Heavyweight Check In 6

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Pushkin.

Hey, everyone.

Before we start the show, I just wanted to make a little announcement.

Heavyweight is going to remain available on every platform, but we're going to be making some extra bonus material exclusive to those who listen on Spotify.

Right now on Spotify, we're offering the hard-hitting and beer-sponsored eight-part investigative series, The Heavyweight Diaries.

And we'll have some other fun bonus content coming later this year.

So if you want to check all that out, you can follow us for free on Spotify.

All right, let's start the show.

Hello?

Stevie?

Yes.

Let me get Khalila on the line.

Hello.

Khalila.

It's Jonathan.

Yep.

Goldstein.

I know.

You're both there?

Hey.

What's going on?

So, you know, I'm at home with my parents.

And my older brother and his fiancé, Miriam, are staying with us as well.

Yeah.

And we're all pretty much on top of each other.

And there's, like, not really anywhere to escape to.

But the thing I'm really enjoying about it, actually, is I've gotten to know Miriam so much better.

She and my brother have been dating for like eight years, but I don't think we'd ever hung out one-on-one before now.

It feels like a Jane Austen novel or something where like your brother's betrothed is staying at the house and like the ladies are getting to spend time together and like go for strolls and stuff.

Yeah, and I'm learning all these little things about her, which I find so entertaining.

She has a terrible sense of direction.

Basically, she can't form any kind of mental map in her head.

She told me this great story about when she first started driving.

She was in the town where she grew up her whole life.

And I got lost and I had no idea where I was going.

And somehow I just decided to follow the car in front of me.

Where were you trying to go?

I was trying to get home.

You were trying to go home and you were just like, maybe the car in front of me is also going to my house.

I didn't know, but I just figured they were going somewhere and they would at least be going like on real roads and going like on the right direction and roads.

But actually, it was a terrible idea and the car in front of me turned onto the highway.

So I just followed them on the highway for like, I don't know, a while.

And finally, I like pulled over in a gas station.

And I was like, where am I?

And it was in Pennsylvania.

And where did you start?

I started in Maryland.

It's pretty extreme.

Like,

she gets lost in restaurants.

If she goes to the bathroom, she can't find her way back to the table.

You know, she's been at our house for a little while now.

And still, like, when she goes on walks in the neighborhood, she has a really hard time getting back.

So, she was telling me that the way she gets around is basically by just stumbling on what she calls landmarks.

There's some bone on the street that's kind of near your street, like near the gutter.

And a lot of times I'm walking and the bone is nearby, and then your house is really close by.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Like an animal bone?

Yeah, like I don't know if there's like part of a chicken bone or like even something a dog was chewing on, but it's been like really helpful because there have been a few times that I'm kind of like a bit lost, and then I look down and there's the bone, and it's like, oh, good.

Wait, what's gonna happen when someone cleans up that chicken bone?

I know, I was like, that bone could be gone like any day.

The bone has been very reliable for like three

or four weeks since I've been here.

Our house, which for me is feeling like smaller and smaller every day,

for her,

it's like completely the opposite.

My experience of walking and moving around in spaces in the world, I do think everything feels really, really huge to me all the time, like unfathomably, like infinitely just

mysterious and kind of unknowable.

And so I think I might be a bit lucky and that I may not be feeling that claustrophobia that a lot of people are feeling right now in in quarantine

I just am fascinated by how she experiences the world and I've actually been doing these sort of like experiments with her where I make her close her eyes and I ask her to point to things that are in the room like the TV or the couch or the kitchen table or whatever

and then I have her open her eyes.

Wait, oh my God, wait, was was all of that wrong?

Because I thought the whole time that I was in a totally different part of the house.

Did you do that on purpose or no?

No, no, no, no.

You weren't trying to trick me.

No.

I was totally shocked to open my eyes and be in your place.

I am not sharing my home with a sister-in-law to be,

but I did talk to my little sister this week.

Oh.

So she's much younger than me.

She's a senior in high school right

Her name's Jaffy.

And I also feel like she has it together in a way that I did not in high school.

Like if I look at pictures of her and her friends, I'm like, wow, they look so polished.

So normally she'd be graduating in a couple weeks because she's a senior, but obviously they're not having a real graduation.

