Host: Dame Wilburn
Dame: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Dame Wilburn.
So much about Valentine's Day is focused on puppy love. The gifts, the dinners, the guy giving the flower to the girl. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with all of that. But this week, our stories are about a deeper kind of love, one that persists beyond February 14th, and finds its way to us when we least expect it.
Our first storyteller is Kemp Powers. Kemp told this story at a GrandSLAM in Los Angeles almost 10 years ago. The theme of the night was Point of No Return. Here's Kemp, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Kemp: [00:00:51] I'm 37 years old. I wasn't really very good at much of anything in my 20s, least of all marriage. But the decision to get a divorce wasn't an easy one. It's interesting, because for a lot of people, the legal tangle is what stops them from getting a divorce. But in my world, that wasn't really a big decision maker. It was because we had a daughter. And going through it, that meant that on some level, I was going to be losing her, if not literally, then figuratively.
So, when people have a really bad breakup, it's not uncommon for one parent to be left feeling like basically their kid is better off without them. And in my case, it wasn't very hard to convince me. To put it very simply, I really, really, really sucked at being a dad. When my daughter was a small infant, I swore that she was going to break some kind of record for falling out of bassinets, falling out of cribs, falling out [chuckles] of beds. It always seemed to happen when I was the one that was watching her.
I was hardly ever around. I traveled so much for work. And on the rare occasions that I was there, any effort that I made to try to bond with her always seemed to backfire. When she was three months old, I bought her this gangly little puppet that I named Sanchez, after my favorite reggae dancehall singer. [audience laughter] She was really into Sesame Street, so I really thought that this puppet was going to bring her a lot of joy. Instead, it terrified her. [audience laughter] And [coughs] from there, things just continued to get worse.
By the time when she was six months old, I decided that it was really smart for her to know that fire was dangerous, and it was something that she should stay away from. So, one day, when I was making a cup of tea, I picked her up. Holding her in one hand and the hot kettle in the other, I explained very carefully that you should never, ever, ever touch hot things, because they could hurt you. At least I did in my mind, because in reality, by the time I got to the word, touch, she’d already reached out and grabbed the bottom of the steaming kettle and burned herself.
So, by the time my daughter was one year old, I was already pretty much afraid to be left alone with her. She suffered from a febrile seizure at 18 months and vomited in the middle of the night and inhaled it, almost choking to death. She was in the hospital for a week. I remembered looking at her in that incubator with the tubes up her nose and the butterfly IV in her hand, and thinking to myself, “Dude, you’re just going to fucking get somebody killed.” And so, I didn’t fight, because I didn’t really think I had any right to.
I didn’t fight the incredibly restrictive visitation rights that I had. I didn’t fight when her mother asked for my approval to relocate to Phoenix. I didn’t even fight when the visitation that we did agree upon fell by the wayside, because at the end of the day, they were too busy in their life out there for her to keep up with her schedule of visitation in Los Angeles.
So, my friends, they were really supportive, but they weren’t really able to offer me any counsel. It was this really bizarre twist that we had all grown up in this world where divorce was just a fact of life, but suddenly I found myself in this adult world where every single family that I knew was nuclear. It was like we were suddenly back in the 1950s, only I didn’t have to drink out of a separate water fountain and I didn’t have to worry about getting lynched for having had a kid with a white lady. But every single person that I knew my age, was either so happily married that it bordered on sickening or so relentlessly single that it bordered on parody.
My friends love me and I love them too. But to all of them, to the friends who were married, I was basically that single guy they could live vicariously through. And to the ones who were single, I was the divorcé with all the responsibility that proved to them that them not having any kids and not getting married had been the right decision to make.
So, I basically went on with my life and got used to the routine that we had. That was all I really had, the sporadic phone calls, the grudging pickups that happened at the halfway point between Los Angeles and Phoenix in an aptly named shithole of a town called Desert Center. It was a barren place filled with more scorpions and dust devils than people. And our drives out of the desert, my daughter and I hardly ever spoke. I was pretty glad about that, because not talking meant that I never really had to explain why we were in the situation that we were in.
So, one day back in March, I get this telephone call early in the morning, and it's from my daughter. I'm pretty surprised, because she almost never calls me. When I answer, she's distraught, she's crying. She says, "Dad, a tsunami has just destroyed Japan and it's heading for California. You need to get out of bed right now and get to a high point immediately." Now, initially, I just had to assure her that there was no chance that a tidal wave was going to wash away Koreatown anytime soon. [audience laughter] But she was still too worried to be calmed down.
So, to assuage her fears, I had to talk to her, and we talked. We talked about her piano lessons. We talked about her upcoming 13th birthday. We talked about her now six-year-old brother who lived with me, who she missed dearly. And we talked about me, who she missed just as much. It turned out that she still had her puppet, Sanchez, which she hung on the wall next to her bed.
When my daughter’s 13th birthday came around, we made a pact. Going forward, we would speak every Sunday at 12:00 PM, no matter where we were. When we spoke, she would get to ask me one question. It didn’t matter what the question was, I had to give her the answer. This was something that made me a little bit nervous, because I was finally going to be held accountable for something. When the first question came, it was, "What was my favorite book?" After that, it was, "What was my favorite movie?" A week later, "What was my favorite song?" As the weeks turned into months, these questions revolved around the things I'd done, the places I'd been and how I was living my life.
