The Moth (20 page)

I felt like I was actually broken. That things could happen in life that would just break a man. And that not only wouldn’t you be stronger, but you would never ever again have what you had before. And I felt like things had slipped in a way that I would never be able to recover.

And this girl that let me move in with her was getting a little worried because I was just so sad all the time.

To try and make money, I would gather my little set of chisels and tools and go up to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where there’s always some billionaire working on his mansion. I would see a construction site, and I’d go up and knock on the door and ask if they needed anybody to work, just a day
laborer. And the foreman, you know, he’d see a guy with his own tools, who knows his way around a job site, English is his first language, and he’d be like, “All right, put him down there and see what he can do.”

And I’d go, and I’d start working. I’d be in this incredible mansion that was being renovated, and I’d look around at the unbelievable materials, and I’d think of how lucky these people were to be living there. When we were done with this work, they’d be surrounded by amazing craftsmanship.

So I’d be there working, and I’d be making a mortise for an offset pivot hinge in a rosewood door, and the beauty of everything that I was working on contrasted with my life, and I would just start to cry. And so I’d be on my hands and knees, sobbing.

And one of the laborers would go tell the foreman, “The dude you hired, man, he’s sobbing in the library.”

And the foreman, usually, you know, an Irish guy, would come and say, [
in an Irish accent
] “Eddie, I can go ahead and pay you for the day. Go and have a drink, man. We don’t need you anymore.” And then that would be it, I’d get fired.

I was getting fired again and again. And these people didn’t know what had happened to me, they just knew they couldn’t have some guy weeping in the basement. I couldn’t hold a job, and I was getting angry.

The Canadian poet-bartender—she’s my girlfriend now—and she’s worried because my attitude is becoming not so good.

One day I leave a site after being fired once again. I walk out onto Park Avenue, and I see this guy walking by. His hair is perfectly coiffed, and his tie is knotted, and his shoes are shined, and he’s in this impeccable suit with his shiny briefcase.

And I see that guy, and I just want to tackle him and kneel on his chest and punch him in his face and go, “You know,
you’re not good! You’re just
lucky
, man. You think that everything you know and all you’re doing is keeping you where you are; but you’re just lucky, because it can all be gone, you can just lose it!” And I have this rage towards him.

I don’t do anything—I let him keep walking—but I’ve just wanted to hurt an innocent stranger, a passerby, to make a point about what is wrong with my life.

And in that moment I realize I’ve lost who I was before. I’ve become more like the kids who stabbed me.

It’s incredible to feel like you’re not who you used to be. I was going down a road where I was going to meet the guys who were my attackers. And I was going to be in hell, because I would go there alone, because that path was just bitterness.

And for the first time I realized I could
never
get back to where I was before: that guy, that business, that whole life was just
gone
. I had lost it. But up until that moment I had never believed that I had lost it. I had always thought I was going to get back to being that guy again.

As I sat there, I thought,
I’ve got to do something
new.

It felt liberating. It was like,
All right, I can’t go back, because that’s gone. And I don’t want to be evil and bad. I’m going to do this new thing. I can do it!

And then I remembered,
I have this girl.

And I run home, and I’m like, “OK, I’m not going to be the sad guy, and I’m not going to be the mad guy. I’m going to change, and we’re going to work this out—will you marry me?”

And she’s like, “No! You need a little more work here,” but she’s enthused by my enthusiasm.

And she knows I’m never going to ask her again. So after about another year and a half, she feels like we have something,
and
she
asks
me
to marry
her
. And so we do. And we end up building this routine again, and setting up a life.

And now we have a two-year-old daughter. And I put her shoes on in the morning, and I head out to work.

In his day job,
Ed Gavagan
is the owner of PraxisNYC, a design/build firm practicing across a broad spectrum but specializing in boutique residences. Ed creates homes and furniture for fancy people and humble folk the world over. He is a founder of Design Starts Here, an architects’ collaborative that offers free design services to the public from a pop-up storefront in Manhattan. Two weeks after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Design Starts Here mobilized a fund raising effort, and Ed traveled with a three-man team into Haiti on a relief mission, delivering tons of food, medicine, and clothing to refugees, clinics, and hospitals. In 2009, Ed began telling stories with The Moth at a StorySLAM in Manhattan. From there, he has won a Moth GrandSLAM and contributed to The Moth Mainstage events, The Moth iTunes podcast,
The Moth Radio Hour
on public radio, and various Moth outreach events. He designed and built The Moth offices in 2011. Ed gave a TED talk at TEDMed2012 based on one of his Moth stories. He was one of forty innovators invited by Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the United States, to participate in the Safety Data Initiative organized by President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Ed lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

ADAM GOPNIK

T
he story I want to tell you tonight is a simple story about myself and my son Luke. Some of you may have read about him over the years. I write about him often enough. And the truth is we’ve always been pretty good friends. Father and son, of course, but we’ve always shared a lot in common. We lived through Paris together, and we love football. I’ve taught him to love hockey; we even love the same hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens.

But recently he turned twelve, and in New York City, because everything is a little accelerated, twelve is really thirteen. And when thirteen happens to kids, as you all know, something profound changes. They begin to become adolescents; they approach being teenagers. And the bond, no matter how strong it is, between a father and son, or a mother and son or daughter, begins to change. It begins to alter. And suddenly they become more distant from you.

