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This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows. From New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more, The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson. When people ask me how to find a story from their lives, I often suggest that they think of a time when they felt out of place, at odds with the world, or in a situation where they were uncomfortable. In this hour, we'll hear from three people who have felt out of step in one way or another.
I first heard John Elder Robeson on the radio talking about autism and his book Switched On, a memoir of brain change and emotional awakening. I had never heard anyone describe the inner workings of a brain the way he did, and I knew I wanted to hear more about his life. He's an intriguing and friendly man, and the more questions I asked, the more twists and turns he revealed. He told this story at a show in Boston where we partnered with public radio station WGBH. Here's John Elder Robeson. Well...
There I was, years before, 15 years old. I didn't have any friends. I was failing every one of my classes at Amherst High School out in the western part of the state. You know, I never knew what to say or do. I couldn't tell what other people were thinking. I always seemed to say the wrong thing, and I thought I said something nice to make them smile, and instead I pissed them off. And it was the same with my schoolwork.
my teachers would give me work to do and either I didn't understand it and I couldn't do it at all or I understood it all too well and frankly it was stupid and you wouldn't do it either and I told them that and they just did the only thing they could and they flunked me and anyway I could see I wasn't getting anywhere and I resolved to drop out of school and do something else and this was you know the 70s and
I had a guidance counselor. And in his supportive way, he says to me, "Boy, you drop out of school, and even the army isn't going to take you, because Vietnam's coming to an end, and they won't take high school dropouts and losers." And so, encouraged by that advice, I decided that I would do what millions of other people did. Running off to the circus is what they did in the last century, but in the '70s,
Kids like me, we dream to join in a rock and roll band. Well, millions of young people dream to be in that guitar player, be in a singer up on stage. I didn't have any friends. There's no way I was going to be friends with a million people out there in the audience. And I didn't have a dream of being the singer and the star on stage. Instead, what I had was an interest in electronics. And I had taught myself music.
how to fix and repair and modify and eventually build guitar amplifiers and sound effects. So all those other kids thought they could become the rock and roll superstars, and they ended up waiting on tables. I thought I'd be the engineer that would make their amplifiers work, and I never didn't have a job.
And I joined local bands and I started working for bigger and bigger bands. And I got hired by a company called Britannia Row, who was back then Pink Floyd's sound company. And that brought me out here to Boston, playing what I thought was big rock and roll. I was right down the street here at the Orpheum Theater with the Kinks and with Talking Heads and Roxy Music and one English act after another. And so...
One day in the studio down there, this fellow comes in, and we were doing some work with him, and he comes in, takes out a guitar, and he starts digging at it with a chisel. And I had always been unable to deal with other people, but I had a great love of machinery, and I couldn't stand to see him destroying that guitar, and I wondered what was the matter with him, and I went over and I asked him. And he told me he wanted to make the guitar blow fire.
And I just was thinking, well, I better get it out of his hands before this crazy musician destroys it. And I said, well, I could do that, and I could do it professionally. And you know, I couldn't ask a girl the time of day, but somehow I could tell this famous musician that I could fix his guitar professionally. And the fellow was, he's freely a kiss, and he turns to his roadie after talking to me a few minutes, and he says, Tex, have Gibson send this guy a guitar right away.
And so they did. And took it home. And me and some of my friends, because I had a few friends by then, we got together and we made that guitar blow fire. And we went on to make every guitar Kiss put on a stage back then that shot fire, shot rockets, lit up and exploded. We made them all in Amherst, Massachusetts. So anyway, there I was. I was in my early 20s.
And I'd been a total loser in school, but the world of musicians had welcomed me. It didn't matter what I looked like or what I sounded like. I could say the craziest, dumbest things at all. It didn't matter if I couldn't talk to girls, if I could talk to guitars. That was good enough, because if you could make beautiful music, you were welcome in that world. And people started inviting me to do other stuff. They invited me to start making stuff for movies.
and I got asked to go interview for a job as director of research at this new company back then called Lucasfilms. So I looked to see where they are, and you know, they're in Los Angeles, and there I was in western Massachusetts, and...
