Host: Dan Kennedy

Dan: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I am Dan Kennedy. Hope your summer is going great. We have an excellent episode of the podcast for you today. Two stories about the secret world of our parents. 

The first story is by Shalom Auslander, and it was told live here in New York City in 2012. The theme of the night was Ho, Ho, Ho! Stories of Naughty and Nice. Here's Shalom. 

[cheers and applause] 

Shalom: [00:00:32] Awesome. I love raising it. I think the defining characteristic of my childhood, was that I had two dads. Unfortunately, they were not of the loving, encouraging, homosexual kind. My first father was Father in Heaven. I was raised very strict, Orthodox, Jewish. Black hats, black coats, no cheeseburgers. It was like being Amish, but without the fun. [audience laughter] What my rabbis taught me, was that essentially, God was a fucking asshole. Anytime you thought things were going to be good, He made it shitty. You thought something worked out, well, He made it bad. That was kind of-- He was a dick. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the essential message. [audience laughter] 

My other father was the father in my house, my actual father, who in many ways was more frightening than God. He was a violent man. He drank. He smoked cigarettes, which was terrifying to me for some reason. I'd seen him hit my brother and give him a bloody nose. I'd seen him knock my mother out on the floor. I never saw them kiss. I don't even think I ever saw my mother and father hug. So, the only difference between the two fathers, was that God, it seemed, was an asshole from day one. 

But even at the young age of eight or so, I remembered a better time with my father. I remembered playing in the snow with him. I remember tickle fights. And so, I thought if I could just somehow reconnect with him, if I could do something to find some common ground with him, maybe I could help the family. Because that's what children do. They think they can help the family, because children are fucking idiots. And so, I decided there's got to be some way for me to connect with him. But what could I do? 

I couldn't start drinking. I couldn't offer to pack his Camel cigarettes for him. I didn't think that was going to work. And then, it occurred to me, then I remembered that in his youth, my father was an avid photographer. There was even a diploma on the wall from Tisch School of the Arts that he'd been to for film and photography. My mother told us that when the kids came along, he had to put it all away and get a real job. And so, he'd put all his camera equipment into boxes, and stuck them under the closet underneath the stairs and never opened them again. 

And so, one Shabbos night, Friday night, while everyone was upstairs getting ready for the holy day, I snuck into the closet downstairs. They would keep the light on, so that it could light the stairway. I snuck underneath and found the boxes. I pulled out the first box and it was filled with lenses, camera lenses. I was looking at them and trying to play with them. And then, I opened the second box. It's filled with camera bodies and weird meters and things. I opened the third box and it's filled with my father's photographs, which I couldn't believe I'd never even seen any of these. And they were landscapes or photos of the house that they lived in. Very simple things. And I'm rummaging through it. 

At the bottom of the box, there's a white envelope sealed in acid free paper. It seemed like it must have been something good. And so, even though it was Shabbos, I tear it open and I take out the picture. It's a dirty picture, an incredibly dirty picture. It's a photo of a man. He's standing facing the camera. He's not wearing a shirt, but he's wearing pants. And in behind him, there's a woman tied up, spread eagled on a table platform. She has her skirt on, but no top. She's wearing a bra. And if I look really closely, which I did, I could see almost boobs. [audience chuckles] 

And then, I hear a creak in the floor upstairs and I freeze, because I think it's my father and he'll kill me. And then, I look back down at the picture and I look at the man and I recognize him. And I think, dad? It's my father, much younger. I'm thinking, what is my father doing in a dirty picture? And then, I look a little more closely at the woman. Mom? [audience laughter] It was my mother. I think the rabbis were right. This is exactly the kind of shit God pulls. [audience laughter] Here's Garden of Eden. Fuck you. Get out. [audience laughter] You're out of slavery. Fuck you. You're in the desert. You find a dirty picture. Fuck you. It's your mother. [audience laughter] [audience applause]  

That's just the way he rolls. [audience laughter] So, I put the picture back in the envelope, put it at the back of the box, seal it in and run and swear I'm never going back in there again. The following Friday, I'm back under the stairs. [audience laughter] Yeshiva ended early on Fridays, so that we could go home and ostensibly prepare for Shabbos. But my parents both worked, so it gave me a couple hours free before they came home. So, I thought I'd go looking for pictures of other naked, tied up women who preferably had not given birth to me. 

