Hello, It's Steve Fishman from Orbit Media and this is Get the Money and Run. Today is our final episode, and well, a lot of finales disappoint I assure you this one does not over to Ben.
You are listening to The Burden season four Get the Money and Run. I'm Benadere and this is episode seven Batel Peril.
Yeah, we talked about how when you're robbing banks and at the height of your prison Joe Persona basically cut your conscience off, like totally shut down your sense of morality. Did your conscience then come back when you're in solitary.
Yeah, my conscience just came back with a fury. He woke up like, oh, okay, we'll show you on It doesn't come back and say, oh we'll protect you. We're gonna only give you a little bit of your shit at one time. It dumps it all on you. And I had stopped kind of growing and being aware, like trying to have any self awareness, probably around age eleven, and now I'd done all these terrible adult things and I had to deal with it with a very fragile conscience,
very fragile awareness, and so instantly almost incant. He was like, I can never get back this. I'm disqualified, and now I don't want to go be back be a bad guy anymore because that sucks. But now I don't want to go and be a good guy because that's impossible. So you know what I probably should do. It is probably just like save everyone time, just kill myself. Like that's exactly the logic. I think.
Disqualified is a really interesting word.
Yeah, I felt like I just didn't have I didn't have any right to want to go play in that arena a good peace. I knew good people, I'd heard a lot of good people. So the conscience was not kind to me because it did not It didn't say, oh, we love You're gonna take care of you. No, man, I was I was suffocating under the the ultifying weight
of remorse and grief and shame. What comes up is sometimes down deep in me as that where I remember something and just a shame and the grief remorse of who I was just comes up, and yeah, man, that's that's what it was.
Then Part one, go for Broken.
Joe.
What was scary about that? What was scary about changing?
Well, what I realized was as I started thinking about changing, I realized that, oh, Fuck, that's hard. I'm fearless about taking people in a revolt. I'll go down to heartbeat. I'm fearless about walking in a cell with a knife. I'm fearless all day long about that. I don't want to go inside myself and demand that I change. So I decided to change my idea strong and weak and say, Okay, i've been thinking I'm strong, I'm actually weak. I want to get strong. How do I get real strong? I'm
gonna go know myself. I'm gonna go I'm gonna go figure this out. Well, I started writing, and then I just got a sheet of paper and I said, Mom, what are the stories I've been telling people all my life that means something to me? They communicate something about me. Oh I'm brave because of this. Oh you know what, I'm fearless because of this. We all have stories that we're carrying this little box with us, and they are identity stories. They are the stories we used to tell people.
This is who we are, because these are stories we tell ourselves of who we are. And so I thought, what are the stories that I tell and have been telling since I was a child about who I am that represent me? Stabbing my dad at my mother's funeral, like all the stories, like what are the stories who make up my sense of identity? And then I would wake up and say, Okay, which one do I want to write? That's when I started came out with the
concert of owning your story. Because you can't know who you are if you don't know the origins of things. You have to like realize what parts of your story are wrong, false, don't fit. And that was super helpful. Now I'm thinking, I gotta be on the line and I don't want guys fucking with me. I gotta like investigate on the page how to become a nice guy,
a good person soft. And the irony is that in order to give myself the space and nobody would fuck with me so I could be in my cell to like do all the soft investigation of myself, because I had to dial up my persona on the tier like don't fuck with me, man, don't you know who I am? I had to continue to perform hyper maleness to get to learn all this time to read and write letters to people and try to change my life.
How difficult was that to have sort of the the two different personas one one where you're acting tough and then the one where you're trying to, I guess, go soft in a way.
It was very tough because remember guys, guys who walk around like they're ready to stab you. It only works if everyone thinks they're gonna that you will stab them. And I had to do that several times. I'm like trying to trying to tell myself that that's our ego, that's our ego, Like you can't, you can't take that stuff personally. So I actually have these like real things that are happening, and then I get to try and like say, okay, so I agree with this new teaching
that I'm that I'm learning and stuff. It makes sense to me. I like it. I like I like it. Theoretically it makes sense. I'd already been changing my life a little bit with it, so I want to keep leaning into it. But I would plenty times have an opportunity or something would get kicked up in me, and then I would get to like constructed, like I was able to start realizing under all these acts of rage or all these acts of indignancy in me, basically what they were is it was when the rager come up
it was disguising the fact that I felt wounded. That was the big, big, fucking lesson. And this kept coming up over and over and over again, and being able to develop that distance from the moment is like, Okay, I'm gonna be able to get out of here, I'm going to be able to stop putting holds them in.
