The Moth Radio Hour: Under The Gun
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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles, and in this hour, we have three stories from our main stage events. In all three stories, a gun makes an appearance, and each story illustrates a different perspective, different situations where guns come into play. The stories deal with mature and sometimes violent subject matter, so just a word of caution before we get started.

If you're a frequent listener to this radio hour, you've probably heard me mention before that a few years ago, my family and I relocated from New York City to a small town in southern Sweden. I traveled to the U.S. frequently for moth events, and on one of my trips back to the States, I was struck by something. People always joke about Americans and their guns.

But I'd never really noticed what a starring role guns play in popular culture. I remember sitting in a cab in New York City and a bus passed with this huge picture of Tom Cruise holding a gun. And after that, I started to notice all these different ads for movies and TV shows featuring guns. It's like when you start to notice something, you can't stop seeing it.

When guns make an appearance in a moth story, the experience people have with them differs wildly. Whether someone's describing the feeling of having a gun held to their head, or that time they had a hilarious afternoon shooting clay pigeons, or perhaps they served in the military and went to war. But the difference is, moth stories are true. They're real-life experiences, not Hollywood. ♪

Our first story comes from Cheryl Della Pietra. She told it in an evening we produced in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater in partnership with local public radio station KQED. The theme of the evening was Going for Broke. Here's Cheryl Della Pietra live at the Moth. I failed the Condé Nast typing test twice. It was 1992 and I was a recent college graduate and

And I desperately wanted to be in magazine journalism, and in order to work at any Conde Nast magazine in New York, you had to pass this ridiculous typing test. So I finally passed it on the third try, but I still didn't get a job. I was just this girl from a small town in Connecticut. And I didn't really look the part, I wasn't very sophisticated, and I think ultimately it just wasn't a good fit.

So I decided that I was going to engage in the time-honored tradition of slinging drinks at a bar and trying to write the great American novel. One day, a friend of mine who was interning at Rolling Stone called me up, and he said to me, "Hunter S. Thompson is looking for an editorial assistant for his new novel. Do you want to put your hat into the ring?"

So it was that Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson. And I wasn't a sycophant, but I'd read his books, I knew about the drugs and the guns and the women. So I said, "Sure." I wanted to be a writer, and I thought this was one way to do it. So I wrote a letter, and in the letter, in addition to mentioning other inappropriate things, I made sure to say at the very end that I was a full-time bartender, thinking that this would get me some cred. I faxed it to him, because that's what you did in 1992.

And I went to work. I come home, stumbling home at 2:30 in the morning, tipsy myself, get into bed, 3:00 a.m. the phone rings and I hear this mumbly baritone on the other end of the line. And he says, "Cheryl there?" I said, "Speaking." He goes, "This is Hunter S. Thompson. I read your letter and I liked it. Can you get out here tomorrow?" So without any thought of how I was going to do it, I just said, "Yes."

He says, "Great, my assistant will call you in the morning with all the details, but I'm going to meet you at Aspen Airport. I'll be the one with the red umbrella." So the next morning I'm woken up rather early and it's his personal assistant and she gives me the details. She says, "There's a ticket waiting for you at LaGuardia. Go now. You'll come out here for a three-day trial period and if you do well, you'll go back and get your things and come back out and if you don't, you'll go home for good."

And she made sure to tell me the return ticket was already bought. So I pack a duffel bag and I barely tell anybody that I'm going out there because in case I failed at that too, I just wanted to slip back into my life, however pathetic it was. So I land in Aspen and I walk out of the gate and sure enough, as promised, there's Hunter S. Thompson with a giant red umbrella in the middle of the airport looking like he's working for Travelers Insurance.

So he looks like this deranged Mary Poppins. He's got on the glasses and the hat and he's got the Converse on. And I go up and introduce myself and he's very shy and he just walks me out to the parking lot and there is the Red Shark. So for those of you who know Hunter's work, the Red Shark is a 1970 Chevy Impala convertible that has played more than a passing role in much of his work. I can't believe I'm about to get into the shark.

It's this thing, it's like getting inside of a whale. It's like a sofa on wheels. And I get in there and forget about texting and driving. He has a full-on tumbler of scotch and he just starts going well above the speed limit. We go to the Woody Creek Tavern for lunch.

And then we walk in, and the whole place starts buzzing. And he doesn't ask me what I want. He just orders enough food for about six or seven people. He orders tamales and hamburgers and french fries. And all this food comes, and when it comes, he just starts pouring condiments all over it, mostly hot sauce. So...

I'm waiting for something kind of interview-like to happen, but instead he just starts talking about the election. He starts talking about his neighbor, something about cattle. Then he brings up guns, and I say, "Oh, I've never shot a gun," and his eyebrows go up. And then I try to bring it around to an interview, and I say, "So what are you working on right now?" And he says, "It's a novel." And I say, "Well, what would my job be as your assistant?" And he just orders another round.

So he orders us two Biff's, which is a whiskey and Bailey's shooter, and we down those, and he asks for a piece of chocolate cake to go. We end up back in the shark, and he takes a plastic bag from his pocket, and he starts shoving whatever's in this plastic bag into the chocolate cake. Then he turns to me, hands me the cake and a plastic fork. So I think this is a test.

And I look down into the cake and I realize that what he has shoved into the cake is hallucinogenic mushrooms. So I figure if I want this job, when Hunter S. Thompson hands you a fork, you just take a bite. So I take a giant bite of the cake and I hand it back to him. And he takes a giant bite of the cake. Then he starts the shark up. Then he procures a bottle of Chivas from underneath the front seat. Laughter

Takes a big swig off of it and hands it to me, and at this point I'm like, "Well, okay." So I take a swig and we start winding our way up the mountain. When we get to the top, there's a group of tourists hanging out, and Hunter takes from the back of the seat a screecher gun. So this doesn't hold ammo, it's used to scare away birds from crops. But these people don't know that. They see Hunter as Thompson plus gun equals something crazy is about to happen.

We rear up in the car and he grabs my hand and he shoots the gun and makes this god awful noise and he says, "Yee-haw!" And I say, "Yee-haw!" because it seems like the thing to do. We turn, do a donut in the shark and we end up going back down the mountain and sure enough, a minute later, a squad car materializes. So he takes my face in his hands and he says, "Listen to me. You don't ever have to talk to the cops. Do you understand me?"

And I know he's being serious, but at this point I am shrooming out of my mind and all I can do is crack up. So I start laughing, thinking we can't be in any kind of real trouble. So the cops come over and they ask me my name and I can't say anything. They ask him what my name is and he doesn't say anything. And finally he just says, we're not talking to you. So the cops go behind the car and they start deliberating. And I can only imagine what this conversation is like. Like, do we mess with the local college?

Do we make the big score? They check out the gun. They see that it's fake. And they decide to let the shrooming drunk man go. So we end up back down at his house. The only way I can describe the house is honky-tonk meets architectural digest. And that's where I meet his personal assistant, who's this kind of graying, long-haired, beautiful hippie. And she sees me, and she takes me aside. And no doubt she has seen this before, the first day mushrooms grow.

She says to me, "Try to keep up, but you know, don't try to keep up." And she says, "You're going to be staying with me over at the cabin next door. Come over when you're ready." So now I think our interview is about to start. I'm here for a job. But instead what happens is Hunter goes to the fridge and he takes out a pitcher of margaritas, a bottle of green chartreuse, a tray of cocaine, he gets a whole key lime pie, and a .22 rifle.

And he takes everything and I follow him back to the hot tub room where he puts everything down and puts Caligula in the VCR. So I feel a little bit uncomfortable, but I soon realize for him, this is Tuesday. So day one ends, my Hunter S. Thompson starter package is done and I go back to the cabin and pass out. Day two, I go to his house and there is none of this Mary prankster anymore. He is convinced that

that our run-in with the cops yesterday is going to land him in prison for the rest of his life, and that I'm going to prison too. And he's been on the phone with lawyers all morning, and he's full of paranoia and rage. And he hands me a notebook, and he says, "Here's what the lawyers told us to do. You have to write down everything we did yesterday." I start writing and writing and writing, and I think to myself, "Well, this is kind of like a job. This is kind of like a job you would do for Hunter S. Thompson."

So I'm writing and writing and writing, and then he says, "Now you can't leave." And I think, "Maybe I just got a promotion." So later on in our conversation, he mentions one of his books, one that I hadn't read. And when he finds out that I didn't read it, he gets really upset. He goes and he gets it from the back room and he slams it in front of me and he says, "Go back to the cabin and read this, and don't come back till you've done it."

