The Wager

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Okay, so after the sound of the call to prayer fades, outside a tiny village, I'm walking down this path. To either side is jungle. Critters. Bark overhead. It's hot. It's lush. I do not know this place. Rural Indonesia. It's just me by myself. Though I see a kid. Maybe 11 or 12. He's grinning. He says, he says something. Then he starts walking into the jungle. Motions me to follow him.

Trail behind a strange boy in the woods. I trip after him over stumps, over branches. What? I'm about to turn back. When I hear voices. Music. We turn left, right. And now I understand where all the village menfolk went. Cut out of the foliage emerges a whole secret world. Dudes squatting around, circles, pressing fistfuls of cash from one person's hand to the next, smoking, eating, laughing. All of it framed by...

Rows and rows of wicker cages. Inside each cage, beautiful, multicolored roosters stare back out, occasionally tipping their heads back to scream. These are our gladiators. They will fight to the death in the middle of that circle. And the boy, he's talking to me again. He's pointing me, saying that I should pick. One of the birds? No, no, he's saying I should pick this bird, his bird. I'm guessing one he raised. And a man, maybe his father nods behind him.

I kneel down to peer inside the cage at the most glorious animal I've ever seen. Proud. Plumings an explosion of black, red, green. His feathers burn translucent. Blinks back at me. Eyes brilliant, alien, fierce. A winner. The boy knows absolutely he has me. He smiles. He holds out his hand. I shove money into it. I turn back toward the cage transfixed because soon... Very, very soon. The fight will begin. Today.

On Snap Judgment at KQED Studios, we proudly present The Wager. My name is Clem Washington. They say a sucker is born every minute. But not if you're listening. The Snap Judgment. Yes, it is on. We are here at LA's historic Orpheum Theater, a crowd full, way in the shadows, not knowing who's going to take this stage and share their tale. They're going to be delighted. I've got a secret. We've got Snap Royalty, a dear friend of mine, Dr. Raymond Christian.

I was about 12 years old, and it was one of the hottest days I could remember. Just hanging out with the boys, a group of six or seven of us, a combination of which... change frequently. A hot, oppressive day, just hanging outside when we were out of school. The heat radiating from the pavement. Tar sticking to our shoes. But there was one sanctuary for us from the heat. And that was the air-conditioned funeral home.

That was located on the corner between the two blocks where we played. You'd go inside that funeral home in that air conditioning with our skin all moist. and you'd be cooled off instantly and refreshed. Now, in our community, it was not unusual for people to come to the funeral home to view bodies of people they didn't even know. They did so out of curiosity. They did so to verify. Is that the man who was killed trying to rob somebody?

Is that the kid who was killed on the bicycle? Now, the people who worked in the funeral home, they knew that on occasion, us kids would come inside. Just to cool off. And they would allow this on occasion. But they had just one rule. You must sit in the viewing room. Which meant we had to look at the bodies. Not something we wanted to do, but all of us knew the rules of the game. And we would sit there and close our eyes for the...

Fifteen minutes or so that we were allowed to be inside. One day we're outside and we're playing kickball. And I kicked this ball all the way across the street, and it's about to sail over this fence where this vicious dog stayed inside. And every time people got close to that fence or near it, he would snarl and snap and try to attack it. And as the ball was about to head over the fence, all of a sudden, out of nowhere,

This kid shows up and dives and just slaps the ball down and saves the day. Now, none of us knew who this kid was. How is it that he seemed? So familiar. He was like one of us, but yet he was none of us. And that's the first time we met him. And he went inside the funeral home like he had done it many times before. After that, he started to show up all the time. But none of us could ever recall him ever being there when we started again.

It always seemed as if we'd be playing and running and going around the corner on our bikes, and all of a sudden he would just appear. There was always one more of us. Now, the fact that he didn't speak, wouldn't answer our questions, was not so unusual to us. We lived in a community where there were lots of people who came from rural areas, we said the country, who had disabilities.

Both adults and children alike. In fact, I probably knew a half a dozen kids who didn't speak just like this. He was a skinny kid. Had a small afro about two inches. He wore a shirt that he didn't button up, cut off pants, tennis shoes with no socks. He was a different kind of kid. One day.

