Puppets, Pastors & Secret Agents: The Moth Radio Hour

In this hour, stories of considering "what's in a name," a dangerous CIA mission, and the rise and fall of an unusual musical act. This episode is hosted by Moth Senior Director Meg Bowles. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: What started as a joke on social media becomes a passion project for Brently Heilbron. As the Chief of Disguise at the CIA, Jonna Mendez breaks a cardinal rule and becomes visible. Esau McCaulley prepares for the most difficult eulogy of his pastoral career. Podcast # 1000

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles, and in this show, we take to the stage at America's Got Talent, go on a mission with a former CIA operative, and stand with a clergy member as he prepares for one of the hardest eulogies of his career. Our first story comes from Brently Hillbrun. He told it in Austin, Texas, where we partnered with the Paramount Theater. Here's Brently, live at The Moth.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  About a year before I was born, my infant brother, Brian, passed away of what they used to call crib death. And in the Jewish religion, you often take the first letter of the dead person's name, so I was named after him. And I always felt like I had two lives to live. I put this enormous pressure on myself to succeed, because to fail meant I failed not just for one life, but for two. And in spite of my best intentions, failure just seemed to follow me around. I failed at so many first dates. I wasn't particularly great in school,

• 1:26Speaker 01

  and then I pursued a career in acting, which is just a series of failures. And I got married in my early twenties, and when my marriage ended up failing, I was at the lowest point I had ever been at. I felt I let down my wife, and my kids, and the big brother that I never knew. Now, I'm a classic, sensitive artist type, so I really tried to write appropriately Moby songs to meet the moment. But my sarcasm always got in the way. And so one day, it just manifested itself as a Facebook post that simply said,

• 2:08Speaker 01

  "I'm gonna start an emo puppet band called Fragile Rock."

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Within minutes, I started getting notification after notification. People wanted in. Now, keep in mind, this project did not exist, but here were respected people in the Austin creative community that wanted to be a part of it. And the first person to respond was a guitarist that said, "I'll be in that band." And then, within the comments, the band fleshes out with bass and drums, and an old friend volunteered to make puppets. And then, by the end of the post, I was, in fact, in an emo puppet band called Fragile Rock.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  So I started to research, like, where these characters look like. And we came up with the tortured lead singer Milo S. with the bangs and the eyeliner, and the good-natured guitarist that's always auditioning, and the Kim Gordon-inspired cool of the bassist. And we made a video for a song called "I Am Sad and So Am I",

• 3:20Speaker 01

  and started playing around town and getting some notoriety. And soon, we were asked to play at South by Southwest.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Right before the festival, some nerdcore sites like Nerdist and Boing Boing started picking up stories about us, and buzz began to grow. And even NPR ran a piece about us. And that led NPR's Bob Bowles to come to our show and offer us a Tiny Desk Concert on the spot.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  A Tiny Desk Concert for an emo puppet band. And it hit me, is this what I'm gonna be known for?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  All those years of serious works produced nothing? Like, I can't be known for my searing portrayal of Laertes in Hamlet, or like a pretentious one-person show where I play Lenny Bruce meeting Salvador Dali in heaven? No. An emo puppet band was the thing. And I felt like I was failing at success.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Not long after, I got a message on Facebook that said, "Hey Brently, I'm a senior producer at America's Got Talent, and we would love Fragile Rock to audition for us." And I'm like, "We have performed in front of 100 to 300 people, but this is freaking ABC, and they have 10 million viewers per season. I mean, this is the thing that's gonna put us on the national map." But there's one catch. We had to mask everything but the puppets. And that's not what we did. We... It's a very Strings and All kind of project.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Fragile Rock, you see the band, you see the puppets, the puppeteers. You know, it's very Brechtian, which is my attempt at pretension creeping out again.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  But we figure, what's a little change when TV comes a-callin'? So we figured it out, and then we load up in a van. We head to Dallas for the audition, and they have us at the Fairmont Hotel, which is pretty posh. And when you audition for one of these shows, they put you in this room with like every kind of auditioning act imaginable. It is a total carny hellscape.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I am overwhelmed, and I am exhilarated. And we audition, and I'm crouched down, and my arm is outstretched, and I am not a trained puppeteer. And this position, over time, hurts like hell. But we audition, and we keep getting called back. And then, a couple days later, I received a two-word text, "You're in." We were going to America's Got Talent. Within a week, we are flying out to LA on AGT's dime. Three musicians, seven puppets, puppeteers, a coven of significant others.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And when we get there, the producers start oozing with these confidence-building questions, like, "When you win the contest?" Not "if," but "when you win this." "What are you gonna do with the million dollars?" And suddenly, this thing that, like, I never knew I wanted, became the most important thing in the world. And I was certain we were gonna win.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So we're behind the curtain, ready to go on. The band is 25 to 30 feet away. We're usually right next to them. I can't see or hear them, no problem. And I'm giddy, and I'm nervous, and I'm a little bit frantic. And I'm crouched down. We have these TV monitors to kind of see what our puppets look like. And I can hear the rumblings of 5,000 people in the audience. And then I hear Simon Cowell say something to one of the celebrity judges. And on that night, we had Mel B., Scary Spice,

