Host: Catherine Burns
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Catherine: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Catherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth, and I'll be your host this time.
We have three stories this hour. A man struggles to get back to normal after being randomly attacked by strangers, a young backpacker accidentally finds himself on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, and animator is haunted by the voices in her film.
Our first story is from Ed Gavagan. Ed has told a number of stories of The Moth, many of them centering around the incident at the heart of this story. Ed told it at an event we did in conjunction with Oregon Public Radio and Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. A warning, the story involves an act of violence, and may be upsetting for some listeners. Here's Ed Gavagan, live at The Moth.
[applause]
Ed: [00:01:06] You know, you wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you put on your shoes, you head out into the world, you feel like you're going to come back home at night, go to sleep, get up, you do it again. That rhythm creates the framework that you use to create a life and you make plans and you count on continuity. And John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans.”
I woke up one morning. I wasn't wearing any of my own clothes. I had two chest tubes. I had a hose going up my nose down to drain my stomach. I had a catheter, a morphine drip. I woke into this fog of pain. It felt like I had broken through the ice into a lake of frozen hurt. At the end of my bed, I could see the surgeon who had spent all night saving my life. He was holding my foot, and he had given me about a 2% chance of living. Next to him were two homicide detectives.
Now, they were homicide detectives because they had gotten the case because they didn't think I was going to make it, and they didn't want to have to do the paperwork swap. Let me tell you, when you start your day with two homicide detectives explaining what happened the night before, it's the downhill from there. They began to explain to me they had five young men in custody, and they wanted me to identify them from the mug shots before I died. I didn't know this, but they just wanted me to make an X next to the pictures.
What had happened is that these young men had come in from Brooklyn, they were part of a gang. The initiation for them to move up into the upper echelons of their gang was to come into Manhattan and kill somebody. They had set up this little ambush, where they had one lookout at either end of the block, and the three guys would sit on the stoop and they had their knives open up their sleeve like that and the lookout at either end and they would wait.
It was late at night and it was the night before Thanksgiving, so the city was really empty. And this guy walks around the corner, and he heads down the block, and the two lookouts give the go ahead. The three guys stand up and start walking towards him. He has his key out and he puts his key in the door and he goes into the lobby and the door closes behind him and they're locked out. He pushes the elevator button, he goes upstairs, and he gets undressed, and he goes to bed. And he never knows what just didn't hit him. And I'm the next guy.
I come down the block. One of the very lucky things from that night is when I was in University of Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team. So, I got one good punch and knocked the middle guy out. They caught him and he gave up everybody else, which is how they had these five guys in custody. Nobody expected me to make it, and I did. I lived. They took me off life support, moved me into ICU. The nurse comes in with the clipboard and she wants to talk to me about my insurance. I was self-employed at the time, so I like to say I was insurance free. [audience laughter] When she found that out, the next morning, the person that I saw said, “It's amazing how well you're doing and we just think you ought to go home.” [audience laughter] They gave me a bottle of Percocet and a cane and a bag to put my stuff in. The flowers hadn't even stopped wilted yet.
So, I end up in my apartment at home in very bad shape. The nightmares were unbelievable. I couldn't eat. They had removed about a third of my intestines. I had two collapsed lungs. I was missing organs that I didn't know that I had. And things were very, very difficult. In New York, if you can't go to work and make money and pay your rent, you don't get to stay in your apartment. [audience laughter] I would try and walk down the street to do my job. I had a little business building custom furniture. Whenever I saw a young man that had any hint of menace, this feeling would hit me.
And the feeling was, if you're driving late at night in the winter on a snowy road, and you're going a little fast, and you come into a turn, and you feel all four wheels slip, and you feel the car start to go, and you see the guardrail, and you know there's nothing you can do. And then, all of a sudden, you hit the dry pavement and the wheels grip and you're back in control and nothing happened. And then, you get hit with this adrenaline feeling in the back of your knees and your palms and you taste your mouth. But you're driving and you're like, nothing happened. I would have that feeling seeing teenage kids on the street six, seven, eight times a day if I tried to ride the subway. And it wore me out. I was having, in the end, what was post-traumatic stress symptoms.
I ended up losing my apartment, and essentially then becoming homeless. I lost my business. I went to the district attorney's office for an appointment where I had five attempted murder trials that I had to handle. I broke down. I was crying. I was like, “I can't believe I was so lucky to be alive, but now I'm homeless.” He gave me a number a little late, I thought, for the victim's assistance people. [audience laughter] But it was because I didn't talk. I just kept it all in.
