Host: George Dawes
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
George: [00:00:13] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour.
You might think that the best Moth stories are about overcoming steep odds to find triumph for the radiant light or something, but I don't. I don't really trust those stories. I think those tales are best left to Hollywood. I'm the founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green. And the stories I find myself drawn to are the ones about darkness, how we face up to darkness.
Life often hurts. Death always hurts. It seems pointless to deny it, but you don't have to resign yourself to it either. In the shadow of suffering, in the shadow of death, you can learn to love and flourish. Edna St. Vincent Millay put it this way, “Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.” In this hour, three Moth stories about facing the dark.
Our first story is from Kate Braestrup, who told it at a Moth in Portland, Maine, where we partner with MPBN. Here's Kate.
[applause]
Kate: [00:01:37] So, Nina's mother came up to me. She said, “I have a problem. Nina, my daughter wants to visit her cousin Andy.” Well, I looked over at Nina, and Nina was hanging by her knees from the swing in her backyard. Her hair was sweeping the ground. “How old is Nina, again?” She said, “Five.” I said, “Oh.” I should probably mention that Andy was dead, which isn't unusual. I have been the chaplain to the Maine warden service for 12 years now. And in addition to enforcing fish and wildlife law, Maine's game wardens respond to a variety of outdoor calamities, including search and rescue operations, snowmobile accidents, all-terrain vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, drownings. When it's a fatal, the chaplain goes with them.
When I teach the game wardens, the new baby game wardens, at the academy, the art of managing death, the example I usually use is my own. I want to illustrate for them that when a family member says they want to see the body of their loved one, you can trust that. You really can. So, I tell them about when my husband, Drew, died. He died in 1996. He was a police officer and he was killed instantly when his cruiser was T boned by a truck.
And as soon as I heard the news, I wanted to see his body. I wanted to take care of him and bathe and dress him. I said as much to the funeral director when he showed up at the house. And the funeral director used that special voice that they learn in funeral parlor school, [audience laughter] “Yes,” he said, “I see. Yes.” And then, he went back to the funeral parlor, went into his office and called the state police and said, “I thought you should know that trooper's widow wants to bathe and dress the body herself.” Basically, the state police freak out.
So, phone calls were going, ricocheting back and forth across the state of Maine all night long, from the state police command staff to the funeral parlor to Tom, the trooper who had been assigned specifically to manage me. And in the morning, Tom arrived at my house with the news that the state police, upon consideration, had decided that they would allow me to do this thing. “But you have to take me with you,” he said. “And I'll go too,” said my mom. Good old mom. [audience laughter] “And you have to take Sergeant Cunningham and Sergeant Drake as well, because they aren't sure about this. You're going to have to trust us, Kate, because if we don't like what we see, we are going to take you out.”
So, I pictured all three police officers taking out their sidearms [audience laughter] right there in the funeral parlor. “I don't think that will be necessary,” I said. “She grew up on a farm,” said my mom. “She's used to dead things.” [audience laughter] What were they afraid of? Well, duh. They were afraid that seeing the body would make it hurt more. They were trying to protect me. So, I had to feign absolute confidence. I took my mother's hand and she and I, flanked by law enforcement professionals, did a weird perp walk up the street [audience laughter] to the funeral parlor where Mr. Moss, the funeral director, let us in.
They all kept their eyeballs peeled, watching me walk into the cool room where Drew's body lay. He was there, and he was dead. But that's all, he was just dead. He was wearing the Halloween novelty boxer shorts, our nine-year-old had chosen for him. [audience laughter] They were covered with little bats that were saying, trick or treat. “I'm okay,” I said. So, the troopers and my mom and the funeral director all went out, and I had about 20 minutes by myself. And then, they came back. And together, we got Drew bathed and dressed in his Class A's, his dress uniform.
I can't say it was easy. I mean, if you've ever tried to put someone in a Class A uniform who's not cooperating, [audience laughter] you know what I mean? But we made him look spiffy. It was better than fine. It was better than okay. It was terrible, and beautiful, and funny, and sad and it was fine.
So, after that's the story that I use. Occasionally, there'll be a warden who needs a biblical reference. So, I'll point out to him that back in Bible times, there were no state troopers or funeral directors to get in the way of things. Mary Magdalene did not have to justify herself to the disciples, did not have to overcome their protective skepticism when she wanted to go to Jesus’ tomb to anoint His body. She did not feel called upon to justify her distress when she arrived and found the body gone.
