From WPC Chicago. This is American life. I'm out of class. I know how it is to beat somebody.
I know how it is to pull the trigger, you know, like, drive by the stuff. I know it is pull the trigger. I know what it is to. I know where to stand in the middle of the street like a stop sign, you know, throwing no gang signs, expecting a bullet to come to you, somebody to just whack you the head or something, you know.
From the time he was 13 until the time he was 17, Arnie's life was organized around one thing. The Latin Kings, a huge street gang here in Chicago. Then when he was 17, some kids dragged him to youth group and church services. Until one day, he felt the presence of the Lord and he believed.
And Arnie quit his gang. He still organized his life around one thing, but now the one thing was God. But when you quit in a street gang, one of the problems that you face is that your former enemies do not know that you quit. They see you on the street and they come after you, and you don't have your gang protect you anymore.
You know, there's no way. Liberty. No, you know, you can't just publish a notice in the Federal Register in the classified as your local paper. And so guys kept coming up around you on the street trying to fight him or shoot him.
Once, for example, some gang kids came up, and I only happened to be walking with a guy who was a friend of theirs. So he jumped in front of me before they were gonna shoot me. And he goes, no, he's a Christian. He's a man of God.
He's not a king anymore. That's king of the right to be. And the guy was like, no way. I know him.
He ain't no Christian. So he was like, move. And he was gonna hit me, right? I was very hit.
People just run, you know, it's like, elbow him here, you know, punch him here and make a. So I can get out. It's like when I was ready, boom. Take control.
Just start fighting. But I just like, wait a minute. No, I'm not gonna do that. God has changed me.
I'm a new creation, like I said in the Bible. Therefore, anybody who's in Christ, a new creation go. Has gone. The new has come.
And I am the new that has come. I just looked around, I was like, hey. I just. I just said, look, I'm a man of God now.
You know, you do what you gotta do. You know what I'm saying? But I don't gang bang no More. And soon I hope to see you in our church prison doors together.
So he was like, man, so he got mad, real mad. He said, forget you, man. And he walked away. And his boy walked back to the car and he was gone.
To me, trying to tell me a lot of these stories. And they're all like stories in the Bible. You know, the stories where Paul goes out among the non believers and they want to hurt him and he's filled with the Holy Spirit, the Bible says. And for some reason, because I guess he filled the Holy Spirit, they can honor him.
Sometimes I think his life is not like his stories. The one I like the best is Stephen in the Book of Acts when he got stoned. That's just. That's.
I love that story because I feel like. Like Stephen is me. Yeah, like I'm Stephen. Like.
Like I'm not. But I just. Like we got the same spirit, which you do. But like, it's like Stephen, like how they have him ready to persecute him and he's like, he's not afraid to tell the truth.
In other words, he's down for his, you know, he's willing to live and die for what he believes in. Just like when we will to live and die for gay man. Because you, you know, like, like, you know, I was like, you know what I'm saying? That's.
You gotta live and die for that crown, right? And that's what he was like. He was like, for God, you know, our Lord. So he's.
He's there, he's being down for. He's standing up firm, you know, he's like, I don't care what anybod, you know, when you're on the street, I don't care. I'm a 19k, what's up? You know, I don't care what's up.
You know, they beat their chest with their gangs. I know what's up, what's up, you know, I'm disabled. They're not afraid or ashamed to say who they are. There are people from everything in the world that one thing, one idea, one belief.
And they organize their whole understanding of the world around that belief. The belief might be God or free market economics or animal rights or the ozone layer. Some people structure their lives around collecting old records or around sex or theater or politics or Star Trek or basketball. I've been one thing person.
Maybe one person too. Arnie certainly was. And his new one thing, the Lord filled the same place in his life that the old one thing the gang used to, you know, Sometimes I want to give it all. Just like I give it all to my gang, you know, I want to give it all to him.
Believe in double. You know? I want to. I want to die for the Lord, you know?
I don't care if he crucified. I don't care to shoot me. You feel the same way? Yeah, exactly.
It's like I have the same mentality and the same heart when I was for a different reason than a different person. Well, today on our program, one thing. People. People organize their lives around just one idea and the price they pay for that.
Fact one, when you one thing is your ex girlfriend. Fact two Inescapable logic. What happens when you take a utopian vision of nudism. Yes, nudism.
To its logical end. As you want things. The true story of a nude presidential candidate. Pack three More than One thing.
How journalist Philip Wise came to agree with some conspiracy theorists but decided not to follow the cause. Act four Quitting. Quitting regrets from a former one thinger. Stay with us.
Act one Life Without Leanne. Let's start a show with kind of one thing behavior. Most people at some point or another have gone through themselves, taken perhaps just a step or two further. They must have taken it.
Good evening and welcome to Life Without Leanne. I'm Larry, and this is day 683. That's nearly 98 weeks since Leanne and I broke up. Funny, each time I fall in love, it's always you.
