Muneesh Jain - Safe at Home

 

My parents are from India. So, in our house, that meant we had a high bar set for academic achievement and a specific type of professional success, doctor, lawyer, engineer. By the time my sister was 12, she knew she was going to be a doctor, just like my dad. When I was nine, I called a family meeting to let everyone know I was never going to be a doctor, [audience laughter] or a lawyer, or an engineer. I was going to be a gymnast. My parents, they tolerated it, but told me that one day I was going to have to grow out of it. But I went to the gym six days a week, five hours a night. And by the time I was a teenager, I was training for the Olympics. And multiple injuries ended my career. My folks, they said, “All right, you got that out of your system. Now, it's time to focus on your education.”

 

I needed them to be impressed with me the way they were my sister. I couldn't wrap my head around doing it their way. So, I came up with a bigger idea. When I was 19, I got a job with ESPN. I was producing live segments for SportsCenter, ESPN News, hanging out with my sports idols. My folks, they kept reminding me, “Don't let this get in the way of your schoolwork.” [audience chuckles] All right, fine. If that wasn't good enough, I came up with a bigger idea. I left the network and moved to Detroit, Michigan, a city that I love, and I started a sports magazine. I sold ads, I found distributors. I built a staff with grown-ass people who had kids older than me. [audience laughter] 

 

We were killing it. We were up to 50,000 subscribers. People were recognizing me on the street. Hell, Muhammad Ali said he liked my magazine. [audience aww] But every time I'd see my parents, they'd just ask me, “When are you going back to college, get that degree?” This time, there was no bigger idea. I had to make this work. I doubled down, worked twice as hard, which also meant that I pretty much stopped sleeping entirely and started drinking and drugging the nights away to manage my stress levels. When I was 24, my doctor told me that I was six months away from a heart attack. I either had to get rid of the magazine or die. So, I gave up. And something broke inside of me, and I couldn't face my parents. 

 

I took the money I'd saved from ESPN and the magazine and I ran away. I moved to New York into a tiny 160-square-foot studio apartment where the windows didn't even open. And it was there that my self-imposed exile began, slowly losing contact with every human I'd ever met. The delivery guy would just leave the food outside my apartment, because I couldn't even make eye contact with him. I was a failure. My parents would call and I never knew what to say. My dad would lecture me that I wasn't even a part of the family anymore, my mom would yell at me that I needed to get my life together. And every conversation just ended in tears. So, I stopped answering their calls. Then they started sending me money to keep me alive, and I took it, and that made me hate myself so much more, and so I just stopped leaving my apartment entirely.

 

The TV would be on 24 hours a day. I wasn't watching it at all. I just needed flashing images and noise to block out the constant stream of shame, regret, self-loathing that was clanging around the inside of my skull. And that became my life, every day, all day, living in near isolation for five years. One day, a baseball game just happened to be on. Now, I hadn't watched a sporting event of any kind since the death of my magazine. It was always just too hard. But on this day, I was so broken, I just stared emotionlessly at the screen in front of me. And within a couple of innings, something strange was happening. I felt myself sitting up in my bed, engaging with something outside of my own head. I was smiling. I mean, actually, smiling for the first time in five years.

 

By the time the game ended, I'd already ordered the MLB TV package, and just started mainlining baseball. [audience laughter] I was watching every game, reading every article, going back over the last five years to see everything that I'd missed. In the middle of it all, I remembered that dream I had when I was six. One day, I'm going to see a baseball game at all 30 MLB stadiums. It's one of those silly things that a lot of baseball fans want to do, but few actually get a chance to do it. And the ones who do, do it over the course of a lifetime, like a normal human person. [audience chuckles] But in this moment, nobody even knew that I existed. I could disappear off the planet and no one would notice. So, I said, “Screw it. I'm going to do it, and I'm going to do it in one season. I'm going to drive 17,000 miles in 95 days and go to a baseball game at all 30 ballparks.”

 

I started obsessively poring over maps and schedules, planning out my route. Every time I'd go down to the bodega to buy another pack of cigarettes, instead I would take that money out of the ATM, go back up to my apartment, shove it underneath my mattress. By the time the next baseball season came around, I'd saved $6,000 and quit smoking. [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

 

I was ready to go. I called my parents to let them know what I was doing, and they really didn't know what to say. They were just happy that I was alive. I hit the road. Every 48 hours, I was in a new city. But I didn't want to just sit in the ballpark alone. I needed a way to reintegrate myself into society. The problem was I had completely forgotten how to even have a conversation with somebody else. So, I invented a podcast. I couldn't have cared less if anybody actually listened to this thing, I just needed an excuse to go talk to strangers. And it was working. People were talking to me about the stats of their favorite ballplayers, the histories of their ballparks. One kid at Citi Field at a Mets game spent 20 minutes meticulously breaking down why it was that the Yankees sucked. [audience laughter] 

