Host: Jay Allison
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. And this time, we're bringing you a storytelling event recorded live at the beautiful Wilbur Theater in Boston and presented in partnership with public radio station WGBH. The theme of the evening was Twist of Fate. And your host is author and storyteller Tara Clancy.
[cheers and applause]
Tara: [00:00:36] Boston! How are ya?
[cheers]
You good? All right. All right. Well, I was going to come up here and say that they brought me in, because I'm local flavor, but the truth is, in New York, because my accent is now so rarefied, people always ask me more than once if I'm from Boston. [audience chuckle] They'll ask me if I'm Boston. And the first few times, I'm like, "No, no." Finally, I was just like, "Yeah, I am. [audience chuckle] I am from Wellsington. It's very fancy. [audience chuckle] I grew up in a big house, lot of money." No, I am from Queens.
All right. So, the question tonight was, “Tell us what the last time you were surprised. What was your last big surprise,” when I asked our first storyteller that question, she said “Today, when she picked out a pastry, thinking that it was berry, but instead it was beets.” [audience chuckle] Yuck. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sofija Stefanovic.
[cheers and applause]
Sofija: [00:01:54] Last year, on top of my relationship with my boyfriend Michael, I found myself in another relationship with a woman called Cindy. It was based on deception and guilt, and it left me feeling like a crap. So, I first met Cindy on the internet via my spam folder. She was single, [audience chuckle] she was a hairstylist, she was from Senegal, she was obviously a scammer. Now, I already knew something about scammers, because I had written for a TV show a couple years back and I'd researched them. So, I knew that romance scammers approach lonely hearts online, and they start a relationship with them and they eventually fleece them of their money. I had even become friends with a romance scam victim, an 80-year-old guy called Bill, who had been left heartbroken and bankrupt by his scam.
And just before I moved from Australia to the US, I celebrated Bill's birthday with him. I was the only guest. We spoke as we usually did about his scam. And he said something that really stuck with me. He said that the whole time he was being scammed, he knew in the back of his head that he was being scammed, but he kept sending money because he couldn't bear for it to end. I found that fascinating how someone's-- I'd always thought that scam victims were pretty gullible people and that they were a bit stupid. But Bill was neither of these things. He was a really smart, worldly man. I thought it was amazing how someone's loneliness can override their common sense.
And so, last year, my boyfriend Michael and I make the big move from Melbourne, Australia, to New York. And every day, Michael goes to work and he makes new friends and I stay at home researching scams, because I want to write about them. I want to write about victims like Bill, and I want to write about perpetrators. So, that's around the time that Cindy's email comes into my spam folder. And it says something like, "Hello, my sweet man, are you looking for a friendship?" Everyone gets those emails. You get them all the time. You just press delete. But for me, at this particular point in my life, it was like this amazing present that had dropped in my lap and here I had myself a guinea pig scammer.
So, I responded. I clicked reply and I said, "Hello, Cindy, tell me about your hairstylist work." And immediately, I get this ping notification that Cindy wants to chat with me. And she says, "Hi, sweetie." Clearly, she's got her wires crossed between me and someone else who she's scamming, because she asks me what the weather is like in Mumbai. [audience chuckle] So, I google it and I tell her what the weather is like in Mumbai. [audience laughter] It becomes apparent that she thinks I'm a middle-aged man, which I also don't correct her on, because we're all lying to each other at this point. [audience laughter] And so, she thinks I'm a middle-aged man in Mumbai and she knows about the weather now. I also used a fake unisex name just to make things a bit easier for myself.
