Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It. Each of us is the protagonist of our own myth, an epic we get to write and rewrite every waking day.
Our stories reveal our passions and fears, our sadness, hardships and joys.
And when we share this story, we invite others to understand who we are, to comprehend us through the universe. Grammar of the soul.
You are listening to the all night Society, an actual play podcast brought to you by Queens court games.
Ivy Larue slumps in the passenger seat of a worn out Lincoln town car, staring into an empty parking lot on Chicago's north shore. The tramire is grunge and pretty, with a wash of new goth and an orange county accent that belies her commanding intellect.
Whatever meeting the sheriff insisted she observed tonight is running late, hours late, and colleague Joshua Crozier has turned to small talk to break the silence.
Ford Ivy chooses to indulge the banu Hakeem.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: My life before all of huh?
You are asking about something I haven't given much thought to in a long, long time.
At their best, my younger days were spent excelling in everything, drinking up the myriad accolades the world saw fit to bestow upon my wonder.
I arrived in this world blessed with incomparable intelligence, the capacity to master any skill or subject I deemed worthy of my time. I was, as my violin teacher called me, a vundergind.
And at their worst, well, I spent a lot of time suffocating under the weight of inferiority.
My older brother, Connor, he was also a vondicind, etc. Etc.
But with a three year head start.
Imagine what that's like, being the second genius, the second prodigy. Imagine being incomparable, but not.
I'd love to sit here and blame it all on the patriarchy, railing about how misogyny kept me down, but my parents weren't like that.
It really was just a case of Connor came first.
You were valedictorian. So was Connor. Allstate athletic title, just like Connor. Full ride to your first choice university. Connor must be so proud, seeing his little sister follow his example.
I just wanted some of that for know, some praise that wasn't soiled with my brother's accomplishments.
To the point I even tried to game the system, looking for a box that Connor hadn't already ticked, a trophy he hadn't already won.
So my senior year of. I guess that would have been 88, I joined the academic decathlon team. My brother had already claimed the state debate title three years prior, but academic decathlon? Fresh, virgin, unconred territory.
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Oh, so you're a queen of the nerds figures.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Actually, yeah, unironically I carried our team to the national championships that year. A trip to San Antonio for myself and my eight royal nerd subjects. Without getting too into the nerdy weeds about it. Academic decathlon covers Deca events.
[00:04:33] Speaker C: I'm sorry.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Deca.
Ten in Greek. Jesus. An interview, an essay, an original speech, and seven multiple choice exams. And all but one of those exams. It's just you at a desk with your number two pencil. The last one they call the super quiz.
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Wait, seriously? They call it the super quiz?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: 15 questions, all answered on the spot, in front of a big audience.
[00:05:04] Speaker D: Of course.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: I nailed it. What disease brought down the Han dynasty? Smallpox. First colony to gain independence in Africa.
[00:05:13] Speaker D: Libya.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Followed by Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ghana. Dolly Madison was the first presidential spouse to be referred to as first lady. Donatello used wax casting to produce his David statues in the mid 14 hundreds. And the EUa is the stone believed to keep the Ogbanji bound to the human world. And, hey, not that they asked, but that comes from the Odonani spirituality of southern Nigeria.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: And you've hung onto that for all these years.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Four gold medals. The highest individual score of any participant in the contest. History. And the special joy of knocking JJ Pierce off their three year win streak.
And all of that in front of my mother, who, for the first time in six years, had finally bothered to show up to one of my events. After the awards ceremony, when the excitement had died down and folks started clearing out, I found her in the crowd. I was beaming, awards in hand. This was it. This was my first.
She looked me straight in the eye without acknowledging a single one of my accomplishments and said, for goodness sake, ivy, pull your shoulders back.
[00:06:30] Speaker D: You look sloppy.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: All of this against the back wall of the auditorium because she hadn't even bothered to find a seat.
[00:06:41] Speaker E: Ah.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: Nine months.
Nine months of studying and coaching and writing and researching and memorizing and rehearsing and making clear to my teammates that if they didn't want to keep up, they could find a different hobby, because I would not let them drag me down. I was not doing this for the camaraderie. All of that, by the way, while also maintaining my honor status, keeping up with track and field practice, and preparing for my violin competitions. All of it culminating in this grand victory. And my mother only found words to criticize my posture.
U I should have learned my lesson, really.
