598: My Undesirable Talent 

Ira Glass

Biba Struja was in high school in Serbia when he learned he was different from other people.

Ira Glass

We talked about it through an interpreter. He was on the phone from Serbia. He said it was a rainy day. They were going in to weld gates and fences. And his friend touched the fence they were working on and got a shock.

Ira Glass

Nothing happened.

Ira Glass

Then another guy touches the fence, and he was shocked. Biba sees this, and he thinks, oh, it's a prank. They're pretending.

Ira Glass

Biba has a genetic mutation where he doesn't sweat. That means his skin has a lot less water and so a higher resistance to electricity. He says he does not feel currents that would shock most of us. And scientists say, yeah, that might be possible. This super power does come with that huge downside of not sweating, ever. Having a body that cannot cool itself is really, really miserable.

Ira Glass

Because of the heat.

Ira Glass

But the biggest problem with having a special talent like a high resistance to electricity is figuring out what exactly you do with that talent. You can't just put on a costume and join the X-Men. Until the day that mankind is threatened by an alien race whose bodies are electric charges, you really aren't much use as a superhero. Biba's brother has the same genetic mutation, and he decided to do nothing with it. He stayed on the family farm.

But Biba was sure there must be a way to monetize this. So he went into show business, created a little act doing electricity tricks, like this one-- he sticks a fork in each end of a hot dog, holds the hot dog in midair in front of his face, one hand on each fork, and then-- OK, it's not clear exactly what's going on or whether you actually need a genetic mutation to do this trick, but electricity is pumped through the forks and cooks the hot dog.

Ira Glass

This is from a really good film that was made about Biba called Battery Man, Biba saying, am I the fastest grill or not? It just takes a minute or so to cook a hot dog this way. He toured around Europe doing this act, mostly in discos, he says, sometimes on TV. It's not much of a living. He's got kids. So he supplements that with a job that also sounds like it's kind of a grind for him-- he does therapeutic massages with electricity, up to 20 a day.

Ira Glass

In English, anyway, this word "electrobiotherapist" has the unusual distinction of producing not one hit when you Google it. Mostly, you're probably getting the picture-- Biba's special talent does not seem to make him very happy. When we talked, he complained about the injustice of being born in Serbia, where people don't understand his special gift. In the movie about him, he says sometimes his talent feels like a curse. But when I asked him about that, he said, we're all cursed.

Ira Glass

That's what having a talent like this does to you. You end up saying stuff like that. It seems sometimes like our entire culture is about glorifying people who have incredible special abilities. We have superhero films. We have magazine articles on inspiringly great musicians and writers, then tech billionaires who invent whole new kinds of businesses.

Today, we are not going to be talking about those people. For once, let us look at the less fortunate super-talented-- and by that I mean people who are gifted, but gifted with skills that just don't help anyone that much. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, "My Undesirable Talent." Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, "Climb Spree." So we begin today with a man whose special skill was in the criminal arts. Is that a phrase? Like, I said that, suddenly it felt very Hogwarts School. Anyway, I'm trying to say he had a real gift for committing crimes. Karen Duffin explains.

Karen Duffin

Lou Bronfeld was a cop in San Francisco for 42 years. He spent 16 of those in the burglary unit. And when he talks about his most memorable cases, there's the one where two teenagers stole koalas from the zoo to impress their girlfriends, and there was a series of remarkable burglaries that all happened in the spring of 2002. They all fit the same pattern.

Karen Duffin

He appeared to be a career criminal, often left no trace. Businesses sometimes didn't even know they'd been burglarized until they opened the safe or cash register. But it wasn't just his methods. It was the volume. Within a month, he'd pulled off dozens of burglaries.

Karen Duffin

They assigned more cops later at night to the neighborhood Spider-Man mostly hit. It took two months to catch him. But in those two months, he'd done 63 burglaries. Lou thinks it was the largest burglary count ever charged by the San Francisco DA's office. Spider-Man had done so much so unusually and in such little time the cops were anxious to finally meet him. They had a sense for who he'd probably be.