Nowadays, we are led to believe that it's the presence of the body, not its absence, that is most distressing. But in my experience, and I have a lot of experience by now, it is far, far more common for the bereaved to wish they had seen their loved one's body than for them to regret having done so. So, at the main warden service, we are very proactive, as they say, about making space, about empowering and enabling and encouraging families, and about getting the strangers out of the way at some point in our operation, so that the moms and the dads and the lovers and the friends and the siblings can take care of their own.
And let me tell you, the mourners are magnificent. Even when the body is smelly or skeletal or ugly, they're magnificent. They are tender and brave. A mother will smooth the wet hair back from her drowned son's face. The dad will hold his hand. The spouse will lay a flower on his breast and murmur endearments. “I love you,” they say, “And goodbye.” Is this what Nina had in mind, little Nina, when she wanted to visit cousin Andy? I don't know. I don't think she knew, because she'd never seen a dead person before. She didn't even live on a farm. I mean, maybe there was a dead goldfish in her past, but she's five. That's not a lot of past to work with.
“What if it hurts more?” her mom said. “What if it hurts more? She's five years old and cousin Andy was four.” Suffer the little children to come unto me. That line kept going through my head. Although, as the wardens told me, the one good thing you could say about Andy's death was that he didn't suffer. He didn't have time. He was killed instantly when an ATV, an all-terrain vehicle driven by a neighbor, rolled over on him.
When we finished processing the scene, the body was taken directly to the funeral home. That's where Nina wanted to go. She wanted to go and visit his body. I had seen his body. I can't say it was easy. “But she's so sure”, her mom said. “She's five years old,” her dad said. Finally, I said, “You know, I think it would be okay. I don't believe it would make it worse. She's your child. You know her. You know what's best for her. But I think it would be okay.” “Well, we're going to have to think about it,” said the dad.
A few days later, I went back, because the family had asked me to preside over the service. So, I arrived at the church early, and Nina's mom was up at the altar table arranging photographs and pictures and flowers and Tonka trucks and stuff. She said, “I have to remember to leave room for the box containing Andy's ashes.” But it's a small box. I said, “So, what did you decide about Nina? What did Nina do?” She looked at me, and her eyes went big with the persistent astonishment of someone who's seen a miracle. Her eyes just pop and she goes, “Let me tell you, it was amazing.”
Little Nina, they drive her to the funeral home. She hops out of the car. She's out across the parking lot with such confidence that they have to scramble to keep up. They get to the door of the cool room where Andy's body is, and they stop her and they say, “Nina, you know, Andy is not going to be able to talk to you.” “Yup,” says Nina. “And you know that he isn't going to be able to stand up or walk or move or even open his eyes.” “Yes. Yes,” says Nina. She opens the door and in she goes. She walks right up to the dais where Andy's little body lay covered with his quilt his mom had made him when he was a baby. She walks all the way around the dais, touching him, making sure he's all there. And then, she takes his hand and she puts her head down on his chest and she talks to him.
Well, after about 10 minutes of this, her mother, who's awash in tears, says, “Okay, Nina, are you ready to go?” “No,” says Nina, “But I'll tell you when I am.” So, she smooths the hair back from his brow. She sings to him. She puts his Fisher Price telescope in his hand, so that he can see anything he wants to see from heaven. And then, she said, “I'm ready to go. Now, I'm ready to go. But he's not going to be getting up, so I have to tuck him in.” So, she walks around the dais again, tucking him in very carefully, and then she says, “I love you, Andy. Dandy. Goodbye.”
You can trust a human being with grief, even a small human being. I tell the wardens walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is only love that has come up against its oldest challenge. And after all these mortal years, love knows how to handle it. I don't need to have confidence. I certainly don't need to have to feign confidence anymore in that, because I have Nina. And with her parent’s permission, so do you. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
George: [00:14:31] That was Kate Braestrup. I talked to Kate recently about her work, which really is about facing the dark. I asked her how folks would generally react to the news that their loved ones were dead. And she said that after the initial shock of the news had faded a little, folks usually had a question for her.
