The Longreads Blog

Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Katie MacBride | Longreads | April 2018 | 11 minutes (2,641 words)

 

They found me outside my cubicle, flat on the ground, wearing my winter coat, with my purse slung over my shoulder. I had worked there less than two months. I took the position because, six months after graduating college, I still didn’t have a “real” job, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that sporadic babysitting gigs amounted to what was listed on my resume as “professional nanny.”

The job was in Chicago; before I took it, I was living with my parents in my childhood home in California. I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom, working essentially the same job as I had in high school. My entire existence felt like glaring proof of my failure to become an adult, as if I were trapped in a kind of pre-adulthood purgatory — one I would have done anything to escape. So I took a job I didn’t want, in a city that was cold and unfamiliar and where I knew exactly one person, my sister. With lofty and wildly inaccurate ideas about how fun having me around might be, my sister invited me to live with her until I found a place of my own.

Two months into my time in Chicago, when they found me passed out in front of my cubicle, it wasn’t hard for them to figure out who to call on the way to the hospital. There was still only one number with a Chicago area code in my phone.

***

I don’t remember any of that, of course. I only remember waking up on a gurney in an emergency room that looked like every other one I’d ever found myself in. There had been a lot of them. Two years earlier, I had spent nearly a month in the hospital, after doctors performed two emergency surgeries on my colon. It was a congenital defect, a sleeper cell in my body since birth, waiting to explode.

Was it happening again? I had been having stomach problems;more specifically, I had been shitting blood. I looked around the fluorescent chaos of the ER for a doctor to whom I could tell my medical woes. What I would not tell a doctor — what wouldn’t even occur to me to mention — is that I’d been drinking a fifth of vodka every day for the past six months.

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Memphis Celebrates King For #MLK50, But Still Struggles To Honor What He Worked For

(AFP / Getty Images)

For the anniversary of the 1968 strike of sanitation workers that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis, Tennessee, civic leaders organized #MLK50, a series of events meant to commemorate the city’s legacy of civil rights activism and explore the nation’s progress on issues of racial and economic equity. Memphis writer Zandria F. Robinson tries to reconcile the pomp and circumstance of the festivities with the inequality that lingers, stagnant and unchanged over the past fifty years in a personal essay for Scalawag. 

Being 16 when King was killed, Mama spent her whole life knowing. I don’t know how many years of extra mourning she was born with. Nor do I know which cataclysmic rupture in the Memphis history that happened to her before she was born—the lynchings of Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and William Stewart? The burning of Ida B. Wells’s newspaper offices?—was the source of that extra mourning. Growing up, Mama’s stories of her every day and emotional life after that Thursday, April 4, 1968, made me know that she was herself a museum, archiving all the things of her life and rotating what was on view. She was the docent of her life and of Black southern women’s lives and Black Memphis life, guiding us through her exhibits. Mama was an activist for being a museum and for just thinking she deserved freedom. She taught us the Black folk cogito: I think therefore I am free…

What is the mood like in Memphis 50 years after the assassination of King? What’s it like to be the poorest large Black city in the country and the city that killed a man leading a campaign advocating for poor people at the same time? What about that bankruptcy and environmental racism and foreclosure and infant mortality? How you—is it “y’all?—feel about all of this police surveillance? Where is the best barbecue/soul food? You say your little cousin was shot in the back by police before social media? Is the dream continuing here, where his blood was spilled? Is this ground zero for the civil rights movement? Is the dream now a nightmare? How can we keep King’s dreams alive? Do you know a sanitation worker? About this mountaintop: Are we there yet? Will we ever get there? Was his blood the magic?

Our mood is that low, salty, stank ass simmer of weariness of the same, that stale mid-summer mustiness, that heaviness of a viscous mourning we haven’t been able to put down because King and our cousins and friends are murdered and resurrected to be murdered again. We are tired of unfulfilled dreams, dreams deferred, cranes in the sky, and raisins in the sun.

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Unearthing the History of Lynching, One Story at a Time

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 20: Names and dates of lynching victims are inscribed on corten steel monuments at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice on April 20, 2018 in Montgomery, Al. More than 800 corten steel monuments are on display representing each county in the United States where a lynching took place. More than four thousand victims are honored at the memorial. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On April 26, 2018, the first national memorial to honor victims of lynchings opens in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial’s main feature is an installation of more than 800 suspended columns made of steel, one for each U.S. county where the murders occurred. The names of victims are etched into the markers — in places, the engravings simply read, “unknown.” Bryan Stevenson, whose Montgomery-based Equal Justice Institute,  compiled an official tally of burnings, hangings, shootings, and drownings of black Americans by white mobs from 1877 – 1950 and created the memorial, said he wanted to capture the “scale” of the 20th century’s racial terrorism.

