Huh.
Do you wear shoes with shoelaces? You or you wear Velcrow?
Did you come up with these questions by yourself?
No, I have a writer's room. No, I'm just curious. I remember you used to like Velcrow. You said that anybody who is foolish enough to have to stoop down and tie their shoelaces deserves what they get. That shoelaces get covered in urine and bile, and that velcro is the fabric of the future. That's what you'd always say. You have shoes with shoelaces, right, shoes shoelaces?
Yes?
Do you always double not them? No?
You don't any other compelling questions, Johnny, that you have.
If you showed up to a bowling alley with a watermelon, you think they'd let you bowl. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode, Lenny, right after the break.
Back.
When I was a kid, I often carried around a tape recorder and outstretched mic created a buffer between me and the world. Recording was my way of managing life, and so I recorded everything, my parents' arguments, their phone calls, and I'm telling you thro fish my mom pretending to audition for soap operas Amanda Darling, how are you today? Mostly though I recorded myself, I made radio plays.
Rich Stone Productions present the Adventures of Nedley with no one to share in my love for a medium do o way since the Truman administration.
I put on the plays alone, all the voices performed by me for an audience of zero. Our story opens.
Up where Nedley is about to get off.
Oh what a lousy day. That's our Nedley. Nedley was an eleven year old spitfire who did as he pleased. Since I myself was an eleven year old rule following nerd Nedley was my id.
Here comes boom boom, She's my dream.
High Needy Hi he boom boom bom, and the whole psychodrama played out as one man show.
This movie was directed by Jonathan Goldstein, screenplay by Jonathan Wilsey. All voices in it are done by Jonathan Goldstein. This is a Jonathan Goldstein production whom.
It was all just me and my microphone until the day Lenny came along. I was twelve years old when we were first introduced at a birthday party. Immediately Lennie asked me what blood type I was oh, I said, uncertainly, me too, he shouted, genuinely excited to find some small thing we shared. I was an aloof kid, but was quickly won over by Lenny's goodness and the fact our mothers were already best friends made our best friendship feel faded.
Plus that Lenny proved as obsessive about recording as I was sealed the deal. The weekends revolved around our recording radio plays. Lenny and I would sleep in the same foold out in his parents' den. His dad, Izzy, a large man with a thick Polish accent, would make us breakfast in just his underwear, his undershirt tucked into his jockeys like it was some style imported from the Old Country. One time, trying to explain to Izzy how I liked my eggs and having no success with Fried, I described
two sons and a Cloud. Lenny loved that so much that he started ordering his eggs that way too, Two Sons and a Cloud. After breakfast, we'd head to Lenny's bedroom, shut the door, and record all morning. We were a gang of two Golden Lennox presents. The Lennox was from Lennie, the gold from Goldstein for the first time, I no
longer felt alone. Together. Lenny and I recorded prank phone calls our parents' dinner parties, and we made radio play after radio play, creating characters like Flip and Will, two burned out radio DJs. We take you to Flip.
Flip is going to introduce you, Slip is taking you to Will. Okay Will, No Will is taking you to Slip. No Beck, you will.
As a part of the Flip and Will radio show, we did live phone outs to our quote unquote listeners. In the eighties, dialing a phone was so arduous it's surprising people even bothered. But without driver's licenses or money, Lenny and I made the effort. The phone brought us a sense of freedom and adventure.
Okay you three?
Three?
Hello?
What would you do if you had to move a television survey?
Why?
Thank you think you need it?
Why the Cold War is not over? It never was?
This is Lenny now, age fifty two.
John, What is not understandable about this?
Because I'm getting frustrated.
Now I'm in Minnesota and Lenny is in Canada. We haven't spoken in nine years, and at the moment, for some reason, we're discussing Russia's role in Ukraine well.
Still there.
In our late teens, Lenny and I began to have less and less in common and we drifted apart. Our first conversation in almost a decade is not going well. I mean, I'm not sure that I fully get it. You mean that, I mean it's not that complicated.
Yeah, we destroyed communism using their communism.
Now they destroyed capitalism using our capitalists.
I guess about your subject.
