The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  I was hopelessly staring at my résumé, trying to figure out how I was going to explain these gaps in it, and why a hip-hop artist was really excited about being a full-time administrative assistant.

  But as I was listening to the music, suddenly, it started to sound familiar.

  I thought, I kind of recognize that song.

  And then I was like, Wait a minute, I WROTE that song. That’s “Things I’ve Seen.” That’s the song that did it for us!

  One of the employees looked at his co-worker and was like, “Yo, remember this song, ‘Things I’ve Seen’? I fuckin’ love that shit. Song was so hot.”

  I got excited, like maybe somebody’s going to recognize me. I started looking around. But no one did.

  But it was kinda okay, because I realized at that moment that my music coming out this speaker was giving me a message, and what it was saying is, You don’t have to suffocate trying to pretend to be some rock star who hangs out with Laurence Fishburne. But these guys heard your song, and they liked it. And in a way, isn’t that what making music is really about anyway? What I always loved most about music was that you don’t have to be a big, important person to make compelling songs that can reach out and touch somebody.

  I also realized in that moment that maybe I have more to offer the world than Excel spreadsheets. I was looking for a third door, where I could do what I wanted, and at the same time make opportunities for other people to make music.

  I found that door when I was offered the chance to run a studio for an incredible nonprofit organization called Street Poets. Street Poets works with marginalized youth, to help develop them into artists and teachers and healers. After working at Street Poets, I was able to get my PhD and become a professor of media studies.

  And now, sometimes when I’m sitting in my office, my students come in and they’re so excited to tell me about their dreams and their fears.

  And I know I should say to them, Listen, y’all, it’s hard out there. Life kicks your ass. Play it safe.

  But I never do.

  I tell them, “Go for it. Enjoy it while it lasts, but brace yourself, because when it doesn’t, sometimes you’ve got to figure out who you’re not so you can become who you are.”

  DR. CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA is a scholar, an activist, and an artist who holds a creativity professorship in Clemson University’s Department of Communication Studies. He is a board member for several youth-mentoring programs, including Street Poets Inc., and a news analyst for Uprising Radio. His January 2015 article, “Vocal Color in Public Radio,” produced for Transom.org, was featured on NPR, in the Washington Post, and on BuzzFeed, trending nationally on Twitter and spawning a nationwide discussion of diversity in public media. Chenjerai’s livestream journalism at Black Lives Matter protests during 2014–15 has been viewed by tens of thousands of viewers. Chenjerai is also a founding member of the hip-hop group the Spooks, whose first album, S.I.O.S.O.S. Vol. 1 (2000), produced singles that reached gold-selling levels in four countries and placed highly on Top 10 charts around the world. You can learn more about his work at Chenjerai.net.

  This story was told on November 17, 2015, at Blue Man Group’s Astor Place Theatre in New York City. The theme of the evening was The Moth and Blue Man: Tribes. Director: Catherine Burns.

  When I was thirty-five years old, I went home to live with my mother, Patti. Patti was a tiny little red-haired lady. Just a sweet gal—funny and intelligent. She was a lovable eccentric, who looked at the world through a crooked pair of rose-colored glasses.

  She was a single mother—divorced. And she had been both of those of things since I was ten. For the majority of my life, it had just been the two of us.

  Now, the reason I was living at home again was because Patti had recently been diagnosed as terminal, given six months to a year left to live, and she’d asked me to come home and help her through it. I said yes immediately and went home.

  But we made a pledge to each other when I first got there. We promised that we were in this together. That she would do her best to treat me like an adult, and I would do my best not to act like a child.

  The other thing that we decided was that we were going to look at it like a job, a job with responsibilities attached to it. My title was Primary Caregiver, and with that job title I received seventy-five dollars cash every Friday.

  Jealous?

  For the first couple of months, I had two main responsibilities, each of them very different. Patti was a steadfast worker and wanted to work up until the last day that she possibly could. So my first job responsibility was to drive her to work in the morning at nine and then pick her up at three o’clock in the afternoon, which left me six hours to do with as I pleased.

  One thing I would do is I’d go to the gym for a couple of hours, where I got in absolutely ridiculous shape. Or I would engage in my new hobby, one that I picked up while I was at home, and one that I’m going to tell you about now completely and totally unapologetically: scrapbooking.

  I love it. I’m very, very good at it, and I find it therapeutic and rewarding. Patti and I used to joke that I could easily be described as a thirty-five-year-old heterosexual male, with the hobbies of a seventy-five-year-old woman, in the body of a twenty-five-year-old gay man.

  My second job responsibility was a little bit different, and it was this: Patti had a rare form of cancer called leiomyosarcoma, which was a free-floating tumor that was making its way through her body, systematically shutting down her organs. To do this it had to expend energy.

  Therefore, it had to expel a waste product, which was in the form of a liquid that would collect on her lungs throughout the day. So every day at seven thirty in the morning, I would take a stent that was connected to the inside of her body, hook it up to a vacuum, and drain all of that fluid off of her lungs.