The story of lynchings in the U.S can also be told on a smaller scale. Mob violence against blacks was wrought on communities, families and individual bodies. Throughout the memorial, details of some of the killings are listed along a walkway. But documentation of many of the murders is scarce: newspaper accounts are missing or unreliable, and memories of many witnesses and bystanders has been lost to silence and grief.

For New York Times magazine, journalist Vanessa Gregory unearths one story as she follows the descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, to Oxford, Mississippi, where they learn the details of the events surrounding his 1935 murder by a white mob and visit his possible burial site in an attempt to come to terms with their family history.

Higginbottom was 4 when the mob came for his father. He is now 87, with eyes set in a perpetual glaucoma squint and the strong voice of a younger man. He is the last remaining family member to have seen his father alive, and the thought of returning to Oxford was gnawing at him. The anxiety began when his daughters first proposed the trip, and it intensified that morning when he woke. And now Washington, the youngest of his six children, was peppering him with questions.

“So, who is your daddy’s mama?”

“I don’t know my grandmother on my daddy’s side,” he said.

“When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?”

“I don’t know when my parents got married.”

Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching. They raised E.W., the eldest, and his siblings, Flora and Willie Wade, in Forrest City, Ark., and later in Memphis. Higginbottom’s mother told the children their father had been hanged but didn’t share many details. And she almost never spoke of her dead husband’s character, habits or looks — the stories of his life. Maybe grief kept her quiet. Or fear. Either way, Higginbottom knew better than to mention his daddy. Sometimes he asked his cousins Dorothy and Olivia about him, but they told him to leave it alone. Don’t mess around in that, they said. You might get hurt.

Higginbottom had occasionally returned to Oxford when he was younger, chaperoned by uncles who wanted to visit relatives or take in a service at the family’s former church. But it had been a long time. He stared at the fields consumed by kudzu, the gravel drives, the hardwoods lush with summer growth, and saw only a foreign country. “I was trying to see something I recognized around here, but I don’t,” he said. “It don’t look like I ever lived down here.” As they sped closer to Oxford, he kept gazing out the window, scanning the landscape for even a spark of memory.

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When Staying Clean Isn’t an Option

Lance Armstrong, right, follows teammate Floyd Landis, up the La Croix pass during the 2004 Tour de France. (Bernard Papon/L'Equipe via AP Pool, File)

Patrick Redford‘s in-depth look at Lance Armstrong in Deadspin is a blow-by-blow look at the history of doping in professional cycling generally, and at Armstrong’s not-insignificant role in spreading it. Through interviews and court filings, he shows us just how necessary doping felt to cyclists — and how heartbreaking Armstrong’s insistence on doping was for some of the athletes who were drawn into his ambit in search of professional success:

Dave Zabriskie joined USPS in 2001, and he later wrote in his USADA affidavit that he began to ride bikes competitively as a refuge from a “difficult home life” resulting in part from his father struggling with addiction. He vowed “never to take drugs” after his father died. In 2003, Bruyneel and del Moral called Zabriskie and Michael Barry for a meeting at a Girona cafe, where they brought him EPO and made it clear that the two would have to join the rest of the team on the program. Zabriskie said he felt cornered, but eventually he acceded to keep his cycling career alive. It caused him to have a breakdown.

Armstrong’s program wasn’t just a highly-organized system of doping and training, it was also a highly-organized system of evading detection:

Armstrong’s performance was scrutinized and investigated by anti-doping authorities and the European press, but no matter how loudly he was accused of cheating, Armstrong never technically failed a drug test in his career. According to USADA’s groundbreaking 2012 investigation, that was due in large part to a coordinated effort to dodge drug testers. Hincapie says he warned Armstrong at a race in Spain that drug officials were coming to test him right after Armstrong had just taken testosterone, and Armstrong evaded them by dropping out of the race. Hamilton also notes that the UCI simply didn’t have an effective whereabouts program, and USPS riders regularly hid from testers or refused to appear. When testers did show up, riders would usually be tipped off beforehand and would take a saline injection to normalize their blood values.

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Making a Pilgrimage Along Prince’s Purple Trail

AP Photo/Jim Mone, File

Even when their music exists outside of time and space, certain musicians become inseparable from the places they lived. Lou Reed was New York. Édith Piaf was Paris. Prince was Minneapolis.

