205: Plan B

Ira Glass

There's a short story by the fiction writer Ron Carlson in which a guy loses his job after 10 years at the job. His boss tells him, OK, go to Plan B. And the guy says, this was Plan B. Which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully toward Plan A, but Plan A turns out to be completely different from what we thought it was going to be. And so we switch to a backup. And then the backup plan becomes our life.

A while back, I was giving a talk to about 100 people. And knowing I was going to be talking about this on the radio, I asked them to remember back to when they first hit adulthood. What is it that they thought their lives would be like? What was their Plan A back then? And I asked them, OK, how many of you are still on Plan A?

Out of 100 people, only one person raised her hand. Just one. The youngest person in the room-- just 23 years old. Everybody else in the room was like, Plan B? What about Plan C, and D, and F?

Today on our program, stories of the backup plan and people living the backup plan, which is most of us. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in five acts, including the story of how you decide, as your backup plan, to kidnap the child of the most famous entertainer in the world. And Jonathan Goldstein's story of how he took a telemarketing job just to tide things over for a while, and then kept it for 10 years-- finding, to his disappointment, that he was better at telemarketing than at anything else in his life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, It's Another Tequila Sunrise. John Hodgman tells this fable of giving up one dream for another much more ridiculous dream.

John Hodgman

A few years ago, the company that owns Jose Cuervo Tequila purchased Marina Key, a small eight-acre speck of an island in the Caribbean. And they renamed it Cuervo Nation. They applied to the UN for independent statehood. They encouraged US citizens to defect by a simple ritual of drinking a shot. They even tried to field an Olympic volleyball team.

The whole thing was a bold experiment in advertising via nation building. But since those heady early days of independence, the nation's patriotic fervor has calmed somewhat. It's now used as a place to send contest winners and a promotional lure for members of the World Press, which is how I found myself headed to Cuervo Nation last June for a series of very educational tequila tastings and how I met the nation's most prominent citizen and ambassador to the world.

He stood at the dock waiting for us as our ferry chugged over from Tortola. Shaven-headed, goateed, he sort of looked like Anton LaVey-- were it not for the Speedos, mirror shades, and red superhero cape. A satanist at spring break. Through a megaphone, he alerted us that we are now entering a party zone. As we disembarked, he began scooting maniacally around us with a tequila shot balanced on his bald head, daring us to suck it down without using our hands. This was Cuervo Man.

The other Cuervo representatives were there to teach us about tequila. Cuervo Man, I was told, was there to party with us. His job was to party. And just as I began to grasp the frightening yet thrilling ramifications of this fact, Cuervo Man spotted me. He pointed to his shot-crowned head, opened his arms wide, and chased me down the dock.

Cuervo Man's real name is Ryan McDonough. I learned this from the Cuervo reps, who I think were a little annoyed that I was asking so few questions about their tequila, and so many questions about the man who seemed to be their trained tequila monkey. Actually, I was told, the term is party catalyst.

And when he wasn't on the island, Ryan was going from bar to bar all over the Northeast, embodying the untamed spirit of Jose Cuervo. Meaning what? I asked them. Meaning he does interactive promotions designed to introduce consumers to the responsible enjoyment of the various brands of Jose Cuervo Tequila. Meaning what? I asked them.

And that's when Ryan ran up to the table with a toilet seat around his neck and a plunger stuck to the top of his head. Dude, he said. Check it out. Plunger on my head. And then he ran down to the beach and shoved sand down his pants. And then he sang a dirty song and made us do shots in teams. And then he collapsed in the surf and barked like a seal.

It's sort of hard to explain what he does, they told me. And that's exactly why he fascinated me.

I mean, consider the plunger. Were it me, I might have come up with putting a toilet seat around my neck, sure. That's a natural. But then to extend the metaphor, to take the imaginative leap to the plunger on the head? Well, that's genius.

By the last night I was there, the Cuervo reps realized I was a lost cause. They left me with a bottle of Cuervo Especial and went to bed. And Ryan and I got to talking.

