Echokinesis

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April 7, 2021 marks 25 years since my friend Tony died. So I sat down with some of Tony's best friends from his last years — some of my best friends to this day — to talk about Tony again and tell Tony stories and try and understand better what happened back in 1996 and why has Tony had such an effect on some of our lives all these years later.

👉🏾 Listen to Part 1 here: echokinesis.com

🙏🏽 Thank you to the participants, my friends: Thea Anderson, Brenda Baletti, David Goldberg, Brent Kanbayashi, Jonah Moran, and Rhasaan Orange.

🎹 Music by Tyler Cash. Thanks to Eric Freidenberg for editorial guidance and Luz Fleming for expert additional editing, mixing, recording, and technical guidance.

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes discussions of drug use, mental illness, and some language that may not be appropriate for kids. Listener discretion is advised.

🤘🏽 TF3 for life

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When I was 21, my friend Tony died. It was a tough, sad decline and his friends like me witnessed it up close. Or at least I thought we were up close, because what's clear to me now, is that none of us really understood what Tony was going through. And then, suddenly, he was gone. For me and some of his other friends, losing Tony at age 21 was a major, defining moment in our lives, and all these years later, he's still an important figure in what made us who we are.

We all have our own memories of Tony, and what I found working on this piece was: we remember some of the same things differently. And we all look back at our time with Tony *through the lens* of our *own* lives, so we all look back at *Tony* differently. I guess that's to be expected, but working on this put that into focus for me.

April 7, 2021 marks 25 years since all that happened. So I sat down with some of Tony's friends to talk about him again and to tell some Tony stories and to try and understand better what happened back in 1996 and why has Tony loomed large in our lives all these years.

👉🏾 Listen to Part 2 here: echokinesis.com

🙏🏽 Thank you to the participants, my friends: Thea Anderson, Brenda Baletti, David Goldberg, Brent Kanbayashi, Jonah Moran, and Rhasaan Orange.

🎹 Music by Tyler Cash. Thanks to Eric Freidenberg for editorial advice and Luz Fleming for expert additional editing, mixing, recording, and technical guidance. Cover photo by Max Osterweis.

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes discussions of drug use, mental illness, and some language that may not be appropriate for kids. Listener discretion is advised.



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Rhasaan recounts a dreamlike tale from a previous life, of young adults living in New York City in the late 90s awash in drinking, drugs, and VHS mixtapes, and a curious evening in the West Village with a strange visit from a police officer. 

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains explicit language and adult situations. Listener discretion is advised.

🥋🇧🇷 Learn more about Rhasaan Orange at RenatoLaranja.com

Well, you know, now coming to think about it, I'll never fucking forget this. And this is a story.

We’re talking about stories? I remember, still to this day, this shit seems like something that I made up or something that I dreamt, but I know it happened. And I can't place all the fucking people that were with us. But there are people who could vouch for this, who can corroborate this story.

You remember that place that he was living? It was in the West Village and right up the street there was a public pool. You remember it was like a classic New York apartment, you know, with the fire escape on the outside.

So we would, a lot of times, you remember these days, like a lot of times we would end up at that place, you know, drinking and smoking, watching stupid ass movies or whatever. I remember I would bring, I don't know if you remember, but I would always bring mix tapes I would make at home, like kind of pre-Internet, you know, like Instagram or whatever, like, my way of like sharing videos and shit with people was like, I would keep a VHS tape in the VCR and record Video Music Box for videos that would come on or like some weird shit on public access or whatever. And I would make, like, mix tapes of just weird shit and videos and what have you. I would bring those over and watch that kinda shit.

But anyway, so we're all there. And this is at the point where it hasn't gotten to the real, real bad. But it was at a time when he was frequently doing coke and shit. And, you know, it was me, him, I could be mistaken but I believe Jonah was there. And Brenda was there and maybe…who was the roommate at that time? Damn. The Italian chick. This is embarrassing because I should know her name. In any case, maybe we edit this part out.

But anyway. Ok, so we were all in there and just smoking weed and whatever. But also people are doing coke, you know, and I don’t remember if I was doing it, but I don't think so because I wasn't the type—I would do coke, honestly, when I was really drunk. I wouldn’t do it just kind of casually at like, 8:00 at night.

