The late Sheikh Ezzedin Hosseini (far left) and Abdullah Mohtadi (far right ) with other Komala party members, circa 1980. Hosseini, a spiritual leader in Mahabad, was a principle Kurdish negotiator and supported by the Komala. (Photo via)

Iran isn't a country that seems too concerned with the rights of its people. Or its animals, for that matter. And what with the country's recent elections and the ousting of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by president-elect Hassan Rouhani, those rights violations have attracted a fair share of international media attention lately. However, there's one issue that the spotlight seems to have missed: that of Iran's ethnic minorities.    

Iran's Kurdish community (like most Kurdish communities) has, through the years, suffered some pretty hefty human rights violations, ranging from summary arrests of peaceful political activists to executions without a fair trial. Abdullah Mohtadi is the leader of Komala, the Kurdish branch of the Communist Party of Iran, which is illegal under Sharia law. I called him up to get a perspective of how Iran's most persecuted ethnic minority feels about today's political climate in Iran. 

Sheikh Ezzedin Hosseini (left) and Abdullah Mohtadi (right) shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. (Photo via)

VICE: Hi Mr Mohtadi. So, do you consider Rohani winning the election a step towards democratic progress?
Abdullah Mohtadi: The whole structure of the Iranian constitution and its laws are not favourable to democratic change. Khamenei still has the final word as the Supreme Leader of Iran. The people who voted for Rohani are certainly for change, but whether he can deliver it or not is something else. I greatly doubt it.

Western media portrays Rohani as a "moderate reformist". What do you think of that?
Rohani has never been a reformist, and he has never claimed to be one – never. What he claims to be is moderate. I’m sure Khamenei will oppose any serious and real change because he's not for a genuine rapprochement with the West – he thinks democratic values are corrupt Western values.

What did you think of the Iranian media coverage during the elections?
Iranian media is strictly controlled by the government. Until recently, Iranian media has portrayed Kurds as "enemies of god" – agents of the United States, Israel and cruel terrorists, which is totally wrong. In fact, it was the Iranian regime who first attacked Kurdistan when Kurds demanded their rights. So we need a real change in the attitude of the Iranian media.

So what's the future for Kurds in Iran, currently?
No government can ignore the Kurdish issue – the future of democracy depends on it.

I read that your party, the Komalah, was considered illegal under Sharia law. Is that still the case?
It is, like almost every political party in Kurdish Iran. We were launched in 1969, then during the time of the Shah we stayed underground and took part in the revolution. Shortly afterwards, we and the other main Kurdish party, KDPI, were both made illegal.

KomalaCamp, Near Soulaimani City, Iraq. 2000. (Photo via)

What are your party’s priorities?
We're for a democratic, secular and federal Iran. We strongly believe in the separation between state and religion, and we are also for a system where every ethnic group – Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis – can have self-rule, governing their local and regional affairs through elected bodies. We believe in the importance of social, political and civil movements in a broad coalition to bring about powerful change in Iran, for labour, women’s and students’ movements and ethnic minorities.

Does your party believe in establishing a larger, cross-border Kurdistan?
This isn't part of our program – either to succeed from Iran or to make a political entity with any other section of Kurdistan outside Iran. What we ask and fight for is a democratic Iran, where the rights and lives of Kurds and other minorities are respected by the constitution.

How do you feel about Iran’s relationship with Syria and other neighbouring countries?
We are strongly against the Islamic republic’s foreign policies towards its neighbours in exporting the "Islamic Revolution" to the world by harbouring and protecting terrorists in the region. So we are against any intervention in Syria. Syria’s people must decide their own fate and we support them in their fight.

Can you comment on Iran’s nuclear program?
We are really suspicious of it. It's not in the interests of the Iranian people to pursue such programs. In fact, it is harmful. We understand the concerns of the international community. But in terms of exerting political pressure and sanctions, the human rights issues cannot be pushed aside.

A large percentage of Kurds chose to boycott the presidential elections. Why?
It wasn't out of indifference, but a ”protest vote” because they didn’t believe that they could bring about change. Those who voted for Rohani don’t hold him in high regard – he was just the best out of a bad selection.

Did you vote in the recent presidential elections?
No, I didn’t. It's not enough to have the right to vote. You’ve got to be able to produce your own candidates, and right now there is no such opportunity for anyone outside the narrow ruling clique. They even disqualified important figures of their own system. There is no political freedom in Iran, there are no genuine political parties in Iran. There is no freedom of speech. There is no freedom of assembly or press. So how do you expect fair elections in Iran? There is no chance.

Follow Christine on Twitter: @ChristineCocoJ

Enjoy reading about the problems facing the Kurdish people? Try these:

Could the Turkish Uprising Be a Breakthrough for the Country's Kurds?

Meet the YPG, the Kurdish Militia that Doesn't Want Help From Anyone

Is Kurdistan Going to Escape the Clutches of Iraq?

Watch - Female Fighters of Kurdistan

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. With the assistance of my friends at the @YesYoureRacist Twitter account, I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- A small company based out of the always-tolerant, pro-government state of Idaho has begun selling ammunition as a “deterrent” to “strike fear into the hearts of those bent upon hate, violence and murder,” according to their website. Who could it be that’s bent upon hate, violence, and murder? Could it be paranoid shut-ins who sell bullets on the internet? No, of course not! That would be “Islamists.” The deterrent in question is bullets coated with pork.

Jihawg Ammo, the ammunition company in question, describes its product as “certified 'Haraam' or unclean. According to the belief system of the radical Islamist becoming 'unclean' during Jihad will prevent their attaining entrance into heaven. Jihawg Ammo is a natural deterrent to radical and suicidal acts of violence.”

The owners of Jihawg—whose clever slogan is “Peace by Pork”—claim that just owning the bullets will prevent Islamic radicals from… doing something, I’m not sure what. They aren’t really explicit about what the threat is, other than it is definitely from Muslims and their dreaded Sharia law. Last time I checked, a gun is useless against a series of directives. 

Are they expecting a bunch of al-Qaeda members to engage in armed combat on the mainland of the United States as though this were a re-remake of Red Dawn? A gun is fairly useless if your enemy is operating in secret and not wearing a uniform. You have to know who the bad guy is to make a projectile weapon work. That’s one of the primary rules of combat. I guess these bullets will really scare President Obama when personally comes to take your rifles away, since he’s a Muslim, right?

Maybe I’m not seeing the benefit of this clearly. Maybe next time one of these patriots is at the gym and he sees a brown face leaving a duffel bag on the floor, he can scream, “I have a gun filled with ham! Disable your IED immediately!” and said brown face will comply. This is not necessarily racist, since it's more concerned with a religion than an ethnic group (shoutout to the people who have already sent me "Islam is not a race" emails) so I give this a 4, but if this were a column called "This Week in Islamophobia," I'd have to invent a new rating just for how stupid this is.

For the record, their “Porcine Coating” is “pattern pending,” so hurry up and rip these guys off! They don’t even know what a “patent” is!

 - The Trayvon Martin trial started this week, and the big story coming out of those proceedings is that while being stalked by his eventual killer George Zimmerman, Martin told Rachel Jeantel over the phone that he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.”

The usual right-wing pundits pounced as soon as they could. Their blessed outrage machine was cranking out zingers implying that Martin and Jeantel are racists, while the left-wing media found inexplicable ways to somehow claim that Trayvon’s use of the word was not “racial” or “offensive.”

This column has always been about exposing America’s lie that we are in some sort of “post-racial harmony” era because of Barack Obama’s ascendance to the White House. Much has changed for the better in this country, but so much is worse, primarily because of the instant, archivable forms of communication offered by modern technology (the internet, cell phones, etc.)

No one can keep their hatred a secret they way they used to, as illustrated by the ten inane tweets I compiled below, but this is also shown by Martin's use of a racial slur. Even if the right-wing media is attempting to use this quote as a way to demean Martin in death, they are right that what he said was wrong. I have no interest in joining with any pundit who thinks that calling someone a “cracker” is OK. I believe that Zimmerman should be punished for killing an unarmed child, but the sort of racial mistrust and enmity that both parties displayed in this tragedy is exactly how we got to this point in the first place.RACIST

- A far “weightier” topic than Trayvon Martin is Paula Deen, the woman who perfected the “Hobo Burger” and also the use of racial slurs. Her book sales are still strong, even after her racism got revealed and a cruise she’s sponsoring is also expected to see a glut of ticket sales. When I attempted to reach her for comment, Ms. Deen screamed, “What do I have to do to get people to leave me alone? Tell the world I put baby scrotums in my peach cobbler?!”

Then she hung up. 3

Photo by Flickr User GageSkidmore

- Ann Coulter, who holds the Guinness Book of World Record title for “World’s Longest Neck,” receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for her latest assertion, on Fox News, that the immigration bill that recently passed the US Senate is merely a ploy by the Democratic Party to get “30 million new voters.” After explaining that voters in majority Republican states are “outbreeding” their liberal counterparts, like it's some kind of competition to see which political party has the strongest sperm, she proceeded to state that she believes that every illegal immigrant who is "amnestied" will magically vote for Democrats. That's a major reason why she wants to stop this bill from passing the House of Representatives.

Treating immigrants from South America, Mexico, and elsewhere as sheep who blindly follow one party (rather than people who, like many Americans, don't support Republican policies because they are insane and dangerous) is a sign that you don't respect their intelligence. Of course, we've already seen conservatives do that very thing. 6

@YesYoureRacist’s Ten Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @mrfatcunt: I aint racist! But why do 99.9% of crimes, especially knife crimes involve black people?

9. @chandylarr: From my experience, black women are the worst drivers. #notracist

8. @mrsolodolo1010: I am not racist, but to me, it seems that a city that is highly populated with minorities, turns into a shithole. #sorry

7. @nroeder: obama is from kenya, im from america.. im more qualified to be president than he is. stupid ni**er.

6. @DontEvenLiftBro: I'm not racist but f*ck do I hate Chinese people.... Like.... Get some respect for personal space and common sense

5. @assshhh___: I'm not racist but black people should be with black people and white people should be with white people.

4. @NecyGee: I'm not racist but I hate older Mexican men

3. @lkjhgfdewefrtyuI: SWEAR SUADI ARABIANS DON'T KNOW HOW TO ACT IN PUBLIC IM NOT RACIST BUT JESUS LEARN HOW TO FUNCTION AND TIP YOUR WAITOR

2. @WeaverFever69: I have blonde hair and blue eyes. I'm not racist but I am part of the master race. Have sex with me ladies.

1. @exsistings: im not racist but black people talking about ppl being racist is what makes ppl racist

Last Week in Racism: Paula Deen Is Exhausted from Being So Racist All the Time

@dave_schilling

"Have you ever looked up at the sky on a clear, star-filled night and wondered at the awesome magnitude of the universe… and asked yourself: who and what am I; where do I come from and where am I going? And have you ever considered the possibility that life—life in any form—may exist out there among the stars? If that thought stimulates your mind as well as your imagination—you may be interested in seeing a very unusual publication called OMNI, the newest and most original magazine in America today."

–Bob Guccione, 1983

The warehouse that contains the biggest OMNI magazine collection in the world is in New Jersey. It's the most nondescript building you could imagine. Actually, it's somehow more than nondescript; its appearance and contents are so diametrically opposed that the building veers into a negative space of visual mundacity. When I visited, it was raining. The beige buildings peeling along the I-95 were streaked with mold and dust. I pulled my rental car into a nearly empty parking lot and ran through the rain toward the building, which supposedly held the sacred relics of the greatest science magazine that ever was.

A few months ago, I wrote an article about OMNI. The magazine’s been out of print for 15 years, and you're lucky if you can even find a solitary old copy in a thrift store. But if you hit upon a trove of issues, like I did as a teenager rifling through an estate sale, and if you're the right kind of person, OMNI will blow your mind. You'll find that its voice is as radically relevant now as it was in its heyday of the 1980s. A gonzo blend of science and science fiction, it was sexy, irreverent, scarily prescient—I never imagined when I was investigating its history that I'd find myself elbow-deep in the biggest OMNI collection in the world. But that's the internet for you.