  The process took about ninety seconds, and we would get about a liter of fluid off each time. We had a signal. When she felt empty, she would raise her hand in the air, and then I would have to immediately close the valve.

  We were warned by the doctors that were either of us to miss this timing, all of the liquid would be gone, and then the air would be violently sucked out of her lung. In her weakened state, she would have a heart attack and die in front of me.

  So for a few seconds every day, Patti’s life was in my hands. Optimism was a full-time job. And I will be very candid with you: when I first got home, all I wanted to do was run as far away from this as I possibly could. It was too much for me to bear at some points.

  The thing that really made it all make sense to me was when I realized that Patti could not run away from this either, that we were stuck. We couldn’t do anything about it, and we just had to deal with it.

  But then one night everything changed.

  We were watching the third season of The West Wing. There was a quote that came on that caught her ear and left an indelible mark, and it became the cornerstone of how we looked at this entire thing.

  The paraphrased quote is this: “We all fall, and it matters. But when the fall is all you have left, it matters a great deal.”

  This led us to have a lot of very honest discussions. One was something that we had never really broached before, which was what do you do when you know beyond the shadow of a doubt you’re going to die? No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This is just your fate.

  Do you let that knowledge crush you and dictate your actions for your remaining days? Or do you accept your fate, embracing it and doing things that you want to do, holding your head high?

  I asked her, “How do you want to go out?”

  And she answered, “I don’t want to go out with a whimper. I do not want people feeling sorry for me.”

  So that led me to one night suggest, “What if we threw a party for you, like a grand bon voyage, where I would emcee it and put on a performance—a tribute?”

  She loved the idea.

  It was great for her, because she loved the idea of being able to say good-bye to every
one in her life that meant something to her.

  Plus, as she said to me afterwards, and I quote, “I will never get to see you get married or become a father, so this will just have to be the next-best thing.”

  But there was one thing holding her back before she would fully commit to this party. If Patti were here to describe herself, she would say that she was fiscally frugal. But because she’s not here to defend herself, I’ll put it a different way: she was a cheapskate who refused to spend money.

  So the next day, I went and did some pricing, and I reported back to her that for us to have it at the venue that she wanted, it was going to cost us a minimum of eight thousand dollars.

  She said, “Oh, no. This was a really good idea, but no.”

  I went away, and I thought about it, and I came back to her with this argument.

  I said, “Mom, you have the money. I’m about to inherit this money, and this is how I would choose to spend it.”

  Later that night, as I was sitting in my bedroom working on a very masculine scrapbook, Patti stood in my doorway, and she said, “Kevin, my entire life I’ve been saving for the future. The future’s now, isn’t it?”

  I said, “Yeah, it is.”

  And she said, “Okay, let’s have this party.”

  At this point planning began. Invitations went out, and this was such an exciting time for us, because it gave us so much. It gave us something to talk about, it gave us something to plan for, and most importantly, it gave us something to look forward to, because we desperately needed it.

  One night, while a little wine-tipsy at dinner, we started playing a cute game—we confessed secrets to each other, because none of them mattered anymore. All the things that I had done in the past were simply stops on the road that eventually led me to come home and help her. So if I ever had a free pass with my mother, this was it.

  In my tipsy way, I told her all about how when I was sixteen I stole beer from our local grocery store. And how when I was twenty-two I had a yearlong secret affair with my thirty-seven-year-old college professor (yet still only received a B in her class).

  My favorite one was the comically dangerous drug transaction that I did on the streets of Vienna, Austria. The only reason I got out of it safely was because one of the guys thought I looked like Chuck Norris.

  Patti and I were laughing, having a great time, and then she told me something that absolutely broke my heart. When she was twenty-four years old, Patti married my father. Never being one of the popular kids, Patti was nervous about having a wedding shower thrown in her honor.

  But her roommate at the time (who was also her maid of honor) said, “Don’t you worry about it. It’s all going to be fine.”

  Cut to the day of the wedding shower, and Patti, my grandmother, and the roommate sat in a sparsely decorated room for over an hour, and no one showed up.

  To a twenty-four-year-old woman, this was a devastating and defining moment. That night she confessed a fear that she had always had: no one will come to my party.

  I knew at this point that this was no longer just a want, this was a need, and this was something that I had to deliver for her.

  Like I said, she was a single mother, and she had done so many selfless things for me that I had no other choice. So, I doubled my efforts, and I tried to contend with the different factors that must be contended with as you are planning a large event, but there were so many things that I could not control.

  Five days before the party, her health took a sharp turn, and she had to be rushed to the hospital, where I was told that she did not have much more time. Then relatives with opinions started coming to town, and not everybody thought the idea for the party was awesome.

  There was one, her brother, who came and said, “You need to cancel this party, because what you two are doing,” and I quote, “is morbid and completely inappropriate.”