It turned out Cuervo Man and I have a lot in common. We both live in New York. Like me, Ryan is 30 years old, originally from the Boston area. Like me, he went to an Ivy League school and spent most of his time there drinking and feeling out of place. Yes, the man barking like a seal-- that's a Princeton man.

And that's when I realized that apart from some small matters of fate and several thousand sit-ups on Ryan's part, we were the same. We both came out of college with an English degree, a thirst for booze, and the absurd faith that someone would pay us simply for being drunk and charming. And in a strange but undeniable way, for Ryan, that turned out to be true. And that's when I realized I was jealous of him.

How does one get to be a party catalyst? I asked. Dude, he said. That's what everyone wants to know.

John Hodgman

It's six months later, and I'm in Ryan's apartment in Brooklyn. He's agreed to take me with him to a couple of bars out on Long Island, where he's doing whatever it is he does. And he's showing me a few of the things he'll bring with him.

John Hodgman

It was never Ryan's dream to have a job wearing a plunger. He wanted to act. It's a cliche, I know, and so did Ryan. But he had done some singing and musical theater in college, and this was his dream. Specifically, this was his dream.

John Hodgman

Ryan did South Pacific in summer stock and some dinner theater, but it really wasn't coming together the way he wanted it to. From the beginning, he knew he needed a backup plan, so he started looking for a job in finance. After all, what's a Princeton degree good for if not making money?

John Hodgman

He interviewed at six companies, but he only got a call back at one.

John Hodgman

To act, he needed a day job. But the day job wanted him to act. So he was stuck in New York, working part-time at a mail order Bible company and part-time at an Upper East Side bar.

Now, Ryan enjoyed a delicious beverage from time to time. And when he drank, either after his shift or sometimes during, everyone paid attention to him. He'd make jokes and balance shot glasses on his head. He owned the room.

John Hodgman

And so Ryan joined a shadow industry of party professionals-- the kind you might meet on resorts or on yachts, leading surfside limbo competitions, or at reunions encouraging people to dance. People whose job it is to force us to interact, to touch one another, to have fun. Because apparently, this is something we've forgotten how to do.

Ryan paid his dues working bar mitzvahs, organizing group games, dressing up as Woody from Toy Story, complete with a big plastic head over his own head. And then he got the call from Jose Cuervo. They were running a tugboat called the Untamed Spirit II for short booze cruises out of San Diego, and they wanted him on it. His job would be to entertain winners of various Jose Cuervo promotional contests. And it turned out they pretty much enjoyed the same things that 13-year-olds did, minus the big plastic head and plus tequila. And Ryan could drink, too.

John Hodgman

Ryan had entered the party zone.

John Hodgman

Monterey Sports Bar is on route 24 in Uniondale, Long Island. Hofstra University is nearby. But this part of Uniondale is not so much a college town as it is a college strip, a blacktop spoke of suburban sprawl with Monterey's on the corner, next to a guns and ammo shop, next to a Starbucks. Inside, its dank and cavernous, with banners advertising $0.15 wings and $5 pitchers.

I'll learn many important things tonight. But perhaps the most surprising is this-- people in bars apparently need Cuervo t-shirts and mini shot glasses in order to live. And to get them, they will do unimaginable things.

John Hodgman

Let me set the scene. Ryan is standing at the back of a crowded bar. He's torn off his black breakaway sweatpants to reveal a very tight Speedo stuffed with t-shirts. And then-- how shall I put this?-- young women crouch down in front of him, take hold of a shirt with their teeth, and pull.

John Hodgman

I hadn't bargained for this.

John Hodgman

If Ryan's not giving girls t-shirts out of his pants, he's serving them shots off his head eye level with their bras, or asking them to lick his scalp, or just rubbing up against them. Maybe it's because he seems more mischievous than predatory, or maybe it's because he comes with the sanction and strange demi-celebrity of a well-known liquor brand. But Ryan is able to do and say things in the name of Cuervo that would get you arrested under most circumstances. And his antics aren't just tolerated, they're adored.

