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- [00:01]
Apple Representative
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- [00:30]
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- [01:33]
Dan Kennedy
I'm Dan Kennedy. Hey, before we get started, the Moth main stage is coming to St. Paul on Saturday, November 10, and that's presented by Minnesota Public Radio. For ticketing information and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, Visit our site themoth.org Also, here's some news.
- [01:53]
Paul Ruest
Hey everybody, it's Paul Ruest, the podcast audio producer. I'm jumping in here to let our Chicago listeners know that the Chicago Grand Slam is coming up on September 17th at the Park West. Brian Babylon will be hosting what's going to be a great show. So jump on the moth website@themoth.org for show and ticket information. Okay, let's go back to Dan with this week's done.
- [02:16]
Dan Kennedy
The story you're about to hear by Mishka Shabali was told live at our members show last year. The theme of the night was Walk the line stories of balancing acts.
- [02:33]
Mishka Shabali
I was fast asleep when the disaster struck. We hit with a deep, tearing crash of such sustained violence I felt the entire boat shudder under me like a wounded animal. I tried to jump out of my bunk, but the boat flopped over on its side, threw me against the wall and then back into my bunk and the cabin filled with noise. I could Hear boards twisting and squealing against each other. I could hear the boat grinding against the rocks. I could hear the crew yelling and shouting questions. I knew I had to find John, Captain Peter's 89 year old father. And he wasn't in the bunk across from me and he wasn't on the floor, so he had to be in the front bunk. I called his name twice and he didn't respond. So I carefully climbed out of my bunk and moved forward into the darkness, deeper into the ruined boat. Spring of 2001. I just graduated college. My friend Jacob had just shot his final speedball and died on his kitchen floor. And my drinking was spiraling out of control. I've been working with Jacob to try and keep him clean even as I was drinking in class or drinking before class in the mornings. You know, just a medicinal amount to get rid of the shakes and the chills and the sweats. And then after we graduated, we played phone tag and lost touch. You know, he was trying to keep normal hours and I was staying up till 8am drinking and doing coke with trannies. I didn't have a cell phone at the time, just a crappy pager. And the day after he died, my pager delivered a voicemail from the other side. Hey, what's up, man? It's Jake. Just calling, just trying to catch up with you. All right, I'll talk to you soon. I remember sitting at my kitchen table drinking straight from the bottle, playing that message over and over again, searching for a clue, an explanation, a reason I wanted to die. But my mother had explicitly forbidden suicide. So I jumped at the chance to crew on a dangerous sailing trip from the Dominican Republic up to Florida. I thought it was a good compromise. When I got to John's bunk, a shaft of light came through one of the scupper holes and I saw a tangle of limbs like a pile of firewood. And my heart dropped. I reached out and I grabbed something. John, I said yes. Peter's father had slept through the entire thing. Several equipment failures and navigational error and a storm have put us on the uninhabited point of an island in the Bahamas. In the middle of the night. We got everybody safely on shore, but it was a bleak scene. Captain Peter's boat, his life's work and his home of the last 20 years ruined on the rocks. And the five of us stranded there with limited, limited amount of water and nobody knew we were in trouble. We shot off flares and radioed for help and then when nobody came, we just got wasted on some shitty Red wine and passed out on the beach. Peter woke me in the morning when the sun rose. He had been there several years earlier, and he knew Matthewtown, the island's lone settlement, was a short 25 miles away. So he was going to hike that 25 miles to go and get help. I think I surprised both of us by saying that I would go. Mishka, I'm the captain. The captain always stays with the ship. It's my responsibility. Your responsibility is here with the ship. I can't let you go, dude. Whenever I say something serious, I have to preface it with dude. Dude, no offense, but you're old and you have Parkinson's and you have a family. I'm younger, I'm faster, I'm stronger, and I'm expendable. I'm going. I took my share of the water. One gallon, some peanuts and a couple of multivitamins my mother had forced on me before I left. I said, if I'm not back by this time tomorrow, send someone else. The beach was littered with trash, and right away I found a hard hat. So I ripped up the rotting webbing out of it and put it on my head backwards to protect my head and my neck from the sun. I'd been wearing a T shirt, shorts, and running shoes when the boat wrecked, but they'd all gotten soaked, so I was wearing a long sleeve, white button down, my boxer shorts. And the final humiliation, socks and sandals.