 

As I bounced from ballpark to ballpark, I noticed that my conversations, they were evolving. I talked to a father and son in Baltimore, where after our official interview, the father pulled me aside to quietly confide in me that he didn't really have a relationship with his eldest son, but his youngest, his youngest loved baseball. So, he knew that at least they'd be able to talk about that. [audience aww] I talked to a mother and daughter in San Francisco who'd been going to games together for 20 years. Three generations of women in Texas, the grandmother proudly shoving little Laney, her nine-year-old granddaughter, in front of my microphone, saying, "Little Laney, tell the nice man, what do you do all your school reports on?" And little Laney excitedly screams out, "The Texas Rangers!" I realized we weren't really even talking about baseball anymore. We were talking about family connection.

 

By the time I got to LA, I'd already driven 8,000 miles on my own. I was halfway done with my tour. But this, this was my hell week. Because the Angels and the Dodgers rarely play at home at the same time, I had to catch a game in Anaheim, drive 17 hours up to Seattle, turn back around, drive 17 hours back to LA, then 30 hours to Minnesota. [audience aww] It's 4,000 miles in 10 days. But I was a man possessed, nothing was going to stop me. After my Angels game, I hopped in the car and headed up north. But about halfway into the drive, my vision starts to get blurry and my body starts to uncontrollably shake. I pull over just in time to open the door and projectile vomit all over the side of the highway.

 

I didn't know what to do, so I called my dad. He just sighed into the phone and said, "You have food poisoning. What am I supposed to do from here? Gatorade and Pepto-Bismol." My mom gets on the phone and starts screaming at me, "This is ridiculous. You need to take better care of yourself," and I hung up. I wasn't in the mood for another lecture. I made it to Seattle in time for my game by double-fisting Gatorade and Pepto-Bismol. I was staying with some family friends, so I knew they'd be able to take care of me. The next day, I hear a knock at the door. Nobody's home, so I walk upstairs and through the glass door I see the silhouette of a 4’10” 90-pound little woman. I open the door and just say, "What are you doing here, Mother?" [audience chuckles] And she says, "I'm here to help you drive." 

 

Now, she must have seen the panic on my face, because she followed that up with, "And I've been listening to your podcast. I know you don't take bathroom or food breaks when you're on the road, so I'm not going to take any breaks either. We're going to stay on your schedule." I didn't know she was listening to the podcast. And then, she said one more thing, "I'm driving the whole way. So, you've got two options. You sit next to me and you can sleep, or we can talk." Now, I honestly can't remember the last time my mom and I had been in the same room together without it devolving into tears. So, I said, "Okay, Mama." I got in the car and I immediately went to sleep. [audience laughter] 

 

I slept the entire way to LA. When we got there, she said, "I'm not going to go to the baseball game with you." I said, "Why not?" She said, "Because you've got work to do. And if people see you there with your mother, they're not going to want to talk to you." I said, "You're being ridiculous. Of course, you're going to come," and I got her a ticket. We're at Dodger Stadium, and I start interviewing the gentleman sitting next to me, as I'd done at every ballpark before. My mom, she moves to the seat behind us to give us some space to chat. 

 

And after the interview is over, I can hear her talking to her new seatmate. And her new seatmate's asking, "Wow, you must be a huge baseball fan to do this type of road trip." And my mom just answers, "No, I really don't like baseball. I like watching my son watch baseball." [audience aww] I pretended like I didn't hear that. After the game was over, we're walking back to the car, and she stops me. She wants to show me a picture she'd taken during the game. I looked down at her phone, and it's actually a picture of me and the guy that I'd been interviewing. And she just said, "Look, you're smiling." I said, "When are you going home, Mama?" And she said, "No, no, no, no. I'm going to drive with you to Minnesota, too." This time there was no panic on my face. I said, "Okay, we're going to split the drive and let's talk."

 

As we made our way out east, I started talking to my mom the way that I'd been talking to these strangers at the ballpark these last couple of months, asking her stories about her life. This woman, she survived three wars between India and Pakistan. I didn't know that. She told me the story of how her and my dad's arranged marriage came to be. I knew they were arranged, I just never knew how or why it happened. I don't know why I never bothered to ask her that. 

 

Right before we got to Minnesota, we made a quick pit stop in South Dakota at Mount Rushmore. As we're walking up to the monument, my mom peeled off to call my dad. I was eavesdropping, and I could hear her say, “As immigrants to this country, we'd always wanted to see Mount Rushmore. We just never found a reason to make the trip. This is all so exciting. I can't wait for you to be able to see our son. He's just so happy." Thank you.