Kate: [00:14:51] And the question is almost always, “Where is he? Where's the body?” Every now and then you get somebody who says, “I don't want to see the body. That's not him anymore,” or whatever, which is fine. But almost all the time they want to see the body. And they do. I mean, it's actually an amazing thing to be part of. They do it. Most of the time, in fact, they go right up to the body bag, unzip the body bag, they want to see them, they want touch them.
It doesn't actually even depend on the condition of the body that I've had people say they want to see a body that's been underwater for five months, and they see the body and they take care of the body in some symbolic way by some symbolic grooming, so wiping the mud off or something. When they're done, they’re done. And just like Nina, they say goodbye and they're ready to go. I mean, it's a miracle, George, really. [chuckles] I mean, I don't know how they do it, but they do it.
George: [00:16:00] It's interesting, because this is what you do as a chaplain. You spend a lot of time dealing with grief, and you're also such a powerful storyteller.
Kate: [00:16:08] One of the odd things about being a chaplain, is that I don't talk that much. And that is the part that really surprises my family members, [chuckles] because usually I talk quite a lot and tell stories and all of that. But just in terms of the sheer pure loss, like here's this one person who has lost someone else or here's a family who's lost someone that they can't bear to lose. I mean, that's that. And the moment that we are presiding over is by definition a hinge moment in that family's life. So, it will be remembered vividly.
I mean, life tends to divide into before we lost dad and after we lost dad or before the baby died and after the baby died. I mean, we do that. So, I sometimes think about how when that moment is remembered and that story is told by this family, with any luck, will vaguely recall that the game wardens were them and that maybe that there was this nice lady who helped or whatever. But what I really hope they remember and tell in their story, is that they were powerful, that they were loving, that they did a good job, that the story really gets to be theirs and that they are heroes of it.
George: [00:17:38] In addition to her work as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup is also the author of some penetratingly beautiful books. I suggest starting with Here If You Need Me. You can find a link at themoth.org. This story appears in the book, All These Wonders: True Stories about Facing the Unknown from The Moth, which is available now.
In a moment, a young woman, distressed by her father's memories of the Holocaust, becomes a neuroscientist driven to study the fountain of dark memories, the hippocampus. And the actor John Turturro on the strangest of family outings, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[melancholy music]
Jay: [00:18:50] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
[cheers and applause]
George: [00:19:40] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm George Dawes Green. In this hour, stories about facing the dark. Here's the neuroscientist, Daniela Schiller, telling her story at New York City's Webster Hall.
Daniela: [00:19:58] It's 10:00 AM. A siren is heard across the country. Everybody stops everything and stands in attention. The whole country is pausing for one minute of silence. It's a major violation of social rules if you don't. So, everybody does it. Men, women, children, everybody, except my dad. He just sits there, continues to read the newspaper and sips his morning coffee. He doesn't even try tone down the “Mm," he says. That's how I know Memorial Day for the Holocaust started.
This happens once a year. And it fell right on my yearly visit to Israel. The day before I take a walk in our industrial neighborhood, I see the corner where I had this horrible accident with my skateboard, but I didn't cry. I figured if my dad went through the Holocaust, surely, I can handle a little pain.
One summer, my parents travel and they sent me up north to a kibbutz to stay until they're back. There, I meet a group of Germans who came to volunteer. It's the first time I see German people. The neighborhood kids used to beat me up for looking like a German. And indeed, I blend right in. The leader of the group is Johan. Every night, we hang out together after work. With eighth grade level English, I tell him about my hometown, Rishon LeZion, and he tells me about Berlin.
One evening, Johan brings a book of poems. I think he's about to kiss me, but I keep my cool and say, “Cool, go ahead and read.” Suddenly, I hear this flood of words in German. [German language] It was a poem by Friedrich Schiller, who has my surname. That was a surprise.
Johan goes on and on. These German words are pouring out of his mouth. I never heard it so closely before. It's terrifying. I start to see images of Nazis pushing Jews into trailers, skeletal humans behind barbed wires, smoke coming out of gas chambers, until I scream stop and I push Johan off me. Johan sits there all flustered. What am I going to say? That my entire life the only times I heard German was in Holocaust movies, that the Germans did something to my dad, but I don't know what because he never talks about it?
