Host: Sarah Austin Jenness
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Sarah: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness from The Moth. I'm glad you're listening.
The Moth is a place for true stories told by all kinds of people to audiences all around the world. This hour explores the idea of home with five stories. We'll hear about a peace trip to Jerusalem, a kid's staph infection in the woods, a knife drawn at a homeless shelter, an evicted mom's lesson, and our first story about a family who feels most at home with the Boston Red Sox.
[cheers and applause]
Here's Jimmy Tingle, live at The Moth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Jimmy: [00:00:52] When my son Seamus was five years old, I was so anxious to get him into baseball that I offered to coach the T ball team. And the thing about T ball is when one kid hits the ball, both teams chase it around the field, [audience laughter] which is hilarious, unless you're the coach. [audience laughter] Sort of organized chaos. And after the second game, my son quit the team. [audience chuckles] My wife said, he had problems with the coach. [audience laughter] I said, "Quit? You can't quit baseball. Baseball is in our blood. It's in the Tingle family blood."
Ever since we were kids watching the Boston Red Sox and the 1967 pennant race, when they won the pennant in 1967 with the Impossible Dream team. When we all had our favorite, Rico Petrocelli, the Italian shortstop for the Red Sox, my mother's favorite. She called him "My paisan" [audience chuckles] after her Italian roots. My father had two cabs in Cambridge. And on several occasions, he actually drove Boston Red Sox players to Fenway Park.
Now, to the outside world, they might have just been utility infielders, but to us, they were like gods. [audience chuckles] We never won the World Series in 1967. I think a lot of it had to do with the theme of that 1967 team. The theme was "The Impossible Dream." [audience chuckles] It's very difficult to win a World Series, [audience laughter] when the word impossible [audience laughter] is part of your theme. [audience laughter] But it just made us more psyched up to win and more into baseball.
Opening day, 1972, my brother Bobby and a bunch of kids from the teen center got tickets to go to Fenway Park on opening day. And they sat right under the backstop. And a foul ball got stuck up in the backstop. My brother Bobby watched that foul ball for three innings. When the umpire wasn't looking, my brother Bobby ran out on the field, started climbing up the backstop to get the foul ball. [audience chuckles] My mother and father were home watching the game on television. [audience laughter]
And the announcer came over the air and said, "There's a delay in the game. There's a young blond-headed boy climbing up the backstop to get a foul ball." And Mama Tingle turned to Pop Tingle and said, "That sounds like something Bobby would do." [audience laughter] And the umpire tried to grab him, and he shushed him away, and he scurried up-- screamed like a squirrel. He got the ball, and he sat on that crossbar, and held the ball up. [audience chuckles] And 34,000 Boston Red Sox fans gave my brother Bobby a standing ovation. [audience laughter] [audience applause]
Opening day, 1972. The next day, he was on the front page of the Boston Globe. [audience laughter] Other newspapers came to our house. We were celebrities. [audience laughter] We were baseball celebrities. They were taking our picture in front of the house with bats, and gloves, and balls. [audience laughter] But even though I told my son Seamus that story many times, he still wasn't into baseball. [audience laughter]
One day, he comes home from school and he says, "Dad, the Red Sox are playing the Yankees today in the pennant race. Can we watch it on television?” Can we watch it on television? That was the most beautiful question I ever heard. [audience chuckles] “Of course, we can watch it on television.” We sat there on the couch, my wife made popcorn, we got all ready to watch the Yankees and the Red Sox duke it out in the 2004 pennant race.
We were so pumped up, and the whole city was pumped up. They lost the first game. I said, "That's okay, son. We'll get them the second game." And the Red Sox lost the second game. "That's okay, we'll get them the third game." And they lost the third game. [audience chuckles] Now, the theme for the 2004 Boston Red Sox was "You got to believe." [audience laughter] But it's very difficult to believe [audience laughter] when your team is losing three games to nothing to the world champion New York Yankees.
When your team is winning, very few people criticize the team or second guess the coach. But when your team starts losing, some people feel compelled to put in their two cents. [audience chuckles] I fell into that category. [audience laughter] I find myself turning into one of my uncles trying to give my son a teaching moment. "You see, Seamus, the reason the Yankees always win-- Look at these people. Clean cut, in shape, well-disciplined players. Look at the Red Sox. [audience laughter] Long hair, beards. Johnny Damon, hair down to his shoulders, a big beard. He looks like the lead singer for ZZ Top. [audience laughter] Hey, Johnny, ZZ Top never won a World Series."
