813: Is That What I Look Like?

Nancy Updike

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Nancy Updike filling in for Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun, a good one, and I'm going to start with this story that I want to share. It's a little personal.

I was at MAC, the makeup store, not the computer store. And I was buying foundation, which I almost never wear. It's the makeup you put all over your face to give yourself the pretend perfect skin. And I asked the salesman for help finding the right color.

And he looked at me, and he said-- almost like he was thinking out loud-- he said, your neck, it's so much more yellow than your face. And then he turned away to start looking for the impossible color that would solve this problem of the yellow right next to the so-much-more-yellow.

And if you're thinking, oh, this was just a sales technique to invent a problem and then offer to fix it with more products, I wish that had been the case. But this was not an upsell. This was a cri de coeur. The man really just seemed to be expressing his frustration at this stumper of my mismatched face and neck.

This sort of out-of-the-blue, perfectly sharpened comment stops you cold, because it's not an insult. It's an observation that is true. You just hadn't thought of it before. It's shocking, because you think, I know myself. I know what I've got, what I haven't got. No one's going to spot something about me that I haven't already seen. Not true. You can be among friends, doing something you love, feeling great.

Nancy Updike

This is Dee Watson. She was in a play a while back.

Nancy Updike

These are not statements that a human being forgets. The moment you hear the observation, it becomes part of how you see yourself, seemingly forever. Even something tiny, if it hits you right, can turn into this chirpy little voicemail that your brain is never able to erase.

And it doesn't have to be about looks. It can be a comment on how you run or laugh or drive, how much money you make, or what books you've read or haven't read-- any outside assessment of you that you never saw coming and could not shake once it was uttered. One of our former producers, Jane Feltes-- she's actually now Jane Marie-- years ago, dated a man who she later decided was a jerk. He wanted to make her feel insecure. But one night, they were watching TV, and her feet were sticking up out of the blanket.

Nancy Updike

This is a fifth-grade teacher named Matthew Dicks, who is either the bravest or the most foolhardy man in America.

Nancy Updike

A few years ago, there was a girl in his class-- very shy. And she got the nod that it was OK for her to make fun of Matthew if she wanted.

Nancy Updike

Now, you can say that Matthew brought this on himself. He gives some students permission to make fun of him, and he built a stage where students can peer down at him in judgment. But even if he did none of that, he's still a sitting duck for this exact kind of critical gaze.

Nancy Updike

Today on the radio show, I, Nancy "Yellow Neck" Updike, bring you stories about people facing the unexpected moment of realizing how other people see them, what that means, and what in God's name to do about it. Today's show-- "Is That What I Look Like"? Prepare to learn the truth. Plus, a special guest appearance that will surprise and delight you. Stay with us.

Nancy Updike

Act One, Blunt Force. Domingo Martinez has this story about a vision in Brownsville, Texas. Here's Domingo.

Domingo Martinez

When I was 16, I realized, as far as my family went, school was considered my time, which meant I couldn't be pressed into labor by my father or grandmother. They were farm workers, and they made no claim on my time when I was supposed to be in school. So I learned to take advantage of this. I'd make it to school before 7:30 AM, either by school bus or my mother's Taurus, and then wait out options for escape. By my sophomore year, this kid named Tony Garcia had become my primary friend.

Tony was nearly 19 and only a junior. But he didn't seem all that bad, because he had good parents and an even better little brother who was about to lap him at graduation. Together, Tony and I would find ways to while away the hours by doing anything other than attending class before we had to report home again.

We were big fans of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and we believed we were continuing a long-celebrated American tradition by ditching class and getting stoned-- a fantasy combination of Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson. But really, we were just lazy and looking for a good time.

The skipping itself was not a problem. The problem was taking care of our grades and absences on our report cards before they reached our parents. And it was actually Tony who initiated me into the trade that I eventually pursued-- graphic design. But in this early stage, in high school, it was plain and simple forgery. There was no design in what we were doing.

It was Tony who placed the first X-Acto knife I ever held in my hands. And immediately, I felt an overwhelming sense of possibility, holding that little penknife. We'd intercept the report cards when they came in the mail. And then, Tony took careful pains to explain this whole process to me, his flunky-- a term that came uncomfortably close to becoming literal-- over the photocopier in the library, feeding dimes into the machine like he was playing slots, in search of a copy that didn't blur or show the incisions in the original.

Look, man, he said through his trendy and tinted John Lennon glasses-- a wanker style even then. You just got to remove the 2 from the 23 absences and then lighten the reproduction, and now you got 3 absences in first period, instead of 23. Now take the 8 from the 48, move the 4 over, and put the 8 in front of that. And now you have a B in Spanish instead of an F.

