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Dan Kennedy (2:10)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I am Dan Kennedy. Hope your summer is going great. We have an excellent episode of the podcast for you today. Two stories about the secret world of our Parents. The first story is by Shalom Auslander and it was told live here in New York City in 2012. The theme of the night was Ho Ho Ho. Stories of the Naughty and Nice. Here's Shalom.

Shalom Auslander (2:40)

Awesome. I love raising it. I think the defining characteristic of my childhood was that I had two dads. Unfortunately, they were not of the loving, encouraging, homosexual kind. My first father was Father in Heaven. I was raised very strict Orthodox Jewish Black hats, black coats, no cheeseburgers. It was kind of like being Amish, but without the fun. And what my rabbis taught me was that essentially, God was a fucking asshole. Anytime you thought things were going to be good, he made it shitty. He thought something worked out well, he made it bad. That was kind of. He was a dick. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the essential message. My other father was the father in my house. My actual father, who in many ways was more frightening than God. He was a violent man. He drank, he smoked cigarettes, which was terrifying to me for some reason. He. I'd seen him hit my brother and give him a bloody nose. I'd seen him knock my mother out on the floor. I never. I never saw them kiss. I don't even think I ever saw my mother and father hug. So the only difference between the two fathers was that God, it seemed, was an asshole from day one. But even at the young age of eight or so, I remembered a better time with my father. I remembered playing in the snow with him. I remember tickle fights. And so I thought if I could just somehow reconnect with him, if I could do something to find some common ground with him, maybe I could help the family, because that's what children do. They. They think they can help the family because children are fucking idiots. And so I decided there's got to be some way for me to connect with him. But what could I do? I couldn't start drinking. I couldn't, you know, offer to pack his Camel cigarettes for him. I didn't think that was going to work. And then it occurred to me, then I remembered that in his youth, my father was an avid photographer. There was even a diploma on the wall from Tisch School of the Arts that he'd been to for film and photography. And my mother told us that when the kids came along, he had to put it all away and get a real job. And so he put all his camera equipment into boxes and stuck them under the closet underneath the stairs and never opened them again. And so one Shabbos night, Friday night, while everyone was upstairs getting ready for the holy day, I snuck into the closet downstairs. They would keep the light on so that it could light the stairway. And I snuck underneath and found the boxes. And I pulled out the first box, and it was filled with lenses, camera lenses. And I was looking at them and trying to play with them. And then I opened the second box, and it's filled with camera bodies and weird kind of meters and things. And I opened the Third box, and it's filled with my father's photographs, which I couldn't believe. I'd never even seen any of these. And. And they were landscapes or photos of the house that they lived in, very simple things. And I'm rummaging through it, and at the bottom of the box there's a white envelope sealed in sort of acid free paper. And it seemed like it must have been something good. And so even though it was Shabbos, I tear it open and I take out the picture. And it's a dirty picture, an incredibly dirty picture. There's. It's a photo of a man. He's standing facing the camera, and he's not wearing a shirt, but he's wearing pants. And in behind him there's a woman tied up, spread eagled on like a table platform. And she has her skirt on, but no top. And she's wearing a bra. And if I look really closely, which I did, I could see almost boobs. And then I hear a creak in the floor upstairs, and I freeze because I think it's my father and he'll kill me. And then I look back down at the picture and I look at the man and I recognize him. And I think, dad. And it's my father, much younger. And I'm thinking, what is my father doing in a dirty picture? And then I look a little more closely at the woman. Mom. And it was my mother. And I think the rabbis were right. This is exactly the kind of shit God pulls, right? You know, here's Garden of Eden. Fuck you. Get out. You're out of slavery. Fuck you. You're in the desert, you find a dirty picture. Fuck you, it's your. That's just the way he rolls. So I put the picture back in the envelope, put it at the back of the box, seal it in and run and swear I'm never going back in there again. The following Friday, I'm back under the stairs. Yeshiva ended early on Fridays so that we could go home and ostensibly prepare for Shabbos. But my parents both worked, so it gave me a couple hours free before they came home. So I thought I'd go looking for pictures of other naked, tied up women who preferably had not given birth to me. So I go under the stairs, I look through the box. There's nothing. But when I'd been looking at that picture before I knew it was Mommy, I had given me this tingle in my stomach and I wanted that tingle back. So I went upstairs to their bedroom, which was insane. My father was the kind of guy who would leave like a paperclip on the drawer side so that if it was moved, he would know. And I began looking for dirty pictures. And I found them, a lot of them. I found dirty magazines under my father's mattress and his nightstand. Men on top of women, women on top of men, women with women, no men with men. Which seemed like sort of an arbitrary omission at the time to me. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Then I went to my mother's side of the bedroom and I opened up her nightstand and there's this big jar of ointment and then this tube of cherry flavored lotion. And it's so bizarre to me because we have cherries in the fridge if you like cherries so much. And then there's this sort of wand that looks like a plane without wings. And when I turned the bottom, it started buzzing like crazy. And there's these two balls that are connected with a string. And when you shake them, you can hear these other balls inside those balls. And I was desperate to get at those balls because they must be very special balls if they're inside other balls. But no matter how much I. I could not open those balls, you know, like. And so I realized this is. I should probably quit while I'm ahead. I've got about an hour till my father comes home. But something told me, some sort of vision told me there was something better. There must be something even better if I found this much good stuff already. And then in my father's underwear drawer, underneath all his dirty underwear, sort of like in the movies where the fiercest dragon protects the greatest treasure. I found two metal tins, film tins, and I took them out and I opened the first one up. And it's got like a knife and scissors and this odd looking tape. And I open up the second one and it's a film. And I hold it up to the light and I'm going through it to see what it is. And all I can make out is this woman in the living room and she's vacuuming. And at that point I hear a noise. I hear a car door slam. And I freaked out because again, this is just like, God, I find a porno film and now I'm going to get busted. So I run to the window thinking it's my father. Fortunately, the driveway is empty, There's a neighbor coming home, and I've got like a half hour left. But I couldn't. The idea of that stomach tingle was too appealing. I couldn't give it up. So I went into his closet and I found the projector. And I take the projector out, and I've never worked a projector before, but I was some kind of pornography prodigy. And I plug it in, and I see how the bottom reel feeds, moves and feeds the top reel past the bulb. And I put the thing in, and I turn it on, and I'm shaking as I turn it on, and I switch it on, and I'm thinking, please, God, don't be Mom. And I turn. She did vacuum a lot, so it was a distinct possibility. And it isn't Mom. It's this beautiful woman with enormous boobs. And she's vacuuming her living room. And all of a sudden a man walks in and he kisses her and he starts unbuttoning her blouse. And that tingle returned. And the blouse drops to the floor. And then he removes one strap of her bra and then the other. And just as he's about to let the bra fall to the floor, her stomach begins to glow yellow and then orange, brighter and brighter. And I'm thinking, is this what happens when you take a girl's bra off? And then I think, it must be God sort of talking to me. If he spoke to Moses through a burning bush, why wouldn't he talk to me through a burning porno film? And I'm watching it, and she starts to get red, and then she starts to get black, and then her face begins to distort. And then I think I'm smelling smoke, and then I'm smelling smoke, and then smoke sort of wafts past me and I turn around and the film has snapped in half and the bottom is spinning and going flap, flap, flap, flap, flap. And it's throwing burning porno and smoke all over the bedroom. And I want to cry. This is a very dangerous human being. And I've now burnt his porno film. I'm in his room and he's going to be home any minute. So I panic and I pull the cord out of the projector, I open up all the windows. The fire alarm starts to go. I grab a broom from the closet and start knocking it to shut it off, spray air freshener all over the room, grab the burnt film and the two reels, close the door and run downstairs and jump into bed under the covers. What seems like seconds later, I hear his car drive into the driveway, the door slam, his heavy footsteps upstairs to the bedroom. And I'm counting the seconds. I think maybe I got away with it. And suddenly there's that heavy stomp coming back, back, back down the stairs. He throws the door open. I jump. And he says, what the hell are you doing in my room? And I could see his hand gripping the doorknob. I mean, this guy wants to kill me. And I said, I had a stomachache. I had to use the bathroom. And he says, what's wrong with your bathroom? And I said, well, it was too cold. I don't feel good. And he stares at me, waiting for me to crack. And then just grabs the doorknob with his hand again and says, stay the hell out of my goddamn room. And slams the door. And he leaves. Later that night, everyone's upstairs getting ready for Shabbos. And I take the films and I go into the bathroom and I lock the door. And I realize that the only way I can save this film is by cutting the piece out that I burnt and taping it together. And I do that, and it's kind of a weird jump cut, which is what I would learn later in life because. And so I have to cut on her blouse falling to the floor, which is called a match cut, or cutting on the action, which I would learn later in life. And it's kind of a good cut, except I look through the film, and now it's the only cut in the whole film. And I figure he's gonna notice that. So I went through the film and I put in, like, half a dozen other cuts. And when they were at dinner, I went and put it back in his room and closed the door. The following Friday, I'm home alone again. And I decide to screen the film for myself. And I watch it, and it's actually much better. You know, it kind of moves along a bit better. There's a lot of unnecessary narrative. And at first I'm very proud. And then I feel quite sad, actually. Because I realize that this is something that he would be proud of me for. And it's something I could never admit to because he was dirty and I was dirty, and I could never have that in common with him. And so I never told him. To this day, about 15 years ago, I'm on my way toward total estrangement with my family. And one of my last visits to their house, I decide it might be nice to find that picture of my mother tied up. Because I just started psychiatry. And, you know, it'd be a nice Exhibit A for my doctor. Because it's not too late to raise the rates if that's what he wants to do. So again, Friday night, except now I'm in my mid-20s. I sneak under the stairs, I open the box up, I take it out and there's more dust on the box than there was before. I take out the envelope and I open it up and there's that picture. And I'm expecting quite a dirty picture. Except that's not what I found. What I found was something that made me quite sad because I realized it was the only time I ever saw them showing any affection for each other. It was the only time they seemed interested or were having any fun. And so in the time that passed, what went from being a very dirty picture went to being one of the most beautiful pictures of them, if the only one I ever saw. And so I took the photo and I put it back in its acid free envelope and I sealed it as best I could and I put it back in the bottom of the box, put it back under the stairs, left, closed the door and never saw it again. Happy Chanukah.