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‘It was illegal. And it ruined him.’

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At ESPN, Tom Junod reflects on his father’s gambling habit: “…he made people think he was a gangster when really he was just a mark.”

Everybody thought Lou Junod was a gangster. He not only looked the part, with his pinkie ring and French cuffs and blue dress shirts white at the collar, he played it, cultivating an air of danger. He had beautiful manners and always strove to be a gentleman, the striving itself a part of his charm. But there was something feral about him behind the civility, the elaborate coded masculinity and even more elaborate actorly diction. He chased down men when they cut him off in traffic and got into fistfights well into his 70s, his anger an eclipse you couldn’t help but look at even though you knew it would strike you blind. He had an underworld glamour, even to his own children, and a reputation. People figured he had “connections,” and he did — his connections called our house, like old friends. But they weren’t friends. They were bookies, and they had him by the balls.

He placed his first bet on the first Super Bowl, Chiefs-Packers 1967. That was also the first football game I ever watched, because my uncle George was married to Vince Lombardi’s sister. Who the hell knows why you fall in love, but I can tell you that several love stories began that day: between America and the NFL, between my father and gambling, between me and football, and between me and my father.

I was 8 years old at the time, alone in the house because my brother and sister had just gone off to college. I was afraid of him until football. He scared me often to tears, and football gave me a way of talking to him without crying. And it gave him a way of talking to me, well, without making me cry. I dedicated myself to football in an effort to reconcile myself to him, and to reconcile him to the rest of my family. That he lost tens of thousands of dollars in the process didn’t really matter as much to me as my role in trying to help him win.

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The Paths of Rhythm

Pfife, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest in the recording studio in New York City on September 10, 1991. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Hanif Abdurraqib Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

 

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

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Accidental Music History: How Jeff Gold Saved Rare Iggy & the Stooges Recordings from the Dump

AP Photo/Valley Morning Star, Jesse Mendoza

Jeff Gold has lived many lives. He was the first employee at Los Angeles’ Rhino Records back in 1976. He served as VP/Marketing and Creative Services at A&M Records, and as Executive Vice President/General Manager of Warner Bros, where he worked with everyone from Iggy Pop to Herb Alpert. He’s currently one of the most active, respected music archivists and record dealers in the world, a status he cements through frequent donations of historically important memorabilia to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He helped drummer Ringo Starr catalogue the first copy of The Beatles’ White Album, numbered #0000001, which sold for $790,000. While searching through the collection of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason, he found a previously unknown, live recording of Bob Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963. And he also identified 149 acetates full of unreleased songs that Dylan made during the Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning sessions — they’d sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades. Those are monumental musical discoveries!

At his core, Gold is a dedicated listener who’s collected records since his parents’ collection first enchanted him at the age seven or eight. He just loves music, and he’s turned that love into a multifaceted career. If you’re an Iggy and the Stooges fan, you have him to thank for a few things.

Various Stooges message boards have breathlessly wondered how an unknown Stooges outtake named “Asthma Attack” ended up on the 2010 deluxe reissue of their debut album, The Stooges. And there’s been whispers about who found John Cale’s original, rejected mixes of that album. We now know — Gold found them, waiting in Danny Fields’ unpaid storage locker. Gold’s diligence saved those recordings, along with the earliest known live Stooges recording: live at Ungano’s in 1970, from certain death.

Somehow, no one had formally asked Gold about how these recordings were discovered, so I did. I’m just an excited fan, too, and since a documentary impulse drives a lot of my writing, I wanted to save the story of Gold saving music, and share it with you, fellow Stooges fans.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: How did you get to look through Danny Fields’ storage unit?

