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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Deer Meat, Dance Moves, and Motherhood
00:57:14
A young mother is obsessed with creating an absolutely perfect life for her children, Moth founder George Dawes Green details a bizarre interruption during a beloved poker game in Georgia, and a little boy’s dreamy childhood comes to a screeching halt on a North Carolina highway.
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- [00:00]
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- [02:21]
Kathryn Burns
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kathryn Burns from the Moth and I'll be your host this time. The Moth is about true personal stories. We encourage people to talk about the biggest moments of their lives, the moments that really made them them. We record the stories and play the best of them for you here every week. We have three stories this hour. A young woman is determined to create a perfect, perfect life for her children, no matter what the cost. A little boy's dreamy childhood comes to a screeching halt on the North Carolina highway and a gift gone wrong interrupts a madcap poker game in Georgia. Our first story is from Joyce Maynard. She told the story in a show we called Can't Help Stories about Compulsions. Here's Joyce Maynard live at the mall.
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Joyce Maynard
In the family where I grew up, no blood was ever shed. At least not the kind that was visible. In all the years of living under my parents roof, I never broke a bone. My mother and father never one time had to take me to the emergency room. And I strongly suspect that we never had to buy a second box of band aids. And the reason for that was pretty simple. My parents were spectacularly protective and hovered over me to make sure that no pain or physical injury should occur. I lived in the state of New Hampshire, but never set my feet into ski boots. I don't think a piece of athletic equipment ever crossed our threshold. My mother made sure that I didn't enter the water for swimming until a full hour after eating. And my father stood over me and brushed away the mosquitoes before they landed. But every night at 6 o'clock he climbed the stairs to our attic and took out the vodka. And through the night he drank and painted. And sometimes late in the night, he summoned me to his attic studio where he painted beautiful lyric landscapes of the British Columbia of his youth as a painter and expounded to me with poetic eloquence on the sacrifice that he had made of giving up the life of an artist to be a parent. And in the morning we never talked about it. Holidays were a particularly stressful time in our family with a particular amount of alcohol. More than one Christmas my father threw the tree across the floor. My mother was gone surprisingly often, and when she was, it was left to me to hide the car keys. And maybe because of that, although I grew up to have the life of a certain level of artistic expression that had eluded my two enormously artistically gifted parents, the goal that I found most elusive and wonderful was to be part of a happy family. And I believe that my best shot of having happy relatives was to give birth to them. So I married quite young, at 23, an artist. And though I would come to realize over the years that we had surprisingly little in common, we did both share a passion, a creative passion. Although he was a painter and I was a writer, I think we both felt that there was no creative undertaking more thrilling and potentially fulfilling than to make and raise children. And we got right to it. I think one of the things that I loved about having babies was the sense that here was a person who was still perfect. A person with a clean slate and I so wanted to keep her that way. I actually had none of my parents tendencies towards protection for physical injury. I could even have been called a somewhat negligent mother. I was happy to see toddlers breathe over my babies and didn't feel a particular need to wash my hand or worry about germs because I knew that there were greater dangers in the world. And the greatest dangers to me were the dangers of emotional pain and the disappointment of failed dreams. I think my daughter was 18 months old when she got chickenpox. And I stood over her to make sure that she was so beautiful. And she had such beautiful black hair. And I knew that if you scratched the scabs there would be no hair that would grow. And I couldn't yet explain to an 18 month old not to scratch her skin. So I just guarded her so carefully. But I missed on one. And I saw suddenly this tiny little microscopic dot on the top of her head where I realized that she had scratched a scab. And just the thought that there was going to be this one hair that would not grow brought me to tears. I wanted so many things for her. And one that I had not had myself as a child was a sibling who really adored her. And it was the first of the increasing number of great battles with my husband to provide her with one. And for four years we fought about it because he wanted to live the life of an artist and I wanted to live the life of a member of a happy family if it killed us. And so it took four years, but my son Charlie was born and two years later my son Willie. I was always a fanatically compulsive protector of my children's magical childhood. But never more so than when holidays and birthdays came around. I never would have bought a store bought cake. And I created extraordinary three day festivals for their birthdays. Scavenger hunts with poems, clues