John Hodgman

On Cuervo Nation, I would have described him as a kind of corporate jester. But as I watched women gleefully French him and then wander casually back to their boyfriends, a better word comes to mind. He's a satyr, the half-man, half-beast concert of Dionysus, god of drunken revelry. And not just because he's got a hairy back.

John Hodgman

And if you haven't guessed already, this is the other reason I'm fascinated by Ryan's job. While the rest of the bar grind dances and flirts and watches sports on the 30 odd TVs at Monterey's, I've somehow managed to plant myself next to the single screen that's inexplicably tuned to PBS-- specifically, Ric Burns's documentary of New York.

Ryan, on the other hand, is out there, moving in a world in which commerce and pleasure and liquor and sex are all intimately and uncritically entwined. And everyone is having a wicked good time. It's a world in which I normally don't travel, and Ryan is my ticket in. When he runs out to his car for a last minute t-shirt resupply, I realize that this is my chance to try my hand at satyrdom.

I get a tray of shots from the woman who's been helping Ryan, and I start making the rounds.

And I do follow her. But when we find her friends, they all just stare at me. Maybe it's not clear, so I say, do you want free tequila? And they just say, no thanks.

If there's one thing that should not be hard to give away in a bar, it's free drinks. And yet as I go from corner to corner, no one is drinking off my head. No one is pulling anything out of my pants. And part of the problem is, I'm not Ryan.

And maybe I should shave my head and loosen up a little. But beyond that, what I don't realize until I'm out there doing it is, as much as I love to drink, and as much as I love Jose Cuervo Tequila, and as much as I'd love another free trip to Cuervo Nation, I feel weird pushing some big company's message that slamming down shots is a great game, that drinking always equals fun.

Which even Ryan knows isn't exactly true. Because one thing I haven't mentioned yet, and probably should have, is that Ryan doesn't drink, at least not anymore.

John Hodgman

Part of Ryan's act is writing new lyrics to existing rock songs that describe the pleasures of drinking Cuervo or give very precise directions on how to do a body shot. Here's an example. Quote, "Shots with or without training wheels. Cuervo doesn't hurt. You know it heals."

It's a little unnerving to hear, knowing that the person who wrote these lyrics is the same person who quit drinking more than a year ago, in part because he was afraid that it might kill him. He was kicked out of a hotel in Florida for throwing a table of the balcony. In St. Louis, he blacked out in the middle of a promotion. And at Cuervo Nation, he got so loaded he cursed out an elderly guest he was supposed to be entertaining.

John Hodgman

The problem for Ryan was that in most cases, it is very bad to be caught drinking on the job. But in Ryan's case, it only made him more successful. The wilder and drunker he got, the more bars wanted him back, the more Cuervo wanted him back.

And what amazes me is that at the time Ryan was deciding to get sober, Cuervo asked him to sign on for another 100 promotional gigs over the course of the coming year. And Ryan said, how about 150? That's every weekend, almost half the year spent in bars, tequila on his head, tequila spilling down his face. It must be like Eve working in the apple factory that's owned by snakes.

John Hodgman

Ryan's 150-day bar hop for Cuervo is almost over. His current contract is coming to a close, and he's now working on a new, very different project.

John Hodgman

This is a television ad for the Panasonic Sonic Shaver Max electric shaver, in which Ryan plays a character called Sonic Man. He got the gig from someone who saw him doing a Cuervo promotion, and a lot of it's the same. He jumps around in public, accosting people, yelling at them, convincing them of the superiority of this particular brand of shaver by hopping into fountains and getting sprayed with a hose.

John Hodgman

But if it sounds as if there's no difference, think of this. First, people do not generally drink while they're shaving. And second, Ryan's an actor now-- an actual actor, with national exposure, a good agent, making decent money. So the backup plan has brought him back to his original plan, and I'm happy for him, but also kind of sad. Put it this way. I still kind of want to be Cuervo Man, but I don't think I'd ever want to be Sonic Man.

The fact is Ryan's leaving something behind-- the booze, obviously. And that's a good thing. But also the Bacchanalian power of the booze, its danger, the contradictions that made Cuervo Man more than a day job, but a kind of inspired extension of Ryan himself-- which is, to say, a kind of art.