The last time I saw Lenny was back home in Canada. Our mothers, who were still best friends, thought it'd be nice for the families to get together. Lenny showed up at the restaurant with a shaved head and thin chin strap beard. With the way he kept his arms crossed and his posture erect that evening, Lenny had something of the dictator about him. He was living in the bachelor's apartment and his parents' basement in Chamity Laval, the suburb
we grew up in just outside of Montreal. Lenny drove a school bus for Orthodox Jews and said the Hasidim had nicknamed him the Surgeon because of how he zipped through narrow streets with such precision. At the end of the meal, Lenny asked if I wanted to go outside and smoke a joint, a for ole times sake kind of thing. The idea of smoking a joint outside a suburban strip mall restaurant while our aged parents waited in side was unappealing, so I said no, at least stand
outside with me, Lenny said, and keep me company. But I dug my heels in and Lenny grew angry. We parted on bad terms that evening, almost ten years ago, and that was the last time I saw Lennie or thought too hard about him until now. The reason Lenny and I are speaking right now is because he has only months to live. Lenny is dying of pancreatic cancer and his undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. He's recently gone through eleven hours of surgery to keep the cancer from spreading,
but it was no use. Even though that first conversation went poorly, I continue to spend my evenings talking to Lennie because somewhere in the back of my mind is the memory of the kid from my childhood, the kid who stayed by my side tending to my adult sized depression in the darkest hour hours of my teens. I remember days and nights spent in Lenny's bedroom, just lying in his bed under the black bulb of his light fixture, listening to Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden. Too scared to
face the world. Back then, Lennie would reassure me, telling me to think all the bad thoughts I could, to get them out of my system, to exhaust them so that eventually I'd only be left with the good ones. Being with Lennie was one of the few places where I felt safe, and so I call him again and again. Hey, Lenny, how are you doing?
H S shit?
Yeah. Our conversations usually occur at night, with Lenny still in his parents' basement, the same basement where we spent our childhoods, and me wandering the silent streets of my midwestern neighborhood. During these phone chats, I never know what to say. I struggle to find common ground, but always come up short. When I bring up old mutual friends, Lenny speaks of them resentfully. With jobs, it's the same the idiots at the trucking firm, the anti semites at
the refrigeration company. On the rare occasion, I raise something personal about myself, it gets no traction when I tell him how I'm now a father of a five year old Lennie, a bachelor, says that people who have kids only do it for ego reasons. Mostly we stick to the subject of Lenny's pain, which is brutal. He can't eat without pain, stand or even lie down without pain. Sometimes he'll put the phone down and I'll listen to
him as he howls from the bathroom. There are drugs, some prescribed and some not, but no matter, there's always pain, and anger at the pain, and anger at what seems like me. On most nights, after a typical conversation, I come home and say to my wife Emily, that maybe this is a bad idea. We drifted apart for a reason. I say, we're strangers, and yet even though Lenny doesn't seem to even want to talk to me, we continue to talk night after night. I'm beginning to get the
impression that maybe he has no one else. No no, no, of course not.
Well, wish me luck.
Lenny says he wants to leave something behind, and so we record, just like we did when we were kids. Back then, we perform different characters. Now, Ostensibly we're just ourselves.
I really did my shouffle to rice, lemon, lime, garlic, and pepper.
Oh nice, nothing complicated and it is gorgeous.
Great? And how's your sleeping?
I sleep like shit? What do you think I have to think?
I met every two hours?
The horrible life when you spend your life, society of the universe punish you all the anger, all the hatred. What do you think you could get away with it?
Lenny is no longer the sweet, lonely kid who told me not to squat the house fly in his bedroom because he was his pet, The boy with whom I'd been so close that I'd run my hands through his thick black hair as though it were my own, smoohing it up into the air. I pretended I'd invented the latest in men's hairstyles. The Beethoven that Lenny seems to be long gone. Even though Lenny and I weren't in touch over the years, when I'd ask after him, my
mother would always say the same thing. Lenny and his parents were fighting like cats and dogs. Lenny's father died about a year ago. Now it's just him and his mom. Do you see you see your mother every day?
Unfortunately, I make an attempt to treat her like a human being, and every day she disappoints me. She's a gross mind. My father too, he was gross, too gross.
You loved him, you loved your dad, Yeah, I did.
But he was a gross man who did everything that makes his life easier in my life harder.
