Episode 201: Invisible Suitcases

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• Writer Damon Young Compares Living While Black To An Extreme Sport

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  Damon Young is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Very Smart Brothas, a senior editor at The Root and a columnist for GQ. He’s also the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker,” a provocative and often funny memoir written as a series of essays. Through the course of the book, Young explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be black, and a man, in America today.

  In the opening essay, “Living While Black Is an Extreme Sport,” Young writes about the Polar Bear Plunge, an annual event that happens every New Year’s Day in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Hundreds of people strip naked and dive into the Monongahela River.

  “And Pittsburgh isn’t Wisconsin but it’s usually pretty cold that time of year and so they’re basically jumping into a Slush Puppie, butt-naked into a Slush Puppie,” Young told WPR’s “BETA.” “And without even knowing the people who do this, without even seeing this, I’m certain that the image that pops into your head is that these are most likely white people.”

  “And I think that one of the reasons why black people aren’t as interested in those sorts of activities is because just existing while black already provides enough thrills that we don’t have to invent them,” he added.

  Young said there are many things that take the place of “cave diving or bungee jumping or shark wrestling” for black people.

  “When you’re getting stopped by the police or even when the police just follow you, and just all of the stuff that exists, all of the stuff that’s going through your head while that’s happening — ‘Is my music too loud? Was I going too fast? Am I wearing the right clothes?’ And these things don’t make really any difference but that doesn’t stop them from going through your head and just the absurdity that exists when you’re having these thoughts and you’re having these reactions, that’s where the extreme sport analogy comes in,” he said.

  In another essay, Young writes that when he was 17, there was nothing he wanted more than for someone to call him the n-word.

  “When I was 6 or 7 years old, my parents basically started a race riot at this neighborhood deli in Pittsburgh because the white kid who was working behind the register called my grandmother and my mom n——.”

  Young’s mother and grandmother went up the street to find his father. When they returned to the deli, Young’s father asked the kid to apologize. He didn’t. And “the race-riot-to-end-all-race-riots starts. And this is a deli so there were olives used. There were deli meats thrown. There were jars of jelly smashed,” Young recounted.

  Nobody was seriously hurt but Young’s parents and grandmother were arrested. However, they were eventually released because one of the police officers was a black woman with some sort of authority.

  “And so hearing the story when I’m a kid made me a little jealous because I had never been called that to my face before. And I wanted a story like the one my parents had, about being called that and reacting in a way that kind of quote-unquote proved their blackness. It almost became sort of like a rite of passage for me in my head,” he said.

  “And my parents weren’t the only ones that had that type of story. Some of my friends did, some of my other family members did. You would read sometimes in the paper or watch on the news about situations where a person was racially harassed and then they ended up turning the tables on the harasser,” Young said. “And again, as a kid and as a young teen, I wanted an experience like that to be able to, I don’t know, just to be able to possess that, almost like some sort of video game where each level you go at, you get like a different award or you get like a different like sword or something and I wanted that.”

  When it finally happened to him, he was in his senior year at Penn Hills High School, waiting for a bus. A red pickup truck went by and as it did, a man stuck his head out the passenger side window, looked at Young and screamed the n-word at him.

  “I’d been waiting this long for this thing to happen and now I didn’t even have an opportunity to react. After it did happen, I kind of just really and pretty immediately recognized how absurd it was for me to want to be called this very terrible thing. And so since then, and again we’re going back to when I was 16, 17, that desire has basically dissipated where I don’t need to experience that to have any sort of measure of my own racial identity,” he said.

  In an essay called “Living While Black Killed My Mom,” Young writes about the death of his mother, Vivienne, from lung cancer in 2013. She’d been a smoker for 30 years and quit smoking about five years before she died. Young said that in the years before his mother received her diagnosis, she experienced severe back pain, constant headaches and stomach aches, which he now knows were symptoms of her cancer.

  “But when she would go to the doctor sometimes, her pain wasn’t taken as seriously as I think it should have been,” Young said. “Where, you know, maybe they told her to take some Advil. Or maybe they told her to stop drinking so much pop or to get some more exercise. All those things are helpful, but I do wonder if they would have treated her differently, if they would have taken her pain more seriously if she wasn’t a working-class black woman, if she were maybe an upper-middle-class white woman.”

  In this essay, Young writes that “America is a serial killer of black women.”