And I thought to myself, these people do not know that I'm a high school dropout. They don't know that I've been lying about my age since I was 16 because the drinking age was 21 to play bars. And I'm going to go get a job out there, and they're going to discover that I'm just a high school dropout and a loser and a total fraud. And they're going to fire me, and I'll starve to death out there in California. And I know to tell you that, you know, today, I'm...
It seems crazy, but that's what I believed. And I thought to myself, well, boy, you can't keep this going. You're just total failure. You've blown it in music, and I better start doing something else. And I started a business fixing cars because I figured fixing automobiles, nobody cared where you came from, and I could just do what I wanted. And so I started doing that, and fixing cars actually...
gave me something. It gave me the ability to talk to people because the first time in my life I had to talk to somebody nicely enough that they would want to come back a second time because that's the nature of being in business. And I got to know some of the customers who came in because our car business prospered and I turned out to have a sort of a touch with automobiles just like I did with guitars and electronics.
And I got to know this one fellow who came in over a few years who was a therapist with a Land Rover. And I would say to him while the Land Rover was in being fixed, I would tell him, you know, a lot of times customers come in and I don't know what to say. And they say things to me like, don't you know how to talk to somebody like me? Don't you realize the customer's always right? Right?
And I would think to myself, what kind of crazy shit is that? The customer is not always right. If you knew the answer, you wouldn't be here. And so I thought I was truthful. And he would explain to me that sometimes customers didn't see things the same way I did.
And I told him about being sort of lonely and isolated, and I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. And after a few years of these conversations, he comes in one day, and he says to me, John, I've been thinking about this, and I thought about it for a long time, because in the therapy world, we got this saying that therapists shouldn't diagnose their friends, or pretty soon they won't have any left. But there's this thing everyone's talking about in the mental health community. This is in the 1990s.
And he says, you are the poster boy for it. And I thought for a long time about telling you because you're a successful guy, but you have told me about being lonely and all. And it's this thing called Asperger's syndrome. And it's a form of autism. And I was like stunned. I had no idea. I had no idea what autism was. And I took this book he gave me and I looked in it and it was like,
People with Asperger's can't look other people in the eye and all my life people said that to me and people with Asperger's can't read body language and they get too close to people and scare them or they turn away when they're talking and people think we're rude and people with Asperger's we say inappropriate things because we don't have any filters in our heads and even if we are right about whether the customers are experts people don't like to hear that and you know
I read that book of his and I thought to myself, I'm going to, by God, teach myself to act different. I'm going to make myself normal. Well, of course, today a disability community won't say things like that, but this was a different time. And so I resolved to teach myself...
I resolved to teach myself how to behave. And you know the difference was like magic. I began to have friends and to be invited places. And I started speaking out because I knew that there were millions of young people growing up who had crummy childhoods just like me because people told us we were losers and retards and morons and all the other ugly things people said to me.
And when I started speaking out, people began inviting me to speak out more. People began asking me if I wanted to get involved in research. So some folks from Harvard Medical School right here in town came to me and they said, "We'd be interested in your autistic perspective in a study that we want to do to use a new tool to see if we can help autistic people read emotions in other people."
And they were just sort of looking for me to endorse it, but I heard that and I thought, "Boy, that's the thing that's been wrong with me all my life." Of course, they didn't know that. And I said, "Where do I sign up?" And they brought me into the lab.
And they sat me down in front of a computer and they said, we're going to show you these faces on the screen and you just have to push the buttons. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they jealous? Are they angry? And the faces flashed in front of me and I had absolutely no idea what I was seeing.
And I thought, I flunked it before we even started. And they said, no, not at all. What we're going to do is we're going to stimulate you with this machine. It was a thing called TMS that we're going to fire pulses of electromagnetic energy into your head with this. And afterwards, we're going to test you again and we're going to see if the responses change. And they sat me in a chair and they fired this TMS into my head for half an hour. And my brain was just kind of in neutral the whole time.
And then it stopped. And it's like, "Hurry, come on, we gotta get you in and we gotta test you before it wears off." And so I go over and I sit down and they show me the faces again. And it's exactly the same. I got no idea what I'm seeing. And I thought,
What kind of a crazy fool was I to think I could go to a hospital and these mad scientists could do something to me and it would change me? Now it was, you know, Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School are really good mad scientists, but even still. So I'd get in my car to drive home. And driving home, I always would listen to old music and I put on this recording of Tavares playing.
