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- [00:00]
Kevin Allison
Folks in my 40s and 50s, one of my biggest disappointments has been that no one ever really taught me about skin care. I just come from a generation of midwestern men who were really out of the loop for decades. So in recent years I have experimented with a gazillion skincare products. But I found it's just so overwhelming. There's so many different things I've tried that left me saying, okay, is this doing anything? You know, there's a lot of wrinkles now and the dullness and looseness and the dark circles and bags under the eyes, it stresses me out. So I have to say I'm also genuinely grateful that our sponsor One Skin sent me their OS1 peptide products for the face and under eye treatment. I'm actually seeing and feeling an unmistakable difference. My skin is brighter and it's tighter, it's softer, it's not greasy. And even the under eye, the tired, dark, baggy stuff is fading away. The thing is, as we age, some skin cells stop functioning the way they should. Longevity scientists call them zombie cells. And One Skin's OS1 peptide was specifically engineered to address those doing something most skin care was never built to do. Their results are backed by four peer reviewed clinical studies, over 10,000 five star reviews. And it was all born of from over a decade of longevity research. One Skin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try One Skin with 15% off using the code risk at One Skin risk, that's 15 off OneSkin Co with the code risk. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.
- [02:42]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
- [02:53]
Kevin Allison
No.
- [02:53]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once.
- [02:58]
Interviewer/Host
Okay, that's fair.
- [03:00]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. These may apply.
- [03:14]
Joy Keller
If you've ever blasted synth beats from your boombox or burned CDs for your besties, this one's for you. As people get older, much like their music tastes, their health needs change. AG1 is the simple daily health drink designed to deliver over 75 essential daily nutrients in pre and probiotics to support energy, digestion, and mood so you can make the most out of every decade and dance break. Learn more@drinkag1.com hi, it's me, Jesse Tyler
- [03:43]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Ferguson, in case you haven't heard. And I don't know how that's possible. You're obviously not seeing my Instagram stories, but I have a podcast. I know, I know, I know. I didn't think there was enough podcasts, especially podcasts hosted by actors. So here I am. It's called Dinner's on Me, and it's actually pretty special to me. It combines two things that I absolutely love. Eating and connecting with people. So in each episode, I take an old friend or a new friend out to a fabulous meal. And as we break bread, we dive into everything from imposter syndrome and mental health to being a new parent and navigating new relationships. It's fun because you truly get to be a fly on the wall for some really intimate conversations. So please, pull up a chair, join us. You can listen to Dinners on me wherever you get your podcasts.
- [04:43]
Tommy Gallen
Risk.
- [04:45]
Kevin Allison
Hey, folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison, and every Thursday we release these special episodes where we look back at from our earlier years. This week, an episode that premiered in March of 2014. It's an episode we call Live From San Diego. Hey, folks, this is Kevin. On today's episode, you'll hear Justin Hudnall.
- [05:14]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
You know, between a bottle of Jack Daniels and Minolta, there's nothing a woman won't do. That and more. But first, Ram.
- [06:01]
Kevin Allison
Hello, kids. This. This is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison, and this is Fuck Monster behind me now. And why not? If it was gonna be anyone behind me now, it might as well be Fuck Monster. This episode this week is live from San Diego. We are so thankful to Amy Lisucki and Finest City Improv for hosting us in San Diego. We had such a wonderful time there. In a little bit, we're going to hear from writer Joy Keller. But before that, writer, actor, comedian Tommy Gallen is going to share a story to kick us off. Here he is now, live from San Diego, it's Tommy Gallen with a story we call Just Commit.
- [07:10]
Tommy Gallen
Thank you. So I'm sitting on an airplane chair, and I feel like the angel of Death has his arms around me. My wife is sitting next to me. And my 3 year old son is sitting next to her. And I've just puked into the little paper bag that's conveniently placed in the front of my seat. And I promise myself I am never going to drink this much again. And yeah, it's a promise that we make to ourselves the first time we drink. That promise is, I'm never going to drink again. But the promise evolves. And so the first time I made the promise was the first time I drank. I was 11 years old and it was my fifth grade graduation. The ceremony was over and I still remember the suit. The white suit, the white shirt, the tie, the blazer, it was all crisp. And I'm outside, I didn't want to let this suit go. I felt so just cool being a grown up and wearing the suit. And I'm outside playing basketball with my cousins and my cousin John turns to me and he tells me, hey man, it's your graduation. You should see if you can drink some alcohol. I think that sounds like a great idea. Adults have been hiding this from us for years. It must be fantastic. So I go to my mom and I ask her if I could have a sip of alcohol to celebrate the occasion. And she says yes. And so I do. I have a sip of every single drink I can get my hands on. And I remember going back outside and playing basketball like a college freshman playing pool. Just thinking I'm the best. I'm shooting shots and I'm hitting them and I'm missing some, but one of them hits the garage roof and bounces into the pool. Pool. And I've got the confidence that it's going to save the day. I'm going to be a hero. I climb up onto the side of the pool and I crawl over and I reach out and the basketball's right at my fingertips and I fall directly into the pool with my suit on, the white shirt. And I feel the cold and the darkness. And it's extremely dark because it's just the end of the season. And the pool cover was still on the pool. And it engulfs me. And I go deeper into the pool and it's black and it tastes like green because there's still algae. And I hear a splash and I feel this. And it's a hand grabbing me and I'm being pulled out. And it's my mom. And she walks me back inside through the party, through this walk of shame of my aunts and my uncles and my grandparents. The first time I make this promise and the first time I get Drunk is also the first time I black out. And it reiterated to me the next day that I vomited so much that specks of vomit actually hit the ceiling in my room. And through the vomit, I promised my mom I am never going to drink again. Yeah. And I don't. I don't drink again that much. You know, a little experimenting in high school, but I don't really get drunk again until college. College. First time I get drunk in college is on tequila. Long, long, long story short, I do remember throwing up that night and having my. My, My roommate holding my hair over the garbage. But the promise this time was a little different. This time the promise was, this is great. I promise to get better at this. Like a bodybuilder who can bench £400 and feels great. Because next time it's gonna be 4:05. Every drink that brings me closer to getting drunk and throwing up means next time that won't be so bad. But we all have our limits. And later in college, I found myself. I can't tell you what happened that night, but the next morning, I remember waking up to the sun rising over the dashboard of a car. I'm in the passenger seat and the sun opens up my dehydrated eyes and I realize, this isn't my car. I don't own a car. And I look next to me and there's a guy sleeping in the driver's seat. And I don't know him either. There's a dollar bill on his lap. So I take that dollar bill and I put it in my pocket. Then I wake him up and I say, hey, man, do you know how I got here? He goes, who the fuck are you? Like, look, I don't know how I got here. I don't know what's going on. Do you know anything about how this happened? He's like, no. I was like, can you give me a ride back to campus? Get the fuck out of my car. So I get out of his car and it's freezing. And I think to myself, this is. Is fantastic. I can't wait to tell people this story. It's just great. And if this is what alcohol is going to bring me, I promise to never make a promise again. And I don't. For years, many, many drunken tales come in and out of my life until we flash forward to June. It's Friday the 13th, 2008. Coming back from the Cherry Lane Theater where my comedy troupe fucked Fuct. We have just done a show at the Cherry Lane Theatre and I'm heading home And I shouldn't have been driving this time. It was my car. I'm on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, driving south, and there's incredible traffic. The lights are all green, so I figure there must be an accident. And sure enough, the next thing I see are police lights. But it's not an accident. The traffic's narrowing. It's a DWI stop. And I get up to the stop and the cop leans right into the window, past the steering wheel, into my face and says, you been drinking tonight, son? And I lie. I tilt my head to the side to not breathe in his face. No, officer. Where you coming from, son? Cherry Lane Theater. What show did you see? Fucked. License and registration. Take my wallet out. I start pulling my driver's license out. All right, son, put it away. Have a nice evening. Get away with it. Totally. I get home at about 3 in the morning. At 7am, my wife's water breaks. Had I been arrested that night, I would have spent the entire weekend in jail and missed my son's birth. So I made a new promise. I decided I was gonna quit drinking for a little bit, just to see what that was like. It had been a good 20 year run at that point since I started at 11.