So I go back and I, my tail between my legs, and his assistant is there and she says, "Oh, don't worry about that, he'll apologize tomorrow." And I go back and I sit in my bed and I start reading the book and I start doing the math. I say, "Do I even want this job?" And I think, "Yes, this is better. It's better than imposter syndrome and going home to slinging Malibu and Diet Cokes to people." And sure enough, in the middle of the night, there's a note of apology slid under my door.

Day three brings more of the same. It's more drugs. It's more guns. It's more pie. It's more wigs. It's just more of everything. And I'm waiting to find out what this job is and if I'm even remotely close to getting it. And just as I'm losing all hope that anything remotely resembling work is going to happen, Hunter puts a piece of paper into his typewriter and he goes, plink, plunk.

And I laugh to myself because he would have failed the Conde Nast typing test too. He keeps typing away and he pulls it out and he says, "Fax this to CNN right now." And I look at it and it's a note to Ed Turner saying how criticizing the election coverage. So I fax that and we go out onto the shooting range because the sun is coming up at this point. And we start shooting guns. He gives me a .22 rifle. He says, "This is a lady's gun."

We shoot and shoot. He says, "You know what? You're a pretty good shot." And I think, "Well, this is as good a reason as any for me to get this job." And I do. I'll get the job. And for five months, I was Hunter's assistant. And five months was about all I could handle. The highs were super high, quite literally. The lows were super low. And after that experience, it took me about two years to recover.

But it took many, many more years after that for me to finally figure out what that experience meant in my life. Hunter had no fear. He did have a little bit of loathing. But I would like to think that he helped this 22-year-old girl become more fearless. My last day there, the limo we had been in dropped me off at the airport, and I was alone, and I realized that I was sitting on his hat. I put it on, made my flight, and I'm glad I still have it.

That was Cheryl Della Pietra. Cheryl is currently an associate editor on the copy desk at ESPN.com and author of the novel Gonzo Girl, which was inspired by her experience working as Hunter S. Thompson's assistant.

Cheryl still has Hunter's hat. It usually hangs on her closet, but it comes out every once in a while for special appearances. She says people really love to try it on. They seem to feel connected to him. Everyone knew him by the hat, the aviators, the cigarette filter. She told me that working with Hunter made her really think about things like taking risks and what it means to be alive. Hunter once wrote, "'Who is the happier man? "'He who has braved the storm of life and lived, "'or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?'

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Coming up, a young woman finds herself caught between opposing forces when she travels to a small town in Columbia when The Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles.

Our next story comes from Martha Ruiz Perea. Martha grew up in Bogota, Colombia, as she mentions in her story. It's the Colombia of Pablo Escobar, of corruption and daily bombings and killings. A word of caution, this story contains violence and also has a few graphic details about a medical procedure. So if you're squeamish, we just wanted to give you a heads up. Here's Martha Ruiz Perea live at the Hanover Theater in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I was about to graduate from dental school when I told my mother that I had been assigned to do my residency at a hospital in a small town in Colombia called Neiva. My mother was really upset. It was 1992. I was 21 years old, and we lived in Bogota, Colombia. This was the Colombia of Pablo Escobar, of government corruption and assassinations, of daily kidnappings and bombings, of paramilitary groups and massacres.

It was also the Colombia of the FARC, the oldest guerrilla movement in modern history. It was also Colombia where this war between opposing forces became normal to us. You hear a loud noise, like when a car backfires, and you went down to the ground, you waited, you got up, you dusted off, and you moved on. So my mother called my father, who at the time lived in Granada, another very violent town in Colombia.

And my father came to the phone and asked me if I was scared, and I said yes. And he said, you know, mija, you know how I live here in Granada. You know how dangerous it is. You know how violent it is. And you know why I stay? Because if the good people don't stay and serve, then the bad people take over. So you go where you're being called to serve, and you help those who need you the most. Just be smart, be careful, and call your mother.

And with that, I went to NAVA, and I arrived one April afternoon at this hospital, and my first impression was that it was overcrowded and underfunded, but also that there were plenty of people helping it stay afloat. My daily work at the hospital began at 7 a.m. I did the round with the resident physicians, and then I went to care and took care of my outpatients until 5 p.m. I focused strictly on general dentistry.

taking one patient every 15 minutes and two short breaks during the day. At night and on the weekends, I would be on call at the emergency room for any emergencies that dealt with superficial injuries above the neck. That's how I learned how to put noses, eyelids, and ears back on people. The room where I lived at the hospital during the residency faced this roof terrace that I quickly came to find out was inhabited by hundreds of bats.

