Latest / EST's "Truth Be Told" / "Monsters Always Want to Party" by Kevin Fisher

Transcript

"Monsters Always Want to Party" by Kevin Fisher · EST's "Truth Be Told"

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Truth Be Told Season 2, Love and Theater.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: While 13 of the 14 stories this season were pulled from two sold-out nights at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York, The Moment I Knew, and The Theatre, this Halloween-inspired episode is from an earlier night called Monsters.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so without further ado, Kevin Fisher, in his studio recorded tale about rabbiting, which was his lifelong tool for evading monsters and bullies, until it perhaps met its match.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Monsters always want to party.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Usually the large, loud, lone men who scream from the sidelines, or as close as they can get to any speaker or the marchers.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: A month ago, I'm outside 26 Federal Plaza, the federal offices downtown, where a group of doctors are speaking to the press after being turned away trying to provide care to the people ICE detains on the tenth floor there.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: A large man stands subway brush hour distance in front of me.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's over six feet, shaped like a walrus, and looks like he's been dipped in stubble.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: He has opera lungs.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: He chants over and over again, drowning out the doctors, self-hating Jews, legal immigration, momdami communist, and most often America, which he pronounces with the Germanic spelling like Kafka.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: He turns every few minutes to shout, Viva Trump! to startled bystanders across Broadway who gawk at Walrus Man like they are suddenly at SeaWorld.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Mona, my younger troll patrol partner, gets most of Walrus Man's abuse.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Your hairy pits are disgusting.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: You hate men, you hate men, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I live with a man, Mona says, breaking character.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Does he have a penis?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: A real one?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: You have to ask nowadays.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: He chuckles in a kind of we hate each other, but isn't life fun vibe?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: But he's frustrated.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to party.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: He wants someone to scream with.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Bullies, it turns out, are a little clingy.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Walrus man paces for the next hour, circling the crowd as Mona and I protect each new speaker.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: We block him by moving arms outstretched in a kind of choreography.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: When Walrus Man takes a break, we break.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Mona tells me to shake my legs and arms to redistribute your adrenaline and insist I drink water because she's a top for hydration.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: All this time, Walrusman doesn't pick on me.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been that way.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Early in life I noticed that bullies don't see me.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like a rabbit on a path that becomes very still as you approach.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: You can see the rabbit.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can see the rabbit.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's right there, but the rabbit's stillness, perhaps its naked terror, provides it a kind of protection.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I went to middle school in England, which can be a Petri dish for bullies.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: I perfected rabbiting there.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Older boys, prefects at my school patrolled the hallways, stopping and searching other boys for contraband, taking their candy, money, or inhalers.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: The headmaster's son checked girls' underwear for cleanliness each morning with her cane lifting their pleated skirts.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pervy Hogwarts.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Boys play two sports at the school, cricket and boxing.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: I am nine years old learning to box in no school uniform.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Knit tie, jacket with a crest, wool shorts, high gray socks, and black oxfords.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: An outfit that would not be out of place at New York Fashion Week.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: We get a quick boxing lesson so we can start competing right away.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Keep your gloves up and keep your head out of the way, we are told, which sounds like rabbiting.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: The younger boys fight tears when they're hit.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: When their tears come, they smear their snot with their tears to hide them.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: I survive a gentle battery from my smaller opponents.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: A bit wobbly, I'm ready to go back to Latin class, but the prefects think it would be fun to see me box against an older boy.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm put in a ring with an enormous boy whose name I still remember as Samson.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Samson is a flurry of punches.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I put my gloves up to protect my head and stay close so his punches stay short.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: A kind of rabbiting.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Even so I am hit.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I feel my brain hit the back of my head like a wet towel.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't follow a cry.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Samson stops.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I taste metal in my mouth from the blood.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: The head prefect walks over to put an avuncular hand on my shoulder.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: He tells me I had a lot of pluck, and I feel the forbidden charge of praise from a bully.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's confusing.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I learned how to rabbit in adult life.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: The loud subway racists, barking feral dogs, or any police in small towns or some states.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: I eventually work in public health with a monster, one that wants very much to party, HIV.