The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  But Dad wasn’t just a schoolteacher either. He was also my bus driver. So he’d pick us up from our house, drop me off at school, teach me all day, and then I’d work with him on the pig farm after he dropped me off at home.

  So I saw him every single day, from the morning until the nighttime.

  On Sundays my family and I would go to church.

  Dad was the minister at the local church.

  So all I had were Saturdays. And when you grow up on the farm in rural South Australia, all you do on Saturdays is play sports.

  Dad was my football coach, my basketball coach, and my tennis coach.

  He was everything in my life, this very serious, stern, proud, and impatient man.

  My dad was also a man who had never said a swear word in his entire life.

  And even as little kids, we’d say, “How is this possible, Dad? How is this possible you’ve never said a swear word?”

  He had the same answer every time: “There are other words you can use, and there’s no need for that language.”

  I’m not kidding. I’ve seen him walk around the back of the car at nighttime and hit his shin so hard on the tow bar of the car that he dropped to his knees, looked up at the moon, raised his fists, and yelled, “CURSES!”

  Like a Scooby-Doo villain, he yells, “Curses!” This is the only word that my dad uses.

  The other thing he did instead of swearing is just yell out his feelings.

  So he’d be out working on the farm, and we’d hear this scream of “I’m ANGRY!”

  “I’m annoyed! I’m UPSET!”

  That’s what he does instead of swearing.

  When I turned eighteen years old, I decided that farm life wasn’t for me, and I moved to the city and started going to university. I was studying the arts, and I became a vegetarian.

  Around this time my second-oldest brother moved to a place called Kangaroo Island. Kangaroo Island is off the coast of South Australia. It’s this beautiful, natural wonderland.

  My dad loves Kangaroo Island. He’s never been anywhere else in the world, never even gotten on a plane. And he’s got the same excuse for not traveling anywhere, and that’s “Why do I need to go anywhere? Kangaroo Island is right there.”

  I would say to him, “Look, you know, Dad, I’ve been to Japan and places like that.”

  He said, “I’ve seen Japanese people on Kangaroo Island. Why do I need to go anywhere else?”

  He loves Kangaroo Island so much that he goes to visit my brother every single weekend. He visits him so much that he managed to get a job on Kangaroo Island as the minister at the local church on Sundays. He takes another job after church on Sunday going hunting with farmers, hunting these wild pigs, which are one of the only introduced species on Kangaroo Island.

  I go to visit my brother when I’m eighteen years old, and we go to church in the morning.

  My dad does the service, and then after church my dad says to me, “Do you want to come hunting with me?”

  I say, “Uh, no, I don’t. I don’t need to do that.”

  He says, “Do you just want to come and check it out? It’s in this beautiful national park.”

  And I say, “Okay, that’s sounds fun,” and so Dad and I drive to this national park.

  There’s a big shed out in the front. I walk into the shed, and there are all these hunters and farmers loading up trucks with guns and then driving off through this national park, hunting these wild pigs.

  Dad says again, “Are you sure you don’t want to come hunting with me?”

  I say, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t need to do that.”

  He says, “Okay, I’ll organize for a ride back for you, but before we do, can you help me load up this truck with guns?” and Dad hands me a gun.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever held a gun before.

  (We’re in America, you’re probably all packing right now.)

  But I feel the weight of this gun, and I feel a sense of power, and this weird feeling, like Oh, yeah, I want to shoot something. Let’s shoot something. I want to go hunting.

  So I tell my Dad I’ll go, and Dad says, “Great.”

  We load up this truck with guns, and then Dad and I drive off through this national park. We park the truck, and it’s just Dad and me hunting the wild pigs. After about three hours, Dad shoots six wild pigs.

  I shoot none. I enjoy looking through the scope at things far away. I like jumping out from bushes and pretending to shoot things and going “Pow, pow, pow!” I’m having a really good time.

  Dad keeps thinking I’m going to shoot something, when I’m not, I’m just looking through my scope.

  He’s getting very annoyed, and I know this because he’s screaming, “I’m annoyed!”

  He says, “Look, do you want to shoot something?”

  I say, “No, Dad, I’m having a really good time. I feel like I’m in Predator or something like that!”

  By this time I’ve put mud under my eyes like a soldier.

  He says, “No, I’m going to find you something to shoot.”

  He disappears off through these trees, and he comes back about ten minutes later, and he whispers, “I found you something.”

  I follow him, and he tells me to look through my scope, and I look, and I see a pig, and it is a big pig. As it lies down, I see a bunch of little babies come up and start suckling at its teats.

  I’m looking at this mother pig through my scope, and Dad whispers in my ear, “It’s easy.”

  I say, “I know it’s easy, Dad, but this is a bit fucked, don’t you think?”

  And he says, “There’s no need for that language.”

  Dad whispers again, “It’s easy. You’re helping. This pig is a nuisance. They ruin the local flora and fauna. They ruin the environment for the local animals. You’re helping. You can do this.”

  I look at this pig, and I say to Dad, “Do I have to shoot the babies as well?”