My daughter is 13 years old and 5’10” tall. But I can still pick her up and I can still hold her in my arms. We talk every week now. When I hold her every time that I see her, and when I do, I just make sure that I keep that hot kettle just a little bit out of reach. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:07:33] That was Kemp Powers. Kemp Powers is a playwright, director, screenwriter and occasional bird watcher. He says, he was a very angry and cynical young man who inexplicably grew into a happy and optimistic adult. Kemp is the co-director and co-writer of Soul, and the playwright and screenwriter of One Night in Miami. The play and now film details the fictionalized meeting of Brother Malcolm, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke at the Hampton House in February of 1964. You can watch it now on Amazon Prime.
Up next this week is Beth Bradley. Beth told this story at a StorySLAM in Denver, where the theme of the night was Love Hurts. Here's Beth, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Beth: [00:08:28] So, it was a Tuesday night, and I was in the market for frozen pizza. I happened to be at the fancy natural grocery store. As such, their pizza options were pretty grim. So, there were lots of things involving, like pretend cheese or cauliflower, things of that nature. So, I'm glumly perusing the options. I happen upon one that appears to have actual pizza ingredients in it. [audience laughter] It's called Home Run. But immediately, my reflex was, I can't get that one. And so, I kept looking. But then, I took a second and I was like “Why did I just decide that?” I realized that the last time I had it was in Seattle. My ex-boyfriend had brought it over for dinner one night. I remember him just being very impressed with the quality [audience laughter] and also likewise with himself for having purchased it.
So, the thing with my ex-boyfriend is that the whole time we were together, he was battling an alcohol addiction. That's why we had to break up. And then, in March, the worst thing that could possibly happen happened and he died because of it. So, that's why I can't get this pizza. As I'm thinking about that, I'm realizing like I've been doing these other little things that are similar in an unconscious way. Like, he loved that show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. And I do too, but I can't watch any of the episodes that he hasn't been able to watch.
Or, we used to take my dog on nature walks near his house. He always referred to us as the Nature Rangers, [chuckles] which I liked because I thought of third graders wearing ranger hats or something. [chuckles] And so, even though two of the three Nature Rangers are still here like I've retired the name and I don’t ever think of it that way anymore.
So, I’m still in the frozen food aisle, just rudely blocking the pizzas from everyone else. I’m starting to tear up and cry a little bit. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about grief, being in grief, studying grief, but this pizza aisle crying stage of grief [audience laughter] feels like one I didn’t read about. [audience laughter] It feels new and I’m trying to figure out why.
So, I think it’s like when you lose somebody to an addiction, there's obviously a lot of sorrow with that, but there's also blame and guilt and regret and anger. It just feels like poison sometimes like carrying that stuff around with you. And so, it's like where I just want to forget it happened, you know? So, sometimes I'm mad at me. Sometimes I'm mad at him. Sometimes I'm mad at other people he knew. Sometimes I'm just mad at the world that it happened. But it's like, in this moment, all this time I've spent wanting to forget him, instead I'm remembering this pizza and I'm remembering the Nature Rangers and Kimmy Schmidt.
And it's like, I know that the reason I'm not doing these things is not coming from that anger or that guilt. It's something different. It's like, after all this time, I want to have a connection to him. I want some solidarity with him. And that feels new and that feels different. If you can't have this pizza, then neither can I. So, I think about some of the things that I've learned about grief. One of the things I've learned, is that you have to let it happen to you, like you have to let it change you the way that it's going to.
I've looked for healing in the mountains or in churches, but if he only is going to find me in the grocery store [chuckles] pizza aisle, I'll take it, you know? [audience laughter] And maybe someday, I will eat these pizzas again, or I'll watch Kimmy Schmidt. But for now, it feels like the right thing to do to remember him.
After trying to detangle my story from his and disconnect from him, this is something I can do to stay connected to him. Even though it's not like a monument, or a plaque or something monumental to come back to, it's like, I think that if he knew that my healing and memory of him were pizza-based-- [audience laughter] He loved pizza, [chuckles] and he loves laughing and I think that he would crack up and I think he would love it.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:14:18] That was Beth Bradley. Beth is a marketing content director who lives in Denver. She loves dogs, hiking and adventures of all kinds. Beth says, she's been telling stories since she could talk and listening to The Moth since she was a teenager. She's proud to say she's won two SLAMs and come in second at the Denver GrandSLAM twice. You can check out a photo of Beth and her beloved dog, Ember, at our website, themoth.org/extras.
This Valentine's Day, we hope you'll take time to celebrate all the different kinds of love in your life. Most people who listen to The Moth know how I met my wife. But what they haven’t heard is how I met my platonic soulmate. He and I went to college together, and we met the way most college people meet, during a kegger.
I stepped off the tailgate of a pickup truck and fell into Mark. From then on, we've just been connected. The pandemic has been difficult for us. We don’t get together as much as we used to, but we do keep in touch by sharing song lyrics. Our favorite one comes from Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing: I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry, Hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why.
If you have a story about love, any kind of love, consider throwing your name in the hat at one of our virtual StorySLAMs. The theme for the month of February is Love Hurts. For more upcoming themes, details and tickets, head to our website, themoth.org/events.
That’s all for us this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Julia: [00:16:16] Dame Wilburn is a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth. She’s also the host of the podcast, Dame’s Eclectic Brain.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by me, Julia Purcell, with Sarah Austin Jenness and Sarah Jane Johnson.
The rest of The Moth’s leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public, prx.org.