Listening to Joe Rogan

For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. spotters, moon-landing deniers, Holy Rollers, and village explainers—the whole barbaric yawp of American talk. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives—for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon.