The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  This story was told on June 24, 2015, at The Players in New York City. The theme of the evening was Tangled and Twisted: Stories of the Ties That Bind. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  I was twelve years old, and I was in my third foster home. And my very first foster father had just called.

  He called to say that he was very sorry to hear about my mother. But what he didn’t know was that nobody had told me she was dead.

  I was in foster homes because my parents drank. They weren’t bad people; I always felt loved. But when they weren’t drinking, they were better parents. And they were drinking more and more frequently.

  Eventually people started to notice. I never noticed, because I didn’t have another childhood to compare it to. So when I got taken out of my home, I was very confused and upset.

  When I found out that she had died, I just got empty—hollowed out. And then when no one else called to say that she had died, I started to get really angry.

  You know, like, burn-the-world angry.

  And being a kid, a black kid, in foster homes in Maine, and burn-the-world angry, there’s not a lot of foster homes that wanna hang on to you for very long.

  I started going through ’em pretty quick. I learned the magic number was five. If you get to five foster homes, you’re marked. You’re trouble.

  So you can’t get placement, and you are homeless. And then you go into shelters. You can only stay in a shelter for thirty days, and then you’re on to the next, and on to the next.

  This is affectionately called the “shelter shuffle.”

  The education you get in the shelter is nothing to mention. When I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me that, because I am black, I will have to be twice as smart as the smartest white man in the room to get recognized half as much.

  So education was always a very important thing to me. I knew I had to straighten out. When I was fourteen, and I got my seventh foster home, I knew I had to hang on to this for dear life, no matter the cost.

  I get to my seventh foster home. The caseworker drops me off. I bring all my stuff into the room, my room, which was in the basement (they’re almost always in the basement).

  And I’m really nervous, because I don’t wanna mess this up. So I go up onto the porch, and I light a cigarette.

  The foster father comes out, and then it hits me that maybe this man, that the state has put in charge of me, might have something to say about this. But he doesn’t. Instead he leans on the railing with me and lights his own cigarette.

  I think, This is beautiful. This is just me and him, watching the sun set over the pines. Beautiful, beautiful.

  He turns to me, and he says, “Yep. I never had no problem with coloreds.”

  And I think, Well, with an attitude like that, how could you?

  So this man, it turns out, wasn’t the prince you might think. There was another foster child there, and he was twelve years old, and he had fetal alcohol syndrome, and this man liked to torture him. The man also had a dog who was old and dying, and he liked to kick the dog.

  It wasn’t going well, and it becomes this frustration where this is your life, and you can’t do anything about it. I can’t help the kid. I can’t help the dog. I can’t help myself.

  It’s like you’re starving to death, and there’s one source of food, and it’s this apple down between these rocks. You can reach your hand in and grab it, but you can’t pull it out while holding it. And this is your life.

  But on the bus to school, there was this cute little brunette named Jenny, sitting by herself, nose in a book. And that was usually what I would do. So one day I asked her if she wanted to be loners together.

  She laughed. And I have to tell you that it is so great to have somebody in your life who laughs.

  So I’m talking to her on the bus every day, and pretty soon we’re talking every night on the phone. And that’s going really well, but back at the foster home, things are getting worse and worse and worse. There’s this family get-together, and during dinner the foster father blows up at me, and he calls me a black bastard in front of everybody in the room.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a racial slur out of his mouth. But it wasn’t that. It was the rage in his voice. And the fact that there was a roomful of people, and when I looked at every pair of eyes in the room, they all just went to the floor.

  I was abandoned, and completely alone, and nobody had my back. This was when the panic set in. Where it was finally too hard to stay. I had to go.

  So the next morning my caseworker drops me off at the shelter. And at this point I’m completely accepting of this, because I’m not gonna get an eighth foster home. It’s very clear I’m not gonna make it three more years at this place, so this is the best I’m gonna do.

  But I take my allotted phone time at night, and I still call Jenny. I don’t tell her where I am, because I just lost my one chance to go to college. And because I move so much, I’ve lost every friend I’ve ever had, including her.

  She just doesn’t know it yet.

  And as long as I can keep her on the phone, she won’t.

  But eventually, it slips out. And I can’t remember what she said. I just remember getting empty again and hanging up.

  I wait the next week to call her, and almost immediately she hands the phone to her father. Now, at this point I’ve had a lot of conversations in my life about “Don’t call the house again,” “Don’t come by here,” “You’re a bad influence.” But that’s not the conversation I have.

  What he says to me is, “Would you like to come live with us?”

  Now, when I tell you that, you need to understand that my relationship with Jenny had been only on the phone or on the bus. She’d never been to my house. I’d never been to hers. And her father, who I’m talking to right now, had never even met me.

  He’d never seen my face. The first contact we’re having is right now, on the phone.

