The conflict among Colombia’s armed groups has been so prolonged that its resultant human rights abuses are essentially normalized in the lives of millions of civilians. The twenty-three narratives in Throwing Stones at the Moon illustrate the effects of systematic violence, and the traumas that persist despite its familiarity. I spoke with the book’s editors, journalist Sibylla Brodzinsky and researcher Max Schoening, to shed light on the human rights crisis in Colombia, the future of peace negotiations, and the power of bringing voices of survivors to the forefront of a conversation dominated by the perpetrators and beneficiaries of Colombia’s conflict.

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The Rumpus: Tell me about how you got involved in this project.

Max Schoening: I had done some volunteer work for Voice of Witness. When I moved to Colombia, I got in touch with Sibylla because I knew that she was an experienced journalist, and covered human rights issues here. So I knew about the Voice of Witness series and thought that Colombia would be a great country to include.

I think one of the main reasons we thought it would be a great book in the series is that Colombia’s human rights problems and internal conflict, as geographically close as it is to the United States, and as intertwined as Colombia is with the U.S. as a top ally in South America and as recipient of billions in aid—mostly military aid—the human rights problems, the forced displacement, and the war remains largely unknown in the U.S. and abroad. And when it is known, it’s often thought of through the stereotype of senseless violence or just drug-related violence, and not [in consideration of] the full complexities of the history of the country. So we thought this would be a great addition to the series, particularly through the voices of Colombians who have been displaced by the violence

Sibylla Brodzinsky: I’ve been in Colombia for 13 years now, and have talked to a lot of victims over the years, and it came to a point where I actually thought about oral history, because I wanted to dig a little deeper and understand people’s stories better. You know, sitting with somebody and having them tell their story and knowing that in a journalism article it was [only] going to be one or two paragraphs in the story. And I felt the limitations of that. And so when Max came to me with this idea—I didn’t know about Voice of Witness—I thought it would be perfect. It just seemed that no series on human rights, and human rights abuses around the world, is complete without something on Colombia. It’s just had such a long history of violence and victimization. So I jumped at the idea.

Rumpus: How did each of the stories end up in this volume? Were they all interviews done specifically for this book, or were they compiled before the project developed?

Brodzinsky: They were all done for the book. We did many more than what made it onto the book, so there was a process of selection. We came upon some incredible stories that we later couldn’t, for some reason or another, reach the person again to fill in gaps or details in the story, or get questions answered to bring the narrative together in a cohesive way, so unfortunately there are some interviews that didn’t make it in for that reason. There are also people who didn’t want to share the level of detail that we wanted to include in the book, in order to have a literary quality to the story. So we probably did about 60 interviews in total, and 23 made it in the book.

Rumpus: How did you find the individuals who you did end up interviewing for the book?

Schoening: From the start we set out with a plan of the regions we wanted to capture in the book to give a representative depiction of the country, because Colombia is country that is really divided between regions. The culture is completely different in the Andean regions, the Caribbean coast, the Pacific coast, the Amazon, the Eastern Plains region—so there’s a diversity of culture, and in terms of the human rights problems, there’s very specific problems in different areas. We started with that premise, and also types of topics we knew we wanted to cover. For instance, one topic would be land restitution. Colombia is trying to push through implementing a law that aims to return stolen and abandoned land to internally displaced people. We wanted to have a narrative that reflected that process.

And then NGOs helped us find some people. Sometimes, we would just show up. The first narrative in the book is in El Salado. It’s where one of the most well-known atrocities in the recent conflict happened. It’s a major massacre that occurred in 2000 on the Caribbean coast, and we knew we wanted to get a story from one of the survivors. So we went there, to the nearest town, and took a Jeep out to this village. We kind of just showed up.

Brodzinsky: We had some names and we contacted two women who didn’t even know we were coming. We showed up and said, “So-and-so told us to look here.” We ended up doing four or five interviews there, and used one of them.

Schoening: That was a case where we knew the village we knew we wanted to go to. In other cases, [we worked with] NGOs; in one case I read in an article, the last narrative in the book. [The narrator] is a land restitution leader who was shot in the face in October 2010, and it was this article about how he was living in hiding. So through contacts here, I got to meet with him.

Brodzinsky: Others were absolutely random. Max found someone on the street whose story made it in the book. So it’s been a little bit of everything.

Schoening: A lot of people helped us along the way. Offering directions, homes to meet in and interview people.

Rumpus: One of the perhaps more random ones that stuck out to me was the individual who had been a cocaine processing lab manager, who was interviewed with his pet rabbit. In the introduction to his story, it mentioned that you had just met him on the street, and taken him out for coffee. It was an interesting idea that made me think about where these people came from and the diversity of their stories.

Brodzinsky: Part of doing that too, when we thought about where to go and who to approach, was to show all the facets and faces of displacement in Colombia. Obviously we can’t show them all. But there’s a very good sampling in the book of the different manifestations, the different reasons behind it. So that’s what we’re aiming for.

Rumpus: There’s so much packed into this book. Its structure by region conveys the reach of the paramilitary, guerrilla, and government-sanctioned activity that begets this widespread human displacement, and while the overarching narratives definitely come across, processing it, I found, could be overwhelming. I want to know what your understanding of the pervasive nature of the conflict is. Within this huge diversity of narrators, of stories, what sort of framework is important for people to keep in mind when they approach this much information and this much history?

Brodzinsky: In a way I think the stories in the book—and this may sound cliché—they’re almost a quilt. And each individual piece helps build the quilt of this conflict. No two experiences are the same; I think that’s really clear in the book. And it shows the often random, and in other cases very targeted, nature of the conflict for the victims, I think that what a reader can take away is how complex it is. I think we can’t stress enough: it’s not a drug war. It’s not just an insurgency. It’s not just a repressive government. It’s all of those things at different times, and in tandem.

Schoening: It can be a dizzying array of armed groups in the conflict, and it’s not always clear if it’s politically driven, economically driven, ideologically driven or just over resources. But if you ask me how we organized the information in a way that would make it accessible for people who don’t necessarily come to the book knowing a ton about Colombia, the introduction explains the basic contours of the internal conflict, and also the different human rights problems in the country, particularly recent human rights scandals and abuses. And with the regional introductions, we’ve tried to give an overview of the history of each region, and the salient characteristics. And then with the individual narratives, there’s also introductions where we summarize what happens to the person in a way that can hopefully make it more accessible.

Rumpus: Something you said about the introduction made me think of a line in the forward which basically stated that part of the purpose not just of this volume, but of the Voice of Witness series as a whole, is to allow survivors to tell their stories for the purpose of distancing themselves from what the crisis was at the time of trauma. It’s hard to overestimate the stress that this conflict has put on citizens over so many decades, and it’s almost unfathomable how many times people in these stories have had to leave and lose everything and start again. Can you take a few minutes to speak about what a displaced person experiences in crisis and afterwards?

Brodzinsky: Again every experience is different, but I think some of the common experiences are, first, terror over whatever it is that causes displacement. You don’t leave [your home] just because. And then I think, obviously, fear of the unknown. Again, it’s different. Some people end up with family, others end up on the streets of Bogotá. But all of it involves experiencing upheaval, and being forced to flee some very extreme situation of violence or threat. It’s a complete upheaval of everyone’s life, in every case.

There is a very weak social safety net for the displaced. It doesn’t work. It’s very complicated. In theory, people are eligible for emergency aid as soon as they declare themselves displaced. In reality, it can take 6 months to a year. By that time you’ve figured it out or you’ve…you know. The aid that’s meant to cushion the initial arrival of people to their place of displacement is basically nonexistent. There are some humanitarian organizations that do give some aid. But government aid is not very helpful in most cases. So basically people are left to fend for themselves. If they’re rural workers who have come to the city, obviously they’re at a huge disadvantage trying to find work.

Schoening: I would agree in that it’s impossible to reduce the experiences of all the displaced to one experience. There are some overarching themes. One was a theme of loss. You lose, from a material context, if you’re a farmer—and most displaced people are displaced from the countryside—you lose your life savings that you’ve invested in your farm, in building your house, in buying cattle, things like that. A lot of the displaced people lose a family member; sometimes more than one loved one. You’re also losing a community. So there’s a lot of loss when you have to leave where you’re from. And when you move to the new place, there’s social dislocation. You don’t have the safety net of community that you used to have, you’re thrown into an environment where it’s hard to find work, you don’t necessarily trust your neighbors, and it can affect your family life. Loss and dislocation.

It’s also transformative. This comes through in some stories. These people have incredible willpower to seek justice for something that happened against them. So, there is a newfound strength. Whether it’s just the strength to survive and provide food for your family, or strength you find to confront your perpetrators to make sure they’re brought to justice. I think that resilience comes through in the book, as well.

Brodzinsky: A lot of times the displaced leave the situation of violence and some of the areas they end up, especially in the large cities, are violent themselves. So they’re faced with a new type of violence, in street gangs. They’ve fled from one really extreme situation trying to safeguard their lives, and end up in a different but equally threatening situation.

Schoening: Right, they’re more vulnerable, and it exposes them to new abuses.

Rumpus: Have you kept in touch with any of the narrators, or been able to see if anyone’s situations have changed drastically from when you interviewed them?

Brodzinsky: We are in contact with quite a few of the narrators.

Schoening: One example of someone we kept in touch with was Felipe, whose ex-wife and three of his children were killed in a massacre in 2010. We met with him in the beginning of 2011. He was pretty destroyed at that point. He was with one of his surviving sons, he was physically sick. An amazing storyteller, and someone who can also really crack a joke. When we first met up with him, his other son had had his hand nearly chopped off by an armed group trying to recruit him. His 14-year-old son. And the most recent time we talked to him, he didn’t even know where this son was anymore.

Rumpus: One of the results of being exposed to the diversity of voices in this book is that I got a clear sense of the people as well as of the geography of the country and the conflict. I’m wondering if you considered including a narrative by someone involved in a guerilla group or a paramilitary group. Or if that would’ve even been a possibility, to fill this diverse illustration in even more.