Lenny's parents had had another son before him, but because of profound mental and physical disabilities, he was institutionalized. After that, they adopted Lenny. Both Lenny and I were raised by parents who saw screaming and hitting as the solution to all of life's child rearing dilemmas. But from Lenny's perspective, worse than that was the neglect. Lenny's dad worked a lot, and his mom always seemed to have more time for her friends than for him. It's something Lenny still can't let go of.
It's called normal responsibility, you know what I mean? My friends got it? How come I didn't?
Yeah?
Well, what's so unspecial about me that I get the shitty fucking neglect? You know, I did my best. That's my favorite line.
I did my best.
You know, if that's the best, maybe you should the boss. Yeah, that's your best way I'll tell you the truth. I'm looking forward having that one last week, knowing that it's finally done, that I could just like yes, because it's been a bitch. This life has been a bitch, and it's most because people have been pitched and they remained bitches.
What does one owe a childhood friend, especially when that friend seems to have changed so much over the course of our phone calls. The question that keeps kicking around in the back of my mind is whether all of
Lenny's anger has somehow eaten up the goodness. I continue to phone Lenny over the next couple of months in hopes of seeing it, feeling that goodness again, and so we talk about the sex ed books at the Yamha Library, watching The Love Boat on Saturday nights when his parents were out with my parents, raiding his mom's freezer for TV dinners, while playing Calleco vision. Mostly though, I just listen and try to be there, and over time Lenny grows softer with me, and I grow less afraid of
offending him, afraid of offending a dying man. And then one night I receive a message. Listening to it now, I'm struck by how much Lenny's voice had mellowed since our first conversations. Instead of Jonathan or John, Lenny calls me Johnny, just like he did when we were kids, like he did when we were best friends.
Hi, I'm sorry to call you directly like this, without signaling or anything, but in a development and I needed to talk to.
You as soon as you can.
Mhm mhmm, Yeah, John, is it too late? No?
No, No, it's okay. How are you.
Not well?
John? You know it's hard to tell you anything else.
I'm sorry, what's going on.
I'm just I'm weak. I'm gonna go into palliative care.
Okay, there's no other recourse.
Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to function at home.
Yeah, because I'm not too good with pain.
Johns Well, you've been dealing with so much of it.
No, I mean my whole life. I've never been good with me. I'm a wider wis. I'm just a big words. It's funny through everything, the pain's still there. Pain never ends, even with drives.
Yeah, that's not bad.
Job.
I don't foresee getting better.
If I suddenly disappeared or you know, I can't talk to you.
No, I'm probably like you know gone. I had my last drive yesterday. I travel around the the valve. Yeah, just like one last highway ride.
It's not a huge deal.
I've done a lot of driving my time. I play. Need to remember I'm dying anyway.
Bigger things to think about?
What?
What did? What do you find yourself thinking about?
I thing I lived?
I lived as well as I could in my capacity. I had good experiences at least. Yeah, it wasn't the best life well lived, but wasn't the worst either.
Could have been worse. That's the legacy of my life. Could have been worse.
Just gonna.
I just want to enjoy looking at the sky, looking at things new.
Yeah, reveling and be alive.
I remember the last lady, she was scary.
Who's this the last lady?
Which she has a little pudgy remember.
Lenny would sometimes drift into delusions, imaginary flights that would weave throughout our conversation, But other times the delusions were mixed up with childhood memories, like time had collapsed and Lenny was all ages at once dying, but also back to an age when his parents and drove us to the mall and they're cut less supreme.
So if you want the front Seaco grabbit.
Now, the delusions were tender and vulnerable, and observing them was like standing over his bed watching him dream they should just go home.
I'm dead tired for some reason. We're at the Why taking a course.
We're at the Why.
We're at the hym Tree taking a course.
No, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. I'll tell you if I can't follow.
Well, that's so weird, though, that I would have such a delusion.
Maybe it's a subconscious desire to visit.
With you in a normal way, in a normal setting.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're visiting for holidays, normal, everything's normal. So or when was it when we're going to see each.
Other in a couple of weeks. The plan is for me to see Lenny during a visit back home, my first since COVID that long.
Yeah, No, I'm serious. I'm not being facetious.
Yeah, yeah, say it's.
Down to the wire. Maybe the last few weeks of things. Mm hmm. Maybe I don't know.
I don't get.
Depressed or anything.
Lenny wasn't just saying I don't want to bum you out. He was one of the few people who knew how fragile I could be even now he was trying to protect me, even as he was dying.