And then, the Red Sox won game four, and then they won game five, and then they won game six. And in game seven, the Boston Red Sox secured their place in baseball history by becoming the first team to come back from a three-game deficit to win four straight games, win the American League pennant, and beat the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. [audience cheers and applause]
There's only one word to describe that series with the Yankees. Biblical. [audience laughter] And then, came the World Series. And the whole town can feel it, and everybody can feel it. We haven't won in 86 years. We're getting ready to watch the game. My son Seamus says, "Dad, you think we can win the World Series this year?" And on the surface, I'm saying, "Of course, we can win the World Series. We're the Boston Red Sox." But internally, I'm saying, “It's highly doubtful.” [audience laughter] And then, we won the first game. He's going, "Dad, we got a good chance now. We won one game, they got to win four. We only have to win three, we got a pretty good chance." "Don't get ahead of yourselves, Seamus."
Then we won the second game. "Dad, we got a better chance now, huh?" "One game at a time, son." [audience chuckles] Then we won the third game. "Dad, it looks pretty good now, huh?" "Don't get your hopes up. [audience laughter] On paper, it seems logical, yes." [audience laughter] And then, game four, the Red Sox are winning by a few runs in the fifth inning. My son goes to bed, it's a school night. They're still winning by a few runs in the seventh inning. My wife goes to bed, it's a school night. [audience chuckles] eighth inning, nineth inning, one out, two outs. Ground ball to the pitcher over to first, three outs. The Boston Red Sox just won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.
I'm in my living room. [audience chuckles] I'm completely alone. [audience laughter] I've got my pajamas on, [audience laughter] my bathrobe, my slippers, and my herbal tea. [audience laughter] And I realize I'm middle-aged. [audience laughter] But the most beautiful thing for me about the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series, is that my son and I fell in love with baseball. And we bonded like we never bonded before. For that Christmas, he got bats and balls and DVDs and batting helmets and shirts and a new glove. We were immersed in baseball. The entire winter, we played catch every single night after supper in the park across the street from our house. Every single night, even in the snowbanks.
The great thing about the snowbanks, you could dive into the snowbanks to catch the ball, and I'd throw him long fly balls and do the announcer's voice: "There's a long fly ball to deep center field. Johnny Damon's back. He's way back. He's way, way back. He dives, and makes a tremendous catch!" And that April, we actually got tickets to go to Fenway Park for the very first time in his life. It was so cool, and he was so pumped up to go to the Red Sox game. He goes, "Dad, I'm going to bring my new glove to the game. Maybe catch a ball, maybe catch a foul ball." I don't have the heart to tell him, 34,000 people, you have virtually no chance of getting a ball. [audience chuckles] But we bring the glove.
When you're a little kid and you walk up that ramp for the first time at Fenway Park and you see the green left field wall, the left field, the Green Monster, so beautiful, so Boston, so majestic, so baseball, so beautiful. [audience chuckles] And the lights are so bright, and the field is so bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, bright green. So appealing. We had beautiful box seats about 100, maybe 200 rows back [audience laughter] on the first base side. We got there early. I'm sitting there, and I'm looking up at that backstop, getting a little nostalgic, thinking about all the people I used to come to games with as a kid who aren't around anymore, my father, a couple of my uncles, a few of my friends. I'm retelling the story to Seamus about my brother Bobby when he climbed a backstop in 1972.
And in about the third inning, the kids behind us actually caught a foul ball. [audience aw] So, on my son's seven-year-old mind, it's conceivable that he can get a foul ball. So, he's sitting there with a glove and he's twitching on every pitch. [audience laughter] "Dad, when are they going to hit it back up here, huh?" He's twitching on every pitch. Then we get food. He's got a hot dog and a Coke. He gives me the glove. I'm sitting there, I'm twitching on every pitch. [audience laughter] And what happened was it was freezing out, and the Red Sox were winning by about six or seven runs in the sixth inning. And people start leaving in droves, and all these much better seats start opening up closer to the field.