Brodzinsky: Well, we did include Ramon, the person who we found on the street. When we listened to his story we found that he had been involved with the paramilitaries. We talked about whether to include it or not. We weren’t sure. We ultimately thought that it was a good idea, to show that it’s just—everybody. I mean, he, as a former paramilitary, was displaced by the guerillas who came in. So we talked about it, because he wasn’t our favorite person, he isn’t as sympathetic an individual as others. But we thought this story was very powerful and important to tell.

Schoening: Not the most sympathetic, but incredibly friendly with us. But, he clearly collaborated with paramilitaries and disposed of bodies in the river.

Brodzinsky: And [was] really unapologetic about it.

Schoening: Yeah, really unapologetic. I do think that to include those stories of perpetrators would enrich an understanding of Colombia. But I think that wasn’t what this book was about. In Colombia, there’s a lot more space given to the voices of perpetrators; there’s TV shows about them, you know. And the experiences of people who are dispossessed by them, who feel like victims, don’t get as much space.

Brodzinsky: But I do think that’s interesting. There are two narratives where civilians play with the idea of joining one or the other armed groups, the guerrillas or the paramilitaries. Not for ideological purposes, and I think that’s what makes it interesting. This is just one of the options, one of the very few options they have in their lives. One chooses to join, and then backs out—Danny. The other, Alicia, [thought] about it and decided not to, but she lived with the guerrillas all her life, and there was nothing strange about living among guerillas for her. So, in that sense we wanted to focus on civilians, but I think those two narratives in particular show the normalcy of these armed groups in the everyday lives of normal individuals.

Rumpus: This book covers a significantly longer period of time than most other Voice of Witness books, with violence related to this conflict beginning in the ’40s and not ending with the demobilization of paramilitary groups in 2004 to 2005. What are your thoughts on whether or not the sources of violence and displacement have remained the same? How have things changed, if at all?

Schoening: I think that the violence in the country is constantly transforming: the groups are mutating, they change names. They may have different motivations over time, the ideology might change over time. But there’s also continuity, which is quite evident in the time leading back to La Violencia, which was the period of fighting between conservative and liberal parties where the majority of people who killed each other were poor peasants. There was very little ideological division between the two parties. A lot of it was about land. That theme persists today. It’s at the heart of the conflict. You can look at it as well in terms of intergenerational cycles of violence—people seeking revenge for deaths of family members—and they can later turn into leaders of groups as well. But I think, without a doubt, there is continuity dating back to the violence in the ’40s and ’50s.

Brodzinsky: To summarize, it’s a constantly evolving conflict and one of the constants is displacement of civilians. I think that in the book, one of the narratives that best illustrates that is Alberto, who was displaced as a young child during La Violencia, then as a grown man had his farms taken away from him by the guerillas. And really the FARC [1] was born from the guerillas that actually helped his family escape during La Violencia. So there’s this odd cycle in his life, that’s repeated in many lives. I think that illustrates how the violence changes. He says he’s not afraid of dead people because he’s been through that, he knows that.

Rumpus: This is clearly a real-time human rights crisis, which is coming to light again just in recent days, as the Colombian government announced that it’s preparing for a new round of peace talks with the FARC. Do you have any insights into this development?

Brodzinsky: It’s kind of a whole new ballgame for both sides. The FARC is not the same as it was during the last attempt at peace talks, which was from ‘99 to 2002. They’re half the size, they’re weakened, they’ve lost a lot of their legendary leaders, and the current leaders are not as ideological as some of their predecessors. Some people consider Alfonso Cano, the previous FARC leader who was killed last November, a Stalinist. The current leader is a little more open to talks, open to putting an end to the conflict. It seems to me, without wanting to be overly optimistic, that for the first time there is a very real intent to reach a peace agreement, and to end the conflict. I’ve covered previous peace talks, and it was a circus. Nobody ever took it seriously. And I do get the feeling that this is a serious effort. It’s going to be really difficult, and there’s going to be a lot of problems along the way, but I do think this is the most serious effort in recent history.

Rumpus: To bring it back to Throwing Stones, I’d like to ask what your goals are for this book. How do you see it being used, and what do you hope it achieves?

Schoening: One of the chief purposes of the book is to make people aware. We’re exclusively touring the book in the U.S. We want to put this on the map. The human rights problems, the human consequences of the conflict here. And not only the conflict; a lot of the narratives aren’t necessarily directly related to what we’d consider the armed conflict between the guerrillas and the state. It’s other types of violence that can be associated with the conflict but not necessarily part of warfare between guerillas and the government. But I think that the human rights issues in Colombia have been somewhat overshadowed, particularly in recent years, by this recent narrative that Colombia has overcome its problems, it’s this emerging economy. We want to really show that these abuses and displacement continue to go on, and that the scars of the violence are still there, and there’s a lot there that will be very difficult to repair. To achieve justice for those who are documented in this book because ending the conflict doesn’t necessarily mean achieving justice for the victims. It’s an important issue whether the victims in this book, and millions of other victims, will see their day in court, and see justice achieved.

A final ingredient would be to build complexity. Our goal isn’t just to raise awareness for the sake of awareness, but to add depth to the way people understand Colombia. Human rights in Colombia can often be a polarizing subject, often in the context of the free trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombia. Hopefully with these highly personal narratives, we can really empathize with the narrators: see them as people that can break through the preconceptions that people have about Colombia, from whatever position they’re taking, whatever lens they have on the country.

Brodzinsky: I think that’s the general purpose of the book. When I first started, the idea behind it was to highlight the fact that these victims exist, and every day there are new victims of the conflict. And to a large extent they were either being ignored or, outside Colombia, their existence wasn’t acknowledged. So that was a big purpose of doing this. And also, some of these people have told their stories quite a few times, probably not in this level of detail, but many of these people are just anonymous, random people we found. And they hadn’t told their story, either in a really long time, or ever, and no one had really been interested in hearing it. And I think on that level, the impact on the individual level with the narrators is also important. I think it is liberating for people to tell their stories, to know that people care to hear them and care what happened to them.

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Author’s Note: responses reflect editors’ personal opinions, and are not reflective of the institutions they represent elsewhere (including The Economist and Human Rights Watch).

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[1] The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, one of the dominant Marxist guerilla groups.

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“She was quite a doll and I didn’t want anybody else.”

My wife, Helen, and I have been married sixty-five years. I met her in junior high school. And I think we figured it up. It’s seventy-one years that she and I have been together. Practically. We weren’t actually dating in junior high school until a little later, but I knew her and we were friends and so on.

We’ve lived in the Kansas City area all our lives. Back then it was like any other medium-sized city, everything was pretty smooth, there weren’t a lot of the troubles that there is today. It was just a good place to be. My father run a bakery there and we just had a great time. Her father worked for Procter & Gamble. I think he was a soap blender or something.

We lived about eight blocks difference. I could just walk on over anytime. We’d talk, you know, and play together in school. I met her brothers and we got very well acquainted. They liked to fish like I do, so everything was hunky-dory. I did a lot of hunting and fishing with them and we got so we were, you know, kind of like family already, as far as that goes in some respects.

So, you know, the feeling—it kind of grows on you.

Girls back then, well, it was all different. It’s very hard to even remember. Girls and boys. As far as dressing goes, there weren’t any of this show this and show that. (laughs) There weren’t any tattoos then, neither. None of that stuff. They just wore normal dresses and, you know, whatever the kids wore to school. The hairstyle was very conservative too. Nothing real fancy. Helen, she was really blonde and she dressed and looked like a blonde—very neat and very particular. Not one to show off. A regular good listener and just a nice person to be around.

It just seemed to be the normal thing, and we both understood it. She was quite a doll and I didn’t want anybody else. That’s the way it was. I’ve got good taste!

We were sweethearts for quite a while. I had a high school graduation and then I had a little bit of college that I didn’t get to complete because of the war. I went and volunteered in Leavenworth, Kansas. Helen, well, she took it like she always does. Whatever has to be, has to be. Then I was at air force training in Sherman, Texas. She came down there. We got married. I wanted to make sure that when I came home that she was still mine. (laughs) She was my sweetheart and I wasn’t fooling around.

We never did have any doubts about each other at all. Absolutely not. I knew I loved her and she knew she loved me and we still feel the same way. She’s my one and only. I’ve never had another. I remember, it was hard when I left. The last time I saw her, just before we took off overseas, we was surrounded by a lot of people. Everybody was doing the same thing, really. They had their wives there with them. I remember, I was trying to keep her as long as I could before I went.

I was a pilot stationed on Guam. I saw action in Japan mostly. It was about thirteen hours in the air, you know, back and forth. We’d bomb and then fly the six, seven hours back to Guam. Thousands of miles. Nothing but ocean and sky until you get to Japan.

I don’t know how many missions I flew. I just remember I would sit there for thirteen hours in that airplane, you know, and you think about a lot of things. We had to worry about the weather along with everything else. That long time over ocean water, there’s always some storms or typhoons. You had to be alert because there were no warnings what was ahead. It was a lot of worry. Just nerves. They did their darnedest to shoot us down!

But I’d think about her. She was in my thoughts every time. I’d be wondering how she was getting by, and how she was living with her folks, and just what the heck was good for her, really. It helped.

I worried about her a bit. That she might be meeting somebody else or something like that. The thought would cross my mind once in a while. But I trusted her and she trusted me and that’s the way it was.

I stayed in contact with her by writing letters. You’d write a letter, and hell, it’d be a month before you heard anything one way or the other. But if I got a letter from her, I’d read it two or three, four times, just to think about her. And I’d look at her picture every day. I had her picture right by my bunk. It was a good one—nothing fancy or nothing, you know, suggestive or anything like that, just from the waist up and such. I still got it. It stayed on my bed. I didn’t take it on the planes. You were not supposed to take anything personal, you know, if you get shot down or whatever.

