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Trouble

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Jill Talbot | Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | October 2018 | 15 minutes (4,207 words)

Sixteen

We met at gas stations. At the water tower. Under a street lamp in a new subdivision off Cartwright Road called Indian Trails, its curved streets and empty lots, its darkness and our darings. We met at Brian Walker’s house. Or Denise Simpson’s. But most of the time at Lisa Harrison’s, because her father always poured his fourth highball early enough to be out by nine. We met at the playground behind Shaw Elementary. The banks of Lake Ray Hubbard. One night, we met in the police station parking lot and waited for Bobby Ryan to walk out, holding our breath ’til he did. We were 16, 17, searching. Back then our town was a dry city, so we’d drive the 10 miles to Buckeye Liquor off Dolphin Road, the first liquor store inside the Dallas city limits. And we waited in our cars for the blonde, big-smiled Michael Nelson to emerge with our wine coolers (Matilda Bay), our cases of beer (Bud Light), and our smokes (Camel Unfiltereds). Michael wasn’t older than any of us, just cocky enough to walk into a liquor store in a shaky part of town wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a purple lei, for a reason I don’t remember. On school day mornings, we met on the marble steps of Mesquite High, planning our next party and laughing about the last close call.

I was known for two things: being the drunkest at every party and having the earliest curfew, 11:30. My father liked to remind me that nothing good happened after midnight, so my after-midnight had to come early. I’d drink two to everyone’s one and wander off to backseats, to backrooms, to the back of a pickup with one boy or another, worried I’d run out of time to be ready enough to call it a night.

We were 16, 17, searching.

I found trouble early. Maybe it began with the beer I drank in my closet one morning before 8th grade English, a lukewarm Bud Karen Miller stole from her dad’s stash in the crisper of their refrigerator. Maybe it was earlier, second grade, when I snuck off to tow-headed Bobby Rich’s house, the one with his father’s Harley parked out front. Bobby and I would kiss on his back porch until we’d hear his father’s coughs through the screen door, and I’d hop on my bike and pedal back home. Or maybe it was those years of parking lots and pickup trucks and that one night when I learned what trouble my trouble could call forth. And how I ran toward it still.

Laugh

It happened early, still it is a story I would tell if I was dying. I’d tell it because that’s when I learned there’s what happens and then there’s the aftermath. What happened took maybe five minutes, I don’t know exactly, but the aftermath, well, it’s still with me. I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

It was a normal day in the fall of second grade at Union Terrace. I was walking home with Mike after school. Often, we went to his house after school, up the block from my house on 22nd Street. A stone house with a Great Dane. His older brother and sister were usually out of the house. His mother was often lying down in her room and wasn’t to be disturbed. My mother preferred that I went elsewhere after school and only cared that I showed up for dinner. Neither of our mothers paid much attention to what we did.


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On that day Mike and I went into the basement and listened to West Side Story. We sometimes listened to Broadway musicals and sang and danced along with the songs. On this day his older brother was in the house. As if timed, Mike went upstairs to see his mother, and his older brother dragged me into the basement bathroom where he made me touch his penis. Did I rub it, did he put into my mouth, did he masturbate? I’m not sure. I know he showed me a small black and white photo of a nude woman with large breasts and pubic hair which frightened me. I remember that. When he was done with me, he unlocked the door and pushed me out, spinning me back into the basement. And he laughed.

I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

Did I tell Mike? No, I did not, though I wondered later if he planned his absence with his brother. I didn’t go upstairs into his mother’s darkened room where she was lying down and tell her. I did go home. But I didn’t tell my mother. I came home and sat down to whatever dinner we were having, probably some overcooked piece of meat, boiled vegetables, and hard rolls, and I picked at the food on my plate, stared at the tall glass of milk, and then excused myself and went to my room where I lay on my bed and turned my face to the wall.

Everything changed that day and yet I told no one, said not a word. My mother did not share cautionary tales or give advice about dangers I might encounter. I don’t think her silence was born out of a trust she felt in the world. It was her fatalism, not her faith that explained why she didn’t even try to protect me.

I wondered what my mother would have thought of his laugh as he pushed me out the door. She would have known what it meant, that he laughed because he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone about what happened, that he would get away with what he had done. Which he did. His laugh: I hear it still.

Threat

Two boys carried me to the car after the concert because I was too drunk to walk, not even 16. I remember I wasn’t 16 because I was always getting rides to school with friends or friends’ older brothers and for about a week, a strawberry-blonde boy who pulled up to my house, always a few minutes before the bell. He bounced on his toes when he walked through the hallways, laughing. And he had an alliterative name, two hard Gs, first name and last. Everyone called him by both, whether he knew them or not. On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should. He was only two years older, but he seemed to me like a grown man, devastatingly boyish and dangerously developed.

My father was his football coach. That is to say, my father was the football coach at my high school, so I was known to everyone, that is to say, visible, whether I wanted to be or not, which is why, I’m sure, I eventually leaned fast and far toward edges of nothing good so that I could let go for a few hours of who I was to everyone in that town. To forget. It was never rebellion as much as it was escape.