Maybe it would have been better for me, you know, mental health long term, to just accept that I wasn't the one they were proud of, that I never would be.
To my parents, affection was earned, your reward for hard work, and Connor had set the bar so high there just wasn't any way for me to shine brighter than he did.
But I didn't learn, so it kept hurting just as bad.
When I was awarded a national merit scholarship, when I was named a Davidson fellow, when I graduated from Stanford three years later, summa cum laude, and walked out with a Fulbright scholarship and an offer to continue my studies at Cambridge.
Although that last one might actually have been my fault, deciding to study cultural anthropology instead of earning a real degree, like finance, like Connor.
But Connor's academic work only ever earned him a job at our father's white shoe investment firm, where mine had me traveling to DC to accept, in case I didn't mention it, my Fulbright.
[00:09:05] Speaker D: By.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Myself because while I was accepting one of the most prestigious postgraduate scholarships on the planet, trying to remember to breathe, shaking hands and standing for pictures with Senator John Glenn, who had just presented the award on behalf of the United States Congress.
My parents were in Connecticut watching Connor play in some off season alumni charity game for the Bulldogs because it was important to him, because Connecticut is so beautiful in November.
It's a little chilly.
I think that would have broken other people.
I mean, I know people who have been broken like that. You know people who have been broken like that. You work with them, they're dating your best friend. Hell, maybe even you dated them. There's that one person they'll never be able to please and it just clings to them for the rest of their lives, dragging them down like Sisyphus.
That's not me.
Well, not anymore.
After the ceremony, I ended up back in my hotel room alone.
I paced the room for a time, already plotting the next scheme, the one that this time would win them over.
But for once, and honest to God, I can't tell you what it was about that moment. But for once, something finally clicked and I just let it all go.
If I had to guess, perhaps it was realizing that what should have been the most important moment of my life, the thing I should have been ecstatic about for much longer than that fleeting moment, was already unimportant because it didn't get me what I wanted.
But I'd made it to where I was, in spite of my brother, in spite of my parents.
They were too busy fawning over the success of the first, that they'd missed the brilliance of their second.
And I wasn't going to punish myself for their lack of vision any longer.
In a few months, I'd be on my way to England, ready to surround myself with greater minds than theirs. From that point forward, there was only one person I was concerned with proving myself to. And she looked awfully smug smiling back at me in the mirror.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Joshua Crozier sits perched atop an uneven bar stool, a gaunt and serious figure steeped in the aromas of stale smoke and spilled liquor typical of bars like these.
Here, the background of kindred society is muffled by the clatter of pool cues and empty glasses.
He smiles into the watered down remnants of a jack and coke, a drink ordered out of habit rather than desire, and regales his nosferatu colleague with another story.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: Right, so that Boston police Department corruption case back in 1980, you ever hear about that one? It was a pretty big deal at the time.
Everyone went around calling it the next serpico. But it never managed to grab its own name. Not really. And without a name, guess making anything other than a dry documentary about it was going to be pretty tough.
This wasn't your standard corruption case where money's taken in and beatings are handed out?
There's plenty of that in Boston. No, this went a whole hell of a lot deeper than that.
Cops Cullen in hits using mafia connections. Local gangs pan off cops to smoke a rival lieutenant. Crazier shit than that, even. All of it blown open by one guy, one whistleblower. The bureau managed to hide from everyone but the US attorney.
Like I said, it was wild times.
The verdicts. They landed on the front page in 1980. But things really kicked off in 76. Maybe 77. It wasn't too long after I started seeing my girlfriend, Rachel.
Someone had started sending anonymous tips to the Herald. A new lead every week. Outing a cop or a friendly for something shady, something morally ambiguous, something downright illegal.
It started small. A few cash greased palms here, a few prisoners with unexplained injuries there. But Mr. Anonymous started taking bigger heads real quick.
Getting the papers to ask why certain officers were associating with known mafia bosses. Or why so many local drug runners disappeared in police custody with no questions asked.
Yeah, okay. So the department had its own internal investigations going. And this is the days before everyone knew those were bullshit. But either way, the pressure was building.
Newspapers, city hall, the governor. Everyone wanted to know why this wasn't being handled one way or another.
And us guys in uniform, no one trusted anyone.
