628: In the Shadow of the City

desolate area at the far end of town.

“We're half my west of the old abandoned steel mills, where half my north of landfills”

were methane fires used to burn, just south of the auto chunk yard, just east at the side of the old city dump, where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction. But he down here called it Mount Pesini, for the ottoman who let the city put it here. We'll notice all these wuppets you call it, tire marks.

This street is used as for drag racing, you're robbed, because it's basically far enough

away from the police that they don't do anything about it. My guide is Charlie Gregorson, he grew up down here. It shows me where I like, like how you met him, used to be back in the 40s when he was a kid. He got fishing on a robot with his dad, then the city started filling in huge sections of the leg, with garbage and a generator ash.

He come here in the 70s and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings, which had been recently demolished, blue-y sell-of-and-master pieces, like the stock exchange building and the garact theater. This is where they ended up. Now, now to show me, we're standing here where all the buildings being dumped and what

that looked right here, right here at what it was, the north end of the dump. Actually, we picked up a few pieces of the stock exchange ornament right out of the lake, but of course, most of it had been ground right into the dirt because they had bulldozers that would just keep on, they would dump the stuff in piles and the bulldozers would just flatten it all out.

And so they'd be this, like, Louis Sullivan, Terracotta ornament, just sticking out. Yeah. And so walking around with these pieces of building, sticking up, I mean, it just seems like it just must have been such a strange scene, like this apocalyptic death of a city. Oh, yeah.

“Well, I remember saying one of these big Phoenix columns that I knew could come out of the”

garact theater was just sticking out of the ground. Two of those in the garact theater distributed the weight of the upper floors that were over the stage. One of those was just sticking out and about a 45 degree angle out of the ground. And at that point, the garact had been gone for almost 10 years.

There were once big plans for this area for knous and waterways, a hybrid that never

worked out. There's zoning maps of the city that show streets and complete neighborhoods, I hope a grid of them that nobody ever got around to building. Instead, now, on top of all the trash, stands a golf course. Charlie says it from the clubhouse, you get exactly the same view that he used to get.

Back when he and his dad took out the robot. It's the same spot. That's where the lake went as well as you can see clear to downtown.

“That's how far away, might as well be another city.”

What's today on our program, we have stories from several places like this, in the shadow

of the city, that weird, no man's land. We had always feels like secret stuff is happening,

you know, just out of sight. WBEZ Chicago, it's this American life, I'm our glass. Our program today was first broadcast a few years ago. It's in three acts, at one Brooklyn archipelago, in that act, some passengers set sail one day on a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour, and end up getting lost in the wilderness. One fears for his life on a string of islands that is just outside,

a very, very big city. Back to troubled bridge of a water, a guy goes to a remote spot to help people who do not want to be helped. Back three, please, in my backyard, controversy over industrial odors coming from our factory odors, that for once, people want to keep coming. Stay with us. This American life today shows rerun, at one, Brooklyn archipelago. Bright Martin has this

story which takes place in the outskirts of, well, perhaps you've already figured out which city. Listen, it happens. You go out for a night with your friends and you wind up drunk in your underwear, soaking wet, covered with blood, and shipwrecked on a desert island, all within sight of the Empire State Building. These things happen, or at least they did happen,

to Alex Jaroff. Alex is 17 years old. He moved to the US from a small town in the Ukraine when he was nine. He's skinny and wears tight eye t-shirts, an unmanageable spray of frizzy blonde hair, and a valiant of not altogether successful starter mustache, and he can probably

name for the record.

“My name is Alex Jaroff, and I love to have very radical experiences in life, and I consider”

myself to be a psychedelic artistically productive person.

Here are a few other things about Alex. He lives with his cute older girlfriend and is exceptionally patient parents and a small apartment in the midwood section of Brooklyn. Instead of going to high school, he's enrolled in an internet home school and program. He's at work on a science fiction novel, and there's a lot of several hundred in-flight hours as a student pilot. But most of Alex's time is spent as a guitarist singer and songwriter

for his band, E. Buffalo. When I went to see them play at a two-day Russian rock festival last fall, I learned several things. First, there are many, many exoviet immigrants living in Brooklyn. Second, they all very earnestly want to rock. And third, Alex Jaroff, whether he's arriving on his back on stage or reclining in the dressing room with a beer in a cigarette,

“it's kind of a superstar. Before we get to our story, the other key person you'll need”

to meet is someone who entered Alex's life at a crucial moment years ago when Alex

first came to the States. Alex had an awkward adjustment. He fought in school and was kind of depressed. He was bored. Then one day Alex was walking along the Brighton Beach boardwalk and saw a group of older guys collecting money for something called the Russian punk rock club of America. Older guys, like 25 and 30 years old. Alex was 12. One of the musicians he met that day was Roman Gajalov, who immediately took to the young Alex. Well, he had

this blink in his eyes. It's sometimes you see extraordinary person and, you know, you kind of know this. He wasn't a peer to us as a 12-year-old at that moment. At 12 years

old, he was writing songs that I was writing at 18. And after this, we've been together all