in iambic pentameter and puppet shows with music composed for the events. And Christmas, elaborate Christmas, Valentine's Day, the entire month of February. We cleared our dining room table and set out all the art supplies filled with glitter and every conceivable kind of paint to make amazing valentines. And the entire month of December, as I say to Christmas. And I never went to Toys R Us. I wasn't really interested in just a lot of stuff I wanted to provide for my children. The kinds of objects, the kinds of gifts that might really have been made in Santa's workshop. And to do this I once I searched the entire east coast for a ventriloquist puppet for my son Willie, and ended up driving 200 miles to find it. My father had recently died and left me a sum total of $500 in his will, and my husband had it all earmarked to buy snow tires. But I went out one day and bought a $500 dollhouse. That was another of our grand battles. Of course, when there are. And I should say that he was increasingly appalled and disgusted by the display of these Christmases, which he really stepped aside from. So that one morning he came in Christmas morning and saw the array of items which I think that year included a department store mannequin that I'd found in a going out of business department store in northern New Hampshire. And he insisted that half of the items be removed from the room. And our children, I suppose, did not have an entirely magical December 25th that year. Well, of course, one of the problems of providing magical objects in your child's life is that you then must protect that they not get lost. And I had recognized by this time that although blood could be dripping from my veins and I wouldn't notice their pain, I sensed on my nerve endings. And of course, when that's the case, you do everything you can to protect against their pain. So every time a Barbie came into the room, into our lives, the first thing I thought was, guard those shoes. My sons, one year for Christmas, they got the Playmobil pirate ship. And of all the elaborate rigging and pirates and little items on the treasure chest and little coins in the pirate ship, the one particular thing that my son Charlie loved best was this little gold sword. And I knew so well the heartbreak that could come that I said to him very specifically when we went out to the. The station wagon one day, please don't take the sword with you. But he evidently took the sword, because about 20 minutes later, I heard this gasp in the back of the. From the back of the station wagon. And I knew that the sword had fallen out the window. For the next hour and a half, I circled a stretch of highway with my high beams on. I did find the sword, although I was almost struck by an 18 wheeler retrieving it. Halloween. My husband, perhaps understandably, had absented himself more and more. And of the many things that I could provide with my prodigious energies, parenting energies, I could not provide a father who would always be around when I wanted him to. And he was more and more chillingly, familiarly off in his studio painting. But more and more, we did things alone. I wanted their life to be big, bigger than Mine had been. We didn't have a lot of money. We had very little money. And I would never have supposed that I could take my children to Europe, much as I would have loved it. And then one day I saw an ad for a weekend in London for $100. And so I thought that I can afford. And I bought three tickets for them and one for me, and we headed out to London. And I told them that they could each have one object in London. And my son Charlie chose these wonderful, brightly colored leather juggling balls. And we went down into the London tube. And Charlie began. He couldn't wait. And he began to juggle with the juggling balls. And I, knowing so well all the dangers that could happen, said, no, Charlie, don't juggle in the tube. But it was too late. One of the juggling balls fell into the pit, and I jumped in after it. And that was the moment, as my daughter stood on the edge of the subway platform, screaming for me to climb out, that I realized that I was becoming an insane mother. That Mother's day, I was 35 years old. I got a call that my mother had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. And I was going, of course, to be with her for what proved to be the last weeks of her life. And before I left home, I sat the children down and I explained to them what had happened. And my youngest son said, is Grandma going to die? And I said, yes. And then he asked the next question, which was an even harder one, one whose answer was more painful to deliver, and will you ever die? And once again, I had to say yes. And then came the third question, and will I ever die? And I had to say, well, not for a very long time. In fact, my mother's was not the only death. That summer, my marriage also ended. And it was probably time for that to happen. And I found that although my grief was extreme, it paled besides the extraordinary sorrow over having to inflict this pain of the news to my children. And in fact, it was the last experience, I think, that my husband and I could truly share together our shared sorrow over telling them that news. And we brought them into the living room, and I can still see them very clearly. 