Every badge in the city, no matter how clean, was wondering when it was going to be their turn. Anywhere in the city you could go into the precinct locker room and you'd see cops sniffing around. Just raw suspicion. Wondering who it was that was selling people out. Was it a solo play? Some guy on his moral high horse? An undercover fed, maybe. Shit, maybe a whole ring of them. A full blown conspiracy.
Partners looked twice at each other before going anywhere. Not even the chief was safe from the rumors. Everyone expected. Everyone else was waiting to stab them in the back for something they'd done, for something they might do, for something they were still doing.
Shit, I was nervous, too.
You ever felt that knot in the pit of your stomach when you know you're about to be caught for something?
Yeah. So imagine that lasting for years. And you have a pretty good idea of what life was like for me in the Boston PD.
And it only got worse for me and for everyone else.
Even if my reasons were a little.
[00:16:20] Speaker D: Oh, let me guess. You were the whistleblower, weren't you?
[00:16:26] Speaker C: That's very observant of you, Schmendric. Yes, it was me who was smitting the tips.
And I was the one who blew the whistle in 80.
[00:16:35] Speaker D: But why would you go through the trouble of doing that?
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Look, so I wanted to be a cop as long as I can remember. I wanted to walk the beat. I wanted to chase down the bad guys. I wanted to be the one kicking down doors and yelling, everyone, hands in the air.
And I did that for a couple of years. But then I got pecked for detective. And wouldn't you know it, I enjoyed that a whole hell of a lot more than being officer crojier.
Crime scenes.
Crime scenes are all quiet.
You walk into one, you know something happened here, and someone knows about it. And all you gotta do is draw the lines and connect the dots.
Suffice it to say, I was really fucking good at drawing lines and connecting dots. And that's what got me into trouble. Probably six months after I picked up brank, I'd been working this homicide. Real ugly case. Turned out to be a mob connection. Let me tell you, nothing in my life had felt as good as putting that guy behind bars. First degree murder, life sentence. Eligible for parole after 30 years.
Section chief gave me two whole days to celebrate that one before he handed down my next case. And that was that.
Next thing you know, it's three months later, and I'm driving to the station after a shift. And I see this guy, the same fucking guy, walking down the street.
I damn near crashed my car with that double take, making sure it was him.
And it was.
Turns out there had been some bad evidence that got the charges knocked down to conspiracy. And the appellate bench had decided this model citizen deserved leniency. Leniency from the state? From life in prison to three goddamn months?
[00:18:33] Speaker D: Oh, what the fuck, Joshua? I'd have raised hell about that shit.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Yeah, and I did. And I got a lot of man that's not right. Followed by a shrug of the shoulders. But, hey, what can you do?
I was naive, but that got me paying attention real quick. Drawing lines, connecting dots. And just like that, I was seeing it everywhere. All the favors, the bribes, the schemes, the rackets, right there, right in front of my eyes, just like it always had been.
[00:19:07] Speaker D: It was like the veil had been lifted. I guess.
Not quite as zealous as the freshly converted.
[00:19:15] Speaker C: Yeah, something like that. Honestly, even after all this time, I can't explain how I didn't see it earlier. Plain as it was hell, it was one step away from being water cooler talk, at least being so open, I got to skip that period of denial. And poof, just like that. All my ideas about what police officers were and how they operated were twisted, shattered.
I grew up a lot in those next few months. Hardened, I guess. Sure, I was still proud of my work, my attention to detail, my ability to see justice properly served. None of that changed.
I just realized only a handful of people in the department actually shared those ideals, and even fewer were willing to pursue them with the same kind of vigor.
The profession just wasn't worthy of the enthusiasm I'd given it before.
[00:20:17] Speaker D: So you turned on them.
[00:20:19] Speaker C: Oh, yes.
See, I don't remember when the idea for anonymous tips popped into my head or when I finally decided to pull the trigger on it. It couldn't have been more than a year after I graduated the academy, because. Yeah, it was close to my second year with the department.
I started off small, testing the waters. The first tip was about some minor accounting errors in the motor pool budget handed over to one of the city's pulp rags. Not the best and brightest of Boston's fourth estate, sure, but I'd given them enough to catch the scent and follow the money out of the station.
They never did manage to figure out why it was leaving or where it was going, but that wasn't really the point.
That was my test run, my proof of concept. The department was forced to hold a few meetings. The crooks got a little more careful, and that was that.
No one came within a hundred miles of pegging me as the source.