  So when he asked me if I wanna do this, my visceral gut reaction is, Hell no. Because I have actual blood relatives that did not take me in when I went into foster care. No family had ever done me any good.

  But my father raised me from a very young age to know it’s okay to be scared but not to ever be stupid.

  So I said, “Yes.”

  My caseworker drops me off at Jenny’s, and it is a huge, beautiful place. Everybody there has huge, beautiful smiles. Her father, her mother. Her four siblings.

  A bigger bunch of overachievers in your life you have never seen. None of them had seen an A-minus, ever. And this was the time when I realized that, for the first time in my life, I am in way over my head. Because prior to this, everything had been about survival. But this was gonna have to be about betterment, and achievement.

  While this is all happening, my father is trying to prove to the state that he’s got his act together, and eventually we get to a place where we get a supervised visit.

  Now, supervised visit means this: it’s him and me and a caseworker in a very stale, fluorescently lit office. And I am petrified, because I’ve always lived by these little credos that my father has taught me.

  But there’s a part of me that thinks, Uh, I might have made this up just to get through. Maybe he’s the drunk jerk that they think he is. But I need him to be the man that I think he is.

  I get in there. And he’s the man I think he is.

  So eventually we get a visit where he gets to come to Jenny’s. And he comes, and they are naturally protective of me and a little trepidatious about this.

  They have an old piano, and I mention, “My father plays the piano.”

  What I don’t say is that my father is a world-class jazz pianist. So when he sits down to play the piano, the only thing more beautiful than the sound coming out, is the sound of all of the family’s jaws hitting the floor at once.

  And in what was a really surreal moment for them, he becomes real to them as well. And they begin to champion me and him getting together, and after a while
I go back to live with him.

  Eventually I go to college. And the other day, I was talking to Jenny about this very thing, and I told her that the thing that sticks with me about it is that I was a really angry kid. I wasn’t a good kid. These people took me in. And by no means did I pay them back with kindness when I was there. I was still very, very angry.

  And it hangs on me that I didn’t treat them as well as they treated me.

  Jenny said, “I don’t remember you being a bad kid. I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  And I can’t tell if she’s right, and I am being too hard on myself, or if she’s just as kind as somebody raised by her parents should be.

  SAMUEL JAMES is a world-touring musician and the creator of Kitty Critic, a music/comedy web series in which musicians perform live for their fans’ cats. James was born last in a long line of performers, including dancers, storytellers, choir singers, porch-stomping guitar thumpers, and a session jazz pianist, all dating back to the 1800s. You can find him at therealsamueljames.com and kittycriticmusic.com.

  This story was told on June 5, 2014, at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine. The theme of the evening was Leap of Faith. Director: Meg Bowles.

  I wanted a fresh start. I was living in New York. My boyfriend, Adam, had just broken up with me and moved across the country to Los Angeles. He was a good guy—it was just one of those “going nowhere for three years” relationships.

  Neither of us had done anything horrible, like have an affair. We just weren’t a good fit.

  Which my mother used to tell me on the phone the whole three years. Very gently. Like, “You’re both such nice people. Maybe you’re just not a good fit.”

  But Adam and I were both just passive enough to keep it going. If things got bad, and one of us might begin to muster the courage to pull the plug, then it would be one of our birthdays. Or we’d get really great concert tickets. And that would keep the relationship going for a few more months. And months turned into years.

  In three years Adam never told me he loved me. And I think I loved him, but I wasn’t going to say it first. (Because I’m so mature.)

  Then one night Adam took me out to this beautiful dinner. He told me he cared about me very deeply. And that he never wanted to marry me.

  It was essentially a reverse proposal.

  And that was it. He broke up with me, he moved to Los Angeles, it was over. And it was so painful for me.

  I remember just wanting to forget him—forget the past three years and just wake up one morning and start fresh.

  I got my wish.

  I woke up in an ambulance, wearing a cheerleading outfit (which, if you’re over thirty and it’s not Halloween, raises questions, you know?).

  There were EMTs all around me, and then I was on a gurney. Then I was being placed into a CT scanner, and then I was in this hospital room with all these concerned strangers gathered around me.

  But they weren’t strangers. I just couldn’t identify them.

  What I didn’t know was that earlier that day there’d been an accident. I’d been filming this television pilot. It was a movie spoof show. The pilot was a parody of Bring It On, the cheerleading movie. We were asked to do a stunt that we never rehearsed.

  The stunt was I was to be thrown high up in the air and caught.

  I was thrown high up in the air…but I landed on my back and my head.

  I suffered a massive concussion and a slipped disk in my back. I could barely walk, and I had no idea who I was.

  Diagnosis: amnesia.

  So I also didn’t know that my boyfriend had dumped me a few weeks before and moved to Los Angeles. I didn’t know anything.

  In the hospital someone put a phone up to my ear and told me it was my mother. I heard this frantic female voice on the other end of the line, and it meant nothing. A friend knew where I lived, took me home, dug the keys out of my purse, got me into my apartment, and put me into bed.

