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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Episode 1010
00:54:41
A socialite-turned social activist inherits her mother’s hunting trophy collection, a hospital orderly with an attitude problem is put to the test and Tony Hendra takes us on the set of the groundbreaking hilarious 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.”
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- [00:01]
Apple Representative
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- [00:30]
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- [01:41]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to a special edition of the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. All right, here's the thing. We're gonna do something a little different this week. Actually, it's sort of a lot different. In celebration of our radio show going weekly in 2013, we're bringing you a special edition of the podcast featuring an entire hour long episode of the radio show hosted by the Moth's founder, George Dawes Green. I think you're gonna love the Moth Radio Hour and you're probably gonna want to catch more episodes of it. Just check your local public radio station to find out when they're airing the show. Okay, so are you ready? Here it is, the Moth Radio Hour.
- [02:32]
George Dawes Green
From prx, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm George Dawes Green, the founder of the Moth, and I'll be your host this hour. At the Moth, we tell true stories without notes or second takes. They're like old fashioned front porch stories. But these tales are about our lives. They're personal, and they're sometimes intense or hysterical or mysterious. A while ago, the very mysterious Burkhara Legendre invited some of us to supper on her plantation. We drove down this rather plain South Carolina highway, strip malls and billboards for liposuction. And then we turned off onto a little road that took us away from all that and into the woods. An owl flew right in front of our windshield, and we drove for miles down this avenue of oak trees to a house that had been built in the 1680s. And Bokhara Legendre and all her radiance came out to greet us. And she fed us and told us stories all night long. We like to say that the spirit of the moth alights wherever people are telling stories. The tale you're about to hear was one that Bokhara told at a special moth at the museum of natural history in New York city, where she was surrounded by all these great African trophy animals. Here's Bokhara Legendre.
- [04:08]
Bokhara Legendre
My mother was a big white hunter at the time when a lot of people thought that the world was full of animals who basically hung out until somebody white in a topee shot them. And my mother was one of those people in a topi. And right upstairs in this museum in the African wing, there's a collection of nyala that she collected with my father in 1928. Now, in 1928, mummy was 26, and she was not only getting ready to have a career as a big game hunter, she also was getting ready to get married. So she organized a trip to Abyssinia, which is what Ethiopia was called then, for the natural history museum. And she invited this very attractive pair of brothers who she'd met the summer before, Sidney and Maurice Legendre. And they all set out for Abyssinia. And it wasn't exactly. It wouldn't be my way of seducing a man to invite him to shoot, but, you know, times have changed. And they arrived in Africa. It took a month on the boat to get to Africa, and then they spent another couple of months trying to get ready to go on the trip. And they had to get their tents together and their sherpas and their this and their that to get organized. But months went by and they still weren't allowed to go shooting. Well, when you arrive in a country like that, you have to list everything that's with you. Every tent, every gun, everything. And they listed all their shotguns, and each shotgun has a serial number, and it can be as many as 10 numbers. And they discovered that actually the Abyssinians Thought that the numbers were the number of guns and that Mummy had come to start a revolution. But when they cleared that up, they let them go. And they spent the next couple of months under canvas, as they say. And somewhere between the tent and the Sultan's palace, Mummy chose Daddy. Now, there was some question about whether it was going to be Morris or Sydney, but Sidney was kind of tall, dark and handsome, and he was a very good listener, which Mummy liked. Well, at the end of the Abyssinian trip, Mummy and Daddy got married and they went back to America. And 35 years later, mummy and I decided to go around the world. Now, Mummy was a real let's get cracking, let's get the show on the road and have a really great time kind of girl. I mean, she liked to have costume parties. She invited everybody to go shooting with her, whether it was on an expedition or at her plantation in South Carolina. And she just wanted to taste everything and try everything and have a ton of fun. Now, for example, during the war, she was in the OSS in Paris, and she had a desk