When I was given, offhandedly, in an email, a shot at poking through this collection, I'd imagined long tables stacked with documents and boxes brimming with unpublished science-fiction gems. I was told it was an archive, and, to me, the word "archive" implied something academic, a facility staffed by white-gloved attendants. Instead, the OMNI archive is a nebulous assortment of filing cabinets, piles of paintings, folders haphazardly stuffed with printing acetates and doodles—all strewn about a medical-supply sales office in Englewood, New Jersey. There are attendants, but they aren't librarians; they're employees of Jeremy Frommer, a financier and fast-talking entrepreneur who came upon the collection accidentally, when a storage locker he bought on a whim last November happened to contain a sizable chunk of the estate of Bob Guccione, lord and master of the Penthouse empire and, less famously, publisher of OMNI magazine.

Guccione, if he is remembered at all, is usually mythologized as a kitsch tycoon dripping with gold chains, shirt open practically to his waist. His 27,000-square-foot home in Manhattan was the largest private residence in the city. He collected Van Gogh and Picasso paintings and filled his homes with busts of Caesar, Napoleonic sphinxes, and hand-molded brick shipped from Italy. He was a recluse, by some accounts. He shot the early Penthouse pictorials himself. And he loved science fiction. Jane Homlish, Bob's personal assistant for 37 years, who I met in Englewood, explained it to me this way: "He always said that people with genius minds—and his mind was established as genius—were always as fascinated with sex as they were science."

Bob Guccione died in 2010, by which point OMNI magazine was long gone—but in Englewood, they both live on. Sheet after sheet of slides are being dusted off, examined, and photographed. Original cover artwork from the magazine is being hunted down. Paintings are being uncrated. People like me are being brought in, simply to marvel at the goods. In one afternoon, I found cover drafts with greasy pencil notations, thousands of 35-mm slides, large-format chromes, magazines bundled with stapled paperwork, production materials, and untold amounts of photos and artwork. It's chaos. Everything is still being fussed through and tossed around; after his storage unit mother lode, Jeremy got the bug, and the OMNI collection keeps growing. He has but one goal: to own the most complete collection in the world of ephemera relating to this largely forgotten magazine. "I don't think there is anything like this collection," Jeremy told me. "I don't even think it exists for a specific magazine, let alone the coolest geek sci-fi magazine of the 80s and 90s."

Archival art from OMNI.

Like Penthouse, which was forced to scrap its trademark soft-focus nudie spreads for hardcore sex acts in the 1990s, OMNI's glory days faded with the rise of the internet. It went out of print in 1995, after a short stint as an online magazine. According to Dark Empire, a hefty biography of Bob Guccione authored by his son, which I discovered (along with an equally sizable stack of rejection letters from publishers) in Jeremy's archive, the magazine launched in 1978 and was shuttered 18 years later, after racking up cumulative losses of over $80 million. Of course, an 18-year print run is nothing to sneer at, but OMNI was bankrolled by a fountain of cash generated by Penthouse. And by bankrolled, I mean bankrolled: the most shocking thing I found in Jeremy's filing cabinets wasn't the Penthouse negatives but stacks of magazines annotated with invoices detailing how much each contributor was paid. For the issue dated November 1989, Guccione's company, General Media Incorporated, spent $16,843.65 on illustrations—solar sails, airbrushed mazes, a silhouette of Neptune pressed up against an inky sky. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that this sum eclipses the entire monthly operating budgets of many modern magazines.

This is because Bob loved art. His mansions in Manhattan and on the Hudson river were both filled with old masters and paintings by the hundreds of artists he tapped to illustrate OMNI and Penthouse. "Design was everything for Bob," Jane said. No matter if they were selecting pictorials for Penthouse or laying out the sleek, futuristic pages of OMNI, it was the same. "I knew in the end, we would thinking about that vertical, that horizontal, we'd be thinking about that perfect placement, we'd be thinking about design, color, light." When Guccione's empire crumbled—General Media went bankrupt in 2003—his personal assets were liquidated to pay off debts. The Van Goghs, Modiglianis, Picassos, and Renoirs went to the auction house; the rest of the artworks—sexy pictures and science fiction landscapes alike—were scattered to the wind.

That is, until Jeremy's storage locker windfall. Although OMNI magazine published award-winning science journalism and canonical sci-fi (William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George R. R. Martin were regular contributors), it's the artwork that's taking center stage in the archives now. It's everywhere: propped up against walls, on the light-table, falling off the shelves. Very soon, all of this stuff will be leaving Englewood. Like a Hydra whose snarling heads grow back twofold with every swipe of the sword, OMNI is returning with a vengeance. An exhibition of its art is in the works, some of which I saw: original lithographs and paintings from the magazine, artworks that Jeremy et al. have been tracking down at huge cost. The warehouse now stashes 53 surrealistic oils and fantasy landscapes and contains works by Rafal Olbinski, Robert Kittila, Jon Berkey, Tsuneo Sanda, and Bruce Jensen. Coming up: a book of this collected artwork, released by Powerhouse Books; a panel at the Toronto Fan Expo; and eventually booths at conventions around the country.

Jeremy told me, as I left the warehouse, that fate had brought me there. That I was among only a few dozen people in the world to see this stuff. That I should go to Toronto with them. That this new OMNI could use someone like me; that I could tell their story, if I wanted. So here it is, and here I am, without warning, mixed up in it. OMNI really was the greatest science magazine of all time, not in spite of, but perhaps because it was published by a complex, misunderstood, visionary lothario, a man who, cocooned in his country estate, isolated from the world, surrounded by wealth and sex, had the luxury to speculate wildly about the future. Guccione didn't get to choose what would happen to his vision after he died—nobody does, not even millionaires—but it remains, in bits and pieces, in the hands of its coincidental inheritor. Maybe it can rise again. First in New Jersey. Then to the stars.

Claire Evans plays in a band called YACHT and writes about science, mostly.

Here's some more stuff about science, fiction, and science fiction:

Science Fiction's Hidden Hero

We Spoke to the Guy Who Wrote the Real Screenplay for 'Argo'

'A Puzzle' by Stanisław Lem

I’ve been bowling since I was a kid. But the idea of a professional bowler always seemed ridiculous to me. You roll the ball down the lane and knock some pins over. How could anyone get paid for that? 

The archetypal bowler in my mind was always Bill Murray as Ernie McCracken in Kingpin. Even though Ernie’s a fictional character, I know there are crazier people out there than him. Kingpin must have influenced director Sean Dunne, because he went out and found a real-life weirdo who's more nuts, philandering, and balding than Ernie on his wildest day.

Rocky Salemmo is the star of Dunne’s short documentary The Bowler, but it’s his hustling, hooking, and failures that take center stage. It’s hard to believe that this greasy sleezebag he has no qualms owning up to his failures. Watching Rocky cruise through his days talking about backroom blowjobs and ditching debts by sneaking out of bathroom windows is deceptively charming. The guy is the definition of scumbag. But at the same time, you have to respect his hustle.

Sean Dunne is a New York based documentary filmmaker with a number of award-winning shorts under his belt including American Juggalos, The Archive, and others. His first feature documentary Oxyana premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, where he won Best New Director and garnered a special jury mention for the film. Oxyana depicts the scourge of Oxycontin on a small West Virginia mining town. It’s a fucked and an incredibly powerful portrait of the failures of the American Dream. Watch that film at Oxyana.com starting July 1st. More of Sean’s work can be seen at Very Ape Productions.

I caught up with Sean and asked him a few questions about The Bowler and his creative process. Check it out below.

VICE: All of your documentaries follow peculiar, but emblematic American characters including Juggalos, a record collector, musicians, druggies, etc... What's your process for finding your subjects?
Sean Dunne: It varies from film to film. I'm drawn to a certain type of stripped down honesty that seems to be more plentiful on the fringes of society. So if there were a process, it starts with simply opening myself up to the world, going outside my comfort zone, and just listening. For me, that's when the most inspirational stuff happens. If something or someone captures my attention and the ideas start flowing, then I'll come back with the camera. It's natural. I wouldn't want to force that part.

How do you get these people to open up to you, especially as a white New York filmmaker who maybe isn't in with any of the crowds you depict?
We keep a really mellow vibe when we're shooting, we don't really make a big deal about it or go out of our way to make our subjects feel they are under the microscope. It's a casual and simple approach and my subjects seem to respond well to that. I learned a lot from listening to Howard Stern. The way he interviews people really intrigued and influenced me. It's a give and take. If you want people to open up you have to earn it, not expect it.

How long did you hang out with Rocky before you knew you could find a compelling story in him?  
It was love at first sight. I had this idea for a short doc called The Bowler about the type of dude I used to see at the bowling alley where I grew up. I had a pretty fleshed out vision for what I wanted it to look like and feel like, but I didn't have my subject. As a total shot in the dark, I put word out to a few people that I was looking for one of these old school, New York, Bowling Alley rats. A couple weeks later I got a call from my boy Stone Roberts saying that he had hired a limo driver to take his friends to a concert and the driver wouldn't shut the fuck up about all his bowling exploits. Seemed about right. We arranged to meet at The Gutter in Williamsburg a couple days later. The second Rocky walked in the door I knew we had our guy. We partied hard that night and he hustled my ass for $100 in bowling. We shot the film a week later.

Is there a story you wish you could've told, but couldn't get the access? 
Rocky was an open book. His only concerns were that the IRS would come after him for talking about how much money he had won. It struck me as advanced thinking for someone who doesn't really concern himself with consequences. While making Oxyana we had a good lead on an interview with a police officer that we understood was struggling with prescription pill abuse. It would have been a courageous and potentially career threatening move for him to speak to us, so I suppose he thought better of it. I really wanted that one. Unfortunately, down in southern West Virginia, we didn't have to look far to find a story equally as harrowing and compelling.

What are you working on now?
We are entering into the world of online sex shows and the women who make their livings performing them. It's called Cam Girlz. We're shooting that now. It's a fascinating online subculture that offers so many insights into real world issues like sex, empowerment, exploitation, independence, morality, and vibrator preference.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Boobie'

Photo by Keith Allison, via Flickr

If you are a die-hard Boston sports fan, chances are you're relieved this week is over. The cavalcade of bad news might finally end. The heartbreak started on Sunday with the announcement that Doc Rivers, head coach for the Boston Celtics, was leaving for the Los Angeles Clippers. It only got worse as reports surfaced that star players Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett were being traded to the Brooklyn Nets. Rivers, Pierce, and Garnett were all fan favorites who were instrumental in leading the storied Celts to their first title in 22 years. Things got worse the following night when the Boston Bruins (who won the Stanley Cup in 2011 after a near 40-year draught), kept up a time-honored Boston sports tradition and choked at the last second of the big game—resulting in a stunning Stanley Cup Finals loss to the Chicago Blackhawks. All of this was happening while (now former) New England Patriots star tight end Aaron Hernandez was arrested and charged with the murder of his friend, semi-pro football player Odin Llyod. He's also being investigated for a double homocide that happened last summer.

Hernandez was arraigned Wednesday morning, and the Patriots immediately released him from his $40-million-dollar contract. The Pats will be still be good this coming season, but after spy-gate (when their coach was fined for recording other teams' practices, Uggs-gate (when their pretty boy quarterback was photographed wearing the lamest footwear imaginable), and now Tebow-time (when the team acquired the most annoying player in the league) the Pats seem a shadow of their dyanstic dominance of last decade. The Boston Red Sox are currently in 1st place, but they have plenty of time to blow it. Indeed it seems that many Beantown fans (a term no one from Boston actually uses) have been taken back to a gloomy time when Boston sports teams always lost. Granted the Bruins made it to the finals and will likely continue to be OK next season, but its their futility in clutch moments that matters.

To me the descent into sports mediocrity bodes well for the city. We might be taken back to a golden time when Boston was cool and no one really cared about sports. 

With all four major sports teams in Boston winning multiple championships over the course of the last decade (I'm not even going to include the New England Revolution, since nobody else does), it's hard to remember a time when local sports weren't the talk of the town. A walk around the city today makes it even harder to remember when there were more interesting and exciting things happening in the city than sitting in a crowded, crappy bar in front of a TV screen watching overpaid out-of-state athletes play with their respective balls while bellyaching to the townie next to you about gentrification. Besides a few huge championships for the Celtics in the early 80s, many local sports fans glumly sat in silence while bitterly sipping a perpetually half-empty bottle for 20 years.  

