The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Amazing Life of Glenn Loury

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

In a remarkable and candid conversation, Glenn Loury discusses his new book "Late Admissions," and his amazing, checkered, erratic, inspirational, and dramatic life. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:37 Performing the book for Audible 00:05:04 Had to be Honest to be Believed 00:09:09 A Gifted Family 00:15:22 Understanding Slavery and History 00:20:07 Constant Self-Doubt and Inferiority Complex 00:26:11 Betraying a Best Friend 00:32:25 Decoding Glenn's Politics from His Life 00:32:57 Stealing a Car 00:38:54 A Child Is Born 00:39:54 Glenn's Son's Gift to His Father 00:47:34 Glenn's Heroic Father 00:49:05 Glenn feels Put Off by Middle-Class Blacks 00:57:13 Arrested 01:03:14 Modern Hypocrisy 01:05:29 Speaking in Tongues 01:09:33 Smoking Crack 01:20:21 Called the N-Word 01:24:00 Final Remarks on Humanity

All right. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm here to do a special interview with someone I'm proud to call a friend at this point in my life, Mr. Glenn Lowry, who was just telling me about his back surgery. And well, you want to give a little up-to-date for the people, a little repetition of what you told me. Oh, yeah. Well, I had a major surgery. It was an eight-hour procedure. They operated on three different sites on my vertebrae, L3, L4, L4, L5, and L5, S1. Pins were inserted. Rods were affixed. And it's three months out now, and I was just reporting to Nome that I'm doing pretty good.

I'm up walking about. I don't take pain medication anymore. I can put on my own shoes and shower myself and, you know, things like that. And, um, my, uh, I'm, I'm back to my, uh, public intellectual stuff and my book is out. I've been promoting, uh, mostly virtual cause my travel is restricted, but other than that, you know, I'm, I'm doing okay here. You drive, you're driving your wife crazy. Uh, it's true that we're spending a lot more time together yeah yeah we're we're amused over here honey get me this ah you know they start out sympathetic

anyway all right so Glenn I I contacted you to interview you about your book. I read the entire book start to finish, which is something I almost never do anymore is finish books. I read half, two thirds of a book usually before I put it down. This book is just unbelievable. And none of the reviews have done it justice. I don't know. How have you felt about the reviews? When I say justice, I don't mean anything positive. There was a review and commentary that I really liked. The review and commentary. Gosh, I'm sorry. I don't remember.

I could look it up, but I don't want to take the time to do so. An estimable writer whose name would be familiar to you, but I'm blocking on it. John Cochran, the economist that Hoover keeps a blog, and he did a long reaction to the book, which was passionate and loving, and I appreciated it. I mean, I don't mean to parse the reviews now, because there were other reviews, and almost all of them are pretty, you know uh encouraging i didn't mean they were negative i meant that they somehow didn't really deal with the the grittiness of it in some way to me almost yeah i think they were i think they were frightened off by the grittiness of it actually Yes, yes. And to me, that is the real appeal of the book is that you're laying out there, in my mind, the real humanity of people. And I mean, I have a lot of notes here, but it brings out to my mind how much hypocrisy we're surrounded by. To me, your story is revelatory bad luck that brought you to worse outcomes than other people,

but this is who people are. This is the real condition of man. And I remember during the Kavanaugh hearings, I was just infuriated. We'll get to that. But one of the Greek guys had said that the male libido is like being chained to a madman. I mean, he would have enjoyed this book.

All right. And I just say a few more things. You're going to talk the whole time, but this book is cinematic. I found myself gasping out loud. I could literally picture it as a movie. It reminded me of, did you ever see the movie Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman? Yeah.

Where he goes through a religious period and a hustler period and a fancy dude period and a drunken period and even kind of an identity driven period where he really identifies with the Native Americans. This reminded me of that in a way except it's real life it's just amazing everybody should read this book oh thanks no that's wonderful to hear man and i'm gonna quote some stuff from the book but my intention is to go and get the audible and replace my voice with you actually reading those quotes when you're reading your own audiobook and you have to read it slowly, was it emotional for you to relive those moments as you're reading them? Yeah, it's a performance actually, you know, because you're bringing a kind of emotive tone to the reading,

you know, you're emphasizing, you're raising or lowering your voice. You know, I even actually sing at one point during the reading when I'm quoting my mother. I have her singing Judy Garland's The Man That Got Away while I'm sitting on the edge of the bed. I'm a little kid now, I'm like 12 years old. She's going out for the night. She's putting on her stockings and making a face. And she's singing this, The Man That Got Away, Judy Garland. And I quote, you know, you can only quote without explicit permission, two lines from the thing. So I quote like the last two lines. And I sing them. my mother turns from the dresser and again sits on the edge of the bed she's lost in thought singing plaintively don't know what happened it's all a

crazy game yeah i also learned from the book that you play piano as well you're a musical guy apparently yeah you know i knock around a little bit but uh reliving yeah reliving and the feelings the feelings of you know in that moment i get busted man you know oh my god i'm going to jail oh my god uh or get robbed at gunpoint you know um i'll just start i'd start the book starts out this way i am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them. And yet they are true. I'm going to tell you that I have lied because I need you to believe me. I'm going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me because I need you to trust me. I'm going to tell you that I have abandoned people who needed me because I need you to stick with me.

I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don't tell it all, nothing I say will be heard. So I had an idea. The idea developed from taking note of the fact that it's autobiography. So I'm telling a story about myself. I'm telling the story. So the reader has to know that I'm going to make myself look good and will therefore discount what I say or be suspicious about what I say. So I have to win the reader's trust. And in fact, I need to foreshadow to the reader that I'm going to tell you some things about myself that are really not

very attractive. But I do want you to stick with me. And what you said at the beginning, Noam, really inspires me about the humanity. You know, about the humanity that, okay, I succumbed to temptation. Okay, I gave in to impulse. Okay, I was not using very good judgment. Okay, I was inadequately concerned about the well-being of others close to me who would be impacted by my actions. I betrayed. I lied. I fornicated.

I indulged. I indulged to excess. I took risks that were ridiculous. I abandoned people. So that's a lot of negative territory. And at the end of it, I want the reader to think of me as a human being struggling with stuff and to see me in my honesty, candidly manning up to but overcoming stuff. And that's kind of what I'm getting at in that passage at the beginning of the book I'll just read you the notes that I wrote the first thing I noticed about your early life

was that you were surrounded by extremely bright I would guess genetically gifted people that run through your lineage and already that makes the story unique. Do you agree that the people around you, close to you, your family, your father, your uncle, that these were above average gifted people and that this somehow is in your blood as well?