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Howie Mandel, Canadian, and my childhood comedy hero. I had all his records. We had Heidi Klum, supermodel, and of course, the infamous Simon Cowell. And I noticed our mics aren't quite working properly, and my stomach drops, like I'm on a roller coaster. And I feel claustrophobic for the first time, cramped down behind a partition. But the curtain rises, the band starts playing, and we start singing. And it would've been great if we had played and sang at the same time.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  That first buzzer, "Ehhhh," came in hard and fast. And I can't see it, but I know there's a big red X in front of one of the judges. And I'm like praying it's not Howie Mandel. We stumble on for a few more seconds, and that second buzzer comes like lightning, "Ehhhh," and that's when the boos start.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  First, a confident group by the judges, and it grows by the thousands. We stumble on like a wounded gazelle, and finally, that third buzzer comes and puts us out of our misery. It is over before it began. And I just wanted to slink offstage and head back to Austin, but oh no, I forgot how these shows work. You see, even after the mercy killing comes the feedback.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Now, keep in mind, these are just our puppets that they're going to be talking to. We are still crouched down, mortified.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  The first person to speak was Mel B. She said, "This is just too mean. I don't like mean." And I'm like, "Holy shit, I am too mean for Scary Spice."

• 10:05Speaker 01

  The second to talk was Howie Mandel. And he said, "This project is totally without merit. Whoever came up with it should be embarrassed and ashamed." And I'm like, "Oh, Howie, it was me. It me." That one hurt. Now, I don't remember what Heidi Klum said, but up next was Simon Cowell. And I try to preempt this nightmare by having my puppet say something like, "Hey, Simon, I'm just like you. We're like misunderstood geniuses that everybody hates."

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Crickets. In fact, he seemed to inhale my comment, like the sea sucks in the tide before a tsunami hits.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And then he said, and I will never, ever forget this. He said, "If I were a dead toddler, then maybe I would enjoy this terrible thing."

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And I think to myself, "Jesus Christ, that's the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me."

• 11:46Speaker 01

  But I didn't think it. I said it out loud.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Into the microphone.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Completely breaking character.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  It was a natural reaction to the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And we were then invited to rise

• 12:21Speaker 01

  so we could take it all in with our human eyes,

• 12:27Speaker 01

  where I got to see the stone, angry faces of celebrity judges at the scorn and rejection of 5,000 pissed-off people.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And when we got offstage, a producer clarified that what Simon actually said was "deaf toddler," not "dead," but it hardly made it better.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, here's the kicker. The show was so bad, such an epic fail, they didn't even air it.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Right? Here's a show built on people failing, and we didn't make the cut.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I failed at failing.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  When I got back to Austin, though, a realization hit me. When you are in an emo puppet band built on the foundation of divorce, failure is kind of baked into the project, you know?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So we leaned into it.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  And we started putting the judges' quotes on our promotional materials.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Fragile Rock: Totally Without Merit.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Fragile Rock: The Embarrassed and Ashamed Tour.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  You know, I put myself out there on a national stage, and it could not have gone worse.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  But I put myself out there. You know? And I think that that's the thing that people regret. Not going for it. Not trying.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I think anyone here, where at their bones, will tell you that the road to success is paved with many, many failures. And I had a brother named Brian who never had the chance to fail. But I think we can all agree

• 15:21Speaker 01

  that I have proudly done enough for both of us. Thank you.

• 15:32Meg Bowles?

