572: Transformers

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

[SCREAMING]

Ira Glass

Tess is 12, and back when she was 10, she and her dad were driving by Six Flags Magic Mountain. And she told her dad that when kids at school talked about going on roller coasters, and which ones they'd ridden, and how awesome they are, she always felt kind of dumb because she was so scared of them.

Ira Glass

He wasn't, of course. And he made this recording of the trip that I heard on this podcast called Unfictional that I want to play you some of now, because this recording is great. Her dad is Bob Carson, who hosts that show, Unfictional.

Ira Glass

So they get to the park, and they start with the easy roller coasters, right? They'd watched videos of the ones they would go on to prepare. And so after they do the Road Runner Express, and the Gold Rusher, they advance to the Ninja, which turns you sideways. And then they came to the big challenge.

Ira Glass

So they approach this huge, frightening-looking steel contraption. Can I just say, looping is a fantastically bland way to describe what this thing does. It is an enormous loop, nine stories high, like a giant Hot Wheels loop that flips you totally upside down. Anyway, here's the recording of what happened.

[CREAKING]

Ira Glass

Ladies and gentlemen, when does it ever happen like this, right? That you change so fast? You were one thing, now you're another. Change usually takes time. Psyching yourself up, and self-help books, and advice from friends, and one tentative step after the next. This is about as efficient as it ever gets.

Ira Glass

Today on our show, it's the new year. People are making resolutions. We have stories of people deciding they are going to totally transform themselves, overcome their fears, finally change the things about themselves that have dogged them and held them back their entire lives, things that, in some cases, it's hard to believe could ever change. Stay with us.

Anthony Devito

My grandma Vicki is 90 years old. She lives in a nursing home, and lately she can't stop talking about her new boyfriend, Frank. They're very much in love, and their dialogue is straight out of a romantic comedy. I mean, this is what it sounds like when they're drinking tea.

Anthony Devito

That's the way Frank talks. He's like an encyclopedia of love cliches, but totally sincere about it.

Anthony Devito

Again, Grandma is 90. Frank's 62, which makes him 28 years younger than my grandma. That's not even a cougar. That's a different animal. It's like a water buffalo. Also, she's partially deaf, while Frank is blind, he's got one leg, and it's an interracial relationship. As a stand up comedian, I've never felt more pressure to write a joke.

This is in no way the grandma who raised me. She's not a lovestruck, soft hearted kind of girl. She's a tough Italian lady from New Jersey, right out of central casting. If you've ever seen a mob movie in the last 30 years, you got the picture. Her eyebrows are drawn on, but not at the appropriate height, so she always looks shocked. It's all there, the opinions, the accent, and yes, even the racism.

So a relationship with a blind, one legged black guy, not the thing you'd expect from grandma. And yet, none of that's the most surprising part. What's most surprising is that she has anything to do with a man at all. The grandma I've always known, she despised men. Like, she was fundamentally against them as a concept. So all this lovey dovey Frank business, it's like she's been inhabited by an alien.

In order to understand how opposed my grandma was to men, I need to tell you the very weird story of the tenant who lived with my family when I was growing up. This was in Bloomfield, New Jersey. My dad died in a car crash when I was a baby, so my mom and I moved in with my aunt, grandma, and great grandma. We lived in a two story house with a basement. Each floor had a different set of women.

The only other guy in the house besides me was our tenant, John. He rented out our living room. John was always there, lying on the rug, shirtless, in black sweatpants, eating waffles, and watching animal shows.

My grandma didn't like John. She treated him like a second class citizen. Whenever she walked through the living room, she'd look at him and grunt. She was fixated on keeping him away from all our food.

I'd open the fridge and there'd be stickers on everything there. Milk, cold cuts, leftover pasta. They all said "Not for John." Then one day I thought I overheard my aunt saying John and Grandma Vicki were married. And I'm like, what?

Anthony Devito

That's my mom.

