to have a molten core? And then finally-- I think Harry Brakeman is fascinating. What? You know Harry Brakeman? At first I was like, who? But then I remembered that Harry Brakeman was the pastor at my Grandma Ruth's Methodist church a while back. Now he's retired, and he and his wife live in eastern Michigan, out in the country. They live in this little tiny house over in Port Huron, like Ruth and Bill's house, like, you know, 1,200 square feet. They started this school down in Haiti, which is an American thing to do. We like to do that. Go out in the world and start schools to make people like us. And it turned into a university. What? Yeah. Brakeman University. Medical school, I think they're trying to put together. They've got a four year college with, I think they have some grad programs. Brakeman University, is what it's called. Methodist church-- I kind of doubted this story from the jump. Like, maybe he had a church there, and it's possible that they taught a Sunday School, but then someone was talking to somebody, and it turned into a game of telephone, and in the end, everyone in Michigan thinks Harry Brakeman's like running the Harvard of the Caribbean. Their story fascinates me. And it was Harry's deal from the beginning to the end. OK. So that phone call, that was a week before the earthquake in Haiti. So when the earthquake happened, then I found myself worried about this school that I didn't even know if it existed. I was born right here, almost where I'm sitting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, Harry Brakeman, 87 years old, in his home in Clyde, Michigan. And Harry says it's true. There is a school. Back in the '70s, a missionary visits Harry's church, and he's talking about some work he's doing in Haiti, and would Harry want to join and help. So in 1976, the Brakemans fly into Port-au-Prince for the first time. We got a truck to pick us up and took us to a church. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] says you're preaching here today. I was like, I'm what? He said, you're preaching! So [? Bells Head Farm ?] was the largest Protestant church in Port-au-Prince, and I never had such a experience in my life. But I was scared. My knees were almost shaking, knocking. And I said, Lord, you've got me in a mess, and you've got to get me out of here. But he did. And I'm not an evangelist. I've never done that kind of work. I was just always a pastor. But when I got done with preaching, the people just flooded to the altar. In fact, the team called me another Billy Graham. Now, I've heard Harry's sermons, and to tell you the truth, they sound pretty much like this conversation. He's not all filled with the spirit or anything. So you can see how special this was. He toured around the island and saw how people live. And that opened my eyes up a lot. I've never seen people so poor in my life. My heart was broken. My pocketbook was broken, too. His missionary work took him to a small town called Petit Goave, or Ti Goave, about 40 miles west of Port-au-Prince on a two lane highway. It's a fishing town on the coast. Kind of a commercial center for all the tiny villages in the mountains that surround it. They were building churches, and Harry had the idea to build a school. The work was hard, hauling construction supplies from Port-au-Prince and working crazy hours to avoid the midday sun. What wasn't as difficult was finding volunteers. When Michigan construction jobs dried up every winter, Harry said they found plenty of people happy to spend a few months warming up in Haiti. We'd gone back, and then we started back in those villages. They'd have rice mats in their houses, and they'd let us sleep [? on those. ?] And we would sleep and work, work and sleep. I remember, I started singing a song-- Learn to lean, learn to lean, learn to lean on Jesus, finding more strength than I've ever dreamed, I've learned to lean on him. We would often start singing that when things got kind of rough, at first. As the students grew, the classes grew, and so on and so forth, until they had 650 students and 42 teachers, all of them Haitian. They taught preschool through junior college, and then two years ago added university level courses. They were affiliated with a medical campus in Port-au-Prince. At least, that was the case up until a month ago. So tell me about what's going on in Petit Goave now. As far as we know, the only damage to our school-- last year, they put a room on top of the auditorium to house computers in. We understand that's fallen down. But the rest of the school is still usable. Three weeks after the earthquake, I asked a newspaper reporter from New Jersey, Meredith Mandell, who was traveling to Haiti to do her own story, if she would go, or at least try to go, to Petit Goave, and find the school, and if she found it, was it standing? Meredith said that these helicopters were flying really low overhead the whole time she was there. Eventually, she found the school. Wow. Now you see this room fell down here, where we had, I thought, this is the college area Brakeman. The best school in Petit Goave. And everybody knows about that. But as you see, for example, on the left side of the school, that all the walls fell down. That one you see here, we had the computers room that fell down here. The guy she's talking to is Luc Lespenasse whom Harry put me in touch with. Luc's known the Brakemans for years. He met them when he was a teen, back when they first visited Petit Goave. In the '80s, he came to live with them in Michigan for a few years, and they put him through college. They call them their Haitian son. The original classrooms were solidly constructed with rebar support, and all finished nicely. Kind of looks like it could be a high school in southern California And those buildings, they're still standing, though they do have that empty, frozen in time feeling. Like the date of the quake, January 12, is still written on one of the chalkboards in teacher's handwriting. But a few recent additions to the school were thrown up with cinderblocks, and they've come down. The new computer lab is just piles of rubble. But overall, the school fared pretty well compared to the rest of Petit Goave, which was essentially leveled. Not only was it hit in the first quake, but that 5.9 magnitude aftershock that happened a week later? The epicenter was right beneath Petit Goave. So the school is kind of the last thing on anyone's mind. I had a long talk with Luc on the phone, but without thinking, I made the mistake of starting with the standard non-emergency disasters on small talk. Luc? Yes? Hi! This is Jane. Oh, yes. How have you been? I've been OK. How about you? Oh, just so-so. In a few words, I would say things are really bad. But where I am at in Petit Goave, there are so many houses that have been destroyed, also with a lot of people inside. With people inside? Yes, yes. For years, Luc's run an ad hoc orphanage out of his house, which is now uninhabitable. Altogether, since he started, he's taken in 172 kids. Right now he has 15 boys, seven of them he's legally adopted. So what are you doing during the day, you know, most days? You mean right now, or in the past? Right now, like this week. How are you spending your days? Oh, dear. Right now, I can say, if I ask you if it is right now or in the past, that's because right now, we have a new Haiti. This is-- I can say we are in another world. I'ts not the same in the past. He said his boys were keeping themselves busy, playing dominoes, basketball. Help has been slow to arrive to Petit Goave. Medical teams didn't get here until a week after the quake. Stores are down, and even if they weren't, Luc can't access his money because the banks were destroyed. More kids show up every day asking for help. He says everyone is just waiting, but they're not even sure what they're waiting for. Right. I feel embarrassed doing a story about trying to figure out what's happened to Harry's school when there are obviously so many other questions that are more important, you know? Yeah. I know what you mean. But anyway, you know that Harry-- many Haitian people consider Harry Brakeman as a Haitian or so. Many people there count Harry as a Haitian, Luc says. A lot of things he's been doing for us. A lot of schools and a lot of church. His heart is really with us. So one of the reasons that we are glad to name the school after him, College Harry Brakeman. I spoke to him the other day, and he seemed to think that school could continue, you know, somehow. But I don't think he understands how bad it is. No, I don't think so, I don't think so. Me, I talked to his wife on the phone. You know, for some reason, I did not tell them all I've been telling you. Because they so care for the people here. I felt it will embarrass just to tell them exactly what happened. For example, I can say in Petit Goave only, we have more than 1,000 people die. Luc said it's a thousand. The official count, according to the mayor, is more like 1,100 so far. And that's in a town of roughly 12,000 people. And by the way, I would like to ask you also to help us in your prayers. In our prayers? Yes, yes. So we hope that you won't forget us in your prayers. I like a lot about this story. I mean, I think you were so hampered by crummy-- two sets of crummy tape-- like most of your subjects are really hard to understand. You know what I mean? Like you really had a lot of work to do in this story as a narrator. And I think you did it. I mean, I think you take us through. I liked the moment of where you said that your dad had pitched this to you before the earthquake, and then the earthquake hit, and all of a sudden you found yourself wondering about this university that you weren't even sure actually really existed. And I thought that was my favorite part, was to come at the end, and like, now we care about a university in a town I've never heard of. I really liked that. I feel like I'm on American Idol. OK. So it's time to vote. We've heard all the stories. Just to review on what those stories were one more time. It was my dad's story the suit on the train, Lisa's story about the funny funeral, Nancy's story about the Erie Canal, Alex's story about corporations as people, Robyn's story about her dad's rotary phone-controlled car, Alissa's story about her bubbe's deathbed boredom, Sarah's story about Christmas and her daughter and her mom, and Jane's story about the college in Haiti. Are there criteria for voting? Yeah, there's indefinitely criteria. And I think you should consider all of the criteria when, I think, thinking about-- well, there's just the, expertise, there's entertainment, level of difficulty-- Yeah. How hard was the pitch from the parent? Yeah. If you had to listen to one again, what would you listen to? That's a good way to think about it. Yeah, I know. And for me, that would narrow it down for me to Lisa and Robyn. That would narrow it down, to me, to Lisa and Nancy. Yeah. Lisa's story about the funny funeral, Nancy's story about the Erie Canal, for me it would be Lisa's story about the funny funerals and Robyn's story about the car. Yeah. I'm going with Lisa. I'm going with Lisa, too. I was going to say Robyn. I'm torn between Robyn and Jane. Robyn's story about the dad's car and Jane's story about Haiti, why? Why those two? Well, going into it, I was like, oh, it's Robyn. Because it just felt like such a solid story. It just, well-- Not like that usual crap we put out here. Yeah. It was like, I mean, I'm not a fan of This American Life, so I don't, like, seek it out, but if I have to listen, like, that would have been pretty good, you know? But then with Jane's, it's like, that is such a-- it goes in such an unexpected place, and it was hard. I'm going to make a little push for Nancy here as well. Just because Erie Canal. That is hard. That is really hard. And I feel like, contrary to some here, I feel like I did learn quite a lot about the Erie Canal. I did too. And totally entertaining. So I feel like she really hit the three criteria. Yeah, but you remember the first like minute and a half of Nancy's piece, which is just like these incredibly boring pieces of factual information? I think it's all a red herring so the song hits you-- it's still in the service of the song. I appreciated the stagecraft of that. OK. So I'm just going to take a little score here. So I'm voting Lisa. Julie? In an all-around, package, kind of best-in-show kind of way, I enjoyed Lisa's the most. OK. Lisa? I'm going to go for Robyn. Alissa? Robyn. Sarah? After pushing Nancy, really-- I'm really torn between Lisa and Nancy. Nancy. OK. Seth? Jane. Jane? Lisa. OK. Robyn? Lisa. OK. The final tally. Lisa, you have four votes. Nancy has one, Robin has two, and Jane, you have one. Congratulations, Lisa. Congratulations, Lisa! Thank you. Thanks. Have fun with your parents. Yeah! By the way, they have to say with you. Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with the greatest documentary production staff in radio-- Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semian, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder Our intern, who is already making our stories better, is Brian Reed. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Music consultant, Jessica Hopper. Audio engineering for today's shows by Paul [? Rues. Special thanks today to our parents, especially the ones who we interviewed who didn't make it into the show. Don't forget to go to our website and vote. We really are curious what the audience favorite is for today's show. We went your vote. The web address is www.thisamericanlife.org. At our website, you can also listen to Alex Blumberg's complete story, the one that we cut off in the middle. If you happen to be an iPhone user, there's also a link at that site to a new iPhone app that gives you all 400 of our episodes at your fingertips which is three bucks. The app also has amazing extras, like David Sedaris's first few radio stories, or I also interview Terry Gross and she interviews me, and there's a free behind-the-scenes video of our show, there's an amazing cartoon slide story done by Chris Ware. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our 400 episodes by our partner in all this, Mr. Torey Malatia, who does not understand why Lisa Pollak's funny funeral stories should win number one. What was so funny? What was so funny, Mitch? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Barbara Drobish was a good lay-- dee.
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Dave was in his late 20s, and it would not be accurate to say that he was living at home with his parents, but only because half the time he was staying at his sister's house. He was playing in a band, doing some writing, not making much money, and his parents were worried. And one day he was hanging out with his mom. We were coming home from going ice skating together, which right there you can see that out. To be fair, I like ice skating. I'm a quarter Canadian. Wait, wait, wait. You can see what? What does that show that you went ice skating with your mom? Well, most guys, after a certain age, wouldn't go regularly ice skating with their mom to like [? organ ?] sessions where you're skating arm in arm around. I mean this is the sort of stuff I would do with my mom, like pretty regularly. So they pull into the driveway. Dave's mom tells him there's going to be a benefit for this retirement home for nuns and priests. His mom's an old school Catholic who goes to mass every day. And she says it's going to be at a hotel in downtown Cleveland. They live in Cleveland. And Maureen McGovern, who sang the theme to The Poseidon Adventure back in the '70s was going to be the entertainment. And she's like, so I'm getting tickets. So let me know if you want to go. And I said, no, I don't want to go. And then, so she just said, OK, well just let me know then. She's like, because I have to get the tickets in the next couple of weeks. And I figured, I didn't give it any thought, but then it kept coming up over and over. Like, let me know, the benefit's coming up and I need to buy tickets. So are you going to go? And I said, no. And she said, all right, well I need to know by next week if you're going to go. And this just went on and on for a couple of weeks. This was a big thing. My mom kept saying like, and there will be nuns and priests there. Like they're going to get some of the old nuns and priests from the retirement place out. You can walk up and touch them and stuff. I don't know why she made that a selling point. Maybe that was a selling point for her. Maybe she likes nuns and priests. She does. And she knows some of the old ones from back in the day. Oh yeah, she's super into nuns and priests. And these weren't just the regular nuns and priests that she see's everyday on the ball field. These are some of the older players. You have the cards, you know, but you never see out of the stadium anymore. Yeah, exactly. It was like the fantasy league. Like Father Mackey from St. Anne's in 1952. So there's a lot of that going on. And then, somewhere along the line, my mom brings up the fact that a priest that used to teach at my high school when I was there, Father Dennis, was recovering from two heart attacks. And so she's like, you know, I ran into Father Dennis up at church. And I was telling him about the benefit. And he was really into it. Yeah, I bet he would like to come to this benefit also. Why don't you bring him? And I was like, I'm not going. And she's like, well, I already told him you were going to call. So Dave realizes he's trapped. Checkmate. He's going to have to at least call Father Dennis. And Father Dennis, was he just like another teacher at the school or was he somebody who you especially liked? I liked him. Yeah, I mean I knew him. He ran the choir. Yeah, I thought he was a great guy. He loaned me his guitar. He played guitar. So it wasn't like we had kept in touch or anything. You know, I had fond memories of him. But I hadn't seen him in years. So he gets Father Dennis on the phone and they agree that Dave is going to pick him up and they'll attend the event together. Comes the big day, it goes exactly as you might imagine a lunchtime fundraiser for retired nuns and priests in a hotel in downtown Cleveland with Maureen McGovern singing usually goes. Now there were a couple of wild card moments to the day that I'll run through quickly for you. First, Dave runs into a friend at the event from grade school-- now gay-- whose Dave mom is convinced that they should set up with one of Dave's sisters, even though Dave tries to keep explaining to her that Guy is gay. And she thinks that I'm being mean, insulting him by calling him gay. I'm like, no, he's a gay man. That's fine. And just explain to me why it's not going to work out? Second, the luncheon buffet turns out to be mostly fried foods. None of which can be eaten by Father Dennis, who's still recovering from his two heart attacks and requested a special low fat meal. Though Dave's mom has come prepared for this. She sort of like, looks around real quickly and then reaches under the table. And she snuck in a bag of bread and like sandwich meats thinking that we could just make some sandwiches for him at the table. And I'm just horrified. Father Dennis tells her very politely, thanks, but no. He doesn't want a sandwich. And eventually the waiters do arrange for him to get some sort of meal. At their table are some very old people, Dave's parents, Dave, and Father Dennis. There's no drinking, which Dave says might have really helped things. And after a while, Dave and Father Dennis have run out of small talk. So it's getting quiet and we're sitting next to each other. At some point, Father Dennis turns to me and he's sort of like, you know, I don't know. Normally I understand why I'm somewhere. If I'm invited somewhere I know why. But I guess I don't know. I don't know why I'm here. I'm really confused. I don't feel any connection to this. And I was just like, what? What do you mean? I thought you wanted to be here. I thought that was the whole thing. That's why I'm here. I thought you wanted to be here. And he says, no. Your mother told me that you wanted to be here and that you really wanted me to go. So I thought that I should do it for you and your mom. And we're just sitting there, like oh gosh. We've been just duped by what I thought was a really nice lady. My mother just tricked us into this. Did you ask your mom afterwards about the whole thing? Yeah. And did she explain what she was hoping was going to happen once she got you and Father Dennis together? No, she just kept saying like, oh, I just thought it would be a really nice time for you. For both of you. She was very invasive about it. And I confronted her saying, do you think like that I'm going to hang out with his priest and then I'm going to want to become a priest? And she's like, no. She wouldn't admit to that, and that's maybe-- But you think that's what it might be? Like in the back of her mind she's just like, maybe you're single, you're in your late 20s. Maybe you should be a priest? Maybe. Or at least have some sort of like priestly influence. I think there was like a bigger thing, but she'll never tell me. Dave says this was par for the course. His mom often mystified him. And a certain amount of her parenting, of any parenting really, is putting your kids into situations you know are going to be good for them whether they like it or not. Or even, whether they understand it. There's been a number of things over the years that I just could not wrap my head around why she was making me do it. And I really thought she was torturing me. Like what? She made me take typing lessons that I could not fathom why. I was like 13-years-old, 14-years-old. It just seemed just random, like here's something that I'll hate. I'll just make him do it. And like, now, literally like it didn't even hit me until like the last few years when I realized that a huge part of everyday for me, I'm typing all the time. I remember seeing that one day and be like, oh my God. That's why she made me endure that horrible summer of typing lessons. Literally, 20 years later I figured it out why she did that to me. From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, The Parent Trap, stories of parents doing their best to be good parents and do right by their kids by putting the kids into situation that they believe will be helpful. Our show in two acts today. Act one, Letter Day Saint. David Segal has the story of a mom doing something that you would expect and hope a mom would do, give her kid a little advice. Act two, The Opposite of Tarzan. We are very, very excited to have a brand new story from the amazing team that does the show Radiolab. This is a story about interspecies parenting. Stay with us. Act 1, Letter Day Saint. Sometimes a parent can do something kind of extraordinary, really above and beyond what most people do with the best of intentions, just looking out for their kid. And do I even need to say that they can have all kinds of unintended consequences. David Segal has this example. In 1991, Elizabeth Gee was dying of cancer. And as she thought about the time she had left to live, she worried about her only child, Rebecca. Then 16 years old. And she discussed her worries with her husband. She just looked at me one night. I mean, she was hooked up with all of this stuff. This is Gordon Gee. And she just looked at me. She said, you know, I really feel that I need to continue to be an influence on Rebecca's life and continue to be part of her life. She knew she was terminal. She knew that she only had about a month to live. And she made this discrimination that she was going to write letters to her daughter. Specifically, birthday letters. The plan she told Gordon was this. She would write letters that he would send to Rebecca, one per year, every year, on December 4, Rebecca's birthday. The letters would be sealed and for Rebecca's eye's only. There were 13 of them. Each tailored for a specific birthday. Plus a letter for the day of Rebecca's wedding. Rebecca didn't know any of this until the first letter, which she read the day she turned 17. To a daughter reeling from the loss of her mother, it was the ultimate birthday present. She said in one of my first letters that these were a way to connect to her. That all I had to do to connect to her was to open a letter. And then she would be there. One of the early letters arrived on a birthday at college, when she was feeling particularly isolated. And this letter said basically, you will never be alone. You will never be alone. You will always have me. And I just remember feeling this incredible feeling of peace. It almost felt like getting a letter from someone who was alive. It happened the same way every year. Gordon, a college president for most of his professional life, now at Ohio State University, would overnight a sealed envelope, adding a brief card of his own. And every year, Rebecca went through a birthday letter ritual. Usually sometime in the afternoon before dinner I'd sit down and open it and read Dad's note. Feel the page, look at her signature. Usually it'd be the first thing. And think, gosh, that's just so amazing that she's gone and I'm looking at her signature and it's saying I love you. And then I'd read through it. Each letter was about 2,000 typed words on thick white paper signed by hand, "You're the sweetest girl in the world. Or just, "Love forever, Mommy." Elizabeth told Gordon that she wanted to describe the world as she saw it, and as Rebecca would see it as a young woman. And she does so in the letters with a mix of pep talks, moral instruction, autobiography, and parental affection. Often she focuses on what was happening to her on the age Rebecca would be when she opened each letter. So when Rebecca turned 21, Elizabeth described a dress she owned when she was 21. Quote, "You would not believe what I wore. A black fake fur suit with a pink top and the plastic ping pong earrings. Everyone thought it was fashionable, but I laugh when I think of it." A lot of the letters are advice on how to live. Quote, "Most children benefit from the simulation of daycare," she writes. Urging Rebecca not to give up her career when she has children. Quote, "You are not a uni-dimensional person. Under that balance, you will be frustrated." And her mother had high expectations. In one letter she asks her daughter, "Are you contemplating a dissertation? Interviewing with scientific laboratories or NASA? Traveling to excited places?" Rebecca pushed herself to meet those expectations. In college when her friends were out drinking, she stayed in and studied. Other kids might have found this all a little too heavy, Rebecca found it inspiring. For example, when I decided I didn't have the confidence to go to medical school and I wasn't going to do it, the letter that year basically said, you need to find ethical expression in your work. She ended up going to medical school. There was just no way I could have become a banker in the setting of these letters. I mean not that bankers don't have ethical expression, but for most of college, I think I had this enormous sense of purpose that I had a responsibility to do something meaningful. Both to me and to other people. As galvanizing as these letters could be, they could also be upsetting. The first person to fully appreciate how upsetting they were was her father. He was the one who dealt with the fall out. He saw that keeping his promise to his wife meant causing his daughter emotional distress. And on her birthday. It was as if I could predict the sunrising. Rebecca would get the letters and then, I'd receive either that night or the next morning, a very tearful telephone call about how much she missed her mom. And I'd have these prolonged telephone calls. What sort of things would you talk about? Well, I mean, she'd just say she's sad. You know, very sad. I wish my mother had been able to live. And been able to be here for me when I needed her. And been able to go shopping with me and all the kinds of things that I think any young woman would love to have her mother do. And you can imagine, that was very difficult for me. Toward the end of her college years, the letters were difficult for Rebecca for another reason. One of her mother's regular theme, actually you could say it was the dominant theme, was religious faith. The Gee's are Mormons and to her mother, staying close to the church was essential. The most important thing for her was that I be a Mormon woman in the way that she wanted me to be. Which was a woman that went to the temple. A woman who married a Mormon man. A woman who believed all of the Mormon theology. By the time Rebecca was a senior in college, she was moving away from the church. So she worried a lot about disappointing her mother, who in the letters was constantly imploring her to stay. Quote, "You must always have the goal of going to the temple. For there you receive great gifts. It is in the temple that we are joined in eternal bonds and powers that will unite us in the world's beyond." In another letter she wrote, "You will make good life choices. I know you will. But no matter your choice, never lose sight of the temple for me, please." By age 21, after a few years of getting these letters and going through a process where I realized this right not going to be in my life, sometimes I would feel angry. And I remember at age 21 thinking, man, do I have to open up this one this year? This is tough. I don't want to do it. And my friend saying, well, why don't you wait? We'll go out to dinner. Maybe open it up tomorrow. And I felt guilty. And I remember feeling like if I didn't open it up I would really disappoint her. And yet, then I open it up and it's all about, I hope you marry a Mormon man and I hope you go to the temple. And if you don't go to the temple, you won't go to heaven. You're not going to see me. And I'm not doing it. And that's a pretty hard thing to hear on your birthday. Gordon was devout, but he could listen to Rebecca's reasons for leaving the church and came to accept them. Her mother couldn't do that. And in the three-way conversation that is part of any relationship of child, mother, and father, the voice of Rebecca's mother always spoke the loudest. It might seem strange that the deceased parent had the most sway, but her mother's opinion was fixed. There's no arguing with her. That haunted Rebecca. And while Gordon found himself reassuring his daughter, the comforts he offered were always trumped by Rebecca's memory of her mother. It's difficult to compete with a dead spouse or in this sense, a dead mother. Because I'm here and I have all of the frailties of who I am. And over time, obviously her mother became very iconic. In many ways, very perfect. And clearly, could do no wrong. And I mean I never did say this to her, although I've joked with her a couple times. You know, who am I, chopped liver? Because the letters were written exclusively for Rebecca, Gordon thought it was inappropriate to ask too many questions about them. For the same reason, Rebecca never volunteered to share them. Father and daughter were just following a set of instructions. As outdated and as trying as those instructions were. Over the years, as he dealt with his daughter's anguish, Gordon tossed out some hints the perhaps it was a bad idea for him to lob these annual grief bombs into her life. I did on several occasions, I just said, you know, you have to remember that your mother was very ill. And that she loved you very much. But I'm not quite certain how healthy this is to have these letters and I said that to her directly. And I've said that to her on several occasions. And because it was very hard on me. It would really break my heart when I would hear her be so sad. But Rebecca never seemed to pick up on her father's hints, or his misgivings. As painful as the letters were, she felt as though she had no choice but to read them carefully. So Gordon sent them all, though he was conflicted about it enough that he actually delegated the FedExing part to his secretary. All of this letter related dread culminated with Rebecca's wedding, which happened in 2006 in an Episcopal church. But Rebecca and Gordon suspected the letter Elizabeth wrote for Rebecca's wedding would contain her longest course yet on the importance of marrying in a Mormon temple. Which is why both father and daughter told me they were secretly relieved when the letter, which Gordon's secretary says she sent, vanished in the FedEx system. I remember thinking, if there is one for my wedding, I definitely don't want to open it on my wedding day. Because I really want my wedding day to be happy. And I don't want to sit, I don't want to cry. That day in particular, didn't want the letter to be a part of it. Because all the birthday letters had been sent, the wedding letter would have been the final letter in the series. Was there part of you when the letters ran out that felt relief? Yeah, I think so. I think that without a doubt, it was an opportunity to move on. On the other level, this was the last kind of visible written, tangible connection that she had with her mother. It's almost like another death? Right. And I think it was to her in many ways. But it was also a new beginning. For the first time, Rebecca began living a life that wasn't shadowed by a looming reminder of her mother's unmet hopes. Rebecca had become a physician. And she married a doctor named Allan Moore, whom she had met in residency. It was a very happy marriage and it ended tragically, a mere 18 months after it started when the couple was hit by an SUV while riding a Vespa. Rebecca was severely injured and Allan was killed. For the second time in her life, Rebecca was forced to cope with a devastating loss. But this time was different. She spent her months of physical rehab contemplating and writing about her memories of Allan. And I remember thinking to myself, this is how it should be when you grieve for someone. You should remember the beautiful times, the things you shared. You should celebrate that person, but you shouldn't be dragged back into the grave with them every year. Why did she do this to me? Rebecca says a year and a half after her husband's death, she feels like she's farther along in her grieving for him than she was 10 years after her mother died. I mourned my husband's loss, Allan's loss. I love him, but I'm moving on with my life as he would want me to. I think to have letters from him for my birthdays or a yearly, would make it harder for me to move on. At the same time, the letters her mother sent were so essential in forming the person that Rebecca became, it's hard for her to imagine growing up without them. In the end, would I have wanted a life without these? I can't say that because they made me feel incredibly loved. They made me know how much she valued her time on this earth with me. I got to hear that. I got to hear that after she died. Recently, Rebecca has started to grasp the hardships the letters imposed on her dad. And she thinks it would've been better if she had shared the letters with her father in real time, even if that went against her mother's wishes. This surely wasn't Elizabeth's intention, but when she wrote those letter, she left behind the bricks for a wall that kept her husband and her daughter apart, at least when the subject came to Elizabeth. Along with instructions that made discussing that wall very difficult. It was a plan that neither Rebecca nor Gordon ever consented to. And now, very gingerly, the wall is being dismantled. A months ago Rebecca sent her Dad a copy of one of the letters from her 24th birthday. Much of which is about Gordon's strengths as a dad. She has yet to share any of the others. And during our interview, Gordon joked that he was a little jealous that I got to read the letters before he did. But a dying wish has a momentum all its own. And though the letters are now locked in a safe in Gordon's home, he still hasn't looked at them. And Rebecca still hasn't asked him to. David Segal is a reporter for the New York Times. Coming up, a set of parents like any others trying to impress their values on their child. Though in this case it's tricky because the child is not in their same species. 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 different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Parent Trap, we have stories of parents doing their best to be conscientious loving parents, accidentally setting traps for their kids or themselves along the way. We've arrived at act 2 of our show. Act 2, The Opposite of Tarzan. The parents in this next story do a lot of things that are really just amazing. They actually reach outside their own species into a different species, adopt a baby, raise it, love it, without really thinking through the consequences. Which turn out to be big. Here are the hosts of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, and the story this baby, Lucy. So let's just start at the beginning. Who is Lucy? Lucy is a chimpanzee that actually, this was found out later, born to a circus entertainer. Born in their camp. What country are we in? In the US. They traveled up and down the East Coast, the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Chimp Arc Show, something like that. They were very popular. We heard about Lucy from Charles Siebert, he's a reporter. And he tells the tale of a chimpanzee. She was a chimpanzee born-- do you know Jad? 1964. This is an early version of a chimp raised entirely in a human environment. One of the earliest. But it's not the kind of story that you may have heard before, where the chimp grows up with humans and then actually ends up mauling the humans. This is much more complex than that. And Charles, himself, first bumped into the tale in this really old, obscure memoir. Long out of print. Yeah, what's the name of the book? Do you actually have it with you? Hold on. It's called Lucy- Growing Up Human: A Chimpanzee Daughter in a Psychotherapist's Family by Maurice K. Temerlin. Maurice K. Temerlin, he is the psychotherapist. He's a psychotherapist. And he's also the dad in this story. And his wife, Jane, who's a social worker, she's the mom. Now the thing to know was that, especially for Maurice Temerlin, this was more than just adopting a baby champ. This was an experiment. He wanted to know, given the right upbringing, how human could Lucy he become? What he says early on in this book, "Would she learn to love us and perhaps-- --have other human emotions as well? Would she be well-behaved, rebellious. Intelligent or stupid? What about sex? Maurice Temerlin actually died in 1989, but these are his words read by radio host, David Garland. Would she mother her offspring? Could she learn to talk? How intelligent might she be? And so how did they her? He says that he and his wife, Jane, made all the arrangements. Went and got the chimp-- --from the day the infant was born. The mother was anesthetized. In the early morning of her second day, Jane fed the mother a Coca-Cola, which had been spiked with phencyclidine, a drug which puts chimpanzees into a deep, pleasant sleep. And the baby was taken away. Jane named her Lucy and brought her home on a commercial airline, carried in a bassinet, her face covered with a lacy blanket. We were blissfully unaware of the complexities we were creating on the day Lucy came home. So the baby was a day or two old? Just two days old. So it wasn't weened? No, and that was part of the experiment. They bottle feed her. Yeah. She quickly learned to hold her own bottle. At two months, her eyes would focus. At three months, she was trying to climb out of her crib to go to people. And at six months, she was pretty mobile on all four limbs. The memoir goes on. By the time she was about a year old-- She was eating at the table with us. Forks, spoons, knives. She would see us using silverware and immediately dos o herself. She began to dress herself in skirts. Shw would often grab my hand, pull me to my feet and beg me to chase her. Always looking back to see that Daddy was not too far behind. You know, he really went at this with this sort of full bore earnestness. You know, when he calls her his darling daughter-- I took great pride in my daughter's achievements. He does feel like a real parent to Lucy. She was so responsive to being looked at, held, and stroked. But he's also, make no mistake, treating this as a very intense cutting edge experiment. The next phase of the experiment, which occupies a good deal of the book, involve one of those talents that we thought used to only be limited to us: language. Can you introduce yourself, please? OK, my name is Roger Fouts. I'm a professor of psychology and I've worked with chimpanzees since 1967. Roger Fouts was called in by Maurice Temerlin to address one of the crucial questions of the experiment. Could she learn to talk? Right. And at the time, he was the guy. He had just been part of a team that had proven for the first time the chimps could use sign language to communicate. So his job with Lucy was to teach her how to sign. And I think I came into her life when she was-- as I remember, it was 1970. I think it was four or five. She was four or five years old. Roger taught her signs for airplane, baby doll, ball, banana, barrette, berry, bird. Yeah, so I was sort of like-- Blanket. --the tutor friend, babysitter that would come over for a few hours each day and spend some time just playing with Lucy. I would work on signs. Cat. We'd read books together, or we'd go for walks. I would chat with her basically. Cry. Dirty. And he says that Lucy-- Enough. Just sort of-- Picked it up. Picked it all up. It was like a game. She learned some 250 signs. And the big question is, OK, so is it me or mimicry, or are they able to spontaneously create words and put some together in a new original way? And there's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that in fact, Lucy did spontaneously create words. In a later session, when shown a piece of watermelon, Lucy tasted it and she called it candy drink. When shown an onion before Roger good teach her the ASL sign for onion, Lucy volunteered-- Cry hurt food. Wow. She would also lie to me. Really? Yes. And lying we should also say is another one of those things that people used to think only we do. During one of my sessions I came in and she had a potty accident. She had been potty trained, but sometimes she didn't always make it. And I was upset because I was now faced with having to clean it up. And so I said, who's is that? And she said, Sue. Who's Sue? Sue was one of my students that would come in and spend time with Lucy too. I said, no, Sue's not here. She blamed it on Sue. Finally she fessed up and yeah, said Lucy. And sorry. Sue? Yes This is Sue. Sue Savage [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. The grad student of yours who says she didn't actually see that like take place. Yes, well I wasn't there. But she told us that when she met Lucy, she was blown away by the incongruity of it all. Like for instance, every time she would walk in the house, Lucy would just-- Walk casually into the kitchen and search through the cupboard for the kind a tea she wanted that day, and put some water in a kettle and put it on the stove and make us tea. But it was the casualness with which she did it, the kind of air about it that yes, I'm making tea, and I would like you to have some too. Because tea is what we do. When we meet new people, we have tea. Wow. Lucy her developed an awareness of our emotions. If Jane is distressed-- Temerlin's wife. --Lucy notices it immediately and attempts to comfort her by putting her arm about her, grooming her or kissing her. If Jane is sick, Lucy would exhibit tender protectiveness toward her. Bringing her food, sharing her own food. As we get to this next part, this is sort of the midpoint of the memoir. It's useful to sort of remember a basic fact of biology. Speciation happens when you've got one group of creatures that gets divided into two, and then these two groups evolve away from one another. And eventually they get so far away from each other that they can't have babies. And nature makes sure that they can't have babies by making one species basically undesirable to the other. You look across, you're a baboon. You look across at a chimp and you go, eh. Yeah, you're only sexually attracted to your own kind. That is essentially what a species is. This isn't something you're supposed to be able to learn or unlearn. This is just the way it is. Yeah, which brings us to some troubling passages in the book. Beginning really on page 105. Can you read it? Yeah. And we should warn that this next minute and a half contains s sexual reference. One afternoon around 5 o'clock, Jane and I were sitting in the living room when we observed this sequence of behavior. Lucy left the living room and went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and took from it a glass. Opened a different cabinet and brought out a-- Bottle of gin. Gin? Yeah. She loved gin and tonics. That's actually not the important part. It's what happens next. She takes her gin and goes back to the living room, sits on the couch, and there's really no other way to say this. She starts to masturbate. But even that's not the important part. It's actually the very next moment. That a boundary that took proximity six million years to establish dissolves. Mr. Temerlin sees Lucy doing this and he thinks, hmm, this? This is a perfect experimental moment. So he runs off to the mall. Buys a copy of Plagirl magazine and brings it back to her. Because it's full of naked guys? Yep. And Lucy would masturbate to these centerfolds. I was not a part of that. I was never there when Lucy looked at the porno. But Sue says that she was there for what happened next. Yes. I was there when she was introduced to her first adult male chimpanzee. Had Lucy ever seen another chimpanzee before? Never seen another chimpanzee from the moment of birth. Wow. She says they brought this male chimp in To see if Lucy was attracted to chimpanzee males. And was she? Well, the male chimpanzee would sit there with his hand held out toward her and she was very frightened. And she tried to move away. It was then, says sue, that she realized that in every way that mattered, Lucy was no longer a chimp. She was stranded. Right in between this great divide that I knew was there between humans and non-humans. And I did not know how to negotiate this. There is no category in our language, except a mythical one for something that's not human and not animal. Insofar as this was an experiment, Maurice Temerlin wrote about it as a kind of triumph. Human nurture conquers chimpanzee nature. But slowly, over time, nature reasserted itself. As Lucy grew, became five, and then seven, and then nine-- 10 going on 11-- She became strong says Charles. Really strong. They had by this time, rigged up an entire portion of the house for this very strong willful animal. Behind bars, padded rooms so you can bounce-- Behind bars? They built a cage inside the house? In their house. To which defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing. That's right. Was she destroying things? Oh God, she was tearing the house to sheds. Lucy was into everything. She could take a normal living room and turn it into pure chaos in less than five minutes. Now that she's grown and is five to seven times stronger than I am, she could tear us apart, literally. It was more and more challenging and time-consuming and upsetting to the extent that he and his wife finally said, all right, we can't do this anymore. This is too much. Experiment over. The memoir ends with a big fat question, what will happen to Lucy? On the final page, Maurice Temerlin says, well, we know we can't keep her, but we don't know what to do. The end. I was raised in the romantic tradition and I like books to have happy endings. If they don't have happy endings, they should have tragic endings. I hate books which have no ending, like this one. Hi. Hi, is this Janice? Yes it is. This is Janice Carter. Not only does she know the ending of the story, she's actually the key player in it. Yeah, I hope we have a decent conversation because the lines here are really terrible. It took us a really long time to find Janice Cater. She lives in a remote part of Gambia in Western Africa. And that'll become relevant in a second. How did you meet Lucy? I met her through one of my part time jobs that I had to put myself through grad school, was to clean Lucy's cage. That's how I met her. I cleaned up after her. In fact, Janice says, she was one of the few people who could actually handle Lucy when she was out of her cage. Besides the Temerlins because she had been quite difficult with previous caretakers. Was that because you were stronger than the predecessor caretakers or you were cleverer? Well, I think it was probably more timing. I think that the time that I entered Lucy's, she was looking something outside of that sphere of mom and dad. And I was a friend. In any case, Janice ended up being in Lucy's life at the exact moment when the Temerlin's finally decided what they were going to do with Lucy. They visited a number of-- It's 1977. They had just spent a year traveling around the world, looking at different options: zoos, research labs, chimp retirement homes, which were these facilities that were springing up to house chimps like Lucy, who'd been raised by humans or in the circus. But every place they visited she says, was just too depressing for them. Too cage-like, for this being that they essentially considered their daughter. And so the decision they came to was that the best way to honor Lucy, the best way to really make her happy was to simply let her go in the wild. And they asked Janice to help them do it. Did you have any idea or any experience of what you were getting yourself into? Zero. I didn't have a clue. So after a 22 hour flight, Janice, the Temerlins, and Lucy arrive in Dakar, Senegal. I remember arriving really early in the morning and how hot it was even early in the morning. Compared to Oklahoma, this was just different. Lots of insects and mosquitoes and high, high, high humidity. It was the rainy season. After they landed, she says they piled into a car. And crossed the Gambia River. And then made their way to a nature reserve. A nature reserve. Which was basically just a bunch of big cages. Really large enclosures there-- Sitting right outside in the jungle. So they get there, coax Lucy into one of these cases, say their goodbyes for the night, and they leave her to spend