  Brently Hillbrun is a writer and performer based in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring with Fragile Rock, he works as a high school drama teacher, helping grow the next generation of creators. After Brently left the stage that night in Austin, the host got up in front of a sold-out crowd, 1,300 people.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  We may not be a crowd of 5,000, but I want y'all to tell, to show Brently Hillbrun what the sound of 1,300 loving and adoring and supportive fans sounds like. Give it up one more time!

• 16:17Speaker 02

  That's what I'm talking about!

• 16:18Meg Bowles?

  I was in the audience, and I gotta say, it was a wonderful moment, and one I know Brently appreciated, especially since Austin happens to be his hometown.

• 16:34Meg Bowles?

  Fragile Rock's failure on America's Got Talent didn't stop the world's only emo puppet band. They just celebrated their 10-year anniversary and released a new album called Micro Famous. You can find out more about Brently and see pictures of his Fragile Rock adventures on our website, themoth.org.

• 17:12Meg Bowles?

  Coming up, a woman comes face-to-face with a notorious terrorist when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 17:36Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. Our next story comes from Jonna Mendez, who took the stage at the Somerville Theater in Massachusetts, where we partner with local public radio station WBUR. Here's Jonna Mendez.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  So I was standing in a hallway outside of the Oval Office in Washington, DC. I was standing there with six men I didn't know. I was chief of disguise at the time at the CIA, and I was wearing a disguise, but they had no idea. It was slow because the meeting in the Oval was going long. We were gonna go in and brief President George H.W. Bush, and we were kind of stuck for a few minutes. Then finally, the doors opened, and we went in. And the President is sitting in the Oval Office, behind the Resolute Desk, with these wonderful windows behind him.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  He's backlit. And there was a semicircle of chairs in front of that desk. There were six chairs. And I went to the one that I already knew where to be. I had to step very carefully across the presidential seal in the carpeting. I didn't want to step on it. Took my seat. Everybody else took their seat. And I went first. This was the President's morning briefing. I was going to give the first speak, and then I was going to be the first one to leave. I was wearing the first animated, full-face mask that my disguise office had produced, and I was going to brief the President wearing it. And he had no idea.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  I took him pictures of himself when he had been head of CIA. Oh, he had a mustache. He had some different glasses. It was a small disguise. I said, "We've gotten much better since you left." He said, "Like, like what?" I said, "I'm gonna take it off and show you." He said, "Wait, wait. Not yet." And he said, "Okay, take it off." And I did the Tom Cruise peel, way before Tom Cruise did it. And I had the mask up in my hand, up in the air. The hair is still attached. It's a face, and it's hair. The men in the semicircle, some had been listening, some had not. Johnson Nunu, who was next to me,

• 20:19Speaker 04

  had not been listening. And he let out, I don't know if I would call it a shriek or a squeal.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  He was startled, and next to him was Bob Gates, who had also been with CIA, and he just smiled. And on the far end was Brent Scowcroft, who was kind of scowling at me, holding my head up in the air. There was a White House photographer in the room, and she was going around taking pictures. It was a moment. This was something we'd worked on for 10 years, and we were very proud of. So first one to brief, I was then the first one to leave. I went out to the outer office, where the President's dog, Millie, had just had puppies, and I was actually on the floor, playing with the puppies, when the photographer came out and said, "What did you just do?" Now, I know she took the pictures, because I could hear the shutters clicking.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  And I said, "I can't talk about it. It's classified." I was in CIA's office that resembled Q in the James Bond movies. We made all the toys for James. We made all the audio bugs, all the disguises, secret white concealment devices. We didn't think a lot of James. He wasn't technical. But we made him whatever toys he thought he needed, and we were more than happy to provide them. So that in this office of Q, I was one of the very few women that was working my way through it. I started out in clandestine photography. I had been a photographer when I joined the CIA, amateur.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  And I was now teaching foreign agents around the world in how to use our cameras to collect intelligence for the United States government. Now, you think camera, but you don't know what I'm talking about. My cameras would fit in a lipstick, a cigarette lighter, a key fob, a fountain pen. You could put it in a button behind your-- you could put them anywhere. And so I'm training all of these agents in how to use those cameras, how to be safe, how to get the information back to us. It was an interesting place to begin. Because I was in the CIA and undercover, everything I did, every trip I took, every operation I took part in,