And it’s like—if I can even use the word in this context—it’s sort of like the mortality of parenting. That is to say, you know it’s going to happen, but you can’t believe it’s going to happen
to you. You think,
It happens to other people, but it won’t happen to me.

And so about a year ago Luke started coming home from school at three o’clock. I work at home, and I write. Three-fifteen I would open the door, and I would do the thing that no parent should ever do, but that no parent can resist, even though you hear the chorus of parents past behind you saying, “Don’t do that!” The doorbell rings, and you open it, and there’s your twelve-year-old, and you can’t help yourself, you say, “How was your day at school?” And the twelve-year-old hunches his shoulders and droops his head and walks into his room without saying a word, and the door shuts.

Now you know what’s going on on the other side of that door; he’s on his computer. You sort of wish you could smell the healthy whiff of marijuana or hear the sounds of adolescent groping because that at least you can connect to from your own adolescence. But there’s not a chance of that. They’re on their computers; they’re instant messaging each other, six or seven at a time, talking about just what big schmucks their parents are. And that’s appropriate.

And you never learn! The doorbell rings the next day at three-fifteen, you open it, and the great chorus of parents past chants, “Do not ask the question!” And like Oedipus you do the thing you’re never supposed to do, you say, “How was your day at school?” And you get a shrug, and he walks into his room and shuts the door. Well, I understood it. And I knew that he was back there in the silence instant messaging his friends, as I say.

Now, instant messaging is something that I could not understand. I couldn’t understand the appeal of it, and I couldn’t understand the prevalence of it. Because the truth is when I was twelve years old, we used the telephone all the time. We had a
series of phone conversations with everyone we knew. And it always seemed to me that had the telephone come second and the instant message been the thing that Alexander Graham Bell invented a hundred years ago, there’d be no question that the telephone call would be the huge technological breakthrough. If Steve Jobs had invented the phone call, it would have been on the front page of the
Times
the next day, and there’d have been giant back-page ads everywhere you looked talking about “Finally, real voices! Real communication!”

“Liberate yourself from the pressure of the keyboard. Hear your sweetheart talk!” It would have been the great breakthrough of the twentieth century. But because that was the nineteenth century, kids only instant message. That’s the only way I can understand it.

Well, Luke is always insisting that I download software—Skype, or Limewire—and he insisted that I download AOL Instant Messenger, and I did. And I had it on my desktop. One day he comes in, I ask the question, he walks into his room, the door shuts, I go back to my little study, and I’m writing, and suddenly I hear a
ping
on my screen. And I look down, and it’s an instant message from Luke.

“Hey, Dad! Wuz up?”

And I write, “Nothing much. Wuz up with you?”

And he says, “Oh, I had a terrible day at school.”

And right away—he’s fifteen feet away from me—we have the conversation that he denied me at the door five minutes before. And I realized, of course, what it was really all about. The appeal of instant messaging is that you control—the child controls—the means of communication. You’re not accepting the three-fifteen third degree. You’re claiming the right to control your own conversations.

And so every day from then on it became a sort of ritual. It was practically Japanese. Doorbell would ring, I would open the door, Luke would come in, we would bow at each other, he would say nothing. He would walk into his room, shut the door, I would go back to my office and shut the door, and about thirty seconds later a
ping
would go on, and it would be Luke.

“Hey, Dad! Wuz up with you today?”

And we would instant message each other and have a conversation about our days. And sometimes we’d actually be sitting on the same bed watching a hockey game together, instant messaging each other in total silence.

Now I loved instant messaging, once I’d gotten the hang of it. I loved the simplicity of it, I loved the autonomy of it, and I loved the language of abbreviations that instant messaging has. And Luke taught me all of the abbreviations: “brb” means “be right back,” “U2” means “you too,” “g2g” means “got to go.”

And then there was one that he didn’t even have to teach me because it was so self-evident and that was “LOL.” And I knew right away that it meant “lots of love” because he put it at the end of every message that he sent me. And even when I sent him a really sententious message (you know, one of those “Just do the things you’ve got to do, and then you’ll be able to do the things you want to do. I had homework too.”), he would always write back, “OK, Dad. LOL—Luke.” And I was really moved by this because even when I was lecturing him, he was able to absorb it in a mature way and send “lots of love” back to me as he thought about it. And I thought,
This is such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the twentieth century because it’s like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody you know.

And for the next six months I was infatuated with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission, and I sent “LOL”
to everybody I knew. My sister was getting divorced out in California, and I wrote to her, “We’re all behind you and beside you, LOL—your brother.” My father got ill, and I sent him “LOL” in Canada. Everybody I knew at work, at home—
everyone
—I sent them “LOL.” I was an instant messaging demon.

Well, one evening I’m in the lounge at LaGuardia waiting for a plane. I have to travel a lot to speak. And I was IM’ing with Luke, and he and I were discussing this. And I was really full of emotion. I hate traveling, I don’t like being away from the children. And I wrote to him, “Luke, I just want you to understand that every weekend I’m away is a weekend I hate, but I have to do it to live the life we want to live and to make money for us. LOL—your dad.”

And suddenly on my screen, there at midnight in the lounge in LaGuardia, I see coming across my screen giant letters, like an incoming message from NORAD—
Bombers are on the way!
—and it says, “DAD! WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU THINK ‘LOL’ MEANS?—LUKE”