Hello folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison, and every Thursday we release these special episodes where we look back at content from the earlier years of the podcast. This year, 2023, Risk has been going through a bit of an existential crisis. We've been in such a tight financial squeeze that we've been doing a huge fundraising effort amongst our listeners.
So on Thursdays, we've been rerunning some of the all-time classic Risk Stories as a way of showing how special Risk is. A lot of these are stories you're just not going to hear anywhere else. And where we have been able to, we're reconnecting with the storytellers to see where they're at now. Malik Masters, who tells today's story, was not able to record a conversation with me because her apartment building is under construction, but she asked if I could interview her via email, and if I could just read that to everyone.
So I'm going to do that after the story. You're going to hear this fascinating conversation between the two of us via email. Now, this story first ran on the podcast in May of 2017, and I should warn you there's various kinds of abuse that are described in it, abuse toward animals, and well, there's a mystery at the center of the story of just how bad things might have been in her family. So without further ado, here is Malik Masters with a story we call In The Shadows.
I was thinking about a time when me and my dad bonded. It was a dead or alive video. You spin me right around, and we got up, and we started dancing to the video, and my dad stopped me, and he's like, do you see the way he shimmies? But shimmies, the way he shimmies.
So we started shimmies. It was so fun, because my dad was always so guarded, and he just totally dropped it all, and we just had fun, and it was it was really great, because that was a moment that was just for me and him. My dad had this uncanny ability to put up walls around himself. It was just like this magic force field that no one can get through.
So he was he was six-six, and like just how big he was. No one would mess with my dad. He had to develop that ability to keep his defenses strong, because everything that was going on was his parents. He just he had to build a wall between them.
He had to build that wall to keep himself safe and sane. He he was an escapist. He read fantasy books like No Tomorrow, and you know his world was about Star Trek and you know movies, and just anything that had nothing to do with reality, sci-fi, fantasy horror, that was his land. But when you tried to bring him back into the real world, he would always veer back off into his own land.
He was always there, but he wasn't really present. He was a big fan of metal music. One of the recurring themes in an album I listened to a lot was Killer B killed, or Kill'emall. I know a lot of people say, well this stuff is bad, so it's gonna make you violent.
I gravitated towards that because I was already violent. That was already within me. I inherited that. It was something that has been a part of my family for years.
I was living in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and there was a boy, and his name was Paul. And Paul was a stereotypical dork. He had those big, thick, black glasses, and he was a lot taller than me. He was really payable, and I was attracted to him.
I liked him. But as a child, I was probably around nine years old, maybe eight. I didn't know how to express my feelings for him, so I started to punch him. I didn't know why, but when I would hit him and I could see the pain register on his face, it felt like fireworks were going off.
It was very satisfying to me, and I was just fascinated by it. One day, my grandparents were talking about how girls can't beat up boys, and I said, I can beat up a boy, and I'll show you. So they came along and they stood across the street while I just hit this kid over and over and over, and I kicked him, and I hit him. And my grandparents were laughing and cheering and waving their arms like this was the best thing they'd ever seen.
That was the first thing I can think of where I started getting really terrible. I remember when my dad got really sick, I was telling him he was a terrible dad, and like, how could he say this, and how could he say that? And then he just looked at me and he said, some parents rape their children. I'm not perfect, but that kind of thing happens.
I didn't know what to do or what to say. I was in complete shock, and as time passed, I realized that that was him telling me that my grandpa not only abused his own wife but abused his children as well. If you were looking for darkness in my family, you didn't have to look far. I remember finding a microwave in the dark room, and I opened it up, and the smell that hit me was the smell that I've never smelled before since.
It was this horrid stench. It was thick, it was alive, it was dead, it was so many things at once. And I looked inside the microwave, and I saw browns, flatters, mold, and a lot of fur, flattened furry things on the bottom of the microwave. I was horrified, I was scared, I didn't understand what I found, and I took it to my dad.
My dad didn't have a reaction. My dad looked in the microwave, and he just was like, yeah, that's your great grandpa. He was a very messed up person, and he got a lot of pleasure from harming smaller, weaker things. He was throwing the rats in the microwave, and he was watching them die.
And that was his entertainment. I didn't understand. I didn't have any backstory. I didn't know why this person, who was really nasty to everyone.
There was no question he was a bad person, but I didn't understand why someone would go from just being a jerk to everyone to killing small animals. My dad just, it was so familiar to him, he didn't even need to examine it. And that scared me. My mom had no concept of who my dad was.