And so, I go and I talk to the-- I sit there and I don't have an appointment or anything. I'm waiting and this girl comes out and she's like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. She's got the turtleneck and the ponytail, and she leads me back to her cubicle. I'm in this really dark place, and I have this feeling that we're not going to connect. I get to her cubicle and pinned up on the wall next to her monitor is that poster. I know you know it, of the kitten with the branch saying, [audience laughter] “Hang in there, baby.” I just don't feel like she's going to help me. [audience laughter]
She gives me this paperwork to fill out for Medicaid, and she gives me some more paperwork on how to get on a list for subsidized housing. It's an 18-month wait, but at least you're on the list. Another sheet with some addresses in the Bronx where I can go for group counseling that's free. I feel like a drowning man who's just been thrown a kit to build a boat. [audience laughter]
I walk out of there, and I go to my favorite bartender, who's this cute Lebanese Canadian girl who's a poet. She lets me move in and stay on the couch. She's rocking this Simone de Beauvoir look, and she's got this whole-- She's smart and funny. The thing from those days that-- She listened, which was amazing, because what people did, and they were all very well meaning, but they had one of three responses. And the first response was when I tried to talk about my feelings and my fear and this turmoil in my head, they would say, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” And that made me want to punch them in the face and ask them if they knew what the reason for that was. [audience laughter]
And then the second thing that people tended to say was, “You've just got to get over it, man. You're alive. You're lucky. You've just got to put this in the past and just move on and gather yourself together.” And that made me want to stab them six times and come back and talk to them in six months and go, “So, how's it working out? You got any advice for me now, because I could really use some help from somebody that knows what I'm going through?” And the third thing that people would say, and again, they're very well meaning, it just was absolutely no help, was that, “Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” [audience laughter]
The problem with that was that I felt like I had come to New York, I'd started this little business, I had built a life, and I had lost everything. I'd lost my apartment, my business. I got no help. This girl that had become-- Let me move in with her was getting a little worried, because I was just so sad all the time, and that I felt like you could actually-- I read Nietzsche. I went to college. I was up all night in the student union, drinking coffee and going, “Yeah, if it doesn't kill you, man. It makes you stronger.” But I felt like I was actually broken, that things could happen in your life that would just break a man. And not only you wouldn't be stronger, but you would never have ever again what you had before.
I felt like things had slipped in a way that I would never be able to recover. What I would do to try and make money and have a job as I gather my little set of chisels and tools, and go up to the Upper East side, Manhattan, where there's always some billionaires working on his mansion. I could see a construction site, and I'd go up and knock on the door and ask if they needed anybody to work just a day laborer. And the foreman, he sees a guy with his own tools. He knows his way around the job site. English is his first language. They'd be like, “All right, put him down there and see what he can do.”
I go and I start working. I knew what I was doing. I'd be in this incredible mansion being renovated, and I'd look around at the unbelievable materials, and I'd think of how lucky these people were to be living. When we were done with this work, they'd be surrounded by beautiful materials and amazing craftsmanship. I'd be there working, and I'd be making a mortise for an offset pivot hinge in a rosewood door. The beauty of everything that I was working on contrasted with my life, I would just start to cry. And so, I'd be on my hands and knees sobbing in the library under construction. One of the laborers would go tell the foreman, like, “You know that dude you hired, man, he's sobbing in the library.”
The foreman, usually this Irish guy come and, “Ed, I'm going to pay you for the day. Go have a drink, man. We don't need you anymore.” And then, that would be it. I'd get fired. I was getting fired again and again. It was always-- These people didn't know what happened to me. They just knew they couldn't have some guy weeping in the basement. [audience laughter] I couldn't hold a job, and I was getting angrier. And now, she's my girlfriend, the Canadian poet bartender, but she's worried because my attitude is not so good.
And I leave. After being fired yet again, I walk out onto Park Avenue. I've got my little bag of tools, and I see this guy walking by, and he's got his hair, he’s perfectly coiffed, and his Hermes tie is knotted and his shoes are shined, his impeccable suit with his shiny briefcase. I see that guy, and I just want to tackle him and just kneel on his chest and punch him in the face and go, “You know? You're not good. You're just lucky, man. You think that all of your assumptions and everything you know, and all you're doing is keeping you where you are. You're just lucky, because it can all just be gone. You can lose it.”
