Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Kennedy. And this week is all about summertime disaster and misadventures. School's out, the weather's warm and the kids are left to their own devices. Oh, God, that was the sweetest feeling on Earth. We've got two stories for you this week.
First up, Nisse Greenberg. Nisse told this story at a SLAM we had in Philadelphia, where the theme of the night was The Fast Lane. Here's Nisse, live at The Moth.
[applause]
Nisse: [00:00:32] Hi. So, we're in the back of Adam's mom's minivan and-- I'm in the back of Adam's mom's minivan and I'm thinking about how the seating arrangement really represents the social hierarchy of our friend group. [audience chuckles] We usually don't get to ride in Adam's mom's minivan, but his mom is working the late shift at the hospital, so we got to steal the car. Usually, we take Adam's 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit, which can fit five people, six if you're going on back roads, and I consider myself the seventh friend. Typically, conversations after school go like this. “Oh, we have Adam's car. I can fit, like, how many people do we have? We have 1, 2, 7.” Everybody just sits silently until I go. “I think I have homework. I think I got a lot of homework to do.” “Oh, really? You have home work. Oh, that sucks. That we wanted to-- All right, let's go.” [audience laughter]
Every Friday and Saturday-- And so, there are some days though you can't not hang out with friends, because you don't want to look at your parents pitying face anymore. Or, they're like, “Oh, no, it's our pleasure to play board games with you again on Friday.” [audience chuckles] Always been our dream. We had a son. You want to do some sort of the- [audience laughter] But it's the last day of school sophomore year, and I don't want to see my parents face. So, I take the bus into town, so that I can meet up with my friends and hang out in the minivan, because I know we got the minivan. It doesn't matter anyway because-- Oh, God, sorry. Because I was going to get a scholarship to go to Australia. [audience laughter] Another white guy talking about,- [audience laughter] [audience applause] -“You thought you were safe, but you're not.” I was going to go to Australia. [audience laughter] Scholarship. And I was going to have a whole new group of friends. It didn't matter that I was the seventh friend and that I was in the backseat of the minivan, because I was going to get to go zip lining through the Jungle and go to Ayers Rock and go scooter scuba diving by the Great Barrier Reef and see animal. The animals in Australia are crazy, because Darwin and shit. [audience chuckles] I'm so psyched about this new plan, which is going to inform my new life. And then, I fade back into reality, because I'm tired of daydreaming about trying to defend my lifestyle, which is my favorite pastime, but also makes me feel icky inside.
I listen to what we're talking about, and what everybody's talking about is a place to go longboarding. I don't know if you've ever gone longboarding, but it's skateboarding for nerdier kids. [audience chuckles] It's like, if you wanted to skateboard but didn't want to do any fun tricks. [audience laughter] So, they're looking for a cool place to go longboarding. And I go, “Hey. Hey. Hey, guys.” “What?” “What about West Street Extension?” And this wave of revelation comes from the back and reorders the social hierarchy. Everybody's like, “Yeah, West Street Extension,” which is this cut off road that no traffic is allowed to go on and is two and a half miles of slight downhill, which is the perfect amount of time to contemplate your loneliness. [audience chuckles]
We all high five awkwardly, because we don't really have an emotional connection. [audience laughter] We zip off to West Street Extension. We get to the top and Eben gets out and he puts down his board and he zips off into the distance, into the darkness. And then, Josh puts down his board and he looks at me and he goes, “Nisse, you want to go?” I know that seems like a very minor moment, but it was big. I was getting picked second, and I am so used to getting picked second to last, just above snot bubble. [audience laughter] And I'm psyched.
I jump on the board and I kick off hard, so I can start going fast. I go 5ft before I realize I'm going really fast. [audience laughter] Like a really, really fast. And I'm like, “This is maybe too fast.” I went too-- I bit off a little more than I could chew. I'm going to jump off. I'm going to start over. I know it's embarrassing, but whatever, I'll just start over. I can go at my pace. I jump off and my feet stop and the rest of my body doesn't. [audience laughter] And the next thing that hits the ground is my face. And then, I roll onto my arm and then I rag doll it 720 onto my knee. I can hear my friends laughing behind me. Don't feel bad for me. I went five feet and fell off. [audience laughter]
I don't have time. Leo comes running towards me. Really, he's running towards the board. I look down and my knee is doing a dollar squirt gun, and my arm doesn't have any more skin on it. He looks at me, and he stops and he goes six shades paler of white. And I'm like, “What? What's wrong?” “Oh, my God.” I realize my face is in this many pieces and everybody goes into teenage panic mode and trying to solve everything. Like, “We got to go to the hospital. How do we get to the hospital?” They shove me in shotgun, which is sweet. I've never gotten shotgun before. [audience laughter]
We go off. We start going to the hospital and we're planning in our mind, in the way, like, “Oh, we can't go to the hospital because Adam's mom's there. We weren't supposed to steal the car.” We were like, “Which way? We got to get to the home first.” And I go, “Guys, guys, guys.” And everybody goes, “What, what, what?” Because he wasn't the guy whose face is in as many pieces as the Soviet Union after the communist fall. And I go, “Guys, if my parents ask, I was wearing a helmet.” [audience laughter] We all high five, a little less awkwardly, because we're a little more emotionally connected.
We get to the hospital and what we realize is that my jaw is broken in two places. I'm going to have to have it wired shut. I can't go into high altitudes, into the jungle and I can't go swimming and I can't go to Australia, and I've never been to Australia. But my parents still think I was wearing a helmet. [audience laughter] Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:07:32] That was Nisse Greenberg. Wow, this is an interesting bio. Nisse enjoys eating food that challenges assumptions of moral hierarchies like salt liquorice or that 9% milk fat yogurt. Here's the more traditional part of that bio. He's been a high school math teacher and storytelling instructor. Nowadays, he's the deputy director of The Story Collider, a non-profit dedicated to true personal stories about science.
