bestofthemoth - Tumblr blog

[bestofthemoth]

Perfect Moments

Brian Finkelstein

The standard commitment to work at the Humanitarian Suicide Hotline is six months. Most people work six months, and then they leave, quickly. A few make it a year. Nobody usually goes beyond a year. I was a volunteer there for four years. It started when I was twenty-two years old, and I was young, and I believed in things. I thought maybe I could help the world. I was that age.

So I show up one Saturday morning and walk into this church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and there’s a bunch of people milling about. And I see this guy who is clearly in charge. He tells us his name is Glen, and even though he’s got this corporate Jewish metrosexual hippie thing going on, he’s also got a little bit of drill sergeant because as soon as he starts the training he’s weeding people out.

One of the most important things Glen weeded out was people who either lost somebody of suicide, or had contemplated or tried to commit suicide. At the end of two weeks of training, out of 58 people, there were only four of us left, because Glen was really good. But I will tell you right now, I was better.

What Glen didn’t know about me was that four years before this, I lived in San Diego, CA, and I was dating this girl Tracy. Tracy was addicted to meth, and I was addicted to Tracy. So Tracy would do meth and I would try to do her; neither one of us would ever be satisfied. That’s addiction. 

One day Tracy slept with my best friend, and I’d had it. And I bet you Glen didn’t know that I took a bottle of tequila and a .38 and jumped in my car and drove to Torrey Pines Beach. I drank about half a bottle of tequila and then I stuck the gun in my mouth. And I’ll bet you Glen has no idea how good it feels to stick a loaded gun in your mouth, it feels incredibly good to have some control over something. And I sat there, and I was trying to contemplate doing it, and then... I threw up. 

And there’s nothing that snaps you out of a suicide impulse more than throwing up on a gun. And I felt really good. I felt this moment of clarity. I was at this beautiful beach and I went into the water. It was late at night, a full moon and the waves sort of washing over me, and I realized that’s what life is. Moments of beauty and then it’s horrible. But then for a moment it’s good again, and for me, that was enough. But I bet you Glen didn’t know any of that. Because I never told him. 

Now, the training basically says that when you answer the call you say, “Humanitarian Suicide Hotline. Thanks for calling.” Then you shut up and listen. At the end of twelve minutes, it’s time to end the call. But before you end the call, you have to evaluate the person’s level of suicide. Glen said the closest thing to a warning sign that you have is if somebody says, “I don’t want to die. I just want the pain to stop.” If you hear somebody say that a bell should go off. That’s a person who’s on the edge. 

So four years later, I’m working at the hotline. It’s just me and my shift partner, Adam, working the overnight shift. And around 4AM the phone rings and I pick it up.

“Hello, Humanitarians, can I help you?”

And this very young, cute, scared voice comes on the phone and says, “Hi, My name is Amy. I’d like to talk. I was just calling because I was feeling a little sad.” 

And I was like, “Oh, what are you sad about?”

And she goes, “Ah, I don’t know, things are pretty good. I have good grades at school, and my parents don’t get it, but they love me, and, you know, I have a good friend back in Tennessee where I’m from, and NYU’s good. I have good friends here.”

Right away I pictured her, the way you do when you talk to somebody on the phone. I pictured her in her dorm room, and I pictured a quilt, and I pictured her with long hair, sitting on her bed, you know... I got her figured out. And so I said, “Well, that sounds good. But you said you were sad. What do you think about when that happens?”

She felt what she described as a hand coming from behind her and sort of pushing her down. And she felt this crippling sadness, and that there are people who are clinically depressed, but she thought maybe a lot of people overuse that word, or use it as an excuse, and she was worried she might be like that. 

I noticed it was about time to wrap it up, but Amy started telling me this story about going to some place with her family one day, and their father bought ice cream, and it was a great day. But then Amy started to slur her speech a little bit. I said, “Amy, what’s going on, are you okay?”

And she goes, “Yeah, I know it’s selfish but I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to die. I just want the pain to stop.”

And I woke up. 

“Amy do you feel so bad that you think about suicide?”

And she said, “Yes.”

“Do you have a plan for how you would do it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you set a time for when you’re gonna do it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Amy have you taken any steps today to kill yourself?” (on phone, taking notes) “Twenty high-strength painkillers? What kind of painkillers? You drank too? Amy, given the fact that you took twenty high-strength painkillers, and that you drank, and that you haven’t thrown up, do you understand that you could die, within an hour? Amy, look, do you want help? I can do something but only if you ask. Great, what’s your address? (to Adam) Adam, call 911. (to Amy) What kind of ice cream was it that your father bought you? You mentioned that your father bought you ice cream. What kind was it? (Silence) Amy? Amy?!”