On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should.

I remember he drove a long car, something old that would have been uncool had anyone else been driving it. I remember he drove so fast I stared at the needle of the odometer, willing it to roll back to the left. My body tense, one clenched fist around the door handle. Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” so loud the windows shook. I only rode with him a few days — the threat of being in the car with him stronger than my silent desire.

A few months later, that desire still shook through me like those car windows when I ended up standing next to him at a sold-out concert in Dallas. I remember he ran down to the concessions and came back with two beers. And I remember being more confused at how he got the beer than anything else, but I drank it. And then another and another and I don’t remember how many anothers. I don’t even remember the concert, but there’s this flash, a brief scene of him asking a guy from school, the guy who sat in front of me in English, to help carry me to his car.

And then, he was pulling into the school parking lot for some reason and it was dark and he was on me and then in me and then driving me home. Hazy street lights overhead. I was suddenly alert and awake in a way I had never been, as if I had learned something about the world and my life and myself, and I had. When I asked him why he did it, he laughed before saying this: “I had to do something to sober you up.”

And I did what I did for years, I walked up the long sidewalk to the front door of my house and shimmied the key into the lock as quietly as I could and I tiptoed to my parents’ door and whispered “I’m home.”

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Child’s Pose

Would anything have prepared me, would anything my mother could have said made a difference in what happened? I ask myself this now, so many years later. So many years later I think I have inherited my mother’s fatalism, the belief that no matter what I did, no matter what she did or didn’t do, trouble would find me. I did not rush toward trouble but when it came, when it arrived, it seemed as if there was no other destination possible, as if my mother had given me up, promised me at birth to trouble incarnate.

Even at the age of sixteen, an age when many no longer assume the child’s pose, I was innocent, innocent the way some animals never learn to growl or bite. Plenty had happened to me that should have made me wary, stand-offish. That came later but at this time I was remarkably open-hearted.

It’s funny what I remember. I remember that I was wearing my mother’s cast-off heavy-woven, long green skirt, that fell to my ankles. I wore tights underneath and boots, the long dangling earrings my mother had brought back from Mexico for me, and her old buckskin coat with the fringe on the arms. An outlandish outfit furnished from her castaways. It was a Saturday night in March during spring break and I was going to a party with a friend from school. I didn’t know any details. I’m sure I lied to my parents about where I was going and what I was doing. My friend’s older brother was driving us to the party. He would pick us up later to bring us home.

About this older brother. He was famous around town, thought to be the most handsome guy anyone had ever seen, a gifted tennis player, smart, attending an ivy league college, and trouble, complete and utter trouble. A guy who could get any girl he wanted but who just as easily dumped them when he was done. I had watched him from afar, listened to his sister talk about his misadventures with a long list of girls. In the fall of our senior year, he had seen my senior photo, you know the small versions we give to all our friends. He saw the little black and white photo of me standing by one of the heritage trees on campus and he became obsessed with me, well, not me so much as the girl in the photo. I knew this because his sister told me. He even asked me out to a party on New Year’s Eve. What I remember about that evening was that he was indeed handsome, but he was also dull. He relied on his looks so thoroughly that he neglected anything else or maybe there was some justice in the world and he didn’t get everything when the gods were divvying out the prizes. It was a boring night. I was the youngest, a stranger among the older crowd and I remember feeling his friends were baffled by my inclusion. After that, we didn’t see each other until he drove his sister and I to this party. During the drive he acted as if he didn’t know me and that was ok with me.

At the party I drank with abandon. I took tequila shots with some guy while playing darts. I remember having a wonderful time, laughing my head off, without a care in the world. Not a trace of caution or concern. I remember this because the feeling sometimes comes back to me along with the realization that I’ll never feel quite that way again. I felt safe and happy, completely in the moment. I didn’t think about my parents or older brothers or what might happen to me. And then my friend’s older brother arrived to take us home and suddenly I was so drunk I couldn’t make it down the stairs. The guy I was playing darts with and my friend’s older brother had to carry me down both flights and put me in the car. I don’t remember whether they put me in the back seat or the front seat, but I do remember the hostile look exchanged between the older brother and the guy who I played darts with. I think the dart guy was a good guy and he didn’t like the way the older brother took possession of me. I have no idea what happened to my friend from school.

I was taken to yet another house, whose I don’t know, and the older brother took me into a bedroom and placed me on the bed. I was in and out of consciousness, mostly out, with brief spells when I opened my eyes. I opened my eyes when the older brother pulled down my tights and got on top of me. I have no idea how long he was on me, whether I opened my eyes repeatedly or only when he was finishing, and his groans woke me.

At some point he hauled me to my feet and got me back in the car and drove me to my house. I don’t remember any words between us. He didn’t get out of the car and help me to the door. He leaned across me, opened the car door and looked at me as if to say get out. Which I did. Somehow. And I walked up the flagstone path to the back porch, stumbled around looking for the key, and finally opened the door. It was way past my curfew and my father had been listening for my return. I can’t remember if he saw me or just spoke to me from behind his bedroom door. It’s hard to believe he could have set eyes on me and not known something wrong had happened.

And it’s hard to fathom what he made of my running a bath at 2:30 in the morning. But that’s what I did.

My mother never stirred.

The next morning my father told me my grandmother, his mother, had died last night. A massive heart attack. He never asked why I was so late that night.

After

I’m going back for a moment to Before. Before all the trouble and distrust, before my eyes darted across rooms with concern.

My father had a rule: When a boy walked me to the door at the end of the night, I was not to go beyond the door frame. I was not to linger at the boy’s car or on the walkway or in the shadows of the porch. But the boys did. Nights, they’d knock quietly on my bedroom window, huddle under the street light out front, or call me on the phone and ask me to meet them outside in 10 minutes. The lust in their voices, husky tremors, made me nervous. I ignored them. I hung up. I kept the blinds closed. Once, Brian Walker passed me in the hallway at school, a nervous laugh: “Your dad sure is fast.” The night before, my father had caught five or six of them on the side of the house outside my bedroom window. He chased them for blocks, barefoot, nearly catching them before they hopped the fence to Randy Becker’s house. My father never said a word.

But for all his rules and curfews and threats shouted on dark streets to boys, he couldn’t protect me, not then, and not years later, once I stepped beyond that door frame.

So much of my trouble happened in hotel rooms. Here’s one: A hotel suite in Dallas my junior year, a haze of bodies aglow (blue shadows) in the glare from the TV in the next room. A boy beside me in bed. I’d only had two beers, so he must have slipped me something. My body heavy, boulder-like. I struggled against his hands, the ones that pressed my wrists above my head while he kneed my legs apart. I had never been with a boy (this months before the concert, the truck, the parking lot), so I fought to close my body, my legs, to cover myself as much as I could. After a while, he hopped up from the bed, laughing: “You’re strong.” I watched his shadow blend into the blue shapes beyond the door, and I got home, but I don’t remember how. My parents were out of town that weekend, and when they came home the next morning, they found me sleeping on the couch, my mauve comforter pulled around me. After that, they never left me alone at home, and I will always wonder if they saw the panic in my face, the kind that comes after scrambling back from a ledge.

Thinking back on all this, I can’t remember my mother ever reacting or warning or being aware. Of course I always had cover stories, reasons and explanations I came up with on the drive home, and if she didn’t believe them, she never said.

Years later, in my late 20s, I sat in my apartment living room late into a night, drinking and talking with two other women, friends. After enough wine, we began alternating stories of hotel rooms, of backseats, of back bedrooms. One of the women, tall and tough, described the hours she hid under her bed to avoid a half-brother’s repeated attempts and advances. But we all had something more in common, a siren-like sexual aggression, a craving for conquests, a need for nights to end with a man in our bed, in our mouths, in us.

There’s a difference between being out of control and not being in control, and that night, through our shared histories, our adopted proclivities, we realized we had chosen, somewhere along the way, to be predatory and promiscuous so that no man could ever have the advantage again.

Lost Corridor

The winter of my senior year of high school, my parents shipped me off to board at Moravian Seminary for Girls, the school I had been attending since 9th grade as a day student. They had come to the end of dealing with me after a tumultuous fall. My mother especially was done with me, she said. Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

I was installed on the top floor of Main, on one of its narrow corridors that held four small rooms and a set of back stairs. The corridor was known as the Lost Corridor because the girls living there had been sent away by their parents and were no longer wanted at home. Maybe they were never wanted. This is where I landed that winter.

Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

On this corridor, three doors down, at the very end lived Linna. Linna was tall and willowy, with thin brown hair that she wore parted in the middle and fanned both sides of her face in peek-a-boo fashion. She outlined her eyes with black kohl, top lids and bottoms which made her look paler than she already was. I liked this Linna. She moved quietly with long strides and she often smiled at me when our paths crossed. I didn’t know her story though I was sure she had one. We all did. No one came to live on The Lost Corridor without a story. Her chosen quote for the year book was playfully dark from Richard Farina: “Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.” Mine was painfully sincere, from Theodore Roethke: “Leaves, leaves, turn and tell me what I am.”

Sometime that spring when I thought nothing more could happen to me, I had a dream. One thing I knew about Linna was that like me she had spent her youth with horses. In the dream Linna and I taught little girls how to ride. We led the horses out of their stalls to the mounting block where we hoisted the girls into the saddle, putting their feet in the stirrups, tightening girths. Then they walked their horses to the riding ring. We both stood in the middle of the ring like my first riding teacher Miss Reba. I faced one side, and Linna faced the other. We were teaching them the voice that horses listen to, the touch that horses feel. I used to wonder if Miss Reba knew which girls would learn and which would not. Linna and I had our hunches. Then we got on our own horses and led our charges down to the water. We told them they were to follow us, to hold on and let their horses swim. Hold on but not too tightly, we said. Don’t be scared. But, of course, some of the little girls held on too tightly and their horses bucked them into the water. Linna and I pulled the fallen girls out of the water and carried them in the saddle before us. We told the girls who didn’t fall off that they had passed the test, a test they didn’t know they were taking, and as a prize they could keep their horses. The last image of the dream was a line of horses with their small riders walking into the woods.

When I woke, I wondered which Linna and I were. Were we the girls who held on too tightly and had to be pulled from the water or did we learn the voice that horses listen to and take our horses into the woods?

Sharp Edges

I think women look at each other and think what we see either resembles our own reflections or something we’d rather not know in ourselves. I know I do this. It’s been 30 years, and every time I put on mascara, I think of Denise Simpson, the way she put on coat after coat of thick black, the way she put mine on when we’d get ready together in her room, the way I couldn’t (still can’t) get my lashes as pronounced as hers. A silly example, but I think it may be a metaphor, like your dream.

One night, a few months into my senior year, I took my father’s car across town without permission to borrow some of Denise’s clothes and forgot to put the seat back. I see myself perched on the fireplace hearth while my father paces the middle of the living room, yelling, “When you leave this house, you’re going to go wild. Wild!” At that crescendo of his second wild, he raises his arms in frustration and fury, and for a split second, I see it: the flash of futility in his attempts to get me safely across the churning waters, to keep me from running as fast as I can toward my own woods.

I already had wildness. I didn’t need to leave home to find it, but wildness begs another trouble, an expectation that the paths we’ve tread will be the ones we take again.

We had all gone to different colleges in Texas and we met at Brian Walker’s house over winter break that first year and we played some drinking game at a table in the garage and Brian brought his roommate home with him, and the roommate had heard enough stories about me that he had a plan, to get me drunk enough for them all to watch. More shadows in the doorframe, more struggling, this time futile.

That night became a different kind of door frame, a different kind of chasing away, one that kept me voiceless in my dorm room for the most of that year. I remember volunteering to repaint the hallway that spring — a mosaic that ran the walls in different directions, a pattern that took patience and my attention for months. Each shape and sharp edge a re-mapping, and I wondered with each brushstroke if I would like this new hallway. I did for a while.

But eventually, I left those walls.

I transferred to a different school.

And I found the woods again.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Waveformessays.wordpress.com. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

The Writer Alone

Pexels / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Tajja Isen | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (3,511 words)

Imagine the kind of company I was: Between sixteen and twenty-three, solitude lit up the part of my brain that other people save for smoking breaks. How long it had been since my last bout and how soon till the next, when I’d finally slip away and breathe easy. If the smoker’s unit of time was the splintered hour, mine was the unbroken day. Real life did not begin until I was alone. Anything done around others was merely provisional, a wavering line between two points, during which my mind was mostly elsewhere — if I even showed up. To friends, I made out like I was put upon, as though these ascetic stretches were mandated by some higher-up. As if it didn’t feel a bit like playing god to cancel plans and sever a connection. I affected regret, but I thrived on these excisions; tiny cuts that whittled my world into a zone of focus. These, I believed, were the optimal, and probably only, conditions under which art could be made.

It worked, at least for a while. I was militant about the time and space in which I wrote. I’d mimic the rhythms of different idols — Kafka’s wee hours worked well, as we shared a need for silence in houses stuffed with other lives; Franzen’s free passage from early rising to writing, an unbroken motion from one dream state to another. I briefly considered the Nabokovian retreat to drafting in the bathroom. Unpopular heroes, now, but I was very young, and men remain a benchmark for permission to take your work seriously. Franzen in particular compelled me; the way he made his dedication into a sort of faith. Stretches of The Corrections were written with shades drawn and lights off, the author blindfolded — presumably of his own accord — and his ears doubly blocked by plugs and muffs. This to keep the work “free of all clichés.” I admit to a curiosity about this method that still flickers.

Now, this kind of glass-blown aloneness feels like it’s fallen out of fashion; something consigned to a certain type of writer from the late nineties or early aughts, for whom the internet remains a thing to be poked with a stick from afar. I’ve been shaped by Franzen’s work more than it’s cool to admit, but in late 2018, it’s hard to conceive of a model of “genius” that’s aged worse than a white man alone in the dark, sensorily deprived in preparation to pass judgment on the culture. Who dares to cover his eyes, especially now? We tend, and rightly, to be suspicious of the artist who wants to hold herself apart from the quick, polluting current of opinion, yet still reserve the right to jump in and condemn it. The total opt-out has become the stuff of satire, the absurdity of privilege writ large, whether through its deliberate skewering in fiction or the razor-edged photographic negative of a magazine profile. Most people have lives. Read more…

‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’

"Punkers and policemen face each other during a demonstration against the census on the 9th of May in 1987." Chris Hoffmann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Algonquin Books

Will Hermes | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,534 words)

Punk rock was revolution-minded from the get-go, at least about aesthetics. Its political consciousness bloomed later –- most vividly in the U.K., then in scenes around the world. Yet for all the anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan bluster, punk can lay direct claim to just one full regime change. That’s the takeaway from Tim Mohr’s revelatory new book Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It chronicles the rise of the scene — essentially seeded, Mohr writes, by a 15-year-old girl whose moniker became Major — in the Soviet Bloc German Democratic Republic in the ’80s. As its numbers swelled, it attracted the attention of the famously ruthless Stasi intelligence and security force (basically the KGB of the GDR), whose mandate included crushing any murmurs of rebelliousness or dissent, and who employed a psychological warfare strategy known as Zersetzung, or decomposition, towards those ends. Kids were picked up and interrogated, for hours and even days, for their haircuts, or clothing, or scraps of paper with song lyrics. For even minor transgressions, they lost college placements, government-controlled apartments, and jobs, their parents and relatives often punished in a similar manner. Kids were arrested and beaten, spent months in prison, threatened with expatriation.