So, I go under the stairs, I look through the box, there's nothing. But when I'd been looking at that picture before I knew it was mommy, I'd given me this tingle in my stomach and I wanted that tingle back. So, I went upstairs to their bedroom, which was insane. My father was the kind of guy who would leave a paperclip on the drawer side, so that if it was moved, he would know. I began looking for dirty pictures. I found them, a lot of them. I found dirty magazines under my father's mattress and his nightstand. Men on top of women, women on top of men, women with women. No men with men, which seemed like an arbitrary omission at the time to me. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. 

Then I went to my mother's side of the bedroom, and I opened up her nightstand. There's this big jar of ointment and then this tube of cherry flavored lotion. It's so bizarre to me, because we have cherries in the fridge, if you like cherries so much. [audience laughter] And then, there's this wand that looks like a plane without wings. When I turned the bottom, it started buzzing like crazy. There's these two balls that are connected with a string. When you shake them, you can hear these other balls inside those balls. I was desperate to get at those balls, because they must be very special balls if they're inside other balls. But no matter how much I twisted, I could not open those balls. [audience laughter] 

And so, I realized this is-- I should probably quit while I'm ahead. I've got about an hour till my father comes home. But something told me, [chuckles] some sort of vision told me there was something better. There must be something even better if I found this much good stuff already. And then, in my father's underwear drawer, underneath all his dirty underwear, like in the movies where the fiercest dragon protects the greatest treasure, [audience laughter] I found two metal tins, film tins. I took them out and I opened the first one up. It's got like a knife and scissors and this odd-looking tape. 

I open up the second one and it's a film. I hold it up to the light, and I'm going through it to see what it is. All I can make out is this woman in a living room, and she's vacuuming. At that point, I hear a noise. I hear a car door slam. I freaked out, because again, this is just like God. I find a porno film, and now I'm going to get busted. So, I run to the window thinking it's my father. Fortunately, the driveway is empty. There's a neighbor coming home. I've got like a half hour left. The idea of that stomach tingle was too appealing, I couldn't give it up. 

So I went into his closet and I found the projector. [chuckles] I take the projector out-- I've never worked a projector before. But I was some kind of pornography prodigy. [audience laughter] I plug it in, and I see how the bottom reel feeds, moves and feeds the top reel past the bulb. I put the thing in and I turn it on. I'm shaking as I turn it on, and I switch it on and I'm thinking, please, God, don't be mom. She did vacuum a lot, so it was a distinct possibility. It isn't mom. It's this beautiful woman with enormous boobs, and she's vacuuming her living room. All of a sudden, a man walks in, and he kisses her and he starts unbuttoning her blouse. And that tingle returned. 

The blouse drops to the floor. And then, he removes one strap of her bra and then the other. And just as he's about to let the bra fall to the floor, her stomach begins to glow yellow and then orange, brighter and brighter. And I'm thinking, is this what happens when you take a girl's bra off? And then, I think it must be God talking to me. If He spoke to Moses through a burning bush, why wouldn't He talk to me through a burning porno film? I'm watching it. She starts to get red, and then she starts to get black and then her face begins to distort. And then, I think I'm smelling smoke-- And then, I'm smelling smoke and then smoke wafts past me, and I turn around and the film has snapped in half, and the bottom is spinning and going flap, flap, flap, flap, flap and it's throwing burning porno and smoke all over the bedroom. 

And I want to cry. This is a very dangerous human being and I've now burnt his porno film. I'm in his room, and he's going to be home any minute. So, I panic. I pull the cord out of the projector. I open up all the windows. The fire alarm starts to go. I grab a broom from the closet and start knocking it to shut it off, spray air freshener all over the room, grab the burnt film and the two reels, close the door, and run downstairs and jump into bed under the covers. What seems like seconds later, I hear his car drive into the driveway, the door slam, his heavy footsteps upstairs to the bedroom. I'm counting the seconds, and I think maybe I got away with it. 

And suddenly, there's that heavy stomp coming back, back, back down the stairs. He throws the door open. I jump. And he says, “What the hell are you doing in my room?” I could see his hand gripping the doorknob. I mean, this guy wants to kill me. And I said, “I had a stomachache. I had to use the bathroom.” And he says, “What's wrong with your bathroom?” And I said, “Well, it was too cold. I don't feel good.” He stares at me, waiting for me to crack and then just grabs the doorknob with his hand again and says, “Stay the hell out of my goddamn room,” and slams the door. And he leaves. 