I agree with that. And I mean, you could be talking about IQ or whatever, or you could talk, be talking about common sense and shrewdness and, you know, good judgment and a character, you know, determination, grit. Yeah, I mean, my uncle Mooney came up in South Side of Chicago in the 1920s and 30s. And he was a heroin addict at one point. He knew a lot of gangsters. I mean, he could have gone any way. And my auntie Lois was this magnificent woman who was kind of the matriarch over our family. When she found Uncle Mooney,

she kind of made it clear to him that he could have her, the queen, but only if he, you know, got serious. And, you know, he built a life. You know, my uncle Adler was a near contemporary of Martin King Jr. at Morehouse College in the 1940s and was one of the very few blacks to finish the law school at Northwestern University in the early 1950s and was an oratorical genius. I mean, he was truly, truly a gifted articulator or whatever the thing was. My father worked his way through law school at night.

He was an accountant. He was a manager. He got to the top of the Internal Revenue Service, running a big income tax processing center in Kansas City at the end of his career, an inspiration to me. Yeah, and I'm leaving some people out. So, you know, it's funny. I don't know if you ever saw. There was this hatchet job documentary that Dinesh D'Souza did maybe his father as well, I don't remember. But what you see is that, and the only thing I remember from that whole documentary is that, oh, they're all brilliant also. You know, and you see this quite often. Oh, of course it runs in families. You know, you have musicians who turn out to be the unclaimed children of other famous musicians.

Nora Jones turned out to be Ravi Shankar's daughter, you know. I mean, I don't know how far I want to go with the genetic stuff. I'm not going to go the full ugliness of it, but definitely in small gene pools, I don't think it can be denied, you know. Musical genius and obviously I don't know what your IQ is, Glenn, but you're some kind of genius, right?

Anyway, so the other thing that's interesting to me about the book is that, now you were born in 1958, is that right? 1948. So you're telling the story here, your childhood basically all your formative years

prior to 1964 and I was just expecting a few horror stories of racism of traumatic experiences based on your skin color. And there were none in the book.

Am I missing one? I don't think there were any. Well, I talk about being at that Black Panther meeting with Woody, the guy that looked like a white guy and him getting. Yeah, that's later. And I left out. I mean, it's in the draft uh but it didn't make the cutting room uh it ended up on the cutting room floor a story about riding my bike into this

polish neighborhood i'm on the south side of chicago and it's very segregated and you know everybody's a stone's throw from everybody else it's not far between these neighborhoods so on this side of state street you know know, the Negroes, the black people were living on that side of State Street, the Polish Catholic people were living. And I'm riding my bicycle over there. And these guys start chasing me, throwing rocks at me and stuff, you know, for riding my bike down the street. All I was doing was riding my bicycle. And I barely got away from them. If they had caught me, I assume they would have beat me up. And you knew not to go into the Polish neighborhood or whatever. You know. I mean, I could have told that story.

I could have told the story about how there used to be race riots after the Catholic League, public school league, football face-off, where you had the Catholic schools and they were thick on the ground in Chicago because of the ethnic composition, the Irish and the South. And you had the public schools and oftentimes the school, high school that prevailed in the public school system was a mostly black high school. So basically you got a black teams versus white teams and the crowds of, you know, racially divided. And getting from the stadium to the public transit was a real challenge, you know, because people are picking fights with people. And I mean, I could have told those stories. So those stories were definitely there. My mother and my aunt used to talk about not being able to go to certain department stores to shop for clothing in downtown Chicago and within their lifetime, you know, they were born in the 1920s and uh whatnot but uh so it was definitely uh in the era the cops

i mean it was just given that uh they were going to mess with you you know i mean stop you for no good reason pull you over you make you open up your trunk or whatever was this was this scarring uh psychologically or it was just something that was the way it was and you didn't really... Well, it didn't scar me. I can imagine it might have scarred some people. It wasn't sufficiently impactful that I thought I needed to talk about it in the book. When I remember my upcoming in Chicago, that's not one of the things I think about. You know, this is just as an aside. As we get away from certain parts in history, you know, we read history, but we really don't

learn to, we don't learn much from history books. I'm learning this in my own life as I hear people describing events, young people writing about events that I lived through. And I'm sure you've had this experience. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. That's not the way it was. And one of the things I dabbled in, I read a little bit of Frederick Douglass's autobiography. I read a little bit of Du Bois, was it called Black Reconstruction? What was it called? The name of that? That's a massive term. and in both those books they describe either slavery in douglas's case or being very close knowing a lot of people who had been slaves and it's just fascinating how different they describe slavery with nuances and and just different than people today describe slavery,

which it becomes a one-dimensional horror. Of course, it was a horror. But there's other aspects to it, right, that people much closer to it could describe. If somebody were to have said the things about slavery that I read in Du Bois, they'd be criticized immediately for being soft on slavery or rationalizing slavery.

So it's just, you're part of a generation and that generation won't be around that much longer, right? God forbid, I hate to say. Who actually experienced a certain part of history.

I appreciate that. You know what i mean like and to give a flavor for it i think is important the thing you're saying about slavery made me think about eugene genovese the historian the book is called roll jordan roll the world the slaves made i'm pretty sure that's the subtitle and it's exactly told from the point of view of the fact that you know the human experience on a day-to from the point of view of the fact that, you know, the human experience on a day to day basis in terms of what people were doing and how they lived isn't captured by a sort of stick figure, you know, one dimensional kind of domination, you know, thing. I mean, there was a world that was made in the cauldron of slavery. And that was an expression of the human spirit that had an authenticity and an integrity of its own slavery and that was an expression of the human spirit uh that had an authenticity

and an integrity of its own and that deserves to be taken seriously and not rendered as a cartoon you know some kind of anyway uh yeah i i agree very much with with that sentiment in in in dubois's book just um he he does this part this is the part i read where he compares slavery black slavery to wage slavery. He was a socialist, right? Yeah. And he says, black slavery is horrible for these reasons, but at least they had a room over their head and meals. This is what he says.

