The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  Straight away he wrote back:It was about 2-3 months from when the SEC called me in for the first time until I started trading again. The reason I didn’t trade for those 2-3 months is because I had all of my money tied up in a stock. I sold it at the end of the year to take a tax loss, which allowed me to start trading again. I wasn’t frightened by them because it was clear that they were focused on whether or not I was being paid to profile stocks when the fact is I was not. I was never told by them that I was doing something wrong and I was never told by them not to do something.

  By September 1999, Jonathan Lebed was playing at the top of his game. He had figured out the advantage, after he had bought shares in a small company, in publicizing his many interests. “I came up with it myself,” he said of the idea. “It was obvious from the newspapers and CNBC. Of course stocks respond to publicity!”

  After he had picked and bought his stock, he would write a single message about it and stick it up in as many places on Yahoo! Finance as he could between five and eight in the morning, when he left home for school. There were no explicit rules on Yahoo! Finance, but there were constraints. The first was that Yahoo! limited the number of messages he could post using one e-mail address. He would click onto Yahoo! and open an account with one of his four AOL screen names; a few minutes later, Yahoo!, mysteriously, would tell him that his messages could no longer be delivered. Eventually, he figured out that they must have some limit that they weren’t telling people about. He got around it by grabbing another of his four AOL screen names and creating another Yahoo! account. By rotating his four AOL screen names, he found he could get his message onto maybe two hundred Yahoo! message boards before school.

  He also found that when he went to do it the next time, with a different stock, Yahoo! would no longer accept messages from his AOL screen names. So he was forced to create four more screen names and start over again. Yahoo! never told him he shouldn’t do this. “The account would be just, like, deleted,” he said. “Yahoo! never had a policy; it’s just what I figured out.” The SEC accused Jonathan of trying to seem like more than one person when he promoted his stocks, but when you see how and why he did what he did, that is clearly false. (For instance, he ignored the feature on Yahoo! that enables users to employ up to seven different “fictitious names” for each e-mail address.) It’s more true to say that he was trying to simulate an appearance on CNBC.

  Over time, he learned that some messages had more effect on the stock market than others. “I definitely refined it,” he said of his Internet persona. “In the beginning, I would write, like, very professionally. But then I started putting stuff in caps and using exclamation points and making it sound more exciting. That worked better. When it’s more exciting, it draws people’s attention to it compared to when you write, like, dull or something.” The trick was to find a stock that he could get excited about. He sifted the Internet chat rooms and the shopping mall with three things in mind: (1) “It had to be in the area of the stock market that is likely to become a popular play”; (2) “It had to be undervalued compared to similar companies”; and (3) “It had to be undiscovered—not that many people talking about it on the message boards.”

  Over a couple of months, I drifted in and out of Jonathan Lebed’s life and became used to its staccato rhythms. His defining trait was that the strangest things happened to him, and he just thought of them as perfectly normal—and there was no one around to clarify matters. The threat of being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Newark and sent away to a juvenile detention center still hung over him, but he didn’t give any of it a second thought. He had his parents, his twelve-year-old sister, Dana, and a crowd of friends at Cedar Grove High School, most of whom owned pieces of Internet businesses and all of whom speculated in the stock market. “There are three groups of kids in our school,” one of them explained to me. “There’s the jocks, there’s the druggies and there’s us—the more business-oriented. The jocks and the druggies respect what we do. At first, a lot of the kids are, like, What are you doing? But once kids see money, they get excited.”

  The first time I heard this version of the social structure of Cedar Grove High, I hadn’t taken it seriously. But then one day I went out with Jonathan and one of his friends, Keith Graham, into a neighboring suburb to do what they liked to do most when they weren’t doing business—shoot pool. We parked the car and set out down an unprosperous street in search of the pool hall.

  “Remember West Coast Video?” Keith said drolly.

  I looked up. We were walking past a derelict building with West Coast Video stenciled on its plate glass.

  Jonathan chuckled knowingly. “We owned, like, half the company.”