Yet the scene kept growing. Bands like Namenlos and Schleim-Keim formed, playing gigs in church compounds — pretty much the only places alternative culture could exist, since church “open work” spaces were theoretically off-limits to the Stasi, at least initially. There, communities grew; punks connected with environmental activists and others working for change, sharing strategies and collaborating. They staged concerts and festivals, which the Stasi tried to suppress. When street protests began in force, swelling from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, it was a culmination of the civil unrest that began in significant part, Mohr suggests, with a handful of strong-willed teenage punks hanging out at a park in Plänterwald.

Mohr encountered this history during his years in East Berlin, where he deejayed in clubs that had sprouted in the free-for-all communities of post-reunification Germany — clubs often created, staffed and attended by the same culture warriors that came up in the ’80s punk scene. Mohr spoke with us from his current home in Brooklyn, NY.

Listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast:

Longreads: So how did you first wind up in Berlin? This was after the wall fell, right?

Tim Mohr: Yeah, it was ‘92, so two years after unification. I was just determined to live abroad for a while, and I didn’t really have much of a clue about Germany. I guess I’d say I was a stupid American at the time. I thought Oktoberfest and Germany were the same thing, and I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and see everyone running around in lederhosen.

Chugging beer…

Yeah, out of giant mugs. And of course, it wasn’t the case. I ended up in a typical Eastern Bloc high rise, far in the East. This was somewhat disappointing. But pretty quickly I discovered the scene that was happening in crumbling old buildings in the central part of town, where people were squatting and the first generation of clubs and bars were up and running.

Read more…

Eight Days in September, A Decade Later

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

In the ‘Notes and Sources’ section of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s bestseller, Too Big To Fail, the New York Times financial writer and columnist details the extraordinary access he was given about the events of the Lehman Weekend—that is, the two days in mid-September 2008 in which the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG nearly collapsed.

“One CEO, whom I have known for several years, arrived at our first meeting with meticulous handwritten notes,” writes Sorkin. “‘I’m giving you them for the same reason I took them,’ he explained. ‘This was history in the making.'” While Sorkin’s gripping narrative not only illuminates the minute-by-minute details of the weekend, but also the lead-up to the events that nearly cratered the U.S. economy, his book wasn’t the first account to highlight the minute particulars and nuances of how close the nation came to another Great Depression—that would be James B. Stewart’s ‘Eight Days,’ which was published in the New Yorker about a month before Sorkin’s book debuted.

While Stewart’s reporting isn’t as encompassing as Sorkin’s, which is understandable given the level of access that Sorkin possessed — sources provided videotaped recordings of internal meetings as well as illustrations documenting the seating arrangement of fateful meetings — Stewart deftly navigated the topsy-turvy nature of a 72 hour period that has since afflicted multiple generations. The genius of ‘Eight Days’ is how seamlessly Stewart weaves weighty material into a feature of how Wall Street nearly broke America.

Referring to a Lehman failure, the Treasury official said, “We knew it would be awful.” At the same time, after months of turmoil, anyone still owning Lehman stock or commercial paper had to be considered a speculator. Perhaps investors would stop assuming that the government would bail out every wayward financial institution and adjust their risk-taking accordingly. “Everybody in some part of their brain thought it was a good thing for Lehman Brothers to go under,” the Treasury official said. “Was this ten per cent of the brain? I don’t know. . . . But the thought was there somewhere.”

At noon, Steven Shafran, a senior adviser at the Treasury, text-messaged his colleagues, “We lost the patient.”

Read the story

Eli Saslow on the Slow-Motion Toppling of Derek Black’s White Supremacism

Associated Press

Jonny Auping | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (5,065 words)

Before Richard Spencer became one of white nationalism’s poster boys, before Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos helped normalize stringently racist ideologies, before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and before the Charlottesville riots, no one was more suited and prepared to head this generation of prejudice than Derek Black.

Derek’s father, Don, founded Stormfront, the largest online community for racists. His godfather was David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and probably the most notorious white nationalist alive. By his mid-teens Derek was living up to that pedigree. He hosted a daily radio show in which he advocated for an all-white America and denied the legitimacy of the Holocaust. By 2008, among his community, Derek was a prodigy.

How Derek became a white nationalist is relatively obvious: He was a product of his environment. But in his new book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, Eli Saslow dives into a much more complex and emotional journey: How Derek dug his way out.