her very first night alone outdoors. After a few weeks, Maurice and Jane Temerlin decided to leave. And the plan was that Janice, for just a little while, would stay behind. To help Lucy with the transition. She started to lose her hair and get skin infections. I wasn't happy being there either. I hated it. How long did you think you would be staying there? Three weeks. Three weeks. Wow. And so were saying that Janice Carter has actually never left. At the end of those three weeks, there was just no way that I could leave Lucy. The weeks turn into months, and then into a year. And still, Lucy's stressed out. She's not eating, her hair is falling out. And by this point, a whole nother group of chimps shows up at this nature reserve. These were former captives like Lucy, and they start to deteriorate as well. So Janice decides what she needs to do is change locations. So she takes Lucy and all these other chimps to this abandoned island that she'd found. It's a long narrow island. This is in the Gambia River. It's a mile wide at its widest point. Very thick screen forest. And the idea here was that you would release them and they would be able to do whatever in the island and learn how to climb trees, and learn how to forage, and learn how to establish relationships with each other? Was that the notion? Yeah, in a nutshell. And you would think that if you gave them freedom, they would just jump for joy and that's the last chapter of the book. But it's not what happened. She says that when Lucy and the other chimps got to the island and she let them loose, they clung to her. During the day she'd walk them around the island and point out of them, here are the fruits you should be eating. These are the leaves you should be eating. They weren't interested in any of that stuff. Oh no. They were actually more interested in her stuff. Which was what they were used to. I had human objects and tools that I needed for my own survival and they wanted to use them. Like when I would cook or brush my teeth or take a bath, or anything that I wanted to do, they wanted to be doing it with me. Janice figured the only way this was going to work is if she could somehow keep the chimps away from her and her tools. And so here's where she does something really radical. She had run into a couple of British army officers who were passing through the Gambi on some kind of wilderness training thing. And she somehow convinced them to build her a cage, a giant metal industrial cage. Then to fly it over to her island. In a helicopter. And drop it thunk, right in the center. The thing about this cage is that it wasn't for the chimps. It was for her. Yes. You lived in a cage? I lived in a cage. Yes. Wow. And in the beginning she says, her cage didn't even have a roof. No. In the rainy season it rained on me. The only thing above her head was this fine wire mesh to keep the chimps out. The chimps all wanted to be inside with me. When I said, no, then they would climb on top of the cage and sleep out in the open on the wire on top right above me. Every time there was any sound in the night of a hyena or anything, they would immediately squeal and defecate and urinate right on top of me. Oh God. Really? Then I put [UNINTELLIGIBLE] on the roof. But then they started dancing on the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. They really liked the sound that it made. So they were all day long busy dancing. It sounds funny and it was at times. But it distracted them from being chimps. After about a year, says Janice, most of the chimps lost interest in her. Because they couldn't get her tools. She was stuck in a cage. They gave up. They stopped hanging around her and they'd just wonder off into the forest and forage for themselves. Yet Lucy did stay behind. Due to the obvious reasons, I think she was different than all the rest of the chimps. And so Janice and Lucy entered into a kind of sign language battle of wills. If I came out of the tent to look to see if they were all gone, there she was right there looking really forlorn at me and using sign language to tell me to come out to be with her. But Janice would sign to Lucy, no Lucy, go. Go. Lucy would then sign back, no, Janice come. No, Lucy go. No Janice come. Lucy go. And this went on and on. I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried. But Lucy wouldn't move. She would just stand there, waiting for Janice to help her. Sometimes I would stay inside the tent all day long and I would try to ignore her, ignore that she was there. Thinking that if I ignored her, then she'd go off with the others. But that didn't work. And if I did look at her, then she would sign that she was hurt. She would use the sign for hurt. Meanwhile, she wasn't foraging for herself. She was getting thinner. And I tried everything and really, really knocked myself out trying to do things for her. And I just started to think maybe she never was going to do it. And we would argue about it. I ate everything. I was eating ants, I was eating the sticky [? latex ?] and figs. I was doing everyhing that I was trying really nauseating to do just so that she will watch me do it and think, wow, if she's doing it, then I'm going to do it too. And she wouldn't do it. She'd just turn her head away. And I honestly thought at one point that she would rather starve to death than have to work for her food. I was losing hope. But incredibly, Janice kept at this for years. She'd have to toss Lucy some food, some of her's, just to keep Lucy from starving. But she kept at it. And then, one evening, after a really, really long day-- Oh, what a drag of a day. Janice and Lucy are walking through the forest and they both stop because they're so beat. And crash. And we just, we fell asleep. On the ground together. And when I woke up, Lucy was actually holding my hand. And she had a leaf. She's holding out a leaf? Yes. She reached out and she offered it to me. And then I offered it to her. And she ate it. It was a miracle. It was an absolute miracle. And after that says Janice-- She was turned. And actually, from that moment on Lucy did start to make the effort and go off? And be a chimp? And be a chimp? That's Charles Siebert again. And it was not too long after that that Janice went away and-- Left the island? Yeah. Janice says she'd periodically circle in a boat just to keep an eye on Lucy. But she says she never, not once, set foot on that island. At least not for a year. Then one day she decided to go back. This day is the first day that I went actually on the island. She pulled her boat up to the tip of the island where there's just a little clearing and she parked. And as she did, Lucy and the other chimps who had heard the boat, came out of the forest and into the clearing. And Lucy and her walked toward each other. And I took with me some of Lucy's possession that had been important to her, like her mirror. And she used to like to draw and books, just to see how she responded to it. And what did she do? Well she looked at the things. She looked at the book. She looked at herself in the mirror and she signed to herself in the mirror. Then all of a sudden she grabbed me. I mean really grabbed me. One arm circled all the way around me and she sort of held me really, really tight. It really made me breathless and I started crying. She started begin these soft little pants. And I'm still pretty certain what she was saying to me was it's OK. You know, it's all OK now. At that moment, somebody in Janice's boat snapped a picture of her and Lucy hugging. It's a picture that Charles Siebert printed in his book. And it's one of those images that when you see it, I don't know why, it just haunts you. Lucy has their head against Janice's chest and Janice has her arms around Lucy. It's one of the more fraught moments. You have to just look at the picture. I mean it sort of made me want to write the book. Something about the complexity and the invertedness of that picture. After that, the other chimps had started to go. And she wanted to go with them. And she got up and she didn't turn back to look at me. She just kept walking. She wanted to go with the other chimps and she did. A year later, Janice went back to visit Lucy again. But when she got there, this time Lucy was gone. And I went to all the different places looking to see if we could find anything. And we did. We found her body. She was lying right near the place where Janice's cage had been, just a skeleton. Her skull and her hands and her feet were separated from the rest of her skeleton. So how did you know that that was her body? She had a split between her front teeth and she was very long. And there was nobody else missing. And maybe the saddest, strangest thing was that-- We didn't find any signs of her skin or hair. It appeared that Lucy had been skinned. And no one knows actually what happened. But because the hands were taken, which poachers do, they thought one of the conjectures which makes it really unbelievably tragic is that they think that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, just sort of guilelessly approached poachers, not knowing that they were that. And that they just took advantage of their unwitting and over eager prey. But that was Lucy's end. The scenario that I have developed to cope with her death is that a fisherman or someone, some local person that just happened to pull up next to the land and was going to take a break or [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] or do something. And because she always felt confidence around humans, she probably approached the person. Perhaps she surprised the person and just on reflexes, defense, she was probably shot. I've got no other explanation. Janice Carter still lives in Gambia. It's then when she realized that the chimps there would never have a chance to survive unless their human neighbors understood that might be a good thing. So these days she spends a lot of her time teaching people in Gambia about chimps, to convince them about the importance of protecting the chimps habitat. Charles Siebert's latest book, all about the midway point between animals and humans is The Wauchula Woods Accord. Radiolab is a production of New York's Public radio station WNYC, distributed around the country by NPR. If you go to the Radiolab website this week, you can see that eerie photo that they talked about with Janice Carter and Lucy embracing. Radiolab.org. I just want to put a personal plug in here. If you're already not downloading the free podcast of Radiolab that comes out every two weeks, you are missing the most adventurous, enjoyable news show in public radio. Thanks to the Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. And to Lulu Miller who did some of the production work on this story. Well our program was produced today by Robyn Semien and myself with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder with production help from Brian Reed. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. A program note. That interview that I did with Dave Hill at the top of today's show about his mom was recorded about three weeks ago. Last week, his mom, Bernadette Hill, though everybody called her Bunny, died at the age of 80. Dave has been on our show and around our office a lot lately. He wrote the song about the Erie Canal in last week's show. And our thoughts are with him and with his family. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Tory Malatia, who hears himself here in the credits each week next to the funders and the thank you's and all our names. And he just doesn't understand why. I don't know. Normally, I understand why I'm somewhere. I know why. But I guess I don't know, I don't know why I'm here. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American Life.
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Luke was eleven when his family moved from the normal, boring suburbs to what amounted to, basically, the coolest place on earth. His dad got this job as the manager of this tourist park called the Butterfly Farm. --that had domes filled with rainforest and exotic birds and butterflies and a miniature train track and pony rides and mini bike rides and a launching ramp for the water skiers who came and skied-- Also, a spider house, a picnic area, a snake house, and a guy named Vic, who did a show with his collection of deadly snakes. It's This American Life, by the way, from WBEZ Chicago. And the only bad thing about being 11 and living out in the countryside on the grounds of such an incredible place was the school that Luke attended. This was in Australia, outside what was then a little town called Wilberforce. And the other students were these tough kids who didn't accept Luke at all, which is why it was such a great day for Luke when his whole class took a field trip to the Butterfly Farm. It was my place, my kingdom, my turf, and I felt extremely excited and filled with anticipation that I could kind of relax and show off at the same time. Show off, especially because his dad had asked the snake handler, Vic, to come in and do a show for Luke's class. Normally, Vic didn't work during the week. There weren't big enough crowds to justify it. But Luke's dad, knowing this would be good for Luke, asked him to come in special. And that meant that I was going to help Vic. We'd been living there for about six months. And now my brothers and I, we were allowed into the snake room, the snake house. And he would deal with the poisonous snakes, and we would deal with the nonpoisonous snakes and the pythons. So that was fun, and that was exciting, as you could imagine, for an 11-year-old boy, being watched behind the glass by his 80 classmates and teachers. Oh, right, you're going to seem like this brave kid dealing with snakes and getting to do something that's so cool. Yeah, totally cool, and I would be totally at home with it, because I was by that stage and loved doing it. Every weekend I would watch Vic do his shows. I knew them off by heart. And I just used to love standing there amongst the crowd every weekend and feeling everybody's amazement as he would milk the death adder and show the venom dripping down the glass. And Vic was fearless. That was his world. He was very, very comfortable handling snakes. And they came up, and all the kids piled out of the buses. And I got to saunter out to the buses and say hi to my teachers. And the day began. And so at a certain point, around the middle of the day, it was time to see the snake show. So then everybody's in the snake house. I'm in there with Vic putting the snakes in the bags. Everybody's watching us through the window. This is just prep for the show. They would put the snakes into bags, and then they would carry them to the stage for Vic's presentation. And all of a sudden, this incredible thing happens. Beside me, Vic picks up a tiger snake, the second-deadliest snake in Australia. And it bites him three times, tf, tf, tf, like that. And it made this little sort of thump, thump, thump sound on his hand as it bit him. Had you ever seen that before? No, no, nothing had ever gone wrong. I had never seen a snake bite a human being before. And now I saw it from one of the deadliest snakes in the world, and it was massively powerful, the moment of the bite. And it was a triple bite, bang, bang, bang. And Vic drops the snake, and he says, damn, and starts sucking the web of his hand where the snake bit him. And I'm completely astonished. I'm just on my knees, looking at him, thinking, what happens next? How bad is this? Well, I knew it was bad. I heard him give the talk every weekend about how bad the tiger snake bite is. And Vic says, listen, run down to the kiosk and get me a pint of milk. So I say, OK, and I run out the door. And I've got a task, now, you know? And there's this little general store, kind of kiosk thing at the place. So I run down. I get the pint of milk. I say, this is for Vic. Like, I don't have to pay. This is the beginning of all the rules of the day being broken, you know? It's one of my clearest memories of this day, is how everything went the way it shouldn't have gone, and all bets were off. I get the pint of milk. I run back up. He opens it, and he drinks this pint down, drinks the whole thing down in one long mouthful. And I say, so are you OK, Vic? And he's like, yeah, yeah, everything's fine, mate. Everything's fine. Let's do the show. And this is because like, milk is some sort of thing you do if you get bitten by a deadly snake? I think the milk thing was just one of those weird old wives tales or one of those Australian Bush recipes that this helps if you get bitten by a snake. So we're ready to go now. We have all the snakes in the bags, and we leave the snake house. And it's this weird Pied Piper kind of thing. It's me and Vic, weighed down with these little blue canvas bags filled with writhing snakes. And we all walk down to the snake platform where he gave the shows, followed by all of my classmates and our teachers, and the only other people there that day at the Butterfly Farm was a couple of busloads of kids in wheelchairs. They were kind of the spina bifida kids, or kids who are disabled in various ways. And they were there with their minders, these middle-aged women mostly, pushing these very disabled kids in wheelchairs. So they, too, are following us all down for the big snake show. And the snake platform was about the size of a boxing ring. It was a raised platform, and people would circle the platform on all four sides. And Vic begins the show. And he gets about 10 minutes into the show, and he's holding a green tree snake, which is a thin little whippet-like snake. And suddenly, he says, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to have to stop the show now, because-- and he's standing straight up, and his eyes glaze over. And he's instantly unconscious, that's clear, and he starts to fall backwards. And at the instant that he falls backwards, the snake in his hands, he releases it, and it falls over the edge of the platform and into the lap of one of these kids in a wheelchair and starts writhing around in the kid's lap. OK, crazy, and nobody knows what to do. The snake is on this child's lap. And because Vic has turned stiff as a board-- He doesn't break his fall at all. He's completely unconscious from a standing position. And he hits the wooden platform with this thwack, this enormous thump, a horrible cracking sound of his head hitting the wood. So at the same instant, this kid in the wheelchair, this kid had sort of claw hands and so on, and he's looking down at the snake in his lap. And he starts to just go-- [MOANS] And everybody around the kid in the wheelchair just runs away screaming, including the lady who's looking after him. At the same instant, Vic has hit the ground, and his arms have spread out, and arms and legs spread in a kind of star shape. And I'm staring at him and the kid. And then I catch the eye of one of my teachers who's looking at me, as if to say, what's going on. So I have to act suddenly. There's this moment now where I suddenly realize that I'm the one with the greatest knowledge, and that my teachers, in a sense, are standing there powerless and beginning to be freaked out and not having a clue what to do. It was an amazing moment. And an amazing moment for a kid to have at 11. Like, when you're 11, you don't get many situations where you are the one, and adults need to look to you to take control of a situation. Yeah. So I run over to the kid, and there's this moment where I look in his eye, and I say something like, it's OK. And I take the snake out of his lap in the way that I was taught to do, which is gently and without any jerky movements, and run up the stairs onto the platform. And that's the moment where I see how incredibly bad things are, in terms of Vic's state of health. And so what does it look like? First of all, it's horrendously embarrassing, because he's pissed his pants, this guy who I looked up to so much. And it's everywhere. The whole bottom half of his body is soaked, and it's all around him, spreading on these floorboards. It was very much no longer a matter of, this is so good for me because this might change my place in the pecking order amongst these difficult school kids in this difficult situation, but just a matter of, oh, my god, I think Vic's dying, or Vic's dead. His face is almost black by now. It's this kind of bruised purple-black color. So I put the snake back into the blue canvas bag and tied the knot the way Vic had taught me. And then I said to my teachers, I'll get my dad. And then I proceeded to sprint up the hill to the house, screaming at the top of my lungs, Dad, Dad, Dad! It was a pretty far way to go. And he gets his dad, and Luke's dad came back with them. And when they got back, none of the adults had taken any action at all. One of Luke's teachers was kneeling next to Vic, but he wasn't administering CPR or doing mouth to mouth or anything at all. He was just kneeling there, not sure what to do. Luke's dad lifted Vic's limp body into the car, tore off to the hospital. And that was it. Luke gathered up the snakes and put them back where they belonged. So Vic survived. But the incredibly sad thing was, that was the last snake show he ever gave in his life. He was on a kidney machine for three months. His skin took three months to gradually, gradually return back to its color. And that was it. Yeah. That was kind of, end of career. When I tell the story, even now, it's absolutely vivid, and it's always vivid in my gut, you know? All of the main moments of what happened that day are still in my gut. It's, to this day, one of the most vivid and intense memories in my life, because in some weird way, it was a turning point. It was one of those series of events heading towards adolescence and heading towards developing a concept of yourself as an autonomous human being, as an adult. And how often in your life do you have a moment where it suddenly becomes so utterly clear what you have to do and only you can do it? I think it's really rare. For me, that was it. That was that moment. I mean, I love every moment of my life. And without sounding pretentious, I hope it doesn't sound pretentious, but at some absolutely primal level, it was this deeply satisfying sense of actually doing something heroic. Well, today on our radio show, stories of people saving the day and what takes them over when they do it. And these stories of people who jump in are just seized by the sense that they have to act. They don't have a choice. They won't be able to live with themselves if they don't jump into action. There's something incredibly pure about it. Our show in two acts, one in the wilds of Mexico, one in the halls of academia. Stay with us. Act 1, Midlife Cowboy. We have this story from James Spring, who lives in a city that's not so far from the Mexican border, San Diego. At 39, I took a little inventory of my life and found myself to be unremarkable in almost every way. For more than a decade, I'd held a job writing ad copy in radio commercials in San Diego. I had a wife, two kids, two mortgages, TiVo, prescription reading glasses, and about 20 extra pounds that I no longer had the energy or ambition to lose. My 40th birthday was only a couple of months away in April. My wife, Kelly, had a brighter attitude about it all. We'll throw you a big party, she said. It'll be fun. I don't think so, I said. I didn't want a party. It's your big 4-0, she said. Think about what you want to do for it. I did think about it, for a long time. In the end, what I thought was, I'm going to do something big to help somebody else in a big way. It's going to be a great big thing. And when it's done, I'm going to feel really, really good and helpful. What do you mean help somebody, my wife said. I don't know, I said. It was still pretty shapeless inside my head. I used to be a boat captain. I knew parts of Mexico better than pretty much anybody. Maybe that was a start. Who are you going to help, my wife said. Help them what? I don't know, I said. Something's going to come up. Maybe an earthquake will hit, and I'll help dig people out. Maybe a helicopter will go down in Baja. I could help find it. This was all met with the most epic of eye-rolling and sighing. At least twice a week, this conversation continued to divide us. She'd talk about party planning, and I'd have to remind her that I might not even be around. I might be out, you know, rescuing people. April arrived and still no earthquakes or helicopters. So on Friday, about 5 o'clock, right after work, I thought, maybe I should be a little more proactive. I did a Google search on two words that seemed to make the most sense for my plan-- "Baja" and "missing." It might be time to explain the Baja part. In the late '80s, I worked in the area that the Drug Enforcement Agency calls the Western Mexico Baja Corridor. But I wasn't one of the good guys. It was over 20 years ago. I had just dropped out of college, and I was a little aimless. I reconnected with a friend that I'll call Alex, back in San Diego. Alex had put together an enterprise moving methamphetamine along the West Coast. Right about the time I arrived, a new law had been passed in the US that made it tough to get the main ingredient, ephedrine. But I was pretty sure we could still get it in Mexico. The border was less than a half hour away. The ephedrine pipeline was easy to establish, and soon it got filled with other stuff, too-- coke, marijuana. Personally, the drugs held no attraction for me, which made it easy to justify my actions. I mean, if these dirtbags wanted to ruin their lives with meth, let them. It turned out I was really good at the job. I got to know my way around Mexico, around the marinas and hidden ranchos and dirt airstrips, around the cops and soldiers. I came to love the Baja Peninsula. But during this time, the business was falling apart back on the US side. Alex and his pals had developed bad drug habits, and they got really sloppy. I'd been away in Mexico during two police raids on the house in San Diego, but I was there for the third one. I was arrested and taken to jail with the others. But the cops didn't have a warrant, so they had to drop the charges. I moved out of the house. But a couple of weeks later, some bad guys came in the middle of the night, black sweatshirts, black ski masks. They beat Alex into a coma, raped his girlfriend. They stole everything they could get their hands on. After that, I packed up my red Jeep and I drove south to Baja. I didn't come back for four years. By the time I moved back to San Diego in 1993, I'd fashioned myself into an upstanding citizen, an ambitious and enthusiastic member of the workforce. And life rolled along pretty much like I suppose it does for most people-- an HMO, a 401(k), a family. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but life was really steady. It was good, far better than I deserved. And so, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I brought up Google and typed the words "Baja" and "missing." The top result on Google was a day-old newspaper article about a fugitive couple wanted for kidnapping and murder. The story, essentially, was that this couple, Richard Carelli and Michelle Pinkerton, were a pair of chronic meth heads who killed their landlord in San Francisco. And then they drove to Santa Cruz and kidnapped their own six-year-old daughter from the grandparents who'd been given legal custody. And oh, yeah, also on the run with them, their two-month-old baby girl with Down syndrome. Clearly, these were not great parents. A year earlier they were holed up in a motel when police raided the room and found them with a pile of stolen property and methamphetamines. Their daughter, Viana, then four years old, was found hiding under the motel bed. The newspaper picture of Viana showed a smiling little girl with blond hair and blue eyes and a dress with pink polka dots. She looked just like my daughter Addie. Police had been searching for Viana and her parents for more than three months. This article said that a month earlier a tourist might have spotted the family in a town called San Quintín on Baja California's Pacific coast. Meth head kidnapper murderers on the run-- I was a former meth supplier. I absolutely do not believe in destiny, but Jesus Christ. There was a link to a Missing flyer with pictures and a phone number to call. I dialed, and a switchboard operator answered for the San Francisco Police Department. I realized I had no idea what to say. Hi, I said, I'm calling about a flyer for a missing girl, Viana Carelli. A flyer sir, the operator said. Or I guess a poster, I said, like a Missing poster. Sir, do you know the whereabouts of a missing person? No, I said, I just want to he-- I just need to talk to somebody in charge of the Viana Carelli case. Can you spell that, sir? I spelled the name. She put me on hold three times. Obviously, I hadn't called the right person. I looked up other contact info for the San Francisco Police Department. I made a couple more calls and quickly realized I needed to fake a little more competence. Here's what I was going to say. Look, I'm certain that there's a team of officers and volunteers conducting canvassing and search parties. I would like to volunteer to join the effort. But the conversation never got that far. Instead, each time, nobody knew what I was talking about. I finally convinced somebody to transfer me to the Detectives division. I got an answering machine saying that the office was closed until Monday morning. The lack of information, the lack of interest by the police department was surprising-- unbelievable, really. This whole story had become front-page news because of the way the San Francisco police had already bungled it. The newspaper said that after Carelli and Pinkerton's landlord was reported missing, the police didn't respond for a month. And when they did finally arrive at his building to look for him, they found his tenants, Carelli and Pinkerton, unwilling to let them search the property. A police dog keyed on Carelli's van in the driveway. There were blood stains visible in the open garage, but the officers had no warrant. They allowed the couple to drive away in their beat-up white Mercury sedan. The cops eventually towed Carelli's van, but then, incredibly, they didn't search it. On the impound lot, somebody finally looked inside and found the body of the landlord. He'd been dead for six weeks. By this time, Carelli and Pinkerton were already hundreds of miles away. Cell phone records showed that they made it as far as Vegas, and then, for three months, nothing. So maybe the San Francisco police were not the best resource here. I looked online for volunteer groups, flyer passer-outers, candlelight vigils. Again, nothing. All that was left at this point was the little girl's family, the grandparents and an uncle that the newspaper had called the family spokesman. Probably every nut job in the world was calling them, the smarmy investigators and the psychics, grifters, con men. I found the uncle's phone number and then just sort of dialed. It went exactly like you'd think it would, which is to say, badly. If your main objective in a conversation is to convince someone that you're not crazy, you've already lost. Essentially, what the uncle said was, thank you for your concern. The police are doing everything they can. We appreciate the support. And then the call was over. I was on my own. To be honest, it felt sort of good, sort of familiar, but better, because I knew without a doubt that this was the right thing to do. I was going to Baja. Now I just had to go home and tell my wife. She wasn't happy. You said you were going to help people in an earthquake, she said. This isn't our problem. This isn't your fight. She was crying and yelling. They're drug addicts. They're murderers. She spent a long time listing reasons why I shouldn't go. I understood why she was worried. Baja's rough. Every couple of weeks, there's another string of beheadings or a government official hung from a bridge, usually thanks to the drug cartels. Last year, a guy nicknamed [SPEAKING SPANISH], the Stew Maker, confessed to dissolving the bodies of more than 300 of his victims in acid. These stories helped keep Baja pristine, free of tourists, free of development, free of laws. It's like the old Wild West. And like the Old West, there's no cell phone service, so Kelly knew she couldn't even call me down there. I kept repeating the one thing she couldn't argue with. Nobody's looking for those little girls, I said. If I don't go, who will? The next day, Saturday, I packed-- gas cans, topo maps, GPS, water jugs, fix-a-flat. I sent an email to my boss saying that something sudden had come up and that I'd be taking a vacation week, or maybe two. I took the lousy Missing flyer that I'd found online and redesigned it. I added a picture of the infant and a photo of a car from the Autotrader that matched Richard Carelli's white Mercury. I translated the flyer to Spanish and changed the headline to read [SPEAKING SPANISH], which means kidnapped. I went to Kinko's and printed 2,500 copies. Baja, California itself is a dusty peninsula that begins near the San Diego-Tijuana border and ends 1,000 miles later in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas. There's only one road that runs from top to bottom. And at various points along the way, it passes tiny villages and military checkpoints, and about two dozen of the state-run Pemex gas stations. Without much to go on, this is what I chose to believe. Richard Carelli knew nothing of Baja. He spoke no Spanish and had no friends. He had no weapons at this point and no money. The family was still traveling in the Mercury sedan. They would not willingly double-back through military checkpoints or cross into areas where they'd be required to show ID and register. Between the beat-up sedan and the newborn, they had to be somewhere close to the highway. I spent the first day passing out flyers at gas stations, at police stations, at military checkpoints, where I also passed out old Playboy magazines I had put in my truck to grease the skids with soldiers, a trick I resurrected from the old days. I made countless stops and starts. At every market and rancho near a dusty crossroads, I told the story. Not a single person had heard it before, but they were all titillated now by the drama of the murderous couple and their poor children. Just before dark, I arrived in San Quintín, the town where the couple might have been spotted a month earlier. Taco stands, bars, hotels, campgrounds, nobody had seen or heard of the family. I went to bed sometime around midnight, but I couldn't fall asleep. I lay on the lumpy mattress and tried to envision every possibility. Were Carelli and Pinkerton living in a village? Had they squatted in an abandoned ranch? Had they found a benefactor? Were they already dead? I wondered if maybe I was insane to be here. And some time, before I fell asleep, it hit me that they might not even have come to Mexico at all. The next morning, I woke to the sounds of roosters, day two. I got in my truck and headed south. I had my doubts, but I figured I had to keep going. An hour later, I came to a tiny farming community called Santa Maria. I went into a market and left a stack of flyers. A small group of men was milling around a pot of coffee. When I went back outside to the gas pumps, the guy who ran the market came out with one of the flyers in his hand. These people, he said, they were here. Really, I said. Somehow I doubted it. He looked at the flyer again. They bought water, milk, and potato chips. They asked if we sold diapers, but we don't. His grocery list was so specific. They were here. They had to be. What vehicle were they driving, I asked. This one. He pointed at the flyer. How long ago? Three weeks. The timing was exactly right. Did you see the children, I asked. No, he said. I thanked him and left with a new plan. I would race straight down to the Baja Sur state line, the halfway point of the peninsula where the family would be forced to register. I would bribe the immigration officials for a peek at the book and confirm that Carelli and Pinkerton didn't sneak past. And then I'd double back, and they'd scoop them up like a net. I was driving so fast now that the tire squealed on the turns. Before a half hour passed, I reached the village of El Rosario. The Pemex station there could be the last gas for 200 miles. I'd probably filled my tank in El Rosario 300 times. It was too important a place to not stop for a minute and hang some flyers. I jammed on the brakes and skidded across the lane into the gas station. I was posting a flyer near a gas pump when one of the attendants approached. [SPEAKING SPANISH], he said. I saw her, the blonde. Where, I asked. At pump number one, he said. She asked me about a cheap place to eat. When, I said. Three days ago. Three days, I said. You mean three weeks? Days, he said, three days ago. Next door to the gas station was a small motel. I showed the flyer to the two ladies working behind the reception desk. When they saw it, they both shrieked and covered their mouths. Yes, the family was here in El Rosario. They were living in a small house just two doors away from the home of one of the receptionists. Yes, they were still driving the white car, but they'd been trying to sell it in the village. And yes, the little girls were still with them. But the infant, whose name was Faith, was very sick. The blonde woman, they told me, was earning money by teaching dance lessons to children in the village for 10 pesos an hour, $1 an hour. The house was 100 meters away, less. What time are the classes, I asked. 3 o'clock, one of them said. I looked at my watch. It was 2:45. Carelli and Pinkerton were here, now, a block away. Things were moving so fast through my head that it felt like Earth time had stopped. I could suddenly see everything that I needed to do next so clearly. I told the women at the motel not to tell anyone about our conversation. I ran back to the gas station and ripped down the flyers and took back the stack I'd left. I needed to get my truck and its American license plates off the road fast. It was a tiny town. I had to assume that word would soon get back to Carelli and Pinkerton. I drove a half block to the town's small payphone office and hid my car behind the building. An operator connected me to the uncle in Santa Cruz. I found them, I said. I told him the story as quickly as I could. He gave me a phone number for a US marshal handling the case, and I got him on the phone. I found them, I said. The US marshal seemed doubtful, annoyed. I let him know that I could get together a team of local police and go get Carelli. Don't do anything, he said. Call me back in one hour. I looked at my watch again. It was now after 3 o'clock. Dance class was in session. If I called the US marshal back in an hour, and he instructed me to contact the local cops-- which was the only reasonable option-- that whole process might take another hour, maybe more. And it might be too late. I went across the street to the cinder block police station. Three cops were gathered around a small television watching a movie with Chuck Norris and a midget. I later figured out that the movie was Lone Wolf McQuade, the 1983 classic in which Chuck Norris's character makes an incursion into Mexico to take care of business. Hey, partner, where are you headed? Mexico. Mexico? What the hell for? They got my daughter. Well, hold on, I'm coming. It's not your fight. I need to speak with the comandante, I said. One of the cops leaned back in his chair. I'm the comandante. What do you want? He was clearly irritated by the interruption, but he led me to a tiny room with a metal desk and closed the door. When I'd finished telling him the story, he radioed his off-duty cops and told them to report to the station immediately. They called for backup from San Quintín. The dance class was half over. In the police station, bulletproof vests were pulled from lockers. Weapons were loaded. One of the cops found an extra flak jacket that would fit me. At the one-hour mark, I dialed the US marshal from the telephone in the police station. It's no good, he said. The paperwork's not in order. He told me we'd have to wait until tomorrow. There will be no tomorrow, I said. There are two white men in this town, Richard Carelli and me. Pretty soon, he's going to know it, if he doesn't already. And then, he's going to do whatever it takes to run again. The marshal exhaled sharply. Ugh, he said. Call me in a half hour. You got to be kidding me, I thought. The Mexican cops stood all around me waiting for the word. I told them that I needed to make one more phone call. I dialed the uncle in Santa Cruz. Look, I said. The US marshal says that we have to wait until tomorrow. I explained that it didn't have to be this way, that I didn't work for the US Marshal. But this wasn't my decision. It was his family. Only he could decide. He conferred for a few moments with the grandparents. And then he said, the paperwork will be ready by the time it's needed. Go do it. Mexican federal cops arrived from San Quintín a few moments later, four unmarked truckloads full of guys with big mustaches and leather jackets. Most of them carried assault rifles. One of the trucks was sent out to observe the house. They radioed back to the station that the children were out front with the mother. A few seconds later came the report that the father was now outside, too. The leader of the federal squad said, vamonos. Then he put a hand on my chest and ordered me to stay put. 10 minutes later, they returned. Michelle Pinkerton and the children were in the back of one truck. Carelli was handcuffed in another. They jerked him out of his seat and stood him in front of me. And when he saw me, the fight drained out of him. Any fantasy he might have held about the arrest being just a Mexican shakedown was dead. He asked me why he was being arrested. I didn't respond. Viana stared out the door of the other truck, wide-eyed and nervous. Michelle Pinkerton was working hard to convince her daughter that everything was OK. She held the baby tightly in one arm and hugged Viana with the other, rocking them both gently against her. We caravaned back to the federal headquarters, where a big group of cops whooped as Richard Carelli was pulled from the truck and led up to the station. Michelle and the girls were taken out of the other truck, and Viana watched in horror as her father was led through the doors. She moved onto the sidewalk and stood next to me. She was really dirty, but she seemed healthy. Hi, I said. Hola, she said. Speaking Spanish now, huh? Si. You OK? Si. The cops asked me to wait in one of the offices with Michelle and the girls. Viana kept asking about her father. Michelle assured her that he was fine. She was trying to find another blanket to wrap around Faith. The infant was so tiny, and her breathing was raspy. Michelle did everything she could to not look at me. I sat for a long time, just watching her trying to stave off this new reality. Viana leaned over Faith and kissed her forehead. The baby cooed, and Viana laughed. And Michelle draped her arms around her daughters, and she smiled a smile so sad that I had to look away. Carelli was next door in a jail cell. He called to me, sir, excuse me sir. Can you please tell me why we're here? Sir, please. One of the cops entered the office where we sat and grabbed a leg shackle, this heavy black iron thing that looked like it belonged in a dungeon. He carried it to Carelli's cell. Viana started to cry. I have a daughter, I said to her. She's four. She looks just like you. She likes to play princess. Do you play princess, too? Viana nodded. Michelle straightened up in her chair and asked me, are you from here? No, I said. I'm from California. Her eyes teared up and she nodded. Yeah. This was not what I signed up for. She just seemed like a mom. Where was the screaming, the blaming, the meth head excuses? Where was all the horrible parenting? Had they all been cured by their time here? Suddenly, I didn't really feel like I was riding in on the white horse. I just felt like I was meddling with somebody's family. What right did I have to upend the lives of these two little girls? What does the baby need, I asked, diapers? Michelle nodded. Yeah, and formula. I drove into town and bought way too many baby supplies and some stuff for Viana, too. Then I stopped at a taco stand and bought three dozen carne asada tacos. Viana lit up when she saw the food. Did you bring food for my daddy, too? I asked the cops if it was OK for her to deliver tacos to her father. I helped Viana make a plate and then followed her to the cell where Carelli was cuffed to the bars. Hi, honey, he said. Are you OK? She nodded. He held her face in his hands and kissed the top of her head through the bars. They spoke softly for a few minutes. I tried to fade as far away as I could. Carelli fought to keep it together. He looked up at me. Are you a bounty hunter? No, I said. What are you? I'm just a guy trying to help. He seemed to hold this for a long moment. Thank you, he said. I looked down. Yeah. I called the uncle in Santa Cruz, tried to explain what I'd seen. The girls seemed well cared for, that they seemed loved. I told him that things were different than I had expected. Well, he said, Viana loves her grandparents, too. I drove home the next day. I didn't know it yet, but the media was already in a full frenzy. CNN and CBS and Fox were calling my office. All the news reports were pretty black and white. --relatives. And after a whole month, police had no luck finding the girls. But one guy did in just two days. James Spring, who's also-- They were calling me a hero, but I didn't feel like one. All right, James. I'm so-- In a lot of ways, I felt like a homewrecker. I did a couple of interviews, but they went poorly. How in the world did you pull this off? You went to Mexico, and what did you do? Basically, I created a flyer in Spanish. And the thing about the Baja-- So I stopped. The one bright spot in all the coverage, the one moment that made me feel like maybe I had done the right thing was some video shot at the airport when Viana got off the plane in the US. Grandma! Oh! In it, Viana sees her grandmother at the arrival gate, and she yells Grandma and runs into her arms. And they're both crying. OK, you're home now, OK? The grandma tells her, it's OK, you're home now. It's been a hard time, huh? I must have watched that video 100 times. All week, the phone calls didn't stop. Producers were trying to buy the movie rights. Long-lost relatives tried to reconnect. Everybody was calling, except Viana's grandparents. I'd been thinking of them a lot. I just wanted to know that the girls were happy. Not happy, but you know, that they were OK, that they were going to be OK. But the grandparents didn't call, and I couldn't call them. They had to be overwhelmed. I felt like maybe I'd intruded into the girls' lives enough already. But I needed to do something. I sent a huge box of presents to the kids and a notebook for Viana, so she could write letters to her parents. On the inside cover, I wrote her a note. I tried to make her understand why I'd done this. It was kind of an explanation, kind of an apology, even though I knew she was way too young to comprehend any of it. I got no response. And then I started learning some odd things. On one newspaper's website, I found a comment from a guy who said he was Michelle Pinkerton's brother. He called her white trash, said that he hopes she was brought to justice for her crimes. A reporter told me that he'd interviewed the grandfather and that the guy had made some pretty hateful remarks about Richard Carelli, about hoping that Carelli would become some big black guy's girlfriend in prison. And then there was a photographer who'd been sent to take pictures of the family who gave an equally depressing report. He said he couldn't shoot any photos in the house, because it didn't look like children even lived there-- no toys, no kid stuff on the walls. Of course, that doesn't mean anything. It's just cosmetic. It didn't mean they weren't taking good care of them or didn't love them. I didn't know what to believe. I was worried about those little girls, and nothing I'd heard since Baja was making me feel any better. Eight months passed. A trial date was set. And then one day, in the middle of the week, I got a call from Viana's grandfather. It wasn't a thank you, but it was like a, man, that thing you did in Mexico was really something. And I said, yeah? And then he reiterated his hopes that Viana's father be raped in prison every day for the rest of his life. He told me that the trial was about to begin, that I might get some phone calls from prosecutors. And then the call was over. Carelli was charged with first-degree murder. He admitted the landlord had died during a fight they had but said it was unintentional. At trial, the details came out. The landlord's lip was busted open. His nose was broken. He was badly bruised and had been stabbed with a small knife. His body was found wrapped in a sleeping bag bound with duct tape and buried under a pile of trash in the back of the van. The official cause of death was suffocation. The defense argued that meth had given Carelli a condition called hypofrontality, meaning he couldn't think straight, so he made wacky decisions, like storing a corpse in his van and kidnapping his daughter and fleeing to Baja. In other words, the meth made him do it, which, as a former meth smuggler, didn't make me feel so great. The trial ended with a hung jury, so Richard Carelli wasn't convicted of first-degree murder. He'd have to be retried on a lesser charge. At some point, I got a phone call from a private investigator. Michelle Pinkerton's public defender had hired the guy to track me down. Miss Pinkerton says that you spent a couple of days with her and the kids in Mexico, he said. I told him that seemed a strange way to describe it. Did you see her, he asked, interacting with the children? I told him that I did. Well, she was thinking you might have some good things to say about what you saw there. It took me a moment to understand that I'd just been asked to be the character witness for a meth addict and accused murderer who had taken her kids on the run. And in a way, I was really tempted, because she did seem like a good mother on that day, a mother who loved her kids, anyway, and whose kids loved her. But I couldn't do it. None of this had really turned out like it was supposed to, not like I imagined it would. I was afraid to nudge the outcome again one way or the other. I did not want to put my thumb on the scale. I could think of too many ways my testimony might just make things worse. This was none of my business when I went to Baja, and it wasn't my business now. Only now, I knew it. James Spring in San Diego. Richard Carelli eventually pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and Michelle Pinkerton to child abduction and violating her probation. Today's show is a rerun, and in the years since James Spring's 40th birthday, dozens of people who heard about what happened have contacted James, asking him to find their missing loved ones. He's decided help out in a bunch of these cases. There's the paranoid schizophrenic in the Sierra Juarez, the guy who's been missing for 35 years, a surfer that disappeared in Baja, California, the guy in Oaxaca, who he got to confess to a murder and reveal the location of the body. His current case is tracking down three men who were kidnapped in the Mexican city of Veracruz. He says his wife is not crazy about any of this. Coming up, the Devil's Advocate, a Devil's Advocate that is so disturbed by the evidence in front of him that he has no choice but to come out on the side of the angels. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "Save the Day," stories of people who get the impulse to step in where others turn their backs and do good and rescue the needy. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, I'd Like to Spank the Academy. Every year since 1998, the University of Montevallo, a small liberal arts college outside of Birmingham, Alabama, has held an event called The Life Raft Debate. It's got a simple premise. There's been a global catastrophe, nuclear war, something has wiped out the world, except, miraculously, the hundreds of students who are in the audience of The Life Raft Debate. The students are on a life raft. It's only got one spot left. And six professors and other university staffers sit up on the stage and make the case, one by one, that their department, their academic discipline, is the one that deserves that one empty seat, that deserves to be saved, that their academic discipline will help the students survive, will make the students' lives so much more meaningful. Different professors take part in this every year. There are different winners every year. Nancy Updike heard about the event from a listener, a student back when we first broadcast today's show named Carrie Matthews. Hello, Carrie Matthews. And Nancy looked into this. The man who started The Life Raft Debate, a philosophy professor at the University of Montevallo named Michael Patton, warned me when he sent a bunch of DVDs of the event that there had been a sort of convergence of silliness at the 2007 debate. And I was looking forward to the silliness as a corrective to what I figured would be a pretty intense overall intellectualism and dryness. Because what else is there to think when someone says, hey, I've got a DVD of university professors arguing about how their area of study is better than anyone else's area of study? So I popped the 2007 DVD in. And instead of a debate, I watched gimmicks pile up, one after another. The dean of the business school rolled into the gym where the event was being held on a Harley-- --to the tune of the song that's not named "Teenage Wasteland," but that we all know as "Teenage Wasteland." He parked, took off his leather jacket, and strolled up to sit next to the other people on stage. He was the first to make his five-minute pitch to the audience. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. I'm here tonight to talk to you about strategy. I'm a strategist, so you'll understand what that means. I was trained to take the strengths and weaknesses that you may possess, and to put them together with opportunities. Now, on the life raft, you're going to need this, because there's going to be some women, there's going to be some men, and we need to put together your strengths and your weaknesses. I know I sound like Elvis, but I'm sorry. It just comes out that way. Dean of the business school. He went on to say that strategy would not be enough on the life raft. He also promised leadership. He did a demonstration, asking the audience to stand. OK, guys. This is your part. Do it with me now. Here we go. Hey, hey, we got some leadership. Yeah, ladies, you get it. You do the other part. We will, we will rock you. Oh, we will, we will-- (ALL) Rock you! And we will, we will-- Keep in mind that the stage is set up with a lectern, microphones, tables with professors seated at them facing the audience, just like some earnest think-tank-sponsored political discussion or like a college debate. A professor of education showed up on stage in a formal academic robe and then took it off to reveal a superhero costume to audience cheers. He was Captain Education. To his right was an art history professor, who argued that the post-apocalyptic world would be bleak without images, and the survivors would need an art historian to get the most out of any images they created. Her conclusion, out of the blue-- We can build a new world, a better world, a world in which women have the power. Remember, it's the men who have got us into this mess. The chair of the English department tried briefly to argue for the importance of storytelling in human culture, and then used up most of his time reciting a three minute and 15 second poem he made up about a mythical women's football team at the university and its champion kicker, Mighty Mitzi. Mighty Mitzi might get to kick once more. She put it through for three good points. Her foot was sure to score. Watching the debate, I found myself getting strangely mad, like I'd gone to a wrestling match, and all the wrestlers worried that the audience would find wrestling too violent, so they just walked around doing the preening and smack-talking. And as I remember it, pretty much every student getting a liberal arts degree worries at some point that their education might actually be useless. That's what makes The Life Raft Debate a funny idea and a serious one. It's a forum for the students to say to their professors, make us believe in the value of what we're doing here. That cause seemed lost in this debate. And then the Devil's Advocate got up to rescue us all. Every Life Raft Debate has a Devil's Advocate. He makes the same argument every year. Vote for no one, and he never wins. In this debate, the Devil's Advocate was an untenured English professor named Jon Smith, who, when he heard how the debate was going, threw out most of his prepared notes and spoke of the cuff, making the most impassioned speech of the entire event and one of the most satisfying speeches I've heard in a long time. I'm going to let it play through the end. I required my freshmen to come to this, because I thought, because we're covering argument, that they would be exposed to argument. Guys, I am so sorry. What I'd like to do is to give you a little history of The Life Raft Debate and try to explain how we got to the present pass, by way, I guess, of apology. It used to be that The Life Raft Debate-- it's sponsored by the Philosophy Club, and it was a fairly semi-philosophical discussion about which disciplines truly contributed the most to a liberal education. That's what was being contested. I haven't been here the whole 10 years they've been doing it. But I've been here five, and I can dimly remember when Michael Patton won. He was funny, but he also made a case. He made a serious argument. Steve Parker, the next year, won. He made a good argument, which is a double achievement, because sociology is not a real discipline. But something went terribly awry in about 2004. And I can remember this, because I was on the stage. Wilson Fallin stood on a chair and declared that God is a historian. And the audience ate it up and voted for him. They weren't really voting for Wilson Fallin, the scholar or the historian. I'm sure he's both those things, but they were voting for Wilson Fallin, the Baptist preacher. The next year, you voted for a cook. And I thought it couldn't get any worse, and the year after that, you voted for an administrator. You've brought yourself to this. Because seriously, these are smart people up here. They have stooped to some of the stupidest crap to make you laugh. And all of us who are serious teachers sometimes can fall into that trap. We want to be funny. We want to be entertaining. And we get this sense that, if they're laughing, we must be teaching. It isn't always true. I think there's a general argumentative fallacy that's gone on with every single one of these poor people up here, and I don't know how they got sucked into it, but it's probably your fault. It's what I call the Sherry Ford fallacy. Sherry, are you here tonight? OK. You may remember this from the 2004 debate. It's always stuck in my mind. Sherry argued that, because you need to communicate to have sex, you need a communications professor to have sex. I'm pretty sure you don't. Images are great, but we haven't yet heard the case made, how much do you need an art historian to have images? You're probably going to have images anyway. Education is wonderful, but people were doing education for a couple of thousand years before someone got the idea of having education professors. People have been telling stories for a long time before there were departments of English and foreign languages and so forth. And I hate to do that, because that's my own discipline that I have to shoot down. But good lord, the guy recited a poem. That's not an argument. Look, folks, it's gone too far. You may have been entertained for the last half hour or so, 45 minutes, whatever. But I don't think you were intellectually challenged. I don't think a strong case was made for anybody's discipline. And I honestly think The Life Raft Debate has gotten kind of far away from what it initially used to be and what it should be. You have a chance tonight to change that. To vote for no one is not to say, oh, I don't like any of them, or they're not all funny, or they're not charming, or whatever. It's just to say, come on, treat us like adults. Argue for your discipline. You can do that and be funny. But please, you can send that message, and I hope tonight you will. Here's what I realized when I felt so thrilled that the students, for the first time ever in The Life Raft Debate, voted for the Devil's Advocate. At some point for me, the whole thing became a metaphor for politics in the US right now-- the non-debates, the pandering, the flimsiness, the endless stagecraft, and all of it swallowing up the serious people along with the vacuous ones. Part of the time, I was seated in the bleachers watching it. And then part of the time, I was off to the side pacing madly. Jon Smith, the Devil's Advocate himself, also saw politics in the debate when I got in touch with him after watching. There's a degree to which we sort of expect public discourse is going to be just horrifically debased, that you're going to have these god-awful arguments. And there's nothing else except crappy emotional appeals that may or may not actually impact on real issues. So one thing that did feel really good is that the students responded. They said, no, we do care about substance. Caring about substance doesn't mean we have to surround ourselves with massive bores. But it does mean we have to stiffen our spines and raise our standards, which Jon says he's done with help from role models. People like Simon Cowell, actually, have done wonders for us as teachers. Simon Cowell of American Idol. Of American Idol, right. As of the '90s, everybody was so frickin' concerned with everybody's self-esteem, that it was very hard to just actually come out and say something that everybody knew was true, but it would have been perceived as being impolite. It became very hard or unusual if you actually said, this is a bad argument, to a student, on a paper. And you would think that students who have been brought up being told they're special all the time-- everybody talks about the millennials as the generation that were brought up being told they're special all the time-- would be these fragile narcissists who would collapse at the instant that they got some real criticism. But what I've found is that they're quite robust. In the years since Jon spoke in 2007, The Life Raft Debate has been more substantive, while still being funny. One year, a history professor told the audience that history shows that in the chaos following a global catastrophe, one person on the life raft, one of you in the audience, he said, would definitely become a dictator. And he, as a historian, would be the ideal advisor to this dictator, to tell them how to be benevolent. A mathematics professor, all in camouflage gear, calmly argued that without mathematics, the life raft survivors would have trouble navigating anywhere and building anything durable once they got there. He also promised that no one on the life raft would have to do math ever again. He won. Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show. In the years since her interview with Jon Smith, he switched schools from Montevallo and teaches elsewhere. Our program was produced today by Robyn Semien and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Our music consultant for today's show, Jessica Hopper. Our technical director is Matt Tierney, production help from Anna Martin, mixing help today from Jared Floyd. Special thanks today to Liz Armstrong, Mary [? Wattenberg, ?] [INAUDIBLE], Starlee Kine, and Curtis Gilbert. Luke Davies, who told this story at the beginning of our show, writes poetry and novels and makes films and TV. His newest film, Beautiful Boy, opens at the Toronto Film Festival this week. Our website, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 shows for absolutely free, 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. We were hanging out at the beach just at the end of summer. And I told him, Torey, sunscreen, sunscreen! But he didn't listen. His skin took three months to gradually, gradually return back to its color. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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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 barbwire at the border. Whatever. He's there. He's been there awhile. 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 their 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. And you lose your bearings and you will 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. This is 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: Confession. In that Act, the true story of a fixer for the Catholic Church. And now he came to sympathize with people who he was sent by the church to deceive. Act Two: Blood Agent. How microscopic beings inside you and me can control our thoughts and minds. No kidding. Act Three: As The Worm Turns. The story of a man who invites the enemy inside. And I mean really inside. Act Four: Sleeping With The Enemy, in which we ask who's side is your girlfriend on anyway. Act One: Confession. It's Easter week. Pope Benedict has been facing a lot of criticism with allegations that he didn't adequately discipline priests who were accused of sexual abuse, back before Pope Benedict was a Pope, back when he was an Archbishop and a Cardinal. So we've decided to revisit a story that we first broadcast in 2003, about a young American priest who was sent out on a series of jobs by church administrators to squelch some scandals. Scandals not too different from the ones that are surfacing in the news right now. But spending time out among the people who he's supposed to be deceiving, the priest 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 St. 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 7:00 o'clock like normal. I 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 Abbot 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 and sits down. And I've got my books out. I've got class in 10 minutes. "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 St. Mary's Hall that we need to be a faculty resident." The faculty resident is a live-in counselor at the college dorm. The campus at St. John's includes a university. I said, "Well, I'd love to be a faculty resident someday. I think that'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 had been popping up. So ultimately there's only one conclusion that can be drawn that there was 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 St. Elizabeth's in the town of Hastings. He was replacing a pastor who had been withdrawn for what the monastery called a incredible allocation. Wall arrived at St. Elizabeth's on February 2, 1993. Replacing a pastor is not easy. People in a parish tend to get attached to the 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. And 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'm tried to be as candid and simple as possible. But I felt taken back. And I felt sad from the very beginning. And I didn't enjoy that experience. At first, Wall was trying 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 St. Elizabeth's began coming forward. They would show up unannounced at the rectory or in the church after mass and ask 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. Obviously I'm 27 years old. I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. Emotionally, I really have no idea what to do 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 on? 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 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 the hurt. And so you really have to put your professional hat on and keep an arm's distance. Wall survived the scandal at St. Elizabeth's. And he helped a superior survive it too. He never told parishioners about the allegations in their parish. And the stories he was hearing in private never became problem. After serving a year at St. Elizabeth's, Wall thought he would come back to the monastery. But the end of this term he received a letter from the abbot, instructing him to report to another parish, St. Bernard's. The monk there have 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 20 years old and 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. And I really felt I was doing the right thing. Not long after Wall arrived at St. 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 St. 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 one third of priests said they do not waiver from a celibate life. After awhile, Wall stopped thinking of broken vows as something foreign to his world. You know, once you seen 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 be 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 St. 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 St. Bernard's for another year. So it sounds like a bad construction deal. Two more weeks. Give me two more weeks and we'll be done. And it just kept going on. And it kept going on. Meanwhile, the monks he replaced were getting exactly what Wall himself had asked for. They were going back to the monastary, 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 in 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-- a 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 have 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's was barrel-chested, a former offensive lineman on the St. 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 cannon law. Specifically, with the different archives cannon law sets up for storing and hiding information. The first is the historical archives, which is just the names, states, people, those kinds of things. Then you have the secret archives. The secret archives-- 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 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. I mean what really is the purpose of these so-called secrets? Why can't everything be in the personnel records. And then some items just be labelled 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. Did you ever-- 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 believed, 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 as I 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 costs of childhood sexual abuse by priests and the religious. And I remember having an epiphany. And sitting on the porch at St. Mary's in Stillwater. And that's when 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 31, 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 where 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 will be working on things and he'd call me up, and said, "Dude, what do I do with this? What does this mean? What am I supposed to do with it? What are other things can I-- 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 assessment of priests, from the secret archives. The fact that he switched sides, that's he's fighting the church, doesn't seem to trouble him. He believes he is doing what God wants them 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 was 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-- it's hard to know these days where priests belong on the ethical ladder, but most people know exactly what a lawyer is. So it's odd to hear you talk about this work being more fulfilling in some ways that 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 the 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. Patrick Wall, however, no longer does. Since we first aired this story in 2003, Patrick has worked on nearly a thousand sexual abuse cases involving priests and co-authored a book called Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church's 2,000 Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse. He says after all this, he no longer believes that the Catholic Church has the capacity to change. His daughter, now eight years old, is not enrolled in Catholic school. Coming up, enemies on our turf-- controlling the minds of ants, of rats, of you and me. This is not some whacked out conspiracy theory, my friends. This is science. In a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This is 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, Enemy Camp-- stories of what it means to work behind enemy lines. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two: 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 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 eventually it kind of coughs it up. And so there you have this sort of clump of kind OF nail goo with a 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 he 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. Sort of 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 upwards. 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 their favorite grazing times, towards the end of the day. So the ant goes up there. The 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 that is it's 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 actually are 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 kind of ascribing a kind of intentionality to them. They don't have consciousness. They don't have brains in any way. And its hard for us to even understand what they're doing without kind of like putting that on them. Yeah. 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. How does a tapeworm inside a fish know that if it makes it flick and flail a certain way, that it'll 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 to not have brains-- a lot of them don't even have nerves. So it's just this sinister chemical wisdom they have. And it seems like all the parasites break down into two different groups. There 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's 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 kind of 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 in it. It's amazing. And what scientists think then happens is that the fish can then sort of use the parasite as its tongue. It'll go out and it'll catch some food. And it'll catch a fish. And will crush up the food on the back of this parasite. The fish I guess doesn't mind too if it can still get its meal I guess. And the fish can then kind of get back to its life. So many of these stories just are such gross-out stories on a visceral level. Well, 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. Yeah. But we don't name football teams after tapeworms. You don't have the Tapeworms or something like 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 just sort of eating them from the outside, I guess you could say. 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 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. Huh. 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. Like we're the ones with the brains and the thinking and the consciousness. Well, then maybe you're overselling your brain you know. I mean the brain's a wonderful thing. But these parasites are able to pull the strings in those brains in a lot of cases. Say for example, a rat. Rats are very smart animals. I mean they know how to learn. They know how to figure out their surroundings. But there's a parasite called toxoplasma, that'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. 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 towards your doom by this single-celled parasite. Mr. Zimmer, whose side are you on? I think I'm on the parasite's side when it comes to getting a bad rap. 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. Well, 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. What is this? Are you saying this because they could sense that you are in league with them? Who knows? Well, maybe they think I'm here to serve their purpose. Carl Zimmer. His book, the perfect reading material if you ever whenever long talk with an eight-year-old boy, is Parasite Rex. Act Three. As The Worm Turns. Well, as long as we're on the subject of apologists for parasites, let's hear this story from the staff of Radiolab. Here's Radiolab's host Robert Krulwich and reporter Patrick Walters. So Patrick, are you there? Yeah, I'm here, Robert. So just tell us a little bit about this fellow, what's his name exactly? His name is Jasper Lawrence. He actually grew up in England. He grew up in this little farm in the southwest corner of England. And it's important to know before hearing any part of his story, that Jasper has had allergies for pretty much his whole life. On really bad days, my eyes would swell up so much from pollen or air borne allergens that they would feel like they were swelling shut. I could feel my eyes squeaking in my sockets. It was an enormously uncomfortable feeling. But it was nothing debilitating. They were just allergies. And so he's just like most other people who have allergies. You just learn to deal with it. You know, you live with it. But what changed for me in my late 20s, early 30s was my asthma. And at that time I was living in Santa Cruz. I was relatively recently married. We had three cats that had been grandfathered in with the relationship. And I started a landscaping business. I really didn't work for someone else. I think someone with allergies, a landscaping business, that seems kind of unexpected. Stupid is actually the word for it. And within six months or a year-- He starts to notice-- --this really weird barking cough. Was there anything in particular that brought this on? No. It was just sitting and breathing. Cats certainly didn't help. Right. And during that period, my asthma got much worse, very, very quickly. By the time it was 1996, 1997, I was seeing specialists, having skin allergen tests, and cycling through emergency inhalers, trying Singulair and all these other drugs that were coming on the market. I was being hospitalized at least couple of times a year. I mean I looked terrible. I had dark eyes and pale, waxy skin. I had that allergic look. It was a really bad time. And he decides in the summer of 2004 to take a vacation. He made this visit to England. Yeah. I took my two daughters back to see my aunt who had raised me. Very early in the visit, I was sitting at her kitchen table. And she asked me if I'd seen a BBC documentary about parasites and their connection with things like asthma and allergies and multiple sclerosis. And of course I hadn't. But I went upstairs and got on the internet after lunch. And I stayed on the internet until perhaps 2:00 in the morning. I didn't stop. I was reading and reading the work of all these researchers. One study after the next. And Japan. And epidemiological studies in Africa. Animal models of multiple sclerosis. This enormous weight of evidence that in the developing world people don't really have asthma or allergies. And what he discovers is that behind all of this, to his shock, is hookworms. Hookworm? Yeah. Hookworms. Yeah. I learned that asthma was 50% less likely in someone who had a hookworm infection. So this sort of just like hits you. Oh, yeah. What did you think when you read that? Oh, I immediately was determined to obtain hookworm. Immediately. I couldn't wait. So hookworms are these very tiny worms the size of a little hair. But if you take a microscope in you zoom way in, they have this big circular mouth mouth, brimming full of pointy teeth. very. Scary to look at. They have these toothy mouths so that they can borough up through your feet, ride through your blood, and eventually end up down in your gut, and start chewing on the inside of your intestines. This guy wants hookworms in his intestines? Absolutely. And so did you just Google it? Yeah. Hookworms for sale. I mean someone has got to be selling them. But nothing. I contacted every laboratory supply company in the world and parasitology research centers. And they all said the same thing. No. Various flavors of no. And so I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to go to the tropics. So fast forward a little. Jasper is in Cameroon, along the coast. Quite literally and figuratively the armpit of Africa. He's 200 miles north of the equator. It's extremely hot. He finds a guy to drive them around. And so and his driver would go to a village-- We'd get out of the car. --walk up to these villagers and ask them if they could see the latrine. Just an open area of ground. Usually with bushes so people could have a little bit privacy. And I would go over to the area, remove my shoes, and start walking. The first time I did that I almost couldn't do it. It must have been 110 degrees that day-- 100% humidity. And the stench and the noise from the insects. It was so repulsive and so disgusting. How many villages and latrines do you think you visited? Between 30 and 40. Jasper spent two weeks there walking around in village latrines and then he flew home. I got back from Africa in early February. So I was looking at allergy season coming up. And the day I realized that I longer had allergies, that was such a good day. I got into my car and I started driving. And I had the window down. And I felt the breeze blowing across my face. In the past what that meant was that very quickly my eyes would be itching uncontrollably. Snot and phlegm was going to be pouring out of every orifice in my face. And it didn't happen. It didn't happen. I just started screaming in the car. I was so, so happy. And I haven't had an asthma attack since I went to Africa. I no longer have allergies. The vast majority of the benefit that I've experienced has come from hookworm. What is the hookworm doing? Do you know? Well, so the immune system that we learn about in elementary school is all about like these attack cells that go after foreign invaders and destroy them. Right. And that's a big important part of the immune system. But if the immune system were allowed to attack and destroy things unchecked, it could kill you. And there are lots of diseases where the primary symptoms are caused by the immune system attacking the body that's it's really designed to protect. Allergies and asthma are just two of these. Some of the more serious ones are like Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, in which the immune system actually starts attacking the inside of the intestines. Uhhuh. There are like 80 of these diseases. Eighty of them. And so what scientists have found in lots and lots of mouse studies and in some human studies to this point too, is that once the hookworms get inside the gut and the immune system actually starts attacking, somehow hookworms actually stimulate these cells, which just quiet things down. And tell the attack cells to stop attacking. So these are like lullaby cells? Exactly. What lots and lots of scientists think-- Joel Weinstock-- Joel Weinstock. Tufts Medical Center. And dozens of others is that over-- --thousands and thousands of years-- Hookworms almost developed in tandem with the human immune system. Co-evolution. Parasites living within your body, your immune system changes. If you got to a point where the hookworms could survive safely-- The worm gets a home. There's food coming down the food pipe and in return-- The human immune system gains some kind of-- Some form of-- Positive regulatory --advantage. So that if you had this glitch where your immune system started attacking your own body, the presence of the hookworms would keep things-- --controlled. That's the gift. You do something for the worm. The worm does something for you. So then by that logic, what we in the West, in the richer countries have done stupidly is we have cleaned ourselves up too much. And we don't have enough wormies in us. Yeah, this is called-- They call it the hygiene hypothesis. --the hygiene hypothesis. That we're not dirty enough. Too clean. We function like rain forests. We're ecosystems. And we've entirely eliminated a class of organism that co-evolved with us and our genetic predecessors for millions of years. Now, I don't want to leave the impression that hygiene is bad for you. People can't go back to living in filth-- kids playing in sewage by the river bank. But in improving our hygiene, we're also excluding organisms that may be important for making us well. So then what does Jasper do about all of this? He decides to start a business selling hookworm to people. What? You can call him up. And he will literally Fed-Ex a dose of hookworms to your door. How? Sorry, to break in for a second-- Pat-- Where does he get the hookworm from? This is weird. Jasper gets the hookworm from himself. Could you describe how you go about getting hookworm from your stool into one of your patients? Well, it's a very easy organism to work with. It gets up and it walks out of it. So it doesn't take an enormous amount of work to separate it from the feces. And then having done that, I repeatedly wash them in solutions of antibiotics to make sure that anything that could live on them is killed. People contact us. We'll have them complete a questionnaire, submit a recent blood test. Then we'll ship them a dose and all the materials and equipment and the instructions necessary to infect themselves. Is this a safe thing to do? Jasper has done tons and tons of research. But he's not a doctor. Right. The treatment is not approved by the FDA. That's what I wonder. Is there any serious sort of double-blind study trying to figure out whether some safe delivery of hookworm might make sense? Yes. So one of one of the guys who was sort of a pioneer in this hookworm research is David Pritchard. I'm Professor David Pritchard. Immunologist and parasitologist. --at the University of Nottingham where I study parasites and the wound healing properties of maggots. So we've now got two safety trials under our belts. But we've yet to conduct the trials to show that therapeutic benefit results from infection with worms. So Pritchard infected himself pretty much just to make sure that it was safe. What we did was, 10 of us in the lab took worms at different doses. We were either given 10, 25, 50, or 100 worms. And then we had to report on the symptoms. And on the back of that study, we determined that 10 worms were tolerated. But Pritchard, when he did this proof of safety study, he actually give himself 50 hookworms. Oh. Which put him out of commission for awhile. Well, I felt pretty bad. I mean pain in the gut really. You could feel them. Because they are biting on your tissues. I mean if you have too many hookworms, they can cause things like diarrhea. And the most serious side effect and the side effect that makes them sort of a public health enemy is that they can give you anemia. So if you have too many, you lose quite a bit of blood to these parasites. Well, if you take too many hookworm, which you're not going to, if you come to us, the worse thing you're going to get is anemia. But it's not like you wake up one morning in your drained of blood. It's very slow to develop. And it's very easy to deal with. Jasper's kind of just gone for it. You know, it's a very sort of like cowboy move. So the scientific community, I think they believe that I'm premature-- It's not FDA approved. --in offering this to the public. You don't know what it is. You don't know it's purity. It's not safe. But I've talked to several clients who have really severe allergies and asthma. They say they're just achieved these great results. And Jasper also says he's seen success with a few multiple sclerosis patients and several Crohn's disease patients too. Like how many people do you think that you have infected? It's about 85 right now. How is business? Is it everything that-- Business is adequate. But I honestly don't know why I don't wake up in the morning with my front garden 20 deep with people with ulcerative collitis, Crohn's disease, allergies. I just don't know why I'm not completely buried. The way he sees it, people are scared. Well, they're the people who are coming from the point of view of what they learned in kindergarten about clean drinking water and sewers. To them, worms and parasites are so repulsive that there is nothing good to be said about them. But I can make you better. It's simple. It's cheap. I mean for god's sakes, these organisms fall out my rear end every day, a half a million at a time. The raw material is human excrement for god's sake. All people have to do is open their minds. Are you really that scared of a little worm? Thanks to Patrick Walters and the hosts of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich for that story. After that story was first broadcast, the Food and Drug Administration decided to pay a visit to Jasper Lawrence's house in Santa Cruz. Officials inspected the lab where he harvests his hookworms, told him he had to shut down his operation. That night, Jasper and his wife packed up their belongings and fled the country, so he could keep harvesting and selling hookworms. Jasper's website is autoimmunetherapies.com. And before you get any big ideas about ordering some hookworms, he is not shipping worms right now to the United States of America. Act Four. Sleeping With Your Enemy. We have this story about what is hidden inside of us-- the secret agents within. From writer Etgar Keret. Among other things, he says that this is a story of his real-life wife. Actor Matt Malloy reads it for it. A quick warning for listeners before we begin. This story acknowledges 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. The 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. 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 gotta 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. The truth is, as soon as you say it, she melts. And you screw, right there in the living room. And afterwards, you lie there holding 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 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 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 into 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. And 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, until 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 gotta 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 3:00 a.m. "I'm going to hit the sack," you tell him. And he waves to you. And stays in the bean bag chair, staring at the Fashion channel. You wake up the next morning exhausted, with a slight stomach ache. 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 you find yourselves talking about a baby. And at night, you and the fatsoguy 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, beak plates likes 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 its 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, until it hurts. Matt Malloy. Reading Etgar Keret's story, "Fatso", which appears in his book, The Nimrod Flipout. Kaaret's most recent collection is The Girl on the Fridge. This story was translated into English by Miriam Shlesinger. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Thanks to them. If you're not listening to Radiolab, you should be. The new season starts this week-- radiolab.org. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. The store at our website is back up in operation. And there's an update to our iPhone app. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International, WBEZ. Management oversight for our program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who has just one question for you: Hey, baby. Want to play nanny goat and ride in the back? I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life.
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A friend of mine ran her own small business. It was just her and this guy, the bookkeeper. And she loved the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper did the billing. He kept the accounts. He saw that vendors were paid on time. He did basically all the stuff that, to my friend, was just kind of drudgery. She used to say that she didn't know what she would do without him. They were really close. So it was this great setup for years. And then one day, the bookkeeper disappeared with her money. Classic inside job. Perfect one. The bookkeeper knew everything. My friend totally trusted him. And sometimes I wondered, was the idea of using what he knew and taking the money like this little bug in his brain eating away at him for years. Once he figured out that he could take the money, was it hard for him not to take the money? Well, today on our radio show, we have two stories of people who get inside. They get inside some system. They truly understand the system. And then they have to figure out what to do with their insider knowledge. One of the stories is this incredible tale of money guys on the make right when the housing market was starting to collapse. The other is this story of cops and robbers, drug busts and drug users playing a cat and mouse game. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Act One, Eat My Shorts. Something you hear from a lot of people on Wall Street, this crisis that we're going through now, nobody saw it coming. Nobody saw this coming. See what I mean? This is Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of the failed mortgage lender Countrywide on Australia Broadcasting. S&P and Moody's didn't see it coming. Bear Stearns certainly didn't see it coming. Merrill Lynch didn't see it coming. Nobody saw this coming. Brian Moynihan, head of Bank of America, told a congressional hearing he didn't either. No one involved in the housing system, lenders, rating agencies, investors, insurers, consumers, regulators, and policy makers foresaw a dramatic and rapid depreciation in home prices. Even Robert Rubin, former treasury secretary, former chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup's Board of Directors said just this week-- Almost all of us, including me, who were involved in the financial system, that is to say, financial firms, regulators, rating agencies, analysts, and commentators, missed the powerful combination of factors that led to this crisis and the serious possibility of a massive crisis. The recent collapse of the financial system has been described as a 100-year flood, a perfect storm, a force of nature. And it is so frustrating to hear it described that way, as something that happened to Wall Street instead of something that Wall Street brought on itself. At the height of the boom, Wall Street was doing such strange, dangerous things, bankers and brokers all over the country were giving huge mortgages to people who could not afford to pay them back. Investors were then buying and selling these terrible mortgages to each other as if they were worth something. Banks convinced analysts to rate this stuff as completely safe. And then they believed their own lousy ratings. They believed their own hype. And really, nobody suspected this could all come crashing down? Here on our radio show, we have never believed that this was true. We've never believed this idea that nobody knew. That really, we're all to blame because all of us, from homeowners to investment bankers, all got caught in this irrational exuberance in the housing bubble. We didn't believe it. After two years of reporting on this crisis, we felt pretty sure that not only must there be some people on Wall Street who figured out what would happen, there must have been people who helped bring on the crisis, who fed the fire, and who figured out ways to profit from that. And so we wanted to find some of those people. To do that, we and our regular team of crack economics reporters at Planet Money asked the investigative reporting outfit ProPublica to join up with us. ProPublica spent seven months conducting dozens of interviews, pouring over thousands of pages of financial documents. And they uncovered some things no one has ever heard before in all the reporting that's been done on the crisis. And today, with their help, we bring you this story of people at one company and their associates who took home hundreds of millions of dollars in personal income while, at the same time, helping to worsen the crisis that taxpayers, that you and I, will be paying off for years to come. Here's Alex Blumberg with the reporting team from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to bring you the story of this inside job. This inside job takes place deep in the heart of Wall Street financial engineering. It's full of intrigue and genius and questionable behavior. And it resembles, in ways that will eventually be revealed, the plot of a Mel Brooks musical. But it begins far from Wall Street, on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, where a man named Alec Litowitz was starting a new hedge fund. We'll get to what exactly a hedge fund is in a minute. First though, here's Jake Bernstein from ProPublica with the hedge fund's name. Magnetar. And that's because Litowitz, the guy who started Magnetar, is a big astronomy buff. A magnetar is kind of like a black hole. It's a star that's burned out. And it is the most magnetic force in the universe. And they have a marketing spiel. You may not have noticed, but that was the other half of the ProPublica duo entering the conversation, Jesse Eisinger. And they have a marketing spiel. They say that this firm is going to attract the best employees, the best investors. We're going to have the highest returns. And they give t-shirts to people that say, "Very bright. Very magnetic." And sometimes employees would joke that they're named after a black hole. But for the most part, they start out with these high ambitions and excitement, and they're really enthusiastic about it. So what do hedge funds do anyway? Well basically, they gather a bunch of money from investors, and they try to get that money to grow using whatever strategy they think will make them and their investors rich. Magnetar decided that one of the ways it was going to make money was by investing in a corner of the financial markets we've heard a lot about lately, securities made of subprime mortgages, and was going to go for one of the more esoteric of these securities, collateralized debt obligations or CDOs. Such are the times that we live in that CDOs have appeared on more than one episode of This American Life lately. CDOs have the distinction of being the single most toxic financial instruments of the financial crisis. The instruments that did more damage to the world's financial system than any other single instrument out there. And what you need to know about a CDO to understand this story is pretty simple. A CDO, at least the kind Magnetar was interested in, is a financial security that's made up of dozens of bonds. And each bond is itself made up of hundreds of individual mortgages and not safe mortgages. These were pretty risky ones to borrowers with poor credit. Now Alec Litowitz, who was only 38 when he started Magnetar, had already amassed a personal fortune in finance. This allowed him and his wife to take a couple of years kicking around Europe, collecting antiques for a big house they were building on the shores of Lake Michigan. And during the time they were away, CDOs were becoming the hot, new thing on Wall Street. A record number were on their way to being sold in 2005, which would shatter the previous record set in 2004. But by the time Alec Litowitz was back and had his new hedge fund up and running at the end of 2005, things were starting to change in the CDO world. We talked to a guy named Bill Tomljanovic a guy on Wall Street who put together CDOs. He said that at the end of 2005, people on Wall Street were starting to worry about the housing market. Unfortunately, since Bill is in finance, he doesn't say it like that. He says it like this-- In 2005, the summer, spreads on RMBS collateral started expanding. And that is banker-speak for people started to worry about the housing market? Yes, ah yes. Now what Bill is saying here, which sounds really boring, it is huge. It means that part of our theory, the theory that got us into this story in the first place, was correct. There was a group of people on Wall Street who are not like most people in America. They were not caught by surprise. In 2005, two full years before the collapse of the major subprime lenders like New Century and Countrywide, three full years before the failure of Lehman Brothers and AIG and the big government bailout, a lot of people on Wall Street were looking at housing prices around the country and seeing signs that things were not well. Las Vegas had an overheated market. Certain sectors of California were looking very aggressive in terms of real estate valuation. Was it enough-- Was the bubble ready to burst? You could see this uncertainty showing up in bond prices in 2005, long before everything crashed. The anxiety is right there in the interest rate numbers. Some of the people on Wall Street who buy bonds