We're gonna start out, as always with our Leanne Watcher of the Week. My kudos go out to Mike of Evanston, Illinois, who called in with this eloquent report on a brief encounter I with Leanne on April 28th. Hey, Larry, I love the show. Listen, I ran into Leanne last week.
She lost some weight, but she's still beautiful, you know. She said she's been exercising, you know, taking classes, doing this, doing that. But it appeared to me that she was struggling to fill some void. Your name didn't come up, but, you know, it wasn't so much what she said as what she didn't say.
Thanks, Mike. I think we all know what she was trying to say. I wish it all could be such good news, but unfortunately, Operation Terrible Mistake not been the success that we anticipated. And I'm afraid we may have to rethink our strategy.
As you may recall from our April 20 program, the objectives of Operation Turbo Stake were One, apply societal pressure. Two, foster emotional uncertainty. Three, precipitate reevaluation and ideally, four, achieve reconciliation when I brought up this plan, I suggested the following conversation starter. You know, when you run into Leanne on the street or something, I suggested you say something like, leanne, I was so sorry to hear about you and Larry.
You make such a wonderful couple. So I don't mind telling you I think you are making a terrible mistake. This is my own personal opinion on the matter. Now, unfortunately, a number of well meaning individuals took this suggestion more literally than I intended and repeated it verbatim till the end.
And some of it sounds like you were practicing it. And it created an effect other than the one I desired. I've now received word through an intermediary that Leanne requests that I quote, call off the zombies. We will honor her wishes as always.
Though I must emphasize I cannot be held responsible for the behavior of individuals acting on their own initiative. Thank heaven all little girls, all little girls get bigger every day. When Leanne was little, number 36 in the series, at a regular Monday lunch, Leanne's mother told me a cute story. She says that when Leanne was 7, she fell while roller skating and badly skinned her knee.
There was no permanent scar, unfortunately. In an effort to console her, Leanne's mother recalls telling Leanne, if you don't stop crying, your Boo Boo's going to think you don't like him. And that's why to this day, Leanne endearingly refers to minor cuts and scrapes as Mr. Boo.
I got the minutes of most recently an anonymous meeting, which I'll read to you now. It was our first meeting at Gansbase. The partner Mark richly accommodated by closing off the back rooms, applying extra folding chairs, all in attendance. Praise the wisdom of moving these meetings to my apartment, which some of them had complained was not a nuclear territorium.
It was getting kind of cramped. In any case, on a related matter, Mark told me privately after the meeting that he appreciated our patronage, but he asked that in future we try not to monopolize the jukebox or at least try to play a variety of songs. He threatened to remove all the Hank Williams selections if we just need some improvement. So let's all try to work some pets climbing there or something, okay?
Meeting started out, we ordered the first round and Tom's suggestion we dispense with the reading of the minutes. We proceed immediately to old business. They continue to be on Leanne's eyes and whether they are turbulent sea green or sand like moon blue they are, by the way, sandplike moon blue. But when it appeared there'd be no middle ground on the issue, Dick stood up and announced, hey, you know, like Elton John, who cares if they're blue or they're green?
Those are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen. The motion to adopt its language carried unanimously. And we collect more change for the jukebox. We ordered another round and conversation turned naturally to the rest of Leanne.
Her quirky, perky nose, her funny sunny smile, the pretty curve of her neck, her soft shoulders and so on, until petty jealousy preluded further discussion. Soon thereafter, we took a break over some refreshments. Then it was time to walk with new members. This stubby and not particularly attractive man who had been spy with Leanne as recently as mid January, stood up and he said, my name is Harry and I love Leanne.
Harry then related his long, sad tale, the details of which we are all too familiar with her. He ended with that same old refrain. She met this guy, she said. She's deliriously happy.
That prompted Gunther. You know, Millie doesn't speak very often to speak up. She's deliriously happy, he said, staring into his beer. That guy is doomed.
Those of who could still laugh about it did. Really? Harry said, so you think then there's a chance I could win her back? This question property extends to debate leading to the inevitable threats of violence.
And it only cease when Quentin moved that we change the name of the group from Lovers of Leanne to Victims of Leanne. That most resounded feat, of course, and we voted to adjourn. Elmo closed the meeting by seeing Olie Anne, including this new verse that he had recently come to him in the dream. I have a recording.
Holy Ann. I love you, love you still I love you I love you I. I love you still I always will. It's about Lian.
Okay, A Leanne announcement to my special friend Jane, who has been so supportive during this difficult time, has suggested that there might be a need for a group addressing concerns of the lovers of the lovers of Lian. Anybody who knows somebody who might be interested in such a group to have them write to Lian and on care of the station. We all know what that music means. It's time for this week's Lian challenge.
