775: The Possum Experiment

Ira Glass

A while back, when she first moved to LA, Jessica worked at a pole dancing studio, an exercise place. The pay wasn't great. She was just a receptionist. But there were things about the place that she just loved.

Another nice thing about the job, when she checked everyone in for a class and class started, she'd take these long breaks. Once, she strode over to Starbucks. On the way, she saw this poster on a telephone pole. Somebody had found a lost animal.

Ira Glass

Which got her thinking. And when she got back to work, without much to do, she decided to make a poster of her own.

Ira Glass

I'd say the second possum is actually kind of scary. It's bearing its sharp teeth, snarling. And then handwritten underneath, there are bullet points. "Male, no collar, not very friendly. I think he might be scared."

Ira Glass

She made a few copies, less than a dozen, and put them up around her neighborhood. The idea that some hapless, well-meaning person would put up a poster like this, thinking that they had a cat, it just seemed so funny to her. She thought it was obvious that it was a joke. She really didn't expect the calls.

Ira Glass

Like this next guy, who-- the sound quality, this isn't so great. He says it's his cat, and the cat is a really gentle spirit.

Ira Glass

"You've got to thump him in the nose," he's saying.

Ira Glass

Clearly very bad advice. Jessica says maybe this guy is just trying to mess with her. Which brings us to the last of her three categories of callers, making up maybe 10% of all calls, she says.

Ira Glass

Jessica ended up getting hundreds of calls from all over the country because someone posted her "cat found" sign on the internet. And the fact that overwhelmingly most people who called wanted to help her out and warn her it was possum, and that only 10% of the callers went out of their way to be mean. She says normally, she thought, people as a whole were not so great. She wasn't somebody who had much faith in humanity.

Ira Glass

Sure.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on the program, "The Possum Experiment." We have three stories today on our show of people in wildly different situations, puzzling it out. Can we trust people, really? Are people mostly good?

I know that it's such an embarrassingly basic question to be asking, but sometimes you really are in situations where that is the thing you need to figure out. But we don't just ask the question today. We have answers. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, "Now You See Me." Kiese Laymon's a writer, and he's pretty clear on where he stands on this question, can you usually trust people? He lands squarely in the camp of be skeptical. He says we've all been burned by other people, by institutions. We build up distrust, and distrust protects us.

Which is the opposite of what Darryl Lennox believes. Darryl's a comedian. He says we're better off trusting that most people have good intentions. Yeah, you run into bad apples, but it's not worth constantly being on guard. This is not, however, what Darryl always believed. In fact, until recently, he was more like Kiese. But then something happened, something big, that changed his mind. Kiese talked to him about it.

Kiese Laymon

There's a joke that Darryl Lennox tells that I love. He's a comedian, and a lot of his comedy has to do with the absurdities of losing his vision.

Kiese Laymon

I love this joke, because this stranger at the baggage claim, who reminds me of all my Newport-smoking uncles in Milwaukee, is recognizing Darryl and letting him know it. It's like that knowing nod I've gotten my entire life from older Black men strangers, often with a slow shake of a head and a mild smirk.

Kiese Laymon

Darryl always had problems with his vision. So growing up, he was able to see well enough to play point guard on his basketball teams in high school and college. He went completely blind in his left eye two decades ago, when he was 33. And then in 2018, he became allergic to his glaucoma meds and started to lose the vision in his other eye.

Kiese Laymon

Before he lost his sight, Darryl described himself as a fighter, nearly completely distrusting of the motives of strangers. He stayed clear of them as best he could. But after he completely lost his sight, that changed. He felt like he had to trust strangers now, that he was getting into situations just getting from one place to another, where he thought he had no choice. This, of course, isn't how everyone who's blind moves through the world.

Strangers started approaching Darryl in a new way too. Realizing he was blind, they would come up to him at bars, restaurants, and airports, and start telling him secrets, lots of secrets, all the secrets. He told me he'd have conversations like this eight or 10 times a week sometimes.

Kiese Laymon

Strangers will talk to Darryl about their partner's cheating, their money issues, their brutal divorces. An ex-Catholic priest told him he liked to have sex with straight men. Some dude told him how he once robbed a bank in Seattle and got away with it. Each confession unprovoked, completely unsolicited, and by the way, mostly from white strangers and all from folks who are not blind.

