Heavyweight - The Heavy Wait Diaries: Chapter 6

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Heavyweight Season 4 begins September 26th. Until then, we bring you The Heavy Wait Diaries. Each Thursday, a new chapter will be presented to ease the burden of your wait. In Chapter 6, Jonathan gets a new co-host. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Previously on Miller High Life Presents, The Heavyweight Diaries. Can't wait to hear the first episode of the new season. I have nothing. Timothy Nelson is our union representative. Subway sandwich. Timothy Nelson.

I have nothing. Are we all set for our listening party? Timothy Nelson. Gimlet's Executive Listening Room is a darkened chamber with the deadened acoustics of a sarcophagus. We all find our seats, Stevie and Kalila take the couch, and heavyweight union head Timothy Nelson commandeers a backwards office chair. Nelson dons his careful listening face,

a horrid affair that involves squinting his eyes, tilting his head beatifically, and, I can only assume, tightly puckering his colon. Finally, Bloomberg drags his silver-plated Peloton bicycle into the center of the room. Hope you don't mind if I take a spin while I take it all in, he says. And Timothy Nelson lets loose a belly chuckle sycophantic enough to make my spermatic cord unraveled at great expense only weeks earlier re-ravel. As much an enemy of capitalism as he was, Timothy Nelson still couldn't help kissing the ring. And by ring, I mean caboose.

Alex Bloomberg's executive ass caboose. Nice one, chief, says Nelson, chasing after Bloomberg's two-wheeler to swat his foot in camaraderie. Once the room settles down, I squint through the darkness. Eight beady eyes stare back at me, expectant and unblinking, like a pack of rabid raccoons about to tear through a garbage bag full of content. My only option is to stall. I succeed in buying myself ten minutes by accidentally rebooting my computer several times, but the room is growing restless. What is a heavyweight, I ask, a portmanteau composed of two separate words, heavy, meaning to exert a gravitational pull, and weight, something that can be hoisted, either in a curling motion or from a squatting position.

While my mouth jabbers on autopilot, my brain is in a terrible sweat. Think, Johnny, think. Stories, stories. But of the billions of stories to steal and repurpose, only two come to mind. The seminal kiddie book Good Night Moon, in which a suicidal rabbit bids adieu to his earthly possessions, and that poem about footsteps in the sand. Please give me something else, I beg my throbbing brain. Good night, podcast, it whispers back. Good night, healthcare. Good night, Twitter followers. But just as I'm about to initiate plan B,

tearing down the window curtains in a curtain-clutching fake heart attack worthy of Red Fox, a third story enters my brain pan. No, please, I scream think. Get out. As I will later recount in increasing states of hysteria to increasingly expensive therapists, it's in this moment that my fate hops into a potato sack with Timothy Nelson's fate.

Before I even knew what I was saying, I was saying this. The scene is set in an office elevator as one man tells the tale of sandwiches gone awry, if you will. I laugh at my own joke to enforce its comedic properties. I don't get it, says Stevie. I think I do, says Kalila. I shoot them a stern look and continue. My girlfriend wanted a Subway sandwich without olives, the man says. And I wanted a Subway sandwich with olives. That's me,

with olives. That's me, cries Timothy Nelson. I am that man. With a wave of my storytelling arm, I shush him down. Ah, but with Impish Lico, Slavic lord of misrule helming the wheel of this supper wagon we call life, nothing is ever certain. And so the man who desperately drooled for a sandwich with olives received the one without, while his lady friend, vigorously salivating for a sandwich without olives, received a sandwich with. Will these star-crossed sandwiches ever find their rightful sandwich eaters? Well, why don't they just swap sandwiches? asks Bloomberg.

Why, indeed, I wonder. It's just as I'm about to admit defeat, admit that I have nothing, admit that like a half-baked sandwich bread made without yeast, this plotline has no rising action. Admit that, yes, Alex, this is indeed the most asinine story ever told.

It is at this exact moment of my final comeuppance that Timothy Nelson grants me a kind of salvation. My special lady is allergic to pickled peppers, pipes he, and my sandwich was populated by a peck of them. And like the humble sandwich, so too is man, I say, already hearing the swell of orchestral music in my mind's ear. Like sandwiches, are we not assembled according to a greater unknowable plan? Who among us has not found themselves slathered in the mayonnaise of doubt, sliced in two by the bread knife of self-hatred, had our crusts removed by the attentive mother of anxiety. Who among us will not be chewed up,

devoured, and excreted before our time? Out of the darkness, I see Timothy Nelson wipe a tear from his cheek. So true, he says. But what if that olive-burdened couple had the chance at a do-over, I continue, affecting the voice of a wizard casting a magic spell, and could confront the sandwich maker who got their orders so horribly wrong? If you allow yourself to venture

past the limits of your earthly imagination, try to envision what such a conversation might yield. Bloomberg stops peddling his $3,000 wheel-less bicycle, his attention wrapped. Interviewing the Subway sandwich artist who got the order wrong, he says. Of course. To offer the mustard of forbearance, I say. The sweet tapenade of forgiveness. Timothy Nelson is now openly blubbering. Damn you and your storytelling, he weeps.

And for an added layer of narrative richness, I say, the man eavesdropping in the elevator was none other than the host of Heavyweight himself. You were wearing earbuds, cries Nelson with incredulity. And when I asked you how your weekend was, you ordered me to pipe down because you were listening to a podcast. But you weren't listening to a podcast at all. Oh, but I was, I say. Just one that was yet to be recorded.

Beautiful, says Bloomberg. The symmetry is breathtaking. In response, all of us in the room, dutifully quoting from the Gimlet Manifesto, recite in unison, symmetry divided by catharsis and multiplied by advertising dollars equals storytelling.

We all take deeply satisfying sips from the Miller Highlif's we've all been drinking and that I never mentioned until this moment. You and Timothy will have to work together very closely on this one, Bloomberg says. I'm seeing a co-reporting situation. I don't know, I say. Khalil and Stevie are always telling me that heavyweight's more of a

one-man operation. We could sell some product placement brand opportunities to Subway, says Bloomberg, steamrolling me. And maybe you could also find out why Subway bread smells the way it does. You mean smelling like if you put an armpit in a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake oven and set it on high, I ask? That

smell? I love the smell of Subway bread, says Timothy Nelson. Bloomberg laughs and claps his hands together. I'm just loving the banter here, he says. I know we can put our political differences aside in the interest of creating some compelling content, says Timothy Nelson. And then, for some reason, he extends his fist to me. Uncertainly, I grab hold of it and shake. I had saved the show.

But at what price? This has been Chapter 6 of the Heavyweight Diaries. The next season of Heavyweight will begin in three weeks on September 26th. Remember, September 26th is Spotify Day. Actually, every day is Spotify Day. Actually, every day is Spotify Day, at least according to the corporate mantra we're forced to repeat every morning. Heavyweight is me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Jorge Just, Stevie Lane, Kalila Holt, and B.A. Parker.

This episode was mixed by Emma Munger. Music by Bobby Lord. Our ad music is Vivaldi's Spring, performed by the Wichita State University Chamber Players. We'll have a new chapter of the Heavyweight Diaries next week.