Did you start thinking about other people in your life who had traumatized you. I mean, I'm thinking mostly of your dad.
Yeah. So, you know, when I started investigating my wounds, it was like they all these old child wounds would come out right, like I feel I see it's I'm I'm remembering this episode from my childhood. That's where it all went back to. And then I was like, oh shit, my dad he had a really shitty childhood, just like me. Then I started looking at that and I knew my dad's past and when he was young, my grandfather used
to put him in a chicken coop. My grandfather really was mad at mins treated my dad like he was the worst kid. He had some deep animosity in my dad. I think my grandfather may have thought that my dad wasn't his even so, my dad got treated very badly, humiliated, humiliated, humiliated, over and over, which is why he wanted to get out of the house at sixteen to marry my mother. That's when I was born. He just wanted to get
the hell out. So I knew he had been treated terribly brutally, and then he grew up and he did the same thing. In all my life, I had thought my dad was a monster. People would even tell me, man, let's do a monster. And I liked thinking of him as a monster because then I could think about the bad things I wanted to do to him. Because I made him into this object. He's a monster. He's not a person. He's like the other He's not us, he's
not like me. But when I examined my life and I started seeing all the bad things that I had done, and I understood where it came from, and I was able to look at my father and say, oh, he's doing these because of his wounds, his early humiliations, his early trauma. He's no different than me than this monster. Who I now understood was this little boy who had been brutalized and humiliated and traumatized and behave badly. He wasn't a monster. Yes, he did monsters things but he
was no longer a monster me. He was a kid who didn't ask for any of the shit that happened to him. And then it was like, oh fuck, I was a kid. I didn't ask for any of it. I didn't ask for the beatings. I didn't ask to witness the trauma that he inflicted on my brother. I didn't ask for the trauma of that. I didn't ask for the death of my mother. I didn't ask for any of the none of it. None of it. And it happened, and he shaped me, and I grew up and I did monsters things, but I wasn't a monster.
Being able to have an understanding of my father to give him compassion. That gave me that phrase, Oh well, then he's not a monster. He did monstrous thing, He's not a monster came back to me and I could appropriate for myself and say, oh, yeah, I'm not I
did monster, but I'm not a monster either. It gave me like this tag, this tagline that I could remind myself when I would start feeling super shameful, that which was you know, really really heavy on those early days because I just felt like, fuck it, I'm gonna always fuck up I'm just I'm a terrible, evil person. I might as well just kill myself because I'm gonna fail at this thing to try and get better too. So I needed help and that line I did monsters things
when I'm not a monster. Just like I gave it to my dad, I was able to use it for myself and that thing that gave me some rich propulsion in the in a direction away from from shame, just compassion for myself, you know. But I first extended it to my dad, and then it came back to me.
We'll be right back.
Part two.
First day out, Jo, Do you remember your last day in prison?
I woke up and showered, changed, shaved shit. I did not shine my shoes because I only was going to walk out with shower shoes because I gave my shoes to somebody else. And then I just waited when I went to breakfast and then went to my cell, and I waited to be called. And sure enough, at a certain point, pretty early, it's like loyal, roll it up, roll it up. And so I go and they escort me to the administration building, and now they start processing
me out. Sign this sign, that sign, this fingerprint, that photo of this here's your clothes. Change into these because your My family had sent me closed ahead of time. And then they brought me to the gate. When they brought me to the gate, and they asshole guards like all right, see you soon, like I'm coming back, and I was given a one hundred and fifty dollars check.
So first thing I do when I walk out of the prison that I'd spent seventy years for for robbing banks, the first thing I do is I go to a bank. And when I go to a bank, this time, I'm going to make an entirely different experience. And I'm like, I'm this is momentous, man, this is I'm different man than I went in. And I have a different relationship to banking. So I walk up and I put both my hands on the doors, and I open the doors and walk in and I kind of walk. I need
to sign the so I go to the counter. I put both my hands out on the counter and then I look up and I go wait in line, and I look at every camera in there, dumbly just like what what what? Just looking at all of them, just getting my face. I wanted to be known, I wanted to be seen. And then I got my cash and I walked out, and then I had this experience as my first brush with grief, because you know, I'm out there, I'm doing good. I'm happy, I mean as happy as
you can be. I'm carrying grief with me. Obviously, I'm so sorrow and and all sorts of fear and all sorts of things, but I'm really generally like, oh man, it feels good to be out. So at one point I go to buy something and there's this guy in there, this young guy, pimply big Ol'adam's apple. I think you're probably be a college kid, but sweetheart, and then I come up with my little you know, bullshit postcards and
gum and whatever, and then he takes my money. My money falls out of his hand, and then like he triesking me the receipt and it falls on the floor. It's just it was like so clumsy, but as he was as he bent down to pick up the receipt, and he was just so apologetic to me, apologetic to me.