  He goes, “No, just shoot the mum. They’ll die on their own.”

  And again he says, “You’re helping, these are pests. You’re helping, you can do this.”

  I sit looking at this pig for what feels like forever, and I think, I can do this.

  I get the pig’s head in my sights, I close my eyes and pull the trigger.

  When I open my eyes, I see Dad’s back in front of me, and I see him drop to the right.

  And I have just shot Dad in the back.

  He swings around as he grabs himself by the shoulder. Blood starts coming out from between his fingers. He looks at me.

  His eyes are wide, and he just says, “YOU FUCKING SHOT ME!”

  That’s the first time he’s ever said a swear word. He just unleashes this tirade of abuses.

  “You effing shot me! I am effing dead! Do you know where we are? We are in the middle of nowhere. I am effing dead. You have effing killed me!”

  And as he’s doing this, I sit in shock, and I drop the gun to the ground. I stare at Dad, and secretly, in the back of my brain, I want to go, There’s no need for that language.

  But I don’t. I don’t say anything.

  And Dad just continues, “I can’t believe it’s you. Out of all of my sons, you’re the one who kills me. The vegetarian, the city boy.”

  He pulls out his phone, and he throws it at me and says, “Call Mum. Call Mum. Tell her you’ve killed me and I’m dead.”

  I get his phone, and I dial emergency (I’m not an idiot).

  I say, “Uh, I’ve just shot my dad.”

  And they say, “Where are you?”

  “Kangaroo Island.”

  And they say, “We need you to be a bit more specific than that.”

  “I don’t know where, there’s a national park. There are trees here. People go hunting here.”

  And they say, “We think we know where you are. There’s a property about
a kilometer away. Do you think you can get him to this property?”

  I say, “Yeah, he seems okay.”

  I hang up from them, and I tell Dad, “We’ve got to get to this property.”

  He says, “Give me your jumper, your sweater.”

  I take off my sweater, and he uses the sleeve to stuff into the bullet hole. I put my arm around him and hold the jumper into his chest as I carry him back to where we’ve parked the truck. I put him in the passenger side. I run around to the driver’s side.

  I start the truck up, but I can’t drive a stick shift. And this is a big old truck with one these gearshifts on the steering wheel. I grind it into gear, and we bounce forward and stop.

  Dad screams in pain. I start it up again, I grind it into a different gear, and we bounce forward and stop again.

  Dad screams again, and says, “Get out!”

  I get out of the truck, and I walk around to the passenger side as Dad slides along the seat (leaving a trail of blood across the back of the seat) and drives himself to this property.

  Now, on the emergency line all they’ve told me is to make sure that Dad stays awake, which is good, now that he’s driving.

  And finally we get to the property. By the time we get there, Dad’s gone this bluey-gray color.

  The helicopter is there to pick us up, and Dad gets loaded by the ambulance people out of the truck and into the back of the helicopter. I get on the helicopter with Dad, and we get flown to the hospital for free (thanks to Australia’s health system).

  Dad is in surgery for quite a while, and all I remember next is my mum walking out.

  She says, “He’s going to be okay. He’s lost his collarbone, and he had very little blood left in his body when he got here, but he’s going to be okay. Do you want to go and visit him?”

  I say, “No,” because I just can’t.

  Mum says, “It’s okay,” as she counsels me through what has happened.

  Eventually I go into my dad’s hospital room. He’s lying in the bed, sort of strapped up.

  We lock eyes, and he says…“I hope you’ve learned something.”

  And I did learn something.

  I’ve never touched another gun.

  Years later I’ll learn that Dad has almost been shot about twelve times from different mates because he gets so impatient that he often jumps in front of people as they’re about to shoot.

  And you know what? I think my dad learned something that day.

  Sometimes there is a need for that kind of language.

  * * *

  JON BENNETT’s comedy career began in his homeland of Australia, and after fourteen years in the business, he is now known as one of the most prolific storyteller/comedians touring the world. With a total of eight hourlong individual comedy shows, Jon is constantly performing across the globe, making people laugh through exceptional comedic storytelling. He has received multiple five-star reviews in reputable publications worldwide and won awards such as Funniest Show Award in the London Fringe, Critics Choice Award for Best Solo Show at the Orlando Fringe, and a Golden Gibbo Award nomination at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. He has performed at a number of prestigious festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and Just for Laughs in Montreal. You can find out more about Jon at jonbennettcomedy.com.

  This story was told on June 22, 2017, at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. The theme of the evening was Great Escapes. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  In the summer of 2013, I was in Cairo, Egypt. I was on assignment for Al Jazeera, covering a major political upheaval.

  The president at the time, a guy named Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, had been deposed and jailed in what his supporters said was a military coup.

  So, in protest, they set up these sit-ins in the city. It was a hot, crazy summer—really tense. And by the middle of August, the government finally did what they’d been threatening to do, which is to clear the sit-ins. But they did so with unabated violence.

