Speaker 1: Hey, can I ask you? Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 1: When we were back in elementary school, because we go
Speaker 1: way back, would you have ever thought that one day
Speaker 1: I would have a podcast?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, I would not say that I foresaw a future.
Speaker 2: For you, Johnny.
Speaker 1: Did you just say I didn't foresee a future for
Speaker 1: you or I didn't foresee that future for you?
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm at that future.
Speaker 1: Did you really think I didn't have a future at all?
Speaker 1: I was a good eater, stayed out of trouble, pretty
Speaker 1: good at tether Ball, Remember from gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan
Speaker 1: Goldstein and this is Heavyweight today's episode another roadside attraction.
Speaker 1: Right after the break growing up, I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in bookstores. At twelve, it was the science
Speaker 1: fiction section that called to me. At fourteen, the poetry section.
Speaker 1: At fifteen, it was the biographies, so I could chart
Speaker 1: the progress I was making towards greatness. If you're like me,
Speaker 1: the mere act of being in a bookstore fills you
Speaker 1: with the kind of wonder and overwhelm that comes with
Speaker 1: looking at the stars at night. You feel the vastness,
Speaker 1: You feel your mortality. How much of this can I
Speaker 1: possibly read in a lifetime, you ask, gazing at the shelves,
Speaker 1: and yet there's also this feeling of coziness. Books grant
Speaker 1: you access to the secret lives and thoughts of people
Speaker 1: you'll never meet, but whom you grow to care about
Speaker 1: as you would close friends. And so in this spirit,
Speaker 1: I present you a book in three chapters. Chapter one, Stephanie, So,
Speaker 1: I grew.
Speaker 4: Up in this little town outside of Austin called Dripping Springs.
Speaker 4: We all call it Dripping Dripping for short, dripping. There's
Speaker 4: a spring that drips. It's a very conservative religious town.
Speaker 4: When I was growing up, this was a tiny town,
Speaker 4: like going out to people's land to hang out in
Speaker 4: the woods.
Speaker 1: As a teenager growing up in Dripping, there really wasn't
Speaker 1: much to do. So Stephanie started going to church multiple
Speaker 1: times a week and reading all the books she could
Speaker 1: get her hands on. Church and books became her two
Speaker 1: great loves, and the two coexisted peacefully for years until
Speaker 1: the day her beloved church decided to ban one of
Speaker 1: her beloved books, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
Speaker 4: The reason it was they were trying to get it
Speaker 4: banned was one scene in the book, maybe two paragraphs long,
Speaker 4: and it is explicit, and it is an assault scene,
Speaker 4: and their reasoning was that young boys would be aroused.
Speaker 4: Nobody had read the book who was trying to get
Speaker 4: a banned. I took it upon myself to write a
Speaker 4: speech like a manifesto against the censorship of The Handmaid's Tale.
Speaker 1: At her high school, Stephanie went from classroom to classroom
Speaker 1: reading her essay, and.
Speaker 4: Scott the church very very, very mad, and they became convinced,
Speaker 4: some of the leaders, that I was more or less
Speaker 4: being taken over by the devil.
Speaker 1: The angrier of the church got, the more Stephanie started
Speaker 1: to realize that she didn't agree with a lot of
Speaker 1: what the church believed.
Speaker 4: I got into a pretty big argument about homosexuality in
Speaker 4: the Bible at the church, and at the time I
Speaker 4: did not know that I wasn't straight, but I knew.
Speaker 5: That I didn't agree with the church.
Speaker 4: I was questioning everything I'd ever known about religion and God,
Speaker 4: and I started having panic attacks multiple times a day.
Speaker 1: It was during this uncertain period of searching that while
Speaker 1: out driving in her neighborhood, Stephanie noticed something new. A
Speaker 1: small house surrounded by lush gardens and a pond and
Speaker 1: most strikingly, atop the house's roof sat large scale replicas
Speaker 1: of books.
Speaker 4: It felt like it fell out of the sky. I
Speaker 4: just remember when the sign went up.
Speaker 1: I was very curious, what did the sign say?
Speaker 5: Another roadside attraction?
Speaker 1: Another roadside attraction, It turned out, was a bookstore tucked
Speaker 1: within a tiny house. Stephanie began to frequent it regularly,
Speaker 1: spending her babysitting money on Salinger and Vonnegut and Poe.
Speaker 1: There were no other bookstores in Dripping Springs at the
Speaker 1: t barely any stores at all. It was as if
Speaker 1: the bookstore appeared in answer to some secret wish Stephanie
Speaker 1: had made.