Some of you might remember Saturday Night Fever. It's a huge movie back in the 70s and Tavares sang more than a woman and a number of the other songs on that. But before they sang in that movie, they sang in clubs right here in Boston because they were guys from New Bedford. And I played a recording of them. And you know, it was like I was back in 1977 again. It was like all the years just fell away and
And it was so real, it was like I could smell a cigarette smoke right there in my car. And you know, all the years I engineered rock and roll, and people told me I did such a great job of delivering beautiful music, and I could never feel it. It didn't make any difference to me what we played. And that night, as that music played, I could feel it, that these were love songs. They were stories written for real people.
And I could feel it for the first time. And I got home and it made me cry. And it didn't make me cry because, you know, what didn't make me sad didn't make me happy. It just was like overwhelming. And I wrote to the scientists and I said, that's some powerful mojo you got in that machine. And, you know, it really was like a dream come true. I thought I could see and I could feel emotions in people. And I thought it's going to be magical. It's going to be beauty and sweetness and light.
And of course it wasn't. It was fear and anger and jealousy and all the bad emotions that fill the world. And I thought, well, shouldn't I have known? They say the news is nothing but bad news and that's what life is. And yet the thing that I had wanted had come true. And as I learned to live with being different, and this happened all to me eight years ago, as I learned about that, I realized that
That it was being different. It was being that freak that didn't have any friends but could talk to guitar amplifiers. That was the thing that made me special in the world. And I always thought what I want most of all is to be normal. But my wish to be normal, it was just like a crazy fantasy. It was like I want to be like everyone else.
And of course, being that way is throwing away the one thing in my life that made me successful. And it was really, that was the thing I learned from my time with those scientists, was that people like me are complete functional humans. We are not broken versions of someone else's normal. And we're okay like we are. So thank you.
That was John Elder Robeson. He's the author of four books, Look Me in the Eye, Be Different, Raising Cubby, and Switched On. John is also the neurodiversity scholar at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a fierce voice for autism awareness. John still oversees his business restoring Bentley, Land Rover, and Mercedes motor cars in Springfield, Mass., and needless to say, John always rolls up in style.
I gave John a follow-up call at his shop, and here's a part of our conversation. John, you told me once about a thought you had about calculus. Because did you try and study calculus at school? So when I was a kid in high school, I failed all my math classes because I couldn't understand the mathematics as they taught it in books. But I was fascinated by math.
electronics and music and sound waves. And I taught myself how electronic circuits manipulated sound waves and I eventually taught myself how to make sound effects based on the experiments and the imaginings in my mind. And when I worked for Britannia Row, Pink Floyd's sound company, when I worked for Kiss and I worked for other rock and roll bands creating these effects,
I always thought that I was inferior to a real engineer who knew math. And I thought to myself, I don't know math. But then as I got older and I learned about autism, I realized...
that this math that they teach in school is nothing more than a system of representation to teach people who don't have it in them naturally. And for me, the calculus lives in my mind. Even though I can't do calculus on paper, I can manipulate waves and I can predict the results and I can build circuits that will deliver that. And that is truly the magic. And that's something that is a part of me being autistic.
And it's in today's world, because I can't learn the non-autistic way that they teach in school, I'm a failure. But in the world of musicians, I was a huge success. And you can still hear my musical devices today. Wow, that was beautiful. I realized that there are some of us where the calculus lives in our minds. And we credit Newton with inventing calculus.
But today, many people who study Newton's life, they say Isaac Newton was very likely an autistic person based on what's known of his behavior. And when I hear that, I think, okay, well, maybe Newton didn't invent the calculus. Maybe Newton was just an autistic guy like me. And he looked at the waveforms of ripples on ponds and in other places where he saw waves and he imagined a
a mathematical system to predict those changes and movements of waves that was understandable to other people who didn't have the gift of doing it in their heads. But maybe for some of us, the calculus has always lived in us. And perhaps that's an example of the kind of thing neurological diversity brings to society. Maybe we are disabled most of the time, but if we can
think through those things nobody else can. That's a great power in the right circumstance, and it's a kind of a remarkable thing. I love how you just explained that. So, John, you told me one time about, is it wrong to call it a sixth sense that you have, a way that you have of hearing what's happening inside a car? I don't.
