00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Brian. I'm excited to share something special with you today. It's a moving, one-of-a-kind podcast that stems from a simple question. If you'd never met your biological father, how far would you go to find him? That's the heart of Reaching Out, a new podcast from Futuro and KCRW. It follows Sarah Cavado's search for his father, along with his twin brother, a father neither of them has ever known, and everything that search starts to reveal about their family. The first two episodes are out right now. Be sure to find Reaching Out in your podcast feed and follow it to get the rest of the episodes weekly. And keep listening right now for episode one. Here's Reaching Out.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: Join Futuro Plus for early access to the whole season, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content for Reaching Out. Go to futuromediagroup.org backslash join plus to get access today. Futuro. On February 15th, 2020, Connor calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father. You do not record this conversation. This is notable, if only because so much of your life has been recorded. Moments far less consequential than this. You're on Connor's fourth birthday. A school performance. You play a scared rabbit, your only line.
00:01:34
Speaker 3: I think we're lost.
00:01:35
Speaker 4: Don't worry, we'll just go back to where we came.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: Which way did we come? A house party when you were 16, when you first began to record yourself.
00:01:44
Speaker 5: These records were made because you or someone else thought the moment was worth keeping.
00:01:50
Speaker 6: A sort of prescient.
00:01:52
Speaker 2: Act, one that assumes that you might want to return, that what is captured here may hold some significance, that what is remembered may cohere somehow with the story of your life as you are meant to understand it. There is a price for what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, for the story we make of it. If you had known how this would all turn out, maybe you would have recorded everything. Or if you had known the cost, maybe you would not have recorded anything at all. but you did not know, could not have known. On February 15th, 2020, your brother calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father, but there is no record of that call. There is, however, a recording of the call you make a few days later.
00:03:12
Speaker 4: Hello?
00:03:14
Speaker 6: Hey, brother.
00:03:15
Speaker 7: Hey, what's up?
00:03:17
Speaker 2: Nothing.
00:03:18
Speaker 8: My phone is at 10%, by the way.
00:03:20
Speaker 6: That's cool.
00:03:22
Speaker 8: I don't feel like talking on the phone very long.
00:03:25
Speaker 7: I'm tired.
00:03:27
Speaker 3: I'm recording.
00:03:28
Speaker 8: I hope that is okay.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: Oh, really?
00:03:31
Speaker 7: Okay.
00:03:32
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: All right.
00:03:34
Speaker 4: That's cool.
00:03:36
Speaker 8: Are you recording because you want to talk about dad stuff?
00:03:40
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:03:40
Speaker 8: Well, not just because of that.
00:03:42
Speaker 7: But yeah.
00:03:57
Speaker 2: These days, you rarely know where Connor is until he's already there. You call and he's in Washington with his girlfriend. You call again and he's barely got service. He's trimming weed in Arcata. Or he's hopped the train to the Midwest. Or he's crashing on a friend's couch in Oakland.
00:04:12
Speaker 8: Just fucking... So I'm in New Orleans right now, right? You know that? You're where?
00:04:18
Speaker 2: Right now, Connor is partying in New Orleans with his girlfriend. Right now, you are pacing around your room in Harlem, staring at a whiteboard where you have scribbled a list of vague to-dos. Dentist, student loans, respond to email, and clean. You do not bother to erase these tasks each week. The tasks will remain undone, or they will be rewritten.
00:04:42
Speaker 8: Today, me and Claire were walking to go get my bike, and we walked by this guy who apparently used to live here. We keep walking, and all of a sudden, I hear beer steps, and.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: I look behind.
00:04:53
Speaker 8: He's walking really quickly to catch up with us. He's walking, and he's like, you faggot. You can't bring females here. What the fuck do you think you're doing? I was like, it's my girlfriend. And then he kind of just Mean mugged and blank stared, and then he started walking back to his chair, right?
00:05:15
Speaker 2: Connor does not like it when you point out your differences, but contrast is the rightful and unavoidable dominion of twins. There are superficial distinctions, the kind of differences strangers point out when you inevitably pull up a photo of Connor after they learn you're a twin. Your tightly coiled curls, Connor's loose, wavy hair. Connor's growth spurt at 16. Your 5'7, which you say is 5'8. But nothing makes you feel more different from your brother than when he tells you these kinds of stories. Because it is in these stories that your critical difference becomes most obvious.
00:05:49
Speaker 8: And then we keep walking. It's about like a mile and a half or so back to the house. And I like turn around and the fucking guy is like a block away from us.
00:06:00
Speaker 4: Whoa.
00:06:01
Speaker 8: I just had fucking like these knives in his hand. And like polishing his knives on his shirt and like looking at us.
00:06:08
Speaker 2: The critical difference between you and Connor is this. Long ago, without realizing it, you chose a kind of freedom. The kind that imparts stability and safety, and that you pay for in unsubsidized loans, quarterly job reviews, happy hours with co-workers, boring party conversation, conferences with field practitioners, mid-century modern furniture, boxing classes, and dental checkups. And Connor chose a kind of freedom that comes with land projects, one-off jobs at biker festivals, wide-open mountain ranges from the Union Pacific Line, and that he pays for in a persistent smoker's cough, weeks on remote weed farms with fish fans, and being pursued in New Orleans by a guy with a knife.
00:06:51
Speaker 8: It was just like a psycho-ass move. So yeah, that was crazy. That's why I was talking to you.
00:06:58
Speaker 2: You do not return to the subject of your birth father tonight. You talk about your mother. who left her apartment in Oakland after they raised the rent a few months ago. She's dog-sitting for strangers now to save money.
00:07:10
Speaker 8: She's, like, talking to me about how she's, like, bouncing around a bunch right now.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:07:17
Speaker 8: Living that nomadic lifestyle, am I right?
00:07:21
Speaker 7: Uh-huh.
00:07:22
Speaker 2: You wrestle about timing for your next call.
00:07:24
Speaker 8: Yeah, probably can't talk tomorrow, but I can talk sometime in the next few days.
00:07:30
Speaker 7: Tell me what time.
00:07:33
Speaker 8: And Dave, dude, I don't have a schedule.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: Your brother thinks you are a judgmental normie, and you think he is a judgmental hobo. This is the shared cost of your divergent freedoms. You both pay for your choices with the degree of distance it puts between you. But you do love each other, and you are trying to be better, to be nicer, to be closer. This routine of phone calls, which began a few months ago, is your attempt.
00:07:59
Speaker 8: I want to drink water and eat meals.
00:08:05
Speaker 9: It's unlikely you speak about your father again, but it's hard to say for sure.
00:08:17
Speaker 2: There are no records of phone calls with Connor that week or the next. You assume his impulse to look for your father is a passing one. You doubt you follow up. You went through your phase, of course, the one that you imagine most fatherless teenagers go through. in which your father's absence took on an outsized significance, in which your adolescent brain dissected and disassembled its meaning in relation to your sense of self? Was your fatherlessness, while you felt so apart from others, was his abandonment a sort of permanent wound on your psyche? Only one way to find out. Write a lot of shitty poetry. None of those poems are recorded, thank God. But one vestige remains. a play about two boys waiting to meet their father at a cafe. You wrote it when you were 17. It was called, perhaps a little over-precisely, Waiting to Meet Your Father, and was haltingly, painfully acted out by two fellow art students.
00:09:15
Speaker 6: What if he doesn't show?
00:09:17
Speaker 5: He will.
00:09:18
Speaker 6: And if he doesn't? I'll be okay.
00:09:21
Speaker 3: I'll be okay.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: The central tension of the play is that the two boys are waiting at a cafe to meet their father who they've never known. But he is running late, or maybe he is standing them up. The brothers argue about whether or not they should wait to find out which one it is. One boy is sure it won't be worth it. The other is adamant they stay.