Anthony Devito

No, I didn't know that we're married. You know why? Because nobody told me.

I'm 33 now, and two and a half decades have passed since I learned that John was my grandpa. And you know what? This conversation that you're hearing right now, this is the first time my mom and I have ever talked about it since that day when I was eight.

Anthony Devito

Think about that for a second, what that says about my family's aggressive lack of interest in processing feelings. So being a DeVito, I learned John was my grandpa, and then I didn't change anything about my behavior at all towards him. And he didn't act any different with me either. He stayed the tenant.

Here's how my grandpa ended up in the doghouse. One day, years before I was born, Grandma goes out to move Grandpa's car in the driveway. She pulls down the sun visor.

My mom filled me in on the details my grandma couldn't bring herself to say. The envelopes contained pictures of Grandpa with another woman-- the one he was renting secret apartments for. For Grandma, the marriage was over. But Grandpa John refused to move out, because he always denied ever having an affair. And Grandma never filed for divorce because she didn't have the money to move herself and four kids. There was a total standoff in the house.

Anthony Devito

They hadn't always been unhappy. She says he was this charming, funny guy who loved to dance and bought her beautiful gifts, rings, necklaces, a blue fox fur coat. They had four daughters together, big family dinners every night, vacations at the Jersey Shore. It was nice.

But now she ignored him. She chose not to recognize her husband sleeping under the same roof. She never explained to my mom or sisters why their dad had moved into the living room. So sometimes they'd sneak him a plate of food or give him some extra money.

Finally, when I was in seventh grade, they forced him out. My aunts and great grandma were fed up he wasn't helping with the mortgage. I never saw him again. And soon after, he died of a heart attack. When my grandma heard the news, she was blank, absolutely no emotion. He'd already been dead to her for years.

There were some other guys who tried with Grandma. I mean, really tried. Seriously courted her.

First, there was Mr. Bill, our fix it man. He'd always try to kiss her, and she'd wiggle out of there. Then there was Gene, a school crossing guard. He wanted to marry her, and proclaimed his love over and over.

And her? There's no other way to say it. She took huge pleasure in turning them down. It was the one activity that gave her pure joy.

It was hard to watch. I was in high school then, and I feel bad for Gene. I wanted to pull him aside and be like, dude, just walk away. You're a crossing guard. You of all people should know when to stop. I remember he used to leave these sobbing voicemails, private outpourings of emotion. And Grandma would play them for me, laughing while she cleaned the kitchen.

Anthony Devito

So when my mom walked into the nursing home one day and she saw this guy pulled up next to my grandma in his wheelchair, needless to say, she was surprised.

Anthony Devito

My mom wondered if she messed up her medication. No, really. She worried about that. We all did. Since then, it's been an adjustment, the thought that Grandma could ever have feelings for a man.

My grandma moved into the nursing home for health reasons a year ago, and it was brutal, the way those things often are. She'd been living with my mom and my aunt. Their life at home was so close, everyone sitting around the table, up in each other's business in a good way, every day. There were always multiple conversations happening at the same time. You jump in and out of them like double Dutch.

And Grandma was the center of it all. She held court. Her laugh would fill the room. Now she was alone, and she hated it. She didn't talk to anyone, wouldn't leave her room for months. Every time we visited her, she begged for us to take her home. That is, until she met Frank.

Anthony Devito

My grandma had wheeled up to him and held out her right arm. Frank had lost his leg and was struggling to make it down the hallway. That day, he was wearing a prosthetic leg and using a cane.

Anthony Devito

After that, my grandma always sat next to Frank in the cafeteria.

Anthony Devito

I see them do this all the time.

Anthony Devito

They're like a couple of cozy cellmates, playing cards, watching Family Feud. Frank can't see anything, so Grandma gives him the play by play. They talk about what life was like on the outside. She loved a beer at the end of a long day. For Frank, it was rum and Coke.