5, 7 and 11. Willie, Charlie and Audrey sitting on the couch, looking as if they expected news of another great adventure coming up. And we told them instead that we were not going to live together as a family anymore. And each of them responded in their very different ways, so like themselves. Audrey, the oldest, who had learned by now that I felt her pain and wanted to spare me that. So she didn't show it, made a stiff little smile and said, I think I'll go watch Cosby now. Willie, the youngest, who never spared anybody anything, he was five, stood up and let out an animal moan, a wail, a sound I had never heard come out of him before or since, since, thank God, and flung himself against the wall with the force of a grown man and said, you mean you'll be divorced for all my life? And Charlie, who was 7, got up silently and went into the kitchen. The table was, as always, covered with art supplies. And he took out the colored pencil and he began to draw. And I later saw he had drawn almost as if he was drawing it in blood, a heart. Not like the valentines of our February festivals, but inch by inch, so centimeter by centimeter, so painstakingly. And then after he drew the heart and shaded it with little sort of shadow marks behind it, he made a line like a piece of picture wire, like the heart was a picture. And then he made a little dot in the center, like the picture was hanging on the wall. And then my second grader wrote for his writer mother and his artist father the words love is the best art of all. And I think that was the moment that I knew the foolishness of ever supposing that I could protect my children from pain and the folly of the ways that I had attempted to do so. That was 16 years ago. Since then, many injuries have been incurred. My children for many years traveled back and forth between our two houses with their belongings always in brown paper bags. They lived through car accidents and girlfriends breaking up with them and boyfriends breaking up with them and a case of malaria on a trip to Africa. Because they continued to be adventurers, they just went farther and farther away. The thing is that I have discovered that although I failed abysmally at protecting my children from pain, I am in fact related by blood to three amazingly happy and well adjusted human beings. And what I believe now is that as impossible as it is to spare our children pain, the real task before a parent is to raise them so that they will be strong enough to survive it. Thanks.
- [18:30]
Kathryn Burns
That was Joyce Maylord. Her latest novel is called after her, and the film Labor Day is based on her novel of the same name. I recently spoke with Joyce over the phone at her home in Costa Rica to talk about how telling stories affects her writing.
- [18:46]
Joyce Maynard
I used to think of my writing as just kind of my, you know, my way of getting in the back door of what I really Wanted to be, which was up on a stage, connecting with an audience. And actually, although I love what I do, and I feel really extraordinarily lucky to have gotten to do this all the years that I have, my one complaint about being a writer for the page is that I don't get to see and hear the response of a reader to my work. So at the Moth, I did, and I could hear people laugh and I could hear people gasp sometimes. I also learned a lot. I could feel when I. You can feel when you're losing somebody. You can feel when you need to pull them back. It's a very immediate form of storytelling that actually has informed my writing for the page as well. And not just my memoir writing, but absolutely my fiction.
- [19:46]
Kathryn Burns
We talked about how rarely writers get to experience firsthand the reactions of their audience.
- [19:51]
Joyce Maynard
Back a million years ago, when I was a reporter in New York City, I remember one time riding the subway to Times Square and seeing somebody open up the New York Times with a story that I had written. And I was looking over her shoulder, and I was so excited to watch her reading.
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Kathryn Burns
That's so cool. And I'm sure the person reading it would have died if she knew she was sitting next to the author.
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Joyce Maynard
I don't know. I think there are probably greater thrills in her life, but for me to be able to hear laughter, that. Most of all, to hear laughter.
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Kathryn Burns
Part of what makes your writing so brilliant is your willingness to be vulnerable and, like, very open on the page. Did you feel even more vulnerable being on stage? With that direct experience with the audience.
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Joyce Maynard
The more willing you are to expose your flaws and failings. I would just say your humanness. The more you will. The more I will relate to an audience, the more an audience will relate to me.
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Kathryn Burns
So I wanted to ask for listeners who I know will want to know, which is, how are your children doing? Give us an update.
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Joyce Maynard
Well, it's pretty easy to locate them. One of them appears on television every Tuesday night as a heartthrob bad boy with a heart of gold. My son is now in his late 20s, and he's on a show called Heart of Dixie. And my other son is a. Is a DJ known as Captain Planet. You can find him on YouTube spinning really great beats. So, yes, they're all grown up. My daughter still lives on our old farm in New Hampshire and works as a. As a counselor. Very troubled kids there, so they've survived their childhood.
- [21:38]
Kathryn Burns
To hear more of my conversation with Joyce Maynard, go to themoth.org while you're there. Pitch us your own story. In a moment, a forgotten freezer full of deer meat makes a surprise guest appearance at a poker game.