Later that night, everyone's upstairs getting ready for Shabbos. I take the films and I go into the bathroom and I lock the door. I realize that the only way I can save this film is by cutting the piece out that I burnt and taping it together. I do that. It's a weird jump cut, which is what I would learn later in life, because-- [audience laughter] And so, I have to cut on her blouse falling to the floor, which is called a match cut or cutting on the action, which I would learn later in life. It's a good cut, except I look through the film, and now it's the only cut in the whole film. I figure he's going to notice that. So, I went through the film and I put in half a dozen other cuts. [audience laughter] When they were at dinner, I went and put it back in his room and closed the door. 

The following Friday, I'm home alone again and I decide to screen the film for myself. [audience laughter] I watch it, and it's actually much better. [audience laughter] It moves along a bit better. There's a lot of unnecessary narrative. At first, I'm very proud. And then, I feel quite sad, actually, because I realize that this is something that he would be proud of me for and it's something I could never admit to, because he was dirty and I was dirty, and I could never have that in common with him. And so, I never told him, to this day. 

About 15 years ago, I'm on my way toward total estrangement with my family. One of my last visits to their house, I decide it might be nice to find that picture of my mother tied up, because I just started psychiatry. [audience laughter] It'd be a nice exhibit A for my doctor, [audience laughter] because it's not too late to raise the rates if that's what he wants to do. So, again, Friday night, except now I'm in my mid-20s, I sneak under the stairs, I open the box up, I take it out and there's more dust on the box than there was before. I take out the envelope, and I open it up and there's that picture. I'm expecting quite a dirty picture, except that's not what I found. What I found was something that made me quite a sad, because I realized it was the only time I ever saw them showing any affection for each other. It was the only time they seemed interested or were having any fun. 

And so, in the time that passed, what went from being a very dirty picture it went to being one of the most beautiful pictures of them, if the only one I ever saw. And so, I took the photo and I put it back in its acid free envelope, and I sealed it as best I could and I put it back in the bottom of the box, put it back under the stairs, left, closed the door and never saw it again. Happy Hanukkah. 

[cheers and applause] 

Dan: [00:15:33] Shalom Auslander's critically acclaimed novel, Hope: A Tragedy is a national and international bestseller. Auslander lives in upstate New York. 

Okay, so, our second story this week is by Jeannette Walls. She told this story back in 2005. The theme of the night was Up, Down, In, Out. Here's Jeannette. 

[applause] 

Jeannette: [00:16:00] One evening, not too long ago, I was going to a party. I was all dressed up for it. The taxi got stuck in traffic about a block and a half away from the party where I was headed. I got a little irritated, glanced out the window, considered getting out and walking the rest of the way, and I noticed a woman. She was rooting around in the garbage. She looked like your average run of the mill homeless woman, but she was, in fact, my mother. 

At that moment, I was terrified. I was terrified that she would spot me and call out my name, and that somebody that was going to the party where I was going to would realize that this woman was my mother. Because this is something I hadn't told anybody, none of my friends or coworkers. There was no doubt in my mind that if people knew this secret, that I would lose everything that I'd worked so hard for. So, to my eternal shame, I slid in the back of the taxi and I asked the driver to take me home, which at the time was Park Avenue. Once I got there, I paced around the apartment. I was a little rattled by the whole event. I glanced in the mirror, and I didn't much like the person I saw there. 

So, I arranged to get together with my mother, a couple of days later. We had a whole method for getting together and got together at a Chinese restaurant. By the time I'd gotten there, she'd already dumped all the sweet and sour sauce and the soy sauce and the spicy mustard sauce into her purse, along with all those little crunchy noodles they gave you for free. She was in a great mood. My mom's a very upbeat person. I sat down and I said, “Mom, what is it that you want in life? I want to buy you something to help you. What is it that you want and need?” She actually mentioned electrolysis. She said she had a little bit of a mustache coming in. 

And I said, “No, Mom. I mean, something that would really change your life, something that could help you and really turn things around for you.” And she said, “Who are you to try to dictate my life? I'm not the one who needs my life changed.” She knew I didn't tell anybody about her. And she said, “You're the one whose values are all screwed up. Shame on you. Won't even admit to the people that I'm your mother.” And I said, “But, Mom, what on earth am I supposed to tell people when they ask me about you?” She looked at me as though I'd asked her the stupidest question in the world, and she said, “Tell them the truth. That's simple enough.” But the truth wasn't so simple. 