Oh, I said, in total understanding, a big smile growing on my face. Give a man a ride, he skips for a day. Teach him how to forge-- it was ridiculously short-sighted, sure. But at that age, I never thought further than the immediate threat. Simply convincing my mother everything was quiet at school was enough for me. Dealing with school records and the larger consequences of robbing myself of even a substandard education-- all that, I would face at a later date, and certainly have.

Tony would usually borrow his mother's car for our expeditions-- a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88. We'd leave school and drive to South Padre Island, a resort town at the end of a 28-mile highway that felt much more cosmopolitan than Brownsville, Texas, ever could. We did that drive back and forth, three or four times a day, listening to Led Zeppelin, nodding our heads in unison with whomever else was stoned or drunk in the car.

My junior year and his senior year, Tony's parents bought him a Dodge Daytona. It was the year he would most assuredly graduate, they felt, and it was a chance for him to develop responsibility. In the mornings, the minute my mother would drop me off at school and disappear around the corner, Tony would drive around and park right in front of the school to pick me up, right in front of everybody.

Dude, you got to come skipping with me today, he'd say. But on one particular morning, late in 1988, I balk. Nah, Tony, I got to go back to class today, I protest. It's Thursday, and I haven't been since last week. Look, he says, I got two signed reentry slips. I can get you back in tomorrow or next week. It's not a problem. And I found a new place to get killer weed. Finding pot was always a problem. So when Tony said he found someone new, and it wasn't one of the morons who hung out by the tennis courts before school, I was intrigued.

We first drive to a housing project east of school, where a woman sold $2 quarts of Budweiser out of her living room from a cooler to anyone with money, no questions asked. We buy a couple of quarts and smoke the last half-joint Tony has on the way to his new killer weed supplier. I was getting a bit high when I began to recognize the route he was taking, and was then thoroughly taken aback when he drove right into my grandmother's driveway.

I couldn't understand why. It just didn't make sense. This was the same driveway my family Pontiac would regularly pull into after church on Sundays when I was growing up in the late 1970s-- my mother's mother's house in downtown Brownsville. I was, I think the term is, "unnerved." My two uncles, Johnny and Abel, were working on a '79 Camaro when Tony drives up and parks hood to hood with their car. The hood was up, and they were both leaning into the guts of the engine.

Their heads popped up like bearded biker prairie dogs. I sat frozen in the passenger seat, uncertain what to do next. Tony, noticing that I was startled, tells me to be cool, to chill out. These guys look mean, but they're all right. Anyways, he says as he's getting out of the driver's side, they're kind of dumb. But they got great weed. Didn't I know it. Abel and Johnny had a long history with local biker gangs, even a rumored affiliation with the Hell's Angels.

They could get drugs nobody else could in this town. And as a result, they were total burnouts, hardly capable of cogent speech patterns in either English or Spanish. They landed in jail as often as other people attended church. But what they lacked in brains, they certainly made up in brawn. Not that they'd tear apart a teenager like Tony or me, not in the daylight, anyway. They had a code about that sort of thing. But if they felt cheated, they'd have taken a tire iron to my head long before they recognized me as their nephew. They were that burned out.

So I sit there, paralyzed, in the front seat, side B of Houses of the Holy playing on Tony's cassette deck. And because it's hot, the AC is blasting. So once Tony closes the door, I can't hear anything. I just watch as this terrifying pantomime plays out before me.

Tony, half-shaven in his preppy clothes, closes the door and hails his greeting. My uncle Abel, already brain-dead from years of sniffing paint, narrows his eyes in suspicion, and then noiselessly responds with a nodding, hey. Tony averts eye contact, looking anywhere but directly at Abel, for fear that Abel might charge like a gorilla.

Abel gives him a suspicious quick upward jut of the chin that says, did I sell to you before? Who told you I got weed? Tony lowers his head in quiet confidence, talking to Abel. Then my uncle Johnny nods towards me in the car, says something to Tony. They all turn to look at me. My eyes go wide, a big smile on my face, nodding. Tony says something, and then they all laugh together. Led Zeppelin still plays loudly in the car.

Then, my uncle Abel slaps Tony on the back and leads him around to the back of the car, right where I am. Johnny stands there, too, looking at me and smiling, makes his index finger and thumb into a mock roach, and laughs. I mimic the roach back. Even now, he doesn't recognize me.

Then, Tony and Abel emerge around the other side of the car with Tony's hand in his pocket, and both of them are laughing like they're suddenly old friends. Tony turns and waves, and both Johnny and Abel wave back. The door opens, and Tony says, dude, we got a big joint for 2 bucks, as he gets in the driver's seat. This has freaked me out to no end. Abel and Johnny are both waving, making the universal roach smoking signal as we drive off. And it leaves me feeling really, really conflicted.

The car slips up the southernmost terminus of Highway 77, and we head north from urban Brownsville to drive around as we smoke the joint. Tony lights it, and it starts burning purple. Purple haze, he says, and then follows it with his characteristic, aah!