- [07:27]
Paul Ruest
Ladies.
- [07:33]
Mishka Shabali
The shoreline unfolded in a series of deep coves. So I found myself covering twice the ground I wanted to. And after crawling through several mangrove swamps, I decided it would just be easier to, you know, to walk point to point through the shallow water. I mean, you know, I knew I had to be careful because if I twisted an ankle or something, they'd just be finding my bones. Years later, I mean, I knew there were sharks. We'd been fishing off the back of the boat. It seemed like every other fish that we caught, we lost to sharks. You'd have something on the line and then all of a sudden it would go slack and you'd pull up a huge fish head, just gushing blood. And you could tell from the bite radius that it wasn't a little shark, but that was out at sea. And, you know, so. So I took off my sandals and I took off my socks. And then in less than 2ft of water, I want to say it was a 12 foot, like maybe 12ft. It was probably closer to 7ft, but that's still a pretty fucking big shark to come upon when you're walking into the water. Thank God it was dead, just rocking with the motion of the waves. But if it was dead, then why couldn't I smell it? So I took a rock and sort of chucked at the shark. It thumped the shark on the back. It thrashed wildly and then headed out for deeper water. So I decided to stick to the shore after that. I took a couple multivitamins and a handful of peanuts to get over the hangover, you know, and. But it just made me thirstier, so I didn't eat anything else after that. And, you know, I mean, I was already starting incredibly dehydrated and even holding off drinking until like, my throat was parched and my lips were dry. I was already like down to half of my water before I knew it. And there was no place to stop and rest. There was no shade, you know, I would just. I would be cooked. So I, you know, I kept going. As my. As my water diminished and my condition degraded, I obsessed over these murky calculations. I knew that each step I took brought me closer to Matthewtown. And each step also used up some of my dwindling energy and brought me closer to zero. Now I knew I'd made significant progress because I'd been walking for. Well, I didn't have a watch, so I didn't know how long I'd been walking. But either way, my water was getting incredibly low. And I knew that regardless of what my destination was, salvation or the other thing, that I was getting closer as the. As my sun stroke kicked in. I laughed, I sang, I talked to myself. I started to confuse shadows with water. So I would walk wide around a puddle, only to walk through a shadow that somehow got my feet wet. And the noise I heard, it was my breath or it was the wind or the waves. It was a woman's voice cooing in my ear. It was several women laughing at me. It was a crowd cheering for me or booing me. It was a boat. It was an entire fleet of boats coming to my rescue. I had wanted to be test on this trip to see what I could do, if I could do anything. But I was ready for it to be over. I approached the point of one of those endless coves and I willed Matthewtown to appear on the other side. Crappy little gas station, hostile locals, understocked, overpriced grocery store, melting popsicles. But when I came around the corner, there was just sand and sea and mangroves. And I fell on my face in the sand and I cried. I was 24 years old and what had I done with my life? I calculatedly drank as much as I could get away with at my job without getting fired. I had sponged unconscionable amounts of coke off of friends and strangers. I had repeatedly cheated on my girlfriend. And I'd abandoned my friend Jacob in his time of need. It seemed like I had spent all my time either jerking off or hungover, or jerking off while hungover. And now I was going to die here, alone on this sun bleached rock, my life almost completely unlived. I cried for the songs that I'd written but not recorded and now people wouldn't remember me for. And I cried for all the fucked up shit that I had done that now would be the only thing that people would remember me for. I cried because I was never going to see my mother's hands again. I love you, Mom. You're number one. So sitting in the sand, staring up the sky, I made one last desperate calculation. The sun was directly overhead. So worst case scenario, I maybe covered only 15 or 16 miles, which meant I had 10 miles to go. I had about a cup of water left and my body was shutting down. Now. I read all those corny macho survival books. They say you can survive by drinking your own pee. So