327: By Proxy

Ira Glass

There's really no way around some arguments. Maybe arguments just want to happen. One of the producers of our radio show, This American Life, was at this conference recently, and this guy named Eric Molinsky told her about this strangely and unexpectedly fierce argument that he had gotten into with a good friend of his. It was his cousin in fact. And the whole thing started with no warning at all. Like he told Nancy, they were happily chatting away in a nice warm cafe.

Ira Glass

And in the middle of this tirade, in the back of his mind, Eric was thinking, why are we getting so heated up over this, both of us? And then, something occurred to Eric.

Ira Glass

Eric's ex-girlfriend was a political activist with a special focus on corporate tax loopholes. His cousin Mara's ex-boyfriend worked in hedge funds.

Ira Glass

You know when you fall in love with somebody, it's like they have an open path straight to your heart. And without you even realizing it, other things can just ride in on that path-- political ideas, favorite bands, favorite writers, pet peeves. And where those things are concerned, you basically just become the person you love. You're like their proxy. In my own life, my own opinions about television are so thoroughly shaped by my wife's opinions that a coworker recently told me that sometimes she wished that she could just skip the middleman and talk straight to my wife.

But I think that we don't just become proxies for the people that we love. It happens with friends. It happens in business settings. It happens in politics. And when it happens, things can get very confusing. When you really step in for somebody else, substitute yourself for somebody else, it can be hard to tell if you're doing the right thing at all. If you're doing what they would want or what you want.

Well, from Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, By Proxy, stories of people turning into proxies for other people, sometimes by choice, sometimes they just find that it's happened to them without them even noticing. Act one of our show today, I'm The Decider. What do you do when a friend asks you to make a decision that she probably should be making for herself? Well, Davy Rothbart found himself in that very position. Act two, Killing The Messengers, what it's like to be the proxy for the least popular guys in town, when the town is Mosul and the guys are the US Army. Act three, Redemption By Proxy, a teenage girl and a message from beyond the grave. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, I'm The Decider. There are all kinds of situations where we step in as reluctant proxies. As a favor for friends or family, taking over some chore they don't want to do, taking their kids or their pets off their hands for a while. Doing something because it's the right thing to do and nobody else is stepping in. That's what happened to Davy Rothbart, more or less.

Davy Rothbart

So Cassandra is this childhood friend of mine who moved away when she was maybe 13 to Chicago, then to California, then Pensacola, Florida. I think she had kind of a tough go of things growing up. She never really knew her dad, and her and her mom and brother kept moving around a ton. A couple times she called me crying when she had to pull up stakes again. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth, and when we were 20, we traveled around Eastern Europe together, just as friends.

Every couple of years since, she'll surface in my life by way of a middle of the night phone call. She'll be in the midst of a crisis and desperate for my advice. Maybe about problems at her work, or with school, or with a boyfriend, her little brother in trouble with the law. She'll say things to me like, you're so sensible. You understand how things work. You're so smart about things. Not just smart, but wise. It's kind of hard to resist.

So after she calls me with a problem, for a week or so we talk every day, just going through it all. And by then, we've figured out a good approach. Say she's got a manager at work who's overly flirtatious, making her uncomfortable. I kind of ask her a bunch of questions. What's he doing exactly? How often? Have other people witnessed his behavior? Who's his supervisor? After talking a bunch, we make a plan for some kind of decisive action. She feels a whole lot better, and I, in turn, feel sensible, knowledgeable and smart. Not just smart, but wise.

Then a few years ago she called me, freaking out. She had a new kind of crisis, not like anything I had ever dealt with before. She was pregnant, almost three months pregnant. The dad was her sometimes boyfriend, a hippie wanderer type named Rainbow Bear. She was living in Santa Barbara, she said, without any close friends around, no one to really turn to, and she was really upset and confused, torn up about whether she should have this baby or not. Rainbow Bear wasn't involved. She said to me, tell me what to do and I'll do it.

So I did pretty much what any sensible and smart person would do in that situation. I told her I couldn't make the decision for her, but that I would do everything I could to equip her with as much information as possible, so that she'd be able to decide what to do on her own. Then I got to work. I knew one friend who'd had an abortion and had always been haunted by it, and another friend who'd had an abortion and, while sad about it of course, really believed it had been the right thing to do. I also found a woman who'd given her baby up for adoption, and another who'd kept her baby and was a single mom.