“the time. We call him Khrusha. You know, that's- What does that mean? Khrusha is mean. Little”

big little big little big little. Under his new friend's tutelage, Alex began walking around in an old Bolshevik style hat and trench coat. And his friend's gave him books, Dusty Fsky, Tolkien, guides to Slavic paganism, the Beats, and also Robinson, Khrusha and Treasure Island. Alex was particularly fond of those. And our story today, our own seafaring tale, happens on a boat that Roman owns. A 25-foot white sailboat which Alex likes to refer to as

the yacht. One cool evening last May, Alex, Roman, and another friend named Alex. Alex Luba Chomsky decided to take a nice little boat trip into Make a Bay. The body of water that wraps around the southern end of Brooklyn. He was Alex. The three of us decided to just get like 10 gallons of gas. And my friend Roman, he got a bottle of rum and we got two cans of food. And we just decided to have a cool trip on the yacht. And I started saying, "Oh, I'll go with the open ocean.

Let's sail to Poland." I told him. Roman had a slightly less ambitious agenda. Plan was just to go to the bridge under the Racoa bridge, then turn around and then come back. It should have taken about 40 minutes, yep. Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Before they even left the Marina, Roman, who'd been making headway through the bottle of rum, fell into the water and they had to

haul him back in. He was clearly in no shape to drive. This is Alex. He got drunk, but he just was babbling something laughing like he said, "Don't go there, don't go there." And he was constantly saying, "Don't hit the shelves." He was already like, he didn't control the situation by that time. As a responsible journalist, I should say for the record that Roman does have one objection to Alex's version of events. It wasn't a rum, by the way. It was a cognac. I don't know why everybody

puts rum. So it was a cognac. You sure? It was a let-track. Yes, it was a let-track cognac. I don't know how come it's become rum. It's probably Alex told was rum, but it was cognac. Not a little bit, it was a lot. We was out of commission. I was out of commission. Alex and Alex had had a few drinks themselves, but we were perfectly sober and everything. We might have had a few drinks, but we were perfectly sober. I wonder if you know how to drive a boat.

No, no, but we got ahead of it. It wasn't that hard. So we knew how to drive it. So it was like, it didn't seem pretty hard. It turned on the border. It turned on the border. It turns cool. Somehow they managed to get out of the marina, gun the engine, and take off across the water toward the marine park bridge in the distance. Once there, they decided to try to sail

They drank some rum, or maybe cognac. One way or another, they drank a lot of it. At one point,

“they almost crashed into a small island. Gas was running low, but they figured that if”

worst came to worst, they could always put up the sails and still make it home. Then they got caught in a strong current that turned the boat in circles. The perfect time you would think to begin to panic, or if you're the kind of person who forgets trouble the moment you're out of it, or even while you're in it. The perfect time to shoot off all the boat's flares into the water, just for fun.

Finally, the series of mistakes reached a critical mass. They had no cell phone,

Romans had died when they fell in the water. No flares, no captain, and almost no gas. Even Alex had to admit they were in trouble. We didn't know where we were, and then we realized we weren't going to make it anywhere, and we're like, in the morning, we'll figure out what to do. So we went to sleep. It was a glorious spring morning on Jamaica Bay. Sun glinting off the water,

“galls calling overhead, as our young pleasure cruisers slumbered. The light filtering into the”

boats cabin woke Roman and Alex Clubachansky first and they came up on deck. What they saw was not good. After drifting through the night, the boat had come to rest in the shallows of a small bay,

alongside an uninhabited landmass. Stretching out behind them, they could see a long furrow where

the tide had dragged them deep into thick mud. And as they stood there, blinking and wondering how this might have happened, the wind carried them in another ten feet inland. They could see the skyline of Manhattan on the horizon, the runways of JFK airport a little closer, and signs of civilization in every direction. They could even see boats passing by in the distance, but these were too far away to take any notice. It was obvious that they were, in a word, shipwrecked.

The hungover sailors sat down to decide what to do. Roman and Glubachansky were in favor of waiting to be rescued, or for the tide to rise and pull them out again. Meanwhile, Alex was formulating his own plan. Beyond the island they were closest to, lay another landmass, which Alex was sure led somewhere. His idea was to swim to it, walk to civilization, catch a bus somewhere, and bring back help for his friends, who, as Alex remembers it, thought the plan was frankly

idiotic. These are islands, said Roman, who in truth had actually been out on the bay before him as in a position to know. But Alex was sure that Roman was wrong. So Alex stripped to his underwear. He put what he thought he might need in a waterproof plastic mayonnaise jar. He brought his metro card for the bus he was going to swim to, an expired passport for ID, and his favorite Buddhist medallion for lock. He wrapped his clothes in a cellophane blanket and bid his friends farewell.