So, Cindy sends me a photo. She's this Senegalese woman, quite pretty, with a full build, hair tied back in a ponytail, leaning against a car. Even though I know that this isn't necessarily the real Cindy who I'm talking to, because scammers often steal photos from various places, it's easier to attach a face to a name. So, whenever something comes from Cindy, this is the woman who I think of. The World Cup soccer is just starting at this point, and I'm a fan. And because Cindy is from Senegal, I assume that she is too, because soccer is big in Senegal. But she tells me that she's not into it, but that she will make an effort to watch it, because I like it, and that's what people in relationships do for each other. So, according to her, we're now dating. [audience laughter]
So, while my boyfriend is at work, my Senegalese girlfriend and I chat online and watch soccer. [audience laughter] When my boyfriend is not at work, I tactfully close my laptop, because I don't want him to think that while he's away, all I'm doing is chatting to scammers. I don't want him to see just how many pings I get from Cindy, because I get so many pings from Cindy. Cindy is probably the most attentive person I've ever semi-dated in my life. [audience laughter] If I go to the restroom, she'll write like, "Hey, babe, I love you." And if I'm not there to answer immediately, she'll write the same thing like 60 more times. So, I'll come back to this screen full of "I love you, I love you," which is, in some ways, really nice and in some ways, really overwhelming. [audience chuckle]
So, we've been chatting for a couple of weeks. One thing that I find strange, is that Cindy hasn't asked me for any money yet, even though technically that's her job, right, as a scammer. So, she sends me emails full of her favorite R&B lyrics and photos of herself, but no money requests. She does, however, start asking me for a photo of myself, and she still thinks I'm the middle-aged Indian guy. So, I've got a problem now, and I think, okay, I'm just going to come clean. Cindy's going to break up with me. It won't be too bad, because this is taking up quite a lot of my time. I think I've taken this relationship far enough.
So, I type, "Hey, Cindy, I have a confession to make." And she says, "What is it?" And I say, "I am not a man." And there's silence. I think, oh God. Cindy's up at 01:00 AM, she's working really hard for a buck and I've just told her that I've been lying to her. And she says, "Well, send me a picture." And by this point, I thought I would be Cindy free, so I'm a little confused that she's asking me for a picture. So, I make something up about how I don't have any pictures on my hard drive. And she says, "Hey, listen, you have been lying to me for several weeks now. I have sent you my photos. The least you could do is send me a photo of yourself." And in this moment, because I'm prone to feeling anxious and guilty at the best of times, I think, actually, she's right. I really should send her a photo.
So I get a photo, I send it [audience laughter] and I wait to see what she says. And she writes back, and she says, "Oh, you're pretty." And I go, all in capitals, I write, "THANK YOU, SO ARE YOU!" Because I'm quite flattered. Also, I'm really relieved that she's not angry at me anymore. Also, I've just realized that I've sent her a real photo of myself that she could potentially trace back to the real me and then send me a dead rat in the mail. [audience chuckle] So, I'm dealing with all this stuff. Cindy's typing a really long message, because I can see by the little dots. She sends it, and she says, "Hey, listen, I was brought up thinking that women should be with men, but I have fallen in love with you and I am willing to give this relationship a try. Even though you are a woman, I'm willing to keep going with it if you are."
I'm taken aback by this as well. And in the heat of the moment, I type, "Okay, let's do it." [audience laughter] So, suddenly, the real me is dating Cindy. [audience laughter] So, Cindy soon becomes tired of just chatting online and she asks me to call her. So, I dutifully do. She picks up the phone and says, "Hello." And I say, "Hello." And suddenly, my scammer not only has a face from the photo I remembered, but she has a voice. She doesn't sound like someone working for an international criminal organization. She just sounds like a tired woman trying to keep her voice down. And a baby starts crying, and I say, "Oh, do you have kids?" And Cindy says, "No, no, no. That's just the kid of this family who I share an apartment with."
I think maybe she's not telling me the truth, that she's a parent, and I wonder whether she has a partner or if she's a single parent. And then, Cindy says that she's about to be evicted from her apartment and she needs $140. And there it is. It's what I was waiting for this whole time. But suddenly, I'm not really ready for it, because Cindy isn't just a spam in my inbox anymore. She's actually a real person on the other end of the line asking me personally to help her. And so, I make up a lie about how I told my friend about her, and my friend said that maybe Cindy's a scammer. It's not that I think that, but you know, are you?
And Cindy says, "What?" She says it with such outrage that for a second I think, hang on, what if I've got this whole thing wrong and she is just like a hairstylist from Senegal who did fall in love with me, thinking I was a middle-aged Indian man, and then has stayed in love with me actually, and I'm the idiot? And then, I think, no, that's probably not true. So, I say, "I'm sorry, I can't send you any money." And she says, "All right, never mind." And the conversation peters out.
Afterwards, even though I know that it's Cindy's job to scam me, I can't help but feel guilty, because I think about her tired voice, I think about that baby crying and I think that $140 isn't really that much money. I start googling Senegal and I see that 50% of its population lives in poverty. And who's to say that Cindy isn't one of those people? And right on cue, an email comes from Cindy and she reminds me of her hard life. She tells me that her parents are dead, that her uncle is abusive, that she could sell her body like other girls, but she doesn't. And she says, "I'm trying to be a good girl. Please help me." Even if the things she's telling me aren't true, I know that they could be true. I feel like a jerk for stringing her along and I decide that I want to write Cindy a real letter from the real me.