  “My mom unfortunately is not unique. This is a thing that happens with black people, black women specifically, in America, which is this advanced country. The infant mortality rates for black women are terrifying. There are studies that still show that even doctors still believe that black people have more of a tolerance for pain than white people do,” Young said. “You know, our life expectancy is lower than it should be here. There are so many things that you could cite, so many actual like facts and studies that have proven these things that have been circulating in my head and this feeling that I have about my mom.”

  The final essay is called “Zoe,” after Young’s 3-year-old daughter. In this essay, he writes about how as she grows up, Zoe will be exposed to Toni Morrison, Beyoncé, bell hooks and “Black Panther.”

  Which raises the question, when will Zoe be exposed to Young’s book? “When she’s able to read. Now some of the chapters, maybe I’ll wait until she’s in high school. When she’s able to understand what’s in the book and she wants to read it, then yeah, I’m sure she’ll be curious about what Daddy does for a living.”

• Writer And Podcast Host Nora McInerny Balances Heartbreak And Happiness

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  In the span of about six weeks in the fall of 2014, writer Nora McInerny miscarried her second child, lost her father to cancer and then her husband, Aaron, to brain cancer.

  “Not the best time in my life,” McInerny told WPR’s “BETA.” “It was just a series of terrible events.”

  That’s a huge amount of anguish for anyone to handle and McInerny admits she is still grappling with heartbreak today. She says the shock of these tragic episodes put her brain into a kind of autopilot and packaged her grief for her to untangle later.

  “Also, I had an almost 2-year-old child and the thing about kids is, even if your world has completely fallen apart, they want to eat breakfast,” she said.

  When she finally began to absorb her deep loss, she became a “reluctant expert” on grief and set about creating a space for these delicate conversations.

  She released a memoir (“It’s Okay to Laugh“) and launched the podcast “Terrible, Thanks For Asking” that she hopes is a tonic and necessary resource for folks coping with sorrow of all kinds.

  “We talk to regular, everyday people about a thing that they’ve gone through or are going through and we tell their story with empathy, but without pity and give them the space to be,” McInerny said of the podcast.

  The title (a rejected name for her memoir) also highlights a central error code in the human psyche that bottles up grief when asked how we’re doing.

  “When we give everybody in our life the same answer, it makes it really, really hard for people to be there for us. It really creates this prison of loneliness and I experienced that,” McInerny said.

  As she approached the tour for her memoir and the launch date of her podcast, McInerny also fell in love again. Or as she puts it, simultaneously.

  “I found myself really struggling with the knowledge that I was happy and that it felt in direct conflict with my grief.” she recalled. “I had not had the experience of being in love with two people at the same time before.”

  Furthermore, McInerny became pregnant with her new husband Matthew’s child. She expressed deep reservations about heading out on a book tour for a memoir on grief, while newly pregnant.

  “I truly thought that I am going to stand up there with this record of my love for Aaron and people are going to see that pregnancy and think ‘Yeah right, can’t be too sad.’”

  Nora channeled this tension between what she thought she should be feeling and what she did feel into her newest memoir, “No Happy Endings.”

  Like her previous output, McInerny hopes the book will open up honest discussion that there is no template to life and no right way or wrong way to handle your pain.

  “The way that we talk about grief, we use a lot of common phrases. Things like, ‘You’re moving on’ and ‘There’s a happy ending;’ ‘There’s a silver lining to this,’ and the fact is, Matthew is not the ending of Aaron. Matthew and our family as it exists now is a new beginning,” said McInerny.

  She felt herself challenging the prevailing attitude on love that it can only be directed at one person until divorce or death at which time you are allowed to pour it into someone else.

  “I still love Aaron so much and I love Matthew now,” McInerny explained. “A part of me was afraid to be happy and I was also afraid that it meant that somehow this new relationship discounted what I had with Aaron and what I still feel for Aaron. Even more than that, I was afraid that other people would think that Aaron was over for me.”

  From the outside, McInerny’s family looks like something straight out of central casting, but she understands the painful places her family is forged from and wants them to know it’s perfectly fine to be of two minds about those conflicting feelings.

  “I want the kids to know it’s OK if this love we have, this family we have, this happiness we have — if that is complicated for you, that’s OK.”

  She is also well aware that life is messy and more heartache is ahead. In fact, one of the most wrenching chapters in her memoir and episodes of “Terrible, Thanks For Asking,” is McInerny reflecting on the death of Matthew’s brother.

  “I have not filled up my tragedy punch card,” she says. “It’s not as if I got 2014 out of the way and now it’s smooth sailing.”

  However, McInerny knows heartache and happiness are intertwined and that tension is what shapes us.