job and things got kind of tame. And so she was with a bunch of cronies one day at the Ritz Bar, and she said, why don't we just go out and see the war? So they rented a car and they drove to the front lines to look at the shooting. I mean, the German front. Well, they all got captured and spent the next six months in prison camp. Well, Mummy, when we went around the world, kind of remembered the world the way it had been. And she thought that everybody would entertain her. You see, the way it used to be in the 20s was that if it took a month to get somewhere, by the time you got there, I mean, the people at the embassies and in the government were so thrilled to see someone that they really got excited about it. And when Mummy traveled, why, the embassies gave balls for her and the local governments entertained her. And, I mean, they had tribal dances and they had sacrifices of animals and candlelight dinners, and it was really exciting. And so when Mummy and I went around the world, we packed our ball gowns and our matching satin slippers, and every single country we went to, we sent our cards in to the ambassador and the local government on little silver trays that were proffered by the butlers. And then we'd go back to the hotel and wait for the call. But we never got called, because nowadays people. People just don't get excited when you travel. So I knew that Mummy wasn't really. I mean, the world wasn't measuring up the way Mummy wanted it to, and I wasn't measuring up the way Mummy wanted me to. In fact, I'd gone on the trip because I wanted to see the world and Mummy wanted to check it out again. And I thought that somehow I would change my relationship with my mother and suddenly we would become really close and it would just be this wonderful trip, which sort of mother, daughter, we'd become really close and everything would be wonderful. But instead of being like that, the whole thing gave me a terrible pain in my tummy. And I was sick the whole time. And every country we got to, I was sick. And this made Mummy even more disappointed. So 35 years later, mummy dies and I inherit her plantation in South Carolina. And the plantation has this great big lodge where all the trophies of Mummy's whole life are hung on the walls. And I've decided that the way to deal with this is I'm going to change the karma of the plantation. I'm going to bring in my spiritual friends and my new age friends and we're going to have. We're going to stop war and stop shooting and have peace, and it's really going to be marvelous. But Mummy started fighting me right from the beginning. I mean, I painted the house and I redecorated. And right away, the first night I moved into her newly painted bedroom, there was a huge fire in the fireplace and it erupted in masses of black smoke. And I had to get people to come in and put out the fire. And one of them told me that they saw a mummy in the smoke. Then this Christmas tree fell over three times in the night and these wool sconces of lambs were falling off the walls. I mean, finally my manager, who is a very un. Sort of crazy person, said, Mrs. La Jonde, that's enough. So anyway, despite all this, I had my first gathering and I got up to welcome all of the people and I talked about how we're all one, and from stardust we come, and to stardust we'll go, and the rest of the world, and we're all going to get together and it's just going to be wonderful. And I noticed that everybody's faces were absolutely stony and that they were sort of looking around me. And I looked up and there was a big hippo over my head, and all around me were the heads of lions and tigers and buffalo. And the floors were covered with animal skins with tigers and leopards and zebras. And the wood for the fire was. Were in elephant feet. And People had hung their hats on elephant tusks and even the sofas were covered with animal skins. And I thought, I've just got to get rid of this stuff. So I called Anne Aristoff. Now she's a very big deal person at the Natural History Museum. And I reminded her that over the years Mummy had killed all these animals and had been so helpful to the museum. And I said, gee, I wonder, Mrs. Aristof, if you'd like to have 150 heads? And she said, I'm sorry, we only take the whole animal. So then I called Ralph Lauren and I said, how would you like to have the collection of some authentic wasp polo playing family? And they said, well, we'd like it, but there seems to be that there's a law that you can't send endangered species, even the heads, over state lines. So then I found a collector and the collector said he would take the moose, the elephant, the tiger, but he wouldn't take the water buffalo. And I said, look, I want a full animal deal. So then I thought, I give up. I'm not going to be able to do it. I can't really step into Mummy's shoes because these animals, animals represent her power. And in a way, if you think about it, the Africans, when they go shooting, not shooting, but bows and arrows, the young men have to kill a lion in order to prove their manhood. And in some funny way, these animals are mummies power. And I'm sort of stuck with them and