- [14:21]
Interviewer/Host
And
- [14:24]
Tommy Gallen
so I decided at the end of the year, when January comes around, I'll give myself a few more months. When January comes around, I'm going to do a full year of no drinking. And I did it. And not only did I do it, when I got to the end of the year, I felt great. So I just hung tight for like another four months. We went on a vacation, my wife and I and my son. And on that vacation, I decided, I've got this. I mean, I've been sober for 14 months. It really hasn't been that big of a deal. No shakes, no withdrawal, no issues. So why can't I just go back to drinking a little bit? And sure enough, I did for about a year. It's the night before our big trip to Texas, which we always fly down with the family, my wife and my son. And my wife tells me before I leave for work that day, listen, when you get done with work, don't drink too much because we've got to pack. We've got this trip tomorrow. And so I have to go to the People's Improv Theater to work. I have to take a stop and pick up a MacBook Air for my wife. Then I gotta shoot up to Fordham University at Lincoln center to do a friend stage reading. Then after that, it's back down to the Cherry Lane for rehearsal and then back home to pack after work. I'm sitting at the bar at the Pit, and I'm having a few drinks, and my brother walks in and he makes some comment to the bartender. I don't even remember what the comment was, but I remember how it made me feel. It was something totally benign, like, oh, Tommy's having another drink, huh? Showing him how much you could put down, something really silly like that. But something inside of me turned, like, dark. And I felt, you know what? I don't want my college Persona to be my current Persona. And I got pissed off. And instead of sharing that with him and getting it off my chest, I decided, I'm gonna show you how much I can drink. And I drank about five beers there before we headed up to the staged reading. And when I got to the staged reading, my buddy who was doing it handed me a bottle of wine for the row. I didn't share it with the row. In about an hour, I drank that bottle of wine. And then to really show my brother, I ditched him. And I took a cab down to the Cherry Lane theater by myself. And I proceeded to pour myself a glass of scotch in a pint glass. And I drank that. And then I stole a cigarette, and I hadn't had a cigarette in five years. And I left, and I started smoking the cigarette. And I got halfway through, and I realized I don't have my wife's computer that I brought earlier today. So I backtracked and I followed my steps, and it was back at the theater. Thank God I found it. I got home, but now it's about midnight, and I'm drunk, super duper drunk. And my wife is unhappy, super fucking and unhappy. And she's just talking about packing and airplanes, and I'm like, just relax. I've got this. Take a shower. I'll pack. So she takes a shower, I pack. I put the luggage right by the door to leave. She comes out of the shower, same unhappy face. She sees the bags at the door and says, I want to see how you packed. This infuriates me. Why do you need to see how I packed? You gotta point out how I did something else wrong, that I didn't put the underwear next to the sock. What could I have possibly done wrong to pack now? To tell you the truth, I couldn't tell you. I could have packed the dog for all I knew. I had no idea what I packed, how I packed. So we open up the bag, and as it turns out, my strategy for Packing was to take my dresser drawer out and turn it upside down into the luggage. So I had one bag filled with underwear and socks and three T shirts, because T shirts were in the second drawer. I had no pants. I packed nothing of my wife or son's clothes. And so what seemed the most fitting was to go out on the front porch and cry. I don't know if I was crying because I felt bad or because I felt like if I cried, I would manipulate her from anger to feeling pity, but I cried, and it was a real cry. It felt like it was really, really hanging on me. That blackness, that darkness that I felt earlier in the day when I had started drinking, it had experienced, expanded. And she sent my brother out to talk to me, and I explained to him the comment and blah, blah, blah. And I could see it in his face that he really felt bad, but it wasn't his fault. This was totally on me. I went back in and I apologized. And at this point, I had about three hours to sleep this off, which was impossible. The next morning, I wake up, force as much water as I can into me, as much Advil, just to stumble to the airport. I've heard that they don't let drunk people on airplanes, and I think that's not 100% true. So I'm sitting on the airplane and I've got this puke bag in my hand, and I have to do something with it now. So I walk to the front of the plane and I just hand it to a flight attendant. I say, here, I figured she's seen these before and knows what to do with them. And at that second, I realize the airplane door hasn't shut yet and this is going to be a really long flight. So I promised myself I wouldn't drink that much anymore. And about a week later, it's my birthday and I'm at the Pit in Manhattan. My brother and I have birthdays very close, so we did a joint birthday party there. The owner of the Pit, Ali, we get into a conversation and we just start talking about drinking. And I could already feel myself drinking too much that night. And he just tells me something. I tell him this whole story, and he tells me, look, whatever you're gonna do, if you're going to cut down your drinking, just commit to it. If you're going to quit drinking, just commit to it. And being an improviser, the idea of commitment and committing to something really, really resonated with me. And so I decided to just commit. And I didn't have another drink. And it's been about two and a half years now. And the thing is, every time I go to a party or anytime I go someplace where there's alcohol and I'm offered a drink, people say to me, why don't you drink? And most recently, somebody said to me, you want a drink? And I said, no. He goes, are you an alcoholic? And I said, no, of course not. And then I kind of half explained this story. But that's the thing, the thing that I hate to say is that word alcoholic. And I don't know, maybe I'm in denial. Maybe I'm just somebody who had a bunch of crazy years behind me and now it's kind of, kind of all done because I've got kids and a wife and a life. But the thing that I do know is that when I compare my life and those experiments of time that I didn't drink compared to the experiments of time where I did, I've just got a much happier outlook and a much happier family. And at least for now, I think I'm going to stick with that. Thank you.
