Sarah Evans | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,405 words)
“Get the fuck out of my life.”
Sam’s voice wobbles and cracks, confessing to youth and vulnerability that his venom-filled words otherwise mask. The door slams in my face, as my youngest child runs — literally runs — to meet his drug dealer. I heave a sigh and head to bed for the night. We won’t see Sam again tonight, and maybe not tomorrow either.
***
It wasn’t always like this, but I can construct the map that has led us here. Snippets of his childhood haunt me. Tonight I get lost in a memory of a hot summer night when my kids were spinning around like tops in the backyard under the strings of light that crisscrossed our backyard. I can still hear the peals of laughter escaping Sam, barely out of toddlerhood. His pace picked up, making my stomach flip-flop just watching him. His older sister, Mia, came to an abrupt halt and sat down next to me. Read more…
When my mother first came to America, she wore a pink coat with a rounded collar and four beveled black buttons. A farewell present from her parents and by far the most expensive garment she’d ever owned, the coat was wool, custom-made, and heavy enough to withstand the winters of Boston. It was March 1959; she was 22 and had never been outside of Japan or on a plane, and she’d not seen my father, Shoichi, for a year, but she wasn’t nervous, at least not much, or at least less nervous than excited. In her carry-on was a copy of A Little Princess, a pocket Japanese-English dictionary, and a daikon, a Japanese turnip, that she planned to grate, douse with soy sauce, and share with Shoichi for their first meal together in America.
The story of the eighteen months that followed, when my mother lived with my father in Boston, also sounded like a fairy tale.
A beautifully written, wrenching story from one of the best feature writers in America. It’s about football, sure, but it’s actually about a son and the mother who raised him — a mother who was blinded in her late 20s by a bucket of bleach mixed with lye. DeAndre Hopkins was 10 years old at the time. Mina Kimes’ brilliant prose tells an incredible story of resilience and love. It’ll stick with you for quite some time after: If her son scores, she explains, her daughter will help her stand up and lean over the barrier so she can accept the football from Hopkins. This ritual serves as a reminder that, while she can’t see her son, he still sees her — and he wants the world to see her too.
This isn’t exactly a feature, but to label it simply a Q&A is to sell it short. It’s just a lovely, lovely interview with Jackie MacMullan, one of the all-time greats in sports journalism. Personally, I can’t imagine being a female sportswriter right now without someone like Jackie Mac to look up to, without someone like Jackie Mac paving the way. She opens up about her crazy career path and her issues with access journalism (preach!) in this day and age in the NBA. She also discussed the problems with writers being fans (again, preach!) openly. I loved all of it, and it’s worth sitting down to read. It’s not quite a feature, but you’ll feel you have a good read on the GOAT by the end. (Also, she references her relationship with Celtics great Red Auerbach … who is the person I named my dog after! Bonus points for that.)
One of the best stories I read this year came in just under the wire, in SI’s Sportsperson of the Year issue in mid-December. Jenny Vrentas wrote a masterful piece on an athlete I thought I knew quite a bit about. But it became clear as I began reading this that there were layers to Megan Rapinoe I was totally unaware of, layers that made her even more intriguing both as an athlete and person. There’s a care and precision to the reporting and writing of this piece that comes through in each and every word. You can tell it’s important to Jenny that just the fourth unaccompanied woman to be named Sportsperson of the Year have her story told honestly and fairly. And she does just that. Read more…
Carolita Johnson | Longreads | December 2019 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)
This essay began very differently a few months ago. I had started writing it at the same time as the previous one in this series, “Till death do us part,” and, just as I observed while writing the fifth one, the very act of writing it resulted in a real-time evolution of my understanding, processing, assessment, and reassessment of what I was writing about, to the point that by the end of the essay, it was obvious I was not the same person who had begun writing it. Just as I’ve changed from the beginning of an essay to the end of it, every few months I look back on my life and think, yet again, how much more like myself I feel. Three years, three months or three pages — it can be a long, slow recovery, or it can happen in shorter but exponentially more intense increments. Recent widows and widowers will either be glad to know, or be dismayed to know that, well, from what I gather, and with luck, it never really ends.