I got them all to agree to talk to Cassandra, but she was really shy, and too upset to reach out to strangers. Those are your friends, not mine, she said, I'll feel weird calling them. So OK, I changed my plan, and talked at great length to each of these women myself, then relayed their stories to Cassandra, careful to present them in a balanced way, so it wouldn't seem like I was favoring one option over another.

I'd even gone so far as so talk to a couple of friends in med school to gauge the medical risks of a later first term abortion. Relatively safe, it turns out. At the end of all this, Cassandra was only more confused and overwhelmed. Please, she begged me, tell me what you think I should do. And that's where I should have said, look, nobody can tell you what to do in this situation. Of course this is agonizing, but only you can know what path to take. Whatever you choose, that will be the right decision. But that's not what I said.

Cassandra was barely getting by on her own as a cashier at a health food store. No medical insurance, shady roommates, a shaky lease, a boyfriend named Rainbow Bear. Cassandra, I said, I know being a mother appeals to you but you're still so young. Maybe this isn't the right time. Down the road you'll have the chance to have a baby with a guy who's going to be there to raise the child with you. It's just going to be so hard on your own. I think you should wait. I think you should wait. Sort of a pleasant euphemism for kill the fetus.

Cassandra sounded sad but she said I was right, and that now she knew what to do. She kept thanking me for being such a kind and generous friend. We talked maybe once more the next day, and then she disappeared again. For months afterwards, I felt weird about what I'd done. I did think it was probably for the best, but what if something went wrong and she was never able to have children again? Or what if she never found the right guy and this had been her one chance to be a mother? I think it would have felt equally weird if I'd told her to have the baby too. I just felt like I shouldn't have been the one to decide.

Three years later, I'm living in Chicago and I get a call. It's Cassandra. She's in the Chicago suburbs staying with her grandfather. She invites me out to visitor her and we agree to meet the next day at the playground across from her grandfather's house. I pull up, hop out of my car, and there's Cassandra, waving to me from beside the swing set. Then I see, tearing through the grass toward me, a little blond, two year old boy. It's Cassandra's son of course. She had the baby after all, and he's got the same name as my favorite basketball player in the world, Isaiah, like Isaiah Thomas. Davy, meet Isaiah Bear.

My eyes got all watery. And Isaiah, he's like the most incredible, joyous, dazzlingly intelligent two year old boy I've ever met in my life. I swear this is true. That night, we brought him to my friend Nicole's house. I was couch surfing at her place at the time. And when we introduced him to 12 people in a circle, he went right back around and knew every single person's name. Incredible. At the same time, as amazing as Isaiah was, Cassandra was struggling. Rainbow bear had rumbled off and she'd been bouncing from town to town, first staying with his parents, then an old boyfriend or two, and now her grandfather. But that was a bad situation too. She had to get out of there.

And here I was. I felt pretty guilty for having pressed Cassandra to have an abortion. Somehow I thought, if I could help his path toward a good life, I could make up for that little part where I'd suggested he be exterminated. So I jumped back in again. I took over. And I came up with a plan. I'd move back home to my folks' house in Michigan for a little while. I'd bring Cassandra and Isaiah to live with us for a couple of months in Ann Arbor. And Cassandra said that's what she wanted. Stay with my folks, get a job, work and save money, then move into her own place and raise her son.

I was really excited about the whole thing. I truly wanted to help Cassandra, you know? She'd been a lifelong friend. And I also liked the idea of being altruistic. And the idea that this other girl I was chasing after at the time might see me as altruistic. And it occurred to me that living with Cassandra and Isaiah would be kind of like having my own kid. At the basketball court where I'd played ball in Chicago, there was this one guy who always brought his two kids with him, like two and four years old. Between games, he'd mess around with them for a couple of minutes, or shout at them from wandering too far away. I liked the idea of showing up at the court in Ann Arbor with Isaiah, and being able to cuff him, roughhouse with him and teach him how to shoot. Being a dad, or acting as a dad, makes you feel more like a man. Makes you seem a little more tough and rugged.

Having Cassandra and Isaiah in Ann Arbor was great. My mom got a little kiddy pool for the backyard, and Sandra and Isaiah spent all afternoon and evening back there. Cassandra made soup and all kinds of complicated vegan foods in the kitchen and washed her clothes with a hose and hung them up to dry on the old, rusty playground equipment out back. We had a basketball hoop in our driveway, and me and my friends started showing young Isaiah how to shoot. We called him Zeke, after Isaiah Thomas' nickname. And the kid, Zeke, had the sunniest disposition, and he was a natural athlete.