It's hard to say that I wish you were here.
Yeah. Recently my therapist recommended ketamine to me, a drug sometimes prescribed for untreatable depression. In my case, she thought it might help shift my perspective, which still tends towards darkness. A day after Lenny and I had this conversation, while taking several hits for my ketamine Inhaler and about to go for a Saturday morning run, I was suddenly overcome with sobbing and a feeling of unreality. As a man
in newer to epiphanies, I was shaken. Like most, I don't often see my existence on Earth approximating anything close to a quote unquote arc. Instead, things come in flashes. I'm four years old, eating a chocolate bar at my aunt Tilly's house, taking such tiny bites that Tilly calls me the mousey. My theory is that if the bites are small enough, it will last forever. I'm six, regretting having told my father about my kindergarten crush, because he's
just told a table full of relatives about it. I will never trust this man again. I think I'm fifteen and seeing a breast for the very first time. European sunbathers are at the same beach as me. The image will clod's way into my thoughts over and over for the next ten years. I'm sixteen getting turned down to prom on a city bus. Lorraine Kaufman is telling me that only I would ask someone to prom on a city bus. Then, for some reason, I'm fifty and moving
to Minnesota. While waiting at JFK for the flight that will take me and Emily and our then two year old son Aggi to our new life. Oggi walks up to a stranger and hugs his legs, and I burst into tears. A smell a meal, a day at the beach, and so goes a life without the record button pressed down. Life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make sense of. It helps me to shed light, but always
in retrospect. With the ketamine coursing through me, though, I saw the dots illuminate and connect, each handing off with purpose, one to the other, like a succession of dominoes, tracing the seemingly useless years that got me to where I was with the wife, the child, the job. It all felt so precarious, like I was standing on a narrow column of shoe boxes. It filled me with vertigo to the question of what one owes a childhood friend. In
my case, I owed Lenny everything. It was through knowing him in those early years that the base of the tower was formed. It was in making tapes together in his bedroom that I discovered a feeling i'd pursue towards a career. Suddenly I could see how everything counted, that Lenny counted, that my love for Lenny counted. I wanted Lenny to know this. I wanted him to know that while our personalities might have driven us apart, a deep
rooted love brought us back together. But later that day I got a call from my mother informing me that Lennie had died. In the months after Lenny's death, I'm unable to let go of how I wasn't there for him in his last days. I obsess over what his final moments might have been like. I begin accidentally calling my son by Lenny's name. I do this so often that eventually my son begins to ask, who in the world is Lenny I try to answer him, but never
know quite how. We were best friends when I wasn't much older than you, I say, and then I get COVID and I isolate in my basement. I watch all the old movies. Lenny and I used to watch Animal House, Monty Python, any Hall, but instead of laughing after each punchline, I cry. Lennie had an older cousin named Betsy, who had taken on the task of cleaning up Lenny's basement.
I reached out to see if Betsy could set aside some of Lenny's art or photos for me, but she said that wasn't something I should pursue.
It's not a situation where I don't think he'd want any of his coveted items.
That place was a hoarder's paradise. It was filthy.
That place has not been cleaned in forty years easily, and there was vermin.
It probably could have been condemned. Betsy says that Lenny had taken the baseboards off the walls with an eye towards renovation, but then he let the project go and never put them back, which allowed mice into the house, and the mice got into everything. My dad had stopped by to do an errand for Lenny's mom and had the same kind of report. It was like going into
a dark, subterranean world, he said. My father described Lenny's room as cluttered with books and DVDs from floor to ceiling, the windows blocked out so the son couldn't get in. How could anyone live under those circumstances, my father said, How could anyone, and especially how could Lenny. I keep thinking about how when we were kids, winding up in
our parents' basements would have been our worst nightmare. How could Lenny have ended up living out his last days in the very place he despised most.
That was always this thing that he never wanted to happen.
This is Lenny's ex girlfriend, Louise. Lenny and Louise dated in their twenties. I first met her at a bar one night, after having not seen Lenny in years. They were coming from a kiss concert and both Lenny and Louise's faces were painted, Louise as Peter Chris and Lenny as Ace Freely. They both wanted to go as Ace, but Lenny said that would have been ridiculous.