Darryl says people do this because since he can't see them. He can't judge them. I wonder if these strangers are leaning violently almost on that Morpheus idea, that a blind Black man is some kind of oracle, a soothsayer, a wise Black superhuman here to save us all. I wanted to try my best to not be like that. And yet, as we talked about strangers, I wanted badly to confess to Darryl how terrified I've always been of them and how COVID made this worse, made me see every stranger as someone I might kill or be killed by, how two years into the pandemic I've been nudged from being slightly anti-social into a complete recluse.

I didn't say any of that to him. But it was why I was interested in talking to him in the first place, because his experience of the last two years has been the complete opposite. He went blind at the beginning of the pandemic, and since then he's more embracing of strangers, more open to them than he's ever been in his life. I listened to all of his albums and was intrigued, if not fully convinced, by his musings on that and on the relationships between blindness and Blackness. Here's one of those.

Kiese Laymon

I got the joke, but I wasn't sure if I was supposed to laugh at the broom closet trope or nod up and down slowly, signaling that I was aware of the broom closet trope. Darryl told me this one confession story that was also one of these instances where he could see his blindness diffusing his Blackness in real time. It was about a guy he bumped into by accident as he sat down at a bar. The guy seemed unusually mad about it, even after Darryl apologized and explained he couldn't see.

Kiese Laymon

Bob the cop went on to confess how being so vigilantly mistrustful was taking a toll on him, and he wasn't sure if he could keep doing it.

The cop formerly known as Bob wasn't just telling on himself. To me, he was telling on his entire profession. Darryl told me that when they finished talking, the cop hugged him tightly and did not want to let go.

Kiese Laymon

There was something incredibly dizzying and high-key brutal about the "this doesn't happen if I'm blind" part of the story Darryl told me.

Kiese Laymon

I asked Darryl about this so many different ways. Like, really? And each time, he responded with almost single-minded positivity. His whole album, Superbloom, is about accepting catastrophe and willing that catastrophe into absolute abundance.

I got to confess, I didn't get Darryl's refusal to allow any cynicism or even healthy skepticism in until he told me this story about his response to George Floyd's murder. It made me realize how singularly internal his existence is and how singularly protective he must be of that. Darryl said when he heard about the video of George Floyd being murdered, he immediately remembered the sound of George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin.

Kiese Laymon

I remember watching the video and immediately turning the sound off at the point where George Floyd utters the syllable "Ma" in "Mama." Darryl did not listen to George Floyd call for his mama at all. He knew that the sound of a Black human being accepting death and/or fighting for his life while an officer's knee flattened his throat would take his imagination into places his insides would likely never escape.

While we were talking, I wondered how differently this conversation would have gone if we were alone. I foolishly imagined that it would be just us during our conversation, but that's not how it works. As we talk, there were four other strangers listening in, producers who were neither big, Black, or blind feeding me questions on Zoom, a sound guy standing behind me for three hours in my tiny office. There was the imagined audience of folks who were not big, Black, or blind. It made whatever connection we had feel like a short-lived spectacular performance that neither of us were directing.

Kiese Laymon

Like there was this one amateur comedian.

Kiese Laymon

Though I've been firmly on this side of vision and this side of suspicion my entire life, my relationship with both started to shift immediately after my conversation with Darryl. I tried so hard not to be that goofy man whose life is changed in one interaction with the blind Black dude.

But the truth is, the day following our conversation, I didn't wait in the parking lot for my neighbors to go in before I got out of my car. I didn't sit on my couch working all day, wondering what it would be like to actually go outside and play. I went to the park near dusk and swung on swings next to strangers for the first time since the pandemic started. While swinging, I kept my mask on and listened again to Darryl's latest album. I kept replaying the first track, where the older brother from Milwaukee recognizes Darryl at the baggage claim.

Kiese Laymon

That few minutes of swinging next to unmasked strangers, laughing goofily with Darryl's voice in my ears, it didn't make me feel free, or delivered, or fundamentally changed. It made me go home in what feels like a world full of ruin, extremely thankful to be alive, and listen to an unexpected voicemail from a stranger named Darryl. "Man," I texted him back, "I'm so glad we ain't strangers no more."

Ira Glass

Kiese Laymon, he's the author of several books, most recently a memoir called Heavy. Coming up, a guy comes to New York City thinking it's a den of iniquity. And then a stranger walks up to him with a very unusual suggestion. Should he take the advice? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "The Possum Experiment," stories that shed light on the embarrassingly basic question, are most people usually trying to do the right thing? Can they be trusted? We've arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, "Spring Awakening."