There were some rough trips. This one particular one, they shot up both my wings and part of the rudder control. We had one left in-board engine out, and I knew we weren’t going to make it back to Guam. So I told my navigator to plot a course to the nearest island under our control. And it was one of those little islands that had runways on them but there was a cliff on each end of the runway. And it was five hundred or something feet to the water off the both ends. We got on the final approach and everything was going pretty good and I had the wheels down, and my right in-board engine quit. I just got the nose over the cliff and the landing gear hit. We made a big kind of a fishhook turn and we went on fire. I lost my belly gunner and waist gunner.
I didn’t even know my head was bleeding. All I’m thinking about is how do we get out of this thing? Some of the guys got their outfit on fire. I was trying to beat them out and I got both my hands burned. There was twelve of us and we all got out except those two guys. The waist gunner, I saw his body, but the belly gunner he got ground up pretty bad, you know, because he couldn’t get out.

This was in 1944. I was twenty-one. I know I was more of a man than I was when I went over there. When I came back home and saw Helen for the first time, I thought she was the finest thing that God ever created. (laughs) I couldn’t wait to get my arms around her.

We lived in an apartment, then we found this little house, and my first job out of the service was with General Motors. I gave them forty-one years. I started out on the line as an assembler before they had the conveyors in and we built them on dollies and pushed them to the next station. Then they asked me if I’d be a foreman. And then I was general foreman, then shift superintendent, then superintendent, then director of quality control. I was that for twenty-one years and then, when they shut the old plant down, they wanted me to come over to the new plant, and I said, “No, I’m going to go home to my wife.” And I retired.

Helen never worked. She raised our boy, kept our home. And she was very supportive of me. She agreed with whatever I decided that it was my job to do and she did her job and we didn’t have any problems there. She has been a good, faithful, enduring person and I wouldn’t trade for nothing. I’d do this whole thing over again in a New York second. I think it has worked real good. I didn’t ever have to worry about any of the marriage problems. We understand each other, we know each other well, and it just works.

We argue. Sure. We get in our little discussions, arguments, what you will. Sometimes I get the better end of it. Sometimes she does. I quit counting a long time ago. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You know how that is. There are times when, you know, we get mad and walk away or something, but hell, an hour later, it’s forgotten and by the wayside. You make it work.

A lot of couples don’t do that today. They miss out on the benefits. We’ve got one boy and he’s sixty-two now. Fred Jr. Now, Fred has been through a couple of relationships. So maybe he didn’t pick up enough from the old man! But, well, we don’t know a whole lot of people right now that has been long together. There are some, but not many. I think it’s personal to us. I’m just once and never again and that kind of thing. I still love her and she still loves me.

I don’t have a lot of advice. Give and take. You know? You have to share. We both think the same way and we try to live by the rules. Death do we part. Oh, yes. And one more: True love exists. If you make it. It’s a true thing if you make it true.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #4.”

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Dominic Sclafani, Age 30
Tucson, Arizona

“He’s like, ‘She’s going to eat you alive.’ And I go, ‘Yes, I know.’”

I like people who play. People who are fun and who punch me at random moments and who do weird shit. The first time I met Chyna, we were at a rave. She bit me. I was totally into it. I’m like, “Fucking bite me harder!” And she got all excited and I got all excited, because I like being bitten and scratched up. That was orgasmic. When we left, people were actually frightened of the way I looked. She had torn me apart from my forehead to my waist. I mean, forget just blood—I was bruised and bleeding. And I was singing out, I was so happy about it.

I was living on the border of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California. I was in college, studying philosophy, which I found out later was a mistake. I’m much more into psychology. I was working at a sushi bar in Huntington Beach where it was expected that you drink on the job. Korn and Orgy and all those bands used to come in. It was a party restaurant. I was having a lot of fun—nineteen and doing coke probably three times a week, just getting into Ecstasy. I got a whole new group of friends. Chyna was a part of that scene.

Chyna ended up getting together with my best friend, Randy. I’ve known Randy since we were eight. Anyway, it was cool the way it worked out, because this way, I still got to see Chyna without having to deal with her bullshit. Honestly, she was a kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.

Chyna’s mom was a drug addict and Chyna was abused by her mom’s boyfriend. She never had a clean slate to begin with. But Chyna was really smart and a good survivor. She was a beautiful, beautiful girl—about five one, a great mix of Chinese and Native American. And she was—well, by this time we were doing speed, so she was about 102 pounds. But she was strong as shit. She’d punch Randy. He’d be like, “Ow,” and I’d always think, “Fuck, I wouldn’t be saying ‘Ow!’ I’d be saying ‘Again!’ ” (laughs)

When Randy and I moved to Huntington Beach, Chyna just kind of tagged along. Thing is, she wasn’t working, wasn’t cleaning the house, she wasn’t giving anything, just living off of me and Randy. And it started to feel like we were both her boyfriend. She had Randy, the guy she went to bed with, and she had me, who provided most of the money and drugs and fun stuff. But Randy never understood how to keep her under control. I was like, “Dude, you gotta man up if you’re gonna deal with her.” But he was such a puppy. And slowly over the months, she started seducing me. I mean slow.

Chyna smoked a lot of meth. One night I tried some. It was fucking fantastic. All of a sudden I had a ten-day week. I could get all my schoolwork done. I could do my shift at the restaurant every night and have plenty of energy for my band. My grade point average immediately jumped up. Randy started doing it too. But eventually he was like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” He’d come out at seven in the morning and there I am, fucking having been up all night. And instead of he and Chyna having sex, she starts staying up with me, doing meth. So Randy starts getting pissy.

Now this is where she’s gifted. She tells Randy things, then she comes to me and tells me things slightly differently. She starts fighting with Randy more, and she makes it look like it’s his fault. So now their whole relationship starts going to shit.

To clear his head, Randy went out of state for two weeks. And that was it. Chyna made her move. Walked into my room at two in the morning. And I’m like, “Okay, what? Are you cold?” Because I didn’t… I was totally not suspecting it. And she’s basically naked in my bed kind of thing, and I’m like, “Oh, oh, oh, okay. Shit. Yes.”

At first I thought, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a big deal.” But it was. It was like finishing something off that should’ve been taken care of a long time ago, when she clawed me up at the rave—just kind of a completion of that experience. Very soon into it, I realized I wasn’t just having sex with her. I was starting our relationship. And I knew it. It wasn’t like we just had this little fling and I was going to let her go back to my best friend. No, we’ve really crossed this boundary. She’s mine now.

So Randy comes back. I’m a Southern man. I can’t lie to my best friend. I had to tell him. By this time I’m totally into Chyna. I loved her, and I believed in the relationship. So I looked at Randy and said, “I like your girlfriend.” Well, he totally flipped out. He threw a fit. He was like, “You got to stop! You got to stop this shit right now!”

I got down on my knees, took off my glasses and put them in my pocket. Hands behind my back. Like I said, I’m from the South. It’s etiquette for someone to punch you if you sleep with their girlfriend. I said no, it’s not going to stop. I told him to hit me. But he didn’t hit me. He destroyed the house instead, which I ended up having to pay for. I would rather he broke my nose. I mean, I was kind of insulted. And I still had insurance at that time.

But you know, all I could do is say, “I’m fucking sorry, it crept up on me.”

He’s like, “She’s going to eat you alive.”

And I go, “Yes, I know.”

And he goes, “Yes. You’re fucked.”

Chyna and I both moved out right away. She had another place to stay. I started sleeping in my car because I didn’t want to go back into the house. Randy was my best friend and I was just experiencing so much sorrow and guilt. For the record, Randy and I are still friends. But after all this shit went down, our friendship was done for around two years. At the time, though, there was really no other choice. This shit was really happening.

So by this point, I’d busted up a friendship, I dropped out of college, I was addicted to speed, and I was going to get used and abandoned by the person I’d done it for. I mean, I knew it. And so with all this knowledge, I figured, ah fuck it, let’s do it any- way. Just, you know, like the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What else are we going to do?

Eventually we decided to move out to Tucson, Arizona, where my mom lives. When we first got out there, we stayed at her house. My mom got sick of us pretty quick. So Chyna and I both got jobs at this local restaurant and moved out to our own place. Since we weren’t at my mom’s house, we started doing even more meth.

Chyna and I always had this instant physical intensity as a couple. I have a really strong stomach and chest, so she just punched me whenever she wanted to, as hard as she could. She bloodied me up pretty good all the time—not just during sex. She was just really affectionate and passionate and fun and smart.

We played music all day long and all night long. We loved the same music, and that’s a really big one for me: Tool, Radiohead, Zero 7, Tricky, stuff like that—experimental stuff, from Pink Floyd to The Mars Volta. I don’t think there was a single band that we had static on—ever. We’d get high together and experience the music physically. I’d play DJ, changing the music every few songs, and we’d just sit there and soak the music in, really like studying the notes, losing ourselves to it, then coming back, seeing the world, seeing ourselves and the music in a different way. Which is really kind of an intimate experience.

We used to do art when were on speed. We’d be drawing, just one piece for about thirty hours. We’d keep switching the CDs to make sure we got the mood right. We were always very in tune with everything, from the rhythm to, you know, the undertones of the vocal intonations, where it becomes visual, where you can see the person singing the lines, like they’re onstage, like they’re doing theater for themselves. Chyna could access the music at a holy, deep level, the same way I was able to.

We loved the same lines. We heard the same things in the songs. She was better at that than probably any girlfriend I’ve had, and it was really attractive to me, because music is… I don’t say, like, “It’s my life,” because that would assume that it’s still outside of me. And she would attach to it the same way.

Due to being on the same drug we could do a lot of the same things. There’s a reducing valve in the brain for sight, which is why you normally can’t see oxygen, nitrogen, things in the air. But after you’re sleep deprived for thirty-six hours, it goes away, so all of a sudden you think you’re hallucinating, but what you’re seeing is really there. So we’d get fucked up, and I’d start playing with energy, and by playing with energy I mean I’d intend certain hot spots of magnetism and basically create a ball out of it, and then not say anything and have her try to watch it and follow it around the room. It can be done. Magnetics are intense. And she was very open to that, which is nice because most of my girlfriends haven’t been into that. Even most of my friends aren’t. We did a lot of that. And also, like, using body energy to play around. We were very much in tune with each other’s bodies. There were no boundaries between the two of us.