Karen Duffin

The guy had no prior arrests, didn't appear criminally sophisticated at all-- rather, a little naive. Lou says he was a gentleman-- quiet, polite, seemed relieved to have been caught. They had a hard time connecting the Spider-Man in their heads with the person in front of them, which is a feeling I understand.

Spider-Man is a friend of mine. During his crime spree, we knew each other from church. I was Mormon at the time. He still is. The idea that the guy who sat next to me singing "Choose the Right When a Choice Is Placed Before You" was going out every night and lowering himself into stores on ropes? How did that make any sense at all?

I know everyone always says, I didn't see it coming. But nobody who knew him saw it coming. He's super capable in this effortless way-- cooking, singing, dancing, sports. If he wasn't so nice, it'd be easy to hate him for it, which is to say, it just felt so unnecessary. He had so many ways to make money. Why would he steal it? He was so well dressed, so perfectly put together, that the one clue his best friend Juliann spotted that something might be wrong was this--

Karen Duffin

She was alarmed because he had dirt under his fingernails. At church, people called him the guy with the Italian shoes.

Karen Duffin

He doesn't want to use his name here on the radio, so we thought we'd call him Peter Parker, or maybe Peter Parkour, since that's his MO. He proposed Peter Park. Sounds more Korean, he said, which he is. We decided to go with just Peter.

I've been friends with Peter for 15 years. And all that time, my understanding of him has had this gap, like a blurry patch on a photo, when it comes to Spider-Man. There are so many things I've wondered and just never asked. Now, I'd finally get my chance.

Karen Duffin

Of course, lots of people have gambling problems, and lots of people resort to stealing to feed that addiction. But lots of people do not embark on crime sprees so spectacular the cops give them a superhero nickname.

Peter explains what happened this way-- he found himself penniless and weeks behind on rent. One night, he was closing up at the health club where he worked, and he went to transfer the cash to the safe like every night. But that night, he thought, oh, I could just borrow this, gamble it, win enough to pay back my landlord, and then replace it by morning.

Karen Duffin

For taking the $200.

Karen Duffin

And then he remembered this concession stand at his school, the City College of San Francisco. He'd bought snacks there. It's remote, probably easy to break into. He also remembered that when he worked at a restaurant, they didn't lock the safe. He hoped the concession stand didn't, either.

We're driving up to the concession stand.

Karen Duffin

It's a one-story building, maybe 15 by 15, fully concrete with a rolling window in front where vendors hand out hot dogs and beers during games.

Karen Duffin

He did. He found a hatch on top, like a skylight, but it's steel. He turned the handle. It was unlocked. He opened it, and he dropped 10 feet into the darkness. No rope, just jumped. Had no idea what he was dropping into. He'd never been in there before. Pretty soon, bingo.

Karen Duffin

He climbed on a table and out the hatch, drove straight back to his work, put the $200 he'd stolen earlier that night into the safe, and went home.

Karen Duffin

This plan, of course, is crazy. When he took the money to the casino, it did not turn into permanent financial stability. He lost it, all of it. But now, he had a way to get it back.

Karen Duffin

And with this thought, everything changed. The transformation from being one of us to being Spider-Man was as simple as he stumbled onto something that worked. And once he found it, he didn't let it go. He started looking at the city with different eyes.

Karen Duffin

Places he could easily climb on top of.

Karen Duffin

We're in the Sunset District. And I knew how many places he'd robbed, but seeing him point to one after another after another kind of blew my mind, made the scale of it seem so much bigger-- a flower shop, a burger joint, a comic book store, a kickboxing gym he climbed into through the skylight.

Karen Duffin

Further down the block, he points to a series of buildings.

Karen Duffin

Almost every news article mentioned that one. They say he leapt 10 feet between the two buildings. And on the side of one of those buildings--

Karen Duffin

He's pointing at places I've been to in a neighborhood where I used to live, including a cafe we used to go to together. I had no idea he'd stolen something from that place. Somehow, that never came up. At the Noriega Produce Market just a few blocks away--

Karen Duffin

Peter's police report says that, quote, "The manner in which the crimes were carried out indicates planning and sophistication." But if you ask Peter, his primary method was winging it. He wore whatever he had on, didn't case the interiors of the store in advance-- just chose a place and figured out how to break in. He assembled a backpack of misfit tools he'd picked up at random-- garden hose, a carjack, a meat cleaver he used to cut through walls.