I have this rage at him. I don't do anything and let him keep walking. But I realize as I have that feeling that I have just wanted to hurt an innocent stranger, passerby, to make a point about what is wrong with my life. And in that moment, I realized I've become more like the kids that stabbed me. I've lost who I was before. It's an incredible feeling to feel like you're not who you used to be, and that the feeling was that I was slipping down into someplace where I was going down a road where I was going to meet the guys who were my attackers and I was going to be in hell, because I would go there alone. Like, that path was just of bitterness and there was no way out.
At the same time, for the first time as I was sitting there thinking about these feelings of what was happening to me, I realized I can never get back to where I was. That guy, that business, that whole life is just gone. I lost it. But I had never believed that I had lost it. I always thought I was trying to get back to be that guy. As I sat there and I thought about, I realized I got to do something new. It felt liberating. It was like, “All right, I can't go back because that's gone. And I don't want to be evil and bad, and I'm going to do this new thing.” And I'm like, “I can do it. I can do it. I have this girl.”
And I run home and I'm like, “Okay, I'm not going to be the sad guy and I'm not going to be the mad guy. I'm going to change and we're going to work this out. Will you marry me?” And she's like, “No. [audience laughter] You need a little more work here.” [audience laughter] But she's enthused by my enthusiasm. She knows I'm never going to ask her again. So, after about another year and a half, she feels like we got something and so she asks me to marry her. And so, we do. And we end up building this routine again and setting up a life. And now, I have a two-year-old daughter. I put her shoes on in the morning and I head out to work. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:17:48] That was Ed Gavagan. Ed designs and builds homes and furniture for people all over the world. His work has been featured in Architectural Digest and the New York Times. I recently sat down with Ed to talk about the effect telling this story has had on him.
So, the stories you tell involve very painful memories. And how do you prepare for telling them?
Ed: [00:18:12] There are certain memories that are bound up in having post-traumatic stress, and that those memories are unlike anything else. Those memories live in a different part of the brain. I think even neurochemically, it's a completely separate vault for the post-traumatic stress memories. Those memories come up in a way that is in high def and extremely vivid. I go back to that moment. And so, to prepare for that, you can't in a way, like you just have to-- You say to yourself, “I don't want to lose my composure,” but there's almost no way to not have that. It’ll hit you.
Catherine: [00:19:06] I was wondering about the cathartic effect of telling these stories over and over. It seems like you fully enter each story with each telling, and it helps you in some way to go back there and share these memories by taking what's inside and putting it outside. You're liberating what's private and making it public, especially shared before a big warm audience of fellow humans. I was wondering what you think about that.
Ed: [00:19:30] The thing that I didn't anticipate was that by telling the story, I remind myself to be grateful. To be grateful.
Catherine: [00:19:45] To hear more of my conversation with Ed Gavagan, go to themoth.org. While you're there, pitch us your own story. Many of the most beautiful stories on The Moth Mainstage have been told by people who called our pitch line.
In a moment, writer Nathan Englander will have a story about the hazards of traveling behind the Iron Curtain with only a mixtape, a few bucks, and the Eurail pass.
[Peace Piece by Bill Evans]
Jay: [00:20:26] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Catherine: [00:20:36] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Our next story is from writer Nathan Englander. We first met Nathan at a writers’ festival in Perth, Australia. We knew after just a few conversations that we had to get Nathan to tell a story for us. Here's Nathan Englander, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Nathan: [00:21:01] For those of you who are less than 100 years old, I want to tell you there used to be something called The Soviet Union. [audience laughter] They were our arch enemy and we were locked in a perpetual state of cold war with them for my whole life until I was an adult to contrast that to our perpetual war on terror that we're now in, going around the city, we're all afraid something's going to blow up that might blow up. Well, back then, we were afraid everything was going to blow up. We were going to melt the whole world into a tiny glass marble.
The symbol of this split between east and west was the Berlin Wall, which not only divided that city, it literally divided the planet. I think about it now, it's hard to go back to that, but it was really people would die trying to cross. They were literally trapped, they would literally dream of freedom, they would hide in trunks of cars or dig or try to hang glide, and they would be shot dead. That's how serious it was.
So, in 1989, I'm on my junior year in Jerusalem, studying abroad, and suddenly word comes just out of nowhere, “The wall has been breached. It's open. There's a crossing between east and West. People can move freely.” It's not like today where you know Halliburton for $100 million plows the thing down. People are literally ripping it down with their bare hands with hammers and chisels. This is just unbelievable. The only thing I can think of it in terms of today, literally, like I say to you, like I'm announcing right now on stage, but we have peace with Iran, there's peace in the Middle East, you can go take an Al Qaeda bus tour of Kabul, go see Osama bin Laden's [audience laughter] coffee shop, that kind of stuff. It was just literally mind boggling.
