On a rainy September morning in 1950, jazz pianist Hazel Scott stood in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee hoping to clear her name.

The publication “Red Channels” had accused Scott — along with 150 other cultural figures — of communist sympathies. Failure to respond would be seen as an admission of guilt. But her appearance at HUAC had a greater purpose than personal exoneration. She believed she had a responsibility to stem the tide of paranoia that gained momentum by the day.

She told the committee’s members, “Mudslinging and unverified charges are just the wrong ways to handle this problem.” With the same poise she brought to the stage as a musician, she testified that “what happens to me happens to others and it is part of a pattern which could spread and really damage our national morale and security.”

Chin up, shoulders back, she warned against “profiteers in patriotism who seek easy money and notoriety at the expense of the nation’s security and peace of mind,” and that continuing down this road would transform America’s artists from a “loyal troupe of patriotic, energetic citizens ready to give their all for America” into a “wronged group whose creative value has been destroyed.”

Speaking with a voice that simultaneously conveyed clarity and nuance, strength and warmth, she knew what she was doing. She had been rehearsing for this moment her entire life.

* * *

Born in Trinidad, Scott was raised on music. Her whole family played and her mother, Alma, an aspiring concert pianist, taught music to help make ends meet. Unbeknownst to her family, Hazel Scott absorbed everything she heard until one day she woke her grandmother from a nap by playing a familiar hymn on the piano, two-handed and with perfect pitch. Her grandmother woke thinking, not wrongly, that she was witnessing a miracle.

Scott’s arc was fixed in the stars from that moment on. At three years old, she played parties, churches, and gatherings. But economic opportunity was hard to come by, and when her parents’ marriage fell apart in 1923, her mother decided she and Scott would emigrate to New York City.

Scott grocery shopped, prepared meals, and handled the household’s money. When word got around that, in her house, a child paid the bills, a gang of white teenagers broke in and demanded money. Scott refused to give them any. They beat her black and blue, and Scott still refused to turn over the cash. Finally, as police sirens grew nearer, the boys ran off with her blood on their hands.

Another time, Scott was playing near the trench being dug for the subway line that would become the A train when, according to Scott, a white girl from the neighborhood who she had been playing with told her to “Turn around so that I can brush you off and send you to school.” When she did, the girl pushed her into the trench.

The workmen who rescued Scott had the unmistakable look of “fear and guilt” in their eyes. “They, too, were white,” Scott later wrote in her journal. “They had witnessed the horrible act. They were involved and they resented it and me.”

Scott resolved never to be so naïve again — nor did she allow the incident to dictate her life.

She kept playing piano, kept stunning audiences, and impressed one person in particular. The story sounds more like legend than fact, but several sources, including Scott’s journal and the accounts of the parties involved, confirm it.

German-born, wearing a meticulous goatee and a pocket watch, and steeped in the traditions of European classical music, Juilliard founder Frank Damrosch was the very model of high culture in New York City. As such, his blood began to boil when he heard someone in the audition room improvising over Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Major.” Marching down the hall to confront the blasphemer brash enough to attempt such a thing, he heard the ninths being substituted with the sixths. It was sacrilege, he thought, until he saw who was playing.

Since eight-year-old Scott’s hands couldn’t reach the piece’s intervals, she played the sixths to make it sound the way she intuitively knew it should. No one taught her how to do this. She wrote: “I was only reaching for the closest thing that sounded like it, not even knowing what a sixth was at that age.”

When she finished, the auditions director whispered, “I am in the presence of a genius.” Damrosch agreed and Scott was admitted to Juilliard. But her real education wasn’t in the classroom. It was in her living room.

In New York, Alma quickly became a successful jazz musician and befriended some of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest stars in the process. In turn, they shone on young Hazel. She sat beside ragtime legend Fats Waller — whom she called “Uncle” — at the piano, while his hands strode syncopated rhythms across the keys. Piano legend Art Tatum became a close family friend and mentor to Hazel, advising her to dive deep into the blues.

Meanwhile Hazel’s mother, Alma, bought a brownstone on West 118th Street, opened a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, and taught herself to play tenor sax. Her circle widened. Lester Young and Billie Holiday came over after hours. Young and Alma traded turns playing sax in the living room when she and Holiday weren’t gossiping in the kitchen. Holiday became like a big sister to Hazel, taking her under her wing as Hazel ventured out into the life of a working musician. In an article she wrote for Ebony, Hazel Scott recalled how, once, when “wondering where I was going and what I was doing, I began to cry.” Holiday then “stopped, gripped my arm and dragged me to a back room.” She told Scott, “Never let them see you cry” — a piece of advice Scott followed forever.

While still a child, Hazel Scott played piano for dance classes and churches. At 13 she joined her mother’s jazz band, Alma Long Scott’s American Creolians. When she outgrew the gig, her mother secured her a spot playing piano after the Count Basie Orchestra at the posh Roseland Ballroom. Watching Basie bring the house down, Hazel turned to Alma and said, “You expect me to follow this?” Stage fright or no, she played what would become her signature boogie-woogie style. The crowd adored her. From there, she took flight.

* * *

At the time, the majority of jazz clubs were segregated. Even the famed Cotton Club in Harlem, where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway headlined, had a “colored” section. Blacks and whites almost never shared the stage. But in 1938, a shoe clerk from Trenton, New Jersey, opened a different kind of club.

Cafe Society was “the wrong place for the Right people” according to founder Barney Josephson. He once said, “I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front.” It was there that Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” for the first time and became a legend, and it was there that Holiday got Scott her first steady engagement.

When Holiday canceled a standing engagement three weeks early, she insisted Scott take her place. By the end of the run, Scott was Cafe Society’s new headliner. Only 19 years old, she inherited the bench previously occupied by piano greats like Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. But as The New York Amsterdam News reported, “Hazel more than holds her own, and demonstrates a style all her own.”

As it turned out, not only was Scott a brilliant pianist, she also had a hell of a voice: deep and sonorous, comforting yet provocative — the sort of singing style that makes you want to embrace the sublime melancholy that is love and life and whiskey on a midwinter’s night.

And, she was beautiful. She wore floor-length ball gowns on stage and gazed out into the audience with almond-shaped eyes that seemed to communicate a deep knowledge of everyone they fixed upon. Like watching a painter paint or a sculptor sculpt, when Scott sang, you saw the song traveling through her, taking shape before emerging from her lips. And when she played her boogie-woogie, she grinned ear to ear, looking like self-possessed joy manifested. She was, in a word, irresistible.

Audiences flocked to see her. Fan mail flooded in. Josephson decided to open a second Cafe Society location, uptown for a swankier audience, with Scott as the marquee performer. New York’s finest showed up in droves, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who dropped in one evening for “some entertainment and relaxation,” as one reporter wrote. After the show, Mrs. Roosevelt asked Scott to join her for a late supper. Because she had already changed from her evening wear to streetwear, Scott begged off the invitation.

“I’m inviting you,” said Mrs. Roosevelt, “not your clothes.”

How could Scott refuse?

She was the reigning queen of jazz, a friend to some of the most famous names in the country, and all at just 22 years old.

Hazel Scott had conquered New York. Hollywood was next. But in a motion picture industry where people of color were usually restricted to playing maids, cannibals, or buffoons, was there room for Hazel Scott?

* * *

Nine black soldiers march down a hill to the sound of piano and drum. They are upright, dignified, ready to fight and die. Their sweethearts line the road, waving handkerchiefs and bidding their fellows goodbye. It’s 1943, and the question on the backlot is, “What should these women wear?”

The scene is from “The Heat’s On,” a patriotic 1943 musical. Scott is performing a rah-rah number called “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” In conceptualizing the scene, the director intended to dress the women in what Hollywood assumed all black women would wear: dirty aprons.

Scott wasn’t having it. Her contract always included final script and wardrobe approval, ensuring she’d never play or look the fool. She told the choreographer she wanted that protection extended to the extras who shared her stage.

“What do you care?” said the choreographer. “You’re beautifully dressed.”

“The next thing I knew,” wrote Scott, “we were screaming at each other and all work had stopped. … I insisted that no scene in which I was involved would display Black women wearing dirty aprons to send their men to die for their country.”

Neither side relented, so Scott went on strike. For three days, the studio begged and pleaded for her to return to set. But Scott would not be moved. The more the clock ticked, the more money it cost, a fact of which Scott was well aware. Finally, the studio caved to Scott’s demands, and the women appear in the film wearing particularly fetching floral dresses.

Though she won the battle, Columbia Pictures was far from conceding the war. In the minds of producers who were used to dictating to African-Americans — particularly to African-American women — Scott’s public victory was more than they could stand. In the next two years, she was given small parts in two more second-rate movies. After that, she was finished with motion pictures.

“I had antagonized the head of Columbia Pictures,” wrote Scott in her journal. “In short, committed suicide!”

She packed her bags and headed back east — where love was about to sweep her off her feet.

* * *

Scott was once again wowing crowds at Cafe Society, when she caught the eye of a young politician. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., soon to become New York’s first African-American congressman, pulled Josephson aside, and asked for an introduction.

“Are you really interested in Hazel,” said Josephson, who considered Scott a daughter, “or are you just screwing around?”

Powell assured him of his sincerity, Josephson made the introduction, and their romance caught fire — despite the fact that Powell had been married to nightclub singer Isabel Washington since 1933. For the next year, Scott and Powell pursued their love with reckless abandon, damned be the consequences. In 1945, he married Scott 11 short days after his divorce was finalized.

Her career in Hollywood dead, Scott started touring, winning rave reviews at concerts across the country and fighting discrimination throughout. In November 1948, she refused to play a sold-out show at the University of Texas because the audience was segregated, despite the anti-Jim Crow clause in her contract, which allowed her to cancel the booking without forfeiting her pay. And in February 1949, she sued a restaurant in the tiny town of Pasco, Washington, after she and a companion were refused service because, as the proprietor put it, “We don’t serve coloreds.” Scott won $250 in the suit, and donated the proceeds to the NAACP.

Scott was making around $75,000 a year during this time — making her one of the most successful musicians in the country, black or white. After five years’ continued success, Hollywood could ignore her no longer. In 1950, she came to break the color barrier on the small screen.

* * *

Scott sits at the keys of a grand piano in an elegant white gown. With a backdrop of Manhattan behind her, she looks like the urban empress she had become.

“Hello,” she coos, “I’m Hazel Scott.”

Broadcast on the DuMont Network, The Hazel Scott Show was the first television program to have an African-American woman as its solo host. Three nights a week, Scott played her signature mix of boogie-woogie, classics, and jazz standards in living rooms across America. It was a landmark moment. As a passionate civil and women’s rights activist, the show symbolized a triumphant accomplishment. As a career musician, her program took her to professional heights known by few, assuring her place in the pantheon of America’s greatest performers. To be sure, Scott had arrived at the success she had sought since playing that first simple tune in Trinidad as a three-year-old.

And then, just like that, it all came tumbling down. “Red Channels.” HUAC. Another star tainted by a whiff of Communism.

When she stood in front of HUAC, it only made sense to speak truth to power, to stand up for what she believed in. She believed herself the embodiment of the American dream, and she spoke in its defense. In an unwavering voice she told the committee, “the entertainment profession has done its part for America, in war and peace, and it must not be dragged through the mud of hysterical name-calling at a moment when we need to enrich and project the American way of life to the world. There is no better, more effective, more easily understood medium for telling and selling the American way of life than our entertainers, creative artists, and performers, for they are the real voice of America.”

But they did not hear her, did not believe her. And she in turn underestimated the power of fear, never having bent to it herself.

One week after her testimony, DuMont canceled The Hazel Scott Show. Concert appearances became few and far between. Even nightclub gigs were hard to come by.

Exhausted and unraveled, Scott went to Paris on what was to be a three-week vacation. Her sojourn extended to three years. To her, Paris became “the magic of looking up the Champs-Élysées from the Place de la Concorde and being warmed by the merry madness of the lights.” It was also “a much needed rest, not from work, but from racial tension.”

She played across Europe and in North Africa and the Middle East. Crowds still loved her, still swooned over her swinging classics. But it was not the same. Her spotlight had dimmed, and would never again shine on her the way it had in her halcyon days.

Eventually, Scott returned to America and slipped further into obscurity. In 1981 she passed away at 61 from cancer. Her albums are hard to come by now and her name never appears where it should, beside Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and others who we think of when we think of jazz. But for a while, she led them all, until a country twisted by fear pushed her past the point from which even she, the force of nature that she was, could return.

The post This Black Woman Was Once the Biggest Star in Jazz. Here’s Why You’ve Never Heard of Her. appeared first on Narratively.

A week before Christmas in 1999, two cheery Child Life Specialists wearing smiles and ID badges knocked on my hospital room door.

“Hi! I’m Karen! Check this out,” said the enthusiastic Shelly Long doppelganger, as they wheeled in a large computer station with a webcam and a bright, colorful sticker that read: “Starbright World.”

My neighbor, a nine-year-old girl named Kayla, poked her head into my room. “It’s awesome!” she shouted, motioning to the computer before riding off on her IV pole like a scooter into the sunset.

Child Lifers spent the afternoon delivering the clunky unit room to room, each patient getting around 30 minutes of playtime. I was used to playing bedside Nintendo 64, but this was new. They beamed like they were unveiling a gift. It turns out, they were.

I was 12 when the pain started. It came without warning, gripping my gut like a gunshot wound. At first it came and went, but by the time I was 13 it was constant. After a year and a half of misdiagnoses and unsuccessful treatments, my doctors told me I was suffering from a rare disease called porphyria. Characterized by an extreme sensitivity to light, porphyria is one possible origin of vampire folklore. The disease attacked my nervous system and rendered my legs, stomach, and left arm useless. I lived in literal darkness; the light actually hurt. I was barely conscious for a year.

After proper treatments and years in the hospital – at times on death’s door – I finally turned a corner. I was paralyzed and sick, but more stable, and awake. I was grateful to have my mind. I escaped there. I lived there. Things had been so bad, hoping for more – more recovery, more of life – felt greedy. But then came Starbright World.

The concept was a “virtual playground” where sick kids could explore a vast and ever-growing 3D landscape, complete with secret caves and beaches and the ability to build your own worlds. I logged on and chose my avatar, a glittery blue dolphin. The landing page was a galaxy-themed starscape where little globes, or “worlds,” floated around in constant motion. Feel like flying through the clouds with your friends? “Sky Zone” it is! Have an IV but in the mood for bowling? Why the hell not! There were game rooms and racetracks, holiday events, writing contests, film festivals, celebrity guests, and doctors who explained the ins and outs of common medical procedures.

It was a place where imagination and reality met and the walls disappeared. The lively “chat world” was the heart of the home and filled with kids who were fluent in sick kid speak. We made up stupid names for our ailments. Hirschsprung’s was awesomesprung’s. Porphyria was porphy. My port-a-cath was called Phyllis. That sort of thing. And it was all secure and closely monitored, so you didn’t have to worry about the fellow Kansas-based 13-year-old you were chatting with actually being a 47-year-old creep.

Being seriously ill, especially as a child, is terribly isolating. Everything is a reminder that you’re different, that you’re “abnormal.” Television commercials were mostly about food I couldn’t eat. Visits from school friends highlighted what I was missing; reminders of a life I used to live, and love. Kids relate to one another through shared interests and experiences. How do you explain your pain to someone who hasn’t felt it? The experiences and medical language that accompany chronic illness can feel like a language barrier. When Starbright World entered my life, I suddenly had access to an entire community of kids who got it. It was a virtual speakeasy for kids who all knew the passcode.

Like any space where teenagers congregate, there were couples, marriages, even. We had a prom in Starbright World. My date and dear friend, Adam, lives in Maryland. He has a serious condition that caused strokes when he was a baby and has made surgery a regular part of life. We all had something. On Starbright prom night, Adam had a corsage delivered to my house. We video chatted and spent hours in the community chat room with our friends – celebrating, being kids. We watched movies together from across the country in the community virtual movie theater. I spent so much time on group calls my parents had to get me my own telephone line.

* * *

It was two a.m. I couldn’t sleep. My nerve-damaged arm lay swollen and discolored on an elevated foam cradle. It throbbed like it had its own heartbeat. I listened to the familiar beep, beep, woosh of my feeding pump and oxygen machine. The rest of the house was dark and quiet, the only light emanating from my computer. I was home, for now, in between hospital stays. For my 17th birthday, my parents and hospital staff surprised me with an instillation disc that allowed me to access Starbright World from home. I spent every waking moment online. The place was pretty empty that night, but then a notification popped up that a fellow night owl was online. I sent a message and immediately received a reply.

She was in the hospital in Denver. She was 14. Her name was Molly. She was born with an especially rare and severe form of Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital disorder affecting the large intestine. She’d never known life without G-tubes, surgeries, and hospital stays. We chatted for hours about nurses who didn’t swab our central lines properly, potentially leading to infection. “Been there,” I said. We bonded over misdiagnoses and arrogant doctors who’d nearly killed us. We’d both experienced medical trauma and talking through it, even laughing about it, was our coping mechanism. We’d both learned to speak up and be our own advocates in hospital settings. We took control and took no shit. We talked about movies. We both loved film. We were both writers. The first time we talked, it felt familiar. I got the sense that we were picking up where we’d left off, like the universe was reintroducing us. We talked for hours, every day, from then on. She sent me pictures of her horse and her dogs. She recorded an HGTV-style tour of her house and sent it to me in the mail. She made me Conan O’Brien and George Clooney collages.

Six months and hours of video chats, phone calls, all-night chat room marathons, and instant messages later, we made plans for Molly to travel to Kansas and spend the week. Our moms arranged the details and made sure Molly’s medical needs were clear. She traveled with a portable feeding pump. The jump from online to in-person friendship was seamless. My bedroom was on the first floor and formerly served as my dad’s office before I’d gotten sick. I moved downstairs when I became too weak to walk. It was essentially a makeshift hospital room complete with feeding pumps, IV poles, dressing change kits, and a giant oxygen machine. It was kept dark to protect me from various forms of light exposure. A lot of kids would have been freaked out by the setup; it was a lot to take in. Not Molly. She walked in like she’d been there a hundred times. If Reese Witherspoon and Lindsay Lohan à la “The Parent Trap” had an adorable tiny human baby, it would be Molly.

She sat in a chair at my bedside, at first. We talked about my wall-to-wall movie posters that my incredibly patient and accommodating homecare nurse had climbed up on a ladder to hang. We laughed and took pictures together. After a few minutes, she hopped into my hospital bed and we spent the week making crank calls, watching scary movies, and talking about boys. My left arm was useless so I got really good at playing video games one-handed. We’d play online and piss off boys – and men – who didn’t like getting their butts kicked by a couple of girls. We pulled all-nighters. She didn’t care about my tubes or medicines or pumps. She had them, too. I never felt bedridden when we were together.

* * *

After six years in bed, my medicines started to work and my nervous system slowly but surely began its long and uncharted recovery. My home-care nurse drove me to intensive physical and occupational therapy sessions and I learned to walk, eat, and use my arm again. My main goal, though, beyond regaining function, was to move to Los Angeles and live on my own. My parents had one rule: “You can move to Los Angeles when you can stand.” They needed to know that I could at least reach a phone, or my medicine, in the event of an emergency. So I learned to sit up, roll over, and get myself off the ground if I fell. Little by little, my body came back to life.

My stomach had been paralyzed for years, I was fed through a J-Tube – a special kind of feeding tube that bypasses the stomach completely. Molly was there for my first bite of food in five years. My parents had recently acquired a wheelchair-accessible van, and we all piled in and drove to J. Alexander’s. My dad lifted me into a booth next to Molly and we ate pie together. In that moment, with that freaking magical, graham cracker-y key lime pie, I could have died happy. It will always be the best bite of food I’ve ever tasted.

I was still sensitive to the sun and suffered terrible pain in my stomach and extremities regularly. I used my wheelchair to get around most of the time. The tendons in my legs required Botox injections. My body felt like a rubber band stretched to its limit. My bones and joints were a mess. I could stand, though, and, for the first time in over four years, I could even walk short distances. The extent of my recovery was bonkers to my doctors, nurses, and everyone who knew I’d essentially been a large infant dependent on my parents and caregivers for everything just a year and a half prior.

I always knew I was going to make movies. Before I got sick, I would practice my terrible British accents in front of the mirror and record it, play it back, and try again. I acted out scenes from my favorite movies and wrote alternate endings. When I got sick, and eventually became bedridden, movies were an escape. My nurses brought me every movie from the communal Peds Unit stash, and they ran to Blockbuster for me on the regular. Molly, Starbright World, and its community moderators confirmed my cinematic passions. Moderators were mostly based in Los Angeles and many worked in the film industry. I had a network of support waiting for me when I was finally well enough to head west.

Eventually, after I’d achieved “can stand” status, my brave-as-hell-family loaded up a U-Haul trailer and schlepped my crazy ass, and my golden retriever, to Los Angeles.

“You survived everything else,” my dad told me. “We have to let you go.”

We stopped frequently, at roadside eateries and gas stations, hoping for a few minutes’ respite from the sun. My stomach hurt. A lot. So much so that I wondered if I was really ready to be on my own. But I blocked out the doubt and focused on the feeling that I had to get to Los Angeles. I’d already missed so much, and life was waiting for me.

I knew how to change a port dressing and set up an IV pump like it was nothing, but keeping house and paying utility bills was foreign to me. Learning to drive in Los Angeles was some next level “Jesus, Take the Wheel” shit. One night, I went the wrong direction on the freeway. I had flashes of “Planes, Trains, & Automobiles.” I called my mom sobbing. I dropped my iPod once and rear-ended two FBI agents on Sunset Boulevard. All I could do was laugh, cry, and ramble like a lunatic about my love for Mulder and Scully. Navigating the adult world was a crash course in what I’d missed.

Sometimes I pinched myself because it was all so weird. Good, but weird. I had gotten used to living inside a body that struggled to function. I was at its mercy, and the mercy of those around me. If I wanted something, it was brought to me. If my bed linens needed to be changed, a complicated, multi-step process ensued. I was pre-medicated with pain meds because the process was excruciating. My dad would lift my body; my mom would carry my arm while it rested on its foam support. I was placed in a chair and a nurse held my head up so I didn’t flop like a baby. Everything was difficult. The idea that I could now do whatever I wanted to do with my body was a novelty. It didn’t feel real, and I began experiencing panic attacks for the first time since before I’d gotten sick. I think the flood of new physical and mental sensations were just a lot to process.

I attended film school. I was so pale due to my problems with the sun that classmates used me to white balance a camera. Rude, but well played. I looked like one of those translucent fish that dwell in the deepest part of the sea. We saved money on dolly rentals because I could sit in my chair and hold the camera. Silver linings galore.

Molly visited often and later moved nearby. We tooled around town in my Jeep – dubbed “Dame Maggie Smith the Jeep” – filled to the brim with medical equipment that was probably unsafe for the road. A rogue IV pole in the backseat nearly impaled us with each tap of the break. We were a sight. Two pasty chicks (porphyria + transplant meds = limited sun exposure) in giant sunglasses, blasting the “Newsies” soundtrack with the windows down and singing like fools.

I had a big surgery in 2009 and she came up to the hospital to hang out. She walked around the unit with me while I did slow laps with my service dog, Phoebe; a bulky walker; and physical therapist. Molly never rushed me along. She never walked ahead of me. She walked with me, beside me. We went to see “Happy Go Lucky” a couple of weeks later. We hated it, but I loved that afternoon. I was still slow, unable to bear any weight on my right leg, poking along like a disabled snail. And she was right beside me, holding my arm, guiding my walker, one step at a time. She was tiny. But she had a presence that was as big and strong as a lion. She was protective of those she loved. Whenever anyone messed with us, whether it was an ignorant business owner who gave me flak about Phoebe, or a creepy guy who stared too long, she handled it without a moment’s hesitation.

She lived a lot of life during her time in Los Angeles. She got to be a 20-year-old for a while. She had fun. She attended college and went to Paris and she lived by the sea. She met a guy. The guy. His name was Corey, and they loved each other deeply.

And then a decade after my bedridden days, Molly and I changed places: My health was stable, and she was very sick. She’d already received a small bowel transplant, and later, a kidney donated by her mom. Things were going downhill fast, though, and she had to leave California. Her transplant hospital in Omaha became home. She needed a four-organ transplant to survive. It was a long shot. Still, we hoped.

* * *

Molly had so many close calls over the years. She was born with her illness. Going to the hospital was as normal to her as going to school for most kids. Accessing her central line was second nature, preparing medication and IV pumps and dressing changes were routine. And as much as it was a part of her, it didn’t define her. She’d walk five dogs in the summer heat, do a shift at her job as a receptionist in a vet clinic, take care of her own animals, then hook up to meds and IV fluids to try and maintain some semblance of health and normalcy. She was like one of those circus ladies swinging from the rafters, diving through fiery hoops, always nailing the landing. I took it for granted that she would be okay. Surviving was just what she did.

This time was going to be different. Her mom told me I needed to get to Omaha to be with her as quickly as possible. “I never want either of you girls to be blindsided,” she always said.

I arrived at the hospital and talked with Corey and Molly’s family. None of us could quite believe we were losing her. Later, I climbed into her hospital bed. I held her hand and rested my head on her shoulder and I talked about the time we jumped the curb in Santa Monica in the middle of the night because we wanted to go to the beach. We ended up straddling the median before finally freeing ourselves. An actual entrance to the beach was like five feet away, but we didn’t notice that until we had already become criminals. And the time we went sledding attached to ATVs, and the time we visited the haunted hotel where Stephen King wrote The Shining and I was convinced for a year that I had photographic evidence of a ghost, only to realize it was my thumb. And the time we crammed four dogs into the Focus and the red dog was definitely trying to get us to careen off a cliff. And the time, and the time, and the time…

I didn’t see the tubes or the medicines or the pumps. Just her. Just my best friend in the whole world.

She’d wanted to wait until she was better and out of the hospital to marry Corey. Thinking of the future gave her something to focus on and look forward to. It became clear, though, that time was running short.

Ultimately, she had the perfect wedding. Her nurses and doctors transformed a hospital conference room into a wedding chapel with tulle decorations and flower petals on the floor. A beautifully handwritten banner with “Molly & Corey” in cursive hung on the wall. Her beloved doctor gave her his grandmother’s pearls to wear on her wedding day and we all formed a procession line down the transplant unit hallway. She looked beautiful. I was her maid of honor. I stood beside her wheelchair like she’d done for me so many times before and listened as two 24-year-old kids showed everyone in the room exactly what love really meant. It was so sad and so special. She hadn’t been allowed to eat in months. On her wedding day, though, she had red velvet cake, her favorite.

She died a few days later.

When I got married in 2016, I framed a photo of us and reserved a seat for her front and center. Several former Starbright World friends were there. A band of misfit kids with superpower strength, and the adults who guided them through the labyrinth of chronically ill adolescence, had formed a family.

Looking back at my teen years, I recall so much joy. So much laughter, and adventure, and camaraderie. Instead of “the bedridden years,” they were the years of firsts, of lasts, of Halloween costume contests, online film festivals and April Fool’s pranks, prom and late-night movies and soul-bearing conversations that filled my heart and mind with peace. They were the years of pure love. Because of a virtual world of color and communication, imagination and understanding – because of them – I was free.

The post Life Inside a Digital World for Chronically Ill Teens appeared first on Narratively.

Shelbie Dimond drops her high-waisted jeans, shirt, bra, and thong into a pile beside her camera kit. She looks over Hollywood’s rooftops from a large patio. Strangers amble out of the house, smoking cigarettes or chasing their dogs.

“Um, can you get naked?” she asks Kevin, who’s given her access to this place. She’s just met him in person, though they’ve followed each other on Instagram for a while.

“You want me to get naked right now?” he asks.

“Yeah, we’re going to make this quick. I’m cold.”

Kevin’s girlfriend presses a button on her laptop, and “Take My Breath Away” begins playing.

“O.K., you don’t have to be naked yet,” Dimond says.

Kevin clambers across a mattress set in the corner of the space, onto the balcony ledge.

“Is this going to take a while?” he asks.

“Yeah. It’s film,” says Dimond. “And I’m the photographer and the model.”

Dimond began taking pictures as a child, but only forayed into nude self-portraiture a few years ago. Using vintage cameras, Dimond makes vulnerable, emotionally expressive photographs that have been shown as far away as Denmark, in both solo galleries and alongside the work of Sally Mann and other photographers.

Dimond’s expectations for today’s shoot match those she’s had for any other: She’s trying out the space, seeing what comes from it.

Ordering Kevin off the wall, Dimond covers his face with a mask, bobby-pinning it to his hair. It’s clownish, with a blunt red line for a mouth, one blue-shadowed eyehole, and a blue splotch where the other eye would be.

She winds the timer on her camera. Her skin raises with goose bumps as her blonde, pin-up-girl hair blows up off her shoulders like a cape. A light smell of sweat drifts from her body as she quickly kneels on the wall beside Kevin.

Her Polaroid spits out the photo and Dimond lays it on the mattress to develop.

The scene: A small, masked man leans away from a thin, pale woman, gazing up at her. Her fingertips rest on his shoulder; her bent knee is close to his chest. At his eye level, her nipples stand against the wind. The roof above and the wall below frame their bodies, blue sky, a pair of thick cypresses. The mask covering Kevin’s face is unsettling, evoking the hard-edged silence at the start of desert-set horror films. He’s clothed, and this adds a menacing quality to the photo, since Dimond is vulnerable, bare and youthful.

Far from this freewheeling corner of Los Angeles is Dimond’s rural home in Delton, Michigan. Born into a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Dimond chafed against religious constrictions early. Her photography led her out of Delton, beyond the close circle of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents united by belief in Jehovah. Living in line with her desires and ambitions meant being shunned by most of the people she loved.

She’s been trying ever since to find replacements. One idea she has would visually fill in this loss through a photo series made up of different takes on her biological family’s portrait.

People would stand in for her original family members, dressed as her family was, and she’d create a host of different versions of the same shot, imagining what could take the place of the home she can’t get back.

* * *

After the shoot, Dimond slips on a light-green silk negligée and matching short-sleeved bed-jacket, both hand-sewn during the 1930s. She taps glitter around her eyes and smooths some through her hair before applying a fresh coat of hairspray from a gold can. She’s got a party to get to.

Dimond loads her belongings into her Volkswagen SUV. The narrow road requires frequent turns as it winds down the hill, but the tight quarters don’t temper Dimond’s somewhat aggressive driving. She eats from a plastic container of chocolate-covered almonds and tells me about life before Los Angeles, before photography, before atheism.

Dimond’s parents, who didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, married young, as is usual for Jehovah’s Witnesses. They settled near Long Lake, in Delton, close to family, and Dimond’s early life revolved around the water.

“Every year, there would be a turtle that laid [its] eggs too late in the summer,” she says. “I would go and harvest the eggs and hatch them over the winter and then release them in the spring.”

Dimond’s dad sporadically pulled her out of bed to their rowboat to watch meteor showers or the northern lights. Together, they planted a sunflower that outgrew her and gathered pieces of the old railroad that had run nearby. He taught her to use an analog camera, the Canon A-1. Taking it everywhere, Dimond shot the icicles hanging from her roof, her black cat, and a wall full of vintage hats at a store in Grand Rapids.

“My childhood was awesome,” she says, “outside of the Jehovah’s Witness stuff.”

Meetings at the “Kingdom Hall” — what Jehovah’s Witnesses call their houses of worship — were dry gatherings. “There’s only one Bible, so you go over the same stuff a lot,” Dimond says. At school, Dimond was prohibited from celebrating classmates’ birthdays and required to leave the classroom during lessons on evolution.

These restrictions could be borne, mostly, but Dimond found ways to occasionally subvert the rules. She often got away with sneaking out of her house, but one winter day she and a friend weren’t so lucky. They thought their tracks would be covered over by fresh snow, but the snow didn’t come soon enough. The girls got caught. Within days, Dimond was called to confess at a “judicial meeting” with the church elders and her father, who had to be in the room since Dimond was only 14.