***
Immediately after my husband Michael died I found myself alone in the house we had been renting from his daughter for the last year and a half. It had been full of his relatives for a week, from the moment he came home to die. Now, it was empty. Empty except for our stuff, and not just our stuff from our life together: preparing for a future that would now never happen, for the six months of treatment and recovery we had expected to live through after his surgery, I’d stocked up on six months’ worth of toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap, dish soap — soap and cleaners of every kind — dry goods, anything that was heavy and not available within a mile’s walk for me, since I don’t drive. Now, I felt like a stowaway on an abandoned frigate, floating along aimlessly.
I still had our dog, Hammy, with me, a 14-year-old poodle named after the noir fiction writer, Dashiel Hammett, of the “Thin Man” movies, whose dialogue Michael and I often quoted to each other. Hammy, too, was close to approaching the home stretch of his life, but for now he was there to stand guard while I cried on every floor of the house, with a preference for the one in the kitchen. Have you ever noticed that the kitchen floor is somehow the most suited for letting your knees give out before crumpling to the floor in wretched tears? I recommend it. I suppose it’s because the kitchen is where so much of coupled life happens. That’s where you will have eaten together, had coffee in the morning together, sipped hot lemon water and honey to ward off colds together, cooked for each other. If you’re going to mourn your lost partner, it might as well be in the place where the spirit of your partnership seems to occupy every cupboard, shelf, and drawer.
A friend immediately insisted on “sitting shiva” with me, which, as a modern adaptation (though I’m not religious and am unfamiliar with this Jewish tradition), took the form of bringing me my favorite coffee beverage, a cortado, from my favorite cafe so I wouldn’t have to go outside with my leaky-faucet eyes. This is exactly how the crying began to feel: tears that puzzlingly continued even when I thought I was done crying. I mused that it was as if a pipe were broken inside me and I might need to call some kind of metaphysical plumber soon. Read more…
Unsurprisingly, you can order a murder online, using forums on the dark web geared toward undertaking any heinous task for money. Jurisdiction is tricky and as Brian Merchant reports at Harper’s Magazine, law enforcement is either too overwhelmed or unequipped to deal with the problem. Strangely, targets usually don’t believe the threat is genuine. Some of these sites are known scams, designed to fleece the hit orderer for whatever amount they’re willing to pay. Others are, sadly, for real.
Monteiro started scrolling through messages he had cached from Yura’s previous sites. The markets may have been scams, but the desire for violence was real. Monteiro had amassed a running list of people who had been singled out for death; people who’d had bounties placed on their heads, and a log of detailed conversations about how and why their would-be killers wanted them beaten, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered. It was like a Wikipedia entry for the outer extremes of human cruelty. Before I left, Monteiro gave me the password so I’d be able to keep tabs on it myself.
I began calling, emailing, and reaching out on social media to massage therapists and managers of Chinese restaurants and right-wing bloggers and I.T. guys and aerospace engineers and sex offenders and web developers. Some I couldn’t track down at all; others never answered their phones or returned my messages. I didn’t blame them. There is no easy way to say, “Hello, I found your name on a kill list on the dark net, and while the site is a scam the order is not; someone you likely know wants you dead badly enough to pay thousands of dollars to an impossibly shady website. Give me a ring back anytime,” though I tried every imaginable permutation. I was blocked on Twitter, hung up on, and, occasionally, kindly received.
In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion.
So far, according to Monteiro, eight people have been arrested for ordering murders through Yura’s websites, on the basis of evidence Monteiro passed to law enforcement. One of them, a young Californian named Beau Brigham, had paid less than $5 toward a hit on his stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of soliciting murder and sentenced to three years in prison.