Meanwhile, when sports were terrible in Boston, there were groundbreaking comedy and music scenes bubbling up throughout the city and in neighboring Cambridge. Comedians such as Louis CK, David Cross, Steven Wright, and scores of others got their start during the mid-to-late 80s Boston comedy boom. Propelled by pioneer rock radio stations WBCN and WFNX, Boston was at one time a mecca for live music. On any night of the week, dozens upon dozens of nightclubs throughout the city swelled with rowdy revelers who got to see bands like the Cars, the Lemonheads, and the Pixies get their starts in intimate venues like The Rat or TT The Bear's alongside a seminal and respected punk and indie scene. A string of nightclubs and discos were also at the height of their popularity back then and cologned jabronis felt free to act rapey while blowing lines until they could find an open Dunkin' Donuts for the drive back to Saugus.

Basically, there was something cool for you to do no matter what you were into, especially if you hated sports. Ever since the Sox broke the curse and the Pats started winning and the Celts and Bruins made it to the finals semi-reliably, these party-killing words infected so many, many flat-screen-laden bars:

"The game's on."

While the same Atlantic waters also flow through the veins of New York and Philadelphia fans, Boston, to its credit, easily has the most irascibly passionate and loyal sports fans in the country. It is a long and indisputable part of the city's history. However, the fans are also the most irrationally sore losers in sports history. (I was caught in a crowd of dejected Sox fans during Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series who were chanting "Yankees Suck!" even after the Red Sox gave up the lead and lost in an agonizing extra inning.) Even with that flaw, Boston teams and their fans were generally revered and respected nationwide. The teams (other than the Celts) were plucky underdogs you knew were going to lose but you had to cheer them on because you couldn't believe they even made it that far to begin with. Soon enough as the teams began winning championships and the fans became even cockier and unrepentant about it, the rest of the country finally saw Boston's hubris peeking out. 

Even more inexplicable was how the line between punks and jocks blurred in the late 90s. Kenmore Square was long a battleground between the patrons of Fenway Park and the punk club The Rathskeller. Fenway's famed left field wall, The Green Monster, almost served as a sort of Berlin Wall seperating the two cultural factions. But as sports took Boston over, and with the help of bro-punk bands like Dropkick Murphy's, you began seeing undercover looking Sullys in Red Sox jerseys and scaly caps pogoing around in the Rat basement while neon green mohawks burst out from under navy blue Red Sox caps on Yawkey Way heading to a Sox game. The high school jock/punk rivalry was as longstanding and bitter as the Red Sox vs the Yankees or Celtics vs Lakers. Whenever I would hear someone yell, "HEY FREAK!" at me in the hallway at school, it was never followed up with, "I got fahkin bleacha seats against the Orioles this weekend, you in?" To give you an idea of how absolutely lame the Boston music scene has become, Anngelle Wood, who now runs The Rock N Roll Rumble, Boston's long-running annual competition for young local bands, had this to say about the Boston Police routinely harassing and shutting down clandestine venues around the city, in the wake of Boston turning into a massively stale sports bar. It is also humorous to mention that many fans have long said that the Rumble was a curse for whichever band won that year. Move over curse of the Bambino.

As Boston makes the painful realization that its teams might suck again, perhaps they will also realize how many cool and exciting things used to happen in the city when there was hardly ever a post-season to get worked up about. While it is sad to see people feel like "winners" based on other people's accomplishments, there is nothing sadder than watching losers pin their hopes onto other losers. Nobody wants to be Providence. 

@JohnLiam

More about Boston's storied past:

Snitch on Snitch on Snitch: The Whitey Bulger Trial

South Boston Is Too Ugly for Reality TV

The First Chain of Strength Interview in 20 Years Is Mostly About Clothes

 

In 2010, cancer-stricken millionaire Forrest Fenn buried a chest containing three million dollars worth of treasure somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe. Clues to the chest’s whereabouts, the 79-year-old states, are hidden in the text of a memoir and poem he published that same year. Thousands have searched, to no avail. “The treasure is still out there,” Fenn insists.  

“There’s something about the sight of massive amounts of gold that really gets to you,” renowned thriller writer Douglas Preston mused over the phone. A long-time friend of Fenn’s, Preston saw the treasure before it was hidden. “When you open the lid... it was all thrown in willy-nilly, just these huge heaps of massive gold coins, gold nuggets the size of hens eggs, jewels, gold bracelets, gold ornaments from South America, and everything glittering in the light.”

I called Fenn at his home in New Mexico to request an interview. I imagined him with the warm, expansive voice that accompanies a nod and a firm handshake. Instead his molasses Texas drawl came out surly. I could hear the tightness of his jaw. I could hear him squinting. He sounded hounded. It was obvious that his plan had taken on a life of its own and begun to oppress him. He agreed to the interview and hung up.  The next day he wrote to cancel. He claimed he was “worn out,” but that I could ask him questions via email. He also sent me the contact information for some of his friends.

At the top of Fenn’s list was Dal Neitzel. Dal is the curator of a popular blog about the Fenn treasure and a master of what he likes to call “maritime salvage and exploration.” I gave Dal a call at his home in Washington. We spoke first of his other expeditions: recovering ships from the 1400s through the 1900s all over the world.

“When you’re diving down there,” he explained. “You’re coming across real folks. You would run across a skeleton and there would be a sabre still attached to what would be the waist by a leather belt. The coins that were in this sailor’s pocket were laying down there in the sand right where his pocket would have been.”

“How do those experiences compare to looking for Forrest’s treasure?” I asked.

“There is a great deal of caution and officiality about search and salvage operations, but searching for Forrest’s treasure is just plain fun. Everybody in the whole universe has got an opinion about it. Sit down for a beer with other searchers and you’ll be there for hours.”

“What’s the best interpretation of the poem you’ve heard so far?” 

“There are people on the blog that look at the poem in ways it never would have occurred to me was possible. For instance, there are people that deal in numerology, and so they attach numbers to everything. And, you say to yourself, ‘That numerology stuff is crazy!’ and then you look at the results they come up with, and you say, ‘My goodness! There must be something in it!’  There are other people who turn everything into anagrams. The poem at its base is so general, there are thousands of places in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe that can fit it. But, once you dig into the poem, you see how deep the poem can be, and how cryptic the poem really is.”

“I heard you’re searching in Wyoming now. Have you given up on New Mexico?”

“I think it’s too soon to say Dal’s given up on anything. If the clues led me to the moon, I’d have a look at it!”

With a healthy dose of Dal’s optimism working its way through my brain and a new metal detector folded up in my carry-on, I boarded a flight to Santa Fe.

New Mexico’s capital was brimming with like-minded folks. “At least 1/6 of the people you see in this city are here for the treasure,” Joel LeCuyer explained. Joel manned the counter at Collected Works Bookstore, the sole distributer of Forrest Fenn’s memoir The Thrill of the Chase.

“Could this whole treasure thing just be a ruse to sell more books?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” he admitted. “But, I can tell you that Forrest isn’t getting any money from it. The way it’s set up, as the printers, we take most of the profit and the rest is donated to people who can’t afford cancer treatment.”

“So, what kind of people buy this thing?” I asked.

“Mostly crazy people,” Joel confided. “I mean, the dude has stalkers. He has a police escort with him. People have been parking outside his house and following him to the grocery store. Someone even dug up his parents’ graves.”

We talked a while longer, and Joel passed along some tips about where to look for the treasure.  He sent me off the same way that nearly all the people who assisted me would: “If you find it, just remember who helped you.”

That night, I pulled out The Thrill of the Chase, a thin, hardcover volume filled with black and white photographs of the author’s life. I began reading about Fenn’s Tom Sawyer childhood, hunting and fishing—his courtship of the beautiful Peggy Jean Proctor, his future wife - his experiences as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, having been shot down twice. After the war, Fenn writes briefly about starting the art dealership that would make him a multi-millionaire. Conspicuously absent from the book was his time as a maverick archeologist, and the massive case the FBI has open against him for grave robbing. Eventually, Forrest introduces the treasure poem I’ve read so many times, I have it memorized:

 As I have gone alone in there
And with my treasures bold,
I can keep my secret where,
And hint of riches new and old.

 Begin it where warm waters halt
And take it in the canyon down,
Not far, but too far to walk,
Put in below the home of Brown.

 From there it’s no place for the meek,
The end is ever drawing nigh;
There’ll be no paddle up your creek,
Just heavy loads and water high.

If you’ve been wise and found the blaze,
Look quickly down, your quest to cease,
But tarry scant with marvel gaze,
Just take the chest and go in peace.

So why is it that I must go
And leave my trove for all to seek?
The answers I already know,
I’ve done it tired, and now I’m weak.

So hear me all and listen good,
Your effort will be worth the cold.
If you are brave and in the wood
I give you title to the gold.

The next morning, I ate pancakes at a diner in Taos with a childhood friend of mine who had driven in from San Diego. I had written to him about my plans and he had responded in his usual deadpan:

I could offer my services in wilderness survival for a cut of the gold. I'll bring a rifle and enough ammo to protect us from being devoured by the many bears that I assume there will be. We'll also need a compass, so keep that in mind. (Cost of the compass comes from your portion of the gold.)

Your potential treasure hunting partner and eventual betrayer,

Luke

The table disappeared under our maps and notebooks as we strategized. For the first day out, we settled on a location up near the Colorado border. A discussion with treasure hunters J.D. Noble and Michelle LaBounty made us think that line “worth the cold” could mean the chest was behind a waterfall we would have to plunge into. We settled on Placer Creek Falls after discovering that “Placer” translates into “Gold is here.”  The warm water halting could be explained by the merging of a warm water and a cold water river upstream. The united river travels through a canyon before becoming a shallow creek as it nears the falls. There would be no paddle up a scrawny creek like that. We decided that “Home of Brown” could refer to Brown Trout, as the area was considered good fishing for that particular species. As an added bonus, the place was strewn with abandoned mining equipment, which was our “hint of riches new and old.” 

We spent a glorious day following the creek, scrambling over barbed wire, climbing rocks, dodging snakes, even waging a snowball fight with the contents of a die-hard snow drift. We stormed the falls like heroes. At the summit stood a strange, jagged rock formation, covered in orange lichen—enough of a blaze to get our hearts pounding. We combed that area on our hands and knees for hours and came up with nothing. “Well, if it’s not here, it damn well should be!” we exclaimed to console ourselves. Every day was a variation of that theme—a series of rambling adventures that occurred only because a man we had never met got cancer and began to contemplate his mortality.

The Thrill of the Chase is filled with end-of-life meditations on oblivion.

Fenn writes:

“Sooner or later each of us will be nothing but the leftovers of history or an asterisk in a book that was never written.”

“Is it fair that no one recalls where those brave French soldiers fell and are now interred in that remote jungle clearing, hidden from life for a million sunsets?”

“They all really said the same thing: ‘Look at me, I’m somebody; please don’t forget.’  So of course we forgot.”

In the chest that we didn’t find is a copy of Fenn’s autobiography, so the future will know of him. He talks repeatedly about his treasure hunt lasting for a thousand or even 10,000 years, carrying the memory of him with it, long after his death. “What about a million years?” I wanted to ask, “What about a billion?” It was an inquiry not just about his death – but about my death too, and the death of all of us. Still, it seemed a harsh interrogation for a man of his age. Instead, I wrote to him simply, “Can anything last forever?”

His response was immediate: “If you can define ‘forever’ for me, I will answer the question.”

Roc’s new book, And, was released last year. You can find more information on his website.

Also by Roc Morin:

In Pursuit of the Four-Month-Long Orgasm

Breast Cancer Survivors Find the Michelangelo of Nipple Tattoos

3,500 Cops Who Want All Drugs to Be Legal

A photo from the author’s Bitcoin-funded trip to Bocas del Toro.

In March I flew from San Francisco to Panama City with less than $200 in my bank account. I wasn’t worried about my lack of funds. A week earlier, a guy I’d met online had bought me a plane ticket to help him crew a sailboat from the eastern end of the Panama Canal back to the states—and I had a stockpile of bitcoins that could support me down south.

A year earlier, I’d bought a bunch of bitcoins at $4 per bitcoin after reading about the decentralized, unregulated, peer-to-peer currency. At this point, its only practical function still seems to be facilitating shady deals online and making fast cash for chubby guys who like to stare at computer monitors—but they say it has potential. I tested out Silk Road (the internet drug market) and bought some junk, but for the most part, my digital cash just sat there. It was nothing more than my own amateur market speculation, but I knew the Mickey Mouse currency would tide me over if anything went wrong on the trip. 

And of course, it did.

My first night at sea, I went below the deck to puke and wound up staring into a toilet filled with bloody vomit. The captain turned the ship around, and at the port, a Panamanian doctor told me getting back on the boat meant risking a perforated ulcer, which at sea meant bleeding out. I told the captain I was staying behind on doctor’s orders.