I can't really take over the plantation as long as they're there and I can't get rid of them. And I thought, I give up. I mean, I've been beaten, I can't do it. And then I thought, I'm having a mano au mano fight with the spirits here. What am I going to do? And I decided to have a Beltane festival and that I would build a huge bonfire and I would put all the animals heads in the bonfire and I would invite all my shaman friends and my Native American friends and my California friends and we'd all drum and sing and dance around the bonfire and the spirits of the animals would go up with the smoke and we, well, we'd be absolved of the whole problem. I just thought it was the most perfect solution. And I thought, afterwards, I'll have an oyster roast and I'll hire a band. However, the manager of the plantation nixed that scheme because he said that there's formaldehyde in the animals heads and that we would all be Poisoned. But I know that the real reason is that's not good South Carolina plantation behavior. And he hated it. And, you know, the whole plantation hated that I was trying to do this. The gall of me. Trying to throw away the fruits of Mummy's life, the trophies of her entire career. So, anyway, just as I thought, I have to really give up. I've had it. My nephew called up and he said he wanted the heads. And I said, how great. So I put them in two trucks and I sent two trucks of heads to my nephew. But I couldn't think what he wanted them for because he put them in storage. But at least they were off my hands. And I thought, it's kind of amazing because here I am tonight in the Natural History Museum. And this was, in a way, the center of my mother's public power because she didn't only collect for this museum, she collected for lots of museums. And so here I am telling my story at the Moth. And this museum used to represent mainly stuffed animals and old bones. And now upstairs, there's an exhibition of Hindu spirituality. And at Medway, the plantation where we used to have meetings before the hunt, now I've got scientists and Sufis and politicians talking about how we're going to end war. And on the walls where there used to be those stuffed animal heads, now I have my paintings of animals to call in the spirits so that the animal spirits will help me. And I realized I'm free.
- [17:55]
George Dawes Green
That was Bakara Legendre. The Moth Radio Hour will continue in a minute with a story about the making of the legendary film. This is Spinal Tap.
- [18:10]
Production Team
This hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media and presented by the public radio exchange prx.org.
- [18:29]
Apple Representative
Sa.
- [19:20]
George Dawes Green
From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour and I'm George Dawes Green, founder of the Moth. Tony Hendra was the first editor of the National Lampoon. He wrote the best selling memoir, Father the Man who Saved My Soul, which grew out of a Moth story he told. He once played the role of the band manager Ian Faith in the classic mockumentary this Is Spinal Tap. And that was the subject of a story he told at A Moth in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art. Here's Tony Hendrick.
- [20:00]
Tony Hendra
It's 1982. I am sitting in a sumptuous beach house in Malibu, watching a magnificent Pacific sunset. And this is shaping up as the worst day of my life. I was in Los Angeles for two reasons. First, to promote my latest satirical publication and secondly, to appear in a low budget movie which was the directorial debut of an old friend of mine. I wasn't terribly keen about this, never having been in a movie, and he had some deranged notion about shooting it like a documentary. The satirical publication was much more my speed. It was a time, as you probably remember, when there was a man in the White House who was talking quite lively and frequently about a winnable nuclear war against the godless Soviets. And some of us in New York had decided this was a satirical opportunity. And we put together this parody pamphlet of the kind that would inform people of what they could do in the event of nuclear Armageddon. And it was put out by an agency called the Futile Preparedness Agency. And it gave you little tips about what you could do in the event of a direct hit by a, you know, hundred megaton bomb on your home. It was called Meet Mr. Bomb, and Mr. Bomb was a very cheery, helpful 1950s hydrogen bomb with a wide smile and good teeth and a firm handshake. Now, meet Mr. Bomb is quite funny, and Newsweek had said they were going to put it on their cover. So I had, at my own expense, 200,000 copies of this printed up. And I had just heard minutes earlier from my publisher that the largest distributor in the Southwest had read Mr. Bomb, and he had not enjoyed it. He was a Razorback Reaganite, and he had shredded every one of the hundred thousand copies I'd shipped to him, refused to pay for them. And since I had no money left to sue him, I was effectively bankrupt. Now, the house I was staying in was, to some degree, a house of gloom. It belonged to a member of the band, you remember, that legendary 60s group. And I had