Mr. Apology

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Speaker 2 This is Apology. Apology is not associated with the police or any other organization, but rather is a way for you to tell people what you have done wrong and how you feel about it.

Speaker 3 All statements received by Apology will be played back to the public, so please do not identify yourself. Talk for as long as you want.
Thank you.

Speaker 5 My first impression was that he was good-looking and tall.

Speaker 6 I'm very tall.

Speaker 5 And in my mind, I always had my mother's admonition to find a tall husband.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 5 so I liked the fact that he was tall. And he asked me questions about myself.
And that was something that a lot of men didn't do. I mean, it was more like the time of quick hookups.

Speaker 5 And he really wasn't like that.

Speaker 7 In 1980, Marissa Bridge met her future husband, Alan Bridge, at a a bar in New York. Marissa says they were both artists and got along right away.

Speaker 7 And they ended up talking for hours about everything, including their work.

Speaker 5 He mentioned something about an answering machine, and I didn't know anybody that had an answering machine. It was new technology back then.

Speaker 5 So I really, and I didn't really care that much. I was into him.
And I actually went home with him that night. And we drove on these bumpy streets in Lower Manhattan.

Speaker 5 And he took me to this loft on 28th Street. And

Speaker 5 I had never been in a space like that. And

Speaker 5 it had, I really didn't see too much of anything.

Speaker 5 It was late. It was probably two or three in the morning.
Everything was dark. But I remember a red light that was blinking on this little object, which was the answering machine.
I found out later.

Speaker 7 Did he check the messages?

Speaker 5 He did. He did.
Yes, but he didn't really explain himself too much.

Speaker 5 And it wasn't till probably a week or two later that he played the tapes for me. And

Speaker 5 then I really got what he was doing and I was really blown away.

Speaker 7 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Speaker 7 So what happened the week later when you finally heard the messages?

Speaker 5 Well, I was over at his apartment for dinner and he said, I want to play you some calls that came in. And I said, okay, great.
And all the lights, he turned all the lights off. It was after dinner.

Speaker 5 And he put the answering machine on and he had these giant speakers that were like three feet high by like two feet wide. And

Speaker 5 the first one that I heard was a teenage runaway and how she ran away from home and she was living on the the streets of New York, and she felt that she maybe had made a mistake. She felt very lonely.

Speaker 9 Hi,

Speaker 9 um,

Speaker 10 I'm a runaway, and uh,

Speaker 10 all I want to say is that I'm kind of sorry that I left.

Speaker 10 See, I'm 15, and uh,

Speaker 10 I saw your number in the newspaper. When I saw it, I had a call because

Speaker 10 it's like

Speaker 10 I mean, you walk around on the streets all day long, just looking for someone who just might say, Hey,

Speaker 10 want a place to go? Come with me. I give you food and everything.

Speaker 9 That's all I want.

Speaker 10 I guess I take up too much time on the tape,

Speaker 11 but I I just gotta talk.

Speaker 5 And that struck me so deeply because

Speaker 5 back then, this was 1980, there was no way to hear anything like that unless you were a priest in a confessional. I mean, there was no computers, there were no cell phones.

Speaker 5 Answering machines, which could record a voice, were very new. So it was extraordinary to hear someone's inner thoughts.

Speaker 5 And it just blew me away that he had somehow set up a system where this young woman felt free enough to speak that personally about her life and her situation.

Speaker 7 Alan had printed 1,500 posters with the phone number.

Speaker 5 Alan put the phone number out on telephone polls in subway stations, wherever he could in New York City, and

Speaker 5 invited people to call and apologize. The poster said, attention criminals, blue collar, white collar.
It is the people you must apologize to, not to the state, not to God.

Speaker 5 Get your misdeeds off your chest, call apology.

Speaker 7 The poster Alan printed also warned callers that their calls would be recorded and that they shouldn't identify themselves and should call from a payphone so they couldn't be traced.

Speaker 7 And there was text in italics that read,

Speaker 7 apology is a private experiment. It is not associated in any way with any police, governmental, religious, or other organization.