Well, within two seconds, people start showing up back in Jerusalem. Friends and stuff start showing up with pieces of the wall. They're going to be part of history. They're going over there chipping at it. They're helping put the world back together. And this girl I have a crush on shows up and she gives me a piece of the wall and I'm holding it. It's like holding moon rock. I'm holding it, it's got the graffiti on it. I just can't believe I'm holding it. It's such an amazing thing to be a part of, except I ain't. It's like, clear to me in an instant, like, I need to go be a part of this.
So, I grabbed my buddy Joel, who dragged me to Jerusalem, and we set the plan in order, and we're going to do it a Jewish boy style. We're going to do like a Passover, slavery to freedom route. [audience laughter] So, we fly into Warsaw and we do like speaking of bus tours. We hit all the highlights. We do Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka. [audience laughter] We hit all our favorite concentration camps, [audience laughter] and we end up in Prague, where we're going to take a night train to Berlin and that's the end of this heroic journey for us, which is we're going to get to Berlin in the morning, we're going to chip at the Wall, cross to the west, and go home at the end of our year. It's all exciting.
Well, no, we thought this is a grand plan. Nobody else seems to have thought this was the same grand plan, because we are alone on this platform at night. It is pitch dark. There's nobody else there. We're just waiting on this platform in Prague. Ain't nobody else there. Basically, here comes our train. We think it's our train. It starts rolling through the station, but it doesn't stop, it just keeps rolling, clattering those tracks. And what it is is an old freight train.
Now, can I tell you, I am Long Island raised. Like, for me, I have been raised on a full-on diet of the Holocaust. [audience laughter] This sets instant Holocaust PTSD in my head. [audience laughter] You know what I'm saying? For those of you like, I'm yeshiva boy, like we didn't do The Diary of Anne Frank. We went clockwork orange style. [audience laughter] Honestly, I have a friend here, she’ll tell you from a way too young age, they would sit us there and flash images, no joke. Like, piles of bodies, piles of teeth, piles of hair, just combs, just these really unbelievably dark images.
And there's no greater symbol of it. They always did the jackboots. All those old tapes played big black jackboots. And then, those trains. These are the trains that annihilated our people. They would stuff them full of Jews, and when there was no more room, they would stuff babies in over the people's head. There we are standing on the same platforms. It's not like it changed. We're on the same platform, those are the same tracks, this could be the same train that destroyed our people. We're just standing there dead silent.
Well, the next train is our train. [audience laughter] We get up on it, and back to the Long island part. I know my trains, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst, Babylon. [audience laughter] I know my roots. I can tell you-- [unintelligible 00:25:26] went to switch cars, I know when something doesn't feel right when I step into a train car, and this feels bad. It's over hot and already over packed. We're looking for our seats. We got our numbers and we go over our compartment and we open it and we expect two British people drinking tea. It's like the beds are open, it's six guys laid out head to toe, like sardines. Honestly, it smells of piss, it smells of beer, and most of all, it just smells of sadness.
These are refugees. We're on some freedom adventure. People have been trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Like, the wall has come down, people are on the move. Like a good American at that time, I don't think I could point Canada on a map. I can't tell you today, are they Romani or-- No idea. But just refugees on the move. Well, we don't want our seats anymore and they ain't giving them up. We look around in this packed car and this nice family, they make room for us. We take off our packs. They slide their kids over and they let us in their compartment. I could cry telling this to you right now, these people with nothing, they offer to share their food with us.
We settle in, and we're rolling, and we're on our way to Berlin, and then the train stops. I don't speak anything. I don't know what's happening. I don't know how they understood it, what's getting screamed, but suddenly bedlam. You know what I'm saying? They're grabbing their stuff. You can feel it in the corridor. Everybody has to get off the train. And there we are, packed like turtles getting jostled. We are out the train. We're not at a station, we're down the ladder, we're in the dirt, in the night, running in these groups. It's going this way, and that's eddies and rivers. We're just flowing with these refugees. We don't know if there's a fire or what's going on. We are just terrified. It seems to me I'm a coward at everything. It seems like a nightmare of a bad idea, what we have done. Like, I don't know what's going on.