- [21:52]
George Dawes Green
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by the Public Radio Exchange.
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- [23:32]
Joyce Maynard
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- [24:03]
Kathryn Burns
This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Kathryn Burns. Our next story is from the founder of the Moth, George Dawes Green. He grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia. If you've never been there, it's a magical place. This may sound like a Southern cliche, but every house seems like it's been there for at least a hundred years. With Spanish moss hanging from big trees and a feeling that nobody is in a hurry to get anywhere. There must be jerks who live there, but in my many trips, I've never met a single one. Just fine funny people that you'd want to spend a long summer evening with. Here's George Dawes Green live at the great hall at the Cooper Union.
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Kevin R. Free
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 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 give that girl a glass of bourbon. And the insults would 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 who 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. Your 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 Frank. 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 the 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 quitter. And then a few months passed, and Larry went into the pantry to get something. I don't know what. 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 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 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. You can 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 I Just can't describe to you this smell, 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 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 is 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 arrayed before her seven masked banditos. Or maybe they were the 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 mom died. And then Wanda d 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 were 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.
- [38:58]
Kathryn Burns
That was George Doss Green. George is the founder of the Moth and the Unchained tour and the author of the novels Ravens, the Juror and the Caveman's Valentine. When we come back, we'll hear about a young boy's dreams of being the next Gary Coleman.
- [39:26]
George Dawes Green
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange prx.org.
- [39:38]
Kathryn Burns
This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. Hi, I'm Katherine Burns from the Moth. Our last story is from playwright and performer Kevin R. Free, who we met through our friends at the New York Neo Futurists. We want to caution you that the story contains a graphic description of an accident and may be hard for some listeners. Here's Kevin R. Free live at the Moth.
- [40:09]
Kevin R. Free
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. 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. 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.
- [41:18]
She would.
- [41:19]
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, my mother or 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. 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. 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. 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 by my father's, at 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, and 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. Yeah. Thank you. 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. 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 that 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 started drinking.
- [50:44]
Joyce Maynard
Thank you.
- [50:47]
Kevin R. Free
But this story normally ends with me asking my friends and family to toast 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.
- [51:18]
Kathryn Burns
That was Kevin R. Froo. Kevin is a writer performer. He's written over 60 short films, plays for the New York Neo Futurist's long running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and a full length play, A Raisin in the Salad Black plays for white people. To share any of the stories you've heard in this hour, go to themoth.org where you can send a link to your friends and family so they can stream any Moth story for free. The stories are also available at the iTunes store and we're on Twitter he moth many of the most beautiful stories on the Moth main stage have been told by people who called our pitch line. A lot of those people had never even been on stage before, so even if you can't imagine telling your story in front of a bunch of people, call anyway. If your story is selected, one of us Moths would be happy to help you prepare. The number is 877799 again, that's 877799 moth. Or you can pitch us a story@themoth.org.
- [52:25]
Sai A. Adler
Oh hi, yeah, my name is Sai A. Adler. To see the world I joined the Norwegian Merchant Marine when I was 24 year old and a math student and on my way home from Japan I was attacked by a mad fellow sailor. One evening I went to my locker to get cigarettes. He said hey, you're making too much noise. Jumped out of his junk bunk bed, kicked me hard with both feet, knocked me to the floor, broke my glasses and we grappled and rolled around the galley floor and at one point I had him in a headlock and he bit me deep on my right chest. When we separated at deck he said, hey, you're bleeding. Go see the first mate. Well my two inch wound became infected and my fever rose to 104. Our cargo ship carried no doctor and I felt I would die and I thought what a stupid way for a Brooklyn boy to die in the middle of the Pacific Ocean from a crazy sailor's bite.
- [53:29]
Kathryn Burns
Pitch us your own story@the moth.org that's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll listen next time.
- [53:46]
George Dawes Green
Your host this hour was the Moth's artistic director, Kathryn Burns. Kathryn also directed the stories in this show. The rest of the Moths directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess, Jennifer Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Maggie Sino, Kirsty Bennett, Jenna Weiss Berman and Brandon Echter. Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Bill Frazelle, Alain Toussaint, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Links to all the music are at our website. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, with help from Vicki Merrick. This hour was produced by with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange. Prx.org for more about our podcast. For information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.