After watching the boat sail off without me, I hitched a ride to Panama City, where I checked in to a hostel and spent the night drinking ulcer-friendly coke at a rooftop bar (the doc had banned me from touching liquor). The club had a lovely view of the ersatz metropolis and was packed with wealthy Latin American expats. With the exception of the Colombian prostitutes the expats had hired as arm candy, everyone seemed like they worked in finance, which makes sense considering they call Panama City the money laundering capital of the Americas. There are apartment towers scattered about seemingly at random, the rumor being that half the floors are empty—nothing more than projects built as a way for drug lords to own legitimate assets.

In other words, Panama City was the perfect place to live on digital speculation. My second day in town, I sold ten bitcoins for $52 each on the digital currency exchange website Mt.Gox and then used BitInstant, a Brooklyn-based service, to turn a Mt.Gox voucher into digital dollars of the PayPal variety. In three days, PayPal wired my funny money to my Chase Manhattan account, magically no longer funny. And bitcoin kept shooting up—each time I made a withdrawal from my Mt.Gox account the value of bitcoins was higher than before.

But I didn’t like Panama City. I may have been making easy money, but I didn’t like spending my time with seedy white guys who hung out in bars discussing the vague financial jobs that brought them to a wannabe South Beach. So I hopped a bus to Bocas del Toro—Panama’s backpacker party islands—for spring break.

What I did there, besides feel just a little too old, was slowly get over the fear of my alleged ulcer by turning bitcoins into dollars, dollars into beer, and beer into awkward dancing with Israeli girls who had no interest in gentiles. 

I lived the high life, but I couldn't bring myself to look closely at the numbers—I knew this boom was a bubble. Midway through the process of buying a tan Scandinavian girl a beer, I became anxious about my bank account, but confidence returned between the dollar tequila shot and chaser. Bitcoin was a bubble, but damn it if I couldn’t ride that bubble straight into a Swedish girl’s pants. If I could play this market right, I could transform this cycle of bleary mornings and oh-so-close nights into a lifestyle.

I got tired of Bocas del Toro—its humid debauchery had run its course. So I hopped a bus to the breezy mountain town of Boquete. When I arrived, I realized my bitcoin money had bought me a gut that was swollen enough to make me look like I had a potbelly. I was done with Panamanian piss beer and slutty Danish girls no matter how nice their thighs were. 

Bitcoin peaked at $266 while I was in Boquete. I went out and bought a huge meal, ate ice cream, went on a tour of a coffee plantation, sent presents home, and bought strangers mojitos. Two days later Bitcoin crashed to $60 and I stopped eating.

I left for Costa Rica hoping that Bitcoin would rebound, but ran into problems with my passport at the border. They wouldn’t let me through, so I blew my last $20 on a bus back to Panama City, where I had to barter my sunglasses on a cab ride back to a hostel that has a free pancake breakfast and doesn’t make you pay up front. I sold my iPod for food money, slipped my belt a notch tighter, and sat back to watch the bitcoin market churn, praying for another bubble that never came. 

More about Bitcoin:

This Is How Bitcoin Could Die

The Bitcoin Crash Begins

Feds Seize Funds from the Largest Bitcoin Exchange

Photo via Flickr user Marco Bellucci

Mistakes and embarrassment are the raison d’être of most reality programs. We watch these shows to see someone’s sense of self unravel in HD until they’re hunched over crying on a staircase or drunk at 10 AM or screaming into a phone all Mel Gibson-like. There's enough melodramatic misery caught on camera for you to make your DVR a graveyard of tragedy that doesn’t register as such for the same reason Seattleites don’t fret about rain. You can voyeuristically gaze into the lives of the saddest, angriest, loneliest people imaginable, shrug, and think, Huh, I guess that’s what that’s like.

The Bachelorette is one of the few reality programs where the main draw isn’t that you get to laugh at dumb people or gawk at Dorito-skinned twentysomethings cussing at each other. It’s sweet and romantic—which is to say it’s been tweaked by producers to be as inoffensive and unremarkable as possible without ever becoming boring. On a show that supposedly portrays the human drama of people building meaningful relationships, the protagonists are all washed-out archetypes—hair-gelled mortgage adjuster, hair-gelled bar owner, hair-gelled pile of meatballs in a person costume, girl—who have the emotional range of those Do you like me? Y/N/M”cards that get passed around sixth-grade classrooms. The show’s weightiest moments are mundane conversations about falling in love smothered in romantic signifiers—helicopter shots! candlelit dinners! sparkly attire!—cribbed from the same 12 books and movies that Reader’s Digest subscribers have been told depict ideal courtship.

Host Chris Harrison occasionally shows up to remind the pack of domesticated bros that this is not a game, gentlemen: this is one woman looking for happiness. Harrison and the contestants tend to conflate love and happiness to the point that they imply one cannot exist without the other. This is the show’s dogma, which reveals an agenda it would like you to think it doesn’t have—it assumes that everyone wants and needs a monogamous relationship, that all audience members will empathize with contestants who will degrade themselves in front of America for the chance at “true love” and are literally reduced to tears talking about how badly they want to find someone to have children with.  

By being squeaky clean to the point of near featurelessness, The Bachelorette has a broad appeal—12 million viewers, at its peak—and the yogurt and soap and clothing companies that advertise on it are confident their vaguely feminist marketing campaigns will mesh perfectly with the show’s themes. Learn to love yourself by abetting the capitalists. The insipidness of the show’s contestants—specifically the bachelorette herself, who always seems like she was developed in a lab to be slightly above average in every way—allows mom and daughter to imagine themselves in Desiree or Ashley or Emily’s gaudy stilettos. The protagonist of The Bachelorette isn’t any of the people you see on the screen, but you and your desire. Or, put another way: you and your insecurities.

The problem with this desire-hawking is that the desire has no real object. The love The Bachelorette constantly references isn’t recognizable because it’s love as panacea—the idea is that love itself, not the thing you love, not the goodness love inspires in you, will set you free and save you from your shit job and shit relationships. The Bachelorette is every bit as much of a freak show as whatever airs on A&E’s Friday Night Personality Disorders lineup, but it flips the relationship between you and the people living in your TV: you’re the freak and the desperate idiots trying to find an impossible thing on a Disneyfied speed date are the normal ones.

This perhaps explains why contestants—who apparently buy into this bullshit just as much as anyone—sometimes have meltdowns as they leave the show. On last season’s Bachelor, Sarah Herron got sent home by Adonis-statue-made-out-of-corn Sean Lowe and looked like her face might cave in on itself as she sobbed, “This always happens to me. I wanted to stop him before he started because I knew what he was going to say... ‘You’re an amazing girl. I know how special you are. I want to connect with you so bad, but I don’t.’” The acid in her tone betrays that she can’t possibly be this devastated about getting dumped by Lowe, who she knew for all of six weeks while competing with 19 other women for his attention. Her experience on The Bachelor is emblematic of her experience with men in general. Yet she keeps striking out, perhaps quixotically, in pursuit of someone who will love her, because that’s just a thing you do, even if it’s hurts. If you can’t identify with that, what the hell is wrong with you?

One uninsiduous-seeming way to make someone feel self-conscious about something they do or the way they live is to imply that it’s abnormal. When I started living with my girlfriend, we observed each other during those mundane around-the-apartment moments you spend alone when you’re single—brushing your teeth, scrambling an egg, sweeping up the living room—and I realized we perform some of these tasks differently. A brief but noticeable pang of concern shoots through you when you think, Wait, does everyone else shampoo their hair first, then scrub their body with soap? Do I bathe in the wrong order? Hopefully you realize you’re being ridiculous. But it’s a powerful feeling, to worry for a moment that your normal might be weird.

If you’re single or even just not particularly infatuated with the idea of being madly in love, The Bachelorette would like you to know that your normal is weird. It does this by aggressively asserting that it’s an extraordinary show about normative desires—check out how many times the phrase fairy tale comes up. The couple formed at the end of the show is living the dream and you, well, you’re just sitting on that couch, tragically untouched by a great, life-defining love.  

The Bachelorette is just one of the many television shows, movies, and books that comprise the entertainment arm of the monogamy-industrial complex. It's essentially just one long prelude to a Match.com ad where a couple talk about how they found that special someone while trying to suppress glee-giggles the entire goddamn time. Once you buy the idea of monogamous love as a thing worth worshipping, they attempt to sell you dating services, the right kind of razor, diamonds and jewelry to “symbolize your love”... Eventually, you have photogenic older couples winking at you in ads for dick-hardening pills, because what’s ideal romantic love without ideal romantic fucking at 70 years old?  

Nearly every Bachelor and Bachelorette ends with a breakup on the front page of People some six months after the show ends, and everyone knows that, but for a moment, when two attractive people are falling in love—and talking, endlessly, about how they are falling in love, and they’re nuzzled against one another on a candlelit Tahitian beach—the love that The Bachelorette and dating sites and romantic comedies and makeup companies are telling you exists seems like it might not exactly be a lie. It seems nice. That’s how they get you.

@cs_mcgowan

More on reality TV:

Alexis Neiers’s Pretty Wild Road to Recovery

South Boston Is too Ugly for Reality TV

Amy’s Baking Company’s Grand Reopening Nearly Bored Me to Death

Photo by C_Pichler, via Flickr.

I only had to walk one avenue, but in New York City one avenue block can feel like a very long distance.

It was a little after one in the morning and I’d just done a show at the UCB Theater at the corner of 26^th Street and Eighth Avenue. I had to make it from Eighth to Seventh and I would be a half block from the one train stop I needed to start my journey home. I’d performed at that theater for a decade. I’d walked that block thousands of times. There wasn’t much to it. A few quiet restaurants, a parking lot, the entrance to an underground S&M club, and not much else.

I’d been on that block late at night so many times that it was easy for me to sense when something was wrong.

I first noticed the man was following me before I even finished crossing Eighth Ave. He’d been slouching on the ground along with a few other homeless people in front of the Duane Reade on the corner. There were a few of these guys who made this corner their stomping grounds, and I’d never felt threatened by them at all. But on this night, as I shuffled east across the avenue, I saw one of the guys stand up, look in my direction, and step towards me. This guy had been sitting apart from the gang of drunks. He’d been using them for camouflage. He wasn’t of their tribe, he rose out above them, and he made me a target. I felt it from half an avenue away.

I picked up my pace and glanced back as he turned the corner. He saw that I was hustling and sped up as well. I abruptly stopped, looking into the window of a closed down restaurant, pretending to read their menu. He stopped too, and pretended to be looking into the window of the shuttered business he was standing in front of.

Fuck, I thought to myself. He isn’t just trying to mug me. He’s waiting for me to get someplace specific.

Is there someone else waiting halfway down the block? My mind raced. Maybe they’re trying to trap me in? I looked to my right, but couldn’t see anyone in the darkness. Do I cross the street and double back to eighth? Do I try to find safety and comfort inside the S&M club? When an unexpected 1 AM visit to an S&M club feels like the safest possible option, you know something has gone wrong with your night.

I resumed my walk, going at a very slow pace—by any reasonable measure, in New York City when someone walks as slow as I was, people behind them will pass them. He didn’t. I was positive—there was someplace or someone this guy was herding me towards, and if I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the situation before I stumbled upon that trap, I was in deep trouble.

I walked fast and heard the guy speed up behind me. My options were running out. I was alone with a predator in the middle of a dark and sleepy block in New York City. I hadn’t turned back in time. I hadn’t ducked into the S&M club in time. I was alone with this guy and his intentions.

That’s when I saw her sleeve sticking out of the window of a parked car: her uniformed sleeve.

I saw that the woman in the driver’s seat of that unmarked parked car was a cop, and I leapt in her direction.

“I don’t want to startle you, ma’am,” I hissed in a whisper. “But that guy halfway down the block is following me.”

“Are you positive?” she asked, glancing back at him in her rear view mirror.

“One hundred percent,” I replied.

“OK,” she smiled. She then reached up, flicked a switch, and a loud siren erupted from the car, shattering the silence of the sleepy block.

The guy turned and sprinted.

“Have a nice night,” she smiled. I glanced down the block nervously. “I’ll keep my eye on you.”

Cops are everywhere in New York City. Cars drive by every few minutes. Uniforms stand nonchalantly at street corners. Anyone who’s ever been around an emergency in Manhattan realizes that there are plainclothes officers on these streets walking past us more than we ever realize.