I start typing this email in which I want to be honest and I want to tell her a little bit about me, but I end up telling her a whole lot. So, I tell her that my family moved from Yugoslavia to Australia when the wars began, that my dad died when I was little, that when my parents took us over to Australia, they thought that we'd never be split up again, but that here I've moved to New York and I've left my mother behind and that I miss my mum and my sister.
I don't know why I'm telling Cindy all of this. Like, I think maybe I want her to see that I'm different to the other people she chats with on the internet. I think I want her to like me. But in any case, while I'm typing, I find myself crying. I write to Cindy that if only she'll be honest with me and tell me about her real self and about being a scammer that I'll find some money and I'll send it to her, that I don't mind. And the next day Cindy writes back and she ignores most of my email and just says that she's not a scammer and sends me her Western Union details. [audience laughter] That annoys me. So, I go back to her and say I'm not going to do it, unless she admits to people being a scammer.
We go back and forth like this for about a week, getting more and more annoyed with each other, until finally Cindy snaps and she writes me this email all in caps, angry voice, telling me that I'm a wicked, selfish woman and that she wouldn't want my money even if I did send it. She tells me that God will send a helper for her, because God always helps those in need. And she tells me that she never wants to hear from me again. And for the first time in a month, my computer goes completely silent.
After Cindy dumps me, [audience chuckle] I feel like I understand Bill a little bit better. Because Bill said that the whole time he was being scammed, he knew in the back of his mind that he was being scammed, but he kept sending money, because he didn't want to get dumped the way that I had. Bill made up excuses for his scammer just like I made up excuses for Cindy, even though I knew she was a scammer in the front of my mind. But still I told myself, maybe she's a single parent, maybe she really needs this money.
It reminded me of one of those really bad relationships that you stay in and you overlook so much bad stuff, because you don't want to be alone. I still think about Cindy sometimes, like when I'm watching sports [chuckles] and I wonder about her. I wonder if her baby still cries while she's scamming people. I wonder whether she still has that photo of me and if she'll one day take her revenge. I wonder whether she thinks about me at all and if she remembers the things we told each other, some of them true, some of them not, about soccer and friendship and love. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Tara: [00:15:04] Sofija Stefanovic.
Jay: [00:15:08] Sofija Stefanovic is a Serbian-Australian writer living in New York. She hosts the monthly literary salon Women of Letters at Joe's Pub. She's the author of You're Just Too Good to Be True, a love story about lonely hearts and internet scams.
[upbeat music]
Support for The Moth comes from Constant Contact with email marketing features like drag and drop editing and mobile-friendly templates. Constant Contact is committed to helping small businesses and nonprofits become marketers. Learn more at constantcontact.com.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
[cheers and applause]
Jay: [00:16:27] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. And we're bringing you a live event recorded in Boston at the Wilbur Theatre. Here's your host, Tara Clancy, telling a story of her own.
Tara: [00:16:40] All right. Are you ready? Lesbian baby making 101, here it comes. [chuckles] So, for my first son, it was super easy. My wife and I went to a sperm bank. We got sperm, she got inseminated and nine months later, we had a baby. But my second son, things get a lot more interesting. So, we go back to our same doctor when we're ready to have the second kid.
And at this point, my wife is 10 years older than me, so she was 42 and I was 32. We sit down, you know, down at his desk, and he just says right away, he just says, "Listen, medically speaking, Tara, you should have this baby." [audience chuckle] And right away, I say, “No.” [audience laughter] Just like that. “Nope. Have you seen me? No, no. I don't do those sorts of things.” [audience chuckle]
Really, really, I want to be pregnant, like, about as much as that guy, right? [audience laughter] Actually, that guy wants to be pregnant a little more than me, all right? [audience laughter] That's how little I want to be pregnant. But he convinces me that I have to go home and I have to think about it. Okay, fine. I decide that I'm going to at least give it one night. He says, "Give it one night." And I said, "Okay." I go back to my apartment and my wife gives me some space, and I'm just like-- I'm pacing around the apartment and I'm trying to, like, hype myself into it-- I'm trying to convince myself to do it.