But the speed was making me crazy. Chyna and I were both doing lots of it. I’m stealing from work, I’m supporting the habit for the both of us. I did it for almost two years and I could tell when I crossed a line with it. I noticed the second when it was like, okay, I can’t do this anymore.

When we stopped all that stuff it got different. The timing was off. We’d be tired, uninterested. Even three days without, you get really, really tired. It feels like taking tranquilizers all day long. And it’s not that the speed was the predication for our sexual relationship, but the lack of it definitely hurt it. We didn’t adjust very well, because I had to get drunk instead. Drunk boys, you know, we go to sleep. After a long day we go to sleep. We’re not as affectionate.

I’m one of the one hundred that quits cold turkey, just goes nope, I’m done. She couldn’t do that, apparently. She had a detox freak-out, and she kept on doing speed. We had a fight. She tore everything off the wall. So Chyna didn’t quit. And she was nuts.

I don’t fight. I’ve had seven girlfriends, and I’ve never fought with any of them. But Chyna could get me every time. Her favorite line was, “Why don’t you go fuck your mother since you love her so much more than me!” She was always baiting me to punch her in the nose. She’d get right up in my face, screaming at me over God knows what—usually something about how I left the kitchen cupboard open.

So she was staying up, doing speed with other people while I was, like, passed out on the couch. I was just drinking, drinking, drinking, drinking—pouring alcohol into my face. I’m kind of mourning the relationship at this point because I knew it was going to be bad, I just didn’t know when. I could see that she was starting to make ties with this new guy we were hanging out with. And I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. She was getting her next boyfriend lined up.

I was over my mom’s house, drunk as a skunk, and I told her, “You know, I don’t like my girlfriend, but I’m not going to break up with her.” My mom was like, “Well, that doesn’t sound very smart. What do you plan on doing?” And I said, “I think I’ll drink myself to death over the next six months.” And my mom just looked at me, like, “You rat fuck.” (laughs)

I was in a deep slump. I was doing over a bottle of vodka every day. I drank enough to black out on a daily basis. I’d lose entire weeks. I drove drunk, I drove blacked out. I’d developed liver failure and jaundice. I’d actually turned yellow. And every time I got sober, I’d start getting drunk again.

I know psychology. So I know that people have their own velocity when they go through trauma, pain, guilt, all of that stuff. And I know it’s retarded, but I wasn’t done with her. I wasn’t done with it yet. And I had nothing better to do.

One day, in between a double shift at the restaurant, I came home and drank a pint of rum and went to take a nap before going back. Chyna comes home while I’m passed out, turns off the alarm clock, and goes back to work. At the restaurant, she tells them I’m acting all fucked up and crazy, and I’m really drunk. When I finally come in, I get fired. And the next morning, when I’m passed out again, Chyna throws me outside, calls my mom and tells her she’s calling the cops unless she comes to get me.

Next thing I know I’m in Delaware. That’s where my dad lives. The minute I got there, I blacked out on his floor. When I woke up, I knew I needed help. I went to my first AA meeting. I ended up doing probably four hundred meetings in the next year.

They say that 3.5 percent of people who go to those meetings get helped. Well, I wasn’t one of those 3.5. I started working again and started drinking again.

During the time I was struggling to get clean, I found out from my mom that Chyna had become a manager at the restaurant she’d gotten me fired from. And that she already had another boyfriend. Five months after moving to Delaware, I finally wrote her a breakup note—which is hilarious, because she had already dated two other guys by then. I was basically left with nothing.

I was stuck with my dad in Delaware, because Chyna was living in the same town as my mom. I just never wanted to see her again.

You know, I’m an intimate guy. That’s just the way I am. I’m always kind. I’m very dedicated. When I’m with somebody, there’s nobody else in the world. And that’s how I was with Chyna. I was broken up bad for about a week, and then I was like okay, this is how this was supposed to end.

But my body knows that it will always care for her and get a little bit excited when I see her on Facebook. My body will always wonder how she’s doing. But that’s just the body. It does what it does. I don’t get hung up on it. I mean, I’ve probably shared more time and intimacy and knowledge with Chyna than anybody else. If you count the nights we stayed up, we basically spent the equivalent of seven years together. I’ve known her since she was eighteen years old. And she’s thirty now. But the truth is, we broke up seven years ago.

I haven’t had a real girlfriend since we were together. I haven’t lived with anybody except my parents. I’m on disability now because of too much trauma and who the hell knows what else. I still drink, but I switched to whiskey because it tastes bad and so I only drink a pint or less. What I’m drinking right now won’t kill me—not until I’m fifty-five or something. Which is fine. I thought I was going to be dead years ago, so everyone’s kind of happy about that.

I’m in Tucson now. I moved back as soon as I found out she had gone. I think she’s in Vegas. I haven’t seen her. I know she’s alive and healthy. The last time I talked to her was around a year ago. I was about to go to a Pixies concert. I called her to tell her, because she loves the Pixies. But she took offense and hung up on me. We talked for five minutes. I was drunk, and I could tell she was fucked up. I was trying to be friendly and she took it the wrong way. I never heard from her again until recently. I think she accidentally sent me a group e-mail.

***

Rumpus original art by Christina Gualy.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3.”

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Sibylla Brodzinsky and Max Schoening
• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• An Oral History of Myself: 11. Ashley

“That man could turn me on by touching my little fingernail.”

When I married my first husband, I married to be married forever. And because he was a womanizer and a weekend alcoholic, that changed that whole theory.

Clyde.

The son of a bitch.

I remember the day—this was years after we divorced—my daughter called me and says, “I know you don’t care, but Clyde had a heart attack and died when he was out jogging.” And honest to God, I thought, “Son of a bitch, I’ll never be able to run him over.”

He was so bad. Bad about his own kids. He’s not even worth talking about.

***

I met Bill at Domino’s, a nightclub. The owner took me over to introduce him. What can I say? I knew I loved him the minute we talked.

We left the bar, and I said, you know, “I’m separated, and I have four kids, and I won’t go to bed with you tonight.”

And he said, “Who asked you?”

And I said, “You will.”

And he did.

And I didn’t.

But we sat in the car and necked until I thought our skin was going to fall off.

I came home that night. And the next day, I told Ruth, my neighbor lady friend. I said, “I found him.” I said, “He’s a combination of”—I don’t know if you know who these are— “Alexander King”—he’s a writer—“Jack Parr”—the host on a talk show—“and Captain Kangaroo.” And that’s what I got. That was Bill.

I don’t know if you have this, for your freezer, the food sales-man—there were guys that went into homes and sold people food plans. You order, reorder to fill it. Well, he was in that. And the first time he showed me the pitch that he gave to people, I was enchanted. I just thought, “I’ll buy one now!” He could sell snow to Eskimos.

My oldest girl couldn’t stand it, because I was bringing him into the house. She was thirteen at the time and she says, “I don’t want you to marry him. I want it to stay the way it is. You, me, and the kids.”

And I said, “Okay. If I can’t have any friends, then you can’t have any boyfriends.” So that closed up. I said, “First of all, I don’t care whether any of you like him or not. You will respect him. I’m marrying him for me. Not for you.”

***

I was about thirty-three or thirty-four. We didn’t get married until ’62. We saw each other every day from our second date until the day we got married. And he was my husband of twenty-four years. I was so blessed. He adored me and I adored him. It was just a mutual admiration society.

He was built like a gorilla. I mean, he was really built like a silverback gorilla. He wore a size 52 coat. Let me tell you, he was a big man. He wasn’t tall. He’s just six feet, but he was big. And he was just so cute. He was just so cute.

Love to me was being a responsible person. To someone and for someone. Bill was a rock. He was like a father, a brother, a lover, a friend, a pal, a buddy, and would do anything for me. It was always very safe and very secure. And I needed the emotional security that Bill could give me. I didn’t care about finances.

I used to tell him, I said, “Look, I don’t need your goddamn money. I didn’t marry you for your money. I married you to love me. That’s it. I don’t care about all this other stuff.” Because he was always wanting to buy… if there was an appliance out in the market, I had it. He was so good.
Bill was steady. But he was never boring. No, no. He was too intelligent to be boring. He was Italian-Irish. I’m Italian-Russian. And we could argue about how to boil an egg. Our house was always in an uproar. We fought about everything—except important stuff. Never fought about money or anything like that.

He died of cancer.

***

Four months after he died, I was sitting in a bar. I used to always sit by myself at the table. Because even when I was fifty-something, I was pretty hot. I wanted to select who sat down next to me. And that’s how I found Edward. He came over and asked me to dance. And then I invited him to my table. That was the beginning of it. I said, “I like your face. I’m going to take you home with me.”

Ed had been married for twenty-five years and he had stayed with his wife—I forget… Daisy? Daisy—until all the kids were grown up. They had a house out in Palm Springs. He said he was sitting in the Jacuzzi and some guy on the radio said, “Is this the way you want to live the rest of your life?” And he got up out of the Jacuzzi and took his clothes and left! (laughs) Which I thought was great!

Oh, he was crappy dressed. I had to redo him. My husband had some beautiful clothes, which I gave to him. My daughter-in-law said, “Doesn’t that feel strange seeing Bill’s clothes on Ed?” I said, “No, you’re wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts. That doesn’t feel strange to me.” It’s a piece of material! It’s just a fabric. That’s all it is. It’s not the man.

I know my kids were just horrified. Four months after Bill died, I’m out honking around in bars. And I wasn’t… I guess I was. When I told them that Ed had this ’67 Ford truck, they were convinced that I was either going to get killed or robbed.

And then after we’d been going together about three weeks, he says, “Would you like to go on a fishing trip?”

Yes! (laughs)

When we left, I’m going down the freeway and I’m thinking, “What the hell am I doing? I’ve only known this man for three weeks and I’m going off to Idaho and Utah in this horrible truck I wouldn’t let anybody catch me dead in.” But he was so different and he was so… he was more poetic than Bill. When he was fourteen years old, he was a wrangler. He’d say things like, “You never heard anything until you’ve heard a cougar scream at night.” Or he’d say, “Watch a snowflake kiss the ground.” What am I going to do but fall in love?