that are made up of hundreds of home mortgages were starting to demand more interest for their investment, saying essentially, we'll buy this bond, but you have to pay us more because it's looking riskier to us. Which is just another way of saying, we're worried. And because of this, people like Bill Tomljanovic were thinking that the good times might be coming to an end in the CDO world. The level of difficulty to replicate the business plan of '05 in '06 was pretty-- I mean, everyone was worried, how are we going to keep volume up, make the same amount of money for the firm? How are we going to recreate this in '06 because it was such a great year in '05. So here's all these people on Wall Street in late 2005 thinking, the CDO business might be slowing down, housing might be cooling off, things might be returning to normal. And then in walks Magnetar. Magnetar spends the first quarter of '06 talking to as many people as possible in the CDO business, really understanding it, interviewing people, getting a good sort of lay of the land. And then, they put out the word that they want to buy equity. OK. Equity. A quick word of explanation. Every CDO was divided into layers. A layer at the top that was considered the safest, the layers below that, which were considered semi-safe, and then the bottom layer, which was considered the riskiest. Of course, after the crash, we learned that no part of the CDO was safe. Every part of most subprime CDOs is now worthless. But back in 2005 and 2006, they were still making these distinctions. So the part at the bottom, that riskiest part, that was called the equity tranche. Tranche is just Wall Street lingo for layer. The equity tranche, the equity layer paid a lot more interest than the top layers, the idea being, if you bought that risky equity, you got paid for that risk. But still, it was the riskiest part of a CDO that was made up of risky bonds backed by risky mortgages. It was not an easy sell. Here's Bill Tomljanovic. The equity was the toughest part when the business-- early 2000s either analyzing-- Finding somebody to take the riskiest portion. Riskiest portion. That was the hardest part to find? It was very difficult, yes. So here we are in early 2006. CDO managers and investment banks are thinking the CDO party is ending. And in comes this hedge fund saying not only do they want to buy CDOs, but-- They want to buy that lowest tranche, that lowest piece of the CDO. The one that was hardest to place? The one that was hardest to place. And they want to buy lots and lots and lots of it. As one banker said to us, it was like a miracle. Suddenly, this big equity buyer shows up. In other words, it seemed like Wall Street felt it had found its sucker. An article in Business Week later wondered if Magnetar was poised to get "shredded." Magnetar's entrance into the CDO market in 2006 had a huge impact though. If they were willing to buy the equity piece, it became easier for Wall Street banks to make the CDO. Buyers were easier to find for the parts that were less risky. Magnetar, as the equity buyer, was often called the sponsor of the CDOs in which it bought the equity since, without Magnetar, the CDO probably wouldn't have gotten made in the first place. Magnetar's entry into the market helped the CDO business, which insiders worried was petering out in 2005, roar back to life. 2006 ended up being even bigger than 2005. In fact, it became the best year in CDO history. A lot of CDO deals got done, and a lot of that had to do with Magnetar. Their pace of production was extraordinary by any estimation. In a year's time, from the middle of '06 to the middle of '07, they do 28 deals worth an estimated $40 billion. Just to put that in perspective, that's about a third to a half of this corner of the subprime CDO market that they were operating in. And for one hedge fund to account for that much was very rare. In fact, we ran this by Bill Tomljanovic, the CDO manager. He was familiar with Magnetar, but he didn't know how many deals they'd been a part of. And when we ran that number by him, he was pretty impressed. That's a lot of deals. That's a lot of deals. Is that enough to sort of be an influence in the market? I would say that-- wow-- it sounds big. Now most insiders who knew Magnetar would not have described them as suckers. In fact, every single person that Jake and Jesse and I have talked to about Magnetar uses the same word to describe them, smart. Sometimes they'll say, really smart. And yet, here they were going on this huge spending spree, buying the riskiest parts of these financial products that were all backed by a housing market insiders were starting to view with more and more suspicion. And that caused a lot of people to wonder, why? People puzzled it out. And they talked about it. And they tried to figure out, well, what's the strategy here? Why would they like such risky stuff? And then they figured it out. As one CDO manager said to us, "At a certain point, we were in on the joke." The joke being that Magnetar was also betting against the very CDOs that it was creating. So how do you bet against a CDO? You don't need to go to Vegas. You don't even need to leave Wall Street. There's another type of financial product that Wall Street had created. It's called a credit default swap. You may have heard that term before as well. A credit default swap can be used to bet that some part of a CDO will fail. And the way it works, you pick a CDO that you think might fail, and then you pay some Wall Street firm a little bit of money a few times a year. If the CDO does fine, the Wall Street firm keeps your money. But if it fails, the Wall Street firm pays you the entire value of the part of the CDO that you're betting against, a massive amount of money. The theory on the street was Magnetar didn't care in the long term whether the equity it was buying survived. They made the equity investment mainly as a catalyst for the creation of the rest of the CDO. Magnetar would cause these CDOs to be created by buying this tiny equity portion, which was typically just 5% or 6% of the value of the entire CDO. And then, they'd place a bet, take out a credit default swap on one of the larger sections above. They also placed bets against other, similar CDOs out there. So the theory among many of the people Jake and Jesse interviewed-- and I should emphasize, Magnetar disputes this theory-- but the theory was, say the equity portion cost Magnetar $10 million to buy, but the entire CDO itself is a hundred times that, $1 billion or even $2 billion. If one of the upper sections of the CDO goes bust, and Magnetar is betting against it, they stood to make a lot more than $10 million, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. It was such a brilliant idea, soon others got in on the act. This strategy was being employed by some hedge funds, but Magnetar was the biggest. They did it the most. They put the most money toward it. And in fact, on Wall Street, it became known-- according to the people we've talked to-- as the Magnetar trade. OK. Here's another piece of jargon. The strategy of betting that something will go down in value, in the language of Wall Street, it's called shorting or taking a short position. And there were a handful of other hedge funds out there shorting housing-related securities like CDOs. A new book by author Michael Lewis, The Big Short, tells several of their stories. And generally, there's nothing wrong with shorting. In fact, many people argue that shorting, which happens millions and millions of times a day, every single day on Wall Street, is actually a good thing because it keeps prices more tethered to reality. It's harder for a mania to develop if people who have a dim view of things can bet on that view. But the Magnetar trade was not shorting in the traditional sense, betting against something which already exists. The Magnetar trade was betting against something Magnetar itself helped create, which is the exact opposite of what you want shorting to do. In traditional shorting, by betting, essentially, that certain things out there are crappy and overvalued, you are helping to rid the world of those crappy, overvalued things. But a lot of people thought that what Magnetar was doing was bringing crappy, overvalued things into the world in order to bet against them. We talked to Jon Pickhardt, a lawyer whose firm is suing an investment bank that helped set up some of the deals with Magnetar and with other hedge funds that were doing what Magnetar was doing. Yeah, a number of the hedge funds, they were simultaneously entering into significant short positions with respect to the CDO or its collateral. In other words, were they being basically built to fail? In some cases, yes. In trying to come up with an accurate metaphor, have you ever seen The Producers? Yes. So in the plot of The Producers, there's a scene where he hires an accountant, and he says, where he's sort of murmuring to himself, and he's like, hm, you could almost make more money if the play fails than if it succeeds. Carry the 3, divided by 4-- amazing! It's absolutely amazing, but under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit. It feels very similar. Is it? Well, from the hedge fund standpoint, that clearly was the case. Clearly, they would benefit more if the CDO ultimately failed. Don't you see Bloom? Darling Bloom, glorious Bloom. It's so simple. Step one, we find the worst play ever written. Step two, we hire the worst director in town. Step three, I raise $2 million. Two? Yes, one for me, one for you. Step four, we hire the worst actors in New York and open on Broadway. And before you can say step five, we close on Broadway, take our $2 million and go to Rio. Oh, Rio? Nah, that would never work. Oh, ye of little faith. Jake and Jesse have had several conversations with Magnetar, and they say, what they were doing was nothing like what Nathan Lane is singing about here. Magnetar says, "We didn't have an opinion on whether the housing market would crash or soar. We weren't hoping the CDOs would fail. We weren't betting against them. We were simply hedging ourselves." Now this is something you hear a lot on Wall Street, the great hedge versus bet debate. A hedge is like insurance. If you're making an investment in something like a house, you expect the house to stay standing, you expect to live in it, but something could happen. It could catch fire or get swept away by a tornado or fall into a sinkhole. So you buy insurance. In other words, you hedge. You pay a little bit a year in case those things happen. But that doesn't mean you're betting that they will. And in fact, hedge funds originally got their name because, in the early days of hedge funds, they hedged all kinds of bets. And that is exactly what Magnetar said it was doing, being a classic hedge fund. By buying credit defaults swaps on the CDOs it was helping create, it was simply protecting itself if something unforeseen happened to them. The problem with figuring out whether it's a bet or a hedge, is that the action of betting and the action of hedging look exactly the same. The only difference is intent. But there are some clues to look for that help figure out intent. For example, is the size of the bet against the investment bigger than the investment itself? Are they taking out a million dollar insurance policy on a hundred thousand dollar house? So in Magnetar's case, it would be interesting to see how many bets did they make on which CDOs for how much money. Unfortunately, none of this information is public. Still in the case of the Magnetar deals, there is some evidence that the play was expected to flop. To understand this evidence, you have to know a little bit about how a CDO gets marketed and sold. OK. So first, you have the investors. This can be anyone who wanted buy a layer of a CDO, could be a hedge fund like Magnetar, a pension fund, an insurance company. They're the buyer. Then you have the seller. That was the Wall Street bank. They were the ones who went out and found the investors, said, "Hey, we're putting together this CDO. Would you like to buy a piece of it?" And in the CDO business, there was often a third party, the CDO manager. The CDO manager is the one person in this transaction who has what's called fiduciary duty. They're there to make sure that investors aren't being ripped off, that the game is played honestly. The CDO manager was sort of like the referee. He would be the entity that stood between the investors and the bank. The CDO manager had one other very important function. The CDO manager picked the assets that went into the CDO. OK. Assets. Remember, CDOs are a bunch of mortgage-backed loans bunched together. These mortgage-backed loans, in Wall Street parlance, were called the CDO's assets. They were also called the collateral. It's basically the stuff that goes in to making the CDOs. The CDO manager picked that stuff. Again, here's Jake and Jesse. So we interviewed a lot a bankers and CDO managers and others in the business, and they told us something interesting. They said that Magnetar was frequently pushing for riskier assets to be put into the CDOs. All right. I'm going to play that last bit again because that is key. They said that Magnetar was frequently pushing for riskier assets to be put into the CDOs. In other words, Magnetar was targeting the referees, the CDO managers. Jake and Jesse have compiled seven different cases where Magnetar actively tried to influence the CDO managers to get them to put riskier assets into their CDOs. For example, in Magnetar's very first deal to put together a CDO-- We spoke to a person who was involved in the deal. And right away, it became clear to the CDO manager, according to this person, that Magnetar wanted influence. They would ask for specific bonds to buy. They'd say, would you consider these bonds? And according to this person that we talked to, they said, let's just say that we didn't think their suggestions made a lot of sense. You are understanding this right. The CDO manager was confused because the investor, Magnetar, was putting pressure on him to put riskier assets into the CDO that that very same investor was buying. And this happened over and over with Magnetar CDOs. There was another banker involved in the creation of another Magnetar CDO who described a "back and forth fight" between Magnetar and the CDO manager over the quality of the assets, again, with Magnetar pushing for riskier ones. And there was another deal where the fight took place over email, which Jake and Jesse got copies of. In an email that one Magnetar person wrote in September of 2006 said, "The original portfolio target spreadsheet that I have had a strangely low spread target. That, of course, would not at all be beneficial to us. I've attached the target portfolio that I would like for this deal with target spreads." So basically, in the email, they're saying, these are the kinds of assets we want, and this is how risky we want it to be. Well, the CDO manager was not terribly excited about this. And he sent an email back rather forcefully saying, "We will not assemble a portfolio we are not proud of and feel strongly about in the name of a spread target." And so the two sides drifted apart and the CDO was never consummated in part because of the CDO manager's concern about Magnetar's need for riskier assets. And finally, there was a meeting Jesse and Jake had over lunch with a former banker, who worked on one of Magnetar's CDOs. He lost his job soon after. At lunch, they showed this banker the list of unusually risky assets that were in the CDO that he'd helped put together with Magnetar. And he looked at it. And he went down the list. And he said, "Yeah, they asked for this one, and they got it. They asked for this one, and they got it. They asked for this one, and it went in." And then he said, "After looking at this, I deserved to lose my job." There are other clues as well that Magnetar was trying to produce a flop. Magnetar's CDOs, in an independent analysis commissioned by ProPublica, went bad faster than other, similar CDOs. And then, of course, there's this. For a company that came in at the height of the housing mania, invested in the riskiest parts of the dodgiest subprime-related CDOs out there, CDOs which got completely wiped out in the crash-- a crash which started just months after it finished making its last purchase-- Magnetar sure did make a lot of money. 2007 was a very profitable year for Magnetar. We know that one of their funds, the constellation fund-- which presumably had some of the profits from their CDO business-- was up 76%. And we know that the firm Magnetar grew rapidly during this period. When Litowitz, its founder, Alec Litowitz, started Magnetar in 2005, he had $1.7 billion under management. And by the end of 2007, he had $8 billion. Almost $8. Almost $8 billion. So within the span of almost three years, he'd increased the amount of money under management by $6 billion. Right. And while some of that, I'm sure, was new investors, some of that was also profit from the business that they were doing. If Magnetar was making a lot of money on these CDOs, there was another group that wasn't. And that was the group of people who were buying the top-rated portions of these CDOs that Magnetar was sponsoring and then betting against. There was a group of mutual funds in Tennessee that lost a bunch of money on Magnetar CDOs. There was a regional bank in Ohio. A Lutheran fraternal organization in Minnesota. But surprisingly, the biggest purchasers of Magnetar CDOs, we now know, were the very same investment banks that put these CDOs together in the first place. That's right. The banks were making these CDOs and essentially selling them to themselves. For example, one CDO deal that Jake and Jesse have managed to learn a lot about, a CDO that Magnetar put together with J.P. Morgan. Magnetar bought the equity portion of the deal for around $10 million. J.P. Morgan bought the top portion for almost 100 times that, nearly $1 billion, which was strange because some of the bankers at J.P. Morgan knew that Magnetar had selected especially risky assets to go into the CDO and that Magnetar had placed a bet against the middle portion of the CDO. But they went ahead and put the deal together and then bought the biggest piece of it without hedging themselves either because they convinced themselves it still wasn't that risky or because they just didn't give a damn about the risk or some combination of the two. What they were certain about was how much money they'd make in fees. J.P. Morgan made, we understand, $20 million in fees for the bank, but-- Probably about half of which was distributed in bonuses to the bankers who worked on it. Yeah, roughly. Generally. Generally. And yet the bank retained the top-rated, safest portion of the deal. That eventually got wiped out and they took about an $880 million loss on the deal according to people we've spoken to. We talked to one banker in this world who did CDO business. And he described what had happened as a success. We were sort of taken aback by this because most of these CDOs failed, and the banks ended up saddled with huge losses, which the taxpayers will be paying off for a long time to come. And so we asked, "How could this be a success?" And he said, "Well, the bankers did very well. Their bottom lines, their bank accounts are still quite full. They might not be at those banks anymore, but they're doing all right." So in the eyes of individual actors, this was not a complete and total debacle. This is an important thing to understand. Bankers made money even when they were buying things that eventually blew up the bank. We talked to another CDO manager, Jim Finkel, who said that for every CDO that a bank put together, it got a fee, usually 1% or 2% of the overall value of the CDO. And remember, CDOs were often worth a billion dollars or more. 1% of a billion? That's $10 million. And the bank earned this fee the minute it finished putting the CDO together, not 7 or 10 years later when the CDO was supposed to finish paying off. Every deal would get 1% or 2% fee so let's just keep doing billions of dollars of deals, and that'll rack up the tens and twenties millions of dollars in fees. I think Merrill Lynch made $700 million in CDO fees in 2006. I mean, that's just an enormous amount of money. How many people is that going to inside Merrill Lynch? That was going to somewhere between 50 and 80 people. That's a lot per person. That's a lot per person. That whole $700 million was not going to their personal pockets, right? The firm probably created a bonus pool of, say, $100 to $150 million out of that. But still, you're talking about the head of the group probably walked home with $10-plus million, $15 million. This situation, where the individual bankers made money whether or not the investments they sold collapsed, should be added to the list of causes of the financial crisis that we're still living out. It helps explain why the crisis was as big as it was. And it also helps explain the answer to the question, wait, why were the CDO managers and investment banks so eager to help Magnetar do this in the first place? I think this is where we have a rousing defense of Magnetar. I mean, essentially Magnetar was doing right by its investors. They found a weakness in the Wall Street machine, and they exploited it. But there were other actors in this drama. Those other actors were the CDO managers and investment banks that put these deals together. The ones that Jake and Jesse have spoken to, they knew what Magnetar was doing. They knew that Magnetar was asking for riskier and riskier assets to go into the deal. And they knew that they were placing bets against other parts of the CDOs that they were helping to spawn. And yet, this information wasn't in any of the documents that were available to the Lutherans in Minnesota or the banks in Ohio or the mutual funds in Tennessee or any of the other investors out there, who were buying the other parts of the CDOs that Magnetar was sponsoring. When you look at it this way, if the investment banks and CDO managers had been doing their jobs, actually explaining to their investors what was behind these CDOs, well, the Magnetar trade might not have been possible. So if the investment bank came to an investor and said, we have got an investment for you. A hedge fund actually asked us to create it, and they asked us to put riskier assets into the deal, and, oh, by the way, they're betting against it. Would you like to buy it? And the answer is going to be obvious. They're not going to do it. The role of Magnetar, both as equity investor and in their bets against the very CDOs they helped create, were not disclosed in any way to investors in the written documents about the deals. Not the marketing material, not the prospectuses, not in the hundreds of pages that an investor could get to see information about the deal was it disclosed that it was, in fact, Magnetar who had helped create the deal and who bet against it. There is an argument to be made that the fact that investment banks and CDO managers weren't disclosing this information might present securities law violations. It might be worth looking into anyway, if you were, say, I don't know, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Did the banks represent this thing that they're selling fairly and accurately and disclose or tell the investors all the material information? And the question revolves around this concept in the securities law of materiality, which is extremely difficult to define. And the materiality issue is just basically what is material, what do the investors need to know, and what do they not need to know basically? Like what is material for them to know? Exactly. Right. To make their decision on whether they want to invest or not. In the conversations that you've had with the people on Wall Street and the people in the CDO managers and the people from Magnetar and everybody who you've talked to on the inside, was there ever outrage expressed? Did anybody ever say to you, man, what those guys were doing, that was questionable, or that seemed wrong, or that seemed ethically dubious, or anything like that? The answer is yes. But I think within Wall Street, there's a sense that Magnetar was a predator, a shark, if you will, and that you don't blame the predator for hunting the prey. That's what predators do. But I recall one banker, who we spoke to, who said, "When Magnetar arrived on the scene, we all should have gone running. We all should have taken off." Yeah, yeah, he said, "We should have run for the hills, everyone, all of us in America." And what did he see as the problem? What he saw was that Magnetar had figured out how dysfunctional the system had become and was going to exploit that dysfunction. And that it should have been a sign to everybody that there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the way Wall Street was operating. Even if what was happening here wasn't illegal, it had profound consequences for the financial system, the taxpayers, and the global economy. If the CDO market had been allowed to cool off at the end of 2005, as market insiders thought it might, the financial crisis almost certainly would not have been as bad as it was. Magnetar, by entering the market when it did, by catalyzing the volume of production that it did, extended the mania and exacerbated the crash. Of the 24 Magnetar CDOs that ProPublica was able to track down, 23 of them are nearly worthless today. In total, nearly $40 billion evaporated. A good portion of that $40 billion was held by the banks, no doubt part of the hole the taxpayers had to cover when we bailed out the financial system. The Magnetar trade also had a direct impact on the housing market all over the country. If the CDO business had gone down, as people were predicting in 2005, home mortgages would've been less available in 2006 and 2007 for people buying houses in California and Florida. There would have been less money out there looking for riskier and riskier mortgages to stuff into mortgage-backed securities to feed the CDOs that Magnetar was helping to create. There would have been, in short, fewer people in houses they couldn't afford then and fewer people facing foreclosure today. People making short-term decisions for their own short-term profit added to the pain we're all going through now. Fortunes were made on CDO desks all over Wall Street in 2006 and 2007. Some of the banks where those fortunes were made may be gone, but the people who made them and the fortunes themselves remain. According to a magazine which tracks hedge fund pay, Alec Litowitz, the head of Magnetar, personally took home an estimated $280 million in 2007. Magnetar declined to comment on that figure. Unlike some of the Wall Street banks with whom the fund worked, Magnetar is still open for business and still looking for ways to make its clients money. Alex Blumberg, who's part of our Planet Money team. Planet Money is a co-production between our program and NPR News. This story was done as a collaboration with ProPublica and the reporters Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger. A statement from Magnetar and its full response to our questions, emails between a CDO manager and Magnetar, a timeline of the deals, analysis, lots of documents, a more detailed version of this story are all at ProPublica's website propublica.org. By the way, just this week, the former CEO of Citigroup, Charles Prince, testified before the financial crisis inquiry commission about CDOs. Citigroup did several CDO deals with Magnetar. The names of those deals, Cetus 2 and 4, Octans 3, Lacerta, each of these deals was over $1 billion. Now they're almost worthless, of course. Charles Prince told the commission that CDOs made up most of the losses at Citigroup. He said, these were the losses, CDOs, that required the government to bail out the bank even though at the time, he said, everyone believed they were totally safe investments. Citi bought the best parts of the CDOs, what Prince called-- --super senior tranches of CDOs that carried the lowest possible risk of default. It bears emphasis that Citi was by no means alone in this view, and that everyone, including our risk managers, government regulators, other banks, and CDO structurers, all believed that these securities held virtually no risk. Prince emphasized that even the Citibank employees who made the decisions to keep these CDOs on the books had no reason to suspect that they might go bad. In other words, no one saw it coming. Step one, we write a check for $10 million, hand the check to a Wall Street bank and ask them to make us a CDO. Step two, they create the CDO using risky stuff, very risky stuff, extremely risky stuff. Step three, other investors commit hundreds of millions of dollars to the CDO. Step four, we bet against the CDO using a credit default swap. Step five, the housing market crashes, the CDO's value drops to 0, our bet pays off, and we make hundreds of millions of dollars. And before you can say, step six, we're rich. We're gonna bet against the American dream. We're gonna be on the winning team. Purchase risky debt on a massive scale, then place a bet that the debt will fail. Hundreds of millions for Magnetar, the economy collapsing like a dying star. No one will know 'til it's on NPR. And who cares? It's time to hit the town. This sucker could go down. The housing market's losing steam. And all we gotta do to make our dreams come true, is bet against the American dream. John Treacy Eagan and Christian Borle on vocals. "Bet Against The American Dream," the music and lyrics were written for our show by Robert Lopez, produced by music supervisor Steven Oremus. The orchestrator was Bruce Coughlin. To see a video of these amazing Broadway performers recording the song, go to Planet Money's website npr.org/money. Coming up, what cops know about cops. 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 reporting, interviews, songs, anything we can think of on that theme. Today's show, Inside Job. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Taking A Big Pink Eraser To The Thin Blue Line. You may have heard of these self-produced DVDs called Never Get Busted Again. In them, there's a guy named Barry Cooper who shows small-time pot growers how to avoid trouble with the police. For example, how to handle yourself when a cop stops you on the highway with his drug-sniffing dog. It's a good idea to carry a cat in your car if you're going to have a couple of marijuana cigarettes. This confuses the dog, where his drive is channeled to chasing these things instead of looking for the marijuana. He also explains how to grow pot without getting caught indoors or out, how to spot undercovers and informants, how to handle knock and talks and rap and taps-- that's when a cop tries to talk his way into your house. If you hear a knock at your door and, upon investigating, you notice it's the police, if your door is not locked, go ahead and lock it right then. I don't open the door for police. That's Barry demonstrating how you should yell through the window at the officer. All this advice could really only come from a consummate insider. And Barry Cooper is one. He's a former narcotics cop and a dirty narcotics cop at that. And recently he has moved on from the DVDs to a new venture, again, drawing on his experience in law enforcement. Michael May tells the story from Austin. I've watched videos taken from the dashboard camera on Barry Cooper's squad car in the mid-'90s. Back then, he had short, cropped hair, cop mustache. He liked to lean into a suspect with a smirk that said, I know you're lying. OK. Where's the marijuana at? I ain't got none. These two ladies in here been smoking weed too? No. Barry was a member of the Permian Basin Drug Task Force, a west Texas unit that became notorious for using unscrupulous tactics in the war on drugs. It was eventually shut down by the FBI in the late '90s. But to Barry, it was a great assignment. He learned all the ways to bend the law to rack up, harass, and chase down suspects. Barry was in his early 20s, and he says, the thing he loved most about being a cop was the adrenaline rush. One of his favorite things to do was to pull people over on the highway, and then, just for kicks, incite a chase. How? They taught us in the academy that once we found drugs on somebody to handcuff them immediately. Instead of doing that, I would look at the suspect and say, "Hmm, well, some crack cocaine I found in your pocket. You're under arrest for a felony. You're going to go to prison for life." Whether he was or not, he didn't know that. And I would just turn around and walk to the patrol car to get my paperwork ready and to radio it in, giving that suspect time to run. And they often did. And then the foot chase would be on, and then the fight would ensue, and that would get my adrenaline fix. I was one of the biggest [BLEEP] you'd ever want to meet in a drug deal. A lot of what I was doing was doing illegal searches, such as making my dog false alert or saying, I had an informant to raid a house when I never did. And we would raid a house. It's called using a ghost informant. Or conducting illegal searches on citizens to seize narcotics. It also includes stealing money. I never planted drugs, but I often threatened to to scare citizens into becoming my informant. Barry served eight years on the force, but after getting caught doing an overzealous search of a black man's underwear looking for drugs, his department was sued in a federal civil rights case. They settled, but Barry left the force anyway, frustrated and angry that his superiors didn't defend him. He bounced around for a few years after that, opening several used car lots, founding a church, even starting a cage fighting business. But it was his next step that truly changed his life when he fell in love with his current wife, Candi, and began smoking the substance he'd spent years arresting people for. I spent the next year literally in her bedroom, her and I growing close together, talking and smoking pot. I'd never eaten a pizza in bed in my life until then. We would order pizza and smoke marijuana. And the first thing I did was laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. And I just couldn't believe the joy I was feeling. That would turn into crying. And she knew I had a lot of guilt. I'd start talking to her about how bad I felt about the stuff I did to people for this marijuana that I was enjoying and that was healing me. So she was smart enough to help me get through those flashbacks. And she'd tell me, "That was rotten what you did, Barry, but you were doing what you thought was right. And the important thing is now, humans can change, and people will forgive you." Barry wanted to atone. So this is when he created the Never Get Busted DVDs. In three years, he says, he sold over 50,000. Today, Barry had long hair, a goatee, hoop earrings, and a pin-up girl tattooed on his neck. He smiles a lot and cries easily and says, "I love you" as a casual greeting, part redneck, part hippie, part ex-cop. When I introduced him to my wife, she told me she felt like she'd just walked into a Coen brothers movie. And Barry's next big idea was like something straight out of one of those movies. He decided he wanted to do more than just help potheads. He wanted to expose and punish the cops that put them in prison. Barry says, the war on drugs has warped the priorities of law enforcement. Small-town police fund their own salaries by seizing cash and property in drug raids. Incredibly, they don't even have to charge someone with a crime to keep the stuff. And he says, that's given cops a reason to routinely bend the law to bust people. Which brings us to Barry's latest great idea. It involves chases and traps and suspicious props and anonymous tips and TV. Barry would set up elaborate stings to catch cops in the act of breaking the law. And he'd film it for a reality TV show he wanted to create called KopBusters, spelled with a K. Every year, thousands of innocent people are sent to prison, many because of corrupt cops. Do you have a search warrant? This is the KopBusters trailer. Barry put it together to shop his idea around to TV networks. And in 2008, Barry decides to test his premise by stinging cops in Odessa, where he once worked on the task force. He believed that cops were corrupt there and had a plan to prove it. And Barry also had a secret weapon, an unlikely benefactor, one with deep pockets. His name was Raymond Madden, and he was a conservative middle-aged businessman. For most of his life, Raymond trusted the police and voted tough on crime. Then his daughter, Yolanda, was arrested for having an ounce of meth and sentenced to eight years in prison. Madden was convinced the police had planted the drugs on her. A police informant even testified at her trial that he'd framed her. Madden spent years trying to get activists and reporters interested in the case to no avail. Then he came across Barry Cooper on the internet. The first thing I got of Barry was his videos. And I thought, "What a nut job this guy is." But I was desperate. So you're talking about a father who's desperate. I mean, I was running out of options. Barry knew a lot of the players in this deal because he had been involved in the Odessa scene. And he had a knowledge that I didn't have. He knew how cops think. I didn't. That's where I always kept making my mistakes is I went up to people thinking they were going to be honest. But he knew how they thought. And so I kind of think of Barry as like some of these-- I call them blue-haired biddies of [? Baptist, ?] they're blue-haired-- that used to smoke and don't smoke. My gosh, there's nothing worse than a reformed smoker to be around. You know? Or a reformed drunk. Well, Barry was a reformed cop. And my gosh, there's probably nothing more sanctimonious. Barry told Raymond he couldn't get Yolanda out of prison, but he could embarrass the police and get the press to look into her case. His plan went like this: set up a fake marijuana grow house and get the Odessa police to raid it illegally. Inside, he put a single grow light over a couple of Christmas trees, Barry's idea of a punch line. He'd invite local media along to catch the police looking like fools when they busted in. Raymond spent over $30,000 setting this all up. Barry rented a house, wired it with four cameras, bought laptops to watch the video streaming live, hired a crew and a lawyer and put them all up in hotels while they set the trap. To bait the police, Barry's crew sends an anonymous letter to a local church, promising a house full of pot plants and $19,000 in drug money. An anonymous tip alone is not enough for a search warrant. Barry was hoping they'd search the house illegally, while, of course, he filmed everything. So the letter goes out to the church. Oh yeah, it also mentions the money is going to be gone by the next day. 14 hours later-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Back up. Zoom out. Zoom out. And here come the cops. Barry and his team are sitting in the hotel room watching the scene on computers when the cops burst in the back door of the house with guns drawn. They're in. They're in. They're raiding it. The police walk in the living room and stand in front of a poster Barry has hung on the wall. It tells them they're on KopBusters. They lower their guns. One says, "We've been set up, huh?" Let's go. Barry jumps in the car to go confront the cops before they leave. He's clearly high on adrenaline at this point just like the old days. He jumps out of his car. Hey, I'm Barry Cooper with KopBusters. Why are you in my house? Barry runs into the street wearing a bright red t-shirt with the words "Free Yolanda" printed on it. He starts hollering at the police. They tell him if he doesn't get on the sidewalk, they're going to arrest him. We're not giving nobody no hassle. Y'all planted drugs on Yolanda, and she's in prison because of it. That's giving people a hassle. Sir, you've been warned. You've been warned. I'm glad that-- You've been warned. You've been warned. You've been warned. You're blocking the roadway. You can go to jail for it. Video cameras, plants masquerading as drugs, and a message are what police found while serving a search warrant today. Barry had invited the local TV news to film the raid, and people got the point. Folks in west Texas didn't like the fact that cops busted in on a home on such flimsy evidence. And the police alienated even more residents when they threatened to subpoena the local paper, The Odessa American, to get the names of people posting anti-police comments on the newspaper's website. The reality show team out of Austin has been setting up the fake drug den for six months. But why all the trouble? Get Yolanda Madden out of prison. Raymond got the publicity he was after. A quarter million people watched the raid on YouTube. Newspapers started covering the Yolanda case. A year later, a judge released Yolanda from prison on the grounds that the prosecution had withheld documents. She's now awaiting retrial. For their part, the Odessa police department released a statement saying, the raid was a waste of law enforcement time and taxpayer money. The police threatened to charge Barry for staging the sting, but they never did. After Odessa, Barry went looking for more dirty cops to bust. Without Raymond's money to spend, these were pretty low-budget affairs. Barry dressed up a duffel bag to look like something a drug dealer would tote around, including a crack pipe and $45 in cash, hoping cops would find it and take the money. He did the sting three times. Then the police struck back. Five days after Barry posted a video on YouTube of a cop in Williamson County finding the $45 in the bag and pocketing it, Williamson County police arrested Barry. And they did something police almost never do. They raided his home on a misdemeanor charge. The charge was false report to a peace officer for a phone call made to police about one of the duffel bags. Barry's wife, Candi, his 14-year-old daughter, and 8-year-old stepson were home during the raid. Barry was in handcuffs, but he still knew how police think. So he was sure he knew what this was all about. And I explained to them, after they had pointed those guns at my wife and then walked me into the house, I said, "Before any of you mother [BLEEP] are going to search any bit of my house, you're going to have to listen to me." And one of them tried to quiet me down. I said, "Mother [BLEEP], are you kidding me? This is a misdemeanor raid. I'm in handcuffs. I'm going to have my moment, or I'm not cooperating." So they stood down. And I went one by one, shaming every one of them, female officers and male officers, explaining to them that we were non-violent, that this was activism, that we know this is retaliation. The police included narcotics officers who obviously hoped to find drugs in the house. They found a little pot, only enough for a misdemeanor possession charge. The police also referred Barry and Candi to Child Protective Services, charging that they were providing their teenage daughter with pot. After a visit, CPS dismissed the case. But the investigation took its toll. Two weeks ago, Zach, Barry's 8-year-old stepson, visited his father for spring break and still hasn't been returned to Candi and Barry. Zach's father heard about the raid and filed for custody. Here's Barry. Our son being taken from us was so hard that, for the safety of my family, we decided that we're not going to do any more cop stings. You know, I was expecting-- I never would have done those bag drops, if I would have known it would have led to this. KopBusters was over. Barry had thought his first-hand knowledge of the system would keep him a step ahead. But the cops didn't need an elaborate ruse to sting Barry. They didn't need to plan for months and set a trap and get it all on video. They just needed a reason to come bursting in the front door. Michael May is the culture editor at The Texas Observer, whose website, texasobserver.org, is linking to all of the YouTube videos of Barry's police raids. Our program was produced today by Jane Feltes, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Brian Reed. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our website thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our shows for absolutely free. And this week, you can get your own free MP3 of our original Broadway number "Bet Against The American Dream" and, of course, sheet music for any high school drama departments who want to do their own production of today's show. Musicians in our original Broadway number, Mark Hummel, Randy Cohen, Dave Phillips, Sean McDaniel, Dave Mann, Charles Pillow, Dave Riekenberg, Tony Kadleck, Bud Burridge, and Randy Andos. Studio engineer for this song John Kilgore. Music contractor Michael Keller. Copyist Karl Mansfield. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. When we ran out of doughnuts and bagels on staff doughnut day this week, he made such a moving speech. Almost all of us, including me, missed the powerful combination of factors that led to this crisis and the serious possibility of a massive crisis. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI, Public Radio International.