And many masters, he says, were okay, were kind in some way. Some were murderous, but many weren't. He said, but wage slavery, you're all out on your own. You don't know where your next meal is coming from. And just the idea that you could compare the two would be off limits today. And I hadn't conceived of how awful it was to live as a wage slave in those days. Well, to me, a serious review of American history could not avoid this. I mean, you've got the Irish immigrants living in tenements on the eastern seaboard of the United States,

working in sweatshops and whatnot. And nobody was concerned. I mean, that's the point, the point about slavery, the awful ironic point is that the ownership thing internalizes the maintenance thing. So if you follow me, you know, somebody's got a bottom line and they don't want to see their investment go to waste. So so the guy who's running a factory in Boston or Baltimore or somewhere isn't concerned about the caloric intake of his workforce. And he's going to bid the wage down to a subsistence wage. And those people are going to just scrape to get by. And when you go and look at the actual caloric intake, you know, if you go and try to measure on historical records, how much were people eating? It wouldn't be at all a surprise to me to learn that people on slave plantations were actually eating better

than people living in slums. So, I mean, that's Du Bois' point, and I think it's a valid point. All right. Glenn, one theme in this book, and I identify with it, actually, is constant self-doubt. This seems to be just an aspect of your personality. I don't know if it's imposter syndrome, but from your earliest days,

you both seem to realize that you're gifted. And then yet, if one thing doesn't go right for you, you become riddled with self-doubt. And just to say, you were a math whiz, you were a chess whiz, you were valedictorian, and yet you had constant insecurity. Later on, you had one math competition that you were chosen to go to because you were the best math student and you didn't score that well and it sent you into a depression. You were so riddled with self-doubt that you almost flunked out of the Illinois Institute of Technology apparently because you were psyched out in some way, which I couldn't understand from the book. So tell us about all that. Well you left out the part about getting to Harvard as the first black tenured professor of economics and then, quote, choking, as I describe in the book, and abandoning my technical economics portfolio for life at the Kennedy School of Government as a political economy policy and commentary guru. And yeah, I mean, one of my cousins upon reading the book commented,

Glenn's always had an inferiority complex, insecurity problem. Imagining that the reason I'm spilling my guts and telling all these horrible stories on myself, I'm sort of seeking absolution and I'm, you know, kind of feeling unworthy. I'm feeling unfit, you know, and whatever. And you can psychoanalyze me if you want to from a distance. I was younger than the other kids in my class when I was in grade school and in high school. I was a couple of years younger.

I was 12 years old when I first started high school. That was certainly part of it. So I was shorter of stature. I had less facility with the girls. I was an athlete at my own level. But when I tried out for the high school basketball team, man, those guys ran right over me. So there was a little bit of that. It did come as a big surprise to me that I was really, really good at some of this stuff. When

I got to Northwestern and started taking those courses, at first I thought it was going to be a struggle just to hold on. And I realized that I was acing stuff and it was coming naturally and whatnot. And that did come as a kind of pleasant surprise. And maybe I feared the balloon would burst somehow, you know, that it can't, you know, can't last. Something like that. But why did you have trouble at illinois institute of technology it i i didn't study i i spent all my time hanging out smoking weed and drinking vodka and uh playing pool uh john is a character who i uh described in book, a friend of mine from New York City who was the same class as me at MIT, black guy, and we used to hang out together. And we'd go out trying to pick up girls and go for joyrides and whatnot.

And it was completely irresponsible of me. I mean, I was, maybe this has happened to other people, free from parental supervision in a direct way, perhaps for the first, I mean, you know, I was kind of on my own. And I didn't use my time very well. And then my girlfriend got pregnant. That's Charlene? Yeah. I do remember you describing that at some point, and I could see how that would lead to what you're talking about, you had some trouble and got psyched out by the courses. Yeah, because I was used to being on top in the classes, and then when I would not be doing the studying and not doing the homework, and I'd come in and I didn't understand what was going on in the lecture. And I felt embarrassed by know, embarrassed by that.

And that was a terrible feeling. And so it was a kind of after that, I dug a hole for myself. And then I kind of denied the fact that I was in the hole, you know. Do you still struggle with the self-doubt? Yeah, I guess I'd have to admit that I do. I have panic attacks sometimes before I have to do things, give talks. Like what kind of thing? Well, you know, I mean, am I going to have anything to say?

What am I going to say? And yet it always comes to you, right? Yeah, even before classes sometimes, you know, I'm, you know, manic, you know, because I'm trying to get my thoughts together and I want everything. And it always goes, maybe every now and then it doesn't go as smoothly as I would have had it go, but it always goes okay, you know. Yeah, I think this is just a personality type I'm the same way I played gigs thousands of gigs and every day every time before a gig started I would get

just nervous and other people I know who should have been nervous you know they were just casual as hell I can't I remember reading some story about John Glenn, the astronaut, when, you know, whatever mission he was going up on, they have all the astronauts' vital signs,

they're monitoring them at mission control, and the other two astronauts with him, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the pulse rate to the sky, and John Glenn apparently showed no indication of nerves that's just gotta be how he's built right you had a best friend Woody who was

so light skinned he could pass for white and he was your best friend you describe betraying him twice is he still alive? You describe betraying him twice. Is he still alive? No, he's not.

He's been dead maybe 15 years. You betrayed him once at a Black Panthers meeting and later on having an affair with his wife. But I actually gasped out loud when I read this. A critical moment came when the leaders interrupted their speech-making to solicit ideas from the crowd. Woody had an idea and enthusiastically raised his voice above the murmur. But before he could finish his first sentence, he was cut short by one of the dashiki-clad brothers in charge, who demanded to know how a white boy got the authority to have an opinion about what we black people should be doing. That was one of our problems, the man said. We were always letting white people peep our whole card,

but we were never privy to their deliberations in return. A silence fell over the room. The indignant brother asked if anyone could vouch for this white boy. More excruciating silence ensued. Now it was my moment of truth. Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. I refused to speak up for him. He was asked to leave the meeting, and he did so without uttering a word in his own defense. I stayed, but I didn't hear anything anyone said after that. All the rage, the calls to arms, the strategizing passed right over me. I had betrayed my friend. And for what? So this is a big incident in your life.

So tell us about it. It actually relates to what we were talking about earlier about insecurity. See, I wanted to be accepted by the brothers, by the other black guys, by the radicals. I want to be accepted by the brothers you know by the other black guys by the by the radicals but you know I want to be black I want to be in with the with the uh race with with the racial uh grievance thing now I knew privately that Woody was okay I mean he was my best friend we'd grown up together playing stickball in the alley. I mean, I'd known Woody for 10 years at that point, and we had been through thick and thin. Can I just interrupt you for one second, Glenn? I'm just saying, at this point,

he was not only your best friend, but you also describe him as being almost heroic, because having the option actually to live and pass as white, he embraced his color and consequently a more difficult life for himself. So you admired him for that. So it's even heavier than what you described. That's well said, Dom. I certainly did.

And he had a sister, Wendy, and she actually made a different choice in terms of how she lived her life. She kind of went white know, went white, quote unquote. And I mean, you have to understand these people were very light skinned. I mean, they look like, well, like you. I mean, you know, they, but there was, as it were, black blood in the, you know, preceding generations on both sides of the family. And within his parents' respective families, there were people who were passing.