Speaker 7 Just above a row of tear-off numbers, it said,

Speaker 7 when you call, you will be alone with a tape recorder.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 poster struck people. And right away, the first night that he put posters up, he got calls.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was a service that he gave to people because

Speaker 5 he himself had been a petty criminal. He started shoplifting, I believe when he was in art school, and he started shoplifting art books and art supplies.

Speaker 5 And he kept it up through college and through his 20s and into his early 30s.

Speaker 7 When he decided to stop, he made a mechanical sculpture that he called crime time.

Speaker 7 The sculpture was a box that you could stick your hand into to try to steal a marble. To do it, you had to spin a wheel of chance.

Speaker 7 Depending on the results of the spin, you'd either get away with the crime and get to remove a marble from the box, or you would get caught and your hand would get stuck.

Speaker 3 I'd like to apologize when I used to be a mailman. I had a job between semesters and college and it was delivered the mail.

Speaker 3 And nobody really monitored what we did or anything and a lot of times I would just throw it away. Just toss out the people's mail, not really caring whether or not they got their letters.

Speaker 3 Because I just hated the job so much.

Speaker 3 Now I don't know if any people ever complained or whatever happened because I didn't even, it was a summer job to me, you know.

Speaker 3 But I just like to apologize to people if they didn't get mail, like if they had important letters or bills or

Speaker 12 um and it just you know I feel bad about having done it but when I did it I didn't even realize you know how it could have a bad effect on somebody phones have not gotten their mail

Speaker 12 so I'm just apologizing for that

Speaker 12 I'm sorry for when I went over to visit my grandmother.

Speaker 12 I went over to a friend's house and he had a cute little dog

Speaker 12 and we were playing with it.

Speaker 12 And all of a sudden

Speaker 12 he um he started to attack me

Speaker 10 and so I had to keep hitting it with a stick

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 I'm sorry I did that.

Speaker 10 Bye.

Speaker 7 When you would go over there in the early days, could you even, could you get away from the phone ringing or what did it look like?

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 5 the loft was a big open space and Alan's bedroom was separated from the living room only by a like a six-foot bookcase. So it didn't even go to the ceiling.
So it was pretty, it was open.

Speaker 5 And the apology line sat on that bookcase.

Speaker 5 And Alan had cut out a hole in the back of the bookcase where his bed was and he made a louvered door so he could open the louvered door anytime, day or night when he was in bed and attend to the apology line answering machine.

Speaker 5 So the machine was there. It was in the living room, it was in the bedroom, and it was on all the time.
It was on 24-7. So there was no getting away from it.
And we would be sleeping in his bed.

Speaker 5 And if a call came in in the middle of the night, he'd have the volume up and we would hear it come in.

Speaker 5 And sometimes it was really annoying. And sometimes it was like, wait a minute, this person is like incredible.
Like, what are they talking about? And we'd wake up and listen.

Speaker 5 I just want to apologize to all those people I was up there with in the Green Correctional Facility. Cooksake, New York,

Speaker 5 up in the Catskills.

Speaker 5 Everybody wanted me to help them

Speaker 5 work on their case while I was an inmate in the state prison law library, but I was too busy working on my own

Speaker 5 and I got my ass out and they're still in there.

Speaker 5 Hello. I'd like to apologize to the bank manager and to the janitor or cleaning man at the Manufacturers Hanover Trust branch at Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 5 I peed,

Speaker 5 urinated, in the trash can at the little room where they have the automatic teller and 24-hour machine because I had to go bad. And it's very hard to find

Speaker 5 a public restroom in New York City that's clean or at least halfway safe. So

Speaker 5 I used my little bank card and got into the room and I peed in the trash can.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 I'm really sorry I did that, but I had to. I really did.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 9 Did you ever call the line?

Speaker 5 Um,

Speaker 5 no. I, well, I called once or twice, kind of in the early days of our relationship.
I would call from my apartment in Upper Manhattan and I would leave kind of like a flirty, sexy message for him.

Speaker 7 Was it kind of like your way to reach out to him to say,

Speaker 7 This is all very hard and heavy stuff a lot of the times you're hearing on this line. Here I am, you know.