• 22:42Speaker 04

  I was typically using false documents, false name, and false look. I was wearing disguise everywhere I went. The foreign agents that I was training, they all knew me as Jane from Washington. That was my cover name. It was not very exciting, but it worked really well. There was a lot of obfuscation. There was a lot of problems with neighbors and good friends who had no idea where I worked or what I did. And so I told a good number of lies to them to try and cover the constant travel that I was undertaking. It was a bad method

• 23:26Speaker 04

  of keeping your old friends, but I made a lot of new ones. And eventually, I moved on to disguise. Disguise was a fascinating new field that I wanted to be in. I went to Hollywood and got involved with the areas of deception, illusion, and magic behind the scenes in L.A. So we were playing both sides of the game. We could provide almost anything that our case officers needed to do their jobs. Always undercover, always with false documents, always with disguise. The whole point was never to be seen. You wanted to be invisible.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Being seen could get you killed or the foreigners that you were working with. This was a dangerous, dangerous game. So I was visiting a CIA station in the subcontinent. I was there to do a routine photo assignment. And the chief of station said, "We have an emergency. I've been contacted by a terrorist, who I met once before, when he was in some real trouble." And he's in trouble, this terrorist. He is being sought by his-- his own terrorist organization is chasing him. Interpol is chasing him. The security service of the country that we are in right now is chasing him. This man is desperate. He is dangerous. And he's telling me

• 24:55Speaker 04

  that he knows of a plan to bring down an American commercial jet. I have to meet this man. If there's information, I have to get this information. So suddenly, we go into high gear. He said, "I'm not going to meet him in true face. I need a disguise." We sent-- I sent some people out to buy him a shawar kameez, which is the local costume of the city that we were in. I colored his hair black. I gave him horn-rimmed glasses, a little bit of makeup on his too-pale skin. I gave him a big cigar and a file. And I said, "The meeting's in that hotel. You walk in the lobby like you own the place." I mean, with authority. Just go in there.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Ahead of him, six CIA officers. I was one. We went ahead of him to set up around the lobby. He said, "I'm scared to death of this guy, and I'm not going in there alone. I want eyes on what's happening." So we went ahead. We set up all around the lobby. Somebody was at the bar. Somebody was reading a newspaper. And I went in, and I saw a rug shop at the back of the lobby with three walls of glass. And I thought, "Perfect. It's a glass box. I will park myself in there. I can see the lobby." I start looking at rugs. The men start serving me tea. I'm counting knots. I'm looking at the lobby. I glanced up to my right,

• 26:22Speaker 04

  and to my right, across a hallway, through a glass wall, and then through another glass wall, in the newsstand is the terrorist. The terrorist was a little man. He was about five foot four, wearing his shawar kameez. And he was staring straight at me. I'm kneeling on the floor. He's in the newsstand. And he staring at me was like a laser. He had the most penetrating look, and he just held my gaze. You're not supposed to make eye connection in a scenario like this. Eye connection is recognition. It's personal.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  You don't ever do that. But I was frozen, as it turned out. I couldn't break it. And he wanted me to know that he knew. He wanted me to know that I was seen, that he saw me. I haven't mentioned that he was flanked by two really big-- what would you call them? They weren't soldiers. They were poshtuns, I think. And they had Kalashnikovs, long guns. Imagine a Hyatt Hotel lobby with a little man in a shawar kameez and two guards with long guns. No one in that hotel was walking up to this man and saying, "Excuse me, sir. Could you put the guns down?" Everyone was scared of this guy. He's looking at me.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  I'm frozen. And all I could think was, "This is possibly-- this is it. They will possibly kill me. It will mean nothing to them." And I found myself hoping that if they killed me, that I would be made a star in the CIA's lobby. We have a whole wall-- we have a wall of stars, and every star represents a CIA officer that's been killed overseas, usually undercover, in the line of duty in a foreign country. And I thought, "Oh, my God. That's how you end up on the wall."