There were family events that I could not be invited to. You know, a summer thing where everybody's going up to grandpa's because I was too dark-skinned because there was this complex thing that was going on within these respective families. But yeah, Woody, when Ira Glass of Public Radio interviewed Woody about what I wrote about this incident, which they did an episode on at This American Life. uh woody's a public defender uh with an office in downtown chicago and a picture of i think it's uh eldridge cleaver or huey p newton uh behind him you know from the 1960s indicating radical sentiment the first thing he says to ira glass is i am the whitest black man you're ever going to see and yeah they couldn't send him to the local public high school

because he would have been getting his ass kicked every day going to school. You know, his parents ended up sending him to a Catholic prep high school, but no sooner did he get there than he went to the ghetto and he found Elvie, a sweet, cute, very dark-skinned little girl.

When they met, she was probably 15 years old. And subsequently married her. And you started to say before that when Push came to shove and you had to vouch for him, you kind of betrayed him because of the peer pressure of the brothers, as you say. Except that he didn't really experience that as a betrayal, which I thought was so interesting. Yes, I did betray him. I could have spoken up for him and I didn't. And I know within my own heart why I didn't speak up for him, because I was currying favor with those black guys.

And that was cheap. I sold my friend down the river for what racial solidarity in a in a heated moment of balled up fists this versus a whole lifetime with somebody uh but he being the guy that he is is thinking well he's got to hang with his people it's no big deal you know he he's given a choice between me and his people he chose his people i'm okay with that this literally is what he thought he was surprised that it was such a big deal to me we never spoke about it afterwards and uh he was surprised to to learn that it was something that i was writing about 20 years later of course everybody's going to read this book and try to decode how all these experiences culmin to be, I've always felt there's more to it than what some people take from it, that you appear to be quite judgmental of, are people who are doing many of the same things that you've done in your life and there but for the grace of God could be you. You describe like you stole a car one time.

I guess you could tell that story. You stole a car. You didn't mean much. It was just to impress a girl. And lucky for you, the police and law enforcement kind of let you off the hook. But another guy in the same shoes, that might have been where his life veers off into a life of crime and a life of horrors. I can stop there and you can comment on that one if you want.

Yeah, I was 17. I i borrowed i want to say i borrowed because i was trying to impress this girl i was going to take it back you know but i got arrested driving the car on my way to pick her up so i ended up standing her up and my father having to come in and bail me out uh and it's true uh my uncle knew people in the court because he's a lawyer and was able to say, in effect, to the judge presiding, this is not a bad kid. It's not like he's in with some car theft gang or something like that. I mean, this is a one off thing. I mean, you don't want to ruin this kid's life by sending him to the, you know, whatever. And so I got a pass. So, pass so yeah yeah that's true um but the larger point that you're you're making is the interplay between a kind of social prescription you know black people need to

do this homicide rate is too high kids need to finish school parents need to stop having babies out of wedlock uh you know a kind of conservative with a small C, social prescription, the family is the core of things, you know, religion, etc. But then libertinage, is that a word? Is that a word? But I mean, living like a libertine, you know, then letting letting it all hang out, you know, I mean, and indulging yourself in, you know, in your private life. And I'm telling these stories, and yet I'm standing up at a podium giving a speech about something. And that's there's a problem there. I grant you that. I used to want to say, oh, man, there's no problem. Look, I never said I was a saint.

Maybe it's true. I should live better. Maybe I am bad. OK, bad on me, bad on me. That doesn't mean I'm wrong about what I'm saying about what needs to happen. And that could be true. But you make a mockery out of the very notion of moral leadership. If you live like a pig and tell people that they need to stand up straight with their shoulders back. I mean, you know, I have I paint a scene in the book where I'm sitting with Father Richard John Newhouse, the late distinguished historian, Catholic historian at the end of his life, Lutheran pastor when I first met him. And we're on a committee and we're in a city in Europe where there's a meeting of the committee to talk about some stuff. Doesn't really matter what. after I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar when I got exposed for keeping a mistress in an apartment where I'm married to this very respectable woman and whatnot, but I've got this girlfriend

and it's a secret, and then we get into a fight and it becomes public and whatever, and I say to Father Newhouse, I say Martin Luther King wasn't always faithful to his wife either. I mean, what's the big deal? That doesn't mean that, you know. And he got really heated in his response to that. He said, you've got to be kidding me. King's infidelity was a disaster for the movement. It was harmful. It was terrible. I mean, it was a terrible flaw. You've got to compare

yourself to him and say you get a pass? You got to be kidding me. He was right. Well, I mean, he's right. If a superior alien species ever came to Earth and were studying man, they would just note that infidelity was one of the ways that men behave. You know, there would be no moral overlay on it. It's such a fundamental aspect of human nature. And I admire anybody who's never done it. And I admire that very small group of men who have never done it despite having tremendous

temptation and opportunity, which not everybody lives lives where this is put in front of them all the time. But I would not beat yourself up about that. I just think that we know too many people who've done it and we know too many people who are lying about having done it. And I think people just should not be holier than thou about that aspect of human nature. I don't mean to let anybody off the hook.

Again, I admire anybody who can overcome it, but it's not on the list of things I think we should be hyperjudgmental about. I respect that. And I'm not sure that's inconsistent with what I said, although... Anyway, now, I don't want to evaluate what you just said. I want to accept it. I think there's a considerable amount of merit there. I don't want to let you off the hook.

I'm bringing this stuff up only because it's in your book, so I assume it's fine to talk about it. I would never presume to bring this stuff up if I had read about it somewhere other than in your own words. But one difference between you and your father. So your father, this is an amazing story. I'll let you tell it. But he found himself,

your mother gave birth to a child that was not his. And he embraced that child as his own for his entire life. In contrast to you, who had a mistress or a girlfriend that had a baby. Alden, I think, was his son's name. That is his name, Alden. Alden. And you had no relationship with him until he was an adult. And by the way, he's kind of a chip off the old block. I went and read some of his writing, and there's some similarity there.

But anyway, so that's a tougher one, Glenn. That was a bad thing that you did. But you've come to terms with it. You want to tell us about it? Well, Alden's a wonderful... And how your father's lesson hung over you you're falling short compared to him well you've read the book no am i i can see that you've read the book so first my father uh everett lowry uh who um as fate would have it, did not meet his father until he was an adult.

