Shortcuts: Lawrence Wood & Amanda Egge

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Go back to [Shortcuts: Lawrence Wood & Amanda Egge} Episode. 
 

Host: Dan Kennedy

 

Dan: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Many times, stories are about taking the long way. They're about what happens when we make the difficult decision that we knew would be good for us, and we made it, even though it was tough. But what about the times when we don't exactly rise to the challenge? This week, two stories about taking shortcuts. 

 

First up, we have Lawrence Wood, live at The Moth StorySLAM in Chicago, where the theme of the night was Gangs, Cliques, and Crowds. Here's Lawrence.

 

[cheers and applause] 

 

Lawrence: [00:00:32] When I was a teenager, I read only what I had to for school. There were rare exceptions. In ninth grade, my English teacher took me aside after class one day, and she gave me a book called The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks, who's best remembered now as the director of the 1971 movie Shaft. [audience chuckles] It's a good movie. It was a good book. [audience chuckles] 

 

And The Learning Tree is his autobiographical account of growing up black in the Deep South in the 1930s. It was banned in my school because of a brief sex scene at the beginning that was not nearly explicit enough for my taste. [audience laughter] But I liked the book. But still, it didn't trigger a love of reading that my teacher hoped it would. I still only read what I had to.

 

But that finally changed my senior year when I took an English class from a teacher who at first, I really didn't like at all. She had us read and write a book report on Jane Eyre. And the night before the report was due, I banged out a first draft and I typed "Jane Eyre" on the title page, because that's what the paper was about and handed it in. And a week later, she holds my paper up in the air and she says, "This is not Jane Eyre. This is a very poorly written analysis of Jane Eyre." And then, she said, "D," and she gave me the paperback. But then, she started assigning books by more contemporary authors that I really loved. I finally understood for the first time why people read for pleasure. And from that point on, I read constantly.

 

And many years later, I joined a book group. And this book group had some academics in it, English professors, people who took literature very seriously. And one of them was a woman named Laura who taught English at Northwestern University. She got to assign our book two months in a row. And the first book she assigned was The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is about this group of pretentious college students who kill one of their own. And I just hated it. When I looked at the author photo, I thought, oh, this is why she recommended it. The author looked just like her. [audience laughter] It was long, and boring, and only one of the characters died and I wanted them all to die. [audience laughter] 

 

And the next month she made us read or she told us to read Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. I didn't read it, partly because it reminded me of the 19th century novels like Jane Eyre that I hated in high school, and partly because I was still so annoyed about having to read The Secret History. [audience chuckles] And so, I knew I'd have to miss the discussion. But on the night this discussion was scheduled to take place, I stopped off at Tower Records. And there I saw a whole rack full of those yellow and black study guides called CliffsNotes. I saw one for Lord Jim, and I thought, maybe I can go to the discussion. [audience chuckles] So, I went.

 

I offered as my own insight something that I had read in the CliffsNotes. And Laura said, "Well, that's really interesting." And then, she asked me more about the comment I made. And so, I repeated what I could remember from the study guide. [audience chuckles] We went back and forth like this. It really dominated the discussion for the whole evening. And at the end of the night, everybody agreed that the discussion had been a success. And even though I should have just been relieved and kept my mouth shut, I confessed to reading the CliffsNotes. [audience chuckles] And everybody just stared at me. Laura looked like I kicked her in the gut. 

 

When I got home and told my wife what happened, she said, "What were you thinking?" She had been in a book group for many years, another book group, and she knew that these things were just not done. [audience chuckles] And the next morning, a guy from the group called me and he said, "Look, after you left last night, a few of us were talking about what happened, and we decided it would be better if you didn't return." [audience laughter] And I said, "You're kicking me out?" [audience laughter] And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Of a book group?" [audience chuckles] And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Because I read the CliffsNotes?" And he said, "Yes, because you read the CliffsNotes, Larry, you cheated." 

 

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had never heard of anybody getting expelled from a book group before, [audience chuckles] and neither had my wife. When I gave her the news, she said, "Well, that I didn't expect." She sounded sympathetic. So, I said, "Well, can I join your book group?" [audience laughter] And she said, "Absolutely not." [audience laughter] Thank you.

 

[cheers and applause] 

 

Dan: [00:05:38] That was Lawrence Wood. Lawrence is an attorney, a Moth StorySLAM regular, and a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, where he teaches a seminar on poverty law. Lawrence has also won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest a record-setting seven times. If you want to check out some of his entries into the contest, you can see those cartoons on our site, themoth.org. 

 

Up next, Amanda Egge. And a quick heads up to our listeners. This story deals with drug use and addiction, so we just wanted to give you a quick note about that. Amanda shared this story at a Moth GrandSLAM in Los Angeles. The theme of the night was The Deep End.

 

Amanda: [00:06:22] I knew we had to quit heroin, because we were running out of money. And honestly, being a junkie was not part of my life plan. At the time, I was 23, living in New York with my college boyfriend Dominic, our three cats, and a $120 a day heroin habit. Dominic and I had tried quitting on our own, but we could never make it past the third day of withdrawal. For those of you who've never kicked heroin before, it's like the worst flu you've ever had times a million. But the hardest part is not the severe cramping, anxiety, diarrhea, vomiting, or cold sweats, it's knowing that the instant cure to your misery is just a subway ride away in Bushwick. [audience chuckles] 

 

Still, going to rehab seemed like too drastic a move. I mean, [audience chuckles] yes, I was addicted to heroin, and I couldn't go more than a couple of hours without using or I'd start to feel sick. And heroin makes it impossible to orgasm, so I hadn't come in a year and a half. [audience chuckles] I was so constipated that I found myself digging rock hard poop out of my butt with latex gloves. But I was also in the number one PhD program for philosophy. [audience chuckles] There was no way I could miss my metaphysics seminar. [audience chuckles] 

 

So, I found an outpatient program that would prescribe you Darvon, Klonopin and clonidine to help step you down off opiates. We did that a couple of times, but we kept relapsing for stupid reasons. Like one day, I was looking around the apartment, and it was a mess, and so I wrote Dominic a note about it. And when I got home, he was sitting on the couch smoking heroin, and I was like, "What are you doing?" And he said, "In your note, you said to pick up." And I said, "I meant the apartment." [audience chuckles] But there he was smoking heroin, so I did too. 

 

One day, after another relapse, I started having a panic attack. And for some reason in that moment, I picked up the phone to call my mom. I said, “Mom, you have to come to New York. There's something I want to tell you." That's all I said. She didn't ask what it was. She just got on a plane. But the truth is, she already knew. She just didn't know it was heroin. My mom met with me and my therapist. And my therapist said, "You need to go to rehab." And I said, "No, I just need to go to Hawaii or something." [audience chuckles] And he said, "No, you need to go to rehab. There's one in Arizona. It's called Sierra Tucson." And I said, "Let me think about it." 

 

So, that night, I went home and I googled Sierra Tucson, and I saw on their website that they have horses. And growing up, I'd always loved going horseback riding. So, I decided that I could go to rehab, because they had horses. [audience chuckles] Not to get off horse, but for the horses. [audience chuckles] I went in the next day, and I told my therapist, "Okay, yes, I'll go to Sierra Tucson." And he said, "You can't now. Your boyfriend is going there." And I said, "Fuck you, that's my rehab," [audience chuckles] and I stormed out of the room. 

 

My mom convinced me to come back in, and my therapist said, "It's okay. There are other rehabs. There's one in Malibu." And I said, "Does it have horses?" And he said, "No, but it has celebrities." [audience laughter] By the time I arrived in rehab, I was already 24 hours into heroin withdrawal. They gave me some stuff to help through the first couple days of detox, but I still felt like shit and I couldn't really sleep for the first month. Heroin makes you super relaxed. When your body gets used to that and you take it away, what you're left with is edginess and adrenaline. 

 

At night, the rehab would take us to these outside drug and alcohol meetings. And there were these two guys from another rehab that I would always hang out with at the meetings, because they were cute, but also because they were celebrities. [audience chuckles] One night, one of them said to me, "Hey, we huffed hair mousse today." "How?" I asked. I'd been sitting in the rehab bathroom staring at a huffing warning label on a bottle of air freshener for weeks, trying to figure out how to do it. [audience chuckles] 

 

They told me, and that night, I went back to the rehab, and I went through all the other patients' stuff, and I stole every bottle of hair mousse that I could find, which was two, and I hid them. And then, whenever I felt like I needed to get high, I would go in the bathroom and take a huff. Huffing made rehab really manageable. [audience chuckles] Then I ran out of the hair mousse, and I started requesting it, along with my weekly carton of cigarettes. But for some reason, the rehab never brought me any. 

 

And then one day this local Malibu girl came and picked me up to take me to a meeting. I was riding with her in her car, and I knew we were about to pass by a beauty supply store and I thought, I should just ask her to stop, so that I can get some hair mousse. And then, my next thought was, oh my God, am I just going to be a hair mousse addict for the rest of my life? [audience laughter] That was the moment I realized that drugs were over for me. 

 

In rehab, they tell you that you have to hit bottom in order to get clean. But hitting bottom isn't like touching the floor of a pool. It's murkier than that. Because no matter where your bottom is, you could always go lower. Dominic found his bottom when he used heroin one last time after he left Sierra Tucson. But for me, it wasn't the heroin that convinced me I was a drug addict, it was the hair mousse. [audience laughter]

 

[cheers and applause] 

 

Dan: [00:11:56] That was Amanda Egge. Amanda lived through tragedy, comedy, and heroin addiction in her teens and early 20s, but turned her life around at the age of 23. She's now married with two kids and runs a popular home bakery specializing in decorated sugar cookies.

 

Amanda told this story at The Moth about six years ago, so we followed up with her to see how she's doing now, and she says, "I haven't used hair mousse or heroin since I left rehab in 2001. I live a pretty normal life now that looks nothing like it did when I was in my early 20s. And I did finally get that trip to Hawaii when my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Unfortunately, I didn't get to ride horses then either."

 

Lastly, if you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, you can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National hotline at 1-800-662-HELP. You can also find additional resources on our website at themoth.org in the extras for this episode. 

 

That’s going to do it this time around, but we’ll be back again soon with some more stories. And until then, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.

 

Julia: [00:13:07] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock On, and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth.

 

Dan: [00:13:16] Podcast production by Julia Purcell and Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.