And the way that I'm doing that is the same, I think, as the way, the night before my varsity softball tryout, Like I'm just walking around the apartment. I'm going, "Come on, Clancy, you're coming in the clutch. [audience chuckle] Come on, we're going to take one for the team. Come on, let's go. You could do this." I go over to the mirror in my apartment, and I'm just looking at myself in the mirror, and I turn and I puff out my shirt. I'm imagining myself pregnant. But more than that, I'm imagining somebody else seeing me pregnant. I don't realize what I'm doing in the moment, but I'm going, "You talking to me? [audience laughter] You talking to a pregnant lady? You talking to me, right?"
Like, other women, they go home, they knit booties, I'm De Niro in Taxi Driver. [audience laughter] But it works. I don't know why or how, but it works. I decide that I am going to go through with it. And so, I go back to the doctor. I had this preliminary blood work done, and I go back to the doctor, and I sit back down, and he takes a look at me and he just goes, "Okay." He goes, "Tara, you have a fertility problem." I said, "Yes, I know. It's called being a lesbian. [audience laughter] What am I paying you for?" Now, he said, "You have another one." I said, "Oh, really?"
And he said, "But look, it's not the end of the world. Just instead of doing insemination like we did with your wife, this time around, we have to do an in vitro fertilization. So, they go in and they remove your eggs surgically and they put them in a little dish and they fertilize them and they put the whole mess back in. It's super common these days, really, statistically speaking, 99% of the time, absolutely nothing goes wrong. And 1% of the time, you are me.” [audience chuckle] I had the one and only life-threatening response to in vitro. I'm not going to bore you with all the medical details. I'll just put it like this.
It was as if when they removed the eggs from my body, that first part of the surgery, when they removed the eggs from my body, it was as if like unbeknownst to me, my uterus had low jack, right? [audience chuckle] Like, the second they came out, my uterus was like [imitates police siren] [audience laughter] or the police arrived at my uterus. It was terrible. I almost died, but I didn't. Here I am. [audience laughter]
They couldn't go through the second half of the surgery, and I had to recap. All right. A month later, I'm recovered, we go back into the doctor and he goes, "Look, all right, at this point, we can continue on. We can do the second part of the in vitro." That's about to be that. And then he says, "But actually, medically speaking, there's a better option at this point, and that is that Shawna, my wife, that you carry this baby." He starts to go into all the sciencey stuff about why this is better. But I'm not listening to any of it, because I'm too busy doing the fucking jig. [audience laughter] I'm like, “Diddly diddy. Sign her up. Da da la. Here she is.” Saved by the bell. This is amazing. Yes. Yes, she will. [audience laughter]
And we do it. Let me just not undercut the beauty of that for a second. My wife got pregnant with my biological baby, the baby that I could not have pretty much. It was amazing. And all goes well. Nine months go by. I get that familiar shake in the middle of the night. We've done this once before. I know what that means. I hop out of bed. I don't even look at her. I pull up my pants. I grab the hospital bag. But when I turn back around to face her, it's not good. It's like she has gone 0 to 60 in a second. I don't know if this is normal or not, but of course, for a second, I have that panic of, I'm like, "Oh, my God, this is all my fault. It was too good to be true. But there's no time for that.”
I just go over to her, throw her arm over my shoulder, help her down the stairs. We flag a cab. We get into the cab and she is going bonkers. She's got her feet out the window. I'm leaning into the driver, "You got to go through the lights. You got to go through the lights. She's going to have the baby in the cab, go through the lights." The cab goes flying uptown. We get to the hospital. She can't get out of the car. I get a wheelchair, put her in it. I go flying up into the maternity wards.