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If you grew up in a big city, you may have heard the urban legend alligators in the sewers. They got there when people brought back baby alligators from vacations in Florida and flushed them down the toilets. That's the kind of thing that, once you turn 12, you don't believe in anymore. Well, New York Times, February 10, 1935, reports three teenagers were shoveling snow into a manhole on East 123rd Street. They look down and see an alligator, which they pull out. It's not very healthy. And they carry it to the Lehigh Stove and Repair Shop at 441 East 123rd. Lots of neighbors witness it. People are quoted by name. Best guess? The gator came off a boat in the Harlem River. Or, take this urban legend. I'd heard this one, but I'd never believed it. Turns out to be true. Ian Meyer in Portland, Oregon, three years ago, walks home one night with his girlfriend from a party, where he'd had a couple of beers, three beers. Gets to his house, goes in the bathroom Start unzipping with one hand, lifting the lid with the other hand, and, you know, I get the lid maybe halfway open. And there was this wet, beady-eyed rat in the toilet just looking up at me. Right? Maybe you heard stories like this that don't seem they could possibly be true about somebody. They go in their bathroom late at night. They sit down. They get bit by a rat that came up through the pipes into the toilet. Here it is. The lid was down, so he must have come up through the sewer pipe somehow and swum through the lines and popped up into our toilet. Was the rat trying to get out of the toilet? No, I think he was just as-- almost as stunned as I was. No, he was just sort of perched in the bowl, looking up when I opened the lid. OK. Horrifying. Ian, of course, quickly closes the lid, stands there dumbstruck. What's his next move? It's obvious. I took a minute, gathered myself, and then flushed. Cracked the lid just a little bit, and he's still there. He's just more wet now, and he's probably a little more alert now. Now he's mad. Yeah, now he's ready to get out of there. He's ready to take action. Ian picks up the magazine rack by the toilet, which is heavy with three-years-old National Geographics. He puts this on top of the toilet lid, leaves the bathroom to figure out his next play. His girlfriend, Chelsea, is outside. I don't want to kill the rat because I've never killed an animal. It should be easy enough to just catch him and let him go outside. Sure What I told myself that I needed in order to accomplish that plan, one, was some music. I had to-- Really? That was step one? OK. That was step one actually. And that was Chelsea's job. She had to turn some loud music on. This was kind of to psych me up. Ian puts a leather garden glove on one hand and puts a rubber kitchen glove on top of that figuring, the rat's wet, that's going to be better. So I gear up, go in the bathroom, shut the door. And then I guess I must've just kind of stood in there for five minutes or so because the next thing I know, Chelsea has the music turned down, and she's asking me, what's going on in there. I don't know what she thought had gone on, but she was worried and was checking on me, making sure that everything was OK. And once she checked on me I think that kind of triggered the man instinct, like, OK, come on dude, get it together. Yeah, time for some pride. It's just a rat. At this point, I take the magazine rack off of the toilet lid, crack the seat, and, somehow, before I know it, he's halfway out of the toilet. Not good. Ian drops the lid, leans his weight on it, which catches the rat half-in half-out of the toilet. Its head and front arms are sticking out, waving around. Now he just feels sorry for the little thing. But this is his chance to set it free. And so I'm thinking, OK perfect, I've got him caught here. He can't move anywhere. I'll reach down, grab him, carry out the plan. Right when I reach down, he bites me. He bites my finger. I'll spare you the gory details that follow. Let's just say that after another couple grabs, Ian comes to realize that he cannot capture the rat. He's going to have to kill him while he's trapped there halfway out of the toilet bowl. Which Ian does with his not-bare hands. It was terrifying for months after that, maybe a year after that. Chelsea and I, we would just be extremely paranoid about sitting on the toilet especially at night. Ian says half the people he tells this story to don't believe it. He thinks they just don't want to believe it. But it turns out that the pipes that lead from your house to the sewer are not full of water. They're mostly empty unless you're doing your wash or something else that's sending a lot of water down. So rats can climb up through the pipes, and the only time that they actually need to hold their breath is when they get into the little reservoir in the toilet trap. In a way, it's surprising it doesn't happen more often. Ian says he's found another rat in his toilet since then. He now flushes when he walks into the bathroom just to send water down the pipes as a precaution against vermin. As for Chelsea? I think it was worse for Chelsea because she didn't actually really ever see the rat in the toilet. I got to see it, and I came to terms with it somewhat. For her, it was just-- it was still just sort of a myth. Chelsea was left with the urban legend that rats could come up into the toilet. I mean, now she knew it was true. So when she went into the bathroom, her imagination could just go wild. Well, today on our radio show, we tried to wave away the smoky vapor of illusion and myth. We dive into a few stories, a few urban myths to see what is real and what is not so our imaginations don't have to run wild anymore. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. We bring you today three stories of real urban legends. Act One, What's That Smell, in which a retired millionaire tries to understand the reality of a tough, seedy inner city neighborhood. Act Two, Fleeing Is Believing. Foreigners come to the US who believe all kinds of misinformation about us that turns out to be true. Act Three, Sleeper Cells. Is it an urban myth that your cell phone gives you brain tumors? Stay with us. What's that smell? The way Steve Poizner sees it, he did something admirable, something daring, something unusual. And when I read his account of what he did, he seemed sincere about it too. He's a bit of a corny writer. Though even that, you can kind of forgive him. He's not a professional author. At the age of 45, after starting one Silicon Valley company that he sold for $30 million and a second one that sold for $1 billion, Poizner didn't need to work anymore. He says, he wanted to do some good for people. And so he called a dozen public high schools and volunteered to be a guest teacher of some sort. One called him back, a high school called Mount Pleasant. And Poizner got into his car, drove the 15 miles from his neighborhood in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley to East San Jose. I passed nearby my neighborhood French bakery and the local Ferrari dealership. This is Steve Poizner reading from the book he wrote about this. "Several miles and a couple of highways later, I took the Capitol Expressway exit and drove into what felt like another planet. Signs advertising janitorial supply stores and taquerias. Exhaust hung over 10 lanes of inner city traffic. Yellowing, weedy gardens fronted many of the homes, as did driveways marred by large oil spots or broken-down cars." When he sees the sound walls that separate California homes from the highway, he asks, were they keeping out the city's grit and noise or hiding profoundly sad lives? He's allowed in the school to teach one US government class for one semester under another teacher's supervision. What he finds in the school are leaky roofs, hardened, unresponsive students, gangs and violence, a drop-out rate twice the national average. He worries that one student is going to punch him. And later, that this student and his thug friends are going to push him up against a wall. He wonders if the students are "too busy ducking bullets to consider their careers." At the end of his first visit to school, he's relieved to find his Lexus still in the parking lot where he left it. "The shadows grew longer and the surroundings became a bit scary. Opening the door to my car, I notice a residential street just over the school's parking lot's fence. There was an old Cadillac resting on two flat tires, something smelled rotten like trash that had sat around for too long, and a dog's raspy bark sounded uncomfortably close." And the only problem with this is a lot of it might not be true. Good evening. Steve Poizner released a new book today. It is about his time as a substitute teacher at a high school in East San Jose. And what he put in print is drawing a lot of heat. ABC7's Lisa Amin Gulezian is live tonight to explain. Steve Poizner's book got more attention than most do because in the seven years since he spent one semester at Mount Pleasant High School, Steve Poizner ran for assemblyman and lost, ran for a statewide office, California Insurance Commissioner, and won. He's in his fourth year in that job now. And today, he's one of two front-runners to become the Republican candidate for the governor of California. And right after publication, his book, which is titled Mount Pleasant, jumped to number 5 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Mount Pleasant High School students, teachers, parents, and alumni are outraged. Tonight, we are here to denounce Steve Poizner's comments. Well, you know, it got very heated inside of Barnes and Noble before Steve Poizner's book signing. Eddie Garcia, the president of the East Side Union School Board, got in Poizner's face, challenging him about things that are written inside Mount Pleasant. I heard about Steve Poizner and the controversy over whether his book got things wrong when a publicist for the book contacted our radio program. She wrote an email describing the incident at the bookstore this way, "Liberal activist took offense at how he describes the school, accurately, as plagued by gangs, teen pregnancy, and disrepair. They are trying to shut him up and discredit his argument about charter schools." Poizner makes a case for charter schools late in the book. "This is a classic case of liberals refusing to listen to simple facts and rational solutions." So I read the excerpt of his book online. There's a full chapter, and Poizner links to it from his campaign website. You can read it yourself. And it raised more questions than it answered. It's a very odd chapter, all about Poizner's first days teaching a class at Mount Pleasant. There's scene after scene where he's floundering, standing in front of the class asking big, abstract questions. "Would you want to live in a country where the leader didn't want to lead, if the money issued by the government wasn't any good, or people were treated unfairly?" None of the students respond. He's a rookie teacher. He doesn't know how to engage them yet. Nothing unusual there. But here's the strange thing. The conclusion Poizner comes to, again and again, during these scenes isn't that he's doing anything wrong, or he has anything to learn as a teacher. Instead, he blames the kids. They're tough. They're unmotivated. They lack ambition. They're wired differently. The students, meanwhile, in every scene in the book-- I've read the whole book-- seem utterly lovely. Polite, they don't interrupt, they don't talk back. They just seem a little bored. His very worst student is a graduating senior, who's hoping to go into the Marines. Checking school records, I learn that Poizner's unmotivated, unambitious class included one of the school valedictorians, Charles Rudy, who graduated and went to college. Could he be getting this so completely wrong, I wondered? Could he have written an entire book misperceiving so thoroughly what was happening in front of his own eyes and was now trying to use that book to run for governor? It seemed too incredible. And that's what brought me to San Jose last week to visit the school and its neighborhood. My eyes were rolling throughout the entire book. This is Joe Lovato. He teaches English at Mount Pleasant. His Dad taught English at Mount Pleasant before him. Well, in the book, he tells stories of crossing the valley from his local Ferrari dealership, past his local French bakery, crossing town, getting off the freeway into my neighborhood and passing the taquerias and then wondering about the profoundly sad lives of the people who live behind the sound walls along the highway there. That's me. I live there. I can tell you, I have the white picket fence. I have two-- Literally? Yeah, literally. A very well-manicured lawn. My Infiniti is in the front. And I've got a real cute dog. I've got two kids running around in the front yard with my wife chasing them around. The derogatory statements to our students, the inaccuracies, the exaggerations, that's the part we're upset about. Mark Holston is one of Joe's colleagues in the English department. In his book, Poizner talks a few times about wishing that he could have a Stand and Deliver moment with his students. And Mark says, that's a problem right there. There's a narrative he had in his mind. He saw teacher movies, and that was the narrative he had. And it fits his narrative to show that this school is a horrible school. I wouldn't work at the school he described. I'd be afraid to work in the school that he described in the thing. It's almost like he's stepping over bodies, and there's gun shots as he goes to his classroom every day. And it's completely inaccurate, but it fits his narrative. It fits promoting himself for the governor. And if anybody hasn't-- and some people say, well, it's not true, we know it's not true, it's exaggeration. But anybody else outside of East San Jose reads this book, that's the truth. Driving around the neighborhood, it is hard to disagree with the teachers who say that it is a perfectly nice middle class and working class area. Occasionally you'll see a house in bad shape, but overwhelmingly it's nicely tended yards, garages, decent cars and SUVs in the driveways. It's suburban. I was surprised to learn that when Poizner taught here in 2003, there was a golf course just a couple blocks from the school. There's still a lake and the Raging Waters water park. He doesn't mention those in the book. We called a half dozen local real estate agents who confirmed what the teachers told us. That the neighborhood looks the same today as it did back in 2003. If anything, they said, with the recession, it's gotten a little worse. Average house price in 2003 near the school was $457,000. Today, it's $317,000. Well, it's 4:45, and I'm standing in the staff parking lot where Steve Poizner used to park his car, I suppose. And I am hearing the raspy sound of a dog's bark. I can't see any beat-up, old cars over the fence. Mainly, it's incredibly lush and green and beautiful. There are little purple flowers. There are palm trees. And it's just-- it's lovely. And it smells nice. Though there is the dumpster for the school right by the parking lot. Conceivably, on some day that he was out here, that's what was making the trash smell was the school's own trash. Now we went to the neighborhood and were told it hasn't changed that much since 2003 when you were there and-- So I ran all this by Steve Poizner, the tidy houses, the golf course, what I did not smell in the parking lot. Are you overplaying the desperate poverty of this neighborhood? No, I don't think so. I mean, it's definitely not like some inner city areas. And I don't know what-- what you described doesn't strike me as the neighborhood I was at. I mean, at least in 2002 and 2003. I mean, the neighborhood is rough and tumble in that there's definitely a lot of crime and, no question, lower income. And there's a lot of signs that people were struggling economically. That's why the crime statistics for surrounding the school, you can get those from the San Jose Police Department like I did. And we definitely documented that not only did it appear to be kind of a rough up-and-coming area, but the police will tell you that too. So we went to the police. And they informed us that no, the neighborhood around Mount Pleasant High School is not especially dangerous or crime ridden. It's average for San Jose. And while San Jose might have a reputation in the richer suburbs around it for being sketchy and definitely was more dangerous in the '70s and '80s, a police spokesman told us that that view is out of date, an urban myth. According to FBI statistics, San Jose is one of the safest cities in the country. There are 371 violent crimes per 100,000 people in San Jose in 2003, the year Poizner was there. You'd be more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Austin, Texas or Seattle or Phoenix or Columbus, Ohio or San Francisco. When it came to property crime that year, you were more than twice as likely to have something stolen from you in Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or nearly any big city you can name. In his book, Poizner plays up the violence at the school itself. He mentions a shooting at the school that happened all the way back in 1990 where a Vietnamese student from another school shot a Mount Pleasant freshman. And Poizner tells a story of a student of his who let him know that she wouldn't be at class for a couple of days because her boyfriend was on trial for being the driver in a bank robbery. There's another student in Poizner's class that Poizner assumes must be in a gang. Though confusingly in the book, Poizner never actually goes to the trouble to find out if the student is in a gang. That's the student who Poizner worries will hit him or get his thug friends and push him against a wall. So is the school dangerous? Well, I checked with the man who knows, Christopher Schroeder, the associate principal at Mount Pleasant in charge of discipline. There is a gang presence in the area. They've been here for-- we're into the second and sometimes third generation of gang families. We know this. But at school, we don't have gang problems per se. Our students are able to sit next to each other in a classroom and not have conflicts. We don't have fights in the classroom. We don't have fights on campus. We have few fights. Off the top of my head, I think we've had about a dozen fights this year. That's about the number of fights that you would get at any high school even in a fancy neighborhood. There are no metal detectors in the school's entrances. Mr. Schroeder says, the total number of gang members among the 1,900 students here? 50 at most. They are aware that we know who they are. But we also have gang intervention specialists who work with them every day. Almost every day, we have a gang intervention specialist out there with those guys, talking about their problems, talking about what's happening on the street, making sure that we have peace on campus. When it comes to the drop out rate, Steve Poizner also seems to be choosing his statistics very selectively. Mount Pleasant's dropout rate, including the year he was there, is consistently better, sometimes far better than the state and national dropout rates, which is a huge achievement for a school like Mount Pleasant that is 2/3 Latino. Nationally, Latino dropout rates are much higher than those of other students. In his book, Poizner doesn't mention any of those numbers. And he doesn't mention the school's stats at all, but instead quotes a number for the district that the school is in, the East Side Union High School District. Even here, he cherry-picks. In 2003, the year Poizner was at the district, its dropout rate was slightly lower than the state and national averages. Poizner instead chooses to quote the number for one of the two years during the past decade, 2005, when the district had twice as many dropouts as the state and national numbers. Statistically, Poizner did not teach at a terrible school in a terrible neighborhood, but an average school in an average neighborhood. We got trouble. Oh, we got trouble. Right here in River City. Right here in River City. With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool. That stands for pool. We surely got trouble. These are the dangerous toughs of Mount Pleasant High School rehearsing The Music Man in the brand new auditorium that the school just built. The school has 150 students studying animation in a special studio with rows of Macs and animation stands. This was all going on when Poizner was at the school too. There are 19 AP classes. There's a vocational program teaching metal and woodworking and computer-aided design plus a variety of special projects and programs to close the achievement gap and get less-priveleged kids to college. School attendance is 95%. All right. "Iowa Stubborn." Everyone into place. Some things about the school though clearly could be better. The school doesn't hit its goals in statewide testing. It ranks in the 40th percentile of all California schools partly because a fourth of Mount Pleasant student body is rated "not proficient" in English. But measured against schools with similar demographics, it's in the 70th percentile. For years, I was a reporter in the Chicago Public Schools for NPR's daily news programs. I've been in great schools. I've been in dangerous schools, urban schools, suburban schools. Mount Pleasant is definitely one of the better public high schools I've ever visited. And I know that it may seem like I'm belaboring all this, putting this one book under a microscope point by point, but so many of the political discussions in our country just seem so disconnected from reality. Every year, there are egregious examples of politicians and commentators who believe that if they repeat some non-fact over and over, it becomes true. And the more I looked into Poizner's book, the more it seemed like one of those rare cases that is so obviously and provably untrue. Though in Poizner's case, what made this especially interesting was that from his book, it seemed very possible that he really is just a well-meaning, idealistic guy who wants to help people who just got a lot of this wrong. Though when I asked Steve Poizner if that's what happened here, that it is not a dangerous, bad school, he stuck by his guns. You write really honestly in the book about how you aren't from a neighborhood like this and how naive you are going in. I mean, you write really, really honestly about it. Do you think it's possible that you went into this neighborhood, and you just misperceived how dangerous and tough it is? And that's what people are pointing out? Well, most people who are reading the book, just don't have that reaction. There are some-- Well, no, but I'm not talking about-- I'm talking about the people in the neighborhood, who know the neighborhood. I don't think it's a surprise that people who are in that neighborhood bristle at blunt observations. But do you think it's possible that-- By the way, I just said-- Do you think it's possible-- I mean, you talk so honestly about this in the book-- do you think it's possible that you just misperceived it because you weren't used to that kind of neighborhood? Well, this is a book about my experience. And so that's all the book is about based on my background. So I'm taking it-- so are you saying you do think it's possible? This is the way I perceive it. So you think it might be possible? No, I'm not saying that. What upsets me from the beginning and even now is his intent. Again, English teacher Mark Holsten. Soon after his experience at Mount Pleasant, he ran for assemblyman. And I think what kind of turned me off to him was I got some of his campaign literature, and on there he had, businessman/teacher based on his one semester teaching. And he claimed he was a teacher by profession. And right away, that's what kind of offended me. The centerpiece of his campaign was his experience at Mount Pleasant High School. Even in his commercials, he said, I've taught in schools, I know what it's like to work at the schools, I can fix the problems and things like that. From my understanding, it was obvious that he was there to exploit our students, to exploit our school. He came there saying, he had no political ambitions. He told our principal, this is not about politics, I just want to give back to the community, I just want to see what it's like to teach in a school and get a better understanding what the schools are like. Even in his book, he says, I had no intention of running for office when I went there. Poizner still insists on that. It was two months after he stopped teaching at the school that he filed papers to start fundraising to run for assemblyman. In the spring after that, his campaign came back to Mount Pleasant to shoot a commercial with testimony from teachers and students about what Poizner had done for the school. The videographer set up a camera and lights in one of the classrooms during seventh period. And students were ushered in one at a time. In campaigning, including in one of his campaign biographies-- a biography which, by the way, calls Mount Pleasant "an inner city high school"-- Poizner also touts the fact that the principal of Mount Pleasant named him Rookie Teacher of the Year. Oh, the Rookie of the Year thing, it was-- Mark Holston and Joe Lovato explained that at the end of school that year, the principal quickly wrote up a bunch of certificates on his computer for a staff party. Lots of people got them for all kinds of things. And that's the other part that really incensed me when he put out his press release as a result of his he received the Rookie of the Year award as if it was voted on statewide, and there was a board, and there was a panel, and essays were written about great he was. It was a certificate printed out. Everybody that was leaving was getting certificates. And that was a certificate of appreciation. The reason I've been wanting to talk to people about the book is just because I hate to see somebody's character get assassinated unfairly, which is my judgement that was what's been happening. Todd Richards is the social studies teacher who supervised Steve Poizner in classroom 612 back in 2003. He's still there. Well, it's still largely as it would have been when Poizner was here. You can see there's the usual whiteboard in front. There's a screen for the LCD projector. In the debate among Mount Pleasant teachers over whether Steve Poizner was a Machiavellian schemer, who used them, or a sincere, perhaps slightly naive guy, who actually wanted to help out, Mr. Richards is a principled agnostic. We can't know what he was thinking, Richards says. So let's judge his actions. Richard says that he was as suspicious as anybody when this millionaire showed up in his classroom. But over the course of the year-- I came to think that he was someone who cared deeply about the students. I'd had people from the business world come in and really talk down to students, not put any effort into it, speak to them in jargon. I mean, it just-- I never want you back kind of thing. Poizner clearly worked very, very hard on this class. He was a rookie. He made rookie mistakes. But he clearly wanted the kids to have a valuable experience. And he clearly cared that they graduate and do well. When I recorded Mr. Richards teaching a class, his sixth-period college-level macroeconomics class for seniors-- So, C plus I plus G plus X minus M. He asked me if I would like to take five minutes and ask a few questions of the students. He left the room, so his presence wouldn't bias anybody. I asked the class if there was anything that they would want me to ask Poizner on their behalf or to say to him. One senior raised his hand and said that he'd just heard from colleges. I'm going to Berkeley. Take that Poizner. No, seriously. Because it's like how is he going to talk about us the way he did when we had almost nine people get into Berkley this year? That's ridiculous. Yvette Rodriguez, another senior, spoke up. A lot of things that he said is something that you would expect someone who doesn't live in this neighborhood to think of us. He was just really quick to judge. He didn't grow up here. And he says it in his book. Where he grew up, they don't have any of this, so how is he just going to-- I'm not going to go judge him and say, oh, you know, he's like a rich white guy and doesn't know. Because I don't know him. But yet he's over here judging us. That's stereotyping. So I think he needs to come out and say-- apologize I think, at least, because a lot of us felt really offended by it. When I visited the school, I went to Mr. Richards' class. And I asked the students if they had questions for you or anything that they would like me to say to you. And they had one request. One senior girl said, she'd like you to admit you got things wrong. She'd like you to apologize. What do you want to say to her? Well, no. I appreciate her feedback. And I appreciate their passion. And by the way, it's been pretty interesting to see how much school spirit has emerged as some people at the school were concerned about whether their school was being fairly characterized. Let's just step back for a second and just think about what I've done and what I'm doing. So here, I sell my last company for a lot of money. And I'm pretty financially well-off. And I decide to go into Mount Pleasant High School. And then after I teach at the school for an extended period of time, I then go back to the school every year to do guest teaching. And then my wife and I get all kinds of requests from teachers and students about certain projects. And we end up donating over $80,000 to the school over a period of many years. I love the school. And then I write this book about my experiences at the school. And the purpose of the book-- even the critics at the school, I guess, seem to understand-- the purpose of the book is to zero in on the fact that Mount Pleasant High School is underperforming. Huge opportunities to improve. The school is in the bottom 40%. And I guess you can argue about my characterizations of the school. I stand by them. But no one seems to be arguing with the conclusions of the book. Well, sort of. Some conclusions, obviously, people do argue with. But this particular conclusion-- that being at the 40th percentile among California public schools is not good enough-- is one that's kind of gotten lost in the shuffle in a lot of the discussion at the school. And that's the part that kind of frustrates me. Sudhir Karandikar created the AP calculus program at Mount Pleasant. He teaches four classes of AP calculus. He's the only teacher I saw at school who could be described as dapper. And the only one wearing a suit, a charcoal gray pinstripe. He's been at Mount Pleasant 14 years. And he says, sure, Poizner got it wrong when he wrote that this is a dangerous school. The whole ducking bullets and the kid is going to hit him and his Lexus is going to get stolen, it was either a gross exaggeration for the sake of making a dramatic book, or he just misread it. Let's move on. We know he got the safety issue wrong. As far as academic performance of this school, he was dead-on. Academically, I don't find anything wrong in his conclusions or assessments of our school academically. "We should be doing a better job with these kids," Mr. Karandikar said. "That's what we should move the discussion to now." A few teachers told me that they agreed with Poizner, that academically the school should be better. And they like the fact that Poizner gives lots of details in his book to help his readers understand the money problems that the school faces and that he shows some of the everyday teaching problems they're up against, stuff that isn't really talked about in the news or normal political discussions about schools. Here's English teacher Vivian Bricksin. He talks about one student that tells them, "I don't think I want to do that," when he's trying to encourage them to work a little harder. And that is a kind of a surprising challenge to face as a teacher. "No, I don't think I want to do that." And the lack of motivation is a daily challenge, I think, for teachers in the school even if they're veterans. Steve Poizner says, this is exactly what he hopes readers will take from his book. He wants it to lead to a better discussion about how to improve schools. In the book, he talks mostly about charter schools as being a good laboratory for new ideas. In his gubernatorial campaign, he also talks about cutting down on the central school bureaucracy in California, giving more control of the curriculum and more money to local schools, two things that teachers like, of course. Many of Mount Pleasant's teachers are less keen on two of Poizner's other big proposals, to make it easier to fire teachers and suspend rules at the bottom 40% of California schools and to expel from public schools all the students who are in the country illegally, which would, of course, affect students at Mount Pleasant. Poizner told me that, in the end, it doesn't matter if he got facts wrong about the school. Because everywhere, but at Mount Pleasant itself, this is the discussion that he hopes his book will engender. Most Californians have absolutely no idea what goes on in a classroom, what goes on in the public education system. And so, at the end of it all, a month from now or a year from now, when people are debating this book, they're not going to be debating whether my characterization of the smells in the neighborhood are the same as yours when you went there. I mean, the purpose of the book is to improve the public education system. English teacher Mark Holston sees this one differently. He says for Poizner to misread what this school and this neighborhood are all about says a lot about his judgment. And that does mean something. Half the state of California, who he's trying to represent, looks like our neighborhood. Our neighborhood looks more like California than the neighborhood he comes from. So I think he's completely out of touch. I hate to think that somebody, even getting this far, could be that naive, and be that clueless. That's even scarier. Because I'm sure he's going to run for something else. And he can't be that way off. It's terrifying he's that way off. Again, this is an average high school. And if he was the governor, he'd be the chief educator for the state of California. And if he could misinterpret what he's sees in this school and portray a school as one of the toughest when it's an average high school in California, it's scary for our future in California if he ever got elected. One week after Poizner's book made it to number 5 on the best seller list, it dropped to number 33. The campaign declined to give sales figures for the book and declined to say whether it bought enough copies itself in that first week to put the book on the best seller list. The principal at Mount Pleasant told me she now finds herself with an awkward dilemma. Poizner has donated the profits from the book sales to the school. And she's not sure that they should take it. He got so many things wrong about Mount Pleasant and offended so many people. But at the same time, with budgets being slashed, it's hard for her to turn her back on any money that might help her students. Coming up, what refugees halfway around the world know about us thanks to Chevy Chase and other true urban legends. 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 we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, True Urban Legends. We're wading into the vapory shadows of urban myth to see what is real and what is not. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Fleeing is Believing. Refugees often spend decades in camps waiting, waiting for wars to end back home, waiting to be resettled, some of them to the United States. This leaves a lot of time to think about what the future might hold and makes for a huge rumor mill fed by third cousins and friends of friends who get to the United States and send back word of what it's like. And that's where the confusion begins. Mary Wiltenburg, a reporter who has spent years documenting refugee life in America, has this story. Say you're a refugee. Once you've survived whatever hell you fled plus 10 more years in a crowded camp, there are rumors about the US you want to believe. America is the land of easy money, endless food, plentiful jobs, machines that cook and clean for you. Still, it's not like you'll believe just anything. The refugees I've talked with say a lot of the rumors they hear seem way too far-fetched to be true. Some people are very fat. You cannot imagine how fat they are. Kissing in public and all of that is normal. You shouldn't look. You shouldn't be surprised by it. When people grow old in America, as they become seniors, they send them to nursing homes to live in. When they go to the beach, they dress up in this swimsuit, which I call it underwear. In America, they say white people kiss their dogs, they hold it. And it's like, that is crazy. How can anybody kiss a dog? What makes these rumors so unbelievable often is how inscrutable or frightening or taboo they would have been back home. I never, never thought people would show affection in public. It was just unbelievable. Faiza Mohamed is Somali and grew up as a refugee in Kenya where the whole idea of PDA was unimaginable especially among unmarried people. When refugees like her are accepted for resettlement in the US, they're bombarded with information about the country in these three-day orientation marathons that cover everything from fire safety to banking, sexual harassment to how to use an airplane toilet. Faiza's orientation leader actually mentioned that it's common for American couples to express affection in public. And did you believe it when I said it? No, because the person that was giving us the orientation was Somali herself. So I really didn't even think that she knew the reality of it. Another problem is Hollywood, the source of some of the most enticing images of America and some of the most exaggerated. Sinisa Milovanovic, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, spent years waiting in Germany before coming to the US. In Berlin one Christmas, a movie came on TV, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. In case you've been spared the pleasure, it features Chevy Chase as a guy who's, let's say, intense about seasonal decorating. He's covered every inch of his house with lights, nests of sparking extension cords, Santa-related [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. We're going to have the best looking house in town, Russ. Think you might be overdoing it, Dad? And when you look at the spoof movies or comedies, they overblow out of the proportion many things just to make it funny. And when I saw it, I just thought, oh, this cannot be true. This is too much light. That's a lot of lights, Dad. You want something you can be proud of, don't you? A few after they watched this, Sinisa and his wife moved to Fargo, North Dakota. One night their first winter there, Sinisa got home, and his wife told him she had something to show him outside. And I didn't know what was it, so we got into the car, and we went around a couple of neighborhoods, residential area. And all of a sudden, I saw the whole row of houses. And to me, it seems like every single one of them had some kind of lights on it. Oh Clark, it's so lovely. And some people had not only the lights, but they also had the props, snowmen or reindeer and things like that. And we said to each other, they really do decorate their houses as Chevy Chase did. It's a beaut, Clark. It's a beaut. You taught me everything I know about exterior illumination. Thank you. Thank you. Even years later, former refugees recall these moments with incredible clarity. The shock or bewilderment or comedy of realizing, that's true? People here don't follow soccer? Men really date other men? Americans sleep in bed with their cats? A lot of times, the reaction is, whoa, OK. But once in a while, the moment changes a person's whole image of America. Hazem Taee, an Iraqi refugee, had heard back home that ordinary Americans could go into stores and buy guns. But that seemed incredible. How could a country keep law and order if its civilians were armed? Then one day, not long after his family arrived in Phoenix, they pulled up to a stoplight next to a guy on his motorcycle. He didn't look like a policeman, but for some reason he had a gun on his belt. We looked at him. He had a tattoo, a leather jacket with a bird on it on the back and a ponytail. He didn't look official to us. Who were you with? Me, my wife, and three kids. And I'm advising them not to look, not to look, don't bring his attention, just take a quick look, and don't turn your face. And then, my kids started asking me, why would he have a gun, what is he planning to do? And I said, I don't know. One especially scary rumor, one that refugees from all over the world told me they heard, but couldn't fathom, is that in America, people without homes sleep on the streets. When you come from someplace where it would be unthinkably shameful to let that happen to a relative, it's hard to believe. When Haider Hamza arrived in the US from Iraq four years ago, he was sure this was a myth. Then late one night, he went walking in Central Park. And there was a bench, and I saw an older woman not looking very happy, sleeping on that bench. And she looked in a pretty bad shape. So I got close, I tried talking to her. And she started asking for help and things like that. And I didn't know why she was there. I didn't know what happened, so I didn't know what to do. I picked up the phone, I called 911. A lady answered, and I gave a description of the woman. And she said, "Well, is the woman bleeding?" And I went to check, and I said, "No, she's not." And so she said, "Is she naked?" I said, "No, actually." She paused for a second and said, "Well, is she homeless?" And I said, "I don't know." So I walked up to the woman, I said, "Excuse me, ma'am, are you homeless?" And she said, "Of course I'm homeless." So I got up on the phone and said, "Yes, she's homeless." No matter who tells you that there are people who are homeless here in the United States, it's impossible to believe. That's Hazem, who saw the guy on the motorcycle with the gun. Now he works as a case manager at a resettlement agency, helping fellow refugees transition to American life. A couple of years ago, he told a group of clients that if they missed rent payments or couldn't find a job, they could wind up homeless and have to live in a shelter. They thought he was lying. Frustrated, he loaded them into a van and drove them past a homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix with a line out the door. They were shocked. And they asked me what it is, "Are those really homeless people? And I said, "Yes, and you could easily lose your home or apartment. If you don't pay, you'll be evicted after a few months." It happens so fast. You come here lost as can be and within a couple of years, you're the ambassador, the friend of a friend fielding calls from overseas in the middle of the night. You're showing around dazed new arrivals and watching their astonishment at the guns in Walmart, the dogs in handbags, the couples kissing in the park. And you're the one telling them, "Don't worry. Don't stare. That's normal here." Mary Wiltenburg lives in Atlanta. Act 3, Sleeper Cells. The scariest urban myths are the ones that are about stuff that is everywhere, that we use every day, that we can't avoid, that our drinking water might be impure, that there are toxins in our food, that killer earthquakes might be coming to the west coast, that the polar ice caps might melt. Oh, wait a second, some of those are actually confirmed by scientists. Which brings me to cell phones. There was an article in GQ Magazine recently about cell phones about whether they're bad for us. "The only honest way to think of our cell phones," the article says, "is that they are tiny, low-power microwave ovens, without walls, that we hold to the sides of our heads." Which is true. Cell phones and ovens both use the same kinds of waves, microwave frequencies. But, of course, microwave ovens use much, much, much more power, enough to cook meat. And there's lots of research out there that's found no negative effects on our bodies from cell phones. In fact, there's another article in Harper's Magazine just this month about the same thing, are cell phones bad for us? And that article points out that for all the research that's found that cell phones make us lose sleep, make us think slower, break apart our DNA, cause brain damage in children, there are just as many studies, if not more, that say that cell phones make us more sleepy, make us think faster, don't break our DNA, and don't affect children one way or another. Other countries, especially in Europe, take the possible threat of cell phones much more seriously than we do here in the US. Health ministries in Canada, Russia and Finland have asked for restrictions on sales of cell phones to children. France is trying to ban cell phones in schools. Some European governments are trying to ban wifi in government buildings and on campuses. Wifi also uses those microwave frequencies. And the National Library of France already got rid of it. People have protested and torn down cell towers in Spain, Ireland, Australia, and Israel. In 2007, the European Union's environmental agency warned that cell phone technology "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol." The operative word there, of course, is "could." The weird word is "petrol." So what should we believe? Are they bad for us? Or aren't they? Christopher Ketcham, who wrote the GQ article, talked me through some of the most troubling studies. Now in your article, you lay out a lot of data, a lot of studies. What's the most alarming evidence you have? Go ahead, scare us. All right. Well, there's a lot. There is something called Interphone, which is a 13-country study, European wide and also including Israel, that has been looking at the incidence of brain tumors and tumors generally as related to cell phone use. And the big conclusion from that study is that for those users of cell phones who use cell phones for 10 years or more on the same side of the head, there's a 40% increased chance of getting a brain tumor. A brain tumor on that side of the head? On that side of the head. Probably shaped like a cell phone. So the-- All right. That last part you're just making up. I'm just making it up. I'm just making it up. There is an independent Swedish study a couple of years ago found that there was a 420% increased chance of getting brain tumors for those who were using cell phones at age 20 or earlier. So four times more chances? Yeah, four times more. The speculation is that this is because children's or young people's brains are not fully formed. Their skulls are thinner so that they absorb more radiation. Allan Frey, the neuroscientist who, in many ways, shepherded me through a lot of the early studies, when he was working for the Office of Naval Research in the 1970s, he found that cell-phone-type radiation could cause blood brain barrier leakage. That is, it could cause perforations in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain. Now that's really bad news. OK, give me another. Well, for example, a researcher biologist named Henry Lai at the University of Washington found that after two hours of exposure to microwave frequencies-- At the level that comes out of a cell phone. At the level that comes out of a cell phone, you can have DNA damage. After two hours, it's double-strand breakage in DNA. Now so these are the studies that show that we do have reason to worry. Aren't there a lot of other studies on the other side saying, like, no, no, no, we don't have to worry. Oh yeah, there are lots and lots of studies showing that. And the really interesting thing to me is that if you divide the many, many studies on this subject about the biological effects of cell phones radiation-- And it's hundreds of studies, right? It's hundreds of studies, hundreds of studies over the years. When you look at these studies and divide them by funding, you'll find that 75% of those studies that were independently funded-- that is, that had no funding from industry-- From the cell phone business, yeah. The Nokias, the Ericssons, just the telecom industry generally. You find that 75% of those studies show some type of effect. Those studies-- Wait, wait. Let me just-- So in other words, if there's no funding from telephone companies or people associated with them, 75% of the studies show, yes, the electromagnetic signals out of cell phones actually do affect our cells. They have a biological effect. OK. Yes. Now if you pool the studies that are funded by the industry, you find that only 25% of those studies show a biological effect. So there appears to be-- and the argument has been among the scientists who I interviewed-- there appears to be a skewing, a data skewing, that is related to the source of funding. Now the EPA used to look into this to see the environmental effect of this kind of radiation. But you're right that it stopped. Talk about why it stopped. Well, what happened is in the 1970s, there was serious laboratory research into the biological effects of microwave radiation. EPA was foremost in this. You also had NIOSH. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health? Yes. And also FDA, Food and Drug Administration. These were all agencies that were studying these effects. And then the Reagan administration came into office, Star Wars, these huge radar-operated-- This is all the 1980s, yeah. This is all the 1980s. Radar-operated missile defense systems were to be implemented. And military interests-- Westinghouse and Boeing and huge-- that produce all sorts of the radar systems for the military-- along with the military pressured Congress to pressure EPA to stop this kind of research. This is what your sources inside the EPA told you? Yes, this is what my sources inside the EPA said. And funding was taken away from the EPA. Funding was taken away from the FDA. And those researchers, those civilian scientists who were looking into this, were told, listen you don't need to look into this anymore, we're going to handle it in the Air Force. And right now, which federal agency is responsible for making sure that our cell phones aren't killing us? The FCC. But Louis Slesin told me-- And Slesin is? Louis Slesin is the publisher of Microwave News. He's, I think, one of the foremost experts on the various studies. Let me just read what he said. He said, "The committees setting the EM-- the electromagnetic-- safety levels historically have been dominated by representatives from the military, by companies like Raytheon and General Electric, by the telecom companies, and now by the cell phone industry." Slesin tells me that it is basically a Trojan horse for the private sector to dictate public policy. OK. So I remember when cell phones first came out, and there were scare stories about whether or not they were harmful and whether they might cause brain tumors. And at that point in the '90s, it was all very speculative. And then it seemed like those stories went away. And I, as somebody just like reading the news, I just thought like, well, I guess that means that there's nothing to worry about. Are you saying, yes, we now know cell phones do give us brain tumors? Or are you saying, yes, we now know we need to worry that there's not enough research to know they're safe? The latter. Listen, even the FDA will tell you. Their official notice on this issue is that we, the FDA, are not certain about the safety of these devices. But at the same time, the FDA will say, but, there doesn't appear to be a risk either. So they hedge it. So if the safety isn't clear, but then they have like hundreds of millions of them out being used, so it's just like a big science experiment. Huge science experiment. One of the scientists who I interviewed, Leif Salford, this Swedish neuroscientist, said, This is the largest human biological experiment ever because we really don't know what the effects are going to be, what the long-term effects are going to be, what the short-term effects are going to be. And is this one of these things where we don't know the answer, but lots of people are looking into it, and a lot of money is going into it to figure this out? Or is this one of these things where we don't know the answer? And really nobody-- like, not much money is really going into this to figure this out? In this country, there is almost-- there is nothing is going on. There's just almost no research. In Europe, there's a lot of research. In Israel, which has one of the highest per capita uses of cell phones, there's a lot of research. In Sweden, home of Ericsson, a lot of research. Now how did you get into the subject? Did you know somebody who-- How did you get into this? My daughter's grandmother bought her a cell phone in France, in Paris. And at the same time, I saw a little notice in Le Monde about-- it was a little, tiny notice buried deep in the paper about possible risks from cell phones. And I said, wait a minute, let me start looking into this. And given all that you've learned, have-- your daughter is a teenager? She's 14. So have you tried to talk her into not using her cell phone? Oh, I talk to her all the time. I'm always yelling at her. And how does that go? Badly. She now uses it to text most often. But sometimes I catch her on it. And I get really pissed off. And that is, I catch her with it to her ear. And I say, "No, if you're going to use it, you have to use your speaker phone. If you're going to keep it near your body, it has to be off." Well, do you think that she believes you that the cell phone is dangerous? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That's the problem. I don't know if she believes me. And so, given your success with your own child, how do you feel about your chances of success writing articles and convincing other people to put down their cell phones? Oh, most people think I'm crazy. Most people think I'm absolutely bonkers. They just dismiss outright what I have to say. Dismiss it like won't even listen to the evidence? No, they will listen to the evidence. And then they'll call their friend to tell them about it on their cell phone. It's like-- So, you know, they don't care. They just-- One time I was in an elevator coming down, and some guy was pecking away on his cell phone, then put it to his head. And I mentioned it. What did you say? Wait, what did you say? I said to him, "You know that device could be very dangerous for you." And I don't know why I said that. I guess I was just being nosy and being tiresome and-- And the whole car just started laughing. They just start laughing. They're like, yeah, yeah, you know. And I think they were laughing at me. Christopher Ketcham is an investigative reporter. We linked to his GQ article at our website. Our program is produced today by Sarah Koenig with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from Brian Reed. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. For this week, you can see the raw data that we think contradicts Steve Poizner's findings at Mount Pleasant. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who wants all of us here at WBEZ to get back to our exercise programs, back on the stair machine. Summer is coming. Some people are very fat. You cannot imagine how fat they are. 