So, he's going, "Dad, there's two seats over there." So, we get down there, he goes, "There's two seats over there." We move down there, he goes, "There's two seats over there." We move four or five times in three innings. And by the ninth inning, my friends, we are directly behind the Boston Red Sox dugout. Here is the roof of the dugout. Here are our seats. You could not get any closer. You're practically on the field. And Johnny Damon had been taken out of the game, because they were winning by so many runs. And Johnny Damon is kneeling on the top step of the dugout. He's kneeling there, he's got the red hooded sweatshirt on, the long hair and the beard coming down. I said, "Seamus, it's Johnny Damon." "Johnny, [audience laughter] what's up, brother?"
He turns around, gives us the victory sign. "Seamus, you see that? Johnny Damon just waved to us. “Hey, Johnny. Johnny, you got a ball?" [audience laughter] He goes into the dugout, comes out, and rolls a ball across the roof of the dugout into my son's glove. [audience awe] Baseball is much bigger than baseball. It's about family, it's about friends, it's about community, it's about the next generation, it's about the rite of passage. My son now has his own baseball story to tell his kids someday, you got to believe. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond]
Sarah: [00:14:14] That was Jimmy Tingle. Jimmy is a comedian and commentator from Cambridge, Massachusetts. A graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the founder of Humor for Humanity. To see a photo of Jimmy and his son Seamus in their element at a Red Sox game, and for lots of extras related to the stories you hear on The Moth Radio Hour, go to our website, themoth.org.
[Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond]
Coming up next, three stories from our Moth Community Program, all from a storytelling workshop that highlighted family homelessness.
Jay: [00:15:00] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:15:10] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin Jenness.
The Moth runs a community program, where we teach storytelling to at-risk and underheard populations around the world. The next three stories were discovered and crafted in a personal storytelling workshop called Home: Lost and Found. 18 men and women directly affected by homelessness worked on their stories with us over a two-week period. You're about to hear three of the stories that emerged, and we'll include more in another episode. By the way, thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for supporting this program. So, here's Jason Schmidt with his Moth story.
[applause]
Jason: [00:15:52] So, my parents split up when I was two. My mom went to California by herself. I stayed in Eugene, Oregon, with my dad. My mom wanted to be an artist, my dad wanted to be a parent. But he was a young guy. He was 22 when I was born, and he was a junkie, and a dealer, and stuff was just always going wrong. When I was three, he got busted in our living room right in front of me for dealing coke. And then, when I was four, our housemate accidentally burned our house down. It was just always one thing or another like that.
But Dad had this trick that he could do. You know, the bad thing would happen, and we'd be sitting next to the road with all of our worldly possessions, and he'd say, "Sit tight, kid. I'll be right back," and then he would leave and come back. And when he came back, he would have a phone number, or a used car, or some friend who owed us a favor, or 10 years on probation instead of 20 years in jail. It was like this magic trick he could do, and it was amazing. He was like a superhero to me. There was nothing my dad couldn't do. But it didn't mean that life was easy.
The economy in Oregon back then was really bad. He couldn't work straight jobs, because he had a felony conviction, and he couldn't deal because he was on probation. But then when I was seven, they cut his probation short because of some budget problem, and they were letting nonviolent offenders go early. Dad had an idea where we were going to go. We had heard that there were jobs in good schools and cheap housing, if you can imagine such a thing in Seattle. [audience laughter] It was the 1970s. [audience laughter]
So, we put all our stuff in storage, and we got in Dad's crappy yellow Vega. He had just enough cash in his pocket for food, gas, and we were hoping, first, last, and deposit on a place here in Seattle. So, the only thing was, we were going to do one thing before we left. We were going to go camping for a little while, because just outside Eugene, there's this little piece of heaven. It's the Fall Creek watershed, and it's gorgeous. We'd had a lot of good times out there with our friends, and we wanted to say goodbye to it before we left.
So, we got in Dad's car with a little bit of cash and some blankets, and our stuff was in storage. We went to Fall Creek, and we got a great camping spot right next to the river. Got out, had a campfire, roasted some marshmallows and told some stories and got in the car and went to sleep. And in the middle of that night, our first night camping, my dad wakes up because he's hot. He can't figure out why he's hot. That's his first question is, why am I hot? He can't figure out why. And then, he realizes it's me. I'm generating a tremendous amount of heat. I was hot to the touch. He actually couldn't leave his hand on my forehead.