once believed that the band was the greatest rock and roll group in history, if not the universe. And of course, they had broken up a few years earlier for the usual egotistical, unnecessary reasons, leaving me bitterly disappointed. And the mood that I was in at that point, this breaking up seemed to me to be symptomatic of the age. Things were breaking up, falling apart. They were coming to an end. Peggy Noonan famously called those years Morning in America. To me, they were more like late evening in America. And worse things than that were happening. I mean, a year before that, a deranged fan had shot John Lennon in the street. Not many months before this, a death much closer to home had happened, which was that of John Belushi. And I had given John Belushi his first job, actually his first starring role, in a show I produced for the National Lampoon called Lemmings. And Lemmings was a Full scale parody of Woodstock, at which all the great rock idols got theirs. And John was the sort of satanic MC of all this and was absolutely brilliant. And Blemish became a big Off Broadway hit. And John was launched on his stellar career and his equally magnificent drug habit, which had just killed him. My first marriage was in ruins, and I knew that basically it was my fault. And it seemed to me somehow appropriate that I was in California, because California is the end. I mean, it's the end of America. You can't go any further right after that, it's 5,000 miles of oceanic night, and then you get to China and it all starts over again. And it was also appropriate that somehow this magnificent sunset was sliding gradually underneath the horizon and to Stygian darkness. And for the first time in my life, I just wondered what the hell was the point in going on now, whoever owned this house, Robbie Robertson or Richard Manuel, whoever it was, was kind enough to have left a quart of vodka in it. And I also had with me my very first prescription for Valium. I'd always hated downers. I'd never taken them. But I'd been sleeping badly and my doctor said this was the answer. So these two things taken together seemed to me to present a perfect opportunity. So I laid out 10 Valium. I figured that's how many it would take. I took a big, big slug of vodka and took my first Valium ever and then took another slug of vodka. Nothing much seemed to happen. So I took two more Valium and a really big hit of vodka this time. Still nothing. Clearly this wasn't going to work. I would have to take the remaining seven Valium and get it over with. And so I took a really big hit of vodka to prepare myself for this step. And I picked up the Valium and I looked at them in my hand for a long time. And I fell asleep. And about 14 hours later I woke, and I was still just as suicidal, but now had a massive hangover, too. And I remember through the fog that I was supposed to be on a movie set. To be precise, about four hours earlier. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do was be in a movie set. And especially a movie about rock and roll, which at this point I hated. And it. It didn't have a script, this movie. It had to be totally improvised. And I'd never improvised in my life either. But I was a professional. So I jumped in my car and sped across the Malibu hills to the location. And they rushed me into hair and wardrobe and so forth and so on, and rushed me to the set. And there were the three stars of the movie, looking absolutely hilarious in their fright wigs. And the set was actually a limo. And I was placed in the limo with them. And somebody yelled, action. And we were underway. And they were brilliant. None of them was British, but they all had perfect British accents. And they were being incredibly funny in character, intimidatingly funny. And I knew that very soon one of them would turn to me and say something, and I would have to answer. Now, I'd done a little homework. I'd read up on improvisation, and I'd talked to all my friends who'd been in improv groups. And the consensus seemed to be there was one basic rule you had to follow. Listen. Can't bring anything preconceived to improvisation. You must just listen not just to what people are saying, the other people are saying, but to what their faces are saying, what their bodies and their movements are saying. And if you do that, just simply answer what you hear, it will work. And now the moment came. The character called David was turning to me and he was saying something to me. And I could see in his face that his character thought my character was pretty sleazy, that this character, whose name was Ian, lied a lot. And out of my mouth came this voice that wasn't really mine. It was sort of evasive and sort of slimily ingratiating. And it had that kind of nasal whine, you know, that was beginning to creep into everyday English. And it worked. It was amazing. I mean, the scene was enabled to continue being funny. I mean, I wasn't funny, but I helped them be funny. And my friend, the director, was very happy with the scene, so we did another take of it, and he was even happy with that. And then we did another scene and another scene, and pretty soon the