No, if a sixth sense is the right word, I couldn't really, I couldn't tell what a person was thinking when they said something to me. Somebody might say, oh, that's great. And I did not know if, well, that was...
great that I figured it out. I bested them in an intellectual competition or that was great and they really appreciate it. Or if it was sarcastic and they thought that, look now at what I broke and they were really pissed. I couldn't tell them apart. And so when I was a little boy, I didn't have any subtlety at all. And if somebody said that's great after I dropped a plate and broke it,
I would think, okay, I can break another one. You know, I mean, how do I know? You know, maybe they hated those plates and I broke one and I can break five more. And of course, the grownups would, they would get pissed and they would think that I was playing games with them or tricks or something and I wasn't, I couldn't tell. But then when I got older and I started working on machines,
I realized that most humans are just as ignorant about what's going on in machines as I am about what's going on in their minds when they say something to me. So I could stand next to a car and I could listen to it and I could just tell that there was a problem with the fan belt, with the tensioner pulley, or I could tell that there was, there was a problem in some other component. Maybe there was, there was a problem with the tensioner for the timing chain gears. And, um,
And I would hear that and know, but a regular person would have no idea at all. They would just say, oh, it's just the sound of the car running. And I guess it's exactly the same analogy as me not understanding what someone means when they say, oh, that's great when I dropped a plate and it broke.
I mean, I may be a machine whisperer, as it were, if others are animal whisperers, but there are plenty of machine whisperers in the world, and I would wager that many of us are autistic. I'm sure that there are people who have these same abilities as me in every city in the country. You just got to find us. You know, the CDC says that one in 30 guys...
has some level of autism like me and fully 13% of our population is neurodivergent in some way, whether it's with autism, ADHD, dyslexia. So frankly, there's a shitload of us and we're everywhere. And I'm by no means unique, even if I can't diagnose your car's noises over your telephone right now. I like that you're sharing the spotlight with other people, but come on, you're pretty badass.
That was John Elder-Overson in Springfield, Massachusetts. To see a picture of John and Ace Frehley of Kiss with one of the special guitars John worked on, visit themoth.org, where you can also share this story or any of the stories you hear on The Moth Radio Hour. Next, we'll hear about an upheaval in a middle school in Portland, Oregon, when The Moth Radio Hour continues. I'll be a blade, lay down the bed. Oh, oh, oh.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange PRX.org. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson. This hour, we're exploring what it means to be an outsider. This next storyteller loved her community and school, but when a teacher was replaced, the whole dynamic changed.
Live in Portland where we partner with Oregon Public Broadcasting, here's Renee Watson. I grew up in Oregon. My house, my school, my church were all nestled and nurtured in the black community of Northeast Portland. And it felt like everybody knew each other. We were always seeing each other whether it was at church or school or at a community gathering.
One of my favorite gatherings was the annual celebration for Martin Luther King's birthday that would happen at Jefferson High School. The whole neighborhood would flood the auditorium at Jeff and there would be an all-day festival to celebrate his life. Now to understand the significance of this festival you need to know that in my neighborhood we loved Martin Luther King Jr.
He was taught to us the most in school as an activist and a leader of the civil rights movement. At church, his face were on some of the fans that we would fan ourselves with. Some of our grandparents had his picture framed and hanging in their living room as if he was a family member. And in school, we would argue about who would get to read the paragraph that would tell about his life in our history books. So he was special to us.
And this celebration was epic. African dancers, poetry performances, theater performances. There would be people reciting his speeches and always a call to action. Somebody would always say, "We have to keep living the dream. Use your voice for something good. Stand up against injustice." And as a kid, I didn't think that they were really talking to me. That stuff was for the adults.
But in the fifth grade, my teacher taught us that we didn't have to wait till we were adults to use our voice for something good. There had been a tragedy in our community. She came to class with tears in her eyes. It was the middle of November, right before Thanksgiving, and she told the class that an Ethiopian man had been killed. He had been killed by skinheads. His name was Mulugeta Sarra.