So I escalated. I even got a little cocky. From small budget discrepancies to full blown cash bribes from prisoners with suspicious injuries to straight up disappearances, the whole nine yards. I was still careful for sure, right? I submitted to a different paper every time, dropping documents and mailboxes at random. Soon, every paper in the city was chasing this spider web of a story. Mob money has a home in the Boston PD.
I've managed to spin the whole thing from a department that had gone full blown paranoid and hadn't come close to cut.
I figured I was invincible.
[00:21:59] Speaker D: Nah, nah, you only thought you were invincible.
[00:22:03] Speaker C: I mean, what can I say? I fucked up.
Two days. Two days after my second anniversary with the force, and I was getting called into the chief's office, he had this grim, sour look on his face. I knew right away I'd been made.
So one of those tips I'd put out, right? Turns out I was the only one with the insider knowledge to connect a particular mobster and his generous donation to the police benevolent funds to a particular Murder. That had gone well. Let's call it under investigated. And the chief, he'd done his homework.
[00:22:42] Speaker D: Oh, shit. You got caught. What'd you do?
[00:22:46] Speaker C: Well, the chief wasn't some cartoon villain, right? A slimy, corrupt asshole for sure, but not some legion of doom type. He just laid it all out, straight and simple. I was to send a letter to my outlets thanking them for their help in purifying the department, give the impression that this had all been low level officers making plays without any knowledge from.
[00:23:09] Speaker D: The higher ups, or else.
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Or else there'd be consequences.
I didn't have to ask, and I doubt you do either.
Firing me would just make too much of a spectacle. And they didn't have anything to pin charges on. That didn't leave the thin blue line with very many options.
I left his office with a knot in my throat, my heart pounding against my ribs, and zero question about what I had to do next.
[00:23:42] Speaker D: Let me guess, you got the fuck out of town.
[00:23:45] Speaker C: No, I went to the bureau with it. All of it.
[00:23:49] Speaker D: Ballsy move.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: It was a risky move, for sure, but without a play of that magnitude, it was only a matter of time before the big fish moved to permanently resolve the issue.
These people play for keeps. I couldn't guarantee my own safety, let alone Rachel's. And, oh, yeah, by the way, all that corrupt mob stuff, the beatings, the murders, whatever, all that would still be going on.
It took five months for the feds to do enough of their own digging to substantiate the case. They made public filings of their charges, and on that very same day, the threats started rolling in.
They weren't exactly subtle. Maybe subtle enough to make sure no one could prove their source, but the message was still clear enough. The public was going to turn their attention elsewhere eventually. And when that happened, I wasn't going to be safe anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not at the grocery store, not even at that italian place on 17th. And the note made real careful mention that I liked the meatball subs the best.
I wouldn't be safe anywhere. I was fucked.
[00:24:58] Speaker D: And yet you're still here. You must have done something right.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I did. I took the witness stand. I told the jury everything I knew, even though any one of those men lined up in front of me could have made that call, sent my name to some back Ellie Slicer. Take the job, no questions asked. But I still did it.
[00:25:19] Speaker D: Well, I guess that's because you're a brave dude, Josh.
[00:25:23] Speaker C: No. It's because I was a fucking idiot. I was still learning how the game was played. While I was playing it, I started all this trouble without an ace up my sleeve. I would have absolutely ended up killed, buried, forgotten. Say, for this buddy of mine, Paul Kenfer. He was a new guy. Ish. He was smart. Smarter than me, probably. See, while I was walking around thinking I'd never get caught, Paul was spreading a rumor that I had some kind of dead man switch. That if someone iced me, all the real nasty stuff would get out. It was a total lie, of course, but it worked. Well, sort of. For all my effort, the case turned out to be pretty mundane, really. Some low level guys got pinned five years here, ten years there. But the feds were content to declare victory and walk away without taking on the big guys.
The real creeps behind it weren't even indicted. No one went to jail, no one paid a cent. As soon as the public had something else to rail against, it was back to business as usual for the Boston PD.
[00:26:30] Speaker D: Oh, man, that sucks. No justice in the justice system, I guess.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really rather short.
Anyway, I made it out unscathed for a few years. The new guys coming in knew someone was watching, and thanks to Paul, they were way too afraid to do anything about it.
I went back to work, and I figured that's how I'd spend every year, right up until retirement.