So he didn't know his father when he was coming up. And his mother died when he was 15 years old. He was in high school. And he was, after that, living and raised by his mother's father and his grandmother. But he and my mother, they were high school sweethearts. My mother was 19 years old when I was born. and my mother and father had been going together, dating, whatever, for maybe two or three years

before I was born. And my mother was carrying on an affair, evidently, early in the marriage and became pregnant, and my sister, Leonette, was born. She is my sister, Leonette, very fair-complected with light-colored, light brown and straight, not curly hair. She doesn't look anything like either my mother or my father's side of the family. And I mean, I tell the story in the book, you know, she comes home from the hospital with my mother and the grandfather says to my father, well, you know, that's not really your kid. And

my father says, don't say that. And they get into a big fight. But it's probably not his kid. I mean, you know. But he nevertheless mans up. I mean, he doesn't give any credence to the issue of paternity. And even though he and my mother break up, not long after my sister's born, I'm probably about three years old, three and a half years old, and she's two. And we move out of the grandfather's house, and we're living with my mother. They break up. And my mother remarries eventually, and she remarries someone whom I believe was Leonette's father,

et cetera. But my father never kind of broke fidelity with this, quote, fiction about Leonette's paternity. That was his daughter. I was his son. No man could say that and make it mean anything. That was his attitude. And in a way, he kind of trumped the shame and injury attended to my mother's infidelity. He kind of beat it. he kind of beat it. He kind of canceled it in a way just by his stand up edness, by his faithfulness.

Now, fast forward 25 years. You got Glenn and I'm married to Charlene and I'm having an affair with Janice Brazan, who is Alden's mother. She gets pregnant. I'm not sure it's my kid. I'm kind of equivocating about whether or not, you know, I'm really the father of this child. The child comes into the world. The court system comes around and asks for financial support and confronts me with the possibility or the option of acknowledging paternity or of challenging the allegation of paternity. And I elect not to challenge the allegation of paternity, even though I'm not exactly certain about paternity. And I try to explain why in the book, although even now, as I say this out loud, I don't think I can fully make a rational justification for my failure to follow through with my obligations as father of Alden from practically the day that he was born. The courts did eventually run me down, and I had to pay up on the child support, but I had no relationship with him, none whatsoever.

I see a photograph of him a few months after he's born and recognize myself in his features, and so put to rest the questions I had in my mind about paternity. But I don't follow through. I try to keep it a secret. I try to keep it a secret from my wife as long as I can. And I move out of Chicago. I move to Cambridge to go to graduate school and then subsequently to take a job. And I make no effort

to reach out to him. I have no contact with him whatsoever. I abandoned him. And it's not until my children from my first marriage, Lisa and Tamara, Charlene's children, who know of Alden, basically confront me that I don't actually have any relationship with him. And even then, after I meet him for the first time, I don't follow through and years go by and it's tortured. I'm happy to be able to report that, you know, this is a long story. Alden is born in 1969. And here we are in the year 2024. His firstborn, Amira, just completed the University of Maryland College of Law. I have a wonderful relationship with her, with Alden, with his other two children, Alexis and Ariel. I am their poppy. Alden and I have spent long hours together in close commiseration. He's a journalist, a prominent journalist in Chicago, works for WBEZ, the radio station, and writes for the Chicago Sun-Times on a regular basis. And, you know, I have built, we have built, through thick and thin, fitfully, with stops and starts, over decades, the kind of relationship that my father never had with his father.

So that's the broad outlines of the story anyway, Noah. And this is a credit to him in some way, right? He must be a very forgiving and special guy. And he's written about it. He wrote a Father's Day essay for the Chicago Reporter, which is a local rag that he used to write for, that really brought me to tears in which he talked about trying to be a better father himself than he had ever had in his

own life. This kind of thing. But yeah, very much to his credit. I mean, he can tell his own story, but I have nothing but admiration for his commitment to the project of building a relationship with his father. And in a certain way, you're very lucky. I mean, he saved you in a way. I mean, I had a very bad falling out with my father shortly before he died. And I had a beautiful relationship with my father my entire life. And over stupid stuff, I mean, just the dumbest stuff business related stuff just ridiculous stuff we had a very awful falling

out and it was so traumatic to me i couldn't breathe you know and then i was just lucky that when he got sick he didn't die suddenly uh he he died over a number of months and of course the second we knew he was going to die the whole fight became meaningless and so we over a number of months. And of course, the second we knew he was going to die, the whole fight became meaningless. And so we had a number of months together that we were able to rebond. And I just often think that if he had died during that period where we'd have our falling out, the psychological weight I would have carried would have just been unbearable for the rest of my life. And in some way, I think, I'm just speculating that he saved you from a psychological weight that you were going to be carrying for the rest of your life. Wow. I never thought of it that way, no. But you have a point. Yeah.

All right. Quote Glenn Lowry. These are not the kind of Black people I grew up with on the South Side. They're both more and less sophisticated than us. They've seen more of the world, but less of the streets. They carry themselves with a nonchalance that communicates how comfortable they feel

in Northwestern's rarefied air. And they should feel comfortable since most of them are the children of doctors, lawyers, and professors, members of the Black bourgeoisie whose lives growing up were not as different from those of their white peers as they would have me believe. Nothing wrong with it, but the thought that someday they'll all sit around in their well-appointed living rooms and reminisce about their time in the struggle makes me ill. This brother wouldn't know struggle if it pinned him down and sat on his head. I know something about struggle. This is a theme. This is a Glenn Lowry theme, a kind of

snobbery against, forgive me, against the people who kind of sound like the John McWhorters of the world and maybe the Coleman Hughes of the world who you've now made your peace with. But years ago, that type of middle class, one generation removed from the hardscrabble life, they got under your skin, right? That is well observed, Noah. That is certainly correct. I hadn't made the John McWhorter connection, but I see what you mean. I don't know John's backstory, but just by the way he presents, I'm assuming. Well, no, he would tell you that himself. Forgive me, John.

His mother was a college teacher, and I'm not sure exactly what his father did, but he grew up in Mount Airy in Philadelphia, and he went to Montessori or some such schools. Oh, no, maybe it was the Quakers. I can't recall. But anyway, yeah, he had a precious middle-class, bougie African-American upbringing. And yeah, I had a chip on my shoulder about those kinds of Negroes. And it was magnified by the intellectual piece. So there was the class resentment. They had it easy.

Their fathers were professionals. They drove around in big cars. There was a nonchalance in a kind of, they knew what fork to use and what wine to order and whatnot. But, you know, if you had to go into a housing project and come out with your, you know, with your body intact and get what you wanted and whatever and, you know, get by, they wouldn't know how to manage. They wouldn't they wouldn't know how to manage. They wouldn't know how to hang, this kind of thing. And like I said, I think I had a chip on my shoulder,

but it was magnified by the fact that I was like, my eyes were wide open. It was like this wonderful world that I had entered into of academic depth and range and whatnot, literature, history, philosophy, politics, mathematics. I was reading these big books. I was getting an education. And along with this nonchalant, blasé kind of ease

and social acceptance and resources was a kind of, you know, of that time, as I recall, a phony, you know, alienation. You know, they were black. They were radical. They had Afros.