Next up, we have a story from Anagha Mahajan. Anagha told this story at a Chicago StorySLAM, where the theme of the night was Broken. Here's Anagha, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Anagha: [00:08:20] All right. So, my grandfather is the biggest miser that I have ever known in my entire life. [audience laughter] Don't get me wrong, he's a good guy and I loved him. But that was after I really got to know him. But up until my early years, I thought he was quite the penny pincher, to put it nicely. [audience chuckles]
So, my brother Anand and I, we are two years apart. We both spent most of our childhood with our grandparents, because my father had a transferable job and they made the wise parenting decision of just dropping us off at our grandparent’s place. [audience laughter] So, my grandparents lived in this small town, almost a village in India in the state of Maharashtra called Chikhli. So, it was a little village where my grandfather was a lawyer. He was well respected, well feared as well. [audience laughter] And his father before him was also a lawyer and a landlord. So, all that put together, ours was a well-educated and pretty well to do family in the otherwise poor and not so well to do neighborhood.
So, my brother and I grew up in a neighborhood filled with lots of kids. All the kids were scared of my grandfather, as was everybody else. Now, I say my grandfather was a miser, because I noticed a lot of things about him growing up when I was 10 or 12. One peculiar thing he used to do was he used to turn off the main power supply to our house before he left to work, [audience laughter] before he went to court. “Why do you need electricity in the day?” he would say. [audience laughter] “Read a book.” [audience laughter] He would turn it back only after he was back, and after it was dark, and still we would just turn on little lights like that and never the big tube lights, what we had in our house.
This was all right during the school year, but it was particularly difficult in the summer vacation when all of us were home for three months straight. This was one particular summer when I was 10, my brother was 12. It was also very hot in the part of the country where we grew up, so it could be 120 degrees on some days. And without electricity, we had to come up with very innovative ways to keep ourselves busy. And one way was the kids these days may not know, but it was to play outside. [audience laughter]
We used to play outside. But sometimes there was this fear of getting burned because of the sun. So, we had to play inside. We had this big house built by the British back in the day. It's 100-year-old. So, our house has this large lobby right outside, rectangular. So, the kids, our friends and my brother and I came up with this novel game. It was called indoor cricket. [audience laughter] So, just like cricket, which is just like baseball, not really. [audience laughter]
So, we came up with this really intricate game where, there was a pitcher, the batsman. No, the pitcher is a baller, right? Yeah. So, there was a bowler, there was a batsman and things like that. We came up with really detailed rules. Like, you couldn't do overarm bowling. You had to do only underarm. You could be out even if it is one toss catch, you could score certain runs when it hits the wall, when it hit something else. So, it was a very intricate game.
One afternoon, we were playing this game and I was batting, whatever it's called in baseball terms, and I was feeling particularly heroic that afternoon. When my friend pitched it underarm, I swung my bat. And the moment it hit the bat, fuck. [audience laughter] And I realized something's going to go wrong. The ball just went in top speed. I still remember, I see the ball flying away and it went straight for the wall in front of me and there was a tube light on the wall up and it just hit it right in the center and splat. The tube light just broke into millions of pieces and came chattering down. And that was that.
We were just panicking and we were all frozen in our feet. One of my friends, he was so scared that he ran away and we never saw him for rest of the summer. [audience laughter] But my brother and I, we had to do something, because the whole indoor cricket worked like a clockwork. Only because we knew that my grandfather left at 10:00 AM in the morning and he was back at 04:00 PM in the afternoon. So, we had to get order in that particular room before 04:00.
So, we put on our best problem-solving hat, and we cleaned the mess right there and then we wanted to find out what to do about the tube light. We couldn't buy a new one, we didn't have the resources to go get one. Not the money, obviously, because he never gave us anything. [audience laughter] But then, it struck in that moment that because we grew up in this household where head of household is my grandfather, Ajoba, as we called him, we never threw away anything. Even if it didn't work, we always kept it.
So, I knew there were some tube lights lying around in the house. I quickly grabbed one. So, it didn't work, but it wasn't broken. So, we put it back up into the slot, wherever the now broken tube light was, and we put it there. We were very confident that we wouldn't be caught, because my grandfather never turns on the tube light in the night. [audience laughter]
So, yeah, he came back he saw the tube light, he didn't find anything fishy. That day went by, three months went by and the tube light never got turned on. One night, he was reluctant, it was winter, so he had to turn it on. I was right there and he goes like, “What happened to the tube light?” But I was ready. For three months, I have been practicing when this moment comes. [audience laughter] What I'm going to do? So, he goes like, “What happened?” I just put my best practice shrug, and I go like, “I don't know.” [audience laughter] And that was that.
So, the tube light got replaced and it was never spoken of again. It's been years since that incident. My grandfather passed away, and I was back in the house few years after that. I was sitting in the same lobby and very fondly was looking at the slot where the broken tube light was remembering my grandfather very fondly at that time, and I realized that I've been sitting in a very low-lit room. The tube light was still not on. And in that moment, I realized that I am my miser grandfather now. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:15:09] That was Anagha Mahajan. Anagha was born and raised in a small town in India. She was an electronics engineer for many years, but she's recently started her dream job as program manager at Google. In her free time, she loves planning events, hiking and hosting friends for board games.
That's it for us this week here on The Moth Podcast. Until next time from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.
Julia: [00:15:37] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth.
Dan: [00:15:45] Podcast, production by Julia Purcell. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.