Leanne is what she eats. But how well do you know what she eats? Everybody knows Leanne like horseradish and her hamburgers. But what kind of horseradish?
Okay, here's a hint. She received a case of it last Christmas. The answer to last week's challenge was. You guessed it from left to right.
I know a lot of People thought that was a trick to that question, but there wasn't. Stop. Woe. Yes.
Wait a minute. Just propose me. Wait. Wait.
Just a postman. It's time for the mail. The mail we have this week with entries to the candid Leanne Photo Contest. I think I need to remind everybody that the rules clearly state that Leanne must be the only person shown in the photograph.
In case any of you want to submit, I'm going to extend the deadline for two weeks until May 23rd. Please remember, entries can't be returned. Oh, first letter. One of our far flung correspondents, Miles, writes from Lexington, Kentucky.
I'm going to be in town in the near future, and I was hoping to finally meet this Leanne I've heard so much about. Do you have her phone number and address? Write her directly. Well, Miles, is really no need for that.
Why don't you just send your correspondence to Leanne, care of me, and I'll make sure she gets it? And we also have a letter here from Reggie of Buffalo Grove, Illinois, who writes in, and I think it's very interesting. We've got a number of letters like this. He writes, larry, isn't it time you got on with your life?
It's been nearly two years since Leanne broke up with you. Actually, we're a couple weeks before that. But anyway, he says it's been actually two years since Leanne brought up with you, and I hate to tell you, pal, but it's over. O v e R But listen, he says, there are a lot of other chicks in the sea, my friend, and they're yours for the picking.
Go for it. Well, Reggie, I don't know quite how to answer that. It's difficult to determine exactly what it is you're driving at. I mean, I'm afraid I don't share your bitter perspective, and I don't really get all your playground aphorisms, but please understand when I suggest this, you know nothing about love potential.
Reg, your Larry Lovely anti T shirt is in the mail. That's it for Life at the end this week, and let's hope it's the last week. I'm Larry and I love Leanne. Whenever it's early twilight, Larry Doyle writes for the Simpsons, which isn't known.
He now loves Becky. Funny, it's not a star. I see. It's always you act two inescapable logic.
When you seize by one idea, by one thing, it's not like you choose it. It's like it chooses you. And often one thing has a logic to it that seems inescapable. These are perfectly logical, consistent systems once you get inside them.
You know, macrobiotics, Mormonism, the JFK assassination theories. This is the story of someone who found the logic of his one thing irresistible, and he followed that logic to his logical plan, didn't destroy what happened to him as a result. This is a true story set in 1976. Chicago player Bill O'Reilly tells the story.
Before we begin a quick parental advisory. There is nudity in the story. No sex. Nothing very explicit, but there is nudity.
Eddie Hickok Collins taught high school English in Baldwin, Long Island. Remedial readers whose attention stands kept them far away from Herman Melville or Nathaniel Hawthorne, Holden Caulfield and Catcher in the Rye. Those seemed just right to Eddie, despite the fact that Catcher in the Rye was on the banned bookshelf of the school library. The library didn't like the use of the F word on page 201 of Catcher in the Rye.
But page 201 was Eddie Collins's favorite page, and he figured his remedial readers would love it, too. His young hooligans who all wanted and needed to get naked and needed page 201, thought a the school soon gave notice, though under no circumstances was he to teach that dirty Catcher in the Rye the F word. Beloved page 201. They were deemed questionable and inappropriate.
Eddie began reading book aloud to his remedial class that day, and the remedial readers all took notice. They nodded and they grunted at all good parts and running their long adolescent fingers over and over through the greasy pompadours as good old Holden Caulfield rolled along and cheering and chanting out the F word. When Eddie torn to page 201. Edward Hickok Collins was fired from teaching high school English in Baldwin, Long island, and he spent the rest of that year pacing in front of the fireplace at his mother's house.
It was a cold winter, but Ed was already heated up from his recent battle with censorship. So Eddie pulled off more and more of his clothes, his shirt, his shoes, his pants, and he flung them in all directions. Eddie built up the fire and he sweated aloud. If he couldn't teach the F word, how could he live free?
That he demanded of himself the F word, the sex act that had to be naked and lovely. That felt right and right felt natural. And why hide that? Eddie thought.
And that's when he first started. He would never dress again. You know how an idea catches and grabs a hold of you? Maybe you've had that.
An idea that speaks to your most private imaginings and your deepest hurt feelings, your most secret, strange joys. And that idea says, here I am. Change everything, because I'm here. I'm perfect.
I'm enlightened by sexuality. I'm the new laughing cure for cancer. I am my body in shape and in perfect yoga pose. And these ideas feel so crucial that the access of your world turns to embrace them.
Eddie's idea felt like that. And Eddie's idea was naked. And it was obvious. It was without guilt or second thought.
Nudity. Nudity. Now Eddie ran naked all the way to the high school. It was his first nude round.