But it was silent. And it was silent for two minutes. And then five minutes. And I’m supposed to hang up the phone, but who the hell could hang up the phone? And around fourteen minutes I heard people knocking at the door, and then I heard it crash open, and I heard the phone being picked up, and a voice said, “It’s okay. We’ve got her.”

Click.

I went home. I was supposed to go back to the hotline for a debriefing based on that call. I called Glen and told him I quit. And then I did all the things you’re not supposed to do. I obsessed about it. I stayed up, and I drank, and I smoked, and I drank, and I searched the internet and the papers and finally, after three days, I found it. In the Daily News, page 23.

But I didn’t know until that moment that she was dead, and I was the last person to talk to her. Not her mom in Tennessee, or her best friend, or some boy at NYU that probably had a crush on her but never talked to her. 

Me.

And the thing of it is, I have had bigger personal tragedies over the years. I spoke to her for less than an hour twenty years ago. But I think about it every day. She’s me, in that car. If I had pulled the trigger, that would be me. And she never got to find out what I got to find out, which is it’s terrible sometimes, but there are these perfect life moments. And that’s enough.

Live at The Moth

[bestofthemoth]

Bearing Witness

D. Parvaz

In the summer of 2013 I was in Cairo, Egypt. I was on assignment for Al-Jazeera and I was covering a major political upheaval. The president at the time, a guy named Mohammad Morsi who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood party, had been deposed and jailed in what his supporters said was an illeigmiate military coup. So in protest they set up these sit-ins, two of them in the city. And it was this hot, crazy summer, really tense, and by the middle of August the government finally did what it had threatened to do, which was clear the sit-ins. But they did so with unabated violence. They started shooting at people in the sit-ins and in the surrounding neighborhoods around 7 in the morning and didn’t stop until well into the night, until pretty much everybody was either dead or arrested. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a massacre in broad daylight in a capital city of roughly 20 million. 

So the next day, along with a producer who worked in the local bureau and could translate Arabic for me, I went to a mosque where maybe 200 of these bodies were kept. A lot of them were also burned really badly and there were blocks of ice on top of them. And there were these family members going in and out of this mosque to identify their loved ones. It was intensely chaotic and emotional. So my colleague and I walk outside and we start talking to this woman. And she says her husband is among the dead and she’s shaking and in shock. She’s describing her last phone conversation with her husband when the shooting started. And she describes him as an engineer who was unarmed, and he was the father of her 4 children. And my colleague is translating and I’m not even looking, I’m in my notebook, furiously not wanting to miss a detail. And then he stops translating while she’s still talking and I look up at him finally, which is what he was waiting for, and the look on my face is like “Dude, what?” And he leans in and whispers, “Now would be a good time for you to put an arm around her. And this makes my little reporters brain totally short circuit. I am not a touchy-feely person. I don’t hug you for you to tell me your story. But the look on his face was just clear: get over yourself, be human now, and put your arm around her. 

So I really robotically lift my arm to put around her shoulder, and the second my hand touches her she collapses into my chest. And she’s a very very tiny woman, very petite. But she just sinks into me and starts sobbing as she’s holding onto me, and I’ve got my pen and paper and it  hits me really hard that this woman doesnt care what kind of reporter I am, or what my stupid little rules are. She wants me to register what is happening to her on the worst day of her life. She wants me to bear witness to what’s happening to her. And I should have known better, and in fact I did know better.

A few years prior to that in the spring of 2011 was the start of the uprising in Syria, what is now the civil war. And I was sitting in the newsroom, in Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, watching this grainy YouTube footage of civilians being mowed down by the Syrian military. And at the same time we had a government spokesperson on our airwaves claiming that this wasn’t really happening, that it was a distortion of the truth, there was a conspiracy. And we couldn’t confirm any of this because they’d already closed down our bureau in Damascus and they weren’t issuing journalists visas, so what to do? Well. I’m a multinational, I have an Iranian passport. So my boss agreed to deploy me to Syria, where I wouldn’t need a visa to enter, just to see what’s going on.