At night, I had to sleep with the window open because temperatures raised up to 105 degrees and there was no AC at the hospital. So I figured that by wrapping myself in a soaking wet beach towel, I could combat the heat and avoid the bats. This, I figured, after I woke up one hot night to the horror of a baby bat sleeping comfortably next to me on my pillow...

and another one bathing in the glass of water that I had left on top of my night table. Another one of these hot nights, I went to sleep, and the next thing I remember is standing in the room next to a man holding a rifle. I didn't know what time it was. I think it was dark outside, I guess the early hours of the morning. In the dark, I could see another armed person guarding my bedroom door.

The man held me by my arm and ordered me to get dressed, and that's when I realized I had been pulled out of my beach towel and I was standing in my underwear in front of them. I rushed to look for my uniform in the dark, and while I got dressed, I began to think of my parents and of the stories I had heard of doctors and nurses being kidnapped and taken away. And once dressed, I turned to the man, I said,

I asked him if I could leave a note for my parents, and he said no. And he grabbed me by the arm, and I was rushed out of the room. We went down this emergency stairwell that was lined with men that were dressed like these two men with these rags wrapping their heads and letting their eyes only visible. I did not look at any of them in the eye. I didn't want them to think that I could remember them. All of them addressed the man holding me as commander.

Once we got to the first floor, I realized the rebels had sieged the hospital. I was ordered not to speak and go straight to my office. So I did, and we went down this long corridor that led to my office, and the farther away I got, the more hopeless I felt. Once we got to the office, I realized the doorknob had been broken, and inside in the dark, two men awaited. The man holding me said that I had three hours to help him, or I would have to come with them.

I was terrified. I didn't know what else to ask, so I asked who's the patient. And from within the shadows, one of the men turned on a flashlight and revealed a child about 15 years old, wearing this dirty t-shirt and broken pants and soiled boots. And his face completely deformed by an exacerbated abscess that made the left side of his face look like a water balloon about to burst.

The man holding me let me go, but when I approached and tried to touch the child, I felt the pressure of that rifle on my back. And he said, "Can you help us or not?" And I said, "Yes, I can." So we went in and I told him to sit the child on the chair, but I also told him that I needed to turn on all the instruments and lights, and he agreed. But he told me to warn him about every move that I would make, and I agreed to that. Once inside, I also realized that I was going to need assistance. I needed someone to hold that kid down.

I couldn't make him drowsy because I knew they were on foot and they had to leave the hospital on foot. I couldn't give him anesthesia because given the degree of the infection, no anesthesia would catch. So I was going to have to do this procedure without numbing him and it was going to hurt a lot.

I explained this to the commander and he signaled to one of his men who immediately put the rifle on the floor, jumped on top of the kid, straddled him at his thighs, grabbed his arms and held them by the side of his body. So I had my assistant ready.

I was shaking. I had an idea of what I had to do. I had seen it in books and in enormous live presentations in my oral pathology classes, but I had never done this. This was the first time that I would do this by myself. What I did know, though, was that if I touch, I made a mistake in my incision, and I touch the nerve that runs by that area of the face, I could cause the paralysis of half of this kid's face for life.

I also knew that if this infection progressed, this kid could go into sepsis and die. And in the back of my head, I also knew that if the army had been notified that the guerrillas were in the hospital, they could burst in at any moment and there would be a crossfire and I would become collateral damage by the end of that morning. So I grabbed a towel and I wet it in cold water and I rubbed the kid's forehead with it. He was burning in fever.

I didn't want to ask his name, and so I called him Pelau, which means kid in the area of Colombia where I come from. I explained to him what I was going to do, and I told him that it was going to hurt a lot, that he could cry and scream but not bite, and that if he wanted me to help, to stop, I would stop and let him rest. He looked up at me, and his little eyes filled with tears, and he nodded, and my heart shrunk. This kid was in so much pain.