OK, so one answer to the question "can you trust people to do the right thing" is that you can trust the people in your own group. And you can define that group however you want-- the people you share a religion with, or a nationality, or a race. Or maybe you grew up in the same place, went to the same school. They're the ones who share your values. Everybody else, don't trust them.

That's how the person in this next story, Clay Elder, felt about things till one day during a visit to New York City. Elna Baker, tell us what happened.

Elna Baker

I've known Clay since we were 15. And when we get together, it's not unusual for us to Mormon out.

Elna Baker

Try to remember church songs and other stuff from when we were kids.

Elna Baker

Clay is gay. As a kid growing up in the Mormon Church, he was taught that practicing homosexuality was akin to incest or bestiality. He hid out in musical theater, which, I know, terrible hiding place. But in Utah, that worked.

He studied theater at BYU. That's where he learned some of the musicals that Mormons love, the cheesy G-rated shows like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He didn't think it was something he would be able to do professionally. Instead, he saw it as a hobby.

He did musicals that the Mormon church put on, playing everyone from Joseph Smith, father of Mormonism, to Joseph, father of Jesus, or stepfather. He'd get on stage in front of thousands, help Mary give birth to the Son of God, and then sneak out to gay bars. If he kissed a guy, he'd feel guilty. And then he'd repent, then repeat. It was torture. He knew that a bigger city like New York was where people went to do all the things he wanted to do, but he couldn't imagine going there.

Elna Baker

"The great and spacious building" is Mormon code for the wicked outside world. In the Book of Mormon, the people who lived in the great and spacious building dressed in fancy clothes and pointed out their windows at the believers, laughing at us and mocking us. Their goal was to tempt us away from the righteous path. Clay saw New York and the people in it as the great and spacious building.

Elna Baker

So it took a lot to get Clay to New York, a catastrophic event. It all started when Clay got a boyfriend, his first, and almost no one knew. It was a big deal for him. It meant stepping away from the church, possibly losing his family. After they slept together, they decided to get tested for HIV as a precaution. This was 2006.

Elna Baker

To be openly out like that in Utah County was rare, Clay says. They both did the tests. Clay got called in to get his results-- negative. And then it was his boyfriend's turn.

Elna Baker

The doctor told Clay that since he had been having unprotected sex, he likely had HIV too. It was just too close to exposure for it to show up on the rapid test.

Elna Baker

To Clay, the cruel irony of getting HIV with his first real boyfriend wasn't lost on him. The doctor took blood samples and sent them home to wait a week for the results. The next few days were hell.

Elna Baker

Clay spent nearly all the money he had on two flights and a cheap hotel. They got to New York and started getting as many $20 rush tickets to musicals as they could afford-- Spamalot, Jersey Boys.

Elna Baker

What was actually happening was that Clay was on the phone during the day, trying to get them both in a medical trial for HIV meds. This is what he was thinking about as he was waiting in line to see another bouncy musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The doors opened. They shuffled into the theater. Their tickets were standing room only, so they hung in the back against the wall.

Elna Baker

They saw Sweeney Todd the following night. If you don't know the show, it's really different than the other musicals Clay had been seeing all week. It's about a barber who's seeking revenge on society by slitting the throats of his customers. His partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, takes the bodies and bakes them into meat pies. It was nothing like the shows Clay knew from BYU. For Clay, it was like that moment in the movie Pleasantville, where the whole world is in black and white, and suddenly you see a red rose.

Elna Baker

Clay tells him how he ended up moving to New York because of it, how he's now on Broadway. It's a mushy, cathartic reunion.

Elna Baker

Clay has heard this recording many times. But when he plays it for me, his reaction is visceral. His face turns red. He's crying. What is it about a random act of kindness that does this to us?

Like Clay, I can't talk about the strangers who've helped me without being reduced to a puddle. I think it has to do with the fact that it feels so unearned. Like if a family member or a friend does something for me, I understand it, because they love me. They care. But if a stranger does it, it breaks my brain a little. That's what I think is happening to Clay.

Elna Baker

By the way, I called up Mark, asked him why he gave Clay the money all those years ago. To explain one of the biggest reasons, he told me a story about this time he went to Italy. He had planned to stay with a new friend who'd recently moved to Rome. But the guy totally flaked on him, and he had nowhere but expensive hotels to sleep.

Mark didn't have that kind of money, so he called up this gay couple he had met his first night in Italy-- they ran a bar in town-- and asked them if they knew of a cheap hostel. Their response? Come stay with us.