Jeff Gold: Danny and I have a very close mutual friend. That guy knows that I am always looking for memorabilia to buy, and he hooked me up with Danny who had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell to raise some money. So I flew from Los Angeles to New York [around 2002]. Danny was one of those guys who saved everything, so he had file cabinets full of stuff. You’d look up ‘1971,’ and there would be everything from postcards from Lou Reed to a Christmas card from his printer thanking him for his business, or dry cleaning receipts, you name it, and it was indiscriminately saved. I just sat on his floor for days and went through it, file by file, item by item, and pulled out anything that I was interested in buying. I found lots of amazing stuff that Danny was very happy to convert to cash. I probably spent two and a half days at his place the first time, then came back a few months later for round two. While I was looking I said to him, ‘Hey, do you have a storage locker?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I haven’t really paid the bills in a while, they’re bugging me.’ I said, ‘Danny, you have to pay the bills. If you don’t pay the bill, they open up the lock and sell the stuff at auction or, if it looks uninteresting, throw it away.’ He sounded very uninterested. I said, ‘How about I pay the bill and go look and see if there’s anything I can buy from you?’ He said sure. So he called the place up, which was maybe five blocks from his house, and told them that I was gonna come pay the bill, which was three or so months in arrears, and that I had permission to look in the locker. It was a funky storage locker. With no lights and no windows, this place was a dark jumble of boxes. I kind of looked around for a couple of hours and pulled stuff out.

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The Cabin

Photos courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lavinia Spalding | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,805 words)

 

The old rancher stood on the porch of my log cabin, shuffling his boots. Then he lowered the rim of his cowboy hat, squinted, and delivered the news I’d been dreading — the news that had probably been inevitable from the start.

Though I say the cabin was mine, I should confess it was really his. The rancher’s. Still, I felt possessive. I’d lived there only months, but I loved the wide covered porch where I’d hung my rope hammock, bought for 20 bucks in Mexico. I loved the woodstove and my nascent ability to make a half-decent fire on a chilly night. I loved the view from my picture window, past bright green fields and golden sandstone mesas, all the way to a distant blue triangle of mountain. A herd of deer grazed insouciantly in my yard each evening, a chorus of coyotes sang late at night. I loved everything about my cabin — especially what it represented: something that had eluded me my entire adult life. Read more…

Forming Relationships with the Road: An Interview with Tom Zoellner

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

Reading Tom Zoellner‘s Tucson Weekly piece “Interstate 10: A Personal History,” about the road between Phoenix and Tucson, I knew immediately I was meeting a native desert rat who knew my home turf. I grew up in Phoenix and went to college in Tucson, so I’ve driven that same stretch of interstate countless times. During my drives, I used to sketch ideas for ways to write about it, about the dry land it travels through and all the active roadside businesses and decaying relics of yesteryear. I never got past the note-taking stage, which is partly why I am so excited to see someone else write such a worthy homage to what Zoellner calls the state’s “most reviled” stretch of road.

People loathe it and do it on auto-pilot. By paying close attention, Zoellner functions as a tour guide in a place you’d never expect to want a tour, narrating all the interesting, ugly, and odd points along the way, as well as his connections to it. Ultimately, his piece is as much about the land as it is about learning to see past our own boredom and prejudices, to cast the familiar anew. When I read the word “caliche” on the last page, it made me homesick. Only a desert rat knows what caliche means, and seeing it in print warmed my red-chilé-colored heart. Zoellner talked with me about writing this piece and the nature of placed-based writing.

* * *

You lived in Phoenix but grew up in Tucson. When did you get the idea to write about this stretch of desert highway?

I suspect every commuter has a funny ongoing relationship with the buildings and objects outside the window on their regular drive — little physical mysteries. Who lives in that house? How did that ugly sculpture get there? Does anyone really feel socially elevated after going to “Elite Car Wash?” These musings, often pointless, are the background noise of real thought, like a radio station playing a song of which you’re barely cognizant, and I realized with a jolt while on I-10 that the essential spool of these half-awake thoughts had not substantially changed since I was 12 years old. Nor had the highway, really — it was just as uninviting and shabby-looking as ever. And it occurred to me that this was Arizona’s most unloved highway, but it was also the one most traveled by a statistically overwhelming margin. That became the central paradox of the story, and pretty much everyone who lived in Arizona would get that instinctually, and likely have a similar interior relationship with this road.

Had you made other attempts to write about it? I ask because I did — I sketched notes for a piece about it for years while driving it — and I’m excited to see that you succeeded where I failed.