We get into the triage area. I take one second, I take my eyes off her, I turn to the receptionist and say, "I don't have time to fill out any paperwork. Just point me to an OR and just point to really fast." When I turn back, my wife has gotten up out of the wheelchair. She's got her hands on the armrest, she has got her shirt up, her pants down, her butt is up. [audience chuckle] She is pissing, moaning, screaming. [screams] Other ladies in the waiting room are texting their moms, "I just started labor." [screams] [audience laughter]
She's screaming, she's going bonkers. Finally, this nurse comes in, and she's from the islands and she’s like, "She going to have that baby on the floor. Get her up in the gurney." [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
"She going to have that baby on the floor. Get her up in the gurney!" And in my accent, I'm like, "She's going to have the baby on the floor, on the floor, on the floor. She's going to have the baby on the floor." She's going back and forth. [audience laughter] They put her up on a gurney, they wheel her into a room, and 10 seconds later, we have a perfectly healthy second little boy. [audience cheers and applause]
Thank you. Thank you. We love him. But I think we named him in vengeance. My firstborn son is named Ray Clancy. He will punch you in the nuts. [audience laughter] This second guy, [chuckles] we named him Harry. [audience laughter] Harry Clancy. He will sell you a used Honda. [audience laughter]
All right, are you ready for some more stories? [audience cheers and applause]
All right. When I asked our next storyteller the question, "When were you last surprised?" He said, it was when his wife threw him a surprise 50th birthday party on his 51st birthday. [audience laughter] But she bought him an awesome guitar anyway. Please welcome Paul Manafo.
[cheers and applause]
Paul: [00:25:28] Memorial Day weekend, 2014. My wife Mary and I are in bed, and we get a phone call at midnight. Wakes us out of a sound sleep. It was Mass General Hospital calling to tell me they had a liver available and I needed to get to the hospital by 03:00 AM. I'd been on the liver transplant list for almost two years, and this was the first phone call I'd gotten telling me I needed to get to the hospital.
Now, I live on Martha's Vineyard. [audience chuckle] There are no ferries or planes running at that time of night. So, Mary decided to make some phone calls. She called Angel Flight. She called our local hospital. She called our local police department. She called the state police. She called the Coast Guard. No one was able to help us. She then said, "Honey, I got a great idea. Let's call our buddy Jay Wilbur. He's our local harbor master. Maybe he can take us over in a zippy fast boat over to the mainland." So, we call Jay, wake him up out of bed, and he says, "Absolutely, I'll get you guys over. He said, “Meet me at Owen Park boat dock in 15 minutes."
We get in the car, grab our gear and we're heading over to Owen Park. On the way there, Mary's phone rings and it's the state police calling. They've had a change of heart. They're going to meet us in Falmouth with an ambulance and a police escort and get us up to Boston. We get into Jay's boat, and within minutes, we are in Falmouth. We'd gotten there so quickly, we had beaten the state police and [chuckles] the ambulance.
When they got there, they loaded me into the back of the ambulance and put Mary up front with the driver and off we went. By the time we hit Route 3, we were going 110 miles an hour. [audience chuckle] We had a police escort in the back, a police escort in the front and the blue lights were blazing like crazy. We got to Mass General just before 03:00 AM. [audience cheers and applause]
We had made it from my house on the Vineyard to Mass General in under an hour and a half. [audience laughter] A record in any book. When we got to the hospital, they started prepping me for surgery. Doctors and nurses were coming in and out like crazy. And then, our friend Martha called a while after we were there and she said, "You guys, I just saw you on the Channel 5 early morning news show." [audience laughter] She said the headline read, "Vineyard man rushed to Mass General for life-saving liver transplant." [audience chuckle] And then, it quieted down.
A surgeon walked in a while later and I thought to myself, all right, the waiting's over, here we go. He came in, sat down at the edge of the bed and he said, "Paul, I have bad news.” He said “The liver that we thought was going to be available for you turned out not to be any good. You won't be getting a transplant today." I was devastated. Early on, they'd warned me this might be a possibility of not getting it the first time out, but still, I was devastated. We had just accomplished this herculean effort to get to Boston and it turned out to be for naught. So, I got dressed, we got our gear, we headed down to South Station to catch the Peter Pan bus back to Woods Hole on the ferry home.
In the early 1980s, I had been diagnosed with hepatitis C. And over 30 years, my liver took a beating. Finally, with advances in medicine, a cure became available that took care of my hepatitis virus. But the damage was done. I had cirrhosis, and liver cancer, and I needed a liver and I needed it soon. After that first phone call, I had four more calls over the next several weeks. I had one more trip to Boston, and had three phone calls that kept me on standby. Each one would raise my hopes up high, and each one ended the same way, “Sorry, not today.”
I was beginning to think maybe this wasn't going to happen, and I could die. One night, while watching The Jon Stewart Show, I had a complete breakdown. The rejections had built up so much that I couldn't handle it and I sobbed uncontrollably in my wife's arms. She just cradled me, and kept saying over and over again, [sobs] "Have faith, Honey. Don't give up hope." She's one of those glass-half-full kind of people. [audience chuckle] But I was losing hope. She just kept holding me in her arms, saying, "Honey, hang in there. Don't give up. Keep the faith and have hope."