Speaker 4: It almost felt like magical realism, felt like opening a
Speaker 4: curtain and going into another world, and like the moment
Speaker 4: I stepped inside, it just felt like, I don't know,
Speaker 4: it just felt like I belonged there. I never felt
Speaker 4: like I fit in, And I think it was the
Speaker 4: only place that I didn't feel judged, and it was
Speaker 4: the only place that I didn't feel panicked. It felt
Speaker 4: like a chapel almost.
Speaker 1: There was always incense burning inside and music playing there
Speaker 1: reminded Stephanie of the kind you'd hear in a spa
Speaker 1: It all added to the feeling of dreaminess, and I
Speaker 1: would always.
Speaker 4: Kind of like shuffle past the register back to the
Speaker 4: fiction section, which was behind the comic books. All the
Speaker 4: books were wrapped in plastic. Practically, even if they were
Speaker 4: like a dollar, it was all empty. I think I
Speaker 4: can recall maybe one time when someone else was in
Speaker 4: there besides me and the owner.
Speaker 1: The owner. The owner was a quiet, stoic man, always
Speaker 1: seated behind the counter, always the only one on duty.
Speaker 1: He became a source of fascination for Stephanie.
Speaker 4: I admired him in a way because I just thought, like,
Speaker 4: anyone who has the guts to open a bookstore like
Speaker 4: this in a little town off this little road must
Speaker 4: be interesting.
Speaker 1: Did you ever speak to him?
Speaker 5: Not really.
Speaker 4: I would like put my book up on the counter
Speaker 4: and put my money up, and then like run out.
Speaker 5: I felt so.
Speaker 4: Nervous, but not in a bad way, crush like but
Speaker 4: not romantic. I don't know if he knows, like how
Speaker 4: important that was to me, just to have these little
Speaker 4: moments of peace.
Speaker 5: I don't know, It's hard to explain. It just felt.
Speaker 4: It was a thing at a time where I really
Speaker 4: needed to feel like there was going to be a
Speaker 4: world outside of the one I was living in, where
Speaker 4: I was going to be able to live a life
Speaker 4: separate from my hometown. It made me feel like the
Speaker 4: world was bigger and that there was something beyond what
Speaker 4: I was going through.
Speaker 1: Stephanie visited the bookstore all through the summer of her
Speaker 1: sixteenth year, and then one day, without warning or notice,
Speaker 1: another roadside attraction just vanished.
Speaker 4: Drove by and there was like a closed sign in
Speaker 4: the window, and just remember being like devastated.
Speaker 5: It was so.
Speaker 4: Fleeting, it was just like it's gone.
Speaker 1: Stephanie's now in her mid thirties, she's gotten beyond the
Speaker 1: world of dripping springs. In fact, she just recently moved
Speaker 1: to la to pursue a career as a writer, but
Speaker 1: she continues to think about the little bookstore that served
Speaker 1: as her teenage refuge and about the man who opened it.
Speaker 1: Did you get the guy's name? No, you don't even
Speaker 1: know his name.
Speaker 5: I don't know his name.
Speaker 1: What did he look like?
Speaker 4: M It's sort of like when you have a dream
Speaker 4: and you you see someone, but you just see like
Speaker 4: a figure.
Speaker 5: That's my memory of him.
Speaker 1: Who was this man who opened a perfect place in
Speaker 1: a tiny town, who carefully placed each book in a
Speaker 1: plastic sleeve to keep it safe.
Speaker 4: What led him to opening the bookstore? Why was it
Speaker 4: open and closed so quickly? I just want to know,
Speaker 4: like why dripping? Like why this little tiny town.
Speaker 1: Because she doesn't know the owner's name, Stephanie has tried
Speaker 1: googling the store over the years, but nothing much ever
Speaker 1: comes up in the process, though she's realized that the
Speaker 1: name Another Roadside Attraction is the title of a book
Speaker 1: by Tom Robbins, an author she's come to love as
Speaker 1: an adult.
Speaker 5: And then I thought, maybe we have the same taste
Speaker 5: in literature.
Speaker 1: The only other clue Stephanie's research has turned up is
Speaker 1: an old business listing. It shows the store's address, she says,
Speaker 1: but not much else. She pulls the page up.
Speaker 2: To share with me.
Speaker 5: Wait, there's a name here.
Speaker 1: And in so doing, Stephanie notices something at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the page. What is it?
Speaker 2: Check?
Speaker 5: And there's an old phone number.
Speaker 2: Two.
Speaker 1: Have you ever tried phoning the phone number?
Speaker 5: I haven't.
Speaker 1: Well, you know what we got to do?
Speaker 5: Huh are you going to find him?
Speaker 1: Well, we have to, gues I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'll try to. But why don't we try to phone
Speaker 1: that number. Okay, okay, here we go, nervous. Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I have the right phone number.
Speaker 1: I'm looking for someone who is the owner of a
Speaker 1: bookstore called Another Roadside Attraction.