Roman watched him disappear into the surf. Of course they tried to stop him. I tried to give him reasonable things, but he got little bit too much excited. So I decided to give him a challenge in life. What should I just knock him down and say stop it? He wanted to swim, he wanted to swim, and he swam. I swam really violently to get myself warmed up, and by the middle I got really tired,

and it was really cold and I'm like, oh, it's much worse than I thought. And there's birds flying like peeking on me. I'm like, oh, these crazy strange faraway birds are going to bite me or something, you know. And I got really lucky because my legs suddenly hit the hit the bottom, and I'm like, and I got what's so happy when I came out there. I was so cold, but I was happy. Okay, and I was definitely sure that it was civilization because told buildings were right

behind the trees. They were like, and the bridge was right over there, and I'm like, oh, finally,

Anna, and I was even singing a song walking, and the birds were screaming something to me, and I'm like, yeah, you know, I made it. I'm still not sure. I understand why you left your friends, so because I thought we were going to be stuck there for a really long time, maybe for the whole

“day. The only thing I could do is just try to get to civilization. And especially these islands,”

they were, they were pressuring me to go there. You know, they were so close, and I'm like, and I got really bored. You know, I wake up in the morning. I don't want to stay in one spot on the yacht, and like, and think about how we're going to get saved. You know, I really want to do something, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to have this little adventure. I'm going to go out and try to make it somewhere, and I did, except he didn't. Soon he realized that he was indeed on

And he wasn't about to do that. He was alone. So Alex said about doing all the things a good

guest we should do. He wrote a giant help in the sand for the benefit of the planes landing at JFK. He circumnavigated the island looking for supplies. He found a stick in a piece of red cloth and made a flag to signal passing ships. Then he found several big pieces of styrofoam in some wood and spent an hour or two of fashioning a raft, but a collapsed when he sat down on it. Undeterred, he went back to searching for something that would be his ticket off the island,

and then he found it. It was the hollowed out carcass of a jet ski, or as he calls it, a scooter. I knew 100% knew that it was going to float. Although it was pretty badly dug into the sand, and as I was digging out the scooter, something really bad happened. Like, there was a piece of glass under it. I didn't see it. I was just digging, digging, and I didn't have any, any shovel or anything, and I cut my finger really bad. I started getting huge amounts of blood

was coming out, and I had this white t-shirt. It was eventually all in blood. Now there was really no way of the island, even by swimming, because, you know, sharks. It was a galling situation, and it was made even more manning, because the city was right there.

“I was thinking, how in the hell did I get myself into this situation?”

I never believed that something like this could happen in New York City, you know?

Like, in such a huge city that you can see skyscrapers like 10 miles away, and on the other side, you can die looking at them, you know? And also, I got a little mad at the city of New York. I could understand if they had just one pay phone there, or at least, I don't know, like a button to press to know that you're there, you know? By probably six o'clock in the evening, it was getting a little dark.

All my excitement has fled away, and I got very cold, so I was like shaking, you know, shivering, and no help at all, so I'm like, wow, this is going to get really bad.

Were you hungry at this point also?

I was very hungry, and I was very thirsty, and I found liams, I tried to open them up, but they tasted so nasty, I couldn't, I didn't even think about eating them. Like, there was no source of food other than the ducks.

“Oh, yes, the ducks. You want to hear about the ducks?”

I wasn't going to get rescued in the next hour or two. I had a plan to kill a bunch of ducks to get some warm blood to warm myself, you know? So to drink some blood and to cut the moped and use them to warm myself. I had this strange idea about using them as slippers. I even had, after that, I even had this psychedelic idea of floating on the ducks, making a raft out of the ducks. Imagine a man with strings attached to the ducks floating on the

water, so it's like this duck writer, you know? Totally normal for a Russian hiker to go and pick up a duck and not just to kill it, but to eat it. I can't, I don't, like, you could just go over and pick up a duck. Like, how did you catch the duck? Oh, um, yeah, you just go after it with a stick. I mean, you're a human being, you got more brains than a duck you can catch it.

But I wasn't really thinking about doing it. I wasn't like fantasizing about killing ducks or anything like that. I was just thinking that if it comes to that, I'll have to, I'll have to get some

“blood to drink, you know? I know it sounds very violent, but like I was fighting for my life, you know?”

Like people might laugh when they hear about being trapped on an island that's so close to civilization and the sharks and the ducks. I knew it was, it's a funny situation, but I really got the feeling of what is it like being on a desert island. I felt like a Robinson cruiser, you know? I knew what I was like to be by yourself away from civilization with no help and you're facing this huge problem and the only person that's near you is you and the ghost of your death close by,

you know? So I could smell the smell, my death in the air. It turns out that the island where Alex was stranded is called ruffle bar and it lies only a 20 minute boat ride away from the coast of Brooklyn. Far from being traumatized or ashamed of his exploits, Alex wanted nothing more than to go back out there and from the advantage of my overpriced

smelling your own death in the air while at least theoretical commuting distance to Midtownman hat, so we hired a boat to take us to ruffle bar. In truth, I wasn't as completely surprised as some might be to learn that such a place exists. I grew up near the islands of Jamaica Bay, and a neighborhood called Canarse. And when I was little, my friends and I would cut through the empty lots near my house to explore the mix of trash and nature on the shoreline. It was a place

“totally apart from the rest of my mostly urban childhood, a secret place that my friends who lived”

even 10 or 15 blocks away were unaware existed. But then the smaller islands around New York have

always occupied a weird place on the edge of the city, home to all sorts of enterprise that the

citizenry either doesn't know about or prefers not to sit. Sanitariums and prisons, potters fields and grandfailed schemes. Ruffle bar itself had been the site of several of the latter. Since the Civil War, it housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a shortly of doom community of some 40 building. We stopped in front of a concrete foundation, a building of some corners here. Oh, look, this is a cool thing. This is one of the world where two things that's here,

like you open them up and you can go inside as like a room in there. It might be like something like a bunker or something. You see the rope here and the rope is really old enough. Let me take

“a picture of it. There are no buildings left here. The island is returned to a deeply wild state.”

There's a wall of dense brush and a few trees around which sinister gulls are circled. We pass a flock of ducks who take one look at Alex and wisely move away. I'm really thinking about where the heck is the scooter, but it seems like it should be as we turn in. It should be more sure like here. Maybe the who? Yep, that's exactly it. Oh, wow. This is the scooter I tried it again. Let me show you. Maybe you'll see the glass and stuff. It's a boss. As we search for Alex

as Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plane of thick dry grass, madadown like a carpet. Underneath you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scuring around. Still, reminders that we are in fact in a major metropolis are

always close at hand. For one thing, there's the garbage. Piles of plastic and driftwood,

but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer dryer, several refrigerators, and oddly boats, three perfectly intact ones, complete with hoars. I hesitate to point these out to Alex, though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for them to attract to the water. And then there's this reminder of civilization. Hallelujah. He's dressed up, but I'm really sorry. He was always close enough to the city,

but simply having a cell phone would have had him tuck safely into bed within half an hour. Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubachanski. Back on the boat, they were having a final time. A police helicopter was performing drills nearby, and apparently no slouches in the cliched cast-weight department themselves. They had figured out that they could signal it with a mirror. But why rush? We really enjoyed the time staying there.

We were just sitting in the boat and, you know, smoking the last tobacco that we have left. And we make a deal that we're not going to eat each other if we're really going to get hungry. So basically, we were having fun, you know, just a little bit, no hustle, no nothing, you know, very quiet, nice weather. Oh, so you were actually holding off signaling the helicopters while you had a nice day. Yeah, of course. It was a nice day.

Still, as it began to get dark and the cigarettes ran out, the friends thought it was probably time to get a move on. A helicopter soon arrived and airlifted them off the boat. It wasn't until they were safely ashore wrapped in blankets and being fed complimentary cookies. Then either of them happened to mention that there'd been a third passenger. When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion and dehydration, had left him in a

trans-like, almost wild state. And for him, this island will always be a place where maybe

they'd be monster. And that was actually when I was here. I was wondering if it's like totally wild place. Are there any animals here other than birds? I was maybe hoping to see some cool animal, like a badger or some kind of animal. I like badgers a lot actually. This is one of my favorite animals. You know, I like badgers for the same reason, probably. I like the state of Utah where I never

“was, you know? It's like something that has some kind of, what's it called? Like a secret or”

it's hiding or it's like, they attract me in the way that they might be hiding something cool from me.

His insistence on finding mystery and adventure everywhere he looks. It's easy to laugh at that

to write it all off as adolescence to pitety. But what if it's more than that? What if it's also a kind of adolescent magic? Actually, I'm thinking that this needed to happen, you know? I, I think I think like if I was a boring person and I would just like stay at home all the time and be like a nerd, I would never get into this situation. So I think this happened strictly because I was with the right people at the right time, like in the right situation, you know?

Think about that. Every step of the way, by almost any measure, Alex could not have been more raw. It takes a special kind of grace to turn that into right time, right place. And how can you help but envy that? Who wouldn't rather live in a world where if you believe you should have an adventure you do? In which each of your mistakes does a narrow your life but expands it.

“In which the worst thing that could possibly happen is being bored and you can go to sleep on”

stormy seas and trust that when you wake up, if you're very lucky, you'll be in Utah.

What I'm trying to say is this, Alex does something I never in a million years would have thought

possible. He makes me think it might be cool to be a teenager again. There's a story that back in the 1830s, a ship carrying $54,000 in Mexican gold was hijacked by pirates outside Jamaica Bay and that the treasure was buried somewhere near Ruffle Bar. On our way back from the island, I tell Alex this and he listens with great interest. If you found the treasure he wants to know, could he keep it? Maybe I say, if he didn't tell anybody.