As it turns out, I was wrong about that, too.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Schmendrich hunches in the Technicolor glow of a computer monitor, alternating between bursts of frenzied keystrokes and long, still silences.
Between her closed off posture and oversized wardrobe, it's difficult to make out the modeled greasy skin that defines her particular version of Kane's curse.
Without looking up from her work, she interrupts the quiet with a question.
[00:27:53] Speaker D: Do you have regrets?
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Excuse me?
[00:27:59] Speaker D: You know, regrets. Like you look back on your life and wish you could have done something different. Like if you just changed one choice somehow, somewhere, things would have just been better.
[00:28:16] Speaker E: I think everyone has regrets.
[00:28:21] Speaker D: True.
[00:28:24] Speaker E: You seem a little bothered. Did you want to talk about it?
[00:28:33] Speaker D: Sure.
I was just kind of thinking about this.
My career, if you could call it that, and how it basically ruined my life. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love what I do. There's this challenge to it unlike anything else, really. It takes a special kind of person to read between the lines of code and instantly perceive what those random strings and letters and numbers actually mean and how you might be able to manipulate them to your advantage.
Take the right code, add the right commands, and now you've got a program looping infinitely inside of itself. A worm tearing through the guts of a network, bogging down the entire system.
All that with the power of a keystroke, and damn, am I good at it. Great at it.
But it didn't come without a price.
Let's play a game. It's called look at me and try to imagine me as a child. What do you see?
[00:29:39] Speaker E: Solitary book nerd.
[00:29:41] Speaker D: Yeah, that feels like the right answer, doesn't it? But. Nope. Wrong.
I was a certified cool kid. The kind with tons of friends who went to tons of parties and coordinated her outfits with the other certified cool kids every day.
I got good grades. Teachers loved having me in their class. I was a popular, charming angel, the exact opposite of the antisocial computer nerd. And yet, well, here I am.
[00:30:14] Speaker E: Okay, so what changed?
[00:30:19] Speaker D: A lot of things. Not all at once, but one after another after another after another.
It started in my preteen years. I guess my parents were getting real big into their careers, hunting down that next promotion, and, hey, that was fantastic. They deserved it. And as their kid, I really wanted to cheer them on.
But that's also a really shaky stage where you're almost a teenager and making all your decisions from a place of complete ignorance, but you go nuts anytime someone calls you out on it.
So they're both full speed into their work, and every day, the apple of their eye becomes just that little less shiny.
Everything started to just fall apart. I was skipping volleyball practice, mouthing off in class. My grades started slipping, and there were no more matching outfits.
Then, right when you think it can't get any worse, bam. Divorce.
My parents were neglecting me, and they were neglecting each other. And this whole life we had unraveled into a big, gross mess of nothing.
Then the typical divorce parents thing started. They tried to bribe me into good behavior. And that's how I got my first computer. You know how sometimes you've just had this shit awful day and you go out and buy yourself something nice because you just need to feel better? And it works for, like, a few hours or maybe a couple of days, but that glitter fades away, and you realize all those feelings you were trying to cover up are just still there. This computer, it wasn't like that. The screen was somewhere I could go to hide from those feelings. I stopped doing any sort of extracurricular activities, stopped hanging out with my friends.
I traded all of that for circuits and keyboards and programs and the warm green glow of the computer screen.
A week turns into a month, and a month turns into a year. And just like that. I mean, I'd given up on my parents, but I think that's also when they gave up on me. I was dead to the world before, you know?
Dead to the world.
[00:32:45] Speaker E: Schmantrak.
[00:32:47] Speaker D: I barely made it through school. Yeah, there were some classes I managed to survive because the material just came naturally, but the rest I just skated by. Not that I cared. I knew I was good with computers. Really good. I'd started making a name for myself in some pretty exclusive circles. Who cares if scarlett almost failed high school? Schmendrick. Me. I was famous. Sort of. I was the person with the technical know how to get you what you wanted. If I wanted to. And that could be a real roll of the dice for some people because, I don't know, maybe it was because my parents were both cops, but I had this real strong moral compass.
Want to break in just to look around? That's fine. Dig up some dirt on a corrupt a hole. Let's go rip off some average Joe's credit card. Nope. No, thanks. Not my style.
And it wasn't just online stuff, right? I remember this one time. Oh, God, my dad was so mad, I snuck some code into my dad's mouse driver. So every time he went to close out of a program, when he would try to click that little x with the mouse, it would skyrocket off in some random freaking direction. It was like his mouse was possessed.