For 10 nights they hosted Mark, a complete stranger. Mark says they were total gentlemen, trusting him in a way that frankly shocked him. They gave him keys, told him he could come and go as he pleased. He couldn't believe their generosity. And it changed him into the kind of guy who hands a stranger $200 and says, "Hey, go see this show. It'll change your life."

Ira Glass

Elna Baker is one of the producers of our show. This is one of the songs in the show that Clay is doing on Broadway right now.

[MUSIC - "ANOTHER HUNDRED PEOPLE" BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM]

Ira Glass

Act 3, "Never Hear the End of It." So we close out today's show with this story that is very on point with everything we've been talking about till now from Sean Cole.

Sean Cole

This is one of my favorite stories to tell. I tell it at parties or to anyone who will listen. And since we're here talking about the nature of people and whether they're mostly good or mostly bad, I figured I'd tell it to you. Have you ever seen A Clockwork Orange, the Stanley Kubrick movie-- guys running around in bowler hats and jockstraps on the outside of their pants, committing acts of, quote unquote, "ultraviolence?" It's one of the most iconic films of the 20th century, set in a dystopian near-future where teenage hoodlums speak this stylized, Russified slang. It's also intensely violent and deeply misogynist in ways I don't think I understood when I first saw it and obsessed over it. I was in my teens then, the same age that the main character Alex is supposed to be.

Sean Cole

The thing is, the meaning of the story, what it says about the inherent goodness or badness of people, has been largely and grossly misunderstood, or at least the meaning that was originally intended by its creator, Anthony Burgess, the guy who wrote the novel the movie's based on. He talked about this a lot in his lifetime.

Sean Cole

The final chapter, chapter 21. The film is actually really faithful to the book until that last part. But that last chapter radicalizes everything. If you know the movie, you know the movie. But if you don't, you at least need to know the plot of it for any of this to make sense. I'll try to summarize it as quick as I can.

So Alex and his three droogs, meaning friends, they spend their nights getting hopped up on drug-infused milk and hurting people. They beat up a panhandler, steal a car, and run other cars off the road. There's a pretty famous rape scene, which incidentally was inspired by Burgess's first wife getting assaulted, though not sexually, by a group of American soldiers. About a third of the way through, Alex accidentally murders someone during a break-in and goes to prison. And after serving a couple years, the government chooses him for a new experimental type of aversion therapy.

Sean Cole

They give him this drug which makes him basically allergic to violence. Any time he so much as pictures hitting someone, he's overwhelmed by nausea and dread, also whenever he hears the music of Beethoven, but that's another thing. Then the government does this presentation where they trot out the new forcibly reformed Alex, subject him to insults, injury, sexual temptation, and in response all he can do is gag and retch. Then a priest in the audience leaps up to object with the operative word--

Sean Cole

Anyway, Alex gets out. A bunch of bad stuff happens. He tries to kill himself. The government sees the whole thing as a PR nightmare and gives him an antidote to the treatment, transforming him back to his evil, remorseless, smashing-things self. Also he can listen to Beethoven again.

Sean Cole

The end. It's bleak with a point that it's better to let people choose to be bad than to brainwash them into harmless robots, clockwork oranges, with no will of their own. But in the book, the final chapter that wasn't in the movie, it changes the meaning of everything that's gone before it.

In the final chapter Alex is back at the Korova Milk Bar with three new droogs, whole new gang. But this time when they go out to stomp on random people, Alex hangs back. Something's eating at him. It's like he's bored with all the violence now, doesn't enjoy any of this like he used to.

He wanders into a coffee shop where he runs into a member of his old gang, Pete, and Pete's wife. They look happy, living the quiet life. And Alex thinks, maybe that's what's missing. Maybe I should settle down, have a kid, hopefully a son. "I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plott," he says, meaning his body. "Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O, my brothers. I was like growing up."

When I read that, it was like the top of my head blew off. Alex isn't inherently evil. He didn't just go back to doing all the bad stuff he used to do. And he didn't need an experimental drug to reform him. He just needed time to get there on his own. I was in my early 20s when I picked up the novel, so some years after I saw the movie. And the feeling was like I'd unfairly underestimated someone for a long time.

It's also an ending that comports more with reality. There's research that shows a big reason people disengage from gang life is just that they get older, age out of it. But more than that, the two endings represent two completely different ways of looking at the world. One is saying that people can change, even the worst people, whereas the other is saying that evil is evil, irredeemably.

And those two worldviews, they're baked into this ridiculous backstory about that final chapter. According to Burgess, when the book was published here in the States, the publisher told him they wouldn't put it out unless they could cut chapter 21. This was way before the movie was optioned. It was still just a novel. They said the optimistic ending was Pollyanna-ish, naive, and bland.