So, he wakes me up. I'm kind of lucid. I seem functioning. It's dark, it's the middle of the night. He doesn't know what to do. But I seemed okay, so we went back to sleep. And in the morning, every little nick and cut on my body, like little kids get, was red and swollen. There was one on my arm, and he just touched it and it just burst open, and blood and pus started running down my arm. And he said later that the thing that was most terrifying about that moment was that I didn't react to it. I was seven, and I was just looking at it like it was happening to somebody else.
So, he got in the front of the car, and we drove down to our family practitioner Dr. Barry Hill. Dad and I sat in the exam room, and he gave me Tylenol to lower my fever and antibiotics and he said that what I had was a flesh-eating staph infection over most of my body. He prescribed us this special soap that was supposed to take care of the staph infection, and he said my dad would have to monitor my temperature. If it got above 104, he should take me to the emergency room immediately and that I should get plenty of fluids and a lot of sleep.
It wasn't said, but it was strongly implied that what we shouldn't do was go live in the woods, [audience chuckles] and bathe in the stream with all the living things that have their poop and their own bacteria. So, we went out in the lobby, and dad went to the pharmacy, and he used our house money to get the soap and a handful of change. He came back. I sat there next to a phone booth in the lobby, and he made calls. He called everybody we knew. Nobody could take us, because they had kids and they couldn't risk them getting infected, or they had roommates where they were dealing and they didn't want a kid in the house.
So, I was sitting there and I was watching my dad making phone calls. He wasn't yelling and he wasn't begging, but he was getting scared. I'd never really seen that before in all of his previous magic tricks. I had this moment, this seven-year-old epiphany, where I was thinking about all the other times that stuff like this had happened. I was thinking about it from his perspective, and I started to realize that to him, each of these near misses were just points on a trajectory leading to this moment where we had been sliding downhill for a couple of years. That's what it would have looked like to him. I just hadn't noticed, because I was a kid.
So, he runs out of change, and we go back out, and get in the car. He sits there with his hands on the steering wheel, and I'm still hoping I'm wrong, so I look at him and I go, "Where are we going, Dad?" And he goes, "Just be quiet for a minute." And then, he starts the car, and we go back out to the woods. It wasn't the end of things like it had looked like. The soap worked, and he checked my temperature, and it went down, and we spent a while out in the woods. It was fun. It was almost what we'd intended to do, except that we weren't camping anymore. We were homeless.
We stayed there longer than we needed to. At some point, I did that thing again where I tried to imagine it from his perspective, and I started to understand that he was avoiding the reality that we didn't have any money for a house when we got to Seattle. But eventually, we just had to go. So, we got to Seattle in dad's crappy yellow Vega with $20 and no place to stay. And that worked out, eventually. That worked out. We had other houses, and we had other near misses. But the way that I saw my dad had really changed forever. He wasn't a superhero or a magician to me anymore. He was just a man who did his best. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[I'm Going Home by Regina Carter]
Sarah: [00:24:09] Jason Schmidt lives in Seattle with his family. And he's the author of the memoir, A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me. Proceeds from the book help to cover the costs of higher education for young people living in poverty. For more information, go to themoth.org.
Next up, a story from Launa Lea, another graduate of our Home Lost and Found Community Workshop. Here's Launa live, at The Moth.
[applause]
Launa: [00:24:45] There's an intersection in Seattle at 90th and Aurora that's known as the Switchblade. For the last five years, I've been working with people who are experiencing homelessness and addiction on North Aurora. And Aurora is an interesting place. It's the kind of place where you can find a lot of beauty and a lot of needles.
So, I'm working at this community center that's at the Switchblade. And the space is set up like a giant loft with a living room, a library, and a kitchen. I'm making coffee for people just like every other morning. I see a woman walk in, like many of the women who visit us at the community center. She makes her living as a sex worker. So, I see this lady come wobbling in on these toothpick stiletto thigh-high boots. She tries kicking those things off and they don't come off. She's wrestling and cussing, rustling, rustling and cussing and wrangling. She finally gets out of them, and she crawls into an armchair, and she falls asleep. At some point, I notice she's been covered with a blanket. She's asleep, and it's a very peaceful scene.
Less than an hour later, the same woman is screaming at the top of her lungs. So, I come out from the back to see what's going on. I didn't hear everything she said, but I heard her say this. She said, "I work hard. I don't steal. And everything I have, I paid for myself. Why would someone take one of the only things I have? How am I supposed to work tonight without my shoes?"