Right.

This week she had

her sort of fake graduation.

What they're doing is they're having all the kids come to the school over the course of three days and they're just filming them walking across the stage.

They were basically like tape lines every six feet and yeah, we basically just walk across stage.

Did they like play music or anything while you were walking across the stage?

Nope.

Like she just walked across a silent stage in an empty room and they were like, okay, that's your graduation.

Yeah.

I guess it wasn't like totally empty.

It was like there were a handful of people there in this very large arena.

Obviously, mom and dad were there, and then they had to wear masks.

And my principal was there to like kind of remind me what to do.

But my principal, he stood really close to me.

And I was like really weird.

The closest I've been to another person besides my family in a long time.

And did it feel like a graduation?

It was pretty anticlimactic.

None of this really feels real.

So

I mean, I feel like you normally get those feelings anyway of like, oh, it doesn't really feel over, but like it really doesn't feel over.

Yeah, yeah.

I assume you're not having a prom.

No, that was one of the first things we canceled.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I feel kind of grateful that I hadn't already bought my dress.

The little things, right?

Dad jokingly was like, well, at least you don't have a date.

It's like, yeah, you're right.

No way I'm getting a a boyfriend in high school now.

Well, I didn't either, so I don't know if that's any comfort.

I didn't have super high hopes for anybody.

Jonathan, how are you doing?

You know, I'm doing okay.

I.

I had a milestone this weekend.

My three-year-old Aggie showed an interest in what I do for a living for the the very first time.

So I invited him into my home studio so

he could feel the magic.

Yeah, yeah, hear it.

Can you hear yourself?

You could see how you're recording when you see those little lines.

When you talk loud, it goes up.

Up.

Okay, that's a little loud.

Mostly what we did was just fight over the microphone.

I just want to hold it.

Let me hold this.

I'm going to hold it.

No, no, no.

I'm going to.

I'm going to.

No, no.

We ended up calling up his grandmother to interview her.

Hi!

Hi!

We're interviewing you.

That makes me feel very important.

What's new?

It's hard to think of new things when you can't leave your house.

I come out of more of a, I guess, public radio tradition.

Sure.

But Augie seems to adhere more to commercial morning zoo aesthetic.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Dung.

Dung who.

Dung, doggy dong.

Yeah.

Ha ha ha ha.

I'm helping Papa.

You are?

I see you have a microphone.

And are you in his studio?

No, I'm in the closet.

But the closet is my studio.

My fear now is that hearing his old man say in that pleading tone of voice that the closet is my studio might be Auggie's very first memory.

Anyway, you know what time it is?

12.

Ad time.

Did you say bedtime?

I said ad time, but I wish it were bedtime.

Wrong again.

It's ad time.

So I was right.

You know why they call them ads?

Because they add a value to your life.

Because they add so much to your life.

And when we get back, you're not going to believe who I talk to next.

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Heavyweight gang.

Yeah.

You remember my old friend James?

He's a successful TV writer living in Toronto.

In season one, we snuck onto a golf course to scatter his dad's ashes.

So one night recently, James began to feel really ill with what he's now pretty sure was COVID.

What's scary?

So his wife decided to seal him off in their bedroom away from their two kids.

And James is feeling much better now, but he's still in isolation.

So I gave him a call to see how he's doing.

And he told me about the weird way that the sickness first came on.

I was doing a jigsta puzzle.

It's a Woodstock puzzle.

And you'd think it's all like hippie, peaceful, it's going to be easy?

No, it was a nightmare, this puzzle.

How many pieces?

How many pieces?

A thousand.

Well, I'm no punk.

I'm no punk.

Anything less than a thousand, that's a kid puzzle.

Anyways, it's a mad, challenging puzzle, and it just, it was really getting on my nerves.

I mean, really, it was pissing me off.

I couldn't get to sleep because I just started, I was getting angry and I felt sick.

And I thought

you thought you were just like sick with anger about the puzzle?

For real, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I was like starting to get, you know, like, oh, my stomach's sick, and I'm mad at this goddamn puzzle.

But at a certain point, did you realize, you know, actually, it's not normal to be getting this upset and this sick over a puzzle?

Eventually about four or five in the morning, I got so cold and I started to shake and I went, oh, I'm sick.