  I looked at him. He seemed perfectly serious. He began to tick off the reasons for his investment. “First, they were about to open an Internet subsidiary; second, they were going to sell DVDs when no other video chain . . .”

  I stopped him before he really got going. “Who owned half the company?”

  “Me and a few others. Keith, Michael, Tom, Dan.”

  “Some teachers, too,” Keith said.

  “Yeah, the teachers heard about it,” Jonathan said. He must have seen me looking strangely at him because he added: “It wasn’t that big a deal. We probably didn’t have a controlling interest in the company, but we had a fairly good percentage of the stock.”

  “Teachers?” I said. “The teachers followed you into this sort of thing.”

  “Sometimes,” Jonathan said.

  “All the time,” Keith said. Keith is a year older than Jonathan and tends to be a more straightforward narrator of events. Jonathan will habitually dramatize or understate some case and emit a strange frequency, like a boy not quite sure how hard to blow into his new tuba, and Keith will invariably correct him. “As soon as people at school found out what Jonathan was in, everybody got in. Like, right way. It was, like, if Jonathan’s in on it, it must be good.” And then the two boys moved on to some other subject, bored with the memory of having led some teachers in the acquisition of shares of West Coast Video. We entered the pool hall and took a table, where we were joined by another friend, John. Keith had paged him.

  My role in Jonathan Lebed’s life suddenly became clear: to express sufficient wonder at whatever he has been up to that he is compelled to elaborate.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How would other kids find out what Jonathan was in?”

  “It’s high school,” said Keith, in a tone reserved for people over thirty-five. “Four hundred kids. People talk.”

  “How would the teachers find out?”

  Now Keith gave me a look that told me that I’m the most prominent citizen of a new nation called Stupid. “They would ask us!” he said.

  “But why?”

  “They saw we were making money,” Keith said.

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan, who, odd as it sounds, exhibits none of his friend’s knowingness. He just knows. “I feel, like, that most of my classes, my grades would depend not on my performance but on how the stocks were doing.”

  “Not really,” Keith said.

  “OK,” Jonathan said. “Maybe not that. But, like, I didn’t think it mattered if I was late for class.”

  Keith considered that. “That’s true,” he said.

  “I mean,” Jonathan said, “they were making, like, thousands of dollars off the trades, more than their salaries even. . . .”

  “Look,” I said, “I know this is a stupid question. But was there any teacher who, say, disapproved of what you were doing?”

  The three boys considered this, plainly for the first time in their lives.

  “The librarian,” Jonathan finally said.

  “Yeah,” John said. “But that’s only because the computers were in the library, and she didn’t like us using them.”

  “You traded stocks from the library?”

  “Fifth-period study hall was in the library,” Keith said. “Fifth-period study hall was like a little Wall
Street. But sometimes the librarian would say the computers were for study purposes only. None of the other teachers cared.”

  “They were trading,” Jonathan said.

  The mood had shifted. We shot pool and pretended that there was no more boring place to be than this world we live in. “Even though we owned like a million shares,” Jonathan said, picking up the new mood, “it wasn’t that big a deal. West Coast Video was trading at like thirty cents a share when we got in.”

  Keith looked up from the cue ball. “When you got in,” he said.

  “Everyone else got in at sixty-five cents; then it collapsed. Most of the people lost money on that one.”

  “Hmmm,” Jonathan said, with real satisfaction. “That’s when I got out.”

  Suddenly I realized that the SEC was right: there were victims to be found from Jonathan Lebed’s life on the Internet. They were right here in New Jersey. I turned to Keith. “You’re Jonathan’s victim.”

  “Yeah, Keith,” Jonathan said, laughing. “You’re my victim.”

  “Nah,” Keith said. “In the stock market, you go in knowing you can lose. We were just doing what Jon was doing, but not doing as good a job at it.”