John Hodgman

And I wonder, now that he's the actor he always wanted to be, if we'll ever get a role as good as the one he's already played.

Ira Glass

That story and this week's entire program were first broadcast back in 2002. Since then, Cuervo Nation has closed down. Ryan now lives in Long Beach, California with his wife and five-year-old son. He says he's been sober for 18 years now, and he has gotten some work as an actor. Yes, Plan A kicked in kind of late. He's just wrapping up work on an indie film that he wrote and acted in called Last Night in Rozzie. John Hodgman has a new book coming out in a few weeks called Medallion Status.

[MUSIC - EVE 6, "INSIDE OUT"]

Ira Glass

Act Two, Why Talk? Here's a situation that many of us have been in and found ourselves confused about what to do. You start to become friends with somebody from work, and then you run up against this problem, which requires action of some sort and a new plan. It happened to one of our producers, Starlee Kine, at her last job, with a woman named Robin.

Starlee Kine

We had just met, and we'd go out for drinks and stuff after work. We really liked each other, and we wanted to, like-- we kind of decided we were going to be, like, new really good friends, you know? But we didn't know anything about each other. So we'd start to tell each other things. But the problem was we were just so busy, and there was never enough time to tell each other the big stories in our life.

Ira Glass

And at that point, your friend Robin came up with a Plan B.

Starlee Kine

She did. She got to the point where she-- 'cause she would start to tell me stories and she'd get really frustrated by how much she had to tell. And then she was, like, I'm just going to make you a tape. And so at one point, I was going home to LA. I'm from LA. And then right before I left for LA, she just was like, here you go. Here's your tape. And I started listening to it, and it was true. She started by saying, OK, so now I'm going to do my ex-boyfriend montage.

Starlee Kine

The whole first side A is all her ex-boyfriends, all the ways they affected her, and how it changed her, and just with all the little details thrown in. And it's very thorough, and it's very complete. And I definitely get a sense of the boyfriend.

Starlee Kine

I mean the whole goal of it is so nice and touching, that she wanted me to know this about her. And then she put his time into making this, like, catalog of her life so that I could know her better.

Starlee Kine

And then on side B, she has a list of the other things that she wanted me to know. And they're really, really, really small things, and they're just like, I had this dream once, and I feel you should know this. I get afraid when people are choking in restaurants. Just like tiny couple sentences, and she's got a list. And she's kind of checking it off as she goes along.

Ira Glass

And then, after all that, she takes around the tape recorder and then she gets other people to talk on your tape?

Starlee Kine

Yes. She walks around and has people say hello to me. And she says, will you say happy birthday to my 75-year-old grandmother, Starlee?

Ira Glass

Complete strangers.

Starlee Kine

Total complete strangers. They're just random people on the street.

Ira Glass

So did this do what she wanted it to do?

Starlee Kine

Oh, I think so. For sure, yeah. It totally felt like the perfect solution to the problem of making friends as you get older. Because it's really, as you get older-- I'm not that old, but the thing I miss most as an adult is time, is time is so valuable now.

And you don't get to have the same conversations that you did when you were in high school where you'd be on the phone with someone for, like, eight hours a night. Or you'd just stay up all night long and tell every single thing that's ever happened to you, and it was even less that had happened to you because you were, like, 15 years old.

And there was just so much talking, so much bonding. Bonding, bonding, bonding. And as an adult, you just don't have the chance to do that very much. And now we're really good friends. Since then, I understand all of her references. Like, I feel like I've known her much longer than I have.

Ira Glass

But isn't kind of the point of being friends with somebody that when they tell you this information, that it happens in a conversation? That that's not the background for the friendship, but that actually is the friendship.

Starlee Kine

Yeah, I mean, some can say that. Sure. But as far as the past stuff, I feel like it's not that big a difference sometimes. Because it gets to a point where you just have all these kind of bottled stories. Like, I got this boyfriend, he did this. And I have this boyfriend, he did this. And it meant this, and it meant that. And it's like why not just put those stories on a cassette tape to have someone listen to it all at once?