That's what this is.

Yeah.

I was moaning on every outpress like this.

It was like, oh, for hours I was going, oh,

huh.

One night, as I'm going,

I heard people outside being like, what is that?

Like, I was causing a disturbance in the neighborhood.

It was like the exorcist or something.

You know a migraine?

You're in a migraine?

No, but I, I mean, I've heard, I've read about them.

Yeah, me too.

So it's like I had a migraine in my body.

It's like my legs were a migraine.

Everything hurt.

And I said something like, I want to die.

I want to die.

You know, oh, it's just, I did.

I really wanted to die for a good 48 hours.

Kill me.

So the weirdest thing was that in spite of how sick he was and how he felt like he was looking at his own mortality, we spent most of the conversation talking about this movie, this 70s disaster film that he'd seen as a kid and had decided to rewatch while he was recovering in quarantine.

And the movie is

strangely timely because it's about a pandemic and it's called The Cassandra Crossing.

It is one of the worst movies ever made.

It's terrible.

It's like eating bad ice cream.

So wait, so what happens?

So it's...

The Cassandra Crossing takes place on a very sexy, glamorous train from Geneva to Brebra, and it's filled with stars.

And what's the twist that makes a disaster movie?

A terrorist infected with the bubonic plague gets on the train, and he's going to get everybody sick, and they're going to die.

And the government, Representative Burt Lancaster, decides they're just going to kill everybody.

Let's just kill them.

So they stop the train at Nuremberg.

At Nuremberg.

No connotations there.

And they board it up with metal.

The Cassandra crossing of the title is they're going to divert the train over a crossing, an elevated bridge, okay, massive, huge bridge over a canyon, knowing that the bridge cannot sustain this train and they will all plummet to their death.

And they deliberately pump the train full of pure oxygen, which is flammable, knowing that when the train crashes, it's going to blow up.

There's OJ Simpson.

He's playing a priest, but he's actually an agent from Interpol who's tracking Martin Sheen, the drug dealer.

Turns out Martin Sheen's a heroin addict and he goes bananas because he needs heroin, right?

Grabs a machine gun and starts shooting people.

He starts shooting people.

And then, because he's like, I need to stop.

So I get this.

You're going to love this.

There was always a moment like this in all 70s movies where the British actor would act.

So this is Richard Harris's moment to act.

And it's like, so what will you do then?

Will you shoot everyone on the train?

So start.

Start with me.

Shoot me.

And Martin Sheen's like, oh, yeah, you're right.

That's bad.

I shouldn't do that.

Before he was a heron addict/slash dealer, he was a champion mountain climber in Europe.

He borrows some kids' tennis shoes and he goes out.

This is a terrible movie.

So the stunt double is like, I don't know, eight feet tall, and it's obviously not Martin Sheen, but whatever.

Do you know, as you're telling that, like, it sounds as though, like, hadn't you said you saw this movie as a kid, I would think, like, was this a fever dream?

It's very real.

You can probably find it in the delete bin of any gas station.

As Susan Sontag said, the disaster movie gives the audience the opportunity to live through their own death.

Do you think that's why you sought out this movie at this moment?

Hell yeah.

Absolutely.

Because I thought I was...

I don't mean to say I thought I was dying in a histrionic, you know, sort of like melodramatic way.

I was like, I'm dying.

And part of me wanted to die because I didn't want to keep going through what I was going through.

It sounds stupid, but that's what I thought.

As I was coming out of it, shortly before I decided to watch Cassandra Crossing again and realizing, oh, no, okay, you're not only are you not going to die, but it was really stupid to want to die.

That was just the stupidest thing you've ever thought of because

your kids are there.

And yeah, they're annoying, but they're awesome.

And I have things to write.

And I really did have this sense of like, oh my God, it's not over for me.

And I've got shit to do.

I'm actually happier than I've been in a really long time.

And I'm talking like years and years and years.

I swear to God, I've, there's a lightness.

I just feel light in a way that I haven't

ever,

maybe.

How long have you been in there now?

Like a week and a half now.

So I still got more time in here.

Got my computer.

I got my jigsaw puzzle.

Of course, I did, Shelly did bring up my goddamn woodstock puzzle.

Did you continue working on it?

