The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  I say to my mother, “Listen, you wait down here.”

  I start walking up the eleven floors. They’re very long flights. It’s kind of dark.

  And I’m thinking what a roller coaster mental illness is. Not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved. It’s a sentence that you’re given, and it’s a life sentence. And there’s all the things that you have to go through: the doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction (literally and emotionally), the police coming to your house, the shame that you live with. It just goes on and on.

  It’s not like those movies like A Beautiful Mind where someone reaches out and says, “All you need is love.” You know?

  Love is a given, but it’s a war of attrition. It really is. It’s a long, endless baseball season that never, ever ends. It goes on and on. You have to have unbelievable patience and emotional fortitude to survive. That’s what wears you out.

  It kills a lot of people, and that’s why you see so many people out on the street, because their families flee (and I don’t blame them), and they become wards of the state.

  So anyway, that’s what’s going through my mind as I come up and knock on the door. My brother’s happy to see me. I talk to the doctor. And then my brother’s friend, this young, thin black man named Isaiah, who draws pictures of his life every day—he storyboards his entire existence—comes over and shows me his latest masterpiece.

  And I say, “Nice, Isaiah,” as I’m trying to deal with my brother and the doctor.

  Isaiah whispers in my ear, “Can I come, too, with you?”

  And I say, “Isaiah, listen. I’d love to take you, but it’s a blackout and I’m just gonna take Ralph, okay?”

  So we go down the stairs. We have to go down slowly, because my brother can’t see so well. He had an altercation with a very huge patient who was an ex-prisoner from Rikers Island, and the guy savagely beat him, and now my brother’s blind in one eye.

  I come outside with my brother and my mom, and of course we’ve brought him cigarettes. Now, I’m worried about the time, because it was 4:10 when the blackout happened. By now it’s around 5:00. I’m worried about the light. But my brother is in no hurry.

  So I give him a cigarette. He can’t have one cigarette, he has to have one after another after another, and he smokes them down to the very tiny butt end. And when you give him the pack, you have to open it just so. Everything according to his specifications, otherwise he will take the cigarettes out and break them.

  And that’s kind of symbolic of my relationship with him much of the time:

  I buy him cigarettes; he breaks them.

  I buy him a CD player; he rips off the cover.

  I renovate my mother’s house; he burns it down.

  We get in the car. He has to sit in the backseat, so I can see him in the mirror, because it’s precarious. I have to make sure I keep my eye on my brother, who can sometimes punch the window out of frustration.

  And I have to figure out where am I going. It’s a blackout. What are we going to do? I know he’s hungry. My mother sits to my right. She’s never driven, so she doesn’t know that much about driving. There are no stoplights.

  My mother says, “Why don’t you make a left turn?” I’m in the far-right lane.

  I say, “Mom, I can’t go over three lanes like that,” but she seems kind of oblivious.

  It’s getting later. We see the diner that we normally go to. We pull in. There’s no one in there, but it seems open. So we get out, and we walk in. The owner is this big Greek guy with a walrus mustache.

  I say, “Are you serving?”

  And he says, “Blackout. It’s a blackout!”

  My brother looks at him and goes, “I want a cheeseburger.”

  “No cheeseburger. Blackout. Coffee.”

  So my mother tries to referee the situation.

  She says, “You must have a gas stove.”

  “Pilot light electric. Coffee. No cheeseburger.”

  My brother says, “What about french fries?”

  “No. No. No.”

  My mother and my brother look at him incredulously, like, Look at this guy, what a weakling. There’s a blackout, and he folds like a cheap suit, you know?

  I’m looking at the clock. It’s getting later. I get my brother back in the car after another cigarette. We’re driving. Everything is closed. It’s like a ghost town, because people worry when there’s a blackout. They remember the blackout of 1977. The looting. The stores are closed, the restaurants are closed. Even the hair salon is closed (which is very upsetting to Ralph).

  We just keep driving and driving, and I’m going, Okay, it’s gonna get darker, and we don’t know where we’re going. Plus, I have my own family back in Brooklyn—my wife and two kids.

  So finally I see a little pizzeria on the corner, and I pull over. It looks open. I run in there, and the guy has a wood-burning oven.

  He says, “Yes, I’m open.” He’s an Italian guy, of course, so that’s good.

  We sit outside, and we order brick-oven pizza and warm soda. It takes a long time to come. And I’m looking at my mother and thinking, Wow, she’s getting older.

  And I’m looking at my brother thinking, What’s gonna happen after she’s gone? Who’s gonna take care of him?

  I’m the middle child, one of three boys, and I’m the responsible one, for good and for bad.

  I think, I’m gonna be alone with him one day, and it’s gonna just be me and him.

  And my brother looks at me, and he’s very perceptive when he’s calm. He can spot a person’s weakness with startling accuracy and speed.

  He says, “You know, you get a lot of material from me, don’t you?”

  I go, “Mmm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.”

  He goes, “Where would you be without me?”

  We have the pizza. Of course Ralph wants ice cream, but it’s all melted by then. So he has kind of a milk-shake ice-cream sandwich, which he’s happy about, and he wolfs it down.