His body was flapping like a ship that has come free of its moorings, and it's now spinning and reckless in the surf. And at the high school, all his former students, the remedial readers, they were playing manic playground basketball, and Eddie happily ran out on the court. He wanted to dunk a few in the glorious springtime, dunk a few and then tell the smart guys of his new vision of freedom. And Eddie yelled in his joy as he hit the court.
But his remedial readers weren't glad to see him. They turned away laughing, embarrassed by Eddie's nakedness, and they refused to pass him the ball. And when Eddie persisted, he leaped at each one of the boys in turn. One of them grabbed the ball and smacked it into Eddie's face hard, so hard that both lips stung and bled, and Eddie's eyes filled with tears.
Eddie was lost. Then the remedial readers surrounded and hounded him home. They flicked popsicle sticks and clods of dirt at his exposed penis in his poor backside. And Eddie slammed the door of his mother's house.
He was crying and he was shaking, and all, the remedia readers say, gathered in a pack outside. They were flushed and they talked themselves into a deeper hatred. And one of them grabbed a brick and threw it through Eddie's mother's picture window and shattered it. And then there was such a roar of rage and hurt, and it just ripped through Eddie's brain and grabbed the same brick and threw it back through the same window, the remaining glasses flying.
And then Eddie jumped through the now open window, falling and gashing his poor hands and his poor feet, the remedial readers running all directions, Eddie landing on a wall of glass. And when he looked up in the sky, written in huge letters of flaming Black and red, 6ft high, were the words why? Don't ask why, Live. And right then, something deep exploded in Eddie, and his face and his heart his whole being flushed with joy.
Shock treatments are serious and they're undermining. And in Eddie, they led him to a decade of quiet years, years in which he memorized D.H. lawrence's Women in Love from COVID to cover. But his body, his naked body lay in waiting, impatient for the day when the clothes would come off and his body could go public again.
Eddie Hickok Holmes came to De Calville, Illinois to work on the railroad. And he grew a huge red beard that shouted out a fanfare wherever he went. The palace was our vegetarian restaurant, theater and coffee house. It was work and it was home for we young anti war hippies.
It was a workshop for our ideas on how to change the troubled world that we've been given by our parents. But it was also a refuge and a magnet. A magnet for people who were obsessed with one idea and for the odd. If your father was a mason and now you'd lost your chi and you were doomed to wander the five room universe of the palace looking for it, if you were hopelessly shy and allergic to the 20th century and everything that made it tick, if you were a closet arsonist who just needed a place to rest and battle the flames inside you, if you were a bottom pincher who drank too much schnapps and read only 17th century literature, you were welcome at the Palace.
You could bring your dogs and your books and your bare feet. And as long as you didn't drink Coca Cola there and at least considered not paying your taxes, you were welcome and we would never call the police. Eddy sat up outside the palace, smiling and silent at first, and he offered his own newsletter, the Beast of Revelation, a passionate journalistic banner that proclaims the beauty of the human body. The penis is glorious and the vagina is magical.
They have to be seen to be believed, argued the Beast of Revelations. And after Eddie had figured most of us, the hippie community of the palace had a grasp of his basic message that he came in off the sidewalk and he began to talk to us. He was a public speaker. Could he speak there?
And he had a voice and his eyes were wide awake. And the title of his first talk was Nudity. Nudity. Now he quoted liberally from D.H.
lawrence's Women in Love. Lawrence is big, always big. Nudity and orgasm equals freedom. That's what D.H.
lawrence sees. And Lawrence sees me. Eddie Lawrence agrees with crowns. Nudity, sexuality, they form a square knot of human perfection.
Until the Catholic Church and public education get a hold of you. Oh, they'll twist you and they'll shame you. That's bad. It's bad.
Read Lawrence. He knows he's big. Nudity. Nudity.
Now we all laughed, not knowing why. At the end of each performance, we followed Eddie out on the sidewalk. Eddie tossing his clothes in all directions before running off naked into the night. Dekel was a small place, but by the next week, when Eddie spoke, there was a real crowd that followed him outside for his personal unveiling.
Edward Hickok Collins blossomed with nudity and attention. And by the fourth week, with the crowd urging him on, the clothes came off on stage and Eddie became the nude public speaker, speaking out, but speaking nude. He shouted. And Eddie now began his talks naked.
And he hung around naked. He could be found at the palace at all hours, naked. Sometimes we politely asked him to dress for an occasion, like when someone's parents came to town. And then Eddie would put on his kilt, a kiltie made out of a pair of cut off jeans, slashed free at the legs.
Once my mom came to visit me at the palace, and I don't know what mom expected, but what she got was Eddie naked and relaxed Eddie reading the New York Times Book Review section. It made me very nervous when Eddie sat down with my mother. But my mom loved the New York Times book reviews, and Eddie must have sensed that because he offered it to her and the two of them were soon chatting about books they would never have time to read. And quickly.