• 28:36Speaker 04

  I briefly wondered what my insurance company would say, learning that I had been killed in alias. I wasn't sure-- you know, in a false name. I wasn't sure how that would work. But that was a brief moment. I was scared to death. I almost couldn't breathe. My heart was racing. My pulse was pounding. I was cold, but I had sweat running down my back. My heart was in my ears. I had never been that close to that kind of evil, and it simply was stunning. And while I sat there frozen, he broke that look,

• 29:20Speaker 04

  turned on his heels with his guards, and walked out into the lobby. And I watched him go, and I thought, "This is what luck looks like. If you ever think you're lucky." That was the day that I thought I was lucky. Doing the kind of work that I did cost me a lot of things. It cost me a lot of friends. None of my neighbors, none of my friends back then knew what I did, where I was, who I worked for. It's probably one of the reasons that a lot of people at the CIA, we marry each other. We know who we can trust, and they're the people inside that building with us.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Over the years, I changed. When I first came to CIA, I was a young female officer looking for a job, something worth doing, something that would make a difference. Over time, the job, the work changed me entirely. I discovered that my ambition receded and that my need for recognition disappeared. I discovered that invisibility actually suited me. I traveled all over the world. I came back to the States and eventually was promoted to deputy chief of disguise, and then to chief of disguise,

• 30:45Speaker 04

  where my duties included managing a worldwide staff that was rather difficult to manage. And I enjoyed-- I enjoyed the work very much. After I retired, I hung a picture in my library, rather discreetly, a picture of that moment in the White House, in the Oval Office. And what you see in the picture is the semicircle, the group of men, the woman talking to the President. And before the masks that I was wearing, before those masks were declassified, people would stop in, and they'd look at that picture. And they'd say, "Who's that--

• 31:30Speaker 04

  who is it-- did you know her? Who's that woman in that picture? Was that a friend?" And I would say, "Well, yes. Thank you. I knew her very well. I knew her very, very well. We were really, really close." Thank you.

• 31:58Meg Bowles?

  Jonna Mendez worked at the CIA for 27 years and retired as Chief of the Disguise Division. For those 27 years, she lived her life undercover with the recurring fear that she would die and no one would know who she really was, and the people she loved wouldn't know what happened to her. She would just disappear. She said her most interesting work happened when she was in Moscow, where she developed masks that could basically make a twin for a CIA officer. For instance, an officer would be under surveillance by the Russians, and they might walk into a store and the Russian surveillance team wouldn't follow them in, but rather wait for them to exit. And when the officer who was in the twin disguise would exit the store, the surveillance would

• 32:43Meg Bowles?

  follow them instead, leaving the other officer free to get on with their important work. She said her work in Russia was her favorite, maybe because it was her most difficult. Lives were really on the line, and for officers, disguises were like body armor. Since retiring, Jonna does a lot of speaking engagements, and at one such event at the Spy Museum in Washington DC, a former officer came up to her and asked if she remembered him, because he remembered her. He'd come to her spy lab for a disguise, and he told her that he always hoped their paths would cross again, so he could tell her thank you, because the disguise she made for him saved his life.

• 33:25Meg Bowles?

  Jonna Mendez is the author of a memoir entitled "In True Face" and is currently working on a novel inspired by true events from her days in the CIA. You can see pictures of Jonna and find out more about her on our website, themoth.org. And while you're there, why not pitch us your story? Stories, big or small, we'd love to hear from you. To pitch us your story, you can go to our website and look for "Tell a Story," or you can call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-MOTH. The best pitches are developed for Moth shows all around the world.

• 34:03Meg Bowles?

  Coming up, a man uncovers the deeper story of his namesake, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 34:40Meg Bowles?

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. Our final story comes from Esau McCauley. He told it live onstage in Canada, where we were presented by the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Here's Esau McCauley, live at The Moth.

• 35:00Speaker 05

  My first name, Esau, is not one that you hear very often. In fact, I've never met anybody in person who shares my name, apart from my father, who named me after himself. We got our name from my grandfather, who was a Baptist minister, and he got this idea in his head. He wanted to give his son a biblical name. But there was a problem. He couldn't read. And so, he decides he wants to let the Lord choose the name. And so, he goes and he grabs a large Bible, and he points his finger at the word. Now, my family had one of those old King James Bibles, and I've always thought my name could have been like thou or wither. But it lands on the word Esau. I kid you not, probably from a line

• 35:45Speaker 05

  from the Book of Malachi that says, "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated." But my grandfather gives that name to my father, who in turn gives it to me. Now, for those of you who don't know, Esau is the older brother of Jacob. There's probably tons of Jacobs here living their best lives, because Jacob is the hero of the story in the Bible, who goes on to have a great future. Esau, by contrast, is the unchosen, the one whom nobody wants. He actually trades his future inheritance for a pot of stew. Growing up, the kids in my church used to make fun of me, and they would say to me, "Why are you named after the loser in the Bible?" I used to have this fear that I was going to make