Towards the end of August, the phone rang again at midnight. This time, it didn't wake us up. But it was Mass General Hospital. I knew instinctively who it would be. I heard those familiar words, "We have a liver available and you need to get up to Boston." I just took the phone and handed it to my wife, “I couldn't deal with this. Not again.” Conversations went back and forth for a while, and then finally the surgeon called to talk to me directly. He said, "Paul, I know you've been through this several times now, but I have a good feeling this time.” He said, “If I were you, I'd get up here." So, once again, it's midnight on Martha's Vineyard. [audience laughter] How are we going to get to Boston this time?
I then remembered a conversation I had with film director Doug Liman, who has a house on the Vineyard, and we talked at an event we were both at over the summer. We talked for a while, and at the end of our conversation, he said, "Paul, I have a plane. And if you need to get to Boston while I'm still on the island, I'll fly you up any time of day or night." I'm thinking to myself, this is Doug Liman, right? Sure, he's going to fly me up to Boston. So, I decided, what the hell, I'll give Doug a call. [audience chuckle] I called Doug. When he got on the phone, the first words out of his mouth were, "Is it time?" And I thought, wow, this dude's the real thing.
We met Doug at the Martha's Vineyard Airport at 02:30 AM. It was a beautiful, starlit night with not a moon in the sky, and there wasn't a breath of wind. It was perfect. Mare, my daughter Janique, myself and Doug got into his plane and we headed out to the runway. It was pitch black. Doug flipped the switch on his dashboard and the air-- This was amazing. The airport lit up like a pinball machine. All the runway lights came on just like that. It was the coolest thing ever. It was magic. We took off in silence and flew up into Boston. There wasn't any radio traffic and there wasn't another plane in the sky. It was just so perfect.
When I got to the hospital, I knew the drill by heart. Doctors, nurses, in and out. But this time, something happened that hadn't happened before. A doctor came in and said, "The organ is on its way." And I thought, the organ is on its way. Wow, I'd not heard that before. I thought to myself, maybe this time it's going to happen. At 08:30 AM, they came in with a gurney, loaded me up and they were going to take me off to surgery. I gave my wife and my daughter a kiss and said, "See you on the other side."
I woke up around 08:30 later that same day in the evening. The operation had taken eight hours to complete. When I opened my eyes, my wife and daughter were standing at the foot of the bed. [sobs] My wife looked at me and she said, "Honey, your eyes are white. I can't believe it." For the first time in almost 30 years, my eyes were white instead of a dull yellow. And you know what? I felt amazing. I know I was on a morphine drip, [audience laughter] but really, I felt amazing.
It wasn't until I returned to the Vineyard that I realized how bad my life had been because of my liver disease. And now, it's more than a year later, I'm stronger than I've ever been in my whole life. [audience cheers and applause]
Yeah. I've got muscles. I've got muscles where I never had them before. I'm happy, I'm healthy and I'm living my damn life to the fullest.
[cheers and applause]
Tara: [00:34:56] Paul Manafo, ladies and gentlemen.
[upbeat joyful music]
Jay: [00:35:00] Paul Manafo lives on Martha's Vineyard, where he's an actor and a singer and performs in plays and musicals for adults and children. He's a member of the West Tisbury Congregation Church Choir and is a skilled woodworker and general contractor. For photos of Paul and his family, visit themoth.org.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
[cheers and applause]
Jay: [00:36:17] You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. Here to introduce our last story from this live Moth event in Boston is your host, Tara Clancy.
Tara: [00:36:29] All right. When I asked our final storyteller the question, "When were you last surprised?" He said he is about to be really surprised, because it is probably the first time he is ever on a stage without his guitar. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Salman Ahmad.