Bill was my knight. But Edward was the man. He was a cowboy. I would say that he was the most exciting. When we made our trip to Utah, I found a postcard and it said, “When I grow up, I want to be…” and I checked off cowboy. Mailed one to each of my four kids.

They were horrified that I was doing this. I had been an executive’s wife, with the cocktails, and all that shit-ery that goes on with that, and now I’m with this guy that only owns a truck and the clothes on his back. And they just know that he’s going to do me in. I said, “Look, I’m fifty-seven years old. I’m not some eighteen-year-old kid. I know what the hell I’m doing!” Really, how can you be upset about a man that’s making me so happy? They eventually fell in love with him just like I did.

I had to make some adjustments in my thinking because first of all, he was a mechanic. He was a handyman. So his hands were always grubby-looking and I used to say, “You can’t touch me until you go scrub your hands.” I would make him go scrub his hands with a brush. And I’m an organizer, so I had to get him organized. His truck—the dash looked like… he was a redneck! He was born in Idaho and it was just crap everywhere.

Bill was such a fuss-ass. The biggest fuss-ass in the world. The mailman would come by and drop off the bills and Bill would meet him across the street and give him the bills all paid up! (laughs) That’s the way he was. Oh, yes, I never had to pick up anything after Bill. Never—except cardigan sweaters. He had an aversion to putting his cardigan sweaters away. But his closet—we had this huge walk-in closet. His side was always… shoes were here, this was there. He was just so. He’d wiped the tub down. Wiped the bowl off in the sink. Wiped the shower walls. He was absolutely meticulous about everything.

And Ed just was an absolute slob. Which is why I needed to make sure that I could live with it. Like, what if I couldn’t change it? So then I thought, “Well, okay, if I’m going to do this, let’s face it: It’s going to be your money that does everything. Are you going to resent it after a while? You’re going to have to handle it in such a way that he doesn’t feel like he’s being kept, like a gigolo.”

I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got the money, and you’ve got the time. We’re going to fix up the old Ford truck. And I’m going to sell the house and the Continental. And we’re going to hit the road. And become gypsies.”

Which is exactly what we did.

We did that for nine years. We became prospectors, panning for gold. We did swap meets, we sold solar panels, we went to school. We got drunk and danced every weekend. It was just an incredible life.

I was just hot for his body. He was glorious. (laughs) I mean he really was glorious. He had a big head of hair. Salt and pep- per. He looked like the Marlboro man. And he was about six foot two. And he kept me laughing all the time. What was he? My boy toy? (laughs) No. No, no, he was a love.

***

When I got the face-lift, I’ll never forget… I’ll never know how I ever did that.

I go to see the doctor and he says, “Well, first of all, I want to know why you want one.” I said, “Look at my face. Now, look at my body. My body is forty years younger than my face,” because I had a real tight body. And I said, “I want this to go with this.” And I had a face-lift! And put my boobs in perspective—put them up where they belong. And man, I was in seventh heaven.

But that was one miserable week. And he just lived with me on that. He just stayed by my side and cuddled me and coddled me and, you know, nursed, nurtured me. He was a rock.

When we started selling solar, we went to the school at ARCO, Atlantic Richfield. They have a school for teaching about selling solar panels and stuff. We had to go to school for a week from nine to five. And he was just so bright. Very smart, very, very, very, very smart. Not smart—intelligent. He absorbed everything. I could remember nothing. He was the serious one.

We would travel and it was just marvelous. We spent a summer in Idaho, north of Boise, swap-meeting on the weekends, playing golf during the week. Oh, it was the greatest deal in the world. We just had a great time.

I’ve got some albums of what we did. This is just a smackeroo of what… Okay, here’s the old truck. We sanded and painted it. I hand-painted this with sponge brushes.

We were on that road in Juneau.

There’s a picture of him. He’s such a sweetie. Eddie played the banjo.

This is panning for gold. We never found enough to pay for the books that told us where to find it. This was in ’87? ’86?

Here we are congratulating ourselves at happy hour. Ed had to have happy hour. I don’t care what we were doing at fifteen minutes to five o’clock, it all had to halt.

This place I call Popcorn Ridge, up in Idaho. The only people we saw in three months were two forest ranger ladies and one old man and his grandson coming to get wood. I ran around in a baby doll nightgown and Ed ran around naked! It was just a wonderful life.

***

Being three months on the side of a mountain with somebody twenty-four/seven, you better get along. When you live in a truck… I mean, we’d go to bed and one turn over, the other turn over. That’s the way it was. Because the bed was only so wide.

The people that knew me when I was with Bill, they would say, “I can’t even imagine you out there on the ground in a tent. I can’t even believe that you would do this,” because I was with wigs and false fingernails, five-inch heels—I had the whole shebang. And the people that I met when I was with Ed said, “I can’t imagine you being at a cocktail party, doing the executive life.” But you can’t call it a different lifestyle. It was two different meetings of soul and body and mind.

I suppose it’s like, it’s like having a good bowl of chili and then having another bowl of chili with jalapeños in it! (laughs) Yes. One is sturdy and filling and you feel good when you get to eat it and blah blah blah blah blah. But then you take the one with jalapeños. It sort of sets you up on your heels a little bit. Yeah, oh, yeah. There would never be anybody who could live up to those two men. Never. Never ever, ever, ever. I just know how to pick them.

I was so lucky. You cannot believe how lucky I was. Yes, yes. With Ed, it was always exciting. Because Ed was just… that man could turn me on by touching my little fingernail.

We didn’t have to be married. He did one time admit that it kind of got to him. I really worked hard so he wouldn’t feel like a gigolo. I never gave him a credit card. I never put his name on my checking account. But when we bought the trailer park, I put his name on it.

The kids were having a fit. I said, “Hey, I’ve been with him for ten years. I’ve taken him off the job market. He has got to have something for his time.” I mean, fair is fair.

And we were together twelve years. When he died, it was because he had a heart attack. I went down and emptied the trash and came back. I looked in the kitchen and called, and when I went to the bathroom, I couldn’t get the door open. He’d been sitting on the toilet. He fell over and hit the tub. And then his feet went out and that was keeping the door shut.

It was a crying, shrieking time. I tried never to sleep in our bed again. I couldn’t sleep in it. I had to sleep on the couch for the next two years. The thought of him not being there with me—I couldn’t handle it. It was just too, too wrong.

Two months after Ed died, I was going to go crazy. I needed something to tend to, because all I had was that stupid trailer park. I went into the animal shelter and got me a cat! She’s the only one who put her front paws through the cage. We were meant for each other.

I’ve been living in this motor home since 1999, traveling throughout the United States. My solar panels that I have on the roof give me independence. I don’t have to go into an RV park. From January to September, I stayed in eighty-four different Wal-Marts. Prior to that, I was staying at truck stops.

I only have a cell phone, I don’t have a computer. I don’t want any e-mails, jokes and stuff, junk mail, junk calls. I don’t want any of that. I don’t need it anymore.

People are always trying to set me up. Well, I see the husbands around here. (snores)

The kids will say, “Don’t you get lonesome?”

I say no. Personally, I find my own company more entertaining than most people I meet.

I’ve had a varied life and a good life. Another piece of ass isn’t worth the problems! No way, no way! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I love my privacy.

I get into bed at night and I got my electric blanket on, and I’m snuggled down here, and I got my book right in front of me, and I’m reading and I’m at peace. I’m at peace with the world. I don’t want to accommodate or do anything for anybody. I only want to take care of me, my cat, and my motor home. I like it.

***

Rumpus original art by Lucas Adams.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Sibylla Brodzinsky and Max Schoening
• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• An Oral History of Myself: 11. Ashley

“We need to be able to digest and give people who are very far away the time and space to tell their story in their own words, rather than these hygienic CNN clips of a mother crying and saying we need supplies, or, ‘They came and burned our village in the middle of the night and we had to run.’ It’s so much more important to humanize things like that.”

Voice of Witness (VOW) is a nonprofit book series dedicated to depicting human rights crises through the oral histories of the men and women who have experienced them.  Out of Exile:  Narratives From the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan is the fourth book in the series.

Interestingly, it was intended to be the first book, and the series was conceived through it.  In 2003 Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng traveled to Valentino’s hometown, Marial Bai, and met three women there who had been abducted and enslaved. (Deng is the subject of Eggers’ novel What is the What, a collaborative effort to tell Valentino’s life story.)  A Lost Boy himself, Deng was shocked at the tales the women of his hometown told him, and both men agreed to return when they could sit down with the women and listen to their full life stories.

However, the project didn’t fall into place until Harvard Law student Craig Walzer interviewed Dave and Valentino for the school paper. Walzer had an interest in Sudan and had worked there;  he suggested they do a book about forced migration. In the end, they asked Walzer to do the book.

The result is an emotionally arresting compilation of seventeen Sudanese who have been abducted and displaced. The narrators are more than just victims or news soundbites; they are brothers, sisters, mothers and cousins who have undergone difficulties that no one should undergo. The subject matter isn’t light and some parts are devastating just to read, let alone live through, but many of the narrators offer hope as well.

Since its hardcover release, Sudanese and Darfurian advocacy organizations have used the book to frame their own work, and John Prendergast of the ENOUGH project has presented the book in Congress.

I have had the good fortune to hear Craig speak at various events, and urge those in the San Francisco area  to see him yourself this Thursday, September 17th at 7:00 pm at the Jewish Cultural Museum for The Art of Listening:  Oral Histories from Voice of Witness and StoryCorps.

This month Voice of Witness released Out of Exile in paperback, and Craig was kind enough to sit down with me to speak about his experience.

**
The Rumpus: How did you become involved in this project?

Craig Walzer: I had some experience in Sudan from the summer of 2006, where during my law studies I had gone there to do development work and refugee advocacy work.  I actually spent a little over a month in Cairo, Egypt, and then the rest of the summer in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.  So in the following year I was planning to return in summer, and during I think it was February of that year I met Dave and Valentino when they came to talk at Harvard, where I was studying.  I had an in, and sort of bribed the editor of the newspaper to get me an interview with the two of them.  We got done speaking and they said do you want to walk with us, we’re walking back to the hotel.  We walked and by the end of it they said “send us a proposal and maybe you should do this book for us.”

