I said, “I love you.”
And he said nothing.
So I said it again (because I had amnesia and I could get away with that).
“I love you.”
Again nothing. I didn’t understand.
And then I remembered. The breakup and all the pain that went with it. His move to L.A. Then a post-9/11 reconciliation. September 11 happened, and we were going to give it one more try.
I went out to L.A. to visit him. We went to the beach, and we went to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, and we rode the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier.
I thought of everything he was doing for me. If this wasn’t love, what was?
Why was he even here? And I think the answer is, he’s a good, good man, and he cared for me very deeply. But he was a Giuliani boyfriend. Good in crisis.
Maybe he loved me and just couldn’t say the words. I’ll never know. I mean, I think I loved him, and I wanted to hear it. But maybe I just wanted to say, “Thank you,” and I couldn’t differentiate.
It took about six months for me to recover. My memory just came back slowly over time. And then I must have been fully healed, because a few months after that, Adam and I broke up again. Only this time I knew it was coming because we’d done it before.
I wanted this fresh start. And I got it. I lost myself completely, and then got myself back, almost as if following a script, replaying my entire history with Adam. Nothing had changed.
But this time, that was comforting. Because if nothing changed, it meant I knew who I was. That I was a real person.
And that even without my memory, I was still me.
COLE KAZDIN is a writer, performer, and four-time Emmy-winning television news producer living in Los Angeles. She is a regular contributor for VICE and has written for the New York Times, Salon, Cosmopolitan, and major magazines. She has produced television for HBO Documentaries, ABC Network News, and Discovery. Cole has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour. Her writing has been included in the anthologies Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond and The Best American Sex Writing. She tells stories across the country with The Moth MainStage and performs all over Los Angeles, where she is a proud three-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. She has lectured at universities and teaches writing and storytelling around the country. Cole has survived amnesia, living in New York City, and a very awkward interview with Kirk Cameron during which he told her she was going to hell. She has no regrets. Find her at colekazdin.com.
This story was told on August 27, 2014, at the Byham Theater in Pittsburgh. The theme of the evening was Don’t Look Back. Director: Catherine Burns.
I managed a hotel in an apartment building in Santa Monica for about seven years. I lived in the apartment building, and I had an office in the hotel across the street. Super-easy commute. It’s particularly great when you live in L.A.
You meet a lot of interesting people when you manage an apartment building. For example, there was a retired couple who lived in the apartment next to mine—the Gaskos. The first time I met the husband, I was in my apartment playing guitar and trying to write a song.
There’s a knock on the door, and I open it to find a seventy-year-old man holding a black case. He tells me that he heard me playing music, and he liked it, which was good, and he thought I could use this black Stetson cowboy hat.
Really nice gesture. I thank him, and he says his name is Charlie.
So fast-forward five years, and I’m taking a nap on my couch. I’d been working for two weeks straight, no days off, on call every night. But this particular Wednesday, I was taking off work early, and I was going to see this band, My Morning Jacket, in Hollywood. I was meeting a friend. All planned out.
At 2:00 p.m. the phone rings, and my co-worker is at the hotel with the FBI.
Before I know it, I’m on the phone with an FBI agent, and he says, “I need to talk to you about a tenant in your apartment building.”
I’m on my couch, so I say, “Can we do this tomorrow?” He says no.
“Where are you? Come here now.”
So I get to my office, and I have a seat, and there’s a large man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
He closes the door and throws a manila folder down on the desk. He opens it and points to a sheet of paper. Across the top is “Wanted” and, underneath, a photo of a man and a woman, with names.
He asks if these people live in the apartment next to mine. And at first glance, I know the woman is my neighbor, Carol Gasko. Yes, I know these guys, these are my neighbors.
And while I’ve never heard the name “Catherine Greig,” the name “James J. ‘Whitey’ Bulger” is very familiar. I had heard this name many times when I was in college at Boston University.
But I didn’t really know anything about him. He was a Jimmy Hoffa–type guy to me, like, “Oh, this guy’s missing, he’s never gonna be found.” It was almost like a joke.
So I’m standing there, and the FBI agent says, “What do you think?”
I say, “What does my face tell you?”
He says, “I need percentages.”
I say, “Ninety-nine point five, a hundred percent.”
So he gets on his radio, and while this is happening, it is almost like in a movie after an explosion where the sound just disappears, and you’re trying to process something that you’re not familiar with. You don’t know what’s going on, and you don’t know what’s about to happen.
This is an old man who bought me a bike light one time because he was worried about me riding my bike at night without one. And now I’m discovering he’s a notorious fugitive.
Another agent quickly appears, and he says, “We need the keys to his apartment, and if you don’t give them to us, we’ll bust his door down.”
I say, “Okay, here are the keys.”
He leaves, and then the other agent, Hawaiian Shirt, says, “Look, this guy’s pretty high on the most-wanted list. We could use your help apprehending him.”
My first response is, “I just gave you the keys to his apartment and told you he lives there. So I’m not really sure what else I can do.”