Saslow’s detailed account of Derek’s time at New College in Florida — from his early double life as a student and white nationalist figurehead to his eventual public disavowing of his previous ideology in a letter to the SPLC — required interviews with classmates who publicly shunned him and ones who chose to engage patiently with him (including Jewish and immigrant students who reached out to him), as well as with committed white nationalists, included Derek’s immediate family. In his reporting, Saslow spent “hundreds of hours” with Derek himself, and gained access to personal emails, Facebook, and g-chats containing intense debates, which now serve as the gradual debunking of racist ideologies.

The former Pulitzer Prize winner took the time to speak with Longreads about Derek’s transformation, the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and whether or not there’s a proper way to engage someone who promotes hateful rhetoric. Read more…

Did We Learn From Anita Hill?

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the early 1980s, probably the summer of 1982, a teenage girl was at a party in a Maryland suburb near D.C. It was a memorable night, one which she could recall in detail almost forty years later. Two boys pushed her into a bedroom. One pinned her to the bed and groped her, his body writhing on top of hers, clumsily attempting to pull off her clothes and the one-piece bathing suit underneath them. When she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth. The boys were laughing. The girl was afraid the boy on top of her might accidentally kill her. His friend watched, then tried to join in, jumping on top of them. All three went tumbling to the ground and the girl fled, locking herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys stumbling away.

The girl — around 15 at the time — did what many girls who find themselves in this situation do: She told no one. In the next few years, she struggled academically and socially, unable to form romantic relationships.

It’s possible she watched on television almost ten years later when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being sexually harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. It’s possible she saw Hill accused of being delusional, or a vengeful woman scorned. “She wanted it” is likely something she heard said of this poised and polished scholarly woman. It’s possible that two years after that, in 1993, she watched as David Brock gained plaudits and wealth for a character-assassinating book claiming to show “the Real Anita Hill,” watched when GOP operatives referred to his mansion as the house that Anita built.” It’s possible she again noticed a decade later, in 2001, when Brock quietly disavowed his entire book and said his writing on Hill was gleaned not from reporting, but from rumors intended to destroy her reputation. He faced exactly zero repercussions. It’s possible she watched Hill, an accomplished legal scholar and lawyer, get reduced forever in history to a woman in the shadow of a man for whom consequences proved to be purely theoretical.

A year later, in 2002, the formerly teenaged girl, now a successful professor herself, married. Early in their relationship, she told her husband she’d been physically abused, but it took ten years of struggling in their marriage before the details came out in couples counseling.

It’s unclear whether she noticed that the boy who watched in that room on the night in question published a book, chronicling his history of alcoholism, and including anecdotes about a friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who partied at the beach with him as a teen. According to her husband, she did remember the last name of the boy who held her down: Kavanaugh. In the 2012 therapy session when she revealed the details of the night that traumatized her as a teen, she told her husband that the boy who attacked her was now a federal judge, and she feared he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

That day came earlier this year. Hesitantly, the woman contacted the Washington Post’s tipline and her congresswoman. Through her congresswoman, she sent a letter describing the incident, and requesting confidentiality, to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Frightened of the repercussions of going public with her story, she ignored efforts from the Post and others to speak with her. She hired a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, and took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. The test concluded she was telling the truth.

It’s unlikely that gave her much comfort, if she remembered Anita Hill’s experience. After all, Hill took and passed a polygraph test. The man she accused, Clarence Thomas, refused to, was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and remains on the court to this day.

Those are the details of the story provided by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser thus far, and some of the historical context surrounding them. There are other cultural realities to consider, of course: the current #MeToo movement, which has some women feeling slightly less afraid to speak up about experiences of abuse, and many powerful figures on the defensive, accusing supporters of the movement of going too far. We are in “the year of the woman,” some say. Will that help Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor accusing Kavanaugh? Consider this: 1992 was also “the year of the woman.” It was a year after Anita Hill testified, the same year as the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to regulate abortion as early as the first trimester, a ruling that reaffirmed central tenets of Roe v. Wade while beginning the gradual process of eroding the rights granted to women in the 1973 landmark decision.

Ford initially agreed to testify before Congress, just as Anita Hill did after statements she gave to FBI agents doing background checks on Thomas were leaked to the press. Women from her high school have circulated a letter of support. Of the 65 high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s who signed a letter of support for him last week, only four have stood by their signatures since Ford came forward. (Many of those 65, though, did not respond when POLITICO contacted them.) Mark Judge, the friend who Ford says was with Kavanaugh when he attacked her, has since written that he never saw Kavanaugh behave as Ford described and he would prefer not to testify. The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoena power to compel him to do so, but it’s unclear whether the committee will pursue that route. Meanwhile, a woman who says she went to school with Ford tweeted that she knew about the incident when it happened, though she has since deleted the tweet and declined to discuss it further.

Hill had support back in 1991 too. She had four women waiting to support her credibility, but they were not allowed to speak — because Joe Biden, a Democrat, made a deal with his Republican colleagues. Biden has of late taken up the cause of affirmative consent and campus sexual assault, and has twice come close to apologizing to Hill — though not for suppressing her supporters, or for his own role in the attacks she received (he claims he wishes he’d done more to tone down his colleagues’ attacks on her). As Hill herself said: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

Biden has pointed out he voted against Thomas’ confirmation, but if he suppressed her witnesses, how much does that single vote really matter?