Now, me personally, I've been homeless three times in my life, once as a child, once as a teenager, and once as an adult. And if I've learned one thing from those experiences and from kicking it with this population on Aurora for half a decade, it's this. You cannot be seen as weak when you're on the streets.
So, when she first started up, I figured she was making a statement. She wanted people to know that she wasn't an easy target. But I didn't want things to get out of hand. So, I pulled her aside and I walked her over to our donation closet, told her I'd find her a new pair of shoes. But with each pair of high heels, she got angrier and angrier. And the angrier she got, the more desperate I became. And she finally stopped me and she said, "Launa, I don't want your shoes. I want my shoes, the ones I worked for and paid for myself." I couldn't argue with that. But then, the knife came out, and I realized that I had to make a decision.
Now, any training manual or guidebook will tell you that this is the point where you run to the office, you lock the door, and you dial 911. But as I sat there watching her, remembering what it was like out there, I saw the look in her eyes and I recognized it. And the knife in her hand, I realized, wasn't so much of a weapon as it was a prop. She was putting on a show. She said her piece, she got some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. When she was finished, I said, "Now, will you please put the knife down?" And she did.
Now, this is the part of the story where people usually tell me that they cannot believe I didn't call the police. I told them I wasn't afraid of her. I was afraid for her. You see, if I had called a police officer to the scene, what do you think the odds are that a gun would have been drawn on her? And if a woman had bled out on the floor that day, because I called an officer to the scene who didn't understand street language, who didn't recognize that they were basically watching theater, then that would have been on my conscience for the rest of my life.
So, I went off book, and I followed the code of the street. She got her shoes back, by the way. [audience chuckles] But this story is not about a woman who got her shoes stolen. It's a story about having a voice. Now, sometimes it is my responsibility to call the police. But other times, it's not. Other times, it's my responsibility to simply shut up and listen to someone who has been talked at, talked over, and spoken for, speak for themselves. Even if it's in a language that I don't fully understand. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Sarah: [00:30:20] That was Launa Lea. Launa teaches writing classes at the Aurora Commons, where she supports men and women who are in trouble with homelessness, addiction, and prostitution in Seattle.
And now, Gretchen Waschke. The story you're about to hear will sound a little intimate and different. It was recorded during the last session of this Moth Community Workshop in a quiet meeting room on a Sunday morning before the performance, with only the instructors and the other participants in attendance. It was the first time she told the story in public.
Gretchen: [00:31:02] So, I got home on a Wednesday night in January, after dropping my daughter off with my soon-to-be ex-husband. And I arrived home to find [sobs] a water shut-off notice, an electricity shut-off notice, and an eviction notice. And it was very cold. I went inside, I took those pieces of paper, and I sat in the middle of my very dark living room floor. It was really quiet, and I found myself somewhere between relieved, because I knew my daughter wasn't there. She was with her father, she was safe, and she was warm, and she was cared for, and I was terrified. [chuckles]
We'd recently come to mostly an agreement about how our divorce was going to happen, and who was going to have McKenna, and what the future would look like for me as a mom, although my ex-husband, soon-to-be ex-husband, had made it clear that he didn't think that I could ever be stable enough for her on my own. I was terrified that he would know that maybe that was actually happening. I sat there all night, and I was like-- I couldn't figure out how I'd gone from where I was, [chuckles] with a home and a husband and three dogs and two acres of property, to almost nothing.
I sat there, and I knew that I'd grown up being told, "It doesn't matter what's going on behind closed doors in your home, you walk out and you put on a good face and you figure it out on your own, but you do what you got to do in public. You make it look okay." So, after not sleeping and being very cold and not having a place to shower or really get ready, I stood in the mirror trying to make some semblance of normal before leaving for work on Thursday morning. At the time, I had an office that was closed, and there were no windows. So, it was like a refuge in that moment. I was hoping that I wouldn't actually cross paths with anybody that day. I was not so fortunate. There was a knock on my door, and I almost didn't answer, [chuckles] but I said, "Come in." And it happened to be a woman who, over time of working together, we'd become friends.
Keisha walked through the door, and she looked me in the eye, and she said, "What is going on?" I looked down at my desk. I couldn't look her in the eye. And before I could stop myself, all of these words started tumbling out of my face, that he'd been cheating on me. The divorce was almost final. My parents didn't want to talk to me anymore. I had no water, I had no heat, and I was about to lose the only place I had to be with my daughter. And there it was. It was all there on the table in front of me.