Frank told my grandma he used to work at a factory, wrapping products and plastic. And like her, he was married and had his heart broken. He said his wife fell in love and left him for another man. Then he lost his eyesight to macular degeneration, then his leg to blood clots.

And now he lives in this place. It's not the Ritz. As soon as you get off the elevators, there's just ambient screaming, a full chorus of wails and moans.

There's a smell of sickness which attaches itself to everything. It's a real playground for all five senses. But somehow, Grandma and Frank together make it all a little more tolerable.

[SHOUTING]

Anthony Devito

You know that feeling when you hang out with someone a lot and you just want to be with them all the time, like going home at the end of the day feels like a tiny loss? That happened to Grandma and Frank. It was just they had to go to their separate rooms.

Anthony Devito

I kept asking her to explain this huge transformation, but it's pretty simple, actually. She's 90 years old. She lives in a nursing home, and she fell in love. Recently, Frank asked my grandma to marry him. She said yes.

Ira Glass

Anthony DeVito is a comedian in New York. His website, anthonydevitocomedy.com

[MUSIC - "LOVE REALLY CHANGED ME" BY SPOOKY TOOTH]

Ira Glass

One Monday, she rode a bus as the next of those many steps that she has to do to become an American. This was a year ago. Today's show is a rerun.

This woman is from Afghanistan, but she lives in Detroit now. There are currently a record number of people-- over 60 million, according to the United Nations-- displaced by violence and persecution and needing to start all over elsewhere, change their lives, transform themselves. M is one of them.

She's right now living in a temporary home for asylum seekers called Freedom House. And at Freedom House, they've taught her how to put together an American style resume and go to the doctor in America. Today's lesson is how to get around the city independently. This turns out to be one of the most critical skills if you're going to get a job or really do much of anything in this country, right?

And the Detroit buses are chronically late and confusing. And in the past, other Freedom House refugees have gotten lost for hours when they've been sent out on their very first bus ride. One of them circled around and around and around on the route, not getting off, until finally the driver asked where the guy was going and then drove the bus to Freedom House, which is actually a couple blocks away from the route, to drop the guy off.

Since then, to minimize mishaps, usually a volunteer goes with. And, because I wanted to record this, Freedom House decided not to send a volunteer. They informed me when I arrived, basically, I would be the volunteer.

Ira Glass

Unfortunately for both of us-- well, mostly unfortunately for her-- I've never ridden a bus in Detroit. I really know nothing about Detroit.

We're supposed to transfer to another bus, but it's not so clear where we're supposed to do that. This is a moment that sometimes trips up other refugees, the transfer points, because they're afraid to approach strangers and ask for help. M does not pause. She sees two young guys sitting on a railing at a convenience store in front of a shiny black Mustang, and strides purposefully up to them. She's not very tall, 40-ish, wears squarish glasses and a hijab, a scarf covering her head.

Ira Glass

He and his friend smile at her. It's a smile that says they're flirting with her, but that also says that they know this is not going to work with this devout Muslim lady standing in front of them. They know that they're going through the motions of hitting on her, because, well, that's just what you do, I guess.

Ira Glass

M, maybe you can tell, is this super capable person who seems to have no problem in any situation I see her in, finding out what she needs to know and making things happen. In other words, figuring out how to ride a bus is child's play to her. She's a college grad with a bachelor's in business administration. Back home in Kabul, did project management for an international organization, humanitarian projects.

Ira Glass

It's not unusual of course, but this immigrant who's used to a job in her own country managing things and doing PowerPoint presentations and looking at Excel spreadsheets is hoping here in America, that she'll get work as a seamstress if she she's lucky. She got her papers to work legally a month ago, and looking for work so far has landed nothing.

Ira Glass

The driver on the second just shows M how to use the transfer.

Ira Glass

On the second bus, we're hoping to get off at the corner of Ford and Brest. The driver tells M that he's just filling in, so he can't help us. He doesn't know the stops. There's an automated system that calls out the stops as the bus approaches each one. It's pretty quiet.