Speaker 5 Um, yes, but I also think think it was, hey, don't forget about me.

Speaker 9 You know, I'm up here.

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 I,

Speaker 5 for whatever reason, I was a very determined young woman, and I decided that Alan was it for me. I was hooked, so I wanted to make sure I was in the running.

Speaker 5 But other than that, I didn't call the line.

Speaker 7 There were all kinds of calls. Some were scary.

Speaker 7 Once, someone called in to say they were going to find and kill Alan.

Speaker 7 Alan had been careful about keeping his own identity a secret, only calling himself mister Apology.

Speaker 7 But Marissa says he went out and bought a shotgun to keep beside his bed after that.

Speaker 7 Some of the calls were really minor, like the person who called in to apologize for stealing toilet paper at work.

Speaker 7 Some were shocking. One man called and said, quote,

Speaker 7 I don't know how to say this, but I should apologize for killing someone. I haven't been able to live with myself since.

Speaker 7 Well, um,

Speaker 12 I for once I think this is really original idea. My name's Mary.
I'm not gonna say my last name. I steal from stores all the time.
I really feel guilty.

Speaker 12 And, like, I can't stop. I'm like, what you call a corrective here.

Speaker 12 I don't know what to do.

Speaker 12 But, like, I can't tell my mother. I've been caught before, too, and I just caught so many times and I've been to court and everything that I can't stop.

Speaker 12 I don't know how I'm going to clean up.

Speaker 12 Well talking to your state recorder makes me feel a little bit better.

Speaker 4 I embezzled $400,000

Speaker 4 from a bank over a period of six years.

Speaker 4 I feel very guilty about it, but I never got caught. I did send

Speaker 4 IRS some money as I felt very guilty to cover certain tax expenses.

Speaker 4 If I have a chance to do it again, I probably would repeat it since I have been able to live like a king.

Speaker 5 One man called and said that he accidentally killed his baby brother when he was a child, that he was fooling around with a plastic bag, a garment bag, and put it over the baby's head.

Speaker 5 And the baby turned blue and died. And his parents always thought it was crib death.

Speaker 5 But it wasn't something that he was looking to confess to the authorities. It's more of something that

Speaker 5 was just so morally wrong. It was a heavy burden that he was carrying for

Speaker 5 decades. I think a lot of crimes that are committed are

Speaker 5 by all of us, we don't think of it as a crime necessarily.

Speaker 5 It is maybe illegal, but it's something that more bothers us in our souls that we have to get off our chest and confess to.

Speaker 9 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 7 A reporter named Stephen Sabin heard about the apology line and called to get in touch with Alan Bridge. He wanted to write a story about it, and Alan agreed.

Speaker 7 While Stephen Sabin was working on the story, Someone called into the line and claimed he'd picked up gay men and brought them to his apartment to rob them.

Speaker 7 And in his message, he said he had killed someone.

Speaker 5 So Alan, of course, told Stephen Sabin about it. And Stephen said, well, you have to tell the police.
And Alan said, well, you know, I just started this line and

Speaker 5 I told the callers that I'm not going to go to the police. So this is a safe space where they can talk about things.

Speaker 5 But Stephen went to the police and told the detectives. And a detective called Alan.
And

Speaker 5 Alan didn't want to give him the information, but Alan had planned on doing an interview on NPR. So he decided that he would play

Speaker 5 that call on the show so that he wouldn't be guilty of giving the tape to the police, but the police could hear it.

Speaker 7 Alan never found out whether any arrests were made. But he did continue to cooperate with the police when certain kinds of calls came in.

Speaker 5 I think he had a healthy understanding of

Speaker 5 what what needed to be kept inside the apology line community and what actually needed to go to the police.

Speaker 7 Did he struggle with that?

Speaker 5 He did. He did.

Speaker 5 He did because Alan got an extraordinary response from people.

Speaker 5 He got people to talk about things that

Speaker 5 still to this day, I don't think I've ever heard the sincerity with which he got people to talk about themselves on

Speaker 5 any other kind of system.

Speaker 5 And I think he did that because he provided them a safe space and a sympathetic ear, someone who had been through things and who had done things and wasn't going to judge them.