Cops in New York City don’t have the best reputation. It’s a fast paced city and they deal with a lot, and many people have seen lots of cops interact with the public utilizing what can be gently called “not the best customer service.” The many highly publicized abuses of power by police officers over the years don’t help many NYC citizens trust boys in blue. From what I can tell, most New Yorkers don’t hate cops, but they don’t love them, and generally look towards them with a healthy respect for what they do and an omnipresent fear that they’ll ever have to deal with them personally in any way.

I’ve had a few encounters with cops in this town. The above was by far the most pleasant. Others have ranged from strange to terrifying.

When I lived in Woodside, my apartment was off of Roosevelt Avenue. If you’ve never explored Roosevelt Avenue at night, I sincerely encourage you to hang out for a night along it in the Jackson Heights/Woodside stretch. That area is one of the most diverse in the whole city—Little India buts up against Little Manila, which heads down Roosevelt Avenue into the Irish area. But at night, the Hispanic residents of the neighborhood take over Roosevelt Ave. and it’s beautiful. The 7 Train rides above dozens of street food carts, where little old ladies make the best arepas you’ve ever tasted and you can buy perfect tamales out of stolen shopping carts.

It’s a wonderful, alive scene but it can also be intimidating. There are numerous bars where ladies in bikinis will dance with you for a dollar. They’re not strip clubs per se. They’re comfort bars originally aimed at giving migrant workers companionship in remote locations, they’ve continued to spring up in areas with high illegal immigrant populations. The sidewalks of Jackson Heights are often littered with business cards advertising prostitution services, and it’s not uncommon to walk past a corner where a man will offer to sell you a counterfeit social security card. I list none of this out of judgment; it’s just stuff I’ve seen and that I bring up to note that Roosevelt Avenue has a hidden and intimidating side.

My schedule as a performer often meant late night walks down Roosevelt Avenue from the Jackson Heights station to my house in Woodside. One evening I was walking home with my headphones on and was in that tired, hazy state one enters when walking the same route they walk a dozen times a week. I was off in my own world, on autopilot, just making my way home.

But my routine was smashed when a cop car careened over the curb, onto the sidewalk, and straight at me. The car screeched to a halt and turned a spotlight on me. I threw my back against the front window of the El Sitio Cuban restaurant and instinctively threw my hands up. My headphones tumbled from my ears and I could hear the click as the cop turned on his PA address system.

“Are you Chris Gethard?” he blared over his loudspeaker.

“What?” I shouted. “Yeah. That’s me.”

There was a long pause.

“I saw you do stand up once. You’re really funny,” the cop continued.

“OK,” I said. There was a long pause. “Thank you.”

“Stand up seems really hard,” the loudspeaker blared at me. “I don’t think I’d have the balls to do it.”

“It’s pretty intimidating,” I admitted, “but when it goes well, it’s the best feeling in the world.”

“That’s cool,” the loudspeaker responded. “What the fuck are you doing on Roosevelt Avenue at night?”

“I live on 67th Street,” I informed him.

“Oh shit,” the loudspeaker laughed. “You should take the 7 to 69^th Street at night. Roosevelt Avenue can get kinda rough. Lots of bars.”

“I know,” I shouted into the light. “The 7 was just taking too long, so I took the E.”

“I saw a white guy on Roosevelt,” the loudspeaker informed me, “and I was like Is he looking for pussy or drugs?”

“Neither,” I said. “I promise. Just heading home.’

“Cool,” the loudspeaker said. “Good luck with the stand up. I give you a lot of credit.”

The car backed off of the sidewalk and into the street, then drove off. I was left knowing that at least one cop whose face I’ve never seen is a fan of my work.

While that was jarring, it wasn’t a truly scary experience with the NYPD. I’ve only had one of those.

It was 2002, and I’d just graduated college. Strangely enough, four other performers at the UCB graduated that same month. Three of us were from Rutgers, one from NYU, and another from Hofstra—we all decided to throw a joint party.

Comedians will find any excuse to drink, and our mutual college graduation was a good one. Things went real late, and at three in the morning, I was actually one of the first ones to leave my own party. I told my friends Tarik and Katie that I was driving back to Rutgers and they should say their goodbyes. I headed outside, in need of fresh air after a long night of sweating and drinking with other people in their early 20s.

As I made my way onto the street, a guy off to my right stutter stepped, turned, then quickly made his way around the corner.

That’s weird, I thought, that guy near my car was being shady.

A few minutes later, Katie made her way outside.

“Tarik’s not out here yet?” she asked. I shook my head no. “Cool, I get shotgun.”

We sat in the car, waiting for our third friend, windows down since we were both overheated from the party. We were talking and I looked in the rear view, noting that a car was very slowly driving west up 22^nd Street.

Then it occurred to me that 22^nd Street runs east. Before I could process what was happening, I heard a car door slam.

Then I felt a gun push up against my head, just behind my right ear.

“Don’t. Fucking. Move,” a voice commanded me.

“I won’t,” I said. I looked straight ahead. I could hear Katie breathing heavy next to me.

“Whose fucking car is this?!” the voice barked.

“It’s my car,” I said.

“Don’t fucking lie,” the voice commanded.

I don’t know how I managed to stay calm. “I’m not lying,” I said. “It’s my car. I promise.”

“If you’re lying, you’re in real fucking trouble,” the voice continued. “I’m a cop, don’t fuck around.”

“Oh, thank God,” I said.

“Thank God?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I thought you were carjacking me.”

“Don’t play fucking games,” the cop said, exasperated, pushing my head forward with the gun.

“I’m not playing any games, I swear!” I told him.

“OK. License and registration then. And nothing funny,” he said. “Lady, you get out of the car.”

Katie got out.

“My registration is in my glove compartment,” I said. “Is it OK if I reach for it?”

“It’s fine,” the cop said. I leaned away from the gun, but he kept it trained on me.

I produced my license and registration.

“This is my car,” I said again as he looked them over.

“Now this I don’t fucking get,” the cop said. “A neighbor said he saw a guy breaking into a black Nissan parked in this exact spot.”

I thought for a minute.

“Fuck, I saw that guy,” I said. “I didn’t realize he was breaking into my car.”

“Huh?”

“When I came out here a guy ran away from my car,” I said. “He must have been breaking into it. Then a neighbor called the cops. Then I scared him off. Then I sat down in the car. Then you pointed a gun at my head, because you thought I was him. It makes sense now.”

The cop laughed.

“Wait,” he said. “If you saw somebody being weird and running away from your car, how come you didn’t call it in?”

“Honestly?” I said. “It’s New York City, man. I figured he was just taking a piss on it.”



@ChrisGethard

Previously - Learning About Humanity on Public Transportation

Image by Chris Johns.

The Tyra Banks Show was a photocopy of a photocopy of Oprah that was xeroxed on a copy machine smeared by years of butt cheek scans. From 2005 to 2010, Tyra used her talk show as a platform to imitate the Queen of Talk and exhibit her lack of self-awareness. Who can forget when Tyra pretended to have contracted rabies from a dog for no discernable reason other than a love of rolling around on the floor? Or the time she wore a prosthetic nose for an exposé on the lives of strippers because heterosexual strip club patrons would totally recognize the host of America’s Next Top Model?

My all time favorite Tyra moment was Tyra's take on Oprah's iconic “You get a car! You get a car!” give-a-way. With the enthusiasm of the Mighty O, Tyra told her studio audience they would go home with a jar of Tyra’s  “eye and anything cream,” the beauty secret that made her the hottest supermodel on the planet—a jar of Vaseline bedazzled in $100 worth of Swarovski crystals. 

In between throwing jars of Vaseline at the crowd, Tyra shrieked, rolled across the ground, and screamed about rubbing petroleum jelly on random body parts of her body, such as her shoulders. At the time, I viewed this historic television event as a publicity stunt, but over the years Tyra’s suggestion has haunted me like a ghost in an Oprah Book Club Selection I have never read. Is Vaseline really a miracle product? Could I actually beautify myself with just one jar? Would a jar of Vaseline transform me into Tyra Banks? I decided to cover my body in Vaseline to find out.

Rubbing Vaseline on my skin was more complicated than Tyra made it out to be. As an Armenian, my pores basically secrete Vaseline—dabbing Tyra’s magic jelly on my face like a teenager about to throw down in an acrylic nail scratch-fight was not going to cut it. I needed to take Tyra’s Vaseline ritual to the next level. I googled Vaseline makeup tutorials and discovered a blog post listing 22 different ways to use Vaseline to create jailbreak beauty products. Apparently, girls mix Vaseline with their makeup to make their beauty supply last longer—which is weird considering makeup is as cheap as fried chicken. To justifiably say you’re so poor you have to extend your eye shadow with Vaseline, you have to be subsisting off individual corn kernels like the pilgrims during the first Plymouth winter.

But we are all victims of this economy, so I decided to be a good sport. I mixed Vaseline with my eye shadow and smeared it over my lids, morphing a sophisticated shade of olive into a tone I call “swamp boogers.” I mixed the petroleum goo with brow powder, fixed my brows into place, and contoured my cheekbones with a Vaseline and bronzer. When I finished, I was feeling myself. My eyelashes looked twice as thick, I glowed like a pregnant chick, and my cheekbones stuck out so much, I wondered if people would ask if I had gotten my jaw unwired.

Sadly, this would not last.

I had shit to do besides stare in the mirror, and I live in a house in Boston without air conditioning. Within 40 seconds, the Vaseline started to melt. 

My eyebrows and mascara crawled down my face like they were trying to enter my mouth, and my eyes felt so heavy, I squinted like Rob Lowe in Behind the Candelabra. I looked like a melting chicken—40 minutes later there was no way to stop all the makeup from mixing until I looked like the lead singer of a Misfits cover band. So I gave up. I removed the Vaseline from my face and accepted I could never relish in a bedazzled jar of petroleum jelly like Tyra Banks—she can get away with smearing herself with Vaseline, because she’s a supermodel, a genetic freak. I’m a five-foot-zero Middle Eastern hybrid who would probably look like a Monchhichi doll if I lost my razor.

But when I woke up, I no longer looked like Rob Lowe. I looked like Tyra in the made-for-television movie Life-Size, when she teaches a young Lindsay Lohan that you don’t need a mom if you have a life-size doll named Eve—my face was so smooth. One hour with dirty Vaseline on my face had given me the skin women pay hundreds of dollars for. I smeared refined petrochemicals on my face on the advice of a woman who once instructed an entire nation to kiss her fat ass, and I won. 

@The_Sample_Life

More on celebrities and weird beauty products:

This Is What Happens When You Wear Semen-Scented Perfume

Celebrities as Food

Which Celebrity Do Tween Girls Love Most?

Photo via Flickr user Micah Baldwin

I’m ashamed of the fact that I’ve stuck my dick in a piss cup hundreds of times. I get tested for every drug under the sun, including alcohol, and foolishly, I still take pride in passing 99 percent of them over the past eight years—thought the hits I took on the few occasions I failed were real bad. The saddest part of those failures is the tests are laughably easy to beat. They’re completely fuckin’ worthless if you ask me. They’re just another money-making racket.

Turns out drug testing—which doesn’t effect just convicts but also your average working schlub who has to pee in a cup to get an $8-an-hour stockboy gig—is a multi-billion industry and is increasingly affecting everyday folks’ lives. Around 84 percent of American employers test their employees, but oddly enough, you won’t catch any bankers, traders, or hedge-fund fuckers getting randomly tested even though they’re the ones most likely to sniff rails and then do some dumb shit that ruins people’s lives. (You hear the one about the Washington Mutual manager who snorted meth daily?) The way I figure, it’s only a matter of time before drug testing becomes routine in schools too. Actually, the first piss test I actually failed was in prep school—I was kicked out as a result of smoking weed. Seems like a pretty harsh penalty, but that’s the rules, I guess. That was 1997, and I imagine this practice has become more frequent in the past 15 years.

It seems like they always pick on the people who are already down when it comes to intrusive nonsense like mandatory drug testing, so the criminals got it first. It’s becoming more apparent to me that this is a big fuckin’ hustle. These tests are all beatable. If you really want to catch someone, just give them a hair test every couple of months. You can’t beat that shit. But it’s part of the racket. They want to hit us with a test at least once a week so they can make that money from Medicaid.

