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Dan Kennedy (1:40)

Moth is supported by Brilliant Earth, offering diamond engagement rings and fine jewelry set with ethically sourced diamonds and a curated collection of vintage jewelry dedicated to eco friendly practices and available@brilliantearth.com welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Quick announcement before we get started. You know Joshua Wolfshank? Probably. He's one of our storytellers. He wrote a great book called Lincoln's Melancholy a few years back. He's got a new book out called Powers of Two and it's all about collaboration and creativity. Special online feature. I'm in conversation with Joshua Wolfshank and that's available now at our site justhitthemoth.org and now of course we've got a story for you right here on the podcast. This story that you're about to hear by Kevin R. Free was told live in New York in 2012. The theme of the night was Heart of Darkness, Stories of Love and War. Here's Kevin.

Kevin R. Free (2:48)

When I was a kid, my mother used to drive the welcome wagon, which meant that she literally drove our station wagon and welcomed our new neighbors in Fort Knox, Kentucky. And sometimes she took my brothers and I with her. And at the end of a very long day, my father would come home, he would put his briefcase down, and then he would whisk my mother on a tango down the hallway. They would go all the way down, and then they would turn and they would go all the way back up as the three of us watched. It was awesome. And then we would have dinner together. And then invariably, we would go to the den and we would watch television. We loved tv. We watched Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man. Yeah, Chico and the Man. Good Times. Kojak, the man from Atlantis. We love tv. My mom was really kind of crazy and fun. She liked to make up dances. My favorite dance was called the Loose Booty. And I'm going, of course I'm going to do it for you. So she. You're welcome. She would. So she would put her butt out like this, and then the butt would go to the left, and the left butt cheek would shake like that. And then to the right, and the right one would shake just like that. And that was the Loose Booty. Thank you. Thank you. So I distinctly remember all of us once even climbing onto a bed and trying to make it fly, like in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. This is all at my mother's urging. Inspired by my parents Dance up the hallway. I once asked them on my sixth birthday if they would sing Happy Birthday as I processed up the hall. And my mom said, oh, yes, of course. So it was like, happy birthday. Step to you together. Happy birthday. Step to you together. All the way up the hall till I got to the cake, blew out the candles, and we, of course, ate the cake, and a drama queen was born. So my mom was just really just a very funny person. One time on a road trip, and we always drove in my father's Cadillac. And we had our designated seats. My father drove. My mother was in the passenger seat, my older brother to my left, me in the middle because I was the middle child and my baby brother to the right. And one time on this road trip, a white lady cut us off in her car. And my mother said, cracker. And my father said, doris. Because, you know, the kids were in the back of the car. Come on, Doris. And so my mom said, saltine. I've Loved racial humor ever since. So on Christmas Day in 1975, we were going to take another road trip. It was a normal Christmas morning. We woke up, we opened our presents. I received a bedspread that had the map of the United States on it, and it had the capital of each state marked. I loved this bedspread, but I think it was probably the last time that I cared about geography. So after we ate breakfast, we got into the car, all in our designated seats, My father in the driver's seat, my mom in the passenger seat, my older brother to my left, my younger brother to my right. And we drove from Fort Knox, Kentucky, to Greensboro, North Carolina, to visit my father's parents, my grandparents. But at one point on the trip, my mother said that she wanted to take a nap. So she took off her seatbelt, and she sort of nestled herself in her seat, and I said I wanted to take a nap, too. So I turned around and I straddled the hump in the back of the Cadillac, and I put my head down on the seat and went to sleep. The next thing that I remember is there was a screech and a scream and a crash. And we had been in a really terrible, terrible car accident. So, remember, I was 6 years old, and my only context for car accidents was television. So what I remember is if we had a musical soundtrack, the music was gone, and what was replaced was heavy breathing, and it was in slow motion. And as I lifted my head and I looked to my left, I was facing the back. I looked at my little brother, who was trying to catch his breath, which is probably the heavy breathing I heard. And I looked in front of me, and the car had been split in half. We were kind of. We hit an embankment. Someone had hit us. And then I looked at my older brother, and he had blood on his forehead. And as I kept turning around and I looked into the front seat of the car, I saw my father still in his seatbelt, unconscious, lying on the seat. And then the dashboard, the center of the car, was also split in half. And to the right of the dash of the split in the dash, there was blood and teeth. And above that, a crack in the windshield and a little bit of blood there as well. And I kept turning to the right, and my mother was unconscious, still lying where she was when she was taking the nap. So at this moment, the sound came back. It was no longer in slow motion. We could hear the wind whipping through the windows of the car. And there were lots of images of orphans back then. You know, Tony And Tia escape from Witch Mountain and Family Affair. Buffy and Jody. So this sounds crazy, but this is what my brothers and I said. We saw my parents unconscious on the seat in the front and we screamed, we're orphans. We're orphans. And the next thing we knew is we knew because we were in a car crash. Our car was going to blow up because that's what happens on TV when you're in a car crash. So we scrambled over the front seat and out the window were by my father's where my. The driver's side window. By that time we were on the street and the paramedics had arrived and we discovered that we were not orphans. We rode in the ambulance with my father and with the man who had hit us. And at that point, on some subconscious level, I knew that my mother was dead because my older brother had touched her on the way out of the car. And he was sitting on my father's bed facing the man who had hit us. And he was beating his fist and saying, revenge, Revenge. In the meantime, my mother was in another ambulance speeding away and we never saw her again. So that was Christmas and it was supposed to be a magical time. And it wasn't. Everything changed. My family was completely different. And I never saw my house in Fort Knox, Kentucky ever again. We never packed it up. We just moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in with my grandparents. And in all of this, no one ever said to six year old Kevin, your mother is not coming back. Your mother is dead. That's what that means. And so I needed to deal with it in my six year old way. So I entered the magical world that my mom always wanted me to be in. A few years later, I was convinced in my magical world that Diff'rent Strokes was going to have a nationwide talent search to replace Gary Coleman. Because he was no longer as cute as he once was and his replacement was going to be me. I was positive that was going to happen. I also wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world. I believed that I could. Every chance I got, I would pull a pen out of my pocket and hold it up to the sky and say, ultraman. Does anybody else remember Ultraman? Yeah. I would also say Shazam. Or if I had a necklace, I would pull it out of my shirt and I would do the ISIS chant. Mighty winds that blow on high Lift me now so I can fly. So I got a little older and I gave up my dream of saving the world, being a superhero to save the world. My father remarried, had two beautiful kids my baby sister and brother. But that wasn't enough for me. I didn't want to save the world. I now wanted to save all of my friends. It had been determined that the guy who hit us on Christmas 1975 was a drunk driver. So I decided I was not going to drink. I was that guy in college. While everybody was getting drunk, I carried the 2 liter bottle of Coke, silently judging all of them. And I finished my Coke at each party as well. And it was a dangerous road and I wanted to take care of everybody, save them all. And I ended up in a relationship with a man that I should never have been in a relationship with. But I wanted to save him. I put him through restaurant school so he could become a pastry chef. It didn't work out. And when I was crying my tears over that relationship and I couldn't get out of bed for three days and I couldn't stop crying, I realized that I wasn't going to save him. I wasn't going to be able to save anybody. I couldn't save my mother because my mother wasn't coming back dead meant she was gone. It's permanent. And then I had to stop living my life for other people and I had to live my life for myself. I created my own dances. Eventually. There was one called the Can Opener. It was kind of like that. I celebrate each one of my birthdays. My mother only had 31 birthdays, so when I turned 40, I had four parties. I I started drinking. Thank you. But this story normally ends with me asking my friends and family to toast to the memory of my mother. But tonight I would like to change that and toast myself to my family. To where we were, where we are, and where we're going. And hopefully we all get there at the same time. Thank you.