The meeting was held at the Kingdom Hall in a small room with purple accents. The group sat at a long, blonde-wood table — Dimond, alone, across from the three elders, her father at the head. “He was visibly so uncomfortable,” Dimond says. As though on trial, she had to give detailed answers to the elders’ questions: Yes, she’d kissed a boy. Yes, she’d let him touch her vagina. And, yes, she’d smoked marijuana. Following Dimond’s confession, the men read scriptures, prayed with Dimond and her dad, and sent them out of the room.

Kids are supposed to look up to the elders. But compelling “a little girl, who barely understands anything about her body,” to talk about these sexual things is misogynistic and degrading, said Jennifer Boedecker, a lifelong friend of Dimond’s. Part of the elders’ official role is to decide whether confessors are suitably remorseful. “Because I got caught,” Dimond says, “they decided I wasn’t actually repentant enough.”

Dimond’s punishment was public. The next church meeting covered teenage fornication and marijuana use. Dimond listened, mortified, hotly aware that this was all about her. Still, more embarrassment was to come. After the talk, an announcement: Sister Shelbie Dimond was reproved from the congregation. A reproved congregant can’t comment at the meetings or go out in service. “Everyone turned around and looked at me,” Dimond says. Her public shaming was complete.

Dimond’s problems at home grew more frequent. She continued sneaking out, skinny-dipping, dating, smoking weed. She was pulled out of high school several times. From 2009 to 2010, instead of graduating, she got her GED and then attended community college, where she took her first photography course. Another student in the class, Kahyl Stevenson, said he was “a bit inspired and a little jealous” of Dimond’s precocity with the camera. While her classmates were imitating magazines, or just trying to make “cool pictures,” Stevenson said, Dimond was doing something different, something “heavy, emotionally.”

Around the time of her 18th birthday, Dimond visited her cousin in California and began to date a Jehovah’s Witness she met there. Dimond’s mother convinced her she should be baptized, saying that, with a move to California and marriage being discussed, people would wonder why she hadn’t made the choice to officially join the fold. So, against her better judgment, Dimond went along. Getting baptized was something to celebrate, and Dimond, wearing a yellow dress, enjoyed being the center of attention that day. Now, she’s unsure why she was allowed to take this step. “I was not a good Jehovah’s Witness,” she says. If a person doesn’t formally join the congregation, they can’t be kicked out. They needn’t be shunned by those still part of the community. With time, she has come to view the choice to get baptized as the worst decision of her life.

Right after her baptism, Dimond flew to San Francisco. It was her time; she was so excited to be leaving. But her plans quickly unraveled. Jehovah’s Witness friends would only allow her to live with them if she went door-to-door preaching 50 hours per month. Instead, she lived in her car in the Sausalito Ferry Building parking lot. This couldn’t last. She was barely an adult, terrified of being destroyed in Armageddon for her sins, and quickly running out of options. An acquaintance introduced her to Oscar Edwards, who was living on a boat docked nearby. Out of necessity and attraction, she moved in with him.

The two became inseparable, collaborating on photo projects, riding their rusty 1940s bike around the Bay Area, and hiking through Muir Woods while tripping on mushrooms.

Dimond struggled perpetually with guilt over breaking the rules of her religion. But this wasn’t just about faith. Dimond couldn’t visit her family while living “in sin.” Had she tried, she likely would’ve been officially cut off from the congregation and unable to talk to her parents. So, Dimond and Edwards decided to get married. She claimed she didn’t want a big wedding, knowing few people from her past would come, and so their invitation list stayed short. Still, she was hurt when the day came — October 22, 2012 — and just two relatives besides her parents showed up.

“I cried the next day,” Dimond says.

The wedding wasn’t the solution she’d hoped it would be. She considered returning to the faith, thereby reuniting with her extended family, but that’d mean giving up her freedom and renouncing her new community. She couldn’t go back. She hadn’t regained her family, but, strangely, she was free. She had nothing more to lose.

At the end of that year, she did her first nude portrait shoot. It was something she’d wanted to try for a while. Self-exposure goes against the religious feminine ideal of chastity, purity, asexuality. During the shoot, the photographic process felt the same, but Dimond was altered. Soon, she would expose her own body on film. “It was the next thing for me to do,” she says.

* * *

The first nude Dimond took of herself conveys the depression she was experiencing throughout much of this period. The photo is black and white, darker near its edges. Thin and pale, Dimond lies on a daybed with three low-cushioned walls. A long cylindrical pillow at the bed’s head parallels her body. She rests on her side, faced away from the camera, her knees pulled to her chest. Her feet give the impression of fidgeting in the way they lie one on top of the other. The composition portrays a distinctly feminine sadness.

“I felt liberated,” Dimond says. “It opened up the path to where I am now.”

In 2013, Dimond met Todd Hido, a Bay Area photographer. As his intern, then assistant, Dimond observed a professional at work in what she was coming to see as her field. She took more self-portraits, beginning to act out different behaviors in her photographs — suicide, sexual acts. In this way, she says, she manifested different parts of herself that otherwise might have remained unarticulated.

“I find it really interesting as far as sex goes, and religion, because they treat it as something that’s holy and pure, but dirty and wrong,” Dimond says. “It’s a really confusing way to grow up.”

Through these photos, Dimond reclaimed her sexuality, she says. Or, maybe, she was learning about it for the first time.

In early 2014, Dimond traveled to Paris, and her work assumed a distinctly vintage aura. Often taken outside or in old buildings, her pictures play with imagery of the 1950s housewife, reversing the happy ads of that time and visualizing a dark, empty interior life through spare spaces and Dimond’s blank yet pained face. Lou Noble, a medic on film and television sets and friend of Dimond’s, sees her images as works of “emotional catharsis about identity.” Noble thinks it’s important Dimond knows why she’s making nude portraits, but the nostalgia evoked by other photos of hers concerns him more. As a black man in America, he’s suspicious about outlooks that encourage sentimentality about the past.

It didn’t take long for influential people to notice Dimond’s work. Over Facebook, she heard from the curator of a show at the Brandts Museum, in Denmark. He wanted to exhibit her work alongside Sally Mann’s. Though suspecting a scam, Dimond gave the man her address. A few weeks later, she got an official letter from the museum asking her to be part of the “Selfie” exhibit. “I about shat myself,” she says.

A personal low followed this professional high. Just before turning 23, Dimond got the flu and spent a string of days in bed recovering. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” series was one way to occupy her mind while her body healed. Soon, though, she was more than just occupied. Watching the program, “The indoctrination began to melt away,” Dimond wrote later in a blog post. “I felt this huge sense of relief come over me: I finally began to understand that life, the Universe: it’s all so much bigger than anything I was ever taught.”

The documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” was released soon after. “I watched it alone one night — tears streaming down my face,” Dimond wrote. “It was my childhood — give or take a few things — but with different terms for the practices. The realization washed over me: I was raised in a Cult. My family — all of them — are stuck in a Cult.”

This clarity brought a long-buried memory to the surface. She’d been molested when she was five by her then 14-year-old cousin, who’s now a congregational elder. This was the breaking point. She couldn’t hold herself back anymore. It was time to face her past, and the people she’d been so afraid to be truthful with. Full of anger and sadness, Dimond called her father. She couldn’t understand it: He works in science. How could he have let me grow up inside this anti-science culture? She called her mother and told her what had happened with her cousin almost 20 years before. She was tired of hiding herself, of feeling guilty, of feeling scared. Tired. “I told them that I felt it wasn’t fair — how could they tell me that they loved me unconditionally?” she wrote.

Having, at last, articulated these feelings, Dimond felt able to ask her parents for help. She wanted therapy but couldn’t afford it. They have paid for her healthcare since.

Dimond is lucky. Other Witnesses’ parents have disappeared with the rest of their community, leaving the person who has separated from the faith truly alone. Though grateful, Dimond says therapy “does not make up for such a monumental loss.”

Six months after she got the flu, Dimond was floating on a surfboard in the Pacific Ocean. In the aftermath of her realizations about her childhood, though she’d been in therapy, her depression had taken her to a new low point. She’d begun to self-harm, even breaking a hairbrush over her face. Desperate, she called Lou Noble, who bought her an Amtrak ticket to Los Angeles.

She had grown up near water, but, though she’d always wanted to, had never learned to surf. That day, she did. When Dimond popped up on the surfboard, her perspective about what was possible shifted. What she’d done, where she was in life, none of it had any relation to her husband, family, or childhood faith. “I realized: O.K., I can do this on my own.”

* * *

Dimond pulls onto a side street in the Larchmont neighborhood and parks. Checking her face in the rearview mirror, she rubs a smudge of mascara from her nose. The walk to the party is colder with the sun gone. Though she has a blanket and scarf, she’s still only wearing the silk nightgown and bed-jacket — she has an image to maintain. Tonight’s event, introducing the new season in a friend’s swimwear line, is in the back of a design-store-cum-curiosity-shop, and is fairy themed. Dimond greets friends and a few strangers who recognize her from online, gliding from person to person, smiling easily. Almost all the guests wear dresses and glitter, but Dimond is the only one who looks as though she just stepped away from a 1940s movie set.

She wasn’t always so self-possessed, but when she returned to the Bay Area after learning to surf, she was beginning to be sure of her way forward. It was time to travel to Denmark. Wearing flowy black pants and a short-sleeved, collared top, Dimond visited Brandts. In a sparsely furnished, high-ceilinged room, five of Dimond’s prints hung on a white wall. There’s a photo of her standing beside them, red-lipped, beaming. “I died,” Dimond wrote about being there. Across the hall hung photographs by William Eggleston, Diane Arbus, and Martin Parr. The trip passed quickly; this faraway success couldn’t solve her problems at home. A week after she returned to California — five years into her marriage — Dimond informed her husband she was moving to Los Angeles. They lived together for another month, but their relationship had ended.

Dimond has continued making work. Last year, a Paris gallery threw her a solo show, inviting her to the city. Shortly after this second trip to Paris, Dimond, suffered a mental breakdown, was admitted to a center in L.A. for a month of inpatient psychiatric care, and was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. For some, a diagnosis of mental illness would heighten their affliction. For Dimond, it was a revelation. Finally, she could make sense of her mind. The depression and anxiety, at last, had context as symptoms of a larger illness.

Having borderline personality disorder can mean experiencing a distorted sense of self. Fears of abandonment and behaviors such as self-harming can make even healthy relationships difficult to maintain. Dimond’s treatment regimen — Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — involves keeping a mood-diary, of sorts, and going to individual and group therapy sessions. Dimond thinks she’s had the disorder since she was a teenager “at least,” and sees the way she was raised as directly related to her mental state. Belonging to a community based on meeting certain conditions “really fucks with your brain,” she says.

“I think, in my work, you can tell that sometimes I don’t know what the reality is, or what my reality is, and that I’m sifting through a lot of pain,” Dimond says. In a photograph taken in Paris last year, Dimond stands, completely nude except for her Keds, which are untied. She gazes back at an ominous trailer-home with dark black windows, but her feet remain facing forward. “That photograph really illustrates the hold that my past and my brain has on me,” she says.

One of Dimond’s motivations to keep making work and to post about her religious history online is the response she’s received from complete strangers trapped in the Jehovah’s Witness world. A chart Dimond posted comparing Scientology to Jehovah’s Witnesses made one viewer realize “that it was a cult.” The commenter also said, “What you do, keep doing. You will never know how important that moment was to me.” But Dimond does know. She’s had that moment herself.

Through the online photo-community — Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr — Dimond has met some of her best friends, quite a few of whom are at the fairy party tonight. They reminisce about past shoots, sip pink drinks, eat off each other’s plates, share from a plastic bag of cookies someone’s mom made, and pass a blunt. Less about the fashionable swimwear, this party is a homecoming for the fairy in the green negligée. We stay until most people have left, and then we, too, leave. In her VW, headed back toward the freeway, toward home in North Hollywood, Dimond is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “That was the closest thing I’ve had to a family reunion since leaving home eight years ago.”

The post The Ex-Jehovah’s Witness Who Found Her Voice When She Lost Her Clothes appeared first on Narratively.

The sound of voices in the corridor outside roused me from my fitful sleep. The instant I forced my eyes open, the all-too-familiar feeling of dread gushed through my body. I winced as I leaned on my arm to heave myself upright. The fresh stitches on my forearm from my most recent self-harm tugged sharply. With blurry eyes, I squinted at the clock: 10:43 a.m. This meant I had to wait one hour and 17 minutes until I could have a drink. I never drank before midday; only alcoholics did that.

This hollow feeling of dread had been with me for as long as I could remember, continually gnawing away at my insides. I tried to explain it to my dad when I was about nine years old. All I could tell him was that I felt sick and that something was terribly wrong. My dad took me to a doctor who, of course, found nothing physically wrong with me.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Robin Hood. I would strut around the garden wearing nothing but shorts and a tea towel cape tied around my neck. Grandad would chase me, hoist me onto his shoulders and spin me around like I was flying. It was one of the rare times that I would laugh with the reckless abandon of a typical child. I would grip tightly to his soft balding head and breathe in pipe tobacco and Old Spice as we spun. But as my teenage years approached, suddenly the chasing stopped. Grandad replaced my Robin Hood sword with hideously pink Sindy dolls in cocktail dresses. In his soft Birmingham lilt, he began to insist I “play quietly and sit properly.” I had no idea what “sitting properly” even meant.

As I got older, I began to understand the problem was that I wasn’t what people expected. I didn’t act like typical girls my age, and if it were left up to me, I wouldn’t dress like one either. The trouble was that as my body began to change, it became harder to find any clothes that I was comfortable in. Everything made me feel like there was too much of me. I began to restrict my food in an attempt to lose weight, but my body continued to grow in ways that repulsed me. My grandparents’ gifts started to include dresses, which I was obligated to wear when they visited. I couldn’t hide my disdain; I likely came across as a moody teenager. My grandad’s disappointment in me was evident. The gnawing emptiness was joined by an ever-growing sense of self-loathing.

When I discovered alcohol at the age of 13, it felt like I had found the holy grail. After I hurriedly swallowed a liter bottle of bitterly tart Merrydown cider, the sick feeling was suddenly replaced by a warm, soothing numbness. I felt as if I could breathe freely for the first time in my life.

* * *

I reached over to the bedside table, fumbling for my tobacco tin. My hand found cold metal, and I eagerly grabbed it, preparing to roll my first joint of the day. In my jumbled mind, smoking weed first thing in the morning was somehow O.K., even if drinking alcohol wasn’t. It wouldn’t send me into a blissful blackout, but it would at least take the edge off, enough to function until I could justify having a drink.

I stared across the clothing-strewn floor to my desk, redundant now that I was no longer studying. A few years earlier, I had begun a social work degree. I was 32 years old and it was one of many attempts to get my life together. However, it was there I started to spiral out of control, and just 18 months into the program, my lead tutor suggested that I leave and seek out some help. I hadn’t been able to work since then, and things had continued to get worse. Alcohol no longer took away the feeling of dread, it just barely skimmed the edge off it. Crippling anxiety now accompanied the empty void of despair. I had resorted to self-harming by cutting my arms, in another desperate attempt to blank out the pain. My doctor prescribed medication, and I attended counseling sessions, but the answer as to why I felt like this, or what I could do to change it, never came.

I thought I’d come close to an explanation in my early 20s when I met Denise. I was living in Eastbourne at the time and working as a care assistant in a nursing home. On one early morning shift, Denise breezed into the canteen. My eyes locked onto her face, taking in her sharp angular jawline, which framed a broad cheeky smile. My eyes traveled to her exposed and glorious hairy legs. I mistook her for a man at first and was shocked to discover she was female. Nothing ever happened between us, but the fascination I felt toward her led me to assume that I must be a lesbian. It would explain so much: the tendency to be a tomboy, my lack of relating to anything female.

I then jumped into my lesbian identity with the enthusiasm of an Olympic diver. I had my hair cut short and spiky, and I filled my wardrobe with shirts and ties of every color imaginable. For a while I felt good. I entered into a serious relationship with a woman who loved my masculine ways. However, as the novelty of my reinvention wore off, the deep empty pit of despair returned with new strength. Eventually, my partner couldn’t handle my depression, and she left. It seemed being a lesbian wasn’t my answer after all.

* * *

I inhaled deeply on the joint. As the gray-brown tinged paper burnt closer to my yellow-stained fingers, I began to feel the subtle numbness take hold. Thoughts about trying to sort out my life were soon replaced with thoughts about buying alcohol. It was the weekend; it made sense to wait until Monday to start trying to get my life together. I pulled on the nearest pair of jeans I could find from the heap on the floor, threw on my khaki baseball cap to hide my shame, and headed out.

Being around other people was an anxious and paranoia-inducing ordeal. I hurriedly bought milk and ingredients to make chili rather than just purchasing alcohol. I noticed the wine was on a three-for-£10 deal. I decided it made logical monetary sense to buy all three. Anyway, l was only buying wine as I was having chili that evening. Wine is just something you have with chili — or so I told myself.

The shop assistant did the usual double take when I replied “Thank you” in my high voice after he called me “Sir.” This was a common occurrence for me, and for reasons I could not understand, I really enjoyed it when I was mistaken for a man.

The chili remained unmade that evening, the pint of milk turned sour on the windowsill, Monday came and went.

Four months earlier, l had been discharged from a therapeutic community after completing a 12-month therapy program. There, they tried to teach me controlled drinking, which, based on the state of my life, seemed to have failed. It was clear to me that their therapy didn’t work, and I rang them up to tell them so.

“I’m not managing,” I complained to the receptionist, “I feel like therapy hasn’t helped at all.”

A week later, I met with my therapist, Gilly. Feeling at my wit’s end, for the first time in my life I was honest about the amount of alcohol I was drinking. Gilly looked up at me. A silver chain looped around the large glasses hanging from her neck swayed as gently as the cadence of her soft voice: “Perhaps it would be helpful to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

“I’m not an alcoholic!” I protested. “If I didn’t have these issues I wouldn’t need to drink.” Despite my protests, I agreed to try it.

The following Tuesday night, I hovered tentatively at the side door of Saint Mary’s Church in Oxford. I was met by a tiny and decidedly over-enthusiastic AA greeter who dragged me inside. The narrow room was furnished with a table at the far end, chairs around its outer walls, and an oval arrangement of chairs in the middle. I wondered if the inner circle was for members only. I had imagined a musty and somber room, but this room was alive with bright smiles and laughter.

The meeting began, and as people spoke, I was shocked to hear them describing the exact way that I felt. Yet, by following a sober life and completing the 12 steps, they had managed to find a happy life. I wanted that, but I could not accept I was an alcoholic. I knew I had a problem, but I was terrified of not being able to drink at all. However, the “one day at a time” approach of AA enabled me to cope with the idea of putting down the drink for a brief while. At my next meeting, I announced myself as having “alcohol dependency issues,” making sure to differentiate myself from the alcoholics.

The following weeks were hell on earth. Without the fuzzy haze of alcohol, the outside world became razor sharp, my internal world a raging waterfall of emotions. Then, finally, in one early morning AA meeting, I stopped fighting. I suddenly found myself announcing, “I am an alcoholic.” Those four words would change everything, but not in the way I expected.

* * *

Over the following months, my life changed dramatically. I remained sober, clean, and free from self-harm. Although the inner void was still there, I had learned healthy ways to manage the pain. I had even started to believe in a future where I could finally be free of it. I embraced facing difficult issues and the healing that came from that. One problem I could not seem to shake was my eating. I knew I wasn’t fat and yet the desire to restrict food was still there. It made no sense.

After sharing my eating issues in a meeting one day, I went for a coffee with Kevin, my AA best friend. We had a surprising amount of similarities in how we each struggled with feelings of shame about our bodies. Kevin leaned in, lowered his voice and asked me if he could trust me. I nodded. He took a deep breath and then, with a shaking voice, he told me that he dressed in female clothing at home. His honesty made me voice something I had only uttered a couple of times in my life: I wished I was male.

That evening, as I searched online for some support for my friend, I discovered the vast community of transgender people on YouTube. I had some knowledge of trans women but no idea that trans men existed. I found a video timeline of a trans guy celebrating a year on testosterone. He spoke about always knowing something wasn’t right, about his distress when his puberty began as his breasts grew and his hips developed. I watched his face light up as he described his growing sense of peace in himself as his face, voice, and body had changed. I suddenly had a moment of epiphany where I understood what was making me restrict food: Keeping very slim meant my figure more closely resembled that of a boy.

But I couldn’t be transgender, I thought; I would have surely known earlier in life. I apparently had some gender issues, wanting a boyish figure, enjoying wearing men’s clothes, so perhaps I fit the term genderqueer. In that case, I could alter my appearance a little, to see if that made me feel less ill-at-ease in myself. Watching numerous videos of trans men in early transition, I noticed that most used a “binder,” a vest made of a unique material to flatten their chests. I had been squeezing into a tight sports bra for years to get rid of the unsightly lumps. I ordered a binder, telling myself that it would just allow me to embrace more of my tomboy self.

The morning it arrived, I hungrily tore back the packaging. I squeezed myself into the skin-tight material, and violently shoved my sweaty breasts under my armpits, as per the instructions. I threw on the nearest T-shirt I could find and then stood back to study my appearance in the full-length mirror. I gasped, the realization like a punch to my stomach. There I was; that was my chest the way it should be. I understood at that moment that I was indeed male. I hadn’t realized earlier because when I was growing up, the words just were not available to describe what I had been feeling. There was a name for the pain I’d been feeling all this time: gender dysphoria.

I felt relief to finally know the reason for this pain, but enormous fear about what this meant. I would have to come out to my friends and family. I would have to go through the process of gender transition, and I didn’t even know where to begin with that. Everything was once again uncertain, the future terrifyingly unclear. For the first time in my life, I felt liked and accepted by people. I was convinced that if I said I was transgender I would lose the friendships I’d made, and likely my family, too. I was so afraid of the unknown future that I considered drinking again and this time not stopping until it killed me. Better that, I thought, than to face coming out and trying to lead a sober life as a man who would never be accepted as such.

I didn’t pick up a drink, but I did sink back into a state of despair and anxiety. Every time someone called my name or referred to me as “she” it was like a blow to my chest. I wanted to scream out that I was male. I wanted to tear my skin off and show people that I am here, that I’ve been here all along, underneath, and that the pain I felt was from years of suffocating the real me. Eventually, I reached a point where the pain of continuing to deny my male identity far outweighed the fear of what people might say to me when I announced it. I knew I just had to take a leap of faith.

Being in Alcoholics Anonymous made coming out particularly challenging. Having to announce my name in meetings meant that there wasn’t a subtle way to slowly come out. I just had to do it, fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. On a Friday morning, I walked into the church hall and was greeted by the familiar buzz of voices and the smell of fresh croissants and filter coffee. I said hello to a couple of people, but I was too nervous to do anything but take my seat and wait for the meeting to begin. The part of the meeting came where members were invited to share. I took a deep breath. My heart felt as if it was coming out of my chest and I could barely keep my head still for shaking.

“My name is Finn, and I am an alcoholic,” I announced.

The usual response is to say hello back, but as this was not the name people were used to, I was greeted instead by “Hello,” followed by incoherent mumbling. I took another deep breath and went on to explain that I am transgender and would be grateful if people could use my new name and male pronouns when referring to me. The remaining 15 minutes of the meeting went painfully slowly, and I felt like I was going to throw up every one of my internal organs.

When the meeting ended, I was engulfed by a large crowd, hugging me, saying my new name, congratulating me and expressing their admiration. At that moment, I felt more loved and accepted than I ever had in my life. The joy at hearing myself referred to as “he” confirmed that I had made the right choice. As I went on to other meetings and told more people, the feeling of knowing this is right settled more deeply into my being. I moved from wishing I was a man to understanding that I already was one — one that needed a few modifications, but a man all the same.

I am now approaching eight years sober and clean, and it’s been six-and-a-half years since I announced the truth of who I am. This morning I awoke to the familiar feeling of gratitude and possibility. I jumped out of bed heading for the bathroom, and the hallway mirror stopped me in my tracks. I paused to smile back at the man with the graying sideburns and white flecks in his full beard. I made a cup of tea and settled into my well-worn desk chair, preparing for a day of writing work and university degree study.

The post I Didn’t Know I Was Trans Until I Got Sober appeared first on Narratively.

Narratively is excited to present the online debut of this story, which appears in the September issue of The Red Bulletin, a magazine that tells captivating stories of inspirational people and their achievements within adventure, sports, music, culture, technology and innovation.

Mario Bonfante Jr.’s spirit ascended from the earth as quickly as his body slammed into it. This happened in 2006, when he was just 17, but he still can recall the details of the moment. It was a hot September day in the scratchy town of Gilroy, California, and Mario hovered above himself, observing the scene of his injury from an ethereal remove of 30 feet. He felt no fear or pain. Because he’d launched over the handlebar and landed headfirst, he could only see the back of his wiry body. From above, he watched a fire truck and ambulance arrive, and saw first responders flip him onto a gurney. With mental acuity as certain as the force that had just pulverized his upper spine, Mario saw a light, a luminous entity, a whitish glow distinctly different from the washed-out afternoon sun. It hovered unthreateningly around him. Silently but out loud, the entity spoke: “Do you want to stay or do you want to go?”

“What kind of question is that?” replied Unearthly Mario. “I want to stay. I’m not done yet.” And with that, Mario’s soul transitioned back into his heretofore nimble young frame. Then he looked up and saw his parents standing over him. “I’m sorry,” he told them. “I’m sorry.”

Go ahead, roll your eyes. Mario does not care if you think he conjured the out-of-body experience from the confines of his wheelchair so reporters, sponsors and investors would take interest in his car racing or his invention, a contraption that allows “quads” and “paras” to drive in new ways. He isn’t offended. He knows what happened. So if you want to know how a guy who can barely get a sandwich in his mouth drives a BMW M3 at 130 miles per hour using technology he built in his bedroom, then ponder his story. If you want to know why a teen who sustained a crushing injury is now an adult who races cars, just go with it. Sure, there are other ways to explain his proclivity for risk — neuroscience, daddy issues, ego, even extreme selflessness. But in the end, Mario’s higher power is his engine, his navigator and his driver.

This explains why he’s not afraid of meeting his demise in a wreck. Mario has kind, intelligent eyes; because his diaphragm is virtually out of commission, his speech is calm and benevolent. “No, I’m not afraid of death,” he says. “When and how I die is not in my hands.”

* * *

On a 100-degree day in June, Mario’s hands are clamped to the steering wheel of his M3 as he hits 120 miles per hour at Willow Springs International Raceway, 90 minutes north of Los Angeles. Actually it’s a steering rectangle. When he met the entity in ’06, his C6 vertebra had disintegrated, along with his ability to use almost everything below his nipples. The apparatus he’s designed isn’t just a vital part of the car; it’s an extension of his body. But to understand the ingenuous way it functions, you need to comprehend the scope of Mario’s own disability.

People ask him how someone with any upper-body mobility can be classified as quadriplegic. A “quad” (his word) is someone with severely restricted use of all four limbs. How severe? His feet and legs are forever “on strike,” as he likes to say, though they shake and twitch under duress, in extreme heat, for example.

Folks wonder other things, too. And he’s cool with that. Catheter? Yes, but only when he pees (it’s not permanent). Erections? Yes. Colostomy bag? No. Moving up the body, Mario is lizard-thin through the stomach. His thumbs, index, middle and ring fingers are unusable, gnarled and curled as the funkiest Cheetos in the bag. His pinkies are just functional enough for pecking a keyboard or smartphone; because of the time he spends on all things digital, muscles have sprouted like shiitakes from his otherwise meatless forearms. Don’t be fooled by Mario’s biceps. They’re his “moneymakers.” And his triceps, shoulders, traps, lats, delts and scapula muscles are ropy like an MMA flyweight’s, a result of pushing his chair, driving and working out.

Mario is at Willow Springs to show his invention and driving chops to Mitchell deJong, a pro rallycross driver and holder of at least 10 auto-racing titles or gold medals. The two have met before but have never been in a car together. After sliding from his wheelchair to his M3, Mario shows deJong how it works. To attach himself to his controls, Mario raises his arm using his shoulder muscles and puts his left hand on a vertical spool; with his free hand, he wraps his fingers around the cylinder and flips a lever that locks his palm and digits in place. Someone else then helps him get his right hand around its designated spool and clamps it in. While he’s passed safety regulations that require him to exit the car without help, freeing himself from the controls and getting out of the car in a real-life scenario — with an injury, for example — could be a serious issue, given that fires are common in race-car driving.

Pro drivers are typically control freaks who don’t like to ride shotgun. DeJong is no exception. But when I ask him if he’d rather be driving the car, he offers a humble response. “I don’t know,” he says. “It looks kind of complicated.”

The widgetry in Mario’s invention is hard to explain. It’s spring-loaded in what seems like a hundred ways, which allows him control of the vehicle. To brake, he pushes his left shoulder forward, which in turn moves the left side of the apparatus. To throttle, he twists the right spool, motorcycle-style. Shifting, performed with micro pushes and pulls on the right side, is sequential, not unlike what you’d find in an Audi or VW.

It’s remarkable how well it works, especially if you consider that Mario has no post-high-school education, and no formal training in SolidWorks, the engineering program he uses to design it. “Mario has made something that performs beyond expectations,” says Tyler Reid, a SolidWorks trainer. “The stress analysis and virtual simulation has proven strong so far. If the market is there for a product like this,” he adds, “then the design is close,” meaning it’s almost ready for others to use. The invention’s marketability remains to be seen, but in the meantime Reid is helping Mario with design and 3D printing resources.

It’s one thing to wow engineering weenies with mechanical wizardry; it’s another thing to impress a pro like DeJong. But that’s what happens as the two spin laps for an hour, reaching 120 mph and drifting out of hairpins. DeJong, in his boyishly enthusiastic manner, puts it like this: “When you have full use of all your controls and your limbs, you can steer, you can put one hand on the shifter, the handbrake, you can press buttons, you have your two feet for gas and brake and clutch while you’re doing other things. But with [Mario’s] controls, you need to do it all at the same time, with your hands only.” DeJong is pleasantly surprised by the technology. “It was actually really controlled,” he says. “It flows. I wasn’t sure what to expect, to be honest, but after a lap, I had full trust in him.”

* * *

Mario Bonfante Jr. Could there be a better name for a race-car driver? The nomenclature makes perfect sense, similar in cadence as it is to the name of the legendary Mario Andretti; it’s also evocative of the younger Dale Earnhardt, who followed his father, Dale Sr., to NASCAR fame. Yet it’s hard to imagine why Mario would want to be associated with his old man. By any account, Mario Sr. wasn’t a paragon of parental love and support.

The real father in Mario’s life was his stepdad, Chris Tripp, who came along after his mom, Adriana, split up with Big Mario. Chris and Adriana were just 21 when they got together; Mario Jr. was already a plucky toddler who jumped off everything in sight, “like a little monkey,” Adriana recalls. But his high energy wasn’t always cute. Perhaps for attention, or due to neurological hardwiring, or because his biological father was off starting another family, Mario would throw next-level tantrums and hold his breath till he passed out. Physical activity was his elixir. At first it was tee ball, jiu-jitsu and pee-wee leagues. Mario was small for his age, with the focus and agility of a border collie. “When he said he wanted to play hockey, he hadn’t even been on skates,” Chris says, sitting at his kitchen table in Paso Robles, where Mario currently lives with his parents. “It turned out not to be his thing, but he was top scorer and offensive player of the year.”

Chris had grown up on BMX bikes, so it didn’t take long for Mario to start pedaling. By his 10th birthday he’d become a state champion. Next came competitive motocross. Adriana and Chris gave their full support, on the condition that Mario’s commitment didn’t waver. This was rarely a problem. “They gave me so much,” says Mario. “They were young and working class, stretching their budget. They pushed me because they believed in me. So I believed in me, too.”

All the while, Mario played middle school football. And with time so limited, his parents made him pick a sport. The choice was easy. During a big game, his coach had made a decision that cost the team a victory. “I didn’t want someone else’s choices to determine my future,” he recalls. “If I make a mistake, I don’t want to be able to blame anyone but myself.”