She told us that they beat him with a baseball bat so bad that the bat split in half. When she says this, Jennifer, the only white girl in the classroom says, "Wow, he must have had a hard head." And she laughs. None of us black kids thinks this is funny and neither does our teacher. She takes her into the hallway. I don't know what she says, but when Jennifer comes back in, she sits down and takes out her notebook.
Our teacher has asked us to write a letter or a poem or make art and we're going to give this as a gift to the family. So we stuff our handwritten condolences in this wicker basket that's full of fruit and food. And I don't know why I was one of the students selected to go with our teacher to take this gift.
And I was proud and I felt special, like my voice was doing something, my poem was going to mean something. And we brought this gift and the person at the door thanked us. But it was very clear that they really had nothing to be thankful for. So much pain and sorrow in their eyes and I was frustrated and disappointed because
what was the point of doing this if we weren't going to make it better? And I asked my teacher, like, why did you make us do this? Nothing has changed. And she was like, well, it's not about that. It was never about changing anything or making them feel better. It was about letting them know that their son and their father would never be forgotten. It was about standing up to a hate crime, to an injustice, and adding our voice to the chorus that this is not right.
It was about doing what artists and poets do, she said. Artists and poets respond. And so I thought about this in the weeks to come. There was Thanksgiving and then we went on our winter break to celebrate the holidays. And I kept thinking about what she said about art responding to injustice in our voices, mattering, being important. When we come back to school, my teacher's not there.
She's taken a leave of absence because her husband is ill, and so now we have a new teacher. And this teacher is opposite of her in every way. This teacher is a man. He's white, and he never has us write poems. I don't think he likes us either, and it's very clear that we don't like him.
One day he draws the mouth of a whale on the chalkboard and he's explaining to us that whales eat small, aquatic-like forms. Then he turns to the class and says, "So you see, this is why that story about Jonah and the whale is just a fairy tale. All those stories in the Bible, none of them are real." He says this even though he knows that most of us are Christians.
That on the playground we sing gospel songs and reenact the service from the past Sunday, making fun of the women and their big hats and the way they shout and say, amen. He says this, and when he says this, what I really hear is that he's saying my mama is wrong and my granddaddy and all the people who raised me. Who does he think he is to tell me God is not real?
Our class bands together. We refuse to answer any of his questions, and there are a few boys who have mastered the art of the spitball. Every time he turns his back, somebody spews a spitball across the room and it hits him in his head or his neck or his arm. He doesn't know who's doing it, so he's just yelling at all of us. And then Jennifer says, it's them. They're the ones doing it.
And so the boys get in trouble and now the class really cannot stand Jennifer. There is talk about there being a fight after school to teach her a lesson and tell her to mind her business but then we find out that the boys are getting suspended for a day which means they won't have to come to school which means they really don't have it that bad. So nobody fights Jennifer. But a few days later
She does the unthinkable. We're learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and she blurts out in class, "I don't understand what the big deal is. Why do we have to celebrate his birthday? I wait to see what my teacher's gonna say. Wait to see if he's gonna take her out into the hallway and do whatever it is that teachers do when they take students out into the hallway." But he doesn't say anything. He doesn't do anything.
And by the end of the day, rumors are spreading through the fifth grade like fifth grade cooties. Everybody is saying that Jennifer hates black people, that she says she wishes slavery never ended. The rumors are brutal and there is definitely going to be a fight after school. Nevermind that Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence. Nevermind that just a few days ago we were good Christian kids defending our faith. People are talking about going over to Alberta Park and teaching her a lesson.
So when the bell rings and I see these students running after her into the park, instead of trying to stop them or telling the teacher, I turn the other way. I go home, mostly because my mother does not play. And she knows at what time I get out of school and wants me home at a certain time. So I just obey my mother, go home. And the next day when the principal calls me out of class to ask questions,
if I know anything, probably because she trusts me and thinks I'm a leader, and then I'm going to tell her what's happening. I don't say anything. She asks me, "Well, do you know why someone would even want to fight her? I mean, she's hurt and she's afraid to come back to school. There has to be a reason. What's going on?" I don't say anything.