Biden has long been praised for his ability to “reach across the aisle” and work amicably with his Republican colleagues. Many of today’s top Democrats have the same reputation. Does that mean Ford can expect to be undermined in back-door dealings the way Hill was? The vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation was scheduled for this Thursday, but after three Republican senators said they thought it should be postponed, Sen. Chuck Grassley canceled the vote. A new date has not yet been set.

At first, Ford’s lawyer said on television that Ford would testify before the committee. But after receiving death threats, having her email hacked and identity impersonated online, Ford said an FBI investigation should occur before she is forced to go “on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.” While Ford and her family had to relocate from their home for safety reasons, Kavanaugh’s wife was handing out cupcakes to the reporters outside their house. (Hill’s experience predated the internet age, but she too received harassing phone calls from strangers.)

Sen. Orrin Hatch has claimed the FBI doesn’t conduct such investigations, even though they did investigate Hill’s statements about Thomas. Hatch should know this: During Thomas’ hearing, he praised Biden and Strom Thurmond for ordering an FBI investigation “which was the very right thing to do, and they did what every other chairman and ranking member have done.” (The Justice Department has said the allegation against Kavanaugh “does not involve any potential federal crime” for the FBI to investigate, and that the FBI’s role during background investigations is specifically to look for natural security risks.) The Utah senator even doubled down in recent days: When Sen. Schumer criticized the White House for not ordering an FBI investigation, Hatch said his complaint “does not hold water” because Senate Democrats had withheld Ford’s letter from Republicans and the FBI for two months. Hatch’s accusation comes off a little hypocritical, however, considering the White House and Republicans have withheld the majority of Kavanaugh’s record, only releasing about 7 percent of it and blocking subpoenas seeking answers to a variety of questions. (For comparison, when Justice Elena Kagan was nominated, the Obama White House released about 99 percent of her record.)

Why do these details about Hatch matter? He sits on the committee that will question Ford — and was on it back in 1991 when they questioned Hill. He was one of her most aggressive interrogators, and accused her of plagiarizing her statements about Thomas from “The Exorcist” and an obscure decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, Okla. He doesn’t seem to have changed much since then: Ford hasn’t even testified yet and he and Grassley (also on the committee when it questioned Hill) have already said she is “mistaken” and “mixed up.” As Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has sat on the committee for at least a decade, told The Washington Post, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” which hardly suggests any plan to actually consider any testimony from Ford.

It’s odd that Hatch’s blatant, seemingly blind support for Kavanaugh doesn’t disqualify him from being on the committee considering his appointment. It’s especially worrisome in light of a David Brock tweet claiming that it was Hatch’s staff who selectively leaked part of the FBI investigation into Hill’s claims about Thomas to him. It would not be surprising to hear that Brock is experiencing deja vu these days, harkening back to the days when he was determined to help make Hill appear “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” by printing “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he heard about her. Contradictory claims are making a comeback, it seems: Kavanaugh’s defenders have mounted a wild array of excuses for the man. Sometimes it’s that he wasn’t at the party; other times that there never was a party. Or he was at the party but the incident didn’t happen; or it happened but it doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago and apparently teenage boys categorically sexually assault their female peers and that’s acceptable. Or something happened but it was “rough horse play.”

Hill herself penned an op-ed in the New York Times this week, writing that “the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991.” But will we get it? She doesn’t sound so sure: “That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”

It’s fair to wonder why Republicans wouldn’t want to just pick a new nominee. Ford’s accusation is, after all, not the only problem that has come up during the judge’s hearings. He is accused of lying under oath not only this year, but also in 2004 and 2006. The thing he was allegedly lied about: allegedly stolen documents. (A former staffer for Sen. Hatch now claims that Kavanaugh “knew nothing of the source” of the documents he was provided.) It’s also unclear whether he was truthful about his involvement in the vetting of a judicial nominee whom he recommended for the seat. He may have also lied about his involvement with the appeals court nomination of a lawyer who helped develop the Bush-era interrogation torture policies, and another judge who suggested a reduction of the sentence of a man who helped to burn a cross in front of a mixed-race couple’s home. He may have even lied about his knowledge of the interrogation torture policies themselves (according to Sen. Richard Durbin, to whom Kavanaugh professed his ignorance of the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, “…[Kavanaugh] had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination”).

While legal scholars say Kavanaugh’s actions likely don’t meet the very high bar for perjury, it’s hardly commendable to give someone who apparently struggles to tell the truth under oath — or fully understand the documents he is given or the actions of people he promotes — a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. There are more than 3,000 federal judges in this country. Is it really not possible for Republicans to find one who has not, willfully or otherwise, said untrue things under oath? The Supreme Court is, after all, the highest court in the land. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, then, to hold the people we put on it to the highest standards?

Moreover, is being the party who insisted on putting not just one, but two men accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court really how the GOP wants to define itself?