Ira Glass

We wait for the bus to pull over. The automated system names other streets, Oakdale, Wesley, Birrell. And suddenly I realize--

Ira Glass

No, she doesn't know. Because in Kabul, that's not how you get the guy to stop the bus. That's why she has an American with her. I pull the cord.

You know, she doesn't even know the English word for "cord" yet. She knows rope, sure but cord? That's a more subtle one. She hasn't heard that one yet. A guy in a trucker hat hears us talking about how we're looking for Ford and Brest.

Ira Glass

We climb off the bus.

By "no" of course, what I mean is "yes."

Ira Glass

Like I said, for somebody who lived through Taliban rule, whose previous job was humanitarian relief in the middle of a war, this is still not much of a challenge. Because learning to do concrete tasks, like using a bus transfer, that is not the hard part of turning yourself from an Afghan into an American.

The hard part is that M is here alone. She came here for a conference a year ago. But while she was here, word got to her that certain people back home did not like what she was doing, working and traveling with foreigners. And if she came back, she and her family could be killed. That's, by the way, why I'm not saying her name.

So she's been apart from her children and her husband for over a year. The youngest don't even know where. They think she's in Afghanistan, because it would be dangerous if they would blab to people that she's in America.

The oldest are teenagers. The littlest is now just three. The last time she saw him, he was two. And he doesn't recognize her. He has no idea who she is when she talks to him on Skype. And the others?

Ira Glass

It can take years to get asylum in the United States. The systems been especially backed up recently, because of the flood of children coming in from Latin America. M used to have control of her life. And now the most important thing to her in the world, getting to bring her family here, is on a time she cannot predict or control, and really may take four or five years.

The three-year-old could be eight. He's not doing well as it is. He's acting up. He's a handful for his dad. But today, the sun's shining. It's unseasonably warm. We finish walking the few blocks back to where we're supposed to be.

Ira Glass

The tiniest of tiny victories. And since we first ran this story a year ago, she's had some more. She has a job, a place to live. She does not ride the bus anymore. She drives. One more step to becoming a real American.

Coming up, shy man makes himself unshy without the aid of powdermilk biscuits, because you cannot get powdermilk biscuits in prison, and of course also they don't exist. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show for the new year, as people make resolutions, we have a show that we first ran a year ago about transformers-- people willing themselves to change from one kind of person to another, trying to alter something fundamental about themselves. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Afterburner.

So there are things I think lots of us think we might fix about ourselves. You know, like, someday, when we get around to it. And then for some of us, that day arrives, and we try to rise to the occasion. Keith O'Brien met a guy like that.

Keith O'Brien

Richard Pierce caught my attention the moment I met him. Rich is a prisoner of the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility, way up by the Canadian border, the North Country, people call it. He's unusually open, way more than most prisoners. There's a good chance he's going to be released next year. And he talks frankly about how much that scares him. But he's trying to prepare himself for that moment by joining a club called Toastmasters.

At Toastmasters, people give speeches. Here in the prison, it's supposed to help inmates learn how to speak when they're in front of the parole board or in a job interview, say. And he needs to practice, because for years in prison, Rich said nothing to no one. He worked out alone, walked the yard alone, ate in the chow hall alone. Even for prison, Rich was weirdly quiet, no conversation, no give and take. He was a ghost in a green uniform.

Keith O'Brien

Rich is 52 years old, a big guy, thick and muscular, with a long history of arsons. He's been locked up for 28 of the past 30 years, actually. But before a recent Toastmasters speech, this prison lifer, he looked like he could barely breathe.

Keith O'Brien

Toastmasters is part of Rich's master plan. It's all about re-engaging with people, with the world. He feels like if he can stand up in front of people and talk, he'll be OK in normal conversation. He'll be OK everywhere.