Speaker 5 It was very non-judgmental space. And

Speaker 5 I think he struggled anytime he had to kind of break that trust with people.

Speaker 7 He once told a reporter, quote,

Speaker 7 My job is just to face up to the fact that criminals are, in fact, human beings.

Speaker 7 Part of Alan's idea for the apology line was that he would find a way to not just keep the messages on his machine, but to make them public.

Speaker 7 He wrote to different museums around New York asking if he could come play the tapes, and the new museum took him up on it.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 he asked the telephone company to donate four phone booths, which they did, and they were delivered to the new museum lobby.

Speaker 5 And he took out the metal box that contained the guts of the phone, and he replaced that with an answering machine with tapes that were just on a loop.

Speaker 5 So the tapes were constantly running, and you could pick up the receiver inside those phone booths and hear the tapes going. People just couldn't believe it.

Speaker 5 There were lines to get into the phone booths.

Speaker 7 The New York Times published an article about the show and identified Alan only as Mr. Apology.

Speaker 7 Alan had worn a disguise to the opening. And they printed a photograph of the phone booths.

Speaker 7 Alan's show had been a hit. This was in 1981.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 he was a little disappointed that it was more of a she-she art crowd, and he was upset that probably not a lot of the actual callers were able to hear the tapes.

Speaker 5 So he kept looking for another way to bring the tapes to the callers themselves.

Speaker 7 And then he found it.

Speaker 7 By 1983, a few years after Alan started the Apology Line, the technology for answering machines had improved enough that the outgoing message could be longer than just a short greeting.

Speaker 7 Alan had been using this outgoing message to explain what the line was to callers,

Speaker 7 but now it could be almost 10 minutes long.

Speaker 7 So Alan decided that he would pick a selection of the most interesting messages, put them together into a 10-minute program, and play that on the outgoing message so that anyone who called the apology line number could hear other people's apologies.

Speaker 5 And that's really when the community started to develop.

Speaker 5 That was the first virtual community because that's when

Speaker 5 someone could leave a message and two weeks later they could hear it on the line. Other people could hear it and respond to it.

Speaker 5 And two weeks later, you would hear that person's response and then you could respond. So there was a time lag of two weeks, but that's really when the line became self-sufficient.

Speaker 5 And Alan decided, okay, I'm doing this. I'm doing this.
I'm going to create this world for myself and for the community. And whoever wants it, anyone in the world can call and participate.

Speaker 5 And that's what he did.

Speaker 7 Marissa moved in. She remembers that a lot of times when she came home, they'd listen to a call that came in that day together and then have dinner and talk about it.

Speaker 7 Did you think that it was affecting him hearing all of these secrets?

Speaker 5 Yes, definitely.

Speaker 5 There's a point

Speaker 5 sometime in 1983

Speaker 5 where I had made notes. I'd made notes through my whole time with Alan, but I'd put, Alan's voice has changed.
He sounds so much more serious and somber.

Speaker 5 So it did start to

Speaker 5 weigh on him and he did start to take it a lot more seriously.

Speaker 7 Marissa and Alan got married the next year. And she says that not long after, she asked Alan to move the answering machine and apology line equipment out of the main part of the loft.

Speaker 7 Alan made a little office for himself, or as Marissa put it, a control room.

Speaker 7 And it was around this time they started noticing calls coming in from someone who went by Richie.

Speaker 5 And Richie was just like the bane of my existence because

Speaker 5 he became the focus of Alan's life. Richie called and confessed to be a serial killer, that he would pick up men, mostly people that he met at Times Square.

Speaker 5 He, you know, people that he felt were homeless or that no one would miss, and that he would take them home and torture them for days or weeks.

Speaker 5 And then he would kill them and then he would dispose of their bodies. And he

Speaker 5 called for

Speaker 5 a couple of years and would go into great detail about what he did. And over those

Speaker 5 first couple of years, Alan decided that he wanted to either stop Richie from doing what he was doing or catch him. And Alan became obsessed with Richie.

Speaker 5 And they had long conversations over the apology line. And then

Speaker 5 at some point,

Speaker 5 Alan spoke to a detective in the New York City Police Department and they devised a plan on how to deal with Richie together.