Karen Duffin

He built himself a double life-- worked at the health club during the day, church on Sundays with us, friends on weekends, and an alarm set for 1:00 or 2:00 AM almost every night, when he'd become Spider-Man. If he found money, he'd come home, shower, and go straight to the casino, immediately. If he didn't, he'd go back to bed and sleep all day. As his friend, it was hard to hear that he'd trapped himself in this terrible life. He says he didn't see it.

Karen Duffin

It became like a job, but not a good job. He got injured all the time.

Karen Duffin

One night, he got into this restaurant with another ad-libbed tool. He cut the cord off a vacuum cleaner he found, tied it to the roof, and used it to climb down through the skylight. He landed on the floor, looked out the window, and saw a police car.

He crawls to the register, gets the cash. Worried he's tripped a silent alarm, he tries climbing back up, but loses his grip and falls 10 feet, breaking a table and some chairs. His only option now is the front door.

Karen Duffin

As he told me these stories, I could see why Peter would be good at this-- the guy who thinks quickly on his feet, cool under pressure, intuitive. That night, he went to his best friend Juliann's house, the one who'd notice the dirt under his fingernails.

Karen Duffin

He didn't want anyone to know for all the obvious reasons. He was ashamed. But also, he told me he was used to pretending he was in control, to pretending he was like everyone else. Peter was adopted from Korea into a tiny town in Iowa, mostly white, raised by white parents.

Karen Duffin

It left him always feeling like an outsider. He put on the Italian shoes, kept his feelings to himself, and hoped no one would notice he was different. And this is the thing that struck me, talking to him about all this. At church, we were all so impressed by how composed Peter was, how well put together, without realizing it was because he was trying so hard to be composed and well put together.

Peter was a really great thief in some ways, and a really dumb one in others. He never stopped to think, five dozen burglaries in a row in the same neighborhood during the same hours every day-- wouldn't the cops catch on? They did, and caught him. He confessed everything immediately. He served some time, came out.

And now, of course, we all knew he was Spider-Man, and we rallied around him and rooted for him as he built this new life and went to meetings for his gambling addiction. He was more involved in church than ever. But within a year, secretly, he started going back to the casino. He started stealing again. And this time, he really started to unravel.

Any kind of stealing is pretty tawdry. But because Peter never saw his victims face-to-face, the crime felt a little abstract, like robbing a business and not a person. But one afternoon, he finally committed a crime where he couldn't ignore how ugly it was.

After a failed burglary the night before, he drove around looking for something to swipe in broad daylight. He hoped to find a stray purse or wallet, but he couldn't. So when he spotted a young woman walking down the sidewalk with a purse, he made a decision.

Karen Duffin

He grabbed the purse, and to his horror, she wouldn't let go. So he spun her around, and she fell to the ground, and he ran off with her purse.

Karen Duffin

The next day, he tried to steal another purse from a table at Canvas Cafe, the restaurant that he and I used to go to together sometimes. He was arrested and thrown into jail a second time.

While Peter was behind bars, the guards had heard all about his escapades. They were a little enamored of him. So they took him to an empty corner of the jail one day and dropped a rope down from the ceiling. They wanted to see Spider-Man climb. He was in, he says, the best shape of his life, was doing hundreds of pull-ups and sit-ups every day.

Karen Duffin

When I asked him what he thought the difference was, he said desperation. Sheer desperation. That's how he was able to climb up and down ropes and into buildings. That's how Peter became Spider-Man.

Ira Glass

Karen Duffin is one of the producers of our program. Her friend Peter, by the way, got heavy-duty treatment for his addiction. He hasn't gambled since 2004. Coming up, discovering you can out-Eddie-Murphy Eddie Murphy. That's 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 a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, "My Undesirable Talent," stories of people who find they have a special skill that has some upsides, but in the end, vexingly, more bad than good. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "Uganda Be Kidding Me."