00:09:44
Speaker 4: Do you think about him a lot? No.
00:09:48
Speaker 8: Do you?
00:09:49
Speaker 1: Well, sometimes.
00:09:52
Speaker 4: Like, we're about to fall asleep. It's usually while I'm not thinking that I think about him the most. You know, it's one of those things where when my mind is just drifting, I'll suddenly start wondering about him. And then I'll have to make myself do something to take my mind off him. The more I think about trying to think about him, the more I end up thinking about him.
00:10:10
Speaker 2: In the end.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: Let's go.
00:10:13
Speaker 9: Are you sure?
00:10:15
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: Their father arrives a few moments after they walk out the door. The poetry and playwriting phase was short-lived. When you were 20, you wrote a radio commentary, also over-precisely titled, Searching for Dad.
00:10:36
Speaker 5: Over the last couple of years, I've found myself at the computer googling my biological father's name. I'd sort through the different characters that came up. There was the pastor, the photographer, the game designer. I'd look at images and try to recognize parts of their faces and mine, see if anything about them struck me. I even had some numbers I found in online directories saved under his name in my phone, just in case I ever got the guts to call.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: You turned 20 the month before this commentary aired. On the eve of this new decade of life, you decided it was not worth it to actively think about your birth father anymore. It was not cool to still feel hurt about it, and so you could choose to feel nothing. Whether or not you truly believed that was beside the point, writing it down, recording it would remind you, and remembering it would make it true. Biology may connect us, but I'm a product of so much more than that. The decisions I make, the family and friends I choose to keep around me, those are the things that make me who I am. So for me, the new year means deleting those old numbers from my phone and spending more time searching not for my dad, but for myself. Again, a little over-precise, maybe even a little cliche. The reality is, most people spend their lives searching for their parents. You know people with dead parents who search for them through baby photos and old letters. You know people with living parents who search for them in tense dinner conversations. You belong to the special sect of seeking offspring. Boys without fathers. Connor wants to initiate you into the cult of boys who search for those fathers. This cult, historically, mythologically, tend towards self-destruction. Chariots shattered by thunderbolts, blinding themselves with golden pins. wandering into Arctic tundras to self-immolate. In choosing to give up your father at 20 to write the ending of your story, you are avoiding this fate, and you plan to continue to do so now. You will not sabotage your brother's efforts, but you will not help them either. So you do not follow up with Connor about looking for your father, and Connor does not call. But there are also no records of other calls either. If you had recorded everything, You would hear three sessions here with your new work-subsidized teletherapist. The first, an intake session. A concise, summarized biography of your life as it relates to your inner problems. You make radio documentaries. You won some awards for this last year. Wow, hold on, one second. There are two parts to this speech and I was going to keep it short, but what the hell, I got gold, so.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: You crave the attention and acknowledgement, and it also repulses you. You work at the biggest newspaper in the world, at one of the biggest shows in the country. Lately, you've been leaving early to see if anyone notices. They don't. You were raised by a loving single mother in the Bay Area. You would hear yourself tell your teletherapist that your birth father left before you were born and you've never met him. That you suspect, based on nothing more than an elementary understanding of Freud and a few Instagram therapy videos, that this is the root of some of your problems. Daddy issues. You have a twin brother. But you're not identical. You probably make the same joke you always do. That you're sorry to disappoint your therapist. People are always more excited when they think there's some other version of you out there. Most relevant to your teletherapist, what you would like to fix about yourself. It is mostly one thing, which you are almost embarrassed to admit. You have the sneaking suspicion that you will never fall in love. Then you would hear the second session. In this recording, you would hear your teletherapist say that she gets clients like you all the time, who have succeeded by every other metric in their lives except love. You would hear your equivocal, unsure if that assessment makes you feel better or worse. That your failure is not unique, but a species of pain felt by other people who pay for therapy offered on discount in podcast commercials. You can hear her fumbling plates beneath a running faucet in the background as you describe your last relationship. She tells you, you think, perhaps a little quick to the draw, that it sounds emotionally abusive. Then you would hear the third session, in which her voice sounds diffuse and distant. You will eventually figure out it is because she is speaking to you from her car and you are on speakerphone. You imagine her kids sitting silently in the backseat, listening in as you talk about this mysterious illness all over the news. Your job sent you home a few days ago. There are rumors there's going to be a state of emergency soon. She ends the call by telling you that she has decided to step away from her practice, to focus on her family in this uncertain moment. The memories of the first months of the pandemic are stored data points in your phone. Nike says you run 51.8 miles in the first three months. Quit smoking says you managed to stop for that same period of time. Otherwise, the only reliable testament of this time are the recordings you make of your phone calls.
00:16:10
Speaker 8: By the way, do you mind if I record our conversation?
00:16:12
Speaker 7: I'm recording all of my quarantine combos.
00:16:16
Speaker 8: By the way, I'm recording.
00:16:17
Speaker 3: I've decided I'm going to start recording all my conversations because this seems like a moment.
00:16:22
Speaker 2: You tell yourself that it is for a project you hope to make about this historic moment.
00:16:26
Speaker 7: Didn't touch my grandparents, obviously.
00:16:29
Speaker 8: Although I did.
00:16:30
Speaker 7: Find out that my grandpa went to 7-Eleven to get a Pepsi. I had kind of a panic attack and I realized that I had like a very small window of time to decide whether or not I was going to stay here or try to get home. Whatever, if you want to get sick, but homie, if you get my grandma sick, I'll kill you.
00:16:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's, uh, it's... You and.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: Connor call with the same tepid frequency as before the state of emergency Connor's back in Washington now with his girlfriend. He doesn't speak about looking for your birth father again, and you don't bring it up. Flights are almost completely grounded. You can't leave your house, much less the state. And in this moment, you are both more focused on making life bearable, building fortresses of routine to keep the mania of your confinement from creeping in. Also in the recordings, phone calls with your mom and her best friend, Michelle, who you call Auntie and Cat Head. Your mom has been living with Michelle in Portland since quarantine began.
00:17:39
Speaker 7: Hi, Mommy.
00:17:41
Speaker 6: How are you?
00:17:42
Speaker 7: Hello. I'm back. Your mommy's back. She's here.
00:17:45
Speaker 6: You're back.
00:17:46
Speaker 7: She's here.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: You think maybe you'll transcribe these recordings and complete a screenplay about Mom and Michelle's adventures as strippers in the 80s at the Century Club in San Francisco.
00:17:56
Speaker 7: So does it go from bear to otter and then to something else?
00:18:02
Speaker 8: It's not like an evolution.
00:18:04
Speaker 7: It's just different groups.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:18:08
Speaker 7: Twinks are a totally different category, right?
00:18:11
Speaker 2: This is your favorite kind of call. You get stoned and curl up in bed with the phone balanced on your cheek. You are still at 27, like most children. You like to hear stories of the world before you were in it. of your mother before she was your mother.
00:18:27
Speaker 3: Tell me about what my mom was like when you first met her.
00:18:34
Speaker 7: We were just talking about this the other night, actually. I was working at The Century before she came there. And so she was new, so I was curious. And she seemed a bit reserved and a little standoffish. And so, so one day I finally got my ketchup and I was like, where are you from? And she goes, El Salvador. But then I said, oh, well, like you're so pretty or something. And then she goes, oh, well, you're really pretty too.
00:19:04
Speaker 2: You've learned your mother's story in pieces over years of your adulthood. And then all at once when you made a documentary about her a few years ago. Her schizophrenic mother, her alcoholic father, her molester grandfather. She ran away. And so she has no records. No photo albums, no videos, no trace of her childhood, and no family to ask. Michelle is the closest witness that you have to her life.