I'd held it all day long, but I knew I couldn't hold it for much longer. So the moment of truth. Preserve my dignity and pee in the sand and lose all that moisture when I maybe had 10 miles to go. Or recycle it and maybe live to tell the fucked up story. It's funny, you know, it's only when you're facing death that your filthy truck stop bathroom of a life becomes so precious to you. I. I thought about my friend Jacob and I thought about that last fix that he took. And you know, I wondered if, like, did he know that something was going wrong? Did he see his death naked laid out in front of him like I saw mine? And was he scared? Because I was scared shitless. But I knew that people were counting on me. I knew that Peter and John and the rest of the crew, they were depending on me. And I thought of the looks on their faces when they saw me on the decks of a Coast Guard cutter going in to rescue them. So I took off my construction helmet and I unleashed a hot bladder full of brown multivitamin enriched urine. I mean, it fucking glowed like it was radioactive. With shaking hands, I lifted the helmet to my lips and I choked down as much of my own hot, salty pee as I could stomach. Without puking, and then took a couple of tiny, desperate sips of the water that I had left just to wash the taste out of my mouth. Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to drink out of a punch bowl, but it's not an entirely efficient process. So it was, like, dribbling out of the corners of my mouth and, like, off. It was a horror show. But, you know, after the wave of nausea passed, I felt great. 10 miles, 20 miles, 50 miles, I didn't care. I drank my pee. I had what it took to survive, and I was going to make it home. Less than five minutes later, I was rescued. A group of biologists were out banding turtles, and this is the last day of their study. And because it was the 4th of July, they almost didn't come out. Peter's estimate had been wrong. And I had walked 30 miles, and I was still 25 miles away from civilization. So when they brought me to the coast guard station, I told the coast guard right away, I said, listen, we got four American sailors shipwrecked on the northernmost point of the island. There's one of them is 89, and two of them require medication. Almost instantly, I could hear a helicopter starting up, and it sounded awesome. Just then, a call came in from the Bahamian defense patrol. They had just picked up four shipwrecked sailors on the northernmost point of the island, and they had sent one of their group off to go and get help, and he'd never been picked up. And they wanted the coast guard to get a helicopter. The dispatcher looked at, gave me a funny look, and spoke into his radio. I think we got him. They got me a shower. They gave me this T shirt. One guy made me a sandwich. Two slices of white wonder bread, one piece of bologna, one piece of American cheese, yellow mustard, and lots of mayonnaise. It was the best sandwich I've ever tasted. So it turned out that about an hour after. After Peter had sent me off, he realized that the force of the impact had disconnected the antenna from the radio. So he fixed the radio, radioed for help, got the Bahamian defense patrol right away. They'd been safe for hours. So I got shipwrecked. I walked 30 miles in the blazing hot sun. I drank my own pee, and all I got was this lousy T shirt. In no way am I a hero. I couldn't save Jacob, and I didn't save Peter or John or the rest of the crew. But I saved myself, and I guess that's got to be enough.
- [18:09]
Dan Kennedy
Miska Shibali is the author of the best selling Kindle singles Shipwrecked the Long Run, Are youe Lonesome Tonight and Bachelor Number One. He's currently at work on a full length memoir and another album of his original songs. Find him online@mishkashibali.com or Amazon.com Author Mishka.
- [18:32]
Jay Allison
I'm Jay Allison and we're back with a new season of the Moth Radio Hour with stories from a boxing champion, a flight attendant, a preacher, an atheist, and lots of others telling stories about narrow escapes, profound love, harrowing journeys, dreams come true, and much more. As if that weren't enough, that's the Moth Radio Hour. Check with your local station to find out when they're airing it. Thanks.
- [18:57]
Dan Kennedy
The Moth is a non profit 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 is the author of the book Rock An Office Power Ballad. Learn more@rockontheboook.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.
- [19:26]
Jay Allison
The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.