Ira Glass

Starlee Kine. Coming up, sock puppets dialing for steak and kidnapping as Plan B, in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Plan B, stories of people ditching their expectations and living inside a backup plan, as most of us do. We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, When Kidnapping is Plan B.

Even now, I think Barry Keenan has a hard time thinking of himself as a kidnapper. He grew up in Southern California in Malibu, went to high school with the children of movie stars and other super rich people. And if you could say that he had a plan for his life, he achieved a lot of it by the age of 22.

It was the early 1960s. He was the youngest member of the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. He had successfully put together some real estate deals. He was making a lot of money. But he had also started drinking heavily and became addicted to Percodan and other painkillers.

Ira Glass

Wait, wait, wait. Kidnapping seemed like a good idea, and you put a business plan together?

Ira Glass

When I asked Barry Keenan to tell me what happened when he tried to put his Plan B into effect and do the kidnapping, he's at such pains to get the truth of it across to me-- and to prove especially that the blame for the crime falls entirely on him, and not on two pals that he enlisted to help with the kidnapping.

Now this story is filled with far too many details and takes far longer than we can spend here. Suffice it to say that it was a comedy of errors. In December of 1963, the 23-year-old Keenan and a friend nabbed the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra, Junior, who was performing at Lake Tahoe. Keenan accidentally left his gun in Sinatra's hotel room. He didn't have any cash to buy gas for the getaway car.

During the getaway, his buddy Joe climbed out of the car into a snowstorm and knocked himself out by running into a tree branch. When they called Frank Sinatra, Senior, and demanded a ransom, Sinatra offered them a million dollars, and they tried to talk him down to $240,000 because that's what it said in the plan.

Ira Glass

After successfully getting $240,000 in ransom money and returning Frank Sinatra, Junior, safely home, Barry Keenan and his accomplices were caught. Keenan was sentenced to life plus 75 years, but was released after just 4 years because the psychiatric evaluation found that he was legally insane at the time of his crime. He returned to the real estate business where he was wildly successful-- became a millionaire.

A few years ago, he sold his kidnapping story to the movie studios for several times more than the original ransom amount. He showed his papers indicating that all of his profits from the sale would go to charity and says that he agreed to a movie deal only to set the record straight about a lie that he told during his trial back in the 1960s.

Back then, he says he spread a rumor that the kidnapping was only a publicity stunt staged by the Sinatras and not a real kidnapping. Under the Son of Sam law, which says that convicted felons cannot make a profit from selling their own stories, Frank Sinatra, Junior, challenged Keenan's contract with the movie studios.

In February 2002, the California Supreme Court ruled in Keenan's favor, clearing the way for the movie to be made. But it never was. The studio, Columbia Pictures, put the project on hold. And then in 2003, Showtime made the story into a film with William H. Macy and David Arquette. Barry Keenan got no money from the deal.

[MUSIC - FRANK SINATRA, "ALL OF ME"]

Ira Glass

Act Four, A Fate Most of Us Fear. Years ago, living in Canada, Jonathan Goldstein had a job selling the Montreal Gazette newspaper over the telephone. It was the normal kind of Plan B that most of us have had at one point or another. And when he took the job, he did not realize that it would become a 10-year chapter in his life.

Jonathan Goldstein

When you're a little kid, you never decide that one day you're going to be a telemarketer. It's not something that you plan. It just happens, like the way going bald just happens, or the way falling down a flight of stairs just happens. One minute you're at the top of the landing, and the next you're at the bottom. And you'll be damned if you can remember each one of the individual steps that led you between the two.

All during the time I was working at the Gazette, I found it nearly impossible to bring myself to tell anyone I was a telemarketer. When people asked what it was I did for a living, I'd simply say that I was a salesman. And when they asked what it was that I sold, I would say dreams. And then I would look at them for a moment, quizzically. Then I would say that I was only joking, and then they would say, oh. And I would become uncomfortable, and then they would become uncomfortable. Then they would stop asking me anything.