Speaker 5 And the plan was that Alan would ask Richie to have offline conversations, like in other words, not on the apology line, phone line, but on Alan's personal phone line.

Speaker 5 And Richie agreed. It took a while and they had these hours-long conversations, and they got Richie's home address, and they got all his information.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 then the police

Speaker 5 started surveilling Richie and, you know, watching him. And they found out a lot of information about him.
But

Speaker 5 To cut a very long six-year story short, they had no proof that he had done any of this. And

Speaker 5 at one point, this is something I didn't find out until much, much later.

Speaker 5 Ray Pierce, the detective, had actually called Richie in for an interview. Alan never told me that, and he must have known.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they brought Richie in for questioning, and Ray said that

Speaker 5 he didn't think that Richie was for real. He thought he was a serious fantasist, is what he called it.

Speaker 7 Eventually, Richie stopped calling and talking about murder, which was a relief to Marissa

Speaker 7 and a relief to a lot of the callers who had heard some of Richie's messages.

Speaker 5 Some callers were very into Richie, but other callers decided: hey, no, this guy's an asshole. He says he's killing people.
I don't care whether it's true or not. I don't want to hear about him.

Speaker 5 So it caused a lot of problems in our life and in the life of the apology line.

Speaker 7 And then the line changed again.

Speaker 7 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 15 I first called the apology line because I had a temp job in Manhattan working for an office products wholesaler.

Speaker 15 And I was... didn't really have anything to do.
I literally had about maybe an hour or two's worth of work, and then I just sat at my desk for the rest of the day,

Speaker 15 and I would obsessively listen to the apology line.

Speaker 15 So I would

Speaker 15 sometimes listen on the speakerphone, and if anyone came by, I would shut it off and then pick the handset up and listen that way.

Speaker 15 I didn't want them to see that I was reading at my desk or doing something

Speaker 15 else beside work because I was afraid that they would actually give me work to do if they knew I wasn't doing anything and I didn't really want to do any work.

Speaker 7 This is one of the apology line callers who prefers to remain anonymous even now.

Speaker 7 She started listening in the early 90s and when she finally decided to call in and leave a message, she identified herself as Gladys Godiva.

Speaker 15 Gladys is actually my middle name. I've always been kind of embarrassed about it because it was so old-fashioned and nerdy.

Speaker 15 And Godiva was a name I chose for myself because of Lady Godiva and she had been known to ride on a horse in the nude and I felt like I was revealing myself.

Speaker 15 I'm a little bit of an introvert. I'm not really comfortable talking to people, which is one of the reasons I was calling the apology line and not really

Speaker 15 talking to friends or making art that I would perform in front of people or anything like that.

Speaker 15 Before the apology line, graffiti is something I used to do all the time in the ladies' room

Speaker 15 or places like that. I would scratch things or sometimes write things with a sharpie.

Speaker 15 And this was kind of an evolution of that for me personally.

Speaker 16 Hi, I'd like to

Speaker 16 apologize to myself

Speaker 9 for

Speaker 16 for spending way too much time and effort

Speaker 16 worrying about men

Speaker 16 and relationships and

Speaker 16 just

Speaker 16 wasting myself.

Speaker 16 I'm thirty I'll be thirty years old

Speaker 12 this year and

Speaker 16 I don't know what I

Speaker 9 I

Speaker 9 I don't have a

Speaker 16 I don't know what I want to do when I grow up

Speaker 16 I don't know what I expect these men to do but

Speaker 16 I

Speaker 16 tonight

Speaker 9 I just have to

Speaker 16 stop wasting my life like this

Speaker 17 Hi, I'd like to respond to the 30-year-old or almost 30-year-old who doesn't want to know what she wants to do with her life. I hear you too.
I was there.

Speaker 17 I turned 30 in September, and I went through a lot of the same things that you did. This can be something that's going to take a while, and just to be patient with yourself,

Speaker 17 just

Speaker 17 Try to find a couple of friends that you trust and spend time with them, probably other women for a while.