• How Run-DMC, Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' Collaboration Changed American Music Forever

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  In 1986, Run-DMC were rap superstars while Aerosmith was a ’70s rock band on its last legs. But when the two groups teamed up to record a mashup of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” they changed the course of music history. The Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers documents the saga in his book, “Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever.”

  The original version of “Walk This Way” was featured on Aerosmith’s third album, “Toys In The Attic.” The band recorded the album at the Record Plant in New York City. They had basically finished recording the album, except for one catchy backing track that they had not yet written the lyrics for. So the band members and producer Jack Douglas decided to get some fresh air and took a walk to Times Square.

  “So they walk around that whole day and for some reason, they went and saw ‘Young Frankenstein,’ the Mel Brooks movie,” Edgers told WPR’s “BETA.” “And if you remember that scene, Igor meets Dr. Frankenstein. He met him and he said, ‘Walk this way.’ And you know, he’s all hunched over. I don’t know if that’s a PC joke anymore but then Dr. Frankenstein hunches over. And so when they got back in the studio, they thought that was hilarious. And that became the chorus.”

  “The song itself is really, it’s almost like a pre-rap rap. It’s got the rhythms of like a hip-hop song in some weird way, the way (Aerosmith lead singer) Steven Tyler does it,” said Edgers.

  It’s impossible to determine who came up with the idea for this historic collaboration between the band and Run-DMC, Edgers said, but his reporting indicates that it was probably a combination of three people who were friends.

  “The person who gets credited the most is Rick Rubin, you know, the super producer who produced the record. But Rick Rubin was also talking to Sue Cummings, who was an editor at SPIN Magazine. And she was talking to a guy named Tim Sommer, who was a friend of Rick Rubin’s from (New York University). And I think it was one of those conversations where like Rick Rubin had an idea that melding rock and rap was going to be a good idea. Somebody in the mix said ‘Well, why don’t you get the guys from Aerosmith?’ which Rick Rubin, I think, thought sounded crazy. He loved Aerosmith from the ’70s and they were heroes to him. And since nobody had done this before, it didn’t sound like he’d be able to get Aerosmith. He was like, you know, Tyler and (lead guitarist Joe) Perry won’t do that.”

  Edgers said that Rubin “felt like there was a ceiling already for what you could do in punk or hardcore. And he didn’t feel like there was a ceiling creatively and also popularity-wise of what you could get done in hip-hop or rap. And so that’s what intrigued him — the idea of pushing against that boundary of something new.”

  The opening “Walk This Way” beat had been used for years in hip hop.

  “But the thing that’s important is that nobody in hip-hop used the song to the point that the lyrics came in,” Edgers said. “So like when Steven Tyler started singing, that song was done. And you were a bad DJ if you allowed it to get to that point. So one day, Rick Rubin walks into the studio and he sees Run (Joseph “Run” Simmons) and D (Darryl “DMC” McDaniels) there and he says, ‘What are you doing?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just working on a song.’ And they had ‘Walk This Way,’ the beat, on the turntables. And they were doing what they wanted to do. They had the beat and they were going to do like ‘We’re Run-DMC/It’s a place to be.’ They were going to do their own rap over the beat. And Rick Rubin said, ‘You know that’s Aerosmith, right?’ And they’re like ‘Who?’ They didn’t actually even know it was Aerosmith because the way the DJs did it is they took a record and they would scratch out the song title because they didn’t want people to steal their beat. So what they knew was ‘Hey, this is number four, Toys in the Attic.”

  Rick Rubin gave Run and D the record, a notepad, and told them to go listen to the song in D’s basement and transcribe the lyrics.

  “When they heard it for the first time, what they said was ‘This is hillbilly bull-bleep.’” (Editor’s note: See footage of the recording session below)

  “Walk This Way” became the first rap song to be played on mainstream rock radio. It also revived Aerosmith’s career.

  Edgers said that this collaboration changed our culture.

  “Hip-hop became part of our culture, which it hadn’t been before. So ‘Yo! MTV Raps’ emerges after that. On TV, you’ve got ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’ You’ve got ‘In Living Color,’ you’ve got Arsenio. And, you know, on that record, ‘Raising Hell,’ it’s the first hip-hop merchandising deal, which is ‘My Adidas.’ And Adidas paying Run-DMC a million dollars to market their sneakers.”

  “Hip-hop, which had been like a secret and on college radio,” said Edgers, “suddenly became the central way that our culture processes art and music.”

  Editor’s note: Below are two video clips of the recording sessions. Some of this footage contains graphic language.

  Video: Geoff Edgers, courtesy MTV.

  Video: Geoff Edgers, courtesy MTV.