  But then Patti did something that I have never seen her do before—she stood her ground against her brother and any other naysayers. She was going to have this party; it was not going to be canceled. And she made me promise that it was going to go on with or without her.

  This was going to be her crowning moment, and no one was going to step in her way. You could either get on board or get out of the way. It was amazing to watch.

  (But I know her really well, so let’s be honest: she had also spent eight thousand nonrefundable dollars on this. So there was no way she was going to cancel it.)

  Cut to the day of the party, June 24, 2006, 7:00 p.m., and I will never, ever forget this moment. We’re in the beautiful Sawgrass Marriott in lovely Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, standing in front of the closed doors of Banquet Hall A.

  Patti is behind me in a wheelchair, and I cannot believe that we’ve made it to this point. I’m exhausted; I’ve not slept in days.

  And I turn to her, and I touch her hand, and she gives my hand a reassuring squeeze, and I say to her, “Here we go.”

  I turn around, and I put my hands on the doors, and fueled only by adrenaline and two watered-down vodka-cranberries, I push the doors open, and I walk in the room, and I announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, Patti McGeehan!”

  And the place goes wild.

  The piano player bursts into a rousing rendition of The West Wing theme. Everyone who said they were going to be there had shown up, and all one hundred of them are on their feet, clapping wildly.

  And Patti McGeehan enters the room to her first, and her last, standing ovation. And it is magnificent to witness.

  The party goes spectacularly. It was a wonderful night full of laughter and pragmatic honesty, except for one small snafu that always happens at events of this size, where one guy thought it would be the best idea in the world to give an impromptu speech where he called Patti a MILF (and then defined the acronym). Aside from that, the evening was as good as, if not better than, we had hoped.

  The culmination of the night was a receiving line, where Patti would get to say good-bye to everyone but, more importantly, everyone would get to say good-bye to her. And watching that receiving line from the outside, I can say with assurance that while there was sadness in the farewells, there was not one person in that room who felt sorry for her.

  At the end of the night, she called me over to her, and she gestured for me to lean down. And she kissed me on the cheek, and she said, “Thank you, Kevin. This was so much better than my wedding shower.”

  To which I responded, “You’re very welcome, but that one really wasn’t hard to beat.”

  Eight days later, as I was holding her hand, she drew her final breath. Her last words to me were, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”

  There are many things I got to thank Patti for, specifically this party, which was as much of a gift for me as it was for her.

  I walked out of that house different from how I walked in, and I truly believe it was for my betterment, because I got to see Patti face her fears and conquer them. She showed me beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how much the chips may be stacked against you, there is a way to hold your head high.

  Because when the fall was all she had left, she did it on her terms, because it mattered a great deal.

  And to answer your next question, yes, I made a beautiful scrapbook of the whole thing.

  KEVIN MCGEEHAN spent many years as an actor for Chicago’s famed Second City, traveling around the country and parts of Europe with the National Touring Company. He has red hair, has been mugged at gunpoint, and for a four-month period lived on a massive cruise ship that was almost capsized by a seventy-foot rogue wave. His autobiographical stories can be heard on The Moth Radio Hour and read in Men’s Health magazine. To hear even more stories, you can listen to his storytelling podcast, called Funny, Cuz It’s True. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches improvisation at the Second City Hollywood. (He wrote this bio one year before the publication of this book, so he assumes many new and exciting bioworthy things will have happened in that time.)

  This story
was told on December 11, 2013, at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. The theme of the evening was Naughty or Nice. Director: Maggie Cino.

  I’m at a dinner party in Charlottesville, Virginia. I’ve just moved to town, and I don’t know anybody except for the second cousin of my ex-boyfriend, this woman named Whitney, who invited me to the party.

  All I really know about her is that she’s a huge WASP, which is fine, because I’m a WASP, too. I was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, which is the land of WASPs. So I feel like I know the drill.

  They were going to have two black Labrador retrievers, a house full of eighteenth-century furniture, and then WASPs always have these really threadbare linen napkins. (It’s this weird thing, like they just can’t bear to throw them away.)

  So we’re at dinner, and Whitney turns to me and she says, “Oh, if you’re free next weekend, you’ve gotta come fox hunting with us.”

  All right.

  “It’s really fun. We hunt all day, and then at night we have dinner, and then we go dancing at the club.”

  Okay.

  Then Whitney’s husband says, “Oh, just make sure you watch out for Chuck.”

  “Yeah, Chuck’s a little annoying. Sometimes he attaches himself to single women, so you should avoid him.”

  At this point the hostess breaks in, and she says, “Who attaches himself to single women? I’m single, and nobody ever talks to me. Who’s this Chuck guy?”

  Whitney says, “You know who he is. He’s got really curly hair. He’s kind of got full features.”

  She goes on describing what he was wearing and what happened at the last party. The hostess still has no idea who they’re talking about.

  Then her husband John says, “Oh, just say it. Chuck was the black guy.”

  And this cry goes up around the table.

  “Chuck’s black? He’s black? I didn’t know he was black.”