I mean, of course I know the answer. The answer is because she's the teacher's pet. And because she believed also that Jonah couldn't have been swallowed by the whale. The answer is that she talked about Martin Luther King like he was a nobody. She makes us feel like we're nobodies. That's the answer. Those are the reasons. The reason maybe wasn't about Jennifer. Maybe it was about our teacher who also made us feel like nobodies.
And we couldn't hit and punch and kick him. Maybe it was also because an Ethiopian man was hit and punched and beaten with a baseball bat. And we were sad. We missed our teacher. We were confused. And sometimes sadness feels like anger, and you just get so tired of hurting, and you want to make somebody else hurt too. There were many reasons, but I didn't say anything.
anything. Jennifer never came back to class and I don't know that we missed her or that anybody really cared but I have thought about her over the years and I've also thought about my silence. I've thought about how if I really believe that a poem could be impactful and be meaningful even if it didn't change anything then I also have to believe that my silence was harmful and that's the thing I learned in the fifth grade.
that the voice, it is powerful. It is a mysterious thing because even when it's silent, it can still be heard. Thank you.
That was Renee Watson. I'm happy to report that Renee grew up to be both a teacher and an award-winning author. She teaches creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation, and at the time of this recording has published eight books and shows no signs of stopping. Three recent titles are Piecing Me Together, Watch Me Rise, and Some Places More Than Others.
Renee also launched the #Langston'sLegacy campaign, which raised funds to lease the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived and created during the last 20 years of his life. Visit themoth.org to find a link to her website, where you can see and read all about it. When we return, an Australian man has an adventure on a place called, no kidding, Kangaroo Island. Stick around.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange, PRX.org.
You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson. This next story is from an Australian, John Bennett. He grew up in a small town but now travels the world performing his highly energetic comedy shows at festivals and theaters and churches and bar rooms and really any place that invites him. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say John's typical onstage energy level is about 15. When
When telling his moth story, I asked him to dial it back to a reasonable 11 so the microphone wouldn't blow out. Of course, he went to 12 and we loved it. Here's John Bennett live at a show in Huntsville, Alabama. So I grew up on a tiny little farm in the middle of rural South Australia, this tiny little pig farm with my three older brothers and my mom and my dad.
And it was sort of one of those bat tree pig farms where a lot of the pigs are just locked away in tiny little pens and a lot of the pigs are only allowed to stand up and sit down. And when I was six years old, I awoke in the middle of the night and I ran up to the pig shed and I set free all of the pigs. LAUGHTER
And this was no sort of animal liberation thing or anything like that. I remember what I thought at that time. I wanted to wake up in the morning and just see pigs everywhere. You know, pigs driving the tractor, a pig doing the dishes. I thought pigs would just be everywhere. And I awoke in the morning to my dad shaking me awake. And he took me up to the pig shed. And none of the pigs had moved. And dad said, see, they want to be here. I hope you've learned something.
My dad said those sort of things all the time. I hope you've learned something. And my dad is this very serious, stern, and this impatient man. And he was one of those men who had to have a hand in everything. He had to have a hand in everything. We'd be doing the dishes or something like that, and dad would push us out of the way because we weren't washing the forks properly. One of those men. He had to have a hand in everything. It was everything in my life. He dominated my life growing up. And so I had to work with him on the pig farm every single day. Me and my brothers working on the pig farm. But he wasn't just a pig farmer.
He was also my school teacher. And I don't mean a teacher at my school, I mean my teacher, teaching me every single day at school in this tiny little farming community. And so I had to see him every day at school as well and every night working on the pig farm. But he wasn't just my school teacher either. He was also the bus driver, so he'd pick us up from our house, drive us to school, teach us every day at school, drive us home, and then we'd have to work on the pig farm after that as well. So all me and my brothers had were weekends. Weekends were our times off from Dad. And on Sundays, me and my family would go to church.
Dad was the minister at the local church. So all I had was Saturdays. Saturdays were my respite from Dad. And all you do when you grow up on the farm in rural South Australia, all you do on Saturdays is play sports. Dad was my football coach, my basketball coach, and my tennis coach. He was everything in my life. This very stern, serious, and impatient man. And I remember as a kid, one of the things he said, he never said a swear word in his entire life.