So that was at a time when I was trying to get all like diesel. I was maybe 19 or 20, something like that. I was trying to get all diesel and so I was on the fire escape doing my pull-ups and, you know, just jeans, no shirt kind of deal. So I'm doing that and kind of coming back in, having a drink, going back out and smoking a joint and whatever.

By this time, everybody is just fucked up and, I mean like, I'm high as the moon and I'm just real high mostly just on weed, just high as fuck, mind you. There's coke, you know, there's CDs with like a razor on it. And, you know, nobody's twenty-one. So there's drinks and the place is all hot boxed with weed. And we're all sitting there watching some shit on TV, I can’t remember what it was.

And then, just as if he belongs, like he was just part of the party, you see a fully clothed beat cop just ease through the window, the open window, from the fire escape, into the room. Just as if he had just stepped out for a cigarette. Some white dude. And we were fucking stunned.

I mean, it was a kind of thing where I look over and I think to myself, “Am I even seeing this?” You know, it was surreal. I was like, this can't be happening. And he just came in and we look like, I mean, we didn't even jump. It was like, we look in slow motion… like, “huh? Is he even here? Are we hallucinating this shit?”

And then he proceeds to tell us that he's gotten calls in the neighborhood about a fucking, a Puerto Rican guy robbing houses. That neighborhood was a little bit bougie at that time, you know, kind of West Village or whatever. And so people had called the cops thinking that I was breaking into houses—into people’s apartments, when I was just doing pull-ups.

We all thought like, “this is illegal, you can't do that. You can just come in.”He didn't knock, didn't come to the door. This dude came from the fire escape. I didn't know how he got to that level of the fire escape. Did he jump from the concrete, like from the sidewalk? And jump up to the first rung of that emergency ladder? Did he come from the roof? I don't know. And none of us knew.

I was like, “Yeah, I was just doing pull-ups on the fire escape. No, no, Everything's fine”. And then we were all kind of just like not moving too much because it was as if we just stayed still, he wouldn't see all the shit that was in the room. Like, as if we stay still enough, all this shit will be invisible.

And then he kind of just like told us, “Oh, OK. Well, maybe you should be careful; maybe you should knock that off for the night.”

And I was like, “Oh my bad. Yeah, blah blah blah” and all of us are just trying not to look at… this CD case that's sitting there. Right. Fucking. There… with a razor blade. Oh yeah, oh, you hit it. There's a good chance that's what it was like—cuz Rucyl…remember that shit? Remember Rucyl with her fine ass?

But in any case, so it was like, “Oh my God. So never mind all the under-age drinking, the whole schmear. It didn't look good. We’re all fucked up. There was so much he could have got us for. There was a lot—and mind you, he was the type of person, he was buying coke, like I'm sure he had more that wasn't out. We were sweating fucking bullets. Like, “there's no way we're going to get out of this”. And I felt responsible. I’m like ‘I’m the one who fucked this up.’

And then the cop is like, “Oh, you know, just be careful. Don't be out there.” And then he's like, “Sorry to bother you”, you know, "have a good evening”, you know, “be careful.” And then he just like walked out the fucking front door. We all looked at each other just speechless like, yo—that didn't happen. There's no way that that just happened.

I don't even know how the fuck that even happened. You just have no idea where he came from, how he thought he could just—you can't just come into somebody's house through the window. Who are we going to call? We got all the contraband. We got all this fucking shit. So we weren’t going to say shit. 

And maybe that's the thing. Maybe, when I look back at it, maybe he knew that what he did was against regulation. So he's like, “look, I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” you know? I don't know.

Here's another thing. I don't know why he was by himself. Wouldn’t you think on a call like that it would be like two guys at the front door, not one head from the fire escape? Like “on a hunch” or whatever? On his own? It’s a mystery. That was just a strange thing that happened.

Anyway. But I remember he was in that one fucking house, or apartment, that was kind of like his kinda den of… I don’t know what you would call it, but kind of where he probably ended up losing himself.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Echokinesis. This is a game of sound.

Today’s story was told by Rhasaan Orange. Check out Rhasaan’s podcast under his alter ego, Renato Laranja, “The Vale Tudo Hour” at RenatoLaranja.com.

Music by Luz Fleming. Editing, sound destruction, and mixing by Jacob Bronstein. Archival research by Antonio Maduro. Legal review by Scott Perry.

Echokinesis is a production of WPFK. With funding in part from the CrystalTop Music Foundation.

Don't sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.