They were like, we Americans are tougher than you Brits. We can handle a nihilistic ending. Some people are just beyond hope. That's more realistic. Burgess needed money back then, he said. If the only way to sell the story to Americans was to lop off its conclusion, then so be it.

So now there were two Clockwork Oranges in the world with two different endings depending on where you lived. Burgess writes about this whole mishigas and how he felt about it in an introduction to a later edition of the book. I just want to read-- this is probably my favorite part of what he says.

"Now, when Stanley Kubrick made his film, though he made it in England, he followed the American version and, so it seemed to his audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat prematurely. Audiences did not exactly clamor for their money back, but they wondered why Kubrick left out the denouement. People wrote to me about this. Indeed, much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention while both Kubrick and the New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is, of course, terrible."

It's funny, but it was also endlessly frustrating to Burgess. He wrote that he didn't think the American edition and thus the movie was a fair depiction of human life. It's as inhuman to be 100% evil as it is to be 100% good. The two need to coexist. He was unequivocal about that.

Further, when the film came out, there was a moral panic about it, both in the UK and here in the States. And it wasn't just the violence people were upset about. It was the ending. An editor for The New York Times wrote in the Arts and Leisure section of the paper, "The thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the essence of fascism." I can't help but think how all of this might have been different if that last chapter had never been cut.

And that, for years, was everything I knew. But then recently, as I was getting ready to tell all of this to you, O, my brothers, I thought I should actually do some research, make sure I got my facts straight. And as with A Clockwork Orange itself, it turns out there's a whole other chapter to this saga, one that I didn't know existed. To start with, that quote from Burgess I read earlier that ends with "Life is, of course, terrible."

Sean Cole

This is Andrew Biswell. He's spent more than 25 years researching Burgess in part for his aptly titled book The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. It wasn't always the easiest job.

Sean Cole

The original manuscript, the one Burgess sent around to his editors in England and America.

Sean Cole

"Should we end here? An optional "epilogue" follows." "Epilogue" is in quotes. Again, this was at the end of the second-to-last chapter, where Alex turns bad again.

Sean Cole

Surprised because Burgess publicly was so emphatic that he had been forced to cut the last chapter and that it was the wrong decision. And when Andrew looked into it further, he found that Burgess's editor in America, Eric Swenson, never insisted on scrapping the last chapter. Yes, he thought it was Pollyanna-ish and, quote, "unconvincing," but getting rid of it wasn't a condition of publication.

Not only that, this guy Swenson said Burgess agreed with his opinion and that Burgess told him he'd only added the 21st chapter because the British publisher wanted a happy ending. Also Burgess wrote his own screenplay for A Clockwork Orange that ended at the same place Kubrick's screenplay did, no redemption. And then years later, Burgess wrote a musical, yes, a musical version of the story, which reverted back to the longer redemptive ending and took it even further.

Sean Cole

Oh!

Sean Cole

Is she a character, or is she offstage somewhere?

Sean Cole

[LAUGHS]

Sean Cole

So in the end, which ending do you think that Burgess thought of as the better ending?

Sean Cole

And what does that say, do you think, about his worldview, like about what he believed about the true nature of human beings?

Sean Cole

Which, if that's the reason, makes so much sense. When you have a kid, especially one you're worried won't turn out well, you have to believe people can change like Alex finally changed, dreaming of his own son. It's like they literally ended up on the same page, Burgess and Alex. One of them happened to have typed out that page while the other danced across it in a jockstrap and suspenders. They both grew up.

Funnily, Andrew Biswell says he prefers the shorter ending. Just thinks it makes for a tougher book, although he goes back and forth, he says. Depends on what day you ask him.

Me, I come down where Burgess ultimately did. I like believing that we can grow into better versions of ourselves. And besides all that, you get to see Alex walk off into the sunset. On the last page he says, "Farewell from your little droog." Should we end here?

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our show.

[MUSIC - "TRY A LITTLE KINDNESS" BY GLEN CAMPBELL]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Elna Baker. The people who put our show together today include Bim Adewunmi, Chris Benderev, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michal Comite, Kyla Jones, Tobin Low, Michelle Navarro, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Will Peischel, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Thomas Reid. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Also there's videos. There's lists of favorite shows, if you're looking for something to listen on a long car trip. Again, ThisAmericanLife.org.

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. He went this week to a Gwen Stefani concert. His review?

Ira Glass

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