I started in pretty quickly trying to find Sandra a job. Between me, my friends, and my parents, we found a few solid leads, solid enough that all she had to do was show up for an interview and the job would be hers. These weren't dream jobs, but they were decent paying jobs, like working the register at a Birkenstock store or taking phone orders at Bell's Pizza. But every time we had an interview set up for Sandra, she managed to miss it. She got lost on her way there or Isaiah was nursing and she couldn't leave him right then, those kinds of things. Finally, one day I drove her to an interview. Though she had her own car, I just wanted to make sure she actually went to it.

She got the job, a receptionist at a new agey type salon. They asked her to start work the next morning. I drew a careful map with clear directions so she'd have no trouble finding the place and even set her alarm clock to wake her in plenty of time to get to work. My plan was for me and my dad to split the day looking after Zeke, and then on days we weren't around, Zeke could go to daycare. But the next morning, I wake up and Cassandra's just laying in bed, playing with Zeke. I charged into the room. Oh my God, you're two hours late for work, and it's your first day. And she's just like, oh, I decided not to go.

If you knew Cassandra, you'd be shocked when I told you that she never smoked pot because she just had that total, glassy, dreamlike air to her, completely unperturbed by real world situations. In a lot of ways, she was like a child, which became so frustrating. Cassandra kept putting all of her decisions in my hands, but then she wasn't actually doing any of the things I was telling her to do. And I finally realized, things that were easy for me, like showing up for work on time, showing up at all, were not easy for her. It was clear, she wasn't going to get a job.

And I don't want to be too critical. Taking care of her two year old, she was exhausted all the time. And really, I began to understand just how difficult it would be to raise a kid on your own. I mean, that stuff is relentless when you have two parents. But all alone, it's brutal. Even for me, the allure of playing dad began to wane. I was stuck babysitting a lot. When I tried to take Zeke with me to the schoolyard where I always played basketball, he didn't understand that he couldn't come out on the court when the grownups were playing, and I had to leave the game and take him home. And most days, I'd be at home, trying to get some kind of important work done on the computer, and play Hungry Hungry Hippo at the same time.

Suddenly, I felt desperately like I needed an out. My parents recognized that Cassandra had no intention of finding her own housing and they were ready to have their house back and I was ready to have my life back. My stab at playing dad revealed itself for what it was all along-- a theme park ride, a novelty, a selfish gift. So naturally, I hatched a new, even more ill-conceived plan, and tried to hook Cassandra up with my friend Brandy, so he could take her off my hands.

I knew Brandy was into Cassandra, and he was great with Isaiah, so I kept making plans for all of us to hang out together, then ducking out at the last minute. Randy took over all the dad responsibilities I'd felt saddled with, and Cassandra enjoyed Brandy's kindness and attention. There was actually a momentary romantic spark, and I saw everything unspooling beautifully. But Randy was living at home with his own mom, and they were barely making ends meet as it was. Randy's mom quashed everything really quick. There's no way they're moving in here with us. One of the lowest moments of this whole strange saga was when Cassandra said to me one day-- not angrily, just plainly-- if you want me to leave, I'll leave. You don't have to try and peddle me off on your friends.

There's a TV show from the '80s that I saw only a handful of times, but always really loved, called Quantum Leap. Remember that? Each week's episode would revolve around a different person caught up in a complicated and difficult situation that they couldn't fix. And the star of the show, Scott Bakula, would actually be zapped into that person's body, become that person, and he would make things right. It's one thing to get involved in other people's problems and do your best to help them. But man, it'd be a whole other thing if you could actually inhabit their body and fix everything up yourself. Then you could really help some people.

I'm sure in the end, it's not the best way to do it. At the very least, it's kind of a bullying way to look at other people's problems. But I guess that's me, wanting the ball in my hands, wanting to run the show.

Not long after Cassandra told me I didn't need to peddle her onto my friends, she decided that she and Zeke would pack up and leave town. She had been talking to Zeke's dad, Rainbow Bear, on the phone, and they were going to try to get back together. Rainbow had moved to Hawaii, and Sandra and Isaiah were headed there to meet up with him. It was one of those things where it seemed clearly kind of sad and hopeless, and at the same time, I didn't want to talk her out of it, because it meant they'd be gone and I could resume my own directionless life.