- [21:48]
Interviewer/Host
Tommy gallon.
- [21:55]
Kevin Allison
Awesome. The next storyteller I would like to bring to the stage. She is a writer and editor and she works with something called Tantra Theater in San Diego. She does improv here. You can find her@renegadejoy.com Please welcome to the stage Joy Keller.
- [22:17]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Hi.
- [22:22]
Joy Keller
So when I was 21 years old, I moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Los Angeles, California. And my very first day there was the day of the Rodney King riots. And I loved it. I thought it was great. It was perfect because that's how I felt on the inside. All the chaos and all the entropy just perfectly symbolized what was going on inside me. And I'd found my Mecca. I'd spent the previous year working as a stripper at Temptations Adult Entertainment in Atlanta, which was the TD bar capital of the world at the time. And a lame attempt to get myself back into college, which was the biggest goal of my life. I moved out of the house when I was 17, a very poor family. And I just felt that college would be my ticket out of poverty and it meant the world to me. I wanted to make something of myself and I wanted to prove to my parents that I could do it. So I put myself through two years of college and it was hard. And I thought that stripping would make it easier. But it's not easy to work from 8 o' clock at night until 4 o' clock in the morning and then get up five hours later and talk about comparative Literature. So it didn't work out. After a year of stripping, I realized if I continued pole dancing to Nirvana songs, I was probably going to be Coco by the time I was 25. And I just needed a change. And so that's why I moved to la. I lived on a 28 foot sailboat with a friend of mine from high school. But everything was handy dandy. It was fine for a month or two, walking around barefoot wearing my Daisy Dukes and my Jagermeister T shirt. But you could only get so tan and I'd run out of money. And I was used to having a stash of cash on hand. And I was so broke back then they used to send sample cereal boxes through the mail and I was stealing those from my neighbors. I was starving. So I decided to get a job. And I got the paper out and I read it. We did that too back then. And there's a classified ad. The ad was get paid to meditate. I thought, that's fabulous. Get paid to meditate. There can't be any strings involved in that, right? And it's way better than popping your coochie. So I called and I met this woman named Ann at Jerry's Famous Deli in Marina Del Rey. And over a hot bowl of matzo ball soup, she didn't tell me how I was going to make money meditating. But she did tell me about this man, this teacher whom she had been studying with, named Rama, otherwise known as Frederick Lenz from San Diego, California. This man taught a special blend of American Zen Buddhism and computer programming. And he was the only enlightened Westerner in the world. And if you studied with him, you could become enlightened too, in this lifetime, you know, I didn't know what to think about that. I was. I'd grown up Southern Baptist and left all that behind. But she gave me $100 bill and told me that she did that for anyone who was interested in working with Rama. And she also invited me to this black tie gala affair at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. I'm not going to say no to that. So I took the hundred dollars, I bought some groceries and a party dress. Two days later, Ann picked me up in her Datsun 280Z and off we go. And I was mesmerized. I mean, I'm a country girl seeing this Four Seasons Hotel. The Grammys were going on. There were parties everywhere. I was starstruck. On the way in, I had to sign a waiver. There are two Tibetan dragons at the top. And I had to verify that I was between the ages of 18 and 29 and that I wouldn't sue Rama, Frederick Lenz or Advanced Systems Inc. You'd think that'd be a red flag, but everyone else was doing it, so why not? There were about 200 people there. About 50 of them were Rama's students. And they were all either computer programmers, computer analysts, or systems architect. And they were very nice and very smart and just had their shit together. And all the rest of us were between the ages of 18 and 29, apprentices. And we were all vying for spaces in Rama's community. I didn't know anything meant. I just knew that I loved the tropical fruit topiaries. There was an amazing gourmet spread, and I had a raging eating disorder. At the time, I was in heaven and everyone was so nice. So we're about midway through the meal when this synthesized rock music starts to play. And everyone just stops mid sentence. And all eyes are at the back of the room and in comes Rama. He floats from the corner of the ballroom, and he's just tall, lanky man with this crazy curly kine g hair. And he just talked. He talked about life. He had this nasally voice, and he talked about current events. And he was funny and he was witty and he was charming. And he just held us all in the palms of his hands. And then he asked us to meditate with him. So I closed my eyes and pretended to know what I was doing. And within about three minutes, I started feeling this warm sensation in my belly. And then it started to spread throughout my entire body. My cells were spinning and I was buzzing and I felt like I was going to actually float off my chair. So I opened my eyes and I was assaulted with this tangible golden light. It was like a sun soup. It actually felt like you could just reach out and grab a handful of it. And then I noticed, although I was at the back of the ballroom, I had a direct line of vision to Rama, and he was levitating about a foot off the ground. And I looked around me and everyone else was. Either they had their eyes closed or they didn't see what I was seeing, or they didn't notice it, or it was just something that was a Rama thing that he did. I don't know. Maybe I was hypnotized. Could have been lsd, but I had done lsd and this did not seem like LSD to me. Party tricks aside, I felt amazing. My malaise had melted. My depression had disappeared. I actually gave a shit about life. For a change, I felt like I could be someone. I felt like I was no longer lost, that I had found someplace to be. Now, whatever this person, whatever these people had to offer, I wanted a part of it because I felt like a new person. So I kept going back to these affairs. They happened about once or twice a month at the Four Seasons. Ann sponsored me. I also started helping with the recruiting. And on one such occasion, I saw Rama in an unguarded moment, And I just walked right up to him, held out my hand and said, hi, I'm Joy. He paused, but it wasn't a pregnant pause. He was just taking me in. He was looking at me, and he grabbed my hand and said hello. And we talked for about three to five minutes, just about my aspirations. I'd wanted to be a model, and I also wanted to go into magazines, which I did later on in life. We talked about our past lives. We both agreed that it didn't really matter all that much what your past lives were.
- [30:17]
Interviewer/Host
And ha, ha, ha.