At the same time, her challenge really got me thinking about myself and how I ended up living on Park Avenue and writing about celebrities and socialites, while my mother and father were both essentially living on the streets. And it made me think of my earliest memory. I was three years old. I was cooking hot dogs for myself in a trailer that we lived in some place in Arizona. I cooked for myself a lot. My mother was an artist. She didn't like domestic chores at all, but especially cooking. Her philosophy was, why should I spend an entire afternoon cooking a meal that's going to be gone in a little while when I could spend the same amount of time doing a painting, a thing of beauty that will last forever? So, we, kids, cooked for ourselves. 

And that particular day, I was wearing a skirt that stuck out and it caught on fire. My mom scooped me up and rushed me to the hospital, and I spent six weeks there. What I remember the most about the hospital was how clean it was, and how we had three meals a day and how the nurses changed the sheets even when they didn't look dirty. I liked the hospital. But then, one day, my dad came in and he rescued me from the hospital. He scooped me up in his arms and he said, “We're going to check out Rex Walls style.” So, he ran out with the nurses running after us. He called it, doing the skedaddle. We jumped in the car, ran off. I think we left town that day. I don't really remember. Moved to some other town. 

We were always running away, one place or another, doing the skedaddle. Sometimes the car would break down, we'd have to finish up our skedaddle, hitchhiking or walking the rest of the way. We lived more places than I could count by the time I was 10. But when we weren't running away from something, we were running away from the mafia or bill collectors or the FBI or some nefarious character who was after my father for reasons that he didn't want to tell us, because he didn't want to put us in danger to. And then, we'd end up in some small little town. When we weren't running away from people, we were chasing things. 

About a year after I got out of the hospital, I remember once that I thought I heard a monster under my bed. I went in and told my dad, “There's a monster under my bed.” He looked at me. I half expected him to say there was no such thing as monsters, but instead he said, “Was it a wicked looking creature with scary eyes and big old long teeth?” I said, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like it.” He said, “Hell, that sounds like that old bastard demon. Demon's been chasing me around for years. I guess he figured that Rex Walls don't scare too easy. Now, he's going after my kids. We'll have to show him a thing or two.” So, he got his hunting knife, I got a pipe wrench, go back into my bedroom, he said, “You flush him out and I'll get him.” So, I went under the bed and I'm hollering, “Come here, demon.” Dad's standing over ready to get him. No demon came out. 

So, we went out into the desert night, chasing after the demon, looking in the garbage cans and the rest of the old cars. Couldn't find him. Dad sat next to me and said, “This is like that sorry ass demon. He gets his jollies off scaring people. But the thing you got to know about demon is, is that he's really chicken shit. You turn around, face him in the eye and he turns tail and runs.” When we weren't chasing old demon, because we do it from time to time, even after I stopped believing in demons just for old times’ sake. But when we were chasing demons, we were chasing our dreams. 

See, dad was going to find gold, and we were always looking for it. What we were going to do once we found that gold is dad was going to build us a great big glass house out in the middle of the desert. It was going to be entirely heated by solar energy, so that the blood suckers and bill collectors would stop chasing us, because we were going to-- Everything was going to be run by solar energy. Dad had the blueprints for the glass castle wherever we went. But the glass castle didn't get built for a while. We kept on trying to find some place that would be perfect, but the henchmen and the bloodsuckers were always after us. I started noticing that we were really different from other families. 

For example, there was a time that my mother always insisted that my father go to church with us, even though he was a devout atheist. She was a Catholic. We went to church on midnight Mass one time in Phoenix, and we got booted out because dad was trying to have an argument with a priest in the middle of the Mass about the Immaculate Conception. Dad kept on hollering out that Mary was really just a nice Jewish girl who got herself knocked up and had some [audience laughter] good PR. So, we got booted out of there.

I think we ran out of dreams to chase in the desert. Our luck seemed really down and out, and we ended up moving to the small coal mining town in southern West Virginia where my father had been born, a place called Welch. We hit rock bottom around then. We moved into a little two-room shack. We didn't have an indoor bathroom. We didn't have-- Well, we did have electricity, but it was always turned off because my parents never paid the bills. We didn't have an indoor bathroom as I said. After a while, it just got pretty grim and pretty smelly and I told mom, “We can't live like this.” So, she said, “You're right.” She went out and got a plastic bucket that we kept in the kitchen. 

