Shortcuts: The Moth Podcast

Just to get rid of it and then get rid of it. No, not at all. This is my safe space. You're all right, right? Yes, exactly.

This is the way the store is. They just understand. The store is on the top of the shop or the house. The store is on the top. I don't feel like they're on the top.

The store is on the bottom. Safe. With this store. That's it for today for all of you for Aldi Price, Milka Groser Schmonzelhase, at 90 grams for only 1,920 grams or a lot of Delvia Frischkäse.

At 150 grams for only 9,80 grams. Aldi. Good. For Aldi. Welcome to the Moth Podcast.

I'm Dan Kennedy. Many times stories are about taking the long way. They're about what happens when we make the difficult decision that we knew would be good for us. We made it, and the note was tough.

“But what about the times when we don't exactly rise to the challenge?”

This week, two stories about taking shortcuts.

First up, we have Lawrence Wood, live at the Moth Story Salam in Chicago

where the theme of the night was Gangs, Clicks, and Crowds. Here's Lawrence. When I was a teenager, I read only what I had to for school. There were rare exceptions in ninth grade, my English teacher took me aside after class one day, and she gave me a book called The Learning Tree

by Gordon Parks, who's best remembered now as the director of the 1971 movie shaft. And it's a good movie, it's a good book. And The Learning Tree is his autobiographical account of growing up lack in the deep south in the 1930s, and it was banned in my school,

because of a brief sex scene at the beginning that was not nearly explicit enough for my taste, but I liked the book, but still, it didn't trigger a love of reading that my teacher hoped it would.

I still only read what I had to, but that finally changed my senior year when

I took an English class from a teacher who at first, I really didn't like it all. She had us read and wrote a book report on Jane Air. And the night before the report was due, I banged out a first draft, and I typed Jane

“Air on the title page, because that's what the paper was about and handed it in.”

And a week later, she holds my paper up in the air, and she says, "This is not Jane Air. This is a very poorly written analysis of Jane Air." And then she said, "D," and she gave me the paper back. But then she started assigning books by more contemporary authors that I really loved, and

I finally understood for the first time why people read for pleasure. And from that point on, I read constantly, and many years later, I joined the book group. And this book group had some academics and English professors, people who took literature very seriously, and one of them was a woman named Laura, who taught English at Northwestern University, and she got to assign our book two months in a row.

And the first book she assigned was the secret history by Donna Tart, which is about this

group of pretentious college students who killed one of their own, and I just hated it. And when I looked at the author photo, I thought, "Oh, this is why she recommended it." The author looked just like her. And it was long and boring, and only one of the characters died, and I wanted them all to die.

In the next month, she made a street, or she told us to read, "Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad." And I didn't read it, partly because it reminded me of the 19th century novels like Jane Air that I hated in high school, and partly because I was still so annoyed about having to read the secret history. And so I knew I'd have to miss the discussion, but on the night this discussion was scheduled

to take place, I stomped off at Tower Records. And there I saw a whole rack full of those yellow and black study guides called Cliffs Notes. And I saw one for Lord Jim, and I thought, "I'm maybe I can go to the discussion." So I went, and I offered, as my own insight, something that I had read in the Cliffs Notes,

and Laura said, "Well, that's really interesting."

“And then she asked me more about the common I made, and so I repeated what I could remember”

from the study guide, and we went back and forth like this, really dominated the discussion for the whole evening. And at the end of the night, everybody agreed that the discussion had been a success. And even though I should have just been relieved and kept my mouth shut, I confessed to reading the Cliffs Notes.

And everybody just stared at me and Laura looked like I kicked her in the gut.

And she had been in a book group for many years, another book group, and she knew that these things were just not done.

“And the next morning, a guy from the group called me and he said, "Look, after you”

last night, a few of us were talking about what happened, and we decided it would be better if you didn't return." And I said, "You're kicking me out?" And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Of a book group?"

And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Because I read the Cliffs Notes." And he said, "Yes, because you read the Cliffs Notes, Larry, you cheated." And I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

I had never heard of anybody getting expelled from a book group before.

And neither had my wife. And when I gave her the news, she said, "Well, you know, that I didn't expect." And she sounded sympathetic. So I said, "Can I join your book group?" And she said, "Absolutely not."

Thank you. That was Lawrence Wood. Lawrence is an attorney, a math, storieslam regular, and a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, where he teaches a seminar on poverty law. Lawrence has also won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, a record setting seven times.

This is Eric Glass of the American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, we'll be the way I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories. Old fashion stories that hopefully pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, and then you just want to find out what is

going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories to make you miss appointments and ignore your loved ones. This American Life every week, where we get your podcasts. Up next, Amanda Aggie, and a quick heads up to our listeners.

This story deals with drug use and addiction. So we just wanted to give you a quick note about that. Amanda shared this story at a Mothbrandslam in Los Angeles. The theme of the night was the deep end. I knew we had to quit heroin because we were running out of money.

“And honestly, being a junkie was not part of my life plan.”