Writing can take place in the mind long before your fingers ever hit the keyboard. Stephen King has a wonderful simile about writers as paleontologists who are not so much creating material from scratch but merely excavating fossils that have existed in the subconscious for a long time. In that sense, I’ve been writing this piece since I was a sixth grader with no awareness that anything was being created. And so one day, while making my umpteenth Phoenix-Tucson drive for unrelated reasons, I just scribbled a note on every “old friend” that I saw out the window, as well as the same brief and entirely-predictable thing I always thought when I spotted it. The actual piece took less than two hours to spit out once I sat down. It had already been “written.”

What did your Tucson Weekly editor think of this idea at first? Were they like, “Why would anybody write about that boring drive?”

This was first pitched to Arizona Highways, the legendarily well-illustrated publication of the state highway department that has been touting the visual glories of the state since 1925. I thought they might enjoy a counterintuitive take: “You’ve seen enough of Monument Valley. Now here’s what you didn’t know about the state’s most butt-ugly road!” Suffice to say, this wasn’t for them. I’ve been friends for two decades with Tucson Weekly editor Jim Nintzel, probably the state’s most astute political reporter. He was good enough to give it a try.

Have you read or been influenced by other road stories, a genre that might be called roadside journalism or highway literature? 

One of my favorite books is U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America, a collection of essays and photography published in 1953 by the under-appreciated American writer George Rippey Stewart, and then brilliantly updated by Thomas Vale in 1983 in a book called U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America.

Picacho Trading Post, demolished. Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

What’s it like writing for an alt-weekly right now? Some still seem unpredictable, fun, and adventurous.

When I was a daily newspaper reporter, I wished for the kind of length and freedom enjoyed by alt-weekly writers. I’ve been lucky these last few years to occasionally freelance an article for a few of them.

As you say in the essay, the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) razed most of the town of Picacho, which had been there since the 1880s, and no media outlets wrote about it. Did you discover that while writing this, and is this essay sort of your way to correct that?

Yes on both questions. Picacho deserved a much better civic obituary than I could give it, or that it ever got. ADOT couldn’t tell me much of anything about the decision to virtually eliminate it for the widening of the SR 87 interchange. It was a vanishing whose paper trail seemed thin enough to have been anchored in the 19th century rather than the 21st. Highway villages have an odd relationship with history — built to serve people who are going someplace else, who never stay and who barely give it a close look or remember it.

What are your ideas about the way we relate to physical locations, and about writing about a personal relationship with place?

It’s extremely hard. You could write a ten-volume set about a small place, and still feel like you didn’t capture its real essence. The center will always retreat from your grasp. Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to motion seen behind windows.

The Burrito That Brought Enlightenment

Nico's burrito. Photo by John Burcham

Most people have their favorite late-night food to comfort them or hurl them back in time: Jack in the Box tacos; Denny’s Moons Over My Hammy. For writer Cord Jefferson, nostalgia is a huge pollo asada burrito from Tucson’s 24-hour joint Nico’s. In a feature for Eater, Jefferson admits these might not be the world’s best burritos, but his lifelong attachment to them means he will, in his words, “stand up for when its goodness is challenged.” The virtues he extols for Nico’s extend beyond their delicious food, to the things that make us all love our late-night spots: ambiance, reliability, memorable, slightly ugly interiors. But for him, Nico’s also helped break the monotony of the affluent, elderly, largely white Tucson suburb where he grew up, and the restaurant embodies what he now considers the real Tucson.

It was around this time that I started going to Nico’s a lot. People at Nico’s were mostly young, and not so many of them were white (Tucson gets slightly blacker and a lot more Latino the farther south you go). More exciting than that, though, was the atmosphere, a raucous energy generated by the confluence of drunks and teenagers and insomniacs and drag queens and college students and stoners and people just getting off work and old men in Hawaiian shirts and straight-edge vegan hardcore kids and cops, and various combinations of those things. Nico’s presented a different Tucson than I’d ever known before. One that stayed up late. One that was diverse and lively. It wasn’t just a clubhouse for me and my high school friends like the Max, or wherever the smoldering “teens” of Riverdale hang out. It was a flophouse into which we were funneled along with hundreds of other night owls in a town that largely shut down after 9 p.m. We’d put in our order at the counter and then try to find a booth from which to wait for our food and people-watch. If there was nowhere to sit, we’d stand in the parking lot and eat.