We became pariahs around town. The other kids threw rocks at us and shot buckshot at us. We shot back at them, but we only had a BB gun. But they didn't know it was just a BB gun, so it protected us for a while. The only good thing that happened to me, I think, in that godforsaken town, other than mom kept on giving us art lessons. She still didn't like cooking, but she said, “Once you eat, you'll be fine. But the mind and the soul need to be nourished constantly.” So, we had our art lessons, but we didn't have food so often. 

I think I hit rock bottom personally when one time I hadn't eaten for several days, and I went into the ladies’ room, the girls’ bathroom at the school, and somebody threw away what looked like a perfectly good lunch to me. And so, I fished in and I ate it. And for a long time, that's where I got my food. The only decent thing that happened to me, I think, in that time that we lived in Welch, was there was a teacher named Jeannette Bivens. I was actually named after her. She had been my father's teacher as well. She had been the only person who ever told my father that he actually might amount to something. So, I was named Jeannette after her. We put in an extra N for class. 

She thought I might amount to something too. She was the advisor to the school newspaper and suggested I work for the school newspaper. All of a sudden, this magical thing happened to me when I had a camera around my neck and a notepad in my hand. I could actually go to all of those events where I'd been shunned previously. I wasn't exactly a cool person yet. I wasn't the in crowd, but people would let me in and I actually became somebody. The only bad thing about being on the school newspaper is it was laid out in the town newspaper. The typesetters there would spray Lysol at me whenever I walked in and wherever I stood. But other than that, it was really great. 

It occurred to me, while I was working at the newspaper, I could just do the skedaddle out of Welch. That's the way I grew up. I could just go and reinvent myself somewhere else. So, my older sister and I, we hatched a plan to come to New York City. She was an artist. I was going to come up here and be a writer. We saved up our money. My dad stole it and went on a bender for a couple of days. But we found another way to get up there. She went first, I followed. Then we sent for my brother and my kid sister. 

We ended up living in the South Bronx. We all held a couple of jobs. A lot of people have asked me, “Well, wasn't that hard?” But I got to tell you, after life in Welch, living in New York was the easiest thing in the world. It was this miracle. You paid the bills, you had running water, and you had electricity and life just seemed so easy by comparison. I thought I'd really got it made. I got myself into Barnard College. I was dating this guy who lived on Park Avenue, and life was a piece of cake. 

Then one day, I'm getting ready to go to school, and I turn on the radio and I heard about this traffic tie up on the New Jersey Turnpike. A van had broken down, and the contents had spilled out all over the street. The dog was playing keep away with the cops. My heart sunk. My stomach went into a knot, because this sounded like exactly the chaos that had followed me throughout my entire childhood. My heart really went out to the family in the van. But I didn't think too much more of it. Until later that day, I got a telephone call, and it was from my mother. She said, Jeannette Kunz, we've moved to New York.” I was like, “Mom, by any chance, did your van break down on the New Jersey turnpike?” 

She said, “How did you know that?” I said, “It was on the radio.” And she said, “My goodness, with all the important things going on in New York City, you think they'd have something more important to talk about, the silly little van breaking down.” But she took it as a really good sign, because they'd just gotten to New York and they were already famous. And with them, with my mother and father, they brought all that chaos and that craziness that I'd lived with all of my life. I made a decision to just deny their existence. I would pretend that they weren't around. I was who I had invented, and my past was something else. So, I completely ignored them, and I tried to stay away from them as much as possible. 

Until that day that I was on the New-- Until that day that mom challenged me to tell the truth and I had to really rethink everything. I tried to escape my past, but it had followed me. And on that day, it occurred to me that I had to confront this demon of my past. The amazing thing to me has been that dad was right, “You stare that old demon in the eye and it can't hurt you.” Thank you very much. 

[applause] 

Dan: [00:28:29] Jeannette Walls is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle. She lives in New York and on Long Island. 

That's it for this week. I hope you, guys, loved the stories as much as we did. Thanks to all of you for listening. And we hope you have a story-worthy week. 

Mooj: [00:28:46] Dan Kennedy is the author of the books, Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with The Moth.

Dan: [00:28:56] Podcast, production by Mooj Zadie. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.