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- [00:00]
Toyota Advertiser
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Rosetta Stone Advertiser
The end of the year, I'm thinking about the next Next year is the year I finally make my Spanish better than my 9 year old's. Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program available on desktop or as an app, and it truly immerses you in the language that you want to learn. I can't wait to use Rosetta Stone and finally speak better than my 9 year old who's been learning Spanish in his own way. Rosetta Stone is the trusted expert for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean. I could go on fast language acquisition. Rosetta Stone immerses you in many ways. There are no English translations, so you can really learn to speak, listen and think in that language. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach today. The Moth listeners can take advantage of this Rosetta Stones lifetime membership for 50% off visit rosettastone.com moth that's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your Life. Redeem your 50% off@RosettaStone.com moth today.
- [02:08]
Great Courses Advertiser
This podcast is supported by the Great Courses. Our desire to learn doesn't stop after college. That's the motivation behind the Great Courses. These are engaging video and audio lectures from top professors and experts in their fields. The Great courses offers over 500 topics including literature, history, art and music, science, philosophy and better living. Like Practicing An Introduction to Meditation where award winning professor Mark Muse teaches the key principles and techniques of meditation through guided exercises. The Great Courses has been in production for over 20 years. You can watch or listen to the Great Courses with online downloads and streaming via their apps or on DVDs or CDs without the pressure of exams. The great courses has a special offer for Moth. Order practicing mindfulness and get 80% off the original price. But this 80% savings is only available for a short time. Don't wait. Go to thegreatcourses.com moth that's thegreatcourses.com moth.
- [03:10]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The story you're about to hear is by the Moth's founder, George Dawes Greene. It was told live in New York in 2012 and the theme of the night was around the Bend Stories of Coming Home. Here's George.
- [03:36]
George Dawes Greene
Well, I used to play a lot of poker at the house of my oldest friend Wanda Bullard on St. Simon's island off the coast of Georgia. I loved those nights. I would pull up in Wanda's driveway and look through her dining room window and I could see her in there setting up for poker. And she'd be cleaning the cat food off the dining room table and then cleaning the cats off the dining room table and then setting out her lucky Chinese coins and her lucky shark's teeth and her lucky bottle caps and her lucky ashtray from south of the border. And when she became intent, she would always put her tongue like this. So even though she was 60 years old, she looked a little like Charlie Brown from the comics. And, and my friend Larry would be there in his black cowboy hat and his hooded cobra eyes, shuffling and reshuffling the deck. And I loved these people. And I'd go into that house of junk and Wanda would just light up and say, well, hello there, that's really her voice. And she'd give me a hug, which was always a little awkward because she came up to about here on me. And then, you know, she was a teacher. She'd been a teacher for 40 years. Her students loved her. Everybody loved Wanda because she was so kind and generous and I recognized those qualities. But what really drew me to Wanda was her mean streak. You'd give that girl a glass of bourbon and the insults would start, start to fly. And in fact, these poker nights were just orgies of insults. All of us, me and mom, my 90 year old mother would sometimes come by and Larry and Wanda would just sit there all night and play poker and insult each other. Wanda would say, you're a weasel and your hand is pitiful and you're especially ugly tonight. And I would say, larry, you look like a cobra tonight. And Larry would say, george, you look like a New York pimp tonight in that get up. And Wanda would say, I Can't show you this card right now, but when I do show it to you, I promise you, you'll remember it for the rest of your life. You're sorry life. And guarding this little circle of insults was this ring of just pure blissful chaos. Wanda's cats, she had, like six cats. And all night long, they'd be jumping up and down from the table and scattering the poker pot. And her dogs, she had these two big, ugly hound dogs that would be howling all night anytime anybody ever came by. And there were always strange people coming in and out of that house. There was one particular character named Frankie Stump. Frankie was a drunk and a good old boy, and he loved to hunt. Actually, he loved to drunk hunt. And one day, he shot a deer out on the Sea Palms Golf Course on Sunday afternoon from the window of his pickup truck while it was stopped on Frederica Road for a red light. And then he pulled over and he got out and he field dressed that deer right there on the fairway in front of all these astonished golfers. But there was one friend of ours, Ms. Lucy Mayo, who did not care for Frankie Stump. She was this tiny, tiny woman, and she was one of those people who always is aware of the invisible world all around her. She is always aware of the doings of ghosts and demons and angels. And she hated Frankie Stump because she hated hunting. And she thought that that freezer was full of the. Of the spirits of all those murdered deer. And she thought it would bring a curse on the house. And she said it was an abomination. And she was rolling on about this while we were trying to play poker until Wanda finally couldn't take it anymore. And she said, I don't care. Shut up and play. And then it was Christmas, and this was just a couple of Christmases ago. And Larry got Wanda one of those singing Santa Clauses that you get in Kmart. And I got Wanda one of those singing trophy fish that you get in Kmart. She really loved all this crap. And Lucy Mayo got her one of those roombas, you know, those little robotic vacuum cleaners and that was bouncing around all Christmas day in the kitchen. And the cats were all hissing at it, and the dogs were barking at the cats, and the fish were up on the walls singing away. And Wanda was saying, I own this hand. Put your money in the pot. Put your money in, you little cowards. And this was just about the best Christmas ever. And I remember one time I went outside to make a call, and then I was coming back in, and I looked in through the window. And I saw Larry and my mom and Wanda sitting there. And I began to think maybe I was just attached too much to these people. And so I told myself that nothing lasts forever. I reminded myself that I might well come here one day. And Larry would be gone, and my mom would be gone, and Wanda would be gone, and the house would be empty. And I told myself these things as a way to inoculate myself against any future grief. And I did succeed in making myself really Sad for about 10 minutes. Until we started playing poker again. And then the poker was just so amazing that day that after everybody else was gone, Larry and Wanda and I just stayed there and kept playing poker and laughing. We played all night. We couldn't stop. We played till 5pm the next day. And after 24 hours of poker, I staggered out of that house. And my eyeballs were actually rattling around inside my skull. And Wanda shouted after me, you're a quitt. And then a few months passed, and Larry went into the pantry to get something. I don't know. But he happened to look down, and he noticed that when Lucy Mayo had plugged in the Roomba home base, she had unplugged the freezer. And she had done that on Christmas Day. And now it was the end of February. And Larry called us in, me and Wanda, and. And he pointed at the freezer and said solemnly, don't ever open this. Ever. And the next day, Wanda hired a couple of neighbor kids to come over, you know, and haul the freezer out. Three kids showed up. I guess it should have been four, because Wanda and me and my mother and Larry were sitting in the dining room playing poker. And the kids were back in the pantry getting the freezer. And in between was the kitchen where the pets hung out and molested each other. And we were playing, and then we heard this terrible crash. And then a moment's silence. And then one of the neighbor boys came streaking through the kitchen and ran right past us. And his face was white as a sheet. And he was squeezing, screaming and running for the front door. And his two friends were right behind him. And they were throwing chairs out of the way and clawing at each other just to get past each other, to get out. To get out of that house. And then the dogs showed up. The dogs came running past, and their eye. You could see the white of their eyes because they were horrified. And they were running for the door. And then the cats emerged, and they were just little dark streaks going. And one of them jumped up on the table and slid all the way across the table and everything, the bourbon, the coins, the little, you know, the little lucky coins, everything, everything went flying. And the cat shot out of there. And we were just sitting around staring at each other, blinking, wondering what was going on. And then it hit the smell because those neighbor kids had dropped the freezer and everything had come out. And God knows what kind of meats were in there, but they were all rotten. And, and, and I just can't describe to you this. And you know, all I can say is that, is that wherever that smell was, you had to be elsewhere. And so we got out of there and I may have lost a little dignity because I think I might have elbowed past my 90 year old mother in my haste to get out of there. But then we were out and we were alive. And we rounded up the animals and we brought them over to the neighbor's house. And then we decided that we were going to go back. We were going to put scarves on our face like masks and go rushing in there and grab the freezer and get it out of there. So we did. We wrapped these scarves around our faces and we walked back. And as we came around the corner of the house, we could see Lucy Mayo standing at the front door, knocking, but a little puzzled because the front door was open, which it never was, because the pets would get out, but the pets weren't around and nobody else was around. And she was sniffing the air and getting that smell of death. And you could just see that she was putting together this narrative, this terrible narrative about a burglary gone bad and then murders. And all of her friends were in there dead. And then she heard our footsteps and she wheeled around and saw a raid before her. Seven masked banditos, or maybe they were the spirit, spirits of Frankie's murdered deer. And she was just so terrified. But Wanda then started to laugh. And she just leaned up against the house and she sunk down into a crouch and she just became a ball of laughter. And then all of us were laughing. Even the neighbor kids were on their asses laughing. Even Lucy Mayo had no idea what was going on. Couldn't help but laugh. Because this was one of those moments, those amazing, astonishing moments at Wanda's house that happened all the time, thousands of times until last summer when Larry suddenly died. And then my. My mom died and then Wanda died within a few months of each other. Just 1, 2, 3. And so it's all just as foretold that everybody's gone and that house is empty. I was just there a few months ago. And that sermon that I told myself about how I had to be prepared for this, had to be prepared for this darkness, this sermon was useless because I wasn't prepared at all. Because when the invisible world strikes, we're hopeless. And I shouldn't have even wasted my time with this sermon. I should have just gone back in that house and spent every minute I could playing poker with my friends and taking their money and listening to the insults of my beloved Wanda. Thank you.
- [17:28]
Dan Kennedy
George Dawes Green is the founder of the Moth and an internationally celebrated author. His most recent novel, Ravens, was chosen as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Mail of London. He lives in Savannah, Georgia. Hey, a quick note to our listeners in Missouri. The Moth main stage is coming to St. Louis on Friday, September 19th. For tickets and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, just Visit the site themoth.org Our podcast host.
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Great Courses Advertiser
Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available now.
- [18:08]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.