They’d been talking about doing this book, and initially their idea was to do something on women who had been enslaved during the civil war, particularly from the south. My counter to that was to suggest doing something about forced migration in Sudan, which would sort of tie in the broader scope of the population of the very diverse country.

Rumpus: Why did you go to Sudan in 2006?

Walzer: I had wanted to leave and go to somewhere very different, outside of the G8, and do something where I could be useful. During the previous year I was helping a friend who was working on an article for the New York Times Magazine about Sudan and the International Criminal Court. I helped her doing research and background, and afterward she told me of an opportunity to work at the best domestic Sudanese NGO. That was definitely where I was most interested. I didn’t want to be living in a compound somewhere with a bunch of Dutch and French folk doing things in a back office that’s artificially lit. So I was happy to go there because they thought I’d be useful.

Rumpus: What kind of work did you do there?

Walzer: I thought I was going to go there and feed the hungry, but you realize very quickly that that’s not how it works. The most useful thing that I did there was showing staff members how to use Microsoft Word more efficiently. These are Sudanese folks in the educated class of Sudan, but the country as a whole has been sort of purposefully uneducated by the government as a tool of repression.  So literacy is there, but basic organizational strategy just isn’t there in a strong way. Some of them are lawyers or journalists or engineers, working in their very specific culture, but now they are dependent on development aid. Suddenly they have to be working in a Western template, which means project assessments and updates, and so forth.

Rumpus: Did you meet a lot of Sudanese outside your work while you were there?  Did you explore the place?

Walzer: In Khartoum not so much.  I met the folks I was working with and some of their friends, and went to a Sudanese wedding and little things, but it was a lot harder in Khartoum itself.  The social life there is not vibrant. It’s a city of a couple million people, but the nightlife is very quiet. There’s no alcohol allowed. The city is completely safe but there’s not a lot of activity going on. Part of this is the Sharia law, but it’s also a police state, so there’s that level of security where you just don’t want to step out of line and make a scene of yourself. There aren’t many big, comfortable public spaces in the city.

It was actually in Cairo that I spent a lot of time with Sudanese refugees. There’s a huge Sudanese population in Cairo that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Official numbers are something like twenty-five to thirty-five thousand Sudanese that live in Cairo, but that’s only the documented ones. People there say it’s closer to one or two million Sudanese. And these are Southern Sudanese who fled during the civil wars of the 80s and 90s, and also Darfurians. A lot of Darfurians have gone up there.

Cairo’s the biggest refugee city in Africa. As a gateway to the Arabian peninsula and to Europe, you have Somalians, Eritreans, Liberians, and of course a ton of Sudanese there. It’s a much more dynamic city. It’s huge and bustling, and there are great old bars and cafes.  While I was there I was doing a lot more case work with individuals and got to know a few folks. That was much more where I spent time going to underground establishments, where an old Sudanese lady would brew super-strong Sudanese alcohol that makes vodka taste like Gatorade, and people would sit around and drink. There was much more of a social experience in that city.

Sudan is such a hugely diverse country, and the one thing that people from all corners of it do have in common is that, if not they themselves then at least someone in their family, or someone they know from a village nearby, has been forcibly moved from their homes because of threat of violence, or threat of drought or famine. In a strange way, this is sort of the thread that unites all Sudanese.

Rumpus: How did you come to meet the people you interviewed in the book?

Walzer: Some of them I knew from that summer in Cairo, where I knew I could go back and that person had a story.  I wanted to sit down with them for eight to ten hours and really get it out. Not all of them were that long, but nothing was shorter than a few hours. So I met with those people from Cairo, and then a lot of them helped me to find others.

Tarig, for example, who was a university student and had been there for six or seven years, he’s one of the guides who is in town. If you are new to town and are Sudanese, and you need to get settled and find your coordinates, he’s very good at just helping out with those sorts of things. He was hugely helpful to me.  He had helped me to translate stuff the previous year, so of course I came back and wanted to interview him. But I also asked whether he knew any other folks. He said, “Oh, I can get you ten folks in five minutes, no problem, I’ll get you good stories.”  And he did.

And there was a lot of detective work. We had a list of certain topics that we wanted to cover, and find people who would speak about them in the first person. For example, at the end of 2006 some Sudanese, a community that included Darfurians and southern Sudanese, started a sit-in protest in a park in the middle of the city, near the UN agency office. They occupied the park peacefully and set up tents and just stayed there for three months. They had a whole community set up there; the women would do the laundry and the young men, for the most part, would provide security. Then one night in late December, the Egyptian police stormed the camp, broke it up, and killed about thirty-eight Sudanese in the process, including small children, and captured and tortured probably hundreds of other protesters who were there. We wanted somebody who had been there to tell us what it was like. We had sort of a checklist of things we needed, but it was surprisingly easy to cover it because people had just been around.

It was really a very informal process. Whenever I tried to work with, let’s say, the UN or organizations like that, it actually was only cumbersome.  Just cause there are regulations and people are watching, and then it’s just not nearly as comfortable. It just wasn’t as easy and not as trustworthy. I mean, these are people who are telling highly personal stories that they are never going to see, for all intents and purposes, on their own.

Rumpus: But some people got to see them.

Walzer: Some people got to see them. But many of them I was probably never going to see again, and they were giving me something. And you have to have a reason to want to do that, you have to have a foundation of trust. And that just comes through, say, this guy who knows this guy introduced me to you, or to be able to say, “Yeah, I know that street in Khartoum, and I know that silly-looking building over there,” and they say, “Oh, here’s a white guy who knows where I’m coming from.” It was sort of as capricious as that.

Rumpus: Were these stories something you had to coax out of them? Were they surprised that you wanted to hear the stories?

Walzer: It varied from person to person. Some of them, not terribly often, just wanted to tell me everything from the get go. Some of them obfuscated and danced around what actually happened, and some of them were very emotional. Some were just sort of dumbfoundedly honest and told me, not without a few tears along the way.

My approach with it was to let them set the tone. Most of the folks had probably never sat down in front of a recorder and tried doing this before, and I can’t imagine what that’s like.

It wasn’t sitting down with a recorder saying,  “So tell me about the time you were raped.”  We’d start out with, “Tell me about where you were born and what did it look like? Did you go to primary school? What games did you play as a kid?” And I would just kind of let them run. The big question was, “And what happened next?” And then I would say,  “Can you stop and tell me a little bit more detail about the color, or what it smelled like?” Something like that, and let them determine what was comfortable. The stories that we took were ones that covered a lot of meaty topics of course, but it wasn’t — I was never really motivated to push that.

Rumpus: Did anybody cut the interview short?

Walzer: There was only one woman that just cut off the interview and said she didn’t want to go any further.

Rumpus: Did she give you any reason as to why? Were you surprised?

Walzer: I wasn’t surprised because we were a ways into the project already, and I was kind of waiting for that to happen. She’s the woman I opened the book with. She spoke for about fifteen minutes and then said, “What’s the point of this?” And I said, “Well, we hope that in some small way at least, sharing these stories will spread awareness. I’m not promising you a ticket to New York City, a house for your family, or even much at all, except to share your story.”  She just had no reason to believe in that. She said “I’m sorry, I’m tired.” Very politely, but she just realized that she didn’t want to go there.  And that’s totally respectable.

Rumpus: In the introduction you talk about that and wonder what good this project will do. How do you feel about it now? Now that the book is about to have its paperback release, are you happy with what’s happened?

Walzer: When we were going into the project, one of the reasons actually that I was really excited and enthusiastic about it was that Sudan is an overwhelmingly complex and dangerous situation, and it  is so easy to produce unintended consequences.  With anything that one does, especially coming from the outside.  I was really sort of scared, thinking about going back and doing anything more and thinking, “How do I do this right?” How do you know what you are doing is right?  It’s certainly better to bring some humility to it.  And I sort of thought, this is great!  Certainly at least we can stand on the idea that it’s better to record these things then not to.  It’s better to archive and to tell stories, then not to.

I don’t know if twenty or thirty pages of time for everybody, and eight or ten hours of dialogue that’s clipped down to twenty or thirty pages of story that we try to reflect their voice in, I don’t know if that really does more to obfuscate, or to give the illusion of something that’s real, when that is still only the tip of the iceberg.  I see these people in my minds, I remember sitting down with them with coffee, cigarettes and candy, but I don’t know what the readers see.  I don’t know how much of that really gets through, or if it gives people a taste of it but not enough to really know.

And then I worry about the folks that we spoke to, our narrators, many of whom I’m still in touch with, who in two years, for many of them, nothing has happened.  They are in the same place they were two years ago.  And maybe, even though we did say to them, you know, we’re not paying you money for this, and we’re not promising you anything great, I wonder if it gave them some sort of hope even indeliberately. That even this doesn’t help their case? That makes me wonder.

Rumpus: What if you look at it as a starting point?  The books themselves might not be enough to experience what you experienced, certainly not to experience what those people experienced, but the more people hear a little bit the more they will want to hear more.

Walzer: That’s what we hope.  It’s a difficult thing to quantify.  It is different now than when it was first hot off the presses, and we were like “Here, we’re going to take this and members of Congress are going to read this, and sit down and start weeping in the halls of Congress.” That phase has now passed, and the book takes on a different light now when it’s like, look at where everyone is still.  That part of it — I wasn’t really thinking about that two years ago.

I mean this is part of the dynamic, this is part of working in these sorts of situations.  It’s not supposed to be easy, and maybe it was a little bit of hubris just to be like, “You can at least stand on this:  It’s better to have your story told than not to, and it won’t hurt anybody.”  With any of these things, when you come into a crisis situation, or an oppressive situation, it’s not going to work out as nicely as you’d like it to. It’s part of the way that these things are.