  I wanted to call my dad. I remember having that thought.

  My friend said, “Why don’t you rest? We can call him later.”

  But I wanted to call my dad, and I needed help, because I didn’t know the number.

  Again my friend kind of put me off. “Why don’t you rest? We’ll call later. Sleep a couple of hours.”

  I started getting frustrated. “Why aren’t you helping me? I want to call my dad!”

  My friend was looking at me like I was out of my mind.

  Finally he said, “Don’t you remember? You just called your dad. You’ve talked to him three times. We’ve done this three times. So you can call him, but it’ll be the fourth time. And I’m just worried we’re starting to freak him out.”

  This whole conversation, by the way, is happening with me still wearing the cheerleading outfit. This little white pleated skirt and matching top. Because when the hospital discharges you, it’s like prison—they give you the clothes you showed up in, which for me was the costume from the pilot.

  I had both short- and long-term amnesia. So I knew some things: I knew how to speak, and I knew how to read. But I didn’t know the big stuff, like who I was.

  I also couldn’t retain anything. So if someone left the room and came back ten minutes later, we had to start over.

  I was living quite literally moment to moment.

  A cat walks into the bedroom. Why is there a cat in here? People tell me it’s my cat.

  Everyone that came and went, they were just strangers to me from a past I didn’t even know existed.

  They tried to help. I remember my best friend, Amy, stormed into the bedroom, screaming, “She’s a vegetarian! Don’t let her eat any meat!!”

  That sounded familiar, but it didn’t mean anything. I mean, I could have been gnawing on a veal shank. But it sounded important, and I didn’t want to forget it, so I wrote it down. There was a pad of Post-it notes on a table next to my bed.

  I wrote, “You are a vegetarian.”

  Someone had called Adam, and he flew in from L.A. right away and was at my bedside with tears in his eyes.

  In fact, the first night he slept in my bed with me, which I remember was kind of weird and, I thought, presumptuous because, like, Who is this guy in my bed? He said he was my boyfriend, but he could have been the mailman. I don’t know—I’ve got amnesia.

  The next day Adam showed me pictures of us together, to see if maybe that would jog my memory (and maybe even to make a case for the fact that we were a couple). Pictures of a recent trip I had taken to L.A.: Adam and Cole at the beach, Adam and Cole in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, Adam and Cole in the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier.

  I was in the pictures, but I remembered none of it.

  I wrote down everything. I was terrified of forgetting. Every piece of information was precious. Anytime someone told me something, or on the rare occasions when something might come back on its own, I wrote it down.

  “You are a vegetarian.”

  “We are at war with Iraq.”

  “Kristen is your friend who is slutty.”

  One afternoon I was in a cab, coming home from physical therapy, going over the Queensboro Bridge. I noticed the hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers used to be. My accident happened in November of 2001, and this was a month or so after that.

  I thought, That’s funny…

  I wrote it down on a Post-it: “Twin Towers gone.”

  Adam was the Wonderful Boyfriend. This accident was the best thing that could ever have happened to our relationship. He moved into my apartment. He took me to my weekly neurologist appointments and almost-daily physical therapy.

  He doled out my medications at night and then held me when I woke screaming in the middle of the night from the nightmares that those medications gave me. Or from the sheer disorientation of not knowing who or where I was.

  A girl from yoga visited. I do yoga? What else do I do? I was on this detective mission to find out who I was.

  I found journals written in my
handwriting, in another language. Adam told me it was Portuguese from when I lived in Brazil. I lived in Brazil?

  Cool. What else?

  Do I paint?

  Can I cook?

  Am I an asshole?

  (I mean, what if I’m an asshole?)

  I overheard doctors saying things like, “We don’t know how long she’s going to be like this” and “We’re not sure if she’ll ever fully recover.” And they’re talking about me. I mean, I’m sitting right there in the room.

  The only thing I could be sure of was this growing pile of Post-it notes on my bedside table. I thought the bigger that pile got, the more of a person I became.

  But it still wasn’t me. It was just information, filling an empty space.

  Then one afternoon I was in a cab coming home from physical therapy, going over the Queensboro Bridge again. I started to cry. I had no idea why. But I couldn’t stop.

  And it was right as we passed the hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers used to be. When it first happened, there was that really chilling empty space, like ghosts of buildings.

  I felt flooded. I mean, I wailed. And I couldn’t figure it out. And then it came to me: I was remembering. But it wasn’t a fact or a thing—it was a feeling. It was the first time since the accident that I felt real.

  That night Adam was tucking me into bed. He had just given me my medications, and he was writing it down on a Post-it note, for when in five minutes I asked if it was time for my medications, as I did every night.

  I watched this man taking such wonderful care of me, and I was overcome with emotion.