Just shy of turning 16, Mario asked his parents if he could get a street bike, to get to and from a job. The answer was yes, but he had to learn to ride it on a track. On his second training lap, he sat astride his 600cc Honda and bested his instructor’s time. Weeks later he was perfecting knee-drops. In less than a year, he turned pro. In his spare time, Mario was still BMXing and skateboarding — breaking boundaries and his share of bones. So as his street-bike racing got serious, Chris and Adriana sat him down. “If you want to be a pro,” they told him, “you have to give up everything else.” For one thing, said Chris, “a small injury like a broken arm can cost you a season.” There also was the matter of quality of life. Now in his mid-30s, Chris was starting to pay for the abuse he’d done to his own body as a rowdy young athlete. He wanted Mario to age with less pain. “If you keep doing this,” Chris told him, “you’re gonna be crippled at 40.”

Mario agreed to their terms. He began independent study, skipped parties, tried to ignore the toys in the garage. He trained and raced hard, won local events. At his first big race, a national event in Utah against grown men with as much as a decade more experience, he took first place in the 600cc production class and the 600cc Super Bike class. For kicks, he entered the 750 class (on his 600) and won that, too. Sponsors called. Offers came. A viable career was under way.

But he couldn’t keep the monkey in the cage. One night, for example, while hanging with some buddies, he did a back flip off a 10-foot-high In-N-Out Burger sign. The next day, he stopped at a “six-pack” of BMX jumps that some kids had built. In violation of the pact he’d made with his parents, Mario grabbed a bike for the first time in 18 months, got airborne, and bailed, landing poorly and bruising his heel. He crawled off the track but didn’t take the bum landing as a warning. Instead, he hit it again, this time sticking the landing but with no style. He kept going until The Crash. “The lip of the first jump blew out and I went over the bars. I don’t remember the impact. I just remember leaving my body.”

Sitting at his desk, surrounded by proto-parts he made with a secondhand 3D printer, Mario looks up from his screen. “It’s like I’d been going 200 miles an hour all my life and finally God said, ‘All right, you have to sit still for a second until we figure some stuff out.’”

* * *

This is the part of the journey where most people discover another way to push boundaries, to access whatever bursts of dopamine or joy flood the brain when gunning the accelerator, launching big air or otherwise courting danger. Many top pros have been known to step back. Extreme skier Scot Schmidt made the decision while launching off a 100-foot cliff. War reporters, after dodging bullets or being held captive, ask for saner assignments. Another extreme skier, Kristen Ulmer, had a similar revelation when she attended Burning Man and, as she tells me, “accessed the altered states I usually got through risk. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can get there without skiing off a cliff.’”

Ulmer describes herself as an addict whose drug of choice wasn’t adrenaline. It was fear. But, like a lot of extreme athletes, she says she didn’t understand what was going on in her brain. “There’s this notion that people who take these risks — people like Mario — are fearless, or that they have a death wish,” she says. “The reality is that fear, not fearlessness, induces the adrenaline rush.” The neurochemical orgy one experiences under extreme fear, she explains, is what makes us feel more alive. “This guy Mario doesn’t have a death wish. He has a life wish.”

To get reacquainted with fear, to get himself from a hospital bed to a racetrack, Mario had to adapt to new limitations. His grit, he says, was only as strong as his faith. He was good with God way before he broke his neck. Christianity had come his way when a good friend, Jeremy Baeza, a teenaged motocross racer, died during a practice session. After the tragedy, Jeremy’s parents started a Bible study group, and Mario took comfort in the meetings. After the injury, someone at Bible study in the hospital told him, “God will never put more on your plate than you can handle,” a statement that might have wounded other quadriplegics. But Mario took it as a compliment. “I appreciate what God put on my plate,” he says. “It means he knows I can handle a lot.”

Doctors said someone else would have to feed him; he scoffed. They said he’d need a full-time caregiver to push him around, or that he’d need a power chair, “like Timmy from ‘South Park,’” he says. “I was like, ‘That’s not gonna be me, man.’” He refused help unless necessary. He fought the physical weakness and the self-doubt and occupational therapists who didn’t know his body as well as he did. It didn’t happen as fast as his mastery of hockey or BMX or motorcycle racing, but he proved everyone wrong. Mario learned to push his own chair, balance a burger on his knuckles, maintain his catheter. Then he taught himself to transfer into and out of a passenger car, which he operated using the standard-issue controls provided to differently-abled drivers, essentially a pair of rods connected to the brake and gas pedals.

To most quads, this level of mobility would be a win. To him it was warm-up. Back when he was a motorcycle racer, Mario, like many of his peers, had always planned on racing cars later in life. Of course, no one close to him wanted Mario to race now; they worried about his safety and the danger of false hope. But his parents knew they couldn’t stop him.

This is Mario, they reminded themselves. Staring into the abyss is all he knows.

* * *

In 2013, Mario took a drive from his hometown of Gilroy to the Orange County office of TruSpeed AutoSport, a small Porsche team whose drivers range from gentleman racers to pros. As much as he hated asking for help, he was hoping to get support for something he’d dreamed up — a steering mechanism that also functioned as shifter, brakes and throttle.

It initially didn’t go as he’d hoped. The guys at TruSpeed, he says, “didn’t have enough confidence in the idea or the time to help. So it didn’t work out.” But, he adds, “I’m used to things not working out.” To him, the rejection paled in comparison to losing his chances at a motorcycle racing career.

Mario took some crude drawings to a machine shop near San Jose; they told him to come back with cleaner designs. A few weeks later, having mastered Google SketchUp, he returned with a better representation of the contraption. “No,” they said, “you need dimension drawings, the kind that auto manufacturers use.” Mario discovered SolidWorks on the internet, pawned most of his belongings to buy it and watched hundreds of hours of instructional videos until he could make schematics that a machinist could fabricate. With help from his stepfather and a few mechanic friends, he got the new controls working in a used and gutted $10,000 M3, and started training.

One afternoon in 2014, Mario was spinning laps at Sonoma Raceway when TruSpeed’s manager, Tyler Tadevic, recognized him. In his late teens, Tadevic had raced cars with dreams of making the pro circuit, but he abandoned his goals after he broke his neck from C4 through C6. “I got lucky,” he recalls. “My vertebrae were salvageable. But for the grace of God, I’d have been in a wheelchair.” Tadevic was dumbstruck by Mario’s driving, and his moxie. “He’d gotten farther as a quadriplegic driver than I had with four functioning limbs,” he says. “I just couldn’t believe that in a year he’d pushed the boulder up that hill all by himself. I remember thinking, ‘This guy is a bucket of raw talent, creativity and tenacity. He’s low-hanging fruit.’”

Tadevic gave him a job at TruSpeed’s shop in Costa Mesa, but this victory was followed by a setback. Tadevic had also given a job to a friend of Mario’s, whose dog bit a customer’s child. Mario and his friend had to go. Soon, Mario was back at his parents’ house. Since then, each success has been followed by setbacks that would derail anyone else: short-lived relationships and near misses with corporate sponsors; well-intentioned but noncommittal investors; a shot at a pro career in Finland that was derailed by a manager who turned out to be a grifter. While he always cobbles a few grand or a small favor or a set of tires from a patchwork of admiring individuals and businesses (and supplements his income giving inspirational speeches), no one but Mario’s parents have proven to be true believers. He hasn’t had his Shark Tank moment. No one has stepped up to assemble the whole package — money, handlers, trainers, technology — that a guy with his potential needs to put all of his energy into what he deserves most: a racing career and a way to make his technology available to other paras and quads. In a way, the same determination that has gotten him this far is also what holds him back. “Part of the reason he hasn’t achieved everything he’s set out to do is because he dreams so big and has taken too much on himself,” says Tadevic. “His tenacity is his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.”

* * *

The most visceral way to digest Mario’s doggedness, his addiction to adrenaline — his “life wish” — is to ride shotgun in his M3. After DeJong takes his laps at Willow Springs, I hop in the BMW. And after a few turns, I feel confident in his ability to keep us safe. As we fly down the tarmac, I can feel his confidence grow. By the end of lap two, his need to push the car, and himself, are as obvious as the heatwaves rising from the asphalt. It’s thrilling, but I begin to have concerns. During lunch, Mario was visibly fatigued from the heat; because his body’s thermostat is also on strike, he had to douse himself with water. It took him an hour, soaking in an air-conditioned room, to cool off. But the moment he felt refreshed, he zipped into his nonbreathable fireproof suit and hit the track. His mother and stepfather were with him that day; their concern was palpable.

Approaching the apex of a blind roller and coming into a curve faster than we took it a lap earlier, I begin to see how Mario made the decision, at age 17, that put him in a wheelchair. In ways that most people can’t comprehend, he still has a teenager’s disregard for boundaries. As Tadevic puts it, “The dude’s Give-a-Shitter is totally broken.” By the end of lap three I’ve had enough.

Not Mario. He spins laps with characteristic abandon, as if driving in a race rather than a photo shoot. An hour later he loses control in a turn, taking out a chain-link fence, launching over a gully, eventually coming to a stop with the fence wrapped around the car. The crash, which he says was caused by a transmission issue, happens out of sight from where anyone is standing, so several minutes pass before anyone even realizes what has happened. The M3 is badly damaged, and Mario has to be carried to a support vehicle. The next day over lunch, Mario exhibits no signs of regret. “If I’m going to win races and bring my technology to market so other people can use it,” he says, “I have to keep testing my limits.”

A few weeks later, heading home to Central California from a meeting in Orange County, Mario conducts another test of his limits. He is exhausted, but pulling over for a nap would be, in his view, a minor setback. And Mario, understandably, is tired of setbacks. He tries to fight fatigue but nods off, hits the center divider and wakes up to the impact of the driver-side airbag, which breaks a bone in his hand. Minor setback, meet major one. Now his race car and his daily driver are out of commission. When I ask if he’d finally gotten carried away, he has none of it. “I don’t know a limit,” he says. “I haven’t found one and I don’t want to know any different.”

* * *

Six weeks later, Mario doesn’t have the money to race; and his invention, however brilliant, is too costly to produce and market on his own. So here he is, sitting still like God told him to and trying to figure things out — without a complaint or a trace of self-pity or a whisper about calling it quits.

The more people get to know Mario, the more conflicted their feelings become. Not about Mario the person, who’s undeniably likable. It’s everything he does, and everything he wants, that raise concern. On one hand, he’s Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill; as much as those close to him want him to race professionally and succeed in business, it can be hard to watch him take such risks, only to hit another obstacle. On the flip side, of course, Mario’s determination, rife as it can be with decisions that don’t always serve his best interests, is nevertheless humbling and inspiring. By age 17, he’d achieved more than many people do in a lifetime; then, as a quadriplegic, he doubled down.

In the end, his passion to race reflects his soul and life experience, but it seems like a long shot. However admirable his ambition, racing as a pro likely isn’t a means to a sustainable career for virtually anyone, let alone a quadriplegic. By contrast, Mario’s passion to invent arguably has more upside. Yes, he’s overextended and lacks a partner who can take his idea from bedroom to boardroom, but he has created technology that allows severely disabled people to race cars or drive them in new ways. How it all shakes out remains to be seen. No matter what, it seems, he’ll continue driving and perfecting his invention. It’s all he knows, and it gets him out of bed each morning, amid great physical and emotional challenges. Nothing short of a deadly car wreck will stop Mario from trying to achieve his twin dreams; as he told the glowing entity that day back in 2006, “I want to stay. I’m not done yet.”

The post This Quadriplegic Daredevil Invented His Own Tech to Race at 130mph appeared first on Narratively.

“I was next in line. The customs agents worked with gusto, gliding their metal detectors along émigrés’ arms, legs, and midsections. A heaping pile of confiscated earrings, necklaces, and rings, some still bearing the warmth of their owners’ skin, grew each time an officer barked ‘Next!’ Everyone knew we could legally leave the Soviet Union with only two gold or silver jewelry items per person, but no one expected they’d enforce this rule…”

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The post The One Thing I’d Carry to the Ends of the Earth appeared first on Narratively.

On a September night in 2016, I stayed up late, scouring my email and social media accounts for distractions: upcoming events, good news I’d overlooked, an acceptance of some sort lurking in my spam. One month earlier, I’d announced the sale of my first book – a coming-of-age memoir about the suicide of my only brother, Matthew, told through the series of cars my family and I drove.

I’d worked on this book for years. I’d written through grief, divorce, depression, and solo parenting two small children. At times, I’d fall into an episode of despair and self-doubt. Who was I to tell my brother’s story? Just me. Matthew Stephenson’s kid-sister. Missy, he’d called me.

When the book sold, a feeling I didn’t expect overcame me: grief, and fear, over letting go of my brother’s story. When he was alive, we had a relationship, as siblings, that only the two of us understood. He was my brother, my closest DNA match in the universe, and I could always see in his eyes some sliver of me mirrored back, only better, because he was not me. He was him: slim, six feet tall, and covered, near the end, neck-to-knuckle in tattoos – my family’s own superstar.

In August of 2000, Matthew drank a tray of Jell-O shots, loaded a Glock, and shot himself in the head. He was 29, and I was 25.

I got the news around dinner. I’d just moved to Texas, and I flew out the next day to help my folks settle his affairs in Athens, Georgia. I came home with a quarter portion of our shared DNA, in the form of bone meal, in a carved wooden box.

I carried that box with me for 16 years, from state-to-state and house-to-house. It sat to the left of my writing desk the whole time I drafted the memoir. I don’t feel like I wrote that book alone. Matthew was my co-pilot, and through the process of making the book, I developed a relationship with him built on our shared history, and his absence. Stories and a wound.

So when I got the green light to share the news that our book would become a real book, I waited a day. There was one thing I needed to do: I put that box of bone meal in a backpack and hiked up Mount Sentinel – a mountain in Missoula marked by a large, white “M” (as in Missy, or Matthew). From the top of that mountain, you can see the valley where I live. From my house, I can see the mountain. At the top, I tested the wind, opened the box, said a millionth goodbye, and let him go.

The next day, I posted the news on social media and watched the likes and loves roll in. I felt a bit like Rocky Balboa or Billy Jean King at the end of an epic match. But I also felt the way I’d felt since August 6, 2000 — like Scout without Jem, Leia without Luke, Lisa minus Bart, Caroline after John.

When a spouse loses their other, they become a widower. When a child loses parents, they become an orphan. But there’s no word for it when you lose a sibling. And if it’s your only one, do you, in fact, become an only, a word one letter shy of an anagram for lonely? I’d been a Lonely Only for so long that I didn’t know how else, or who else, to be.

In my screen-lit bedroom that fall night in 2016, I discovered a folder on Facebook labeled other in ghosted gray font — a folder, I learned, where messages from people who are not your “friends” land, unannounced, and wait.

The message I opened around midnight revised my identity in three simple sentences: “I think your father is my bio father. If you want to talk about that, fine. If not, that’s fine too.”

The message had been sent, I saw, the evening before, an oddity that still baffles me. How did I stumble upon that folder, barely a day after the only relevant message arrived, sent by Tony MacMahon, a husband and father of two from Indianapolis, Indiana?

* * *

My father is a social worker and from the time I was young I remember his occasional issues with distraught clients. One woman called my high school writing teacher the spring I graduated and requested copies of everything I’d ever written. Another took Polaroid selfies in our swimming pool when we weren’t home, so I first thought Tony must be one of Dad’s patients – a crazy person claiming to be his therapist’s illegitimate child.

I looked at Tony’s profile, half expecting to find face tattoos, a confederate flag, or links to donate to an evangelical church. I’d always felt like a cultural castaway in Indiana. I was an artsy kid who had trouble finding friends in a state known for car races, basketball, outlet malls, and conservative politics. (Mike Pence hails from my hometown, even.) The chances of me having much in common with any random Hoosier seemed slim. But in Tony’s profile I saw a guy with the same long, sandy brown hair my son has. His build was more like my Uncle Kevin – tall and a tad burly – than my dad or me, who are long and lean, like distance runners. I saw no trace of shared DNA in his pleasant but ordinary appearance, other than the eyes – the same deep-set brown eyes my dad has, my brother had. My eyes. My son’s.

Tony’s posts were the kinds of things I’d see on my friends’ walls: a turntable playing a ’70s tune, a homemade tortilla browning in a cast iron pan, a picture of a camper van. But none of that confirmed anything. My parents had been married since they were 17 and 19, so I had no clue where another brother would have fit into the timeline, and my folks had never seemed complex enough for such secrets.

Tony and I exchanged messages the next morning, and talked on the phone the day after that. When I heard his voice, low and measured, with the ability to slow heart rates – my father’s voice and mine – I knew we were related. I could hear it.

My next dilemma: How would I tell my father I knew his secret? I wrote and edited a heartfelt, multi-paragraph email, saying that I knew about Tony, and I understood why he’d kept him a secret, especially from our mother, who had, after all, lost her only son to suicide. I told him I would keep his secret, too, if needed, but that I was happy to have found Tony – or that Tony found me.

Dad’s three-sentence message back re-arranged my sense of self, and the past, again. “If his mother is Sharon then he’s my bio son,” he wrote. “Of course your mother knows but prefers not to think about it. I think your aunts and uncles knew at one point.”

I had another brother. And everyone knew but me.

Even more shocking, no one thought to say, in the 18 years after his death, while they watched me wring a memoir from my marrow, “Hey. So. Actually? You have another brother.”

I realized my family is not so simple after all. They have kept certain secrets so secret that we forget where we buried them in the first place. It’s the art of what we don’t discuss: my brother’s frightening decline, my mother’s alcoholism, my second cousin’s questionable paternity, and, apparently, my other brother.

Over the next few weeks, however, family members were more or less happy to hear that I knew about Tony. They asked about him. They wanted to know if his life had been more or less O.K. — it had – and they helped me piece together what happened.

Tony’s mother and my father – our father – had been teen lovers. They broke up, and our father moved on to my mother, aware or not – there’s some confusion – that Tony was on his way into the world. Tony was born out of wedlock in 1970, not long before my mother became pregnant and married our father.

I didn’t talk to my mother about Tony because she was – and is – busy dying from late-stage alcoholism, which is pretty much like dying from shame. The loss of her one son was enough. To know my father found another, and that this other son found me? There was just no point, at that point, in adding to her burden.

One of my aunts told me that my mother’s one requirement for marriage was this: That my father never have anything to do with the other child. My mother was 17, her own father a state trooper run over by a semi in the line of duty when she was 14, her first boyfriend killed in a car wreck the year after. Whether or not she delivered that stipulation, I can imagine my mother’s instinct to secure a father for her own child was fierce. Once they married, my parents moved farther away than any of our other family – 70 miles south, to Columbus, Indiana, where I was eventually born, three years and three months after Matthew. Four years and six months after Tony.

* * *

I shared what I learned with Tony, using our preferred communication tool: Facebook Messenger. Though I wanted to stay up all night drinking beers with my Other Brother and spill all I had learned about the intersection of his life and mine, I sensed the narrative was now moving a bit fast for him, so I rationed the stories. I shared a little, let that digest, then shared some more.

My father’s sister, my Aunt Carol, asked if she could friend Tony. He said yes. She was the first to meet him, showing up at a Saturday antique market Tony participates in. He was busy, but they chatted. She told me afterwards the he looked and felt familiar, “like a Stephenson.”

Tony told me that, growing up, his mom never talked about his Bio Dad. Tony always thought, though, that his dad’s name was Stephen because his middle name is Stephen. We laughed about the wit behind that, how he grew up thinking – not wrongly – that he was Stephen’s son. Stephenson.

The fact that my folks chose to move south, to Columbus, Indiana, made more sense once I learned about Tony. I’d always assumed they moved because it was closer to Indiana University, where my father earned his degrees. Mom always said the job prospects and the schools were both better. But perhaps not wanting to run into Tony and his mother at the grocery store was a reason as well.

But mostly, I found myself smiling and whispering the words other brother to myself throughout the day. I wanted to tell everyone the news, but it felt odd to take a 45-year-old secret for a test drive, in the open air. I did tell a few close friends about it, in Montana, where I live with my two kids. It felt safe to share the story on the other side of the continental divide.

I told my kids about their new uncle. They’ve been raised away from Indiana and simply know it as the place where their grandparents spoil them, their grandmother is always sick, and pictures of the uncle who died before they were born line the dining room walls from chair rail to ceiling.

My daughter nodded but didn’t say much. At eight, the idea of a lost relative was pretty abstract to her. My son was 11 and the story caught his attention. He asked what this uncle’s name was, where he lived, and how he found me. Then he said, “Do we have any other brothers?”

“No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Too bad. Can we meet Tony?”

“In August,” I said.

* * *

Because of my mother’s drinking, I don’t visit Indiana, except for a week each August when the pool is open and the sun is likely to be out. During our first visit after connecting with Tony, he and I made plans to meet in Greenwood, a town halfway between our houses. The kids had gone to a bouncy house with my dad, after he’d dropped me off at a beer and burger place off the interstate. Inside, I found Tony and his wife, Kristin, waiting in a booth.

He stood up and they each took turns hugging me. We sat down, ordered beers, and talked for three hours straight – hours that passed like minutes. We talked about the past, about our histories, Tony’s wife adding to the conversation how good she thought this was for him, to fill in some life-long blanks, to know who he came from. The content of the conversation didn’t matter so much as the vibe, which was electric and energetic, like a non-competitive ping-pong match.

At one point, after making Tony laugh with a Matthew story, I said, “He would have liked you.” And Tony said, “Too late.”

I looked at the ceiling, feigning detachment, to blink back tears.

Near the end, my father – our father – showed up with the kids. He’d asked to come, and Tony agreed, though Dad had barely said a word to me about the Tony situation. He sat silently in the background, face heavy, watching Tony meet my kids, who were born three years apart, just like Matthew and me.

My daughter, over-tired, put her head in my lap. My son engaged with Tony immediately. They tossed Star Wars facts back and forth at a head-spinning rate. Tony struck just the right mix of teasing and earnestness. Dad stayed silent.

In the few pictures of Tony and me, we are both beaming like people who just won the lottery, people who want to say “Look who I found,” people who are no longer other or half or lonely or only, but whole.

* * *

This past May, on Tony’s birthday, I mailed him an advanced copy of Driven, the memoir about Matthew and me. Writing the inscription caught me off guard. I was sending Tony a book about the childhood he hadn’t been a part of, and the brother he’d never met. I realized then that the book belongs to him, too. I’d created, without intention, a bridge between two lives.

I wrote: “Perhaps you can meet our brother, or a version of him, on the page. He’d have loved you. I’m sure of that.”

While I don’t know who Matthew would have grown up to be if he’d lived past 29, I do know he’d have been tickled by my father’s secret, and thrilled over the idea, and the reality, of Tony. I would have hung on the outskirts as they talked, wedging myself in where I could – the youngest of three, a moon in their orbit.

Tony messaged me in June to tell me he was knee-deep in the book. “It’s amazing,” he said. “You’re a badass writer.” (The little sister in me beamed.) “But I have to go slow. It’s a lot to absorb.”

I told him I wanted to know how it felt to be him, reading the story of his half-siblings’ childhood, if he’d be willing to report back.

This week, his response came through, via Messenger. “One thing that I felt all through the book was a ‘what if’ kind of thing,” he said. “I have pictured having conversations with [Matthew] about the Dead Kennedys and skateboarding as a teenager and the mayhem that would have ensued.”

He said he could tell from the details in the book that my brother loved me. As I read those words, I realized this was a thing I needed to hear.

He went on to crack a few jokes, comment on a few specifics, and wrapped up the message with, “Sorry for the delay but I’m not known for my writing or computer skills.”

This is what makes him more of a Stephenson than anything else, this tendency to get lost in the gap between words and feelings. In our family, we never much know how to talk about feelings or suicide or alcoholism, but we could talk about cars or music or that crazy guy who drove his motorcycle into a barricade. This is a large part of why I became a writer. I wanted to explore that no-man’s land between language and feeling, to return with a story that might save what I loved most from the void. Like Matthew. Like Tony.

The post Mourning My Only Brother… And then Learning I Had Another All Along appeared first on Narratively.

As you ride up the Loxahatchee River from its mouth in Jupiter, Florida, the canopy of slash pines and cabbage palms eventually starts to close in on you. Wildlife hides in the gnarled thickets of mangrove like a secret, given away by a splash only half seen from the corner of your eye. Everything about this place feels prehistoric, making its visitors feel like interlopers — the very thing this river has evolved to keep out. The turns become more and more hairpin, deceiving and disorienting you, as turtles and alligators eye you wearily before slipping beneath the murky water.

Nearly eight miles up the northwest fork of the river, a weathered, wooden boathouse juts out into the dark water: the first sign of human existence seen for miles. Alongside it is a dock that leads through a bamboo thicket into what was once the heart of wild Florida: Trapper Nelson’s homestead, zoo and jungle garden.

From 1945 through the 1960s, visitors from nearby West Palm Beach could take this same trip upriver and see Trapper’s wild menagerie. The biggest attraction, though, was Trapper himself. Known as Tarzan of the Loxahatchee, he’d wrestle alligators, trap wildcats, and dazzle guests with his infallible good looks and stories of the wild.

The most famous photo of Trapper was taken sometime in the late 1940s. He stands in front of a thatched Chickee hut, shirtless and strapping in swim trunks. His right hand rests casually on his waist, his left one wraps tightly around the neck of a six-foot boa constrictor. He isn’t smiling, but he isn’t displeased either. His expression is almost a dare.

Trapper Nelson was a man of contradictions. He loved solitude, but was a kind and affable host. He was a man who lived without electricity or running water, but read the Wall Street Journal every day. He was a primitive hunter who died just before becoming a millionaire.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Trapper’s death, and the end of his life still remains almost as mysterious as the beginning. His story is a brackish swirl of history and legend, the folklore increasingly impossible to parse from the truth. What we do know is this: on Tuesday, July 30, 1968, Trapper Nelson was found dead at his homestead from a gunshot wound to the upper abdomen. He was 59-years-old. The Martin County Sherriff’s Office ruled it a suicide, but stories still persist today about hidden treasure on his property, about a murderous brother who had a vengeance to exact, about developers looking to take control of the vast acreage he’d amassed over the years. All of which beg the question: was Trapper Nelson sick and misunderstood, or did someone want him dead?

* * *

The first thing people recall about Trapper is his appetite — which, strangely enough, is partly how he ended up in Jupiter in the first place. Before any of that, though, Trapper was born Vince Natulkiewicz on November 6, 1908 in Trenton, New Jersey.

When Vince was around 18, he, along with his brother, Charlie, and their friend John Dykas, left New Jersey to head west toward Colorado. They hunted, trapped and sold hides along the way. From there, they meandered their way to the southernmost part of Texas, where they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. As Vince was setting traps along the river, he was arrested by a group of Federales, who thought he was likely running guns across the river to the rebel groups that remained after the Mexican Revolution.

That’s how Vince found himself sitting in a Mexican prison. For several weeks authorities debated what to do with him. They had no evidence — and they couldn’t afford to keep feeding him; this six-foot-four, 220-pound American was eating his way right through their budget.

Years later, Vince became close friends with one of the founding families of Jupiter — John and Bessie DuBois. They ran a fish camp near the mouth of the Loxahatchee, and often had Vince over for dinner. One night, Bessie brought out a large lemon meringue pie for her guests. One of them took a modest sliver for himself; Vince took the rest of the pie.

* * *

After his release from jail in Mexico, Vince met back up with Charlie and Dykas and headed to Miami. It was September 1931, and the United States was nearly two years into the Great Depression. As their boxcar slowed for a cargo stop, Vince peeked out between slats of the train car and saw a landscape he’d never imagined. The oyster beds were so thick they looked like rocky islands, and surrounding them were tide pools full of mullet fish. Farther out lay the infinite stretch of the Atlantic.

Vince was 23, and already accustomed to trapping, hunting and tanning as a means to survive. Looking out the train car at the bounties of the lower Loxahatchee, he knew only that he wanted to stay awhile. With his new home came a new name: Vince Nelson. The way he figured, people couldn’t pronounce Natulkiewicz and Vince just wanted to make it easier for them.

The three men settled by the beach, where they thatched a small lean-to and spent their days trapping and fishing. Trapping remained a viable business as furriers up north paid good money for pelts — $2 for raccoon, $15 for otter — for customers who could still afford such luxuries. Even so, money was tight, and tensions grew in the small hut. The way Vince’s brother Charlie saw it, their friend John Dykas wasn’t doing his share of the work but was still collecting his share of the money.

On December 17, 1931, Charlie Nelson walked into the West Palm Beach police precinct and confessed to murder. “Finally I’d just had enough,” Charlie wrote in his confession. After months of frustration, Charlie’s temper was on a hair trigger. During one particularly heated argument over money, Charlie reached for his gun and shot Dykas in the face. When he arrived at the police station, the weapon was still warm in his car.

Vince had been out checking his traps and never saw or heard a thing, but at the trial he did something most people presume wasn’t easy for him: he testified against his own brother. He said John was a skilled trapper and had been holding up his share of the bargain, and that Charlie was the instigator of their feud. He didn’t think John had deserved to die. Then he watched from the gallery as the judge handed his brother a life sentence.

Just after the sentence was read, Charlie turned to Vince and swore that he would find a way to kill him.

* * *

Perhaps it was all of this — the murder of his best friend, sending his brother to prison, years on the rails — that led Trapper Nelson to move up to the last crook of the Loxahatchee. Maybe he was tired, maybe he felt as murky and unknowable as the river itself, or maybe he was invigorated at the idea of doing it all on his own. No matter, he was alone now, and he settled somewhere that would keep it that way.

He planted a pineapple patch, citrus trees, almonds and guava and built an elaborate, hand-pumped irrigation system for the gardens. He spent every morning chopping firewood, using a custom-made ax because his hands were so large that he kept breaking the handles on the standard kind. It was a new life, on no one’s terms but his own. So once again, he changed his name just before his 25th birthday. From then on, he’d only be known as Trapper Nelson.

With the name came the beginnings of a legend even bigger than the man. In the local imagination, Trapper became the real-life version of Tarzan, the vine-swinging, primal-yelling wild man that Johnny Weissmuller had brought to life on the silver screen at the time.

“Trapper skinned so many raccoons, wildcats, and other game that even though he bathed … when dogs got downwind of him they would catch the scent of wildcat and bark themselves hoarse — which embarrassed both Trapper and the dog owners,” Bessie DuBois wrote in The History of the Loxahatchee.

As the stories made their way around town, more and more people’s curiosity got the best of them. Were the rumors true? Was there a man really living that far into the river jungle? Was he as kind and gentle as people said? They had to go and see for themselves.

A brood of guinea fowl roosted in the trees near Trapper’s dock and would warn him of visitors by raising a nearly intolerable racket. Trapper played right into the image his callers wanted to see, emerging from the hut with a large indigo snake draped around his neck. He’d show visitors the alligators, the surly wildcats stalking back and forth in their cages, and the snake pit that was like something straight out of a nightmare: teeming with writhing, venomous rattlers that Trapper thought nothing of reaching in and snatching just behind the jaw.

As an old Railway Express agent recalled to James Snyder in his book Life and Death on the Loxahatchee, Trapper once dropped off a cage containing an adult black panther at the rail station. It was headed to a zoo in New York, and Trapper’s only instructions were, “He’s a mean cat, so don’t pester him.”

Sometime near 1938, Trapper decided to start making some money off all these visitors, which were now coming by the boatload. With a steady hand, he painted in careful print the sign that still hangs today: Trapper’s Zoo and Jungle Garden. Admission was 50 cents for adults, 25 for children. The kids would approach cautiously and press their quarter into his enormous hand, wide-eyed with equal parts fear, awe, and curiosity at this giant figure.

Despite their initial hesitation, people remember Trapper as kind and affable. He taught local kids how to trap gopher tortoise and paid them a dime for each one. Not coincidentally, gopher tortoise stew was Trapper’s favorite food.

Business was good, and Trapper expanded both the zoo and his property line. He was buying up as much land as he could, eventually ending up with nearly 1,100 acres. He still traveled into town each day, though now by Jeep instead of rowing the seven miles each way. He’d say hello to the DuBois family, use the payphone outside their fish camp, and buy his Wall Street Journal.

“He’d polish off a box of Hershey bars and wash it down with a quart of milk,” Roy Rood, who’d worked at the DuBois’s fish camp, recalled to Snyder.

The population of Jupiter boomed after World War II, and people had more leisure time and money to spend. Boat captains brought full charters of tourists and locals up the river for a day at Trapper’s. Word of Florida’s wild man spread across the country as tourists took their stories of Trapper wrestling gators in only shorts and a pith helmet back to their cities. Soon, the celebrities came. Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal visited together during their infamous love affair. Boxer Gene Tunney, Edsel Ford, and Palm Beach socialites like the DuPonts and Kennedys also made the trip.