He says, “Well, we can’t just go to his apartment. We have to make sure he’s in there. If it’s just her, it doesn’t really work for us. So why don’t you go knock on the door and see if he’s there?”
In the previous months, Carol had been telling people in the building, “Charlie has dementia, he has heart problems.”
They’d put notes on their door during the day that said, “Don’t knock on the door.” I knew from talking to him over the years that he slept during the day.
I explain this to the agent, and without skipping a beat he moves on, and he says, “Well, what are you doing tonight?”
I say, “I’m going to a concert.”
He says, “You might want to cancel those plans.”
So I call my buddy and tell him, “Look, I don’t think I’m going to make the show tonight, and I can’t tell you why.”
As the original shock is dissipating, I realize I’m going to be with these guys until they have him in cuffs.
Then things really kick in. They place an agent in the hotel at a window that has a good view of the Gaskos’ balcony.
Then the agent wants to go to my apartment. I take him through a back alley and some side streets, so we aren’t walking in front of the apartment building in clear view of Charlie and Carol. We’re stopping at cars, and he’s talking on the radio, and there are agents everywhere. I’m starting to think this is a pretty big deal. It must be. There are this many people staked out in the neighborhood?
The FBI agent says, “They just closed their blinds. Did you tip ’em off?”
“I’ve been with you the whole time, no, of course not.”
We get to my apartment, and I draw them a floor plan of the Gaskos’ place. We’re throwing ideas back and forth about how to get this guy out of his apartment.
My living-room wall shares a wall with Charlie’s bedroom, so I’m
like, “Uh, you know this guy can hear everything we’re saying? Like, he’s repeated conversations I’ve had at night with my friends, asking me why we don’t curse or fight as much as he and his friends did in his younger days.”
We go into my bedroom, and we come up with an idea. We’re going to break into his storage locker in the garage. We go down to the garage, and the FBI agent goes to get his car, and he has some bolt cutters in there.
I’m suddenly just pumped up. I’m involved in something. It’s like a movie. I’m having fun, almost, at this point. The adrenaline is helping me forget about my relationship to these people over the years. I mean, this is the same man who bought me a Christmas present every year for the four years I’d lived there.
Once the lock is broken, we go back to my apartment, and the agent’s telling me, “Okay, this is what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna go down, we’re gonna get everything set, I’m gonna call you, and you knock on his door and bring him down.”
And I’m like, “No, I’m going to go to the hotel, I’m going to call him, and I’m going to tell him to meet me there. Then you guys take care of your business.”
I’m in my office, and I’m thinking about this guy, my neighbor, who looked after an old woman on the first floor. Who one year, when I didn’t write a thank-you note for a Christmas present he gave me, gave me a box of stationery.
I’m thinking, What did this guy actually DO?
So I go to Wikipedia, and I’m reading about murders and extortion and gambling.
I get to the bottom, and in one of his last public sightings with one of his Mafia buddies there’s a quote from him: “When I go down, I’m going out with guns blazing.”
I start to rethink my involvement in the day’s events.
Conveniently, my phone rings, and it’s the FBI, and they say, “Make the call.”
I start to waver: “Look, man, I just read something about this guy…and I don’t know about this.”
He says, “No, no, no, he’ll never know, he’ll never know.”
Which is obviously not true.
But I am this close to getting to my concert, so I say, “All right, I’ll make the call.”
I call the Gaskos from the hotel, and there is no answer. I am relieved. I am so happy that they didn’t answer the phone.
I call the agent back, and I say, “Hey, man, sorry, they didn’t answer. Going to have to do something else.”
He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to knock on the door?”
And I’m like, “Look, man, curtains closed, guns blazing. What if he comes to the door with a gun?”
He says, “Just be like, ‘Hey, man, what’s going on?’ ”
I’m thinking to myself, Uh, he will shoot me before I finish that one statement.
I tell him I’m not going to do that. But while this is going on, Carol calls back. And so I get on the phone, and I explain to her that the storage unit’s been broken into. I can either call the police, or Charlie can meet me in the garage and we’ll look at it.
So she discusses this with him, and she says, “He’ll be down in five minutes.”
“All right, great.”
Hang up, call the FBI. “He’s on his way. Do your thing.”
Then I walk outside, and I’m standing in the courtyard of the hotel, and Carol walks out on her balcony, which is directly across the street. She looks at me, and then she quickly looks down to the garage, and then she looks back at me. I don’t know if she knew, but she looks worried.
She walks back in, and then I get a call from the FBI, and they say, “We got him, go to your concert.”
So I go change clothes, and the adrenaline, and the rush. As soon as I open the door, it’s like a slow-motion shot of Suburbans and vans and FBI agents everywhere. And my neighbor, Charlie Gasko, standing there in cuffs, surrounded by agents, laughing and telling stories.
He almost looks relieved.
I’m staring at this, and as I pass him, I see Carol standing there a few feet away in cuffs. And the magnitude of everything that has happened starts to sink in a little bit.