Speaker 17 You know, we get so involved with getting involved with these men that we forget all about ourselves. And that's why we end up not knowing who we are.

Speaker 17 And I just wanted to wish you luck and lots of love. And I know that there's something out there that's going to make you very happy.
Thank you.

Speaker 15 It was hard to reveal myself in that way. But I was gratified to see that I wasn't the only person who was going through this this kind of thing because I did feel very alone at the time.

Speaker 7 Here's part of a message she left with a list of things she wanted to say to her ex-boyfriends, but never did.

Speaker 16 I asked you questions about your relationships with ex-girlfriend so that I can determine how much you love them and then rank myself accordingly.

Speaker 15 After I would leave a message, I would

Speaker 15 feel some release.

Speaker 15 I felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind, a part of myself that I didn't want anymore.

Speaker 15 I think everyone had their own reasons for calling into the

Speaker 15 And they could be as honest as they wanted to be. They could reveal dark things about themselves without having to deal with the judgment of other people.

Speaker 7 Do you think it's still an apology if you don't have to

Speaker 7 worry about that aspect of it?

Speaker 15 I think it's a better apology if you don't have to deal with the judgment of other people because you can be more honest with yourself.

Speaker 15 You can really examine

Speaker 15 why you committed those acts without making excuses like you would maybe if you apologize to a person and you're trying to

Speaker 15 seem maybe better than you actually are.

Speaker 15 I think people can

Speaker 15 be overwhelmed by their own guilt and

Speaker 15 apologies are important because they allow you to move on in your life.

Speaker 7 Around the time she started listening, Alan got the idea to start an Apology Line magazine with transcriptions of the most interesting messages.

Speaker 7 The Apology Line had been around for almost 15 years, and the idea was that maybe he could sell some ads in the magazine to support the line.

Speaker 7 Alan was also interested in exploring what it might mean to bring a version of the Apology Line online. This was the mid-90s.

Speaker 18 We're talking about an era where the internet wasn't really even a thing yet.

Speaker 7 This is another caller who also prefers to remain anonymous. He was the one who told Alan to look into internet bulletin boards.
He said he would help as much as he could when he wasn't at school.

Speaker 7 He was about 15 years old when he started calling.

Speaker 18 There was one phone in the house

Speaker 18 and so to do this

Speaker 18 because of where the phone was situated also meant that it wasn't necessarily easy to have like the privacy to sit there and listen to these messages for long periods of time.

Speaker 18 And like, for example, I was, you know, babysitting in those days. So then, you know, when we would put the kids to bed that we were babysitting,

Speaker 18 you know, I would be calling at that point.

Speaker 7 Would you stretch the phone line and kind of take it into your room?

Speaker 18 Yeah. So

Speaker 18 because the phone was in, and that house was in the kitchen right rather than sit in the kitchen i would stretch it but um it couldn't actually reach my bedroom so i used to usually do it in my parents uh my parents' bedroom

Speaker 18 you you're sitting there with a phone pressed against your ear

Speaker 18 and

Speaker 18 there's a sense that these people are talking directly to you

Speaker 18 But then you're dealing with, you know, the reality of these are people that you will never meet, you'll never talk to

Speaker 18 but I think that I just hit a point where I felt like I needed to say something to let them know that you know this kid from from Brooklyn was hearing them and and was you know wanting them to be okay

Speaker 18 I recognized that as I got older

Speaker 18 The opportunity for that kind of thing is they're few and far between as you get older. I mean, you have significant others and

Speaker 18 close friends.

Speaker 18 There are times when there's subject matter that you'd have a difficult time even talking about with those people, right?

Speaker 18 And I think that

Speaker 18 for the callers of the apology line, that Alan created this forum that enabled them to have a safe space to speak about topics that

Speaker 18 elsewhere would not provide that level of safety.

Speaker 7 One frequent caller was a man who called himself Ricky. He started calling in the early 90s.

Speaker 7 raised Catholic.

Speaker 7 I'm hoping somebody that calls in

Speaker 7 can maybe give me some input back what I should do.

Speaker 7 And speaking in a hushed tone because I'm at work now.