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. There's this bridge that's part of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive that crosses the Chicago River. You can see this bridge from the offices of WBEZ. It's really close. But unless you're really looking for it, you would miss the hole that is halfway across the bridge. It's at the foot of some steel girders, in between lanes of traffic, just 12 inches by 36. I'd cross the two lanes and then I'd go to where the hole is, and when there was no cars coming at the time I'd slip in. Richard Dorsay became momentarily famous in Chicago, in December 2004, when police learned from one of Richard's friends that Richard and this friend had been living down there, inside the frame of the bridge, tucked way in the rafters underneath the roadway, for years. Authorities kicked him out from this space that Richard says was probably 14- or 18-feet long, and about as wide as two lanes of traffic, with the steel frame of the bridge for walls and a concrete floor. The ceiling was the roadway. Where, out of wood that Richard and his friend mostly took from a construction site, they built three rooms in the dank space, a supply room and two bedrooms. There was electricity from a long extension cord that they hid with piping, and plugged into a regular electric socket in the bridge down below. They made a big stink out of this when actually it hit the papers. I had like a 20inch TV, which was a pain in the butt to get in, but I did it. And I had a little heater and various other things, like a PlayStation, video games, videotapes, VHS. And I'd come back towards the evening and sit back and play the PlayStation and, you know, maybe have some beer, drink some beer and see how far I can go in a driving game before I end up crashing. But this wasn't just an adult treehouse, hidden away inside an old bridge. It was an adult treehouse inside in old drawbridge, a working drawbridge over the Chicago River, that every now and then would raise, turning the entire three-room apartment on its side, pulling the extension cord out of the outlet. The only thing that was actually a little on the scary side was the first time the bridge went up. Everything would tilt, literally. It'd be like a one-sided earthquake. And instead of it shaking, it'd be like the ground just lifting up and tilting. And then, when that bridge is vertical, that bridge really is like vertical. You're standing straight up when in a laying-down position. Some of his stuff was bungee-corded down. The heavy stuff, like the TV, he kept against the back wall of his room, the wall that tilted to become the floor. And sometimes I'd move things just before the bridge went up, because you can hear the motors unlock. And there's a bell on that bridge? Yeah, there's bells. So the bells go off, you hear the motors start. I'd just sit back and ride it. And I'd just lay there, and then as the bridge went up, I slowly slid towards the wall, and then, when it was totally standing straight up, then I'd be standing straight up on that back wall With the mattress next to you? Yes. And after that first time it was kind of like a rush going down a hill on a roller coaster. You know, where you get that laugh and you feel all relieved and it's real great, you know? Richard's been out of there since 2004. He lives with friends in a house now, in the suburbs. And when he talks about his little nest in the bridge today, he is surprisingly unsentimental. It was hot as hell in the summer, he says, and freezing in the winter. And the ceiling was just low enough, five feet and change, that he used to hit his head. But as we talked about it, there was also this. Richard, if your friend hadn't turned you into the cops-- Would I still be there, is that the question? Yeah. Probably. Probably. To me, it's a world of safety and comfort, where to someone else, they see it, oh, another drawbridge, whoopadeedo. The bridge connects point A to B, but there can be a whole life on a bridge. And today, on the radio show, we stop there and stay for an hour and see what happens there. We have three stories of people at three bridges on three continents. Act one is in China. Act two is in the border of Egypt. Act three in Florida. Stay with us. Act one, Troubled Bridge Over Water. In 2003, a year before Richard Dorsay got kicked out of the bridge at the Chicago River, halfway around the world, in Naan-jing, China, a man named Chen Sah, Mr. Chen, took up residence in a bridge, or anyway he spent his weekends there, 10 hours a day away from his wife and daughter. The bridge he chose is this concrete communist monstrosity, four miles long, covered with slogans that celebrate the worker, four lanes of traffic and thousands of pedestrians on the top deck, two train tracks on the lower over the Yangtze River into Naan-jing, a city of seven million. Estimates are fuzzy, but the best guess is that one person per week commits suicide off this bridge. Mr. Chen decided he wanted to try to keep them from jumping, and he started to, single-handedly at first, then with an occasional volunteer. The blog that he keeps about this is the most sober, taciturn, non-boastful account of saving lives imaginable. Occasionally, Mr. Chen will insert his feelings. "Beware heavy thoughts," he declares to himself during one entry. "How I wished he would soon be free of this shadow," he says about an old man he saved in another. But mostly just the facts. Here's a translation from the Chinese: "On July, 25, at 10:30 in the morning, I discovered a woman lying on the bridge railing, on her belly, weeping. I went to her. She wiped her eyes. She said she was just playing and walked toward the center of the bridge. I went with her, and she, very ordinarily, without her cell phone. When I returned at 1:10, I discovered that she had already climbed up on the bridge railing. I restrained her and forced her onto a moped. She is from Naan-jing's Jianye District. Her last name is Jiau, and today she's 45 years old. Because her husband, surname Lee, and 51 years old, is violent towards her and mistreats her, she thought killing yourself would be better. However, she is silent when she thinks of her 15-year-old son." "March 21, 2010. Yesterday at 3:05 PM, I saved a young man in the middle of the bridge. He had drunk a lot of alcohol and was planning to jump over the bridge railing. I at once restrained him and dragged him to safety. As we spoke, I learned his situation was actually quite funny. He was thinking about jumping because, last year, his wife promised to start returning to him CNY 200 of his monthly CNY 1,400 salary to spend as he pleased. But she had not honored her promise. Yesterday afternoon, he started drinking with his friends, and the more you drank the angrier he got. He believed that killing himself would make her realize that not one cent had come to him. He then said another funny thing. His mother's colleague said that the bridge is haunted and could take one's soul. I said, ha ha, it is haunted by drunk ghosts, and I took him home. This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent years." Many of Mr. Chen's entries are about the people that he does not save. "February 15, 5:30 in the morning, a middle-aged man jumped to his death, as reported at this time, and he was holding a photograph of his family." "August 10, 2008, Saturday afternoon at 1:40 PM. A young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed onto the bridge railing. I immediately started my moped, but because I accelerated too quickly, the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her, but when I was 200 meters away, she jumped into the Yangtze. Her silhouette was visible in the water, at a spot 50 meters away, and I could still hear her yelling for help, until a large wave obscured her from view." At the end of each year, Mr. Chen does an inventory of how things are going on the bridge, this one the end of 2009. He wrote that, since he began back in 2003, he'd saved, at that point, 174 people from committing suicide. He counseled another 5,150 on the bridge and 16,000 on the phone. 51,000 people had texted him. Total days volunteering to that point: 646. With regards to the reasons for suicide, he writes, "emotional problems make up 60%. Terminal illness: 20%. Sudden explosive crises: 10%. And domestic violence: 10%." Mike Paterniti recently wrote a magazine article about Mr. Chen. He first heard about him years ago from news reports. He read a bit of his blog in Google Translate. He felt like he had to meet this man who, on his own, had decided to rescue so many people, and flew to China. I thought maybe I'll see him in action. Maybe I'll get to see him save somebody. Just as back story, I mean, I actually came-- I had come from Cambodia, so I was covering these genocide trials, so I wasn't, you know, I didn't have the most optimistic feelings about humanity. And I thought I was going to find something there, like there some-- You said you thought you'd find a hopeful figure. Yeah. I mean, hope, perseverance, generosity. But as soon as I got on the bridge, I realized that all those notions were completely absurd. I mean, I got instantly depressed. First of all, there's this four-mile long bridge and this one man out there sort of trying to pick out who was going to jump. It just seemed, from a distance, like insurmountable odds to actually maybe pull somebody off the bridge. Yeah, you wrote in the article, at one point, you said, first of all, there's the cars, then there's the trains and the bridge is shaking, and then there's just like a sea of people, thousands of people, in the rain with umbrellas, going back and forth on the bridge, and he's just one guy kind of walking up and down. And he has this little moped and does a little cruise on the bridge every once in a while, but even that is a somewhat comical sight to behold. You know, he's on this little broken-down moped, put-putting through the crowd with his big pair of binoculars around his neck. You know, I sort of thought, maybe this isn't even real, like maybe this blog is a complete figment of his imagination, or a fiction that he constructs once a week, and I just don't see how this guy can save anybody out here. And you write in your article, he won't really to talk to you when you're there on the bridge. Yeah, he was really grumpy, and unwilling to acknowledge me. And so, give me a typical exchange between the two of you on the bridge. I think I did ask, like why are you standing here, as opposed to any other spot on this four-mile long bridge? And he turned and lifted his binoculars and focused out towards the river, and then brought his binoculars down, turned the other way, put his binoculars up and focused in the other direction on the crowd. Oh, that's it? He doesn't even respond? No, it was like I wasn't even there. It was like I was some ghost. And I sort of went through some of this and then I said, maybe, you know, is there a better time for us to talk? And he said to the translator, I can talk to you at lunch. So you go to lunch with him, and what happens there? Well, so we were in a little what they call family restaurant near the bridge, and there are no families present. I mean, it's just workers, and they're pretty hard-drinking. In this case, grain alcohol and beer. And so we sit down at the table, and Mr. Chen has invited a man to join us whose name is Mr. Shi. And then we are served some food, and Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi start really drinking a lot of grain alcohol. And I started to sort of drink with them, because it was the convivial thing to do. And then I just realized, I'm going to pass out if I try to stay with these guys, like I'm literally-- my head was spinning and I was-- you know, the whole room was revolving. I just was like-- and he was very disappointed, and so he sort of said, just, we're drinking here, this is what we do at lunch, and drinking loosens the tongue. And so get with the program, and if you can't, then why don't we-- you know, why don't you put on a dress. But then he, at lunch he definitely opened up a little bit more. I mean, he wasn't looking at me when he answered questions, but he was answering them and he was speaking more expansively about life on the bridge. Did he explain why it is that he does this? He said he had read a newspaper article about the bridge and about people jumping off the bridge, and he himself had grown up in the country outside of Naan-jing, so he really related, in particular, to these people from the villages who came to the bridge to end their lives and whose lives were hard and full of despair, and he completely understood that. So you go back up to the bridge and he putters off in his moped, and then-- Yeah, and then he jumped on his moped to go on his rounds, and I didn't have anything to do, but I turned to the translator, Susan, and I said, hey, let's take a little walk out on the bridge. And so we started walking out over the bridge, and we're chatting a little bit, and this guy kind of came lurching by, and I didn't pay any attention to him, but this guy's about 20 feet, 30 feet ahead of us, and he seems to be climbing up on the railing. And, at that point, I just yelled, hey, and then I said to Susan, he's going to go over. And I started running for him, and Susan came running. And I had that one little flash of Mr. Chen saying, some of these people will really take you with them if they can. They're that desperate. And I had that little flash, like this would be a stupid way to die. This would be ridiculous if I go down with this guy, but it didn't come to that, because when I got to him I had my foot on the inside of the sort of the concrete buttress, and I tried to flip him back toward me. And he was completely limp. He was like a bag of sawdust. He just flipped right back on to me, and I hadn't even really pulled him that hard. It's hard to explain, but, like, when I think of it, I just get-- I have to say, I have just goosebumps all over my body right now. Because? Because he was going to kill himself. And because he didn't. So did you feel good? No, I didn't feel good. I felt like kind of nauseous. I felt like, wow, there, every week, somebody actually does this thing, and even if we were to clone Mr. Chen and there were 200 of him out there, they probably-- still, one a week, someone would figure out how to do it. And then, like, oh my god, who's coming next? You know? And so Mr. Chen comes back, right? Yeah, well, it took Mr. Chen a while to come back on his moped, but when he came, when he showed up, the crowd sort of parted, and I was holding onto this man, whose name was Fan Ping. And he said to me, step away, which I thought was a really bad idea, because we're standing right next to the railing. But he had such command of the situation and all the nuances of the situation that I just stepped away. I just let go and stepped away. And then he said, I want to take your picture, which seemed like, you know-- I didn't even understand what that was about. He's taking a picture of the guy? Yeah. So he pulls out his cell phone with a camera, takes a picture. And then he says, and now I think I should punch you in the face. Holy-- And then he said, you call yourself Chinese. How dare you? How dare use call yourself Chinese, come up on this bridge with the intention of killing yourself today? You are somebody's son. How dare you? I am going to punch you in the face. I'm going to punch you right now. And the crowd, of course, is, like, crushing in because they think there's going to-- they think he's going to punch him. And I'm just sitting here like with my mouth open as he's saying this. So he kind of takes another step in closer and Fan Ping says, look, I'm only doing this because my father was in the Red Army and he's lost all of his disability insurance, and there's no way for him to live anymore, and I'm a lousy son because I can't provide for him, and all of our documents burned in a fire, and without those documents we can't get any help. And Mr. Chen says, there nothing worth this. There's no problem that we can't solve. And then he moves in a little bit closer and he touches his arm, just sort of holding him by the elbow with, like, his right hand. Mr. Chen says, I think I can help. I don't like this. I don't like what you're doing here. This isn't the way to solve anything. And, at that point, they have each other's word that they're going to meet on Monday morning at Mr. Chen's office. Do you get creeped out on any big bridge now? Yeah. Well, obviously, after having been on the bridge, I started looking at bridges for their suicide potential. And every bridge is that bridge in Naan-jing, and every person is potentially Fan Ping, and every other person is potentially Mr. Chen. And you kind of look at it like, oh, I wonder if that is a bridge people would jump from. And I wonder if maybe someone should be out here. Mike Paternini. His account of meeting Mr. Chen is in the current issue, the May issue, of GQ Magazine. Act Two, Bridge and Tunnel. We've been talking about bridges so far in the show, but now we're going to turn to tunnel. Same idea, just underground. Tunnels are natural for smuggling, and there's a place that's in the midst of a kind of tunnel fever right now for smuggling, the Gaza Strip. Gaza's the piece of land, of course, on Israel's southwestern corner at the border of Egypt. About 1.5 million Palestinians live in Gaza. And Gaza has had smuggling tunnels for a long time. They were built years ago along the southern border of Gaza, the border it shares with Egypt, to bring in weapons. But in the last couple of years, after Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel has blockaded the goods that come in and out of Gaza, severely restricted, and so now all kinds of stuff is going through those tunnels. That's the tunnel fever. Nobody knows exactly how many tunnels there are now, hundreds, possibly 1,000, more being built every day. They've become central to Gaza's economy. One of our producers, Nancy Updike, recently moved to the Middle East. She says they're now how a lot of basic goods get into Gaza. Clothing and flour and milk and cheese, cement, live animals, cigarettes, chocolate, oil, toothpaste, fish, prescription drugs, generators, computers, also gas and diesel, which are sometimes carried in by hand in cans, but are also pumped through the tunnels in these big hoses. There's an organization called PalTrade. It's this economic data gathering group. The World Bank quotes their statistics. And according to PalTrade, about 100,000 litres of gas, and another 100,000 litres of diesel are being pumped into Gaza every day through these tunnels. The PalTrade guy, also, by the way, sent me a QuickTime video of a car, a whole car, being driven through one of the bigger tunnels in Gaza. So Nancy, so you've talked to this guy who owns his own tunnel? Yeah, I read about people dying in the tunnels, and I made a phone call with the translator, just to see what we could find out. And we reached this guy who was very forthcoming. He talked to us for a couple of hours. He just kind of took us along with him on his errands. You can hear him in the background as he's walking around. There are cars honking, occasionally he talks to people he runs into. He puts us on hold a couple of times. We agreed to call him by a sort of classic Palestinian pseudonym, Abu Muhammad. And he started out by telling us about the first tunnel he worked on, not the one he owns himself now, but the very first tunnel he dug a few years ago. How long did it take to start building the tunnel and to finish it? How long did that take? One whole year. Did anyone die or get injured building the tunnel? Two died. How did the people die? The first one died when the digging that we have being doing in the tunnel fell on him, buried him. Number one. And the second one died when the Egyptians put gas in such a way to poison the whole atmosphere. They did that to try to shut the tunnel down and stop the smuggling? It is a correct assumption on your part. This is why they did it. There was a time when we could not go inside out tunnel for three months. We had to evacuate it for three months in order for the gas to go out. Once it was out, we resumed work. And does the gas have a smell? How do you know that the gas is in the tunnel? It does not have a smell. We find out in two ways: when people start fainting, losing consciousness, we know that the Egyptians have put this gas. Secondly, we find out about this gas from the amin. Amin means the person from whom we buy on the Egyptian side. He is the one who notifies us about the coming of the Egyptian officials and in terms of gas or other things. Sometimes they put bombs as well. So this is just very dangerous work? Yes, lots of things can go wrong and do go wrong. I mean, since I've been here, I think there have been stories every single week about Palestinians dying in the tunnels. Just last week, four guys died in a tunnel. The Palestinians are accusing the Egyptians of gassing them. Egypt denies using gas in the tunnels ever. Tunnels sometimes collapse on their own. And there are always a lot men underground working in the tunnels. PalTrade, that organization I was talking about earlier, estimates that the tunnels employ 30,000 people. Oh my god. Yeah. They don't all work underground, but there are a lot of people under the border between Gaza and Egypt at any given time. How old were the people who died? One was 19 years old and one was 24 years old. When someone dies in the tunnel, is there any compensation to the family? Yes, there is compensation. For a married man, the compensation is $11,000. For an unmarried man, for a bachelor, it's $9,000. These are the conditions put upon the tunnel owner. He has to comply with the government's laws and orders. So the government enforces the rule? This is correct. So the government knows about this and the government has rules for this sort of thing? Absolutely. The government is Hamas in Gaza now, and it controls all of Gaza. And Hamas controls the tunnels. They own some of the tunnels outright and operate them themselves, but they control all of them. They shut them down when they want. They tax whatever goods they want at whatever rate they want. I've also heard about licensing fees the government's been charging to open tunnels, somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000. Basically, what all this means is that smuggling through the tunnels in Gaza is becoming, in some ways, more and more a regular import/export point, taxes, licenses, regulations. It's nowhere near as regulated as an actual import/export would be, but these are holes in the ground covered by tents, just being dug by whoever can pull it off. He has to disconnect for a very important issue for one minute. Oh, so he's putting us on hold? Putting us on hold. [PHONE BEEPING ON HOLD] [SPEAKING IN ARABIC]. There was a problem. What was the problem? I was notified that there was a problem with the electrical power inside the tunnel. Was the person calling to ask what he should do or to get permission to do something? I was told, I was asked to contact the person in charge of repairing the electricity. There was a breakdown in electricity at a time that my workers were bringing in merchandise. This guy started out a few years ago. He was 19 years old, and he was just another tunnel digger. And he said when he was digging it was 15 diggers at a time, making about $20 a day, working 12-hour shifts, six days a week. And once they're finished digging the tunnel, the workers get a percentage of what the tunnel brings in once it's operating as a smuggling operation. And it's $20 a day, is that a lot of money, a little money? It's better than joining the 39% who are unemployed. And so if I'm a laborer and I work in a tunnel, and then I get a percentage once the tunnel is functioning, like how much money can that mean? This guy said, when he started to get a percentage, he was making about $70 a day. That was his cut. And he's getting that $70, not because he's working, carrying stuff through the tunnel, but simply for the work he did in building the tunnel? No, when the tunnel is finished being dug, then those workers become the workers who bring the goods through, so he is doing the work of bringing the goods through. He's still going to work for it, but it's a better wage for still a very difficult, dangerous job. How did you make the transition from being a worker to owning your own tunnel? I used to take a percentage from working in the tunnel. Then I sold my land, my family's land, in order to work more into the tunnels. Was that a big decision, something that you'd thought about for a long time? It was a very difficult decision; however, there was no alternative to this. I had to do it. So that's unusual, right? The translator and I were both very surprised when he said that he sold his family's land. This is not something that Palestinians do. I started as a worker, and then I realized that more tunnels were being dug. And I also realized that the money I was getting as a worker was not enough. Therefore, I decided to do my own tunnel. How big is your tunnel? Can you stand up in it? Can you touch the sides if you hold out your hands? [SPEAKING IN ARABIC]. tunnel My tunnel is 1.6 to 1.7 in height, 1.2 to 1.3 in width. Hey, Nancy, I'll just stop the tape there. What do those numbers mean? It's 1.6 meters and 1.2 meters. 1.6 meters is just over five feet, and 1.2 meters is over three feet, almost four feet. Wait, wait, wait, so it's just over five feet tall and just over three feet wide? So this is, like, it's tiny. Yeah, there are tunnels of all different sizes. Some tunnels are massive. I mean, like I was saying earlier, there are tunnels you can drive a car through. And how deep are the tunnels? Around 30 feet. It varies. 30 feet deep? Yeah, and, from what I've seen, there's sort of a swing that the guy sits on that's on a winch, and he's kind of lowered down into the tunnel. Excuse the personal question, but where do you go to the bathroom in the tunnel? A worker, if he needs to urinate, then he can do it only in a bottle. However, if he needs to do much more than this, he has to leave the tunnel. Nancy, you're asking about that, like needing to use the bathroom, it occurs to me, somehow I pictured these tunnels being like, OK, they go, there's a tent, they go underneath it like a fence or something on the edge of, like, the border, and they come up right on the other side of the fence. No. Like, so they're not very far, but you saying this makes me realize, like, how far are these? Well, the length varies. I've heard of tunnels 250 feet, and others less than that. But it's not just popping under a fence. I mean, these guys are underground for a long time. This guy, Abu Muhammad, was saying that they have an intercom system set up, you know, what you would have in a multi-story house for the person on the first floor to talk to the person on the third floor. And as we were talking about his tunnel and how it operates, I asked the obvious question: Have you ever brought in weapons? No. Do you believe him that he hasn't ran any guns through the tunnel? No, I think whatever people pay to bring in through the tunnels, he and everyone else brings in. And, again, Hamas is the one ultimately in control of the tunnels, so even though this guy owns his own tunnel, if Hamas wants to bring in weapons or cement or anything else, it's coming in through whichever tunnels they dictate. This guy, though, did go on to say something very surprising about weapons smuggling in the tunnels. A strange thing happened concerning weapons. Because weapons are not allowed in the streets of Gaza, therefore there's no need to have weapons. So weapons became extremely cheap. What we have done is to transport weapons to Egypt. We are making $100 per weapon by selling it in Egypt, vice versa. And this, to me, is extremely strange. What weapons are you sending to Egypt? We are sending guns and Kalashnikovs. Wait, wait, Nancy, so in other words, he's saying that they're not bringing weapons into Gaza, basically, they're exporting weapons from Gaza into Egypt and making a profit? Well, he's saying that's what he's doing. And, again, I don't know. He may be bringing weapons in, too. But I believe him that he's also sending them out. So this guy's making this huge economic gamble. He's selling off his family's land to invest in this tunnel. Is it working for him? Is he getting rich? Well, here's what he said. Before, we used to make between $5,000 to $10,000 dollars a month. And the money we were making was good. But now it has decreased from $5,000 to $1,500 a month. Now there's an abundance of tunnels all over the area. And therefore, the work has not become unique. There's a lot of tunnels, and therefore, you make less money. Nancy, doesn't he face one other economic risk, and that is that if there were peace, if peace would break out between the Israelis and the Palestinians, these tunnels wouldn't have a reason to exist, and his whole investment would go to hell? Does he worry at all about peace? I didn't ask him, but I don't think he's worried about peace. I think he's a lot more worried about his tunnel collapsing than he's worried about Israel making peace with Hamas. Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, city and county laws that force possibly dangerous ex-cons to be homeless and move under a bridge. If I asked you to guess which state, which sunny, sunny state would do that, which would you guess? Answers in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. South Florida is known for sun, sand, and surf, but the welcoming committee on your Miami beach is now this: convicted sex offenders. They are pitching tents and camping out by the Julia Tuttle Causeway. You may have seen them when you drive by and wondered why they're there. Why they're there is because, in 2005, Miami Dade County passed a law that required sex offenders who were coming out of jail to find housing at least 2,500 feet from any school, playground, or daycare. You probably heard about these residency restriction laws. Communities all over the country have them, but Miami's was, at the time, probably the strictest law of its kind. If you think about it, 2,500 feet, that's half a mile, eight football fields, in a densely packed city, from any school, park, or daycare. The entire city of Miami Beach, one of the cities that's in that county, is barely a mile wide at its widest point, was now effectively off limits to sex offenders, which its mayor acknowledged. So under this bridge was one of the few spots that sex offenders in Dade County could legally live. Isaiah Thompson broke this story in 2007 for the Miami New Times. He's been closely following it ever since. He says the fact that they ended up at the bridge is really just the beginning. What's happened under this bridge all came to pass because of one man, and he's probably the only one who can fix it, too. He's a man with a mission, and his job is to get missions done, Ron Book. I use my soap box. I use my forum. I use my skills. I have a skill set that makes me the number-one ranked guy in this business. Ron Book's business is lobbying. He's one of the most powerful and influential lobbyists in Florida, a man who refers to the local sheriff as my sheriff, and the state attorney as my state attorney. He can be charming and gracious, but when he has a point to make, he doesn't hold back. See that sign? See that sign right there? He points to two plaques on a wall that's otherwise covered with awards and pictures of him shaking hands with famous people. See that sign right there? It says it can be done. See that sign? Nothing is impossible. What sets me out from the others is I'm driven. What sets me out from the others is I've got more passion. What sets me out from the others is I get up earlier than most everybody else in this business and I stay up later and I get it done. Don't take my word for it. Go out there and ask my colleagues. Pick up the phone, call the other five or six or eight super-lobbyists in this business, and ask them who works harder than anybody else. That's what sets me out. I'm tenacious. I'm nasty if I have to be nasty. I'm firm if I gotta be firm. I'm direct if I gotta be direct. You know, my job is to get it done. And right now, right now, the victims of sexual abuse, the victims of sexual assault, got a guy who is the worst enemy of abusers and offenders and predators and pedophiles, because I am obsessed, because I will spend the rest of my life working to protect people. That's my job. That's my job. Why is it my job? It's my job because, unfortunately for me, I have a daughter who suffered at the hands of a no-good-for-nothing, no-good-for-nothing, no redeeming qualities, no redeeming social values, no redeeming humanistic values, who raped my daughter, who beat my daughter. I am the predators' and offenders' worst enemy. I am their worst nightmare, and I will be that forever until the day I die when they put me in a pine box and put me in the ground. Around 15 years ago, Ron Book hired a nanny who started molesting his daughter. It's an awful story. The nanny was arrested, brought to trial, and sent to prison, but that was just the beginning for Book. When he found out there was no law compelling convicted sex offenders to provide blood samples for HIV tests, he wrote one and got it passed. When the nanny started writing letters to his daughter from prison, and Book found out there was no law explicitly against it, he simply went ahead and got that law passed, too. It's now called the Lauren Book Protection Act, after his daughter. But Book didn't stop there. He and his daughter went on a kind of tour of Florida, pushing residency restrictions. In 2005, he helped write and pass the law in Miami Dade County that required sex offenders to find housing at least 2,500 feet from any school, playground, or daycare, leaving sex offenders with very few places to live. They ended up under that bridge, homeless. And the person in Miami Dade that's in charge of helping homeless people like these find homes and jobs, the person with the resources, the manpower, and a budget of $40 million to help them also happens to be Ron Book. I am chairman of the Miami Dade County Homeless Trust. I have been the chairman of this body for 16 years. This particular population is a piece of the homeless population and I have a responsibility to find them housing and jobs. That's what my homeless trust does. And these guys are a component of that. So the one person who could possibly help the sex offenders find a place to live is their biggest enemy, the person who got them there in the first place. [CAR DRIVING] For as much press as this bridge has gotten, it's surprisingly hard to find. We're looking out for some kind of opening in the fence here. You're going to have to-- we might miss it the first time, because we're going so fast. My producer and I drove there one late and particularly cold night in February. The bridge is part of a six-lane highway, the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which crosses the Biscayne Bay. Put on your turn signal and then see if you can get over. I know it sounds crazy. And drive on the shoulder? Yeah, drive on the shoulder. God, it's hard to do this in the dark. Wait, wait, wait, what's this? Yeah, this is it. This is it. Go slow, because it's real rough terrain. Oh, my god. We're on a tiny island in the middle of the bay. It's about a mile long, until recently, uninhabited. There are no exits on to the island, just a narrow opening in the guard rails, just before you get to the bridge, and a bumpy dirt path that leads underneath it. Here, hidden from the traffic above, we find a kind of post-apocalyptic outpost, scattered between the giant concrete columns that hold the bridge up are half a dozen wooden shanties, bicycles, and a makeshift fishing peer, a mound of rotting trash. Tents that have been fitted out with lights and furniture are tucked into little concrete alcoves high above us, in the rafters of the bridge, as if a particularly modern group of cavemen lived here. The roar of electric generators blocks out almost every sound but the cars whooshing across the bridge overhead. Hello, Patrick. It's Isaiah. I first met Patrick Wiese three years ago, sleeping in a cardboard box. Patrick had just come out of prison, where he'd spent two years and received 10 more years probation for molesting his nine-year-old stepdaughter, a charge to which he pled guilty after turning himself into the police at his wife's request. Considering his circumstances, what was surprising wasn't so much that he had ended up living in a box under a bridge, but how he had come to be right there precisely. His probation officer, he said, had ordered him to live there. I had a woman probation officer at that time, and she told me that I have to live underneath a bridge. I said, wait a minute, you're going to make me homeless? This is crazy. And she let me out the door, told me I have to be there by 10 o'clock at night. So for two or three months I lived, basically, out of a cardboard box. For proof, Patrick extracted a few ratty sheets of paper. One was an official document, a department of corrections letterhead, indicating Patrick's address. Bridge, it said. There are a handful of other places to live 2,500 feet from schools, playground, and daycare centers in the county. They include expensive gated communities most ex-cons can't afford, and the Everglades, where it's illegal to live, and a random apartment building here or there, but they're few and far between. So here's Patrick today. He has a girlfriend and a cell phone, and for a while, a job working at a sub shop making sandwiches. And I've been here almost three years now. When I first came down here I had nothing. I acquired a tent, and I lived up on underneath the bridge. Now, I lived there for a little over a year in one tent. In that year's time, I accumulated, let's see, a TV, lighting, a generator. As you can see, I have my radio. I have my DVD player. Right here is my shower. It has like a-- Wow. --a hot bag. What that is a thermal shower. You fill it up with water, you put it in the sun for two hours and it heats up, so you have hot water instead of taking a cold shower. You know, the essentials. What began as three men living here became a kind of colony, a microcivilization. Tonight, it's nearing most people's curfew, 10 o'clock. An occasional car pulls in under the bridge, briefly lighting the place up and then rumbling off to park somewhere by the water. Other than that, it's dark and seedy. An occasional cigarette cherry reveals people hunkered down in the shadows, talking quietly, drinking. Sex offenders getting out of prison are dropped off here like it's the most normal thing in the world. Voncel Johnson ended up under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in 2009. She walks up to us in slippers and a bathrobe. When I got out of prison, I go-- they told me to go screening report to my probation officer, so I go to her. She tell me, well, I'm sorry, Ms. Johnson, you can't go live where you were supposed to live at. Now I have to go to the Julia Causeway bridge like, what the [BLEEP] is that? I'm thinking, it's OK, it's a treatment. You know, I didn't know. So, in other words, you thought that the bridge was actually just the name of like a halfway house or a treatment. Yes, I was thinking it's a treatment center or something. I didn't know the difference. I'm saying, and then you bring me down on this bridge. He just told me and aunty to follow behind her, and she was going to take us to this place. So you actually, the night that you showed up, she was with you, your probation officer? My probation officer brought me here and told me it's going to be OK. Here it is about 10 o'clock at night, it's pitch dark here, no lights. I see a 1,000 people coming up to my aunt's car like, are you going to be OK? No, I'm not going to be OK. I broke down. I almost had a nervous breakdown. I told her I'd rather go back to prison and do my time and then get out and go where I can live. But they told me I can't do that. I have to sleep under this bridge. Like Voncel, a lot of the people living under the bridge have family more than willing to take them in, but whose addresses don't comply with the law. From the start, there were questions about whether the 2,500-foot rule that put all these people under this bridge actually accomplished what it was originally supposed to do, which was protect children. For example, the law only restricts where sex offenders sleep, literally between the hours of 10 at night and 6 in the morning, when no kids are on the street, anyway. They're free to come and go during the day. Some of them spend the day back at their own houses with their families, including their kids. Jill Levenson is a researcher and social worker at Lynn University in Boca Raton, who specialized in studying sex offender policy, and is as close to a nemesis as Ron Book has in Florida. She says researchers have studied residency restrictions all over the country. From Florida, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Iowa, their conclusions about residence restrictions are remarkably consistent. The results are consistently that there is no relationship between where a sex offender lives and whether or not he reoffends. Sex offenders who live closer to schools or parks or daycare centers do not reabuse children more often than those who live farther away. Meanwhile, the practical difficulties of housing the sex offenders was gumming up the works at a number of government agencies, who began pointing fingers at each other and suing. Maria Kayanan from the ACLU represents a number of the former residents from the bridge. Everybody blames everybody else. The Department of Corrections blames the County for its residency restriction. The County blames the Department of Corrections for having its probation officers tell released offenders that there's no place for them to live in the county other than the Julia Tuttle Causeway. The City of Miami sued the Department of Corrections, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety and Licensing-- I may have that backwards-- because they were putting Julia Tuttle Causeway as the official addresses on folks' driver's license and ID cards. So you're saying the City of Miami sued the DMV for putting Julia Tuttle Causeway on driver's license. That's right. It's like, if we click our heels together three times and just make their ZIP codes a string of zeroes, the problem will go away. As government agencies struggle with all the repercussions of the rule, officials who are pointing fingers at each other started to point them at Ron Book, the man who got them into this mess and the man with the connections to fix it. And Ron stepped into the fray, happy to lead the charge. Again, Maria Kayanan of the ACLU. I just know that he is a force of nature. When he speaks, when he appears, he commands the room. He is omnipresent. No matter whether it's a county commission hearing, whether it's a court hearing, whether it was in our litigation or the city's litigation, [SMACKS THE TABLE] there he was with this Italian suit. The most obvious way to fix the problem at the bridge would be for Ron Book to go back to the legislators who originally passed the 2,500-foot rule and roll it back, and that's something Ron is uniquely qualified to make happen. But that's the one thing that's off the table, as far as Ron Book is concerned. He stands by the 2,500-foot rule. In fact, he won't even admit it's the reason people moved under the bridge in the first place, an issue I've been arguing with him going on three years now. I don't believe the ordinance made them homeless. I don't believe the ordinance put them under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. I disagree that the ordinance put them there. Their crimes put them there. Their crimes put them their Their unemployability put them there. Their lack of financial resources put them there. I don't truly believe 2,500 feet made them there. And I will not-- That's crazy, Ron. There was no one living under the Julia Causeway. You're not going to get me to accept that, because I don't, I don't. As a premise, I just don't. And so, instead, Book concocted a complicated and fabulously expensive plan, using the resources and staff time at his disposal as the head of the Miami Dade Homeless Trust as well as federal stimulus dollars meant primarily for housing people made homeless by the recession and the foreclosure crisis. His staff began working full-time, trying to move the sex offenders one by one into any legal housing they could find. I will promise you this, that it is the 19 of February-- and I know that I told you this place was going to be closed a little sooner than now-- I assure you that you get to be the 1 of April, the 15 of April, there won't be any more people there. There'll be a piece of guardrail up on the eastbound side and a piece of guardrail up on the westbound side. They're not going to be able drive their cars down there anymore. And those people that continue to have a registration address under the Julia Tuttle Causeway will likely have their doors knocked on and they will be taken back to jail for violating the law. On April 1, The Miami Herald reported that the bridge, at last, had been cleared out. All Sex Offenders from Miami's Shanty Town in Housing, said the headline. It was over, except it wasn't over. The day after the bridge had been cleared out, some 30 sex offenders who Book's people had moved into a hotel by the airport were suddenly evicted when one of the men living there was arrested for lewd and lascivious molestation of a minor. Just two days after the bridge had been cleared out for good, its former residents were sleeping on the floor of their probation offices. Asked if some of the men will be going back under the bridge, Book told reporters, that is not an option. So where were they supposed to go? And where were other sex offenders coming out of prison this year and next year supposed to go? The few pockets of Miami Dade County that had housing that complied with the 2,500-foot rule were already filling up disproportionately with sex offenders. Mucking through the sex offender database, I stumbled on a little patch of houses in the middle of miles of farmland, in the middle of nowhere, where, according to the most recent count, 14 sex offenders live alongside families with children. By now, Ron Book has to see all the trouble the 2,500-foot rule is causing. At every turn, he's responded to events by taking on even more responsibility for the lives of these sex offenders. Now he's their landlord, their lawmaker, the arbiter over their fate. But as things have gone wrong, Book has refused to back down or lose face. There have been a few attempts to clean up the current mess by forcing every community in Florida to obey the same statewide residency restriction of 1,000 feet, or maybe 1,500 feet. Book says that's not good enough, throwing numbers out like he's bargaining for a car. 1,750, he'll sometimes say, might be OK for other communities, not his though. For Book, for Book's community, only 2,500 will do. There's a rational, responsible distance somewhere between 1,750 feet and 2,500 feet. What's the difference? It's 250 feet. I mean, what difference does it make? It's another football field away. And when one looks at 1,000 feet, it's three football fields. Well, I can see three football fields. You're in my 10th floor office having this interview with me. I can see three football fields right now. I can see children three football fields away. I have a powerful set of binoculars I will show you on your way out of my office. I could see five football fields with those binoculars. I don't want a predator and offender, somebody convicted, that has been determined to have committed sexually deviant acts on our children, I do not want that person looking out of their bedroom windows, out of their living room windows, down into a park, down into a playground, that had this person who has a predilection to offend against a child scouting out their next victim. The irony, of course, is that Book doesn't need his binocular to see sex offenders anymore. Now he has to deal with them every day. Isaiah Thompson, he's the former host of The Common Rabble. These days, he's a reporter and columnist at the Philadelphia City Paper. Well, our program was produced today by Robyn Semien, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Production help from Brian Reed. Special thanks today to Jim McDonough Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free weekly podcast, or this week read a translation of Mr. Chen's blog about the Yangtze River Bridge and get a link to his Chinese blog, which has tons of pictures. Thanks to Paul Rand by the way, for that translation. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. I went to his office this week and asked for a raise and-- I don't know, I think I've been an OK employee. His reaction was kind of weird. I am going to punch you in the face. How dare you? I'm going to punch you right now. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories with This American Life. (HOST) ANNOUNCER. PRI. Public Radio International.