To which Alex answers precisely as I know he will, the only way he possibly can. He says, but what if I told everybody? Brad Martin, he's correspondent for GQ Magazine and the author of "Difficult Man Behind the

“Scenes of a Creative Revolution." Today's program, like I said earlier, is a rerun. Alex is now 37,”

he's a DJ, making electronic music under the name Duck Hunter, which is a name actually inspired by the ducks in this story. He's at Duck Hunter official on Instagram, and his music's on SoundCloud to Spotify. Coming up, the thing about Chicago, that nobody outside Chicago believes about Chicago, but that actually is totally and completely true. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Support for this American life comes from wise. The app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise. Download the wise app today or visit wise.com, Teas and Seas apply. This American life from our class, each week in a program, of course,

“we choose the theme, bringing you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme today”

show in the shadow of the city. Stories about things happening outside for most of us, but very close to us, we've arrived at Act 2 of our program Act 2, troubled bridge over water. So in 2003, on the edge of a city halfway around the world, a managing China, a man named Chen Sa, Mr. Chen, headed out to a bridge away from his wife and daughter. He was there for 10 hours a day. The bridge he chose is this concrete communist monstrosity,

4 miles long, covered with slogans that celebrate the worker. 4 are going to traffic, thousands of pedestrians in the top deck, two train tracks on the lower deck,

over the Anxie River, and his Nanjing, a city of nine million.

As Mr. Fuzzy, but the best guest back then, was that one person per week took their own life, jumping off this bridge, just a heads up, by the way, that this story is going to discuss suicide. Mr. Chen decided that he wanted to try to keep these people from jumping, and he started to, single-handedly at first, then with an occasional volunteer, the blog that he kept about this, is the most sober, taciturn, non-bossful account of saving lives that you can possibly imagine.

Patiently Mr. Channel insert his feelings, beware heavy thoughts, he declares to himself in one entry, how I wish that he will soon be free of this shadow. He says about an old man that he saved in another. But mostly, it's just the facts. Here's a translation from the Chinese. On July 25th, at 10 30 in the morning, I discovered a woman lying on the bridge railing on a belly, weeping. I went to her. She wiped her eyes, she said she was just playing,

and walked toward the center of the bridge. I went with her, and she very ordinarily, without her cell phone. When I returned at 110, I discovered that she had already climbed up on the bridge railing. I restrained her, I forced her on to her moped. She has from Nanjing's Gianniade District. Her last name is Zhao, and today she's 45 years old,

She's not killing herself or be better. However, she is silent when she thinks of her 15-year-old son.

“March 21, 2010. Yesterday at 305 p.m., I saved a young man in the middle of the bridge.”

He had drunk a lot of alcohol, was planning to jump over the bridge railing. I had once restrained him and dragged him to safety. As we spoke, I learned a situation was actually quite funny. He was thinking about jumping because last year, his wife promised to start returning to him 200 yuan. I was monthly 1,400 yuan salary, to spend as he pleased. But she had not honored her promise. Yesterday afternoon, he started drinking with his friends, and the more he drank, the angry

he got. He believed that killing himself would make a realize that not one cent had come to him. He then said another funny thing. His mother's colleagues said that the bridge is haunted, and could take one soul. I said, "Haha, it is haunted by drunk ghosts," and I took him home. This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent years. Many of Mr. Chen's entries are about the people that he does not save.

February 15, 5.30 in the morning. The middle-aged man jumped to his death. It's reported at this time that he was holding a photograph of his family. August 10, 2008, Saturday afternoon at 1.40 pm. A young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed onto the bridge rally. I immediately started my moped, but because I accelerated too quickly, the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her.

But when I was 200 meters away, she jumped into the angzi. At the end of each year, Mr. Chen has an inventory of how things are going on the bridge. This one is from the end of 2009. He wrote that since he began back in 2003, he had saved at that point 174 people from killing themselves. Counts had another 5,150 on the bridge and 16,000 on the phone.

51,000 people had texted him. Total days volunteering, to that point, 646.

My patterned idiom wrote a magazine article about Mr. Chen. He first heard about a

years ago from news reports. He read a bit of his blog in Google Translate. In fact, he had to meet this man who, on his own, had decided to rescue so many people. And if we'd to China, I thought maybe I'll see him in action. Maybe I'll get to see him save somebody. Just his backstory. I mean, I actually had come from Cambodia. So I was covering this genocide trial. I didn't have the most optimistic feelings about humanity.

“I thought I was going to find something there. You think you're going to have a hopeful figure?”

Yeah. I mean, hope, perseverance, generosity. But as soon as I got on the bridge, I realized that all those notions were completely absurd. I mean, I got instantly depressed.