I'm outside. And I'm looking at pigeons flying around the funeral home. And I'm out with the kid. and without speaking it seemed as if he said to me i like pigeons i like pigeons which was shocking to me So I took him to my house, to my backyard, where I raised pigeons. And like a lot of poor kids, I made my pigeon coop. out of discarded lumber, pieces of cardboard, and a couple of old TVs that I had gutted out. The kid was in my backyard, and I could tell.

The way he looked at the pigeons. The way he touched them. The way he cooled, cooled, cooled to calm them down. I knew. that this kid he loved pigeons well for me I had been raising pigeons since I was about Eight years old. And probably what I enjoyed about them the most was, I don't know, the weird way that they used to move around, the way they pecked at the ground, but probably more than anything.

It was the fact that you could let them go and they would fly away and come back to the home that you made for them. That's where the magic was. But the kind of pigeons that we were really interested in was a type of pigeon that almost stopped in mid-flight and flipped. We'd call this rolling. And some of the better pigeons, they would flip and flip and flip and flip till they'd almost hit the ground and fly right back up. And us kids, we would be so, so excited by this.

And every time we got exposed to someone who had. rollers or somehow was connected to rollers and we'd see them in the sky. We would all get together and we'd stand out in the streets and we would holler and scream to excite the birds to get them to roll even more. Come on, come on, come on. And we would scream and we would holler, come on, come on. But unfortunately, none of us ever acquired Rollers.

They had to be passed on. And for us poor kids, rollers were pretty much out of our financial reach. And after this. Me and the kids started hanging around together all summer. Well, one day, me and the kid were taking a walk through one of the back alleys. And as was the habit in our neighborhood, big old vicious dogs would always seem to take over an alley. And they would chase you until they get to the end of the alley and they would stop. And that's how it was this day.

We're walking through the alley and a big old dog take after us. And we run and run and run and run and run. And we finally we get out to the end of the alley and we made it. We made it. I'm so excited. We just did something together. We boys now. We experienced this crazy thing. I know you got something to say. And I bend over and I'm coughing and I'm laughing. And I look around to see what he thinks about this crazy thing. thing we just went through and he's not there now

I'm starting to feel funny about this kid. He shows up the next day. Now I've got to ask. Man, where'd you go? What happened to you yesterday? What happened to you in the alley? How could you have gotten away? There was no way to go. What happened? And he gives me nothing. Sometime later, we're taking a walk. But this walk is different. He's taking me to a place that I think he's trying to guide me to.

We walk four or five blocks. And I think maybe he lives around here somewhere. And we wind up in front of this old house. The house had been burned. abandoned for several years. And as we're standing there in front of the house, I remember this is the house That that kid got killed in a fire a couple of years ago. Now, I'm starting to feel scared. And I look over at the kid and he's just staring at the house. And I say, you ain't that kid that got killed in the fire.

I'm not believing this. But I feel like I can't move. And the kid is just staring at the house. And I feel like he's telling me without speaking, go inside the house.

I walked toward the house. I started up the stairs. When I reached the top of the stairs, Where the roof has collapsed, over in the corner, illuminated by the light coming in through a piece of broken glass, I see in the corner. Pigeons. There are pigeons in the corner. And wait a minute, this is a pair of pigeons. And they got squabs. Baby pigeons. And these aren't just any pigeons. They're rollers. These are rollers. There are rollers up here.

And so I reach up to them and I grab them and I put them inside my arm and they're all excited and flapping around. And so I start to cool to calm them down. Cool. Cool. And they relax. And I'm happy. And I'm not scared anymore. I've got them in my arms. I want to get outside. I want to show the kid these rollers. How amazing is this? And I get outside and he isn't there. Now I know. He knew I loved rollers. And I know and I believe he wanted me to have those rollers.

And when his babies were ready to pass on, he was ready to pass on. And I raised another six or... Seven generations of rollers. Right up until I joined the army. And I passed them on to another kid. Which was the tradition.

Thank you, Dr. Raymond Christian. And we've got big news. Because Spooked Live is about to rock L.A. and Oakland later this October. Get your tickets at snapjudgment.org. And to find out all things Ray. Check out this podcast, What's Ray Saying? or the Snap Judgment show notes. I want to thank the LAS team for welcoming us. John Cohn.