- [30:23]
Joy Keller
I felt funny and smart, and he made me feel pretty. It was a magical moment. And then I turned around and Ann was standing there like a mad school marm. She took me aside and she scolded me. She said, no one ever touches Rama. You just can't touch him, I guess, because you would infect him with your humanity. But he had touched me. He had taken my hand. We had a thing going, a repartee. But then she shifted and she said, rama only connects physically with women who have a particular type of karma. And you must have that karma, Joy. You are a chosen one. I thought, wow, I'm a chosen one. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew that it had to mean that he liked me, Rama liked me. And if someone this important liked me, I had to take the next step. And I did. And the program worked like this. If you wanted to study with Rama, you had to work with computers. It was highly encouraged that you work with computers because it makes total sense. Really it did at the time. If you're a computer programmer, especially in the early 90s, you made a lot of money. The more money you make, the more freedom you have to pursue your spirituality and also pay Rama a huge sum of money. Beginning, you would pay him $1,000 a month minimum. But in exchange, you got to sit with him and get on the short path to enlightenment in this lifetime. And as you were programming, you could live as a monk in the world. Computer programming helped you get into this meditative zone, like this sausage Casing of Nirvana. And that meant that even if you did have to go into the office, you would be like, your language is. And you're just in your thing. And you didn't have to interact with anyone. You could just be in your Rama zone. You weren't supposed to have friends out of the community, and you were never supposed to talk to your family. But that was okay with me. This was going to be my new family. So I enrolled in computer Learning center in downtown la, which was the last thing that my high school counselor would have recommended for me. I'm a writer, I'm an editor. I'm a performer, I'm an artist. But I had to do this. I had to do this because I was a chosen one. Stripping didn't work out, so here we go. But after a month, I think I barely got through the binary system and I lost it. I hated computer programming so much. I hated it. And my body was actually. I was sick, my kidney was failing. I was miserable. I'd moved in with two of the other ladies at the time who were in the community, and I saw how great their lives were, and I saw how much they loved Rama. And Rama was God. If the sunset was beautiful, it was because of Rama. If you didn't get a parking ticket, it was because of Rama. Rama was God. Rama was everything. And their lives were steady. There were no ups, there were no downs. They had lots of money. Everything was great. That wasn't happening for me, and I couldn't understand why. And I had to think that it was because I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't pretty enough to already be on his yachts, traveling around the world with him. So fuck it. So I just packed everything in my car one morning and I left. And I lived out of my car over the years. I eventually finished college, but I always wondered about Rama. And I always wondered what would happen if I'd stayed. I did some research and I learned some things. I learned that one of the people in the community had committed suicide. I learned that a lot of women had come forth with allegations of sexual abuse. I learned that this community was officially defined as a cult. And I learned that he had an $18 million estate. Even though some of these things were very dubious, I still felt like I'd fucked up because I couldn't program a goddamn computer. I wouldn't be enlightened. And then one day in April 1998, Rama put on a suit and tie, and he put his dog's collar around his neck. He loved his dogs, his Scotty dogs. They were everything to him. And he overdosed on phenobarbital and he jumped off a dock at his private lake. That's where they found him. And my first thought was, holy shit, what are these people going to do now? Because he was their world, how are they going to be able to function? And I was concerned about them. And then my second thought was, wow, if I'd stayed in this cult, what could have transpired? Because there was female follower with him that night, he was also drugged up. Could that have been me as a potential chosen one? Could we have all got involved in some sort of crazy phenobarbital suicide pact? And that's when I had this wash of gratitude and I realized that yeah, my self esteem was abysmally low, lower than the bar needed to stay in a culture that preyed on low self esteem.
- [36:00]
Interviewer/Host
But
- [36:02]
Joy Keller
my intuition was also working for me. That's why my body was breaking down. So the combination of my intuition and my low self esteem, they made a good pair. And it enabled me to get out of a situation that could have set my life on a totally different trajectory. And I instead had found the freedom and the happiness and eventual place in life that I am now. Thank you.
- [37:12]
Kevin Allison
Folks. If you love Risk, one way you can support us for free is by writing us reviews and giving us five star ratings on Apple Podcasts or or Podchaser or Spotify. A five star rating in any of those places really makes a difference. Thank you.
- [37:40]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [38:09]
Kevin Allison
Hey folks, have you ever wondered what you should do if you run into a bear while hiking? Or maybe you want to know about a single leopard that killed over a hundred people in India? If you've got thoughts like these, do I have a show for you. Tooth and Claw is a storytelling podcast that takes listeners through tales of hair raising and often violent encounters with wildlife, as well as the often very human reasons behind the attacks. Story topics cover everything from a black bear rampaging through a hot springs and leaving two people dead in its wake to the unbelievable story of the survivors of the USS Indianapolis and their four day battle with hungry sharks. The best part is that it's led by a wildlife biologist, an animal behavior expert, and his analysis of these stories might just help you avoid a similar encounter. A good starting point is the recent episode the Twisted Tale of the Travis the Chimpanzee. It's a chilling story of a depressed chimpanzee who took his anger out on an unsuspecting woman and changed her life forever. Listen to Tooth and Claw today and get better informed before you venture out into the great outdoors, just search Tooth and Claw on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [39:41]
Joy Keller
Traditional home security only alerts you after a break in, and that's too late.
- [39:45]
Interviewer/Host
SimpliSafe is changing that.
- [39:47]
Kevin Allison
Stop.
- [39:48]
Tommy Gallen
This is Simplisafe.
- [39:49]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Police are on the way.
- [39:50]
Joy Keller
We don't just alert, we stop crime before it starts. Simplisafe plans starting around a dollar a day, save 50% on your new system with professional monitoring@simplisafe.com Spotify or with promo
- [40:02]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
code Spotify Outdoor Deterrence requires a Simplisafe Active Guard Outdoor Protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012 hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for kids and adults alike. So whether you have a tough time snoozing or just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Sunday. Sweet dreams. This is Risk.
- [41:02]
Kevin Allison
This is big Data behind me now, and we just heard from Joy Keller. In a little bit, we're going to hear from storyteller Justin Hudnall, but before that, a story from Leslie the Scientist. Here she is now with a story we call How Nick's Mind Works.
- [41:39]
Interviewer/Host
I'm 18 years old, laying on my back, staring at the wall, a poster featuring a band called the Insane Clown Posse. I'm in my boyfriend's bedroom and he's on top of me, bucking me, and I am laying there patiently waiting for him to finish. Now, it's not his fault. He's doing the best he can. However, unfortunately for him, all I can think about as I stare into the festively painted face of Shaggy 2 Dope is how much I wish he would stop. Just stop what he's doing and instead slap a pair of ice cold hard police issue metal handcuffs onto my wrists, pull my hands up above my head, spit on me, slap my face a couple times, call me a dirty, dirty little slut, then flip me onto my back, give me the sound spanking a dirty slut like me deserves, spread my pink cheeks and really go to town on my tight little asshole. Unfortunately for me, that's not gonna happen today, or any other day for that matter, because he's already told me several times that he's not into any of that dirty, disgusting, kinky stuff. It's gross. So instead I pull on my shirt, we watch an episode of south park and I tell him, babe, I gotta go to work
- [43:09]
Tommy Gallen
now.