  The sun is now setting, so I’m thinking, We’ve got to get back.

  I finally get them in the car. We drive slowly. There’s no streetlights, no stoplights. It’s starting to get dark.

  We finally make it back to this big seventeen-story, foreboding, ugly building with bars. I leave my mother in the car, and I help him in. The place is not lit, and it’s not air-conditioned anymore.

  I feel pulled in all these directions: my mother, my brother, my family in Brooklyn. But I go with my brother, help him up the eleven flights. It’s always hard to say good-bye to him, but this day it’s even harder. And so I give him a hug, I tell him I’ll see him soon.

  I come down, get my mother, and I drive on the parkway to her house in Rosedale, which is a long trip. I get her in the house and make sure the flashlights work. I check the refrigerator, and the food is actually still cold.

  We light a candle, and we talk a little bit. And I’m thinking, Well, this is how it was for thousands of years. People didn’t have electricity, you know? They had a little fire. They talked, and people invented stories.

  I get in my car, and I make my way back to Brooklyn. And I’m thinking about the fact that we imagine that we live in the light. We imagine we can foresee what’s gonna happen. We imagine we can control everything: I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that.

  But the reality is, almost all of us are just stumbling along in the dark, searching, trying to reach some kind of home, while we’re juggling all these balls and hopefully on most days keeping them afloat.

  JOHN TURTURRO made his theatrical debut when he created the title role of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, for which he won an Obie Award. Since then he has performed in numerous stage productions, including Waiting for Godot, The Bald Soprano, and Souls of Naples, for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. On Broadway he appeared in Yasmina Reza’s Life x 3 and directed an evening of one-acts called Relatively Speaking, by Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen. Turturro was n
ominated for a SAG Award for his portrayal of Howard Cosell in Monday Night Mayhem and again nominated for The Bronx Is Burning. He won an Emmy Award for his guest appearance on Monk. Turturro has performed in many films, including Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever; Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money; Robert Redford’s Quiz Show; Alison Anders’s Grace of My Heart; and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? For his lead role in Barton Fink, Turturro won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. He received the Caméra d’Or Award at Cannes for his directorial debut, Mac. Other films as director/writer include Illuminata, Romance & Cigarettes, Passione: A Musical Adventure, Fading Gigolo, and a segment in the upcoming anthology film Rio, I Love You.

  This story was told on November 9, 2015, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was State of Affairs: The Moth Members’ Show. Director: Catherine Burns.

  When I was fifteen years old, I lived for a while in a mausoleum. It was a very short while, less than a week. But it was actually an ecstatic time, this summer of honeysuckle and fireflies and stars, and the deep education that I got, being alive in there.

  I was desperately in love with a girl who was dead, and with a man who was living but psychotic. And it was the happiest time of my life.

  This is how I came to be there. I had come there from a place where I felt dead, which is my hometown of Brunswick, Georgia. Everything was gray. The skies were gray, the Spanish moss was gray. That part of coastal Georgia, everything is covered in Spanish moss. The people are covered in Spanish moss. It’s hot, and it’s slow.

  And the cicadas sing that one note. All the time. That one note. Constantly.

  It was like being buried alive.

  I was lonely, and my parents were drunks. I’d wait for them to go to sleep, and then I’d turn on the light, and stay up the whole night reading—about exploration, mostly, arctic exploration, or searching for the source of the Nile, or really anything that was about getting as far away from Glynn County, Georgia, as one could get.

  And of course, because I stayed up all night, mornings were torture to me. Glynn Academy was torture to me. My grades went into a death spiral, down through the thirties to the twenties to the teens. And I actually kind of longed for the perfection of absolute zero, but I didn’t have the stick-to-itiveness.

  So I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen, and I hitchhiked north. I got a job in New York City as a messenger, and I got to wear this really sharp tie and jacket. I loved being a civilian—I sneered at all yellow school buses.

  For a while I lived in some flops around Manhattan. Then one Saturday I went on a drug run with a friend of mine on a road trip up to New Rochelle, New York, which is a little suburb.

  But anyway, we wound up hanging out at this divey apartment full of drug dealers and derelicts. At one point I went back to the bathroom, and I saw in a back room a man sitting at an upright piano and singing an operatic aria about a dying king cobra. It was this writhing, beautiful, heartbreaking song.

  And I was mesmerized.

  He turned around after the song, and he looked at me and said, “Do you play chess?”

  His name was John Orlando. He was about thirty. If you can imagine, he kind of looked like a slender Alfred Hitchcock.

  We wound up playing chess for a week, and John’s strategy for chess was to gather all of his pieces into a kind of fortress in the rear of the board, on the left side, which he called “the west.” From there he would send his knights out on these long, gallant expeditions, from which they’d never return.

  It would take me hours to pick my way in there and find his king and kill it. And the whole time, John would be laughing hysterically. Afterwards, I could never really see the point of competitive chess. I just wanted to play what John called “chivalric chess.”

  But why was this original man living in this flophouse with drug dealers? Well, the rent was very cheap, and it was split eight ways. And when I moved in, it was split nine ways.