Poor guy. He actually sat me down at his computer and asked me to fix it for him. And, like, knowing how he felt about my hobby, that was a big deal, right?
So we go through the whole debugging process and he's just in my ear the whole time. See? See, that's what it's doing. Scarlett. Can you fix it?
And sure, I could, but you can't just expect someone to tackle that kind of issue, real serious stuff, without payment, right? Say, a new video game or some hardware upgrades. I can't actually remember what I asked him for, but, man, I was such a pain.
But, I mean, yeah, aside from dad yelling up the stairs. Scarlett, dinner's ready.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: Or.
[00:34:56] Speaker D: Scarlett, my computer is acting up again. I didn't do much interacting with real people.
It was all online. People I met through hacking circles, yammering in whatever mashed together code passed for a chat program back then.
That's around maybe the time I met ghost. He. Maybe she. They were a huge name in the hacking community. I mean, I was a big deal, yeah. But compared to them, I was just another script kitty. We built a friendship, sort of real slow. They'd taken an interest in some of my earlier work, and I guess I became their apprentice. At least once I got over being the giddy, starstruck mess who couldn't believe someone like that had taken an interest in me.
That apprenticeship led to my magnum opus. My craziest, riskiest, most daring hack ever. I was going to hit the public right where it hurt the most. An act of vile criminality targeting one of the single most important institutions in the whole country.
Doctor who?
Right when people were sitting down for the most sacred of evening rituals, I was going to steal control of the airwaves.
It took a lot of hard work and plenty of ghost resources, but, my God, was it spectacular. Okay, so the performance was a little lacking, but for 90 whole seconds, the city of Chicago played audience to whatever random nonsense I blurted off the top of my head.
[00:36:30] Speaker E: Dr.
Who?
[00:36:32] Speaker D: Oh, right.
You're old. Okay, well, everyone was talking about it. Newspapers, politicians, tv stations. They still talk about it.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: All right?
[00:36:43] Speaker D: I have a Wikipedia page. I'm a YouTube meme, and I get to read the comment threads and think to myself, aha, you fools. It was me all along. How little you know, man? Trolling those comment threads.
[00:36:59] Speaker E: Right? Comment threads. Those are definitely real things that I know about.
[00:37:05] Speaker D: Okay, come on. For years, I thought the only person who would ever see me, the real me, were my hacker friends. And now everyone got to see me for 90 seconds. They got to experience Schmendrick. I was this joyful little miscreant who bounced into their lives, shaking their hands, blurting out, hello, how do you do? Great. Goodbye. All in the same breath.
Alas, all that rebellion has to come to an end at some point. Yeah, I'd sort of forgotten that my father was still a detective, and a damn good detective. And thinking I could pull off a stunt like that right under his nose and never get caught, that takes hubris. The kind of balls that gets you a page in the Guinness Book of world Record.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Balls.
[00:37:54] Speaker D: It was my birthday. I remember because I always wanted computer parts. And my parents knew they were never going to remember which parts they should buy, so they always gave me cash and sent me to the shop on my own. When I came home, my dad was just at the kitchen table, just sitting there, staring at me with that dad look. The kind that automatically sends a shiver down your spine.
He spoke slowly, like every word had its own weight, that needed to be carefully measured before it could be understood.
No gifts. No happy birthday, Scarlet. Just a cautionary tale. Clear instructions to get my life back on track. Because the path you're on has real, inevitable consequences.
To this day, I don't actually know how much the old man knew. Maybe it was just a hunch. Maybe he knew every detail. But the message was clear. The time for a play was over.
He wanted to set me straight, but, well, that's the regret.
It's not like I told him to go fuck himself. Not literally.
But I moved out to New York with my mom. And really, what's the difference?
I had my chance to be human.
I could have followed my dad's advice, put the computer away and go back to the friends and the parties and the matching outfits, and I fucking blew it.
Now it's like trying to hold on to grains of sand, except the sand is everything that made me human. And I've got these monster nosferatu claws instead of fingers.
The harder I try to scoop it up, the more I lose. It's just watching and waiting and clinging to those last vestiges, holding on to what I can until the last grain is gone and only the monster remains.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Rebecca Mitchell kneels adjacent a traditional Navajo loom, tough fingers dancing patiently over strands of spun wool yarn.