Speaker 7 I really feel like I'm very alone.

Speaker 7 I can't talk to nobody about this.

Speaker 7 You know, I've talked to God about this. I hope he understands.

Speaker 7 Hi, this is for the 30-year-old gentleman who is just coming to terms with his

Speaker 4 gayness and is ambivalent and isn't sure what to do.

Speaker 4 All I can say to you from somebody who's been through a similar situation, I'm slightly older than you, I'm 38, raised intensely Catholic with intense guilt feelings.

Speaker 4 A lot of it simply works itself out over time. I think for you, sir, at this point, the best thing for you to do is just take it a day at a time.

Speaker 5 I say you've made the first step.

Speaker 5 I just think that you're going to

Speaker 5 just learn to accept these feelings. There is no shame to it.

Speaker 5 You know, you're not doing something harmful. You're not wishing harm on anybody, including yourself.

Speaker 5 It's love. I mean, and it's and it's it's um

Speaker 5 it's wonderful.

Speaker 7 Another man called in to say that he'd also gone through what Ricky was going through, and he wanted him to know that there were so many people like him.

Speaker 7 Ricky heard both messages on the outgoing program that Alan put together, and he called back.

Speaker 4 You both made me feel a hell of a lot better about myself.

Speaker 4 You really did.

Speaker 7 After that message, Other callers started leaving messages with advice about places he might go to meet people, groups he could join.

Speaker 7 And if you listen to the messages over time, you can tell that he's really doing it.

Speaker 7 He's going to meetings and clubs.

Speaker 7 In one of the later messages, he shares that he finally worked up the courage to go on a date.

Speaker 4 And I have a lot of you to thank.

Speaker 4 And I don't feel guilty about it like I thought I would.

Speaker 4 It just felt great.

Speaker 4 That's it. Bye.

Speaker 7 By 1995, the Apology Line was getting around 100 calls a day. Alan had expanded it to include three lines.

Speaker 7 But then, one day it stopped.

Speaker 5 We had a boat that we lived on

Speaker 5 for short periods of time in Hampton Bays, New York, that's in Long Island. And we would go out there for weekends and stay on the boat.

Speaker 5 And Alan would go scuba diving in the Chinnocock Inlet, which was was a short drive away. And

Speaker 5 that particular day, he went scuba diving and

Speaker 5 I was on the boat. I didn't go to watch him.
Sometimes I did, but I just didn't feel like it that day. So I was on the boat and

Speaker 5 he typically was gone for about two hours. And when three hours went by and four hours went by and he never came home, I started to get worried.

Speaker 5 But I didn't have a car because we only had one car and he had driven there. And the man who ran the boatyard wasn't home.
So I had no way to get over there.

Speaker 5 So I called a taxi, and that took about 45 minutes to come.

Speaker 5 And by the time I got over there, it was probably like six o'clock or something, but it was August, so it was still light out. And I saw our car parked in the parking lot of this restaurant.

Speaker 5 And I said, oh shit, so he's still here.

Speaker 5 And I was walking over to the car.

Speaker 5 And this man came up to me and he said,

Speaker 6 who are you?

Speaker 5 And I said, who are you? And he said, who are you?

Speaker 5 And I didn't answer him. And he said,

Speaker 5 I'm Detective Bookomer from the Southampton Police Department. Who are you?

Speaker 5 And I said, well, this is my car and I'm here looking for my husband. And

Speaker 5 then

Speaker 5 I don't know if what he said next was first or if I all of a sudden heard the sound of helicopters over my head. But he told me that

Speaker 5 this couple had seen someone get hit by a jet ski and they were looking for him. And I knew Alan was dead at that point.

Speaker 5 The strange thing is that no one ever...

Speaker 5 None of us can understand the group of people that were close with Alan at that time

Speaker 5 will understand. But Alan turned the phone line off that weekend when we left, and I didn't know about that until I got back.

Speaker 5 He'd never turned the line off in 15 years, but it was off when I got back to the apartment. And I didn't know what to do.
I wanted to let the callers know that he had died. I mean,

Speaker 5 this was a guy who was available to them 24-7, and they must have been all, they were all freaking out. But I didn't know

Speaker 5 how to run the line or anything. I knew nothing.