A lot of things don’t translate well. Things that we would think about naturally as sharing stories, but I don’t know if sharing stories means stealing stories, you know?  My friends and I, when we’re drinking, always talk about headlines or notices in my high school alumni magazine that should be like, “Local Jew Steals African Stories and Puts Them In a Book.”  Where do you draw the line between a noble, young guy who travels to Sudan to bring these stories back that the world needs to hear, and a local Jew who steals stories and gets published by McSweeney’s?  I don’t know!

Rumpus: Oh man, that’s harsh on yourself.

Walzer: No, it’s not.  You have to embrace the whole.  It’s multi-sided, and it’s absurd, but that’s what all of this stuff is.  I mean, I think it’s interesting.  I don’t know, I’m not willing to judge or place value.

Rumpus: Did you get your hopes up a little bit?  I would think it’d be hard not to.

Walzer: I don’t know if I got my hopes up; I just had hopes. I tried not to, and then I kind of did cling to some. But I’m glad the stories are out there. I think it fills a niche that’s not filled enough, and that needs work in contemporary political discourse, and contemporary political and social literature.  I think that one of the things that’s so hard is this big paradigm shift now.  The primary sources are so much more available to those of us that want to know what’s going on in the world.  We can hear those voices and see their faces instantly, but we haven’t taken advantage of that nearly enough. I think that we need to be able to digest and give people who are very far away the time and space to tell their story in their own words, rather than these hygienic CNN clips of a mother crying and saying we need supplies, or, “They came and burned our village in the middle of the night and we had to run.”  It’s so much more important to humanize things like that, and I’m glad that we have at least made an honest effort towards that.  I think that it if there’s anything, and again this is me clinging to anything, is that with everything that is going on in Sudan right now, which is complicated and in some ways got stuck at this Save Darfur movement, at least this furthers the debate.

“Save Darfur.” I don’t know what that means, but Darfur hasn’t been saved. There was never a moment it was saved, and yet Darfur is not burning right now.  So were we wrong to say that we have to save them? When George Clooney gets up and says that if we don’t send in peacekeepers in September, then we’re just going to have to send in gravediggers in November, and then September comes and there are no peacekeepers, and then November comes and there are no gravediggers, then what do we do next? That sort of discourse is not enough, and one of the things we do need to look at is the people.

One of the huge untapped resources is this refugee population, this displaced population.  These are people who are not across dangerous international borders, in Cairo for example.  It’s a huge diplomatic gesture, and it’s a longterm investment.  Because whatever happens to “save Darfur,” or to “save Sudan,” is not going to happen in a year. It’ll be a multi-generational task to bring these people back to their homes, to rebuild in a way that’s more fair and to set up systems of government and society that affords equal opportunity, basic rights and dignity.  It’s a project of generations.

We need to work slowly and look at nice little ways that we can help.  At least shining a spotlight on the diaspora more than we do is a good thing to start.

Rumpus: I think so. I worry that if there’s not enough drama surrounding an issue, then there’s not enough interest.

Walzer: I think this is one of the good things about the stories we chose in the book, is that they are kind of weird stories.  I think that’s a big part of bringing people to something like this, especially, is you have to bring in a new slant to tell the iconic story of African suffering.  This is something that will make people tune in very easily.  There are these very hygienic images that come into people’s minds of burning villages and starving children, women in camps, UN blue plastic sheets, things like that.  What I was very intent on doing was bringing in the absurd, weird parts, and the basic dynamic of worlds coming into contact with one another.  When people have to leave their homes, especially if it’s been home for generations, and they are flung out into a world of bureaucacies, computers, different languages, passports, birth certificates and ID cards, you have all these crazy circumstances.  These are stories of people doing things that illuminate the complexity of it, and bring all of these things into this sort of collage.

For example the story of Bob who smuggles himself into Israel. Bob is the one who figured out, well, Sudan hates Israel, everybody in Sudan always told me all my life that Israel is the great Satan. I hate Sudan now because they fucked me over, Cairo is miserable, Cairo hates the Israelis, so it seems like the logical thing, is to go to Israel.  So he gets Bedouin traders to smuggle him through the Egyptian border to the south of Israel, and then goes up and asks for refugee protection in Israel.  The Israelis don’t know what to do with him, or what to make of him because he’s a Sudanese; bad, but he hates the Sudanese government; good. He doesn’t look like an Arab; good, but he’s a Muslim; bad. So they stick him in a prison camp with Palestinian terrorists, or whatever you want to call them.  Palestinian people who have been arrested for causing a ruckus in Israel.  And Bob has the best six months of his life; he has clean facilities, he can play soccer with the guards, he can hang out and smoke cigarettes.  He’s doing okay in the prison camp.  At least he has some hope.

Eventually the UN makes a deal with the Egyptians to say take him back to Egypt, just promise us you won’t give him back to the Sudanese.  He’ll be arrested for espionage and probably executed if you hand him over. The Egyptians say “yeah yeah” and take him.  They take him on the first train down to the southern border of Egypt and northern border of Sudan, and they were about to put him on a plane to his execution when the UN finally gets their act together and realizes that wasn’t a good idea, and saves his ass at the last second.  They get him back up at least to Cairo, where he’s stuck now and saving up money to try to get into Israel again.

I mean, it’s just just fascinating stuff to see. And his resourcefulness!  I’m cutting out, of course, everything it took to get him into Egypt in the first place, to survive in Egypt, things he’s done for years now living underground undocumented.  In Egypt, in the face of all this, the women are forced to care for families and make some sort of life for their children. The stuff that they did is dramatic on a literary level, and I think that brings folks in.  We didn’t plan those things, but it’s just the nature of the beast that people are going to be in sticky situations and they are going to find themselves coming out of it.  That, to me, is much more interesting than bomb-strapped people.  What happened before?  What happened afterward?  That part of it is our comparative advantage, I think, with the oral history format.

With refugees in general that is a comparative advantage, because through these Kafkaesque nightmares they find themselves in, you see very familiar and pervasive themes emerging.  About family and culture, and the way those things change in exile or in a new land, and the new associations that you make with people that you’ve never made before.  How generations change that are growing up in a different land than their fathers did. And how people will beg, borrow and steal to get by when they need to.

***

Read “I Just Want to See It Through: A Full Story from Out of Exile”

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The guys would come out with two little Pinkerton cops: “I need two guys for the bull gang. Two guys to go into the hole.” A thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there. Only four of us would get through.’

Young Paulsen took to the road, along with millions of others. He rode the freights. Half the time, the boxcar, standing room only, was his home. Somewhere out there, in Kansas or Nebraska or who knows where, there might be a job of some sort.”

Some perspective via Studs Terkel, from the introduction to the 1986 edition of Hard Times (1970), an oral history of the Great Depression.

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• An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #4

Jeff Buckley: Having Tim Buckley as my father gave me the parts needed to play music.  Even if I went and became a lawyer and someone asked me to sing something, I’d have the parts to sing. But that’s it. It’s not really [Tim Buckley's] voice that I have – because it wasn’t really his voice to begin with.  It was passed down to us from every man in our family.[i]

This oral history is the story of Jeff Buckley and his band.

Jeff Buckley: I’ve always played in bands – always.  I only go out and play solo to make money to pay the phone bill and the rent. [ii]

After releasing the Live at Sin-e EP, Jeff played a series of solo acoustic shows around New York City in early 1993, looking to attract musicians to form a band with through his live performances.

Mick Grondahl (bassist): …I was backstage hanging out and I noticed Jeff, and he was definitely someone who made me curious.  Backstage, he was very focused on tuning his guitar and cleaning it, and preparing his set.  During the show I noticed the interesting choice of cover songs he was playing and he played a lot of complex chords, and of course he had that great voice. I was quite impressed and we got to talk later at a party, and we talked about music.  He left an impression.

He was playing the New Music Seminar at the Fez, and I went and stood in line – I didn’t even have any money to get in.  Luckily I saw Jeff coming out from behind the curtain while we were waiting to pay, and he was singing “L.A. Woman” by the Doors and I sang the next part, and he remembered me.  We exchanged numbers and I went in to see the show and he had evolved even more.  He came out and did Nina Simone “Be Your Husband.” We got together at Nightingale’s, played pool, and then jammed back at his apartment.

Jeff Buckley: Micky and I sat down at my place. It was late in the evening so we had to play quietly …[iii]

Mick Grondahl: I sense that he wanted someone there to accompany him in the most simple and non-flashy way possible, just support him.  He was already quite interesting on his own. About two weeks after he and I started playing together we auditioned Matt [Johnson - drummer]. He was the first guy we auditioned and we hit it off really well.  Matt remembers Jeff looking at him and smiling and just feeling a connection between us.  And that first night we played together, within an hour, we wrote “Dream Brother.”

Jeff Buckley: Every guitar idea I put out they would close in on as the music happened.[iv]

Gene Bowen (road manager): He toured overseas for a couple weeks to support Live at Sin-e and he was describing how it was great and he loved it, but the absence of a band was really apparent to him.  He always wanted to have a band and then he finally got the band, but then he had to tour solo to support the Sin-e EP. He missed the band and couldn’t wait to get back.  He was really about the band and the personal connection that he had with each of them.

Mick Grondahl: Michael [Tighe] joined when Grace was pretty much wrapped up.  He had never played in a group.  He knew some blues stuff and few riffs here and there.  We auditioned people who played a lot longer in New York, people who had played very complex music, but it was more about enthusiasm and potential. We wanted to recruit people who were almost disciples to Jeff’s music.  If people were too set in what they were doing then there wasn’t this chance to instill the new music that could come from the way that Jeff worked.

Michael Tighe (guitarist): He knew that I played guitar but we never got around to playing together until he asked me to audition for his band.  It clicked.  I felt honored, excited and a little afraid to be playing with these older musicians who had been living in a world of gigs, touring, jamming, writing, recording. A world I wanted to live in.

Gene Bowen: Jeff used to call Michael “Chico” and I used to envision Jeff as an old man at the end of his life, just sitting on his back porch with Michael, because they were just so close.  There was just such a connection there.

Michael Tighe: First impression? A cartoon wolf. Playful and silly with eyes of pain and wildness.

