Hey there, podcast listeners, I'm right here.
I think it's accurate to say that the modern era of podcasting began when serial reinvented
what a podcast could be in 2014.
And so many people began listening to podcast to hear the story of Audensei Ed.
It was just crazy numbers, over 300 million downloads.
I remember at one point we realized the average episode of serial had more people downloading
than the number of people who watched the Game of Thrones finale.
And then since that first season, every season our colleagues at serial have tried something
completely different, building on the ambition of what they began with.
I thought, personally, season three, where they tried to explain basically the way the
entire criminal justice system works for most Americans, the series of ordinary cases
from one courthouse in Cleveland was kind of unbeatable.
Epic.
And then they came out with their new season.
They're in the middle of that right now. And just to encourage you to listen, what we're
going to do now is I'm going to play you the trailer for season four.
And then after that we'll start this week's show.
Here we go.
Right after September 11th, we created a brand new criminal justice system at Guantanamo
Bay, a prison and a court to deal with people we suspected of being terrorists.
To do what we wanted to do at Guantanamo, we pushed aside the old rules for detaining
prisoners of war so we can interrogate people how we wanted and hold them indefinitely
without charging them with a crime.
Maybe you have an idea of what it's like to work at Guantanamo Bay.
Put that aside for a second.
You're on 42 square miles, you've got like five great beaches.
I partied my ass off and give them.
Everyone was getting drunk and getting laid and then I love gimmos.
Like it's Lala land.
We're like a Disneyland employee.
Let's talk about that comparison there.
Oh no, that was a joke.
Definitely a joke.
It's nothing like Disneyland.
Our mission today is to provide safe human legal and transparent.
The US government has its own story about what's been happening inside Guantanamo all
these years.
Legal transparent care.
Transparent care custody and control.
But we wanted the people who served at Guantanamo and survived Guantanamo to tell their
stories.
Now that they've left Guantanamo, what would they say now that they couldn't say that?
A lot as it turns out.
Chaos.
I simply put it was chaotic.
You think your Allah is going to help you?
You think your Quran is correct?
You know, it's a bunch of garbage.
It's a bop bop.
Right.
What rights?
Nobody knows you exist here.
He wasn't tortured.
He wasn't physically beaten.
He wasn't tortured.
He was beaten in the respect that we won.
He lost.
We are tortured by someone who doesn't believe in torture.
How can this guy who believes in human rights doing this to me?
This is something that they would never have made public.
But the day of the riot, morale was never higher because we got to kick their asses
and get away with it.
And that's the God's own truth.
From serial productions in the New York Times, this is serial season four, Guantanamo, hosted
by me, Sarah Cainig and Dana Chivas.
Even on the New York Times Audio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is Guantanamo even still open?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Are you asking me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Paul's a cop in New York.
Paul Bacon.
Officer Bacon.
No jokes, please.
And one night, he did his regular four-demand night shift.
They were protecting from terrorists, basically.
And 2am, the other officer who's working in this booth with him,
takes a lunch break, goes and takes a nap.
And then at 3am, it's Paul's turn for a break.
He's exhausted.
Remember, he had already worked a full shift and has a patrolman.
And he decides that he's also going to take a nap.
So he gets into his patrol car and he drives it out into this parking lot.
I'll go to ways away from the security booth.
I parked my car in the one available spot thinking,
no, this is a parking lot. Nobody's going to be coming by here.
It's going to be fine.
And so I turned off the ignition and just sat there.
And I realized, I can't.
I don't think I'm going to be able to follow sleep sitting up.
So I got out of the driver's seat, gotten back, and closed the door.
And I was asleep within seconds.
I had set my alarm watch to go off so that I would get up in plenty of time
to go back on post so my partner wouldn't worry where I was and everything would be fine.
It would be smooth.
But I woke up a few seconds before my alarm with this terrible realization,
which is that I was locked in the back.
I just, I was like, I'm trapped.
That was my first thought.
Because you don't get out of the back of a police car.
The back of a police car is for prisoners.
And I never really thought about it that a police car is really just like a rolling jail cell.
It's exactly right.
And also, it's, it's hermetically sealed.
I remember it was very cold that night.
It was February and I closed the, the grading to the front and the windows were up.
So it was really, you just feel there was less oxygen in the air.
And also all the windows were all fogged up so I could barely see out.
And, and I started to panic.
I reached for both of the door handles that neither of them worked.
And so I rolled over on my side and, and I pounded against the door.
It's harder than I could with both my feet.
And there's just no way out of this car.
It's dark.
It's cold.
But he's only 60 feet away from the security booth where his partner is.
And he's right next to a sidewalk.
All he needs is for somebody to see him come over and lift the door handle from the outside.
And it gets lucky.
A Pepsi truck parks right on the street right in front of him.
He waves frantically at the driver.
He pounds on the glass.
He can see the driver peering in at him.
And then the driver flees.
He flees.
Who is going to help some maniac trap in the back of a police car?
My next thought was, well, maybe those, maybe somebody else will come by.
And so I wrote in the steam on the window, I wrote the word help.
You know, and I did it backwards.
But then I got the thinking, well, that's not going to be any more convincing.