They seemed comfortable together, and that was amazing to me. My mother fully clothed and Eddie not clothed at all. It was only when Eddie leaned over and asked something so private that my mother never told me what it was. Then my mom flushed and stormed away from the table.
And that's the thing about Eddie. As much as he could win you over and I liked him, he would always find a way to push things just too far. As if any boundary or border was a foreign thing and it was to be disposed of and gotten through, no matter how you felt about it. Eddie moved into our house and invited some of the palace women to sleep with him.
And some of them were happy to do it until the most private details of their intimacy started showing up in his speeches, surrounded by big blinking exclamation points. Look at this. The police came two months into Eddie's talks. Eddie was arrested.
And soon now this nude messiah would stand trial. And he felt that messianic and alone and full of a vision of the world where their pants come down in simultaneous synchronization and whole nations freed from the shackles of clothing walk freely and hang out in peace. And Eddie spent the weeks prior to his trial alternating phone calls to Brezhnev in the Kremlin and Jimmy Carter's White House. Eddie made his calls from the corner laundromat urging long distance operators to support his new strategy.
International Nudity Day, July 4th. Disarm. Now the pants come off. In simultaneous synchronization for world peace.
That's the hook. If you're naked, how can you take yourself seriously? Holding a tank or fondling a nuclear warhead? You'd have to set him down.
Someone at the Kremlin actually answered one of Eddie's calls. And Eddie just poured it on over the phone, his whole platform. But at the White House, they just put him on hold and left him there. Eddie hardly noticed his campaign was heating up.
Eddie's trial for indecency and his presidential campaign, which takes him to the 1976 Republican National Convention. That's in a minute when our program continues. It's this American LifeMyra. Classy two things, which is a theme and bring you a wide variety of stories, different kinds of stories on that theme.
Today's show. One thing. People who are obsessed with one thing. We're in the middle of Act 2.
Bill O'Reilly's story continues. His friend Eddie is one thinger who believes in a kind of utopian nudity and is coming up on trial for indecent exposure. Again, a parental advisory. There's nudity in the story.
There was a large crowd at Eddie's trial for indecent exposure. When the judge walked solemnly in and the clerk called out all please rise. Eddie slipped out his kilt in his T shirt and he did rise. The judge found him into town when the cops dragged him handcuffed and tilted from the courtroom.
Eddie meaning to go willingly, but the crowd was too good away. So Eddie shouted over his shoulder, pulling away from the cops to urge them to join him for International Nudity Day. And the cops moved Edward Hickok Collins from the county jail to the county hospital. Now Eddie was lamb at the hospital.
He was polite and he was cooperative. He'd had shock treatments before and he didn't wish to have them again. He needed his mind. But the doctors gave him Nembertols and Thorazine larchamonts and his tongue thickened and his bright eyes grew heavily lidded and he stumbled over his quotations of Good old page 201.
And after some weeks all that he was really sure of was that the world would be better off naked. And he Was the man to strip it bare. He hung under there. Eddie got out on a deep blue day and he wept because it was June and he was free.
With International Annuity Day just around the corner, over the month, Eddie's plan spread and took wing. International Annuity Day, that's only the beginning. It's the great beginning of the campaign Launcher. The Republican convention that set for Kansas City mere months away.
The Republicans need to disarm. Now the pants come down in simultaneous synchronization. Candidate I'm nude. Run Messiah.
That's the perfect choice for Kansas City. I'm Ronnie and I'm running nude. And on the 4th of July, 200 of us gathered in the center of downtown. It was a place marked by the crossing of two lines of railroad tracks.
Eddie arrived late, running up in his kilts and T shirt and shaking hands and passing out campaign literature. Someone pulled a baby from the crowd ready to kiss, and the crowd cheered and Eddie spoke. He was poignant in his wonder at the beauty of the human body. And then in simultaneous synchronization, the pants came down.
I was there and it was great. We all pulled off our clothes. Really, only about 30 of us did it, but we were all standing in front so it felt like a crowd, a naked crowd. And Eddie was ecstatic.
He beamed with joy and leaping about, his own clothes flew in all directions with an extra set. That day the police moved in with batty wagons, arresting the naked crowd. But they saved Eddie to last. And before they could reach him, a long freight train raced up the track just as the cops were moving towards Eddie.
He timed it perfectly. Waving and nodding, he jumped over the tracks right in front of the engine, leaving the cop on the other side. And by the time the freight train had passed, Eddie was gone. He was already running and he was running nude.