And he was terrified. But so was I. I had a weapon on my back. So I put on my protective gear on and I wrapped my hand around the child's face to prevent him from hitting me. I prepared the scalpel and a handful of gauze. I took a deep breath. I calculated the position of that nerve inside that bloated balloon of skin. And I made my first incision. Slow and careful. And I began to drain slowly.

The kid was screaming and twitching in that chair. The greenish-yellow pus came bursting out of his cheek. The man holding him closed his eyes and turned away. The smell was nauseating.

The kid's tears began to roll, and I kept draining, but suddenly the kid began to cry uncontrollably, so I had to stop. I reached down for his hand, and I held it. It was this small, cold, rough hand, and I grabbed it, and I told him that he was a brave kid, and he closed his eyes and nodded. We were both sweating profusely. I went back to draining, and I felt that rifle in my back.

Once the inflammation gave in enough, I managed to look into the mouth and I found the culprit. It was a rotten molar, and I had to pull it. It was part of the procedure. And with every piece of tooth that I pulled, a scream came along. And with every scream, the barrel of that rifle shook on my back. When the kid couldn't take it anymore, he yelled out, And it was then that I felt that pressure strongest on my back.

and the commander who had been pointing at me broke his silence and he said, almost there, mijo. I realized whose kid was I cradling in my arms. This was the commander's son. I couldn't screw this up. I had to do this right. I went back to draining and squeezing as fast as I could, and as I worked, I saw how the relief came on the kid's face.

It was getting late. It was close to dawn, and I had to finish up, so I finished preparing the wound, and I got up and grabbed some free samples of antibiotics and some medical supplies. I handed them to the commander, and I explained to him how to clean the wound, and I said he should be fine in two weeks, and that's when he said, I hope so, doctora, because I don't want to come back, and you don't want to come where we're going. I was terrified. I was terrified.

He ordered the kid off the chair, and he got up immediately. They circled around me and began to walk away behind me to the door. I felt the pressure of the rifle off my back, and I closed my eyes, and I prayed to God that he wouldn't shoot me right there. Then I heard him from the door when he said that if I didn't move or speak for at least a half an hour, I would be okay, and I nodded. Then I heard the door close.

When I opened my eyes, I looked at my hands and the kid's blood was drying on my latex gloves. And inside, my hands were drenched with sweat. For the following two weeks, I was cold. I didn't want to eat. Everything made me nauseous. I didn't want to answer any questions about the incident. I didn't even tell my parents. I continued to take care of my outpatients, but every time one walked in, I would fear it would be the kid.

And then one day I was at my office and the phone rang. It was from the front desk, and they said I had a package. I was so scared, but I went. And when I got to the front desk, the girl said, a man stopped and left you this note and that. And so I inched toward the desk to look, and I found a sack of oranges with a live chicken tied to it. I opened the envelope and pulled out the note, and in almost illegible writing...

It said, the pelado is okay, doctora. No need to come back. Gracias. I felt some kind of awkward relief, but I put the note back, and I put it back in my uniform, and I went back to work. Later that night, I went to my room, and I climbed out of the window onto the roof terrace. I could hear the bats flapping their wings in the air. I didn't care. I brought the note and matches with me, and I pulled it out, and I burnt it.

And I burnt it because it reminded me of how scared I had been that night, of how frightened I had been for the last two weeks. But I also burnt it because I felt that it connected me to the bad guys. And then I thought, "But what bad guys? This was a sick child." And the bad guys in Colombia in the 90s? Who knew who the bad guys and the good guys were? Nobody knew.

We were all just people caught in this war of, this battle of warlords that nobody knew how to stop. That to this day, as you know, we're trying to stop. And these people that had come to me in search of help, they were just people with mothers and fathers and toothaches capable of hating and loving and gratitude amidst all this violence, capable too of killing and hurting and kidnapping. And yet...

This father had risked his life that day for his son like my own father would, and he had respected my life. And I thought about my father's words about serving the people. And so I've come to think that in times of war, it's very hard to tell who the good people and the bad people are. And if you're gifted with the opportunity of helping another human being, especially in times of war, you do it.

Because that's how you serve not a faction, not a party, not a cause, but the people. So the next night I volunteered at the ER and I went down again to help the people of Neva. Thank you.