For Vogue, writer Rebecca Bengal and photographer Alec Soth search Minneapolis for the houses where Prince lived or that he somehow touched during his life. Bengal talks to the man who owns the house where Prince recorded Dirty Mind. She talks to a fan who moved from Japan and saw hundreds of intimate small club shows. The woman who owns the house where Prince’s teenage band practiced put it best: “This is where greatness came from.”

When she came back to north Minneapolis to look at the house she didn’t recognize the address. “When we were teenagers, we didn’t know it by the house number,” she said. “We just knew it was the Anderson house. We could close our eyes and find it by following the music.” They used the side door, heading straight for the basement, where a teenage Prince Rogers Nelson would be jamming with his best friends, André Anderson now known as André Cymone and Morris Day, in their early bands Grand Central and Champagne (later Shampayne). They played one of their first paying gigs at a church around the corner, for which they each earned $3. When Prince was kicked out of his father’s house, Mrs. Anderson, who had six kids of her own, took him in. “Prince was already so focused, so serious,” Robin said. “He could go really deep and then he’d hit those high notes. Our friends called him ‘Gazoo,’ like from The Flintstones, ’cause he’d wear this white space suit–type suit, bell-bottoms, and high-heel platforms—and then he had this big Afro.”

“You see down the street?” She pointed through her kitchen window. “We would sit on that corner there on Plymouth in our pink foam hair curlers and wait for the go-ahead so we could come over and be groupies and watch them practice. It was okay to be a groupie! It was part of our culture. We were north-siders and so were they.”

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Is Your Job Lynchian, or Is It More Kafkaesque?

Getty/CSA

 

Rachel Paige King | Longreads | April 2018 | 14 minutes (3,753 words)

 

When Richard Bolles, Episcopal minister and author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, died last year at age 90, the New York Times explained his best-selling career guide’s success this way: “‘Parachute’ had come along at the beginning of a historic shift, when corporate strategies like outsourcing, subcontracting, downsizing and mergers were starting to erode traditional notions of job security. The idea that you could stay in one job for a lifetime began coming undone in the early 1970s, and ‘Parachute’s’ perennial sales reflected, at least in part, this new reality.”

Given the tumultuous climate for job seekers over the last half-century — Bolles’s book originally came out in 1970 — the various editions of Parachute have, unsurprisingly, sold a lot of copies (roughly 10 million). In the 2005 edition, for example, Bolles demonstrates why generations of job seekers found his work helpful, with its combination of straight talk and spiritual uplift. For example, he writes, “The typical job in the new millennium is best viewed as a temp job …You must always be mentally prepared to go job-hunting again, at the drop of a hat.” Although the various editions were constantly being updated and revised, we see Bolles (in the mid-aughts at least) spinning the parlous state of job-hunting as not just an inevitable part of modern business but an opportunity for personal transformation. He asks workers to stop expecting not only security, but also stability or even any kind of appreciation for their efforts. At the same time, he presents the world of work as a thrilling adventure (or at the very least a fun challenge) involving short-term gigs with steep learning curves and workplaces characterized by interpersonal drama and managerial indifference to personal struggles. Still, he appears to believe that finding a “dream job” is possible if you stop hoping for any kind of external reward. For Bolles, the job seeker should not be looking not for a single position or even for a traditional career, but for a vocation. Secular people sometimes forget that that word was originally synonymous with the concept of a religious calling, but Bolles, with his seminary training, most likely never did.
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Bolivian President Evo Morales Is Banking on the Country’s Untapped Resource: Coca Leaf

AP Photo/Dado Galdieri

Touted as a cure-all, no more dangerous than a cup of coffee but far more invigorating, the coca leaf doesn’t get you high. It simply wakes you up. Many South Americans in Andean countries use it for energy, to treat altitude sickness, to stay sharp. They see it as as sacred, and a symbol of colonial interference in Indigenous affairs. After cooperating for decades with the U.S.’s War on Drugs, Bolivian president Evo Morales decided to expel the DEA and design its own drug policy: it would encourage farmers to grow and sell coca products inside the country and try to build an export business. Cooperating with the U.S.’s eradication policies had only led to violence; industrialization would offer Bolivians financial promise, and coca was a proud part of the national identity.

For Guernica, Jessica Camille Aguirre reports from Bolivia on its nascent coca industry and the companies trying to use the leaf as an ingredient for potential export. Energized by the leaf and the president, some Bolivians belief the coca industry is going to blow up. Not blow blow, though. As Morales says, “Coca is not cocaine.”