Eventually, there seems like a dominant stream. What it does seem is that they're sending the whole front of the train to the back of the train. Like, the train is being split in the night. We climb back up. Well, if it was packed before, there is no room. It's really panicky. I don't feel like a witness to anything now. I just feel part of it. Joel and I, we are in it. Like, I just want some space, somewhere to be. I want to get safely to Berlin and I want to cross through that wall. Well, it's just we're pushing-- Again, those compartments are overflowing. We make our way to the end of the car and the last compartment in that car has the curtains drawn. So, we give it a yank, and we give it a yank, and we hear someone scream, “Fuck.”
Now, I have to tell you, you cannot learn to curse like an American. You know what I'm saying? Like, I have an Israeli friend, Moti. I remember he always be like, “Nathan, I give a shit.” I'd be like, “No, no, Moti, you don't give a shit.” [audience laughter] He still can't learn it. Point is that is a pitch perfect fuck that I get, [audience laughter] you know? So, we're like, “Fuck. Did you say fuck? We say fuck.” [audience laughter] It's like this chorus of joyous fuck. And then, the door flies open, we fly in, it slams shut. And back to me being a coward. I can tell you know, I don't know if I'm overreacting. There's two American frat boy types there. [audience laughter] Dudes have eyes like saucers. They are as scared and panicked as we are.
Well, this is the embarrassing part of the story. It's just this is any you my age who backpacked then, we honestly all deeply believed that Europe was filled with small bands of ninja robbers who were trained solely to rob 19-year-old Americans. Like, they wanted the bounty of half a joint and a cowboy junkies mixtape. [audience laughter] This was on the black market. You could feed a family off of such bounty.
The more embarrassing part of the story, is we honestly believed it is so stupid. We honestly believed we would tell each other that they would gas you, that they would have like tanks of sleep, they would knock you out, and then take that stuff. So, we all traveled with ropes or bicycle chains. That's how you lock your door. Well, guess what? These guys had the bicycle chain. We were thankful for it. The door was chained. And people are pulling. You know what? We're not the only ones who need a space. Like, people are pulling and yanking and banging at that door and screaming.
Well, the train starts moving. The banging subsides. Every once in a while, there's banging and screaming, but the door's not coming open, and in the way you make home anywhere. The four of us are team. We're a group, we're safe, the adrenaline drains out, we pass out. So, we wake up in the morning. It is beautiful. I've never so enjoyed seeing in a morning like that, like sun streaming. It is lovely, it's bucolic, it's dead silent. There's just trees out the train. We're waiting and we're not moving, so I go to check what's going on. I go out into the corridor, and I very much understand why it's so silent. There's nobody else in the car. Our car is completely empty. [audience laughter]
So, I look into the next car and then I totally understand why it's empty, because there is no next car. There's no locomotive, there's no train. [audience laughter] I look behind us, same difference. We're a car alone, we've been unhooked. At some point in the night, we've lost our train. [audience laughter] So, I also then understand maybe one of those people banging and pulling and screaming was a friendly conductor trying to tell us there was [audience laughter] a second switch. I can hear you all laughing, which means you understand what's happened. I understand what's happened.
Well, going back into that compartment, honestly, we had a very bad night. It's a very difficult information to relay to them. What do you mean there's no-- Like, this idea, where are we? I don't know. You don't know what station? I don't know what country. [audience laughter] So, again, it's not hard to do recon as a group. They come out and they see, we've lost the train. [audience laughter] Well, the one thing we have with us-- Again, it's night. we don't have our iPhones, there's no compass. We know which way our bodies were hurtling through space. So, we put on our packs, we open our door to the next compartment, but there is no train, next car, and we step down onto the tracks, and we hike.
We see a station in the distance, which is good. We hike up towards the station. There's another fact that I have not forgotten in the 20 years since, which is when you show up at the station without the train, the platform is so much higher than you would think. [audience laughter] But they hop up. Joel pulls me up, because that's how it goes. [audience laughter] It's like 06:00 in the morning or something. It's morning light and then there's just one drunken blonde dude with a bottle of vodka stumbling around, not scary happy, like, about our age, looking happy with a bottle of vodka on the platform. We go up to him to inquire, “Do you speak English, and what country are we in?” [audience laughter]
Anyway, He does speak English. He's been out partying. He's got one leg up on us. He's finished his degree. He's been celebrating drunkenly all night. We are in the German Democratic Republic of East Germany. We are in the city of Dresden. And guess where he's going home to? He is headed home to Berlin. So, our group of four, we are now five strong. Our train is coming. It's joyous. I really just want to get through the wall at this point.