They, you know, they had a balled up fist. They were against. But they were also like, I mean, I want to talk about Nietzsche. I called them, of the elite black cadres was one of kind of distance, alienation from and contempt for Western civilization, which I was just finding out about for the first time. And I was thinking, man, there's a lot to know here. How did you get over that snobobbery whatever you want to call it i'm not sure i did you're not sure you did well look i mean as an observer you i mean i deal with this with my wife. You met my wife. My wife is Puerto Rican. She grew up in Bushwick when Bushwick was Bushwick in Brooklyn.

Many, many family members on welfare. Many, many family members who had been to prison on drugs. espouses, she's not a conservative, but on certain aspects, on welfare, and just on certain unpredictable aspects, she can sound like an arch-conservative. But she's judgmental from a life experience that entitles her

to the full credibility of her judgments because she's lived it. She saw it. She remembers the electricity getting turned off. She saw what welfare did to people in her family. So you have a certain credibility to judge certain things that the people that you're describing, they may lack the self-confidence to judge it in the same way. And that's just an observation. I sense it in Coleman, but this is to his credit, Coleman Hughes, who's a friend of both of ours.

He's judgmental. he's not judgmental he's he'll comment empirically but he's careful not to be too judgmental because he's quite aware that he hasn't lived that life and not only that but he's been fortunate to be born into a into a look that is just inherently non-threatening. You know, he's small, he's slight, he has a very pleasant face. He's not perceived like some other people I know right out of Central Casting as a threatening, God forbid, thug, you know? So he doesn't understand what it means to live that way. Anyway, I'm digressing.

But you do understand all of it in a way which is unique to you, especially within the rarefied academic circles that you come from. And I just think that makes your opinions twice as reliable. And I just think it's an interesting dynamic that separates you from the peers that that you hang around with now any comment on that Glenn yeah so I So, I appreciate it. I'm warmed. It warms my heart to hear you say that.

Authenticity, you know, and hard-earned authenticity, it does count for something. hard-earned authenticity. It does count for something. That's all I think to say at the moment. I'm at your disposal, Noah. Just some very interesting things that occurred to me. When the FBI discovered your love nest,

which led, kind of cascaded into you grabbing your lover by the shoulders, She called the cops. You were arrested for some sort of assault. Harvard knew about it. Harvard did not fire you. As I understand it, they waited to see what would come of the case. This is completely different than what would have happened in 2020, where just the accusation, even without the arrest, might have gotten you canceled, as we say. And I wonder if that has occurred to you. I'm sure it has many times. And how that informed your opinion of cancel culture. And by the way, the charges were eventually dropped.

Yeah, all that is correct. It was 1987, 1987. So well before me too, before Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. And yes, Harvard was aware of the fact that I was being charged by the Boston police. In fact, they knew about it before I did because a warrant was issued for my arrest after the altercation. It didn't happen at that time. She didn't call the police.

The police were called by neighbors who heard us in a shouting match and were alarmed. But when the police got there, I had ejected her, quote unquote, from the apartment and physically pushed her through a doorway, through a doorway out of the apartment and closed the door behind her in the heat of an argument. And she went to a women's shelter that evening and sought counsel and support. And the next day went to the Boston police and filed charges against me for assault under the circumstances that at the police station. I could allow them to arrest me without them having to come onto my workplace grounds and cart me off like a common criminal. And that's what happened. And yes, Harvard held its breath and waited to see if I were going to be convicted of a felony assault against this woman. As it happened, she did withdraw the charges and the case was dropped. And I was allowed to remain in my employee at Harvard. And sure, I expect that if that had happened in 2023,

instead of 1967 or 2018 even, I would probably be cashiered regardless of what the legal dispensation was. So yeah, have I thought about it? I've thought about it. I mean, you know, again, I don't quite know what else to say. I was lucky and I'll take it. Certainly I was no more innocent or whatever

than a lot of people who suffered a lot more severe consequences under comparable circumstances. I mean, I feel very strongly that the old system was the right one, that Harvard did the right thing, and they should wait until it's adjudicated before they take action against someone we've seen her accusation was true but exaggerated i think is the way you would say from the book some accusations are false and some accusations are many most i guess are i presume are 100 true but this notion that people's lives were ruined by mere accusations and that these institutions panicked, I would just imagine that you had an extra resentment towards cancel culture because of your experiences not being canceled in a way and knowing that, you know, how unfair it would have been to you. Yeah, well, so an altercation occurred between a man and a woman. Touching was involved. Now, the question is, what about the law? And how do you, you know, because a lot of cases are in the gray zone.

Some cases are very clearly on one side of the line. Some cases are very clearly on the other side of the line. And some cases are kind of in the gray zone. And, you know, it's a question of interpretation and adjudication. And I think the line has moved about what constitutes unacceptable behavior that has to be condemned. I mean, that whole situation was, she was 23, I was 36, you know, stuff like that. Smith College graduate with whom I began to correspond when she was still a student. I'd never had her as a student of my own directly, but she was a student when we met. And, you know, I'm, you know, jet-setting around the world. I took her to Israel with me on a jaunt, you know, and things like that.

And, you know, asymmetric power dynamic would be an understatement in terms of what was going on in that relationship. And I had a wife. Now, you say fidelity is, you know, everybody is doing it, and I grant you it's a part of life. But, you know, it's very hard to defend that isn't it it can't listen it can't be defended it's the hypocrisy that bothers me Glenn

I don't mind the morality I'm not actually secretly copying I never have put my hands on a woman, but I know people who have. I've seen horrible dysfunctional relationships where it just escalated into that among good people.

I've just seen so many things. And one of the things that infuriated me, I touched on it during the Kavanaugh hearings. There were so many hypocrisies there. First of all, just the things that infuriated me, I touched on it during the Kavanaugh hearings. There were so many hypocrisies there. First of all, just the fact that most liberals would have said that anything a 16 or 17 year old does, that if he never does anything again, his record should be expunged. Right. Like just that hypocrisy alone. these men were up there talking about this. And what was he accused of? He was 16 or 17 years old, drunk on a bed

next to a girl in a bathing suit. And he groped her in some way. That's not okay. If my son did that, I'd say, what the hell is the matter with you? I mean, I'd smack him around. I mean, I'm not saying it's okay.