• 36:28Speaker 05

  some big mistake that was going to cause everything to unravel, kind of like the biblical Esau, kind of like my father. My earliest memories of my dad, the guy who shares my name, was his addiction to drugs. I remember when I was about nine or 10 years old, he came home one night, and he was high on something, and I heard him screaming. And so, I slid into the bottom of my transformer sleeping bag. It glowed in the dark. Optimus Prime was in the center, and Optimus Prime was the one who protected the innocent. But that night, Optimus had failed, and I heard this crash outside of my room, and I was so worried about my sisters and my brother and my mom, I got out of the sleeping bag and went into

• 37:09Speaker 05

  the hallway. My father had punched a hole in the wall. My mom was on the other side of the locked bedroom door yelling, "Our shared name. Esau, Esau, get out of here before the police come." And that's that familiar, that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, when the police arrived before things got too bad. And they did, and they took him to jail. And that was kind of my childhood. My father was in and out of jail. But over time, the addiction switched from something violent to something much more depressing, like this diminished man, husk of a man, who was just looking for his next high. And as a result, I grew up without him. He promised he'd come to my high school

• 37:49Speaker 05

  graduation, and he didn't show up. He also missed my college graduation, and my wedding, and the birth of my four children. My wife gave birth to them. I was just there. Okay. Nonetheless, I managed to make something of a life for myself. And despite the name Esau, the unchosen, I actually became a clergy person, maybe because in the absence of my father, there was the church that was there for me as a source of hope or joy, maybe even the presence of God. I wanted to give that to other people. Eventually, my father did manage to get clean, around the time that my sister, my older sister, was getting married. And despite the fact that he missed my wedding, he showed up for hers. And people who know addicts know that addicts are rarely one thing. They're not

• 38:33Speaker 05

  just the person who's addicted. They can also be funny and charming and quick-witted, the person who everybody loves. And it was that version of my father who showed up that day, and everybody was having a good time. I remember we're taking photos, and the different groups were coming in and out to look at the, to meet with the bride and the groom. And me and my father, we were waiting our turn, and we found ourselves sitting next to one another for the first time in years. And so, I turned to him. I wasn't angry anymore. The anger had long ago shifted to curiosity. And I said to him, "Dad, why did you leave us? Why not have this all the time?" And he looked at me, like it was a question that

• 39:16Speaker 05

  he knew he was eventually going to have to answer. And he said to me, "Son, I don't rightly know. No revelation, no grand special moment." But after that, we tried to stay in contact. We called each other on our birthdays. I called him on Father's Day, and we said, I said, "I love you, Dad." And he said, "I love you, son," not because we felt close to one another, because that's what you said when you were a family. My family and I moved to Rochester, and my father got a job driving a truck. And he was going to Buffalo, it was about an hour and a half away, and he said, "I'm going to stop by and see you all on the way back." And for the first time in my life, he kept the promise. This huge