It was like in that moment, flashbacks of all the shit that I had done in prison, Like it just came flooding that moment, and I felt terrible that I, this innocent young man was in front of me and all the terrible things I had done, and I mean it was just, yeah, you know, just the level of abuse I'd done to other people, the dorsis, the stabbings, the ship on guards, the fires and the tears, the making of the knives, the the robbing, the terrorizing all
the people I did, the treating the people who love me shitty. I just felt so it felt like I was gonna just rob this kid of innocence in a way, and I wanted to get out of there as fast, but I just grabbed myself and I ran out. And I'm so not ready for fucking good people, man, Like I'm gonna always feel like fucking terrible ship in front of him. I can't let this keep happening and running out, you know. Yeah, man, it was exhausting to be free, Joe.
You spent you spent a lot of time in prison thinking about your dad and your relationship with your dad. What was it like when you first saw him after getting released.
I saw him when I exited the plane, and there's my dad. He's my dad. I'd done all my heart work on him already, so I just hug him, I love him. We cry, you know, we weep like men. But there was one conversation that solidified what we would try to be the rest of this time and kind of got to, which was this, Dad, So I fucked up really bad. You fucked up really bad. Why don't
we do this. Let my fucked up shit cancel all your fucked up shit, and then your fucked up shit cancel out my fucked up shit, and let's just start over. Let's just do that. Boom, clean slate, turn the fucking page. Yeah, let's just have a fresh start. And that's what we chose to do, just like that. Let's just fresh started. Okay, fresh start. We'll be right back.
M Part three.
Gone in a moment, well, you know, for those of us who are under a three strike serra law is when I like when I got out, there's a mistake you could make that meant that you're never getting out of prison again. It'll wash you up. One mistake, and that one mistake. Many men who came out of prison, when they would be in reinc two programs they would deal with, they would talk about that moment in which they had to choose, am I gonna walk away, or am I gonna wash myself up, never get out of prison.
It's right here, It's decision is right now. It's like I am my life is imperiled in this moment, and not just in peril, like oh, I might go to prison for a couple years, like I'll never get out again. And they call that the moment of fatal peril. Crocodile Cafe, you know, I'd worked at one before, and here we are at this one, and we're on the patio and there's this homeless guy across the street starts walking in traffic,
and there's all this horn. That's why we're paying attention because everyone's trying to stop their honking in him, and he gets so agitated. He stands right in the middle of the road and he puts his arms out like Jesus on the cross, and he throws his head back and he's just standing in the middle the center line. And so the traffic picks up again. It starts going slowly, slowly by I mean, he's just drawn, you know, dramatic there, and people are saying stuff about him in the patio,
and I feel bad for him. I have solidarity. I get it, dude, in those days, like I'm feeling a lot of compassion. And then he comes and he cross the street and he comes to the gate that separates the patio from the sidewalk, and then he opens the kiss the little gate there and walks in and sits at the table far at the far edge of the patio by him, so he doesn't he doesn't get seated, and so now it looks like he wants to be served. And now I can hear the waiters and waitresses like, oh, man,
do we have to serve him? Oh, he's got a stink and this and that, and I'm like, man, this is terrible the way they're talking about this guy. I have total solidarity stir with him. And then I look over at him like kind of want to give him an eye like him, man, I see you, homeboy, like like that kind of thing. Solidarity Sometimes it works, you can. There's I've been out and I've been in places and somebody sees me, I see them. We're like, yeah, we know who we are. Yeah yeah, no, noah, all right,
what's up? All right? And that's it. You let let people know who you are. And I'm trying to give that guy. Then he looks at me, and right from across the patio, he says, what are you looking at you being eating burrito, motherfucker or something like yeah, being burrito eating motherfucker. Like Jess straight up says it to me, calls me on in front of everybody, straight up racist shit, and everyone looks at me. They turn around and look
at me. They have that look that we call him prison, like, hey man, I don't play much chess, but it looks like you're moved. And my anger flashed from zero to one hundred because in that moment, I felt he's threatening me and I don't know that. My hand goes to my fork, but I look at my fork and I'm like, can this thing work? I think I can make this fork work if I need to. I could stab him in the eye. I could stab him. I could stab him in front of his throat. I'll shove this shit
up his nose if I have to. Like, I'm thinking what can I do to hurt him? And I'm like, okay, down, dere, what the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?
