244: MacGyver

Ira Glass

I came to the whole MacGyver thing kind of late. I never saw the TV show. In fact, I heard of MacGyver because he kept showing up in rap lyrics.

MacGyver, of course, is the guy who fought bad guys, but never used a gun. He used his scientific knowledge. He used sheer inventiveness to get himself out of scrapes. The show's been off the air for years, but he still shows up in dozens of songs.

[MUSIC - SAMPLES OF MACGYVER REFERENCES IN HIP HOP SONGS]

MacGyver would turn a hot water bottle into a tear gas dispenser, or roll up a map to turn it into an impromptu dart gun, or mix an antidote to poison from common ingredients found at his local shopping mall, or escape from evildoers using only a bobby pin or piece of gum, notoriously, or the wrapper from the gum, in some diabolically clever way.

In real life, most of us never get to be that clever. In real life, even when there's a situation like, for instance, the largest power outage in US history, it's the professionals who have to jury rig new wiring routes, to figure out how to keep hospitals and emergency services going. It's the professionals who have to be brilliantly ingenious.

Ira Glass

When I reached our contributing editor, Sarah Vowell, in blacked-out New York this Thursday night, she was reading by candlelight. She'd managed to boil water on a gas stove. But that was about all the MacGyver-like ingenuity her situation seemed to call for.

Ira Glass

Ingenious problem solving adventures. We almost never get them in our daily lives. And so today on our radio program we have searched, and we have found not one, not two, not three, but four real-life situations, real-life MacGyver solutions. Cases cracked by ordinary people like you and me.

You know, this is completely the wrong music. Just hold on for a second.

[MUSIC - THEME FROM "MACGYVER"]

There we go. The MacGyver theme.

One story takes place in prison. One involves a very low-budget movie. One solves a problem that most of us have had at one time or another in love. And one, our first act, is the true story of a potential personal crisis averted in an instant.

It is This American Life from Public Radio International and WBEZ Chicago. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Bolt of Lightning, Pro and Con.

When Chuck Klosterman was 20 years old, a junior at the University of North Dakota, when he had his very first girlfriend, she was 29. An adult. He was very young. And Valentine's Day arrived. The day that he came up with a MacGyver-like solution, in an instant, in a flash. Here was the situation.

Ira Glass

Chuck Klosterman is the amazing writer behind Fargo Rock City and, more recently, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

Ira Glass

Act Two. Files in Cakes, Ha!

OK. Here's a situation where resources are scarce and people have to be inventive with what they have-- prison. There's this incredible book of prisoners' inventions called, straightforwardly enough, Prisoners' Inventions, by a California inmate who goes by the pseudonym Angelo. In the book, there are descriptions of the inventions that he and his cellmates, or cellies, have made, and these intricate, schematic drawings of devices to make cottage cheese and yogurt, tattoo guns, wake-up alarms, dice-- all of these items considered contraband, subject to confiscation by authorities.

An actor, Felix Solis, reads some excerpts.

Felix Solis

Modesty curtain. Because of the close quarters, modesty is one of the first casualties of prison life. My cellie, R, however, created this modesty curtain for when we use the toilet. It's just a simple amenity, a reminder, if you will, that some privacy and dignity is still possible.

The curtain is a half sheet suspended from a tightly strung, triple-woven line. The sliding hangers are strings of paperclips attached to the sheet through small holes. The wall mounts are made from wooden dominoes and paperclips, and fastened to the wall with contact cement.

Although the cops are notorious for confiscating inmate creations and many saw this curtain, none ever touched it, though a few ordered it taken down over the years. We never did take it down, and they never pursued the issue.

Ironically, it was a wimpy cellie that I eventually had who finally took it down, supposedly because of cops' warnings to do so. I think the truth of the matter was that he wanted all the paperclips for his own knick knack project.