  TOXIC DREAMS: A CALIFORNIA TOWN FINDS MEANING IN AN ACID PIT

  Jack Hitt

  The Stringfellow Acid Pits were called into being on August 9, 1955, at a dull meeting of small-bore officials in Riverside County, California. The county’s Board of Trade had convened to kick around a new idea, one you still hear among municipal officials in desperate places. The goal was to better facilitate “the program of enticing industries into our county”; the solution, board president Carl Davis said, was for the county to offer a dumping site for the toxic waste that the desired industries would inevitably produce. The board agreed. They approached J. B. Stringfellow, a high-school dropout who operated a granite quarry a mile or so outside the little town of Glen Avon. The county’s proposal was to dump chemicals into the large stone cavities left by Stringfellow’s excavations. The scientific thinking they adopted was: she’ll hold.

  The county imposed a few restrictions on Stringfellow; they discouraged, for example, any “fuming” liquids. But such burdensome government regulations were quickly forgotten, and the quarry began to fill up with an exquisite ragout, including “scrap thinner,” “degreaser,” “bonder lube,” “paint booth waste,” “lube line waste,” “sump waste,” “paint stripper,” “chromated emulsion cleaner,” and “paint line waste.” One trucker would later testify (for there was, inevitably, a lawsuit) to the careful segregation of deadly chemicals at Stringfellow: if “one pond was full,” he said, “we would go up to the next one.”

  A unique attraction offered by Stringfellow was “unsupervised night dumping.” In 1971, local manufacturers received a brochure that read, “If your company finds it necessary to dump on a weekend or during the night, arrangements can be made by telephone with our office.” Eventually even the phone call was eliminated, and the gate was simply left unlocked so that truckers could let themselves in at any hour of any day. The oversight system employed to prevent dumping violations was the honor code.

  A list of the chemicals poured into Stringfellow fills thirteen pages in a court brief (for there were, inevitably, court briefs), including everything from acetylene chloride, butylated hydroxyanisole, and chloro-benzenesulfonic acid to uranium, xylene, and zinc phosphate. One pits veteran recalled in a deposition how the organics would sometimes get mixed into the acids and that Stringfellow, “as a result, caught fire.”

  Between September 1956 and November 1972, the quarry took in thirty-four million gallons of chemicals—hundreds of different chemicals—from about a hundred companies. In 1972, Mr. Stringfellow, fearing that the pits were leaking, agreed to shut the dump down. The huge uncovered lagoons languished, unprotected by even a fence.

  In March 1978, the rainy season in southern California was worse than usual. With each downpour, the acid pits rose. The state announced that rather than allow the chemical mix to overrun the earthen levees that surrounded it, they were going to flush out some of the pits’ contents. Eight hundred thousand gallons of Stringfellow brew were sluiced into the town’s open culverts. It curled around the school, burbled past people’s homes, and finally sloshed into ditches leading out of town. The sewers backed up with an odd viscous foam. Local kids thought the stuff was great; its stickiness made for hilariously goopy bubble beards when they smeared it on their faces.

  That August, Love Canal, New York, was evacuated. Poisonous chemicals had been seeping onto playgrounds and into basements. President Carter declared the town a disaster area. “Toxic waste” became a household word. People in Glen Avon, newly conscious of environmental danger, began wondering about the weird foam they had seen, about the strange odors they sometimes smelled, about disabilities and ailments they had previously chalked up to bad luck. Everything, it seemed, could be traced to the same source: the dump.

  A group of residents banded together, gave itself a name—Concerned Neighbors in Action—and started asking questions of state environmental officials. As the years passed, and answers were slow in coming, Concerned Neighbors became more activist—in 1980, they printed up a T-shirt with a wilted sunflower, a dying bird, and the slogan IT’S THE PITS. In 1984, state authorities announced the existence of an underground plume of Stringfellow slime, inching toward town. After the news, notices went up around town asking people if they had experienced any peculiar ailments or problems. They had. In April 1985, roughly one-third of the town’s population joined in filing a massive lawsuit.