That was Martha Ruiz Perea. Martha is no longer practicing dentistry. She's now a painter and sculptor living in New York City. She worries that this concept of good guys and bad guys is playing out in the U.S. where she lives now. The fear of the other feels especially prevalent these days. And she says in her experience, the fires that are fueled by fear and hate usually cause the most damage. ♪

♪♪♪

Coming up, what happens when doing everything you're told could get you killed? That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles and our last story comes from Boots Riley. Boots is a writer and the co-founder of the hip-hop group The Coup.

He told this story in San Francisco, just across the bay from Oakland where he lives. Here's Boots Riley, live at the Moth. So I have a band called The Coup. We've been around for 20 something years through a lot of technology and gentrification type changes. And the technology change is one that has really changed our music a lot. These days, you can have a studio on your laptop and just be recording anywhere in your car.

in the alley, wherever. But back in when we started out in the early 90s, you had to actually go to a studio and do it analog. And these studios cost a lot of money. So we didn't have a lot of money. And we always did the midnight to eight shift because nobody wanted that time. And that was the cheapest time. And we liked it. I liked it because we didn't

come out, it'd be morning time, everybody just be waking up and we'd have a new song. And we went to the studio, our studio was actually right in this neighborhood in the Tenderloin, and we lived in Oakland, and so every morning we'd drive across the bridge back home. One morning, we're driving back across the bridge, Pam the Funkstress, the Coos DJ, was driving and I was sitting in the back with some other folks that had been in the studio,

And we realized we left our keyboard player at the studio. And so we needed to turn around. The only place to turn around on the Bay Bridge is Treasure Island. And at this time, Treasure Island wasn't full of condos like it is right now. It was a naval base. So we got off on Treasure Island, made that turn, and started heading back up the hill towards the bridge. When all of a sudden we hear, whoo, whoo!

And it was the military police stopping us. They stopped us, the cops stopped us and asked us all for our IDs. There were a bunch of us in the car. We all gave them our IDs. They asked Pam for the registration. And I say from the back, "Registration's in the glove compartment." So somebody opens the glove compartment and a waterfall of bullets come down. Now, let me explain how those bullets got there.

So this was Oakland in the early 1990s, the Bay Area in the early 1990s. Although Oakland was and is kind of known for this media-created image of mass black-on-black violence, what we know is that from CDC statistics is that actually there was less black-on-black murder in the early 1990s than there was in the 50s and 60s.

And so, although many people when they thought of Oakland were scared of being, scared of black people basically, that wasn't what I was afraid of. What I was afraid of were white supremacists. Let me explain further this situation. In the late 80s and early 90s, white supremacist organizations made outward claims that they were going to take back the Bay Area. There was a lynching in the late 80s at the Lafayette BART station.

There was an Aryan Woodstock in the early 90s in Napa. There were neo-Nazi rallies in Union Square. This was a time when people like Tom Metzger were in national news and David Duke could get elected to office. And places like Ocean Beach were not safe for people of color because you'd get stabbed by racist skinheads. So when...

the white supremacist organizations like Aryan Nation started putting out lists of rappers they thought should be killed. That they weren't gonna kill, but they thought they should end up dead. First, when they started putting out these lists, there were rappers like Ice Cube and Chuck D, people who were known for their social justice.

lyrics. And the coup, you could say we were about social justice. We were a radical communist group. We still are. And we were a radical communist band with album titles like Kill My Landlord, Genocide and Juice. Song titles like I Wanna Laugh, Love, Fuck, and Drink Liquor and Help the Damn Revolution Come Quicker. White supremacists didn't like us. And we ended up on one of those lists. And

It's not a good feeling to know that there are crazy people looking at a list of people that should be killed and you are one of them. So we bought guns. We also didn't want to get messed with by the police, so we did it all the way legal. We registered them. We went to the shooting range to make sure we knew what we were doing with them.

And we transported them legally when we needed to transport them. That meant carrying it in a lockbox while it was unloaded in the trunk of your car. What I didn't realize this morning before I told somebody to open the glove compartment was that we had recently been to the shooting range and there was a box of bullets that were open and they came raining down like a waterfall.

And they seem to be going in slow motion. And I feel like I thought the longest oh shit that I could ever think. And in seeming slow motion, the cop pulls out his gun and has it two inches from Pam's head and says, put your hands up. Everybody put your hands up, which we do. And with the gun two inches from her head, Pam is crying.