Wall socket cigarette lighter. I would estimate that a good 60% of inmates smoke. Because of national anti-smoking campaigns, a major problem for smokers in prison has been the elimination of matches and cigarette lighters to discourage in-cell smoking. Variations of materials and methods are possible, but usually, a paperclip and a piece of pencil lead are inserted into the slits in one of the cell's wall sockets.

To achieve a light, a second piece of pencil graphite is used to make a quick bridge between the two terminals, forming a short circuit. At the same time, a piece of combustible material, like a toilet paper wick with fluffed up ends, is also brought close, and hopefully will catch fire from the momentary explosion of fire and heat. And there you have a light for your cigarette.

Caution. When inserting the paperclip or pencil lead into the wall socket, don't accidentally ground yourself by brushing against the cell's stainless steel toilet or sink.

Toilet paper mache cup. We usually get a small packet of state Kool-Aid in our lunches each day. I like to save up the packets so that I can occasionally indulge in a large cup instead of just a small one every day.

This led to a problem the first time I found myself in administrative segregation, since for security reasons, only small paper coffee cups were issued for use there. Besides being too small, these cups tended to start leaking at the seams by about the fourth day of use. And with prison being the way it is, new cups could be obtained only once a week on a one-for-one basis. To get another, you have to turn in the old one.

Well, after stewing on this problem for a while, I came up with what I perceived as a crackpot solution, which after long hesitation, I decided to try out. To my surprise, it worked well, though it was a bitch to make, plus it used up a lot of toilet paper.

Using wet toilet paper, I formed a large paper mache cup around the fist of one hand. A really awkward piece of work, and very thick. Then I took the largest piece of Saran wrap that our lunch bread came in and inserted it inside the cup, leaving the excess sticking over the edge. Note that to prevent leakage, the plastic inside must be an unbroken sheet, so the result is a mess to look at, with lots of folds and wrinkles. And after allowing the whole thing to dry and harden for a few hours, it was ready for use.

To thwart possible confiscation, I put a large black dot on the bottom of the cup the size of the toilet paper roll core, and took to keeping the disguised cup in the new recessed toilet paper holder on the sink. A deception that worked so well that for all I know, the cup could still be in that cell, as I accidentally left it behind when I moved on.

Ira Glass

Excerpts from the book Prisoners' Inventions by a prisoner who goes by the name Angelo. It was read for us by Felix Solis, produced with the help of Jonathan Menjivar. Copies available at the whitewalls.org.

Ira Glass

Act Three. This is one of those schemes that falls into the category, sure, it sounds crazy, but it might just be crazy enough to work. It all begins simply enough. A man dreams of making a movie. He comes to Boston to film it. It's 1988. His name-- David Rudder.

We couldn't get him to come on the radio, but we did get Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote about what happened in GQ magazine.

Ira Glass

Before long, Rudder is interviewing a guy named George Moffly for the job. Moffly is 27. He's made some low-budget commercials for a weight loss clinic and a dog racing track. He's worked on the crew of exactly one Hollywood film called Vampire's Kiss with Nicholas Cage. And from the very start, Moffly says, the whole thing seemed a little odd.

Ira Glass

As you've probably figured out by now, this is no ordinary movie. In fact, the movie is just a front for a scheme that is either ingeniously smart or really, really dumb, depending on your point of view.

David Rudder, in fact, is not David Rudder. He is FBI Special Agent Garland Schweickhardt. Schweickhardt, for years, has been a pencil-pusher at the FBI, a bureaucrat. But he's come up with this idea for a sting operation. Catch the Teamsters, and prove that they're in bed with the mob.

Back when this is happening, back in the late '80s, the Teamsters and the Patriarca crime family seem to be working hand in glove on a lot of things.

Ira Glass

And from the FBI point of view, that is not what they wanted to happen. They wanted the bribe to go down.

Ira Glass

Months go by. Everybody goes back to their regular lives. And then the dentists get a lucky break. A small-time mafia-related thug named Robert Franchi strolls into the FBI office one day and announces that he wants to turn state's evidence and help them nab members of the Patriarca crime family.