She's made her home in an abandoned grain silo, cold and dark, with walls and floors of bare concrete.
But no chill can fully permeate this space, which the quiet and venerable woman fills with matronly warmth.
Nearby, Joshua Crozier watches the gangrel work.
[00:40:36] Speaker E: It's certainly not as easy as it looks. Believe me, I've managed to finish about four. Yes, four. Four weavings of my years of work. This one will make it five.
[00:40:52] Speaker C: Honestly, I figured you'd have made more, considering.
[00:40:55] Speaker E: Well, consider considering that I'm old.
[00:40:59] Speaker C: I mean. Yeah.
[00:41:03] Speaker E: Loom work is slow, deliberate. A decade, a century of practice does not mean the thread draws any more swiftly than when I first took up the craft.
The weft comes together under my fingers with time and the weaving with only further dedication of the same, I'd say I'm something of an authority on the matter. And my works have survived the passage of time, just as I have.
[00:41:30] Speaker C: Yeah, an awful lot of time, but okay. You said you'd made others, right? Over the many years.
[00:41:43] Speaker E: Although I can't say what's become of them. A few I gave to friends, one I made for the cabin back home.
They've no doubt traveled beyond where I could find them.
[00:41:55] Speaker C: I wish I could have seen them.
[00:41:59] Speaker E: While they're perhaps not my own creations, but surely you've seen the works of my people even before those antique shows or the public displays encased in glass. To know the work of a Danae craftsman is to know quality.
Our crafts are so much more than something be wrapped about your shoulders on a golden night or nailed to a wall.
They are our stories, our lives and our homes.
Unlike the threads of our history, they are strong, carefully woven. To unravel them is impossible.
That they continue to exist, that I continue to exist is no incidental stroke of luck.
I wonder what became of my first piece.
It was a glotchun, a thick wool blanket.
Now, even as a little girl, I'd helped my masani with her own work.
She was a small woman, bent by the weight of years, always with her gray hair pulled back.
I would come along and shear the flock, spin their wool, and study her careful work at the loom as she brought those strands to form.
But to take up the craft yourself, that is something sacred.
Every stage, from that first step out into the pasture to the moment your fingers settle on the loom is as much a ritual as it is labor. And that ritual is deeply personal, unique to the individual weaver.
And as the fibers come together, we always leave a single mistake in every weaving. Because, as my grandmother taught me, only the creator is perfect.
We do not create perfect things because we are not perfect.
But I suppose you didn't come to hear me ramble about a life long.
[00:44:10] Speaker C: No. Please, go on. This is fascinating.
To be honest, I was just thinking about how much ivy would hate your grandmother.
[00:44:20] Speaker E: Right.
The perfect witch.
[00:44:26] Speaker C: So, the golchun.
[00:44:32] Speaker E: But how I struggled with that blanket.
Being young and perhaps a bit too proud for my own good, I thought I could make a weaving that would outshine anything that old loom had ever given shape.
The yarn was not so much a creation to me as it was something to be mastered by an arrogant youth. My grandmother must have thought I'd spent too long in the sun, the way I crouched over every fiber of that wool.
When the weaving began in earnest, my mind was abuzz with the grandeur I would render onto the loom. How it would be the greatest blanket ever graced my family's home, and how my ancestors would look upon it with immeasurable pride.
Couldn't count on my hands the number of times the weaving would end up being taken apart and started anew, all in the frustrating search for perfection.
Even that customary mistake I used to leave would be perfect, incorporated just so.
It was a ceaseless exercise in starting, stopping, unwinding all my efforts and starting again.
[00:45:39] Speaker C: That sounds exhausting.
[00:45:44] Speaker E: It was. It was soul draining.
Neither my mother nor grandmother stepped in, however, I was an especially moody young woman, too obsessed with transcending the craft to drink in the wisdom of my elders. A fiercely proud and touchy woman, blind to the traditions and hours spent at her grandmother's side, seeing only a need to prove herself.
Perhaps this was a lesson that all weavers had to learn for themselves.
What's the use of pursuing perfection in your craft when perfection cannot be achieved?
But I haven't been that woman in a long, long time.
She worried too much about how her family might judge her if she didn't give them the best of her work.
About how a single thread left out a place that see a blanket unraveled before the winter.
Those are the follies of youth, being handed such a daunting project, knowing you will be judged by your elders and held against the examples of history.