Rebecca Stume, Kristen Payne, the Orpheum team. It is such a beautiful theater. Ryan Davis and Sarah Rose Leonard at KQED. The original live score was written and performed by Doug Stewart and Eugene Murphy. The original story was produced by Anna Sussman. And this recording was mixed by Miles Lassie. After the break, a goodbye that goes on longer than anyone ever intended. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the wager episode. Now, we've all had those after-school jobs, the cashier, the babysitter. For our next story, this is not about your typical side hustle. What if, after every shift, you played a vital role in one of the most meaningful and personal days of your customer's life? And what if, snappers? One day, it got all messed up. Snap judgment.

Cherie Booker was only 15 when she got a job at the Wiley Funeral Home in Baltimore. She was just supposed to answer the door. But answering the door of a funeral home is never a simple job. One day I was working the front door of a viewing. So I made eye contact with one of the family members that was crying. And I started crying too. So Mr. Wiley came in and he's like...

If you need to cry, then you look at the wall. This is a business. You cannot cry every time someone else is in there crying. From that moment on, I stopped crying. Cherie took her job seriously, and she wanted Mr. Wiley's approval. Mr. Wiley was like a second father to me. It felt like I was a part of the family, and it felt like I was a part of the business. Over the next eight years, she worked her way up from greeter to manager.

So one day I was in charge when we had three viewings scheduled. We had three older Black women, and that was a lot for one day. It was just Mr. Wally and I there that day. The other staff had the day off. So the viewing takes place the day before the funeral, and it's your responsibility to make sure that everything is perfect. And just so you know, we get really intimate with these families.

So I'd already spoken with them and told them that they needed to bring bra, panties, or full slip stockings. The dress that they wanted their loved one to wear. And then they also needed to bring makeup if they needed any. And most importantly, we needed a photo. This is what embalmers use to make sure the deceased looks like themselves. We brought in the family of the woman in the front room. They came in, they viewed her body, and they were absolutely pleased with the way that she looked.

And so the second family that arrived was the family of Miss Johnson. She was the woman in the back room. And all of a sudden I heard someone shout, that's not my mama. And so I'm like, what is happening? And I go into the back room and the daughter says, that's not my mama. I say, ma'am, what do you mean this is not your mother? She's dressed in the pink shroud and she's in the pink and white casket that you ordered. That is not her. You'd think this would be a surprise. I was not surprised.

I've seen this a bunch of times. When the deceased doesn't look the way we want them to, or the family member is simply in denial, we don't want to believe that that is our loved one in that casket. I just rubbed her back and consoled her. I know, I know. Everything's gonna be fine. That's not my f***ing mother. Okay, Cherie thought. Time to regroup. So I took the family into the waiting area and I said, can I offer you some coffee? And they're like, no, but we would like our mother.

Maybe there's a simple mix-up. The daughter says the woman in the back room is not Miss Johnson. The front room is all good, so that woman can't be Miss Johnson either. But there's one other possibility. What if Miss Johnson is in the middle room? So I asked Ms. Johnson's daughter to follow me into the middle room. And I say, is this your mother? She said, no, that's not my mother.

She's cursing. She's yelling. She is pissed. She even walks out of the funeral home. So we don't even know where she's going. And so now the problem. is real. I run upstairs to Mr. Wally. On my way, my mind is starting to race. But I'm also thinking about the advice that Mr. Wally gave me all those years ago. I needed to stay professional. This was not the time to lose my cool. And I just told myself.

You have to stay calm. So I get upstairs. Mr. Wally, there's been a mix-up with the bodies. Ms. Johnson's family said that this is not their mother. Mr. Wally's like, what? What do you mean? We have to find out where we picked this body up from. I look in the folder. This body came from Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so Mr. Raleigh said, let's get them on the phone.

Many things ran through my mind. In funeral time, if we picked up the wrong body, a whole week has gone by so that body could be cremated. It could be buried by now. It could have been taken to the anatomy ward and some future doctors are examining that body. While Mr. Wiley is calling the hospital, the last family shows up.