She looks at me, and she says, “Hi, Josh,” and I can’t speak.
I just meekly waved, and walked to my car, and got on the highway, and called my brother, and said, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today.”
“What?”
“I helped the FBI arrest the most wanted man in the country.”
So a couple of months later, my family’s a little worried about me, and my friends are taking bets on how much longer I have to live. I get home one day, and there’s a letter in the mail from the Plymouth Correctional Facility. I open it, and I see the same familiar cursive writing, and the same “shoot the shit” dialogue tone that I knew from four years living next to Charlie Gasko.
But in this letter he’s reintroducing himself as Jim Bulger.
And so I wrote him back, and I said, “Look, you know I had something to do with the day of the arrest, and my family’s a little worried. So, uh, you know, just a little note of ‘everything’s good’ would be nice.”
He wrote back and said, “Look, they had me with or without your help; no worries.”
So that made my mom feel better, definitely.
New neighbors eventually moved in, and they seemed like nice people.
But what do I know?
JOSH BOND is a resident of Santa Monica, California, where he manages commercial and residential real estate. He also writes original music and performs solo and with his band, For the Kings. Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, he attended college at Boston University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in film production.
This story was told on March 21, 2015, at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The theme of the evening was Bait and Switch. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.
Six months ago I married a man named Mike. And my marriage to Mike made me a stepmother.
To a dog.
Now, what I mean when I say this is not just that Mike had a dog, and now that we’re married, we co-own his dog together. (Although to some extent, that is true.)
What I mean more specifically is that Mike shares custody of a dog with his ex-girlfriend. And as I am now his wife, I also share custody of a dog with his ex-girlfriend.
I found out about this dog-share situation very early in the relationship. The first time I went over to his apartment, there was a dog there. And she was like, “Woof. Woof.”
So I was like, “Oh, my God, are you a cutie? Are you a little cutie?!”
To be clear: I’m not a dog person.
I’m also not not a dog person. It’s just that prior to co-owning one myself, I was unfamiliar with the unconditional love of an animal. So to me it always seemed like a lot of poop, and not much in the way of conversation, and I just wasn’t that interested.
However, if I was interested in a man who owned a dog, I would do a full song and dance about the dog, to lock the business down.
I’d be like, “Ah, blah, blah, blah. Yay! Your dog!”
I always felt it was this very weird, sort of surreal audition for my maternal instinct.
So I was like, “Ah, blah, blah, yay! Mike! Your dog!”
Then one week later, I’m back at the apartment, but this time, no dog.
I’m like, “Mike, where’s the dog?”
And Mike says, “Oh, well, the funny thing, actually…is that I share custody. Of the dog. With my ex.”
And I said, “That is super funny…and also so surprising, really, because I didn’t even know there was an ex, because I did NOT stalk both of you on Facebook!”
And he’s like, “You’re being sarcastic.”
And I’m like, “Yes, I’m being sarcastic.”
Then he says, “Okay, but what I’m trying to get at here, in a nonsarcastic way, is, like genuinely, how do you feel about the whole situation?”
And I said, “Well…I don’t know.”
Because I didn’t. There was part of
me that kind of thought, Oh, okay. This is what cool, hip people do!
But then the other part of me was like, This shit sounds dysfunctional. What?!
It really was both those things, and this next part is cheesy, and I apologize in advance for that. But the thing was, I was smitten with Mike (it was early days), and so I did what you do when you’re smitten, which is you just act agreeable.
You’re not actually even acting agreeable, because you’re so genuinely smitten you feel so agreeable. So you’re like, “Sure! I’ll go along with whatever.” And then it’s, like, Roll of the dice as to whether or not I’m going to resent you for this later on.
A few quick words on the dog. She’s a miniature schnauzer, and she is pretty cute, actually. Her name is Wilma.
A few quick words on the ex. She is a human woman. She’s also pretty cute, actually, and her name is Kelly. Mike and Kelly were together for ten years, which is a long time. Never married, no kids. Mike was the one to end it. And two months after Mike ended it—which is not a long time—Mike met me.
And one month after Mike met me—which, again, not a long time—Kelly found out about us. She found out that we were dating, which was horrible, and which happened because Mike and I had gone to dinner with this good friend of mine…and she’d loved him, and he’d loved her, and she’d loved us together, and it was one of those rare and impossibly good social evenings out.
And then—because those kinds of things don’t actually exist these days if you don’t take a photo and then put them up on Facebook, I awoke the following morning to discover, to my profound dismay, that my friend had put a photograph of Mike and me together up on Facebook.
And not only that, she tagged us in it.
And not only that, she’d used the caption “Lovebirds.”
A few quick words on me. Prior to meeting Mike, I was single, which I know is a given. But the reason I want to make a point of saying that is, it’s not just that I was single—it’s that I self-identified as single.
By this I mean that I’d been single a lot. I’d been on so many dates with so many men who were like, “Sara, I think you’re great, but the thing is…”
The Moth Presents All These Wonders Page 12