It frightens you into wasting your efforts chasing the unattainable.
[00:46:57] Speaker C: Sounds almost like, say, being given a task by the prince.
[00:47:03] Speaker E: Quite.
It's odd now, watching so many of our kind devote themselves to achieving some version of an unblemished ideal.
They toil to be peerless, supreme.
I cannot imagine an eternity squandered on so vain an effort. How can you be so proud as to make any tapestry perfect, be it the blanket you lay on your bed or the story you weave with your life?
We are not immaculate.
Our humanity lives within our flaws.
[00:47:45] Speaker C: Yeah, well, don't let ivy hear you say that.
[00:47:50] Speaker E: She'll learn.
I've had the better part of two centuries to think about that blanket.
I was obsessed with preserving the stories of a colorful and noble people dragged through horrors with feathers in their hair and shedding only a single tear, betrayed and tormented and driven to the brink of extinction by a power committed to this day. Seeing us robbed of our homes.
And because I had survived, I had a responsibility, a duty even, to make sure our culture was preserved in such a way that it could never be extinguished.
In that sense, I had lost the intent of my craft.
Those tragedies do not define my people.
They were not, and are not our identity.
Our survival did not need to be polished and made into something beautiful.
We lived not in glory, not by any stretch of the imagination, but we remained.
[00:49:04] Speaker C: Survival is. It's rarely pretty, no.
[00:49:10] Speaker E: But we grow from it. As I did when I eventually returned to the loom.
I had worked myself into a fever on my own and shut out my family in feudal pursuit of an impossible ideal.
So before I took up the threads again, I went to my Masani side, as I had when I was little girl, and watched her weave.
She had experienced so much in her long life, all the same trials that I had faced and more, but it did not affect her skill with the craft.
She was careful but not obsessive, gathering the fibers to form the selvedge, forming the weave with none of the frantic exactness that had hounded my own work.
It was serene, like an embrace from a loved one, enclosing and safe.
She chanted softly, and we escaped the overbearing heat of a spring sun, traveling into her story, into the gray hills, standing proud above the desert crowned with spots of snow, into the stormy skies that gave way to fields of golden yellow, for heroes posed among their defeated foes and guarded the clans from all manner of beasts.
All the while she chanted softly, fretting gentle words of advice into the songs, passed from grandmothers to mothers to daughters over the uncountable ages, I took her lessons to my own loom. No longer burdened by the urgency of unrivaled creation, these threads would be my own, of my own stories and the joy they carried.
Through dyed strands, I spun the gene bahane, the story of how we came to be, of the dark, where we began in our journey forth, and the wisdom gained in the shaping of the land.
My mind was at peace then, the one and only time in that life, and in this one that I can call feeling that sort of tranquility.
There was my family, my craft, our home.
And whatever the future might bring us, we would always have the strength of our ties to this land and to each other.
Took me two months to finish my blanket.
A splendid recollection of our birth into the world, rendered human by a single white thread cleaving a wide field of dark gray.
[00:51:47] Speaker C: Jesus.
[00:51:50] Speaker E: Of course, there was more to do. The blankets still needed cleaning, and I would have to test the ends.
But kneeling there with my creation now I had become a weaver.
[00:52:04] Speaker C: Your family. They must have loved it.
[00:52:08] Speaker E: Oh, my elders, the joy on their faces when I finally revealed my work.
They had all witnessed the sullen woman agonizing over every thread.
Now she stood, holding a work worthy of being celebrated, woven with a clear head, steeped in the wisdom of the old ways, and all the more beautiful for it.
Any other blanket might have made its way to the trading post, but I couldn't bring myself to part with it.
There would always be other blankets or shawls or rugs, and in those days, people weren't paying thousands of dollars for collectibles or antiques.
The traders back then didn't see the hours of effort that went into a piece, or the chance that go with them.
Whatever we made was worth only a little more than the textiles sped out by machines in the east.
They certainly wouldn't appreciate this first beautiful thing to come from my loom.
So my family kept it, even if some grumbled about the things we could have enjoyed had I allowed it to be traded in.
I'm sure they were grateful in the long term, though.
After all, if your daughter were to vanish forever into the night, you'd want something left of her, wouldn't you've been.
[00:53:38] Speaker A: Listening to the all night Society, an actual play podcast brought to you by Queens court games.
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