Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. And welcome to 2018. I'm Dan Kennedy.
Every year, we try to make it happen, or at least we hope that we'll finally follow through on our resolutions to start living life as our best selves. And we give it a year. But in reality, it can take a whole lot longer than that for things to even begin coming together.
Our first story today comes to us from Kemp Powers. Kemp has been on The Moth Radio Hour. He's been on the podcast, both of those, I think, a few times before. But he told this story back in 2011. The theme of the night was Point of No Return. Here's Kemp.
[applause]
Kemp: [00:00:41] 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 with 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. 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, [audience chuckles] falling out of beds. And 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 in 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 Sánchez after my favorite reggae dance hall 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 chuckles] And 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 years 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. And 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 from 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 that they could live vicariously through. And to the ones who were single, I was the divorcee 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. And I was pretty glad about that, because not talking meant that I never really had to explain why we were in the situation that 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, Sánchez, 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. And 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 about 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]
Dan: [00:07:18] Kemp Powers is a playwright, screenwriter and author. His award-winning play, One Night in Miami is currently being adapted into a feature film. He was most recently a writer on the television show, Star Trek Discovery and now resides in Los Angeles.
Kemp's daughter is now 19 years old. She's a sophomore in college in Arizona. They sometimes spend the holidays together, and they actually spent their New Year's Eve together earlier this week. Several years ago, they started this tradition of going one big family trip every year, usually to someplace new and often to someplace out of the country. Kemp tells us, it's been a wonderful bonding experience, but not just for the two of them, for the entire family. We hope they have many more trips to come and many more stories to tell.
When we asked our next storyteller, Matteson Perry, “What his New year's resolution for 2018 might be?” He said that he's going to go to a meditation retreat for seven days. Mostly to get calm and centered, but also not to watch the news for seven days. Matteson told this next story at an LA SLAM back in 2013. The theme of the night was Fall from Grace. Here's Matteson Perry.
[cheers and applause]
Matteson: [00:08:33] Good evening, everybody. So, about five years ago, I was living in New York City. I was at a one-year anniversary dinner with the girl I was dating at the time. It was going awkward. And the reason was neither one of us had said I love you in that year. That's a long time to go without saying that. I had noticed in the last couple months that both of us had started avoiding the word entirely in any context. Like, you'd be at lunch, you'd be like, “Oh, this is a great turkey sandwich. I liked it. [audience laughter] I liked that turkey sandwich.” So, you have to be careful, because you don't want to rate the person you're dating below a sandwich. [audience chuckles] So it gets tricky.
And so we exchanged cards at this dinner and they were weird, because we couldn't use the L word, so they were weirdly impersonal for anniversary cards. It was like we were signing each other's yearbooks. It was like, “It's been great getting to know you this year. [audience chuckles] Stay cool this summer. [audience laughter] XOXO your boyfriend.” That's good. I think we both knew we weren't the one, but we were nice people, we didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and it was going good enough, so we'd stayed together.
So, about a month after our anniversary, I'm at a bar and my girlfriend is out of town for the weekend, and I meet this girl. Her name's Lindsey. She's really cool, she's pretty and she's dressed hip. We strike up a conversation. She's a friend of a friend. It's just one of those conversations that flows really well. We like all the same things. We laugh a lot. She has a great sense of humor, by which I mean she thinks all of my jokes are funny, [audience chuckles] which is really what guys mean when they say they want a girl with a sense of humor. [audience chuckles]
So, we're talking and it's going really great, just a time where you meet a stranger and you just really connect. We're talking for several hours. All our friends have left the bar and we're still there alone, talking. We're sitting next to each other and it's very intimate. When I lean in to talk to her, I can smell her hair. I don't know why, but other girls hair always smells better than your girlfriend's hair. [audience chuckles] Science can't explain it, but it's true.
And so, we're talking and drinking and talking, and it's late in the evening and then there's that pause, that moment where we're staring at each other and we're supposed to kiss. And my conscience is like, “You can't kiss her. You have a girlfriend. You're a nice guy. Nice guys don't cheat.” And I'm like, “You're right.” But [laughs] like, “Don't people say the things that you regret the most are the things you didn't do and shouldn't? Isn't it better? Who cares about being nice? That's overrated. We should be embracing the moment and living life, right?”