And we would say, how is this possible, Dad? How is this possible that you've never said a swear word? And it had the same answer every time. He said, there are other words you can use, and there's no need for that language. And I'm not kidding. I've seen him walk around the back of the car at night time in the darkness and hit his shin so hard on the tow bar of the car that he just dropped to his knees, looked up at the moon, raised his fists and just yelled, Curses! He yells, Curses! Like a Scooby-Doo villain, he yells, Curses! LAUGHTER
These are the other words that my dad uses instead of swearing and the other words he uses instead of swearing is he just yells his feelings. So we'll be out working on the farm and we'll just hear this scream of just, I'm angry! I'm annoyed! I'm upset! He just yells his feelings, that's what he does instead of swearing. And when I turn 18 years old I decide that farm life isn't for me. I move to the city, I start going to university, I study arts at university and I become a vegetarian.
Around this time, my second oldest brother, Alf, moves to a place called Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia, this tiny little island. Kangaroo Island is this beautiful, natural wonderland in Australia. It's got all those animals that you guys want to see because there's hardly any introduced species on Kangaroo Island, so the local flora and fauna is allowed to thrive.
And around this time, my dad loves Kangaroo Island. He goes and visits my brother every single weekend, and he visits my brother so much that he manages to get a job on Kangaroo Island as a minister at the local church. And he gets his other job after church every Sunday, going hunting with these local farmers and these hunters, hunting these wild pigs, which are the only introduced species on Kangaroo Island. And around this time, I'm going to university, I decide to visit my brother.
And I go to the island. My dad is there on the Sunday and we go to church. And then after church, dad says to me, 18 year old me, he says, do you want to come hunting with me? And I say, no, I'm fine. And he says, I just want to come and check it out. It's in this beautiful national park. It's really beautiful. It's the best part of Kangaroo Island. You should come and check out this national park. And dad has never, never been anywhere else in the world. He hasn't been anywhere else in the world because he's got the same excuse. Why do I need to go anywhere? Kangaroo Island is right there.
And I always say to him things like, you know, Dad, I've been to Japan and places like that. And he'd say, I've seen Japanese people on Kangaroo Island. Why do I need to go anywhere? We always go to hunting and I say, no, and he goes, come check out this national park. So I say, okay, I'll go to this national park. And Dad and I, we drive to this park and there's a big shed out the front of the park. I walk into the shed and there's all these hunters and these farmers just loading up with these trucks with guns and then driving off through this national park hunting these wild pigs. And Dad says again, are you sure you don't want to come hunting? It's really fun. And I say, oh, no, I don't want to do that.
And dad says, "Okay, just help me load up this truck with guns and then I'll organize for a ride back to your brother's house for you." And dad hands me a gun. And I don't know if you've ever held a gun before. I'm in Alabama, you're all probably holding right now, I don't know. But I feel the weight of this gun, I feel the weight and I think, "Oh, I get this weird sense of power, this weird feeling comes over me." And I go, "Oh yeah, let's hunt something. I want to shoot something, let's shoot something."
And Dad says, "Great, we load up this truck with guns and then Dad and I, we drive this truck through in this national park, we park the truck and then for the next three hours Dad and I just walk through this national park hunting these wild pigs." And after these three hours, Dad shoots six wild pigs. Shoot none. I enjoy looking through the scope at things far away, I like looking at birds and stuff like that. I'm having a really good time, I like jumping out from bushes and going "poof, poof, poof" I'm having a really good time.
And dad keeps thinking I'm going to shoot something when I'm not because I'm just sort of messing around and everything like that. And he's getting very annoyed with me because he's screaming I'm annoyed. And he says, look, I keep thinking you're going to shoot something and you're not. Do you want to shoot something? And I say, no, dad, I'm having a really good time. I feel like I'm in Predator or something like that by this time. I put mud under my eyes. And he says, no, no, I'm going to find you something to shoot. And he disappears off through these trees and he comes back about 10 minutes later and he whispers, I found you something.
And I follow him through these trees. He tells me to look through my scope, through the bushes, and I look through my scope, and I see a pig. And it is a big pig. And it is just laying in some mud. And it has a bunch of little babies just running around and suckling to its teats. And I'm looking at this sleeping mother pig, and Dad just whispers in my ear, "It's easy." And I say, "I know it's easy, Dad, but this is a little bit fucked, don't you think?" And he says, "There's no need for that language."