I looked up at her, thinking that she would either laugh or walk out the door, like, “Okay, don't know what to tell you.” I'm pretty sure I held my breath for a million minutes in the five seconds it took her to answer and say, "We got this. I know somebody who needs a housemate." And Sunday night, I laid down next to my daughter, and I listened to her sleep, and I cried, realizing that my community had become my family. [laughs]
[cheers and applause]
So, there it is.
[The Summer Ends by American Football]
Sarah: [00:35:16] That was Gretchen Waschke. She lives with her daughter in Seattle, and she says her community is still her family. She now works as a counselor for the formerly homeless. To learn more about our community program, which teaches storytelling to underheard communities, go to themoth.org.
Coming up, our final story. A young man moves to Jerusalem to make peace, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[The Summer Ends by American Football]
Jay: [00:36:02] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Sarah: [00:36:14] I'm Sarah Austin Jenness, and you're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX.
Our last storyteller is the writer, Nathan Englander. This story was told in New York at a Moth night called Toil and Trouble: Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong. Here's Nathan Englander, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Nathan: [00:36:37] I'm going to put this at official Jewish Upper West Side height. [audience laughter] It's my neighborhood.
I was moving to Jerusalem to make peace. It was 1996, and I was living in Iowa City, Iowa, and peace was breaking out, there was going to be a new world order. Basically. I was sure everyone was going to be holding hands from Baghdad to Tel Aviv. And my friends were already there, and honestly-- Israel had peace with Egypt, they had peace with Jordan, the Palestinian Authority had the West Bank and a casino. The state was happening, it was going to be over, and I was desperately afraid that year that I was going to miss out.
Now, I wasn't just moving. I'm radically secular now, but I was raised religious. I have this concept of Aliyah in my head. I'm making Aliyah. Literally, the route [unintelligible 00:37:24] is to go up in holiness, it's a forever thing when you move to Jerusalem, you don't come back from that. So, I am going there forever.
I had a friend-- Jesus called me, got a job in Denver. He didn't say to me, "I'm moving to Denver and I will die in Denver and Denver will drink my blood." [audience chuckles] But this is the way I'm thinking for Jerusalem. School ends, two weeks later, I'm on a plane. I wake up in Tel Aviv, I walk into the airport and I look for the first official Jew I can find, and I say to him, "Where's the office for new immigrants?" And he looks at me and he says, "Did you come on the plane from Manhattan?" Not New York, not America, Manhattan. [audience laughter] And I tell him, “In fact, I have.” And he says to me, "It's not too late. Go back." [audience laughter]
Two days later, I met this fancy-- I've been there a million times and I've lived there. I met this fancy lefty in the American neighborhood, this professor's house, the academics, all the brilliant lefties. Because it's not just I want to be part of peace. Peace needs me. It needs short story writers. I'm also convinced. One of the architects of the Oslo Accords is there. It's this fancy dinner, and I'm just excited, I can see it happening as she raises her glass and I'm going to get my toast and she says to me, "Welcome to the Titanic." [audience chuckles]
But again, there have been setbacks. Buses are blowing up, the prime minister has been assassinated, but all I can tell you, and I so feel this, it felt so good on the street. We'd go to East Jerusalem on Saturday to the Arab party and eat lunch, and it was just a beautiful time. I didn't want to live with those Americans. I was becoming Israeli. There was this neighborhood in the center of town, all twisty alleyways and houses piled on top of each other. We're all living in a pile. There's the artists and the freaks and the stone messianists and, everything's happening. It is the birth then of Hebrew rap, which I recommend to all of you. [audience chuckles] So much good stuff is going on, and we're all so poor, and living in this crazy place.
Literally, my house is patched with tin and chicken wire. When it rains, my roommate and I would sit there and watch our one light bulb on a wire, just watch the water pour off and it would pour in under the doors, and like a horror movie, just water would run black down the walls. It was just downright dangerous to live that way. It's my buddy's story that sums it up best. He wakes up and he's peeing, it's on fire. His body's shaking, his toes are curling, his eyes are bugging out. It's horrible. And to give you all the gory details, there's a weird non-complication. When he poops and pees, he feels fine. When he pees again, the fire, the eyes, his body's shaking, he can't figure out what's happening. This is for my science friends. [audience laughter]
When he's sitting, he is peeing against porcelain. When he is standing up, his landlord has not grounded electricity. He is closing the circuit and being electrocuted through his wiener. [audience laughter] Honestly, this is the least of Jerusalem life. [audience laughter] Being in the heart of the city, we also have the open-air market, again Upper West Side, there are scientists in and Jews. I know Machane Yehuda. [audience chuckles] It's just this really simple life. You need a cucumber, you go get a cucumber. You need a tomato, you go get a tomato. That's such a nice way to live. I'm in the market with my Israeli girlfriend, and my buddy Mike's in from Haifa, and we're shopping, and it's a Friday, and it's always a beautiful day.
And we're thinking, should we do a real shopping? And we decide, as we always do, let's just be lazy and go home and eat. We walk the couple of blocks, and get to the balcony, and then there is a low boom and another low boom, and we absorb it, and the market has just blown up. I'm thinking, I want to freak out. I'm a kid from Strong Island. Like, “This is not for me.” I just want to freak. My girlfriend says-- She's going to make a man out of me. “This is it. When your number's up, your number’s up.” And I understand it. We don't do chaos theory there. You did not survive September 11th in Minnesota, you didn't survive it in the Bronx. Those are the rules of Jerusalem. If you're close enough to claim it, you're dead. And that's how we're going to do it.
Now, I'm a coward. Why aren't I afraid? Because at this time, I'm an idealist and I honestly believe you have to be willing to die for something. We're making peace, and there is a cost, and there are enemies, and I was really ready to die for that. I would never say such a thing now. But then, I really believed. And not long after, I'm sitting in my cafe writing, downtown, and I'm thinking, I'm going to walk home, and I decide to just do another few more lines of writing, and I sit for a minute, and then it comes again the giant, giant boom.
And I tell you I wrote a short story about this, and I deny any link, and I feel like I am raping the memory to share it with you, but it's my memory, and I just don't like to talk about it, but I will, here. But this is not the first bombing. Now, this is the second. So, there's a second blast and a third, and it is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life. The second blast and the third, you are listening to people get dead. It is a horror. And just you turn into animal. You can't think. You just want to run into the fire, but there's nothing to do. I'm not a paramedic or a policeman. There's a paratrooper, there's my last pee, but there's just nothing to do.
So, I walk up to that corner, and I make my first non-Jerusalemite decision. I think, I don't need these memories. I don't need to see this. And I take another block and walk home. But the next day, I'm back. Because that's what we do. I'm a lefty. I want two states. I want East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital. This is not about Zionism, or colonialism, or territory. This is about my fucking neighborhood. Like, the next day, it's cleaned up. That's the way they do it. No blood, some broken windows, but they're gone. No glass, no nothing. I am back there in the middle of the bomb, just right where it happened, and I'm eating a slice.
I'm going to have a slice of pizza, because it's my town and my block. And if I don't go back the next day, I'm not going to go the day after that or the day after that. And that's how we do it. But at this point, again, I'm still not afraid, but I'm thinking in a Chekhovian Ward 6 idea, like, maybe we should all be going crazy. Maybe this not going crazy is the crazy part. I think we should all be curled up in a corner, drooling. Honestly, it just can't be stopped, the peace. I just think this can't be stopped. Setbacks and setbacks, but this is how things happen.
And the metaphor I used, the thing that kept me going all this time was I just would always think of the moon. Like, we've looked at the moon since the dawn of time, and people wanted to go there. And I thought, that's impossible. It's literally impossible to send a man to the moon, but we sent a man to the moon and we brought him back. And to me, that's how I feel. Peace is impossible, we'll still do it. It’s the time, it's the new millennium, close your eyes and think back. We still had Bill Clinton, there's a surplus, but we also had friends in the world. We are one signature away from peace. We need one more Sharm el-Sheikh, and it's over. It's really finally here after all these years.