I check in with my conscience and he's like, “These are some good points.” [audience laughter] And so, I do it. I lean in and I kiss her. She kisses me back. It's passionate. I take her in my arms and now we're making out right there at the bar. We don't care who's watching, because we're young and we're drunk and it's 03:00 AM in New York City and we're doing something wrong. And it's amazing. It's this great kiss. It's fantastic. It's the kind of kiss people write songs about and people go to war over it. We're doing it. It's life, and we're doing it right now in this bar.
[cheers and applause]
So, it's a good kiss. [audience laughter] So, I'm worried now though, because I've cheated. To defend myself, I will say, on the scale of cheating, like on a scale of one to Arnold Schwarzenegger, [audience laughter] this is like a two at best. We made out drunkenly in Europe, it'd be considered a friendly hello, what we did. [audience laughter] But we're in America, and so it's cheating and [audience laughter] I get caught. It turns out I'm really bad at cheating, because I get caught less than 24 hours later. Here's how.
I write an email to my best friend telling him all about it. [audience laughter] Mistake number one. If you cheat, don't put it in writing. [audience chuckles] If you need to tell someone, call them. And even then, you should be on a burner cell phone, like, you're a drug dealer on the wire. [audience laughter] You just throw it away after. My second mistake was the subject line I chose for this email, which was, and I quote, “So, I cheated on my girlfriend.” [audience laughter] Yeah. Very inconvenient.
When she went to Google something on my computer and noticed an email from my friend titled “RE: So, I cheated on my girlfriend,” she was a bit curious about the content of that email. So, we get into this big fight, of course, and she's yelling at me and she says, “I can't believe you'd cheat on me. I can't believe you'd sleep with someone else.” And I'm like, “Aha, I didn't have sex. We just kissed,” I say. And I'm like, “This is a great defense. I'm at least getting some points back, you know?
But she counters with, “That's worse.” “Kissing is worse than sex, she says, which, no, [audience laughter] no, that's like saying speeding is okay if you wreck your car. Like, that's one is below the other, for sure. Also, I wish I had known that kissing was worse than sex, [audience laughter] when I was busy not having sex. I wish we'd discussed those rules prior to this.
So, we break up. Not that night. Amazingly, we stayed together for a few months, because I was guilty and inertia and fear and you're dumb when you're 25. You're like, “We'll save this. Yay.” And so, we stayed together for a few months. By the time we broke up, it was too late for me to call Lindsey and find out if it had been a one night thing or a long time. And so, I did learn some things.
I made two resolutions after that relationship. The first was to never stay in a relationship with someone I didn't truly care about, I wasn't passionate about being with, because it's unfair to you and them and it's dishonest and it leads to bad things. And my second resolution was to be a lot more thoughtful about my email titles. [audience laughter] I'm Matteson. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:14:27] That was Matteson Perry. Matteson is a screenwriter, performer, two-time winner of The Moth GrandSLAM Storytelling Championship, and the host of the monthly Moth StorySLAM in Los Angeles. Matteson’s book, Available: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Hookups, Love and Brunch, is out now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook. Matteson’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney's, Cosmopolitan and the Daily Beast. Learn more at mattesonperry.com.
Resolutions are never an easy thing. And plenty of times to get the things we want, we have to do some of the things that we don't want to do. And our final storyteller today shared this story at a Chicago Moth StorySLAM called Extra Mile. Here's Rachel Lee, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Rachel: [00:15:20] So, I've been in marketing since I came to Chicago. And surprise, it's awful and it's horrible. [audience laughter] I really hate it. I work for a lighting distributor now. It's really awful to know that you're selling people things they absolutely don't need. [audience chuckles] But there was one instance in my whole marketing career that I killed. I absolutely killed. I had spreadsheets, I had Excels, I had fucking pie charts. [audience chuckles] I had everything possible that you could have in all of this, so that one woman would fall in love with me. [audience laughter]
So, I met this woman at a bus stop, got her number, don't know how I got it and we hang out. She comes over to my house at 10:00 PM after she goes to a work party. After she left, I decided, “Wow, I'm super in love with her.” I want her to love me. I want everything with her. I want to know what it's like to watch a movie with her when it's raining. I want to know what it's like to walk around when it's cold out. [audience chuckles] I absolutely want all that. I want to marry this person.