And I sit there looking at this pig and I say to Dad, "Do I have to shoot the babies as well?" And he goes, "No, just shoot the mum, they'll die by themselves." And I look at this pig forever and I think, "No, I can do this." And Dad whispers again, he goes, "You can do this, you're helping. You're helping. They're an introduced species, they ruin the environment for the local flora and fauna. You're helping, you can do this." And I think, "Okay, I can do this." And I get the pig's head in my sights, I close my eyes and I pull the trigger.
When I open my eyes, I see Dad's back in front of me, and I see him just drop to the right, and I have just shot Dad in the back. He's lost patience and jumped in front of me as I'm just about to shoot it, and I drop the gun, and Dad swings around. He grabs himself by the shoulder. Blood comes out from between his fingers. He looks at me. His eyes are wide, and he just says, "'Fucking shot me!'
The first who ever heard him swear, he just unleashes this tirade of abuse. "You f***ing shot me, I am f***ing dead, you have f***ing killed me. Do you know where we are? We're in the middle of nowhere. I am f***ing dead, you have f***ing killed me." And I'm in shock and I've dropped the gun but secretly in the back of my brain I kinda wanna go "There's no need for that language but I don't say anything." Dad continues this tirade of abuse, he's just like "I can't believe it's you. Out of all of my sons, you're the one who kills me. The vegetarian."
The city boy. And he pulls his phone out, he throws his phone at me and says, "'Call Mum. Call Mum. Tell her you've killed me and I'm dead.'"
And I get his phone and I dial emergency, I'm not an idiot. I dial emergency and I say, "I've just shot my dad." And they say, "Where are you?" And I say, "Kangaroo Island." And they say, "We need you to be a bit more specific than that." And I say, "I don't know, we're in a national park. There are trees that people go hunting here." And they say, "We think we know where you are. There's a property about a kilometre away. Do you think you can get him to that property so we can bring the helicopter in to get him?" And I say, "Yeah, he seems okay."
And I hang up from them, I tell Dad we've got to get to this property and he says, "Give me your jumper, mate, your sweater." And I take off my sweater and he uses the sleeve of my sweater to stuff into a hole in his chest. I have to hold the sweater into his chest as I carry him back to where we've parked the truck. I put him in the passenger side of the truck, I run around to the driver's side, I start the truck up and I can't drive a stick shift.
And this is one of those big old trucks with one of these things on the steering wheel and all I do is I grind it into a gear and bounce forwards and stop and Dad screams in pain. I start it up, I grind it into a different gear and we bounce forwards and stop and Dad screams again and then says, "Get out." I get out of the truck as Dad slides along the seat into the driver's side, living the trail of blood along the back of the seat and drives himself to this property. Now all they've told me to do on the emergency line is just to make sure that Dad stays awake, which is good now that he's driving.
And we get to this property and by the time we get there the helicopter is there, they load dad out of the truck and they load him onto the helicopter. I get on the helicopter and we get taken to hospital. The next thing I remember is my mum just walking out of the surgery, looking at me and saying, "He's gonna be okay. He's lost his collarbone and he had very little blood left in his body when he got here, but he's going to be okay." She says, "Do you want to go and see him?" And I say, "No."
My mum forces into my dad's surgery room. He's just sitting in the bed. He looks at me and he says that thing again. "I hope you've learned something." But you know what? I think my dad learned something on that day. That's that sometimes there is a need for that kind of language. I will also learn something about nine years later. And that is that dad has almost been shot about 12 times because he jumps in front of people as they're about to shoot something. Thank you very much, everyone.
That was John Bennett. Understandably, John has not picked up a gun since that day. His father continues to hunt, but hopefully has stopped his dangerous habit of getting impatient and jumping in at the last minute. You can visit our website to see a photo of John and a link to his website where you can find out how to see one of his comedy shows when he blows through your continent.
Do you have a story about feeling out of step with the world? You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site, themoth.org. Or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the world. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour.
Your host this hour was Jennifer Hickson. Jennifer also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginesse, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Emily Couch.
Moth Stories are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Kiss and Rye Cooter. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange PRX.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.