It turns out one company even got busted recently for unnecessary drug testing, a scam that is obvious to even a fuckin’ duck. It’s a win-win for everyone except the taxpayer. These scumbag pharma companies manufacture these tests for next to nothing and make dumb money off them by charging Medicaid. By the way, none of us convicts actually pay to get tested for drugs. We’re all broke, so the government picks up the tab. I’m sure once the testing spreads to other sectors, somehow the taxpayers will get stuck with the bill under the presumption that testing the public is for the greater good.

I don’t care what anyone says, I know for a fact that almost everyone can beat a drug test after being clean for 72 hours. As long as you know you’re getting tested it should be breeze-easy to beat these things. Lots of us dummies like to press our luck, or we’re too addicted so we fuck up, but, in truth, it’s a very simple game. Plus there are so many ways to tamper with samples. They have synthetic urine now, that works like a charm. Once again, if they used the hair test, there would be basically no way to beat it.

Thanks to them using piss tests, I’ve had a lot of fun while on paper basically being a good boy—but if they had given me the hair test, I absolutely never would’ve used drugs, and maybe I’d be in a better situation now… I’m not going to fuck with something I can’t beat, and the fact that they give us enough wiggle room to game the system gives us some incentive to stay addicted. I can’t help wondering if this is a conscious effort on their part. Even parole and probation seem to be on board with letting us dabble and get “clean” for our tests. I mean, we know when we’re going to report so all we have to do is stop getting high three days prior to our test. You have to be really fuckin’ dumb to step up dirty. So maybe that’s part of their game, showing us some leniency. By letting those of us with enough discipline to occasionally indulge get away with our habit, they filter out the real fuck-ups who have no self-control.

I’m not sure any of this makes sense, but I imagine drug testing is becoming more and more mainstream under the guise of keeping everyone safe. Some states are now thinking about making their welfare recipients take drug tests, supposedly to make sure that tax dollars aren't going toward getting high, but that same money they think they’ll be saving will get wasted on overpriced, ineffective tests.

All of this ignores the psychological degradation one undergoes by taking a piss while being watched. I always feel like a dog when I’m having my dick stared at—even worse than that, because I used to try to be polite to my dogs and not watch when they made waste. Just about the only thing I can do is to talk shit to the guy who's stuck watching me pee, just so I'm not the one being uncomfortable in that spot.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: The Guys Who Really Should Be Locked Up

Abraham and Isaac: Church of Narga Selassie, Dek Island, Lake Tana, Ethiopia. Late 18th century, photo via

Despite the fact that they grew up in a country where marijuana grows rampantly, my parents definitely do not smoke weed. My mom is pretty open minded and has tried it once or twice, but only to confirm that she is not into it. My dad? Total square. Buried in the most cerebral academia for his entire life, he managed to avoid any exposure to drugs, a feat assisted by his Aspy-esque charm that must have screamed “narc” to any potential sharers. That quality also makes him pretty aloof to any details about me as a person, so it was a complete surprise to him when he randomly came across my postcard from the Cannabis Cup. Considering that this is what I look like, it’s kind of ridiculous that he couldn’t detect that I smoke weed. As soon as he did become aware of it, he felt compelled to discuss its hazards with me—not surprising for a guy who gave me the sex talk when I was 23.

When I visit him, I keep my smoking on the DL out of concern for his kids, who are way to small to be passed the tradition. This puts me in a position that I haven’t been in since I moved away from home—finding a safe place to smoke. During holidays, when the handful of friends I have there are back in town, this isn’t a problem, but on a random weekend in June, I had to improvise. I knew my friend Lisa’s mom, who lived in the neighborhood, had recently started smoking weed again. I knew I’d have to adjust my demeanor, abandoning the candor I have with my usual crew of grizzled dudes for a hangout ethic appropriate for a mom. Sure enough, she had made lemonade and laid out snacks on the back deck by the time I got there.

Lisa’s dad was also hanging out, though he didn’t partake. Having learned from my aunt’s Thanksgiving freakout, I knew to warn Lisa’s mom about the power of my weed and I took care to make the joint extra petite. We got a little stoned and caught up on life, and it was the most wholesome stoned hangout I ‘ve ever had. This is how I’m going to get high when I’m older, I thought to myself as I left Lisa’s parents’ house. I smoked another little J to myself before heading back to my dad’s house, where the kids had decided they wanted to go see a movie, Iron Man III, as selected by my little half brother.  The movie wasn’t for another two hours, and I knew that before we headed to the movie theater, I’d have to do a little preparation.

Just before we left, while my step-mom was getting the kids ready, I ran upstairs and rolled a little doobie then dipped out to the side of the garage for a rapid puff. I may have been more careless than usual because my dad knew about Weediquette now, but either way he felt comfortable enough to pop out and join me. He pointed at the joint and said in a most narc-y manner, “Is that grass?” I nodded and offered him a hit, which he turned down, as I knew he would. I was hoping that this would be the moment when he suddenly shed all his stubbornness and innate dad-ness by expressing some curiosity about a hobby of mine. Instead I got a recap of whatever pamphlet he gets his information about weed from.

He did pull out one myth that caught my interest. “You know, centuries ago in India they used to feed soldiers food with marijuana in it to drive them into a frenzy, so that they’d be more ruthless on the battlefield.” While this may be true, I assured my dad that, historically, weed has catalyzed far more acts of peace, love, and sheer sloth than violence and aggression. He refused to believe me, and I told him the only way to prove me wrong would be to try it. It saddened me to see how rigid he was in his thinking, brainwashed by societal mores rooted in the shakiest evidence against marijuana. In my old dad’s mind, my eagerness to show him the light of productive intoxication was merely an erratic need to spread my reefer madness.

The thing that gets me the most was that my dad is a doctor of philosophy. We’ve never seen eye to eye on much, but the only time a discussion doesn’t turn into an uneasy argument is when we’re talking about intangibles—time, space, dimensionality, faith, etc. I knew that when I was younger, my dad simply humored me, fully sure of his philosophical authority. But when I started doing psychedelics and really considering the thoughts I had while on them, I managed to articulate perceptional concepts that made him light up. On this particular night, I told him how much my thinking had been influenced by psychedelics, and that’s when I completely lost him. We were sitting there on two ice floes that had managed to bump for the first time in decades and were now gradually drifting apart again.

It bums me out that my dad, for all his knowledge and wisdom, has chosen to ignore the natural substances in this world that offer us something fantastical—an altered perception. Knowing that there is a way to challenge your perception of the world, what kind of philosopher not only ignores this opportunity, but also actually scorns those who embrace it? I’m lucky enough to have a smart dad who challenged the conventions of my thinking and sparked an interest in the way I see the world. I just wish he was perceptive enough to get the same benefit from me.

@ImYourKid

Previously - Getting Chased by the Cops

Photo by Justin Baeder, via Flickr.

Occasionally, I sleep with this one really skinny dude and after we do it, I get these bruises on my inner thighs from where his bony hips slammed into me. I kind of love mild sex injuries. I run my fingers gently over the purple contusions flanking my groin, and it reminds me of being a teenager and wearing hickeys and carpet burns like badges of honor—proof that I was a real grown up. Even though I am fond of my thigh bruises, sleeping with skinny guys isn't my favorite.

I don’t want to body shame anyone here. Rather than detracting from the wonders of the scrawny, angular male physique, I want to celebrate its antithesis: the tubby guy. Because you know, as it turns out, I’m a bit of a chubby chaser. I also happen to be a feeder by default, but I blame that on my Greek heritage.

I’m interested in a very specific kind of tubby: a thick roundness rather than an actual fatness. Like a dude who looks like he might ride a bike because his legs are huge, but who looks like he likes beer a lot. I want a man who’s built like a tree trunk, but like, a waterlogged tree trunk. A man my mom would describe as both “healthy” (remember, Greek mother) and “cuddly,” but that my high school gym teacher would have egged on with comments like, “Come on now, you’re not here for your good looks!” as he tried to keep up with the rest of the class in sprints. A man whose belly isn’t so much flabby as it is sort of pregnant looking—hard but protrusive.

I once dated a man with a pretty round belly, and I remember what it felt like wrapping my arm around it. We were laying in bed one evening, watching a movie projected onto the wall, and he pulled me into his nook. With my head resting in the joint of his shoulder, I threw my arm around his middle, and I couldn’t reach all the way around. I couldn’t quite see all of the picture, but it didn’t matter--I was transfixed by the subtle rising and falling of my arm as he breathed. I was definitely turned on by the immensity of this very large man I couldn’t hold entirely, but whose nook I was almost completely absorbed into, like memory foam.

If I were to examine my preference deeper, I’d say I enjoy the feeling of being tiny with a big huge meatloaf of a dude smothering me in his beefy manhood. It’s the inner cavewoman, or inner heteronormative-US-sitcom-wife in me. Growing up in Australia, popular television culture taught me something different: that the only sexy men are ones with perennial tans, washboard abs, flippy beach-blonde hair, and names like Shane and Robbo. US television culture is all Homer and Marge Simpson, Ralph and Alice Kramden, and I guess as an alternative to the Surfer-Boyfriend-Eventually-Goes-Pro-or-Gets-Eaten-by-a-Shark romance, the American version is a fetching domestic ideal. So rather than playing beach bunny to a surfer dude, I always wanted to play loud-mouthed, often Mediterranean appearing, teeny-tiny little wife, to a huge, maybe blue collar, cheap-beer loving, fatty husband. I’ve just always wanted to be one of those scratchy voiced, uptight (but always right), super adorable little women who runs the show, with a husband who, through all his folly, knows he hit the jackpot. I know—what is wrong with me, right?

Beyond pop culture norms, at a primal level I think there’s something super sexy about a larger man. He takes up space, but you’re invited to inhabit that space with him. I feel completely consumed. Also worth noting is that I’m not particularly bony myself (let’s just say the booty don’t lie), and it feels quite feminine to be with someone who has more flesh than I do. And, come to think of it, if we were ever in a snow/plane crash/survival situation and someone had to be eaten, having a big guy around means he’d be the logical choice to be cannibalized first.

Also, too many skinny dudes simply can’t throw down. Big guys, more often than not, are strong guys, and I like the idea of a thick-chested man being able to hold me with one arm around the small of my back and flip me over from being on top to being on bottom, without it ever coming out. Now that is some serious man sex, even if he is short of breath while doing it and needs to take a rest afterwards.

As I mentioned already, a lot of my girlfriends have a skinny dude “thing," and there’s nothing wrong with that, but often when I’m attracted to a bigger guy my friends become superficial little bitches and say things like “Ew, that’s gross,” which is ignorant and utterly wrong (except that big guys do have a tendency to sweat more, which is definitely gross, but in a really hot way while you’re fucking). To that argument I say, girls, crawl out of your own butthole for a second and smell the Cheetos and beer. A guy with double the body to love will, a lot of times, have double the love to give.

@Kat_George

Previously - The Big Gulp: My First Time Swallowing

I don’t identify myself as a “bohemian type,” that dirty word denoting free-flowing ideals with the world’s most regimented eating plans. While I respect vegabs, I do not sympathize with them. I look to yoga as a fitness last resort since it consistently feels like a church service I’m thrown into against my will. The closest I come to meditating is when my non-English-speaking hairdresser trims my bangs, and I can feel her many rings trace my forehead and for a moment I forget how alarmingly short she’s cutting my hair, and I am at peace.

Living adjacent to Los Angeles's Silver Lake neighborhood, you face off against some dream-catchers, a.k.a. men and women who claim the world’s defeat will be at the hand of misaligned chakras. I’ve never been one to be swayed by their passion, but I found myself curious. It's the same curiosity that makes a Los Angelino take pause before the grandiosity of the Church of Scientology Museum tour. This past week I followed that desire for peeking over “the spiritual fence” so to speak, and took part in a “sound bath.”

Yep, a “sound bath.” The name alone baffles people with its ambiguity. Who could possibly attempt to define it without having experienced it first themselves? I imagined a vacuous room with several people lying down, experiencing sound waves that feel like Mother Nature orgasming through your eardrums.

Is that a high bar to reach? Possibly. But such was the standard I set for Jamie Ford, a woman who owns the primo internet real estate of Sound-bath.com. The Eagle Rock Center for the Arts advertised this event as a special “Summer Solstice Sound Bath EXPERIENCE,” and with that emphasis I knew: this Jamie chick must be the real deal.