He was a gracious host, building fires for visitors to cook their lunch and answering questions about how one could live without so many modern conveniences. They had left their air-conditioned homes to come look up-close at the alternative, at what it would be like to leave it all behind. Trapper’s life, on the outside at least, was uncomplicated, dangerous, and sexy. But then the mosquitoes came, an unfamiliar howl echoed from the bush, maybe a storm rolled in, and the visitors got back in the boat and headed back to where the river widens, leaving Trapper alone once again.

* * *

In August of 1960, Trapper surprised everyone when he returned to solitude permanently. He cut trees across the narrows to make his homestead unreachable from the river and gated the access point from the dirt road.

No one quite knows for sure why Trapper soured on his time in the limelight, but many have a guess. The population of Jupiter had nearly tripled between 1945 and 1960, and Trapper felt the squeeze of development all around him. The taxes on his land increased sharply, public health officials were imposing regulations on his camp, and developers were doing all they could to drive him out of the precious, waterfront property.

Trapper, like all of Florida at the time, was caught between a reverence for the area’s natural beauty and the inevitable wave (and financial lure) of development. He may have lived primitively, but Trapper was a businessman too, and he knew he could cash in. He sought the counsel of trusted friends and family, but the fate of the property weighed heavily on him. The man who’d trapped wildcats and rattlesnakes without so much as blinking became, for the first time, fearful.

“Have closed my camp to all the public including the cruise,” Trapper wrote to his brother-in-law in a letter dated September 8, 1960. “Now I feel a lot safer as it was a real risk in many ways dealing with the public.”

He also began complaining about his health. He told his last remaining friend, John DuBois, that he was convinced he had colon cancer. John tried to convince him to see a doctor, but Trapper didn’t trust them.

For the next seven years, Trapper withdrew more and more from old friends and acquaintances. In his letters to his sister and her husband, his tone turns from weary of development to being excited by it. In May of 1968 he wrote: “The State Park is now definitely taking steps to make me an offer on my ranch.”

Trapper had been in the negotiation stages of a deal that would allow him to stay on his property until his death and would preserve his acreage as protected state park land. It also would make Trapper Nelson a millionaire.

In late July that year, he dropped his car off at a service station for some repairs. The next day, the shop’s owner, Joe Vleck, drove the truck out to Trapper’s. Through the fence, he saw Trapper across the property. They both waved but said nothing. That was the last time Trapper Nelson was seen alive.

* * *

John DuBois knew something was wrong when Trapper missed an appointment on July 30, 1968. As much as he had changed, Trapper was still not one to skip out on a meeting. On instinct, John drove up to Trapper’s camp and unlocked the gate. The guinea fowl started carrying on, but Trapper didn’t come out to settle them down. Before he got much farther, John caught the smell and followed it to the picnic shelter down by the river. There, face down in the sand, was the body of Trapper Nelson.

“Trapper was lying on his face on the dirt floor of the Seminole Chickee type shed,” DuBois told the Palm Beach Post. “There was a hole in the back of his head.”

His shotgun lay a few feet away. A single shot had entered the left side of his upper abdomen and exited through the back of his head. The Florida heat and the animals had taken a toll on the remains.

The Martin County Sherriff’s Office ruled the death a suicide, citing a lack of signs of a struggle or footprints in the sand. They concluded Trapper had put the gun to his chest and pulled the trigger. Immediately friends and acquaintances doubted that conclusion. He was days away from becoming a millionaire in his land deal, and had mentioned being excited to use the money to travel.

Friends who knew Trapper’s proficiency with guns were baffled that he would choose to kill himself in a manner that left such room for error. Also, the shotgun had no fingerprints on it, not even Trapper’s. The Sherriff’s office had been correct in that there were no footprints — but it’s not that there hadn’t been two sets, indicating an intruder — there were none at all.

Rumors swirled about hitmen and mobsters, but one name kept rumbling around more than all the others: Charlie Nelson. A local woman named Ruby Lanier and her husband, Elzie, had been good friends with Trapper. Late in her life, she recalled to author James D. Snyder that Trapper often told her husband he thought Charlie was coming back to kill him and fulfill that courtroom promise. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, Charlie Nelson had been released from prison on November 20, 1951. The investigation into Trapper’s murder was closed before any of the detectives tried to locate Charlie.

Trapper’s family, however, thought suicide was plausible. If he felt he was growing sicker, they believed he would have killed himself before becoming a burden to his loved ones.

“I guess we’ll never know until somebody gets a little too much to drink and brags a little bit,” Bessie DuBois told the Palm Beach Post in 1974.

On August 6, 1968, a few friends and family members scattered Trapper’s ashes into the calm waters of the Loxahatchee. He had been 59 years old.

It’s been 50 years since the day John DuBois found Trapper dead, and we’ll likely never know what happened in those last moments before a gunshot echoed over the water of the Loxahatchee and ended the life of Florida’s wild man. If he really was alone that day, it would mean Trapper Nelson died as he lived: on his own terms. But was he authoring his own destiny, or had years of solitude in a relentlessly untamable jungle driven him to end his own life?

Today, Trapper’s camp is one of the main attractions in the 10,500-acre wilderness of Jonathan Dickinson State Park. The original buildings all remain, as do the gardens and cages, as permanent a fixture in Florida history as the Legend of the Loxahatchee himself. The buildings lie empty now, but with a bit of imagination you can see Trapper coming around the corner, larger than life, welcoming you with an inky black snaked draped over his chest.

The post The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Panther-Trapping, Gator-Wrestling Wild Man appeared first on Narratively.

I sat across the table from my client Matt, watching as he clicked away on his Kindle keyboard, presumably searching through his notes for clues as to what we had discussed during our session a week prior. “Ah, yes, found them,” he said a minute later. “It says here we planned a studying schedule for my physics final.”

“Did you follow the study plan we worked on?” I asked.

He paused, waiting for a cue. “I have no idea,” he said after realizing I wouldn’t be filling in the gap for him. “Let me search my notes.”

A minute passed as he searched his Kindle again, and then another while he scrolled through the emails and calendar on his phone. “I did not record any studying in the last week,” he said. “So according to my notes, I did not.”

“O.K.,” I said, recording his answer in my own notebook. “How did you feel after taking the exam?” I observed his eyes scanning the wall behind me, his face wearing the recognizable look of someone who is trying to grasp those just-out-of-reach answers.

“I have no idea,” he said and let out a sigh. “I don’t remember taking it at all.”

A year earlier, while out for a jog in his Philadelphia neighborhood, Matt (whose name has been changed to protect patient confidentiality, as have the names of other patients mentioned) had been hit by a car. His physical injuries were minor – a few broken bones and small scrapes – but a few days into his recovery, it became evident he had sustained a more serious injury. Every time he’d fall asleep and wake up again in the hospital, he’d ask where he was and how he got there.

Matt had sustained a traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. His memories from before the accident were accessible, but he struggled to retain new ones, like what he ate for lunch yesterday, or the names of any new people he met, or how confident he felt about a test he’d taken last week.

This was not uncommon among patients recovering from a T.B.I., I was learning. I was a junior in college, and had recently started a new job as a brain injury therapist intern, working in a community re-entry program at an outpatient brain injury rehabilitation center in North Philadelphia.

A semester earlier, I had learned about traumatic brain injuries in a physiological psychology class I took at Drexel University, where I was majoring in psychology and on the pre-med track. This is when I first discovered my fascination with the human brain’s structures, and how physical damage to those structures can affect a person’s perceptions and behaviors.

It was also the first opportunity I had to think critically about my own mother’s brain, and the traumas it has endured throughout her life. I remember poring over different case studies, searching for any recognizable symptoms that might be associated with the parts of her brain that had been damaged, anything that would help me understand my mother better.

Long before I was born, when my mother was 17, she collapsed in her high school’s hallway after suffering a massive aneurysm when a tangle of blood vessels burst in her right frontal lobe, bleeding into her brain.

She doesn’t remember anything between hearing her classmates say she shouldn’t be drinking at school just before passing out and coming to two weeks later in the hospital. Though she’d been conscious the whole time to answer questions the hospital staff had asked, the nurses and doctors startled her when she gained awareness again. She had no memory of them.

My mother was lucky that she didn’t have to relearn how to walk or talk. Though, like some of my clients at the brain injury center, she did experience some short-term memory loss – like not remembering whether she had taken her medicine that morning, or repeating the same story or question over and over again.

Of course, my mother would sometimes come to mind at the brain injury center, though I tried to stay focused on the same mundane tasks interns in all kinds of offices are given: filing, organizing, and ordering lunches. I also got to shadow other brain injury therapists and, eventually, was allowed to work one-on-one with clients like Matt in hour-long sessions. It was a rare opportunity for someone who didn’t yet have an undergraduate degree.

Our collective duty at the center was to help patients who had experienced brain injuries re-learn skills necessary in their daily lives, such as cleaning and cooking, organizing a shopping list, training for a new job, or managing personal finances. Our job was to help people rebuild their lives, one step at a time.

* * *

A few years before I started the internship, during the summer before my senior year of high school, my mother had abandoned us. After marrying a man she’d met on eHarmony, she packed up and left me and my 15-year-old sister, Lindsay alone in our house – without any prior discussion or warning. Her new husband’s home was closer to where she worked, in a town a little more than 20 miles away, though she didn’t check in on us often. Our father, who lived 500 miles away, was oblivious to the situation the entire time. We were too afraid he’d make us move in with him, and so we kept it all a secret.

At the age of 17 – the same age my mother was when she experienced her brain aneurysm – I stepped up into the parent role. I worked as a manager at a nearby grocery store, where I’d shop for our groceries. I was the one who made sure Lindsay finished her homework as I drove us to school each morning, and forged our mother’s signature on any school forms that required it. I took us to the doctor when we got sick. With each day that passed, I collected more resentment toward my mother. She didn’t understand how cumbersome it was for us to navigate daily tasks without her, how painful it was to not have our mom around. She couldn’t seem to grasp that we still needed her, and I was too stubborn to admit I wanted her to come home.

I managed to get myself into college, where I majored in psychology – not for any particular reason, though looking back on it now, I can’t help but see it as the first step of my attempt to understand my mother.

Two years later, I helped Lindsay do the same. She joined me in Philadelphia, where she started coursework in advertising at a nearby college, and we attempted to rebuild our lives. We could look ahead to the future, and were finally allowed to imagine what might be possible for us, and for our careers. But we were both still living in the fallout of our mother’s abandonment. We were stuck in survival mode, lost and craving guidance, in need of someone to help us see that our goals were, in fact, reachable.

Feeling distant from my mother was not a new experience for me. Throughout my childhood and adolescent years, I’d often felt as if there was a wall between us. I vividly remember coming to her when I was 12 or 13, frustrated about something – maybe I was annoyed with my sister, or had just had an argument with a friend, or even likelier, was upset because of a boy. My mother was lying on the couch reading a book as I stormed into the living room with tears running down my face.

She looked up from her book and laughed in reaction to my despair, offering only one of her frequent refrains of “oh, it’s not a big deal” or “life isn’t fair” as comfort. Being dismissive of my emotions and concerns was typical for my mother, as was her cold affect, and I never got used to it. The emotional rejection hurt each time.

In the developmental psychology class I took during my sophomore year at Drexel, I learned about attachment theory, how crucial it is for a baby’s development to bond with their mother after birth, and how important it is for their emotional development that they feel safe in her arms. As I sat in that lecture hall, scribbling down notes from our professor’s slides, my thoughts returned to my mother. I’d been told I was a difficult newborn with bad colic, and knew my mother had gone back to work when I was only a couple of months old – two things that explained our lack of connection, or so I wanted to believe.

I raised my hand, eager to find out whether it was ever too late to start forming that bond. By the time my professor called on me, I was too ashamed to ask.

* * *

At the brain injury rehab, I’d sometimes suggest the patients and I play a card game like War, Solitaire, or Kings, which proved useful as a way to see how long they were able to maintain focus, noting what they could or couldn’t remember about how to play. To test a client’s spatial awareness, I might ask them to assemble blocks into a certain shape, like a tower. To test their organizational abilities, I might hand a client a stack of postcards marked with different zip codes and ask them to sort them.

I’d frequently act out mock scenarios with clients, like when I assisted Laurie, a single mother of four, with planning a meal from start to finish. We met in the quiet back room that had a computer. “What recipe would you like to make for dinner?” I asked.

“Something simple,” said Laurie. “I get lost if there’s too many steps.”

“O.K., simple is good. We can also print out the recipe for you to follow step by step at home,” I reminded her, and then walked her through using Google to search for possible recipes. Once she had decided on one, we worked on writing out a shopping list.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I helped Laurie work through all the steps involved in booking a vacation, from budgeting expenses to looking up flights and hotels. We discussed what to do if she got a call from the school nurse and one of her children was sick, and typed up a list of tips in her phone’s Notes application for her to reference in the future. When she entered the job-training phase of her treatment, we talked about how she might explain her brain injury to her new coworkers, and if she was even required to do so. She was training for an office job, so we practiced tasks like sorting and filing folders, making copies, and alphabetizing names in a Rolodex.

Some patients grew frustrated easily and gave up. Others, like Matt and Laurie, were motivated to finish the task at hand, but sometimes seemed confused about how to do so. It was my job to help encourage them, providing cues when necessary, repeating steps and reinforcing rules – all a great lesson in patience, a trait my mother had always reminded me I didn’t have.

When I started the internship, my new supervisor explained that some of the most common behavioral and emotional problems people with a T.B.I. can experience include verbal or physical outbursts, poor judgment and disinhibition, impulsive behavior, egocentricity, and a lack of empathy.

“You might feel shocked the first few times you experience an inappropriate behavior,” she warned. “You’ll get used to it.”

But there wasn’t much “getting used to it” that I had to do. I had been raised by a woman who lacked inhibition, a woman who said what she felt and thought at all times, unaware of how it might make another person feel, including her children. I had survived her biggest impulsive act. I was more prepared for the job than I ever should have been.

When I had to fend off aggressive or inappropriate comments, or correct a client’s inappropriate behavior – like when one wanted to know if I was dating my male colleague (I was not) – I’d remind myself they didn’t know any better. Their brains had experienced trauma, and now they were moving through the world differently. They needed to relearn and regain different skills, which required time, patience, and guidance.

One afternoon I was walking through the hospital with Jeremy, a client who was volunteering in the maintenance department as part of his job-training program. As he pushed his cart beside me, he tried to fill the quiet hallways with conversation.

“So, when we gonna hang out?” he said. “You’re pretty hot, you know.”

My initial reaction was shock and embarrassment, and if I wasn’t supposed to be the professional one in the situation I might have turned around and run down the hallway. I managed to stumble out a response.

“That’s inappropriate and unprofessional, Jeremy,” I said. “You don’t speak to people you work with like that.”

“O.K., O.K.,” he said with his head down, embarrassed. “Got it.”

Once my knee-jerk shock reaction subsided, I felt something else for Jeremy. As I was teaching him how to interact in the world again after his injury, he was teaching me a lesson in empathy. And maybe, if I could learn to understand and feel compassion for what Jeremy was experiencing, I could learn to feel empathy for my mother, too.

In the end, the internship didn’t lead me anywhere career-wise. I never made it to medical school, but the experience did unlock my ability to re-think and write about my life – and helped salvage my relationship with my mother.

It’s taken years, but I’m finally beginning to understand and appreciate that she’s a complex person, like all of us are. I now see she’s not only someone who has caused trauma for me, but also a person who has endured and survived trauma herself. Like some of my impulsive clients, my mother’s frontal lobe had been damaged as a result of her brain trauma, an injury that likely impaired her judgment and ability to perceive other’s emotions. Maybe she couldn’t be blamed for her character flaws.

Sometimes I worry I’m just trying to impose a narrative on something that’s unexplainable, but knowing it might not have entirely been her fault has helped me forgive her, bit by bit, and we’re finally working to build the bond I’ve always felt was missing.

A few months ago, I went to visit my mother in the Poconos where she and her husband now live. We went out for dinner, just the two of us, and I ordered a bottle of red wine for us to share. I’d been reading a significant book about trauma called The Body Keeps the Score, I told her, and had lately been thinking a lot about how trauma is something we have in common.

“Yours might be physical, and mine emotional,” I said, “but they’re both considered trauma.”

I watched as she sipped her glass of wine. She nodded with a little smile of recognition. “And we both survived,” she said. “We share that, too.”

It wasn’t the warm, motherly embrace I’ve always dreamed of, but after years of working to be able to see my mother, I was finally able to feel seen by her.

They say the human brain is a mystery, an unknowable enigma, and for so much of my life my mother has been exactly that: a riddle I’ve never been able to solve. But the brain is resilient, too, with the ability to repair damaged cells and grow new neurons, capable of creating connections where there used to be none.

The post How Treating People With Brain Injuries Helped Me Forgive My Mother appeared first on Narratively.

Rahul Jadhav struggles to put pen to paper. He’s in a rehab program at an addiction center, sitting on the last bench in the back of the room, and his counselor has asked the class of 30 addicts to draw two columns on their sheets: “strengths” and “vices.” Jadhav is quick to list his cardinal sins: lust, greed, envy, pride and wrath. But when it’s time to consider his strengths, answers evade him. He knows he was good with a 9 millimeter pistol, and an ace at extorting hundreds of thousands of rupees from real estate developers at gunpoint, but those skills can’t be listed.

“Running,” he says, when the counselor, Habiba Jetha calls on him. “I’m good at running.”

“Great,” encourages Jetha, “Do you have any experience?”

“Some,” he hesitates. When the counselor assures him he can drop his guard, Jadhav turns his gaze to the floor. “I run when I’m chased. I have experience running from cops, from the people I shot at, and from rival gang members. The farthest I’ve run is two kilometers — after I fired at a few policemen and bystanders while threatening a real estate developer in Mumbai.”

In Jadhav that day, Jetha saw a frail outlaw whose troubles went beyond alcohol and drugs. She saw a former gangster who was pissed at the world for not taking him back and for not rescuing him from his mistakes. So she suggested he train for a marathon.

“I knew running would be a good outlet for his many frustrations. He could express his anger through running,” says Jetha. “I wanted him to sweat that rage out so he could truly reform.”

In 2016, Jadhav ran in a 10-kilometer race, completing the course in 55 minutes — a respectable time — and found that running for distance is more pleasurable than running for one’s life. He now runs about 20 kilometers a day, has run the Mumbai marathon, and once ran from Mumbai to Pune — a distance of 150 kilometers (93 miles) — in two days. His proudest record, and one he wants to improve on, is 63 kilometers in six hours.

“The current world record is 100 kilometers in six hours. I want to beat that one day,” he smiles, as he sits on a promenade watching the sun set over Mumbai — a city he once terrorized.

* * *

Jadhav grew up in Dombivli, a city on the outskirts of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. During his university years, he met his first and only girlfriend — a shy, soft-spoken girl, who he wished to marry. But the girl’s father, who saw Jadhav struggling to finish his bachelor’s degree, got his daughter married to another man.

“That was the first time I felt this uncontainable rage,” Jadhav says. “That’s when I decided I’ll never allow anyone to make me feel this helpless again. I would be the one in command.”

Soon after, the 21-year-old dropped out of college. Looking for easy money, he met a gunman for the Mumbai mafia who lived in his apartment complex. Charming and determined, Jadhav managed to get a meeting with the local don and an entry-level job in one of India’s many booming industries: extortion.

“It was bad company,” says his father, Ramakant Jadhav. “He had always been a good student, and I’d hoped he’d become a chartered accountant one day. But he started mingling with local goons from the neighborhood, which paved the way for his foray into the world of crime.”

Jadhav began working as a bag man in the hawala department, an informal money transfer system that skirted regular banking channels to ensure the gangsters always had cash on hand. When the money arrived, Jadhav’s job was to dole it out.

“It was easy money,” says Jadhav. “The don calls you. You go to the designated spot, meet the operator, exchange code names, get the money, and deliver it at the addresses given to you. For every 10 lakh [$14,500] I collected and distributed, I would make at least one.”

Jadhav stuck to hawala distributions until 2000, when his father, hoping to encourage his son to “stop loitering in the streets,” convinced him to take a computer course. The internet was still new to India, and Jadhav was keen to exploit it to enhance his criminal résumé. He joined a private class, and came out with invaluable data — names and contact numbers for every real estate developer in Mumbai. Impressed with the findings, the don “promoted” him. Jadhav would now make extortion calls.

“Unlike many others in the underworld,” he says, “I was very quick to develop a sixth sense — I could tell who would pay, and who wouldn’t; who could be convinced over phone, and who required violence.”

Across hundreds of calls the next year, Jadhav was able to extract millions of Indian rupees for his boss. He liked the work, and he was good at it, but the organization needed something more. In 2004, Jadhav’s boss confessed a problem: a shortage of gunmen.

“They’re not loyal anymore,” he said. “Worse, they’ve grown tongues — asking for more money.”

Without a thought, Jadhav agreed to graduate to the “obvious next level.” His work had got him closer to the boss, which, in turn, made him feel indestructible. He was confident that if he was arrested or if rival gangs ever came for his blood, the don would do everything to shield him.

Jadhav picked nine of his friends, all unemployed youths from his neighborhood, and molded them into a gang. When he paid calls on real estate developers, his friends would back him up — or go out on calls by themselves, paying part of the profits back to him.

“It was the lure of money which drew us,” says one friend who does not wish to be identified. “While some of us would accompany Rahul to the shootouts, others would conduct [reconnaissance] before Rahul could fire at his victim and stood waiting with getaway motorbikes after he was done, while a few others stayed stationed at the spot to gauge the victim’s reaction. The reaction, in these instances, is of extreme importance, especially when the rounds are fired in public spaces. We have to be sure that the victim was scared; else, he wouldn’t cough up the money we want from him.”

“It was a good life,” Jadhav says. “I would spend thousands of rupees on my friends, and would drink the best scotch. I was getting addicted to alcohol and hashish, but I didn’t mind that. They made the shootouts easier.”

He fired his gun often, but only rarely did he shoot to kill. Mostly, he says, he made threats. If a developer was reluctant to pay money owed, Jadhav would discharge a few rounds in the office — breaking a pane of glass or shooting into the ceiling. Usually that worked. When it didn’t, things could get out of hand.

* * *

One day in November 2006, Jadhav woke up with a hangover. In order to get rid of it, he drank another three shots of whiskey. He could afford being drunk — his only job for the day was to survey the office of a real estate developer, who he was scheduled to fire at the following day.

Around 11 a.m. Jadhav and an accomplice reached his victim’s office; however, just before the duo was about to enter the premises, their boss called for a sudden change in the plan. They would have to shoot at the builder the same day.

“I was hesitant at first, but I went ahead anyway,” says Jadhav. “I walked to the developer’s cabin, handed him a piece of paper with my boss’s name and number, and ordered him to pay the extortion money we had been asking of him. Of course, I had to shoot at him — that would make sure he would pay up. I took an aim at his chest, while my accomplice shot at his stomach.”

With two critical wounds, the developer collapsed. Jadhav and his cohort rushed out of the office.

Since the shootout was unplanned, Jadhav did not have a getaway vehicle waiting for him. As the security guard chased after them, the duo ran through the streets of Dombivli, rushing to get to the railway station.

“When I turned around, I saw there were several people chasing after us — the guard, a couple of locals, a few bikers, and even a police patrol van,” he says. “I fired a few rounds at the bikers and locals, ensuring the crowd was discouraged. Soon, I was able to stop an auto rickshaw, and threatened the driver at gunpoint. He drove as fast as he could, and dropped us at the station. We then entered a nearby bar, called our boss, and informed him the job was done.”

Such days made him a prime target for the local police, who, in one of the complaints against Jadhav, cited him as a criminal involved in “many serious offences,” and one who “always carries firearms.” But Jadhav insists he never killed anyone, and says that despite the people he left bleeding in his wake, he saw his work as a “noble” business.

“Victimizing the poor is sinful,” he says. “Here, we were taking a negligible amount from the extremely affluent in Mumbai, and giving it to the dons, who were the poorer ones. The way I looked at it, we were facilitating an equitable distribution of wealth in the city.”

* * *

It was February 27, 2007. Jadhav was inebriated when he walked out of a Mumbai bar and was picked up by a police officer. Drunk out of his wits, he was driven to the precinct house.

“Get me some alcohol, and I’ll talk,” Jadhav told the cops arrogantly, still certain about his immortality in the world of crime. The cops didn’t respond. “At least give me a cigarette. Do you have some hashish?”

The policemen handed him a plate of noodles.

Jadhav tried to explain to the interrogating cops that he was an addict, that if he wasn’t given alcohol, he would start shivering and pass out. The policemen, however, didn’t relent. Jadhav passed out and woke up two days later in a government-run hospital, unaware that he had been arrested.

By the time he landed in a Mumbai jail, Jadhav had eleven cases against him, including three counts of attempted murder. He was booked under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, and charged with procuring arms and ammunition for the underworld. Most of his friends, meanwhile, had also been arrested. Most of them were beaten, charged and abandoned by their families. One, upon being arrested, lost his father to a heart attack.

While in jail, Jadhav sank into despair. His friends’ plight had started bothering him. His addictions could no longer come to his rescue, and there was no one on the outside who cared what happened to him. He began to think about reform — something that, for a long time, seemed impossible. As he stayed in the prison, staring out the window at apartments inhabited by “normal” families, he craved the boringness of a mundane life.

Several of his ex-gang members also seemed to be turning against him. Police files show that one guided investigators to the cyber café Jadhav had once used as an office, while others helped the police identify motorcycles used in the crimes.

Jadhav decided he had to make a choice: He could continue to be one of those men in prison, and eventually die like an “unclaimed stray on a street,” or rewrite his story. Determined to start a new life, Jadhav, who could not afford a lawyer, took to reading Indian law books to prepare his bail application — something difficult to get for someone accused of activity related to organized crime.

He “used and misused the law” for his benefit, offering a host of defenses — that the revolvers used in the shootout hadn’t been found, that the motorbikes used in the chase didn’t belong to him, that the eyewitness accounts were inconsistent, and that because he had been passed out for two days following his arrest, he had not been properly presented before the court. His arguments worked, and he was granted bail in 2010.

“When he first returned home after being granted bail, we couldn’t recognize him,” says Sachin Shivale, 45, Jadhav’s childhood friend. “He had lost a lot of weight, and had dark spots all over his face. It was like I’d never known him — the criminal inside him, nor the man who had just walked out of jail. He was a quiet boy when we were growing up, wouldn’t raise a finger at anyone. I couldn’t believe that boy had turned into a gangster. He let us down.”

Although Jadhav had decided to reform, no one — the police, his family, friends or neighbors — believed it possible. His neighbors wouldn’t share their phone numbers with him, and most of them still saw him as a long-haired hooligan with two pistols tucked in his trousers.

Jadhav’s father suggested getting a job, and he started working as a quality inspector for a small razorblades manufacturer. But within a few months, the Mumbai police arrived at his workplace and picked him up for inquiries into an underworld-perpetrated murder. One day in 2011, cops arrived, grabbed him by the nape of the neck, and asked him questions about a recent hold-up.

“They’re friends,” he said, when his coworkers asked him about it. But friends don’t carry machine guns, and no one at the office believed him. He quit the job soon after.

“Every time there was a case of extortion, I was one of the usual suspects,” he says. “They’d ask me the same things every time — Who did you shoot? Where did you shoot? How many bullets? I wanted to let go of that past, but it was being rubbed into my skin over and over again.”

Jadhav’s 71-year-old mother, Shalini says, “They’d even come home, would scour through our belongings, and turned everything upside down each time. They even took my husband away for questioning twice, but we couldn’t do much. We knew our son had been in the wrong.”

* * *

Unable to find another job, Jadhav relapsed into alcohol and drugs. Three years later, in 2013, he was tried and acquitted on all charges, largely on technicalities. In making his ruling, the judge admonished the police department for their failure to prove the charges against Jadhav, writing: “The prosecution has failed to establish the nexus between the accused and the alleged offense. In these circumstances, I have no option but to hold that the prosecution has miserably failed to prove its case against the accused.”

But although Jadhav was acquitted, he was still an alcoholic and drug addict. He would stay high for days on cheap booze and bad drugs. He would go without food for days — comfortably lost in his inebriated stupor, waking up in gutters, abandoned buildings, and footpaths.

“That’s when I decided to refer him to a doctor, and took him to the Thane Institute for Psychological Health,” says Mangala, Jadhav’s sister. “Here, he went cold turkey to get over his addiction. Although the process was extremely difficult, he completed it. He started confiding in his doctor, and said he wanted some time off from nagging policemen and judgemental eyes. The doctor advised him to join the Muktangan Rehabiliation Centre in Pune.”

After completing four 30-day programs at Muktangan, Jadhav wasn’t ready to go back to a society that “just wasn’t willing to take me back.” He joined the center as a volunteer. For a monthly compensation of 1,000 rupees — about $15 — he spent 16 hours a day cleaning toilets, throwing out trash, mopping up vomit, and tying up new addicts during their withdrawals.

“It was very difficult for him to trust me at first,” says Jetha, his counselor. “Everything I’d say, he would go back and verify it through the internet. I noticed he was quieter than other addicts, and was giving up on himself. To reform, he needed to express what he was feeling — anger, frustration, and despair. I was looking for ways of expression for him, and that’s when we discovered he could run.”

Six months after Jadhav started running, in mid-2016, he was ready to go back home. “I realized if I had to reintegrate into the society, I had to go back, and face all those people again — even the ones I shot,” he says. “I hadn’t taken drugs and alcohol in over two years. I was training to become a professional runner.”

He simply experienced a “sense of achievement,” he says, “something I’d never known in my life.”

The post How a Brutal Mafia Enforcer Became a Deadly Serious Marathoner appeared first on Narratively.

When you’re broke off your ass, sometimes you have to reclaim joy by whatever means necessary. I chose burlesque. My pasties were made of scraps from an old dress I’d cut up, cardboard, and nail art gems. The routine consisted mostly of holding up and then dropping a series of signs, which would spell out a letter (the last line of which would be written on my stomach), but I could only afford one pack of signs, so my letter had to be 24 lines long, with no room for mistakes.

My monetary situation was kind of why I was doing this routine. I was seven months pregnant with a baby I was planning to place for adoption with a gay couple, and the letter was addressed to my unborn kiddo. My main reasons for choosing adoption were, as with many birth mothers, financial. I was not only broke: I had defaulted on two student loans and three credit cards, and my wages were being garnished. My bank account was getting down to single digits between paychecks, if not overdrawn.

But despite being totally broke and ill-prepared, I felt calm and even happy in the dressing room, looking in the mirror, my long hair made silky by pregnancy, big breasts, and round belly. Someone in the dressing room commented that I looked like an earth goddess, and honestly I felt like one. Wholesome, yet sexy as hell. In short, I felt like A Motherfucking Woman. This is complicated now, six years later, because I don’t particularly feel like A Motherfucking Woman anymore.

Eventually — just this year, in fact — I would come out as nonbinary. Eventually I would cut my hair off. Eventually I would forget what it felt like to have a person growing in me. Eventually I would claim “they/them” pronouns and buy a chest binder. Eventually I would stumble into a multifaceted, ever-evolving relationship with my AFAB (assigned female at birth) body, a gender-flexible relationship that holds all my body’s history as part of what makes it extraordinary.

But the year I was pregnant, despite knowing full well that pregnancy and uteruses ain’t what determine your gender, I felt like the most Woman of Woman. Reveling in my pregnant body was like a sexy vacation before the storm of grief that eventually awaited me.

* * *

The hot tub was too cold to use, but Didi and I jumped in anyway, shivering in the frigid April air. We grabbed each other’s forearms as we gaped at the opulence of Pablo’s automated-everything, high-ceilinged, why-does-a-man-living-alone-need-this-many-bathrooms, what-does-this-guy-even-do-for-a-living loft apartment.