  I used to commute to my job down in New York City and then come back on the train to this drug den every night. I didn’t do…all that many drugs. But I did happily help to sort and clean, and it was an utterly depraved life for a fifteen-year-old.

  There was a girl my age who used to come by. She was this beautiful redhead and just exploding into her sexuality. Of course she came by for the older guys—she didn’t even notice me. But I was painfully in love with her, and just the smell of her would cripple me.

  Downstairs lived this little old lady Irene, who used to worry about me and tell me that I had to go home. She would bake me lasagna. I would tell her that I really had no home, because my parents were drunks. I loved her. I loved talking to her.

  And I loved John Orlando, who was unbalanced, and who would sit up at that piano all day long working on that opera about the Bronx Zoo, where he had once worked. He was making all of the zookeepers and all of the animals sing these arias.

  I think this opera was driving him insane, because one day I remember walking up from the train station, and John was coming toward me, and he had on this fedora.

  He didn’t really see me, and he sort of walked almost past me, and then he stopped and said, “Mr. Glow, there’s a four-ply fozy flying out of here at five o’clock. Get a line on it.”

  And then he just walked away.

  I was in love with him. I mean, I’m not gay, but this was a physical love. When I was around him, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like he was the world.

  I loved him the way that a worm loves its apple.

  And I think he loved me, too, because the drug dealers were always trying to throw me out.

  They were always saying, “John, this punk kid, he’s fifteen years old, he’s gonna draw unwanted attention.”

  And John would say to them, “No, George stays. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but George has one amazing thing about him. It’s that he doesn’t buy into anything. He just floats through life. I want to see what he’s going to buy into. He stays.”

  So they threw us both out.

  And then we had nowhere to go. We were homeless, and I wasn’t going to get paid for a week, and John never had any money. But he said that there were these mausoleums in the back of the local graveyard that were in disrepair. So we packed up some blankets and some pillows and some wine, and we went and broke into one of these mausoleums.

  It had two marble shelves on either side, and under one was the mortal remains of some man, and under the other was his wife. John and I sort of made our beds on these marble shelves, and we felt so safe there. The caretaker was old and never came around at night. And the police never would go into that graveyard at all.

  We wandered around and got to know our neighbors. There was a dead nineteen-year-old girl buried there. She died in 1928, and her name was Hazel Ash.

  Her inscription read: SHE LIVED FOR POETRY.

  I immediately forgot the sexy redheaded girl, and when we went back to the mausoleum, I said to John, “We have to write poems for Hazel Ash tonight.”

  He wrote these horrible, disgusting, obscene verses. I had to tell him to shut up. He just laughed at me, and his laugh echoed in that mausoleum.

  People ask me if it was spooky in there, and, you know, it really wasn’t spooky to me. I will say that if you don’t like spiders, you would not have liked living there. And I will also say it was clammy and gray and lifeless, and I probably would have been scared out of my wits if John Orlando hadn’t been with me.

  But he was with me every second, because he wouldn’t spend a moment in that graveyard alone. So if I went out at night to take a leak, he would come shuffling out after me, and sort of stand behind me. And in the morning, when I got up bright and early and put on my jacket and tie and went to my job, he went out of the graveyard with me. And then when I came back on the train that night and walked up to the graveyard, he was waiting there by the fence.


  We’d always be hungry. We were hungry to the point that we had to do something. John had a friend, and we walked to the friend’s house. And as we walked, we made up a poem about John’s friend. When we got to his house, we recited the poem to the man, who in exchange gave us supper and a few dollars.

  Later, when John and I were walking home to the graveyard, John said to me, “Now you’re a professional writer.”

  I said, “Oh, come on, John. He just gave us dinner and five bucks.”

  John said, “That’s what the hooker said. You’re a pro.”

  And I was so proud. I had a little piece of pie that I saved for Hazel Ash, and I put it on her gravestone. Then John and I went into the mausoleum, and he sang his songs of the elephants all night. Every now and then, he would let out these amazing farts that he called “El Destructos,” and we would have to evacuate the mausoleum.

  Then the sprinklers came on in the middle of the night, and we ran around buck naked under the sprinklers. And I was so happy that my scalp ached.

  John saw this, and he said, “You know, you’re buying into this, aren’t you?”

  I said, “Into what?”

  He said, “Living in a graveyard.”

  And I laughed, but I wasn’t buying into that. I was buying into being with somebody who turned every moment of his life into art.

  Then, a few days later, I was on my way home from work, coming up the graveyard lawn, and I saw that our mausoleum’s door had a brand-new lock.

  I immediately turned and ran.

  I went to Irene’s house, and she said to me, “So now you have to go home.”

  I said, “I can’t go home until we find John.”

  So I went looking for John every day. About two weeks went by, and then one Sunday morning someone came to get us and said that John was at the chapel on Mayflower Avenue and that he was singing songs about zoo life in the middle of the Mass.

  I ran as fast as I could, and when I got there, they were putting John into a police car and taking him to the mental hospital (from where I don’t think he ever came out, as far as I know).