So I fly into Damascus and unfortunately for me at this point the Syrian authorities have already become super paranoid. So they go through my luggage and they find a satellite phone, which is not a big deal. If you travel in that part of the world you know that outside of major cities you don’t have cell phone coverage. You can buy a satellite phone at any shopping mall, it’s not spy gear. But this was enough for them to get really suspicious, so they strip searched me and found my American passport in the pocket of my jeans. And in this passport was a stamp from Al-Jazeera, my sponsored visa, for Qatar, it’s what I needed to reenter the country. And this escalated things. So they took me into an office. They sat me between these two guys on this couch. There’s all these other guys in the office chain smoking, banging out some kind of report on their computer about me. And when that report was done the two guys sitting on either side of me got up, and they strapped on a bunch of guns, and they peeled me from the couch, and they led me to the parking garage under the airport. And they sat me between them in the back seat, with another armed man in the front seat, and drove off into the night. 

We pulled into a compound, there were 3-4 checkpoints to get into this compound, so I assumed it was some sort of government building, where they pulled me out of the car by my hair and threw me in front of a desk in this dimly lit office. And there were all these men yelling at me and I looked down and saw that I was standing in a considerable amount of somebody else's blood. So they processed me for some kind of arrest, blind folded me, handcuffed me, and ended up taking me to an interrogation with a man who told me to call him Ferras. And nothing I said was accepted by Ferras. That I was a reporter, that I wasn’t part of some kind of conspiracy… he didn’t even believe that I didn’t speak Arabic. So I realized very quickly that truth had no currency there. They threw me into a cell that was absolutely covered in blood. Like, so much that I didn’t know where to stand or lean. So I squatted in this corner and tried to sort of wrap my head around the hell that I was in. 

Maybe an hour or two later a guy comes to the door. He blindfolds me and handcuffs me and I thought I was being taken to another interrogation, but he took me outside into a courtyard and slammed me up against the wall. And I could hear people being tortured a few feet away from me. And I could hear the guards joking, and laughing, and I could smell their cigarettes, they were just acting like regular employees on a coffee break. And I sat against that wall and I thought to myself, they’re going to kill me. And worse than that though, believe it or not, worse than dying, was the thought of dying like that. Which is to say, alone. Because I was alone. I couldn’t locate the humanity in the people around me. And I knew that I was going to be an anonymous body. If I was lucky they would throw me in a ditch, maybe. And my father would never have any peace, he’d never know what happened to me. And I’ve never been so alone in my life. 

After about 20 minutes shivering against this wall, and waiting to be shot in the head, I get pulled off and taken back inside. And I keep thinking, well they didn’t kill me, they didn’t kill me now, but they’re going to kill me, because why, why, why would they not allow a reporter to cover a street protest but see in here all of this, and live? Of course I’m going to write about it, why would they do this? I’m gonna die. They’re going to kill me. I’m gonna die. And this was on a pretty tight loop in my head as they threw me back in a cell. And I can hear people being tortured inside this compound, outside this compound, the voices kind of echo and come and go and blend in and then there’s this one voice that stands out. And I can’t exactly figure out why except that he sounded extremely young, he sounded like a teenager, a boy. And I could tell that there was more than one person hurting him, and he was just howling. He was swearing he didn’t know things, swearing to God he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was calling out to God, calling out to his mother, and I couldn’t take it anymore. It was brutal. And so I put my hands up to my ears to just try to block it out. And the second I did that I felt such shame. Because I realized that this kid was in his own, far worse version of the wall -- that's where he was. He was alone. He was dying alone. That’s what was happening. And so I pulled my hands down, just to do what I could, which was to hear him. I couldn’t call out to him to say, “I hear you're not alone,” couldn't identify him, I didn’t know his name, couldn’t contact his family, couldn’t do anything. All I had was the ability to bear witness in that fashion. The kid was choking on his own blood, in his own country, and nobody was going to know. I felt that it was the least I could do. So I listened to him for a while, and every scream was excruciating. It was like a hole being cut inside me with every one of them. And then rather abruptly, his voice just stopped. 

So a couple of days later the Syrians decided that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for them to permanently disappear an Iranian citizen because they have a good relationship with the Iranian government. So they sent me to Iran via extraordinary rendition for additional questioning for another couple of weeks at another prison there. And much to my surprise the Iranain authorities freed me and sent me back to my family. Which was great, I needed the time off for a little bit, but I didn’t want to not be working. I didn’t need to go to a spa and to breathe alpine air. What I needed was to get back to work. Because not being busy and not working meant the wall was always there. I could feel it. And I wanted to push back against that feeling. I couldn’t wait to get back to work, so I did. The second I could I flung myself back into my job. Every assignment if they didn't give me the assignment I would fight for it. Egypt, Libya, nuclear meltdown in Japan, didn’t matter, I was doing it. And I succeeded. A little too well, in pushing back against that wall and that feeling. And what I did in doing so was I also built a distance between myself and the things that I was reporting on, the people I was reporting on. 