- [43:10]
Interviewer/Host
I know the scene I just described sounds sad. It was. But to be honest, I didn't let it be that big of a deal at end the the time. I mean. Sure, it was a little disturbing to me that I had to conjure up this vivid imagery of myself being verbally degraded and physically harmed to gain any level of sexual arousal. But why try to solve a problem that's so easy to hide? And besides, I figured if I told anyone about these feelings or thoughts that they just try to stick me in a mental institution or never talk to me again. So I pushed these feelings into the back of my head as usual and drove to work. Work for me at the time was a place called Movie Max Cinemas. There's not much Max about these cinemas. They're across the street from a crumbling strip mall owned and operated by Mormons. Don't laugh, Mormons can own things too. It was picture one of those buildings that has been built in the 70s and hasn't changed one tiny bit since. Like a crumbling gray cube with a smaller glass cube in front of it. And this was the box office where I spent about 40 hours a week selling tickets. Don't worry, I like confinement. So that day I worked my usual shift 8 hours. Around 10 o' clock it was time to clock out. So I went to the back office and there I ran into one of the projectionists. His name was John Mitchell and he was placing a DVD onto the manager's desk. I hadn't seen this DVD before, but it looked interesting. It was a rear view of a woman in these sexy stockings, but didn't have like that porny vibe to it. It was more like an indie film. So I asked him what it was and he Said, it's not mine. I am returning it to Nick. Nick was the general manager of the movie theater. I said, oh well, what's it about John? And he absolutely refused to divulge any details of the plot to me. Instead he said, you know what, why don't you borrow it? Just put it back on his desk tomorrow. He won't miss it an extra day. Besides, it'll tell you everything you need need to know about how his mind works. Let me be honest with you guys. At the time I gave very few shits about the inner workings of Nick's mind. He was the general manager of the movie theater. As I said before, I was trying to think of a celebrity I could maybe compare him to or like some point of reference for you guys. But all I could come up with honestly was a bear. Now not the gay bear with the leather harness that you would find in the Castro. No, no, not that kind of bear. Or not like a scary grizzly bear either. He wasn't that hairy, more like a B list Disney movie character. Like the middle bear and Goldilocks and the three bears. Very, very non threatening. He had like a side part before Mumford and Sons made that cool. I had figured out a few facts about his life. I figured he had to be a member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints because you had to be to rise to any level of power in that establishment. I mean, come on. One of the assistant managers was like a 14 year old girl and she was also Mormon. I knew that he had to be some amount of years older than me, probably between 5 and 101 because he had figured out facial hair grooming by that point in life, something many of my peers had not. And also he had a new car which meant he somewhat had his life together. But mostly you guys. He was boring, like painfully boring. He mumbled a lot and he was my boss. So really the only time I paid attention to him was when I was like breaking the rules by gorging on stolen dippin dots in the closet or sneaking up to the roof to smoke weed. So I honestly almost didn't take the DVD home. But I was like, ah, maybe I can blackmail home with some of this shit. So I grabbed it and I took it home to my parents house where I lived at the time, to the bedroom that I shared with my sister. Her bed was like a couple feet away and I popped it into my laptop, put on some headphones and started to watch the movie. Now I had read the front of the DVD case on the way Home. I saw that it was called Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. Who here has seen Secretary? All right, okay. Now I had not read the back of the case. However, if I had, it would say something along the lines of a dominant lawyer hires a young woman to be his secretary and helps her discover a submissive side of her she did not know existed. But again, I was completely ignorant of the plot. So I just started watching the movie and I was thinking, wow, this girl has pretty low self esteem. Good for her though. She is going to typing school. This is going to work out initiative. Oh wow. This lawyer is hiring her even though she has no work experience. Good for the economy. Good for him. This will work out well. And then I started getting worried because she wasn't doing a great job. She was making some mistakes. And then there's a scene where she's made a few too many mistakes and he calls her into his office. He has a piece of paper on his desk and he's circled all the mistakes she's made with a bright red blunt tip Sharpie, which is kind of a blunt instrument for proofreading of that kind. But I'm no judger. And instead of firing her like he probably should have, he instead makes her pull up her skirt, put both of her hands palm down onto his desk, and you guys, he walks behind her and starts spanking her and spanking her and spanking her and spanking her and spanking her and spanking her. Oh my God. I have to explain. I have been a creepy sex pervert, kinky person for as long as I can possibly remember. When all the other five year old girls were watching Aladdin, waiting for him to take her on the magic carpet ride, I was sitting there cross legged, my nose an inch from the TV screen, holding out for the scene where Jafar puts her in those magical golden shackles and imprisons her. Imprisons her just like he did her tiger friend. And as for movies like Peter Pan, Fuck Wendy, you guys, it was all about that scene where Captain Hook ties Tiger Lily to that pole in the cave where the tide is rising. Very elaborate scheme, but also super hot because she is tied to this cage, there's ropes all around her arms and the water is slowly rising and. And the only person who can rescue her is Peter. She is completely helpless and that gave me chills. But my favorite movie, my favorite movie as a kid and maybe still now with Snow White, not because of the magical forest and the cute animals, although they were adorable and not because of the Dwarves, although they are pretty hilarious, especially dopey, but because of the scene in the end where the Evil Queen puts her in that crazy apple coma and she is laying there encased in glass, completely helpless. And anyone can do anything they want to her. Just anyone can walk up and do whatever they want to her body. She's no longer a person. She is a helpless object. And I don't know if I associated the feelings that gave me with sex at the time, but I knew they were bad and I probably shouldn't tell any grownups about them. And I hoped that they would go away with time. But unfortunately in high school they all got worse. The feelings got so much more intense. I don't read Twilight, I don't know what normal 15 year old girls fantasize about, but I remember sitting in US history and we were learning about the Civil War, but my thoughts drifted to something a little bit more sexy. I was thinking maybe I'll be walking home alone one day past a dark alley. Or let's be real people, this is a suburb past a cul de sac. And a car full of hooligans will pull up and they'll jump out and be like, give us all your money. I'll be like, I'm only 15, I don't have any money. They'll be like, it's fine, we'll take your body instead. And I'll be like, oh no, no help. And their leader will like jump out, throw me onto the ground and be like, rub my face in the dirt and be like, you like that dirty girl? You like that? You're liking your face all dirty? I'll be like, oh no, please stop, please stop. But they won't stop. Instead, two more guys will like rip open my shirt and start fondling