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  And I turned around, and it was another mime, only this one was twice the size of the first one, and this hulking Goliath of a man was glowering at me and looked like he wanted to kill me.

  We both heard the canister rolling slowly but noisily down the sidewalk, and he lumbered toward it. I turned around, and I started rushing toward it, and the two of us scrambled to get to that canister, but I got there first. And I grabbed it, and I scooped it up, and I looked at him. He came at me, and I stepped back, and I took a wide stance, and I got all the way down on the ground, and I started rocking back and forth on my heels, and said:

  “YOU WANT THIS, MOTHERFUCKER?!

  “COME

  “AND

  “GET

  “IT!”

  And he stopped cold.

  Now, we both knew he was four times my size. If he ever got his hands on me, he would have been able to break me in two. But at what cost? Because that was the day that I was prepared to die…and when I left the planet, I was taking him with me.

  He must have seen it in my eyes—Kill. The. Mime.—because he turned around and disappeared back into the crowd.

  By now the spray was spreading, and some of the lovely supporters were starting to cough, and sneeze, and choke, and wheeze, and they quickly dispersed without leaving a dime in the mime’s hat.

  It was then that I realized that from all that rocking on the ground, I had bent the heel on my shoe and split my skirt all the way up to my butt, and I had an interview at two o’clock!

  So I hobbled across the street, and I got upstairs to my office. I grabbed my Scotch tape and my stapler. I got myself into the ladies’ room, locked the door, took off my skirt, pulled the seam back together, and stapled, stapled, stapled, stapled. I flattened it out, took some Scotch tape, taped down one edge, taped down the other edge, and placed one in the center for good measure.

  I went back to my desk, where I had a pair of flats, thank the Lord. I put them on, and I waited for that call. When they called, I went upstairs.

  I aced that interview and got the job.

  That was the day that I got in touch with my other side. She doesn’t make many appearances. She’s available on an as-needed basis.

  I call her my quiet fire, and we both thank you.

  * * *

  PHYLLIS MARIE BOWDWIN, a Bronx-born artist, jewelry designer, and griot, tells stories through her writing and her art. A former teacher trainer for the New York City Department of Education, crisis-intervention counselor for the Marble Collegiate Church, and coordinator of daytime casting at ABC, Phyllis was a panelist on the UN’s 2013 Pre-Commission on the Elimination and Prevention of Violence Against Women and Girls. Phyllis’s Middle Passage Maafa brooch was featured in the Styles section of the New York Times, exhibited at the New-York Historical Society, and is in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She holds a BA from the New School and an MA in education from Adelphi University. Phyllis won a 2013 BRIO Award for literature. She is a Moth StorySLAM winner and performed for The Moth Mainstage. Her stories have been published in the Bronx Memoir Project, the UFT’s Reflections Magazine, and the Independent. As a volunteer, Phyllis mentors and conducts life-skills workshops for women and girls. Known as the “Bronx Pickle,” the “Quiet Fire,” and “that nosy, troublemaking #$%@&*,” Phyllis is currently completing her first volume of short stories, The Quiet Fire Chronicles.

  This story was told on March 29, 2017, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. The theme of the evening was All These Wonders. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  I grew up in Israel in the 1980s, and my father’s mission in life was to make sure that his only son—me—grew up to be a real man.

  As soon as I turned four, every Saturday he would take me shooting, which was funny because my arm was exactly the size of a Smith & Wesson .45. Two or three years later, when I was six or seven, my father would take advantage of Israel’s surprisingly relaxed car-rental insurance policies and rent a car to take me on driving lessons (which were terrifying because even sitting in his lap I didn’t reach the wheel).

  Every two or three weeks, there was a special treat. We would stop the rental car by the side of the road and my father would make me go out and change tires, whether the car needed it or not, because in his mind knowing how to change a tire was the epitome of manhood.

  I really hated changing tires.

  And I really hated spending these Saturday afternoons with him. But he didn’t care, because he was inducting me to the International Brotherhood of Macho Men.

  Every chance he got, he would take me to the movies to see his heroes—men like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris or Burt Reynolds. I didn’t mind these guys too much, but they were not my idols.

  My idol was a real live person called the Motorcycle Bandit. He appeared on the scene shortly after my twelfth birthday, robbing bank after bank after bank all over Israel. He was in and out of the banks in under forty seconds, never leaving behind any clues to his real name or identity.

  He got so popular that Israel’s most famous comedy sketch show—sort of the local version of Saturday Night Live—devoted an entire episode to the bandit, speculating in one bit that he probably never robbed a bank in Jerusalem because he didn’t particularly care for that city. So you can imagine what the reaction was the next day, when, in an apparent tribute to his favorite television show, the Motorcycle Bandit robbed his one and only Jerusalem bank.

  People went insane. Women who worked at banks would write their names and phone numbers on little notes so that if the sexy heartthrob robber happened to hit their bank, maybe he would find their number and give them a call.

  But the people who loved the bandit most were us teenage boys. For us he was a hero, and on Purim, which is more or less the Jewish equivalent of Halloween, we all dressed up like him—in a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet and a big shiny gun.

  So about a year and a half later, I’m thirteen. I’m walking home from the eighth grade, and no one’s home, so I mosey over to the kitchen to make myself a snack. I hear a knock on the door, but it’s not a tap-tap-tap. It’s a boom-boom-BOOM.

  I open the door, and there are three police officers standing there. They’re not looking at me, and none of them are saying anything.

  Finally, after about half a minute, one of them looks up and says, “Son, we arrested your father a while ago with a motorcycle helmet and a leather jacket and a big shiny gun.”

  And I remember my first thought was, NO WAY!

  You think, you think MY DAD, with a beer belly and a receding hairline and the terrible jokes, you think THAT GUY is the Motorcycle Bandit?

  But in the hours and the days and the weeks that passed, I learned that he was.

  The real story, as I soon came to learn, began when my father, who was thirty-five at the time and the son of one of Israel’s wealthiest families, was summoned by his father to have “the talk.” Now, if you’ve watched a couple episodes of Dallas or Dynasty or Knot’s Landing, you know “the talk.” It’s when the rich guy calls his wayward playboy son over and says, “Son, it’s time for you to grow up and be a man, take responsibility for your life and get a job.”

  My father didn’t like that at all. So he stormed out of my grandfather’s office, and he hopped on his motorcycle (because, of course), and he drove to the beach. He’d later tell me that as he was sitting there watching the sun set over the Mediterranean, he was thinking about his life. My father grew up in the sixties, so he believed in things like “do what you love” and “follow your heart.”

  So he decided to follow his heart, and his heart led him to robbing banks.

  Now, as it turns out, he was good at it; he was great at it; he was an inventor, an innovator.

  He was the Elon Musk of the stickup job.

  And later I learned how he did it, and it was incredible. To rob a bank in
under forty seconds, he’d take the money at gunpoint, then run out of the bank, jump on his motorcycle, and drive around a corner, up a ramp he had custom-built, and into a van, where he would pause.

  So here’s a seminal existential question of bank robbing: Where’s the last place you would ever look for a bank robber?

  And the answer is: the last place you would ever look for a bank robber is inside the bank he just robbed.

  So my father would take off his jacket and his helmet and tuck the gun back into his pants. He’d calmly walk out of the van and around the corner and go back into the bank, which at that point was a crime scene crawling with police officers.

  One of these police officers would inevitably run up to my father and say, “You can’t be here, sir, this is a crime scene!”

  And my father would give him this dopey look and say, “Oh, can I please just make a quick deposit? My wife will kill me if I don’t.”

  The police officer would say something like “Sure, but be quick about it,” and my father would walk up to the bank teller and deposit the same exact cash he had stolen three minutes earlier. This being the 1980s and computers were still kind of new, he made the cash virtually untraceable.

  It was a work of genius. He was so good at it and he became so popular that eventually he got cocky. He robbed one bank a day, and then two, and then two banks in two different cities.

  One time he was riding in a cab on his way to the airport when the urge struck.

  He asked the cabdriver, “Would you mind stopping? I promise I’ll only be a minute.”

  It was literally true—he was only a minute. He robbed the bank, hopped back into the cab, drove to the airport, and flew off for an all-expenses-paid vacation in New York.

  But you know how this story ends. Eventually he was caught. And after he was arrested, life got really weird, in no small part because Israel, being a small state surrounded by enemies, has its own ideas about prison. Prisoners get one weekend out of the month off to go home on vacation, the logic being that the country only has one airport, and it’s extremely secure, and if you want to go ahead and try to escape through Gaza or Syria, you know, be our guest!

  So every fourth Friday, I would go to the prison to pick my father up, and we would go out and have ourselves a weekend on the town.

  People would come up to him and high-five him and pat him on the back and say things like “Bandit, we love you, you’re cool.”

  But to me he wasn’t cool. And he wasn’t even the bandit. He was my dad, who had just done something so incredibly stupid that it had landed him a twenty-year prison sentence.

  But even weirder than that one weekend a month we spent together were the three weekends a month apart. Because here I would be, and it was Saturday, and there’s no shooting practice, there’s no driving lesson, no changing tires, no Burt Reynolds, and I didn’t know what to do.

  So one afternoon I got dressed, which, by the way, was also an ordeal, because when the police searched our house, they took not only all of my father’s belongings but, because we were more or less the same size, also all of mine. So I put on one of the few outfits I had—this really ratty, disgusting purple sweat suit with the Batman logo on front, which I assume the police thought no self-respecting bank robber would ever wear.

  I walked out and started walking around town, looking for a sign.

  And then I saw it—a literal sign. It was a sign above a theater advertising an all-male Japanese modern-dance show. I thought about it for maybe five seconds, and then I did something that I’m pretty sure my father would disown me for: I bought a ticket, and I went in.