[cheers and applause]
Salman: [00:36:56] There's an old saying in Pakistan which goes like, “That whisper in your heart has strength. It may not have wings, but it has the power to fly.” I first discovered that whisper around the age of six. I was born in Lahore, Pakistan. There was a family wedding. And at family weddings, there always used to be music. So, at this family wedding, a qawwali concert was taking place. Qawwali music is about unity, sacred union, whirling, trance-like rhythms, hand claps and joy. So, as a six-year-old, what I remember is my aunts and uncles dancing in a state of bliss, fanaa, mystical ecstasy. Some of them were throwing money at the musicians. I thought that's a pretty good job. [audience laughter]
But also, I knew as a six-year-old in Pakistan that my career, or what my mother always said was, "Son, you can either become a doctor or you can become a doctor." [audience laughter] That was not for me. Cut to, when I'm 11, my father, who worked in the airlines, he came home and he said, "I've got a job offer in Manhattan. And so, we're moving 8,000 miles away to New York." And so, my younger sister and I-- I'm going to date myself now. We said, "Ronald McDonald, 13 channels of television, let's go." [audience laughter]
So, we arrive. And the first two years in my middle school, I'm the only overweight brown Muslim kid. I have no friends, except for TV and radio. Until one day when I was 13 at my bus stop, this kid who went to school with me, Danny Spitz. He went on to play guitar in the heavy metal band Anthrax. He looked at me and said, "Sal, Sal, Sal, [audience chuckle] dude, you got to get cool." I looked at him and said, "Cool? [audience laughter] What is cool?" So, Danny took this red ticket out of his back pocket and he said, "Dude, if you buy this ticket from me, your life will change."
Now, as he was hustling me that ticket, I'm thinking about my conservative Muslim mother who thinks going out anywhere is you're going to lose your culture, you're going to lose your religion. Yet the whisper in my heart was whispering loudly. And I said, "What is that ticket?" He said, "This is a ticket to see a rock and roll concert at Madison Square Garden. It's for Monday night. It's the only ticket I have." So, I said, "Danny, I'll buy the ticket."
I took the ticket from him, I went home and I said to my mother, "This is field trip. [audience laughter] Entire school is going to Madison Square Garden [audience laughter] on this Monday night and you have to drive me." [audience laughter] So, my mother looks at me with these silent, skeptical eyes, she says, "Well, you'll have to dress up." And so, on that Monday, I'm wearing a yellow floral shirt, red and white striped pants, [audience laughter] a black belt and shiny black shoes. That's how Pakistani kids went out to birthday parties.
[00:40:42] And so, we drive down from Rockland County into Manhattan. I said to my mother, "Three blocks away from Madison Square, just drop me here and pick me up later." As I walk on the sidewalk, now I'm going to date myself, there are thousands and thousands of teenagers with torn jeans, peace signs and expressions which say dazed and confused. [audience chuckle] So, you know where I'm going with this. On the Jumbotron, it says tonight, live in concert, Led Zeppelin. [audience cheers]
Now, for me, Led Zeppelin could have been the Bay City Rollers. [audience laughter] So, I walk in. After hanging around in this smoky atmosphere with thousands, thousands of teenagers who had these blissful expressions just like at the qawwali concert when I was six years old, [audience laughter] the lights go down and these four musicians come up on stage.
One of them, the guitar player Jimmy Page, has this two-headed guitar. He's got dragons painted on his pants, and these laser lights are hitting him. He picks up the guitar and he goes. [imitates guitar music] All of a sudden, this almighty roar goes up saying "Kashmir." [audience laughter] [audience applause]
I'm thinking, Kashmir? It's not safe there. Pakistan and India have fought three wars over Kashmir. [audience laughter] Yet in this tornado of guitar, bass, drums and vocals and a whole lot of love, my heart whispered very strongly again. At the end of that show, I said I want to do that for the rest of my life. [audience laughter] And so, I go home and I said to my mother, "Can I buy a guitar?" And she said, "Well, if you can save up enough money, you can buy a guitar."
So, I worked as a busboy at Blauville Coach Diner, saved up $237 to buy a copy of a Les Paul. Once I had that instrument, it was my soulmate, I just never came out of my room, locked myself in and listened to the Beatles, listened to Zeppelin, Hendrix, Clapton, Beck. I learned all the blues. And pretty soon, my parents got very scared. [audience laughter]
One day, a surgeon uncle from Pakistan showed up and they said, "Can you go into his room and extract him?" [audience laughter] So, my uncle Anwar comes into the room and I'm wailing away and he says, "Beta, son, what are you going to do with your life?" So, behind him was this poster of Jimi Hendrix. I said, "I want to be like that guy there." So, he goes back to my parents and he says, "Look, if he stays in the States, he's going to become a musician. Send him back to Pakistan now. There is no rock music there."