First of all, there's this four mile long bridge and this one man out there sort of trying to pick

out who was going to jump. Yeah, you read in the article at one point. You said first of all, there's the cars and there's the trains and the bridge is shaking. And then there's just like a sea of people, thousands of people in the rain with umbrellas going back and forth in the bridge. And he's just one guy walking up and down. And he has this little mopedhead and does a little cruise on the bridge every once in a while. But even that is somewhat, somewhat comical,

sight to behold. He's on this little broken down mopedhead, put putting through the crowd with his big pair of binoculars around his neck. You know, I sort of thought maybe this isn't even real. Like maybe this blog is a complete figment of his imagination or a fiction that he constructs you know, once a week. And I just don't see how this guy can save anybody out here. And you write in your article, he won't really talk to you when you're when you're there in the

bridge. Yeah, he's really grumpy and unwilling to acknowledge me. And so, and so give me a

“typical exchange between the two of you on the bridge. I think I did ask like why why are you standing”

here as opposed to any other spot on this four mile long bridge. And he turned and lifted his binoculars and focused out towards the river. And then brought his binoculars down, turned the other way, put his binoculars up and focused in the other direction on the crowd. But that's it, he doesn't even respond. No, it wasn't, it was like I wasn't even there. I was like I was some ghost. And I sort of went through some of this. And then I said maybe, you know, is there a better time

for us to talk? And he said to the translator, you know, I can talk to you at lunch. So you get a lunch

the bridge. And if there are no families present, I mean, it's just workers and they're pretty

“hard drinking. In this case, grain alcohol and beer. And so we sit down at the table and”

Mr. Chen has invited a man to join us whose name is Mr. Xi. And then we are served some food. Mr. Chen and Mr. Xi start really drinking a lot of grain alcohol. And I started to sort of drink with them because it was the convivial thing to do. And then I just realized, I'm going to pass out if I can stay with these guys. I'm literally, I was, my head was spitting. I was, you know,

the whole room was revolving. I just was like, and he was, you know, very disappointed. And so he

sort of said, you know, just we're drinking here. This is what we do at lunch. And drinking loosens the tongue. And so, you know, get with the program. And if you can't, then why don't we, you know, why don't you put on a dress? But then he, you know, lunch, he definitely opened up a little bit more. I mean, he, he wasn't looking at me when he answered questions. But he was answering them and he was

“speaking more expansively about life on the bridge. Did he explain why it is that he does this?”

He said he had read a newspaper article about the bridge and about people jumping off the bridge.

And, and he himself had grown up in the country outside an engine. So he really related in particular to these people from the villages who came to the bridge and their lives. And who's lives were hard and full of despair. And he completely understood that. So you go back up to the bridge and, and he, he putters off in his moped. And then, and then he jumped on his moped to go on his rounds. And I didn't have anything to do. But I

turned to the translator Susan and I said, hey, let's take a little walk out on the bridge. And so we started walking out over the bridge and we're chatting a little bit. And this guy kind of came lurching by and he didn't pay any attention to him. But this guy is about 20 feet, 30 feet ahead of us. And he seems to be climbing up on the railing. And at that point, I just yelled, hey, and then I said, Susan, he's going to go over and I started running for him and Susan came running.

And I had that one little flash of Mr. Chen saying, you know, some of these people will really take you with them if they can. They're that desperate. And I had that little flash like this would be a stupid way to die. So be ridiculous. If I go down on this guy. But it didn't come to that because when I got to him, I had my foot on the inside of the sort of the concrete buttress. And I tried to flip him back toward me. And he was completely limp. He was like a bag of sawdust. He just flipped

right back onto me. And I hadn't even really pulled him that hard. It's hard to explain. But like

“when I think of it, I just have to say, I have just goosebumps all over my body right now.”

Because because he was going to kill himself. And because he didn't. So did you feel good? No, I didn't feel good. I felt like kind of nauseous. I felt like, wow, you know, they're there every week. Somebody actually does this thing. And even if we were to clone Mr. Chen and there were 200 of them out there, they'd probably still want a week, someone would figure out how to do it. And then like, oh my god, who's coming next? You know? And so Mr. Chen comes back, right?

Yeah, well, it took Mr. Chen a while to come back on his moped. But when he came, when he showed up, the crowd sort of parted. And I was holding on to this man, whose name was Van Ping.

to the rally. But he had such command of the situation and all the nuances of the situation

that I just stepped away. I just let go and stepped away. And then he said, I want to take your picture which seemed like, you know, I didn't even understand what that was about. He's taking the picture of the guy. Yeah. So he pulls out his cell phone with a camera, takes a picture.

“And then he says, um, and now I think I should punch you in the face. Holy. And then he said,”

you call yourself Chinese. How dare you? How dare you call yourself Chinese? Come up on this bridge with the intention of killing yourself today. You know, you, you are somebody's son, you know, how dare you? I'm going to punch you in the face. I'm going to punch you right now. And the crowd, of course, is like crushing in because they think they're going to, like, he's going to punch him. And then I'm just sitting here like with my mouth open as you say.