Coca, especially in the highlands, enjoys near panacea status. It had deep ties to indigenous culture, and the 30 percent of Bolivians who chew it regularly believe that it can alleviate most ills. In the new and growing coca product market, this tonic-like reputation is its most marketable aspect. “With Coca Real, it’s just the same,” one of Bolivia’s rising coca entrepreneurs, Juan Manuel Rivero, told me, referring to his flagship product, a carbonated energy drink containing coca extract. “A healthy beverage that will effectively combat sorojchi, alleviate exhaustion, and eliminate physical or mental fatigue.” Rivero is one of a dozen or so entrepreneurs who have obtained permission from the government to purchase coca for industrial development. While it’s not illegal to have coca in Bolivia, there is a limit on the amount that can be transported without a permit, and the movement of leaves is closely monitored. His Coca Real drink is one of the products that have entered the market seeking to capitalize on a sympathetic regime and shifting global attitudes about regulating certain kinds of substances.

At Rivero’s factory, where he produces soda concentrate, he offered me some of the finished, neon-green liquid product in a glass to try. It tasted like coca’s distant cousin, just arrived from Miami smacking bubble gum and raving about party yachts. Sweet, bubbly; the unmistakable descendant of Red Bull. I drank it quickly, and recognized an afternote redolent of coca’s tang. “Coca has one bad alkaloid, which is cocaine, and the rest of its alkaloids are good,” Rivero said. (The white powder cocaine is usually the cocaine alkaloid isolated in hydrochloride salt form, occasionally cut with other substances.) “We are sure that our product does not contain a single bad alkaloid. We want to show Bolivia and the world that it’s possible to make appealing derivatives that can be consumed and don’t cause addiction.”

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The Stories We Don’t Tell

Illustration by Lucy Grove-Jones

Lucy Grove-Jones has suffered multiple miscarriages, and she draws and writes about them in an illustrated essay for her site, Silence Killed the Dinosaurs. It’s a deeply compelling, moving read, but not an easy one — and that’s kind of the point.

I could have told this story differently. I could have cut out the jokes about apps and fertility-friendly lube. I could have mentally prepared you from the first line, signaled sooner this was a tragedy and half the cast would be dead (would have never existed) by the final curtain.

But no one warned me.

After the first miscarriage all the doctors and nurses and sonnogrammers told me this was common. I heard different statistics. Sometimes it was one in six pregnancies end in miscarriage, sometimes one in four. The pamphlet the hospital gave me said one in three. Whatever the exact number, it means that there are a lot of not-quite-parents out there.

And yet when I went into that first final ultrasound, I had never had a conversation with someone who I knew had wanted a pregnancy and lost it.

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How the Lani Kai Island Resort Thrives Under a Never-Ending Spring Break

Students on Spring Break in Florida. (Photo by Sean Drakes/Getty Images)

Jen Doll and photographer Eva O’Leary venture to the Lani Kai Island Resort in Fort Meyers Beach, Florida — a hotel known for choosing to host a seemingly never-ending stream of spring breakers to uncover how they not only survive, but manage to embrace the drunken debauchery of the spring break set — within reason, of course.

Then there’s the Lani Kai, which has been a relatively safe space for partiers for 25 years and counting. How does Mr. C do it?

I ask: why become a haven for spring-breakers? Why court that sort of trouble at all? “They’re the future,” Mr. C says. When the hotel started hosting spring-breakers, it employed ten security guards; now it has at least 18. But “these are good kids,” Mr. C clarifies. “Every once in a while, you get somebody that takes it too far, and you just get rid of them. Girls Gone Wild, they tried to come here, and we had none of that.” I ask about the booty-shake contest, and he laughs: “You gotta give them something.” Another thing the resort provides: a cheap all-you-can-eat brunch, because the kids “do not eat! They mostly want to drink. I want them to get at least one good meal.” Watching MTV’s Spring Break series from the comfort of my parents’ den in the ’90s, I never thought about those gyrating college kids getting a square meal, or who was keeping them safe.

I snap a picture of a black cotton dress hanging nearby that declares “I SURVIVED SPRING BREAK,” and marvel again at how this place is both homey and exotic, smutty and sweet. Like an insect cased in amber, the Lani Kai remains something of an untouched gem, pure in its impurity. And that’s what makes it, for better or worse, a spring-break touchstone. You can come here and behave like a 21-year-old again, no matter how old you actually are—as long as you’ve got proper ID.

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Bob Dorough and the Magic Number

Bob Dorough
Bob Dorough. Photo by Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Bob Dorough, who died this week, was instrumental in teaching my generation about math, and language, and civics. He expressed these ideas in the universal language of music, and the fact that Gen X kids were able to memorize entire multiplication tables was because Bob Dorough could write a hook. Read more…