His motives aren't altruistic, mind you. He doesn't want to rid the world of organized crime. He simply owes some gambling debts to a guy, and that guy has gone out and threatened Franchi's mother. His mother.

Ira Glass

Still, it's not like anybody else is offering George a producing job and a producing credit in a movie, so he says yes-- on one condition. He insists that they get a better script.

So first they tried to get somebody to rewrite The Knockdown for $5,000, and then, when that fails--

Ira Glass

While all this is going on, George finds another script-- using $20,000 of your and my tax money-- and they start to hire a crew, build sets, scout locations, to film the movie in Providence. But weird things keep happening.

Ira Glass

David Rudder is convincing enough to the mob guys, though. The movie looks real to them. And pretty soon, the sting goes down, just as planned. The FBI records Rudder paying $25,000 in cash to the mobsters as a fee for making their movie, without 19 Teamsters working on it.

And at that point, the FBI has what it needs to make its case in court. In theory, they should shut the film production down the next day, because there's no purpose now. But they don't shut it down, because Rudder really wants to make his movie.

Ira Glass

This argument does not carry the day with the United States Justice Department. Rudder has to call George and tell him that the dentists have pulled out again. George is crushed. Rudder is crushed. Everybody on the film gets fired.

A year and a half passes before George Moffly finally gets told what it was all about, when the Justice Department contacts him and asks him to testify to a secret grand jury about the movie. He declines that invitation. Being lied to for two years, working on a fake movie, and nearly getting thrown out of a window made him feel like he'd served the country enough already.

The Justice Department does OK in court. Not great. Only one guy goes to prison. But the whole case scares the Teamsters and the mob in New England enough that in the end, despite everything that was wrong-headed and ill-conceived about Garland Schweickhardt's original plan, it actually achieves what it set out to do. The mob and the Teamsters stopped shaking down film crews in New England. So maybe the plan wasn't so crazy, though it might have been smart to change a few of the details.

Coming up. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl concocts far-fetched but weirdly possibly effective MacGyver-like scheme concerning boy. In a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, ingenious MacGyver-like schemes, real ones. Some of them, like this next one, invented by people like you and me. We are at Act Four of our program.

Act Four. A Girl's Guide to Mending the Unmendable. Susan Burton tells the story.

Susan Burton

The summer I graduated from high school, I had a boyfriend who now, years later, I think of as a creep. Since he had my husband's name, I won't call him that. Instead I'll call him what I called him later, which is Shane.

Shane was my friend Lisa's older brother. I was 17, and he was 23. Shane was the only person I'd ever been friends with who had been alive in the 1960s. Of course, he'd only been a toddler, but that wasn't the way I thought about it. Shane was so old that he'd been alive in history.

Shane was also the first person I knew who'd been engaged. The girl he'd been engaged to was named Kathy. They lived together during college, but then she ran off with the manager of Wild Oats, the local health food store. It sounded to me like Kathy was a hippie.

I worked at a health food store too, but my health food store was called Alfalfa's, and it was the type of place where there was less hummus and more pate. There were a lot of Colorado moms in Volvos. I would watch them as they wrote checks. They had big diamond engagement rings from earlier that they now had to figure out how to coordinate with the turquoise jewelry they'd discovered when they moved to the West later in life. One lady, every time she came in, bought lobster salad and leaned in to tell me, "Dear, you wear turquoise very well." I would smile.

I loved everything about Alfalfa's. I loved imagining the lives of the people in my line. I would talk to them about their groceries. "What do you think of that soy cheese pizza?" I would say. Or, "I really like those Rice Dream moon pies."

One morning that summer I looked up and Shane was in my line. It was the first time we'd been together, by ourselves, without his sister. He was holding a single can of all-natural dog food. "I ran out of food for the dogs," he said. Instead of putting the can on the counter, like most people did, he put it right into my hand.