We get on the train. We take our seats. In comes out of central casting, this big, strong East German woman in the very serious conductor uniforms. She takes our tickets. And our tickets are no good. Try showing up at O'Hare with a ticket from Laguardia. Our tickets aren't even from the same country. We have Czech tickets. We did not originate in East Germany, so the tickets are no good. So, we pull out our Eurail passes, which are good everywhere. She looks at them, and she doesn't know them, and they're no good. And this is when I understand, she makes it very clear we are being turned off at the next stop.
Now, you know what? I held it together through Israel and then Intifada, and I held it together through the trip and the night. You know what? I'm actually terrified, because I remember my mother talking about my grandparents saying, “Oh yes, these relatives used to write them from across the--” and then they stopped writing. You know what I'm saying? Then they were just gone. Like, this is a part of the world that swallows Jews. [audience laughter] And you know what? Like, those refugees, like dead serious, there's a reason they're racing. That wall comes down a day, it could go back up in a day, half the world was already trapped behind it for all those years. I just think like, what have we done? I think back to that Al Qaeda bus tour. As I tell you now, I think like, do you have to be on the first bus? [audience laughter] What have we done?
Anyway, so, in the middle of my panic attack, Joel's trying to keep me under control. I see our German friend. He's up. He's up, and he's talking to the conductor, and he's gesticulating. He's delivering the Gettysburg Address there. Honestly, literally, with the light streaming through in the morning, he looks almost sober. It's beautiful. Whatever he's doing, it's beautiful. And when he's done, out of nowhere, she reaches out this conductor with this hard face and it goes soft, and she punches our Eurail passes, and she welcomes us on the train to Berlin.
So, we ask him, “What did you tell her?” And he says, I told her this, “These people have come from America to our country. They've come to see our country. Are you going to tell them that a ticket that is good in Madrid, that is good in Rome, that is good in Paris, is no good here? The great conflict is over. We are one world now. We are all of us, brothers.” Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:34:47] That was Nathan Englander. Nathan is the author of the story collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
When we come back, we'll hear from a documentary filmmaker struggling with how to capture the experience of domestic violence victims, who are too afraid of their abusers to be filmed.
[Maygar Sisters by Tom McDermott + Evan Christopher]
Jay: [00:35:28] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Catherine: [00:35:41] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns from The Moth.
Our last story is from filmmaker Ellie Lee. Back in the 1990s, Ellie worked in the trenches of the independent film world. She told me the story you're about to hear as we stood outside at 3 o'clock in the morning on a freezing cold night, waiting for the crew to make a lighting change on set. I never forgot it, and years later asked her to tell it at a Moth show in Grand Rapids produced with Michigan Public Radio. Here's Ellie Lee, live at The Moth.
[applause]
Ellie: [00:36:17] When I was in college, like most people in college, I had no idea what I was doing and I had no idea what I was supposed to study and what I was supposed to do with my life. So, coming as a child of an immigrant, actually as an immigrant myself, my family was rather poor when we were growing up, so we wanted to be practical. I felt this overwhelming need to study math and physics and computer science, which I did. But I never told my mom that my real passion was animation.
I loved animating. I just discovered it in college. And to try to keep me grounded, as I was studying all these things, I also did a lot of volunteer work at the local homeless shelter in the greater Boston area. And I loved it. I loved also being there every night and just seeing these familiar faces. Year after year, I would see a lot of the same people, unfortunately, the same men and women. And over time, I got to become really close with a lot of the women there, and I'd also noticed a pattern emerge where they were all involved in very abusive relationships with other homeless men.
Late at night, as they started seeing me more often and they started trusting me more, over the years, they started confiding these stories about how they had all been abused as young girls, either physically or sexually, and usually by people that they trusted. It was a family member or friend of the family. Years later, I found studies that estimated that in the Boston area, 86% of all homeless women had these kinds of histories. I remember thinking at the time like, why isn't this being addressed in training. When I go to other shelters, like why isn't this something that's even raised? It was back in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
It's hard to imagine now, but back then, the idea of domestic violence was a fairly new term. It was a fairly new phenomenon to a lot of people. And it had existed for a long time, but never in the public eye. It was always something that happened with great deal of shame behind closed doors. There was this movement to raise awareness about this issue that affected every person, regardless of socioeconomic status. I remember thinking that if a film or something existed that could help in training at the shelters or even for the police department, when they saw a situation on the streets, they would know how to approach a woman. I decided as an undergraduate, well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a documentary film about it.