Hey, man, I say, I'm kind of scared about smoking this. I've never seen one burn this color. Aw, dude, says Tony, don't worry about it. Those guys got killer weed, man. They're like bikers or something. It's probably laced with something. That's why it was 2 bucks.

This idea sounds appealing to Tony. It scares the shit out of me. We're both getting incredibly high. Hey, man, says Tony, wouldn't it be messed up if, like, when you were high, your hair went into a huge orange Afro, and the higher you were, the bigger your Afro got? You couldn't go anywhere, because people would be like, man, that guy's stoned.

I sit there in Tony's car and think about my uncles Johnny and Abel. Johnny had been stabbed in the back with a flatheaded screwdriver about a month earlier in a street fight. His lung had been punctured, and my grandmother said you could hear whistling every time he inhaled. He wouldn't go to the hospital to get it treated for three days.

We're halfway done with the joint when I say to Tony, hey, man, I don't want to get stoned anymore. All right, well, put it out, Tony says, nodding his head back and forth to Zeppelin. Tony's left hand is fingering chords into the neck of an imaginary guitar as he's driving. I watch his fingers move for a few seconds, suspended and twisting around like they're an overturned king crab. And I can find no correlation with the chords in the song.

Man, I mean, I don't want to smoke pot anymore, I say to him. I don't want to skip class anymore. I want to get back to school. Not today, but, like, in general. I don't want to feel like this anymore, like I'm doing something bad. I feel like this all the time now. Dirty.

Look at that really [BLEEP] small house over there. We were on an overpass, and I just noticed a house beneath us in the Brownsville country club, about a 1/4 of the size of the houses surrounding it. Tony starts laughing so hard, I have to make him focus back on the driving.

But then, I laugh along with him. You're stoned, he tells me. Yeah, I say, I'm way stoned. Hey, man, I say a little later. We're driving back to South Padre Island now. You know those guys we bought weed from earlier today? The bikers? Tony says. That was my grandmother's house, man. Those were my uncles, I say, even though I'm really embarrassed by it. Tony finds this befuddling. He can't figure out what the bikers were doing at my grandmother's house.

Those dudes were my mom's brothers, man, my uncles, I explain. Tony is laughing so hard, he has to pull over to the side of the road. His laughing is infectious, and I find myself laughing right along with him, laughing harder than I have laughed in a really, really long time. But I'm feeling utterly beyond redemption on the inside, like I'd just done something today that I couldn't take back, like my course was now set.

Nancy Updike

Domingo Martinez, reading a story from his memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas.

Nancy Updike

Act Two, Not My First Time at the Rodeo. Parents and children are lifelong mirrors for each other. How do you see me? How do I see myself through my relationship with you? Even when you're not face to face with one of your parents, there are conversations between you that play back in your head your whole life-- what they said, what you said. Sometimes you repeat those conversations to explain to someone else or to yourself who you are or who your parents are.

But what if you could rehear the actual dialogue decades later-- not your memory of it but the words that were truly spoken between you and a parent? A while back, I did a story about someone who got that exact chance. Bill Lahey was in his early 20s and on the phone with his father in 1978 when he heard a faint pinging sound on the phone. He mentioned it, and his father said--

Nancy Updike

Two decades later, after his father had died, Bill was at his dad's house in Ohio, cleaning out the office.

Nancy Updike

Even at the time his father was recording, Bill had guessed what could be going on. It was the kind of thing his father might do. And he did. He recorded hours of calls with Bill. And according to his own handwritten labels, he also taped his four other children, his wife, his mother, other relatives, his priest. He recorded calls at home and in the car.

Nancy Updike

From the dates on the cassettes, Bill figured they were an archive of his father, trying to get the people around him onto his side. Bill's mother had left his father after 37 years of marriage. Bill remembered the gist and tone of those conversations pretty well. They were memorable.

And he put off listening to the recordings of them. For 12 years, they sat in a black nylon duffel bag that he would move every time the family moved. This was a pile of information Bill wasn't sure he wanted, from an era of his life he knew he didn't want to relive.

He'd sided with his mom in the divorce, even before the divorce. Since junior high, he'd been lobbying her to leave his dad. As Bill saw his father, he was smart, tenacious, and a tremendous bully with a bad, quick temper and huge blowups.

He got worse over time, and he was worse when he drank. What Bill remembered from the taped conversations were long calls where his father bullied him and he fought back hard. He saw himself as his mother's advocate and protector.

Nancy Updike

After those 12 years of holding on to the tapes, Bill finally reached just about the age his father had been when he'd made the recordings. And suddenly, Bill wanted to hear them. He felt ready but nervous.

Nancy Updike

His father was talking about the fact that Bill and his four siblings all sided with their mother in the divorce, in one way or another.