Apparently, it is. POLITICO quoted a lawyer “close to the White House” insisting Kavanaugh’s nomination would never be withdrawn. “No way,” the lawyer reportedly said. “If anything, it’s the opposite.” Apparently, the White House is concerned that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

This is perhaps not a surprising view from a White House that stands behind a president caught bragging on tape that he doesn’t wait before forcing himself on women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” A president accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women. A president who defended his White House staff secretary after claims of the man’s history of intimate partner violence — which the White House knew about for months — was exposed. Or who said, of child predation allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, “forty years is a long time.” Or who defended Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Corey Lewandowski and so on. In effect, an endorsement from the Trump White House doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that his chosen nominee may have committed sexual predation.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

 

Shelved: The Velvet Underground’s Fourth Album

The Velvet Underground at The Record Plant on May 6, 1969, during a session for VU. L to R: Doug Yule, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison, engineer Gary Kellgren. Photo by William "PoPsie" Randolph.

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (3,669 words)

 

The Velvet Underground album VU is the binding agent in a career of releases that differ so dramatically one from another as to be almost artistic reversals. VU has the dark majesty of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the neurotic strut (if not the head-wrecking dissonance) of White Light/White Heat, the tenderness and emotional insight of The Velvet Underground, and the pure pop sensibility of Loaded. In its 10 tracks, it contains refined versions of what the band did well during the four years they lasted. The irony is that VU wasn’t released until more than a dozen years after the Velvet Underground disbanded.

Recorded primarily in 1969, after the ouster of multi-instrumentalist John Cale, and later cannibalized by principal songwriter Lou Reed for his solo career, the recordings that make up VU were shelved for 16 years. They stayed in the MGM vaults, mostly unmixed, until discovered during the process of reissuing the band’s catalog in the early 80s. As a result, VU benefitted from much improved audio technology and was released to a world not only better prepared for the Velvet Underground, but one that had largely absorbed its lessons. The album made a beautiful tombstone for the band’s career, at a time when all the members were alive to see it.
Read more…

Age Appropriate

igorr1 / Getty, James Woodson / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (4941 words)

In the summer of 2017, when I was 41 years old, I temporarily lost my parents. This is both less and more dramatic than it sounds. On August 1st, the start of the Long Island beach house rental I’d arranged for the month, I got into a car with my mom and dad, who’d helpfully flown up from Florida to join me for the initial stage of this retreat after I realized I hadn’t driven since I was a teenager, and I wasn’t going to start trying again on the Long Island Expressway.

After we loaded the rental car and I dutifully fastened my seatbelt in the backseat, assuming the position of so many family road trips past, I realized I hadn’t mailed my maintenance for my Brooklyn apartment. “Hang on — I’ll be right back!” I yelled, grabbing the envelope with the check in it and dashing across the street toward a mailbox. My dad waited at the side of the road, but then came a surge of traffic, and then a cop, and he had to drive on. “Noooooooo!” I yelled, chasing after the rental car (what kind was it anyway? I had no idea!) in the heat, knowing even as I did my perfunctory sad jog that there was no way I’d catch up.

I had no phone, no purse, no keys, no way to communicate with them other than to send mental signals: I will be right here waiting for you, a Richard Marx song on repeat. When you lose someone, stay put!, I remembered, a lesson imparted at various times during my childhood. So I waited. And waited. Finally, I saw the rental car heading back in my direction. No need to know the make or model when Mom was leaning out of the passenger side window, waving in the wind, shouting my name at the top of her lungs. They’d found me.

It was not the most auspicious beginning to our trip, and I felt relief and embarrassment in equal measures. I was, by all accounts, an adult. Yet I was never really a grown-up, particularly not when my parents were around.
Read more…

No, I Will Not Debate You

akindo / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Laurie Penny | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,795 words)

“The media here is the opposition party.
They don’t understand this country.”
— Steve Bannon, to the New York Times

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

* * *

There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.

Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.

This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.

Read more…

An Interview with Sarah Smarsh, Author of ‘Heartland’

ImagineGolf / Getty

Angela Chen | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

“I was born a fifth-generation Kansas farmer,” writes Sarah Smarsh, “roots so deep in the country where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons.”

In her memoir Heartland, Smarsh tells the story of four generations of that Kansas family. The book reaches back to a great-grandmother working multiple jobs and beaten by her husband, but is addressed to a future generation that will never be: Smarsh’s unborn daughter August.

Smarsh, the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother, “was on a mission toward a life unlike the one I was handed.” August is a theoretical child born during Smarsh’s teenage years, whose very existence would have continued the line of teenage motherhood and derailed Smarsh’s mission. August is at once a guiding principle (“what would I tell my daughter to do?”) and a symbol of the poverty Smarsh worked to escape.

Heartland is the story of a family and the story of a class in America, an explanation to August of all she would have inherited and lost. I spoke to Smarsh by phone between New York and Kansas, where she lives. We discussed the invisibility of class, how “the country” has become a clichéd set of imagery, and how politicians on the left can reach alienated voters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…