Jamie and her “people” (not "followers," as I felt tempted to type) believe that sound baths are a way to unleash the body’s inner powers. According to her website, this experience is set to establish “a more focused and relaxed mind and body... less aches and pains, less depression and anxiety, an amazing night of sleep, and great enjoyment of life in general.” Combine that with the fact that these instruments are intended to “connect you with the planets,” and you’ve got yourself one groovy celestial cocktail.

There were things I was ahead of the curve on, such as expecting to see the fully yoga-ed out Silver Lake-ians who took great ceremony in setting up their meditative dens. Noisily, they gabbed with their perpetually bed-headed pals about the “best vegan Indian food” (no true victor was claimed). But mostly, this crowd was littered with curveballs: the middle-agers who looked en route to a 24-hour fitness only to take a spontaneous detour; the young couple who insisted on bringing their three-year-old only to have him predictably squeal with boredom and confusion. (To be fair, he always enjoyed their sound baths at home; the parent’s weed habits certainly helped.)

Foolishly, I thought just bringing myself would suffice. I was wrong. The true sound-bather brings everything but their bed frame to set up. Even the couple that looked like they had recently gotten back from Goth Day at Disneyland knew what to do. As time went on, more and more people were packed into the room like the smelliest game of Tetris. I found myself face-to-face with the other sound bath pros while I desperately tried to cover up the fact that I was a mere novice.

Once all of Eagle Rock, and most of Silver Lake, was piled in (no one so much as uttered the words, “Fire Marshall”) Jamie took the stage. “It may get a little intense in here,” he said. The crowd laughed, knowing something I didn’t. “Some of you may fall asleep, but most of you will be on an inward journey.” I started to like the sound of that; it conjured this scene of all of us flying on the wings of Falcor from The Neverending Story. Our humanly bodies would soon ride passenger to our souls reaching up to the heavens. Maybe I could get with this, after all.

The crowd got comfortable. I found myself sandwiched between other people’s feet, and my own bare toes dangerously close to the Disneyland goths. I settled on a fetal position, closed my eyes, and waited for the magic to happen.

Gongs were played. Long, drawn-out sounds escaped from the special “quartz-crystal singing bowls.” I forced myself to escape into that otherworldly space, but I struggled to get my thoughts off the BO-laden mat I borrowed from the Center.

Several times I tried imagining the universe, the planets, where our souls go when we die, any Hollywood-approved image of the afterlife. Nothing. My inexplicable sound-bath neighbor fell into such a loud case of snoring that I thought she was making a joke. It was as if she would stir at any moment and shout, “Just kidding! Can you imagine?”

Jamie warned that after it was done, our first impulse of jumping up and leaving should be ignored. Can you physically injure yourself from coming down too fast from floating in the universe? I was about to find out.

We, a group of 100 or so adults, slowly came to, celebrated our “adult nap” with some soft clapping, and that was that. Where was the weird hippie-ness? Where were the love beads and the talk of Mother Earth and Father Sky? I was lost. 

Later that night, I recounted the experience to a friend over wine. We talked about that stranger's smelly feet near my bangs, the Disneyland goths with perfectly aligned chakras, and the whale sounds that confused me as opposed to freeing me.

I couldn’t help but think of the episode of Boy Meets World where the amusingly tragic Shawn can’t go to sleep unless he plays a tape called “Sounds of the Trailer Park.” The joke is that it starts off calm and serene: crickets chirping, air filtering its way through the trees. Suddenly, there’s yelling from truckers and slamming of car doors. Shawn is fast asleep, one with the cosmos.

This was the kind of “sound church” I'm a member of. I'm a city girl. I live adjacent to one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles. There’s a helipad mere blocks away from my apartment. Often times I’m comforted by the whirling of its too-close-for-comfort blades as they soar above my studio. That’s where my “happy place” is; amidst the chaos, not floating high above it.

Before bed, I found myself exhausted by an evening of explaining the weirdness. Though, a curious thing occurred: I’m not certain if it was the extra glass of wine, or the trials of my long day, but wouldn’t you know it, I had the best sleep I’ve had in years.

@juliaprescott

More stories about insane people in LA:

Celebrity Swatting and Other Popular Los Angeles Trends

The Mating Rituals of the Renaissance Pleasure Fair

I Auditioned to Be a Disney Princess

Illustrations by Klone Yourself

REFERRAL AND INITIAL PRESENTATION

Christopher [surname unknown]
Born 02.22.2004

When Christopher arrived for his first assessment he was not like a normal eight-year-old boy. There were elements of wildness to him—long unstyled hair, signs of tooth decay, brown patches on his skin from ringworm. He oscillated between stony emotional blankness and moments of high energy when he prowled around the room, picking objects up and examining them with almost forensic scrutiny—he seemed especially drawn to the collection of ammonites and geological specimens I kept on the shelf. Nor was he age appropriate with respect to his behavior, having no concept of basic social restrictions and rules—for example, he found the shoes he was wearing uncomfortable, so he took them off and began to chew at one of his heels. When he spoke he used a fascinating and unorthodox mode of verbal communication, lacking the personal pronoun, and transposing “I” with “we.” “We want to go back to Lea,” he told me. Christopher was referred for treatment after hospitalization due to extreme weight loss. He was at that stage living in temporary foster care, after removal from his home—a mountain commune called Brant Lea, near K-town (an isolated, fellside settlement in northern England). 

BACKGROUND

Christopher had been discovered wandering the upland moors by a hiker, disoriented and suffering from mild hypothermia, and was admitted to the pediatric ward of the local hospital. He was 18 kg (80 percent of his expected body weight) and alarmingly cachexic—staff described him as “looking like a kid from a concentration camp.” He also had lice and fungal nail infections. He displayed a highly restrictive eating pattern, and when questioned, he described his diet as comprising produce grown or gathered—legumes, lettuce, wild snails, rabbit, and crayfish. There were no immunization or dental records. The site was 11 miles from K-town, an old, part-ruined farm property on common land where the group had squatted and taken over. Christopher had spent all his life to date there. After a program of inpatient weight restoration (sedation and nasogastric tube were unnecessary) Christopher began to eat moderate portions of food. He was discharged and placed in foster care while Social Services assessed the case. After four weeks his foster carer took him to see the family physician, concerned about repeated weight loss. She suspected that Christopher had been using food-avoidance tricks, like hiding bits of meat in his clothing and under his bed. There were also boundary issues—he kept walking in on her while she was in the bathroom, even after instructions not to, and he did not respect her personal property.

ASSESSMENT

At the intake session Christopher did not mind being weighed but had trouble engaging with the assessment process for any length of time and found it difficult to answer questions about himself. The first thing he voluntarily said was, “We want to see the snail farm.” He did not refer to his mother as “Mum” but would respond to her given name—Amber. While able to recognize meaningful and familiar individuals, Christopher had an incoherent and fragmented sense of self; he could not distinguish his identity from that of others, particularly those in the commune. There was some growth retardation, and his reading skills were well below average. However, he showed no signs of possessing a distorted body image or suicidal tendencies. On the Eating Attitudes Test he obtained low scores on the perfectionism and maturity-fear subscales. He did, however, hold a set of strong beliefs about controlling his food intake, his role in the community, and the importance of pleasing the “Firsts” (original commune founders). When I asked if not eating very much would please them, he replied, “We have spinny dreams. Pascal and Jan say our dreams make us special. They see between us.” (Pascal was one of the Firsts and seems to have had a pseudoshamanic role and influence over the group.) “Isn’t it the job of adults to make sure children get enough food to grow up strong?” I asked. Christopher seemed confused, as if the notion of hierarchy and responsibility had not occurred to him. “We always eat the snails,” he said. He then, quite animatedly, described a system he had created for detoxifying snails—three days in a box sprinkled with oatmeal, followed by starvation for two days. “We punch holes in the lid,” Christopher told me, “or they die. If they still have dirt inside, they give our tummies an ache and we throw up.” “How many snails do you eat?” I asked. “Two,” he replied. “Two a day? Can’t you have more? I bet there are lots of snails around?” Christopher shook his head and became agitated. “We mustn’t, we mustn’t, we give two to us all,” he repeated. When he had calmed down we discussed what was an appropriate amount of food for each meal. I showed him the food-pyramid chart, which he took some interest in. He then became restive, got up from the chair, and took from the shelf one of the South Dakota Hoploscaphites that I’d unearthed during my last Rock Soc trip to America. He did not seem to understand that the object belonged to me or that his request to keep it might be inappropriate. Keen to develop the therapeutic alliance, I said it would be fine to borrow the fossil if he promised to return it at the next session. (I was rather nervous about the arrangement.) Christopher agreed, but it was clear he did not appreciate the notion of ownership. 

HISTORY OF PRESENTING PROBLEM AND FAMILY HISTORY

In the next session, the Hoploscaphite was returned. Christopher asked me what the rock was surrounding it. “Pierre Shale,” I replied. “Is it rocky where you lived on the mountain?” Christopher thought for a moment. “Limestone, granite, no sandstone.” I was impressed by his knowledge of the area around K-town. He then said, “Hamish knows about bad soil.” “Who is Hamish?” I asked. “Hamish does sex with us.” The use of the plural pronoun on this occasion was particularly disconcerting. “Who do you mean by ‘us’?” I asked. Christopher simply nodded. “We don’t like him better than Sam and Pascal, though,” he said. After the weigh-in, I asked Christopher to draw pictures of the people at the commune and name them. I asked again about Hamish’s sexual relationship, and he pointed to Amber. He was able to separate out the identities of fellow communers when encouraged to do so, but his first response was invariably to assume a position of naïve unification with other individuals, hence “We had sex” and “Our tummies ache.”  

To understand this particularly unusual case, it is important to relate the environment in which Christopher was raised and the chaos of his upbringing. Records and interviews revealed that there were about nine or ten people at the commune, who had been living for over a decade in prefabricated barns and yurt-like tents with no electricity, except that intermittently provided by a diesel generator. The primary members—Firsts—were as follows: Christopher’s mother, Amber; Amber’s brother, Noel; her former boyfriend Sam; and Pascal (for visual reference see genogram, figure 1.1). He had an older sister, Liana (aged approximately 15), who left the commune a year before Christopher’s hospitalization and removal into care. There were no formal structures demarcating filial or platonic roles, Christopher was not obliged to sleep or eat in Sam and Amber’s yurt, and his basic functions were not monitored with regularity. Consequently, he was regarded as a “community child.” His homeschooling appears to have been sporadic, though some of his practical skills were astonishing; for example, he could tie fishing flies and knew how to work the generator, probably learned from watching those around him. Much of his time was spent autonomously, rather than with Amber, who was an unreliable figure and reacted to Christopher’s needs erratically. For example, he related an incident where he fell through a barn roof and seriously injured his arm. When he approached her, crying, she continued singing the song she was playing on the guitar and ignored him. There were often extended periods when she was away from the commune with her brother, Noel, trading at fairs. When I asked Christopher whom he usually sought for comfort or help with a problem, he said, “We go to sleep and wake up better. Sometimes Pascal sends a stroking dream.”

The community’s ethos was one of brutal honesty and freedom—meetings were held where everyone spoke, airing grievances and disclosing feelings, both good and ill, toward other members. Secrets were regarded as damaging, as were positions of status and labels. Christopher told me that Pascal had originally seen the site in a “flying dream” (perhaps under the influence of narcotics?) and the others had trusted him to find it. Christopher was excited by one story in particular. Two of the commune’s barns had been built by the Firsts. Complaints were made (one suspects architectural innovation was an excuse for people to complain about the group of settlers) and planning officers investigated. Since, one assumes, no permission had been granted, orders were given for the structures to be dismantled. The Firsts chained themselves to the doorframes, “We stopped the diggers bashing our barns down,” Christopher told me proudly. “But this all happened before you were born?” I suggested. “Maybe Liana remembered it happening and told you about it?” I attempted to talk further about this character differentiation, but Christopher proved unresponsive. He often ended the sessions prematurely, dead-eyed and without much emotion. On this occasion he went to the shelf of fossils and lifted up a piece of fulgurite. After a few moments, he said, “It’s too light.” I explained that fulgurite is created by lightning hitting sand, turning the sand into another substance. I asked him if he would like to take it home with him and bring it back again at the next session, and he seemed pleased. 