Before long, we became chummy with the Nico’s staff. They gave us free food and didn’t hassle us when we filled up our plastic cups for water, which was gratis, with soda, which was not. A few times they even gave us beers, which weren’t on the menu and were presumably part of their own stash. Some friends of mine asked if their band could play an impromptu show at Nico’s, which obliged. The crowd ate nachos a few feet away from the drum kit while the lead singer perched atop a table and wailed on his saxophone. The night we graduated high school, a bunch of my friends ended up at Nico’s just before dawn. They sang karaoke on the intercom system and helped the employees mop the floors in preparation for breakfast patrons. (I would have been there, but earlier that evening I broke up with my girlfriend for the last time and walked home from a kegger crying melodramatically, like I was in an Aaron Spelling teen drama.)

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The Late-Night Burrito Joint That Saved Me From Suburbia

Longreads Pick
Source: Eater
Published: Jan 23, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,053 words)

Edward Gorey: A Highly Conjectural Man

Edward Gorey posing with a set piece he designed for the Broadway production of "Dracula," 1977. Jack Mitchell / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (2,151 words)

 

Edward Gorey’s small illustrated books, many of which are collected in his Amphigorey anthologies, are seemingly quite simple and often morbid. Children are befallen by terrible fates. Parents disappear and reappear too late. Danger lurks nearby, as dusk makes its way across the moors. All of this sinister mischief is told in black and white pen-and-ink drawings, with occasional color highlights thrown in (which somehow only serve to make the image more dreary and doom-laden). The characters differ little in appearance, and the prose — when there is any — is often a few rhyming lines near the bottom of the page. Looking closer, one can see the intricacy of the cross-hatching, the careful etching-like strokes that, alongside Gorey’s fragile humor, underpin the darkness.

Edward Gorey, like his art, was at once mercurial and precise. His interests, hobbies, dislikes, and habits are well documented, from his late-in-life love for TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,to his devotion to George Balanchine’s work with the New York City Ballet, to his undying love for the cats with which he lived. His physical appearance — over six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a long beard, draped in a huge fur coat, with rings on multiple fingers and scuffed up white sneakers on his feet — is as much part of the lore of Gorey’s work as the nonsensical creatures who populate his illustrations. Read more…

Shelved: Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine

Paul R. Giunta / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2019 | 17 minutes (3,315 words)

 

The remarkable thing about Fiona Apple’s album Extraordinary Machine is that it’s actually two albums. Each has its own fans and critics; each was reviewed in the mainstream press; each is available to the casual listener.

Upon closer inspection, the story of Extraordinary Machine becomes a room made of mirrors: The album was shelved, perhaps by Apple’s label, or, according to her own admission, by Apple herself. That version of the album, produced by longtime collaborator Jon Brion, was leaked to the internet. It’s called the “Jon Brion version,” but in actuality is a pastiche of original sessions and new material. The official release was mixed without the presence of either of its two producers. The first version was shelved in part because Apple didn’t feel the songs were fully her own, and partly because her label didn’t believe it had commercial potential; the released version proved them right, at least by yielding no hit singles.

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Labor Pains: A Reading List

A doctor examines a pregnant woman in Allahabad, India, 2011. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh, File)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

Prior to researching this column, I felt no significant babymaking desire tugging at my uterus. This is not to say I have not thought of being a mother or a stepmother. Adoption and foster-to-adopt programs have always held a special fascination for me, even when I was a little kid. But the biological mechanics of what happens at the end of the human assembly line — you know, the manner in which the finished product exits the factory door? That always freaked me out.

According to my mother, Child Me reacted to the discussion of labor and delivery with disinterest at best and revulsion at worst. Mom worried that she’d somehow made me afraid of it. In fact, she had not; she’d always spoken of pregnancy as the happiest time of her young life, and had two relatively swift and uncomplicated deliveries with healthy babies. When she was 24, I woke her up at 1:00 a.m. one October morning and was out in the world by a quarter past four, taking the traditional route. When she was 27, my brother took maybe six or seven hours on a Sunday in early December. She said he “shot out like a football.” I never knew how to react to that, and I still don’t.

As a child, I asked her how painful it was. She said, “Kind of like… having to do number two in a really big way.” She has since admitted this was an understatement, though one often does go number two when one does a vaginal delivery, but says “it wasn’t that bad” and “at the end you get a beautiful baby!”