I was really excited that night. I went to the shelter, and I started talking to some of the women, and I told them my idea, and they loved it. They were like, “That's great. That would be a great service to our community, and that would be amazing.” And I said, “Oh, that's perfect. So, you'll be in it, right? You'll participate in the film?” And they said, “Absolutely not. No.” And of course, in that moment I thought about and I said, “Well, of course they're going to say no.” I remember that a lot of the women had confided that in these relationships, they wish that they could leave. They wished that they could break up with their boyfriends, but they were really scared.
They were scared, because if they ever got into a fight with their boyfriend, they would say like, “Don't try to hide. Don't try to go somewhere, because I'll find you. There's only so many shelters in town, there's only so many meal programs, there's only so many drop-in centers and I will find you.” And the women didn't want to suffer the consequences of that. Imagine participating in a film, then all of a sudden, they're airing their dirty laundry and the boys would find them and they would have to suffer those consequences. So, I understood the women's reluctance to be involved, because they were still in crisis.
After getting rejected by the women. I just still felt like, well, somebody needs to make a film like this. And that's when it occurred to me, well, maybe I could make it as animated documentary. I could use the animation in a way I could protect their identities and their anonymity, and it would keep them from being exposed, and I can still share their stories and their experiences and shed light on this issue. All of a sudden, it felt like my life made sense. I loved animation. And then, my work at college, and then my volunteer work at the shelter, it all came together. Suddenly, I felt like I had a purpose.
So, I set off and I started interviewing a lot of homeless women and formerly homeless women. They would serve as the soundtrack for my film. And then, I decided to use charcoal drawings as my animation medium. The charcoal was perfect for me, because I felt like-- Depending on the texture of the paper, the line could be really peaceful and delicate or really violent, snd somehow that could mirror the emotional journeys that a lot of the women were going through.
And then, as the character featured in the film, I would use a character that looked like me, because I felt like I was a conduit for so much of their experiences. It made sense. In a way, it made the film even more personal, I was really, really invested in this film. And so, by the time I was finished with it-- And for those of you who are not familiar with animation, animation is incredibly laborious and tedious. In any given second, you have anywhere from 4 to 12 unique drawings per second. So, it's incredibly time consuming. After a year and a half of working on this film, I had a thousand drawings that I'd created, and I was so overjoyed because I was that much closer to finishing this film.
At the same time, I was not overjoyed by the fact that I was totally broke and I had to move back in with my parents. [audience laughter] So, I called my mom and I was like, “Can you help me move out of my place? This is my last day.” And she said, “Sure, no problem. I'll come over right now.” So, she comes in with a car. I didn't have that much stuff. It all fit in one carload. And the last things to go were my artwork. I put it in the trunk and I closed the trunk and we drove off.
We're driving on store drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a very speedy windy parkway. Cars are going about 40 or 50 miles an hour. Most of the time it's a two-lane parkway, sometimes three with no shoulder. And then, it started getting cloudy. And out of nowhere, there was just a downpour, just pouring buckets of rain. We're driving along, and there's a really sharp turn, a very sharp left turn that you have to make on my way to home. As my mom's making this turn, she hit a pothole, which normally would be totally fine, except for the fact that there was a problem with the trunk. When I had put my artwork in and slammed the trunk shut, I didn't realize the trunk was just really stuck, but not fully locked.
So, it's raining, we're going 45 miles an hour, we hook this sharp left, she hits a pothole, and the trunk popped open, and only the artwork, a thousand drawings, just slid out into two lanes of traffic in the pouring rain. It's rush hour, so I'm seeing all these cars drive over my artwork. I was in a state of shock. I looked in the rearview mirror, I started freaking out. I was like, “Mom, turn around. Please turn around.” Like, “This is a disaster.” It took us 10 minutes to whip around. There's no shoulder, so I'm like, “Stop the car. Stop the car.” I get out in the middle of the parkway and there's traffic all around me. I'm trying to salvage what I can. As I pick up a stack of my drawings, they just melted in my hands like pulp. It was completely destroyed. I'd lost everything.