So he kind of takes another step in closer and Fan Ping says, look, I'm only doing this because my father was in the red army and he's lost all of his disability insurance. And there's no way for him to live anymore. And I'm a lousy son because I can't provide for him and all of our documents burned in a fire and without those documents, we can't get any help. I missed your chances. There's nothing worth this, you know, there's no problem that we can't

solve. And then he moves in a little bit closer and he touches his arm to sort of holding on by the

“elbow with like his right hand. But Mr. Chen says, I, you know, I think, I think I can help you.”

I don't, I don't like this. I don't like what you're doing here. This isn't the way to solve anything. And at that point, they have each other's word that they're going to meet on Monday morning. Hey, Mr. Chen's office. Mike Pedernitty, he says, wrote about meeting Mr. Chen for GQ Magazine. There's a documentary out there about Mr. Chen and the bridge called the Angel of Nanjing. If you or somebody you know might need help, the 98 suicide in crisis life line is

available 24/7 by calling or texting 988. Equity, yes, in my backyard. Now this story about some of the mysterious things happening on the edges of the city and the shadow of the city right under our noses. And to put this story in some context, we're going to turn out to Jorge Joss. You may remember Jorge. He's done some stories for our program. He says that when you move to a new city, you cannot get into the regular conversations

that everybody else gets into. He found this out a little while back when he did the one thing that everyone in Chicago agrees is the very worst thing that anybody can do, he moved to New York. All New Yorkers want to talk about is what subway trying to get to take to get from point to point B and it goes on and you can't say anything. You can't be like, you know that it's covered a tenth planet in the building. Well, you will take the DMZ, you know, to get to the dead planet.

It's inescapable and when you that conversation finally Peter's out, it somehow and it doesn't fail

turns into a conversation about self-loin reception. You can't get into the, you can't get into the conversation. You don't know where the dead spots are. So you can't do any small talk.

“So what happens is the small talk becomes, oh, you just moved in New York. Where are you from?”

Oh, you're from Chicago. How do you like New York? How do you like New York? Everybody wants to know how you like New York because they want you to say New York's the greatest place that I've ever been to and I've burned all of my connections to anywhere that I've ever been before because I love it so much here. When in fact, people would say, so how do you like New York? Well, you know, I like it. It's big. It's stuff. But I really like Chicago. You know,

I really watch Chicago like Chicago is this wonderful dream land where there's a bar on every corner. And, you know, the bridges smell like chocolate. And then you'd pretty much have a silence and the ice in your glass would clink a couple of times. And then they'd say the bridges smell like chocolate. And then I'd describe how wonderful it is that the bridges

would smell the smell like chocolate. And this is something that people in New York have never

ever ever ever ever ever believed. But if you get up early in the morning and it's sort of quiet out

coming up and there's you're in a big save, but nobody's around. Every now and again, they smell like

“brownies. Yeah, that's actually true. That's very, very true. I can say it's true. And the reason why”

is because there's a chocolate plant on the west side that spews that spews the smell of chocolate. Yeah, the smell of magic. To say something, to say like the bridge smells like chocolate doesn't convey like what actually happens. What actually happens is that when you're walking across a bridge and you're dodging cars and it's a bridge over a dead river in the middle of a part of town that is industrial and totally unnatural, you just like sort of walk into this cloud

of like the sweetest memory you have of cookies being made as a child, your sweetest childhood memory. You can walk into that and you can walk into it by surprise in the middle of the day in the middle of a city. Now you know that all this is ending, right? I know. I know it's like a thousand

“little stabs in the heart. Thanks to the federal government. It's like a million little stabs in the heart.”

What happened is this? Somebody complained about the chocolate smell. They complained to the

environmental protection agency. And the federal government never responsive to even a single

complaint from any of its citizens anywhere in the country, left into action. They sent inspectors to the Brahmart Chocolate Company, which has been making chocolate bars and other goodies on Chicago's West Side since 1939, inspectors found that too much cocoa dust was going into the air. More than it's legal under federal standards, the plant installed filtering equipment. In fact, they say they've been planning to get that equipment in place even before the EPA dropped by. In any case,

fewer cocoa particles in the air means less delicious chocolate aroma. It's kind of curious to think