But the fact that people behaved as if they would never. When we know, and every dude knows, that this stuff happens all the time. Who are you kidding here? You want to ruin a man's life at 50 years old because he did something that if you didn't do it, every one of your best friends did. And you're here in front of me pretending that this is some outrageous behavior that you can't even barely utter it. This level of hypocrisy. And we see this in all our institutions.

It's a theme of life in the last 15 years. And it just disturbs me. And I see, I just can imagine how many of those people today who would want somebody fired for what you did, had either done it themselves or had an uncle who did it or a father who did it or a best friend who did it. You know, it's too much for me. As you say in the book here, oh, wait, wait, before I get to that, this is a great story. You actually pretended to speak in tongues during a religious service just to convince everybody that you were in good standing with the faith.

You got to tell that story. This is, again, this should be a movie, Glenn. Just that scene in a movie. Go ahead. Oh, I love that you like it so much, because yeah, it is very sweet, actually, in a way. And the book is full of these kinds of anecdotes. But yeah, I'm going to this church, and I'm a believer, and I'm praying with people and whatnot. And I've joined the crew for setting up chairs, because the church is meeting in a school gymnasium, and there are a couple of hundred parishioners, and so you have to set up chairs. And I'm a part of the crew that

gets there early to set up chairs, and we've been doing it for a while, and so we've gotten to know each other, and we pray together at the beginning and end of each session. So we're at the end of the session, and I'm a relative neophyte, and I haven't yet received baptism in the Holy Spirit, which is the spiritual empowerment that allows you to, in principle, do miracles on behalf of bringing the word about Jesus to the multitudes. And so they're there standing around me, praying for me to receive this gift of the Holy Spirit in real time at that moment. And there are four or five people, their hands are extended, they're touching me, they're praying the Syriatum, and they're expecting something to happen. I'm supposed to receive this gift. And it goes on and it goes on and it goes on and it goes on, and it's interminable, and I'm uncomfortable, and nothing is happening.

I'm not really getting the thing that I'm supposed to be getting. And finally, as a way of coming, of getting out, I start babbling, you know, kind of gibberish-y, you know, affecting what it would be to receive this miraculous presence of God in that moment, in that place, in the body of this very human being, Glenn Lowry, I start doing it, what I've seen other people do under other similar circumstances. And they relent, and the moment passes,

and I'm left with the sour self-loathing of knowing that, you know, I just put on a performance. But with the question of how many other similar performances that I've seen have had the same basic root. Well, I believe that they perform speaking in tongues. Do I believe that it's the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them when they speak in tongues? No, I don't. And I talk about it's the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them when they speak in tongues? No, I don't.

And I talk about that in the book. All right, we're going to wind down to the last thing here. So let me just say that, and this goes back to the car stealing. I've seen people, I've had people in my life who got into trouble in a very unintentional way. Like I had an employee one time and I know she ended up, the end of the story, she ended up stealing a lot of money from me, more than $150,000. But I know that it started, it was when I first opened up,

I had a sloppy system when I first opened up. And she started out, she's tight on money. She borrowed some money, really put it back the next day. Nobody was the wiser. Then at some point wasn't able to put it back the next day. And at some point found herself stealing

$150,000. She didn't set out to steal $150,000. I've suspected that Bernie Madoff might have started out the same way. I don't know if he premeditated the entire Ponzi scheme or he just found himself in it.

Alright. It's just an analogy. I had another friend, a very close friend. He was a black gay guy who was in the closet. He was from Guyana. He had scored the highest score ever on the Guyanese. They have some sort of test there,

which is like an SAT or intelligence test that everybody takes. Very, very gifted. He became a good friend of mine. And because he was in the closet, he would ingratiate himself to straight guys somehow, to somehow have sexual relations in one way. I don't know all the details. And one time, he's a very, very clean-cut guy. And one time, one of the guys that he was trying to seduce gave him crack. And he took the crack. And the rest of his – he's dead now. It led into disasters for him.

He got AIDS. He went blind. I mean, this is a horrible story. I'll tell you the whole story some other time. He's a very, very close friend of mine. He's the last guy in the world who would have imagined himself a crack addict. And he did get off it before he died, but then he ended up dying of other things. But so, anyway, so I just read.

And something like this happened to you. of other things. But so, anyway, so I just read and this, something like this happened to you. You were, you know, with prostitutes, you're trying to get weed, I think.

And then she, she gives you crack. Right here. Give me a second. I'm a little upset about actually thinking about my, his name was Glenn too, by the way,

my friend. Your turn, she says. I follow suit. As I exhale that first hit, I feel like someone has plugged my brain directly into a wall socket. Warmth spreads throughout my body. My heart begins to race. And the ambient sense of unease that had hovered in the background of my perceptions ever since I received that call from Harvard's general counsel disintegrates. My attention is focused solely on this room, this woman, myself, and the plastic bottle in my hand. There is no past pursuing me and no future looming before me. Only the euphoria of the present that seems endless. And this is the first step that leads to a chapter of your life, an extended period of your life, of crack addiction.

And it happens by accident right so I don't have a question other than to ask you to tell us about how you summon the willpower to get off of it and how it informs the way you judge other people. Because let me just say one other thing that from the crack addiction also comes, didn't happen with you, but for many of these people comes the, the crime that they, the crimes that they commit because they're possessed by the devil, which is the crack addiction.

And then their lives are ruined. All in sort of accidental ways. And many, many of these people are black. So this is, I know, a subject close to your heart. So what will you ever want to say

about it? No, I mean, I'm very sorry to hear about your friend, Glenn. And yeah, I got sucked into this world and this way of living because I just wanted to keep doing the drug. And yeah, I dodged a bullet. I mean, I could have, you know, all kinds of things could have gone wrong for me. I could have gotten HIV. I could have been shot to death in an abandoned parking lot somewhere. I could have OD'd, you know, taken too much. I couldn't, you know, a lot of things could have happened. What I had going for me was I could take out $300 a day from my ATM and I had, you know, tens of thousands of dollars sitting in my bank account. So I didn't have to rob anybody or steal anything in order to get the

money to do the stuff that I was doing. Yeah. I don't think for a minute I would have hesitated to do what I needed to do to get the money to do the drug because I had this compulsion about doing the drug. I mean, it was really, really crazy. It kind of took over my life. And the thing was that the crash was so bad. I felt so bad when I was out of money and I was out of drugs and I was coming down. And it was in one of those depths of despair

when I was maxed out at the ATM and it's like 11 o'clock in the morning and I've been out all night and I'm in a fast food parking lot somewhere and I've got barely enough money to make a telephone call. And, uh, you know, I call my wife and tell her I'm in desperate straits. And I had been to an outpatient recovery program. Long story, have to read the book. But I had been going to the outpatient program, but I'd been blowing it off. I hadn't been taking it at all seriously. And when I called them and told them

that I was in need of help and in desperate straits, they told me to come in right now. And I came into the inpatient drug treatment program at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital and began what was a year. It was from January of 1988 to Thanksgiving of 1988 that I was either in inpatient treatment in the hospital or in a halfway house where I was under relatively restrictive supervision and living with other men who were trying to get clean and sober. I found religion sort of in that period. That was help. I went to a lot of AA and NA meetings.