So I wrote underneath help, I wrote, I'm a cop.
But unfortunately, nobody came by to read my message.
His fleece radio is in the front seat out of reach.
And three in the morning, exhausted panic.
It takes him 25 minutes to remember that he is carrying a cell phone.
A cell phone, he says he almost never uses.
But here's the problem.
He's working with an officer that he's never met before.
In a place he's never been before.
He has no idea what the phone number is of that little booth just 60 feet away from his parked car.
That little booth where right now his partner is expecting him back on post, wondering where he is.
His first great idea of the night was to take a nap.
Now he had a second great idea.
I did what I thought I would never have to do ever in my life.
And that is to call 911 as a cop.
When the operator came on very shortly, she says, well, don't worry, we'll put this through to your central dispatcher.
And she was about to get off the phone with me.
And I said, well, wait, there's this very, very important thing to tell the dispatcher.
And that is that this needs to go over the radio as a non-emergency.
Because any time that a cop requests help, and it's not qualified in any way, it sends out the cavalry.
Everybody drops everything they're doing and comes very quickly to that location.
And that's a dangerous situation.
And all because I made this stupid mistake.
So I said, please, make sure that you specify it's a non-emergency.
I swear within a minute lights and sirens coming from all directions.
Now part of the chaos is coming from the police.
Part of the chaos is coming from the fact that Paul wasn't really exactly sure where he was.
Remember, this is not his regular precinct.
So cops are zooming around just trying to find him.
But this seems like way too much commotion even for that.
Something has gone very, very wrong.
So Paul doesn't have 911 again.
They tell him that his call had gone out as a 10 or 10.
10 or 10.
Officer down.
Like as if a cop was being beaten or had just been shot.
That's why everybody was going all over the place.
My call had basically woken up the entire midnight squad.
Probably half that squad was also sleeping.
And now I had gotten everybody's blood going.
So my partner up in the booth finally got up and started walking down into the parking lot.
And I saw him coming and I took my flashlight off my belt.
And I'm shaking my flashlight.
I'm really like crazy just to show him that this is not a headlight of some car.
This is a person being very creative and very emphatic about letting you know that this is somebody stuck.
And he sees me from about 50 yards away.
And he takes his flashlight off and jingles it back at me and it starts to walk away.
He's just thinking I'm having a good time.
Like yeah, ha, ha.
He was walking away.
So I had to wrap really hard on my window again.
And I wrapped so hard that I cut my knuckles.
But he got the point and he came down to my car just lifted the door handle.
It took him two seconds to let me out.
So he's free.
And they call off the cavalry.
Nobody in his regular precinct ever found out about it.
Today on our radio show we bring you stories like this one.
Stories that begin with a bright idea.
Like for instance, you're going to park your car 60 feet from your partner and climb it and take a nap.
And then things happen more than you're barking for it.
More than you wanted.
From WB Easy Chicago, it's this American life.
I'm our class.
Each week we bring you a bunch of stories organized around a single thought.
And this week that thought is it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Our show in 4X today, each of which starts off with great hope and a shiny new idea.
Act 1, luck of the Irish, and that act a bunch of people become very convinced that with one simple purchase,
they can change their lives forever.
Act 2, taxation without an e-bree-ation.
And that act how to make a decision to hire somebody who absolutely, positively is going to do you no good.
And you can tell they're going to do you no good.
And why you may never fire that person.
Act 3, bad morning America.
David Rothbard goes on a morning television and does a little experiment on his hosts.
Act 4, the function of the heart.
An 11 year old girl comes up with a simple scheme on how she can finally get to really know her dad.
Her dad who is not so keen on being known.
Stay with us.
Act 1, luck of the Irish.
This first story takes place far from the New York police force.
This is a very different kind of job.
Maybe about as different as you can get.
Well, I was in River Dance.
But I don't actually dance. I just sing. There's like a lead female singer.
It must be a terrible thing to be the singer in River Dance because nobody...
Actually, you know, it's all about the dancing, right?
No, exactly. And every now and then someone will say something like,
it's called River Dance, not River Sing.
Mr. Mrs. America, please meet Katie Else.
Katie was throwing with River Dance doing eight shows a week working every day.
And they weren't on stage. They would be traveling.
70 people in the company.
That's four singers, a band, sort of tech guys and support people.
And 40, yes, 40 dancers doing that Irish step dancing thing they do.
I don't even know if it's called step dancing.
You know what I'm talking about here? The Michael Flatley, of course you do,
because you've seen television.
Anyway, two months into the tour, a time when working every day,
they're getting tired with the monotony of working every day.
And they needed some excitement and this idea spread through the company like wildfire.
I think it was the idea of the lead dancer and dance captain.
He has this ridiculous luck with raffles.
We have a raffle every Friday.
And he has won it five times.
He just has ridiculous luck with this.
And he just happened to notice on the internet, I guess,
that Meghan millions had gotten up to like $360 million or something like that.
So he suggested that we all do a syndicate ticket.
It's like you pool your money.
So five dollars gets five tickets, but everybody has a share in all the tickets.
Not to complicate it, right? They're playing the lottery.
So the company's physical therapist who's a guy named Scott.