“of like, you know, one small chocolate factory has, you know, somebody complained and they went”

out there and looked at them. Yes, there's a problem that we're going to fix it, but yet, you know, you have thousands of times where it's happened at the power plant and nothing's happened. That's Brian Erbishewski, director of environmental health programs, what was called back when for his broadcast today show the American Lung Association in Chicago is now called the respiratory health association. He points out that was widely reported in Chicago,

that the Illinois Attorney General's Office had documented over 7,600 violations similar to the chocolate company violation at six coal plants in Illinois in six years, back when for his broadcast

today show and they never went after any of those coal plants. Okay, let's step back a minute because

chocolate factories are not a major source of this fine particle pollution. When you look at power plants, they're responsible for about a quarter of the problem. And chocolate is chocolate a quarter of the problem as well? No, no, no, no, it is probably far, far, far less than 1%. Oh, now there's a quote that you gave, we're used in animal metaphor that I've seen quoted in a million articles that I just would like to you to repeat here for our listeners. Oh, I don't know if I can. I actually,

this is the wolves in the antigen. I actually don't know if there's just go animal activists after me for that thing, saying that wolves are not dangerous to humans. That being said. Well, I'll say it if you don't feel like you can, you said that one of us are going to have it here. You said that the EPA, what the EPA was doing with this chocolate factory and ignoring the coal plants, you said, quote, it's like crushing an ant when there's a pack of wolves around,

then claiming you have saved people from harm. How about if we say, all right, you know, it's like crushing an ant and see. Don't be scared of this animal rights people. No, no, I'm just trying to tell you you shark instead, nobody likes sharks. I just like this is just like my entire relationship to government right now can be summed up by this story. Okay, there's all these things that are throwing particles in the air and the only one I like is the one they're getting rid of.

Yeah, and you know, that's my frustration as well. The federal EPA wasn't talking to the press about the chocolate factory. When I called the Illinois State EPA, the manager of compliance and enforcement for the Bureau of Air, a cheerful public servant named Julie Armattage, informed me that there had been a misunderstanding. Yes, she said, the coal plants had bounced out too many particles 7600 times, but she these times was very, very short, at the least a momentary spike at the most

hours a day taking readings. Out of all the blips per year and you get 211 blips per plant per year,

“meaning that well over 99% of the time the plants are in compliance with the law. Yes, taken out”

a context, it appears to be a very bad situation put into context. It's virtually an unissue. And as with the fact that now, there may be less chocolate smell in Chicago. You know, I I'm not really in a position, would I prefer to not have had the whole blue, the broke blue, yes. And you don't feel any sort of twinge as an environmental regulator who's here to make our world a better place as you are that that could be the upside of the whole thing. That's a chocolate

aroma disappears. Yeah, you don't feel any sort of twinge if that would have happened. Well, you know, unfortunately my job here is to ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations and wherever the sentence is going, this is exactly not the answer. We the people of Illinois want to hear. You don't want to hear about laws and regulations. Well, but you know, they're they're for a reason and for the most part, you know, everybody who's following the rules she says. The

feds inspected just like they're supposed to. Blommers was in fact emitting too much chocolate end of story. And then, in the months after I had the conversation with her, the EPA says Blommers fixed the problem. Stop spewing particles into the air that violated the law and good news incredibly with the remitting. Still smell like delicious chocolate. And then,

finally, years after we first broadcast this story in 2024, Blommers shut down a Chicago factory.

They are still manufacturing and Pennsylvania, California, and Canada. But the Chicago plant they said just became too expensive to keep running. Old machines kept needing repair. In the end, when killed the chocolate smell in Chicago was not better regulations. It was not government meddling. It was good old fashion, old age. Which? I don't know. Maybe it's nice not to

“blame the government for something once in a while. What does that ever happen?”

Cream eggs. On the way to the train station, and the wind in the leaves comes the fun of a cream egg. No one knows that I have it. It's so small. Lots of thick chocolate with a stringy sugar, soft and sticky. I've got some of them. Today's episode of our show was produced by Diane Cook, Robin Semi, and myself, without Bloomberg, J. Marie Cercanic, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollack. Senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder, production help from Sam Hogrand,

the a Challenger Seth Lane, Tommy Andreas, and BA Parker, music of Jessica Hopper. Production up on today's rerun for maternity and Chloe Weiner. Also, Michael Kamatee, Molly Marcelo, and Stone Nelson. Special thanks today to Brett Ween, of the American Foundation

“for Suicide Prevention. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to”

public radio stations by PRX. The public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our

programs co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatea. We're asked me to tell you he can kick the ass of anybody. In Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and this is something that people in New York have never ever, ever, ever, ever believed. I'm out of glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. Next time, I'll buy a galaxy. A smooth, wide, smooth space, a slightly on the tongue. Very much a joyous, intergalactic journey through merry mental chocolate, and pure, undescribable

in phoics and dissection. Next week on the podcast of this American Life. Hello. Hey, Mom. Yeah. It's Ira. Yeah. Back in the old days of our radio show, I did a series of interviews with my parents that, no kidding, completely changed my relationship with them. Have you done this? Have you gone to a restaurant with dad and pretended that you didn't know each other? No. No. No. No. But if you did, you're saying that we found a restaurant with you

and pretended we didn't know you. Oh my god, my parents next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.