My mother accepted long ago that making babies was not high on my priority list. She always encouraged my career and creative aspirations. I give her a lot of credit for not pressuring me about it like some women’s mothers do. I’ve told her that I just don’t have baby fever.

But then I researched this column.

And now…

Well, aside from abstinence from sexual intercourse, there is no greater method of birth control than reading birth stories. Add articles about labor and delivery as managed by the medical industry in the United States, and you’ve got a cocktail that should be nearly as effective as the common oral contraceptive.

My hat is off to women who go through with having a baby — and especially those who choose to do it again. That’s wild, lady! But as you’ll see from the stories I’ve collected below, some labor and delivery experiences are less than ideal, to say the very least. I’m glad real women share what really happens to them rather than glossing it over with some fairy tale bullshit. More real stories from real women who don’t pretend everything is easy, please. And more reporting on the way Black women and poor immigrant women are consistently offered a lower standard of maternal healthcare.

1. “I Think, Therefore I Am Getting The Goddamned Epidural” (Rebecca Schuman, Longreads, November 2017)

I despise every hippie braggart Schuman cites from Ina May Gaskin’s creepy-sounding books Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. At one point I also wanted to lightly smack her husband and kick the shit out of her anesthesiologist, though probably not as much as she did.

Dads make mistakes. It is a fact that my dad is awesome and also that while I was being born, he walked into the wrong labor and delivery room, misreading the name on the door. He did not recognize the gaping vagina before him and swiftly made his exit. During my mother’s second delivery experience, with my younger brother, he pissed her the fuck off by a.) complaining about the room temperature and opening the window when she was fucking cold and b.) bringing in a TV so he and the doctor and any orderlies could watch the game. But he turned out to be a splendid dad.

(As for a similar redemption for Schuman’s shitty, bored, Instagram-scrolling anesthesiologist, I have less hope. I’ve always regarded anesthesiologists as the groovy magicians of surgery — they show up, make your life better — or worse, if they want! — and then disappear. This gal seems to have gone to the wrong wizarding school.)

Schuman, who is one smart cookie, talks about Descartes in an accessible way and connects him quite easily to birthing:

“But what then am I?” he asked. “A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.” These might not seem to be questions (or answers) that one naturally associates with the act of giving birth, but perhaps they should be. The midwives in my books were asking versions of these questions, after all, and they shouldn’t be the only ones who got to. Indeed, what makes all that mother-Goddess-yoni-orgasm stuff disquieting is not actually its medical dubiousness. It’s the decidedly un-philosophical certainty of the operation.

If I still drank, I would toss back some bourbon with Schuman (though not if either of us were pregnant, obviously). Regardless, I would like to buy her a beverage or a large carbohydrate-based baked substance one day.

2. “The Lavender Room” (Cheryl Strayed, Slate, April 2014)

Cheryl Strayed had an ideal situation: the desire for a baby, good health, access to excellent care. Then she labored for 43 hours and pushed an 11-pound kid out of her undercarriage. I have no words other than “holy shit, what a warrior.” She is very encouraging of other women having their baby the way they want, which makes this a very sweet and loving story. When she mentions laboring while asking her deceased mother to help her, I got teary-eyed.

It also reminded me of how long labor can take. My sister-in-law and younger brother texted me a few hours after her water broke on a Sunday afternoon. I felt sure the baby would be there by the time I arrived to New Jersey on a flight from Los Angeles the next afternoon. Nope! I visited the hospital room, drank margaritas at the Stuff Yer Face in New Brunswick, New Jersey with the other aunties and an uncle and got a full night’s sleep before I finally woke up to the news that a child was born unto us. Now we are all obsessed with him and his favorite song is “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads. He is 17 months old and looks like Wallace Shawn.

3. “I’ve Given Birth 4 Very Different Ways – Here’s What I’ve Learned” (Laurie Batzel, PopSugar, June 2018)

I think I love this woman. She curses way less than I do but she does not pull punches.