The way Rich isolated himself in prison, he wasn't so different before he was locked up. When I ask why, he explains his mom drank, and she'd hit him, belittle him in front of his friends.

Keith O'Brien

Totally isolated, Rich started setting things on fire, abandoned cars, abandoned houses. No one ever got hurt. He says he just had to do it.

Ira Glass

He burned up a bulldozer and got arrested. He burned down a vacant restaurant and got arrested again. But his big crime happened on July 17th, 2000. He'd been released from prison just 45 days earlier. Rich burned down a restaurant in a big condominium building near a ski resort. He was sentenced to up to 60 years in prison.

He earned parole in 2010 on one of his two arson charges. And he knew he'd come up for parole on the other arson charge five years later. That's when Rich decided he couldn't be alone anymore.

Ira Glass

He joined the prison chess club. He began eating with others, forced himself to do it. And the prison psychologists, the mental gals, Rich calls them, gave him a challenge. Speak to three people, three, in a single day. One morning, Rich woke up, got dressed, and approached a total stranger on the cell block thinking, "OK, I'll try."

Keith O'Brien

Rich was on the hunt now for two more people.

Keith O'Brien

He found victim number two working out. They talked about push ups and pull ups, guy stuff. He cornered victim number three on the basketball court, ended up playing hoops for a while. And when the day was over, Rich figured he'd spoken for 45 minutes, a Richard Pierce record.

The mental gals, the chess, these conversations, they were working. But none of them prepared Rich for Toastmasters, the key, he thought, to real change. Because of course, in Toastmasters, he couldn't just sit there. He had to talk.

Keith O'Brien

Rich, of course, didn't die that night, or the night after that. He's been coming to Toastmasters for a few months now, slowly building up the courage to speak and the skills to do it. I was at the meeting the night he got up and gave a speech for the second time. He was introduced by another prisoner.

Keith O'Brien

Rich's assignment tonight was get to the point. Give a well-structured speech in five to seven minutes. Rich chose to talk about the time 30 years ago he decided to dress up as a cop for Halloween.

Keith O'Brien

Watching him talk, I just didn't want him to fail. Here was Rich, standing in front of a dozen people, palms placed flat on the podium.

Keith O'Brien

He's lost his place, snapping his fingers, trying to remember the words.

Keith O'Brien

He recovered. Then his story wandered a little, but he got a lot of laughs. He connected with the room, a real victory.

Keith O'Brien

After the speech, Rich was really hard on himself. In his self-evaluation, he wrote down three words-- "Horrible, needs practice." But his peers were more forgiving. "Excellent job," they wrote. "Great progress, very good eye contact, very welcoming." They called him "Winning and funny." One inmate said they should have storytelling every Saturday night on the cell block with Mr. Pierce. Another told Rich he had nothing to fear. He was just as good as anyone else.

Rich had been nervous, trembling even. And no one noticed.

Keith O'Brien

No, he's not. He doesn't accept it, but it's true. He's way more normal than he thinks.

Ira Glass

Keith O'Brien in New Hampshire. Since we first ran this story a year ago, Rich got out on parole and is now married and living in Colorado. His wife first heard him on our radio show and started writing to him. They wrote to each other. One thing led to another.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Trailbreaker. So it's not just that deciding to change your life can be completely momentous. Telling people about the decision can be a big deal too. Sean Cole has an example.

Sean Cole

The beginning of this story is as ordinary as you can imagine. A kid comes out to his family during Thanksgiving break from college. The kid was Andy Greer. It was 1989. He said it like this.

Sean Cole

His mom, indeed, was not surprised. His father, he remembers, was very surprised, which was kind of amazing given all of the years Andy spent at musical theater camp.