00:19:29
Speaker 7: The thing I remember also is that she was kind of the grown-up out of all of, like, the girls that I knew and hung out with. She'd been on her own longer, too, because, like, I left home at 17, but she was, like, on her own at 15.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: Your mother's life is a constellation. Points of interest float out there in the vast darkness. She or Michelle, at will, pluck these details from the void. And they become images, and then stories. Like the expensive condo she lived in before you were born. Her twin Siamese cats, Hades and Persephone.
00:19:59
Speaker 7: Or the aquarium full of exotic fish, shattered by the earthquake in 89.
00:20:09
Speaker 2: Or the other dancers, the girlfriend of a famous rock star, a girl cruelly nicknamed Pincushion for her favorite vice. Or Lady T, who wore a steward's uniform for her set, plane crashes projecting behind her as she danced.
00:20:24
Speaker 8: And what did you dance to?
00:20:25
Speaker 2: And what did my mom dance to?
00:20:28
Speaker 7: I would dance to Bob Dylan a lot, actually. So did your mom.
00:20:32
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, but his Christian album. I'm going to scandalize your nephew now. Your auntie did, like, the schoolgirl thing. Let's just be honest.
00:20:43
Speaker 7: Let's just be honest.
00:20:44
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker 8: Yeah. Creepy, but I won't think about that.
00:20:50
Speaker 3: I know.
00:20:51
Speaker 7: When you think about it, it's super creepy. I want to warn you that my phone is.
00:20:56
Speaker 8: You know what?
00:20:56
Speaker 7: I'm going to go upstairs and get the cord.
00:20:59
Speaker 6: But I have to look at this message from your brother.
00:21:02
Speaker 7: Okay, now's your chance, Sarah. Your mom's going upstairs.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: No, Chris.
00:21:10
Speaker 8: What is her, what are her, oh, did you ever meet my birth father?
00:21:18
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:21:20
Speaker 3: And what was your general impression?
00:21:24
Speaker 7: He was okay. I only met your birth father a couple of times. I remember I met him once at the Zeitgeist, and he was really hella tall, for one thing. He was cute. He was, like, handsome.
00:21:40
Speaker 2: Your mother is not exactly withholding about your father. She answers the questions if you ask them, which you did a lot when you were a teenager. Your origin story has remained consistent, but unsatisfyingly brief. Your father was a line cook. He played in a rockabilly band. They met at a bar called the Zeitgeist, dated for a while. She got pregnant. He wasn't ready to be a father. She decided to keep you. For a while, she exchanged letters with his mother, but she was always justifying his choice to not be involved in your lives, so they stopped communicating. Your mother tells you his name, but can't remember how it's spelled.
00:22:19
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I met him a couple of times. I thought, I mean, he seemed nice. He was nice to me.
00:22:22
Speaker 6: He was polite.
00:22:24
Speaker 7: He was, like, clearly trying to, like, make a good impression on me because I was, like, your mom's friend. Yeah, and he was just, he was very tall.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: What you've learned by this point, having just turned 27 a few months ago, is that the stories most adults make of their lives are brief and unsatisfying. Because most adult lives are full of false starts, abrupt endings, and omissions both purposeful and accidental. And so that your aunt's recollection comes down to, tall and nice, is not exactly surprising, as much as fairly consistent with the blunted, uneven shapes of most people's lives.
00:22:58
Speaker 8: You're not feeling depressed there?
00:23:01
Speaker 3: Mm-mm.
00:23:04
Speaker 6: Okay.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: Weeks and months pass like this, signals bouncing back and forth across phone lines and cell towers and fiber optic cables. July now, and you've stopped running, started smoking again. Most of this time is spent getting high, masturbating, and scrolling on Instagram.
00:23:25
Speaker 5: How did we drink all of that aguardiente and I felt like completely sober and hugely hungover the next day?
00:23:32
Speaker 2: If you're not alone, you're drinking on your roof with friends.
00:23:36
Speaker 9: I haven't showered in days.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: I was that way this morning, and.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: Then I finally took a shower. The new world permeates daily life, but more as a passing gesture. It makes me feel better.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: I have no sense of smell, so I can't smell you.
00:23:49
Speaker 2: You got the Rona? No, I didn't have a sense of smell.
00:23:52
Speaker 8: You got the Rona, you fucker.
00:23:54
Speaker 9: I ain't gonna let you go that easy.
00:23:59
Speaker 1: You can't say you love me too.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: But to get that love. Your life is reduced to a crude hierarchy of habits, routines, and immediate pleasures. Strangely, it feels no different from your life before. Only smaller. Yeah, fuck it with your head.
00:24:19
Speaker 9: Don't you miss your ex now?
00:24:24
Speaker 2: The last time you saw your ex was on your 27th birthday. You were shouting at one another beneath the rattling viaduct of the M-Line. The high of the evening's drugs, long worn into a bleary, agitated kind of attention. Your ex shouting, it's been two years. You need to get over me. I got over you in a week. I know you said, I know, even though you didn't know. He texted you recently to ask how you're holding up in lockdown. You told him you need space, but not that you have decided to move to Los Angeles. By the end of July, you found an apartment there. You quit your job, You pack your belongings into seven 24x18 cardboard boxes and load them onto a Greyhound bus. You leave what won't fit or isn't worth the charge for extra weight. On the curb in front of your apartment, talismans of regret. The skateboard you bought with your ex. A wilting palm tree you forgot to water. A stack of books you never got around to reading. A friend once told you that in a good story, the ending feels inevitable. that by the time you arrive there, you have this feeling that the events preceding it and where they lead could not have happened any other way. This is how you feel the night before you leave New York City. You have reached your inevitable end here, which means you might actually have a chance to start again. In the first two months of your arrival to Los Angeles, katabatic winds, dry lightning, a gender-reveal pyrotechnic, and an arsonist ignite a series of fires that turn the sky's slate with ash. Every surface is slick with a fine film, including the sun, which is now a matte red hole in the sky. You learn that here in Los Angeles, seasons are divided between dry or wet. which makes it harder to distinguish the passing of time. The shorthand of the world stutters in place, but you trace the nearly imperceptible movement of the long hand by observing the pomegranate tree outside your living room window. When you arrive in July, the bulbs are pink, dwarfed by pale crowns. By the end of September, they are ruby red and fat, branches sagging under their weight.
00:27:06
Speaker 3: Hey.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: Hi.
00:27:08
Speaker 2: Hey, can you hear me?
00:27:11
Speaker 7: I can.
00:27:11
Speaker 2: Okay, cool.
00:27:14
Speaker 3: I'm sorry I didn't call you earlier. I totally set my mind.
00:27:19
Speaker 2: Connor is driving his truck up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. He's waiting to be called into the fires. You ask him to start recording himself while he's waiting. You think maybe he'll make a project about seasonal firefighters.
00:27:31
Speaker 3: Do you want to record me right now instead of me doing everything?
00:27:35
Speaker 2: I'm recording you right now.
00:27:38
Speaker 4: Oh, you are?
00:27:38
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:27:39
Speaker 4: Oh, good.
00:27:41
Speaker 8: Because I didn't want to do it.
00:27:45
Speaker 6: Well, you should still record.
00:27:46
Speaker 7: I still want you to record yourself.
00:27:48
Speaker 1: It can be very therapeutic, you know.
00:27:50
Speaker 8: Yeah, I know.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: If Connor is lucky, he'll get a call and spend a few weeks or months digging long ditches, lines to contain fires. But so far, nobody has called, and he's spent the summer sleeping in his truck.
00:28:04
Speaker 7: Well, I guess I'll let you go.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: Are you sure?
00:28:08
Speaker 8: Are you feeling okay?
00:28:11
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm fine. I fixed my radio yesterday.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Well, are things going okay? They're okay.
00:28:26
Speaker 8: It's fine.
00:28:26
Speaker 7: It's okay.
00:28:30
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: Love you, brother.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: Love you, too.
00:28:32
Speaker 4: Bye.
00:28:39
Speaker 2: By October, the birds have hollowed out the pomegranates. The empty shells sway lazily on the branches like paper ornaments. You are surprised to find that your next-door neighbors, a young white couple, rarely return your greetings. You live in the heart of a gentrifying Central American neighborhood. When you speak to the cashier at the corner store in Spanish, she responds in English. You want to tell her that you're not like the rest of them. Your grandmother is from Santa Ana, You couldn't have afforded to live here a few years ago. You moved here to be closer to something. You're just not sure what or how.
00:29:14
Speaker 9: I just thought about.
00:29:15
Speaker 2: The fact that I'm hungover and in a pandemic. Friends visit on occasion, but mostly you are alone.
00:29:29
Speaker 4: Anyways.
00:29:31
Speaker 2: Your ex is dating someone new. You see on Instagram that they've adopted a dog. There's no one to share this news with. Your friends think you're over it. which you are. But he's your only ex, which gives the possibility of his happiness without you a cold clarity. Maybe the reason you will never fall in love is that your ex saw something in you which made love impossible. That you needed it more than other people.
00:29:57
Speaker 8: Happy birthday.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: You turn 28. The pomegranate tree dormant in your window. The long hand of the world lurches forward, and the short one trembles. On April 18th, 2021, a little over a year after he first calls you to ask to look for your father, Connor texts you a series of screenshots. They're of an exchange between him and someone from a DNA testing website, a distant relative. You bought a kit for your family a few years ago and forgot about it. In the exchange, Connor asks if there's someone in this distant relative's family with your birth father's name. Yes, in fact, says the stranger. A few days later, Connor receives your birth father's first, middle, and last name. For the first time, spelled correctly. When you search your birth father's name in public records, it returns a result in Los Angeles, in a suburb 40 minutes away from you.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: I mean, how do you feel about it?
00:31:35
Speaker 9: I feel good about it.
00:31:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel good about it.
00:31:39
Speaker 8: For me, I feel like the first day that we kind of got the info, I was like, I'm kind of excited.
00:31:47
Speaker 2: It has been a long time since you've heard Connor excited about anything. It's sweet and unnerving. To say no would be disappointing for him, a betrayal of your attempts towards closeness. But the thought of meeting your birth father inspires very little feeling in you, besides a nascent hope that you might finally finish a project, something you failed to do with your pandemic phone calls or your stripper screenplay or seasonal firefighter project.
00:32:13
Speaker 3: I mean, do you feel like that, like if you met him, that you feel like you won't get anything out of it?
00:32:18
Speaker 8: I guess I'm just trying to figure out like what, you know, like I feel like we're both.
00:32:26
Speaker 7: Almost 30, you know? You know, like, what is this guy going to tell us about ourselves that we.
00:32:31
Speaker 4: Don't already know?
00:32:32
Speaker 3: I hear you, because it's, like, I'm not interested. It's, like, I don't really give a shit about... I mean, I do give a shit.
00:32:39
Speaker 5: I do give a shit about meeting him.
00:32:40
Speaker 3: I don't, like.
00:32:43
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm so much more ready to, like, confront this kind of thing because we're almost 30. It's, like, meeting him is not going to, like, necessarily affect me, I don't think, in some, like, crazy way. I think it's just going to, like, really, for me, I feel like I'm going to have some closure of, like, knowing what, like, I don't know. Do you ever, like, look in the mirror and, like, say, like, like, think about dad or, like, dad, our biological dad?
00:33:18
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
00:33:20
Speaker 3: You ever, like, I think I find myself always looking and being, like, I don't even know what our family looks like. I have mom to compare that to. I have mom's face in a lot of ways, but I also wonder what a biological dad looks like.
00:33:40
Speaker 2: You have tabs open to several potential fathers on Facebook. A series of white men in rimless or squared sunglasses with varied hairlines and gradient, pallid shades. Your top contender sports a buzz cut and a pair of gas station sunglasses. He's an amateur photographer who takes pictures of animals at the zoo.
00:33:59
Speaker 3: I found one picture of a person who kind of looks like he could be related to us, maybe.
00:34:05
Speaker 8: Yeah, I saw one that maybe did.
00:34:06
Speaker 6: I was like, damn, he's pretty ugly.
00:34:08
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:34:09
Speaker 7: Is it the guy with the black hair and the sunglasses on?
00:34:13
Speaker 8: Yeah, that guy.
00:34:14
Speaker 3: I was like, is that really mom's type before she started dating really boring dudes?
00:34:19
Speaker 2: You have not told your mother about any of this, and you're not sure you will. It is very different, you think. to ask questions about your birth father than to meet him.
00:34:29
Speaker 3: And I'm curious about what his life is at.
00:34:33
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:34:35
Speaker 3: I also hope he's falling. No, I'm just kidding.
00:34:41
Speaker 2: A thought occurs to you now as you listen to this recording. A series of questions, really, unavailable to you then. Without experience, we are blind to the nature and intention of our own impulses and actions. To know why we do the things we do, We have to know ourselves, which at this time, you do not. But a hint lies in the contradiction between thought and action. Here's yours. You don't care about your father, so then why record? What do you think you will find when you return to this moment? If you record moments to keep them, to collect them, to cohere them in the story of your life, but you also believe that you have already written the end of this one, then what is it that you think you will find here?
00:35:22
Speaker 8: I am just really curious.
00:35:25
Speaker 7: Who he is.
00:35:27
Speaker 2: Not knowing what you know now, you only think, it's a good story. I'm recording a good story. Two boys search for their father. They receive the answers they need to relieve them of whatever weight his absence still carries for them. Yes, that's good. That will do. Suddenly, it's June again. Almost exactly one year since he arrived to Los Angeles. the pomegranate tree is blooming again. This time, you will manage to pluck one for yourself and eat it before the birds come to harvest the seeds. One night, you will absentmindedly Google your father's name and Los Angeles. The screen will populate with the same buzzcut guy with gas station sunglasses. But now there are two new images. The first is a man standing beside a barber chair. He looks like he was ripped from a Time magazine article from the 50s. Tall, a pencil mustache, slicked back hair. There's an interview with him. He owns the barber shop. He grew up in California, moved to Los Angeles in the mid-90s. Before he was a barber, he says. He was a line cook. The second image is of him standing in front of the shop. It looks familiar. You will type the address into Google Maps. You ate dinner across the street from the shop last night. You will type in your address to measure the distance between you and this barbershop. A short, nearly straight line will appear and an estimated arrival time from your apartment. Five minutes.
00:37:11
Speaker 4: Five minutes.