When I graduated from high school, my family moves back. I'm back in my city of Lahore. But now, what's changed is there used to be democracy, but while I was away, a general, a military dictator, came into power. It was like having a Pakistani Oliver Cromwell. No celebration, no enjoyment, no gender mixing, no music, especially not guitar music. It was like the kingdom of darkness. I was in the first year of medical school in Lahore and I was losing my mind. I couldn't go to any concerts. So, one day, I thought of this crazy idea. There used to be this Gong Show on TV. I thought, you know what? I'm going to put together a secret talent show.
So, anybody in my class who can tell a joke, who can juggle, who can do anything or play guitar can be on stage and have their 10 minutes of fame. So, I schemed this whole thing up. It was off campus, 60 of us. And at this show, I'm waiting for the juggler to end, so I can get up on stage. I had practiced Eddie Van Halen's Eruption. I had one accompanying musician with me, a drummer who had a cymbal, a snare drum and a bass drum. And I said to him, "Each time I look at you, just hit the drums really hard." [audience laughter] So, I go into my solo and I close my eyes. I'm going to this fast finger tapping this part of the solo. And all of a sudden, I hear these screams.
And in my mind's eye, 18 years old, I'm thinking, I am the rock star. [audience laughter] This is a little bit like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. And the screams get louder and louder. I'm just enjoying myself. Until I realize that these screams are not of adulation and admiration, these screams are of apprehension and danger. So, I open up my eyes, and lo and behold, I see the Taliban. And religious extremists who had heard that there was a den of sin and vulgarity, girls and guys mixing with each other, so they came there with burqas. They threw the burqas on the girls.
And one of them, this guy with a crazed look in his eye, came up to me, and before I could process what he was trying to do, he grabbed my guitar, my Les Paul, and he smashed it on the marble floor. My rock and roll dream there-- And in a weird way, I also thought this is complete humiliation, because rock musicians destroy their own guitars. [audience laughter] Yet he goes to me, "If you ever play that thing again, I will shoot you down." They had guns. This was also neighboring Afghanistan, the Soviets were there. So, there was a drug culture, heroin and a Kalashnikov culture, which had filtered into Pakistan. So, it was this really scary time.
A lot of students were killed for no reason. The stark choices I had was either to cave into the fear, give up my passion, or follow my heart. I chose to follow my heart. Now, ever since terrorists have hijacked Islam, they've twisted so many things. For example, suicide is haram. It's prohibited, but there's suicide bombing. Killing innocents is prohibited, but they kill innocents. And the word, the J word, the dreaded J word, jihad, which actually means to strive to lift yourself up and to lift society up has been now conjured up these images of violence and extremism.
So, I decided while I was in medical school, I was going to wage a rock and roll jihad, a struggle to play my music. I started several clandestine underground bands in Lahore, two of which, Vital Signs, became the biggest band in Pakistan, and the one I founded, Junoon, which means uncompromising passion bordering on madness. In other words, crazy. That band became the biggest rock band of South Asia. I found myself– [audience cheers and applause]
Thank you. In 2008, I took Junoon to play the first ever rock concert in Kashmir. Despite death threats from militants, I played at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and I'm here to tell you the story at The Moth. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Tara: [00:49:22] Salman Ahmad.
Jay: [00:49:29] Salman Ahmad's band, Junoon, went on to sell over 25 million albums. The New York Times has called them the U2 of Pakistan. Along with Peter Gabriel, Salman wrote the song, Open Your Eyes, for Pakistan flood relief. You're listening to it now.
[Open Your Eyes by Junoon]
A medical doctor by training, Salman also travels the globe as a goodwill ambassador, helping to eradicate polio. To see a photo of Salman on stage in front of thousands in Kashmir for the first time, go to themoth.org.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.
[Open Your Eyes by Junoon]
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Your host this hour was Tara Clancy. Tara's writing has appeared in The New York Times magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus. Her memoir is titled The Clancys of Queens. Tara lives in New York City with her wife and two sons.
The stories, this hour, were directed by Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles and Sarah Austin Jenness. Our production partner was WGBH in Boston. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff include Catherine Burns and Sarah Haberman. Production support from [unintelligible [00:51:10]
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Recording services come from Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Stellwagen Symphonette. For more information on them and for all the music we use, visit our website, themoth.org.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the 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. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.