Speaker 7 Marissa asked the high schooler who had been helping Alan try to bring the apology line to the internet if he could come over and try to help her turn on the line so she could put out a message letting all the callers know what had happened.

Speaker 5 So he, I think he had a week off of before he had to start back at school and he came to the loft and spent a week trying to figure out how to turn the line on.

Speaker 7 He told us he had no idea what he was doing.

Speaker 18 Alan hadn't actually showed me anything about how the apology line worked.

Speaker 18 I just remembered the day that I went to their house and

Speaker 18 saying, well, I have to do something here to sort of help out. I didn't want to let

Speaker 18 his wife down.

Speaker 5 Miraculously, this young kid was able to get the line running. And then we were able to put a message out telling people that Alan had died and that we would keep them informed of services to come and

Speaker 5 and then people started leaving messages of condolence on the line.

Speaker 7 There was a funeral for family and friends, and Marissa also arranged a special service for all of the apology line callers who wanted to come. It was at Strawberry Fields in Central Park.

Speaker 7 Very few people knew who Alan really was. They just knew him as Mr.
A or Mr. Apology.

Speaker 7 But at the service, Marissa brought his photograph so they could see what he looked like for the first time.

Speaker 5 I didn't know what I would encounter, but

Speaker 5 sorry, this makes me cry.

Speaker 5 There was so much love.

Speaker 5 There were people, so many people there, and some of them were

Speaker 5 in the shadows. Because Strawberry Fields is like a, it's not a huge area.
There's a mosaic that says imagine, and then there's trees around it.

Speaker 5 And some people were in the trees, and some people came up to me. And

Speaker 5 I saw the community. I saw the people.
It was, I felt bad that Alan couldn't see it and couldn't meet them because this was something he created that he'd done with his life.

Speaker 5 And these people were there for him.

Speaker 6 And it was

Speaker 5 unbelievable.

Speaker 7 After Alan died, Marissa had the chance to meet Ricky, the man who had called in and said he was afraid to come out.

Speaker 5 He was really just so, so kind to me, so kind to me. And

Speaker 5 Alan really changed his life. The apology line, and not just Alan, the apology line and the callers changed his life because he came out and he started his new life as a gay man.
And

Speaker 5 it was, you know, I mean, how many times do you get to meet someone that's life has changed for the better because of

Speaker 5 your husband's artwork? You know, it's really cool. It was amazing.

Speaker 15 The apology line was very much of its time.

Speaker 15 I don't think anything like that could exist now.

Speaker 7 Gladys Godiva.

Speaker 15 When you called and listened to the line, because it was on the phone, it was almost very

Speaker 15 confessional. People were sometimes whispering or crying,

Speaker 15 and it was very intimate.

Speaker 15 But I don't think that anything like that could exist now.

Speaker 7 why don't you think alan got sick of it ever just think to himself i did it's it's i got it it's over i think when

Speaker 5 you have a

Speaker 5 a door open to

Speaker 5 all of humanity

Speaker 5 it you can't close it you can't close it i mean he talked um in one npr interview that he did he spoke about listening to the line like looking at a sunset how you never get tired of the sunset day after day.

Speaker 5 It's always different. It's always amazing.

Speaker 5 And he felt like every call was like that, that he never got tired of it because it was something new every day, a new person or something new that a longtime caller was talking about.

Speaker 5 He just thought it was, that it was everything.

Speaker 5 This is apology.

Speaker 4 Apology is not associated with the police or any other organization, but rather is a way for you to to tell people what you have done wrong and how you feel about it.

Speaker 4 All statements received by Apology will be played back to the public, so please do not identify yourself.

Speaker 3 Talk for as long as you want. Thank you.

Speaker 7 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 7 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Segiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Gabrielle Burbay.

Speaker 7 Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Speaker 7 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

Speaker 13 We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

Speaker 7 Once you sign up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too.

Speaker 7 To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com/slash plus.

Speaker 7 We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast.

Speaker 8 We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/slash criminal podcast.

Speaker 7 Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

Speaker 7 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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