day was over, and I had completely forgotten all thoughts of offing myself. But more importantly, something quite wonderful was happening, which was these stars and the extended cast and myself, too. We were all, in some way, on the same emotional page. We had all sort of arrived at this deep disillusion and disappointment with this wonderful music that when we were younger, we had had such high hopes for, that we actually thought some of us would change things, would bring peace and rationality into life, would end racism and war, you remember. And it had betrayed us, and it had been betrayed for us. And it had been a source of failures and disappointments and vulgarity and stupidity and absurdity in pretension and so on. And this whole Cast was just coming into that and devising and finding all these wonderful ways in which venality and cynicism and so forth had poisoned this whole area of the art world. And it wasn't the big sort of comedic set pieces that I loved. It was the little tiny ones where we would find out new dimensions of this. And I'll just give you a quick example. This is actually my. The favorite scene, at least one of the favorite scenes that I'm in. And it's sort of in the middle somewhere. And it's about Nigel, who's the lead guitarist, being backstage before a concert. And a large amount of food has been delivered to Nigel and he's not at all happy with it. And specifically, there's some very small slices of bread which have been delivered with this. And Nigel just doesn't. I don't see how the bits of meat, how. They're too small. The bread's too small for the meat. Look, you see, it won't work. I want big bread, okay? And it is Ian's job, my character's job, to talk this moron down so that he can go out on stage and play the loudest music in the world to brain dead teenagers. And they keep buying tickets. That's his job. And Ian does it in this kind of mothering. He's like a kind aunt, you know, and yet at the same time, it's incredibly cynical, incredibly manipulative and so on. So. So anyway, that sort of body of work came together after. Throughout this. It was just a wonderful, wonderful shoot. And I would actually venture to say that Spinal Tap actually isn't a mockumentary because of this wonderful cinematographer we had Peter Smokeler. It was actually a documentary record of a really fascinating collective comedic experiment that took place at a certain point in time and couldn't have been at any other point in time. And that was a success. And I think that's why it sort of works. That's where it gets its edge and authenticity. And I have one little epitaph to this. I haven't the foggiest idea what it means, but I'm going to throw it in anyway. This was about five years later and Spinal Tap had been out for about three years and was sort of on its way to becoming the minor classic that it became. And I got into a cab in New York and my. My driver was a quintessential acid casualty. I mean, he had, you know, he had one of those beribboned kind of ponytails down to his crack, you know, and he peered in the rearview mirror and he said, hey man, weren't you in spyl tap? And I said, yeah, yeah, I played the manager. Yeah. He said. And he said, oh man, I really dig their music so far out. He said, you know, man, I was into tap before they made that movie.
- [32:05]
George Dawes Green
That was Tony Hendra. We spoke to Tony about his experience telling stories at the Moth.
- [32:12]
Tony Hendra
I think what it most approaches in my experience is improvisation. And I don't mean that in the sense that you're making the story up as you go along, but I do mean in the sense that the audience is really your collaborator, that the audience is guiding you to some degree. They are your helper. And I think that's one of the reasons why they're so generous or why they appear so generous because they are actually they feel that they're part of it. They know what the rules are too. So they're not just spectators that they are actually being involved in the story.
- [32:44]
George Dawes Green
Most recently, Tony was the co author of George Carlin's posthumous memoir, Last Words. All of the stories you're hearing and many more favorites are available at the itunes store. Just search for the best of them all. When we come back, we'll hear the story of a man who rode a hospital gurney like a buckaroo.
- [33:08]
Apple Representative
The girl It's a great big world but there's only one of me you can't touch cuz I talk too much.
- [33:22]
Production Team
This hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media and presented by the public radio exchange. Prx.org.
- [33:51]
Apple Representative
Next day we'll be on our way but tonight we're going to rock it Tonight we're going to rock it SA.
- [34:30]
George Dawes Green
From prx, I'm George Dawes Green and this is the Moth Radio Hour. John Levin is one of those people who seems to be able to do anything he chooses. He's a filmmaker and a writer and a musician and a world traveler. And sometimes he chooses to do nothing, which he also does well. He told this story at a moth at the Players Club in New York City. Here's John Levin.