Cassandra was nothing but sweet and totally appreciative of what me and my family had done for her. But I felt miserable. I worked with little Zeke one last afternoon on his perimeter shooting, then watched him and Cassandra drive away. And then I cried.

Ira Glass

Davy Rothbart in Ann Arbor. His book of stories is The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He's also the creator of Found Magazine, which is at foundmagazine.com.

[MUSIC - "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I CAN SAVE YOU FROM" BY KINGS OF CONVENIENCE]

Coming up, so your country's been occupied by a foreign army, and you work for that army. Who should you really be loyal to? A guy caught in the middle of that problem 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. Each week on our program, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, By Proxy, stories of people substituting themselves for other people, and the difficulties that can create. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act two, Killing The Messengers. Being a proxy can get you murdered. Basim grew up in Iraq, trainined to be an English interpreter. And when the US Army arrived, he got a chance to try out his language skills on actual native English speakers for the first time in his life. Iraq had been cut off from the world for so long, he says, that generations of English teachers were not able to travel outside the country and speak English. So his English had all kinds of mistakes in it as a result.

But he spoke well enough that the Americans offered him a job as an interpreter, and it was a job that he really loved. He made decent money, and he felt like he was helping rebuild his country and bring it into the modern world. But translating for the US Army meant being a proxy for the Americans when he was talking to Iraqis, and being a proxy for the Iraqis when he was talking to American soldiers, which put him in a lot of tough situations.

A quick example: sometimes Iraqi policemen and police trainees would be standing right next to the Americans and then bad mouth them in Arabic. Basim wouldn't translate what they said. That would just make trouble. Instead, he would warn the police in Arabic that they should watch their mouths. That some translators would, in fact, tell the Americans what they were saying word for word, and there was no predicting how the Americans would react. Sometimes the Iraqi police would reply that Basim was taking the Americans' side. It was their country.

Ira Glass

The Army unit that Basim was working with trained Iraqi police. This meant that Basim spent a lot of time translating American police manuals into Arabic, and transiting lectures about police procedure. And as an Iraqi who had always been afraid of the police under Saddam, when police seemed able to do whatever it is that they wanted, Basim really liked this part of his job, teaching Iraqi police to work the way the police operate in modern countries, Western countries. On how to treat detainees, how to respect prisoners' human rights. How to stop a riot without brutality. How to exercise authority fairly, without taking bribes.

And so in April, 2004, when photos from Abu Ghraib prison became public, it was especially disheartening to Basim. This is not what he believed the Americans were all about.

Ira Glass

During this period, it became much harder, Basim says, to convince Iraqis that the Americans were doing anything good.

Ira Glass

Before long, it became dangerous to be a translator. Early in the occupation, clerics had issued an official statement saying it was OK for Iraqis to work with the Americans, including translators. But a year into the occupation, the mood in the country had changed. Translator friends of Basim's were getting killed. One of his teachers, an assistant professor who trained English interpreters at the University of Mosul was killed by people who said that she was graduating traitors.

One day Basim's unit was supposed to process and release a bunch of prisoners who had been transported from Abu Ghraib. Men, they were told, who had been investigated by the Americans and found to have done nothing wrong.

Ira Glass

A few weeks after the prisoner said that he was going to kill Basim, Basim got a threatening phone call. And then a package arrived.

Ira Glass

Basim went on the run. He hid in another town. But when his pregnant wife gave birth to their son, he drove back after curfew to reach her. A three hour drive in the dark past checkpoints where he had to guess if the checkpoints were Sunni or Shia. When they ask if you're Sunni or Shia, if you give the wrong answer, you're dead. Then he just hid for three months.

Before all this running, he'd actually gone to the Americans to ask for help and for protection. The Americans offered to let him live on the Army base, though without his family. Or they said they would drive him home every night in a military convoy to his family's house.

Ira Glass

In the end, Basim felt he had no choice. He left Iraq feeling like he should still be there. Today, Iraqis doing translation for the American forces are kind of an endangered species, a hunted species. The company that hired Basim to work for the Americans, Titan Corporation, has had 323 of its interpreters killed while on the job according to The Christian Science Monitor. But when the US Army relies on interpreters from outside Iraq, Basim says, they have trouble with Iraqi dialects, local meanings and customs. And they make all kinds of translating mistakes that no Iraqi would make.

Basim and his wife and his son are now in Europe, in a community where there are a number of Pakistani and Iranian and Iraqi exiles. Back in Iraq, he was constantly having to explain the Americans to people. But in Europe, he's trying very hard to avoid doing that. He specifically tries to avoid telling people that he was an interpreter for the United States in Iraq.