I think I was eighteen years old when I met him. Oh, I remember. He just there was this death about him that I recognized immediately, and it just automatically attracted me to him. I remember being on the back of his reorcycle and being scared shitless every time, holding on to him so tight. I remember his dog, Max and how much he loved that dog. Yeah, I mean to know that he did. He finished there in the basement.
Why not only did Lenny hate the basement, he hated the whole suburb of Shamedy. We both did. We attended Charmedy High, nicknamed Comedy High because it was so bad it was laughable, pipe bombs in the bathrooms, a geography teacher who was a flat earther, and a music teacher who married a student. I eventually left Chomedy, but Lenny never did, never even left his childhood home. How could our lives have diverred?
So he was very unhappy.
This is Dimitri, high school acquaintance who Lenny reconnected with on Facebook in the last year of his life. Dmitri was the person Lenny saw most during his illness. He works at a local Greek restaurant and would bring Lenny salads at the end of his shift.
He was lonely. I used to talk about how it would have been nice if you had a girlfriend and some kids, or if he had a kids, it would have been nice. She was always alone. I never saw him with anybody ever. Would like She would ask me to hug him a lot. When he was sick. He would always ask me to hug him. I think Leonard didn't feel really much love in his life.
Man Dmitri also knew that Lenny didn't want the basement for his home, let alone his final home. When I tell him how I've been trying to make sense of how it happened. He has a.
Theory drugs, drugs.
When you say drugs, you into a pot.
Pot, mushrooms, LSB. Leonard used to like to take acid, a lot of acid and just a trip out in his room in the dark. I'm a tall look for whatever works, for whatever gets the demons away there. But that's a little fucked up.
Ending up in the basement solely because of drugs doesn't ring true to me. Well, the drugs might have helped with the demons, they didn't create the demons. Plenty of people smoke pot, take LSD and still leave the house, travel the world, kill You. Among my childhood cassettes is another of my mother's performances, But this one wasn't a soap opera audition. It's of my mother pretending to be
her best friend Lenny's mom, Hannah kill you. During those last conversations, Lenny confessed to not only feelings of resentment towards his own mother, but towards my mother too, for taking up so much of his mother's time, time she could have spent on him. As for his dad, Lenny saw Izzy as a constant threat. This is from another flip and will tape o kij lines a rouping now. In the play, I performed the part of Lenny's father, who crashes straight into the flip and will show, oh.
Watch it what knock it up?
Izzy would get physical on occasion, but our parents weren't so different. My father favored the belt, while Izzy delivered what he called patchka's or slaps. And in terms of our mothers, if Hannah had been so often absent because of her friendship with my mother, that it meant my mother was absent too. So is Lennie just more sensitive than I was? Or was he dealing with more than I knew? Okay?
You just jogged in memory.
This is Louise again, Lenny's ex girlfriend, with another theory. Louise recalls a day in college when she stumbled upon what felt like a key, A key that predates the drugs me and Lenny's friendship. It even predates the upbringing he received from his parents.
It was my class for developmental biology, okay, and we were studying the brains of children at that point between zero and twelve months, and we were looking at separation anxiety, and we were studying that, and I remember being appalled.
When I learned.
That at seven months that is when a child's separation anxiety develops. That's when they know what their mother's face looks like, and that's when they start crying when you're handed to another person. And I remembered being appalled because I remember Lenny telling me that he was adopted when he was like six months old, and that his mom
told him that all he ever did was cry. And I remember coming home that day after school and going, oh, my god, no wonder you cried all the time because you knew that this wasn't your mom.
To heal from the loss of his biological mother, to help him deal with just being a sensitive kid. Lenny could have used extra support, but instead he got last.
Just before his mother was kicked out of the convent, he was christened Bandy aass felt.
Just as I had created the alter ego of Nedley to feed my id, Lenny created an alter ego named Andy that fed Lenny with something I could never put my finger on. But re listening to the news handy tapes we recorded all these years later, Andy feels like an expression of Lenny's vulnerability, his desperate need for more love from a parent.
Through the years he was raised with fellow orphans. He never knew the meaning of mother or father. Well, he knew the meaning was of hate. All the kids when nicknamed him, name him.
You're a bastard. You have none.
Andy was the only four year old child in the orphanage who every day would sit down in his bed and contemplate suicide.
Oh no one loves me. Everyone hates me. What did I do? I've gotta wave.
I gotta get.