But when that woman in Egypt fell into my chest and started crying in the second that it took her to fall into me and cry she destroyed that distance. Entirely eradicated it. And I was back at the wall, and the boy’s voices in my head. And as painful as it is, I realized that it was necessary to bear witness, fully, to what’s happening to someone beyond the couple of paragraphs they might actually get in the story. And as much as some stories will leave a mark, sometimes that’s just what it takes.

Live at The Moth

[bestofthemoth]

The One Good Man

Joyce Maynard 

I was thirty-nine years old, living in a small town in New Hampshire with my three children, writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column about my life. It was a really bad time in my life. My mother was dying of a brain tumor. My husband had told me he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and our marriage ended the week that my mother died.

She left me a small amount of money in her will. I was spending most of the money on a lawyer, trying to defend myself against a suit for the custody of my three children. I was under scrutiny to see if I was a fit mother, and the legal bills were mounting.

And then one day, a letter dropped in the mail slot. 

The address was written in pencil, and the return address was followed by a long series of numbers. Even if the return address was not Folsom, California, and even if I’d never bought a single Johnny Cash album, I would have known it came from a man in prison. 

“Dear Joyce,

Many of the guys on my cell block wait excitedly for the day that Penthouse or Biker Chick Magazine is delivered. But the big day in my week is Tuesday afternoon, when I get to read your newspaper column about your life with your children. Signed, Grizzly.” 

Grizzly knew my children well, from my columns. He knew that my daughter had just been cast in Annie and gotten braces. He knew that my son Charlie played the trumpet and he knew that my son Willy was going to be a pitcher.

So I wrote back. “Dear Grizzly, thank you very much for your note.” And I enclosed the annual Christmas photograph that I always took of my kids and me.

Now, I should tell you another thing about men in prison. You know all that time you and I spend on things like going to our jobs, taking care of our children, maybe having a relationship? Men in prison don’t spend time on any of those things, which means they have a lot of time to write letters. A man in prison who cannot touch a woman often develops a particular kind of brilliance at writing.  

So, when I wrote Grizzly a two-sentence letter, I got back a five-page letter. And when I wrote Grizzly a one-paragraph letter, I got back a ten-page letter. And when I wrote Grizzly a one-page letter, I got back a fifty-page letter. I mean, he was writing back more and more, and you’re probably thinking that I might be a "woman of questionable" judgement, and you’re right, without a doubt. But one thing I will attest to is that I know good writing. And Grizzly, knew how to do it. 

But, ya know, he never wrote about his life in prison. He always wrote about what had happened before, and he’d had a very tragic life. He grew up in Southern California, his family had very little money and his parents died tragically. He wrote about the woman that he had loved. And Grizzly, he loved hard. But then his wife died in childbirth. He raised his daughter on his own. And then one day he sent me a photograph of his daughter. I’m reading all this in his letters, you know, just enthralled. And sometimes actually weeping, he told the story so beautifully. 

I could pretend that all of this correspondence was in the name of making a lonely prisoner feel happy. But I will admit to you that more and more I was being drawn into this relationship myself. And I have to say, in my own defense, that at the point Grizzly came into my life, I had been single and out in the world dating a bit. And the fact that somebody works for Charles Schwab, or they have tenure at NYU, is absolutely no guarantee that the person won’t be a true sociopath. 

So I actually came to believe that maybe, just maybe, I found the one good man. I really believed that maybe I had found the one good heart. There was something so real about this man. I guess I have to tell you that I was falling in love with Grizzly. 

And there were a couple of moments when I recognized that this really didn’t make sense, and I’d try to cut it off. Every time I would send a letter saying, "You know what Grizzly I don't really see a future here." He would send back another story that would just break my heart. 

Around that time, he wrote back with astonishing news - he was getting out! And in fact his bus could probably make it to New Hampshire by the start of Little League season. 

My friend said, “You’ve got to find out what he was in for.” 

This seemed like a really rude thing to ask a person. But when I knew he was coming to play catch with my son, I thought I’d better call Folsom Prison. I went through a whole series of social workers to get to the one who was in charge of Grizzly’s case. 

“I’ve got to know what he’s in for.” 

She said, “We don’t do that. There are many procedures. But...why do you ask?” 

“Well, I’m in a relationship with this person, and now that he’s getting out on parole, he’s coming to visit.” 