Somehow, it doesn't feel like our after-work conversation. So, I just say, “it hurts, and I point to his foot that he's stepping on my toes. After this, I think there's something wrong with my memory. It's not my memory, it's my dad. Actually, it's not even his because he never mentioned any of his memories. Still, I have these vivid images of horrific pain and I feel intimate with death, which is very unfortunate, as I would much rather be intimate with Johan. [audience laughter]
need to do something about it. Plan A, heart-to-heart conversation with my dad. I ask him, “Dad, what happened? Why don't you ever stand in attention during the siren?” He says, “Nothing” and leaves the room. Plan B, go to college. [audience laughter] Here, I take some classes about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. I think my dad would be interested, especially because his name is also Sigmund. He listens quietly as I explain. When I'm done, he says, “Psychology is a serious load of crap.” [audience laughter] So, I decided to major in psychology. [audience laughter]
However, people talking about their emotions could be time consuming. So, I decided to focus on a simpler form of human behavior. Mice. I like them. They never talk about emotions. Just like my dad, only small and furry. [audience laughter] Every day I watch their behavior, when they sense the smell of a predator, they freeze in the corner. When they hear the sound of a bell, they freeze in the other corner. I try to change their behavior, but they never forget what they're afraid of.
In 2004, a new movie is out, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The main character wants to erase Clementine, his ex-girlfriend, from his memories. He goes to a doctor who has this innovative technique to erase memories. The state-of-the-art technology is a helmet you put on your head with some wires. [audience laughter] The helmet technology inspires me. I discovered that the movie is based on a true experiment. There's a real lab at NYU that did the actual experiment. I managed to get some government funding, pack my bags and move to New York. I show up at the very lab that did the experiment and ask for a job.
These NYU scientists found a way to change memories. They say that just the act of remembering makes the memory vulnerable. So, you take your memory out of storage. It's floating there, defenseless. That's where they hit it with a drug. So, now, you can't put it back in storage. It's blocked by the drug.
So, it looks like there's one way memory lane, which I think is genius. The only indication that this is true is in the form of a furry mouse that stopped freezing in the corner. So, they give me a job. My mission is to show that this actually works in real human beings. The way to do it is simple. I invite people to the lab and give them electric shocks. [audience laughter] Before each shock, I show them a blue square. After a few times, I don't need to give the shocks anymore. They're really afraid of the blue squares. [audience laughter]
The next phase is to give the drug and get rid of the fear. One problem is I don't actually have the drug. Experiments in humans are complicated more than mice because of federal laws. [audience laughter] So, they're really strict about giving drugs to people, but pretty lenient about giving them electric shocks. [audience laughter] So, I can only do half the experiment. Consequently, until this day, there is a subset of New York population who is really afraid of blue squares. [audience laughter]
As I try to overcome this minor setback, something happens. A bunch of mice in a nearby lab is doing something different. By mistake, they were doing something nice while reliving their bad memory. I think these mice are onto something. Maybe there's a way to rewrite the memory without the drug. The idea is, you take the memory out of storage and you link it with something nice, like the good feelings you have when you win a prize. Then you put it back in storage. But it's different. It has this new information. Your memory is only as good as your last retrieval of it. With this idea in mind, I test it on people and it works.
At least as far as blue squares go, I can rewrite their memory and they're not afraid of them anymore.
So, now, I'm back in Israel for my yearly visit. It's 10:00 AM, and the siren goes on to mark the openings of the Holocaust Memorial Day. Everybody stops and stands still to reminisce about the horrors of World War II. My dad sits there with his newspapers, sipping his morning coffee. I think I finally understand what's going on. The siren is his blue square. He is doing something pleasant while his memory is vulnerable. So, I pour myself a cup, borrow a section of his paper and sit next to him.
[cheers and applause]
George: [00:28:18] Daniela Schiller's telling of that story at The Moth triggered an extraordinary cascade of events for her, leading to her return to Tel Aviv and to the inspiring, harrowing moment when her father began to revisit his Holocaust memories. That story is told by the journalist, Michael Specter in an article in the New Yorker magazine, a beautiful piece called Partial Recall. Come to themoth.org for links and for a picture of Daniela and her father.
By the way, the music you're listening to is from a band of neuroscientists called The Amygdaloids. Daniela Schiller plays the drums.
[Mind Over Matter by The Amygdaloids]
In a moment, the actor John Turturro, his mother and his volatile brother go searching the borough of Queens for an open restaurant, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00:29:49] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
George: [00:30:27] This is The Moth Radio hour from PRX. I'm George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth. Our final story about facing the dark comes from the actor John Turturro, who told it at the Cooper Union in New York City.