my breasts. One guy per breast. Very specific fantasy. And I'm like, please, please help me, help me. But no one will hear me scream. And it was so fucking hot. And I'm sitting there. I'm sitting there just a few years later, watching the secretary trying so hard to keep both hands above the blanket because again, my 15 year old sister is sleeping like two feet away from me. I can't masturbate. Just thinking, this is just basking in all the feelings of dominance and submission and sexualization of pain and the joy that can come from serving another person and thinking, if this movie exists, there must be other people who are into this. It can't be just a Leslie thing. So I'm sitting there and suddenly it hits Me. This is how Nick's mind works. I mean, it has to be. That's what the projectionist said, right? Suddenly, my boring Mormon side parted. Manager had become the boss of my dreams. I went to work the next day and everything had changed. I was sitting in my glass box office, hands on the desk, just waiting for him to show up. My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty. But when he showed up and we were finally alone a few hours later, I didn't say anything. I was ashamed. I mean, what if John the projectionist was just playing a prank on me? It seemed like something he would do. And what if Nick wasn't into any of this kinky weird stuff? And even if he was, it wasn't any of my business and he didn't need to know the weird stuff that I was into. So I just stayed silent. And weeks went by and months went by and only a couple things changed. First of all, I started listening to the things that Nick was mumbling. And with time I realized that he was actually a pretty funny guy. But more than that, he was the most caring person I had ever met in my life. He was a sweet person and he really cared about other people. And there was a little bit of sexual tension, I'm not going to lie, that was rising between us. To be honest, in retrospect, it was mostly one sided, I think. But sometimes he would ask me to do things. Like he was my manager, he had to. And he'd be like, oh, Leslie, can you do like just a real quick bathroom check? I hate to ask, but just make sure that we're not out of paper towels. And I would remember this scene in the Secretary where the lawyer pretends that he threw away an important document and he makes his secretary dig through this dumpster that's outside his window just so he can like watch her degrade herself and get filthy in servitude to him. And I look and in my head I'm like, yes, Nick, yes, I will clean the bathroom. I will scrub the toilet with my bare fricking hands. I will lick the floor and I will enjoy every second of it. And so it sounds weird and crazy and psycho, but cleaning the bathroom was my favorite part of work. I'd go to work thinking, what is Nick going to ask me to do today? So. So months went by and I broke up with that immature juggalo boyfriend who really enjoyed clown based bands. Good call. I was single again. And one day it was the middle of summer and I was getting ready to clean up after pirates of the Caribbean 2 in theater 1. And standing there with my little dustpan in my little broom. And I knew that the time had come. My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty. I was freaking out in my head. But I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to say something to Nick. So I steeled myself and I thought of all the other places an unskilled 18 year old like me could find work. Okay, Cold Stone Creamery, Safeway Supermarkets, Rubio's, Fish tacos. I got this. Plan B. So I start. I forced myself to march into the movie theater, into the back corner, where Nick. Nick is sweeping up alone. And I look up at him and I say, Nick. Yeah, Leslie? How can I help you, Nick? I felt like I was about to pass out. My face was turning red. Nick, I think I have feelings for you. And he looked down at me and he said, leslie, the feelings are mutual. I was so happy and relieved. So a couple days later, we went on our first date. We went to see the Pursuit of Happiness at another movie theater, because that's what you do when you work in a movie theater. And he was super nice. He opened my door for me, he held my hand, he bought me ice cream. But nothing, no. Talk about kinky. Weird stuff came up and I was starting to doubt that, like the movie was even his. It probably was just a prank that John was throwing. And then a couple days later, he took me to Olive Garden. It was delicious. When is it not? Free breadsticks. But the best part of the night came a couple hours after he dropped me off at home. And we were chatting on AOL instant Messenger. And then he sent me this picture. And it was of his desk. And on his computer desk was a pair of ice cold, hard, metal police issue handcuffs. And it had a caption. And the caption read, these would look nice on you. An ice wound. And a couple weeks later, I found myself on the floor of his bedroom. And it was a wooden floor. I was acutely aware of this fact because I was naked except for my little lace thong. And my chest was covered in clothespins. And these were jammed in between the floor and my body. And it hurt, but it felt so good. And I couldn't take them off. I couldn't touch them or feel them because I was hogtied. All I could do was wiggle. And my ass was warm and pink because he had given me the sound spanking that I had been craving my entire life a few minutes earlier. But I couldn't see if it was pink. Because I was blindfolded. And I looked up at him and I wanted to say, you are amazing. This is so hot. But I couldn't because my mouth was stuffed with my dirty panties. And holding these dirty, dirty panties in my mouth was a huge, bright red ball gag. So big that I was drooling and dripping on the floor. I look up at him, I'm like. Because he couldn't understand anything. And he looks down at me and he says, you look so fucking hot right now, my little slut. I should give you another spanking. You deserve it. And I look up at him and I'm like. Because the ball gag. He looks down at me and he says, thank you. Thank you. This is so hot. You're making me so happy right now. Thank you. And I looked up at him and I almost started crying. Not just from the pain of the clothespins, but because I knew. I knew for a fact this wasn't just a Leslie thing anymore. This was a Nick and Leslie thing. And I would never be alone again. And a couple months later, he got down on one knee and he looked up at me and he said, leslie? And I was like, yeah, Nick, Leslie, I love you. I looked at him, I said, I love you, too. Because I did. He was amazing. I did with all my heart. And two years later, he got down on one knee again and he said, leslie, will you marry me? I said, yes, Nick, I will marry you. And it's been eight years, and he has been the best partner I could ever hope for in life. We have the same sense of humor, and we do great couple things all the time. We go camping. We support each other in all our endeavors. We have two cats together, Sir Bucky McBuckingham and Gandalf the Grey. And. And we seem like any other couple on the outside, but sometimes on a weekend night, I'll be at our local bondage club, tied to a St. Andrew's cross, covered in clothespins, with a huge butt plug in my ass, saying, I love you. Thank you, master. Thank you. And I bet you that we are the only couple on our block with a human sized cage in our bedroom.
- [62:06]
Kevin Allison
So you might want to think twice before showing your kids or your nieces and nephews the filth that is Snow
- [62:14]
Interviewer/Host
White
- [62:17]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
The Seven Dwarves.
- [62:19]
Kevin Allison
I was a Pinocchio guy myself because he had a part of him that grew. And then he went to that amazing island full of other boys and got drunk there. All right, I want to bring our final storyteller to the stage. It's been a real Joy working with him. He does stuff here and stuff@sosaywealonline.com Please welcome to the stage Justin Hudnall.