He is the one who organized the whole thing and collected everybody's money.
And the reason why it's him is, okay, if you picture it,
this company of 40 dancers, it's like, and I hate to bring up this analogy,
but honestly, it's very, very apt.
Okay, the starship enterprise.
Okay, remember this?
I always thought that it was really a little weird that the one job,
besides actually flying around and exploring space,
the one set that they bothered to build on this television show
that wasn't actually adventure related was the doctor's office.
I mean, of all the things, right?
And basically, it's like that with river dance.
Scott, the physical therapist, has a very big role behind the scenes in River Dance.
Well, his office is like a center for gossip and for people gather there
like during the show and.
And had the pitch go, like, give me the pitch.
Well, he did, didn't it?
It was just basically like, everybody's doing this.
We want everybody to get involved because then our chances will be better,
which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say when you're talking about the lottery
because your chances are so slim.
Right.
And it's like one more person, but we figured out the stats.
I guess the stats on the mega millions at that point was 1 to 760 trillion.
But we figured we had like a 340 to 760 trillion chance,
which sounded better than one.
Because you guys would buy 340 tickets.
Yeah.
But did it seem, did it seem in some way reasonable?
I'm sitting here actually and you're saying these numbers and I'm writing out on a piece of paper.
760.
And everyone's like, I don't even know, wait, is trillion the next one up from billion?
And then like I'm writing 340.
And then like, honestly, then you start to cross off a zero in a zero.
And then you get the 34 and the 76 and then like a lot of zeros.
And it just still seems like there's a lot of zeros there.
Like you're still up in the kind of billions.
All right, you to one.
Yeah.
I mean, the chances are so unreasonable at that point.
We just kind of forgot about the stats.
I don't even know.
I mean, it just got unreasonable.
Like we just thought for some reason if we focused all our energy on this, we were going to win it.
People even brought up theories of like quantum physics and how we're all energy.
And if we just focus our energy on winning this lottery, like we'll be able to create our own destiny.
But that makes any sense.
It does indeed.
Yeah, no, because when math fails, what do you have left but with your faith?
Faith.
Faith.
Yeah.
Like if there would be dissenters, there would be like, you know, the chances of us winning this, we'd be like, no.
No, no, no, you're the chink in the chain.
We need to focus all our energy on winning the lottery.
And then it just became kind of like a group psychology thing, right?
Like everybody's holding everybody else up.
It's kind of bizarre, like how worked up you can get yourself.
And one of the girls even said she'd been reading like Deepak Shokra or something.
And she was like, we can't say we're going to win the lottery.
We have to say we've won the lottery.
And then we'll win.
How far did this go?
The art started planning what they were going to do with the money.
Katie, for example, was going to pay off her parents' house.
She was going to buy a house for herself.
She was going to put a little recording studio in the house for her singing career.
And as they came closer to the night of the Meghan Millions drawing at Tuesday night,
it was clear what most of the cast wanted.
And I have to say it's kind of touching.
It tells you so much about them and their lives, what it is that they wanted.
See, a lot of the people are quite young in the show.
So they're like, I'm quitting Rivernan, some going to school.
Like everybody was quitting.
No, I'm going to stop that tape right there.
Can I just say this is such a sad statement about the state of education funding in America
that if you're young, okay, you're young, you're in your 20s, you think,
okay, how can I get to college?
You know, it might be a good way then I may be able to finance that.
What would be a good plan?
And the plan that seems reasonable to you, and not just to you, but to you,
and several dozen of your peers is, I'm going to play the piano.
Like everybody was quitting.
But we decided that we would stick out the rest of the tour.
Because it would be a while before it, because at first people were like,
this will be our last show.
This will be our last show.
Like we realized we wouldn't get the money for a while.
So we decided that we'd stick out the rest of the tour.
And then I'll quit after that.
Well, that's sporting up you to honor your commitment to River Dan.
Yeah, isn't it?
Because we were just going to call our producer the next day and tell him we were done.
Well, we also had a plan too, because we had like a break a week later of a few days.
And he's like, well, I'll just go pick up the money and Georgia, you know, like during the break.
I'll bring somebody else with me.
And he's like, first things first, we got to hire ourselves a lawyer.
Like we had the whole game plan.
You know, that's important because there's anybody who's ever been to the movies knows you have to have a game plan.
Because somebody has to go with the physical therapist or Georgia to pick up the money.
Or suddenly you're in a whole, you know, Billy Bob Thornton movie where things are going wrong and people are running off.
And you definitely want to avoid that.
Okay.
All right. This brings us to the big night.
I'm going to make you some big event music here.
Okay. Here we go.
All right. It's the big night. Megan Millions drawing Tuesday night.
A show night for them because every night is a show night.
Backstage before the show. They'll gather in a big huddle around the dance captain.
We're basically amounts to the St. Christmas Day speech.
Remember the fifth.
He kind of made this speech and said, you know, we want you to put all your energy into the show.
And maybe we can win this thing.
You mean while you're dancing, you're dancing for the lottery.
And you're focusing that dance at those little balls somewhere.
Exactly.
You're sending that dancing energy through space.
Yes.
Towards winning the lottery.