I’m a former ballet dancer and have performed in blood-soaked pointe shoes through severe sprains and other sundry injuries. My pain tolerance is not insignificant. But there is no pain on earth like having a baby. When the nurse told me it was too late for an epidural, I would have sobbed if I’d had the strength. I had marched around the labor and delivery unit for three hours straight to avoid Dr. Jerk, I hadn’t slept in over 36 hours, and, as badly as I wanted the “traditional” birthing experience, I would have performed my own C-section right then and there to make the pain stop. Seriously, it’s a good thing there were no spare scalpels, letter openers, or jagged shoelace tips lying around, because I would have gone rogue in a heartbeat.

She had two C-sections followed by two VBACs (vaginal birth after Caeseran). She also says that if a guy tries to convince you that passing a kidney stone is as painful as giving birth with no drugs, you can punch him “in the biscuits.” Starry eyes over here! She concludes with the very kind sentiment “there’s no wrong way to become a mother.” What a refreshing antidote to some of the “you must have a vaginal birth with no drugs so that you can be a true woman” bullshit I read while looking through articles.

4. “Lost Mothers” (ProPublica, 2017-2018)

In publishing, any subject can become a trend, a flash in the pan, a momentary topic of national chatter. Sparked in no small part by Serena Williams talking to Vogue about nearly dying after the birth of her daughter, 2018 saw more mainstream publications begin to cover the topic of maternal mortality among Black women. But organizations like ProPublica, NPR, and smaller independent publications had addressed the issue previously, and Black women themselves had been speaking up about it for years.

It is incumbent upon reporters at mainstream publications to continue to report on this humiliating and devastating national health crisis. In the meantime, ProPublica did the legwork with a series of articles about the many, many Black women who experience a ghastly standard of maternal healthcare in the United States.

5. “I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman” (Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Time, January 2019)

This story is vivid and it is horrifying and it is heartbreaking. Read every word of it. Here are a few: “When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of Black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly.”

6. “Why does it cost $32,093 just to give birth in America?” (Jessica Glenza, The Guardian, January 2018)

These statistics are stark. Writes Glenza:

Despite these high costs, the US consistently ranks poorly in health outcomes for mothers and infants. The US rate of infant mortality is 6.1 for every 1,000 live births, higher than Slovakia and Hungary, and nearly three times the rate of Japan and Finland. The US also has the worst rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. That means America is simultaneously the most expensive and one of the riskiest industrialized nations in which to have children.

So we’re paying the most in the developed world for the shittiest treatment in the developed world? Okay, makes sense. No wonder so many women reject the conventional medical approach to birth and buy into comforting “orgasmic birth is possible, babies just slip right out, pain is all in your mind and was put there by The Man, also buy my book and taint moisturizer” pseudoscience, rocketing from one extreme to the other.

As with anything else, it seems, a complementary medical approach is best, blending conventional medicine with alternative or “traditional” healing techniques. But while my complementary medical idea sounds delightful if you can afford to pay out of pocket, how may health insurance plans will pay for your midwife, doula, obstetrician, nurses and 1+ nights stay at some swanky, soothingly lit spa retreat? Oy vey, what a mess.

* * *

The other ways to obtain a beautiful baby without almost certainly going number two in the process have always seemed the more palatable options to me. Of course, the headaches and heartbreaks possible with adoption and foster-to-adopt are innumerable. Taking on the huge responsibility of parenting does not seem simple — nor should it, I suppose.  Plenty of abusive, nasty jerks have kids, and I rather wish they’d give up for fear of poop on the delivery table or too many forms at the agency.

I may yet become a mother. I don’t know. At present, I am glad to be an aunt; I am glad to entertain my friends when they have kids, or to entertain the kids so that my friends can use the toilet in peace or take a nap. I feel enormous gratitude that generations of American women have fought to ensure that women of childbearing age have rights and protections that were unthinkable years ago — as well as the right to prevent or terminate a pregnancy.

I feel energized to work harder to ensure better access to healthcare for all women, and to help make certain motherhood remains a choice. I should say “biological reproduction” because, as Batzel wrote, “There’s no wrong way to become a mother.”  And of course I know — and you now know I know – it is fine to choose to go without children. You’ll sleep more and save money, much of which you can spend spoiling other people’s kids. I can’t recommend that enough.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote. She also hosts the podcast “Where Ya From?”

Editor: Michelle Weber