Eddie ran all the way to Kansas City, mostly at night, and Playboy magazine picked up his story and sent a reporter and a photographer to follow him. The pictures were all Betty naked eating banana splits with a bunch of old farm boys at a Stuckey's or posed on the seat of a big hog Harley at a rest stop surrounded by big hairy biker guys, naked except for McDonald's cap giving out free french fries and nudity now buttons under the shadow of the golden arches. Playboy magazine bailed him out each time he was arrested. But when he got Kansas City, Eddie got cagey.
This was the big time. And covered himself, his nude body, his kilt and his T shirt in a black three piece suit he bought at the Salvation Army. He borrowed the Playboy writer's press ID and Eddie boldly moved behind Republican lines, making it to the front steps of the convention center. That was close enough.
And the next day Eddie found a fruit crate and he wrote soap all over it in black magic marker and returned to the convention steps, standing up high on the soapbox above the crowd, his whole being overwhelmed with the moment, the power of his big idea blurting out verbiage and joy, his clothes flying and hysterical in all directions. And there were brief looks of childlike wonderful across Republican faces in the crowd. But then they were replaced with this all too adult frown of disgust and censor. The Kansas City cops hard man who had been put on kook alert knocked him from the soapbox and they slammed him into the cement steps and they dragged him bodily away.
Eddie's anxious cry of nudity now drowned out by police radios and the charging march of police boots. And Eddie stayed in jail for the rest of the convention. His name would never appear on the Republican list of nominees that year. And like so many presidential candidates, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Paulsonkas, Ross Perot.
The early days of his campaign would prove to be the most memorable. Edward Hickock Collins had peaked too soon. He returned home to the palace, but he was never quite the same. Eddie's confidence dropped after Kansas City.
He had other big moments, like attending his Yale class reunion football game and dropping his pants and dashing along the sidelines when Yale scored against Harvard. But each one of these episodes led to jail and more hospitals, where a stream of Nembertols and shock treatments left Eddie struggling to keep a hold on his mind. It's strange when you think about it, that nudity would exact this kind of retribution from our society. Nudity.
But Eddie stuck to his vision of the world, his one big idea, that a naked man is a free man and should be allowed to be free. The last I heard of him, he'd moved back home to Baldwin, Long Island. Eddie began liberating the neighbourhood cats and dogs of their leashes, their choke chains and their flea collars. That's the thing about a messianic vision, about one big idea.
If you follow it to its logical conclusion, you don't know where you'll end up. Eddie ended up reading through his cats and dogs. Good old page 201, Catcher on the Rye. The dogs and cats listened.
They were animals. They had no problem with the F word. Nudity came naturally to them. Just kind of play with Thor Riley.
I can't explain glacial motion. Why Los Angeles don't drop into the ocean. I can't unfold the layers of mystery or piece together the tragedy of history. Cause those lucky summers they don't have to work.
Make 3D billboards and big 30 foot smirks. Act three More THAN ONE thing welcome to now in our program with contrary to that eager full hearted one fingers. In this part of the show we turn to reluctant one thingers. Our first witness, journalist Philip Weiss.
Philip Weiss writes for New York observer and other publications and he has spent a lot of time with the Clinton conspiracy theorists. These are the people who see a sinister force. You see one thing behind these events. The death of Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster in 1993, the raiding of Foster's office after his death, Travelgate Web Hubble and whether he was paid off to keep him from cooperating with prosecutors.
Some also included on the list drug and gun running through the Mena airport in Arkansas during Bill Clinton's years as governor, various murders and deaths too numerous to list here. Why is he reporting full of boys became persuaded by some of the one thingers. He saw their logic. But he did not become a one thinger himself.
He spoke with his American Life senior producer Apotheke. But the boy says that before he first went out to meet the Clinton one thingers, his view of them was fairly unambiguous. I thought they were really out to lunch. I thought they were nuts and hung up and obsessed and had nothing really intelligent to say.
So tell me about when you first entered their world in the early weeks or months that they really started dealing with these people. What are they like? What are they like as a group? Well, some of these people meet the Hollywood casting version of an unhappy obsessive.
Some of them do. They're very unpleasant. They have weird idiosyncrasies. They're insistent, they're shrill.
And you just think this is one unhappy camper and I want to get out of his personal space as quickly as possible. Having said that, I've met a number of people who are involved in the Clinton scandals, who are very happy people who are engaging their talents fully. For most of the conspiracy theorists, the main event of the Clinton presidency is the death of Vince Foster. The official version of the facts of Foster's death concluded on July 20, 1993.
Vince Foster drove himself to Fort Marcy park in suburban Virginia, parked his car, walked to a secluded spot and shot himself. But as Phil Boys found out, there's another version of the facts meticulously cataloged in another document, an unofficial one, the most Important event for me was reading the Sprunt Report, which is a classic of sort of call it conspiratorial literature, but it's a study by Hugh Sprunt of Texas Farmers Branch, Texas, outside Dallas, of the record in the Foster case. And it's brilliant. And when I read that, I realized that the questions that these people have raised about the events in Fort Marcy park are not trivial and not nuts.