Man?
No, that guy is just throwing words at you. Man, that's words. That's nothing. It's not about you at all. Dilly that shit down. Down. He's not threatening you, he's not threatening you. It's not a threat. So I started dialing it down. I'm at eighty y. It's not a threat, it's not a threat. And then my mind thought, but what if he walks over here, Like I'm starting to imagine how I'm gonna have to, you know, lunge at
this guy. And now I'm back at one hundred again, and so now I am in such distress, like I can't let go. This was my moment of fatal peril. I've been living out here for several months now, and I've been dealing with humiliation after humiliation after small humiliation out and being helpless and fucking swallowing shit and just like not doing it. This man has crossed such a line that the idea of going over there and really putting damage on this guy's body feels so good. It's
so seductive. That was the danger, Like I understood that this felt too good. I'm trying to figure out how do I let go of this? And I didn't realize well, sometimes it unlike prison, where I could not leave prison. I had to stay there and I had to deal with that. I was like I have an out. I got a car, I got a van. But here's the thing. On the way home, I realized I needed to get a hold of my father, and I need to get ahold of my brother. And I don't know why, Like
to this day, I don't know why. But I was smart enough to say, Paul, you know, I get sleeping back or something, and I need you to come and spend the night with me. Dad, I'm gonna pick you up. I need you to just come and spend the night with me, like I need you guys to stay with me tonight. My dad and brother came. I told Paul, stand by the sleep by the window, Dad, sleep by the door. Do not let me get up and out of here, like I don't want this to happen. I
don't want to become that. And then I lay in bed, thinking I have a whole night to make sure that I do some work on myself so that in the morning I don't get up and go find a gun so I can go rob a bank. But I just lay in bed, and my brother and dad heard heard me just cry. The voices were so strong, and I was not convinced that the beast was not gonna win. I was not convinced. I cried myself to sleep, like I was just so exhausted from the rage that was
coursing through me. Because that's what it was. I was now dancing with that old rage again, that wanted that had done so much damage on the on the planet. I was dancing with that rage, man. And then the morning came. Morning always comes, and the morning comes like there's my dad seated on and reading a book, seated on his you know, by the door, and Paul was brushing his teeth inside the in the bathroom there, and I don't remember like much talking about anything. It was
just very quiet. The sun was coming through the shades, and I do remember that we got up and we just hugged it out, the three of us. We hugged it out, crying. I had leaned on my people's man. They loved me. They wanted me to succeed. They wanted me to stay out. I wanted to stay out. And the fever, you know, it faded, It was gone. I didn't feel that rage anymore. In fact, I felt we got a strategy. And the strategy is very simple. You got to lean on the love man, my dad loved me.
My brother loved me. I love them. We're family and we had had such a blasted out home at one point, but in that moment hugging them, h man, we had the best home we'd ever had. It was reliable, and it was just showing up and helping the other other person out in a moment of crisis. And then I was like, how might make this?
Yeah, you are listening to the burden.
This has been season four, Get the Money and Run. Get the Money and Run was originally released as The Score the Bank Rubber Diaries and was produced by Western Sound and a Cast Studios. Search up The Bank Robber Diaries and click on the yellow cover art to hear a fifteen episode version of this story, including questions and answers from Joeloya. Yet the Money and Run was produced by Me Benader along with Cameron Kel, Haley Fox, and
Stephanie Aguilar. Production assistance from Annett to Run Hell. All the music you heard on Get the Money and Run was original and it was composed, produced and designed by Dan Leone, mixing and mastering by John Evance Evans and Austin Smith. Executive producers are Me Benadair, Joe Loya, Veronica Taylor, and Susie Warhurst. The executive producer and producer of The Burden is Orbit Media, Steve Fishman and Austin Smith. I'm
your host, Benadair. Stay tuned to this feed for more exciting stories from The Burden.
Thanks for listening, and special thanks to assistant producers for Social Media Eva Bruckner and Sarah Feu and Lead assistant producer Eric Axelrod.
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