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From WBEZ Chicago it's This American Life, and distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. The voices that you are hearing is some children. What are they doing? They are just walking. Nothing else. This week I talked to a Haitian journalist, Romuald Felix, over his cell phone as he recorded himself walking around one of the tent cities where some of the 1.3 million displaced Haitians are still living. This was a small tent city in a plaza in the Place Saint Pierre crammed with people. You can see, you know this music that you hear is a man who is putting a big speaker out and some people are dancing. And you can see a man is just sitting there doing nothing. He is just watching. Four months after the earthquake, Romuald says that some people were working, selling fruit, charging cell phones for money on the street, but lots aren't. The rainy season-- which everyone has been dreading-- finally started in earnest last week. He was trapped in his office one day by water three feet deep. Camps get muddy. Water gets in the tents. People have trouble sleeping with it so wet. In this camp, people still have to bathe where everybody can see. There are only six toilets for a thousand people, or maybe it's a lot more than a thousand, so lots of people go in plastic bags. And in the six camps that Romuald visited this week, aid agencies had stopped giving out food. [SPEAKING FRENCH] You hear them? It was 5:00 at night. Romuald asked these four children if they'd eaten today. Two of them said, "I ate something today," and the others said, "No I haven't eaten anything." When I talked this week to Nan Buzard-- who runs relief operations in Haiti for the American Red Cross-- she was unsurprised to hear that people aren't getting food and services, with over 1,000 makeshift camps, there are a lot of gaps. She'd just returned from Haiti the day before we spoke and said that now that they're shifting from the immediate disaster relief to the rebuilding of the country, the decisions have gotten very complicated. I know in Haiti already there are some evaluations where it's showing that local farmers don't feel like it's worth buying seed or bringing their crops into market, because people have had free food distributions. And they're not going to buy from them. Yeah. So when should relief agencies stop giving away free food or providing shelter? When does that become counterproductive? What should they do about something as basic as water? Prior to the earthquake, 70% of the water in Port-au-Prince was sold out of water tanker trucks by small commercial firms. So do we use aid money to actually put those small, individual companies back in business so that they can then charge money for water? Do we try to support the government to actually create a water policy and plan, an infrastructure that provides a certain amount of water free, and then perhaps over that it's a cost to the government? So that seems like an impossible choice. What are we doing? We all-- we struggle. We all struggle. Today on our radio show-- there's been this fantastic outpouring of money and goodwill from around the world. Nearly half of all American households have donated to Haiti, according to one survey. Haitians and foreigners have dedicated themselves to rebuilding the country. And now the question is, how exactly do you do that? Even with all this money and expertise, it's incredibly complicated. And today we join the people on the ground as they try to figure out what would be best. Next. Our show in three acts. Stay with us. Act One, 10,000 Brainiacs. We're all used to the basics. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, one of the 10 or so poorest countries on earth, with the special designation of being one of the few countries in the world that-- for decades-- has gotten poorer and poorer over time. This despite billions in foreign aid, despite the fact that even before the earthquake there were approximately 10,000 non-governmental organizations trying to do good in the country. Two of the reporters that you hear a lot on our show doing economic stories-- Adam Davidson and Chana Joffe-Walt-- have been trying to figure out how it is possible Haiti is still so poor despite all that. They've been traveling back and forth to the country following developments over the last few months and have this story. Here's something that happens a lot in Haiti. You meet someone poor and they tell you the sad reality of their life, some challenge they face every day that keeps them poor. You hear the details and you just can't believe the magnitude of the problem, not because it's big and complicated, because it is so, so small. For example, we met a farmer at this farm, a dusty, patchy field, nothing valuable growing on it, except in the corner, mangoes. How many trees do you have? He has two. The farmer tells us, two trees is barely enough to make a living. She wants more trees. She has the space for 100 trees. She has the time to tend them, but she has no water. Mango trees need water. But then we walk across the field. And right at the far end of it is this roaring river. Right there. Right next to her farm. Why is water a problem if you have water right here? We talked about this question for a long time. It was really confusing. It just did not make sense to us that she couldn't come up with some way to get water from the river right next to her farm onto her farm. At one point I thought, is she lying to us? Why would she lie? Is she just lazy? Does she not have a bucket? So many questions. How do you get water now? Why don't you have enough water to water these trees? Dozens of questions and a consultation with the local mayor-- Who happens to be a self-proclaimed, amateur, mango specialist. Yes, that all ultimately reveals a wildly undramatic truth. She needs a canal, some guys with shovels to dig a trench, some concrete to protect it. The world's simplest, shortest canal. It's a little tricky. The water needs to sit in a particular way around the roots of the mango tree, so you need some control over the water. But it's not that tricky. It's technology the Sumerians probably took for granted 5,000 years ago. It would cost-- at most-- $2,000. And if she gets a canal, she and her family go from being some of the poorest people on earth to much better off. This is what kept striking us in Haiti, just a little upfront investment and people could be living so much better. And with 10,000 organizations in the country doing nothing but trying to make people's lives better-- 10,000 organizations whose mission is to do things like building canals-- how come the average Haitian makes half as much as they did 50 years ago? How come life wasn't improving even before the earthquake? Well, to answer that, we have to leave the farm for a couple minutes-- we will be back-- and meet a businessman name Jean-Maurice Buteau and watch him try to work with one of those non-governmental organizations-- NGOs-- to solve one problem for Haitian farmers. The story begins two years ago. I heard about Jean-Maurice weeks before we met him. We'd been going around Port-au-Prince asking, what are the main industries? Who are the main players? And there aren't a lot of big businessmen in Haiti. The ones that do exist all know each other. They're unusual Haitians in almost every way. They tend to have light skin, they drive cars, have college degrees, speak English. Jean-Maurice though, he's the only one known by a special name. First of all, what do you sell specifically? Well, we export mangoes. Mango is the number one agricultural export from Haiti. Are you Mr. Mango? That's what they call me. Just people started calling me like that. We actually found out later that most people call Jean-Maurice "Mango Man," not Mr. Mango. And Mango Man is one of the biggest mango exporters in Haiti. Mango Man has a very consistent look. Most any day, any context, he's in a white linen button-down, sunglasses with the strap around the back of his head, and a Bluetooth headset. He talks on the Bluetooth a lot, usually while ramming his Jeep through Port-au-Prince's potholes, even while he's talking to you. It's Bluetooth, you, Bluetooth, you, seamless, and confusing if you're you. And Mango Man has a problem. Fruit wholesalers in New York and Miami want to buy a lot of his mangoes. But he can't get enough to meet the demand-- Which is strange, because Haiti actually grows enough mangoes to send to all of the Floridians and New Yorkers who want them. But most of those mangoes aren't grown on big farms. They're grown by individual farmers with just two or three mango trees each. And every season, those farmers pick the mangoes and then store them in a pile outside their houses, or under their beds, where they wait until some middle man-- usually a local guy with a donkey-- comes by and buys them. Americans-- as it turns out-- don't like mangoes that have sat under Haitian beds. Those usually have bruises on them, marks. And so, two years ago-- long before the earthquake-- Jean-Maurice came up with a solution, a business concept that would double his revenue. The concept is-- the simplest thing is cleaning the fruit, transporting it in a plastic crate, to a facility that is not exposed to the sun. So basically, you lose a huge amount of your crop because people don't use plastic containers? And they don't clean the fruit and they don't transport it correctly. The amount of damage we witness-- over 40% to 50% of our production in all sectors-- lost between the field and the table. So you are on a mission to get plastic crates to mango farmers. I mean, it's very self-serving because I'm going to have more product. I mean, I'm not a philanthropist. I'm doing this because I need the product. So back two years ago, before the earthquake, the first thing Jean-Maurice did was he took a bunch of crates, drove 45 minutes out of town to a small mango growing village called Casale. And he went to each house one by one. He'd find the mango farmers on some tiny dirt road. He'd get out of his jeep and hand out his crates. Unfortunately, that with an enormous failure. Well, first they used them as chairs. They would sit on them. They would carry too heavy stuff on it. They were being used for different things that is appropriate for them, in school as bookshelves. Right? And they got lost. Well, a lot of them got broken. When you talk to Jean-Maurice about the crate problem, it seems confusing why this would ever be a problem in the first place. Just tell the farmers, hey, if you pack your mangoes in these crates, everyone will make twice as much money. And then you actually go to the farms and you meet the farmers and you completely get it. Because you meet someone like [? Jealin ?] [? Jermouse ?]. Jealin ?] is that mango farmer from the beginning, the one who needs a canal. And she lives in Casale where Jean-Maurice went and handed out his crates. She didn't know who he was. In fact, it's unclear that [? Jealin ?] even knew that her mangoes are being sent to America. Here's what she did know. Her trees earned her around $600 a year, $2 a day. And in Haiti, $2 a day gets you a house made out of cinder block and metal sheets with a dirt floor on a dirt road. She can only afford to send one of her two kids to school. She chose the younger one. She has no electricity, no running water, no doctor, which makes [? Jealin ?] precisely the average Haitian. Average in every way but one. It's that laugh. She starts every single sentence with it. People in the neighborhood will say I love to laugh, I love to joke. The loudest, laughing mom with the two most sullen, withdrawn teenagers in all of Haiti. I tried and tried. And here are the only few words I managed to extract from her oldest daughter. She's telling me about her sister's school. Again, daughter. Mother. Jealin ?] has no car, no bike, no irrigation, no mattress. So for some white guy from Port-au-Prince-- that's how she sees Jean-Maurice-- for him to show up at Jealin's in his jeep and start handing out crates, she's not going to say, oh OK, this is a tool to increase my earning capacity. [? Jealin ?] doesn't mind bruises on her mangoes. She doesn't know anyone who does. She has no way of even conceptualizing a picky, American consumer. If Jean-Maurice is at about the level of a US exporter 50 years ago, [? Jealin ?] is living in the 1700s, well, with a cell phone. Jean-Maurice realized he was going to need an intermediary, someone who could spend the time to train the farmers how to use the crates, to train them why they should want to use the crates. Basically, someone who can help the farmers accommodate the needs of people living in the 21st century, people these farmers have never met before and can't imagine. And here is where Jean-Maurice hooked up with one of those 10,000 NGOs in Haiti-- non-governmental organizations. Lots of them specialize in training small farmers in agricultural techniques. In fact, many are focused specifically on mangoes, because study after study shows that mangoes are one of the greatest areas of potential growth for Haiti. So there's lots of money and there's lots of specialists ready to help those mango farmers. And here is where we begin to see what those 10,000 organizations are up against. Now Jean-Maurice-- like a surprising number of Haitians-- does not like those NGOs. He says-- and we heard this all the time in Haiti-- those NGOs have been helping for 50 years. And every year, Haiti is poorer and the NGOs are richer. Well, we are working-- it's the first time I'm working with some NGOs. I've stayed away from them for the longest time, because sometimes I realized that they were causing more damage than good. But throughout the years, I've identified certain ones that seem to want to do some things. The one he likes most is called MarChE. Well, it was actually this guy he liked the most, one of the staff named Pierre Brunache. Jean-Maurice liked that Pierre grew up in Haiti, even though Pierre lives in D.C. now. So Mango Man calls Pierre and says, hey, I can't get these mango farmers to use plastic crates. You're the expert. Can you help me? And Pierre says-- I didn't think it was difficult at all. Jean-Maurice thought, great. And then Pierre went on. It's just a matter of getting the land, provide the technical assistance. I never thought it was something difficult. This is where Jean-Maurice gets nervous. Getting land? Technical assistance? Pierre explained. You can't just hand out crates to thousands of dispersed farmers. You need a central place with just a simple structure. Picture a carport, a quarter acre of land, with a hose. Farmers will bring their mangoes, learn how to pack the crates correctly, how to wash the mangoes. Pierre says, we have some rules about this because we've done this in other places. We've seen what works and what doesn't. And when you team up with an NGO, you have to follow their rules. So, if Mango Man wants crates, he has to find a farmer with some land that they can build the mango carport on. To which Jean-Maurice replied, have you ever met a Haitian farmer? Just imagine. You are a small farmer and you own that piece of land. That's all you have. To which Pierre replied, and there's one other rule. The farmer can't own the land the center will be on. They have to donate it. The center will become the economic powerhouse of the community, so you need a neutral place. You can't let one family own it. It has to become a cooperative owned by all of the farmers. And so, Jean-Maurice began his campaign to convince some poor farmer to give up some of his precious land. He called someone he knew in Casale to find out who might have some land. The guy talked to his cousin, [? Jealin, ?] the one with the laugh. [? Jealin's ?] family has a very nice piece of land in a great spot, near the road and near the mango farms. Now, this is where the mission to get some mango farmers a few plastic crates goes from involved to complicated. Because the thing is, the land was passed down from a great-great-grandfather. Maybe a great-great-great-grandfather, nobody remembers exactly. The point is, a whole lot of cousins have equal claim to the land. Jealin ?] called a meeting, gathered her family together to decide whether or not they wanted to donate the land. Where we met, there's a big tree. We have a lot of shadow. It's cool there. Then we sit down on some chairs around the tree. How many people? 60 or 80 people all sat under this tamarind tree? Really? A big, big tree. Everyone, all the cousins started asking questions. Who is this white guy from the capital? Why doesn't he buy our land? What if he never does anything with it? We're going to give away all our land? What will we leave for our children? Everyone, all the 60, must agree. And then nine of them will sign for everyone. There were factions, big disagreements. For a while, Jealin's brother was a holdout. So were the loud cousins, who nobody likes, who left town a while ago but came back when they heard someone was interested in the land. So many meetings under that tamarind tree. Jean-Maurice drove in for many of them. It took months. It took months. I didn't go everyday. We held meetings here. I went there. And their family came here, now they're doing it with the land. So, we've got the land. We can get those crates here. Training. Those mangoes will be beautiful. The farmers will start earning twice as much, so will Jean-Maurice. He calls the NGO and says, all right guys, you can start building the center. The NGO says, great, we just need to see a copy of the deed. The deed. So, Jean-Maurice goes back to the mango farmer with a quick, simple request. The family had acquired the land from somebody else. They never did the papers, but they had their understanding. So these papers first had to be transferred from the original owner to this family. Nobody knew who the original owner was, who sold the land to Jealin's great-great-grandfather. Or great-great-great-grandfather. Right. Nobody knew who had the deed now. But finally, [? Jealin's ?] brother remembered, wait, there was that uncle who always kept papers, the guy who left Haiti a while ago. The person who had the paper is in New York? New York. How did you get the paper from him? Someone who this person-- who is living in New York-- trusts, came with the paper. The brother tells me, that guy sent the paper from his basement in New York with someone he trusts to Haiti. So after weeks and weeks of waiting, they get the paper. But it turns out, to transfer a deed in Haiti involves, literally, hundreds of steps and hundreds of dollars. Transfer of land deed was not in the budget, and if there's one rule every NGO sticks to it's, you do not change the budget. This is where Jean-Maurice loses it. It has to go through this process, it had to go through this process, we had to put it in the budget. I said, well, we had to put it in the budget, but you know, there are sometimes things that occur that-- you know, I'm not God. I don't know every little detail of it. It's like, Hilary Clinton has to approve it at the State Department. Can I just remind everyone, we're talking about getting some farmers a few plastic crates? Crates that they want, that Mango Man wants to just give them, that the NGO wants them to have. But to get those crates to the village of Casale, 60 farmers had to donate some precious land. And they did it. Mango Man had to trust an NGO. And he did it. MarChE-- the NGO-- had to be flexible and pay for something that wasn't in the budget. And they did it. Together, all these people had to overcome more than a century of legal confusion, and they did it. Success. They get to the final, last step. December, 2009, a year and a half after they began. [? Jealin ?] and the other farmers form into a cooperative that would own and operate the crate center. They did that. They took all the paperwork, that very final document one last time into Port-au-Prince and delivered it to the government. This all happened at the very end of last year. And then on January 12 came the earthquake. The document that recognizes them is at the Ministry of Social Affairs. The Ministry of Social Affairs has been flattened like a pancake. Those certain documents are in the pile of rubble at the ministry, under the rubble. It was several weeks before Jean-Maurice could even bring himself to go back to Casale to visit the farmers. It wasn't clear if the earthquake destroyed the crates project entirely, or just set it back months, maybe years. But as survivors started to think about their future, they started asking this question we'd hear every now and then-- usually after someone apologized for even thinking it. Was the earthquake the best thing that could've ever happened to Haiti? The argument goes like this, the world is now focused on Haiti like never before. There's lots of money coming in. Before this, you had those 10,000 NGOs working independently on little projects, making slow progress, maybe, if at all. But what if now there is an opportunity to take all the attention, all the money, and work together like never before? What if this is the shot-- instead of solving one small problem at a time-- to address all the country's problems all at once. Think about [? Jealin ?] and her mangoes. Her problems go way beyond those plastic crates. Remember, she needs a canal. And while we're at it, she needs a road. Once her mangoes get on the truck, they go down this crazy, choppy dirt road. In the rainy season, sometimes the road isn't even there. She really needs a paved road. But then, if there's a lot more trucks carrying a lot more mangoes, the Haitian port can't handle that. Haiti's main seaport is really old. And they'd need to buy new equipment, which means a better banking system to give loans and more professional folks to operate things-- Which means better education to train those professional folks, and while we're at it, health, hospitals. [? Jealin's ?] brother can't help her on the farm because he's really sick. She thinks he has malaria. Thinks. She doesn't know because there's no doctor around to ask. If all that seems like a lot for the world to take on, seriously, we went to the place where this is truly the ambition. We're in a conference room in a new hotel on a hill outside Port-au-Prince where experts from all over the world are sitting around foldable tables and trying to figure out how to do every one of those things and more. They're trying to figure out how much it would cost to address all of Haiti's problems at once. Experts are here from the U.N., the World Bank, from all over the world, doing the thing experts do, staring at Excel spreadsheets and writing assessments. And they're all in these tables divided into groups. There's education, water, infrastructure. And Adam, you and I go table to table asking, what are you going to do for [? Jealin? ?] And everyone has really long, in depth answers. Infrastructure. Well first, if she has a better telephone link in her village, that is the first step to sell her products. If the roads are improved, again, a better way to sell the products. The health table tells us they're working on a plan for hospitals in her area. Education table? They're working on a plan for more free schools. At which point, a Trinidadian woman grabs my arm to tell me, kids need more than schools, you know? They need activities, dance classes, that we are offering over at this table. And over at the environment table, they're offering canals. So you have-- right here in your grid-- millions of dollars for canals. That's exactly the thing that she wants. She wants a canal. Yeah, so hopefully she'll get some. Hopefully. Hopefully your computer will result in her getting a canal. We are hoping so. So the people in this room have their plans. And the world is going to spend billions of dollars on those plans. But now that we've seen how complicated it is to do something basic like get some crates into the hands of some mango farmers, it raises the question, what'll it take for all that money to do something? To actually result in canals and roads and electricity and crates actually getting to [? Jealin? So, let's say you're the US government. You're committed-- as the US government is-- to spending lots of money rebuilding Haiti. You basically have two choices. Chana, the first please. Number one. You could hire Haitian companies and American companies do build things. The Haitian companies will be the Haitian elite. The American companies will leave after a year or two. And if you're Hilary Clinton, in a year-- the anniversary of the earthquake-- you can point to a bunch of successes, big ones. Hospitals rebuilt and roads that are way better than any Haiti has seen. If you're [? Jealin, ?] you probably still don't know how to pack your mangoes into crates and you probably aren't lucky enough to have your tiny piece of land chosen for a tiny canal either. So, Adam, let's look at number two. Number two, you do what development experts call capacity building. You teach the people of Haiti how to do all these things. You use this rebuilding process to give Haiti the ability to build itself. Which means, do for [? Jealin, ?] what America did for farmers more than 100 years ago, create a class of ag-extension agents who go to farms and figure out the best solution for each one, train farmers and laborers how to do things like build proper canals, create small banks to lend the money to farmers for this kind of investment, and you teach [? Jealin ?] how to pack her produce correctly, to wash it and to sell it directly to the exporter. This option, capacity building, do I even need to say it? It takes a long time and it's really, really hard. You need foreign money and you need Haitians to believe in the projects and to participate fully. And you need NGOs that are willing to stay for as long as it takes, which brings us to a classic problem with NGOs and foreign assistance. How you doing? I'm OK. I had a long day. I had a very long day. Several months after the earthquake, we meet up with Jean-Maurice at his cousin's hotel, the same place where the world's experts gathered together to figure out how much it would cost to build Haiti out of poverty. The conference room has emptied out and Jean-Maurice-- Mango Man-- told us he got a call earlier in the week from MarChE, the NGO that was helping train [? Jealin ?] and the other farmers. USAID cut their funding. MarChE is closing their doors. Jean-Maurice shakes his head. Again, that's the habit. It's the norm. They start something, they don't finish it. These NGOs, when they come on the field they make promises and they don't finish up and they don't deliver. This was confusing. There was just a major earthquake and everyone wants to help Haiti. People are sending money, texting money, and USAID is cancelling programs? I called USAID and our conversation with confusing too. We didn't decide to close any program. This is Anthony Chan. He's deputy director for USAID in Haiti, and at first he tells me, technically, they're not closing the program. They're just letting its funding run out. Then he tells me that with all this new money after the earthquake, they need to reassess all their programs and think bigger than little ones like MarChE. And finally he tells me, OK, the program is going away, but it's not his fault. I mean, it's not us deciding. We have bosses in Washington and they are the ones who make those decisions. I mean, eventually they're going to communicate that to us and we'll get the money and we'll begin to work in those areas. And the response to the farmers, we are not going away forever. We are going to be back. Maybe the partners are going to be different, but she shouldn't feel abandoned. The actors may change, but the movie and the plot will still go on. That movie has been going on for more than half a century. There's this recent report called "Haiti in the Balance," which documents how time after time, USAID programs are started and then-- before they can actually help anyone-- a decision is made in Washington to send aid in a whole new direction. The two Marche staff we met left Haiti a couple of weeks ago. Mango season has opened without crates. And this, of course, is how you can continue to have 10,000 NGOs in a country that keeps getting poorer. Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson are part of the Planet Money team. If you like this kind of story-- economics, but interesting. You can be getting it twice a week on the Planet Money podcast and at their blog, www.npr.org/money. It's a co-production between our program and NPR news. Coming up, a new definition of atheist during an earthquake. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Island Time," stories about what happens next in Haiti, now that the world is flooding it with money and help. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act TWO, Compound Fracture. According to the US State Department, there are about 40,000 American citizens who live in Haiti year round. These are business people, NGOs, missionaries. In the 1980s and 1990s, Apricot Irving's family was among them. Apricot's parents were missionaries, agricultural missionaries. They did erosion control farming, reforestation projects. They lived in a town called Limbe, about 150 miles north of Port-au-Prince. It's been 20 years since her family left, but her parents still go back to the north of Haiti every couple of years. And in March, Apricot went with them to see how people are building a new Haiti and how different that effort is from when she was a kid. The missionary compound where I grew up-- that's what we called it, the compound-- is about 15 miles away from where Columbus sank the Santa Maria in 1492. Columbus was just the first of many foreigners with big dreams of how to improve Haiti. We heard a lot about Columbus growing up on the compound because Dr. Hodges-- who ran the missionary hospital in Limbe-- was a huge fan. When I was a teenager, the compound had everything we needed, a missionary school, a TV room, friends. But when I went back this time to visit, it was like a ghost town, a ghost town with a very loud generator. It is kind of creepy in here. There's nobody around. There's all these houses that used to be full of missionary families and kids running around and there's not really anybody else. There's Joanna. Hi Joanna, how are you? You look pretty good. You look pretty good too. Travelling all over the world. Feel great as long as I don't walk. Dr. Hodges died 15 years ago, but his wife Joanna still spends a lot of time in Limbe. She's 87 years old and she's formidable. Everyone thought she'd retire in 2004 when three guys with guns broke into her house. She ended up chasing them down the driveway as they tried to steal her car. One guy broke her arm by beating her with a stick. The watchman later found that the thing that he'd hit me with, it was the walking stick that my husband used to use. But anyway, my arm is OK now. You can't even see the scar. What did you tell the men when they came to your house? I told them, if they killed me, that was all right. Because I knew that God would take care of me, and that I'd come to Haiti mainly to tell the Haitians about God. And I knew that he had a place for me. And I said, "Does he have a place for you?" Because I said, "I don't think he would want you to be doing what you're doing because it's not very nice." They said, "Shut her up," and they tied a cloth around my mouth. [LAUGHTER] I can't believe she can laugh about this now. But maybe that's what spending 52 years in Haiti will do for you. I'm really fond of Joanna. I've known her since I was six years old and she's like a grandma to me. She epitomizes the old way of doing aid work, sort of 19th century benevolence. The foreigners-- usually whites-- lead the way, set an example, do whatever they can, and hope the Haitians catch on. In other words, the foreigners are always in charge. It sounds a little crazy, but until a few years ago, Joanna kept the keys to the medical supply storage room on a chain around her neck. When the Haitian doctors needed to perform an emergency surgery in the middle of the night, they had to wake her up. And, because she was in her 80s, carry her over the mud puddles to open it. The hospital is still run by Joanna's son, even though he now lives in Florida and hasn't been to Haiti in years. So with all the different aid organizations coming into Haiti right now to help out with earthquake relief, is there any advice that you would give to somebody who has never been to Haiti before? I would say that, don't try to change the Haitian people. Try to deal with him and try to understand them. And take them as you would other people. They're people and they need help. They look at life differently than we do. But that doesn't mean that they don't deserve help. Sometimes they're grateful and sometimes they're not. Far fewer patients come to the hospital now than when I lived here for a few reasons. People really loved Dr. Hodges, and when he died, things changed. The hospital got rid of its old payment system, where you were offered credit if you couldn't pay right away. Instead, they started charging a fee upfront for a consultation. It's not much, about $1. But it was more than a lot of people could afford. People resented it. Things got ugly for a while. Graffiti, threats, some protests. Also, there's more competition than there used to be. The number of small Haitian run clinics have opened up that didn't exist 20 years ago. The hospital feels pretty empty right now. But these clinics are jammed with patients. This is Steve James, Dr. Steve James. I grew up with his kids at the missionary compound in Limbe. For a while, Steve was Medical Director at the hospital there, the Hodges Hospital. The work he's doing now is an attempt at something different, a totally different approach to development work. He spends much of his morning greeting people and kissing them. This is how you start the day in Haiti. Everyone asks how your family is, how you slept last night. You can usually tell who the visiting Americans are, because they're the ones trying to skip the handshakes and get straight to work. But not Steve James. He's been in Haiti 30 years now. Every month, he visits 11 small Haitian clinics, including this one. All the clinics Steve visits are faith-based, community-run organizations, meaning the decisions are made by a board of locals. Steve is not on any of the boards. It's kind of a new state of affairs here. He's a white guy and he's not in charge of anything. Yeah, I'm not a program director. I don't run anything. I just stand by and ask questions and encourage, is all. And this is the business office. He shows me around Ebenezer clinic, which was five miles away from the old missionary hospital in Limbe. It's a small, two story building. But there are at least 100 people waiting to be seen, both inside the building and outside under a tree. The clinic has far fewer resources than the hospital. They don't have a surgery wing. They don't even have a place for patients to spend the night. But they let you pay what you can and give you credit for the rest. After the earthquake, they let everyone in for free, not just earthquake victims. Even though the clinic was already $8,500 in debt. Ah, Dr. Manno, we are on the radio with the medical director. Hi. Good morning, Manno. How was Port-au-Prince? A lot of work. A lot, a lot of work. If anyone's in charge here it's Manno. He just got back from doing relief work in Port-au-Prince. Manno's a few years older than I am and I've known him since I was 14. Since I last saw him, Manno has become a doctor. He's the medical director for this clinic, though some patients still want to see the blonde, the foreigner with the American medical degree, the white guy. It happens while I'm standing there and it's awkward. A Haitian pastor comes in and asks for an appointment with Steve who's rushing to make another appointment, so he turns to Manno to see if he can do the consultation instead. He doesn't have his chart yet. So I don't know if you can see him for me, or-- When these people come they want to be seen by you. I know, I'm sorry. Ask him to go home and come when you are here? Well, that's the problem. I told him today I would be here. Say you are not afraid of, but he has to come back on Monday because-- You can hear the frustration in Manno's voice. Because of course, this has happened before. It makes Steve uncomfortable. I will tell him that I have two doctors better than me, and he can see them. Oh here we go, Bonjour, Bonjour. The baby just came. A few days before I arrived, Manno had come back to town with a family of earthquake refugees in the back of his truck, including this three-month-old, who Steve's been waiting to see. Her arm looks terrible. It hangs at a strange angle from her elbow. She comes in with her aunt and her aunt's sister-in-law. They said the baby's got diarrhea and they're worried that the baby's dehydrated today. That's a pretty little baby, baby girl. Her name is-- she has an unusual name. It's Quincy [SPEAKING FRENCH] Kaira. Jacque is her last name. She was a month old when the earthquake hit and she was trapped under the rebel for two days. Neighbors could hear a baby crying. What they didn't realize-- until they dug her out-- was that she was cradled in the arms of her dead mother. Steve thinks she might have survived by nursing. The women have brought an X-ray of her arm, taken at another rural clinic Steve had sent them to, because Ebenezer doesn't have an X-ray machine. OK, we don't yet have electricity in the clinic. They haven't turned on the generator yet, so-- So in a clinic like this, what do you use electricity for? Well, for one, right now I need it to look at this X-ray. That would be nice. Otherwise, I have to hold it up to the window here and make my best guess on a window X-ray. The X-ray isn't the exact angle he'd asked the technician for. So he can't really tell if the elbow's fractured or dislocated, though he suspects both. Steve wants to send the baby to another clinic-- an hour and a half away-- to see one of the visiting orthopedic surgeons-- an American who came to help out with earthquake relief. He makes sure to consult with Manno first. What I would like to know is whether-- at this age-- you would want to intervene or you would want to just wait for the baby to be older. Or, I just would like some help on that. I guess the best is to have the opinion of the orthopedics. If Steve had still been director of the hospital in the compound, he could have had everything done at the same place, X-rays, surgery, an overnight room. Instead, he has to send the baby to three different places-- over horrendous roads-- and someone has to pay for all that. It makes you understand why a lot of NGOs still operate the old foreigners in charge way, it's efficient. This way, the opposite of efficient. But what Steve's doing is that term you heard earlier in the show, capacity building, even though Steve would never call it that. He calls it, "building community." If you want Haitians to create and sustain their own institutions, this is what it looks like, slow and sometimes cumbersome. But Steve knows the pitfalls of the other model. When he was in charge of the old missionary hospital, he found the job so stressful that he even considered leaving medicine. He came to a kind of crossroads and had to make a hard choice. We talked about it in the car. The choice really is-- it almost became for me-- an either/or. On the one hand was that in the face of dysfunction, and in the face of extreme human need, what was required of me was to build a citadel, to become a dictator. And in that dictatorship-- benevolent dictatorship-- I could be the cowboy to fix the problems that would bring efficiency, service and security. What's wrong with that? Why not become a benevolent dictator? The problem that I found with that, is that model creates, in a way, a new slave plantation mentality, where the slaves become dependent on the slave masters. And in the end, one reaps the fruit of slavery, discontent, anger, violence. The choice to then go the other extreme, to purposely work hard at not becoming a dictator-- for the sake of building community-- means that people are going to suffer. People are going to die. Goods will not be provided. Services will not be rendered. Here we are praying when there's somebody that needs a C-section and we can't get it for her. There's a terrible choice. And why is it that, in choosing community, there are these added costs? Why do people die? Why are the goods not distributed? Because community takes time, perseverance and relationship building. Yeah, it drives Americans crazy. We're a fix it culture. That's the height of evil probably, from an American cultural point of view, is to not fix a problem when it's right there to fix. And what's the problem? Fix it. The good news-- Steve says-- is that the slow, cumbersome process is working. There's progress. These clinics are surviving basically on their own, supporting themselves with very little outside help. And when the earthquake hit, that progress paid off. It was Haitians who were on the scene first-- doctors like Manno-- pulling people out of the rubble, distributing water, days before the foreign aid organizations arrived. Apricot Irving. She's writing a book about growing up on a missionary compound in Haiti. Right now she's looking for a publisher. Act Three, "Hait is Destiny." Ben Fountain is a fiction writer who has been going to Haiti two or three times a year for 20 years. He has close friends there. He's written short stories set there, based on the things he's seen. He returned in March to catch up with people. "Did you think we were dead?" This was the first thing asked me by the 13-year-old daughter of my friend Gary, when I reached them by phone a few days after the quake. "Did you think we were dead? She said, as soon as she came on the line. And I hesitated, it seemed rude just to say to a child, "Yes, I thought you were dead." But there was a firmness in her voice, a focus and calm that showed she was beyond all the finer points of etiquette. For the past several days, she'd been very possibly dead to her family and friends back in the states. And now she was testing it, probing this other reality, the one where she died on January 12. How would it feel to be dead? What would it mean to exist only in old emails, pictures, the minds of others? Then the phone was passed to her brother, and he wanted to know too. "Did you think we were dead?" But they hadn't died. Their house had held and they'd ridden out the quake jammed in a doorway with their parents and uncle, the five of them lurching and pitching in that tight space like shipwrecked survivors tossed in a storm. But from their front yard, you could look across the neighboring ravine at the remains of 100 houses that hadn't held. It's like a lobotomy, seeing destruction on this scale. Not just the outsize scale, but the mind-numbing density within the scale. The sheer sensory overload of detail and texture. That football field-sized wilderness of junk and rubble that used to be a trade school, you could find entire geographies of ruin within that expanse. Hills, butes, hummocks, valleys and craters, broad flats cut through with twisting gullies, shredded clothes, shoes, papers, mangled furniture, dark oily clumps of decomposing human matter, rebar twisted and raveled like giant spaghetti balls. And then something impossible and ridiculous, an easy chair, a thickly upholstered loveseat, perched at the top of a free-standing spiral staircase that spun off into nowhere. It didn't make sense. Port-au-Prince was making me stupid. "I have a new definition of the word atheist," my friend, a Haitian eye doctor, told me. "This is the person who doesn't cry out to God in the middle of an earthquake." My friend, the eye doctor, comes from one of the old Mulatto families. And he may be the one true genius I've known in my life. He's fluent in six languages and proficient in three more, knows long passages of world literature by heart, plays the piano beautifully, and placed third in the Haitian National Chess Championship when he was 12. I met him almost 20 years ago, when he was a handsome, young doctor with jet black hair down to his shoulders and the slightly mad eyes of a Rasputin or Houdini. He was brilliant and knew it. On finding out he was a doctor, I made some trite comment about all the good he must be doing in his work. "No," he answered brusquely. "On the contrary, in Haiti, I'm like a jet pilot without a plane." I went to see him as soon as I arrived in Port-au-Prince and found him living with his family in their backyard. Most of their two story house was still standing, though the west wall had sheared away entirely, leaving that side of the house open to the air. And what remained was too shaky for habitation. So now they were living outdoors, sleeping in tents and a re-purposed tool shed and cooking on the stove they'd dragged outside. "And this is luxury," the doctor exclaimed, "We're the lucky ones." He and his wife and one of their sons had been on their small front gallery when the earthquake struck. And at first, they thought it was a heavy truck going by, some gargantuan piece of construction equipment. And then they told me something I would hear many times in the coming days, "We thought it was the apocalypse or Armageddon. We thought the world was blowing up. We thought this was the end of everything, so we just stood on the gallery hugging one another and waited for it to finish." Such were expectations in Haiti, where the apocalypse comes more readily to mind than anything so far-fetched as an earthquake. A Danish filmmaker, a long time acquaintance of mine, was on the third floor of his house in Jacmel when the quake started. And he simply couldn't process what his eyes were seeing. The room started shaking. And then the walls started rippling and bending. And he wondered, how can the walls be moving like that? And there was a hole in the wall, and he wondered why there was a hole in the wall. And then the balcony was gone, and how could that be? He sat on his bed, watching it all unfold in slow motion, but his brain wouldn't accept the information. I asked him, did you think you were losing your mind? "Yes," he cried, "I did think I was losing my mind, because these things I was seeing just didn't make sense." "You think the one thing that's certain in your life," the eye doctor told me, "Is the ground beneath your feet. You think this one thing at least is solid. And when that starts to shake, you experience real terror." We sat down at the small kitchen table in their backyard. So how were they doing? "We're surviving," the doctor said with a shrug, though this might not seem so obvious. Their teen-aged sons hadn't had a school to go to since January 12. The wife's video rental business was lost in the quake. The doctor was doing a lot of meetings these days, but he said they were starting to make him feel like a character in a Kafka story. As one of only 50 ophthalmologists in the entire country, he was much in demand by foreign governments and NGOs to consult on health care projects. And after two solid months of meetings, he was going a little crazy. "What happens at these meetings," he said, "Is that they meet to agree to evaluate the situation, so they can meet to agree to evaluate the situation, so they can meet to agree to evaluate and on and on." He'd been at one such meeting that very afternoon. "I told them it was all bull[BLEEP] and bluff. But even when I insult them, they don't listen to me. They just want a couple of Haitians at the table for decoration. We're there so they can keep on getting their money. "On the plus side," he continued, "There was always plenty of food at these meetings," so he rarely needed to eat at home, which was good because he wasn't making any money these days. His office had been destroyed in the quake and the few pieces of equipment he'd managed to salvage sat in a forlorn little pile in his living room. These days, his practice consisted of people randomly dropping by his house. Doc, everything's all blurry. Doc, my eyes hurt. Doc, can you find me some glasses? I lost my glasses in the quake. Several days a week, he hitch a ride out to one of the tent camps and treat people for free. But otherwise, he sat in his backyard studying Chinese and reading the classics of western philosophy. "You know what I've noticed," he told me that first evening at his house, "God gives you 205 years to do something with Haiti and if you fail, he passes it on to someone else. The Spanish had it from 1492 to 1697, 205 years. Then the French from 1698 to 1803, 205 years. Then the Haitians, from 1804 to 2009, 205 years." So what was coming next? "Maybe a revolution," he answered cryptically. "Or maybe Haiti would survive as a sprawling industrial park for the international aid complex. Or maybe it would become a satellite of the United States, a kind of protectorate." And then I brought up the subject of art. The doctor is-- among his many other talents and accomplishments-- an astute critic and tireless promoter of Haitian art. When I asked him whether anything had been rescued from the iconic institutions of Haitian art, the National Gallery, the Centre d'Art, or the murals of the Trinity Episcopal Church, his brow drew down and he brooded for a minute. "Art is finished in Haiti," he said abruptly, "After what happened here, art has nothing more to say to us." And he went on, "The philosopher Hegel said that before the end of time there will be the end of history, and before the end of history there will be the end of art, maybe this is what we're seeing here, the enacting of Hegel's theory. Haiti is leading the rest of the world to the end of time." Riding around Port-au-Prince during the day, seeing the sheer biblical scale of the destruction, this could definitely put you in an apocalyptic frame of mind. "Poor Haiti," people say, "So primitive, so backward, so far behind the times." I've been hearing about how backward Haiti is for as long as I've been going. But how about this, what if Haiti is ahead of the times? It seems to be on the leading edge of so many current trends, environmental degradation, serial ecological disasters, crumbling infrastructure, a population that exceeds resources, plus a skewed economic order that channels vast wealth to a privileged few while the great majority of people stagnate and struggle. By any objective measure, Haiti appears well-advanced on the track that the rest of the world seems hell bent on following. The eye doctor proposed yet another alternative for Haiti's feature which was the extinction of the Haitian people. In other words, no future at all. And why not? Many countries, many peoples have disappeared over the course of history. Why should Haiti be any different? From a sheer numbers standpoint, the earthquake had been a strong push in that direction. And now, he pointed to the mountains looming over Port-au-Prince. Every year there were fewer trees up there. Every year the rains loosened the soil a little more. Unless drastic changes were made, it was only a matter of time before the mountains crashed down in a kind of land tsunami and buried the city whole like a modern day Pompeii, only with mud and rock instead of volcanic ash. "The terrible thing about existence," the eye doctor told me a few days later, "Is not that there is suffering, but that there's no limit to suffering. I think there's going to be an explosion," the doctor confided, a sentiment that was echoed many times by many people over the course of my visit. Even Haitians, as resourceful and tough as they are, have their limits. They were watching in the camps. They were waiting. [FRENCH PHRASE] was a line of graffiti you saw everywhere. [FRENCH PHRASE]. We're tired, we've had enough. We're simply, [FRENCH PHRASE]. We're here. That was what people often said when you asked how they were doing. [FRENCH PHRASE] we're here. Or a sassier variation, [FRENCH PHRASE]. Better that we're ugly and here than not here. All those tents in Port-au-Prince, all those thousands of tents, sometimes I'd look at them and imagine an army was massed out there. The last time I talked to my friend Gary, the one whose children had wanted to know if I'd thought they were dead, he told me a barricade had been erected outside the gate of the warehouse where he works. Gary is a logistics manager for one of the big NGOs, and those his warehouse operation was clearly there to do good, people were protesting, they wanted jobs. Gary had hired all the workers he could, but for the people outside it wasn't enough. For two days running, he'd had to negotiate his way through the barricade to get home. It's getting radical, he told me. And then he added, come back soon. Ben Fountain. A few of the short stories that he's written, set in Haiti, are in his collection, brief encounters with Che Guevara. Our program today was produced by our senior producer, Julie Snyder with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollack, Robyn Semien, Alyssa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Production help from Brian Reed, Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program, by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, oh we have complained, do we have to wear these silly This American Life blazers to work every single day? Can't we stop that? But he just replies, I mean, it's not us deciding. We have bosses in Washington and they are the ones who make those decisions. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI-- Public Radio International.