- [35:02]
Apple Representative
When I was young, I was a bright, happy, enthusiastic kid. So some people may have been a little surprised when years later, I'd become an angry, sullen, disaffected high school dropout. Was perfectly logical to me. But life as a high school dropout quickly proved even more depressing than life as a high school student. So I sort of, I kind of tested my way into Boston University and then dropped out of that. If I could have signed a form to officially drop out of American society or the human race, that would have been next. So believe me when I tell you that when I was 21 in 1990 and I applied for a job working the night shift in the OR at Massachusetts General Hospital, it was not out of a great desire to help my fellow man. I was only doing it because the job paid really well. $9 an hour, which was $3 an hour more than the job I had been doing working in a supermarket pushing carts of meat around. The fact that the hospital hired me to do that job at that time in my life should be sufficient to scare everyone in this room into taking excellent care of yourselves from now on. But hire me they did. And my actual job title was or nursing assistant, night shift. I was basically an orderly with a few additional responsibilities. But the most fundamental part of the job was transporting patients to surgery, which I was trained to do during the day shift for two weeks when, you know, everything is regularly scheduled and the patients are all in stable condition and they're usually awake but mildly sedated. And it's pretty simple. On the night shift, nothing is scheduled. Of course, it's the middle of the night. Patients are usually kind of bloody, maybe they're highly agitated and need to be restrained. But for the most part, they were either heavily sedated or completely unconscious. Not too much interaction with me. So transporting them to surgery felt eerily reminiscent of my previous job pushing carts of meat around. I didn't see them so much as human beings at a time of great need, but more like, you know, packages that needed to be delivered to a specific room as efficiently as possible. You know, I don't know, burst appendix to OR 22, coked up scumbag with multiple stab wounds to OR 27, pregnant woman hit by a drunk driver to OR 24, guy who shot his face off to OR 33. I mean, all manner of human suffering, but to me, it was all the same. Every once in a while there would be a patient who'd be awake and wanted to chat. And in those circumstances, I was encouraged to sort of talk in a soothing manner as I wheeled them through the halls. Because, you know, it's been clinically proven that a freaked out patient won't do as well under the knife. Like this one guy, Alexander. He was a high school teacher who fallen a great distance in a rock climbing accident and injured his spine. He was really afraid that he was going to be paralyzed and would he be able to teach and what would his students do? He was really worried about his students. And so I Said to him, well, look, anyone who's only concerned about his students at a time like this is probably so dedicated to teaching that nothing will stand in his way. And then for a fact, I added, I only wish I had had a teacher like you when I was in school. Maybe I would have graduated. Which, okay, I admit it was laying on a little thick, but, you know, he seemed to genuinely appreciate that. All right, he was sedated, but he responded by saying, well, you really helped me, so I'm going to help you. I want you to promise me that you're going to go back to school and finish your education. So I immediately think, well, that's not going to happen. But, you know, what am I going to say to this man? No. So I try not to roll my eyes as I make him this promise. I got him to surgery and I never saw him again because, you know, you deliver a package, you don't stand around waiting to see what the guy does with the box. It was not my job to care or to follow up. Anyway, maybe three months later, it's like three in the morning and there's a call from an ICU. They have a patient named Mr. Williams who had had surgery the previous day and apparently had sprung a little leak, needed to come back down. So I go up to get him, and the nurses are disconnecting him from his respirator and his EKG and attaching a portable heart monitor to the rolling ICU bed and an airbag to his breathing tube, which I'm going to have to squeeze to breathe for him during the trip, which means that someone is going to have to come with me, because you can't steer an ICU bed and squeeze an airbag at the same time. Unfortunately, the nurses in the ICU were already over taxed and couldn't spare anyone except for a young woman named Melissa, who I believe was a nursing student. She was very nervous about this because she'd never been anywhere else in the hospital before and had never really been given too much responsibility. But the nurses assured us that despite appearances, Mr. Williams was pretty much okay and this would be totally routine. And I added, yeah, you know, I've done this dozens of times. It'll be a piece of cake. So I'm pushing from the back and squeezing the airbag with my free hand, and I have Melissa steering from the front as I direct