As you might expect, the hard thing about working at the Gazette was that there was just so much rejection. Even though you were calling almost 200 people a day, 98% of whom wanted to see you dead, you still had to bring a certain hopefulness to each call, a feeling that this one, the call you were making right now could be the one. It was almost like trying to hypnotize yourself into believing that something as certain as, say, gravity didn't exist. And the next time you dropped the apple, it won't fall to the ground, but it will float up into the sky like a helium balloon.

I would often pretend the people on the other end of the line were sock puppets to soften the sting of their hang up. I once shared this thought with a girl who had just started working there. Pretend there's a little sock puppet on the other end, I encouraged. All cute with coat button eyes, holding the phone in his mouth. She considered the logic of this for a moment. How does he talk with a phone in his mouth? She asked. And for this, I really didn't have an answer.

In the pitching room, we all wore these headsets that were connected to computers. As soon as we hung up, the computer automatically dialed the next number so that we were always speaking to someone without respite. Our boss was a man named Ray, and if you made two or three sales a day, then you were doing OK, and Ray wouldn't scream at you.

Generally, I found the repetitiousness of the job comforting. You're never at a loss for words. You always know what you're going to say. Because what you were going to say is, hi, my name is Jonathan, and I wanted to know if you're interested in reading the Gazette newspaper.

One time, a woman who answered the phone would not believe I wasn't a friend of hers named Christopher. Stop playing around Christopher, she said. But I'm not Christopher, I responded. Will you cut it out, Christopher? After several minutes of this, I had to hang up on her. I knew that Christopher was going to get it for that.

From my very first week at the Gazette, I was surprised to discover that I had a natural gift for sales. Whatever I was and whatever aspirations I had before I started working there, I became an instant Gazette legend, sometimes selling up to 10 subscriptions in the course of a shift. I got on the phone with people, and I made them want to listen. I joked with the men and flirted with the women. I gently cajoled them, bundling them up in my good strong telemarketing arms and tossed them up into the air where they screamed delightedly, only to land back down with a brand new Gazette subscription.

I would look around me at the other sad sacks in the pitching room and wonder how they could go on just scraping by with their two or three sales a day. Telemarketing had been my backup plan, but now I found myself faced with the uncomfortable fact that it was what I was truly good at. I got myself a lucky ballpoint pen and spent half a day's pay on a fancy attache case to put my leads in. I even had a special way of filling out the order forms that involved clear capital letters and X's, never checks, in the boxes marked Visa or MasterCard.

There was a bell on Ray's desk for when you made a sale. And when I made a sale, I had a special way of hitting it with the balls of my fingers that made it sound as crisp and clean as a glockenspiel. I always kept to the one tap per sale rule. I respected the bill, not like some of the other guys who rang the crap out of it like they were five-year-olds riding their first two-wheeler.

The office manager was a man named Billy. Billy was a fat loudmouthed Greek man in a skintight Hawaiian shirt. One of Billy's jobs was to keep us inspired with pep talks. Billy would explain to us when he first started working at the Gazette, he was sitting right where we were, and that now, he makes as much money as a plumber. And that in fact, we all had the opportunity to make as much as a plumber. I'm going out and eating a big fat steak tonight, he would say, just like the way at the end of a day, a plumber does.

Eventually, as happens to all the mighty, I fell. Even now, I can't explain it. Hubris, my diet. Perhaps I started taking myself too seriously and lost my sense of fun. Who knows? But whatever the case, I suddenly found myself so desperate for sales that at the end of a shift, still with nothing, I would order the paper to my own address and then cancel it the following week.

It's a very real thing, the stink of desperation. It's an actual odor, and people can smell it over the phone line. Your jokes become a little more hurried and forced, your confidence a little more false, your pauses more awkward. I soon found myself gazing longingly at the filled-out order sheets clutched in the fist of the new office superstar, a 17-year-old whose phone name was Candy, who'd stroll past my desk humming "Taking Care of Business."

Now, when I came back from the bathroom during my shift, Ray would ask me what the hell took so long. The toilet was for closers.

A few weeks ago, I got home and found this on my answering machine.