They are serious, good investigative questions. The most convincing evidence that Philip was found in the Sprint report had to do with the possibility that Vince Foster died somewhere other than Fort Mercy park and that his body was moved there by someone. The report points out that there was no dirt on Foster's shoes, despite the fact he was supposed to have walked through the park. There were no car keys found in his pockets, despite the fact that he was supposed to have driven himself there.
There was a missing briefcase, an escorted witness, eyeglasses too far from the body, and contradictory accounts of what kind of gun was found in Foster's hand. And at this point, I don't have any conclusions beyond the strong feeling that there were shenanigans in Fort Marcy park, that his body was brought there. I feel he may have shot himself somewhere else. I think he probably did shoot himself.
The evidence is, to my mind, pretty strong, but there seem to be shenanigans. I went to Arkansas a few times, and main reporters have gone to Arkansas and come back shocked. I came back shocked. I told some.
I felt like the top of my head was blown off. I just felt that things were different down there and that they explained who our president is politically in a way that was not apparent to people on the east coast who saw the Rhodes scholar and the Yale Law School graduate. I thought for a little while that that would be. As a journalist and a writer, that would be my story.
And I was in it for a little while and now I'm not in it. And I don't fully understand why I'm not in it. And I was a few months ago, I guess that I believe. Again, while I buy their story about this administration more than I buy the mainstream story, there's a level of alienation in some of the stuff I've read just cruising the net that I just wasn't ready for.
And I just. I just feared what I might become. When one announces in respectable company that one no longer accepts the official version of events with respect to his Foster's death, people look at you funny. I remember one conversation with the editor, and finally the senator said, Look, Vince Foster committed suicide in Fort Marcy park, okay?
And, you know, what can you say. When your wife is saying to you you're a nut or you've lost perspective, that that's a, you know, you know, maybe I'm making the wrong call, but that scares me. And you know that, that's ruining. It's just a question of how much you want to invest yourself in this position, I think, and you pay a price.
Your skin is flayed and, and that's the traditional price of a heretic. I mean, there's no. I'm not trying to be self dramatizing. It's just, it's the ancient bargain that society makes with these people, and I don't know if I want to make that investment.
One of my first meetings with a person in this community, a guy I've actually become a little friendly with and whom I have a great deal of respect for. And I'm gonna call him Patrick because he uses an alias. This is a guy with a very Jimmy Stewart manner and a very casual manner. And he walked me through Fort Marcy park with great patience, telling me his understanding of what happened on July 20, 1993, when Vince Foster's body was found.
And Patrick's story is a very logical one. He had hundreds and thousands of facts at his fingertips that I was and am in no position really to challenge. He's done more research on this than I have. And at the end of our trip through Fort Marcy Park, I said to him, you know, you've given me a very logical story, Patrick, and I'm willing to believe what you're saying.
You know, it's very logical, but I might just walk on. What do you think of that? What did he say? Well, he just, you know, he would.
He just would say, and accept that you're known as Jimmy Stewart way, you know, gosh, feeling. Just accept that your government is telling you these lies about just this, the most important death in high office since the Kennedy, you know, that kind of thing. I said, yeah, yeah, I, I. Given my understanding of how the world works, I'm willing to accept that they have lied to me about this and that, you know, I got other things to do now.
And I think he just kind of shook his head at that because that is too. That understanding is too central to his worldview to go move on to something else. Philip Weiss is a novelist and colonist in the Air Observer. He's put this marathon producer pop.
Where. Where the hell is built? Where. Where the hell is built Where?
Where the hell is Bill? Where? Where the hell is Bill? Well, maybe he went to get a sideways haircut.
Maybe he went to get a striped shirt. Maybe he went to get some plastic shoes. Maybe he went to get some fun sunglasses. Act 5.
Quitting. Quitting Back in 1994, Evan Harris quit everything in her life. Her job, her boyfriend, her city. And she started to think about quitting as an abstract idea in and of itself.
She started to develop a theory about quitting. She went to name the parts of quitting and she started to post a zine about quitting with a friend of hers. She also published a book about quitting called the Quit for Morgan. Harris joined the words seemed like everything the world was made up of quits.
And quitting history seemed like a series of violent, elaborate quits by nations and peoples. People's personal lives seem driven by a series of endings. Quinn became the lens. The one thing which Evan Harris saw the world.
The point, the point of quitting is, is to move in the world and, and to, and to get bigger and bigger as, as a, as a person. See, I'm. God damn. I.
Sometimes I just start to sound like a nut basically about this. I mean, I, you know, I just. What am I talking about? You know, what am I talking about?
I do have to understand. This is so on my mind, you know, I mean, I think about this all the time. I think about this all the time. I'm thinking about getting everyone out of this room right now, you know, I really am.