She said, “Sit down, honey. I’m gonna break the rules. Your friend will not be getting out any time in the next three hundred years. Do you know why they call him Grizzly? He’s in prison for the grisly murder of his parents. They were beheaded. And I’m going to ask you to please never let him know that I told you this because even in prison he is known as a very violent and dangerous man.” 

I did not write back to Grizzly. But the letters continued to come. At first he just sounded baffled, then increasingly pleading, and then the tone of the letters changed. And they became angry and fierce, and putrid and violent; if any words could have drawn blood, these would have been the ones. 

The letters kept showing up for a full year, but I stopped reading them. That was the year that my divorce concluded and the court determined that I was fit to maintain custody of my children. Clearly they had not spoken to the social worker at Folsom Prison. 

I never could throw Grizzly’s letters away, so I put them in this box. And I’m going to read a short passage from one of those letters: 

Now listen up, baby. I don’t have much to give you. I can’t even plant a kiss on those sweet lips of yours. But I’d die for you. I’d kill for you. There isn’t words to say it, but if you close your eyes and take a breath, you’ll feel it. I'm with you. I’ll be with you forever. 

And I guess I’m with him too, because even many years later I am haunted by this knowledge: that somewhere in a maximum-security prison in Folsom, California, there is a Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder-block wall.

Live at The Moth

[bestofthemoth]

Fireworks from Above

Faye Lane

What I always wanted as a little girl was to tell stories on the stage, because I wanted to be connected to something bigger than myself. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a performer... slash STEWARDESS!

I grew up in my mama’s beauty shop in Texas. It had this long line of hood dryers on one wall, and I would wait until all the ladies were held captive under the dryers and give mandatory concerts. When I wasn’t telling stories and doing shows for the ladies, I would play stewardess, and I would push this little manicure cart around the beauty shop.

“Miss Helen, Miss Melba, would y’all like a magazine? Would y’all like a cocktail?”

And the ladies would say, “Baby, you just give great customer service.”

I was all about customer service.

Well, about ten years ago, I was living in New York City, working as a performer, telling stories and singing songs on the stage. Bad pay, no job security, no benefits. I really needed a job. And I very randomly met this lovely girl with a long, silk scarf tied on the side, who said nine words that changed my life forever, “Have you ever thought about being a flight attendant?”

I had! I was all about customer service back at the beauty shop. Three weeks later, I was in Miami training. Training was exciting but then I graduated. And then I started the job. And I had this epiphany almost right away: This job is hard, and people are horrible. Horrible! I mean, it’s hard to be mean when someone is smiling at you and handing you a cup of coffee and a cookie, but people are. Because a lot of times they don’t see you -- they just see a uniform. 

But I hit bottom one day when I had a passenger who had a heart attack on my flight. He was lying in the aisle, and we had the defibrillator on him. And this woman kept tugging on my blouse: 

“Excuse me, Excuse me!”

I was like, “Just a minute, please. We’re trying to save this guy’s life.”

And then I thought: Wait. Maybe she has an emergency, or maybe she knows something. So I said, “What is it?”

And she held up her coffee cup and said, “This coffee is cold.”

And I learned that people can be cold.

There’s also something that happens to your psychology because you can see the world from above when you fly a lot. And I saw a lot of really horrible things from the air, like devastating California forest fires, New Orleans under water, and most upsetting for me, lower Manhattan smoldering for weeks and weeks. 

And in late September of 2001, I was working a flight, and a passenger came on with a garbage bag, which is kind of a flight attendant pet peeve. So he opened the overhead bin and put the bag in. And my thought was: What’s in that garbage bag. Because in late September of ‘01, we were all still a little edgy and paranoid, so I was kind of keeping my eye on him and the bag. But  I didn’t say anything. 

Then he got up while the seat belt sign was on and came and stood, waiting for the bathroom and I said, “Sir, the seat belt sign is on.”

He said, “I  know, I know, but I really need to go.”

And again I thought: Let it go. Just let it go.

So I said, “Are you traveling for business or pleasure?”

And he said, “Neither. I live in California, but I came to New York because my son was a first responder at Ground Zero, and he died there. I came to pick up his uniform, which is all I have of him, and it’s in a bag in the overhead bin.”

And I remembered why I was there, and why I was hired and why I wanted that job. Because I remembered that everybody has a story. People fly for a reason. Maybe they’re going to a funeral, or maybe it’s something joyful, like a wedding. I don’t know what their story is, but for that little piece of time, I’m a part of it.

And yeah, I saw a lot of horrible things from the air. But I’ve also seen a lot of amazing, beautiful things from the air, like the Grand Canyon, the Northern Lights, and fireworks from above.

Live at The Moth