So it's sort of exciting.
It was quite exciting.
And I mean, we kind of got worked up into a frenzy almost.
Like, people were just going insane.
There's one point where I actually dance.
I dance for about 30 seconds.
And we're kind of like spinning in this circle in the middle.
And usually you're kind of like, yep, you.
But people were like screaming.
And they were yelling things like, do it for the lotto.
Do you think the audience could hear, do it for the lotto?
I'm really off, not.
I mean, you can see why they would get so worked up about this.
They had been working every day for two months.
Which actually brings us to one of the difficult things about doing theater,
especially a show like River Dance.
You have to find ways to break up the monotony of doing something like that.
Because it's not even like you have a role to throw yourself into.
And half of what I think is nonsense anyway.
So to have something else to add to the show or spice up the show,
I think helps a lot.
Because otherwise, you can just easily just be going through the motions.
And that's what I hadn't thought about that.
It's actually a job where you don't get a day off.
And every single day you do exactly the same thing.
And exactly the same thing.
Like it's not like other jobs where you're working in cash register.
And it sort of seems like you're doing the same thing.
But you're actually talking to different people and you're doing this and that.
But you're actually like literally making exactly the same motions around the stage
and uttering the same sounds out of your mouth.
It's exactly the same every day.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that's what I think is the most important thing to do.
And that means, you know, so much to me about a radio show
and what we're trying to do.
And I'm on stage and I'll be talking.
And it'll just feel like nothing, like nothing, like blah, blah,
like gum that's been chewed for way too long.
And this is the thing about doing dance as a job.
Or any kind of performing, music or comedy or acting.
It's like once you turn it into a job, right?
Once it's a job, it means that every night you have to get on stage
and take something that means so much to you, that means the world to you
and you have to repeat it until it does not mean anything at all.
So if you're somebody like Katie,
and a big professional touring production,
you have to consciously do stuff to keep up your energy when you're on stage.
Sometimes if you're on stage and like the dancers are dancing
and I'm not singing, like I'll just be like talking to people
and you know, talking to people.
Smoking a cigarette.
You get a cell phone call.
Excuse me, you got to take this.
No, but I know and I feel that in the same regard with the audience,
you know, when we perform and they think they're getting,
you're giving that all this energy and this amazing performance
and you're really just like, where are we going to go tonight?
What are we going to do?
The night of the big mega-million trying, that was definitely not a problem.
The audience was really reacting to the amount of energy that we were putting out.
Like they were going nuts.
Like they'd be breaking out into applause in the middle of numbers
and just like the amount of volume coming from the audience.
Like you could just tell.
Definitely the best show on tour.
So much energy we were giving them.
But it was for, it was because we wanted to win the lottery.
Like it wasn't because we necessarily wanted to give them a really good show.
It's because we were greedy.
Was it the actual best night of River Denshu ever we're in?
Yeah, like at the end of the show, I almost felt like I was on some kind of like crazy drug
because I was like, yes, do it for the lottery.
You know, like you've gotten yourself so worked up at that point.
At least for me, like I've never had so much energy on stage.
I'm usually a little bit lethargic and you know, just kind of,
I basically just kind of stroll around, turn my head out to the audience and sing.
So they come on stage.
It's 1015, 1020, something like that.
And it's like they are stoned.
You know, they are buzzing.
They are totally hyped up.
And the lottery's at 11 and they gathered the hotel bar and Scott, the physical therapist,
actually went to the trouble to type the numbers of all the lottery tickets out onto a page
which he duplicated and handed copies to everybody.
So that's all over the bar.
And he also had the original tickets sealed neatly in these little plastic bags in numerical order.
Such care.
And pretty much everybody was there.
A bunch of different tables and every table has a different computer printout to like read over the lottery numbers.
So we get the numbers and we're just like pouring over these sheets and we're just getting nothing.
Nothing.
Not even like anything remotely close.
Wow.
So then someone's like, I want to see the originals, like what if you made a mistake in the computer?
So we're going through the originals.
Yeah.
And I love the instinct of that though.
Like the instinct is this must be wrong.
I mean clearly we want.
Exactly.
Like there's been some sort of mistake.
You made a mistake.
But it wasn't even like there was one that was close.
And someone actually brought up that made someone actually pose the idea that maybe Scott had put the numbers in wrong.
And we had won the lottery.
He had won the lottery and was going to take all the money.
Wow.
It's amazing how worked up you can get yourself.
And especially it's like a gang mentality.
How worked up you can get each other.
And then you just crash.
Nobody even hung around she said.
That went straight to bed.
And the next day they did a lousy show.
Incredibly low energy.
And here's the disturbing thing.
The audience loved it.
Couldn't tell it all.
What you think means you know that a.
They are such solid performers and this material, the River Dance material, is so solid.
That even on their worst day.
They are pretty damn good.
Would be.
And it's kind of ugly to say but I'm just going to say it.
When you and I and a lot of people when we get together in a mass group, when we get together in an audience,
when we're sitting in the theater in an audience, we just get stupid.
And it doesn't matter if the performers try.
Katie actually sees it somewhere in between those two.
They're going to see kind of what they want to see.
They came wanting to see this thing.