[cheers and applause]
John Turturro: [00:30:49] My story begins. I am driving my Silver Station Volvo from Brooklyn to my mother's house in Rosedale, Queens, on a hot mid-afternoon August day in 2003. My mother is a widow. My father has passed away from lung cancer 15 years before in 1988. She has not resumed dating. She has sworn off men in no uncertain terms. She has told me that “I am never, ever going to wash another pair of men's underwear again. [audience laughter] I am finished with the species. I'm done.”
She's somewhere around 80 years old, but I don't know, for sure, because she's never told me how old she is. [audience laughter] Matter of fact, on my birth certificate, you can see that she has altered her age. [audience laughter] I'm very close with my mother. We have a very tight relationship. We've always had this bond, this complicity, this silent love between us. I check in with her almost every evening to make sure she's okay and to alleviate her loneliness.
One afternoon when I was editing a film and it was around 12:30, 1 o'clock, and I felt this strange feeling in my body as if somebody was tapping me, saying, “Maybe you should check in on your mother.” I just stood up and I told my editor, “I have to call my mother.” I called her up, and she was having a heart attack and she said, “I'm fine. Don't worry.” And she hung up. [audience laughter] I called her back, and I was able to get the ambulance and myself there in the nick of time.
As long as I can remember, I've always been my mother's protector against my father, my brother and the rest of the world. And she also mine. I grew up in a very volatile house. My father was a World War II veteran. He suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, which wasn't really diagnosed in those days. My older brother, who also had problems lived downstairs. As my father got sick from cancer, he lost his booming voice. As his voice faded away, my brother's voice in the basement rose. I could tell that this was not a good sign for things to come.
You know, when we grow up, we all think we're going to get married, we're going to have our own family and we're going to leave the other family behind, our siblings and our parents. But it doesn't actually always occur that way. It's very hard to break those ties from the first family that formed you.
Anyway, we get in the car, my mother, that day, and we're going to visit my brother, Ralph, who no longer lives with my mother. He now resides at the Creedmoor Mental Health State Hospital. He's lived there for the last seven years. It's the Psychiatric State Hospital. That's the one that's located in Queens off Union Turnpike. Now, he's not too happy about living there, but that's where he's been there for the last seven years. He's been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, borderline personality. Any diagnosis that's out there, he's got it, okay? This is how it's been.
So, he's also been to therapy. He's had shock treatments. He's had every combination of antipsychotic drugs and all the side effects that go with it, the weight gain, the teeth loss, the tremors, the shaking, the stiffness, diabetes. This is the situation that he's in. When he's stable, we were actually allowed to take him out on a pass. He loves to go out on passes, because we take him shopping and he gets something to eat, because he doesn't like the food there. And he also loves to go to the hair salon.
My brother Ralph's hair is very important to him. He doesn't have many teeth, but his hair has to be done just so. If it's not just so, his emotional state plummets and then we have to deal with that. So, we’re on the way to Creedmoor. Creedmoor was a place he lives in building 40. It's 17 story building. He's in the lock facility on the 11th floor. And Creedmoor, when were kids, we used to pass on the parkway with my father driving. It was a place where the boogeyman lived. It was a place where all the crazy people lived and used to say, “You don't want to wind up in Creedmoor.” And that was what we said to each other. And now, it's my brother's home. This is actually the first time I've ever spoken about it in public.
So, we get there, you have to go through two sets of doors, which then you're locked into. I walk to the elevator. I press the button, because it's on the 11th floor. Look at the bank of lights. As we're waiting for the elevator to descend, in the lobby with the security personnel, the lights go out. We don't know what happened. We're all looking around. It's two years after 9/11. Everyone's a little jittery. We're thinking, hey, maybe this could be another attack or something. Most people don't have cell phones. I don't have a cell phone.
About 10 minutes later, they say it's a blackout. It's the blackout of 2003, which affected, I think, 50 million people and knocked out Ontario and eight states here in America. But we don't know this at the time. All I know is that my brother has a pass and he wants to go out and he's looking forward to it. So, I asked the guys, can they call upstairs and talk to the doctor? And they do, and they say, “I can go up there.” So, I asked my mother, I said, “Listen, you wait down here. I go upstairs.”