The family of Miss McLean in the middle room. Miss McLean's son is now calling for me to come downstairs. Excuse me. Excuse me. I need to speak with someone. I walked downstairs. I see this face that is kind of in shock. And he says, I just needed to let you know this is not my mother. It was almost like he was sorry for bothering me. And I said, are you sure this is not your mother? And he says, this is absolutely not her.

This is my last day at Wally Funeral Home. This could be the last day of existence for this funeral home. I am so sorry. We have to figure this out. Give me one second. Cherie runs back up the stairs to Mr. Wiley. Now, he just got off the phone with Johns Hopkins Hospital, and they said, no mix-up over there. Cherie then reports that Yet another family is claiming they have the wrong mother in the casket. You lying, he yelled. He was disgusted. No way. No way that is possible.

Mr. Wally is too through. He lit a few cigarettes while he was on the phone with Johns Hopkins. He was not looking calm and professional at all. I start to feel the pressure of this moment on me. Did I check the bodies well enough to make sure that the right people were in the right casket? Is this my fault? I could feel myself starting to sweat. I'm on my way downstairs to talk to the McLean family. And before I can get back to the middle room, the doorbell rings.

As soon as I open the door, there is a bright light flashing in my face. It is the camera from Fox 45 News with their evening reporter there holding a microphone out. Next thing I hear is Ms. Johnson's daughter. Oh, my God. I came to Wally Funeral Home to view mama and mama is not here. There is somebody lying in mama's casket with mama's clothes on, but it ain't mama. I don't know where my mama is. All I know is that Johns Hopkins and Wally Funeral Home then lost my mama.

No comment. I just slammed the door because now I'm freaking out. We're going to be on the news. What if this lady sues us? The only thing she's going to get is my student loan debt. When Snap Judgment returns, a surprise revelation sends the hunt for Mama in a whole new direction. Stay tuned.

to snap judgment. When last we left, Cherie was staring down at camera crew, asking her the question on everyone's mind, where's mama? Cherie's got nothing to say since she ducks back inside the funeral home with a mama mystery. That's wreaking havoc. Snap judgment. Inside the funeral home, no one is at peace. More and more people are coming to see their loved ones.

People are pacing back and forth in the hallway. The mood has completely shifted from somber to chaotic. And at this point, extended family members cannot get inside because of the mix-up. And they really want to know, why wouldn't we be able to see our loved one? So many things are going on in that moment. I really just needed a chance to breathe and to think.

If that is not Miss McClain in the middle room in their earth-toned casket, there's still a possibility that Miss McClain might be in the back room in that pink shroud and pink casket. So... I go to Miss McLean's son and I ask him to follow me into the back room. I need you to take a look at this woman. And I need you to look very carefully. Is this your mother? He walks to the casket. He looks at her very close in that pink casket. And he looks down at her in that pink shroud.

He gets a little closer. Yes, this is my mother. I have never been more relieved in my entire life. Now that she's matched the McLean son with the McLean mom. I just need to figure out who this lady is in this middle room and make sure Ms. Johnson can locate her mother. The doorbell rings again. I go to the door. This time... There's a police officer standing there. The police officer wants to know, do you have the remains of Ms. Johnson here? We're trying to figure things out now.

Ms. Johnson's daughter is standing there. Can't y'all do something about this? So now we've gone from a PR problem. to a legal issue. This woman has elevated this to a missing corpse case. The people outside of the door are waiting to see what's going on. And the hallway is crowded with people. They are anxious. There's a funeral scheduled for the morning. People are confused. People are angry.

Meantime, there's someone else at the door. Ms. Johnson's other daughter. She comes in. Where is my mother? I begin explaining, I'm so sorry. Take me to my mother. This seems like it's about to all blow up. I'm trying to let you know we're not sure where your mother is. We're trying to figure this out. Please let me see.

Everything has happened so fast, she's barely had time to take it all in. And then I start to think about it again. About how long it took for Miss McClain's son to recognize his mother in that pink shroud. And I had a flash of an idea about what might have happened, about why maybe she wasn't dressed the way he thought she would be. So I take Ms. Johnson's other daughter to the middle room.

She goes up to the casket. She looks at the body. She frowns a little bit. She's looking. What is this? Now, normally. I would think this is a strange behavior, but now I have an idea why she's having such a hard time. And she says, this is her. You see that mole right there? That's her. That's our mother. Now, I don't know whose clothes she's wearing or what caskets she's in. I'm pretty certain we discussed putting her in the pink shroud and pink and white casket.

