Have you ever wondered what it's like to be buried in an avalanche? Weird foreign feeling of despair. Or how it feels to crash a skydive? I remember feeling my body hit the ground.
These are the stories you'll hear on the podcast called What Was That Like? True stories told by the actual person who went through it. And you'll hear actual 911 calls. 911, there's a man who might have to work trying to get in.
Search for What Was That Like? on any podcast app or at whatwasthatlike.com. RISK! Hello, kids.
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 that we're calling Classic RISK Singles. Each of these episodes features just one story from our earlier years. If you're new to RISK, you should know that the podcast can be very uncensored.
This week, a story by Blaine Neese, who first shared this one on the podcast in February of 2011. This is a very emotional story. Here is Blaine Neese now with a story we call Life After. I do multimedia comedy, and I can say that I've never really been myself on stage.
I'm more like character-driven. I started doing alternative family, I guess you call it, and sneaking off and not telling the family. I just do a late night in Philadelphia. I open mic nights and then run off stage and leave.
I entered into a contest, the Andy Kaufman Award. That was the only time that my sister had seen me perform. We are polar opposites, physically and just emotionally and just entirely different people. She's blonde with brown eyes, and she's loud and boisterous and just fun.
She was at the sports. I would read. She didn't. She liked the terrible music, and I, of course, loved great music.
That's just the way it is, I suppose. She had sort of drifted into a drug scene. I don't really know what was going on. I do know there were problems.
The only one we knew conclusively was cocaine. She moved back home, and then there were phone calls, and there was just something plaguing her. The next thing I know is that she's in jail for a year. I had not known that my parents were going to visit her in upstate Pennsylvania in a correctional facility.
By the way, she was a substitute teacher. I always thought that was interesting. She didn't have real problems because they call you in the morning at 5 a.m. They let you know if you have a job that day, which was always, when she lived at home, that was just to drive everyone nuts because she would just be home to us, and the phone would ring off the hook and ring off the hook, and she wouldn't have a job.
But later, she got cleaned up. She got out of jail, and she sort of was getting it back together. I would see her when I came home, and she would sort of be with it. There was still a little nagging something, but the great thing was she came and she saw me perform when I won an award, and it was the only time that she had seen me perform live.
I got the sense that she didn't really like what I do, but she really respected it and was very proud. So I won the award, and some time goes by. I'm doing other shows, and I get contacted to perform in the Just For Last Festival in Chicago. So I did it the first night, and earlier that day, actually, I had got a phone call from my dad.
I didn't check the message until a little bit later. My mom had received a phone call from the job saying that my sister Virginia had not reported for work, and this was odd, so my mom went over to the house and had found her face down in her own apartment where she lived alone. The candle's still burning. My dad said, well, there's nothing you can do.
Your sister is on life support. You're in Chicago. You're not a doctor. There's nothing you can do, so just do your performance.
And then he gave me a call less than, it seems like, 10 minutes later, and he just said, yeah, she's gone. And I was just standing there, and that was it. Then I realized I had the second of my two performances later that night, and I didn't know what to do. Do I just try to take an early flight?
I checked. There were none. My next flight was in the 6 in the morning the next day anyway. So I thought, let me just participate in the largest amount of irony on record, and just perform on the saddest day of my life.
And so I don't remember a thing. I got to the theater. People said, how are you doing? And I couldn't even say, I'm fine.
I just gave my, not so good. I don't really want to talk about it. I just wanted to clear up that her death was non-drug-related. Her body was compromised by the drug use, years of drug use.
And so she was 38, and it was heart failure. We had an experience when I was a kid. I was five years old, I think. We were woken up in the middle of the night, and the next thing I know, we're in the back of a car.
And my mom sort of just leaned back and told us, she's like, we're going home. Your grandfather's died. And my sister just started crying and crying and crying. And I remember sitting there thinking, why am I not crying?
You know, why am I not feeling sad? And that was another thing that I was jealous of her, because she could just be emotional, just pure emotion all the time. We were so different that I was kind of embarrassed of her sometimes. She would just say whatever she thought, which, when someone is with you in their life, it's really embarrassing.
But when they're not, it's very endearing. And we didn't talk much towards the end, but I really wish we had. So the last thing she had posted on Facebook was a ridiculously phrased paragraph, even like text talk, which was just so embarrassing. But it's just like, my brother, performer, Chicago, it was just describing, it's just like, go.
And that was the last contact that I had with her. And then not too long after that, I got a copy of the original performance that she showed up at. It's recording my performance, but I only watch her. She's in the front, in the right corner.
And I can hear her laugh, which is like a ridiculous sound. And I can distinctly pick her voice out of the crowd when they announced that I want. And I just made, I burned like 10 copies of it just to have it, you know? The winner is, everybody.
Wait a minute! So I have a few good memories, and it's all sort of captured, it's preserved. The last few times we had an interaction, which was getting better, she was better, I was on my way, and we had, we didn't really have a huge connection earlier on in life, but I guess if there's a tragic point, it's that we were about to, about to have an adult relationship. So I have to fill the gaps where she was, because there's a void.
Yeah, that's where I stand now, just trying to rectify all this happened and be a better person because of it. And still, to this day, I'm very embarrassed of her, because I'll meet her friends, and they will tell me stories of when I was not there, and I'm just amazed at who she was and how she could just be a person, a genuine person, all the time in front of people, because I'm so quiet, I'm so reserved, I'm just going to go ahead and sort of be myself more. It's like I didn't trust who I was before, but now there's no point in not, you can be yourself. We've all had these experiences.
It's just, it's just a real thing. It connects me to people now where I didn't feel that before. That is all for this week's classic Risk Singles episode. Now don't miss out on our regular full-length episodes.
There's a brand new one every Tuesday, and everything you might want to know about us is at risk-show.com. Do you know, but I'm just talking about the FPS. You know, and if you're full-length episode, yes.