So in this act, as in the first act, we have another guy who tried something once, kind of almost by accident sort of stumbled onto his special skill, and then ran with it for a while until the problems with it became clear. Neil Drumming explains.

Neil Drumming

This story begins when Zora Bikangaga is about to start at a new college.

Neil Drumming

Uganda. Zora's parents are Ugandan. Zora was born in Fresno. It was the summer before he transferred into Westmont College, a small Christian liberal arts school in Santa Barbara. Zora was sitting around with his high school buddies talking about this enthusiastic email he had received. The guy was apparently very excited to meet someone like Zora. Zora's friends, who'd known him for years, found this hilarious.

Neil Drumming

The accent was sort of a hybrid of Zora's dad and Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, Zora's favorite movie. Up until then, Zora had only used it to toy with waiters and crack his friends up. It was a joke. Quick comparison-- here's Eddie Murphy.

Neil Drumming

And now here's Zora.

Neil Drumming

Anyway, back to our story.

Neil Drumming

This is Zora's roommate. His name is Reed. Even now, he's pretty stoked when he remembers the call.

Neil Drumming

Zora could have shown up on the first day of school speaking in his regular voice. But his friends back home wanted to see if he could fool Reed face-to-face. For that, he'd need more than an accent.

Neil Drumming

He figured he'd mess with the guy for a few minutes at the most. But when Zora got to the dorm, Reed wasn't alone.

Neil Drumming

Zora pulled from his parents' experiences and his limited knowledge of Africa to dazzle Reed's family with descriptions of tribes and exotic animals. Again, it could have stopped there. But it was the first day of school, and there were a lot of people who wanted to meet him.

Neil Drumming

Zora stayed in character. He met a bunch of people, all of whom seemed delighted to get to know him. He was enjoying the warm reception so much that he felt a pang of regret when he was introduced to two Kenyan students, actual African students. He knew the game was over.

Neil Drumming

Zora was thrilled and also a bit terrified by his new superpower. He was part Storm, part Mystique, but a dude. He needed to talk to the only people who knew his secret identity.

Neil Drumming

Zora spent most of his childhood in a small, very white town in wine country, northern California, called Healdsburg. His father was a cardiovascular surgeon. And Healdsburg was exactly the kind of place where you'd expect the son of a successful doctor to blend in and thrive. Zora spoke like the other kids in the neighborhood. He played like the other kids in the neighborhood. He just didn't look like the other kids in the neighborhood.

Neil Drumming

As one of the few black kids around, Zora stomached his share of snubs. He was called colorful names like porch monkey, coon, and spear chucker. Oh, and [BLEEP]. Once, a playmate refused to let him use his bathroom for fear his skin color would rub off in the toilet.

These slights baffled Zora because for the most part, he didn't see himself as being different from his friends. And because he never talked to his parents about this stuff, it sometimes weirdly fell to his white friends to explain to him exactly what the hell was going on. Like that time in middle school when he was hanging out with his buddies at a neighborhood store, and the clerk made Zora-- only Zora-- empty his pockets to see if he was stealing.

Neil Drumming

In high school, Zora hit it off with a white girl, but the romance was over before it started.

Neil Drumming

Zora went from being frustrated by all the indignities and exclusion to being guarded and distrustful of most people.

Neil Drumming

Zora wasn't happy with this unhappy person he'd become. So when he got to Westmont and the opportunity arose to become yet another new person, someone who drew others to him rather than repulsing them, Zora seized it.

Neil Drumming

This is Angie. She says everyone at Westmont College seemed to love Zora.

Neil Drumming

Even as a fellow black student, Angie was not immune to thinking of Zora as someone unusual and exciting.

Neil Drumming

So Angie and Zora got very close over the course of the semester. She says they were full fledged BFF's. When they weren't in class, they spent days exploring Santa Barbara together. They watched movies. They played basketball. And they listened to a ton of hip-hop. On Angie's 18th birthday, Zora surprised her with a copy of Common's Like Water for Chocolate.

Neil Drumming

BFF close, but not more.