And it was the hardest thing I ever had to do, stopping to use cocaine. But I finally got myself on track after relapsing. And by the time I left that halfway house in Thanksgiving of 1988, my son Glenn, Linda, and I had a son. He was born in January of 1989. I was on my own two feet. And a day at a time, I was able to put together six months, a year, two years, you know, and haven't used crack in a very long time. But it was hard to stop. And how does the experience inform your political views? I credit what you said a while ago about the fact that it would be easy to go another way and people's lives get destroyed.

So I was robbed at gunpoint a couple of times. One time, the poor guy, desperate guy, he's got his hand down in his shirt like this. I don't really know if he's got a gun or not. He's begging me to throw it in. I just came out of the house where he knows and I know that you can buy it. So he knows I've got something on me because I'm walking back to my car. Now that guy, maybe he's got a gun. Maybe if I resist, somehow I end up shot. How am I, I don't know, better than that guy? We're all enmeshed in the same fucking shithole.

That kind of thought would occur to me later on. I had a period when I was writing and speaking a lot about over-incarceration and too punitive of a legal system and things of this kind. And there before the grace of God go I, those kind of sentiments and the idea that you can see how people would find themselves in a situation and the idea of forgiveness and second chance and all of that, those ideas are boosted by the personal experience that I'm talking about. But I think it's also the case that, you know, I know that I put my one foot in front of the other for a day in and day out, for week in and week out, for month in and month out, in order to get myself reestablished, and that that was on me to a certain extent.

And I'm responsible for whether or not I recover. So is the other guy. So it's a mixed bag. All right, Glenn. so it's a mixed bag alright Glenn well yeah I mean as you said what was the phrase used about the shithole what did you just say I don't remember

I said we're all in the same shithole we're all in you know the guy with the hand down in his waist who's trying to rob me is a part of the same, you know, dead end that I am. I'm walking to my sob. I was driving a sob in those days. And, you know, I've got a couple of packets of the stuff in my pocket and he wants it. Am I any better than him? We're both in the same dead-end misery and whatnot. This is life, and the questions that you deal with are impossible. But this book is just fantastic.

I'll just note that in the story of, the only time in the book that you describe being called the N-word is by the drug rehabilitation counselor. The only person who uses it is a good guy, is a white guy who was a good guy who was trying to taunt you into going straight in some way. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. I love that story. Actually, this is Bob Brown. He's running the halfway house, Hamilton Recovery Homes, where I am in residence for five months in 1988. And he basically, I'm the professor. I'm the only professor in the house. I mean, it's a bunch of drunks, man. There's guys sleeping in boxes in the tea station and guys that just got out of detox and, you know, and me, and me, the Harvard professor. So I stand out. So I got a counselor and the counselor have meetings and he sits in on the meeting every now and then. And of course I have read every page of the recovery book and I, you know, and so when the counselor asked me how things are going, I'm running it out, running it down to him. You know, I got this. I got this. And Bob's sitting in the back in the room and he interrupts. And he says, this guy,

speaking of me, has not said one real thing since I've been in here in the last 30 minutes. He's snowing you, Jack. Jack was the consular's name. He's snowing you. He said, we don't break through and get through to him. We're going to lose him. That's him talking to Jack. Then he turns to me and he says, OK, Professor Lowry, you're so clever. Answer me this. What were you doing out there in the streets of Boston showing your ass just like a nigger from the projects? Quote unquote. That's what the man said. He's a six foot three, 280 pound Irishman. That's what he said to me, man. And really ticked me off and uh you know my first thought was to you know hit him because the guy's six three 280 pounds what are you gonna do

uh and then my second thought was you know except for that inward stuff that's a pretty good question what was I doing? And I did not know the answer to it. I did not know the answer to the question of how I ended up in the places that I found myself showing my butt like I was doing. And I figured, well, maybe I better just be still up in here. Maybe I just better suck it up. Would the question have had the impact that it had if

he hadn't used the N-word? Well, no. I mean, you have to know this guy. No, it wouldn't have been, but it wouldn't have been him. I mean, it wouldn't have been Bob if he hadn't used the N-word. That was Bob. And the N-word part was relevant because I wasn't the only black guy in the house. But most of them were guys from around the South Boston and Dorchester, you know, ethnic white ethnic guys. But, you know, it was a relevant consideration to the whole phenomenon, which glenn lowry in 1988 harvard professor i've been on the front page of every newspaper everybody knows who i am and my blackness is definitely a part of the whole thing it was what was being said at the kitchen table when nobody was listening uh about this whole fiasco of what glenn lowry was doing with his life so it was it

was in you know i mean, I don't have this thing about the N-word that some people like. It's a magic word that if a white guy says it, suddenly the world stops. But it definitely added spice to the meal that Bob Brown was serving. I mean, you know, it amplified the power of his message for me.

Hi, Glenn. I'm very happy to have been able to speak to you about this. There's a quote from scripture that you have somewhere in the book. No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. I think that's, I mean, that could have been the title of the book. It's a great book. I'm very proud to call you my friend. I think it's amazing that you had the strength of character to be so forthright and frank

and share things that you're obviously ashamed of and come to grips with them. I mean, I could go on and on. So I really want to thank you. I hope everybody reads the book. I hope I get to come up and have dinner with you again once you're feeling up and around, maybe in the fall. Oh, yeah, by all means.

I'll give you the last word, and then we'll sign off. Anything else that you want to say? Well, I'm happy to call you friend as well, Noam, really. And I look forward to that dinner sometime in the fall up here in Providence. That's a great idea. And I really appreciate your appreciation of the book, your reaction to the book, your sense of it being an expression of the human condition in a way of the humanity that is true about life, not just about my life. And that's kind of what I was trying to achieve.

I mean, obviously I'm telling the story of my life, but I'm hoping to be able to contribute somehow to people more effectively dealing with the human condition and understanding it through the lens of my telling about my own life. So if your reaction is any indication, I'm being successful in that regard, and I'm very grateful for that. Absolutely, and it didn't occur to me until just now, but it also should be inspiring to people who find themselves in a certain depth of misfortune at some point in their lives

that it's not over until you give up. Anyway, Glenn, I'm going to press stop now. You know how Riverside works. You got to let it just finish up.