00:37:25
Speaker 2: Reaching Out is an original podcast from Futuro Studios in partnership with KCRW. It is written, produced, and narrated by me, Sergio Quevedo. Editing by Maria Garcia. with additional editing help by Marlon Bishop, Fernanda Chavity, and Sam Leeds. Special thanks to Sarah Rattay Maloney for editorial feedback. Our production managers were Jessica Ellis and Victoria Estrada. Mixed by Stephanie LeBeau. Scoring by Lucy Little. Show art by Simran Chawla. Executive produced for Futuro Studios by Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia. Our marketing team included Anelo Reyes and Luis Luna. Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa. Special thanks to Elen Cohen for feedback on the opening of this episode.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Brian. I'm excited to share something special with you today. It's a moving, one-of-a-kind podcast that stems from a simple question. If you'd never met your biological father, how far would you go to find him? That's the heart of Reaching Out, a new podcast from Futuro and KCRW. It follows Sarah Cavado's search for his father, along with his twin brother, a father neither of them has ever known, and everything that search starts to reveal about their family. The first two episodes are out right now. Be sure to find Reaching Out in your podcast feed and follow it to get the rest of the episodes weekly. And keep listening right now for episode one. Here's Reaching Out.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: Join Futuro Plus for early access to the whole season, ad-free listening, and exclusive bonus content for Reaching Out. Go to futuromediagroup.org backslash join plus to get access today. Futuro. On February 15th, 2020, Connor calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father. You do not record this conversation. This is notable, if only because so much of your life has been recorded. Moments far less consequential than this. You're on Connor's fourth birthday. A school performance. You play a scared rabbit, your only line.
00:01:34
Speaker 3: I think we're lost.
00:01:35
Speaker 4: Don't worry, we'll just go back to where we came.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: Which way did we come? A house party when you were 16, when you first began to record yourself.
00:01:44
Speaker 5: These records were made because you or someone else thought the moment was worth keeping.
00:01:50
Speaker 6: A sort of prescient.
00:01:52
Speaker 2: Act, one that assumes that you might want to return, that what is captured here may hold some significance, that what is remembered may cohere somehow with the story of your life as you are meant to understand it. There is a price for what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, for the story we make of it. If you had known how this would all turn out, maybe you would have recorded everything. Or if you had known the cost, maybe you would not have recorded anything at all. but you did not know, could not have known. On February 15th, 2020, your brother calls you to ask if you want to look for your birth father, but there is no record of that call. There is, however, a recording of the call you make a few days later.
00:03:12
Speaker 4: Hello?
00:03:14
Speaker 6: Hey, brother.
00:03:15
Speaker 7: Hey, what's up?
00:03:17
Speaker 2: Nothing.
00:03:18
Speaker 8: My phone is at 10%, by the way.
00:03:20
Speaker 6: That's cool.
00:03:22
Speaker 8: I don't feel like talking on the phone very long.
00:03:25
Speaker 7: I'm tired.
00:03:27
Speaker 3: I'm recording.
00:03:28
Speaker 8: I hope that is okay.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: Oh, really?
00:03:31
Speaker 7: Okay.
00:03:32
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: All right.
00:03:34
Speaker 4: That's cool.
00:03:36
Speaker 8: Are you recording because you want to talk about dad stuff?
00:03:40
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:03:40
Speaker 8: Well, not just because of that.
00:03:42
Speaker 7: But yeah.
00:03:57
Speaker 2: These days, you rarely know where Connor is until he's already there. You call and he's in Washington with his girlfriend. You call again and he's barely got service. He's trimming weed in Arcata. Or he's hopped the train to the Midwest. Or he's crashing on a friend's couch in Oakland.
00:04:12
Speaker 8: Just fucking... So I'm in New Orleans right now, right? You know that? You're where?
00:04:18
Speaker 2: Right now, Connor is partying in New Orleans with his girlfriend. Right now, you are pacing around your room in Harlem, staring at a whiteboard where you have scribbled a list of vague to-dos. Dentist, student loans, respond to email, and clean. You do not bother to erase these tasks each week. The tasks will remain undone, or they will be rewritten.
00:04:42
Speaker 8: Today, me and Claire were walking to go get my bike, and we walked by this guy who apparently used to live here. We keep walking, and all of a sudden, I hear beer steps, and.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: I look behind.
00:04:53
Speaker 8: He's walking really quickly to catch up with us. He's walking, and he's like, you faggot. You can't bring females here. What the fuck do you think you're doing? I was like, it's my girlfriend. And then he kind of just Mean mugged and blank stared, and then he started walking back to his chair, right?
00:05:15
Speaker 2: Connor does not like it when you point out your differences, but contrast is the rightful and unavoidable dominion of twins. There are superficial distinctions, the kind of differences strangers point out when you inevitably pull up a photo of Connor after they learn you're a twin. Your tightly coiled curls, Connor's loose, wavy hair. Connor's growth spurt at 16. Your 5'7, which you say is 5'8. But nothing makes you feel more different from your brother than when he tells you these kinds of stories. Because it is in these stories that your critical difference becomes most obvious.
00:05:49
Speaker 8: And then we keep walking. It's about like a mile and a half or so back to the house. And I like turn around and the fucking guy is like a block away from us.
00:06:00
Speaker 4: Whoa.
00:06:01
Speaker 8: I just had fucking like these knives in his hand. And like polishing his knives on his shirt and like looking at us.
00:06:08
Speaker 2: The critical difference between you and Connor is this. Long ago, without realizing it, you chose a kind of freedom. The kind that imparts stability and safety, and that you pay for in unsubsidized loans, quarterly job reviews, happy hours with co-workers, boring party conversation, conferences with field practitioners, mid-century modern furniture, boxing classes, and dental checkups. And Connor chose a kind of freedom that comes with land projects, one-off jobs at biker festivals, wide-open mountain ranges from the Union Pacific Line, and that he pays for in a persistent smoker's cough, weeks on remote weed farms with fish fans, and being pursued in New Orleans by a guy with a knife.
00:06:51
Speaker 8: It was just like a psycho-ass move. So yeah, that was crazy. That's why I was talking to you.
00:06:58
Speaker 2: You do not return to the subject of your birth father tonight. You talk about your mother. who left her apartment in Oakland after they raised the rent a few months ago. She's dog-sitting for strangers now to save money.
00:07:10
Speaker 8: She's, like, talking to me about how she's, like, bouncing around a bunch right now.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:07:17
Speaker 8: Living that nomadic lifestyle, am I right?
00:07:21
Speaker 7: Uh-huh.
00:07:22
Speaker 2: You wrestle about timing for your next call.
00:07:24
Speaker 8: Yeah, probably can't talk tomorrow, but I can talk sometime in the next few days.
00:07:30
Speaker 7: Tell me what time.
00:07:33
Speaker 8: And Dave, dude, I don't have a schedule.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: Your brother thinks you are a judgmental normie, and you think he is a judgmental hobo. This is the shared cost of your divergent freedoms. You both pay for your choices with the degree of distance it puts between you. But you do love each other, and you are trying to be better, to be nicer, to be closer. This routine of phone calls, which began a few months ago, is your attempt.
00:07:59
Speaker 8: I want to drink water and eat meals.
00:08:05
Speaker 9: It's unlikely you speak about your father again, but it's hard to say for sure.
00:08:17
Speaker 2: There are no records of phone calls with Connor that week or the next. You assume his impulse to look for your father is a passing one. You doubt you follow up. You went through your phase, of course, the one that you imagine most fatherless teenagers go through. in which your father's absence took on an outsized significance, in which your adolescent brain dissected and disassembled its meaning in relation to your sense of self? Was your fatherlessness, while you felt so apart from others, was his abandonment a sort of permanent wound on your psyche? Only one way to find out. Write a lot of shitty poetry. None of those poems are recorded, thank God. But one vestige remains. a play about two boys waiting to meet their father at a cafe. You wrote it when you were 17. It was called, perhaps a little over-precisely, Waiting to Meet Your Father, and was haltingly, painfully acted out by two fellow art students.
00:09:15
Speaker 6: What if he doesn't show?
00:09:17
Speaker 5: He will.
00:09:18
Speaker 6: And if he doesn't? I'll be okay.
00:09:21
Speaker 3: I'll be okay.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: The central tension of the play is that the two boys are waiting at a cafe to meet their father who they've never known. But he is running late, or maybe he is standing them up. The brothers argue about whether or not they should wait to find out which one it is. One boy is sure it won't be worth it. The other is adamant they stay.