I’d broken up with my emotionally abusive ex the year before and immediately launched into the process of reclaiming my body through casual sex. Sex with him had, ironically, been one of the best things about our relationship, and I had needed to prove to myself that I could still have access to that pleasure without him. This quest had resulted in a lot of really lovely one- and two-night stands. When one of these trysts resulted in pregnancy, I saw no reason to change my behavior. After all, if I was already pregnant, I couldn’t get pregnant again.

So, four months into my pregnancy, I’d found myself at a kissing party with my friend Didi. Didi was someone I’d long been attracted to, but we were both a little too subby to pursue each other sexually or romantically. But in my post-breakup sluttiness, we’d established that bringing in an outside party — often via a threesome — was a way that we could act on our attraction without either of us having to be the instigator. Didi was someone I could be radically honest with, someone who would give me emotional aftercare when I caught feelings for one of the guys we double-teamed together, someone with whom I was completely and utterly safe. Going to a kissing party with her was a natural extension of our friendship.

Pablo, an attractive guy wearing pants covered with a print of the Virgin Mary, was the first person Didi and I talked to at the kissing party. When I turned down his offer of a drink because of my pregnancy, he said, “Wow, I’ve always had a fantasy about having sex with a pregnant woman.” Pablo was rich, though I wouldn’t realize it until I went to his loft for the after-party. He lured me there by casually mentioning the hot tub on his roof.

Pablo really wanted to take a picture of me because he thought my pregnant belly looked so good in my tight red dress, so I posed for him. And when the six of us who’d traipsed there together commenced an orgy in Pablo’s “soft room” (exactly what it sounds like — a room with basically a giant mattress for a floor), he could not stop fetishizing my pregnant body.

“Mm, pregnant boobies,” he said at one point. Direct quote.

My pregnant boobies, it’s true, were a sight to behold, but I was caught between enjoying Pablo’s enjoyment of me and feeling a bit squicked out. Thankfully, he started focusing more on Didi while another guy, Rob, ate my pussy for about a year. Rob was gorgeous, and gifted at what he did, and that was about all I knew about him. He gave me more orgasms that evening than some women have in their entire lives. Pregnant orgasms were different; they resonated deeper inside me somehow. When he was done, he kissed me a few times, told me he’d better go check on his girlfriend, and that was the end of that. He was like a mysterious orgasm fairy.

I was alone then, while everyone else was occupied, and I wrapped myself in a blanket and just watched. Pablo noticed me sitting alone, kissed me, and put his hand between my legs, which I didn’t resist but didn’t encourage; then he asked if he should just let me rest, and I said yes, so he stopped. I took myself to one of Pablo’s many bathrooms, looked in the mirror, and realized that what I wanted most was to go home.

When I got out of the bathroom, Didi was already getting dressed, apparently having had the same thought. I started to get dressed too.

“You don’t have to go just because I am,” she said.

“No, I want to go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I said goodbye to Pablo, and he said, “Can we have sex before you go?” I said no, and he was disappointed.

“Sex with a pregnant woman is my one sexual fantasy I haven’t done yet.”

“We’ll fix that soon,” I said. This was a lie.

Didi and I went to a diner and gossiped about the evening. We compared notes: Didi felt as sketched out by Pablo as I did, but thought he had a beautiful penis. We both liked Rob, despite knowing basically nothing about him. And while Rob had been giving me orgasm after orgasm, his girlfriend Emma had been doing the same to Didi — apparently a talented couple. Then I walked Didi to her apartment and crashed in bed with her, cradling the teddy bear she would eventually bring me in the hospital while I was in labor with my son.

As uncomfortable as I felt being fetishized by Pablo, in a way, he was almost beside the point. I got to experience ecstatic pleasure alongside someone I loved, and then when I was done, I was done. I was living life in my gorgeous pregnant body, on my terms. Three months later, as I prepared to do my burlesque routine, Didi was one of the people beside me in the Williamsburg dressing room, helping me get ready to go onstage.

* * *

By the third trimester, sex had become a logistical challenge. My belly was growing, and growing, and stuff had just moved. But by the second date, Irving and I had figured out what angles worked for us, and sex with him had stopped hurting. Actually, sex with Irving was great. He was coming out of a three-year dry spell, and I was full of sexy pregnant energy, so our sex was pretty vigorous — basically two people attacking each other, which is the kind of sex I like to have.

About an hour into date three, just a couple weeks after the burlesque show, Irving abruptly asked, “Can I talk to you?” which confused me, because I thought that’s what we were doing. I was sipping water while he pounded one Jameson and ginger ale after another.

I knew what was coming: Irving was clearly catching feelings for me. And frankly, so was I. Sure, he forced laughter when he was nervous, but we were tender with each other in bed in a way I hadn’t been able to find through group sex with Didi or the one-night-stands. So what did that mean when I was eight months pregnant?

“OK,” Irving said, “I really like you.”

Here it comes, I thought. “I really like you too.”

And then he said, “Sex with you is weird.”

This was not remotely what I expected to hear, so I said nothing while he monologued. The sex was way too intimate, he said. He could feel the baby kicking him when we cuddled, and he couldn’t get past the fact that I was “having another man’s baby,” so he was cutting things off.

This was the beginning of feeling like my pregnant body was a burden, rather than a sexy adventure. From that point, I just kept getting bigger and my feet kept getting more swollen and my pelvic floor was starting to ache with its load. And I was tiring of explaining to strangers that my son would be adopted by another couple. I hated feeling like I had to put them at ease, to convince them that everything was fine so I didn’t have to deal with the burden of their pity.

All I wanted was to just have the baby so there wouldn’t be so many unknowns. I knew that I was probably going to grieve pretty intensely once my son was born, but I really hadn’t started that process yet. When I wasn’t in pain or annoyed, mostly I regarded my pregnancy with bemusement and awe. I stared at my protruding belly in wonder, watching the flesh move as my son moved some limb from one side of my stomach to the other, feeling like I’d been occupied by an alien. There is nothing quite like seeing your body move without your permission.

* * *

The clichés are true. The minute you meet your child, you fall in love. You are done for. You cannot help yourself.

I pushed for three hours, which probably accounted for the bone-aching pain I had throughout my entire body the next day, as well as the enormous hemorrhoids I discovered the first time I took a shit post-childbirth. I had thrown up from the pain several times, and I had stitches in my vagina. But when I first held my kid in my arms, all I could do was gush, certain that he was objectively cuter than every other baby ever born. (I’ve since looked back at photos and realized that this was just new-mom brain.)

Two days later, when my son left the hospital without me, I doubled over in pain. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stand up straight. My torso would not support me. It felt like a physical part of me was being ripped off of my body. Which, in a way, it was.

Childbirth transformed my alien-occupant into a little human; it transformed my adoption from theoretical to devastatingly real; and it transformed my body from a sexy fertility palace into a broken home. I spent the following weeks bleeding, teaching my leaking breasts that no one would be feeding from them, and overcoming symptoms from the flu shot I’d gotten in the hospital.

I did rediscover my access to pleasure pretty quickly; Irving came back almost as soon as the baby was out of me, and the minute the doctor gave me the go-ahead, we got back to being unable to keep our hands off each other. I was in a weird mélange of grieving and fucking, of figuring out all the ways I needed to put myself back together anew. I found out that I could not stand to be around crowds of acquaintances, that I felt assaulted if the other person in a conversation talked too much, that eight times was too many times in one night for your first time after having a baby.

I’ve never been an earth goddess since. My stomach is still soft, never bouncing back to its pre-baby flatness, and tattooed with stretch marks that make my lower abdomen look like the water shining through a swimming pool. I’ve come to love my new tummy quite dearly, but it took a few years. My vagina, honestly, has never been the same; sex still hurts sometimes in ways it never used to, even six years later, and my labia minora is lopsided now. There are still ways in which my body feels like a storm hit it, and although most of the damage has been patched up, you can still see the cracks. I guess, as Leonard Cohen said, that’s how the light gets in.

But before all that, the night of the burlesque show, I stepped out onto the stage proudly, with my markered signs covering my breasts — peak Earth Goddess, Most Woman of Woman. The soft glow of the stage lights illuminated my round stomach, my long brown hair, my swollen tits, my long legs. I knew the crowd was full of my friends, and I beamed at them as they cheered for me. The song playing was Garbage’s “Beloved Freak.” In the photos, you can see me glowing.

The letter read:

Hi Hunter!
(Or whatever your name ends up being)
I hope things are nice in my uterus.
I will miss feeling you kick me
And while part of me wishes I could take you home …
Your future daddies are AWESOME
And I’m excited about this open adoption thing.
I know your dads will do a great job preparing you for the real world
But here’s some life advice from mama:
People suck sometimes.
You will be no exception.
Apologize when you fuck up
But don’t suffer any fools gladly either.
Respect everyone you have sex with
(And everyone you don’t)
If you get a girl pregnant
BE NICE TO HER
Time goes faster than you think it does
So when you go to bed at night
Leave the world more loved and joyful than it was that morning.
Gratitude makes everything better
(But still insist on a fabulous life)
And please know that I will always
(always always always always always always)

And here I dropped the last sign to reveal the final words written on my seven-months-pregnant belly:

LOVE YOU

The post I’m Non-Binary. Pregnancy Made Me Love My Body for the First Time. appeared first on Narratively.

In Italy at the end of 1944, the Negro 92nd Infantry Division of the United States Army discovered two gaunt men who claimed they had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp. One man was thin and blonde with a “scholarly appearance.” The other had brown skin, a slight build and an erect carriage. After two years behind barbed wire, they said, they had fled the camp and gone on an incredible journey to reach the American lines: swimming in lakes, hiking through the snow-covered Apennines, and taking shelter in barns, caves, woods and the homes of friendly partisan supporters. They claimed they dodged bullets and ate leaves to survive; they said they bore witness to the slaughter of women and babies. Their names were Reed Peggram, an African-American, and Gerdh Hauptmann, his Danish friend, and they were “ragged and near collapse from hunger and fatigue.”

Freelance war correspondent Max Johnson, writing for the Negro newspapers Call and Post, New York Amsterdam News and Baltimore Afro-American, reported this curious find. The headlines that accompanied his stories were purposefully provocative: “Negro Escapes German Camp in Italy,” “Two Scholars Flee Concentration Camp,” “How Boston Lad Studying in Denmark Escaped Nazis” and “Boy Friends Scorn Bombs, Come Out OK.” Although he reported their claims, Johnson was skeptical of Peggram’s tale, not even believing that he was an American citizen, since his “accent was decidedly British.” Another correspondent noted that Peggram claimed to have a bachelor’s and master’s from Harvard, that he spoke English flawlessly, along with four other languages, and that despite his ordeal, it was not his physical suffering that upset him most.

“One of my greatest losses was my diploma from Harvard,” Peggram said. “They don’t issue duplicates. But I still have my Phi Beta Kappa key.”

The two men refused to leave each other’s side, but it was not clear if Hauptmann would be allowed to return to the U.S. with Peggram. Johnson called their story, “a modern version of Damon and Pythias,” referencing the Greek legend of loyalty between friends. Here were “bonds of friendship so strong that even the Nazis were unable to break them.”

“If Peggram’s story proves to be correct,” wrote Johnson, “it will undoubtedly become one of the greatest human interest stories yet revealed in this war.”

* * *

Reed Edwin Peggram was born on July 26, 1914, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Harvey Thomas Peggram, worked variously as a shorthand teacher, a self-employed card writer, and, according to his World War I draft card, an artist. Harvey was inducted into the United States Army on November 6, 1917, and served overseas as a private in the medical unit between May 15, 1918, and September 9, 1919. He returned from the war “100 percent disabled,” and became a permanent resident at the Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia, where he was treated for gas poisoning, according to his family. He would remain there until his death in 1956. For all intents and purposes, young Reed no longer had a father.

In the club photographs for the 1931 Boston Latin School literary and drama clubs, Peggram’s face stands out as the only African-American there. In a class of 262 students, Peggram ranked in the first quarter in scholarship. He received several awards and obtained honors on exams in Elementary Latin, Elementary French, Elementary German, and Advanced Latin. As it has been for hundreds of years of Boston Latin graduates, Harvard was the next step.

On his 1931 Harvard application, Peggram said he wanted “to become an accomplished linguist.” He applied for multiple scholarships, stating on financial aid forms that his mother had three additional children with her new husband, “Mr. Farrar,” and that his grandmother was his sole financial supporter. He also listed his father as dead. He was accepted to the college and distinguished himself, not just as a fine student but as one of the few black students at Harvard at the time.

In 1934, applying for a Rhodes Scholarship, Peggram asked Dean A. Chester Hanford for a recommendation. “He is one of the highest scholars in his class,” wrote Hanford. “Last November he was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He is a thorough gentleman.” Hanford shared a copy of the letter with Peggram, who promptly thanked him. But there was another letter Peggram did not see.

“I wish to supplement my letter of May 29th to you about Mr. Reed Peggram by stating that he is a negro [sic],” Hanford wrote in his second letter. “It seemed to me that you should know that fact.”

“Thank you for your testimonial and letter about Reed Peggram,” responded tutor Andrew Sydenham Farrar Gow. “I should like to thank you however for telling me that Peggram is a Negro. I should certainly have been somewhat taken aback if I had admitted a man with such a name unwarned.” Although Gow insisted this information would have no bearing, Peggram did not get the scholarship.

Peggram graduated from Harvard in 1935, magna cum laude, with the thesis, “A comparison of the personal element in Madame Bovary and L’Éducation Sentimentale.” Over the next two years, he would get his master’s from Harvard, study English and comparative literature at Columbia, and return to Harvard to begin work on his Ph.D. It is clear from Peggram’s letters that while there, he became infatuated with Leonard Bernstein, who would later become famous for composing the music for “West Side Story.” Bernstein arrived at Harvard in 1935 and was also a graduate of the Boston Latin School — perhaps the two already knew each other from high school.

One night at Harvard, Peggram and Bernstein sat side by side on a studio couch in a dimly lit room while a quartet played Beethoven. Peggram had asked that the lights be lowered because he believed that it was “more pleasant to listen to music in a room that has been darkened.” Peggram was in “ecstasy and agony at once,” sitting so close to Bernstein. Peggram requested a song from Debussy while Bernstein listened with eyes closed as if he was asleep. In a letter, Peggram would later explain that he felt, “ecstasy because you are here, and agony because I do not dare touch you, even in the dark, for fear of breaking the spell of such exquisite beauty.”

In a series of letters written to Bernstein in October 1937, Peggram referenced T.S. Eliot, Rachmaninoff, Eros and Psyche, Diaghilev’s treatment of Nijinsky, and the speech of Aristophanes in “The Symposium,” a discourse on love that says when a person, “happens on his own particular half, the two of them are wondrously thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, and are hardly to be induced to leave each other’s side for a single moment.” Leonard Bernstein’s archive at the Library of Congress only contains Peggram’s letters. Bernstein’s replies are lost, save for a few brief, devastating quotes that Peggram included in his own letters, which suggest that Bernstein rejected his overtures.

“The revelation of your letter,” wrote Peggram, “was after all, a great shock to me, and your use of the words ‘repulsive’ and ‘shudder’ an insult to the tenets which I hold sacred.” Later Peggram — demonstrating his preference for British spelling — beseeched Bernstein, “May I also request that, as a favour to me, you destroy all my letters and any other material that I have sent or given you during this regrettable incident?”

In 1938, Peggram got a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne: a chance to travel, a fresh start.

* * *

In the fall of 1938, Peggram met the person who would change his life. There is no record of how Peggram met Danish scholar Gerdh Hauptmann, who was studying fine art and painting at the Sorbonne, for the same reason that there is no written record of any facet of their relationship: They were gay, in a time when few dared to write such feelings down. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that this was the definitive romantic relationship of Peggram’s life. Hauptmann taught him Danish; he taught Hauptmann English. Within a year, he would write that they were “inseparable.”

“Recent European events have caused me to leave France for Denmark,” Peggram wrote in September 1939. “I hope you will also join your prayers to mine for humanity, civilization, and culture.”

Peggram spent the early months of the war working with Hauptmann on a 120-page manuscript, “Poems and Sketches,” a translation of the 19th century Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen. During this time, Peggram’s family and friends implored him to return to the U.S. while he still could. The U.S. State Department had already warned Americans to leave the European continent, but Peggram did not. Unable to declare his love for Hauptmann and explain that he would not leave Europe without the man he loved, Peggram baffled his family by insisting that his need to collaborate with Hauptmann on scholarly projects “richer and more profound than either of us had produced separately” made it impossible to leave Hauptmann behind.

The men left Copenhagen shortly before it was invaded by the Nazis on April 9, 1940. They fled to Paris to retrieve their luggage and made their way to Florence, Italy, where they wrongly assumed they would be safe. They spent the rest of the year stranded and broke, pleading for money from family in the U.S. who could not understand why Peggram would not just come home.

Information about Reed’s European movements are located in letters between him and Dorothy Norman, the editor and publisher of the journal Twice a Year from 1938 – 1948. “I am struggling for my life,” Peggram wrote on January 15, 1941. “If someone does not help me very soon, I shall just simply die.”

“We wish only to live, to write, to create, to say what we have to say as only we know how to say it,” he continued. “It is because we know we must do this together that we are only annoyed, rather than grateful, when people offer me a ticket to N.Y. as some have indeed attempted — without explaining, by the way, how my collaborator could ever be saved through this philanthropy.”

He assured Norman that he was not begging nor pleading. He said was merely making, “a statement of fact.”

“Two young artists of more than ordinary ability need immediate financial help in order not to perish,” he wrote. “In the name of art, of culture, of humanity in their deepest sense, this message must somehow be spread around where it will take effect at once, before it is too late.”

Hope came in the form of an inheritance. In September 1940, Peggram’s friend from Harvard, 25-year-old music student and aspiring concert pianist Montford Schley Variell, was found dead, according to The New York Times, “under mysterious circumstances” in his apartment. Lying face down, neatly wrapped from neck to feet in a blanket and sheet, Variell “had been dead for several days.” The police were not sure if he had committed suicide, died accidentally, or was murdered. Initially, the medical examiner declared his death a suicide by gas — the cause was later changed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Variell had a will and two life insurance policies that totaled $81,000, and he left money to several heirs, including $11,000 — worth approximately $160,000 in 2018 — to Peggram. This, he hoped, would be enough to get them both out of Europe. But the money would not be released to him unless he came home — without Hauptmann — to claim it.

Despite the legal obstacles, Peggram held out hope. In a letter dated April 9, 1941, he wrote to Norman: “Just how long it will take us to reach the U.S.A. still depends upon how soon acquaintances, consuls, attorneys, lawyers, etc. can experience sudden attacks of intelligence forceful enough to make them understand that we have been living here by necessity rather than by choice. But we know that even these will realize themselves in the end.”

After this, there were no more letters. Communications between Peggram and his friends and family stopped as, according to Peggram, he and Hauptmann were taken into a concentration camp at Bagni di Lucca, less than 50 miles from Florence.

* * *

When Peggram and Hauptmann told the story of their arrest to the Baltimore Afro-American, they did not mention homosexuality. They were taken into custody, they said, because the authorities felt “a Dane has no right to be a friend of a Negro.” After several days of interrogation, the Germans decided that Peggram would be permitted to leave German-occupied territory, but that Hauptmann, as the subject of a conquered country, would be compelled to join the German army. But, as the Afro-American put it, Peggram and Hauptmann “swore that whatever came, they would not break up.”

They were held at Bagni di Lucca until January 1944, when Allied planes gunned the camp, forcing the Germans to move their prisoners to another site. Over the next few months, the two men were shifted from camp to camp until they reached Piacenza, where Hauptmann was ordered to a German work camp. He refused to leave Peggram, whom the Germans would not compel to leave because, they said, “You are American.” The scholars were put in solitary confinement as the Germans pondered their fate.

“We didn’t know how long we stayed there, but it was really hell,” said Peggram. “Just enough soup to lead a miserable existence. For months we did not see a single human being. In fact, we saw nothing that was living. Not even bugs. There was no light, no action — nothing but a great deal of time to think about what was in store for us.”

Before their fate was decided, the camp was attacked by Italian partisans, who freed the prisoners and gave them shelter. Hauptmann and Peggram spent the rest of the year with the partisans, before striking out on their own in an attempt to reach the American lines.

“They found that all German-occupied territory was a prison,” wrote Johnson. “Without passports or other identification, their lives were worth less than when they were confined.”

Peggram and Hauptmann spent weeks hiking across country, once being shot at by German machine gunners, hiding with partisan families during the day and sleeping in barns at night. At last, they reached the 92nd Infantry Division, and were safe.

“They appeared to be as happy as two kids talking about what Santa Claus had brought them,” wrote Johnson. Although the reporter was initially skeptical of their story, there seems to be no reason to doubt Peggram and Hauptmann’s account of their imprisonment and escape. It is true that there was a camp at Bagni di Lucca, and that 16 miles away was another camp, Colle di Compito, that held citizens from the U.S., Great Britain and Denmark. Prisoners were often transferred between the two camps.

Peggram told Johnson, “We are not principally concerned with going to America. We only want to go some place where we can be assured remaining together to work in peace,” but Peggram returned to the U.S. alone, several months after encountering the 92nd Division. He departed Europe on the hospital ship Algonquin from Naples, Italy, arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 14, 1945. He would not see Hauptmann again.

* * *

Upon his return to the U.S., Peggram was hospitalized for four years, the result, he said in a 1950 alumni newsletter, of a “nervous breakdown.” After his release, he returned to Boston to live in a multiple-family dwelling shared by his mother and half-brother. His existence was mainly solitary.

“My own postgraduate history is no particular triumph,” he wrote in a later class note. “Either I am too lazy or too comfortable (scarcely the latter) to function as a professional translator.”

According to these missives, he spent the rest of his life singing in Episcopal Church choirs, improving the “seven or eight” foreign languages he knew, and failing to convince a publisher to accept his “antique, revised, unpublished doctoral dissertation.” He died on April 20, 1982.

In 1971 Gerdh Hauptmann published a book of poems, Declaration, in English, by a Danish publisher. One poem, “Ante,” appeared to reference his relationship with Peggram. It began:

I remember once —
we were walking together,
perhaps in a year or two, you said,
and we made plans, and discussed
whether it should be in New York
— in Paris — or maybe
somewhere in China.

We did not know then —
although perhaps we did suspect it —
that the apples would not ripen
on the trees
that year
or the next
or ever.

The post The Gay Black American Who Stared Down Nazis in the Name of Love appeared first on Narratively.

I was 4 years old and watching The Jungle Book. It was the scene where Kaa, the snake, was hypnotizing Mowgli to make him an easier meal. He was singing about it too — “Trust in Me”:

Slip into silent slumber
Sail on a silver mist
Slowly and surely your senses
Will cease to resist

I loved the song. I hated it. I needed to pee. But, as always happened when I watched this scene, when I went to the bathroom, nothing happened.

I eventually figured out a pattern, something so automatic and physical it had to be completely natural: A movie or TV show would feature some form of mind control, and it would feel like the most compelling thing I had ever seen, and I would feel an annoying physical sensation in my groin.

I mentioned how I felt to a friend or two, but by the time I was 6, I figured out that not everyone felt the way I did. An odd, nerdy kid in general, I was used to being a bit different. But this felt shameful in a way that my stamp collecting or obsession with fairies did not. I uncharacteristically decided that this was a secret — and I kept it. Very occasionally, I played games with my friends that involved kidnapping and magical spells that turned someone into a slave. But mostly I just daydreamed about hypnosis and mind control — constantly.

A decade later, when I was 14, I noticed the feeling that I got when a story included mind control was growing stronger — there was a heat to it now. Some new need I couldn’t place drove me to Google “hypnosis stories,” just to see what came up.

Of course, I immediately found erotica, and as I scanned some of the worst prose I have ever read (I eventually found better), the feeling roared into a fire in my stomach. It was one of the most intense sensations I had ever experienced, and I suddenly understood.

The nerdy innocent, I had been the last girl in my class to even learn what intercourse was. And now, a word I had heard maybe a couple of times came bubbling into my mind with startling clarity: “This is a fetish,” I thought. “I have a hypnosis fetish.”

Now that I had hit puberty, my fetish also took clearer shape. I didn’t just like the idea of mind control, I knew I wanted it to happen to me. In the stories that captivated me the most, some malevolent controller would lure, or trick, or kidnap some young innocent. Through conventional hypnosis, or drugs, or some sci-fi machine, or magic, the victim would slowly crumble to their captor’s will. In the end, all they would be capable of doing, or even thinking, was what their new master wanted (which, wouldn’t you know it, was usually lots of sex).

“This site is for fantasy only,” declared MCStories.com, the most popular mind-control erotica site. “The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.”

The words hit me hard, confirmed what I already felt; that wanting something so horrible to happen to me made me bad — that there was something really evil inside me, something to be feared. And it was crushing to know that even if I wanted to cave to my desires, what happened in those stories was impossible.

And so, I accepted this realization like the diagnosis of some incurable disease. I’d live with it, probably forever, but I’d do what I could to manage it, to minimize its effect on my life. All sexual desire became a threat, the thing that could push me over the edge into addiction to a fiction that could never be.

* * *

My exposure to the BDSM scene first came when I was in college and got involved in the steampunk community. To this day, I don’t fully understand the overlap, but the geekier the subculture, the more likely it is to include proud perverts. My kinky friends explained how crucial communication is in BDSM. An exchange starts with a conversation about what is — and isn’t — about to happen, including likes, limits, and safe words. What plays out within that context is acceptable, even if it looks like something that’s unacceptable in the outside world, like hitting another person. Conversely, a simple exchange that violates that system — say, a kiss without asking — is a huge infraction. All that talk of negotiation and consent sounded well and good to my new friends, but it never occurred to me that it would be relevant to me — my fantasies were akin to rape, the opposite of consent.

Eventually, I opened up to these friends, who I at least knew wouldn’t judge me, even if I doubted they would understand me. Most had never heard of a hypnosis fetish, but one urged me to go to an upcoming BDSM convention with her. There would be a so-called hypnokink meetup, she had heard. I hesitated for weeks and ultimately went so last-minute that when I arrived I still wasn’t sure if I was going to go through with it.

The hypnosis meetup turned out to be disorganized, so an experienced hypnotist named David started teaching an impromptu class. He had long brown hair and eyes that lit up when he talked.

Over the next hour, he explained how there are misconceptions about hypnosis. A trance is like other altered states, like subspace for BDSM practitioners, he explained. You establish consent and boundaries before you engage in it, and respect all parties involved. Hypnosis wasn’t mind control, but if a hypnotist and a subject wanted to try that sort of fantasy, it could be a collaborative act, one of care and excitement.

In a hypnosis scene, you can use a trance for removing inhibitions, enhancing creativity. You’re essentially using your imagination for anything from hearing “your foot is stuck to the floor” and believing it, to responding to “you feel really submissive toward me.” And a hypnotist can implant a suggestion that works afterward, as long as both parties agree to it, like, “Every time I say ‘good kitty,’ you’ll start acting like a cat.”

I felt like lightning struck me. I felt jubilant. I felt like an idiot for not getting it sooner. Still, I sat, balled up in the fetal position on my chair, the only one not getting up when David asked the room to try an exercise. Aspiring hypnotists grabbed partners and rocked them gently by the shoulders to get them into a trance — no words needed. I was aroused, and freaked out, but I didn’t run away.

After the class, there was a queue of people who wanted to chat with David. I was patient, studying him carefully. When he had a moment, I asked if we could talk. He sat down with me, giving me his full attention.

“First of all, hypnosis is my fetish,” I began.

“Mine too,” he said.

And we were off. Over the next three hours, we talked about kink, about our lives, about our similar Jewish upbringings. His partner hung out with us too — I knew a few polyamorous people through steampunk, but I was surprised by how easy it seemed for these two. Finally, in the middle of the night, we were still talking when David stopped and asked me:

“So, would you like to try?”

Back in his hotel room, we sat across from each other in armchairs. He asked permission to touch me — just to hold my hand, or steady me if I slumped over. I nodded. I was ready.

David started talking — simple instructions about how I could slip into the state I had always craved — and within moments I knew that this was what I really wanted. I felt like I was underwater, but breathing was easier than on land. My thoughts, rather than disappearing, took on focus and clarity — I just stopped noticing what wasn’t important. And what was important was how good I felt, listening to David, sharing this moment. The longer the scene went on, the more it felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. I felt content. I felt excited. I felt very, very turned on.

The scene was simple. David took me into a trance, then he took me out. He gave me a couple of post-hypnotic suggestions, such as one to improve my posture for the rest of the weekend, since I had been treating my spine like a turtle shell all evening. He reminded me that I could stop anytime I wanted. I had no desire to stop.

* * *

David lived near me, so after the convention we started seeing each other more. I would go to his apartment, he would hypnotize me, and we began to explore. He hypnotized me to go into a trance at the snap of his fingers, to act like a dog, to inhabit a “slave girl” persona, to have orgasms at his command. He hypnotized me in front of a class of 30 people to teach them how erotic hypnosis works. He introduced me to other hypnokinksters, to other kinds of kink. After some months, we decided to start using the labels of Dom and sub, to identify as owner and property.

And that’s how we’ve been, going on six years now.

We’ve reached the point in our relationship where I want something just because David does. It’s impossible to extricate love, hypnosis, and conditioning, but however the sausage is made, mind control isn’t just a fantasy shibboleth we throw around — it’s what we’re accomplishing. I frequently tell David that it’s like he’s reading my mind.

“That’s because I’m writing it,” he always responds.

My timing was impeccable. I entered the hypnokink scene in early 2013. Prior to 10 years ago, the hypnosis community existed entirely online. Fetishists and the curious tranced each other in chat rooms (they still do), shared hand-drawn art and hypnotic audio files, talked technique, arranged the occasional real-life date. But eventually, some in big cities realized that their numbers were robust enough for in-person gatherings. (David cofounded the New York City meetup.) That time also saw the birth of the New England Erotic Hypnosis unConference, or NEEHU, the first recurring erotic hypnosis convention, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year.

These days, there are roughly five annual weekend conventions or retreats. I try to go to about three, in addition to monthly classes. Many cities have regular meetups, sometimes hosted by more established BDSM institutions. In the beginning, I was content to serve as David’s subject for demonstrations when he taught — I still love to help him show everything from new techniques for inducing trance to methods for combining hypnosis and erotic humiliation. But I also wanted to show that being submissive didn’t mean being passive, and eventually I was teaching classes of my own, from the subject’s perspective.

When hypnosis met BDSM, though, there was grumbling from both sides. Old-guard hypnotists had reservations about associating with the whips-and-chains set. Some argued that we were aligning ourselves with perverts. Others held on to dangerous, antiquated ideas about hypnosis and power exchange, arguing that BDSM negotiation and consent were too limiting for hypnotic play.

As I first entered the general kink scene, mentioning my fetish would often be met with horror. I have been asked more than once: “Hypnosis? But that takes away consent! Isn’t it automatically abuse?”

Over time, those questions grew less frequent, as hypnosis practitioners taught at BDSM conventions, played with it at parties, spread the good word. It’s not as popular as, say, rope or flogging, but it’s not unusual to meet a kinkster who breaks out a pocket watch from time to time (hypnosis has been called the chocolate sauce of the kink world; you can add it to anything, and it will make it better).

In some ways, the timing of this convergence has become especially intense over the last couple of years. Now is a key moment for the kink scene. Both independent of, and in tandem with, mainstream conversations about power and consent, the BDSM community is starting to self-reflect, to expose predators in its midst, to question how well existing attitudes toward consent work, or are protected. Nearly as soon as the hypnokink scene formed, around 2009, it was plagued with the same issues — at least two major conventions have died and been replaced as a result of allegations of consent violations or mishandling of reports of abuse. In San Francisco, for example, this year will mark the debut of a new convention, which came together after one organizer of the previous West Coast event was banned from all of the other major conventions as accusations of predatory behavior reached a fever pitch.

For all the growing pains, it’s worth being part of this community every time I teach a class and see someone’s eyes light up with excitement, or whenever I tell someone about an amazing trance I had and they understand, or even when I bring up The Jungle Book and someone twinges knowingly. And witnessing the creativity of others is wild. I have seen hypnotic vivisections (since you can’t cut someone open for real), the Darth Vader force choke in real life, and mental transformations into everything from robots to Pokémon.