They think they're getting, you're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance.
And that's what they're going to see.
Which in a way you know is just people being nice.
Assuming the performers are doing their best on stage.
You know, we want to laugh at the comedians jokes.
We want them to be funny.
It's a nice thing.
This whole experience raised some very basic questions about performing.
And in theory, I guess we were talking, we're like, you know, I guess that's how much energy you're supposed to give the audience.
You know, I feel every night.
But you can't.
Like I couldn't do.
I think after we lost the lottery, obviously, I turned to one of my friends and I was like,
I don't think I could do another lot of show.
I don't think it would be possible.
Like it's just too draining.
Because I would think it's more fun to perform if you're more hyped up, you know?
It definitely is more fun.
It kind of puts performing in perspective because I don't know, maybe some people just get themselves really hyped up and can do that every night and, you know, good for them.
But like eight shows a week, that's a lot of shows.
I don't think I could.
You know, one of the conclusions that you all could come to is that although you were dancing your hardest and trying to direct that energy towards the power ball.
That perhaps that isn't really what determines how the power ball falls.
Perhaps.
Well, or possibly you weren't dancing quite hard enough.
Yeah.
Or there was like a touring company of Chicago that really danced.
Well, I think the people who ended up winning was it was another syndicate ticket, but it was nurses.
So I don't know what they did.
They like put as much energy into changing bedpans and putting in IVs as they could.
Or saving lives.
Or saving lives.
Well, I'm going to dance troupe can't compete with that man.
You know, they get in there and they save a couple lives for the lottery.
That's true. I bet they saved a life.
Damn it.
Singer Katie Ells.
Today shows a rerun and since doing this interview, she has quit River Dance.
And now for more of her music, go to Katie Ells.com.
Back to taxation without an ebriation.
So you need help.
You're in over your head and you turn to a professional.
Often that is a good idea.
It just depends on who the professional is that you turn to.
A couple years ago, Joe Lovel and his wife had financial problems.
Tax time was coming around.
And for once he says they got the bright idea to take appropriate steps.
The first time we went to see Len, he spent an hour and a half talking about movies and musicals.
And the actors he'd had his clients way back when nobody knew their names.
F. Murray Abraham owes me, he said.
I've saved his ass for years.
Eventually my wife Kate cut in and explained that we were pretty worried
that the bulk of our income that year had been on taxed and that we hadn't paid any quarterly estimates.
Kate made most of her living then as an improv actor.
And I made most of mine as a freelance writer.
And the truth was we'd spent everything we'd earned and more.
Len looked at us incredulously.
Can one of you explain to me, he said,
how the hell ordinary people beats out raging bull?
Does that make a lick of free consent?
It's a little hard to explain now.
But at the time it seemed true.
It's a little hard to explain now. But at the time it seemed charming rather than worry some
that our accountant was more concerned about what won best picture in 1980 than about our unpaid taxes.
On the subway ride from Lensman Hatton apartment back to Brooklyn.
I went on and on about how reassuring it was to take our financial mess to a guy like him.
His whole attitude was comforting, I kept saying.
Even the fact that he was drunk while we sat there in his office.
It helped put things in perspective.
When we got home, there were three messages on our answering machine.
Each one more slurred than the one that had come before it.
It's Len, the first message started.
You kids are screwed. I'll do what I can, but this is a horror show.
You should know that.
Then a beep and it's me.
Len.
I don't know what the hell we're gonna do here.
And finally this.
Which we had to play over a few times to understand.
Kate, you're a comedian for Christ's sake.
If you go out to drinks with Steve Martin, you can write that off.
That sort of crap?
That's legit.
Kate, who had never met Steve Martin, stared at the answering machine for some time.
Eventually she looked up at me and said,
we can't ever go to Len again.
The next year, I went to Len again.
I know it doesn't make any sense.
I knew it even then.
But the thing was he saved us a ton of money.
And while he did it in a way that was not technically legal,
he made it all seem perfectly justified.
When I went to pick up our return and pause for a moment over some figures
that were utterly fictional, Len scoffed at me.
Look, he said, they want to screw you.
And I'll lie up the was to make sure you don't get screwed.
F*** him.
That's how you have to think about these things.
It was more than just the money though.
There was something, I don't know, kind of cool about having a tax preparer
who couldn't have had less regard for the government's rules.
Len did the taxes of artists and writers and actors,
and the thing he valued about them had nothing to do with their money.
At a time when a few of my friends had become suddenly inexplicably rich,
just sitting in Len's shambles of an office, looking at his albums and books,
at the paintings and sculptures he'd accepted from clients in lieu of actual payment.
It made me feel like I was a part of this creative community.
It was about 10 in the morning when I saw Len,
a week before the filing deadline,
and he was chain-smoking parliaments and drinking scotch from a stainless steel tumbler.
His desk was covered with manila folders, dozens of them.
There were coffee-ringed and cigarette stained,
his calculations scratched across them in a tiny, eligible hand.
There was a drum kit in the corner of the room piled high with even more folders.
And next to Len's desk on a metal cart was a computer that looked like it had just come out of the box.
They told me this freaking program would make it easier, Len said,
but I don't know what the hell.