Ira Glass

Act three, Redemption By Proxy. When you get right down to it, a reputation is kind of a strange idea. It is this idea about you, about who you really are that is somehow connected to you, but that is utterly abstract at the same time. You can't touch it. You can't pin it down in any exact way, and it changes depending on what you do. Until the day you die, then your reputation is in the hands of whoever cares enough to step in as your proxy and take charge of the historical record and tell people who you really were. Eve Abrams has this story.

Eve Abrams

I taught elementary school for 10 years in New York City at this place called The Neighborhood School. It was one of those schools where students call teachers by their first names and where teachers really get to know their students well-- their families, their strengths, their dramas. But sometimes, one kid stands out. This is a story about one of those kids, and his friend, and his teacher. Sophia is the teacher, and also a friend of mine. Lily was our student years ago. She's 16 now. And Lily's classmate Robert was our student too, but he's dead, so I'll let Lily tell you about him.

Eve Abrams

Robert didn't defer to adults and other kids were drawn to that. But he was also sort of hapless. He was the kind of kid who, when he cut school, got caught.

Eve Abrams

That's how Lily saw Robert. Sofia saw him differently. After he was in my class, Robert moved on to Sophia's class right next door, and a lot of times, I'd see and hear them out in the hall together. Mostly I'd hear Sofia. She would lecture Robert about homework and effort and attitude, and her voice got really loud and annoyed. While Sophia lectured, Robert just stood there.

Eve Abrams

Sophia had a harder time with Robert than I did. He was older by the time she taught him, but his reading wasn't much better, and he still struggled with his schoolwork. He'd also gotten really good at deflecting all of the things that teachers would try-- ordering, cajoling, tricking. Sofia would see Robert around the neighborhood after school, hanging out with older boys, doing nothing much. And it frustrated her to no end that this smart, charming kid seemed headed for a lifetime of dead end jobs and disappointments.

Eve Abrams

Incidents between Sophia and Robert piled up and the year ended badly between them. Someone wrote an obscenity about Sofia on the school wall, up high where only a tall kid could write, and our principal was convinced it was Robert. He ended up being banned from the big end of the year party. When Robert didn't show up at graduation, other kids at the school, including Lily, blamed Sofia, even though Sophia had nothing to do with it. Not going had been Robert's decision.

Mostly, Sophia felt she'd done the best that she could with Robert, but she wasn't sure. She felt bad when she thought about him-- bad for not reaching him, bad for having been hard on him. And for the next few years, she dreaded seeing Robert around the neighborhood, especially with other kids she knew, like Lily.

And then one day Sophia heard Robert was dead, stabbed to death for reasons no one knows, even today. He had just turned 16 two weeks before.

Eve Abrams

If nothing else had happened, Robert would have stayed like that in Sophia's head for years-- a kid she always had regrets about, always wished she'd done a better job with. But about six weeks after Robert died, Lily came back to her old elementary school and showed up in Sophia's classroom out of the blue, and she did something none of our students had ever done.

Eve Abrams

Lily wrote the note to Sophia on an impulse while she was grieving. She wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do, or if it was weird, or even if Robert would approve. But before she could talk herself out of it, she sat down at her kitchen counter and wrote it on a pink PostIt.

Eve Abrams

Sophia never wrote back to Lily. She'd wanted to find the perfect way to thank her, but she couldn't decide what to say. And then she figured too much time had passed. Though Lily doesn't see it that way.

Eve Abrams

Until I spoke to her, Lily had no idea how much her note had meant to Sophia. That Sophia kept the note in her wallet, that it had lifted away years of guilt. For Lily, the note was about saving Robert, the part of him that was left in the world. She hadn't realized that it would also rescue Sophia.

Ira Glass

Eve Abrams, in New York.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollack and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, Tommy Andres, PJ Vogt, and Emily Yousef. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Special thanks today to Dan Ephron, Sean Cullen, Dan Calhoun.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Support for This American Life is provided by Saab, founded by 16 Swedish aircraft engineers who decided to bring the spirit of flight down to Earth. Saab, born from jets. Learn more at saabusa.com.

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WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, I tried to bring to him to my weekly basketball game. I tried, I tried, but it just didn't work out.

Davy Rothbart

He didn't understand that he couldn't come out on the court when the grownups were playing, and I had to leave the game and take him home.

Ira Glass

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

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