As soon as I was able, as soon as I was able, I was back at that ship.

Wow.

A listener to the show, Cheyenne, wrote in about her boyfriend, Torstein, who she's in a long-distance relationship with.

And Torstein is having a hard time.

He's stuck at home quarantining with a large family in a crowded house.

Stevie, you can relate probably.

Yeah, totally.

I get it.

Yeah.

And so he was supposed to go off to university this fall, which he was very excited about.

But now all the classes are going to be online.

Yeah.

It feels like similarly with my sister, just like a lot of the milestones that people would normally be hitting right now, they kind of aren't getting to have.

Yeah, so he's sad about that.

And Cheyenne says that he's a big fan of the show, and she asked if the three of us could surprise him with a phone call.

Have fun.

Yeah, so

let's do it.

Let's call Cheyenne first.

Okay.

Here we go.

Get ready to bring the sunshine.

Kaylee.

Oh, God.

I want to hear a smile in your voice.

I'm smiling now.

Can you hear it?

It sounds like it's painting you.

It's sort of like that model thing of smiling just with your eyes.

just smile with your voice.

It's called smoises, and this is called smoice, it's smoissing.

You got a smoice

that is such a gross word.

Um, all right, here we go.

Hello, Cheyenne, hi, hello, hi, Cheyenne.

Um, Cheyenne, uh, you'll conference Torstein in.

Um, okay, okay,

super, so great.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hi, did it work?

Torstein?

Yeah.

Hi, it's Jonathan Goldstein.

Oh, wow.

Hi.

Hi.

You know, your very nice girlfriend who seems to love you very much, she wrote into the show and wanted us to say hi.

Thank you.

Wow.

I'm kind of in shock right now.

Cheyenne had said that you'd been feeling a little down in the midst of everything.

Yeah.

My school just got canceled for the rest of the year.

Not like canceled, but like I'm not going to be able to attend it.

Yeah.

So I was kind of bummed.

Yeah.

How old are you?

I am 20.

How old are you?

It makes it sound like you're like attending a children's birthday party.

So I want to say, I just want to tell you, I mean, I don't know if this takes the pressure off, but truly, nothing matters in like at least until 25.

That does help.

Yeah, you're not not going to remember any of the things you're learning now anyhow.

I mean, I don't know that I totally subscribe to the whole nothing you learned will ever mean anything.

I'm just trying to inspire.

It's not necessarily that like attending class is a shame as much as like there's like 11 people in my house right now.

You know, I was supposed to move out and go to school, but

because of the coronavirus, I'm having to stay at home for another semester.

And

I love my home, but you know, I want to move out and live my own life.

Have you never been out on your own?

Not like I haven't lived on my own.

So that was something that you were excited about?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have eight older siblings and I grew up in a room with

my three older brothers.

Whenever one moved out, I would move up to a different bed.

You know,

there's the nicer beds in my room and the less nice beds.

So I think that

individuality is something that I

decently desired.

And it'll happen, but it just feels like it got postponed a little bit more.

But I think you will probably end up looking back on this time with all 11 of you living in the house as an incredibly

like a kind of moment of grace almost.

You know, it's going to take on a a certain kind of sweetness.

Right.

It might be hard to see now.

But I think I do see it to some degree.

I'm never going to have another chance to live with the three siblings that are home right now and

nieces and nephews that are living at the house right now.

There's joy in

playing games with them and

talking to them.

Yeah.

They probably think you're really cool.

They're better.

My first niece entered the world when I was 12.

And 12-year-old me was like, I want to be called Uncle Awesome.

And that's just stuck.

So for the rest of my life.

They all call you Uncle Awesome?

Yeah.

All the time?

They're also only 12 years younger than you.

And I like the idea of you being like 50 and being

in their late 30s, and they're still like, oh, yeah, Uncle Awesome.

No, no, no, no, no.

By that point, they'll be more mature.

They'll probably cut out the uncle and just call you awesome because they have like an adult relationship with you.

Yeah.

Shane?

Yeah.

Is there anything that you wanted to say?

I'm really proud of you and everything you've done.

And I can't wait to see where you go on this long, long journey of life and the short little journey of college that's a little shorter now.

But

I'm crying.

Why am I crying?

Please.

I love you.

I love you.

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