Neil Drumming

Sorry. That was Eddie Murphy again. I couldn't help myself. Zora says he didn't get physically intimate with anyone the entire time he was in character. He figured if he ever got found out, that would just make his shenanigan seem infinitely more sinister. Zora kept the facade up for months, almost the whole semester, and no one had a clue. They may have even been predisposed not to have a clue. Here's Zora's roommate, Reed, again.

Neil Drumming

And Zora encouraged them to believe he was different, the right kind of different.

Neil Drumming

As much fun as it was being universally adored, Zora started to get annoyed by how little anyone at his school knew about African culture. He found that he could tell them anything, and they would believe it.

Neil Drumming

He's talking about that scene in the movie where the scantily-clad servants sprinkle rose petals at the prince's feet wherever he walks.

Neil Drumming

Zora decided to end the prank with a prank. He started with his roommate.

Neil Drumming

Call it the resilience of youth, but Reed was over it by the time he got back to the dorm room. Zora broke the truth to the rest of his guy friends the same way.

Neil Drumming

Eventually, he outed himself in the school newspaper. Half the school thought it was the brilliant final act of a grand performance art piece, thereby giving Zora another role to play.

Neil Drumming

The president of the college called Zora into his office to interrogate him. He wanted to know if he was somehow taking advantage of the school financially. Was he receiving some scholarship or financial aid package for foreign students that he didn't deserve? It was like that store in Healdsburg all over again. Zora wasn't stealing. He was guilty only of being black. When it came time to tell Angie the truth, Zora decided to do pretty much exactly what he'd done with his roommate, but a little more tenderly because, you know, he liked her.

Neil Drumming

Angie doesn't remember it that way.

Neil Drumming

Zora Bikangaga went from being rejected by a white girl because he was black to being rejected by a black girl because he was just black. And that's not even the end of it.

Neil Drumming

Identity can be funny at that age. Maybe you don't like the way people see you. You want to try something new. You experiment. College kids do it all the time. But being black in America is not like being awkward or having the wrong clothes or being bad at sports. When you're black and someone makes up their mind about you the moment they see you, without you ever having a chance to speak up and announce yourself, it can be so diminishing. It can be heartbreaking. Hell, it can be life-threatening.

Zora wasn't thinking about any of that when he went all Prince Akeem on a whole university. He certainly didn't anticipate that being perceived as fresh from Africa would come with its own set of wild assumptions. He was just goofing around. He stumbled into a place where he suddenly felt welcome and accepted, and he went with it. He clung to it, even if it meant he had to perpetuate a lie.

This new lie felt better than the ones that had been written about him long before he was born because, at least for a while, it felt like it was his to control. It's something any of us might have done, if we had the chops to pull it off.

Ira Glass

Neil Drumming is one of the producers of our program. Zora Bikangaga, by the way, just this year quit his teaching job and is trying out a new career-- acting.

Ira Glass

Act three, "Disbarred." So one of the things that we realized here at the radio show when we were talking about this week's theme amongst ourselves-- this theme "My Undesirable Talent"-- we realized that most talents have some undesirable side to them. Case in point, if you're an athlete or a dancer-- and especially if you get to the point where people pay you to do it, you're in the elite, you're that gifted. Of course, that is fantastic. But one deeply undesirable part of having that kind of talent is that you age out of it. And depending on what you're doing, you can age out of it in your 20s or your 30s.

Ira Glass

This is Wendy Whelan, one of the greatest dancers in the world, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet starting in 1991. She left the New York City Ballet in 2014. And she talked about the experience of walking away from this job that she loved, that she was a master of, in this radio documentary that I heard. And to close out today's show, they gave us permission to play a little excerpt of it here. Here we go.

Ira Glass

Wendy Whelan, from a documentary called A Dancer Dies Twice, produced by Eleanor McDowall, originally a Falling Tree Production for BBC Radio 4. We have a link to the full half-hour documentary. I have to say, I usually hate documentaries where there's no narration. But this one is so, so good. It's at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar. Our production staff includes Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Karen Duffin, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Miki Meek, Robyn Smien, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Updike.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our show's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he showed up at the office this week with a new haircut, kind of a retro one-- really tall, hi-top fade.

Ira Glass

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