And then it started. Shane was the best boyfriend I'd ever had. I felt so grown up, walking across the lawn to his two-story condo, wearing lipstick and cowboy boots. He would be there inside, reading a book on the couch with his two dogs. He'd jump up and kiss me and open me a beer, which he could buy at Liquor Mart himself. We'd sit and talk, and every so often, he'd go to the bookshelf, and soon I'd have a whole stack in front of me. There were so many books he wanted me to read, and movies he wanted me to see. It was like a project to cram it all in.

I'd ride my bike home from Alfalfa's at night and he'd surprise me. Be there outside my house in his car, the windows down, playing, very softly, one of my favorite songs. I'd get in the car and we'd start driving, and he'd look over at me in the passenger seat and tell me the thing I was doing with my thumbs was a known sign of genius. He thought I would be the one in of my class to become famous first.

Soon it was time for me to go to college and for Shane to go back to his job teaching at a junior high. Before I left, Shane wrote me a poem and give me a silver barrette from one of the Native American jewelry stores. Flying across the plains in August, fingering the barrette in my hair, I decided I would miss Shane, but not in a terminal, serious, sad girl way. It had been a perfect summer.

Then I was at school. It was the last year before email really took off, and everyone still wrote letters. I had good letters. Once Shane drew a cartoon of his dogs over the flap. "The boys say hi!" Another time he wrote, "As soon as I sealed this, I felt like writing more." And one time he wrote, "I love you very much."

I thought about this a lot. We'd never said it to each other in real life, but now I didn't know. I wondered. I thought that maybe I had underestimated my feelings for Shane. Instead of thinking of him less, I was thinking of him more. Unfortunately, his letters decreased in direct proportion to my thoughts. Worst, in his last notes, he'd begun to mention a first-grade teacher named Tina.

One night I brought the cordless phone up to my top bunk and I called him. He said, "Well, I have some good news. I'm getting married, to Tina, the first-grade teacher." And that was when I knew-- I loved Shane.

Back home in Boulder for the summer, I couldn't get Shane out of my head. Wearing a skirt, I would ride my muddy mountain bike fast up Arapahoe Road, which I knew he had to drive on a lot, hoping he would see me. I thought the skirt plus the mud made me look wild and pretty at the same time. At night, I'd tilt my halogen bike light upward so that it would cast a mysterious glow upon my face. I'd lean forward, peddling furiously. Drive by, Shane, I'd think. Drive by and see me.

Sometimes in this fantasy, it was Tina who would notice. "Look at that girl on her bike," she'd say. "Look at how fast she's going. And she's so pretty." And Shane would glance away from the road, and it would be me. There would be a silence as he turned back to the wheel, him deciding. They'd slow down at the light. He'd get in the left lane, turn on his blinker. "That's Susan," he'd finally say. "That's Susan?" Tina would say, whipping around just in time to catch me flying over a hill, my hair the lightest thing in the dark night.

And then they would drive back to his parents' house, Shane filled with regret, Tina feeling inadequate. And the next day, while Tina was out, he'd be overcome. He would come to buy a can of dog food at Alfalfa's.

This summer, not even Alfalfa's was fun. The new darling of the front end was a high school sophomore whose father kissed her goodbye outside the automatic doors each morning. The woman who had been so impressed with my ability to wear turquoise seemed not to recognize me when I rang up her lobster salad. I'd stand there in my apron, frowning over products that had once delighted me, like Frookies, and dreaming of the day Shane would stop by.

But it never, ever happened. He never even came in for just one look. I'd become a completely different girl. Less shiny, less charming, less likely to become famous.

One day I resolved to get over Shane before the wedding. It seemed important not to think about him once he was married. Pathetic, but wrong too, in a way that was possibly actionable. The problem was I had no idea how to go about it.