Jonathan Goldstein

When the telemarketer realized that there was no one there to pitch to, he stopped himself. But I want you to listen again and notice the long pause before he actually puts the phone down.

Jonathan Goldstein

He says hello, he inhales, and before he puts the phone down, he pauses. As someone who's sold over the telephone for close to 10 years, I can tell you that the pause between the hello and the hang up is a moment of reprieve. You start to talk, you realize you've gotten an answering machine, and then before you actually hang up, you steal a moment. You take shelter in those few seconds before you hit the hang up button and the onslaught of automatically dialed phone numbers begins anew, delivering the voices of people who will very soon hate you directly into the earphones of your headset and straight into your brain.

I played the message over and over, listening to it, not to better hear the chaos of the pitching room, but to try and imagine what was going through his head. And at the same time, I tried to remember what went through my own head during those pauses. It was always sort of like that moment in a horror film with the guy who's having his head held down in a bathtub of water pops up one last time and goes, [INHALES] before he is pushed back down and is drowned forever.

Since the numbers were automatically dialed, you never knew who was going to pop up in your headset. One time I got my friend Mark Zelnicker on the phone, a guy who I hadn't seen in years. Mark was in my junior high phys ed class. He used to get so excited while playing hog ball that he'd clutch the ball to his chest and roll around the floor drooling.

I tried to keep him on the phone as long as possible, never saying who I was, gleaning whatever I could about his life. I could hear his kids playing around, trying to steal the phone from him. And all throughout, I was shocked by how unfailingly decent he was with me. I felt like the anonymous stranger who shows up on Christmas Day to test a family's kindness. Mark didn't buy the paper, but he didn't rush me off either. It felt good to know that Mark Zelnicker had grown up to be a really nice man.

There was also one time I got my grandmother. After several minutes of talking about how weird it was that I had gotten her number out of all the numbers in the city, she told me that she had just learned that morning that my grandfather's cancer had come back. I looked across the room where Billy the manager was eating French fries, and someone else was ringing the bell on Ray's desk.

After I hung up the phone with her, not a second later, another call popped into my headset. Hi, I'm calling from the Gazette, I said. My grandfather would be dead within the year.

And then one day, I got my own number. I can't explain it better than to say that having that happen is sort of like rounding the corner and running into yourself. At first, you don't quite recognize that it's you. You look a little shorter and less handsome. But then all of a sudden, in one naked instant, you're face to face with yourself. I was the telemarketing dog that had caught its own telemarketing tail.

The message that I left myself, because you just can't resist leaving yourself a message, was something like, yep, here I am. God, this is awful. This is horrible. This has to mean something. But of course, it didn't mean anything. And then for the next several seconds, I listened to the silence on the other end of the line, my own line, as I worried about the rapid fire calls that would start again the moment I hung up.

When I got back home, I had exactly two messages on my machine. One was the message from myself. I was surprised by how loud the background noise was behind me and how much smaller I sounded than I'd imagined all these years. The other message was from my mother. She was imploring me to go back to school and become a speech therapist.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast, Heavyweight, whose new season starts September 26.

Ira Glass

Act Five, The Accursed Items. It's not just human beings who fail to achieve the fate that they thought that fate had in store for them. Most everything does. Most everything eventually ends up somewhere that it was not designed to go, serving a purpose that it was not meant for, even if that purpose is just landfill. We end our program today with this brief inventory from J. Robert Lennon of inanimate objects who have left their Plan A far behind and now inhabit a permanent Plan B.

(HOST) J. ROBERT LENNON: A bottle of pain reliever brought on a business trip that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever, but with buttons. An accomplished forgery of a famous painting that was thought to have been lost in a 1965 mansion fire, which now hangs in the largest gallery of a major American art museum. Sneakers hanging from the power line, with one-half of a boy's broken glasses stuffed into each toe.

Ira Glass

J. Robert Lennon reading a story, The Accursed Items, which is in a collection of stories called See You in Paradise. His latest novel is Broken River.

[MUSIC - QUASI, "CALIFORNIA"] ACT 6:

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.