I don't think those are her earrings, but that's her. Thank you, God. This is their mother. Now Cherie understood what had happened. It was kind of like that movie Face Off. Somewhere along the way, we put the wrong clothes on the wrong person, which we identified with the casket that they were going into. Sadly enough, the pink shroud ended up on Miss McLean.

So we had Ms. Johnson expertly made up as Ms. McClain and Ms. McClain expertly made up as Ms. Johnson. They were unrecognizable by their family. This was a clothes switch, not a body switch. I was just so relieved I could barely speak. Because we were able to locate the body and no crime had taken place. We were able to send the police away. And the news, thankfully, did not cover that story that evening. But this was the biggest.

that we could have ever made. So we just said to the families, we're really sorry. We're really, really sorry. And they just went home. But my night wasn't over. We still had work to do. We had to take those two women back downstairs to change their clothes. And as I was undressing Ms. Johnson, I started to look at her a little closely. I saw the wrinkles in her skin. I saw that mole on her face.

Sometimes you try to ignore death, but it just kind of pops up in you. You know, when you work in a funeral home, you literally hold people's secrets. You see them naked. You hear the things that have happened to them. Everyone doesn't die a beautiful death. You see the bullet holes. You see the slit on their wrist. If I attached to all of those moments, it would be a lot of therapy. I couldn't get personal with them. It made me a little less human. I'd become numb. I'd stop crying.

I started thinking of people as objects. I couldn't understand the rage. And the calls to Fox 45. And the police showing up. And so in that moment... Just alone with Ms. Johnson, I felt those tears that I had been holding back for eight years start to fall.

I was able to get a couple of hours of sleep that night, but I had to prepare for the funeral the next day. The woman in the front room, her funeral went perfectly. Ms. McLean's family. They were still getting over the fact that she was in the wrong casket with the wrong clothes. But once we put her in the new one, they were happy. But Ms. Johnson's family, her daughter...

did not show up for her funeral the next day. When you think about it, that moment is so important in someone's life. I thought it was heartbreaking that Ms. Johnson didn't show up. to pay her final respects to her mother. Now, this could all be written off as a rough day at work, or a good story to tell over a drink. But this one hit hard for Cherie. It just takes one moment to shift everything in your world. I think I checked out after that moment.

Keep in mind, this is eight or nine years of me just working. So I asked Mr. Wiley if I could take a vacation. He said, no, you can't go. And at first I thought he was joking. And so I went to him one more time and he said, well, if you don't show up, then you can leave my key. He had told that to so many people before to leave their key. That was his way of saying that you're done, you're fired. You know, Mr. Wally's standards were high.

There were so many things about him that I loved and I wanted to model it so much so that I was willing to spend a lifetime with dead bodies. But I also wanted this sense of freedom. That moment in the basement when I allowed myself to cry, it was also a freeing moment. So I told him okay, and I gave him the keys.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Cherie Booker for sharing her story with The Snap. Cherie is an author, a poet, a spoken word artist, and a professor. If you want to read more of Cherie's tales from her near decade of work in the funeral business, Check out her memoir, Nine Years Under, Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home. Big thanks to Jessica Hankin and Laura Wexler at the Stoop Storytelling Series in Baltimore for introducing us to Cherie.

The original score for that piece is by Clay Xavier. The editor was Nancy Lopez. It was produced by Justin Cremon. Even a moment. No, an entire world of snap storytelling awaits in a tiny plot. Our five part series following the journey of a group of unhoused folk. They're trying to find a place to call home. It just dropped and you can listen to it all on podcast platforms everywhere. Right this moment. KQD in San Francisco. Snap Judgment's orbiting Hall of Justice. Snap is brought to you.

But the team that only makes thoughtful and responsible wagers, except, of course, for the producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, whatever it is, he's all in. No Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Snap. The union represented producers.

Artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL, CIL, Local 51. Now there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Messini-Miller, Anna Sussman. Renzo Corio, John Facile, Shayna Shealy, Teo Descartes, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, Regina Bediaco.

And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could not be entirely sure where someone's mother is. And you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PR.