her on the shortest route to go to the or. The entire trip would only take a few minutes, most of which would be spent waiting for an old crappy elevator so we're waiting for this elevator, and I briefly considered maybe going out of our way to another building connected by a ramp, where there's, like, a faster, more modern elevator. But I figured it's actually pretty far, and by the time we get there, the time savings will be nullified. So we just stood there, and then the elevator arrived. So we get in, the door's closed, push the button, and nothing happens. And then the lights go out. And so I'm about to say, what the. When we start to move, but it's not right, and we're kind of moving too fast, and the elevator's not making its normal sound, and my stomach is in my throat, and we're falling, and we're falling. And if I had had time for a thought process, it probably would have been like, what the. I'm not ready to die. I didn't sign up for this. And then I would have myself. But before any of that could take place, the elevator's emergency brakes kicked in and slammed us to a stop so violently that I was thrown to my knees, and Melissa was thrown to the floor. And Mr. Williams is, like, bouncing in his bed, and there's, like, his equipment is, like, all jostled around. And so now we're stopped somewhere, and we're in this tiny, dark box, and there's three sounds. I can hear the elevator's emergency signal buzzing and melissa screaming, and Mr. Williams heart monitor indicating that, like our elevator, his heart has stopped. So I get to my feet, and for a brief moment, I think, no, no, no, no, no. But, you know, denial quickly gave way to, in this case, bargaining. I then hit resignation and begrudgingly admitted to myself that I had to kind of get in the game here. Fortunately, in a sense, our situation didn't really leave us with many options. And also fortunately, the hospital had trained me to do CPR when they hired me. So I had Melissa stand up, and, you know, by the dim light lights of the LEDs on the heart monitor, I could just sort of see her hand, and I grabbed it and I put it on the airbag, and I say, okay, you do the airbagging. I'm going to do chest compressions. So I moved around to the side, but Mr. Williams was a big guy, and I couldn't get good leverage. And unfortunately, it was too dark to see the controls of the ICU bed underneath it to lower it, if it even got any lower. So in desperation, I did something I'd seen one of the emergency ward doctors do one time, which is I Went to the foot of the bed, and I climbed up on the bed, sort of mounting Mr. Williams and sort of kneeling over him. I did chest compressions from above, and it seemed to work okay, as far as I could tell. So we were like this in the dark for. I mean, I have no idea how long. It felt like hours, hours, until, like, the lights flickered and came back on and the buzzing emergency thing stopped. And then a garbled voice came over the intercom saying something like, standby. And I was like, you. And then we were moving again, only this time in, like, a controlled manner, which still wasn't comforting at all. Until finally we arrived at the. The third floor, the OR floor, and the doors opened. And Melissa was so overjoyed and so eager to get us out of there that she, you know, just started pushing us forward. And that's when something really bad happened. The wheels on the front of the ICU bed swiveled around halfway right as they were situated over the gap between the elevator and the floor, and slid down into the gap like, you know, slices of bread going into a toaster. I was nearly thrown off of the bed by our sudden change in momentum and had to grab onto the side rails just to stay in place. And then, of course, the elevator doors started slamming on us over and over again. So I thought Melissa was going to cry. She stopped airbagging and ran to the front and was, like, battling the elevator doors as she's trying to lift us out of the gap. And of course, it was no use, so she stopped and went back to airbagging. And of course, I'm still doing chest compressions now, slightly more difficult due to the incline. So, you know, I make eye contact with her, and without actually exchanging words, we both just start screaming for help. It was kind of a busy moment in the OR right then, and no one responded for a while until finally, the first person who did respond was a wonderful older gentleman named Mr. Selwyn, who was one of the night cleaning crew guys. And so he comes running in, and in his sort of thick island accent, he says, what's all the commotion? And then he sees us, and it's like, oh, my God. And he tries to, like, you know, pull us free. And it didn't work, even though he's kind of a strong older guy. And so he's like, okay, you just keep doing what you're doing. I go get more help. And he runs out. And within a few moments, he comes back with reinforcements in the person of Mr. Guppy, who sees us and Says, oh, Jonathan, what you do this for? And the two of them now are trying to lift us free. And they're struggling and struggling, and finally, with, like, a horrible metal scraping sound, they wrench us free. And now we're off. And suddenly all the panic and confusion is, like, forward