Sean Cole

Andy says that night he announced to the mumblety-peg hadn't worked, his dad responded with "I have to think about this a while." And then Andy did what you do in 1989 suburban Maryland when you've just come out to your parents. He drove to the mall and wandered in and out of stores thinking about what just happened. And when he got back to the parking lot, he realized he'd locked his keys in the car. His mom's car that he'd borrowed in order to drive off in a strident blaze of glory.

Sean Cole

So Andy's in a snowy parking lot alone. Finally his mom drives up in the family's other car, gets out, and if this were a much shorter story, she would have simply given him the spare set of keys and driven home.

Sean Cole

This, of course, is Andy's mom, Sandra Greer. She remembers the story a little differently than Andy in places-- not only that it wasn't on Thanksgiving, but also that she and Andy's dad started wondering if Andy might be gay when he was four years old, hence the Growing Up Straight book. So it wasn't much of a shock.

And one other thing you should know about Sandra before we continue is that she's an experimental chemist. Not just by profession. That's how she thinks about everything. For instance, she told me that when Andy announced he was gay, she had already started this long, slow process of coming out herself.

Sean Cole

Believe it or not, Andy and his mom actually haven't talked about any of this in the quarter century since it happened. And one of Andy's burning questions has been about Sandra's state of mind in between his big reveal in the kitchen and the moment she hopped in the car with him. What was going on in her head? He figured-- in fact, he told her when we were all talking about it. He says you must have been in some emotional turmoil during that hour or so. But again, Sandra is a pragmatist and very much a mom.

Sean Cole

And as they were sitting there in the car, Andy quickly realized, wait a second. This means we aren't going to be a family anymore. Not in the same way, which wasn't a relief and wasn't exciting. Plus, it's just that he figured he was the gay one in the family.

Sean Cole

And this is where the story becomes not a story about the secretly gay mother of an openly gay son, but the ingeniously clever secretly gay mother of an openly gay son. The way Andy tells it, his mom basically took to the phones like a pollster in a boiler room, spreading the word that someone they knew very well had come out of the closet.

Sean Cole

Actually, it wasn't a year or so later, says Andy's mom, Sandra. She remembers this part differently too. She says she told Andy's twin brother Mike just a couple of days later, and told their father only a couple of months after that, and then moved out in the spring. Also, she says she doesn't remember calling around to anybody about Andy except for her mother and her sister. And yes, she probably told Myrna Cooperstein. But her coming out and Andy's coming out, they aren't as connected as that, she told me.

Sean Cole

The funny thing is that Andy, for all his role modeliness, again, he was still a kid. And he still had a thing or to learn from his mom about being open minded.

Sean Cole

But he got over it. And within a year or so, Sandra was living as a fully out gay person. Of course, we all have these catalytic people in our lives. Usually, it's an older sibling or a friend, the first person we knew who got us listening to cool music for a change, or kissed somebody, or left home and moved to a new city. Or it's your parents you're fashioning yourself after somehow. How often is it that a person you created and raised is the one who leads you over a threshold?

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our program. Andrew Sean Greer, the guy in that story, is a novelist. His latest book, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

[MUSIC - "CHANGES" BY LANGHORNE SLIM AND THE LAW]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Miki Meek, with Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for this episode is Brian Reed. Our editor for this episode was Joel Lovell. Editorial help for this episode by Julie Snyder. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from Emmanuel Dzotsi. Our staff includes Elise Bergerson, Whitney Dangerfield, Kimberly Henderson, Seth Lind.

Research out help from Michelle Harris and Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damian Graef and Rob Geddis. Special thanks today to Richard Davis and Debra Drennan, Marty Heresniak, WBEZ's Collin Ashmead-Bobbitt, Marketplace's Stephen Cologne, and Cornell University's Bert Odom-Reed.

The podcast, Unfictional, that you heard some excerpts from at the beginning of today's program comes KCRW. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who dressed as Chicken Little for Halloween this year. And no, he was disappointed how it worked out.

Ira Glass

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

[MUSIC - "CHANGES" BY LANGHORNE SLIM AND THE LAW]