In the following assessment sessions, the complicated and unboundaried nature of relations at the commune became clearer, as did the lack of stable and predictable parental care. Prior to Christopher’s hospitalization there had been a period of intense disruption. First his sister chose to leave (he had no contact with her after her departure). Then Hamish (a recent widower) and his daughter, Kiki (aged ten), joined the group. This loss and the new arrivals caused Christopher to feel agitated and confused about the entity to which he believed himself part of. Soon after his arrival, Hamish formed a sexual relationship with Amber, which Christopher witnessed firsthand on several occasions: “We didn’t have to go outside if we didn’t want to while there were the noises.” 

When I asked Christopher if Kiki liked living on the commune and was his friend, he said, “No.” “Why not?” “Kiki doesn’t share books and clothes. She doesn’t come in the bath.” Christopher then described a communal clay bath, which several members of the group used at the same time. The structure appeared to be primitive and was heated underneath by a wood fire. Kiki also felt uncomfortable with the levels of nudity on the site and would remain clothed in Christopher’s presence. On one occasion she had thrown sawdust in his eyes when he’d walked in on her using the toilet (there were no proper doors on the latrines). “Our face stung,” he told me. 

The unstructured environment was rendered increasingly confusing by the arrival of outsiders, whose general habits were not in keeping with anything he recognized as “normal.” It was during this period that Christopher began controlling his food intake. He described eating a precise number of wild snails per day and avoiding meal times by hiding on the moors or pretending one of the other commune members had given him food. That Christopher was left to his own devices much of the time meant his condition either went unnoticed or was wilfully ignored. The Child Protection Enquiry report shows his mother’s response to his hospitalization as follows: “He’s just a bony kid. He runs around so much. And he knows where the eggs are kept if he’s hungry.” 

Due to the complexity of the case, I felt it would be helpful to speak to Christopher’s mother myself in order to assess his perception of life at the commune against hers, and to discuss the possibility of her attending treatment sessions. There was a mobile number, but the first few times I rang, there was no answer (perhaps switched off or no signal in the mountains around K-town). Finally, I was able to reach Pascal. I introduced myself and asked to speak with Amber. Pascal was initially hostile and uncooperative, saying, rather defensively, “What right have you got to interfere? You want to criticize our lifestyle, but what’s your own life like? You can’t see into him like we can. What do you know about children?” When I assured Pascal that talking to Amber would be of benefit to Christopher, and that Christopher’s condition might permanently damage his health, he relented. It took a few minutes for Amber to be found, and then she came on the line. “I don’t want to talk about Christopher,” she began. “He made his choice, and I respect that. But he’s away from us now.” I tried to point out that her son was, at the time of leaving the commune, terribly underweight, sick, and disoriented, far from being able to make rational decisions and that Social Services had intervened as a matter of routine. “Intelligence isn’t about age, those are just society’s concepts,” she said. “Christopher knows all about the environment and love. You want him to be selfish and a machine that only thinks about itself. You want him to be like you, but he won’t ever be like you.” The conversation was deeply frustrating, and when I pointedly asked, “Aren’t you interested in helping your child?” she replied, “But he’s not mine, he’s ours.” When I asked if Christopher’s father might care to attend the sessions instead, she hung up. 

At this point, I found the case particularly difficult and stressful and asked my supervisor to review. I had recently separated from my partner over issues relating to starting a family, and I felt that some of what was being discussed in the sessions was too close to the bone. I was granted two weeks’ leave, after which I resumed my work with Christopher. 

INITIAL FORMULATION

My impression of the commune was poor from the beginning, and much of what was disclosed by Christopher and the conversation with his mother verified my suspicions. There was little privacy or coherence, and the culture, “all of one mind and all free,” which abdicated responsibility and parental leadership and which prized sexual openness and unboundaried sharing, provided an unstructured upbringing for Christopher. The inconsistent behavior of his mother (and, in fact, all caregivers he was exposed to) and her low levels of expressed emotion resulted in a highly ambivalent attachment style, which was reflected in his ways of relating to both his foster carer and myself within our sessions. Never knowing what to expect from Amber and with a complete failure of consistent emotional recognition and mirroring, he was not able to know his own emotional state, wants and needs, or have them validated. I suspect that Christopher’s perception was that he had very little control over the external world, where those around him reacted purely in the moment to their own individual wants and needs. Such an inconsistent and confusing environment is likely to have had a highly detrimental effect on Christopher, and at a young age, he had no choice but to collude in the maladaptive schemas of the commune. His sense of self failed to develop, and my hypothesis was that he used methods of food control in an attempt to create order due to a chaotic internal state and almost complete lack of boundaries.

The aim of our sessions was primarily to separate the individual self from the collective, to recognize personal and societal boundaries, and to break the restrictive eating patterns. In essence, Christopher needed reparenting in order to learn to recognize and understand his own internal state and develop a slightly more functional attachment style now that he was to be integrated into mainstream society. 

INITIAL TREATMENT SESSIONS

In the early sessions Christopher was often emotionally void, ignoring me or dismissing the conversation if he did not want to participate. He also spontaneously attempted to take his clothing off several times, kept opening and closing the window and disrupting the proceedings in other ways, and expressed a desire to be sent back to the commune. As he became more engaged in the proceedings, he also suffered fits of anger—whereas he had often wanted to curtail the early sessions, he began to throw tantrums toward the end of the later ones as I was drawing them to a close, occasionally needing to be forcibly removed by his foster carer. 

He responded well to the environment of the foster home, with its predictability and boundaries, and over a five-month period, his weight stabilized. Christopher began to look and act less like the feral child I had first encountered. He was able to follow simple house rules like knocking on a door before entering, and not attempting to get into the bathtub with other house members. The exercise of lending my fossils, though rather unorthodox, worked well as it encouraged a relationship of trust between us, while also illustrating the nature of ownership and personal possessions in relation to separate individuals. I told Christopher where each fossil had been found—Syria, Argentina, North Wales—and why each was meaningful to me. Toward the end of treatment, his carer indicated that Christopher had himself started to remember to return the items without her prompting. During my two-week leave I had traveled to Morocco, and on one paleo-mineral tour I found a beautifully preserved mid-Ordovician trilobite, which I decided to give to Christopher. The following session he brought it back. I had to explain again that it was a gift, and that it now belonged to him.

More difficult was encouraging Christopher to use the personal pronoun, to begin to ask, “Who am I?” and understand “I am me.” Progress in this area was painfully slow. Christopher believed himself to be somehow joined with the commune, and could not identify the single entity of himself, at least not consciously. Encouraging him to say “I” instead of “we” created high levels of anxiety—he often shouted, “No, we aren’t alone,” and he would scratch at his arms or hit his head. His fear of individuation was profound. It was as if he felt I was trying to convince him that he was becoming a new person, unknown, a stranger to himself, rather than acknowledging his existing state. 

As an intermediate stage, I began to get him to use his name to describe himself, thereby gradually demarcating his identity. “How’s Christopher today?” I would ask. “Christopher watched television last night,” he would reply. A breakthrough came during a project to replicate the snail farm. I was keen to have Christopher teach me how the process of detoxifying worked and thereby demonstrate his unique skills. As Christopher was punching holes in the lid of the margarine box, I asked, “Where will we get the snails from?” “I can always find them hiding under leaves,” he told me. The moment passed without his noticing the self-referencing language, but it had a remarkable effect. In the following session his mood leveled, he became emotionally consistent, and he was able to use the personal pronoun with greater ease. 

OUTCOME AND UPDATED FORMULATION

Though seemingly physically healthy and responding well to psychological treatment, Christopher was found unconscious in his room in the foster carer’s home on 01.25.2013. He was pronounced dead after two hours of attempted resuscitation. Autopsy results were inconclusive, showing no sign of illness, trauma, or suicide. While the initial formulation was not wholly incorrect, it is possible there was an underestimation of the strength of Christopher’s attachment to the collective. Due to the rare nature of the presenting case, it was always my intention to publish it as a paper in the Journal of Contemporary Child Psychotherapy, and I felt that the tragic outcome should not deflect from this intention. On reflection, perhaps treatment proceeded too rapidly and a full range of risk-influencing factors was not identified and taken into account. The case is currently being reviewed as part of an ongoing Severe Untoward Incident investigation. 

On a personal note, though uniquely fascinating, working with Christopher was also extremely challenging and often disturbing. At times I felt particularly angry toward his mother, my supervisor, and even my own limitations in helping him. I wondered whether this was ultimately influenced by my childlessness, a state that I had until then believed myself to be reconciled with, and feelings of attachment to Christopher. I found his sudden, unexplained death extremely distressing and have since restarted my own personal therapy. Christopher’s was my final case. I was granted six months’ leave of absence, but following this, I made the decision to retire from practice. 

Sarah Hall’s collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, was published by Harper Perennial in January.

More from the 2013 Fiction Issue:

The Mare

Jailbait

Miami

Pro-Morsi supporters in Cairo yesterday. Photos courtesy of Tom Dale and Max Siegelbaum.

Yesterday, Egypt saw the culmination of the Tamarod Campaign, a massive petition calling for the impeachment of President Mohamed Morsi. In the year since Morsi was elected, the economy has plummeted, state security has largely retreated from the country's streets, electricity cuts have increased, inflation has risen, and gas has become scarce. Now the country is in the grips of a confusing push and pull between supporters of Morsi's government and the Muslim Brotherhood, those who had ties with the previous Mubarak regime and the left-leaning, loosely grouped anti-Morsi camp.

The latter group took to the streets last night in the largest Egyptian protest since 2011's uprising. In anticipation of that, on Friday, Morsi supporters gathered at Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City district. I headed down to see what exactly they were demonstrating about.

Arriving on bus or by foot, the largely male population traveled to the Square from throughout the country to rail against what many deem as threats to their religion and president. Despite calls for a peaceful rally, groups of protesters were patrolling the grounds, wearing helmets, and idly dragging wooden sticks “to protect our people,” one said.

Mohamed Hussein, a carpenter, traveled to Cairo from the nearby city of Gharbiya to attend the rally. “Morsi is a legal president. We live in Egypt’s first democratic period in 30 years. We must accept the elections,” he said, before adding, “We didn’t come here for Morsi. We came to protect the legislative body.”

Most protesters reiterated some version of this idea. “I’m here to protect the legislative league and Dr. Morsi from Tamarod, but he can't work because people rebel over the legislative league and it’s illegal,” said Essam Abdullah, a lawyer from Mansoura. The point of contention between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the opposition is that the Tamarod (or “rebel”) campaign provides no legal standing for the proposed ousting of the president.

Pro-Morsi protesters with a poster of Morsi in Nasr City on Friday. 

As the speeches wore on, Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist political officials continuously attempted to affirm the religiosity of themselves and those in attendance. "Bring me a man here who smokes cigarettes. Bring me a man here who drinks alcohol. Bring me a man who takes drugs,” shouted Assem Abdel Maged, head of Egypt’s Sunni Islamist movement Gamaa Islamiyaa, considered a terrorist organization by the United States and EU. “Anyone who touches an Egyptian soldier, we will cut his hand,” he continued, invoking the Sharia punishment for theft.

“I am here to stand for our president. He is smart, knows God, and is a good president,” said Amr Sheroui, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth. “Tamarod are all felool [members of the ex-Mubarak Regime]. They could possibly succeed because they ran the country for 30 years,” he added.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Rabea Adaweya square in Nasr City, Cairo on Sunday. Photo courtesy of Tom Dale

Conspiracy theories were rampant among the crowd. “There are people paying money for the destruction of this country. Felool, like Mohamed El Baradei, Hamdeen Sabahi, Amr Moussa. They were controlling the economy before and they want to again now,” I was told. Many also consider the opposition to be out of touch with the needs and desires of the working classes: “The opposition has no presence on the street. They sit in their air-conditioned buildings with their computers but have no contact with the real people,” said a man who told me his name was Hussein.

As the speeches wore on and ashes from fireworks rained down on the crowd, I turned to leave the rally. As I made my way through the throng of people, I stopped next to a horse-drawn cart to rest. Making small talk with the owner of the cart, Saber, I asked him what he thought of Morsi and Tamarod. He explained that he had traveled to the rally from an outer-lying area of Cairo to make a little extra cash from the influx of people, before telling me that he was poor and thought little of politics, but that, “As long as the president is with God, I am with him.”

UPDATE: Egypt's army has given Morsi two days to respond to the protesters demands.

Follow Max on Twitter: @SaxMiegelbaum

More chaos in Egypt:

Ultras, Anarchists, and Street Fighting in Egypt

Egypt's Second Revolution

The Revolution Is Still Going on in Egypt—in Tiny Flashes