So the minute she leaves, I go, “Okay, I got to sit down. I got to figure this out.” I stay up all night. So, I put together a swat. If any of you know what a swat is, it's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. [audience laughter] So I go, “All right.” I go, “My strengths--” I'm like, “Well, I'm nice, I guess.” That's really all I have going. But then I realized I was like, “Wait a minute. I've been broken up with before for being too nice.” That's fucking bullshit. [audience laughter] And so, I was like, “Let me put that on the back burner.”
And I was like, “All right. Well, I'm also pretty polite,” so that'll be something. And so, then I go right on over to the weaknesses. As you can tell, there are going to be several. [audience chuckles] So, I go, “Okay, weaknesses. Well, she's heterosexual. That's not going to help.” [audience laughter] And so, I'm like, “Okay.” So, by default, my vagina's going to be a weakness. [audience laughter] And so, then I'm like, “Okay, location.” That's going to be a big deal.
She lives downtown, I live in Lakeview. That's not going to work out. And then, also another weakness was that she was very fashionable. She's originally from Mexico. She's been all around the world. She knows several languages. She's very cool. And I was like, “I'm just from the Midwest. I've been to Canada twice.” [audience laughter] That's really all I have going. [audience laughter] I like pork rinds, and I like rollerblading at inopportune times during North Lakeshore Drive. [audience chuckles] That's all I really like to do. [audience laughter] And so, that's where I'm at.
And then, I'm like, “Opportunities. Well, she could be my girlfriend, and that could totally change my life.” And then, I'm like, “At the threats.” Again, that coincides with the weaknesses. Vagina. [audience laughter] So, then after I go through that, I'm like, “All right, let me make some Excel charts of [audience chuckles] how I would how based on the structure, strategies that I choose, how my goals would excel.” [audience laughter] And so, that goes down.
And I'm like, “Okay, well, let me--” I came up with a variety of options. I chose digital marketing. That's where the text came in. Y'all know that. [audience chuckles] That always helps. Then I came up with, it's called incognito marketing, where you don't know that you're being marketed to. [audience laughter] And then, I came up with, fittingly enough, relationship marketing, [audience chuckles] where you gain a relationship and decide-- Like, you get this person to really be loyal to you, and so they don't really flee anywhere else. So, I did that.
I implemented these things very slowly. So, the digital marketing, I would text her every day at the end of the day to be like, “How was your day?” [audience laughter] At first, I thought that was going to be awful, because I thought that would be very annoying. But it worked. And then, incognito marketing, when we started hanging out, have you ever been on a date and you didn't really know you were one? [audience chuckles] I did that. And so, I was just very chivalrous to the point where you weren't aware of it, “Oh, fuck.” [audience laughter]
Okay, well, fast forward, like, way ahead. We're sitting on my couch and we're reading this Dr. Seuss’ book. I don't know if you guys know this one, but it's called Oh Say Can You Say? These are some terrible tongue twisters. We're right at Freddy fries French fried fish on Fridays or some shit. [audience laughter] She turns to me and goes, “Hey, I really love you.” And I go, “All right.” [audience laughter] So, my marketing scheme totally worked.
I absolutely hate marketing. It's the worst thing in the world. This was the one time I believed in what I was selling and this was the one time that, believe it or not, this was people who actually really needed and belonged to each other. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Dan: [00:20:50] Rachel Lee is a marketer, freelance writer and the host of a mostly weekly show called The Hotel Hot Chicken Podcast. She enjoys refrigerator magnets, soup and mental health activism. Rachel wrote in to tell us that she and her mystery woman recently separated due to differing career paths. Rachel stayed in Chicago, while her partner moved to New York. They've stayed friends, but Rachel is holding out hope that they reconnect in the future, and she writes, “There is nothing quite like missing her so much.”
When we asked, “What resolution she might make this year?” She said--
Rachel: [00:21:27] I want to feel definitely a better sense of self. I feel like I pretty much just started over when my girlfriend went to New York. I was forced to think about myself and just I think figuring out what I enjoy doing again. It does suck missing her, for sure. But I think by this time next year instead of--
Usually, I'm so pessimistic and I usually wake up in a pessimistic mood. So, I think next year, I'd like to wake up with a spirit of possibility. You know what I mean? I always try to roll with progress, not perfection. So, if I can even just do that, I would consider it a success. [chuckles]
Dan: [00:22:07] That's all for this week on The Moth Podcast. Thanks to you, guys, for listening. We wish you a story-worthy week and also a story-worthy year.
Mooj: [00:22:18] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth Podcast.
Dan: [00:22:26] Production by Timothy Lou Ly. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.