Mick Grondahl: We were in many ways four parts of the group, and it felt like a band and Jeff accepted us as having equal say.  It was very much a democracy – he was the leader but he also listened to us and thought about what we had to say. The relationships that band members have between each other are more important than ability.

Jeff Buckley: They’ve become my family.[v]

June 1, 1994, the band along with Road Manager Gene Bowen and a soundman set out in a 15-passenger Econoline Van on their first extended tour.

Mick Grondahl: We were very excited.  They called it the Podunk Tour, to get us used to playing live. We had already written So Real together, we also covered Kangaroo.  We felt excited about the music, so if no one really showed up to the shows, we were at least doing something that appealed to us.  Jeff was just a great guy, and we all just loved spending time with him. He was really there for us as a leader.

Gene Bowen: The first tour we did with the full band was like a “Shitty City” tour.  The band had been rehearsing for the tour, except they weren’t rehearsing the songs from the record.  The guy from the studio where they were rehearsing told me that he hadn’t heard them play a single note off of Grace.  They were in there just jamming, playing the same riff for hours.

Management had them play the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ.  They rented out the club so they could get the feeling of playing on stage – but the club was empty. Since they weren’t rehearsing the album, the thought was that getting them on a stage and rehearsing would help them get ready for the tour.

After the Stone Pony, we played the Red Creek Inn in Rochester and the tickets were $5 each and 32 tickets were sold. That’s the first show the band ever played together. So we went from playing an empty club to a 32-paid club.

Michael Tighe: When I first came up to the Econoline van [to start the tour] I felt like I was joining the circus.

Gene Bowen: They were all very excited at the beginning of the tour.  It was all of us and the equipment in the van About halfway through the tour, they figured out a way to suspend hammocks from the ceiling of the van over the bench seats. So one person could lay on the bench seat and another person could lay in the hammock, because there was no room in the van at all.

Mick Grondahl: We loved the van! It was difficult to have six people in there with all the gear, but we were together and we shared the time very intimately.  A little too intimately sometimes. We listened to music during the long stretches of driving.  At the time, we all thought it would be great to have a tour bus, but then when we did have a tour bus it just lacked the same intimacy and coziness that we had before.

We liked being on the road and partying – we didn’t have a lot of groupies or anything like that. We really enjoyed just hanging out with each other and playing music.

We were all learning a lot about what music each person liked and we would play it all on the CD player. Jeff didn’t grow up in New York or in an alternative music environment, so a lot of the music that Michael and I knew about he was just getting clued into. So he was excited to hear the stuff we were playing.  Like, the MC5, Sonic Youth, The Grifters, Shudder to Think, the art punk stuff.  And Big Star “Kangaroo.”

Jeff could listen to a song a couple times and then he would be playing it onstage the next night.  He could remember the lyrics, the chord changes, the arrangement and then sometimes come up with a new arrangement.

And he would do that with is own songs, just do a new arrangement and I would walk the wire with him and follow along, not knowing exactly how we were going to play chorus now that we just did the verse in a whole different way.  It was exciting and most of the time we would land on our feet.  It built great confidence between us. We never played the songs the same.  Each night was different.

Gene Bowen: If you hear Dream Brother at the beginning of the tour as opposed to the end, it’s completely different and that’s because of the band.  As a band, they evolved the music as the tour went on.

Michael Tighe: The first night we played, I was so nervous and made some mistakes.  I felt like I was giving birth or being born or something like that.

Mick Grondahl: I remember thinking that for people seeing us for the first time, it might be a bit off-putting.  It was so different; Jeff’s voice, the style, the way the shows were organized… because we didn’t have a set list, we worked on the spot.  We were asking something of the audience, which was patience because we wanted to make each show unique. They were intrigued of course by Jeff’s humor and the mystique that he could project, but mainly his voice and guitar were so stunning.

It took time for the set to get up to speed, but we wanted it start slow and build from nothing. Not just bowl people over and play the catchiest song at the very beginning.

We felt excited about the music, so if no one really showed up to the shows, we were at least doing something that appealed to us.

Gene Bowen: Jack Bookbinder [part of Jeff's management team] had a band called “Lobster of Hate” and they were out on the road playing weekends and we would go into a market where they just played and there would still be posters and flyers everywhere. I’d always ask the club owner, “Hey, how did Lobster of Hate do?” and the response would be, “Oh, they did 300 people.” So, that was the running joke – I’d get in the van after a show and be like, Lobster of Hate: 350 people, Jeff Buckley: 22.”

Gene Bowen: What Columbia Records did with Jeff will never happen again.  Just the economics behind supporting an artist like that.  There is no way now that an artist would play the same market four times. Now they want to get you into the mainstream as quickly as possible Back then it was servicing college radio and fanzines, and that era is over.  Jeff’s fanbase was built from the ground up.

After the U.S. tour, the band went to Europe.

Gene Bowen: There was a real momentum after that U.S. tour. When we got to Europe we were in an actual tour bus.  And we figured out that we could do a tour bus for the US when we got back.  From that point on, it was a bus and it made the grind that much easier.

Mick Grondahl: It was trade off – when we had the van we could stay in hotels, but when got the bus we just stayed on that the whole time. It was the moving hotel.  And we didn’t have the same intimacy we did before.

Jack Bookbinder: There were far more promotional opportunities in Europe for Jeff, just because of the way that Live at Sin-e was promoted from the beginning.  In France, Jeff was one of the top pop artists in the country and you couldn’t say that in America.  He just had something that people there connected to.

Mick Grondahl: Traditionally, I think European audiences are more forgiving and more open. It doesn’t need to be the buzz of the week to give it a chance.  I personally felt like there was more acceptance and more of a feeling of security.  By that point, we had started to come together more as a band so we had more to offer the audience. They were much more keen on us being on TV in Europe than in America. They wanted to capture it even through there wasn’t a lot of hype behind it – they recognized it as something important.

Gene Bowen: In every nook and cranny of the world, Jeff did promotion.  He really understood the business and he knew what it took and what he needed to do. And he loved to talk and share things with people and I used to love hearing him talk.  I would have a line of people standing there waiting to interview him and I would just cycle them through.  And with him, he would always give them way more than they needed – he would just give so much and I would have to come in to let them know time was up.

I started to listen to what was going on, because I thought “Who in their right mind could talk about the same shit, let alone themselves and this record, over and over and over.?”  You either go on autopilot and say the same stuff or you just make stuff up, just for your own sanity.  And what I started to realize was that he would answer their questions, but then he would go off on something else entirely. I think for his own piece of mind he would try to give them something more.  I would always want to cue in just to hear what he was saying – he would be talking about food or something else entirely. There would be a point behind it, but he would weave all this other stuff into it.

Michael Tighe: I don’t remember anything about the television tapings except that I would always think about Hendrix on the BBC to get me fired up.

Mick Grondahl: Chris Cornell came to see us quite early, in 1994 the whole Soundgarden crew.  It was great, since it validated our own feelings of excitement and often when you’re doing something of your own making, you’re naturally excited about it, but you don’t know how everyone else is going to feel. But in this case, our excitement was validated by people like Chris Cornell and Jimmy Page and Paul McCartney and John Cale. It was encouraging.  We were getting recognition from people that we all looked up to.  Certainly for Jeff, it was very exciting.  That to me meant more than record sales and how many tour buses we had.

The band would continue to tour the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia until September 1995.

Gene Bowen: I think the tour went on much too long. And they didn’t really write on the road.  That’s not how Jeff worked.  And they toured the Grace for two years and that whole time they really didn’t have the opportunity to explore other things. Everyone, the band and the crew, were like, “Enough.”

Mick Grondahl: The irritation and feeling of stagnation didn’t start until late 95, after we toured twice on both continents, and then they wanted us to do a third and I felt that was really pushing it. Things started to wear a bit.  Personally, I felt quite self-conscious that we were touring a city for the third time for the same record.

Gene Bowen: I remember he talked about trying to come up with a name for the band, so that it wouldn’t just be Jeff Buckley.

Mick Grondahl: I proposed the name Two Ninas and Jeff liked it a lot, and we all liked it.  But the record company was against using another name because the Jeff Buckley name was so well known. Jeff liked the idea of a band name and that was the closest we ever came to doing it.

The band played its last show with drummer Matt Johnson on March 15^th 1995 in Sydney, Australia.

Mick Grondahl: I look for something different in musicians now than I would have before I had met Jeff.  Before I would concentrate on someone’s technical ability and that certainly has a value, but the person’s creative ability and enthusiasm lends itself to what I feel is a greater contribution to the music.  He was and still is like a mentor in that way.  I’ll never be able to forget what he taught me when I work with other people, just because what he was able to bring out of people was a lot more than what I had ever experienced before.  Having that trust only encourages more creativity and risk taking. I’m truly grateful for that experience.

Jeff Buckley: Artists just need to shut the fuck up and listen to what exactly is coming from inside. You just have to find exactly what you should be doing, and if you didn’t have that thing, you would die. Perish, slowly or quickly, violently or like a chump. And every choice is made from that. I have to do this, I’m made to do this.  I can’t do anything else. I tried. I don’t really feel fulfilled any other way.  Maybe when I get older, it will change. I’m sure it will. [vi]

###

Jeff Buckley died in a tragic drowning accident in 1997. An autopsy showed no drugs in his system.

Gene Bowen: Founded Road Recovery, dedicated to helping young people battle addiction by harnessing the influence of entertainment industry professionals who have confronted similar crises and now wish to share their experience and knowledge.

Mick Grondahl: Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with his wife and daughter and continues to play music.

Matt Johnson: Plays music both as a solo artist and with other artists such as Rufus Wainwright.

Parker Kindred: Continues to play music working with numerous artists, including Antony and the Johnsons.

Michael Tieghe: Lives in New York City and is currently working with a New York band, “The Tiggers.”

[ii] ibid

[iii] Now Magazine

[iv] ibid

[v] Sky Magazine

[vi] Unpublished interview material, February 24, 1994, Amy Yates Wuelfing

***

Painting of Jeff Buckley special for The Rumpus by Mikayla Butchart.

Jeff Buckley, “Grace”

wikipedia page

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