I spent last December taking care of my 70-year-old mother after surgery. She doesn’t like being taken care of. She takes care of herself. She lives happily alone in an impeccably decorated condo near Ann Arbor full of art and books and a fireplace that turns on with a remote control. She does Pilates every morning. She visits my 93-year-old grandmother every afternoon. She wears vegan “leather” and doesn’t eat dairy and goes to her doctors’ appointments and canvasses for the Democratic party and Facetimes her grandson in Chicago on Sundays so I can have a merciful extra hour of sleep. We have the same last name; sometimes her former students read my stuff and email through my website to ask if I am related to the Ms. Stielstra who taught fourth grade and totally changed their lives. I’m her daughter, I say. She’s wonderful, they say, and I say, I know.
“I need surgery,” she told me in September. We were on speakerphone, me stuck in traffic trying to get from the university where I teach to my son’s elementary school. In my head was every movie ever made of a child sitting sad and alone because their mother is late to pick them up. The word surgery hit like a baseball bat: I thought of the inoperable tumor in my best friend’s daughter’s brain, my father’s heart attack on a mountain in Alaska, my friend Randy’s emergency quadruple bypass, the cancers that took both my grandfathers, the hip replacement my grandmother had never recovered from, and the tumor they peeled years ago off my ovary. Please don’t let it spread, I thought.
“Not that kind of surgery,”my mother said, responding audibly to my inner monologue. We talk three or four times a week and she knows how I think. Or maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, our bodies tied together across miles and molecules. Maybe she’s really a witch. “It’s foot surgery,” she said. “Again.”
Five years before she’d had a cyst removed from the bone in her foot and something hadn’t healed right. The pain was constant. She used a cane. She couldn’t drive long distances. She’d been to countless podiatrists, orthopedists, physical therapists. “Looks okay,” they said after X-Rays. “Try this exercise, this ice pack, this orthotic.” She bought special shoes. She bought a stationary bike. Nothing got better and no one could say why. “These things happen as we get older,” they told her, another way of saying It’s all in your head. “I know my body,” she told them, another way of saying Fuck that noise. Of course my elegant mother doesn’t use the word fuck. “Ladies can say shit, damn, and hell,” she always told me, reciting the sentence like it was gospel, like she’d read it in Emily Post. “But they can never say — ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“Foot surgery is good, right?” I said into the speakerphone. My relief was near-tangible, a thing I could hold to my heart. “Maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong.”
“That’s the plan,” she said. “But I won’t be able to walk for a month and — ” She hates asking me for help. I have a kid and a job and she doesn’t want to bother me even though I tell her repeatedly that it’s the furthest thing from. Of course I’ll be there. This is how we take care of each other. Read more…
At Passover dinner in April 1990, our Seder came to the pivotal symbolic moment where we poured a cup of wine and opened the door for the Prophet Elijah. As if on cue, in walked a guy wearing ripped jeans and a black mask, holding a shotgun. It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured him. I’d always thought skinny, long hair, a beard, maybe a robe…
“Sorry to barge in like this,” the guy said, “but we’re going to be taking some shit.” Then he whistled out the door and in walked an identical masked intruder with an equally menacing shotgun. The two of them tied my family up and then proceeded to ransack the house right in front of us, pulling out drawers, throwing around dishes, and kicking over plants as they searched for anything of value.
Some kids spent a week of their summers at the Jersey Shore. Others went camping in the Adirondacks. I spent a week every summer of my childhood in the Children’s Ward of NYU Hospital. Muppet movie nights and a play room where children in wheelchairs piece puzzles together. The click click of high heels hurrying down hallways, the smell of cleaning supplies and anesthesia in the air.
I never wanted my hemangioma to define me. Even if it took up half my face, like a suffocating, throbbing purple blanket over the real me. I knew that it was the first thing people noticed when they looked at me. Who’s going to notice big brown eyes when they’re sitting next to a volcano that exploded on a little girl’s cheek? Read more…
Michael Shapiro| Longreads | October 2019 | 28 minutes (7,073 words)
This essay is published in collaboration with The Delacorte Review. You can read a longer, complete version here.