The wonderful thing about having a fetish is that it never gets old. Every single time, without exception, that David hypnotizes me, whether it be with a snap of his fingers, staring into my eyes, or slapping my face (yes, that works), there’s a moment when I think, “Oh my God, it’s happening.” The repression is gone, but every time I go under, I still feel a profound sense of relief.

My pubescent fantasies are all well and good — I still love reading stories where the victim has their identity taken away forever, and that desire is part of the drive of my kinky relationship. But the fantasies can’t compare with the layers of complexity that exist in a relationship that includes both sadomasochism and cuddling. We engage in long-term psychological conditioning (yes, we call it brainwashing), mutually plotting my destruction. But we also talk about the weather, and music, and religion, and complain about work. I still have my friends (including David’s other partners), and family, and a husband I adore (I had a lot of explaining to do when we met). I’ve learned that a fetish is not proscriptive — or prescriptive. It doesn’t have to look like porn for it to be full and real — and it’s better, if arguably stranger, than fiction.

* * *

David and I are chatting on his couch, and in a second, before I fully realize what’s happening, he’s pressing his finger onto my forehead, an old trigger that sends me plummeting into a trance. I want to yell from pleasure, but I can’t seem to make sounds anymore.

“That’s right,” he says. “Better and better each time. Deeper and deeper each time. Blank and mindless for me.”

At these familiar words, most of my thoughts slow to a crawl, and the rest seem quiet and distant, like the volume is down on a television. I can’t really think, but I can certainly feel. I feel the rush of letting go, eternal surprise at how fully and quickly I respond, eagerness to please, excitement and pride. I vaguely recall that I always wanted to stop thinking when someone told me to, but that I used to think it was impossible. It feels, literally, like magic.

David continues talking, and I concentrate on every word. And yet, at times what he says grows indistinct. I know by now I’m absorbing it all anyway.

Suddenly, he snaps his fingers, and I awake with a gasp.

“Hi,” he grins at me.

“Hi,” I murmur back. He’s teasing me; he knows all I want to do at this moment is go back into the trance, to let him do whatever he wants to me.

And what will that be? Will he tell me to become another person, making a role-play character eerily real? Will he give me a command for later and tell me to forget it for now? I only manage amnesia sometimes, but lately it’s been happening more often — being hypnotized is like any other skill, and I’m always learning some new trick. Or maybe he’ll make me dumb for a while, counting down like he’s lowering a dial on my intelligence. He might give me visions, make me see abstract, swirling colors, vivid as a dream. On a recent date, he told me that the color red was orgasmic, and then changed the lighting of the room to match.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

“Good,” is all I can muster; I’m still halfway in a trance.

“Good.” He touches my forehead again, and I’m gone again.

Whatever happens next, I’m ready for it. Most of my thoughts are indistinct again, but one cuts through, coherent and clear.

“This is why I’m here.”

The post What It’s Like to Have a Hypnosis Fetish appeared first on Narratively.

This past spring, the internet was gleefully stunned by the drum stylings of Yoyoka Soma, an 8-year-old girl from Japan whose size suggests she could comfortably cradle herself inside her kick drum, if she preferred hide-and-go-seek to rock ’n’ roll. In the viral video, Soma flawlessly traverses the pounding nuances of her favorite song, the Led Zeppelin classic “Good Times, Bad Times.” Knocking the cowbell centerpiece metronomically and grinning widely, the adorably bobbed Soma miraculously mimics the drum track laid 50 years ago by John Bonham, the burly, beer-swigging Brit who’s considered one of the greatest rock drummers of all time. Upon seeing the video — which has garnered well over three million views — Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant marveled at her talent, saying, “That’s a technically really difficult thing to do.” Speaking on behalf of his departed drummer, Plant added, “I think he’d be amazed.”

Soma’s clip is just one of thousands of videos submitted from around the world over the past seven years to the Hit Like a Girl contest, an amateur female drumming competition designed to inspire female empowerment and spark a rebound in the struggling musical instrument industry. Contestants create a user profile on the Hit Like a Girl website, then upload an approximately three-minute performance video to YouTube. There are several categories — straight drum-set performance, concert percussion, marching percussion and others — and separate contests for adults and girls under 18. A panel of industry executives and esteemed female drummers serve as judges, with the results of public votes also considered. Scholarships to performing arts programs, free gear and other prizes supplied by more than 60 sponsors are up for grabs.

“We have girls from as young as 7 to women as old as 70 that participated in the contest this year,” says Hit Like a Girl co-founder David Levine, who owns the cymbal manufacturer TRX Cymbals. Levine adds that more than 50 countries and a wide variety of musical genres were represented among this year’s 500-plus contestants — an all-time high. He says he hears gratitude for the existence of Hit Like a Girl from participants and others just learning about it, “pretty much every day.”

The idea sprung out of a chat Levine had with Mindy Abovitz Monk, a drummer who founded Tom Tom Magazine, which strictly covers female percussionists. Abovitz Monk contacted Levine about advertising, and the conversation morphed into a brainstorming session about how to expand the underrepresented and underserved female drumming market. “I just kind of threw out, ‘Why don’t you do a contest?’” Levine says.

Abovitz Monk put her weight behind Hit Like a Girl so she could “have more help creating a hype machine around girls and women drummers globally.” Levine says he hoped the contest would provide a boost to the musical instrument retail industry, which has been floundering of late. (Analog drum kits alone saw a 50 percent decline in the number of units sold between 2004 and 2014, according to a study by the National Association of Music Merchants.) The pair also engaged Phil Hood, the publisher of DRUM! magazine, to help organize and promote Hit Like a Girl.

“Although women make up 50 percent of the population, they’re less than 10 percent of drummers,” Levine says. “So we thought it was a tremendous opportunity.” (A 2013 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that women make up only 26.9 percent of professional musicians, singers and related workers; a University of Iowa study confirms that women are an even lower percentage of drummers.)

Levine works to promote the contest year round, including organizing appearances by winners and contestants at events like this past summer’s GearFest, a musical instrument and gear trade show in Indiana, and November’s Percussive Arts Society’s International Convention, which typically attracts more than 55,000 attendees. He’s also preparing to host a U.S. tour of the winners of this year’s inaugural Hit Like a Girl China contest, which drew 750 competitors. Entries for the 2019 U.S. version of the contest will open this fall.

Over the past seven installments of Hit Like a Girl, Levine says participation has steadily increased, and Soma’s clip this year was the most-viewed video yet. Soma began playing drums at age 2 in part because her parents are musicians — they started their own family band, with Soma manning the drums and her brother on keys. She wrote in an email interview that she loves playing the drums because “It rocks!” and practices two hours each day so she can consistently “take care of the groove.” Soma was surprised when her Hit Like a Girl submission, filmed by her father in their home, went viral, adding that she thought she was in a dream. She hopes to one day tour the world as a drummer, and she says that the Hit Like a Girl contest, which she heard about from a friend, gave her added confidence and the ability to be exposed to other drummers across the globe.

The contest has inspired more mature musicians as well, like TaRiesha Fayson, 31, who lives in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Fayson’s mother taught her to play drums at their church when she was 8 or 9 years old. “I have a big family, and my mother and stepfather struggled a lot,” Fayson recounts. “We always lived in an apartment; we never had enough bedrooms for the kids, so there was definitely not enough room for drums — or money for drums.” Fayson used “whatever I could find” for drumsticks, though she eventually procured a real pair, practicing on buckets or paint cans her stepfather, a maintenance man, had lying around their home. “I couldn’t use the pots and pans; I think my mother would have killed me.”

When she was about 20, she saved up enough money working overnight security jobs to buy a kit, keeping it in a storage unit where she practiced. After just a few months, someone broke into the storage unit and stole the drums. Fayson continued playing drums off and on at church for a few years, but she eventually began to gravitate more toward the keyboard.

In 2014, Fayson, who was working as a special needs assistant at a local school, heard about Hit Like a Girl and considered entering, but she was intimidated by the quality of the other contestants’ videos. “I just didn’t have the funds to get to a studio and have someone come and record it,” she says.

Months later, her cousin texted her a screenshot of the Hit Like a Girl website announcing that Fayson had made the finals. “I’m trying to figure out how because I didn’t submit a video,” she remembers. Her cousin was the culprit, entering Fayson without her knowledge, supplying a video of her performing at their church that he had shot on his iPhone the prior summer. “None of the music was organized; we were just jamming,” Fayson says, “and that video actually won the contest.”

“It helped me see that I was a pretty talented drummer,” Fayson offers about her experience with Hit Like a Girl. She won first prize in the over-18 category for drum-set performance, taking home a slew of prizes, including a new drum kit, without which she might not be drumming at all today. Hit Like a Girl, she says, “refreshed my love for drums” and “redirected my entire life.” She was offered a gig at the House of Blues in Shanghai, China, where she remained for a three-month residency — the first time she’d ever traveled out of the country.

Now a full-time professional drummer, Fayson is endorsed by David Levine’s TRX Cymbals, as well as by M2 Custom Drums. “I’m being exposed a lot lately,” she says. “I’m staying pretty busy.” She plays constantly; personal performance highlights include the Derby City Jazz Festival at the site of the Kentucky Derby and shows with guitarist Ariel O’Neal, who’s played in Beyoncé’s live band.

Levine says he’s seen anecdotal evidence that the number of female drummers has been on the rise since the inception of Hit Like a Girl — and there is some research that bears that out. Guitar Center reports that over the past decade the company has seen more than a 10 percent increase in overall product sales to female customers, and a 9 percent jump in drum sales to women. Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, an organization that sets up lessons with famous musicians, says female enrollment has leaped 25 percent over just the past four years, with many of them playing drums. And the Berklee College of Music has seen an 11 percent growth in female enrollment since 2004, with a 5 percent uptick in women pursuing percussion degrees.

“When we started the contest, I felt that our goal was to change men’s minds about female drummers, to be more accepting and more inclusive,” Levine says. “But I realized this year the goal is really to change women’s minds about them playing drums, and give them permission, in a way, to do what they want. Once they do that, men are going to have to get used to it.”

Another Hit Like a Girl champ, 17-year-old Rebecca Webster of Westport, Connecticut, seconds that sentiment. “There’s not a lot of female drummer role models for me to look to,” Webster says, ironically, given that it was her grandmother who originally turned her on to the instrument.

“When I was in my early 50s, for reasons I never understood, I suddenly became obsessed with wanting to learn how to drum,” says Maida Webster, 74, Rebecca’s grandma. “Twenty-plus years ago, a 50-something-year-old woman looking for drum lessons was really an anomaly; I went to multiple music stores and they looked at me like I was crazy.”

She found a drum instructor willing to give lessons in her home, and she continued playing for a few years. By the time her first grandchild, Rebecca, was 13 months old, Maida was playing beats with her own hands on a kitchen counter while Rebecca determinedly tapped the beats back to her. When Rebecca was 9, Maida gifted her granddaughter her old drum set.

Rebecca, now a conscientious high school senior, has been playing ever since, but she says discovering the Hit Like a Girl contest made her feel less like an outlier: “I always knew that I loved music, but it probably wasn’t until around the time of the contest where I realized I actually wanted to pursue this as a career.”

Two years ago, Webster’s father urged her to enter Hit Like a Girl, and she won first prize in the under-18 drum-set performance contest. She describes her playing style as “tasteful,” explaining that she simply “tries to play what the music needs,” but in her submission clip she executed a medley of drum tracks by the jazz-rock-funk fusion act Snarky Puppy, in an uncharacteristically showy but controlled frenzy.

Webster, who is applying to colleges now, wants to major in jazz performance, and after graduating she hopes to make a living by touring, doing session work, and maybe even getting into producing. “I just want to stay in the game as best I can,” she says.

On a recent Wednesday evening at The Bitter End nightclub in Downtown Manhattan, Webster played the drums for an all-female pop-folk act, the Isabella Rose Trio. A few songs into their set, they eased into a cover of The Pretenders song “Brass in Pocket,” the 1979 hit where Chrissie Hynde assures the listener she’s “gonna make you, make you, make you notice.”

Halfway through the tune, Webster added a couple of original fills, and like thousands of newly determined female drummers around the world who’ve entered Hit Like a Girl, she’s using her arms and using her legs to make you notice.

The post These Fearless Females Are Drumming Their Way Into Music’s Biggest Boys’ Club appeared first on Narratively.

The phone rang in my cubicle at the insurance company. It was Ron, from the Boston office. A brokerage north of Albany wanted to sell our policies; could I get the PowerBuilder system installed on their computers and go up for a two-day training session?

“Sure,” I said, pleased. People invariably complimented me on my user manuals and classes, because I explained things clearly. That made me feel good.

But as soon as we hung up, his words imparted a different feeling. North of Albany. A three-to-four-hour drive from Manhattan. Two-day training session. A hotel. My eyes darted about, then latched onto the IN-BOX, OUT-BOX signs on the stacked metal trays as if to a life raft. Somehow, I got myself to the ladies’ room.

Barricaded in a stall, I started to shake and moan. I stifled the moan but allowed the shakes to continue. After what was probably only five minutes, they wound down. The terror was gone too.

Walking back to my cubicle, I realized this was going to be complicated. I could maintain my imperturbable office persona as long as there was no disruption to my routines outside of work. Being away from my own apartment — stuffed animals and dolls on the bed, homemade macrobiotic food and cookies in the refrigerator, the familiar toilet — was going to be a challenge.

I’d known since I was a teenager that something was wrong with me. It wasn’t normal to talk to faces in the mirror that were not my own. Or to sense that kindly, invisible people floating in the atmosphere were watching over me, understanding me better than real-world people. Or to feel separated from the rest of humanity by a ground-to-sky Plexiglas wall no one else seemed aware of. At the same time, I knew that, except for the few times in my 20s when I wound up in a hospital, I appeared normal. I’d excelled in school and had friends and boyfriends. Now 54, I lived alone and was successful in two careers: weekdays as an IT business systems analyst, weekends as a librarian. I worked seven days a week to pay for therapy, but also because I didn’t do well with alone time. Working kept me in the here and now.

At 46, when I found out I had multiple personality disorder, or MPD (subsequently renamed dissociative identity disorder), I’d been horrified. That bizarre-sounding diagnosis couldn’t apply to me. But my shock quickly turned to relief: There was an official name for my condition. While it would be another few years before I found a therapist experienced in treating multiplicity, just reading clinical literature that documented some of my perceptions helped take away the feeling that I was an alien species.

I learned that “alters” was the term for the other selves I often felt. Some alters can be fairly well-developed, some are fragments, and some have specific administrative tasks to make sure the system as a whole functions as seamlessly as possible.

I came to see how the partitioning mechanism of MPD is helpful to a child who lacks other means of escaping a distressing situation, which in my case had been ongoing emotional trauma, not the sexual abuse most often associated with MPD. But the divisions become a liability when the child grows into an adult and no longer needs to keep knowledge and feelings sealed off in order to survive. That made sense. Nothing bad was happening in my life anymore, yet I still perceived danger everywhere.

Looking back, I realized there had been clues.

In my 20s, after my discharge from the hospital, I moved into a halfway house and started a house newspaper. On the masthead, I listed myself and two other residents who helped put it together. Under their names came four that belonged to no one: Ellen Willow, Winifred Stone, Dorothy Emily Quinn, Laura Emily Mason.

Ellen Willow was a name I’d often called myself when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know who the others were. The names had just flowed from the tips of my fingers as I was typing.

Wondering whether there had been additional clues, I sent for my hospital records. In them, I read, “At times she felt that she had a different real identity; sometimes she was Ellen Willow and sometimes Wendy.” The diagnosis was listed as schizophrenia.

I had no idea who Wendy was, and though I’d been aware of Ellen since I was 15, I’d never considered that she was an alter. I hadn’t known the concept. I had known, however, that we’d glided into and out of each other. I could be Ellen Willow one minute and Vivian the next. I/we had functioned smoothly in one body, no matter that I lived in Brooklyn with a family I wished I weren’t a part of and she was a 15-year-old orphan who lived in Nebraska. Whenever I wrote a poem, I signed it Ellen Willow. When I wrote ordinary things — a note to my mother saying I would be home late, a birthday card for my cousin — the signature sometimes came out Vivian, sometimes Ellen Willow. No one questioned it; my mother and aunts thought Ellen Willow was just a pen name.

In my 50s, when I started therapy specifically for MPD, more of my inside “family” came forward. One of them was Wendy, 6 years old, chatty and precocious. Her main function was to protect another 6-year-old, Emily, who was perpetually in search of a mother. Wendy told my therapist she was named after the character in Peter Pan. There was also teenage Lisa, who had taken my place at my sweet 16 party years earlier, when I’d felt awkward and unable to talk to my guests. Now I understood how I had suddenly been transformed into a gracious hostess, as if a fairy godmother had touched me with her wand. But I recognized Lisa’s darker side too. Her main function was to take away pain, which she sometimes did by making elaborate plans for suicide, sometimes by escaping into psychosis. I heard myself tell my therapist she was named for the mentally ill girl in the book and movie David and Lisa. There were others with names, including Almost-Vivian, whose job was to act as an interface with the world, and some without names. There were also less complicated alters, whom I thought of simply by their function, like the Behavior-Police, the Nurse, the One-Who-Curses-Cars, the Business-Person.

Most illuminating was what I read about the boundaries between alters. Some are solid, blocking knowledge and feelings from crossing in either direction, while others permit leaks both ways. Still, others are one-directional, allowing knowledge and/or feelings to flow in one direction but not the other. That explained why Wendy, insulated from feelings herself but aware of what everyone else was feeling, was able to report to our therapist in a dispassionate manner the anguish the others were not yet able to voice to him. The different types of boundaries make the condition more nuanced than the flamboyant portrayal in popular media, where multiples may be shown “waking up” in a strange place, not knowing how they got there. That does happen, but it is not the typical experience and had never happened to me. Therapy for MPD involves rendering the barriers unnecessary by working through the traumas that originally created them, then fostering mutual understanding, respect and communication between the alters.

* * *

None of that was on my mind, however, as I walked back from the ladies’ room, so distressed by the thought of being away from home that I was in survival mode.

My apartment was a refuge, the only place I could let everyone inside me get their turn for “body time,” unhindered by the Behavior-Police. I could go from coloring with Crayola markers to screaming aloud in terror to reconciling my checkbook to becoming paralyzed with pain to talking in nonsense syllables, all within the space of an hour. I called this essential part of my day “putter time.” It enabled me to rebalance and recharge before my next foray into the world. But it could happen only within the safety of my own walls. Hotel walls wouldn’t work.

Almost-Vivian took control, picked up the phone, and dialed. “Hi, Ron,” she said, mimicking the Business-Person’s voice. “It’s Vivian again. I was wondering whether I could conduct the training by conference call. That’s how I did it with one of our sales offices last month. I’m tied up with an actuarial project.”

“That was our own company,” he said. “For an outside organization, it’s better PR to go in person.”

I hesitated for only a second. “OK. I’ll call them to arrange it.”

Seconds after we said goodbye, Lisa began making fatal plastic-bag plans. I thought of going to an emergency room, but they might not release me when she became less dominant. Almost-Vivian thought we’d be OK now if she could get us out of the office.

“Going to lunch,” I called over the cubicle wall.

“Have a good one,” came the answer.

At a fast-health-food restaurant, Almost-Vivian began to plan. Instead of a plane, train, or rental car — the usual options in my company — I would drive my nine-year-old Volkswagen Golf. It had a familiar odor. My maps and tapes were in the door pocket, the radio was set to my stations. With 85,000 miles on it, all driven by me, my car was a place where everyone felt comfortable. To avoid triggering Emily, who didn’t like public restrooms, we would take our portable toilet: a large soup pot lined with a heavy plastic garbage bag, some kitty litter, and a toilet seat. It was all packed, complete with a roll of Charmin, in my summer bungalow in Westchester County, an hour north of the city. We would stop there on the drive up.

Back at the office, I arranged to give the demo the following Wednesday and Thursday, then chaired a meeting for the actuarial project. At 5 o’clock, I said goodbye to my colleagues and began the three-mile walk to my apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Walking kept me off the subway, where, if someone bumped into me, it set off the One-Who-Curses-Cars. But more important, it was another way of rebalancing. While my body traveled forward, threading through crowds and negotiating crossings, I gave those inside free rein. First came someone who was afraid to stray far from our apartment. Almost-Vivian told her we would ask Jeffery, my therapist, to call us at the hotel. Soothed, she retreated. Right-foot, left-foot. The Business-Person returned. She made a note to call the brokerage to find out what was needed to make our IBM software run on their UNIX machine. Right-foot, left-foot. Someone felt she was being annihilated and started to scream. The Behavior-Police pushed the scream inside, but it was too big, and I felt like my body would explode. Right-foot, left-foot. Almost-Vivian decided we would bring a map to our next session with Jeffery, to show him our route. We would also snap a photograph of him, develop it in the one-hour shop, and take it on the trip. These ideas were comforting, and the scream inside subsided. Right-foot, left-foot.

* * *

The following Tuesday morning, I prepared a snack for the car ride and wrapped uncooked vegetables to bring to the hotel, where I’d arranged for a room with a kitchenette. I packed a steamer pot, knife and some cookies, then loaded everything into my shopping cart and wheeled it to the parking garage a block away.

The first hour’s drive felt OK — I was going to the bungalow I rented every year, and by now it seemed like home. But after I picked up the toilet there, I was going away, into nothingness. I popped The Secret Garden audiobook into the cassette player, and the narrator’s warm voice filled the car: “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen … ” I was immediately transported.

Putnam County, the sign said. I changed to classical music on the radio and watched the vista of trees, still mostly green, accented by early autumn bits of red, yellow and orange. Someone marveled at how cars were powerful enough to climb steep hills, and how roads connected places. You could get anywhere with a map.

Dutchess County. The radio was staticky. I turned it off and returned to The Secret Garden.

Columbia County. I had to pee and scouted the side of the road for a large-enough grassy area. I pulled over, climbed into the back of the car, and lowered myself onto the pot. When I was finished, I closed the bag with a twist tie, readying it to throw into the trash bin when I stopped for gas. Then I got out to sit on the grass and eat.

I reached the hotel by late afternoon and set about unpacking the shopping cart, making the room into a home. I put the cooking pot and utensils on the kitchenette counter, food in the fridge, demo handouts on the desk, Angela’s Ashes on the night table, and Rocky and Jan, my miniature Teddy and Raggedy Ann, on the pillow, alongside the flashlight.

Once I’d eaten and washed the dishes, there were no more routines to ground me. Suddenly, I realized I was alone in the room. If no one could see me, did I exist? I felt disconnected from Jeffery, from everyone I knew. Disconnected from myself as well. The Business-Person wasn’t accessible. All I knew was that I was supposed to give a demo and training session to seven people the next day. I flipped through the handout packets, bewildered by the terminology and diagrams. How would I know what to say? I wanted to die and decided to lie down with a plastic bag over my head. Housekeeping would find me in the morning.

Before I could do that, the Nurse came out. She knew that if I could feel connected to familiar objects, I would become calmer. Safe under her watchful eye, I sat on the floor and emptied the contents of my backpack. Jeffery’s photograph. The coupons he made on index cards, one for Wednesday, one for Thursday. Each said, “I’m with you right now and I won’t forget you.” There was also my cell phone, last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, and whatever junk had accumulated over the past few weeks. I started organizing and began to feel better.

In the morning, I listened to Sesame Street as I cooked oatmeal. The hotel had slipped a newspaper under my door. The headlines helped orient me as an adult. I dressed in a business-casual outfit, put the training handouts, cookies and Rocky into my backpack, and drove to the corporate park where the brokerage was located.

I heard myself give all the proper responses. “Would you like some coffee?” my clients asked. “No, thank you, but I’ll have some tea.” “How was the drive up?” “Fine. The Taconic is a beautiful parkway.” “Is your hotel room comfortable?” “Very. It even has a kitchenette.”

The Business-Person remained in control all morning. Unaware of anyone else inside me, she guided the class through drop-down data windows, commission schedules, and error-checking routines. She didn’t know how to socialize, though, and sitting around the lunch table was a bit problematic until Almost-Vivian took over. Several times during the meal, I slid my hand into my backpack and gave Rocky a squeeze. As if on cue, the Business-Person reappeared for the afternoon session, which went well too. In fact, the class agreed I had covered everything so thoroughly, they didn’t need a second day.

The message reached everyone inside: We could go home tonight! What’s more, we had done a good job. We contained our exuberance until we got into the car and pulled out of the parking lot. Then, with the window rolled up, I gave out a yell. “We did it, guys! We did it! Yay, Team!”

* * *

It would be another 10 years of intense therapy sessions several times a week, with Jeffery as an empathic witness to the feelings and stories of my alters, before I considered myself healed. That didn’t necessarily mean integration, although many of my alters had blended on their own. It meant feeling safe in the world, able to do ordinary things with a minimum of disruption. It meant being able to engage fully with others, not just on the surface, but through and through. No more Plexiglas wall. To those who knew me, the change was observable, but subtle. A colleague at work said, “You seem different lately. More sparkly.” To me, it was huge. Now, when I wake each morning, I no longer have to strategize about how to get through the day. I simply look forward to whatever it might bring.

The post How to Survive a Business Trip When You Have Multiple Personalities appeared first on Narratively.

In the cold, predawn darkness of the Mojave Desert, the blood was pouring out. A man — his hands and feet bound tight with zip ties, his eyes blindfolded and his mouth taped shut — had just been held down by three unseen figures. They’d burned, beaten, stomped and tased him. Then they placed another zip tie around the base of his genitals and cut off his penis.

As quickly as it had all happened, he was left lying in the dirt 100 miles north of Los Angeles, surrounded by Joshua trees and desert brush, with the thrum of a distant highway drifting through the emptiness. He could barely move and was losing blood fast. His thoughts were simple: Am I going to die or am I going to live?

* * *

California’s marijuana business was good back in 2012. A dispensary owner, who will be referred to here as Simon Mitchell, had a busy but discrete operation in the city of Santa Ana. (Due to the graphic nature of the crime committed against him, the victim’s name has been changed.) Though legal recreational marijuana was still years away, laws passed starting in 1996 had opened the door for dispensaries like his to distribute medical marijuana.

But the business was still operating in a gray area. Some dispensaries dealt with unlicensed growers who also dabbled in the illegal drug market, and without legal banking options, dispensaries often held excessive amounts of cash. Owners would contract armored vehicles just to go pay their taxes. Most dispensaries hired security guards, but this sometimes wasn’t enough to dispel crime. Robberies, burglaries and even physical attacks became common.

Mitchell, then 28, had gotten into the business after college. He had a network of suppliers and regularly met with new growers to sample product. Around January 2012, a pudgy dark-haired grower named Kyle Handley, 33, visited the store with marijuana he’d been growing in a rental home in neighboring Fountain Valley. Mitchell liked it and bought five pounds for about $14,000. The two hit it off and talked about starting another home grow.

“He seemed like a normal guy,” Mitchell said during courtroom testimony. (Through their lawyers, both Mitchell and Handley declined interview requests.)

Mitchell was a poker player. He’d met his roommate through a home game, and the Newport Beach house they shared had a felt-topped card table. Trips to Las Vegas were common, and he and friends went for a weekend that March. Handley also happened to be there, so they hung out.

“We all meshed well together, so we invited him out on our next trip,” Mitchell testified.

In May the group booked a $12,000 penthouse in the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. They hit the pool, partied and gambled thousands on the tables. Mitchell bought Handley a hand job at a strip club. “We had a good time,” Mitchell said. The spending was conspicuous but not suspicious for someone in the all-cash marijuana business.

After the trip, Handley stopped coming to the dispensary and answering his phone. Maybe it was a pay-as-you-go phone, a “burner” like many in the drug trade used briefly then abandoned to reduce their chances of being traced. Maybe he simply ran out of product. After years in the marijuana business, Mitchell knew either was possible.

Meanwhile, nearly $1,000 worth of surveillance cameras and GPS trackers were being delivered to Handley’s home, according to records revealed in court. Handley had a mark, and now he needed a partner. He reached out to Hossein Nayeri, 33, a friend from high school back in Fresno who was an amateur surveillance expert.

Nayeri and Handley had grown marijuana together, and later they lived together after moving to Orange County. Now Nayeri shared a Newport Beach apartment with his wife, Cortney Shegerian, then 25, a slender brunette with a wide smile. (Through their lawyers, Nayeri and Shegerian declined to comment for this article.) While she was in class at nearby Whittier Law School or clerking at a law office, he was home surreptitiously tracking his targets.

The more Handley learned about Mitchell’s wealth and spending habits, the more Nayeri became intrigued. He asked Shegerian to use her legal knowledge to dig up information on Mitchell. Days after Mitchell and Handley’s May 2012 Las Vegas trip, an account was opened with TrackingTheWorld, a service for monitoring and mapping GPS devices. With the information Shegerian found, trips were made to hide a GPS tracker on Mitchell’s truck, point a camera at his Newport Beach home and another at his parents’ home.

The surveillance lasted months. Shegerian testified in court that it became Nayeri’s “100 percent focus.”

“Initially I didn’t know what was going on. I would peek over his shoulder and see what he was doing,” Shegerian said. He’d have maps and GPS data on his laptop almost daily. TrackingTheWorld sent him notifications about full memory cards or low batteries on the devices, and she’d drive with him to switch them out.

Nayeri and Handley had a simple question: Where was Mitchell putting all his money? It certainly wasn’t going into a bank, and Handley knew the dispensary was successful and regularly paying growers thousands in cash.

The surveillance offered hints. Eventually Nayeri thought he’d figured it out and began planning a burglary.

“He knew the parents had money at the house,” Shegerian testified. “He was worried about [their] dog because it barked a lot.” Nayeri asked Shegerian to buy some ground meat. He put on gloves, crushed up some blue pills and began mixing the powder into the meat. “He gave me the skillet after it was done, and he said, ‘We can’t use this anymore. It has poison on it,’” Shegerian said.

But in late summer, before they could go through with the burglary, a curious line of GPS pings from Mitchell’s truck showed a tantalizing new clue. According to Shegerian, Nayeri pointed to the map on his laptop and asked why someone would be driving in circles out in the desert.

“And he said to me, ‘Wouldn’t that be a great place to bury money?’”

* * *

Hossein Nayeri and Cortney Shegerian met in Fresno in 2003, according to her testimony. He was 24, an immigrant from Iran who had lived in the U.S. since he was a boy. After high school and a stint in the Marine Corps, he was working in a restaurant and attending city college. She was 16, still in high school, the daughter of a successful businessman who ran an electronics recycling company, and the niece of a prominent Santa Monica attorney. Nayeri and Shegerian dated for a while, then drifted apart. They’d see each other periodically, and he’d sometimes borrow her car. He stopped going to school and started growing marijuana with Handley and another friend, Ehsan Tousi.

In the early morning of December 27, 2005, Nayeri’s life took a dark turn. He and Tousi were driving down a country highway after leaving a tribal casino, and Nayeri, whose blood alcohol content was found to be above the legal limit, crashed the car. Tousi died. Charged with manslaughter, Nayeri was facing at least four years in prison. After a campaign of support from friends and family, he got five years probation.

In 2008 he reconnected with Shegerian, who was attending California State University, Fresno. The two began dating seriously and moved in together. But Nayeri became violent, occasionally pushing her or hitting her arm, Shegerian testified. Then it got worse.

“It grew into full-fledged violence where, like, neighbors would hear, property managers would call,” Shegerian testified.

Despite the violence, they married in June 2010 and moved to Orange County for Shegerian to attend law school. Shegerian kept the relationship secret from her family. Nayeri was seeing a psychiatrist for depression and anxiety, but his violent tendencies still manifested. By late 2010, Nayeri had stopped taking most of his medication and began drinking heavily. He stayed awake for days at a time on Adderall and became increasingly unstable. In early January 2011, according to court records, Nayeri attacked Shegerian. Before she could escape, he followed her to her car, put her in a chokehold and punched her in the legs. The next morning, he lured her back to their apartment by saying he was suicidal. She called the police.

When two Irvine Police Department officers arrived, Nayeri came outside to talk. A police report noted that he was in sweatpants, unshaven and disheveled, smelling of marijuana and the three beers he had drunk.