The one bright spot in my summer was my fiction writing workshop. I'd signed up for a class at the University of Colorado that met two evenings a week. One evening I rode home thinking about my story, "Sunday Morning." "Sunday Morning" was told in the voice of a 12-year-old girl whose parents were on the verge of divorce. Like every story I'd ever written, it was based on a real-life experience.

In one part of the story, I said that the house was always cold, because the father didn't like to waste money on the heating bill. In another part, I mentioned a photograph of girls in matching dresses at the country club. These were just regular old details from my childhood, but the class had seized on them. They thought the country club symbolized an earlier, golden era, and the cold house meant that now the money was gone, and soon the family would be too.

Now, swooping down the bike path, I considered whether, in addition to not getting along, my parents had been losing money. It wasn't a point I had intended to make, but it was right there in the details for the class to discover. They could see things about your life that you couldn't. They could tell you things about your own world that you haven't realized.

And that's when I got the idea. I would write the exact story of my relationship with Shane, the lost, magic summer, him set to marry Tina, the way I couldn't get over him now. I would introduce the class to me, the static protagonist, and they would tell me how to act. They would not only tell me how to get over Shane. They would tell me why it had all happened, what it all meant. I would tell them my own story, and they would explain it to me.

The next morning, during my shift at Alfalfa's, I sipped from a giant glass of hot tea with soy milk and planned out the story. The action would take place on the day of the wedding. It would be a race against the clock scenario. The protagonist would have 24 hours to get over her ex-boyfriend. This struck me as an elegant conceit, and also an efficient one. If I woke up on the day of the wedding and wasn't yet over Shane, I wouldn't have to sweat. Thanks to the class, I'd have a 24-hour cure.

That evening, I sat at the computer. "On the day of the wedding, I worked a double shift," I wrote. "I punched in prices off cans of tuna and pints of Ben and Jerry's, weighed bags of peaches and by-the-pound salads from the salad bar, scooped change out of my drawer and counted it into customers' hands."

I sat back and considered my opening. This was the right idea, but I wanted to change it slightly. I didn't want all the details to be exactly, exactly like my life.

I copied the old version into a new document and began again. "On the day of the wedding, I worked a double shift. In 14 hours, I made 39 goat cheese and bagel sandwiches, wrapped 106 lunch boats in tight Saran wrap, and sliced through 16 different 10-inch cakes on the course of waiting on at least 357 customers. I was counting to keep my mind off of some other things."

I sat back. There, I thought, satisfied. As long as I switch myself from the front end to the deli department, nobody will know this is me. I called the story "Waiting." Like the girl behind the deli counter, I would be stationed in the classroom, waiting to be delivered a satisfying end.

That evening I pedaled to class at race-day speed, full of anticipation. The class was a mix of undergrads and people a few years out of school, like a guy who rode the free trolley from coffeehouse to coffeehouse all day and an aerobics instructor with tan, very shiny legs. Then there was our teacher, George.

"Let's start with 'Waiting,'" George said, as we sat down in class. This was it. I readied myself for the wise and luminous insights of my classmates.

"OK. Just starting with the first paragraph," said the aerobics instructor, "I highly doubt someone would count everything like that."

"Yeah, but the girl. What's her name?" a red-headed Southerner jumped in. "Katie?" He looked around the room for confirmation. "She says in the very next sentence, 'I was counting to keep my mind off of some other things.' It's not like she does it every day."

"I guess I just don't think it's very realistic that somebody could remember all that in their head," the aerobics instructor said.

"Maybe she was writing it down as she went along," somebody suggested. There were nods. I returned the nod. I leaned over the paper and made my first note. "Counting," I wrote, followed by a question mark. Small potatoes, small potatoes, I thought. Bring it on. What else?

"I was wondering where she went off to college," someone said. "I mean, it's back East, but where?" Murmurs of agreement. "Where she went off to college," I dutifully wrote. This was not going according to plan. Come on. How should she should get over him?