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: It lives at the point of intimacy, sex, birth, injection, drug use, a thruple no one asks for.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Seven years ago, I'm at the Niekis Hotel at Harare educating local advocates on PrEP for HIV prevention, how they can get the U.S.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: government, Pepfar, to fund it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Fifty years after the British left what was then Rhodesia, the hotel in Harare is still so British, down to the tea trolleys, meat pies, and faulty towers vibe.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like the English Midlands.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: In the United States, we also have this complicated relationship with our British colonizers, like we broke up, but we aren't over them yet.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Zimbabwe had been run for almost 40 years by Robert Mugabe, who kicked the British out but who let per capita HIV infection rates rise in some areas to 30% annually, one in every three people.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Queer people need no rights, Mugabe said, because there were no queer people in Zimbabwe.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Some monsters don't have fists or claws, instead they have a back to turn.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: I hear coup rumors from the hotel staff on my third day in Harari.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: My Zim friends are used to coup d'etat rumors.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Wishful thinking, maybe today, maybe today he will be gone.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: I get it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Believe me, I get it.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Rumors the opposition will rise up have been happening for years, but my Zim friends don't believe it anymore.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a tank in the main square this morning.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: A small tank.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you were at the tank rental at the airport, it would be the economy tank.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's guarded by young soldiers looking steely.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Zim friends tell me it probably broke down.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Later I see a few young women chatting with the soldiers, so tanks might be just a way to meet women.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps humble bragging how exhausting it is to drive a tank all day.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: My hotel phone rings at 2 AM.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: The front desk asks to put through a call.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Zim friend.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: He is so polite he asks me first how I am and apologizes for waking me.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: He then tells me the army, not the opposition, has taken over.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: This calls for rabbiting, but it feels bad.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: The army is coming and my Zim friends can't leave.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: All the foreigners meet in the lobby.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I step outside to listen and breathe in the cool, coo air.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: The tank is still in the square, but it's quiet outside.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: The teen soldiers sleep fitfully on top of the tank.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: You can get an Uber in a coup, apparently.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: A group of Europeans and I share a cab to the airport at first light.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: We ride on deserted streets to the empty airport named after Mugabe.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: We are stopped at roadblocks by young men with uniforms and guns too large for their frames.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Brabbiting feels like high school, leaving someone else to clean up after a party where you trash their parents' house.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: This must be how the British left 50 years ago.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: We wait at the empty airport lounge.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: The plane sits on the tarmac over an hour as we wonder if we're going to be able to leave, and then we do.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Two months later, I'm in Johannesburg when the corrupt and hated President Zuma resigns.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Where I travel, autocrats resign.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's 2019 and Trump is president.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: People text me to say I should come home immediately.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Back on Troll Patrol in Manhattan, Waller Span shouts over my shoulder.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: His breath is brimstone, his spittle flies, his bloodshot eyes dart around looking for someone to provoke.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: For all the fear and panic they produce, monsters also have disgust.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: On Troll Patrol, we are supposed to be stone.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do not smile or look at people in the eye.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Someone had told me to imagine you don't understand English.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Behind me, people shout, shame, shame at Walrus Man.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And though rabbiting is my superpower, it's time to leave its comfort.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's Walrus Man.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's the swinging cuts to Pephar.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's literally everything.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But when the crowd shout, shame, I choose to be no longer stone.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: A reverse Medusa, I later think.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I chant shame, shame, shame over and over again because it's the one thing that drowns out Walrus Man.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Walrus Man turns his attention from Mona and really looks at me for the first time and actually cackles because now it's a party.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And monsters love to party.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: His short stories have been published recently in Caveat Lector, Packington Review, Underwood Press, Pine Hill Reviews, Wax Paper, Fine Lines, and Avalon Literary Review.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svakar.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: More stories about the moment I knew will be released every Monday and about the theatre every Thursday.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time, remember truth wants to be known.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yours too.