He looked exhausted and distracted.
There's this kid that keeps sending over to help me out,
but everything he says just confuses me more.
He slouched in his chair and rubbed his fists and tight circles around his eyes,
then gave his head a little shake.
Ah, crappy said.
Your old lady's a kick in the pants.
She's a funny chick, I'm sorry she's not here.
He started to chuckle, but the chuckle turned into a coughing fit,
and Len hacked away for a solid half a minute,
waving me off with one hand and resting his forehead on the edge of his desk.
Eventually a tremendously thin and wrinkled woman appeared in the door.
You okay Lenny, she asked?
He lifted his head.
Yeah, good, he said.
And the blood began to slowly retreat from his face.
The woman handed him a handkerchief,
and Len pulled a wad of crumpled bills out of his breast pocket.
Go by as some stakes he said.
Wine, too, if there's anything left over.
Then he looked at me and smiled.
My ex he said.
She's helping me out of a jam here.
I nodded and held onto my folder filled with another year's bad news.
I said something about how great it was that they could still work together,
he and his ex, especially under the gun like this.
Yeah, we've been through it, he said.
And then he went on to tell me about how the two of them went on this trip
to Puerto Rico years ago, shortly after they were married.
We drank rum drinks and sat around burning our asses off all week.
It was great.
On the last day we barely had two nickels to rub together.
So this is what we did.
We went down to the pool for a few last drinks.
You know, just left all our crap in our room, right?
Then caught a cab to the airport and got on the plane with nothing but our towels and sandals.
He started laughing again hard,
and I brace myself for another coughing fit, but it didn't come.
Oh, Christ, he said those were good days.
You could do stuff like that back then.
I just sat there trying to take in what that meant.
30 years ago you could check into a hotel in Puerto Rico for a week,
then not pay and leave all your belongings in your room.
And go to the airport and your swim trunks and fly back to New York City.
While I considered this,
Len pulled himself upright and surveyed the mess on his desk.
He let out a long dramatic sigh and said,
Oh, crap.
There's no use putting it off any longer, right?
Let's have the mess.
I thought of my wife, the funny chick, back home in Brooklyn.
She was really tired of us being jackasses about money.
And I couldn't believe that she'd look kindly on this scene.
I don't know, Len, I said,
it looks like you have your hands full this year.
Why don't I take all this to someone else this time?
Just give me the freaking folder, Len said.
I started to make an excuse,
but before I could get anything out of my mouth,
Len heaved himself out of his chair and fell across the width of his desk.
He grabbed my folder with one of his hands
and I watched his face go crimson.
Come on, he said.
I need this.
I let go.
Len fell back into his chair with my folder in his hands and closed his eyes.
I knew I shouldn't leave it at this,
that I needed to stand up and maybe get a little mean and self-righteous,
until I'm to give me my folder and then walk out of there.
But I couldn't.
I'd like to believe that it was out of some sort of compassion,
that I was looking at a broken man and choosing not to break him further.
And maybe that was part of it.
But it also had something to do with my own private disgrace,
at how little money I had and at how badly I managed it.
It felt to me like it was just a facet of something larger and more troublesome,
an inability to take much of anything very seriously.
Without Len, I'd have to show that folder to someone else
who'd probably look down on me.
Len was less my accountant than the guardian of my shame.
And in that respect, I still needed his services.
So I said okay and walked out and waited for the elevator.
When it arrived, Len's ex-wife stepped off with her stakes and wine.
We smiled at each other and barrested,
and she said, he'll be better next year.
This one's a tuffy.
Len never called us to sign our return.
I assumed he'd filed for an extension,
and I called him a few times and left messages trying to find out,
though I didn't try very hard.
Several months later, we received a letter telling us that Len had died in April,
days before the filing deadline.
I called the accountant who'd sent the letter, and he told me they had taken over a bunch of Len's clients.
Our return had never been filed, he said.
My wife and I owed a lot of money.
He knew what he could to explain the circumstances,
but there were going to be some fines and penalties to pay.
I understood that, right?
I thanked him and hung up and called the IRS.
I know I should have done something I find myself admitting to a woman who repeatedly insisted
that I and no one else was responsible for my taxes.
I know I should have taken care of it differently.
And then I thought of the bulk of Len's body on top of his desk,
the watt of bills he handed to his ex-wife,
the thousands of dollars we owed that we couldn't possibly pay.
I imagined that figure circled in marker, sitting on the pile in Len's office after he died.
Can you tell me I asked her?
Because I genuinely wanted to know.
Can you tell me how someone else would have handled this?
Joe Laval, he's no longer a freelancer,
now he's the executive editor at Pineapple Street Media.
Coming up, give Garbage, be a force for justice,
that's in a minute, which I call a bubble gradeio, when our program continues.
It's this American guy from my reclass.
Every weekend our program of course would use some theme,
bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme.
Today's show seemed like a good idea at the time.
We've did act three of our show, act three, bad morning America.
But every so often it actually happens.
The idea that seems so good at the time actually is kind of.
Which brings us to Davey Rothbard's story.
Davey has been on our show before he is the creator of Found magazine,
where he publishes notes and scraps of paper and pictures,
just kind of randomly discovered by people in the street or wherever.