  And I loved it. Here onstage were these amazing, elegant, graceful men, and guess what? They weren’t punching each other in the face, they were not riding Harley-Davidsons. They were dancing. And yet they were so secure in their bodies and their masculinities.

  I thought to myself, If that’s another way of being a man, what other ways are there?

  And thus began a two-decade-long process of trial and error—of trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to be. And look, some of the things I learned didn’t surprise me at all. I love bourbon, and I’m the kind of guy who would watch as much sports as you would let him in a given day.

  But other things were really surprising, like some French poets moved me to tears. And even though bourbon was great, you know what else tastes really good? Rosé wine. And even though I’m really, really good at changing tires, if I get a flat now, I’m calling AAA.

  I didn’t share any of these insights with my father, because for one thing he’s not really the kind of guy who’s into insights. But, for another, by the time he got out of prison, I was already a man in full—it was too late for him to shape who I became in any meaningful way.

  From time to time, he still comes to visit New York, where I live with my family. And on one of these recent visits, he and I are sitting in my living room, not talking, as men do. And my son comes prancing into the room—my three-year-old boy.

  Now, that boy looks exactly like me. Just as I look exactly like my father.

  And if there’s one thing in the world that boy loves, it’s his older sister.

  And if there’s one thing in the world that his older sister loves, it’s Disney princesses.

  And in prances the child dressed like Princess Anna from Frozen.

  I look at my son, and I look at my father looking at my son (who, by the way, looked amazing in this light green taffeta with a black velvet bodice and some lovely lacing).

  And I know that my father is judging me.

  But you know what? I don’t care. Because at that moment I realize, strangely, that by going to jail when he did, he didn’t just free me from the burden of this macho nonsense, he also freed up my son to grow up as a happy boy who can pretend to be whoever he wants to be, even—or especially—a pretty, pretty princess.

  And I can’t tell you how grateful I am that instead of going through life mindlessly as two tough guys, my son and I are free to become whatever kind of real men we want to be.

  * * *

  LIEL LEIBOVITZ writes for Tablet magazine, the world’s finest Jewish publication, and cohosts its podcast, Unorthodox. He has written some books, most of which are about the beautiful and desperate things people do when searching for redemption. He also has a PhD in video games, which would have made his seven-year-old self very happy. He’s married, a father of two, and a religious fundamentalist when it comes to good coffee.

  This story was told on June 14, 2017, at the Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. The theme of the evening was Domestic Tethers. Director: Catherine Burns.

  I was about to graduate from dental school when I told my mother I had been assigned to do my residency at a hospital in a small town in Colombia called Neiva.

  She was very upset. It was 1992. I was twenty-one years old. This was the Colombia of Pablo Escobar, of daily assassinations and bombings, of government corruption and kidnappings, paramilitary groups and massacres.

  It was also the Colombia of the FARC, one of the oldest guerrilla movements in modern history.

  It was a Colombia where we had gotten used to the war between all these opposing forces. We heard a loud noise, like when a car backfired, and went down on the ground; we waited, we got up, we dusted off, and we moved on.

  Neiva, where I was going, was small, hot, and violent. Add to that the possibility of guerrillas and narcotraffic, and the prospects were pretty scary, especially for a young woman like me who had never left home.

  So my mother called my dad, who at the time lived in Granada, another very violent town in Colombia.

  He asked me if I was scared.

  I said yes.

  He said, “M’ija, you know how I live here in Granada, and you know how violent and dangerous it is. You know why I stay? Because if the good people don’t stay to serve, 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 Neiva. I arrived one April afternoon. My first impression was that this was an overcrowded and underfunded hospital. But there were plenty of people helping it stay afloat.

  My workday at the hospital began early in the morning, doing the rounds with the resident physicians. After that I took care of my outpatients until 5:00 p.m., focusing strictly on general dentistry. I took one patient every fifteen minutes, with two short breaks during the day.

  At night and on the weekends, I would be on call at the ER for any emergencies that dealt with superficial injuries above the neck. That’s how I learned to put noses, eyelids, and ears back onto people.

  The room where I lived at the hospital during my residency faced a roof terrace, which I quickly came to find out was inhabited by hundreds of bats. At night I had to sleep with the window open, because temperatures rose up to 105 degrees, and there was no A/C at the hospital.

  To combat the heat and avoid the bats, I wrapped myself in a soaking-wet beach towel. This I decided after I woke up one night to the horror of a baby bat comfortably sleeping on my pillow next to me and another one bathing in the glass of water I’d left on my night table.

  Then, one hot night, I went to sleep and the next thing I remember is standing in the dark next to a man holding a rifle. I didn’t know what time it was. Early in the morning, I guessed—it was dark outside.

  In the shadows I could see another person, also armed, guarding my bedroom door. The man pointing the rifle at me ordered me to get dressed. It was then that I realized I was in my underwear standing in front of them; I had been pulled out of my beach towel.

  I rushed to look for my uniform in the dark. As I looked, I began thinking of my parents, and the stories I had heard of doctors and nurses being taken by the guerrillas and never returned.