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Probably the strangest thing about the K&R business-- K&R, that's Kidnap and Ransom-- is that it's a business at all, that there are enough kidnappings in the world that a whole industry issues kidnap insurance and there's responders who will help your family through the kidnapping and ransom process. And it's also workaday, like any other business. My name is Daniel Johnson. I oversee Kidnap Response operations for a company called ASI Global. We do a lot of prevention work, which is training of Americans or executives. ASI Global is one of the big American companies in the K&R business. And perhaps this just comes with the job, but Daniel Johnson is capable of a kind of understatement that's sort of breathtaking. For instance, he was telling me how K&R insurance works. So if you were to have a Kidnap Response policy with traveler's insurance and something goes bump in the night, it's our company that gets that call. By bump in the night, Dan means what you or I might call a violent, life-threatening, life-changing abduction. See? Understatement. Another interesting fact about kidnapping insurance with this company-- one condition of having the policy is that you don't tell anybody you have the policy. It's like the first rule of Fight Club. OK, so let's say that I'm thinking about moving my radio show to a country where there are lots of kidnappings. You consult with people who are moving to those areas about what to do if you are kidnapped. If I'm kidnapped, give me advice. What should I do? Well, most of the advice is going to be somewhat region or geographic specific. Some of the steps that we'd recommend for Mexico are obviously not the same steps you'd recommend for the Middle East or even Nigeria. Because of the Catholic culture in Mexico, we do recommend that the victims personalize themselves. Ask for a Bible. In the Mideast, he says, don't do this or talk about religion. But in Mexico, where there are lots of kidnappings these days-- It helps personalize you as some-- it's a basis of relation between you and the abductors. And it's to my advantage if they see me as a person, why? Contrary to popular belief and some of the myths, kidnappers, in most cases, don't wantonly, with no reason whatsoever, go in and abuse the victims. Unfortunately, it does happen in some instances. Well, the more personal you are to them, the more that they can relate to you, the less likely that's going to happen, the better care that they're going to give. The other advantage of a Bible, Dan says, is that you might be captive for a long time. And one of the big problems in that situation is it's really, really boring. People get depressed. They stop taking care of themselves. Some of them think about suicide. So it's important to keep your mind active, to create a routine of things that you do every day, not to sleep all day, which lots of people end up doing. And if you have a Bible, you can read, which is huge. Other tips-- eat what they give you because it's probably the same food that they're eating. Drink the water. Don't try to escape. Don't look your captors in the eye. Sometimes it's viewed as being confrontational with the captors. And you want to be somewhat non-confrontational. Are there counterintuitive things that you tell people to do? Yes. Some of the recommendations we give are counterintuitive. For example, most kidnap victims-- or not most, but many kidnap victims, when they are first captured, feel that their life is in danger so they need to negotiate for themselves. So what they start to do is they start talking about my company made $10 million last year and I'm a senior manager with my company. And my wife has a half million dollars in a 401K. That doesn't help the negotiation process. That raises the expectations of the kidnappers, so what we typically recommend is you don't have financial conversations at all with your captors. But that's hard to do, he says. Your instinct is that you want to trade away everything just to get your life back. You'll do anything. But you have to understand, if it's a kidnapping for ransom-- and one sign of that is that you're still alive-- that's like a business deal, and they need you alive to make their money. And usually, Dan says, you're going to get out. It's just a matter of coming to a price. You have to remember that. And you have to remember that your role in that business deal is to be the hostage, to do what you need to do to survive, to avoid panic. Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our radio show, Held Hostage. We have three stories for you of people who are forced by circumstance to be the hostage and how they cope with what that means. We're going to begin with people held in the traditional way, nabbed and taken to the jungle. But we also have people in our show who are taken hostage in much less literal ways. One man can't get out from under the thumb of one of his neighbors. And we have a man held hostage by love, and I know that sounds really corny, but believe me, it is not what you think. Stay with us. Act One, Captive Audience. So today's episode is a rerun from 2010. And at that time, nearly a decade ago, there was so much kidnapping going on in Colombia, that the country's biggest radio station had a program that was specifically for kidnapping victims. Like, it was targeted to them as an audience. And this was not the only show like this. There were several other shows like this on smaller stations, again, whose audience was kidnapping victims around the country. Annie Correal is originally from Bogota, Colombia. And she went to the biggest radio station and visited the program. The show is called Voces del Secuestro-- Voices of Kidnapping-- and it's been on the big national station in Colombia, Caracol, since 1994. Starting at midnight every Saturday and running until 6:00 AM, hundreds of people call in to send messages to their kidnapped relatives. And in secret camps all through the jungle, prisoners, and sometimes even their guards, tune in to listen. The host kicks off the show welcoming all the hostages in the jungles of Colombia. Most families call in with their messages. But some people actually come into the station like Viviana. Her dad, Edgar Yasid Duarte, is a police commander who was kidnapped in 1998 and still hasn't come home. Tomorrow is Viviana's 13th birthday, and rather than run the risk of not getting on the air, she and her mom are spending the night at the radio station. A dozen interns man flashing phone banks, lining up the callers from around the country who will send out their messages tonight. 170 will make it on the air. Viviana is in a pink hoodie, drinking little cups of coffee from the vending machine to stay awake. She always sends a message to mark her birthday. It's 5:00 in the morning when she finally gets on the air. She says her birthday's an important day in their lives, and she just knows he's going to be there, that they're going to free him this year so he won't miss any more special dates. She says she celebrated with her friends by going to a shopping mall and to the movies and to get ice cream. She tells him she loves him, and she sends him a blessing. I know how she feels. When I was 19, my dad was kidnapped by the FARC, the same rebel group that kidnapped Viviana's dad. The FARC is an army of leftist guerrillas that kidnaps people for political reasons, but also civilians like my dad, for money. My dad, Jaime Correal, was kidnapped on his way home from work in 1999. There was a guy on a motorcycle back there. But I didn't think anything of it. I didn't notice I was being followed. This year when I went back to Colombia, my dad and I drove through a park, up a winding, isolated road to the spot on the highway where it happened. And right where I'm standing, the guy came from behind that pole, and he came with a gun up, was screaming, "Police, police." I tried to get into the traffic, and I couldn't get in because it was bumper to bumper. And that's when they hit the window, and they pulled me out, and they threw me in the backseat with two guys with a weapon. Back then, Colombia was the kidnapping capital of the world. At the peak of the kidnapping craze, there were around 3,000 people kidnapped a year. That's like eight people a day. Carjackings happen in Bogota all the time and in plain view, like my dad's. You know, I had in my mind that it was not so close to the road, but it's right there. Is that the first time you've been back to that spot? Uh-huh. Yep. As we sat in the spot where it happened, he said if he had taken a left, it would have taken him 20 minutes to get home. Instead it took me eight and a half months, 265 days. While my dad was kidnapped, I was in college in the States. But my stepmom Sammy used to call into the radio show, Voices of Kidnapping, to try to reach him. Six months in, when the guerrillas arranged a phone call with my dad, she learned to her amazement that some of our messages actually got through. My dad had had a radio and had listened for us obsessively. It was a black machine. I don't know. It wasn't a brand name that everybody knows. It was something like cauliflower, OK? I mean, it was as valuable as my cigarettes, OK? And something I would wrap really well with my clothes in a plastic bag so they wouldn't get wet. And reception was very bad. We were in the deep jungle, so we learned from the guerrillas how to make antennas. We would steal the Brillo pad, the used ones, when we went by the kitchen. The Brillo pad, you untangle it, and you make a big line of wire. You get a stone, wrap it up in one of the ends, and you throw it up into the trees. That helped tremendously. A guard snuck the radio to my dad. They're not officially allowed, but the FARC lets prisoners listen because it keeps up morale. It keeps them from killing themselves, and it keeps them marching. My dad was moved 37 times during his captivity. The radio meant everything to him because for the first six months that he was held captive by the FARC, my dad was held alone, completely alone. The radio was his only companion. It's really an exercise of patience to be awake for 12 hours, 13 hours, and not being able to do anything. You can do anything. Sometimes you see all those movies. Like, Rambo just exercises when he's in jail. And you say, well, I'm going to start exercising, and you exercise, but you get bored. You start getting in shape, let me tell you. But mentally, you feel you're wasting your time. I was by myself between November that I was kidnapped until May 26. I could talk to the guards very little. They're not supposed to talk to you. But then at night, then you rewind your whole life. How was that? That was scary. Because you start judging yourself. Mostly what comes to mind is what you think you did wrong-- wrong decisions that could have made a difference in your life. But it's being alone with all those ghosts. So when he first heard my stepmom, Sammy, talking to him over the radio, it was like a miracle. You know, it was like 6:20 in the morning. I was laying in bed with my radio. It said, "This is a message for Jaime Correal." I mean, my heart stopped. I said, "Wow." She said, "Your kids are fine. Hold up. Pray." You know, all the encouraging words they can give you. So from now on, that was my lifeline. My dad would stay up all night listening to the show every week. A lot of times, you lose to the station because actually, you're always deep in the jungle, and there's a lot of clouds. And then you just go very softly trying to locate it again. And then you don't want to move the radio, so you end up in these awkward positions and just listening. When they call your name, when they mention your name, your heart always pounds. This is a radio message from my family recorded 10 years ago when my dad was held captive. My stepmom made this tape to send to the radio station, hoping he would hear it, wherever he was. In real life, she was struggling to hold it together, losing weight, dark circles under her eyes. But on the tape, she makes a point to be cheerful. She calls him by his nickname, Lumpy. My Lumpy, [SPEAKING SPANISH] She chose one of her favorite love songs to mix with the radio message. She says every time she hears it, she thinks of him intensely. She asks if he can imagine how much they're going to enjoy making up for lost time. Then she introduces my little sister. My little sister says she hopes he comes back soon safe and sound and that he'll be very, very, very hungry because they'll have his favorite-- eggs and sausage-- waiting for him. Then my brother comes on. He says he's the goalie on the school soccer team and he's blocked a lot of shots. Then he says he loves him and misses him. My stepmom says that she's waiting for him, that she'll always wait for him and he's the love of her life. And she can't wait to pick up where they left off in November. I love you. [SPEAKING SPANISH] [KISS] Ciao, ciao! [SPEAKING SPANISH] The families on Voices of Kidnapping are coached not to say anything negative or cry, so there tends to be a lot of talk of holiday parties and kids' grades at school, weddings, new babies in the family. These days, the number of new kidnappings in Colombia is way down. There are just a few hundred a year. And that's a good thing. But it conceals something basic. The fact is that thousands of people who are kidnapped never came back. There are thousands of families who are still waiting for their relatives to be released, like Viviana, the girl who was celebrating her 13th birthday at the radio station. Viviana's dad has been gone for 11 years, almost her entire life. He's part of a small group of political prisoners that the FARC won't free unless the government agrees to a prisoner exchange. So there's nothing the family can do but wait. Everything Viviana knows about her dad fits easily on top of a coffee table. There's a pile of notebooks filled with his colored pencil drawings, the rusted aviator glasses he was wearing when he was kidnapped, and a few photographs and videos the FARC has sent as proof he is alive. Vienna was so young when her dad was kidnapped, that her only images of him come from these photos and videos. She says that he's in the jungle, but it's impossible to know where because he's posed against a sheet. I remember getting one of those pictures. They call it a [SPEAKING SPANISH] a proof of life. It's like seeing something from another world-- my dad next to a tree in sweatpants and a peasant sweater. My dad is a prisoner. I asked Viviana what her dad looked like in those proofs of life. She says in the older photos, he used to look normal, chubby. But in the recent videos, he's looking thin and he's going bald. She says that's hard because he used to look stronger. She says she thinks to herself, no, why is he like that? Life is hard, she says. To cope, Viviana still talks to her dad, and not just over the radio. She says it's not that she feels he's here. She says she talks to him in her head. I talked to my dad in my head, too. I consulted him about what to major in, and I asked for his help at exam time. When my mood would plummet, I would think it was somehow connected to what he was going through. And in the worst moments, when I wouldn't feel his presence, I'd look outside and say, if he's alive, let there be a sign in the next 60 seconds. And I'd count down. And inevitably, a dog would bark, or a street light would turn on. It's like sending the radio messages. You send these little telepathic messages, you concentrate, and you start to believe someone is out there, listening. I've met families who haven't had a proof of life for five years or a decade. Their loved ones are probably dead, but they act like they're not. They send out messages to them week after week, hoping that they're out there in the dark, holding a radio. Annie Correal, she's a staff reporter for The New York Times. You sometimes hear her on the podcast, The Daily. She originally produced a version of this show with Jay Allison for transom.org. I have to say, a lot has changed since we first aired this story in 2010. Annie's dad was rescued by the Colombian military, along with five other hostages, in August 2000. The family moved to Panama, which is where her dad, Jaime Correal, died in 2016 after a short illness. He was 63. That girl who Annie interviewed, Viviana-- her dad, Edgar Yasid Duarte, was killed by the FARC during a failed rescue attempt in 2011. He'd been held captive for 13 years. Viviana is in college now studying international relations. The FARC disbanded in 2016 as part of a peace deal with the Colombian government. After that, the radio show Voces del Secuestro came to an end. Its final episode was in 2018. Similar programs with messages for hostages also ended. Coming up, taken hostage by somebody whose only weapon is paperwork. 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 show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Held Hostage. In this second half of our program, we move to people who get held hostage without a gun, or a knife, or any kind of traditional captor, and then they have to figure out what to do. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Misdeeds. This is a kind of classic story of people who are not looking for trouble, and then the trouble came looking for them. Wayne Curtis tells the story. 11 years ago, Tracy Poydras and her husband, Oscar, were living in New Orleans. Tracy was a nurse in her late 20s. Her husband ran a nightclub in the city. They were planning for their future, and they decided to invest in a house. They checked out a city program that seizes blighted properties and sells them cheap, and they found a rundown duplex in a decent neighborhood. It was basically just a shell with four walls and a roof and not much of a floor, and they spent something like $50,000 or $60,000 fixing it up. For a while, they lived in one unit and rented out the other. Then they moved out and rented both. The whole process went just as they'd hoped, until 2003, when, pretty much out of the blue, Tracy Poydras got a call from her tenants. They get eviction notices on the upstairs portion and the down. And they're calling us, hysterical. And they're like, what is going on? We've paid our rent. I mean, do we have some kind of problem? I mean, I didn't think we had a problem. The eviction papers have been filed by a person who used to own the building, a guy named Nathaniel Dowl. Tracy figured it was a misunderstanding of some sort, that Dowl was probably just confused and didn't understand that the city had seized his property and sold it to somebody new. Whatever it was, she was sure a simple explanation would clear things up with Mr. Dowl. She was wrong. And pretty soon, Tracy and her husband found themselves in court and, for the first time, came face-to-face with Dowl and his wife, Barbara. I don't know if they had just flown in from a Jamaican retreat or what, but Ms. Dowl had on a tie-dye shirt and jeans, just clearly not dressed for business, not dressed for court. And Mr. Dowl was reeking of marijuana. Reeking. Just to have the nerve to come in there like that, I just knew that something wasn't right, you know? Something was definitely not right. After a long day in court, the judge asked the Dowls for proof that they owned the building. The Dowls couldn't come up with any. The judge stopped the eviction. And for a while at least, everything was OK. A year went by. Life returned to normal. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, and the levees failed. The house the Poydras's had fixed up was now in shambles. Flooding destroyed the first floor, and the wind ripped off the roof. Tracy and her husband hired contractors to start fixing up the place all over again. But then, not long after, the contractor said weird things started happening around the site. Well, and they would notice that a hammer would be missing. And then maybe the next day, the hammer would come back. I mean, just like anything like a crazy Lifetime Movie, just all kind of stuff. And then one day, someone with no rhyme or reason, just someone with, like, schizophrenia kind of had tape just all over the place, just, like, yellow caution tape. It was just everywhere. And they were like, you got to find out what's really going on here. So the next couple of days, I went into New Orleans to try to see if maybe the code enforcement or somebody like that had something to do with it. So then when I went in to the real estate-- I forget which office it's called, but they're the ones that handle the evictions. And I told them my name and my property address, and they were, like, sighing. They were like, oh goodness. Go cross-reference your name. Tracy didn't know it just then, but she had company and plenty of it. Other people across the city were finding that weird things were happening, both with their properties and with the paperwork behind their properties. One of those people was a tall, fairly reserved ex-army officer named Brad Robinson. At the time all this started, he and Tracy Poydras had never met and they traveled in different worlds. But they both had decided that buying up cheap New Orleans property made good sense. Shortly after Brad got out of the army, he and his wife, Michelle, started a business rehabbing blighted old houses and building new ones. In 2004, they'd spotted a house in the city's list of seized buildings, so Brad wrote down the address, 8633 Zimple Street, and drove over to check it out. And that's where I recently met up with Brad. He was waiting there with a stack of photos to show me what the house looked like when he bought it. It was a mess. The grass was several feet high, and vines covered it like an ill-fitting toupee. The back part of the house was collapsing, and from what I could tell from the pictures, the only thing holding up part of it was an old refrigerator. It was so bad that Robinson couldn't imagine anyone would possibly be living in it, much less that the owner would drive up as he stood there, slam his car door, and storm over to him. It was Nathaniel Dowl, the guy who had shown up in court reeking of marijuana. And he said, who are you? And I identified myself. And I said, I found this house on the city's website, and I was looking at purchasing it. And I told him. I said, if you want to keep it, you've got to do two things. Number one, you've got to clean it up. And two, I said, you've got to go down and pay your taxes because you've got maybe seven years, or whatever it was, in taxes that were delinquent. And at first, he was kind of belligerent the first time I met him. And then once I tried to help him and I told what he needed to do to fix the problem, he was talking to me like a friend. Brad actually had a few things in common with Nathaniel Dowl. Both were born and raised in New Orleans. Both were in their 40s. Both were from families that had once bought investment properties here, only to lose some of them to the city for neglect or unpaid taxes. So Brad thought it was only fair to give Dowl a shot at keeping his house. But Dowl failed to act. He didn't pay his back taxes, and the city went ahead and put his house up for auction. Brad picked it up for $10,000. A couple days after buying the house, Brad and two friends stopped by to check it out. He also wanted to disconnect the electric meter, which he worried could be a fire hazard. So we went to pull the meter, and the second I pulled the meter back out, he came running out the door. And what did he say? Basically, he took a baseball bat, and threatened me, and threatened the other two people with me, and said he was sick and tired of the city taking his f-ing properties. Did he come down off the steps? Yeah, he chased us out in the street. He was like a mad man. Brad called the cops who cited both men for disturbing the peace. Brad showed the police some papers proving that he had just bought the house, so the police told Dowl he had to leave. But Brad had a feeling it wasn't over. So I drove back, I think it was like 11 or 12 o'clock at night. And I saw his car parked there, and there was a light on inside the premises. Brad called the cops again. And they came out. And they knocked on the door, and they instructed Mr. Dowl that they had previously ordered him not to return to the property unless he was accompanied and yada, yada. And they placed him in handcuffs for criminal trespass. At that time, Mr. Dowl presented a document. It was a restraining order signed by Judge Paul Brown in Division M, so the police took the handcuffs off and allowed him to stay in the premises that night. None of this made any sense to Brad. Why would a judge sign a restraining order against him? After all, he hadn't done anything. Besides he owned the house. The next morning, I went to see Judge Brown to see why she signed this restraining order, TRO. And she had no recollection of signing it. She emphatically denied it. She had her clerk check her book. There was nothing in there. And then she actually walked me to each judge and asked them and their clerks if any other judge had signed her name to a TRO. And they all said no. The TRO was a fake, and this is where Nathaniel Dowl's background comes in. Under the advice of his attorney, Dowl refused to talk to me. But here's what we know mostly through public records and court documents. Throughout much of his life, Dowl ended up in court for stumbling onto the wrong side of the law for car theft, for pot, for unpaid debts. In 1988, he was sentenced to three years in prison for using bogus money orders. We also know Dowl used to own several houses, places he apparently inherited from his father, who invested his longshoreman salary in properties. Somewhere along the line, Dowl started teaching himself law. He enrolled in a correspondence program and got his paralegal certificate. He learned the basics, what legal documents do, how to file them, what size the paper should be, how to make them look official. In fact, he learned enough that he could produce fake documents pretty easily. Dowl had a couple of favorite scams. One was to take a bogus document to a notary and would stamp it with a seal. That only meant Dowl signed the document in person in front of the notary. But the seal made things look all the more official and gave the appearance that claims in the document had been verified. Dowl also figured out how to make good use of a run-of-the-mill kind of legal document, which, and unless you're a lawyer, you've probably never heard of. It was something called a quitclaim. While it might sound obscure, the idea behind a quitclaim is pretty simple. Let's say you have the rights to a piece of property. You go to the courthouse and file a quitclaim giving those rights to, say, your cousin. So your cousin now has legal rights to that property. The trick that Dowl figured out was that he could file a quitclaim on any piece of property, whether he owned it or not. City officials would look at that document and figure he must have had some rights to begin with, because why else would he file it? And so essentially, Dowl found that armed with just a small bit of legal knowledge, he could trap pretty much anyone he wanted in an upside down topsy-turvy world where all sorts of basic things normally taken for granted just crumble out from beneath you. Brad Robinson's war with Dowl started out small and kind of mundane. Brad sued to get Daniel evicted. Dowl challenged the city's right to take his property. The fight went to the state Supreme Court where Dowl lost. And for a while, Robinson's life went back to normal. But then Dowl started showing up in strange places, like the houses the Robinsons were working on, properties Dowl had never had anything to do with. He would show up at the job sites and pretend to be a buyer of one of the properties and request whoever was there to walk through the property. And later on, if he would go down and create these false documents on every one of them. Dowl would file these bogus documents. Robinson would have to track them down and get them thrown out. And here's the thing. It wasn't like the city or the courts would call Robinson up and say, hey, Dowl came in again. Instead, Robinson had to be constantly watching. I lived down in the inventory archives going through records, because he'd file a document, and I'd go pay an attorney to do a mandamus to pull a document out, and then he'd go back and file another document. So I call him my paper stalker because he'd go down, it would cost me, say, $1,500 to hire a real attorney to do a mandamus, go in front of a judge, and the judge would make a ruling and know this was BS. And she would order the document pulled from the public record. And we did this for god knows how many years. And it was over, and over, and over. How many documents-- do you have any idea-- that you contested with him? I'll be honest with you, it was on, like, every piece of property he could find. Dowl went after his old house, houses that Robinson was renovating, even after Robinson's family home. I was somewhere. I was at a meeting or doing something, and my wife called me up in hysterics. I mean, absolute hysterics. She had come home from work with the children, and there was a notice to vacate posted on the door by a Sheriff's deputy. And she didn't know what it was about or what was going on. And she just went into total hysterics. So I went home, I got it, I went down there, and then I did a little research, and I found out it was my paper stalker again. What does it take to clear something like that up? We had to go to court. We had to hire another attorney. Over time, Dowl grew more brazen. At this point, he was just going after Brad with reams of paperwork. But he stepped things up with Tracy Poydras. She's the woman we talked to earlier, the woman who found her house covered with caution tape. Not only did Dowl file papers claiming he owned her house, he moved in. My mother-in-law went over to the house. And he told her that she couldn't come in. He told her that she couldn't come in. And so she thought, OK, I'm going to call the police. So she calls the police. And they tell her, he has some kind of document with, like, a seal on it. And she had some documents, and she's like, this man does not live here. This is my son's house. And the police were, like, OK, he showed us something saying that he should be in the house, so this is a civil matter. And you all have to go to court. We can't just remove him from the house. And he's in the background, like, making muscles and doing all kind of little stupid victory dances. And we were like, this is just not happening. This house has multiple defense perimeters. It's obvious that you see the shutter and the door, but you don't see all the other things. Meet the third person to get into this war with Nathaniel Dowl. Richard Arias is an attorney in his early 60s. He lives in a house that's dark inside because all the solid wood shutters are sealed tight. He explained to me that stems from a paranoia that dates back to his days as an infantryman in Vietnam. He knew both Nathaniel Dowl and Brad Robinson because he owned a house on Zimple Street next door to the one the two first fought over. Dowl was fighting Robinson, so Dowl came to me for help. Dowl knew that I was a lawyer, so he asked me for help. But that was pretty short-lived because it didn't take long for Dowl to turn on Arias, to decide Arias wasn't his ally, and to start serving him with fake paperwork and eviction notice, all of it. And the thing with Arias, he'd never bought any properties that Dowl once owned. With Arias, it was about vengeance, plain and simple. But regardless, he found himself in this paper war with Nathaniel Dowl. He learned enough to make it look good. He would go to the courthouse and copy other people's work, change it enough, but not enough to correct typographical errors, not enough to remove references to standard forms, not enough to pass the scrutiny of a professional, like a judge. Well, just enough to get in the door. This went on for more than four years, and Arias, the Poydrases, and the Robinsons all felt trapped. They went to the police, who told them it was a matter for the courts. They went to the courts, and the judges said they really couldn't do much, except reverse each fraudulent filing as it was presented to them. They went to the district attorney, who was struggling with the chaos left in the wake of Katrina and had didn't seem too interested in white collar crime. They even went to the court workers, the people who accepted Dowl's bogus documents when he filed them. The workers sort of shrugged and told them that even if they knew the documents were fake, they were bound by state law to accept them. At one point, Tracy's husband Oscar told her if the courts wouldn't help and the police wouldn't help, then they were on their own. You're talking about a 6 foot 3, 300 pound man. He's like, OK, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go in the house with a bat, and I'm not going to hurt him. We're just going to run him out of there, you know? But I'm not going to hurt him. And I told him, you know what? It sounds good. So you do start to lose your mind because you're thinking, OK. Your sane mind is saying, I'm just going to go in there with this bat, and scare him off, and say, get out! Get out of my house. Well, what are you going to do if that doesn't work? What if he has a gun? You can't go in and do that. Then came the mounting costs of all this-- court fees, filing fees, not to mention that after Dowl moved in, the Poydrases had to pay two mortgages, but couldn't rent out their rental property because Dowl was living in it. But the people who felt the strain the worst were Brad and Michelle Robinson, who guessed that when you include court fees and lawyer fees, they ultimately spent about $90,000 on what was originally a $10,000 house. The genius of Dowl's scheme was that he exploited the inertia of the legal system. Every time he filed a quitclaim, he was forcing the system to agree, just by taking the paperwork, that he had some rights to the property. And once the system accepts something as true, even for a moment, it's hard to make it go away. Do that over and over, and you're always a step ahead of your adversaries. And if Nathaniel Dowl hadn't slipped up, it's hard to say how long this all would have gone on. But Dowl finally tried his property trick on the wrong people-- the Feds. Brad Robinson discovered this after Katrina when he applied for federal money to do work on the house on Zimple Street. I called Road Home Program, and they said, Mr. Dowl, you've already got money from this property. And I said, I'm not Mr. Dowl. And he said, oh, uh, well, Barbara Dowl got $137,000. Using bogus property claims, Dowl's wife Barbara had applied for federal Road Home assistance. They got $132,000 on a property the Robinsons owned. That got the attention of the US Attorney's office. And soon Barbara Dowl was indicted by federal grand jury, and Nathaniel Dowl was charged with filing false public records. For a moment, the Robinsons, the Poydrases, and Arias thought they might get their lives back. And then something really dark and crazy happened. Brad had a habit of going out late at night after his kids were asleep-- he liked to play poker-- and then coming home after midnight. But one night-- it was a couple days after Dowl found out he was being charged-- he happened to be in bed early. I was at home sleeping. I was in bed with my wife. About 10:30 that night, I'd gotten up and got a drink of water at my kitchen. You know, you get up and you get a drink without turning on the lights. Standing in my kitchen drinking a glass of water, and I heard somebody say, his name's Brad. I heard two people having a conversation in my driveway adjacent to my house. During this time, the Robinsons had someone staying with them, a friend of a friend named Tony White, who was an engineer from out of town working on some reconstruction projects. He didn't know a lot of people in this city, and most nights he worked late. This was one of those nights. 2:00 in the morning, 2:30 in the morning, my wife was awakened by a phone call. And then she rolled over, and woke me up, and said that an elderly neighbor next door who was up late usually at night had heard something, and there was somebody laying in the street. Brad went outside. And right when I walked out the door, a police unit was pulling up. And I looked at the person, and he was laying face down, so I still didn't know who it was. I did not know who it was. And I walked down. I was in my pajamas, and I walked down. And I was about halfway down. I told my wife, I think it's Tony. But I wasn't sure, and I didn't know if he'd fallen, if he'd had a seizure, and I didn't know if he had a history of seizures or what. All these scenarios were running through my head. And I told my wife to bring the kids inside, so she brought the kids inside. And I knelt down over the body, and I felt his carotid artery. And when I reached down, he was-- there was no pulse whatsoever, so I knew he was dead. Tony White had been shot through his left eye at point blank range. Let's be clear here. The crime is still unsolved, and the investigation never connected the shooting in any way to Dowl, or his wife, or anybody for that matter. And Dowl had an alibi. But there are things that still haunt the Robinsons about the shooting. Brad and Tony were about the same age, height, and build. The killers didn't bother with any of Tony's stuff. They took his car and burned it, but left behind his money and a bunch of expensive camera equipment. Brad's convinced that what happened at his house late that night wasn't just another random crime. Nathaniel Dowl was eventually found guilty for filing fake public records. He's now serving a 10 year sentence, and his appeal was rejected late last month. Brad Robinson says he feels safer with Dowl in jail-- that's no surprise. But he also knows that in six years or so, Dowl will likely be getting out. He worries what will happen then. I think it's just a lull. He's only in jail for maybe, what, six years, 10 years. He might do six. And then he's going to get out, and he's going to come back and probably start up right where he left off, I would imagine. I think we've got a six-year reprieve. And I think when he comes out, he's going to come out with even a bigger vengeance. Because of that fear, Robinson is planning to move his family out of New Orleans before Dowl gets released. Whatever does happen, then, even if it's over for the Robinsons, even if it's over for the Poydrases and Arias, it might not be totally over. Recently, Brad Robinson told me he happened to be looking at the city of New Orleans website, and he saw another one of Nathaniel Dowl's old properties up for sale by the city. Robinson says he feels sorry for whoever buys that place. Wayne Curtis, he's a contributor to The Daily Beast and Garden & Gun. Today's show is a rerun. Nathaniel Dowl died in 2013 shortly before he was due to be released from prison. The murder of Tony White remains unsolved. Act Three, I've Fallen in Love and I Can't Get Up. Sometimes you're a hostage inside your own body. Chris Higgins has this example, and we decided to rerun today's program this week because a movie is opening up this weekend based on this radio story. Anyway, here's Chris. You know it's going to be a pretty weird interview when the first question is this. If you have an attack during this interview, what would you like me to do? I'm talking to Matt Frerking. He's 39. Well, if I fall over, then making sure that I can continue to breathe would be nice or that I haven't come to rest on something sharp or anything like that. About four years ago, Matt started having these strange attacks. The first attack happened when he was taking a shower. His muscles began to feel heavy. His head began to droop. He slumped into a sitting position. He ordered his body to stand, but nothing happened. And so I was sitting there thinking, this is ridiculous. You can lift your head, move your arms, so just do it. And then just as quickly as it happened, a few minutes later, it went away. And I was back to normal and thought, wow, that was strange. And I went down and told my wife about it. He just said I couldn't move. And I was thinking, well, he must be overstating it. You can't just not be able to move. That's just not something that really happens to people. That's Trish, Matt's wife. They have four kids from her previous marriage, and some of those kids have kids of their own. It kept happening. Matt kept collapsing out of the blue every day, sometimes three and four times a day. He went to a string of doctors, including a psychiatrist, and a sleep doctor, and a neurologist. But none of them were able to fix the problem. Matt happens to be a neuroscientist. He's a professor at a university, but he was as baffled as everyone else. When each attack hit him, Matt was still totally conscious. He just couldn't move. Once on campus, he ended up flat on his back in a flower planter for over half an hour with his legs sticking out over the edge. He's fallen down stairs. He's had police and paramedics show up. It took Matt three years to finally get a diagnosis. It turns out he has this disease called narcolepsy with cataplexy. That first part you've probably heard of. Narcolepsy is excessive sleepiness. You can treat that with stimulants. The real problem is the cataplexy, which is making him collapse. Worldwide, researchers estimate that more than a million people have this disease. Although they're not sure why it's happening, they think it's related to REM sleep, the part of sleep when you dream. When you start dreaming, your brain tells you your muscles to go limp, so you don't act out the dream. That same signal was getting sent from Matt's brain, but it's happening while he's awake. So while the cause is hazy-- and by the way, there's no cure-- scientists have managed to figure out what triggers the attacks in most patients. The triggers vary, but the things that most reliably do it are strong emotions, and in particular, strong positive emotions. By and large, those are things that I either have to avoid or recognize that if I do them enough, they're going to trigger an attack. Let me make sure you got that. When Matt gets really happy, when he feels the warm fuzzy stuff, he becomes paralyzed by his emotions-- literally paralyzed. This has been going on for four years, and there's no end in sight. I mean, he told me once, yeah, this is such a sick disease because when I feel love for my wife, excitement at the grandkids, love for the kids, that sort of thing, it makes him have an attack. So for example, when his littlest granddaughter had her second birthday party, Matt showed up. Kids were running around the living room. He was filled with the sentimental happy feelings anyone feels. And then he collapsed on the couch in the middle of a swarm of toddlers who weren't bothered by it. Matt can't even pet a puppy without collapsing. Weddings are just as bad. Matt's brother got married a few weeks ago, and Matt was there, happy for him, and therefore having an attack the whole time. He was propped against a wall, hoping people would ignore him and just go on with the wedding. Poor Matt. This was one of those things that it was just not OK for him to miss, even though we knew it would be difficult. His wedding ceremony was a very small one. They wanted to take pictures of the whole group. Immediately after, my attack hadn't cleared up, so they all basically clustered around where I was propped up against the wall and included me. And so that was very sweet of them. When you look at those pictures, what do you think? Oh, this was only a couple of weeks ago. I haven't actually seen them yet. Are you concerned about it? It seems like it might be-- I don't know-- sort of strange, but also absolutely sweet. Yeah, and in honesty, I probably won't spend much time dwelling on those pictures because it makes it more difficult to not have an attack. It can be a triggering condition just to discuss it even. So at this moment, Matt is starting to have an attack. You can hear him slowing down and hesitating more. It's a bit harder to initiate movements, and I don't know if you've noticed or not. But I feel like my eyes are sort of drooping a bit, and so. We talked for a little while more, and then Matt has to go lie down. It's half an hour before he's able to talk again. Matt's on medication now, and that medication helps him postpone the attacks. He has some warning before he loses control. And think about this. Matt had this attack while he was talking about a photograph he's never seen. If just talking about a picture can cause this, imagine all the other things Matt has to avoid. How does this affect your marriage? Well, profoundly, I guess, is really the way to put it. It's very difficult to allow myself to enjoy being with my wife. It's hard for me to have to either give up those things or not share them with Matt. It sucks, you know? How articulate of me. It's not a cool thing to happen to you. Trish is pretty open about how she's come to deal with Matt's cataplexy and how it's changed their relationship. It messes up their social life and their sex life, too. It's hard to hear that my love-- and when you had those wonderful close moments, when you sit with your arms around one another and you just want to reflect on this is a pretty cool person I'm spending my life with, those make him sick. And sometimes what goes through my mind is a little guilt because is that fair to put him through that? And am I just doing it for myself? Trish is the only person who's really close to Matt these days. She told me that she reminds everyone that if Matt didn't care about them, this wouldn't be happening, that when he collapses, it's proof of his love. Their kids even have a kind of contest going to see who causes him to have more attacks to find out who his favorite is. They'll tease each other, like, did he pass out when you talked to him on the phone? 'Cause he passed out when I talked to him. And after living with this for four years, with being punished every time he experiences happiness, Matt's adapted, though the way he's adapted is sad. He tries to enjoy things less. He told me he tries to think of himself as a robot and not engage too emotionally. He's told me he even has to be careful with how he speaks, not to get too enthusiastic or worked up. When enjoyment and positive emotions cause you to basically be stuck in a state where you can't move, it doesn't take very long for you to find them quite a bit less enjoyable than they were before. So there's sort of a natural retraining that you do of how much to derive joy from things. But it's important to point out even though Matt is being trained by his brain every day not to feel these emotions, he still has them. He's still with Trish, and they make it work. Although Matt tries to avoid happiness, it's still a part of his life. He's proof that you can't avoid happiness. It'll find you no matter what. And Matt's lucky he has a wife who's standing by him. But for now, they're not holding hands. Chris Higgins, he's the host of the Election Ride Home podcast. As I said earlier, a film is coming out this weekend that is a fictionalized story of somebody like Matt Frerking. The screenwriters basically heard this story on the radio and wrote a whole script that tries to imagine what it might be like to try to date and find love with this disease. Like, what happens when you meet somebody who really makes you so joyful, and ecstatic, and therefore triggers these attacks? The film is called Ode to Joy. It stars Martin Freeman. It's in theaters right now in New York, and Los Angeles, and then lots more cities next weekend. And you can watch right now online on Amazon and iTunes. Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and Ben Calhoun, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today show is Julie Snyder, the music up from Jessica Hopper. Additional production on today's rerun from Jessica Lussenhop, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Josh Bearman, Scott Carrier, Annie Baxter, Matt Malloy, Etgar Keret, and Douglas Robinson. Annie Correal's story in Act One was originally produced with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 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. It is so distracting when he comes into the studio while I'm here reading the credits. And he's in the background, like, making muscles and doing all kind of little stupid victory dances. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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