motion, and we're, you know, getting somewhere anyway. And so they say, okay, where you going? And I say, or 29. And they're like, fine, okay. And then the double doors just open, and we're whipping around the corners, and everything's very effortless, and we're flying now. And Melissa is, like, running as she's trying to keep up with and still doing the airbag. And of course, I'm still on top of Mr. Williams, still bumping away at his chest. And there's, like, a breeze in my face from our newfound velocity. And I have to say, it was absolutely exhilarating to the point where I had to actively stifle the urge to laugh out loud. And so, you know, I screw my face up into a mask of seriousness because, you know, it would be a tad unseemly to appear to be enjoying riding a patient down the hall. And we get to or 29, and the entire. The entire surgical team is there, of course, waiting for us, like, where the hell have you been? But as soon as they see us, they know the situation's not normal, so they fly into action, and they sort of seamlessly take over for everybody, and they, you know, draw us into the operating room. And I can now hop off because obviously Mr. Williams is in far more capable hands. So I grab the paperwork that was at the foot of the bed that I have to process for him, and they get to work on him, and they save him, and he lives, Right? So in this case, I did follow up, and I found out that not only did he live through the night, but he recovered and left the hospital. After that, I lost track of him. But. So I processed the paperwork and find Melissa in the hall, and we breathe this collective sigh of relief. Then I escort her back up to the icu, taking a different route so that she wouldn't have to take the bad elevators. And she gives me a hug, and I never see her again. I come back down to the or, and there's my boss behind the main desk, and he says, hey, John, I heard what you did. Nice job. And so part of me was really hoping that that would be the extent of the praise that I would receive. But another part of me was disappointed that that was the extent of the Praise I received. And you know, of course, in that setting, nothing special. But the thing that surprised me was that I cared. Like, since when do I give a about receiving recognition for anything but specifically job performance? So then my boss asked me a few questions about the particulars of what happened. And I told him, and he was like, oh, yeah, I hate those elevators. Don't take those. Take the ones in the white building instead. Thanks. Well, try to keep that in mind. So the exhilarating feeling didn't go away, and it stayed with me for the rest of my shift, all the way home. And it actually prevented me from getting to sleep that morning. It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but at the time, I was so unaccustomed to feeling anything positive, especially related to work, that it took me a really long time to recognize that I enjoyed what I did and enjoyed caring about it. I enjoyed caring about Mr. Williams myself. But, you know, about maybe six months later, I found myself mentioning the incident in a personal essay that I was including with an application to get back into college.
- [52:33]
George Dawes Green
That was John Levin. John used to live in an illegal squad and Brooklyn. And we'd go there after the Moth, sometimes to this grim old factory building. And we'd find our way with cigarette lighters down these endless corridors and arrive at his hidden lair and huddle there. And the wine bottle would go around and the Moth spirit would alight and we'd tell stories all night long. We hope you'll join us. We'd like to hear about all the folks who've turned joined our underground resistance to Hollywood culture. Folks who are holding impromptu moths at their kitchen tables or their porches. A good way to get things started is to ask your guests, if we were at the Moth tonight, what story would you be telling? Then pitch us the best stories right on the web@themost.org so that's the story from the Moth Radio Hour. Hope you'll join us next time.
- [53:41]
Production Team
Your host for this hour was George Dawes Green, the Moth's founder and the author of Ravens, the Juror and the Caveman's Valentine. Today's stories were directed by the Moth's artistic director, Kathryn Burns, and by Joey Zanders. Our producing director is Sarah Austin Janess. Our senior producer is Jennifer Hickson. Moth's recording engineer is Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York City. Thanks to John Zorn for a lot of our music. Our theme music is by the Drift. Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole Massachusetts with help from Vicki Merritt. This hour was produced with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information@macfound.org the Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange. Vrx.org for more information about our podcast or information about how to pitch your own story and everything else, go to the website themoth.org.
- [54:52]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks for listening to this special edition of the Moth Podcast featuring the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Dan Kennedy. See you next week.