Nancy Updike

When Bill went back to listening for real, what he heard was his father pushing one main point with him, hour after hour, which was, how about you talking your mother into trying again?

Nancy Updike

Bill wasn't crushed by the difference between what he heard on the tapes and the tough line he'd remembered taking with his dad. But it did throw him off balance. He really had seen himself, from the time he was a kid, as a warrior, standing up to the strong, protecting the weak, a sort of superhero, when it came to arguing against his dad.

Nancy Updike

Bill says his mother thrived after the divorce. His father, he says, stayed more or less the same. He married again, divorced again. Bill kept up a relationship with him his whole life. That had been his other goal during these calls, besides protecting his mom-- not losing his dad.

He had thought about that even during the worst arguments. Better a long silence than words he couldn't take back. Bill saw his father once or twice a year, every year, after the divorce. And he spoke to him by phone every few weeks until he died.

Nancy Updike

Coming up-- what the movie The Breakfast Club can teach you about parenting if you were in The Breakfast Club. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Nancy Updike, sitting in for Ira Glass. Every week, we choose a theme. You know that. And we present various stories on that theme.

Today's show-- "Is That What I Look Like?" Stories of seeing yourself through other people's eyes, whether you want to or not. And we're here at Act Three, which I think is going to be kind of a two-parter. Act Three-- Ben, do you want to do that part?

Ben Calhoun

Sure. Act Three, The Blunder Years.

Nancy Updike

And that really can be all you need to change your life when you're a teenager-- just one person who thinks you're great. Because chances are, your own sense of yourself is way off. A friend of a friend-- this is a woman in her 50s-- came across an old photo of herself as a teenager.

And it had been years since she'd seen any pictures of herself at that age. And she looked at them and thought, oh, wait, I was pretty. I was pretty. It kind of floored her. Because of course, the girl in the pictures looked nothing like the way she thought of herself at the time. She said she wished she'd known it back then. It would have made a difference.

Lots of us have had that experience-- looking at old family pictures or yearbooks, seeing things we never saw at the time. This next story is a very specialized case of that kind of thing. It's about the actress Molly Ringwald, who, of course, doesn't just have photos, but movies, beautifully shot, widescreen, full-length Hollywood films of herself as a teenager.

She's the redhead, the star, in those three iconic '80s movies by John Hughes-- Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club. Recently, she revisited one of those movies, not exactly by choice, and she talked to Ira Glass. Here's Ira.

Ira Glass

I suppose it's not a big surprise that Molly Ringwald does not sit around watching old Molly Ringwald films. You know, she's seen 'em. She needs a big reason to go back to them.

And recently, her daughter gave her a reason. Her daughter, Mathilda, is 10. And Mathilda wanted to see The Breakfast Club. Of course, 10 is a little young to see The Breakfast Club, but most of her friends had seen it.

Ira Glass

And the fact is, Molly Ringwald preferred to watch it with Mathilda. It just seemed like it might be a nice experience to share together. And there were things in the film that she knew that she was going to want to talk to Mathilda about. Like, for instance, there's a scene where she smokes pot in the film as a teenager.

So Molly showed her The Breakfast Club, not sure at all how she was going to react, not sure what it would be like to see the film through Mathilda's eyes. We sent her a tape recorder to record what happened.

Ira Glass

Which, by the way, Mathilda loved the tape recorder.

Ira Glass

She loved talking into the tape recorder. She loved answering questions-- though she is not going to hear this radio story for a long time. That's the plan. The Breakfast Club, if you've never seen, is five kids. They're stuck together in school on a Saturday, for all-day detention.

They're kids who never would normally talk to each other in school. It's a jock, a brain, a tough kid, a popular girl, and an outsider girl. And you know, it's a John Hughes movie. They bond, talking about all these things that everybody feels in high school.

And you can totally see why it still gets to kids and why it's the John Hughes film that Molly Ringwald looks back on as her favorite. So she and Mathilda-- they make popcorn. They futz around with the TV.

And you know, stars are just like us. They do not know how to operate their video systems either. They cannot figure out how to turn it on, and is it DVD or HDMI?

Nancy Updike

Ira J. Glass with Molly Ringwald. She's still acting and translating, and she's working on a new book about her Paris years. And Mathilda-- she's in college now and just finished filming her first movie.

Nancy Updike

Our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Ira Glass. Our senior producer for this show was Julie Snyder.

Production help from Simon Adler and Lilly Sullivan, additional production help on today's rerun from James Bennett II, Michael Comite Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Our website-- thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream over 800 of our episodes for absolutely free.

Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Torey Malatia, and to our boss, Mr. Ira Glass. While he was hosting the show recently, he spent a little time moonlighting as a realtor. He's really got to work on his pitch.

Domingo Martinez

Look at that really [BLEEP] small house over there.

Nancy Updike

I'm Nancy Updike. Ira Glass will be back with more stories of This American Life.