At the time, I was 23 living in New York with my college boyfriend Dominic. Our three cats, and $120 a day heroin habit.

Dominic and I had tried quitting on her own, but we could never make it past the third day

of withdrawal. For those of you who've never kicked heroin before, it's like the worst flu you've ever had times a million. But the hardest part is not the severe cramping anxiety, diarrhea, vomiting, or cold sweats. It's knowing that the instinct here to your misery is just a subway ride away in Bushwick.

Still going to rehab seemed like too drastic a move. I mean, yes, I was addicted to heroin, and I couldn't go more than a couple of hours without using or it's start to feel sick. And heroin makes it impossible to orgasm so I hadn't come any year and a half. And I was so constipated that I found myself digging rock hard poop out of my butt with

latex gloves, but I was also in the number one Ph.G. program for philosophy. And there was no way I could miss my metaphysics seminar. So I found an outpatient program that would prescribe you a jar of on-clon-appin and clonadine to help step you down off opiates. And we did that a couple of times, but we kept relapsing for stupid reasons, like one day

I was looking around the apartment and it was a mess, and so I wrote Dominic a note about it. And when I got home, he was sitting on the couch smoking heroin, and I was like, "What are you doing?" And he said, "And you're note you said to pick up," and I said, "I meant the apartment."

But there he was smoking heroin, so I did too. One day after another relapse I started having a panic attack, and for some reason in that

“moment I picked up the phone to call my mom, I said, "Mom, you have to come to New York”

there's something I want to tell you," that's all I said.

She didn't ask what it was, she just got on a plane, but the truth is, she already knew.

She just didn't know it was heroin. My mom met with me in my therapist, and my therapist said, "You need to go to rehab." And I said, "No, I just need to go to Hawaii or something." And he said, "No, you need to go to rehab." There's one in Arizona, it's called CR2SON, and I said, "Let me think about it."

So that night I went home, and I googled CR2SON, and I saw on their website that they

So I decided that I could go to rehab because they had horses.

“Not to get off horse, but for the horses, I went in the next day, and I told my therapist,”

"Okay, yes, I'll go to CR2SON," and he said, "You can't now, your boyfriend is going there." He said, "Fuck you, that's my rehab," and I stormed out of the room. My mom convinced me to come back in, and my therapist said, "It's okay, there are other rehabs.

There's one in Malibu," and I said, "Does it have horses?" And he said, "No, but it has celebrities." But the time I arrived in rehab, I was already 24 hours into heroin withdrawal. They gave me some stuff to help through the first couple of days of detox, but I still felt like shit, and I couldn't really sleep for the first month.

“heroin makes you super relaxed, and when your body gets used to that, and you take it away,”

what your left with is edginess and adrenaline. At night, the rehab would take us to these outside drug and alcohol meetings, and there

were these two guys from another rehab that I would always hang out with at the meetings

because they were cute, but also because they were celebrities. One night, one of them said to me, "Hey, we have tear moves today. How I asked. I'd been sitting in the rehab bathroom staring at a huffing warning label on a bottle of air freshener for weeks, trying to figure out how to do it."

They told me, and that night I went back to the rehab, and I went through all the other patients' stuff, and I stole every bottle of hair moves that I could find, which was two, and I hid them, and then whenever I felt like I needed to get high, I would go in the bathroom and take a huff. Huffing made rehab really manageable.

Then I ran out of the hair moves, and I started requesting it along with my weekly

carton of cigarettes, but for some reason the rehab never brought me any, and then one day

this local Malibu girl came and picked me up to take me to a meeting, and I was riding with her in her car, and I knew we were about to pass by a beauty supply store, and I thought I should just ask her to stop so that I can get some hair moves. And then my next thought was, "Oh my God, am I just going to be a hair moves addict for the rest of my life?"

That was the moment I realized that drugs were over for me.

“In rehab, they tell you that you have to hit bottom in order to get clean.”

Fitting bottom isn't like touching the floor of a pool, it's murkier than that, because

no matter where your bottom is, you could always go lower.

Dominic found his bottom when he used heroin one last time after he left CR2 sun, but for me, it wasn't the heroin that convinced me I was a drug addict. It was the hair moves. That was Amanda Aggie, Amanda lived through tragedy, comedy, and heroin addiction in her teens and early 20s, but turned her life around at the age of 23.

She's now married with two kids and runs a popular home bakery specializing in decorated sugar cookies. We followed up with her to see how she's doing now, and she says, "I haven't used hair moves or heroin since I left rehab in 2001. I live a pretty normal life now that looks nothing like it did when I was in my early 20s, and I did finally get that trip

to Hawaii when my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Unfortunately, I didn't get to ride horses then either." Lastly, if you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, you can call the substance abuse and mental health administrations national hotline 1-800-662 help. That's going to do it this time around, but we'll be back again soon with some more stories.

And until then, from all of us here at the Moth, have a story worthy week. Dan Kennedy is the author of Luzer Ghost First, Rock On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with the Moth. Podcast production by Julia Purcell and Paul Ruest.