  The suit’s official title was Penny Newman et al. v. J. B. Stringfellow et al., but the emphasis, on both sides, was on the “et al.” The suit named as defendants J. B. Stringfellow, the state of California, and more than a hundred different dumpers that had used the pits.1 The plaintiff pool consisted of nearly four thousand injured parties alleging damages that included property devaluation, physical ailment, and emotional distress.

  On its surface, then, Stringfellow appears to be merely another wretched tale in the familiar genre of dump narratives: negligent corporate giants in cahoots with craven state lackeys secretly store a witches’ brew of poisons near working-class town and don’t fess up until children are stumping about on withered legs and the elderly are marooned inside oxygen tents. And one would expect the standard ending to this tale: locals sue the hell out of everybody and scoop up millions in well-deserved compensation. But, as I was to learn, there was very little that was standard about the Stringfellow story.

  What first drew my attention to Glen Avon’s woes was that absurd name. Stringfellow. Acid. Pits. Modern life rarely shunts nouns together with such Dickensian economy. After I first encountered that singular name in a newspaper article some four or five years ago, it began to appear in my life eerily, serendipitously. If I was in Washington, the Post had a short update; if in San Francisco, then the Chronicle. If, while dressing in a hotel, I caught an environmental lawyer on C-SPAN, then Stringfellow would be cited offhandedly and without explanation. One evening, seated at an intimate dinner party in New Haven, Connecticut, I casually mentioned my growing interest in Stringfellow. Across the table a head turned and said, “I’ve worked on that case.” Then another guest spoke up. He, too, was indirectly involved. I was not following the case; it was pursuing me.

  The newspaper reports I read created a sense of Cyclopean dimension: a specially constructed courtroom, private judges, secret negotiations, a quarter-million pages of pretrial documents, and legal processes of absurd intricacy. The more I studied Stringfellow, though, the less it seemed to me to be simply a complex of lawsuits. It became, in my mind, a diorama of the twentieth century and all its plagues: complexity, chaos, existential fear, tedium, colossal wads of money, and a neo-medieval conviction that the objective truth is attainable if only one can spend enough money and take enough depositions.

  I wanted to look at Stringfellow up close—not only to wa
de into the particulars of the case but to enter the world that it had created. Four thousand people bound together for nearly two decades constitutes a kind of community, one that is very modern and American—built not upon tribal identification or religious tenets or a credo of common virtue but upon shared victimization. And beyond the plaintiffs, there were hundreds of others—lawyers, clerks, government functionaries—who had spent years wandering the Stringfellow landscape. And so, last fall, I decided to fly to California and explore their world.

  The creative force that transfigured a neglected dump into a legal nightmare was the case’s inherent complexity. For example, Stringfellow has all the superficial features of a straightforward class-action suit—corporate negligence, thousands injured—but it is not one. In a true class-action suit, such as Love Canal or the Dalkon Shield case, a large group of plaintiffs can sue as an individual, because each plaintiff has more or less the same complaint. Stringfellow was not so straightforward. The dump didn’t contain just one chemical; it had hundreds of them. The chemicals didn’t intrude into the plaintiffs’ lives by an established path: some town residents said that the toxins leached into their water; some claimed that their soil had been contaminated; others claimed that the poisons wafted into their homes on the Santa Ana winds. What’s more, each of the four thousand plaintiffs was suffering from a different set of ailments, ranging from young Phillip Leyva’s “extreme retardation of bone maturation,” “learning problem at school,” and “uncontrollable crying” to Barbara Provonsha’s “nightmares,” “memory loss,” and “tingling sensation in lips.”

  Stringfellow was so complex that it had to be seen as four thousand separate personal-injury cases—think of four thousand car accidents—packaged together. The case presented a problem unique in the history of American law. How does a court try four thousand cases that are generally similar but legally different? Judge Erik Kaiser came up with an innovative solution: he would bundle the four thousand plaintiffs into groups of roughly seventeen, and try the bundled cases consecutively. Consider the math: 4,000 divided by 17 = 235 trials. If each one lasted a little under a year—a conservative estimate—the entire process would be wrapped up in two centuries.