• 39:59Speaker 05

  18-wheeler came rumbling down the road. It scandalized my fancy neighborhood I was living in. In those neighborhoods, you can only have an 18-wheeler if you're coming in or if you're moving out. You can't visit an 18-wheeler. But the 18-wheeler stopped in front of my house, and I stood there in the doorway, and my poor children saw the truck, and they were amazed by it, and they ran past me to the truck, and they climbed to the inside, and they were shocked by the idea that you could drive a truck and sleep in the back, because there was a bed right there, and they had the time of their lives. They honked the horn, and it was just some kids playing with their grandfather. And it was just so ordinary, I could cry.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  A few weeks after that visit, I got a call in the middle of the night. It was my sister, Latasha, my older sister. She was weeping. She told me that my father had had a heart attack while driving the truck in California, and his 18-wheeler had veered off one overpass down to the other, and he had died on impact. And I sat there, listening to my sister weep, not knowing what to do. The next morning, I got a call from my mother, and she told me that my siblings and her had been having a conversation, and they decided they wanted me, the clergy person, to deliver the eulogy.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  And for those of you who don't know, clergy have a particular job in eulogies. We have to tell the truth. They have to put their story of the person in the context of the wider purposes of God. We normally sit down with the friends and the family, and we say to them, "Tell me about the person who has passed away. Help me understand their story." I would have to do that with my father, someone I barely knew. I'd sit down with my mom, my sisters, my brother, my aunts, and my uncles. I did the work. I did my job. I sat down, and my uncle told me this story. He told me in 1957, their father, Gus, the one who named us, Esau, he came home one day, and it was cold, and so he lit a fire in the fireplace.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  And that fire quickly got out of control, and it shot up the wall. And on the other side, where the fire was burning the brightest, were twin boys who were asleep in their bedroom. And despite my grandfather's valiant attempts, he couldn't get in to save them. And he was forced to flee with the rest of his family while the two boys burned to death inside. My father was born a few years after those flames, almost a replacement child. But there was a problem. Any mistake that he made was cast against what those boys would have been. They were smart. They were charming. They were funny. They were the future of the family.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  My father, Esau, was cold, aloof, and a failure. He was, for most of his life, actually, Esau, the unchosen, the one no one wanted. I sat down at the dinner table with my uncle, and he told me about the last time they spoke with their father before he passed away. And my grandfather said to my dad, "You're only ever going to cause your mom pain." Then he passed away. The day that my father died, he called my mom. He had been attempting to win her back over the years to zero success. And he said, "Baby, I'm going to win you back." And my mom says, "I don't got time for this.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  I'm going into a movie." And my father strangely turned somber, and he said, "All I can do is pray." And he died 10 minutes later. The eulogy took place at the church where I grew up, where me and my mom and my siblings that tend to most every Sunday usual about my dad. But that Sunday, we're actually all together. I stood in the pulpit. My father was in the casket. My family was weeping in the pews. But I stood up, and I did my job. I told the story.

• 44:15Speaker 05

  I told about the ways in which his addiction shaped the early years of my life, and how it harmed me, and it took me a long time to find forgiveness. But also told them about the wrongs done to him as a child, and that sometimes monsters aren't born, they're created. But also told them about his getting clean later in life, and the fact that he apologized to me and my mom and my siblings for the things he had done wrong, and how he kept thinking that everything was going to turn out all right at the end, that he was on his way home to his family, but he ran out of time. He ran out of road.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Sometimes we don't get the fairy tale endings that we might like, but our wonderings are instructive in their own right. I finished the eulogy, and I sat down, not knowing whether or not I had failed or succeeded. But my father's story and our relationship had been something I had been drawn to my whole life, running it over and over in my head, trying to make sense of it. And I think during that eulogy, I found a sense of an ending, some empathy for him and some peace for myself. I have two boys, and I named them Luke and Peter. I want to know what names. No drama. But you know what?

• 45:42Speaker 05

  I have read the story of Esau and Jacob probably more than anybody who walks this earth. And while it is true, it is true that Esau makes tons of mistakes, and that he does cause a lot of trauma. But it is also true that in this story, Esau was manipulated by his brother Jacob. And as a result of that manipulation, Esau threatens to murder his brother, leading to over a decade of estrangement. But when they finally meet, Esau doesn't take revenge. He runs to his brother, throws his arms around him, hugs him, and kisses him. Esau finds his way to forgiveness in the end. The people were wrong.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  Esau was not a failure. Neither was my dad. And if I could do it all over again, I would probably name one of my sons Esau III. Thank you.

• 46:47Meg Bowles?

  Esau McCauley is the pastor of a church in Naperville, Illinois. He's also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. He's the author of a memoir entitled How Far to the Promised Land and a children's book entitled God's Colorful Kingdom Storybook Bible. Esau said that despite the fact that he chose to end the Esau tradition by naming his son Luke, his son has repeatedly said that he plans to name his son after his father. So maybe one day, there will be an Esau Daniel McCauley III.

• 47:28Meg Bowles?

  You can find out more about Esau and his podcast for Holy Post Media on our website, themoth.org. There you can also find and share the stories you've heard in this hour and others from The Moth Archive. You can also find information about the events we host year-round and follow us on all the major social media platforms. Find a show near you and come out and tell a story. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. Thanks again to all the storytellers in this hour, and thanks to you for listening. We hope you'll join us again next time.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co-producer is Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The Moth's leadership team includes Christina Norman, Marina Cluce, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinalle, Caledonia Cairns, Kate Teller, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Ureña.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Honey Yakan, Roland Gulliver, and all the folks at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Fragile Rock, Epidemic Sound, and Blue Dot Sessions. Podcast music production support from Davey Sumner. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn all about The Moth, go to our website, themoth.org.