“Nayeri told me he has had a very bad life. He had been sodomized as a child and had killed his best friend in a car accident,” an officer wrote in a police report. “I asked Nayeri if he wanted to harm himself or someone else because of the way he felt. Nayeri said ‘I wouldn’t mind hurting the rapists of the world, but I am a gentle person and would never hurt anyone, let alone myself.’”

The officers made Nayeri agree to allow Shegerian to take him to the hospital to stabilize. Once they left, he refused to go. Police later found him wandering the streets, holding a knife, and he was arrested. Shegerian got a temporary protective order. But it didn’t last long and Nayeri soon moved back in. And he reconnected with his longtime friend Kyle Handley.

Nayeri, Shegerian and Handley had known each other socially for years. Shegerian had been to Handley’s house in Fountain Valley with Nayeri, and Handley had stayed with Shegerian and Nayeri in their apartment for a few months in 2011. The last time Handley was over, in September 2012, Shegerian saw the two men playing with a blowtorch in the garage and laughing.

A week later, on September 29, to celebrate Shegerian’s birthday, Nayeri took her to 21 Oceanfront, a white-tablecloth restaurant in Newport Beach. Her actual birthday was still a few days away, on October 1. But Nayeri already had other plans.

* * *

On the afternoon of Monday, October 1, 2012, a white truck pulled into the alleyway behind the Newport Beach home where Mitchell lived. Men in hard hats got out and propped a ladder against the wall. A neighbor heard a strange noise and looked out her window to see a man sitting in the truck and two others fumbling with the ladder. Something seemed off, so she wrote down the license plate number before the truck drove away.

Mary Barnes had just moved into the house with her boyfriend a few days earlier, staying down the hall from Mitchell in the master bedroom. The boyfriend was out of town, and Barnes came home from work to an empty house. A ground floor window was open, oddly. Someone could have stepped right in, she thought as she closed it and then went to bed. Mitchell got home from the dispensary later. He fell asleep on the couch watching TV. It was a normal weeknight.

Around 2:30 a.m., Barnes was asleep when she felt something cold on the back of her neck. “I was instantly awake, and I instantly knew it was the barrel of a gun,” she testified.

“Don’t worry, this isn’t about you,” a man whispered in her ear. “Don’t try to fight and you’ll be all right.”

He taped her mouth, blindfolded her eyes and zip-tied her hands and ankles.

Down the hall, Mitchell woke to a flashlight and a shotgun in his face. He reached out to grab the barrel, but the gun swung around and hit him in the head. He was choked by one person and punched repeatedly by another. He briefly lost consciousness and defecated. When he came to, he was on the floor, being bound, blindfolded and gagged. The stronger attacker grabbed his feet and dragged him downstairs, his face hitting each step on the way.

“He manhandled me pretty good,” testified Mitchell, who is about 5 feet 6 inches tall. They dumped him by the garage and ransacked the house.

Barnes was tied up right next to him. Soon, both were carried into the garage and loaded into the back of a vehicle. Another person began driving.

“They started to kick me, punch me, tase me, and then they started asking where I buried my million dollars,” Mitchell told the courtroom. “I told them I didn’t have a million dollars, and I told them I definitely didn’t have a million dollars buried anywhere.”

They put the gag back on and beat him for a few minutes before ripping it out and asking again.

They drove for hours, and the cycle of beatings and questioning continued. Mitchell was stomped, hit on the bottom of his feet with a rubber hose, and burned with a blowtorch. Spanish-language radio was blaring.

“Where’s the money?” one asked repeatedly, using a fake Spanish accent. “My patrón wants the million dollars.” The other shot him with a Taser.

“He kept calling him puta, puta, and then he started calling him stupid, and he said [it] was going to cost not only his life but also this innocent female, which I assume he was referring to me,” Barnes testified. “At that point I thought we were going to die.”

The van slowed down, and the pavement turned to dirt. They drove about half a mile then stopped. Barnes and Mitchell were dumped on the ground. Mitchell had been there before — not to bury money, but to tour an old mine a friend was hoping he’d invest in. The project hadn’t impressed him, and he’d left, probably thinking he’d never return.

The threats became more intense. “He kept saying ‘We know you have the money, where is it, where is it, we know it’s up here,’” Barnes said. “At one point he raised his voice and said very loudly, ‘Shoot him in the head.’”

The man feigned a call to his supposed boss, speaking in his fake accent and walking away.

“My patrón is going to get very, very upset if we don’t get the million dollars,” he said when he returned, according to Barnes. “If we don’t get the million dollars, I want his dick.”

The men gathered around Mitchell. “They proceeded to hold me down, pull my pants down lower and then cut off my penis,” he testified. As he lay there bleeding, a liquid was poured all over his body. “I thought it was gasoline and they were going to burn me.” The liquid was bleach, apparently intended to destroy DNA evidence. Then they walked away.

One of the men leaned over Barnes and pressed the knife to her hands, still bound behind her.

“I’m going to take this knife and throw it five feet in front of you,” he said, according to Barnes’ testimony. “And if you can get to the knife and cut yourself free, you’ll live. Today’s your lucky day.”

Once the sound of the van kicking gravel faded, Barnes used her knees to push the blindfold from over her eyes. She saw the blade, scooted over and grabbed it behind her back. Then she immediately moved back over to Mitchell and, looking over her shoulder, cut the tape that was wrapped over his mouth. She asked if he was OK, and he said yes. Bending back, she managed to cut the zip ties around her ankles. She tried to cut the ties on Mitchell’s wrists, but they were bound so tight that she couldn’t cut them without lashing his skin.

Barnes could see headlights on a highway nearby. Mitchell was bleeding heavily and needed help. Barefoot in pajamas, her hands bound behind her, she walked over rocks and dirt down to the road, a straightaway on State Route 14. The sun was coming up.

“Several cars went by. I was just screaming ‘Help me, please help me,’” she said. “I could see their faces. They were just shocked.”

Around 7 a.m., Steve Williams of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office was driving southbound on Route 14 when he saw Barnes. “As I was getting closer, I could see the zip ties behind her sticking out from her back,” he said. “As soon as I turned around, I knew something was up.”

He freed Barnes from the zip ties, and she told him where Mitchell was and what had happened. Backup was already on its way. They reached Mitchell a few minutes later. The stench of bleach was overpowering, Williams testified. Mitchell asked for water. He and Barnes were loaded into separate ambulances and rushed to Antelope Valley Hospital, about 25 miles away.

By this time, the kidnappers in the van had been driving for at least an hour. They’d taken the severed penis with them. It was thrown out the window somewhere along the way.

* * *

Within hours, police in Newport Beach were searching Mitchell’s house and canvassing the neighborhood for clues. The neighbor who’d noticed the suspicious workers the day before handed over the license plate number she’d written down. The police quickly identified the truck’s owner: Kyle Handley.

After interviewing Mitchell in the hospital three days later and confirming his acquaintance with Handley, detectives obtained a warrant. The next day, police found a garbage bag of bleach-stained clothes, towels and zip ties on Handley’s back patio. He was arrested.

Later that day, Nayeri hadn’t heard from Handley and was growing concerned. He borrowed Shegerian’s car and drove to Handley’s. The police were still searching the premises. It was only a matter of time before their investigation would lead them to Nayeri.

According to Shegerian’s testimony, Nayeri met with an attorney and then set about systematically destroying his laptops, phones, surveillance equipment and other electronic devices. Within days, he was on a plane to Iran.

* * *

DNA on a plastic glove found inside Handley’s truck would become crucial evidence. It didn’t match anyone in Orange County’s database, but samples were sent to the state, and in January 2013 the California Department of Justice confirmed a match with Nayeri.

Nayeri’s name led back to Shegerian’s. Newport Beach police conducted a search of her car and confiscated phones, surveillance cameras and GPS trackers. The SIM card in the tracker was associated with a TrackingTheWorld account, and investigators were able to determine that the email address that was used to initiate its service had been created in late May 2012 through an internet connection in the offices of a business in Fresno. An employee there turned out to be Naomi Kevorkian, the wife of Ryan Kevorkian, one of Nayeri and Handley’s high school friends. This connection would lead police to investigate both Kevorkians, discovering that Naomi had rented the van and purchased the guns used during the kidnapping. After undercover officers picked up Ryan’s used gym towel at a 24 Hour Fitness, his DNA was matched to DNA found on zip ties obtained from Handley’s house.

Shegerian also became a suspect. In April, detectives called her in, ostensibly to hand over objects confiscated from her car. But at the police station, they questioned her about Nayeri. Shegerian refused to talk. She left the station and told Nayeri about the encounter shortly afterward. Looking for a way to apply pressure, detectives put in a call to her father, the successful Central Valley businessman, who was unaware of Shegerian and Nayeri’s ongoing relationship. “I was dishonest,” Shegerian testified. “It was a difficult time in my life.”

She soon had an attorney. Knowing the incriminating nature of her involvement with Nayeri and the surveillance equipment, Shegerian and her attorney arranged another meeting with detectives in May and made a deal to cooperate. Shegerian was soon coordinating with detectives to find a way to Nayeri, who had been living in Iran for the past seven months, a country with no extradition agreement with the U.S. While he was in Iran, U.S. law enforcement couldn’t touch him. So a ruse was set, and Shegerian was the lure.

She had to play a slow game, gradually convincing Nayeri she was on his side. Over months, in conversations she recorded and gave to Newport Beach police, she rebuilt his trust in her. They started making plans for her to travel and give him money. To underscore her allegiance, she had also begun spending time with Nayeri’s sister, and she attended his uncle’s funeral.

They decided to meet in Barcelona and that Shegerian would bring him $20,000. Nayeri’s sister was invited to put him at ease.

Law enforcement in Newport Beach worked with the FBI to suggest that the ideal route for Nayeri’s travel to Barcelona should include a layover in the Czech Republic, which has an extradition agreement with the U.S.

“We needed to create the opportunity for him to fly into that country,” testified Ryan Peters, the Newport Beach detective who oversaw Shegerian’s contact with Nayeri. A flight was booked, and on November 7, 2013, six months after Shegerian agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, Nayeri boarded a plane in Iran. Shegerian and his sister were already on their way to Barcelona. His flight landed in Prague for a brief layover. He was arrested as soon as he got off the plane.

* * *

In early 2016, Hossein Nayeri was in the Orange County Jail, in Santa Ana. He’d been there a little over a year since his extradition from the Czech Republic, where he’d spent more than 10 months in what he later described as “a dungeon.” Ryan Kevorkian, the alleged third man in the desert, had been in jail since November 2013. (His now ex-wife, Naomi Rhodus, was out on bail.) Kyle Handley had been in jail the longest, since October 6, 2012, just four days after the crime was committed. Their next pretrial hearings were days away, and a jury trial was likely to begin in about a month. Their charges included kidnapping for ransom, torture and aggravated mayhem. All three faced life in prison. But Nayeri had another plan.

Sometime on Friday, January 22, in a jail dorm housing 67 other inmates, Nayeri crouched between two bunk beds. A phone camera filmed as he reached over to the wall and grabbed onto a metal grate. Somehow, it had been cut, and Nayeri pulled it from the wall to reveal a rectangular opening about 1 foot by 2 feet. Nayeri crawled through headfirst. His arm reached back and gave a thumbs up.

The video, later edited, narrated by Nayeri and posted online, details what would become a weeklong escape alongside jailmates Bac Duong, 43, and Jonathan Tieu, 20, both facing charges of attempted murder. The men moved through the innards of the jail, posing for smiling photos, before reaching the roof, where officials later found a rope of bedsheets leading to the ground.

Around 5 the next morning, there was a knock on Shegerian’s door. Now practicing law at her uncle’s firm in Santa Monica, she opened the door to police, there to put her under protective custody. News of Nayeri’s escape scared her, she testified, “more than anything in my life.”

Nayeri, Duong and Tieu wound up in Westminster, California, a few miles from the jail. They called a cab and went shopping. After stops at Target and Walmart, they turned a gun on the driver, took over his car and held him captive. They stole a van, and the two vehicles started a multiday trip north.

Law enforcement sent out urgent alerts about the escaped inmates. Media across the state and the country published their mugshots and followed along with the manhunt. “I think the public should expect the worst if they’re encountering them and call 911 and allow the professionals to respond,” an Orange County sheriff told the press. A $150,000 reward was offered for information leading to their capture.

The fugitives and their captive moved north. In a San Jose motel room, Nayeri and Duong got into an argument about the cab driver. It was nearly a week after their escape, and Nayeri reportedly wanted to kill the driver. Duong refused. After a debate, Duong returned to Orange County with the cab driver and turned himself in.

Nayeri and Tieu made their way to San Francisco. In the back of the stolen van, Tieu pointed the camera at Nayeri, who was holding a small glass pipe. They were in what Nayeri called “the best part of San Francisco” — Haight-Ashbury — “we are not killing anyone, we are not kidnapping anyone. Just trying to pass time, trying to weather the storm.” The camera pans, showing bottled water, bunches of bananas and Tieu in a black T-shirt holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “This is our crib,” Nayeri says. “Water. All the basics. What do you want; you want some bananas? No, we don’t have crack, we don’t have crystal meth. We’re smoking weed and eating bananas. It’s kind of bananas.” They both laugh. “No, we’re not doing the crazy things they’re saying.”

The camera turns back to his face, chewing gum, his goatee and mustache recently shaved, his eyes barely open, a week after breaking out of the Orange County Jail. “A special Friday night in San Francisco,” he says, smiling.

The next day, Nayeri stepped outside and a homeless man recognized his face from the news. He contacted a police officer, and after a brief chase, Nayeri was arrested. Tieu was found hiding in the van.

A year and a half after the escape, Nayeri’s video appeared online. It ends with a monologue over a still of one of his mugshots, his dark hair tousled, his beard full. “We cost the taxpayers a lot of money. More than that, we scared the hell out of people, and caused a lot of anxiety and fear. And at the end of the day, I can’t say I feel good about that,” he said. “I do know, with every ounce of my being, I absolutely feel terrible for every single person who was affected because of us.”

* * *

In December 2017, more than five years after Mitchell’s kidnapping, the first of the alleged perpetrators was put on trial. In handcuffs, a dark suit and white collared shirt, Kyle Handley was escorted into an Orange County courtroom, his face a bit sad, his hair a bit thin. His family was in the courtroom as well, and he offered a slight nod to them before being seated at the defense table. He wouldn’t be called to testify, but the jury would hear from both victims of the kidnapping, Mitchell and Barnes, from Shegerian, and from a wide array of law enforcement members.

Over six days, Orange County deputy district attorneys Heather Brown and Matt Murphy laid out the elaborate crime, and the months-long effort to track down the perpetrators. “There are people here who are never going to be the same,” Murphy told the jury during his closing argument. “You can’t let him get away with it.” Handley was their target, but they were also laying the groundwork for the coming trial of Nayeri, who Murphy referred to as a “psycho.” Nayeri’s trial is scheduled for later this year. The cases against Ryan Kevorkian and Naomi Rhodus are pending.

Handley’s attorney, Robert Weinberg, argued that only circumstantial evidence linked his client to the crime: Handley’s DNA wasn’t found on the zip ties or in the plastic glove, and there’s no proof he had any connection to the surveillance devices used. “Is it some lucky turn of events that nothing turns up on Mr. Handley?” he asked. “Should we just ignore that?”

Court adjourned for the day. When the jury returned the next morning, they entered the deliberation room. Given the extent of the testimony and the relatively high bar of establishing a unanimous vote among 12 jurors, a long deliberation was expected. The few dozen people in the audience trickled out. Brown left the courthouse to get her hair done.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury came to a verdict. On four counts — kidnapping for extortion, kidnapping with intent to harm, aggravated mayhem, and torture — the jury unanimously found Handley guilty. In July, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Standing next to his attorney, Handley shook his head and looked down. Then he sat and put a hand to his eyes.

Mitchell was sitting with his family and his girlfriend in the audience. As the four guilty verdicts were read, he leaned his head back and looked upward. His girlfriend reached over and held his hand.

The post How the Great California Dispensary Heist Went Horrifically Wrong appeared first on Narratively.

“What kind of food do you make?”

I’m inspecting the inside of a convection oven when the event manager asks this seemingly benign question from across the room. She’s knee-deep in event planning knickknacks — picture frames, wire hangers, misfit chairs — and barely paying attention; just trying to make friendly conversation.

I stumble over myself as countless past menus and dishes and memories blur together in an incoherent mess. I think about how simple it is to ask, how difficult it is to answer. I pick the easy answer: “New American, with Asian influences.” No matter how many times I say it, it feels foreign, like a shoe that doesn’t quite fit.

“Cool,” she replies.

It’s late in the day, and I’m mentally drained from scouting location after location for a pop-up dinner I’m planning. The last four and a half years have been a long journey, turning what started as a weekly dinner party into a side business. When I first began hosting supper clubs, a somewhat loose term for a social gathering of guests inside a chef’s home, there were only a handful here and there in New York City. The practice has since grown almost into a prerequisite for up-and-coming chefs who want to build a following for their food outside the expensive confines of a restaurant. It’s funny to think, everything seemed clear and easy when I began. I made kale salads with pomegranate, charred steaks with au jus. Delicious, straightforward food. But over time, as I started digging a little deeper into myself and using food to explore emotional vulnerability in myself and my guests, each dish became a little more difficult to explain, and the answer to the question of what kind of food I really made a little fuzzier.

* * *

A month later, in that same space, I stand in front of the crowd and try again to explain what they are eating, why I cook, who I am. It comes out in fleeting pieces, flashes of emotion hiding behind oil splatters and notes jotted on napkins. I start with the space. That’s easy: Tonight, we’re sitting in a beautiful open-beamed warehouse, multicolor light from floating votive candles bouncing off colored balloons, dancing on everyone’s cheeks.

The theme of this evening’s meal is radical honesty, and 42 people sit listening with some of the innermost pieces of themselves exposed: written proclamations of their biggest failures, job insecurities and societal frustrations immortalized in front of them. I tell them the menu is my thanks for their offerings, seven courses of my own fears and confusions, curiosities and conflicts. “This may make you uncomfortable,” I warn them. I start the evening with “Privilege,” a course of tiny portions: plump mussels carefully shucked, soaking in corn juice, and hand-peeled baby tomatoes. It’s about the excess in our conscious choice to waste. “Ultra Cultured Super Woke Duck” follows second, a tongue-in-cheek reminder that taking one trip, using one spice, making one dish from another culture doesn’t make anyone an expert. There’s a slightly more lighthearted reprieve after that, “Fish That Tastes Like Fish” with oceanic monkfish in a fish-forward broth accented with turnip. “You Make Asian Food, Right?” is not meant to be funny, rather an echo of the same question I’ve heard my entire culinary career, but some guests chuckle. Maybe it’s nervousness, or maybe it’s because they wondered exactly that about me before they came.

The clock at the pass blinks 9:17 p.m. as I serve the fifth course. The dish is my interpretation of shame, I explain, dovetailing with my visceral feeling of disgust at our imprinted cultural hierarchies of which foods matter, which do not. The servers bring out metal lunch boxes, two at a time, and arrange them on the table as plates. Inside, each one bears a sticker that reads: “HELLO MY NAME IS: Disgusting!” The dish uses many of the ingredients I once frantically dissociated myself from, now gentrified into something clever and expensive. Garlic chives, an ingredient often punitively described as smelling like farts, now generally regarded as the secret to Chinese cooking; freshwater eel with its brick-red veins but no sweet soy to mask its robust flavor. They are accompanied by a mound of white snow fungus, coated in a thick green emulsion of duck tongue and peanuts, propping up toasted silkworm larvae. Entomophagy (eating insects) is so gross, yet so sustainable — a nightmare for the woke but privileged.

Staring at a point above the audience’s heads, I admit that this has been the easiest dish to cook but the hardest one to present all night. That making this dish reminds me that I’m still grappling with my identity, the feeling of being a first-generation immigrant who grew up here but never feels at home. I silently gauge the discomfort in the room, the pause as guests observe the dish in front of them before reaching for their utensils. I see them squirm, reacting to the feeling of being a bystander to their own experience, the same way I did for so many years when I observed my own food culture.

I vividly remember my first day of camp, lining up for dinner with a tray in my small hands. I was 6, and for the majority of us, it was our first overnight away from home. Our little voices mingled with nervousness and excitement as we congregated for the buffet of corndogs, tater tots, square mini pizzas. At the very end of the table, I spied pale pink pieces of meat I’d never seen before. I curiously asked for one. It was huge, the thin slice almost completely covering my three-section plate, peering back at me with white sinews and a light-green sheen. As I walked back to my table, I wished for chopsticks, thinking how odd it was to serve food so large and impossible to eat. Everyone around me had opted for pizza, but my uncertainty over etiquette was overtaken by my hunger. I took my fork and stabbed the meat squarely in the middle, letting the sides flap over my hand. I was angling my mouth toward the ham’s edge, a little drip of meat jus teasing down my chin, when my teacher grabbed my hand and waved it in the air for everyone to see. She was angry, but I didn’t know why.

“We do not eat like this. We have manners.”

My English was paltry, but I understood. Shame does not bear the confines of any language. Here, in my new home, there was one message: We set the standards. You follow them.

I had fully relinquished control by 13. I was standing inside our small kitchen with my mother. It was unseasonably hot for a summer day in Seattle, but the air conditioner wasn’t on because it had been deemed too expensive. I was screaming, insisting I would only eat school lunch from now on. My mother’s back was to me as she simultaneously attempted to placate me and put dinner together.

“We can’t afford it,” she pleaded.

I could feel her exhaustion, but I didn’t care. I was blinded by my own selfishness, my own shame. Tired of being relegated to the bathroom to finish my smelly garlic chive dumplings without disturbing my classmates, tired of dumping my pigs’ feet and pork belly over rice into the garbage because it had been called dog food.

“Well, you aren’t a very good mom then!”

When I saw her flinch, I knew I had won. The next few days, I got my fried chicken tenders and mashed potatoes, microwaved pizza with plasticky cheese. As I ate my American lunch with a spork off a Styrofoam tray, I learned something: Eat the right food, and you can be one of us.

It’s a little surreal now, seeing guests in this environment I built, where acceptance is marked so differently. I always cringe a little inside, knowing so well the immense peer pressure food can elicit. But hospitality is not about creating unwarranted stress; it is about sharing something of yourself in every interaction — maybe not a memory but a feeling. When I look back, there are too many to fit into one container.

During my first week of culinary school, when I was 21, my chef-instructor felt compelled to ridicule the lack of cheese in East Asian societies. “So strange these cultures are just missing an entire segment of food,” she snickered. After class, I ate an entire wheel of triple-crème brie and thought about my parents: how lactose intolerant they were, the constant supply of Pepcid in their medicine cabinet. I decided I hated their entire inferior gene pool.

By month seven, I was thoroughly conditioned on the authority of French gastronomy. After meandering through the differences in terroir from Normandy to Brittany, the merits of Sancerre wine versus Sauternes, spending two days on Chinese cuisine felt like a nuisance. My classmates echoed this sentiment as they grew more and more agitated attempting to find the proper ingredients for our dish lineup. “The recipe says shao … zing? What is that, wine? Oh good, this says it’s the same as sherry. I’m just going to use that.” I didn’t bother to step in — the stewarding team had forgotten the Shaoxing wine my classmate was looking for, alongside star anise, Sichuan peppercorn, white pepper and a whole slew more. After all, this was an attempt at diversity, not a commitment. “How do you even pronounce this stuff?” another classmate groaned beside me, scanning each bottle for some marker of English. His complaint was similar to the one I’d had almost every class until now, flushing with embarrassment as I tried to wrangle my tongue into the seemingly impossible shape of gougère.

“You can taste the difference in the milk depending on which side of the Rhône the cow has grazed,” our chef-instructor once told us, most poetically. He had no such musings about Asian cuisine. Once, as I debated with a peer about how to resuscitate a sauce that coincidentally hailed from my birthplace of Shanghai, our instructor sauntered up with advice. “I know what you need.” He left the room and returned with ketchup, an entire metal can of it. I felt the burn of indignation and shame as he began to ladle glop after glop into the sauce, until it was brick red, its purported sweet-and-sour balance forgotten. As if sensing my discomfort, he turned to me and gave his final ruling: “The best Chinese chef I know told me this is the secret to all your food.” Next to him, my classmate scoffed. All that worry over nuance that didn’t even exist.

After graduation, I ran to fine dining, eager to create a new me behind those doors jingling with tasting menu money. But instead of freedom, I found only emptiness among the plates of beautifully manicured food. The only feeling that stayed was the helplessness of being stuck in the same cycle I’d come from: waiting for acceptance from some faceless deity. So I held my tongue as my Korean colleague told me that his future restaurant might feature small plates but surely “something more elegant” than banchan, and when my Filipina colleague insisted that the food from those islands was strictly meant for lowbrow eating and family meals. I sat and waited, instead, for someone else to “discover” the cuisine of my own community. A white knight to indemnify the ingredients I had always loved but was too embarrassed to bring onto a tasting menu. When Epicurious announced celtuce was cool, I remember breathing a sigh of relief. Finally, someone saw the greatness of this juicy stalk I frequently served in gentle poached form. Dan Barber credited his own farmer with finding the vegetable, and I nodded along: Even if he usurped our stories, at least I could be part of one.

“I didn’t believe I deserved to be more, to have a say, but I do,” I tell the crowd as the evening ends and a finger of Kavalan Solist Amontillado — the world’s best whiskey, virtually unknown, hailing not from the U.S. or Scotland but Taiwan — is served as a nightcap. “My food is my story, and it’s complicated and imperfect, but it is just as worthy, and I am the right person to tell it.”

The concept behind these dinners is vulnerability, breaking down barriers so that people can talk about what matters most to them. What scares them. What makes them wake up and do it all over again — or realize it’s not enough and start over. But it took a while for my food to follow suit, and for a while my following waned because I had no clear message. I asked my guests to be vulnerable, but I wasn’t vulnerable myself. I hid behind the stovetop, behind plates, behind complicated cooking methods and ingredients that no one knew, so that I wouldn’t have to face the real things I wanted to address. The memories, the failures, the misconceptions I wanted to bring to light. When I opened my eyes to look kindly upon myself, I found beauty in the food I had forgotten. I may have gone into cooking to run away, but in the end the only acceptance I was searching for was my own.

I’m cleaning up stiff pastry glaze when a guest comes up to the kitchen on his way out. He’s a little tipsy, effusive and thoughtful. “I didn’t know what to expect when each course came out,” he admits. The dishwasher is sloshing steadily behind me, and I shuffle and lean into that sound instead of responding. “But it brought back a lot of lunchtime memories I’d chosen to forget but maybe are worth revisiting.” I smile, almost embarrassed now for being so transparent, yet thankful to be understood. We don’t say too much more, but a strange and pleasant understanding emerges between us. “This event was so nice,” he says as we hug goodbye. “I didn’t have to pretend.”

The post Yes, This Meal Is Supposed to Make You Feel Uncomfortable appeared first on Narratively.

The women were fearless, but the meatmen called them communists.

On the afternoon of July 27, 1935, the sounds of protest filled the Hamtramck, Michigan, shopping district, as a troop of 500 housewives descended on Joseph Campau Avenue with banners and picket signs reading: “Strike Against High Meat Prices. Don’t Buy.”

It was six years into the Great Depression, and the women, many of whom came from working-class immigrant families, were demanding a 20 percent reduction in meat prices from the city’s meat-packers and butcher shops. The picket was the first in a summerlong boycott that eventually spread out of the city’s 2.09 square miles and into neighboring Detroit. It was led by a 32-year-old, 100-pound, first-generation Polish-American named Mary Zuk.

In a state where unemployment topped 25 percent, and where layoffs by the burgeoning auto industry devastated working-class households, women like Zuk were still expected to put food on the table and stretch the family budget as far as it would go. Over the last three years, the price of meat had jumped 62 percent, according to author Ann Folino White’s Plowed Under. Butchers claimed it wasn’t their fault — they blamed President Roosevelt and the increased processing taxes caused by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) — but the women of the country would not be placated.

That spring, black and Jewish housewives in New York closed 4,000 butcher shops with picket lines, and housewives marched against rising meat prices in Chicago. They were peaceful; their aims were modest. The Hamtramck women felt no such restraint. They were cutthroat, boisterous, even militant. With Zuk at their helm, they would strike back hard, and change the nature of consumer activism in America.

* * *

Zuk was born Mary Stanceous in Neffs, Ohio. In 1914, a wave of Polish immigrants migrated to Hamtramck following the opening of the Dodge Main auto plant. Zuk joined the migration in 1922, marrying local auto worker Stanley Zuk shortly after. During the onslaught of the Depression, Zuk’s husband lost his job in the auto industry and she became a mother of two whose family was struggling to make ends meet — which eventually led to her joining the shadows of the local social justice movement.

During the week of the Hamtramck protests, Zuk was elected head of the Committee for Action Against the High Cost of Living. On the Wednesday before the picketing began, the women of the committee flooded a Hamtramck City Council meeting, where they complained that meat had become a luxury food. They presented a resolution to the mayor, Joseph Lewandowski, calling for a federal investigation into meat prices. Then they took to the streets.

Armed with banners, placards and rage, the women formed picket lines that proved nearly impenetrable. The few men who did break the lines — egged on by their wives, they told the newspapers, who mocked them for being afraid of a few women — were seized when they exited the shops. Some were beat down and trampled; others had their packages grabbed and thrown into the streets.

The first day of protests resulted in a $65,000 loss for Hamtramck butchers, and news of the picket spread fast enough to make the third page of the July 28 New York Times. The Associated Press reported that the “housewives’ war for lower meat prices” had been, according to the city’s butchers, “95 percent effective” in stopping customers from entering the shops.

As that first day reached its climax, a meat-packer yelled at the women: “Why don’t you go see President Roosevelt? He started this.”

“Maybe Roosevelt started it by killing the little pigs and the cattle,” Zuk replied. “We don’t know and we don’t care. We aren’t going to pay such high prices for meat, and that’s all there is to it.”

* * *

After the July 27 protest, it didn’t take long for the butchers to give in. By August, butchers were temporarily reducing prices but refused to make a commitment to lower them for good. The women vowed to continue the boycott, leaving no butcher shop without pickets. Soon after, a group of more than 100 protesters descended upon the J. Johann Package Company and attempted to set ablaze the meat inside. The protesters were unsuccessful, and the Chicago Tribune reported that three women and a man were arrested. They weren’t jailed long. That same night, the group was freed, after a crowd of 300 strikers gathered outside the police station and demanded their release.

Barely a week into the protests, the pickets had spread to half a dozen communities outside of Hamtramck. The meatmen were scared, and calls for the National Guard to protect their businesses rang from the mouths of the butchers. Zuk responded by gathering a crowd of 5,000 people in a Detroit park, where she reaffirmed her militant commitment to lowering prices.

“We are going to keep fighting until we knock out these politicians,” she said, according to Greg Kowalski in Hamtramck: The Driven City. “Working people don’t want to eat bones. We want President Roosevelt to give us a country like the Constitution provides. And we working people are the ones who can make him and Congress raise our living standards. We’re going to make him understand he can’t kill off the little pigs. And when we get through with the meat, we’ll start on gas and electricity and the sales tax.”

By mid-August, as the strike held firm, butchers were forced to sell off their remaining stocks and close their businesses. The butchers appealed to Michigan Governor Frank Fitzgerald and sought a circuit court injunction to ban the women from protesting, but Fitzgerald insisted that the issue between the women and the dealers was a federal concern.

Soon after, Zuk moved to dispatch a delegation to Washington, D.C., to present their demands to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. But Wallace had no interest in meeting with the women, and rumors began to spread that he was avoiding them. The delegation began their trip by meeting with AAA consumers’ counsel Calvin Hoover, and was only able to meet with Wallace after threatening not to leave Hoover’s office until he showed.

From the moment he arrived in Hoover’s office, Wallace appeared troubled by the atmosphere. The sight of the reporters in the room put him on edge. There will not be a “full and frank discussion” as long as there are reporters here, he declared.

“Our people want to know what we say and they want to know what you say, so the press people are going to stay,” Zuk responded.

Wallace maintained that the high price of meat was not the fault of the feds and blamed the price dilemma on a national meat shortage. Then, when Zuk voiced the group’s demands — one of which was a ban on AAA processing taxes, which the women said the packers were using to get rich at the expense of the consumers — the room was met with silence.