A couple years ago Davey was promoting a book based on the same materials on this book tour
that went to 136 cities.
And in a lot of these cities he did the local morning TV shows.
This story is about to tell it was recorded in front of a live audience.
Some of the names of cities and people have been changed.
Early on in the tour I took these gigs pretty seriously.
But by the third week of the trip I was starting to wonder who exactly if anyone was watching the local news at 7 a.m.
Also while a couple of the hosts of these shows were real cool and genuinely excited about the book,
most of them didn't get the whole idea behind it.
For some reason this only increased their chipperiness.
Those pants are so fun they'd say looking me up and down.
Glad pants, you're fun.
The one thing that kept me excited about these morning TV gigs was getting to meet and hang out with my other fellow guests.
These were local chefs with recipes of the week,
Mayoral candidates, a team of Irish dancers, a kid with the 80 pound pumpkin.
On Fox 45's Good Morning Baltimore I did my little song and dance.
Then the anchor asked me to stand her couch while she brought out the next guest, Baltimore's best mom.
An 87 year old woman named Darnelda Cole.
She sat next to me on the couch and on the far side of her is that her 50 year old son, Dice.
Darnelda had no idea why she'd been asked to come on TV.
They plotted this as a surprise.
The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he'd written.
Darnelda grew weepy.
At last the anchor declared Darnelda, Baltimore's best mom,
and produced an oversized plaque from somewhere I presented it to her,
at which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms.
I gave her a wild bear hug caught up in the moment,
a moment later the anchor woman joined our embrace.
Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette,
which an alarm producer raced over and doused with a splash of sparkling water.
Darnelda took this in and began hollering at her son and whacking him with her new plaque.
Dice, you can't smoke in here, this is TV we're making.
Put that damn thing out.
There were other high points.
And by high points, I mean low points for the stations and their guests.
In Cleveland, two city parks employees showed off an injured hawk and falcon they'd rescued.
Then the falcon got loose and started flapping about, peeing on everything.
The anchors had to forge on through the local news and sports and weather,
while the falcon continued to dive bomb them,
rashing its urine so it could drip a few drops on them with every sort T.
It was f***ing amazing.
In Chicago, a young soccer champ demonstrating his fancy moves,
booted a ball off the wall of the set, knocking it over backwards,
revealing the fact that we were not actually in the host living room,
as it might appear, but in the middle of a big dank concrete hanger.
In Phoenix, I was sandwiched on air between Cedric the entertainer and the governor of Arizona.
Cedric came on right before me, dropped a couple F-bombs, and then she briskly left,
telling his shaperone, I didn't mean to say that f***ing it just came out.
I swear to God!
I was traveling with my little brother in a van I'd bought off eBay.
Often we would do a found event in one city, take turns driving all night to the next one,
and get to the TV station parking lot around 4 a.m.
I could get a couple hours of sleep before it was time for me to unfold myself,
plump inside all rumpled and blirried, and do my thing for 90 seconds on air.
In the wee hours, security guards in the station lots would poke flashlights in our van windows and roustus.
And I'd explain that I was going to be a guest on the morning show,
and they'd disappear for 20 minutes to check into it, then come back and wake us again
to tell us the things had checked out and everything was cool.
In Seattle, after a young security guard played this game with us,
I asked him if I could come inside to use the John.
We ended up talking for a while, his name was Pico.
It turned out that the station was moving soon to brand new larger digs,
and that Pico was going to be replaced by an automatic gate with a swipe card.
Pico asked why I was going to be on the morning show, and I explained to him the found book,
all notes and letters and photos that folks around the country had found and sent into us,
little scraps that gave a glimpse into the lives of strangers.
Pico got excited.
He told me that earlier that very same night he'd been sifting through boxes
that were being tossed out before the station's big move,
and he'd found a bunch of racy notes written by the morning shows old Dauer Anchorman
to a young camera woman.
Pico and I, we got up to the dumpsters and mucked about until we found the stack of steamy pages.
You should read some of these on the show, Pico cried.
I thought this could be a terrible idea, but Pico was vehement.
This guy's a class A.
I'm telling you, he got a janitor fired for throwing out his lucky tie.
That he left on the bathroom floor, she worked here eight years.
Three hours later we were on the air.
And the Anchorman was turning to me with a grumpy look.
So tell me about this book. You collect trash, is that it?
You like trash, trashy trash.
One person's treasure is another's treasure.
He might very well have been drunk at 7.15 in the morning.
Yes sir, I said, people are finding this stuff all over the country,
all over the world really, and sending it into us.
It's amazing how powerfully you can get a sense of someone just from a little rip piece of paper
you pick up off the grass. Like this one, for example.
Seems like it's a guy who's trying to woo a girl by describing what he'd like to do with her breasts.
I held his note up high and read it out loud.
Stacy, you've got to rack on you now that's a pair.
I will f*** and f*** on them. Quit playing hard to get.
What an expression that fellow had on his face.
For a moment, his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, and each eyebrows deemed a burst
with separate looks of stunned confusion, outrage, remorse, and panic.
Then in an instant, he recovered.
A true professional. And he asked me, so did you bring any other kind of notes?
I had to admit, Pico was right. Great idea.
Back in the lobby, Pico stood with two janitors by a big TV set.
And as I walked out into the bright, blurry morning sun, they applauded and whistled
and called after me, good job, man, good job.
Davey Rothbard does its story in his book, My Heart, This Inidiot.
He's also got a new film out called Seventeen Brocks.
Act 4. Function of the Heart.
When you're a kid and you're frustrated with something in your life, your strategies are kind of limited
for how you can fix what's wrong. When Elspeth was a kid, she saw an opening.
She got an idea. And she got results. She definitely got results.
Mainly, she wanted to get closer to her dad. It was a doctor.
She says what you knew about him already was mostly, well, he worked in a hospital.
A lot of old men.
It was always a relationship where I was always just desperate for attention and for knowledge of him.
I wanted to know what he was like, what he did, what he was interested in.
And he was extremely unforthcoming on every front.
So I would ask him things like, where are you going?
And he would say, oh, when I would say, where?
And he would say, just out.
And he would turn into that kind of incredibly frustrating word game.
Which he would sort of treat it as though this was playful fun. And I just remember by the end of it, I was just enraged.
He was actually around, would he be home at night?
Yeah, he was home, but it was important to him to have quiet.
So when he'd come home, he would want quiet.
And of course, we would scream with enthusiasm that he would be there.
And he would be clearly kind of affronted with all the noise.
So I was 11 at sort of at the height of, I would say, desperation to get something from him.
And this was a thing that was set up by the Unitarian Church.
Parents would come in and they would teach a little class in their specialty.
And so my dad had volunteered, being a doctor, he was going to give a class on the function of the heart.
It was going to be on the function of the heart.
And so I, of course, decided I was going to sign up for my dad's course because I really wanted to finally figure out what he did.
So one of my good friends, Ruthie, also signed up.
So they were the two of us.
And so he had gone out and he bought this at a butcher, he'd gone to a butcher and bought this massive raw, bloody cow heart in to demonstrate the function of the heart.
So the class begins and you see this bloody heart. And automatically are you horrified to start because you thought it would be something else?
Oh no, no, I was quite riveted. No, very cool looking.
And actually genuinely interested in the topic as well.
And so he had sliced open the heart and he opened it up.
And we went through the various functions of the heart.
And then he would ask questions. And there are two of us in the class.
And even so, I raised my hand every time.
And I don't just raise my hand. I raise my hand like, it's me. I know the answer.
I have this, this is the question. This is the question. Yeah. And then he would pause.
And Ruth would be sitting there quite quietly. And then he would ask for what my question would be.
And then I would ask the question. And then he would explain and go into a long, long explanation.
And he's a very quiet man. He's a very, very quiet person, not used to speaking.
And then he would ask another question. And I would again raise my hand.
And not just raise it, but like pump it. I would pump my arm.
And so the whole class was just me dominating the classroom over Ruthie, my very dear friend,
who was the soul of discretion throughout, you know, very subtle, kind of acute reading of the room dynamic.
And then I went to the room, and I went to the room, and I went to the room, and I was like,
I'm going to go to the room, and I was like, I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room, and I'm going to go to the room,
and that was a moment when I realized I have to kind of strategize around this relationship in a way that a child shouldn't have to.
I've got to be more crafty about this in order to get through this childhood thing.
I mean, it's funny because the thing you're describing is this moment of a kid, understanding that their parents really don't have it together all the time,
and they're doing the wrong thing, and like everybody has gone through that moment with their parents at some point,
and in a way that's an amazing thing to have happened at 11.
Yeah, and I did finally get to the point where I accepted the fact that I'm never going to be the quiet person.
I'm always going to be an enthusiastic person who, if I have a great question, I will pump my arm, and I will continue to offend him.
For the duration.
And then of course, I took up the trumpet, which is the world's loudest, most vulgar instrument.
At 11, now that I think of it.
So very shortly after this, I took up the trumpet.
I thought, what is the loudest possible instrument I could choose?
So yeah, now I went right for the trumpet.
Elspeth Carruthers, executive director for the new-bower Collegium for society and culture at the University of Chicago.
Since the first broadcast of this story, Elspeth's dad has died, he was 83.
The program was produced today by Emier, Wiri and myself, the Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Sarah Cainting, Christopher Sretala, and Lisa Pollock.
Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder, production off from Alvin Melleth and Matt Petrini, music album Jessica Hopper,
additional help with today's rerun from Michael Comete, Catherine Romando, and Safia Riddle.
Special thanks to today to Robert Andrew Powell, Peter Rothbart, Jeff Cass, and Ashley Lewis.
Paul Bacon, the policeman who I talked to at the beginning of the program, he is no longer a policeman.
He's written a book about his experience as a cop. It's called Bad Cop, New York's least likely police officer, tells all.
Information at PaulBacon.com.
Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 800 programs for absolutely free.
This American Life is distributed to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
Special thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Melatilla, who swears that thing he said about my mom,
he swears as dollomist understanding.
I didn't mean to say that it just came out. I swear to God.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. Back next week, with more stories of this American Life.