I told people that I was returning to Israel for the first time in thirty-five years to visit a grave and this stopped them, mercifully, from asking why I had been away for so long. This was true; I was going to visit the grave of my best friend, Jonathan Maximon, who had died in 1984 when he was thirty-one. It was also true that I could have gone back in all the years since but for reasons I could not explain to anyone, including myself, I had stayed away.
My wife had twice gone for work, and though we had traveled with our children, we did not take them to Israel, nor send them on Birthright. Then, not long ago, my daughter mentioned that she might be going and while I did not want to intrude on her time, overlapping by a day or so felt like the pretext I needed. Her plans changed but by then I had my ticket.
Jonnie was buried at Yahel, the kibbutz at the southern end of the Negev desert that he had helped found in the late 1970s. I had not been in touch with his wife, Aliza, since his death. I emailed the kibbutz and asked if my message could be passed along. She replied almost immediately. “I am still in Yahel,” she wrote. “Mark my husband, and myself will be happy to meet you.” She and Mark had four grown children. Moriyah, her daughter with Jonnie who had been a year old when he died, now lived in the north and was married with two young sons. He would have been a grandfather.
I was 66 and had not made this trip since Jonnie’s brother called to tell me he was gravely ill. I had just gotten married and was preparing to move to Tokyo. My wife, Susan, told me, “Go.” I had last seen Jonnie seven months earlier. Susan and I were traveling in Egypt and Israel. We took the bus from Jerusalem four hours south to Yahel, which then, like now, felt as if it was in the middle of nowhere. I was so excited to see him that I left my leather jacket on the bus. Hanging over my desk as I write this is a snapshot from that visit. He and I are leaning on a white jeep. He is wearing a San Francisco Fire Department t-shirt that is tight across his broad shoulders. He was always nuts about fire fighters. Together with Aliza and Susan, we went on our only double date to see ”Play it Again, Sam” in the kibbutz cafeteria and as we walked back to their apartment Jonnie told me that I’d be an idiot not to marry Susan because if I didn’t someone else would and quickly. I do not recall his saying this with a smile. Nor was he one to elaborate.
The next time I saw him he was lying in a bed in a dismal ward at Tel HaShomer Hospital near Tel Aviv. A tumor in his spine had paralyzed him from the waist down. His hair was falling out and he was skeletal. Another patient told him, “Get out of this place.” He did, but only to a private room. Read more…
“It’s a very fine line between presenting yourself as a true skater and hardcore and being destructive.” ─ Lance Mountain
JR, one of my oldest, dearest friends, died in December. He was 43. We grew up skating together, during that golden age when Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, and Steve Caballero rode for Powell Peralta’s famed Bones Brigade skate team. Back in the mid-1980s, the Bones Brigade were not only discovering what these wheeled slabs of wood could do, they were releasing weird movies on VHS like The Search for Animal Chin and Future Primitive, where they skated ramps, pools, and steep roads, and clowned around. For kids like me, who didn’t relate to baseball or basketball, those movies taught us how to dress, taught us how to talk, taught us the many tricks we could do if we were willing to constantly injure ourselves practicing. My friends and I wanted to be the Bones Brigade, but most of us turned out differently.
Even though one old-school motto was “skate and destroy,” the Bones Brigade seemed kinder and gentler than most. They didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. Other pros did. Duane Peters, Christian Hosoi, and Jeff Grosso got lost partying. But no drug could give Lance Mountain and Tony Hawk what skating could. VeganMike Vallely put an elephant on his board to remind people of animals’ suffering. Rodney Mullen, essentially the inventor of street skating, spent lots of time reading in the library. Constructive rather than destructive was their identity and their art form. In hindsight, I wish we’d followed their lead sooner.
My middle-aged friends and I decided to honor our shared origins by sprinkling some of JR’s ashes at the Wedge, our old Phoenix skate spot, at the end of this summer. All my life, summer has been my favorite season. I’ve never wanted summers to end, especially this one, this way. Read more…
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