Out of it.
I gotta get out of here. Somehow, well, I knew by ah I was in trouble. I knew by age twelve that life's going to be a little harder than I thought. And I knew by the time I was eighteen nineteen that I got to get out of here and then stay out, and just you know, I'd already learned helplessness.
So I guess I've always wanted to write a book, Lenny said during one of our late night conversations, where everything the hero does is wrong. I think a lot of books are like that, I said. A lot of lives are like that. You don't understand, Lenny said, And maybe I didn't. Perhaps a lot of what we take as a life choice is already encoded in us at a very young age, younger than we can even remember.
And by then it's already too late. The moments are already handing off one to the other, like those dominoes that cannot be stopped. Supposedly, Lenny's biological mother was a fifteen year old girl who eventually came to realize she couldn't raise him on her own. Who knows what those first six months were like for Lenny and how they dictated the life to come. Maybe Lenny was wrong, Maybe his paralysis, his inability to leave the nest, wasn't, as
he said, learned helplessness. But innate, helplessness, the kind of baby feels. Maybe for Lenny, the feeling just never faded away.
I was with him all the way to the end.
This is Dimitri again.
I remember the lats of day. There she goes to me, he calls me up, he goes, and he goes. Look, he goes, can you come over and be with me tonight? He goes, because I'm going to die. She said it as a shut up my life, where you're gonna die. He goes, No, he goes, I'm gonna die. He goes, I'm going to die night. He goes, Can he just come and be with me? He goes, I don't want
to be alone, you know. I'm like, yeah, you know, of course I'm And I stayed with him and we smoked a couple of joints together, had a couple of drinks, a couple of it's a whiskey I did, and I was just telling him, you know, Leonard, I go, it's okay, you know, you can, you can go if you want, you know, don't worry about it, you know, just she need to go.
Just go. Because I never made it to Shamani before Lenny died, because I wasn't there to hug him or to just hold his hand. I'm left with a terrible sense of loss. Of the many questions I have about Lenny's last days, the one that weighs on me most heavily is about Lenny's anger and whether it ever subsided. Do you do you remember what his state of mind was on that last day when you went there? Did he Oh?
Yeah, yeah, he was completely at peace. He wasn't worried or scared at all. I think he had accepted his faith. I think he was just honestly, I think he was just tired. I think he wanted to just go. She seemed to really okay, though he wasn't nervous, he was just quite. I have a video of his last words, Oh wow, I go. What message do you want to share with everybody? Girl about you're at the end?
Dmitri sends me the video he took, and when I hit play, I gasp. I knew how sick Lenny had been, but I guess irrationally, I've been imagining him on the other end of the phone line, looking more like the last time i'd seen him at the restaurant with his parents. In the video, though Lenny looks cadaverous.
If you have one message for the world, what would that be? And he sat for about Ben Saxons. He thought a bit, and he.
Goes love more, fight less, fighting desiccation.
For love more. Fight less. Fighting doesn't get you far, nor does anger. In one of our last phone calls in the final days of his life, Lenny said that he was so weak he could hardly lift himself from the toilet without his mother's aid. I asked if, in general his mother was being helpful.
She's trying, She really is trying. Oh well, how to hear she's succeeding too. She's the only help I got I need her.
It was the first I'd ever heard Lenny acknowledge his mother's effort, which is to say, it's the closest I'd ever heard Lenny come to forgiving her. I knew Lenny in the beginning and can only speculate about the middle. But I do see that in the end, in spite of the pain and the delusions, he allowed his sweetness to shine through. Well. I may never know where Lenny's anger came from, I do know where it went. He laid it down at long last to rest.
Now that the fernentures returning to its.
Goodwill home.
Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
The damage to post, take this moment to the solve.
If we meant it, if we.
Tried, never felt around for far too.
From things that accidentally tal This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me Jonathan Goldstein and supervising producer Stevie Lane, along with Phoebe Flanagan. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt. Production assistance by Moheiney mcgauker. Special thanks to Lauren Silverman and Neil Drumming. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson,
Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Condon, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, Gimbletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Bands, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Heavyweight is a Spotify original podcast. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight, on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or email us at Heavyweight at gimbletmedia dot com. You can also follow our show on Spotify and tap the bell to receive notifications when new episodes drop. We'll be
back next week with a new episode. It don't st