She's always worshiped authority figures. What the authority figure says, you do it. She always follows the rules. She didn't have that inner voice that was calling her to the dark side, like my dad did, and like I have.
And that way, like I related to my dad a lot more than my mom, but I got along with my mom a lot better, because my mom was always nice. Remember, when Silence and the Lambs came out, like he would quote that movie over and over again. Like, so he doesn't live here with a nice chianton, some fava beans. Like, we would all quote it to each other and things were definitely odd, like amongst the family members, because he'd bring up topics like, would you ever eat anyone?
I'd say I'd eat the people I hate, because I was getting bullied, and it made me feel powerful to say, yeah, I'd eat those jerks. You know, but he was very difficult to read, because he did have that force field ability. And the things he kept inside the force field were as important as the things he was keeping outside. My dad's closet, it was a regular closet, but there was a wall that didn't go all the way up to the ceiling.
And if you climbed up the wall, there was a whole new room in there. It had shiny wooden floors, and it was really neat. And the kids weren't allowed up there. Everybody knew no kids allowed.
But of course, when you're a kid and your parents tell you not to do something, that means you're going to do it a lot more. At least that's how I was. I would go up there, and I would read everything in boxes, under pillows, and just, I remember finding a magazine, and it was a little magazine. It had three staples in it, and it had four illustrations.
Every illustration was a different color. The first illustration was of a woman jogging, and it said, she wouldn't be good to eat, because she doesn't have enough meat on her. Her bones would be ropey and rough, and you might as well not even bother. And there was another picture, and it was in a different color, and it was a bodybuilder.
And this bodybuilder, the article said, would be a waste of effort, because his muscles are also way too tough to eat. And then the next picture was of an obese man, and it said that he had too much excess fat on his body, and not enough edible material. So you would have to deal with too much waste product. And then there was a regular guy, a little heavy in the middle, but you know, not obese, just a bit big.
And it said, because of his sedentary lifestyle, that he would be the best person to eat, because his muscles would be soft, and he had the right amount of fat to keep the meat moist, and you wouldn't have to worry about disposing of a ton of waste material. And the title of the article was, what kind of person would be the best meal? At that time, I had a lot of bullies, so I really believed that some people would be better meals than human beings. So when I should have run away screaming, part of me was fascinated, part of me was laughing at it, and part of me was confused.
The things that were hidden up there didn't really seem bad. My friend's parents were hiding porno magazines. My dad was hiding just articles and anatomy books. I was very attracted to the anatomy books, and that's why I continued looking through his stash, because the first time I saw a picture of an illustration of a man without skin, I felt alive.
My nerves came to life. I could tap my fingers together, and I would feel a feeling of absolute ecstasy, going up my arm, and moving down my legs, and then going to the tips of my toes, and moving back up, going to my scalp, and then my scalp tingling. And all I'd have to do is look at that picture and tap my fingers together. I understood that for some people, porn magazines are porn.
But for other people, human anatomy books are porn, and I couldn't get enough of it. If something turns you on, you, in my family, you know, we come from a lot of conservative Christians, so sex is very bad. So if anything is sexy at all, you hide it, you don't talk about it. And that was a kind of sexy that I understood, and a kind of sexy my dad understood too, because it was hidden.
When I was a child, I didn't eat very much, but I hated ham. I hated ham. So when my dad came to my bedroom and he said, I cooked some ham. Most of it's done cooking.
Would you like some ham? I said, I do not want ham. I do not like ham. I don't want ham.
And he said, well, this isn't regular ham. This is the best ham that you're ever going to eat. And you'll be very sad if you don't try any. And I said, I don't care, I don't want ham.
My dad leaves and he comes back. And he has this little pink piece of meat in his palm. It's light pink, and there's like a strange gossamer coating on one side of it. When I look at it, I know it's not ham.
There's no fat marbleized in the meat. The color's wrong. There's just something not right. But I pick it up and I take a bite of it.
And my teeth cut through the meat like I'm biting into play-doh. I chew and my mouth floods with saliva. I don't taste the salty ham taste. I don't taste the meaty ham taste.
This is something completely different. This is something unlabeled. And my brain is flashing that signal, but it also tastes really good. I look at the meat and I can see where my teeth cut through it.
The fibers of the meat were compact. The texture of the meat was almost like velvet. And my dad said, don't stare at it. Just eat it.
So I eat the rest. My dad goes away and I continue to think about this delicious meat. And I go downstairs because I want to sneak some more. I don't want him to have the satisfaction knowing that I think it's delicious.
But when I'm on my way to the kitchen, he stops me. He gets in my way. He's blocking me from the oven. He's blocking me from the kitchen.