Newsweek reported:

The lanky Iowan looked down into Mrs. Zuk’s deep-sunken brown eyes and gulped his Adam’s apple.

Mrs. Zuk: Doesn’t the government want us to live? Everything in Detroit has gone up except wages. 

Wallace fled.

Though the delegation had been shunned, the women continued to voice their concerns throughout D.C., eventually making it into the White House and getting their complaint to Roosevelt’s assistant secretary, “and thence to the Capitol, where Representative Dingell of Michigan told them he would seek passage of his resolution calling for an inquiry in the Detroit area,” The New York Times reported.

One week prior to the delegation’s visit to D.C., U.S. Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri stood on the House floor and called for an investigation into the Hamtramck women’s protest tactics. These women weren’t the working-class immigrants they made out to be, he said. They were spoiled housewives who sought pleasure from throwing public fits — a point he underlined by producing pictures of the women carrying purses, wearing high heels and pearls, their hair coiffed like they had just come from the “bridge club,” not the kitchen.

This was a “fake food strike,” he alleged. He believed that women couldn’t possibly organize such a boycott without the help of men, and he was certain it had been paid for by the meat-packers themselves, who were actively campaigning against the federal AAA processing tax, claiming it was costing them money.

Cannon’s charges didn’t go unchallenged. On August 20, the delegation marched into the congressman’s office. They shouted that they were neither communists nor financed by meat-packers, and then they stormed out.

“Wait, wait,” Cannon yelled. “I’m very disappointed that you won’t stay and discuss this situation.”

“We just came to tell you what we think of you,” Zuk said, and that was that.

 * * *

By the time the delegation returned to Michigan, news of the trip had spread throughout the country. Attacks on meat warehouses were reported in Chicago and small towns across Pennsylvania. Housewives threatened to use Hamtramck-like tactics if their local meat markets didn’t comply with their demands. Demonstrations broke out in Denver, Miami and Indianapolis.

In late August, meat-market owners Julius Friedman and David Rosenberg convinced a circuit judge to intervene in the marches against their businesses. According to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, the men said the “pickets had reduced their business 50 percent by intimidating customers.”

They found sympathy in the court, which barred the protestors from threatening customers and obstructing doorways and sidewalks. Robbed of their most aggressive tactics, Zuk’s women found that as the year went on, the federal government continued to ignore their demands. But on the local level, they had been successful, reducing the price of meat in Hamtramck and easing the strain on the families in their neighborhoods. They stopped the strike in 1936 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the AAA tax unconstitutional, and Zuk shifted her focus to infiltrating politics.

In April 1936, Zuk became the first woman to hold a seat on the Hamtramck City Council. Her platform — fair housing and food prices and reasonable utility costs — resonated with both men and women across the city. With the backing of her fellow housewives, Zuk swept her male competition.

“A mother can organize and still take care of her family,” she said when she won.

The post These 1930s Housewives Were the Godmothers of Radical Consumer Activism appeared first on Narratively.

I arrived in Shanghai on a sticky mid-July afternoon in 2010 with two suitcases, a nonfunctioning cellphone, and a piece of paper that an acquaintance assured me read, “Hello, I don’t speak Chinese. Where is the bus to Jing’an Temple?” It was my first time in China, and also in Asia — and paradoxically, I was home. A few weeks ago, I had received an unexpectedly enormous tax refund and decided to quit my job, move to China, and see how long I could make it last.

Like many people who don’t speak Chinese, I found the language intimidating. I didn’t know what to make of the writing system. I knew that spoken Mandarin had tones, and I’d heard that if you used the wrong tone, you could accidentally deliver a grave insult when you were trying to ask for water. I assumed learning the basics would take at least a decade, and, more important, I thought I could get by without them. In the not-too-distant past, I had spent a semester studying in Europe, where I’d gained confidence in my ability to communicate via body language.

Later, I would appreciate the ways in which Chinese accommodates its learners. Grammar rules are unobtrusive and words can be astoundingly logical. January is “month one,” February “month two.” Mayonnaise is “egg yolk sauce.” But at the time, I was worried about accidentally suggesting someone procreate with his mother when I was trying to ask for the time.

Though the slip of paper would get me from the bus to the apartment I’d found and rented on the internet, I’d been traveling for 36 hours already and was feeling overwhelmed. I set off for the taxi stand instead, and there, I discovered I did not know how to pronounce my address.

* * *

It turned out there were a lot of things that were hard to convey through gesticulation alone, including “Where is the bathroom?”, “Is this yogurt?” and “Is this a restaurant or your street-level dining room?”

I had pictured life abroad as glamorous. I had not imagined eating every meal at McDonald’s, which I did for my first several weeks in Shanghai, because it was the dining establishment that most went out of its way to cater to clueless foreigners. Each McDonald’s had a laminated menu that the staff whipped out whenever a baffled expat approached the counter, allowing you to order by pointing at what you wanted.

Every time I ventured out of my apartment, I encountered more things I needed to, but could not, communicate. I couldn’t take taxis because I didn’t know how to pronounce my destinations. I couldn’t buy products whose packaging obscured their contents because I couldn’t read what was written on them. I was constantly helpless.

One of the few people I knew in Shanghai was a friend from college, Chelsea, who was the first to tell me about the Magic Number. She described it as a free hotline for people who didn’t speak Chinese.

“It’s free?” I asked suspiciously.

We all know that many things are free and many things are good, but few things are both.

“It’s free,” she assured me. She was under the impression that the government had set it up to help tourists navigate the city. I first called the Magic Number a few days later, when a plumber showed up at my apartment. For some reason, the water had been turned off in our unit, and our landlady had texted my roommate to say that someone would be coming by to fix it.

I was living in a four-bedroom apartment I shared with a rotating cast of foreigners. But on that day, I was the only one home.

The plumber arrived in a jumpsuit and sneakers that he removed in the hallway before entering the apartment. He began speaking to me, unsurprisingly, in Chinese. And I, unsurprisingly, was lost. I sighed and settled in for a stretch of feeling frustrated and helpless, but then I remembered the number I’d saved in my phone.

“You have reached the Shanghai Call Center,” an upbeat recorded American voice greeted me. “For services in European languages, please press one.”

I pressed one. The phone rang, and a woman picked up. “Thank-you-for-calling-the-Shanghai-Call-Center-how-can-I-help-you?” she fired off in one breath.

“Um, hi,” I replied, not really sure how to begin the call. “There’s a plumber here. I’m at home, in my apartment, and he’s supposed to be here. He’s here to fix something.” I already sensed that this was too much backstory, but I soldiered on. “I think he’s trying to tell me something, but I don’t speak Chinese, and I was wondering if you could — ” What was my ask here, even? “Tell me what he’s saying?”

She seemed unfazed. “Please pass the phone.”

I held out my phone and gestured for the plumber to take it. He stared, unsure what to do. I gestured again. He took the phone and talked to the woman for a while, then passed it back to me.

“So, he’s saying that your water has been turned off, right?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed.

“And so, he needs to check your pipes, to make sure they’re not leaking, and then if everything is OK, he’ll turn the water back on.”

“OK!” The plumber’s message was so simple, it seemed a wonder I hadn’t been able to interpret it myself. Though perhaps the intricacies of plumbing are not best communicated by pantomime.

“Do you want me to stay on the phone while he checks?” she offered.

“Um, sure,” I sputtered. “If you don’t mind.”

She didn’t, so we both sat on the phone in absolute silence while the plumber inspected the pipes under the kitchen sink and the ones in the bathroom. After a while, I felt awkward about leaving the woman hanging, so I started giving her unnecessary updates.

“Now he’s in the bathroom,” I narrated.

After one last conference with the plumber, the operator told me that everything looked good and that the plumber would turn the water back on. I thanked her profusely, as did the plumber.

When I hung up, I realized I had found my lifeline.

* * *

I hadn’t felt particularly conflicted about the first call — after all, it had been a plumbing-or-death situation — but the next night, I found myself in a taxi with a driver who was trying to ask me something.

I hesitated. Was this worth calling the Magic Number over?

I called, passed the phone to the driver, and then the operator explained that he had been trying to ask me which route I wanted him to take. “I told him just to take the fastest route,” she said.

“Wow, OK,” I stammered, shocked, again, by how simple the information he was trying to convey had been. “Thank you so much!”

Pretty soon, I was calling the Magic Number for everything. When I went to the fruit market and didn’t know how to ask for strawberries, I called the Magic Number. If I was lost and needed directions, I reached for my phone. Any time I was stuck, I dialed 962288 and pressed one.

Within a week, I had the script down pat. I learned to skip the backstory and get straight to my request.

“Hello, there’s a guard yelling and wildly gesticulating that I can’t park my bike here. I’ll pass the phone.”

I learned that they couldn’t give recommendations. They could list all of the restaurants near me, but they couldn’t say which one was their favorite. Everything else was fair game.

Other foreigners in Shanghai who spoke little to no Chinese seemed to agree that the Magic Number was a godsend.

“I must call like 30 times a day,” friends would gush. And I would think, “Well, I only call like 10.”

I was taking things very literally in those days. There’s little room for subtlety when your conversations are like a game of charades.

But I also wasn’t surprised that others were calling so frequently. The Magic Number was one of the greatest ideas I’d ever heard of. The service was helpful and efficient. With it, you could survive in China without speaking Chinese. Why wouldn’t you call 30 times a day?

* * *

One morning, about six months into my stay in China, the Magic Number called me.

“Hello, this is the Shanghai Call Center,” a woman named Jenny on the other end said when I picked up. “You must be surprised that I’m calling you.”

I was. And then I was instantly suspicious. Had the service not been free all along? Were they calling to collect thousands of dollars in back charges?

“Yes,” I replied cautiously.

“I think you must be very familiar with our services,” she said in a way that perhaps implied I was too familiar with their services.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh no,” she assured me. “Actually, you’re one of our best customers.”

Uh oh. You don’t normally consider yourself a customer when you’re not paying for something. If I walk by a man playing an acoustic cover of Beyoncé in Central Park, he is not allowed to send me a bill.

“I’m calling to invite you to our Chinese New Year dinner as a special guest,” she continued. “Because from our records I see that you are one of our most frequent callers for the year.”

“Wait what?” I said. “But I’ve only been in China for six months.”

“Also, from our notes, I can see that you are very polite,” she added, perhaps to un-bruise my feelings.

“You’re taking notes on each call?” This was a lot to take in.

“Yes, and people write that you are very polite.”

“Huh.” Really though? In six months, I had racked up one of the highest call volumes for the year?

“So, can you come?” she asked.

This was the wrong question to ask, but it was the only one I could think of: “Is it free?”

* * *

The formal invitation arrived in my inbox a few days later. It included a note from Jenny. “There will be no charge or any demands from you since you are one of our distinguished guests,” she wrote. “Please just enjoy the dinner and the entertainment shows which will be put on by the girls you have been talking to over the phone.”

I was kindly requested to RSVP by calling the Magic Number, which had been printed on the invitation so we could all pretend that I didn’t have it memorized.

It had never occurred to me that I’d been speaking to the same people over and over again. But it made sense; presumably there were not an infinite number of women working at the call center. Still, I hadn’t thought of myself as a known entity to my most-dialed number. When I hung up, did they turn to the room? “That was Audrey again. She was trying to buy a fitted sheet/She got lost in an H&M/She has a cold and wanted ‘the good stuff.’”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much the Magic Number operators knew about me. They knew I liked yogurt and was allergic to powdered laundry detergent. They knew where I lived, where I worked, what shape my bicycle was in.

I, in turn, became curious about them. What did they do for fun? What were the perks and challenges of their jobs?

In the days leading up to the dinner, I started asking around, assuming others had received the same invitation I had. But whenever I mentioned it, I got blank stares.

“How often do you call?” people would ask.

I’d shrug. “A few times a day.”

Gone were the claims of calling 30 times a day. In their place, an awed, “That’s a lot.”

I’d assumed that everyone else was like me, dialing the number on instinct when they got in a cab. But actually, they’d been learning Chinese.

I did not feel great about this. In fact, I felt like a fairly huge idiot. I had justified not learning the language by telling myself that it was hard and that I was only planning to stay a year, but here was proof that everyone else could do it.

I did the only thing I could think of when I felt overwhelmed: I called the Magic Number. I asked if I could bring a date to the party.

* * *

A few weeks later, I dragged my friend Michael to a historic hotel in downtown Shanghai.

We found our way to an elegant ballroom filled with tables of young women. Our table was, as promised, populated by the people I had been talking to all day.

They were mostly, like me, in their early 20s, and just starting their careers. Few had grown up in Shanghai; many had come here for school and had been in the city not much longer than I had. They were friendly and liked meeting new people — especially people from other parts of the world. They spent their days helping people who were lost or afraid or unsure what was in their coffee.

I came bearing questions. First and foremost: How was the hotline free?

The Shanghai Call Center was, in part, funded by the government. The rest of its budget came from a small department that cold-called people to sell newspaper subscriptions.

“What are some of the strange calls you get?”

“Penis,” they all said immediately. The operators said they received a fairly regular flow of calls from Western men asking how to say the word “penis” in Chinese.

“And then what?” I asked.

“We tell them.”

“And then what?”

“They say thank you.”

“What else?” I asked.

A decent number of people seemed to confuse the Magic Number with a hotel concierge. They would call and ask the Magic Number to call them back at 7 a.m. to wake up them up. Others would try to place delivery orders.

Sometimes, the Magic Number was called in to pinch-hit in relationships. One woman told me about a call she received from a man who wanted her to translate a swell of emotion. “Can you tell my girlfriend that I love her?” he asked.

“But… how did he know he loved her if they didn’t even have enough language in common to say that?” I wondered.

It was strange, but also nice, to put faces to the voices I’d been speaking with for months. The women at our table were interesting and accomplished. They had all mastered at least one foreign language, but most were bona fide polyglots. They said they liked their jobs. They enjoyed helping people, and they also had fun when the calls were slow. They especially liked those shifts; when the phones weren’t ringing, they played games, or watched videos, or sat around talking.

Now I felt bad. Were their best days at work the ones when I happened to be out of town?

No, no, they assured me. They liked their work. And besides, I was always polite when I called.

I kept looking around for other foreigners. I had assumed that I wouldn’t be the only one at the dinner. After all, Jenny had said, “one of the most frequent callers for the year,” indicating that there were others in my boat.

But the only other foreigners present were two language instructors: an American man who spoke near-perfect Chinese, and a Russian woman who was also fluent in English and Chinese. I was, it seemed, the only caller to have been invited — perhaps out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to survive on my own for the four hours the operators were at dinner.

In the days leading up to the dinner, I had thought about what it meant to rack up the highest call volume for the year. I sensed that it wasn’t good. But how bad was it?

When you look up and find you’re the only one doing something, you’ve stumbled upon an idea that’s either incredibly smart or extremely stupid. And I was starting to suspect that my Magic Number stats were not the work of a genius.

Up until that point, I had thought of language as nothing more than a tool for communicating ideas; the Magic Number was simply a more convenient alternative. But now that I was a distinguished-guests party of one, I saw a secondary function: Language helped forge connections, or, more aptly, its absence created a sense of remove.

I’ve always been quick to talk to strangers and endlessly fascinated by the details of lives that are not my own. But in Shanghai, I had dropped the habit of conversing with people I interacted with, because I couldn’t, and my curiosity had withered. I had begun to see the non-English-speakers around me purely as people I needed something from or who needed something from me. I never stopped to wonder what their lives looked like once I vanished from in front of them: what they cared about, what they were having for dinner that night, whether they had ever found themselves far from home, and what they had done while they were there.

The morning after the Magic Number dinner, I went to a bookstore and bought my first Chinese textbook. Sitting at the banquet table, I had realized that I was doing something wrong, and I needed to fix it. And so, I set out to study Chinese, because, on the off-chance I was still in Shanghai next year, I didn’t want to be a translation hotline’s top caller for the second year in a row.

In time, I found I could complain about the weather in Chinese, or purchase some really cool sedatives that somehow were available over-the-counter, and even travel on my own throughout the country. My curiosity returned; a year passed, and instead of returning to the U.S., I stayed.

When I started learning Chinese, I was focused on survival and expressing my wants and needs. What I heard in response was less crucial. As I grew more comfortable with the language, it flipped: I could explain my way around words I didn’t know (“the thing you put on a bed that goes under your head”), and now I cared more about what people were saying back to me. I studied Chinese, at first, because I wanted to speak, and later, because I wanted to understand.

When I look back at my time in China, it’s these conversations — chitchatting with cab drivers, the camaraderie with the women I bought breakfast from each morning, my friendship with neighbors — that mark the transition from when I saw Shanghai as a temporary sojourn to when it started to really feel like home. Rarely were these conversations profound. More often, it was innocuous small talk or neighborhood gossip — but they all came together to form a bigger picture.

The post I Was a Chinese Helpline’s Number One Caller. I Had a Problem. appeared first on Narratively.

On Wednesday, March 4, 2015, Teofil Brank and Etienne Yim traveled from San Diego to Los Angeles in a Ford Focus hatchback, picking up a .357 Colt revolver on the way. They drove through the palm-lined business district on Sepulveda Boulevard and parked opposite a terra-cotta Starbucks close to Los Angeles International Airport, where Brank was about to pick up $1 million in cash.

Obtaining the gun from Yim’s friend Benjamin Williams was simple enough. He also gave them yellow-tinted goggles, earmuffs, a shooting bag and ammo. At Brank’s Koreatown apartment in L.A., they transferred the wooden-handled gun to a backpack.

Brank remembers doing a bump of coke before they pulled up at Starbucks. He told Yim that if anyone shot at him, he should shoot back. It was a cold night, and as Brank crossed the parking lot he had his hood up. He believed it was a necessary precaution.

“I don’t know if he’s out there with a sniper or something … if he’s going to shoot me,” he recalls.

* * *

Two weeks earlier, Brank had arrived at Yim’s San Diego apartment in a sleek black Audi R8 sports car and calmly told his French-born friend over beers that he was about to collect half a million dollars. He said he was blackmailing Donald Burns, a wealthy tech tycoon he met while escorting.

Soon after, Brank and Yim tore through the desert in the sports car to Las Vegas, where they would do cocaine and hang out in strip clubs, celebrating the coming payday. On February 17, Burns wired Brank $500,000 from a Goldman Sachs account. After Vegas, the two friends stopped briefly in San Diego, then continued to Brank’s old stomping ground, Sacramento, where he gave his brother $10,000, according to Yim. In a whirlwind of debauchery, they continued to San Francisco and then back down to L.A. Yim said Brank blew about $20,000 on hotels, clothes and bottle service. With heaps of cash and a $180,000 sports car, Brank could have stopped there, but he had sunk his teeth into Burns and didn’t want to let go. He wanted more. Much more.

At that time, Brank, or “Teo” to his friends, was one of the most famous actors in gay porn, despite being heterosexual. Although married to one woman and in a tumultuous relationship with another, the rugged, hawkishly handsome 25-year-old had found a niche in gay-for-pay porn, performing as Jarec Wentworth.

Born in Romania, Brank came to America as a toddler and grew up near Nashville and then Sacramento. He was the seventh of 10 children and, according to court records, lived in a physically and emotionally abusive household.

After graduating from high school in 2007, he worked in construction and as a residential painter. He married his girlfriend in Reno soon thereafter. By that time, he was already facing domestic abuse charges. After a drunken argument had turned violent, he assaulted her, leaving injuries on her head, back and neck. In March 2009, he was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail.

At 20, he responded to a Craigslist ad and began doing porn. He appeared in 31 scenes for the studio, Sean Cody, then moved on to Randy Blue, before landing an exclusive contract at Men.com. He also started working as an occasional escort, a common side hustle for gay porn actors. Indeed, for many actors, porn is just a shop window for their escorting services.

Brank was making a name for himself, but he had ambitions behind the camera. He wanted to start producing porn, or even mainstream movies, and settle down.

“Eventually, the money came through, and boom, I was starting to have my crew together,” Brank says. “I wanted to have my own studio.”

But even in porn, there are few shortcuts. Those who step out of its shady glamour to find mainstream success are entrepreneurs with an acute sense of how to promote themselves for maximum profit. Brank had always wanted to make money. But he wanted it now, and Burns was his ticket to success.

* * *

A few weeks after the road trip, Yim was asleep in his apartment when Brank texted, “I need your help.” It was Wednesday, March 4, the day of their fateful ride to Starbucks.

Brank was going to collect the $1 million and wanted Yim to drive. Both men feared for their lives. Burns was rich and powerful. He rubbed shoulders with diplomats, business executives and politicians, including wealthy publisher Christopher Forbes and Rudy Giuliani.

During the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles, when Burns called Brank, he sounded anything but intimidating. He told the actor he was sending a courier, “Sean,” to deliver the cash. Brank wondered if “Sean” was really a contract killer.

“I’ve never broken a deal with you, and I’m in a really fucking bad spot now,” Burns said. “I’m trying to work the situation, but I’m getting fucked by my own side here.”

Brank arrived at the coffee shop and clocked Sean at the bar, dressed in a black jacket and jeans. Sean had been there for two hours, parking in the back corner of the lot and stopping to grab a sandwich from the Jersey Mike’s next door. He handed Brank the title to the Audi R8.

“And?” Brank said.

“It’s your lucky day,” Sean replied. “Ready to get paid?”

Brank wanted to do the handoff near the patio outside. Sean left and returned in his black Tesla. The trunk popped to reveal a locked backpack. Sean rummaged around for the key. Brank never got a chance to find out what was inside, as he was quickly surrounded.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Brank remembers thinking.

The yellow letters on the back of the agents’ blue jackets gave him the answer.

FBI.

This was no hit. It was a takedown.

* * *

When law enforcement ensnared Brank, Donald Burns was a 51-year-old business executive worth $138 million. He chaired internet communications company MagicJack VocalTec and was active on the political scene. The Republican, who did not respond to requests for comment on this story, had donated between $1,000 and $2,000 to Rudy Giuliani and to the group that attacked John Kerry’s war record, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He had also occasionally donated to Democrats, including Barack Obama and John Edwards.

With his varnished public persona, pinched face, silvery brown hair and pinkish tan, Burns had floated on the edges of the porn industry for a few years now, pursuing actors at Sean Cody, which catered to subscribers with a fetish for straight men. He even invited the studio to shoot at The Razor House, his glass mansion in the wealthy San Diego suburb of La Jolla. He also owned properties in Palm Beach, Florida, and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Burns met Brank in 2013. The actor told him he had the powers of persuasion and industry connections to help him. Burns in turn created a shopping list of men he wanted to solicit for sex.

“These are the guys that nobody has ever cracked,” Burns wrote in a September 27, 2014, email to Brank (subject line: “Recruiting $22,000 of potential, lol”), in which he listed 11 Sean Cody actors. Burns offered his new de facto pimp between $1,500 and $2,500 for each actor he could deliver for sex parties. He would fly the escorts out to his residences or hotels and then send them away with envelopes full of cash.

Porn actor Billy Santoro remembers Brank as a “very quiet, sweet guy.” Gay performer Jay Austin recalls that he was “really pleasant, professional and polite.” Zachary Sire, who broke the news of Brank’s arrest on the website Str8UpGayPorn, says he was well-regarded among actors and directors.

Veteran actor and producer Michael Lucas notes, however, that many straight men enter the industry when they run out of other options.

“That’s why I think that often these people can be dangerous,” Lucas says. “Can’t you do something else than engage in some sort of homosexual activity? I think it’s desperate, and nothing good can come out of it.”

As a working actor, Brank was making between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, according to a close friend, and the lower amount was more typical. The shelf life of most actors is five to six years, and those with longevity, such as actor Colby Keller, have a keen business sense, says retired actor Devon Hunter.

Although some observers believed that Brank, buoyed by drugs and his minor celebrity, had simply gotten in over his head, others knew how quickly he could turn venomous, lashing out at friends and advocates if he felt wronged or slighted.

Brank’s Men.com profile distills his approach to life. He likes burgers, hiking and driving across town. Best thing about him? “I’m a nice guy.” The worst? “I can be very mean if you get on my bad side.”

* * *

After Brank delivered four men, a fifth date cancelled at the last minute. Burns asked Brank to return his referral fee. When the actor refused, Burns concluded Brank could not be trusted and decided it was time to dissolve their partnership.

In mid-February, about three weeks before the sting and subsequent arrest, Brank was sitting in his Mustang outside an LA Fitness in Hollywood when he got back in touch with the tycoon via text message. Brank says he was high but not too emotional: “Obviously, you can’t get really angry on weed.”

At that moment, Burns was on business at a shipyard in Vancouver, Washington. He read back Brank’s message. “So another month has passed, and you broke your word again. Tisk tisk.”

Burns had no idea what the actor was talking about and texted back a question mark. Brank replied with “the car” and added, “How can we work if trust is broken?” During the course of the conversation, Brank claimed that Burns had promised to let him drive the Audi R8.

“The $2,000 advance is an outstanding issue,” Burns typed. “You’re right that I’m not making a big deal out of it, but I’m not comfortable working together after that.”

“I can bring your house down, Don,” Brank typed back. “Don’t get me mad. I do have a Twitter and your photos. Lies can be made, or maybe it’s the truth.”

Burns’ reputation was his most prized asset. Brank tugged at its frayed edges and wound the thread tightly around Burns’ throat, posting a cryptic message through his Jarec Wentworth Twitter account to thousands of followers.

“Do any porn stars know a guy named Don? Yes, Don.”

Burns’ iPhone shook in his hands. An overwhelming sense of dread settled in his stomach.

“The truth that he knew about me that was so embarrassing and shameful was that I had been paying for sex,” Burns testified during Brank’s criminal trial. “I was afraid that he would post that truthful information to his Twitter account and that information would spread like wildfire.”

“I want a new car, motorcycle, and both hands full of cash,” Brank typed. “Then I will erase it and you.”

* * *

Within days, Burns hired a criminal attorney and forensic investigators. On March 3, 2015, at the FBI’s towering office building in Westwood, Burns handed over his iPhone messages and proof of the $500,000 wire to Brank’s Wells Fargo account.

Brank had erased the tweet after collecting the money and the Audi. “Like we promised. Done.” Then he asked for car insurance and another $500,000. To stall the actor, Burns offered him $50,000 a year, over five years, for the rights to his stage name and Twitter account. FBI agents Joe Brine and Sean Sterle watched as messages arrived on Burns’ phone, and as Brank rejected the proposal.

“I want a condo here in L.A.,” Brank typed. “A bachelor pad. You have taste I like. Two bedroom max. Prefer one. I want $300,000 cash. I want this over ASAP like yesterday so you can be at peace.”

“Condo plus $300,000 or $300,000 and you buy your own?” Burns typed.

“They go for more though … 1 mill cash,” Brank replied.

Agent Sterle posed as Burns’ fixer, “Sean.” It made sense that he would own a luxury car, a Tesla. Sterle thought Brank would feel more at ease at a Starbucks.

“A million dollars and an expensive car … I mean, people have been killed for less,” Sterle testified.

After the sting, Brank was cuffed, booked and charged with extortion and making criminal threats. Yim was arrested and agreed to testify against his friend. Brank was denied bail and rejected a plea deal. From his jail cell, he wrote a rambling email, accusing Burns of raping him in a hotel room during a tryst with another actor (who Brank declined to name). In the same email, he said Burns had framed him and paid him hush money. He claimed the government had doctored his phone calls and erased key text messages.

This was a business dispute, Brank said. He was just claiming what he was owed.

* * *

When Brank’s trial began in July 2015 in a packed, stuffy courtroom inside the federal building on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, he was confident he would get off.

Brank’s attorney, Seema Ahmad, gave an impassioned plea to the jurors. Burns had groomed Brank for a life outside of pornography as a model. He had never feared for his reputation because his dalliances were one of the worst-kept secrets in gay porn. He had even taken a former Sean Cody actor on a jaunt to Paris and showed him off to his high-society friends, helping him through college and paying his living expenses. He had mentored Brank, who in Ahmad’s retelling was more like a spurned lover than a criminal. This case was not about extortion. It was about broken promises.

“Donald Burns doesn’t get to decide that once Mr. Brank asks for a million dollars that all of a sudden now it’s extortion,” Ahmad said. “I understand that it sounds like a lot to us. A million dollars is pennies to Donald Burns.”

Brank watched from the defense table. He was emaciated, and worn down by stress and sleepless jailhouse nights. His brown hair brushed the collar of his shirt, buttoned to the top. He wore no tie and his dress pants were beltless.

On the first day of trial, Burns walked through the double doors at the back of the courtroom, strutted toward the witness box, and was sworn in. Brank followed his every move, but Burns did not make eye contact. The only time the businessman acknowledged the porn star was when he had to identify him for the court.

Dressed in a blazer with a handkerchief in his top pocket, Burns was well rehearsed, and he glanced at the jurors just enough to make a connection, despite his vaguely pompous air. His fear of Brank felt real, and as much as the defense wanted to paint him as a cold, calculating businessman who had indulged his most sordid fantasies, he came across as a victim, not an exploiter.

Brank felt that his defense team did not ask the right questions of Burns and other witnesses, and that they were ignoring his suggestions. He came to believe that the public defenders were in cahoots with the government prosecutors. Ahmad admitted that she did not have the “smoothest relationship” with her client. Brank says that he butted heads with everyone in her office too. He wanted to take the stand to plead his case, but after a mock interrogation, his attorneys shot the idea down.

“They wanted me to sit there like a damn trained dog,” Brank says.

That gave prosecutors free rein to portray Brank in whatever manner they chose. They filled the screens in the courtroom with a blurry surveillance image of the porn star, his sharp eyes peering at the jury zombie-like from beneath his gray hoodie.

“One of the girls is like some fake-ass Christian or religious chick dating some dude that works at a church,” Brank remembers. “I’m like, ‘I’m fucked on this.’”

The defense rested on the second day of the trial, after calling three witnesses, including Sean Cody executives Jason Bumpus and Matthew Power. As the jurors shuffled out of the courtroom on Thursday, July 9, the outcome seemed inevitable, the weight of the evidence too much to bear. By lunch, they had found Brank guilty on all counts.

As the clerk read out the verdict, Brank crumpled, pressing his head to the table. He buried his flushed face in his hands and held back tears.

“They took me back to the cage. I was just like, ‘This isn’t real. It couldn’t have happened.’ But it happened,” Brank says.

At his sentencing hearing in the fall, Brank wore a white jail uniform, his voice breaking as he apologized to Burns.

“I do regret my actions, and I don’t give any excuses for it. I did what I did,” Brank said.

Ahmad asked for leniency. She said Brank’s father had beaten him, sometimes chaining young Teo to his bed with nothing but a bucket to piss in. His mother had thrown knives at Brank and his siblings and given them sleeping pills to pacify them when there wasn’t enough food to go around, she said. After his mom tried to hang herself in the family garage, Brank had watched as his father cut her down. He had abused steroids, which can cause aggressive, manic behavior, the attorney added.

Even taking that into account, U.S. District Judge John Walter was still convinced Brank was “motivated by plain, old-fashioned greed.” He sentenced him to five years and 10 months in federal prison and, with Burns watching from the back of the courtroom, ordered him to pay the victim $500,000 in restitution.

For Jarec Wentworth, the show had been over for months. Now the curtain came down on Teofil Brank.

* * *

Under different circumstances, Brank might have gone on to greater things. Sire, who covered the trial for Str8UpGayPorn, believes the actor could yet make a comeback.

“He was a good actor,” Sire says. “Some of these guys, they show up on set and they can’t get hard, they can’t get a boner. They can’t have sex. They just aren’t good at having sex. But he was really good at having sex, and he did everything too.”

Speaking from prison in Victorville, California, Brank is no longer remorseful. Though vague about his plans on the outside, he says he intends to hire a forensic analyst to review the audio recordings and text messages used at trial.

“I’m not the kind of guy that rolls over. I’m not the kind of guy that fucking gives up and turns the other cheek. You cross the fucking line, you’re done. You’re my fucking number one enemy,” Brank says. “The truth will come out, and that’s how it is.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed Brank’s appeal in February 2018, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined Brank’s petition for review on October 1. He is scheduled for release in April 2020.

The post The “Gay for Pay” Porn Star Who Hatched a Million-Dollar Blackmail Scheme appeared first on Narratively.