Speaker 2: Nope, nope, sorry, you got the throwing number.
Speaker 1: Is your name, Chepe number? Okay, okay, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: He was giving me the bums rush he was.
Speaker 5: He sounded like a Texan.
Speaker 1: And so, with our one lead deader than Texas buzzard bait,
Speaker 1: I let Stephanie go, telling her that once I'm able
Speaker 1: to learn more, I'll be back in touch. But I
Speaker 1: won't be back in touch for another year and a
Speaker 1: half because, as it turns out, the story of Another
Speaker 1: Roadside Attraction would prove to be far more complicated than
Speaker 1: any I could have imagined. After Stephanie and I dialed
Speaker 1: that wrong number, I found an address for Chat and
Speaker 1: sent him a letter, but I never got a response.
Speaker 1: So I kept digging, and in the process I found
Speaker 1: Another Roadside Attractions old business registration. It was there that
Speaker 1: I learned the store was actually listed under two names, Chats,
Speaker 1: but also his wife, Pam's. I figured that through Pam
Speaker 1: I'd be able to reach chat. So I found a
Speaker 1: mailing address for Pam and sent a letter to her
Speaker 1: home explaining the situation. And this time I received a response,
Speaker 1: an email with the subject line the story behind Another
Speaker 1: roadside Attraction. But the email wasn't from Pam. It was
Speaker 1: from a woman named Megan Hi. Megan wrote, where do
Speaker 1: I begin? Chapter two? Megan, Hello, this is Megan Hi.
Speaker 1: This is Jonathan Goldstein.
Speaker 6: Hi.
Speaker 3: Jonathan.
Speaker 1: Megan's a close friend of Pam's, and wrote me back
Speaker 1: on Pam's behalf. In my letter, I'd asked how I
Speaker 1: could get in touch with Chet. I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: him about the magical appearance and sudden disappearance of his bookstore,
Speaker 1: but Megan corrected me on this point. The bookstore was
Speaker 1: not Chet's. She said it was Pam's. That place was
Speaker 1: her baby. Over several emails and a long phone call,
Speaker 1: Megan would tell me the story of another roadside Attraction.
Speaker 1: In her telling, it's the story of Pam, a chronicle
Speaker 1: of her dream and its loss. Megan says she wishes
Speaker 1: she had a happier story to share, but it turns
Speaker 1: out that five years ago, died by suicide. Megan begins
Speaker 1: the story many years earlier, back when she first met Pam.
Speaker 1: Megan was only twenty one at the time and Pam
Speaker 1: about a decade older. The two worked as bank tellers together.
Speaker 3: It was a funny little bank, you know.
Speaker 6: It was a single wide trailer that had been rocked in.
Speaker 6: We didn't wear shoes, you know. We would go back
Speaker 6: behind the teller line and not put shoes on, and
Speaker 6: sometimes we would walk out into the rest of the
Speaker 6: bank without shoes on.
Speaker 1: Megan was raised in Dripping Springs by strict religious parents,
Speaker 1: and so it was very conservative. Pam, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: was the kind of person who didn't mind rocking the boat.
Speaker 1: She was unlike anyone Megan had ever met.
Speaker 3: She was just really punk.
Speaker 6: She always wore sort of long, kind of hippie dresses
Speaker 6: with tribal patterns on them and a lot of dark
Speaker 6: velvets and embroidered you know, things that you might see
Speaker 6: women wearing. It a Tom Petty concert.
Speaker 1: As different as they were, though and Meghan became friends.
Speaker 1: Megan endeared herself with imitations of their coworkers, Debbie's southern drawl,
Speaker 1: Cheryl's obsession with pens. She cracked Pam up and she.
Speaker 6: Had this laugh where she would shoot smoked, so it
Speaker 6: was a very unique laugh for one thing. And then
Speaker 6: she would bend forward and kick her foot, and that's
Speaker 6: when you knew you really got her, was when she
Speaker 6: did that.
Speaker 1: To Stephanie's question about how the bookstore came to be,
Speaker 1: Megan explains that when Pam was younger, she spent many
Speaker 1: years working in bookstores. It was her dream to open
Speaker 1: one of her own someday. Megan remembered the bookstore fondly,
Speaker 1: the little fish ponds on the porch, the garden in
Speaker 1: the back, the incense burning inside.
Speaker 6: It was almost like a little tropical oasis with this
Speaker 6: tiny little cave of a bookstore, and she just always
Speaker 6: was trying to make it a.
Speaker 3: More enjoyable and more welcoming place to visit.
Speaker 1: So, if, like Megan says, Pam was the one behind
Speaker 1: the bookstore, why was it that Stephanie doesn't remember ever
Speaker 1: seeing her there. Why was it only ever chat behind
Speaker 1: the counter? According to Megan, