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Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This Moth podcast is supported by New Belgium Brewing. Join their pedal powered fundraiser Tour de Fat, full of sustainable folly in 15 different cities South Someone will trade their car for a bike inspiration@facebook.com tourdefat and also join us in Durham, North Carolina on Thursday, June 21st for the moth main stage at Carolina Theater. For taking in information and for a list of all our tour stops this spring, visit themoth.org this podcast is brought to you by audible.com the Internet's a leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. Audible has just introduced its A List collection which has some of Hollywood's brightest stars bringing their favorite reads to life. It really is an A List group of narrators. And for the Moth listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. One A List book you may like to consider Consider is a Rage in Harlem read by Samuel L. Jackson. Choose an A List selection or any of the 100,000 titles available free when you visit audiblepodcast.com a list that's audiblepodcast.comalist check out the A list today to get your free audiobook download. Okay, so this week's story by Lee Stringer was told live at the Moth way back in in 2001, the theme of the night was Savage Mood, an evening of stories on Melancholy.
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Lee Stringer
Thank you, Nell. I'll have to ask you to bear with me because I am a writer and I'm used to poring over sentences for hours, sometimes even words if necessary. As I look around, this looks a lot like an AA meeting, so I feel perfectly at home. I knew a woman named Barbara Dunn. She was what we call a senior. She was in her 80s. She was living out what would be the end of her life in a high rise on the Upper west side. She was on her second hip replacement. She was flirting with emphysema and wrestling with loneliness. And the way she chose to wrestle with it was to make sure she always had a gallon jug of stolen on her sideboard. I met her while working at Street News. I was at the time, the editor of Street News, New York's homeless newspaper. Now, the way I became editor was quite simple. Street News had a very healthy rate of attrition. They were also running out of money. If you hung around long enough in the Street News office, you were going to be editor. So that's how I became editor. How I came to work for Street News at all, I started as a salesman was because I was on the street. I was numbered among New York's homeless people. And the reason I was on the street is because at the time, I was a crack addict. Now, my problem was I could not live life without a sense of despair hanging over my head all the time. And the reason I had this sense of despair was that I felt from a very young age I had gotten convinced of the notion that God was going to get me. You all know who God is. I was introduced to him at a very young age. God is the cosmic cop. He's the umpire of life. And what he has done is. This is his ballpark, it's his game. He made all the rules. He made us just for fun. He made us flawed. And he put us here. And. And what he does all day is sits up there just waiting for us to screw up so he can burn us in hell forever. That's what I heard about God. So I knew right from the start that I didn't want to fuck around with this God guy. I also knew right from the start that I had no natural knack, according to the Protestants, for walking with God. And this was oppressive to me because I knew that sooner or later God was going to get me. And the thing. I spent my whole life like this under that dark cloud of God's vengeance hanging over me. And the best thing to do was not to think about It. But as I got older, this got harder and harder to do until flash forward. I'm 35 years old and I've now resorted to the ultimate distraction, crack cocaine. And it worked for a while. I've worked for a while. But I'll tell you, my job at Street News was only my part time job. My full time job was being a crack addict. Because at first crack looked like it solved my problem. I could forget about God, I can forget about my eventual death and what that might evolve involved and I could be for a while in the moment. But you know what? It turned out that being a crackhead is just another job. Street News supported that job. It gave me the income. I was a crackhead with a title. I had worked my way up crackhead dumb to having a title. I had income and if that was enough money, on Sundays I worked at the flea market. Now at the flea market I was only a bathroom attendant, but it gave me 200 bucks. So forget the title. I met Barbara Dunn one day when I became editor and I was looking at some of her copying and I thought she had buried her lead. And I called her up, you know, familiar, a lot of people from publishing here tonight. I called her up, she said, well, come on up and we'll talk about it. So I went up to her high rise apartment on the Upper west side. And I noticed one thing when I walked in the door. Here was a woman who was living alone. She had buried her husband. She and him once owned a paper, by the way, a Long island paper. Alcohol had killed him off and she was living out her loneliness with Stolich and I as a friend. I walked in, she said, glad to meet you. She came up on her bad hip. I shook her hand, she said, would you like something? A bar? And I looked over, I saw the Stolichnaya and several other brands. And I said, I'm going to like this editing thing. Well, eventually Street News fortunes declined and they lost their office space, which was bad for me because Street News office was also my house. At the time I was living at Street News. I would, at first I would disappear. I would stay until everybody had left and then in the morning I'd get up and be there before everybody arrived. It really impressed everybody. I said, boy, these homeless people are so ambitious. He's the first to get here, he's the last. He's going to go far. But they eventually lost the lease. The matriarch died. The sons decided to put the property to more productive use. And Street News was Asked to leave. And at that point, Barbara said to me, well, come stay with me. I thought, what a great idea. I can live in a high rise. I was entering the top echelons of crackhead dom. I would be on the Upper west side. I had a title. I had the whole nine yards. So I went and stayed with Barbara. I ran errands for her. She didn't charge me any rent. All I had to really do is be her drinking buddy. And as a crackhead, I was a perfect drinking buddy. Because drinking buddies are best if they disappear when the ugly stuff comes. You stay for the first three or four drinks and disappear through the vomiting and the shakes and the ravages. And I was a perfect drinking buddy. And one of the things I used to do all the time with Barbara is she would give me her bank card, and I would go get her money. And she would sometimes say, well, here's a couple of bucks walking around money. Now, if I have money and a few drinks, the only place I'm going to walk around to is to go see Flaco and say, give me two. So this went on for quite some time, and then one day she sent me to the bank, and she. People would say to me, well, why would she give her card to a crackhead? Well, the thing is, I was basically an honest person because I knew God was going to get me, but why make him get ugly about it? You know what I mean? So she sent me to the. She sent me to the bank. I go get her money. I come back, she gives me a few dollars. I have a few drinks with her. It's time to go see Flaco. I go to the projects behind Lincoln Center. The regular guy isn't there, but there's another guy all too happy to serve me. I say, give me two. Give him the 20, go around the corner and discover that I have just paid $20 for two pieces of soap. Now, if I don't. Oh, you've been there, huh? That's exactly it. That's exactly it. For the next five minutes. Nothing in this world. Talk about depression, Nothing in this world would ever be right again unless I could have that hit that I went. Because crack is something that wants what it wants, when it wants it, and nothing in the world could be right again until I had that hit. And I'm storming down near Lincoln center, and I put my hand in my pocket, and there's her card. So I say to myself, I have to do a little arithmetic here, because God is watching, and he's Already pissed off at me. So I say to myself, well, I'll just take out $40, and when I get money, I'll pay her back. Simple, right? Go to the machine, take out $40. Long story short, at the end of six days, I have taken $6,000 out of her account. Well, that was it. That was it. After six days, in the dawning hours of one morning, after one night of total madness, of total crack paranoia, I crawl out into the daylight and I realized that God is going to really get me now. Grand larceny. So what I did was I decided that this was it. No more cracks for me. I went and got help. I went to Project Renewal. I went to a treatment center, and they sat on me long enough to steady my nerves. I went to an outreach program. I mean, an outpatient thing, every day for a year. And as soon as I learned a few things there that were very interesting, they told me. One of the things they told me was this. They talked about the God thing. They said, what you need to do is become friends with a higher power. So. Oh, no, no. I know all about higher powers. I knew that every higher power, every master that I had served, crack being one of them, had betrayed me. Uh, oh, betrayed me. And the biggest master I served myself had betrayed me most of all. So I wasn't ready to serve a new master. But they said that I could choose. I can make the higher power be anybody I wanted, I thought I wanted, just as long as I believed in the idea that there was something greater than myself. So I liked that idea. And I arrived at this conclusion that there must be order to the universe, that it must know what it's doing when we don't. Otherwise we wouldn't be here anymore. So I come out of the rehab. And another thing they told me is one of the ways to conjoin with this higher power is to make amends for all of those you have wronged. Which is another idea I understood. It wasn't a matter of balancing the books. It was just a matter that you cannot easily recover with those stones still in your heart. So I was anxious and eager to get out there and make my amends and run to this new higher power. My higher power, by the way, was benevolent. It would not betray me. That's the higher power I chose. Forget the guy, the cop upstairs. My higher power had nothing but my own interest at heart, even when I couldn't see it. So I run. I call up Barbara. I want to make amends. I took your money. I'm in treatment. As soon as I start making money from my book deal, you'll get. You'll get. I'll start paying you back. I said, until then, I'll come visit you. I'll do favors, anything you need. So this is what I'm doing. I'm visiting her once a week. I'm running errands, I'm being social, I'm being comfortable. I'm being company to her. I sit as she drinks, but all the while I am still in the pits of despair because I am a drug addict after all. I want what I want and I want it now. And I want to make amends now. But I have no money, so we're shortening this story. Only half of this story you'll hear the other half will be in my new book. So another thing they told me was there are no coincidences. And one night I come while the book hasn't been published yet. I go to a book launch party and I have no money except for a train ticket. And I missed the last train to Mamaroneck, which is the town I live in. It's an Indian word. I think it means, when's the next train to the city? And I'm standing on the platform of the Fordham Road platform of the Metro north railroad trying to do this, saying, there are no coincidences. Everything's for a reason. There are no coincidences. My higher power has a reason. And next thing I'm screaming at my higher what the fuck reason can you have for stranding me at 2 o'clock in the morning on the steps of these? And I'm screaming and yelling at my. I'm demanding an explanation from my higher power. I get over it. I call Barbara up. I think, oh, Barbara. I call her up. I say to her, well, can I come over? I'm stuck. She says, sure, come on over. I hop over the turnstile, get to Upper west side, go up to her apartment. She says, hi. She's in the bathrobe. It's three in the morning, but she has time for a couple of drinks. I sit there, watch her have a few drinks. She goes to bed. I get crash on the couch. The next morning I wake up, I'm making coffee and I hear her. She says to me, I hear her from the other room. She says, lee, can you come in here for a minute, please? And I get up and I go into her bedroom. She's sitting on the edge of the bed, skin hanging from her arms, circles under her eyes. And she says to me, she says to Me, Lee, can you help me get into a detox? I got goosebumps. And the first thought was, do not let me fuck this up. Because there it was, all on a platter. Everything that I needed, everything that she needed. In a cosmic act of giving, there must be some sort of higher power after all, because there it was. And somehow, though, I don't know, I didn't know what to do, I managed to do everything right. You're supposed to give a person who wants to go in if they need a drink, you give it to them because they could die without it. I didn't know this, but somehow I did everything right. And she went in and she stayed. When she came back out, I started taking her to meetings. And within a year or two later, I was able to give her a check for $6,000. Well, about three months after that, I got the news. Barbara Dunn had died. She had died in an AA meeting. Now, I could have been depressed about that, but you know what? I wasn't. Because I knew something I didn't know before. And that is what it seemed to me, that the last thing that needed to be done in Barbara's journey, which is life, was to get clean and sober. And I had been a part of that. So now I can feel a sense of apprehension about the future. But nowadays, what I know is even death does not lead me any more to despair. Thank you for listening.
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Dan Kennedy
Lee Stringer lived on the streets from the early 80s until the mid-90s. He is a former editor and columnist of Street News. His essays and articles have appeared in a variety of other publications, including the Nation, the New York Times, and Newsday. Now he lives in Mamaroneck, New York. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. Check out the A list today to get your free audiobook download. For a free audiobook of your choice, go to audiblepodcast.com Alist this is Jay.
- [20:21]
Lee Stringer
Allison, producer of the Moth Radio Hour from prx. We've just finished five more shows with lots of great new stories and some wonderful old ones from the archive, and they'll all be airing on local public radio stations right about now, so contact your station to find out more. Thanks.
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Dan Kennedy
The Moth is a nonprofit organization, so consider supporting our free podcast by going to our podcast contribution page or by becoming a Moth member, and you can do that@themost.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy.
- [20:54]
Lee Stringer
Is the author of the book Rock.
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Dan Kennedy
An Office power ballad. Learn more@rockonthebook.com 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 Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.