That tape is from my interview Evan Harris back in 1994. This is Back when she made her big sense of quiz that she was the height of her quitting frenzy and her thinking about quitting at times. She's trying to catalogue, steal all the parts of quitting, the euphoria of quit, the 40th euphoria. We get to quit.
Well, now Evan Harris has quit quitting. Three years after that, Rick quit her. She no longer is in the throes of one thing. I talked to her about it last week.
It was really horrible. It was very, very horrible. And it actually happened in a very, very dramatic way. I was taking this cross country trip and I stopped traveling with the person with whom I was traveling, which was a very big deal.
And I was sitting on a bus, a Greyhound bus, traveling from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I could no longer think about the trip in terms of quitting because a quit of sorts had occurred and the person with whom I was splitting was too important to funnel into the quitting stream. Because the quitting stream quits. The idea that when you quit, you will feel good. That's almost like one of your definitions of quitting from back then.
There's that on one level, but then there's an even more serious level, which was that it was not possible to think of this as anything but what it was. Right. That this was a relationship with a person who I love. Right.
And it wasn't just this theoretical quit. Right. There was nothing theoretical about it. I was on a Greyhound bus.
And so then the fever broke. Then the fever broke. When Queen was all you thought about, back when Queen was all you thought about, what was that like? Oh, it was.
It was great. It was great. My mind was jumping all the time, and everything was fitting in, and it was like a puzzle. It was like figuring out a puzzle, a big jigsaw puzzle, and I would fit a piece in, and then things would start to fit around it.
When I hear this, I just picture you just sitting down and just pouring these pages out, page after page, like in a dream. Like in a seashell. Yes, it was. It was automatic writing, Ira.
It was automatic writing. It was like someone turned on a faucet. See? But what in your life today can compete with that?
Nothing. Oh, what, Zayan. No, no. You say nothing.
I know, but I wanted to think about it more before I said that. Well, you know, like, do you miss having that faucet going full force all the time? Yeah, I do. I really do.
Because there was electricity. That was very exciting, and I think it was much more interesting then, you know, I mean, I think I'm a little bit of a Bohr sometimes now. And now you don't organize your thinking about the world that way. Now, everything doesn't come down to one thing.
Everything is kind of everything. Yes, everything is everything. Do you think that you lost something by. By now seeing everything in the world as everything and not just boiling everything down to one thing?
Yes. What? I am no longer unified. I was unified, and now I'm not unified anymore.
Unified. You mean everything added up to one idea? Right? And I was.
I was able to navigate inside of me in terms of that one thing. So I was a unified person, and I actually had an identity. Can I ask you, what else have you lost by giving up that phase of your life when you really believe? Looking at it that way makes it seem like I sacrificed something by moving away from it.
But I didn't pick to move away from it. I mean, it abandoned me. Era, you know, it abandoned me, really. It did it stopped seeming so interesting.
No, it stopped being available to me. It's not that I decided to stop thinking about it. It's that it decided to stop visiting me. It stopped calling me.
It was terrible. It was horrible. There was a time actually where I was very angry with the one thing because it had abandoned me and it wouldn't. It was not available to me.
It was. It was like. It was like. It was like we had the quit and I had been friends and then something happened and I didn't know what and I had done something terrible and the quit, but didn't come to my birthday party for no reason, you know, and.
Yeah. Wouldn't call me and wouldn't write to me and didn't. And just disappeared. Vanished, evaporated, abandoned me.
And so. And so you used to see quitting as being the engine sort of behind everything around us. Do you feel like that is the best explanatory framework with which to understand your life? Yes and no.
Yes, yes and no. The sad thing is I don't really have a scheme. I attempted. I attempted to embrace another framework.
You did? Yes. What was that? Picking.
Picking? Picking, meaning what? Picking anything. See, I'm a big picker.
I'm a picker. And I also. I like picking. For example, I once at the top of the strawberry picker, which I enjoy very much.
But then that kind of picking. But also the kind of picking, picking and choosing. Well, I mean, as you say that. I mean, it occurs to me that this whole scheme is just the mirror opposite of quitting, really.
I mean, it's just somebody picking stuff instead of somebody quitting stuff. Right? Right. I guess so.
Evan Harris. Our program is produced by Nancy Update myself with Pop to Police, Squeaky Snyder and special guest speaker Eisley contributing editor Sarah Al Jacket and Marty Rock. And you can buy tape with this program. Call us at WBEZ in Chicago.
3128-323380-31283-23380. Our email address radiohale.com funding this up American collective provided by corporations Public Broadcasting with John d. And Catherine McCarthy Foundation. The listeners of WBEC Chicago the BBEC Mansion never recip.
Troy Melty who describes this American Life staff this way. Very unpleasant. They have weird idiosyncrasies. They're insistent.
I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. They're shrill and you just think this is one unhappy camp.