He's blocking me from seeing what's going on in there. And if he was just cooking ham, why does he have to shield me from that? I tell him that I want more ham. And he says, there is no more ham.
I go back up to my room because when my dad puts that wall down, there's just no getting past it. I was just left to wonder, what did I eat? I kept looking for answers to the question. I went back to the alcove in my dad's closet and all the magazines and anatomy books were gone.
My dad died in 1999. He had 14 tumors in his brain and one was the size of a lemon. After his death, my mother would not allow any talk about anything he ever did bad. He was dead.
It was just time to leave it alone. But I needed to talk about it. And when I said, well, that time dad did this, my mom would say it was because he had 14 tumors in his brain. My dad gave me that ham before those tumors had a chance to grow in his brain.
I would love to blame the ham incident on the tumors, but I can't. I feel it's important to talk about the bad things my dad did because that's a part of who he was. I don't want him to be watered down. I don't want him to be generic.
He wasn't generic. He wasn't watered down. He was alive. He was vivid.
He was colorful. He was good. He was bad. He was in the middle.
I just don't want the man I knew to become a part of someone else's mythology instead of who he was. I have no doubt what I ate that day. It wasn't ham. I know what ham tastes like.
I believe that my dad fed me human flesh, which makes him a cannibal. It makes me a cannibal. Intentionally, unintentionally, it's what happened. My dad, he always wanted to go in his own direction, but sometimes the direction he went in was the wrong one.
But at the end of it all, I forgive him and I love him. Well, that is all for Moloch Masters in the shadows. Like I said, that was back in 2017 when we recorded that story. And it's one of the most talked about risk stories ever.
I thought that I would check back in with Moloch Masters to have a little conversation about it. She was unable to actually record an audio conversation, but asked if we could do that via email. So I'm going to read to you the questions I asked and the answers she gave. The first thing I asked was how have you felt about having this story out there in the world?
She said, I got a phone call from a lady who said she worked for Fox News. I hung up on her pretty fast. Fox News has caused so much harm to my family. The thing is, my father was a messed up person, but I still love him and don't want to try to make money off of my memories of him.
I just want to talk about him and find a way to forgive him and be at peace with his memory. My mom is the only friend or family member who said much of anything about it. She said she felt that the mystery need incident was a completely false memory of mine that I might have developed after having ECT electroconvulsive therapy. ECT has been shown that it could cause you to temporarily lose real memories, but not develop new ones.
Honestly, I think one of the most important things to do in life is to always remain open to the possibility that you could be wrong. I'd love for someone to make a really good case for why I'm wrong about the meat. Then I asked, did telling the story help you feel like you understood yourself or your family a little bit better? She said, at first telling the story felt like I took back power that belonged to me, but then I started to feel sick when I really thought about everything.
I kept getting nauseous. I just had to try to avoid the subject again. I said, if there was some way that it could be proven that it was human flesh, and how would that make you feel? She said, I would want to know whose flesh it was, I would want to know if their family knows, I would want to know if I could do anything to help.
But if the opposite could be proven that it wasn't human flesh, I would feel such huge relief. I said, when people talk about the story, they mostly talk about the incident at the end, but there's so much happening in the earlier parts of the story in your family. How are you feeling about all that now? She said, well, my grandfather is dead, and I'm glad he can't hurt anyone anymore.
He was very abusive, especially toward my grandmother. I think sometimes you tend to ignore a lot of bad things about dead family members for your own mental health. I get why other family members might want to believe they were great and not listen to anything to the contrary. Death is a very difficult thing, complex to deal with, and you have to accept that everyone deals with it the best way they can.
Maybe you can talk about things in the future. Maybe they will never really be ready to talk about things. You might need to talk to someone outside the family about how you disagree. And that's that.
I have to say, one of the things I am so grateful for as far as risk goes is how many stories there are of people who went through really extraordinarily difficult, confusing, painful, traumatic sorts of experiences and persevere in working on their own mental health, their own well-being, their journey of transcendence. Still such a fascinating story that raises a lot of questions. And if you'd like to check out some of Malek Master's fiction writing, six of her books are available on Amazon. Like I said before, this is the kind of content you really can't find anywhere but risk.
And if you'd like to help keep risk running, we really and truly very much so do need it. You can become a member over at patreon at patreon.com slash risk and have access to well over 100 hours of bonus content or make a one-time donation at paypal.me slash risk show. And if you prefer to contribute in any other way, you can reach me at kevinatrisk-show.com. Folks, today's the day.
Take a risk.