I remember it's New Year's in Jerusalem, Jewish New Year's, and I throw a big dinner party, and everything feels great. We have a super time. I wake up the next morning, and the country is on fire. We are having a war. Just mutually assured self-destruction, it is over. The hope is gone. And I call my friend Debbie, and she's a war photographer, she answers the phone. I can hear she's in the middle of a firefight. I hear the bullets flying and the shot grenades and the tear gas. She's really in the middle, and I ask her, really from the depths of myself, I want to know, "At dinner last night, do you think Shelly had a good time?" [audience chuckles]
But this is it, because we're going to be normal. This is the point. Debbie still tortures me about this. She doesn't hang up the phone. She gets behind one of those big cement things that you see on the news, one of the blockade things, and she just squats down back there and we go over dinner, like, "Do you think it's okay that Kathy and Kobe drove from Tel Aviv? Like, how was dessert?" We go over that dinner, because that's it. We don't give up.
And then, this is my life now. I don't complain about my neighbor's bad piano anymore. If tank fire's shaking the window, you put in your earplugs and you write your novel. I remember watching Die Hard one night, and I pause and open the balcony door to see that the machine gun fire is also coming from outside. That's my Jerusalem surround sound. It just becomes guns on the copters. It's just never-ending violence, but that's what I get used to. But this is also when I get afraid, because this is when I recognize. I just thought people were playing.
I see that Sharon sucks and Arafat sucks, and they're just-- Nobody is really trying, and that's when I see it's for nothing. That's when I start to see-- The tourists are gone, it's Jerusalem. There's no tourists, there's no buses, you're flying back from abroad on empty planes. It's just nobody wants to come to our country, and nobody in Israel wants to come to Jerusalem, and nobody in Jerusalem wants to come to my neighborhood. I'm sitting there in the shuk on Agrippa Street, eating my hummus, looking at the hummus guy and the other regular customers, because we have to be there. This is what we do. If we die from it, we die from hummus.
I feel it's my obligation, and I just can't understand how I inherited this block, how did it become mine. And about that time, I get a call from a friend in New York, and she's weeping. She did not get invited to the Oscar party of her choice. [audience chuckles] And this hurts me. It does. I calm her down, and I hang up the phone, and I have an epiphany, because I want those fucking concerns. I want to worry about the Oscar parties, I want to weep deeply because I missed the Steve Allen sample sale. [audience chuckles] These are the things I want to worry about.
I've got this Aliyah head. This is my head like, I think being an individual is weak or wanting to drink your coffee and not get blown up is weak. I just think any concerns that are basically what you would call a happy, normal life are somehow wrong. But I'm starting to think otherwise. I'm starting to think I missed that.
So, I'm in New York giving a reading, and I'm walking around, and I'm thinking, you know what? I really like it here. It's such another betrayal. It's so hard to admit once you become a Jerusalemite. I'm thriving. I am thriving in New York. I like it. I like my New York friends. I like it here. And that's when I bump into an ex-expat, a New Yorker to Jerusalem and back. Everyone's already here. I see more people from Jerusalem here in this neighborhood than if I'd go back there.
She's left a year before me. There's this halfway house that they have, this apartment-- You take a Jerusalemite, and it's like coming up so you don't get the bends. It's this place where they can acclimate before you re-release them into the wild. [audience chuckles] That's what we've got. There's a room empty. I know the girl who's left it, she left two years before, and she offers me the room. I look at it, and I think, it's-- I know this thing, because Aliyah, it is forever. I'm supposed to die there. I know how everyone does it. It's extended vacation.
My parents came for two weeks from Israel to New York in 1964, and they're still headed back. That's how we all do it. So, I'm like, “I could just use a little more time here. It's peaceful. It's quiet. I'll do my writing. I deserve this life. It's okay.” Look at the room, I like it. I look at the lease and I sign it. I put down my name, Nathan Englander, and I put down the date, September 1st, 2001. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
[The Summer Ends by American Football]
Sarah: [00:48:26] That was Nathan Englander. Nathan lived in Israel for five years. He now splits his time between Brooklyn, New York and Madison, Wisconsin. His short story collections include For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
So, that's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll join us next time.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Jay: [00:49:03] Your host this hour was Sarah Austin Jenness. Sarah also directed the stories in the show, along with Catherine Burns and Larry Rosen.
The rest of The Moth’s directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Whitney Jones. Parts of this episode were made possible thanks to the generosity and support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Moth would also like to thank Kathryn Henriksen and Colin Minn. Also, Tracy Day, Brian Greene, and our friends at the World Science Festival.
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 is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Neil Diamond, Regina Carter, and American Football. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour is 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.