  They started shooting at people in the sit-ins and the surrounding neighborhoods at around seven in the morning and didn’t stop until well into the night, until pretty much everybody was either dead or arrested.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a massacre in broad daylight in a capital city of roughly 20 million.

  So the next day I went to a mosque where maybe two hundred or so of those bodies were being kept. A lot of them were badly burned, and there were blocks of ice on top of them. There were family members going in and out of this mosque, trying to identify their loved ones.

  It was intensely chaotic and emotional.

  I am with a producer who works in the local bureau and can translate Arabic for me. We walk outside and start talking to a woman who says that her husband is among the dead. She’s shaking and in shock, and she’s describing her last phone conversation with her husband, which ended when the shooting started.

  She describes him as an engineer who was unarmed and the father of her four children. My colleague is translating, and I’m not even looking up. I’m just in my notebook, furiously writing, not wanting to miss a detail.

  And then my colleague stops translating while the woman is still talking, and I look up at him. And the look on my face is like, Dude, what?

  He leans in and whispers, “Um, now would be a good time for you to put an arm around her.”

  This makes my little reporter’s brain totally short-circuit, because I am not a touchy-feely person. I don’t hug you for you to tell me your story; that is not how it works.

  But the look on his face was clear: Get over yourself and be human. Now. Put your arm around her.

  So I robotically lift my arm, and the second my hand touches her, she collapses into my chest. She’s a tiny woman. And she sinks into me and starts sobbing as she’s holding on to me. I’m still holding my pen and paper. And it hits me hard that this woman doesn’t care what kind of reporter I am or what my stupid little rules are.

  She wants me to register what is happening to her on the worst day of her life.

  She wants me to bear witness.

  I should have known better, and in fact I did know better.

  Two years prior to that, in the spring of 2011, was the start of the uprising in Syria, what is now the civil war. I was sitting in the newsroom in Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, watching grainy YouTube footage of unarmed civilians being mowed down by the Syrian military.

  At the same time, we had a government spokesperson on our airwaves claiming that this wasn’t really happening—it was a distortion of the truth; there was a conspiracy. We couldn’t confirm any of this, because they’d already shut down our bureau in Damascus and they weren’t issuing journalist visas.

  So what to do? Well, I’m a multinational. I have an Iranian passport. So my boss agreed to deploy me to Syria, where I wouldn’t need a visa to enter, just to see what’s going on.

  I fly into Damascus, and unfortunately for me, at this point the Syrian authorities have already become super paranoid.

  So they go through my luggage and find a satellite phone, which is not a big deal. If you travel in that part of the world, you know that outside of major cities you don’t really have cell-phone coverage. You can buy a satellite phone at any shopping mall; it’s not spy gear.

  But this was enough for them to get suspicious. So they strip-searched me and found my American passport in the pocket of my jeans. In this passport was a stamp from Al Jazeera, who sponsored my visa for Qatar—it’s what I needed to reenter the country.

  This escalated things.

  They took me into a tiny office and sat me between two guys on a couch. There were all these other guys on their computers, chain-smoking and banging out some kind of report on me.

  When the report was done, the two guys sitting on either side of me got up and strapped
on a bunch of guns. They peeled me from the couch, and they led me to the parking garage under the airport. They sat me between them in the backseat, with another armed man in the front seat, and drove off into the night.

  We pulled into a compound. There were three or four checkpoints to get into this compound, so I assumed it was some sort of government building. They pulled me out of the car by my hair and threw me in front of a desk in a dimly lit portable office.

  There were all these men yelling at me, and I looked down and saw that I was standing in a considerable amount of somebody else’s blood.

  They processed me for some kind of arrest, blindfolded me, handcuffed me, and took me to an interrogation with a man who told me to call him Firas.

  Nothing I said was accepted by Firas: that I was a reporter, that I wasn’t part of some conspiracy. He didn’t even believe that I didn’t speak Arabic. So I realized very quickly that truth had no currency there. They handcuffed me again, blindfolded me, and threw me into a cell.

  I took off the blindfold and saw that I was in a cell that was covered in blood—so much that I didn’t know where to stand or lean. So I kind of squatted in the corner and tried to wrap my head around the hell that I was in.

  An hour or two later, a guy comes to the door and he yells out my father’s name, which is also printed in my Iranian passport. He yells out “Fayrouz!” He can’t tell the difference between my name and my father’s name, I guess. So I get up, and he blindfolds me and handcuffs me.

  I thought that I was being taken to another interrogation, but he took me outside into a courtyard and slammed me up against a wall. I could hear people being tortured a few feet away from me. I could hear the guards, the Mukhābarāt, joking and laughing, and I could smell their cigarettes.

  They were acting like regular employees on a coffee break. And I stood against that wall and I thought to myself, They’re going to kill me. And worse than that thought—believe it or not—worse than dying was the thought of dying like that, which is to say alone, because I was alone.

  I couldn’t locate the humanity in the people around me, and I knew that I was going to be an anonymous body. If I was lucky, they would throw me in a ditch, and my father, whose name was being called out in that place, would never have any peace: he’d never know what had happened to me.