00:09:44
Speaker 4: Do you think about him a lot? No.
00:09:48
Speaker 8: Do you?
00:09:49
Speaker 1: Well, sometimes.
00:09:52
Speaker 4: Like, we're about to fall asleep. It's usually while I'm not thinking that I think about him the most. You know, it's one of those things where when my mind is just drifting, I'll suddenly start wondering about him. And then I'll have to make myself do something to take my mind off him. The more I think about trying to think about him, the more I end up thinking about him.
00:10:10
Speaker 2: In the end.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: Let's go.
00:10:13
Speaker 9: Are you sure?
00:10:15
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: Their father arrives a few moments after they walk out the door. The poetry and playwriting phase was short-lived. When you were 20, you wrote a radio commentary, also over-precisely titled, Searching for Dad.
00:10:36
Speaker 5: Over the last couple of years, I've found myself at the computer googling my biological father's name. I'd sort through the different characters that came up. There was the pastor, the photographer, the game designer. I'd look at images and try to recognize parts of their faces and mine, see if anything about them struck me. I even had some numbers I found in online directories saved under his name in my phone, just in case I ever got the guts to call.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: You turned 20 the month before this commentary aired. On the eve of this new decade of life, you decided it was not worth it to actively think about your birth father anymore. It was not cool to still feel hurt about it, and so you could choose to feel nothing. Whether or not you truly believed that was beside the point, writing it down, recording it would remind you, and remembering it would make it true. Biology may connect us, but I'm a product of so much more than that. The decisions I make, the family and friends I choose to keep around me, those are the things that make me who I am. So for me, the new year means deleting those old numbers from my phone and spending more time searching not for my dad, but for myself. Again, a little over-precise, maybe even a little cliche. The reality is, most people spend their lives searching for their parents. You know people with dead parents who search for them through baby photos and old letters. You know people with living parents who search for them in tense dinner conversations. You belong to the special sect of seeking offspring. Boys without fathers. Connor wants to initiate you into the cult of boys who search for those fathers. This cult, historically, mythologically, tend towards self-destruction. Chariots shattered by thunderbolts, blinding themselves with golden pins. wandering into Arctic tundras to self-immolate. In choosing to give up your father at 20 to write the ending of your story, you are avoiding this fate, and you plan to continue to do so now. You will not sabotage your brother's efforts, but you will not help them either. So you do not follow up with Connor about looking for your father, and Connor does not call. But there are also no records of other calls either. If you had recorded everything, You would hear three sessions here with your new work-subsidized teletherapist. The first, an intake session. A concise, summarized biography of your life as it relates to your inner problems. You make radio documentaries. You won some awards for this last year. Wow, hold on, one second. There are two parts to this speech and I was going to keep it short, but what the hell, I got gold, so.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: You crave the attention and acknowledgement, and it also repulses you. You work at the biggest newspaper in the world, at one of the biggest shows in the country. Lately, you've been leaving early to see if anyone notices. They don't. You were raised by a loving single mother in the Bay Area. You would hear yourself tell your teletherapist that your birth father left before you were born and you've never met him. That you suspect, based on nothing more than an elementary understanding of Freud and a few Instagram therapy videos, that this is the root of some of your problems. Daddy issues. You have a twin brother. But you're not identical. You probably make the same joke you always do. That you're sorry to disappoint your therapist. People are always more excited when they think there's some other version of you out there. Most relevant to your teletherapist, what you would like to fix about yourself. It is mostly one thing, which you are almost embarrassed to admit. You have the sneaking suspicion that you will never fall in love. Then you would hear the second session. In this recording, you would hear your teletherapist say that she gets clients like you all the time, who have succeeded by every other metric in their lives except love. You would hear your equivocal, unsure if that assessment makes you feel better or worse. That your failure is not unique, but a species of pain felt by other people who pay for therapy offered on discount in podcast commercials. You can hear her fumbling plates beneath a running faucet in the background as you describe your last relationship. She tells you, you think, perhaps a little quick to the draw, that it sounds emotionally abusive. Then you would hear the third session, in which her voice sounds diffuse and distant. You will eventually figure out it is because she is speaking to you from her car and you are on speakerphone. You imagine her kids sitting silently in the backseat, listening in as you talk about this mysterious illness all over the news. Your job sent you home a few days ago. There are rumors there's going to be a state of emergency soon. She ends the call by telling you that she has decided to step away from her practice, to focus on her family in this uncertain moment. The memories of the first months of the pandemic are stored data points in your phone. Nike says you run 51.8 miles in the first three months. Quit smoking says you managed to stop for that same period of time. Otherwise, the only reliable testament of this time are the recordings you make of your phone calls.
00:16:10
Speaker 8: By the way, do you mind if I record our conversation?
00:16:12
Speaker 7: I'm recording all of my quarantine combos.
00:16:16
Speaker 8: By the way, I'm recording.
00:16:17
Speaker 3: I've decided I'm going to start recording all my conversations because this seems like a moment.
00:16:22
Speaker 2: You tell yourself that it is for a project you hope to make about this historic moment.
00:16:26
Speaker 7: Didn't touch my grandparents, obviously.
00:16:29
Speaker 8: Although I did.
00:16:30
Speaker 7: Find out that my grandpa went to 7-Eleven to get a Pepsi. I had kind of a panic attack and I realized that I had like a very small window of time to decide whether or not I was going to stay here or try to get home. Whatever, if you want to get sick, but homie, if you get my grandma sick, I'll kill you.
00:16:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's, uh, it's... You and.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: Connor call with the same tepid frequency as before the state of emergency Connor's back in Washington now with his girlfriend. He doesn't speak about looking for your birth father again, and you don't bring it up. Flights are almost completely grounded. You can't leave your house, much less the state. And in this moment, you are both more focused on making life bearable, building fortresses of routine to keep the mania of your confinement from creeping in. Also in the recordings, phone calls with your mom and her best friend, Michelle, who you call Auntie and Cat Head. Your mom has been living with Michelle in Portland since quarantine began.
00:17:39
Speaker 7: Hi, Mommy.
00:17:41
Speaker 6: How are you?
00:17:42
Speaker 7: Hello. I'm back. Your mommy's back. She's here.
00:17:45
Speaker 6: You're back.
00:17:46
Speaker 7: She's here.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: You think maybe you'll transcribe these recordings and complete a screenplay about Mom and Michelle's adventures as strippers in the 80s at the Century Club in San Francisco.
00:17:56
Speaker 7: So does it go from bear to otter and then to something else?
00:18:02
Speaker 8: It's not like an evolution.
00:18:04
Speaker 7: It's just different groups.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:18:08
Speaker 7: Twinks are a totally different category, right?
00:18:11
Speaker 2: This is your favorite kind of call. You get stoned and curl up in bed with the phone balanced on your cheek. You are still at 27, like most children. You like to hear stories of the world before you were in it. of your mother before she was your mother.
00:18:27
Speaker 3: Tell me about what my mom was like when you first met her.
00:18:34
Speaker 7: We were just talking about this the other night, actually. I was working at The Century before she came there. And so she was new, so I was curious. And she seemed a bit reserved and a little standoffish. And so, so one day I finally got my ketchup and I was like, where are you from? And she goes, El Salvador. But then I said, oh, well, like you're so pretty or something. And then she goes, oh, well, you're really pretty too.
00:19:04
Speaker 2: You've learned your mother's story in pieces over years of your adulthood. And then all at once when you made a documentary about her a few years ago. Her schizophrenic mother, her alcoholic father, her molester grandfather. She ran away. And so she has no records. No photo albums, no videos, no trace of her childhood, and no family to ask. Michelle is the closest witness that you have to her life.