- [62:55]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Hey everybody. So my story starts a couple of years ago when I was helping my mom clean out her garage. And this is kind of an archaeological affair with my family because we have a really hard time letting go of the past. Nostalgia will just take on this load and build and build and build until it reaches this critical mass and then it all has to go. And that's what was happening in this instance. The purge was on. And then that's when I found the poster, or to be specific, the posters. At the bottom of a trunk there's like these six silk screened posters, handmade advertising, an art show by a group called Sirius, spelled S I R I U S just like the constellation. And yes, that is a very hippie name to call yourself. And accordingly, it dated from the 1970s. And on the left hand side of these posters were the three artists names. And one of them belonged to my father. So I take the poster in and I show it to my mom and I asked her what's all this about? And she very calmly explains to me that my dad ran a multimedia artist collective in San Diego back in the 70s. So I point out to her that I run a multimedia artist collective in San Diego right now. And all she says is, oh yeah, I know, the parallels are terrifying. And then just walks out of the room. And that's as long as any conversation about my dad with my mom has ever gone. And this could have been a really like groundbreaking, mind altering moment to realize that all along you were just the puppet of parental predestination destination. But it had happened so many times by this point where it had just kind of become degenerated into like a private cliche between her and I. Oh, it's all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. It's eternal recurrence in a nutshell. And I like to say it that way because it sounds a lot smarter than what it was. Which was just a cliche after a long line of cliches. And the first one was the one I used to define my life the first 18 years, my existence, which was ready for it. You don't miss what you don't have. And I had adopted that for two reasons. The first was because I'd never met my father, not in person, not really even heard that much about him. He had had some issues with the truth, to put it diplomatically. And this had led My mother to offer him up an ultimatum wherein he could not pay child support support if he disappeared and never tried to contact us. And he thought that was a pretty good deal at the time and took her up on it. And so the first time he saw me was the last, which was when I was born in the hospital over there in Hillcrest. All I ever really got out of her about him was that he had been in the Vietnam War. He'd done some self medicating with drugs afterwards as a result, and he'd had a really sensitive artistic disposition like mine. And, and triangulated somewhere between those three points was the reason he wasn't able to stay around. And the second reason I wrapped myself up in you don't miss what you don't have was because I grew up in the shadow of these God awful spoiled Generation Xers, this indolent generation of the middle class who just coveted any perceived suffering as a way to make themselves seem more interesting. I put it this way, for those of you who are younger than me, growing up in the 90s in high school in San Diego was like the Winter Olympics if cutting yourself was a sport. Everything looked like a fucking Tori Amos album cover. It was just bobby pins and broken doll parts and these sad little sweaters with holes in them. And you know, the first reaction when you heard something genuinely bad had happened to one of your friends was lucky because it meant you got to act like an asshole with impunity and nobody could ever hold it against you until somebody else came along and, I don't know, knocked you off, had an abortion and topped you. And so the, and of course, like the Smashing Pumpkins, right, was their whiny little marching band and I hated them. So when it was my turn to rebel, I rebelled by being fine. It was the only thing where you could go at that point was just the opposite direction, which is, no, I'm cool. It was scandalous. And it was this idea I think of like, you know, that's what men are like, stoics. Okay, I'll try that. And so it was fine. And it worked for me. 18 years, no problem. Because. And there's a self righteousness to that decision because it's like, oh, someone has to be okay, it's gonna be me. Yeah, yeah, Iwo Jima, modern day, you know, me. Emotional warfare. And all of that was going fine until I met Amber Wade. And Amber Wade was this 6 foot tall Amazon Blonde MVP volleyball player at our high school. And I was this like B list actor in high school. Drama, right? Like I said, nothing changes. All of this has happened before, all this will happen again. And she was the girl that I wasn't supposed to get. Right. There's always one. There's like some unspoken hierarchy. If it was a sitcom, it'd be like, no, you're never chance. But I did get her, and here's how I did it. She had an Electra complex on this enormous scale for the homeschoolers out there, that's a lady version of an Oedipal complex. Cool. And I want to make it clear I'm not being mean. The reason that statement is true and not mean is because at the ripe age of 27, she became very happily married and recently had a beautiful baby boy with a man who was about five years older than her dad. Did you just walk into this show? I'm pretty sure a girl just talked about having her ass played with like a sandbox. That's where you're gonna draw the line. That's just a Tuesday. Oh, the bears. That's delicious. If she was cool with it, I was cool with it. It really wasn't a big deal. It was a no judgment thing. You know, she liked it. What she liked. I liked that. She knew what she liked. You know, it's like. It's just like anything else at that point. It's like, some guys only date Asian shicks, some girls date their dads, whatever, potato, potato. But the thing about it was that she was so confident about who she was. She was so into her own skin. She knew she was a daddy's girl. But the footnote to that is that she was absolutely sure that I had to have issues from growing up in a daddy free environment. And she just picked at me from the moment we met. Like, how could you have never wanted to track him down? Not out of curiosity, not out of nothing. You just nothing. You ended up pushing, pushing, pushing. And I'm not going to say that I hadn't been curious before I'd met Amber, but hers was like that summer blonde hair that just broke the camel's back. It was like being given this hero's journey to go on. And at the end of which is like, oh, I get to be with you. Awesome. I'll embark. And so I started by going home and asking questions. And my mom from. From the very moment we started, made it very clear that they weren't welcome. In fact, I remember the thing she said to me when I asked was, I don't know why you'd want to go wasting Your time tracking down some old wreck who never thought to send you one birthday card in your whole life. And normally in our family, this would have just started a drag down, knockout fight between my mom and I. It was the relationship we had. But I couldn't bring myself in that moment to point out that she'd been the one to tell him not to. You know, when you're a single mother with an only child, you learn how to protect each other's feelings before you even really know that that's what you're doing. And that's the real reason why I hadn't asked about him sooner, Because I didn't want to make her feel guilty. And I could see now that I was. She did feel guilty. So I stopped. But my grandmother was more sympathetic. She'd done a lot of the raising of me while my mom was off at work. And it created this kind of weird relationship between all of us in the family where, like, my grandmother was kind of like the mother to both of us, and my mom and I had, like, almost sibling relationship. And it gave her leeway to make decisions in times like these when the kid comes around looking for dad. But she was the right one to do it because she was from the Ozarks in Arkansas. And every generation of women on that side of the family had just had their expectations of men lowered with every generation until, like, the bar wasn't even wasted high anymore. And, you know, she'd seen shit like she looked like the dust bowl, you know, like she. Things had happened to her. And the result, the kind of, like, beautiful result of all of that, was that she just couldn't be angry at anybody. She just felt sorry for the whole human race. And when she ever talked about my dad, all she would say was, well, he was a fixer upper, which was really accurate and fair, you know. And as a Southern woman, she had a lot of opinions. And one of those opinions was that a boy should know his father if he wants to. And so to keep that option alive, she had stowed away a copy of his Social Security number in the dresser drawer. Crafty. And obviously, it became very apparent very quickly when I finally did show up and had come around asking for him, that she thought about what one might do with that Social Security number because she had a family friend run a credit check on him. Illegal. And we got an address in Waukesha, Wisconsin. No one knows where that is except for, like, one postal employee. Luckily, though, I knew exactly what to write in the letter that I would send to my Father, because I had grown up watching Oprah Winfrey with my grandma. And so I said, I'm not mad. I'm just curious. And I don't want a confrontation. I just want closure. Verbatim. Oprah will teach you anything. I put it in a letter and I sent it off. And it went across the country into the ether. And it wouldn't be until years later that I was told by his new wife of about 10 years that she had been the one to actually get that letter. She took it out of the box and opened it up and read it. And that was the first time she learned that I was not the miscarriage he had told her I was. I know, Like I said, issues with the truth. But she gave him an ultimatum. To her credit, she said, okay, I won't divorce you if you get your ass on a plane and go meet your son. And my dad took her up on it because, again, when it comes to women making my dad options and bargains, he's a very, very, very lucky son of a bitch. So I didn't know any of this at the time, though. At 18, all I knew was that, like, about a week later, I got a letter back. And in it, he commended me for my bravery. And we set a time where he could fly out and meet me. We decided around spring, close to when I'd be graduating, was a good idea. The day came. He called from his motel room right off Interstate 8, told me where he was staying, and I got in the car, honestly, with about as much fanfare as you'd go to buy milk. Drove over there, looked up his room number, went up the stairs, knocked on the door, it opened, and I looked down to meet my dad. And I did not know until that moment that I had expectations of him. But he was not it. He was shorter and a chain smoker and more than a little bit of an alcoholic. And he was quiet, which I am not. And the entire weekend we spent together, I can't really account for anything notable that we said to one another, except that I can say that none of it had anything to do with his absence. Nothing. We avoided that like the plague. And he just kept it to kind of like coin anecdotes about himself. The one that does stick out in my head, though, and I think it sticks out because it sounds like the most, like what I imagined fatherly advice to sound like. You know, between a bottle of Jack Daniels and Minolta, there's nothing a woman won't do. I kept that up here until college and then that was. Was just like talking to any other guy. And as far as I could tell, that's all it was for him, too. And that's okay, right? Not everything has to go like a TED Talk. And then he flew away. And I won. I got from this display of dedication to the cause. Amber Wade, alone in my bed with a bottle of vodka. And then. And we're laughing and we're talking, and we get down to our underwear, and things are going really well. And then I black out. It was the first and only time in my entire life I was just gone to the whole world. And when I wake up, I'm in my tighty whities and, you know, my flaccid dick is out the little hole. Like a little. Like a little periscope of shame
- [76:15]
Tommy Gallen
trying
- [76:15]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
to figure out what's going on, you know? The most dignified way to come to on a Saturday morning at your mom's house. And when I get Amber on the phone to figure out what happened, she didn't want to tell me. She's really cagey. She's humming and hawing. But I keep pushing her, and I'm pushing her and pushing her, and eventually she says, well, you were. We were laughing, you were telling jokes, you were being funny, doing the whole funny guy shtick. And then, you know, out of nowhere, you just. He just started crying. And then that kind of turned into screaming. And the thing you were screaming was, why wasn't he there? Why wasn't he there? Why wasn't he there? Now, if a man realizes that he's full of shit in the woods and he's alone, when he wakes up, he can just kind of go about his business like nothing ever happened, because no one's the wiser. But I had got caught, clearly, in a very eerily similar way to my father had gotten caught proclaiming that nothing in the world was absent, when obviously something was. And I couldn't pretend we didn't have anything in common from that moment on. So despite these inauspicious beginnings, Amber and I actually do manage to date. And we stay together all the way up until we go off to college, respectively, and are separated. But I was distracted for most of the. Of the relationship by what this new development meant, this kind of bomb. And I was terrified by what else I'd managed to shove down into the basement. So I tried to talk to him a couple times on the phone, and that didn't really go anywhere. I even went out to see him in Waukesha. And that didn't go anywhere. We just kind of sat and smoked and drank a lot in silence. And, you know, until I finally got the hint to take it from the dating advice book, he just wasn't that into me. It's okay. Not everything has to end like a TED Talk, like I said. But I did get better at drinking around this time. I got better and better at it. And I don't think I was drinking to forget. I think I was drinking to get to know him. It was like every little cocktail was like a little hint at who this guy was. And then that became just kind of the beginning of the road I embarked on to figure out who my father was. I found a way to get myself sent overseas. It was a lot less humid, a lot less dangerous, but dangerous nonetheless. I kind of got fucked up over it a little bit, just like he had. Maybe the baby version of that, the art collective thing happened that I mentioned earlier, but I did stop before I had a kid, because there's a limit to cliches before they just start getting really cheap. And I like to tell this story now because neither of my parents are any good at dealing with difficult subject matter. And I know their parents weren't, and I'm sure their parents before them weren't. And I think when tough things aren't talked about, it creates this kind of debt of silence, right? That eventually someone has to pay off. Maybe you've inherited it somehow on the road, and it's on your lap now whether or not you're going to pass it on or finally pay off that interest of that emotional credit card, because otherwise no one's ever going to get healthy. And the other reason I like telling this story is because it gets me laid. Because this is my Minolton Jack Daniels. Thank you.
- [79:48]
Tommy Gallen
Only you and you alone can draw me and then leave me Leave me wanting more with every line as if I've never wanted any more than what you're giving Sleep to dream then wake to see another day with you and I.
- [80:13]
Interviewer/Host
And I myself alone may be among
- [80:16]
Tommy Gallen
the lonely dreamers Lonely dreamers dream the most of all Though I'm afraid that with the lonely dreams the grass is always greener Is it true that it is only you and only you alone oh, such is life Such as life
- [80:38]
Interviewer/Host
for the lonely trail.
- [80:51]
Kevin Allison
That is it for this week's episode, folks. This is Matt Soucich behind me now from my neck of the woods, Queens, New York. And that last story we heard was from Justin Hudnall. Thanks so much again to San Diego. And especially to Amy Lesuski and the finest city improv there. Folks, today's the day.
- [81:17]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Take a risk.
- [81:19]
Tommy Gallen
Because true love, it can break it down or make a life worth living. Oh, and only you and I myself alone Must have it all? Oh, only you and I Myself alone Must have it all? Oh, only you and I Myself alone
- [81:37]
Interviewer/Host
Must have it all.
- [81:46]
Joy Keller
Hey, don't forget to get red ridding
- [81:50]
Kevin Allison
by donating right now.
- [82:02]
Joy Keller
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