The cop radios in for backup and in what seems like seconds four or five jeeps full of MPs come and they jump out of the cars saying, "Hut! Hut!" forming a semicircle holding big machine guns. So we're sitting there with our hands up. These MPs become the chorus, the answer to the cops

So whatever he says, they repeat once or twice. So when he says, who has the gun? They say, gun! Who has the gun? I realize that my next words could decide whether we live or die. But I know that I have to answer something. So I think very carefully about the words that I will use and which order I will say them in. As I say, in the trunk.

In a locked box, unloaded, there exists a gun. It is registered to my name. And so they say, get out of the car, keep your hands up. It's kind of hard to get out of a car with your hands up. But believe me, since I know the stakes, my hands stay up and I figure out how to get out of the car. Standing outside of the car, shaking with fear.

what seems like dozens of machine guns pointed at me and dozens of MPs looking for whatever action they're going to see today. And the cop, the initial cop, opens up the trunk. He sees the lockbox. He says, "Where's the key?" I show him the other key, opens up the lockbox. Still got my hands up. He sees there a gun and a clip, which the clip is what the bullets are kept in. And I say,

with my voice shaking and but just trying to get the sound out. "See, it's unloaded. It's totally legal." He says, "How do I know that this gun is unloaded?" And I say, "Well, you see the clip right there. You see it's unloaded." He says, "How do I know there's not one in the chamber?" And I say, "Well, you could pick it up and open it and look in the chamber." He says, "I'm not touching your weapon.

I don't know where he's going with this. "Pick up the gun and show me." I stand there and he says, "Pick up the gun!" And then his chorus of MPs say, "Pick up the gun! Pick up the gun!" He says again, "Pick up the gun!" And they say, "Pick up the gun! Pick up the gun!" Pam yells, "Don't pick up the gun!" I say, "I'm not picking up the gun." And then he says again, "Pick up the gun! Pick up the gun!" And I notice

One of the MPs has tears coming out of his eyes while he's yelling for me to pick up the gun. And then that makes tears come out of my eyes because this is it. And after a couple more times of him saying, pick up the gun, I say, just take me to jail. Just take me to jail. I'm not touching the gun. I'm not touching the gun. Take me to jail. And I see a look. Maybe it's defeat or something. Maybe it's just contempt.

In his eyes, as he says, get in the car. So I get back in the car. He goes over and conferences with the other MPs and comes back, hands us back our licenses and says, look, you all have traffic warrants. So we could be taking you to jail. But as a courtesy, we're going to let you go because this has just been a misunderstanding, a bad situation here. So I don't really want to argue because I just want to get out of there.

But after the guns are not pointed at us anymore and we're about to take off, I ask him, why did you stop us? And he says something about, well, we don't know if they're terrorists. You could be terrorists. We don't know what's going on. So we have to stop and check. And I said, well, if we were some good old boys in a four by four pickup truck with a gun mounted,

on the back of our windshield. I don't think he would have stopped us. He's like, well, I don't know. We take off, pull up towards the hill, and leave there with our lives. And every day or so, I have to cross that bridge, and I see the sign that says Treasure Island Exit. And it reminds me of the time that me doing everything I was supposed to could have got me killed. Thank you.

Boots Riley is the co-founder of the hip-hop group The Coup, as well as the group's lead producer, arranger, and songwriter. He's also a screenwriter and author of a collection of lyrics and anecdotes entitled Tell Homeland Security We Are the Bomb.

Boots and Cheryl, the storyteller from the top of the hour, both told their stories the same night in San Francisco. And afterwards, they talked a lot about privilege, how someone like Hunter S. Thompson, being pulled over for shooting what police believe to be a live firearm, is able to drive away, heavily under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms and alcohol, and how Boots, who followed every law to a T, was asked to prove he was following the rules, prove he was a law-abiding citizen, basically under the threat of a firing squad. ♪

Boots and I also talked a lot about guns and violence in our popular culture, in movies and music, and Boots said something that really resonated. He said, fishing villages inspire fishing songs. You're listening to Boots Riley's band, The Coup, right now.

You can find out more about Boots and his band The Coup on our website. You can also re-listen or share the stories you heard in this hour and get info about our live events online.

That's on our website, themoth.org. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us again next time for the Moth Radio Hour.

Your host this hour was Meg Bowles. Meg also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Timothy Liu Lee. Moss stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Khaki King, Hotay, the Cronus Quartet, and The Coup.

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. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.