00:19:29
Speaker 7: The thing I remember also is that she was kind of the grown-up out of all of, like, the girls that I knew and hung out with. She'd been on her own longer, too, because, like, I left home at 17, but she was, like, on her own at 15.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: Your mother's life is a constellation. Points of interest float out there in the vast darkness. She or Michelle, at will, pluck these details from the void. And they become images, and then stories. Like the expensive condo she lived in before you were born. Her twin Siamese cats, Hades and Persephone.
00:19:59
Speaker 7: Or the aquarium full of exotic fish, shattered by the earthquake in 89.
00:20:09
Speaker 2: Or the other dancers, the girlfriend of a famous rock star, a girl cruelly nicknamed Pincushion for her favorite vice. Or Lady T, who wore a steward's uniform for her set, plane crashes projecting behind her as she danced.
00:20:24
Speaker 8: And what did you dance to?
00:20:25
Speaker 2: And what did my mom dance to?
00:20:28
Speaker 7: I would dance to Bob Dylan a lot, actually. So did your mom.
00:20:32
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, but his Christian album. I'm going to scandalize your nephew now. Your auntie did, like, the schoolgirl thing. Let's just be honest.
00:20:43
Speaker 7: Let's just be honest.
00:20:44
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker 8: Yeah. Creepy, but I won't think about that.
00:20:50
Speaker 3: I know.
00:20:51
Speaker 7: When you think about it, it's super creepy. I want to warn you that my phone is.
00:20:56
Speaker 8: You know what?
00:20:56
Speaker 7: I'm going to go upstairs and get the cord.
00:20:59
Speaker 6: But I have to look at this message from your brother.
00:21:02
Speaker 7: Okay, now's your chance, Sarah. Your mom's going upstairs.
00:21:06
Speaker 2: No, Chris.
00:21:10
Speaker 8: What is her, what are her, oh, did you ever meet my birth father?
00:21:18
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:21:20
Speaker 3: And what was your general impression?
00:21:24
Speaker 7: He was okay. I only met your birth father a couple of times. I remember I met him once at the Zeitgeist, and he was really hella tall, for one thing. He was cute. He was, like, handsome.
00:21:40
Speaker 2: Your mother is not exactly withholding about your father. She answers the questions if you ask them, which you did a lot when you were a teenager. Your origin story has remained consistent, but unsatisfyingly brief. Your father was a line cook. He played in a rockabilly band. They met at a bar called the Zeitgeist, dated for a while. She got pregnant. He wasn't ready to be a father. She decided to keep you. For a while, she exchanged letters with his mother, but she was always justifying his choice to not be involved in your lives, so they stopped communicating. Your mother tells you his name, but can't remember how it's spelled.
00:22:19
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I met him a couple of times. I thought, I mean, he seemed nice. He was nice to me.
00:22:22
Speaker 6: He was polite.
00:22:24
Speaker 7: He was, like, clearly trying to, like, make a good impression on me because I was, like, your mom's friend. Yeah, and he was just, he was very tall.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: What you've learned by this point, having just turned 27 a few months ago, is that the stories most adults make of their lives are brief and unsatisfying. Because most adult lives are full of false starts, abrupt endings, and omissions both purposeful and accidental. And so that your aunt's recollection comes down to, tall and nice, is not exactly surprising, as much as fairly consistent with the blunted, uneven shapes of most people's lives.
00:22:58
Speaker 8: You're not feeling depressed there?
00:23:01
Speaker 3: Mm-mm.
00:23:04
Speaker 6: Okay.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: Weeks and months pass like this, signals bouncing back and forth across phone lines and cell towers and fiber optic cables. July now, and you've stopped running, started smoking again. Most of this time is spent getting high, masturbating, and scrolling on Instagram.
00:23:25
Speaker 5: How did we drink all of that aguardiente and I felt like completely sober and hugely hungover the next day?
00:23:32
Speaker 2: If you're not alone, you're drinking on your roof with friends.
00:23:36
Speaker 9: I haven't showered in days.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: I was that way this morning, and.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: Then I finally took a shower. The new world permeates daily life, but more as a passing gesture. It makes me feel better.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: I have no sense of smell, so I can't smell you.
00:23:49
Speaker 2: You got the Rona? No, I didn't have a sense of smell.
00:23:52
Speaker 8: You got the Rona, you fucker.
00:23:54
Speaker 9: I ain't gonna let you go that easy.
00:23:59
Speaker 1: You can't say you love me too.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: But to get that love. Your life is reduced to a crude hierarchy of habits, routines, and immediate pleasures. Strangely, it feels no different from your life before. Only smaller. Yeah, fuck it with your head.
00:24:19
Speaker 9: Don't you miss your ex now?
00:24:24
Speaker 2: The last time you saw your ex was on your 27th birthday. You were shouting at one another beneath the rattling viaduct of the M-Line. The high of the evening's drugs, long worn into a bleary, agitated kind of attention. Your ex shouting, it's been two years. You need to get over me. I got over you in a week. I know you said, I know, even though you didn't know. He texted you recently to ask how you're holding up in lockdown. You told him you need space, but not that you have decided to move to Los Angeles. By the end of July, you found an apartment there. You quit your job, You pack your belongings into seven 24x18 cardboard boxes and load them onto a Greyhound bus. You leave what won't fit or isn't worth the charge for extra weight. On the curb in front of your apartment, talismans of regret. The skateboard you bought with your ex. A wilting palm tree you forgot to water. A stack of books you never got around to reading. A friend once told you that in a good story, the ending feels inevitable. that by the time you arrive there, you have this feeling that the events preceding it and where they lead could not have happened any other way. This is how you feel the night before you leave New York City. You have reached your inevitable end here, which means you might actually have a chance to start again. In the first two months of your arrival to Los Angeles, katabatic winds, dry lightning, a gender-reveal pyrotechnic, and an arsonist ignite a series of fires that turn the sky's slate with ash. Every surface is slick with a fine film, including the sun, which is now a matte red hole in the sky. You learn that here in Los Angeles, seasons are divided between dry or wet. which makes it harder to distinguish the passing of time. The shorthand of the world stutters in place, but you trace the nearly imperceptible movement of the long hand by observing the pomegranate tree outside your living room window. When you arrive in July, the bulbs are pink, dwarfed by pale crowns. By the end of September, they are ruby red and fat, branches sagging under their weight.
00:27:06
Speaker 3: Hey.
00:27:08
Speaker 4: Hi.
00:27:08
Speaker 2: Hey, can you hear me?
00:27:11
Speaker 7: I can.
00:27:11
Speaker 2: Okay, cool.
00:27:14
Speaker 3: I'm sorry I didn't call you earlier. I totally set my mind.
00:27:19
Speaker 2: Connor is driving his truck up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. He's waiting to be called into the fires. You ask him to start recording himself while he's waiting. You think maybe he'll make a project about seasonal firefighters.
00:27:31
Speaker 3: Do you want to record me right now instead of me doing everything?
00:27:35
Speaker 2: I'm recording you right now.
00:27:38
Speaker 4: Oh, you are?
00:27:38
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:27:39
Speaker 4: Oh, good.
00:27:41
Speaker 8: Because I didn't want to do it.
00:27:45
Speaker 6: Well, you should still record.
00:27:46
Speaker 7: I still want you to record yourself.
00:27:48
Speaker 1: It can be very therapeutic, you know.
00:27:50
Speaker 8: Yeah, I know.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: If Connor is lucky, he'll get a call and spend a few weeks or months digging long ditches, lines to contain fires. But so far, nobody has called, and he's spent the summer sleeping in his truck.