And by the time I got home, I just remember just sitting on my parents’ couch and staring at a piece of lint on the carpet for four hours. I was completely catatonic. I had no idea what I was doing anymore. And that year that followed, I tried desperately to recreate the film, because I felt like I could resurrect it, but I was completely out of steam and out of gas. I gave everything to this project. Emotionally, I'd been invested in it for three years. I just didn't have anything left in me. Part of me also felt like it was torture, like, why would I want to do this to myself again to force myself through the motions of doing something I'd already done? It was so fragile, like who's to say that's not going to get lost again when I'm done but this next round?
So, at that point, I decided to just give up on animation completely. I just never wanted to animate ever again. So, I moved on, and I tried other things, and it was okay. Five years later, I felt this nagging pull that was holding me back and I felt like it was this film. I had made a promise to these women, when they shared their stories with me, I felt like they deserved at least one more attempt by me to try to bring these stories to life. So, I knew I needed help. So, I applied for a bunch of grants. I was very lucky to cobble together some grants, so I could hire a team of animators to work with me.
3,000 drawings later, we were done with the film. It was amazing. I was so excited, and I was starting it with work on the film and edit it. When I got a phone call, I got an invitation to screen a work in progress at this new organization, a non-profit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called On The Rise. They work specifically with chronically homeless women. I thought it was just a perfect match.
So, I screened at their opening event. It was attended by a small group of people, about 30 people. Afterwards, a woman came up to me-- To protect her identity, I'll call her Annie. Annie came up to me. I just remember vividly this woman who was shaking and unable to make eye contact with me. It was almost as though she felt invisible. She didn't feel comfortable in her own shell, and she said, “Thank you so much for making this film. You really captured what it's like to be homeless.”
As we started talking, I learned a little bit more about Annie, that she'd been homeless for about a decade. She'd lost custody of her son once she started living on the streets. She was a heroin addict, and all of her friends were addicts as well. She had just gone to a doctor, because she wasn't feeling well. The doctor had given her some bad news that she had a life-threatening condition, and that she didn't radically change her lifestyle and get some support and help, that she would probably be dead within a year. And that was her wake up call, and that's what brought her on the rise. She was taking those first steps to get help.
I really appreciated her saying. What she said about the film, I felt like I was just very touched and moved by her. 18 months later, I was at this point, a board member for On The Rise. I was attending a luncheon and it was a fundraiser, a small event. I saw a woman who looked really familiar. As I approached her, I realized it was Annie. She looked totally different. She looked six inches taller. She was glowing, and radiant, and gorgeous. She looked me directly in the eye and everything had changed. She was no longer homeless. She was living in her own apartment. She had reconnected with her son.
Because of her advocacy work for homelessness organizations and homeless people, she had been invited to join the board of the National Coalition for the Homeless, which is a really influential organization in Washington, D.C. She had just gotten a scholarship to go back to college, and she was going to school at night while working during the day, and she had taken her health back, and she was training for the Boston Marathon. [audience laughter] She was amazing. I was moved to tears, and I said, “Annie, how did you do it? How did this happen?” She said, “You know, On The Rise helped me a lot. I couldn't have done it without them. But I think the moment that really changed my life was when I saw your film.” And up until that point-- Thank you. [audience cheers and applause]
Thanks. “Up until that point, I beat myself up every day for making bad decisions, and finding myself in these hopeless situations, and not feeling like I could do anything to get out of it. When I saw your film, I realized I wasn't alone. And not only that, I recognized voices in the film. And these were women that I looked up to, because they were formerly homeless and now doing something to change people's lives.” Like, “I didn't know Macy had suffered from a history of abuse. I didn't know Peggy felt trapped and ashamed about her past and what had happened to her. Once I understood that, it wasn't my fault, I didn't have to blame myself anymore. There was this bigger societal problem, and it had a name, and I could defeat it. I could beat it. At that point, I realized I didn't have to beat myself up anymore and I could beat this thing.” And she did.
Looking back, those seven years of anguish and kicking myself and feeling at this incredibly low point and struggling with this film and with my career and all these questions, I made this film in an attempt to save my friends, the women at the shelter, and I realized that it was the women that saved me. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:49:26] That was Ellie Lee. Ellie is a five-time National Emmy Award nominee, and a 2009 duPont Columbia Award winner.
[Rio Part VII by Keith Jarrett]
That's it for The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:49:55] Your host this hour was Catherine Burns. Catherine directed the stories in the show along with Maggie Cino. The rest of The Moth directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jenifer Hixson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Laura Haddon and Whitney Jones.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argot Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Bill Evans, Tom McDermott and Evan Christopher, and Keith Jarrett.
The Moth 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 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.
The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.