"Wait, wait, wait," said the aerobics instructor. "About the bride. Or actually the wife. I thought it was weird how Katie never even thought about the wife, you know? She never even wondered what she was like."

I had to hand it to the aerobics instructor. Sometimes she would come out with something really sharp. "Why didn't she think about the wife?" I wrote, with a big, filled-in arrow next to the note. Why didn't I ever think about Tina, I wondered.

"I guess also I didn't really have a sense of Shane," someone added. "I mean, it says he's a teacher and stuff like that, but I mean more about why he got married so quick." "Why Shane got married so quick," I noted. I was starting to see that there might be a problem. The class had some of the same questions about the characters that I did.

"Let's talk about Katie's feelings for Shane," the teacher said. OK. Now we're getting somewhere, I thought.

"There was this one part that I thought was pretty telling," said one of the older students, "where she says-- on page three, midway down the page." There was the sound of people flipping. "I don't think I loved Shane until he told me he was getting married."

"Exactly," George nodded. "But I think it's getting buried in there. You might want to make it bigger," he said, addressing me directly, "or earlier.

"But you wouldn't want to make that too much the point," someone said, "because obviously she was having a really hard time getting over him. I mean, she did feel something for him."

"Well, I think that's an interesting question," George said, tipping back in his chair. "What are Katie's true feelings? Is this is a story about social status, or is this a story about true love?" I didn't like the way the question was framed.

"Social," the aerobics instructor said. "Definitely social. It seemed like she liked having an older boyfriend." Where was this in my story? But everyone was nodding. Encouraged, the aerobics instructor added, "I mean, if they'd been in love, it would have clicked when they were still together."

No! I felt everything slump inside me. As everyone bobbed their heads in agreement, that Shane and I hadn't been in love, I looked very intently at my paper. "Why didn't anything click?" I wrote. Then I couldn't write the rest of it, so I just made a long dash.

"Maybe she's going through something more than just Shane," somebody suggested. I perked up a little. This was definitely possible. "But there's not enough in here to give us a sense of what that other thing she's going through might be," said George. "We don't know much about Katie. She went off to college. She enjoys mountain biking. But aside from that, who is she?"

She's me, I thought. Look over here! Blonde hair, green skirt, far corner.

The class was silent. Then George turned his entire body and looked me straight in the eye. Oh God, I thought. They know.

"Susan, you might need to do a little pre-writing about Katie. Get a sense of who she is. Figure her out a little more." Yes. I nodded vigorously, as if I, too, was hoping to unlock the mysteries of this girl I'd created.

"OK. Well, we should really move on to the next one," said George. "Susan, I guess my final comment would be that the story needs an end. But it develops well. Nice job," he said.

I sat there blankly. The story needs an end? I thought. No duh, it needs an end. We are gathered together today to figure out the end. The story needing an end is the whole reason we are here. And now we just started talking about some other person's work.

I sat very still and looked around the bright room, all of us at the desks in a big circle. Nothing had happened. I was still the same. Except for now I'd tried this, and it seemed like I had no more chances.

I rode my bike home slowly. It made me feel lonely, thinking of the way they'd talked about my life. It was so in general. None of them knew that they were talking about a real girl in the world.

Then, as the days went by, I felt better. The class had acted like my story wasn't so unusual. Just some old thing with an ex-boyfriend. It made the whole thing feel smaller, like less of an emergency. Dozens of girls now riding their mountain bikes through these very foothills had dated boys and been hurt. It was something that people had heard of, something that happened all the time. It was a known thing that made people sad. Now I rode my bike along Arapahoe Road at the speed of a regular girl, wearing regular clothes, like shorts, and pointing my bike light in the regular direction, straight ahead.

For a while I still thought about Shane, and then suddenly, I didn't think about him at all. Except on every birthday, when I would think, I'm still not as old as he was. And then I was 23, and that was it. I didn't think about him anymore.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton from New York.

Ira Glass

Well you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia. I only agreed to host This American Life because he promised me years ago--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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