I start walking up the 11. They're very long flights. It's dark. I'm thinking, What a roller coaster? Mental illness is not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved. It's a sentence that you're given, and it's a life sentence. There's all the things that you have to go through. The doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction, literally and emotionally. The police coming to your house, the shame that you live with. It just goes on and on. It's not like those movies like A Beautiful Mind, where someone reaches out and says, “All you need is love.” [audience laughter]
Love is a given. But it's a war of attrition. It really is. It's a long, endless baseball season that never, ever ends. It goes on and on. Really what it is, it's this grind-- You have to have unbelievable patience and this emotional fortitude to survive. It kills a lot of people. And that's why you see so many people out on the street, because their families flee, and I don't blame them, and they become wards of the state. So, anyway, that's what's going through my mind as I come up and knock on the door.
My brother's happy to see me. I talk to the doctor, and then his friend, this young, thin black man, Isaiah, who draws his life every day. He storyboards his entire existence, comes over and shows me his latest masterpiece. And I said, “It's very nice, Isaiah,” as I'm trying to deal with my brother and the doctor. He whispers in my ear, “Can I come too with you?” [audience laughter] And I said, “Isaiah, listen, I love to. I love to take you, but it's a blackout and I'm going to take Ralph, okay?” [audience laughter] So, the doctor says, “Okay.”
So, we go down the stairs. We have to go down slow, because my brother can't see so well, because he had an altercation with a very huge patient who was an ex-prisoner from Rikers Island. And the guy savagely beat him and now he's blind in one eye, so I have to take him down. So, I come down with my brother and my mom, who's getting older, come outside. And of course, we've brought him cigarettes. Now, I'm worried about the time because it was 04:10 when the blackout happened. By now, it's around 5 o' clock.
But my brother is in no hurry. [chuckles] I'm worried about the light. Anyway, so, I give him a cigarette. He can't have one cigarette. He has to have one after another and another. He smokes them down to the very tiny bit end. When you give him the pack, you have to open it just so. Everything according to his specifications, otherwise, he will take the cigarettes out and break them. That's how symbolic of my relationship with him. Much of the time, I buy him cigarettes, he breaks them. I buy him a CD player, he rips off the cover. I renovate my mother's house, he burns it down.
We get in the car. [audience laughter] He has to sit in the back seat over here, so I can see him in the mirror, because it's precarious. My mother sits here. She's never driven, so she doesn't know that much about driving. But I want to keep my eye on him. So, I'm driving. There are no stoplights. I have to make sure I keep my eye on my brother, who sometimes can punch the window out of frustration. I have to figure out, where am I going. It's a blackout. What are we going to do? I know he's hungry.
So, my mother says, “Why don't you make a left turn?” I'm in the far-right lane. I say, “Mom, I can't go over three lanes like that.” But she seems oblivious. It's getting later. We see the diner that we normally go to. We pull in. There's no one in there, but it seems open. So, we get out and the guy looks at us, we walk in. He's this big Greek guy with a walrus mustache. And I say, “Are you serving?” And he says, “Blackout.” He goes like this. He says, “Blackout.” [audience laughter]
I know it's a blackout. My brother looks at him and goes, “I want a cheeseburger.” [audience laughter] He goes, “No cheeseburger. Blackout. Coffee.” So, my mother tries to alleviate refereeing the situation. She says, “Well, you must have a gas stove.” He says, “Pilot light, electric. Coffee. No cheeseburger.” So, my brother, of course, keeps asking for the cheeseburger. Then he says, “What about French fries?” And the guy goes, “No, no, no.” So, my mother and my brother look at him incredulously. Like, “Look at this guy. What a weakling. There's a blackout and he falls like a cheap suit. [audience laughter]
So, anyway, I'm looking at the clock. It's getting later. I get him in a car. After another cigarette, we're driving. Everything is closed. It's like a ghost town, because people worry when there's a blackout. They remember 1977. The stores are closed. The restaurants are closed. Even the hair salon is closed, which is very upsetting to Ralph. We just keep driving and driving and I'm going, “Okay, it's going to get darker.” We don't know where we're going, plus I have my own family back in Brooklyn, my wife and two kids.