00:28:04
Speaker 7: Well, I guess I'll let you go.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: Are you sure?
00:28:08
Speaker 8: Are you feeling okay?
00:28:11
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm fine. I fixed my radio yesterday.
00:28:17
Speaker 3: Well, are things going okay? They're okay.
00:28:26
Speaker 8: It's fine.
00:28:26
Speaker 7: It's okay.
00:28:30
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: Love you, brother.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: Love you, too.
00:28:32
Speaker 4: Bye.
00:28:39
Speaker 2: By October, the birds have hollowed out the pomegranates. The empty shells sway lazily on the branches like paper ornaments. You are surprised to find that your next-door neighbors, a young white couple, rarely return your greetings. You live in the heart of a gentrifying Central American neighborhood. When you speak to the cashier at the corner store in Spanish, she responds in English. You want to tell her that you're not like the rest of them. Your grandmother is from Santa Ana, You couldn't have afforded to live here a few years ago. You moved here to be closer to something. You're just not sure what or how.
00:29:14
Speaker 9: I just thought about.
00:29:15
Speaker 2: The fact that I'm hungover and in a pandemic. Friends visit on occasion, but mostly you are alone.
00:29:29
Speaker 4: Anyways.
00:29:31
Speaker 2: Your ex is dating someone new. You see on Instagram that they've adopted a dog. There's no one to share this news with. Your friends think you're over it. which you are. But he's your only ex, which gives the possibility of his happiness without you a cold clarity. Maybe the reason you will never fall in love is that your ex saw something in you which made love impossible. That you needed it more than other people.
00:29:57
Speaker 8: Happy birthday.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: You turn 28. The pomegranate tree dormant in your window. The long hand of the world lurches forward, and the short one trembles. On April 18th, 2021, a little over a year after he first calls you to ask to look for your father, Connor texts you a series of screenshots. They're of an exchange between him and someone from a DNA testing website, a distant relative. You bought a kit for your family a few years ago and forgot about it. In the exchange, Connor asks if there's someone in this distant relative's family with your birth father's name. Yes, in fact, says the stranger. A few days later, Connor receives your birth father's first, middle, and last name. For the first time, spelled correctly. When you search your birth father's name in public records, it returns a result in Los Angeles, in a suburb 40 minutes away from you.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: I mean, how do you feel about it?
00:31:35
Speaker 9: I feel good about it.
00:31:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel good about it.
00:31:39
Speaker 8: For me, I feel like the first day that we kind of got the info, I was like, I'm kind of excited.
00:31:47
Speaker 2: It has been a long time since you've heard Connor excited about anything. It's sweet and unnerving. To say no would be disappointing for him, a betrayal of your attempts towards closeness. But the thought of meeting your birth father inspires very little feeling in you, besides a nascent hope that you might finally finish a project, something you failed to do with your pandemic phone calls or your stripper screenplay or seasonal firefighter project.
00:32:13
Speaker 3: I mean, do you feel like that, like if you met him, that you feel like you won't get anything out of it?
00:32:18
Speaker 8: I guess I'm just trying to figure out like what, you know, like I feel like we're both.
00:32:26
Speaker 7: Almost 30, you know? You know, like, what is this guy going to tell us about ourselves that we.
00:32:31
Speaker 4: Don't already know?
00:32:32
Speaker 3: I hear you, because it's, like, I'm not interested. It's, like, I don't really give a shit about... I mean, I do give a shit.
00:32:39
Speaker 5: I do give a shit about meeting him.
00:32:40
Speaker 3: I don't, like.
00:32:43
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm so much more ready to, like, confront this kind of thing because we're almost 30. It's, like, meeting him is not going to, like, necessarily affect me, I don't think, in some, like, crazy way. I think it's just going to, like, really, for me, I feel like I'm going to have some closure of, like, knowing what, like, I don't know. Do you ever, like, look in the mirror and, like, say, like, like, think about dad or, like, dad, our biological dad?
00:33:18
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
00:33:20
Speaker 3: You ever, like, I think I find myself always looking and being, like, I don't even know what our family looks like. I have mom to compare that to. I have mom's face in a lot of ways, but I also wonder what a biological dad looks like.
00:33:40
Speaker 2: You have tabs open to several potential fathers on Facebook. A series of white men in rimless or squared sunglasses with varied hairlines and gradient, pallid shades. Your top contender sports a buzz cut and a pair of gas station sunglasses. He's an amateur photographer who takes pictures of animals at the zoo.
00:33:59
Speaker 3: I found one picture of a person who kind of looks like he could be related to us, maybe.
00:34:05
Speaker 8: Yeah, I saw one that maybe did.
00:34:06
Speaker 6: I was like, damn, he's pretty ugly.
00:34:08
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:34:09
Speaker 7: Is it the guy with the black hair and the sunglasses on?
00:34:13
Speaker 8: Yeah, that guy.
00:34:14
Speaker 3: I was like, is that really mom's type before she started dating really boring dudes?
00:34:19
Speaker 2: You have not told your mother about any of this, and you're not sure you will. It is very different, you think. to ask questions about your birth father than to meet him.
00:34:29
Speaker 3: And I'm curious about what his life is at.
00:34:33
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:34:35
Speaker 3: I also hope he's falling. No, I'm just kidding.
00:34:41
Speaker 2: A thought occurs to you now as you listen to this recording. A series of questions, really, unavailable to you then. Without experience, we are blind to the nature and intention of our own impulses and actions. To know why we do the things we do, We have to know ourselves, which at this time, you do not. But a hint lies in the contradiction between thought and action. Here's yours. You don't care about your father, so then why record? What do you think you will find when you return to this moment? If you record moments to keep them, to collect them, to cohere them in the story of your life, but you also believe that you have already written the end of this one, then what is it that you think you will find here?
00:35:22
Speaker 8: I am just really curious.
00:35:25
Speaker 7: Who he is.
00:35:27
Speaker 2: Not knowing what you know now, you only think, it's a good story. I'm recording a good story. Two boys search for their father. They receive the answers they need to relieve them of whatever weight his absence still carries for them. Yes, that's good. That will do. Suddenly, it's June again. Almost exactly one year since he arrived to Los Angeles. the pomegranate tree is blooming again. This time, you will manage to pluck one for yourself and eat it before the birds come to harvest the seeds. One night, you will absentmindedly Google your father's name and Los Angeles. The screen will populate with the same buzzcut guy with gas station sunglasses. But now there are two new images. The first is a man standing beside a barber chair. He looks like he was ripped from a Time magazine article from the 50s. Tall, a pencil mustache, slicked back hair. There's an interview with him. He owns the barber shop. He grew up in California, moved to Los Angeles in the mid-90s. Before he was a barber, he says. He was a line cook. The second image is of him standing in front of the shop. It looks familiar. You will type the address into Google Maps. You ate dinner across the street from the shop last night. You will type in your address to measure the distance between you and this barbershop. A short, nearly straight line will appear and an estimated arrival time from your apartment. Five minutes.
00:37:11
Speaker 4: Five minutes.
00:37:25
Speaker 2: Reaching Out is an original podcast from Futuro Studios in partnership with KCRW. It is written, produced, and narrated by me, Sergio Quevedo. Editing by Maria Garcia. with additional editing help by Marlon Bishop, Fernanda Chavity, and Sam Leeds. Special thanks to Sarah Rattay Maloney for editorial feedback. Our production managers were Jessica Ellis and Victoria Estrada. Mixed by Stephanie LeBeau. Scoring by Lucy Little. Show art by Simran Chawla. Executive produced for Futuro Studios by Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia. Our marketing team included Anelo Reyes and Luis Luna. Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa. Special thanks to Elen Cohen for feedback on the opening of this episode.