So, finally, I see a little pizzeria on the corner and I pull over and I say, “Wow.” I jump out, it looks open. I run in there and the guy has a wood burning oven and he says, “Yes, I'm open.” He's an Italian guy, of course, so that's good. [audience laughter] So, I get them to come out, we sit outside out on the table, and we order brick oven pizza and warm soda. They come, it takes a long time. I'm looking at my mother and thinking, “Wow, she's getting older.” I'm looking at my brother thinking, “What's going to happen after she's gone? Who's going to take care of them?” I'm the middle child and one of three boys, and I'm the responsible one for good and for bad. I think, well, I'm going to be alone with him one day and it's going to just be me and him.
My brother looks at me-- He's very perceptive when he's calm. He can spot a person's weakness with startling accuracy and speed like that. He looks at me and he says, “You know, you get a lot of material from me, don't you?” [audience laughter] I go, “Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.” [audience laughter] He goes, “Where would you be without me?” [audience laughter] [audience applause]
Anyway, we have the pizza. Of course, Ralph wants ice cream, but it's all melted by then. So, he has a milkshake ice cream sandwich, which he's happy and wolfs it down. The sun is now setting, so I'm thinking, we got to get back. So, I finally get them in the car, go through the same ritual. We drive slowly. There is no streetlights, there's no stoplights. It's starting to get dark. We finally make it back to this big 17 story, foreboding, ugly, big building with bars. Building 40, the Creedmoor Psychiatric State Hospital.
I pull in. He has some more cigarettes. And then, I come in. I leave my mother in the car and then I help him in. The place is not lit and it's not air conditioned anymore. And so, I really feel torn in all these directions, like, is my mother, my brother, my family in Brooklyn. I go with my brother, help him up the 11 flights. It's always hard to say goodbye to him, but this day, it's even stranger because here he is in this place and he's in the dark, in a dark place. And so, I give him a hug, I tell him I see him soon, come down, get my mother, and I drive on the parkway to her house in Rosedale, which is a long trip.
So, I get her in the house. The flashlights work, I check the refrigerator. The food is actually still cold. And then, she's at the door, I remember that, with a little flashlight and saying, “Be careful, drive carefully.” I get in my car and I make my way back to Brooklyn. I'm thinking in the car, thinking like we imagine that we live in the light. We imagine we know what's going to happen. We imagine we can foresee what's going to happen. We imagine we can control everything. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that and the reality is, truthfully, that almost all of us are just stumbling along in the dark, searching, trying to reach some home while we're juggling all these balls, hopefully keeping them afloat. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
George: [00:47:35] That was John Turturro. John has performed in many films and received the Camera Door Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, the film, Mac. You can find out more about John and about all our storytellers at themoth.org. You can also find this story in The Moth's new book, All These Wonders.
Do you have a story to tell us? You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site or call 877-799-M-O-T-H. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed for Moth shows all around the world. Here's a pitch we liked.
Esther: [00:48:27] Even a few years after my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he was still pretty functional. But then, he started to do these strange things like leaving the stove on and wandering away from home. So, finally, my mom realized she had to put him into adult daycare at the Jewish Community center. She knew that he would be really ashamed to go. And so, she lied to him and she told him he had been hired to teach the other Alzheimer's patients about Judaism. This is how my father began believing that he was a rabbi.
He was raised Jewish, but he was never very religious. Still, he loved being a rabbi. He wore a yarmulke every day, he refused to shave his beard or eat pork, he claimed to speak Yiddish fluently and that he worked at the village temple. He was so convincing that some of the staff at this Jewish center didn't realize he wasn't actually a rabbi. While this whole thing was really sad, it was okay, because he was so happy. When I think back about how much I miss the man that my dad was, sometimes I also miss the rabbi that he was.
George: [00:49:41] Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-M-O-T-H or online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories or others from The Moth archive right through our website or by using The Moth app, which is now available for iOS or Android. We're also on Facebook and Twitter, @themoth.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:50:25] Your host this hour was George Dawes Green. The stories in the show were directed by Catherine Burns and Jenifer Hixson. The rest of The Moth’s directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Ly. Our pitch line story in this hour came from Esther Honing.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Stellwagen Symphonette, Eastmountainsouth, Tin Hat Trio, Gustavo Santoallalla. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world.
The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. A reminder that The Moth's new book, All these Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, is now available. It features 45 stories from our archive, including many of our all-time favorites here on The Moth Radio Hour. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.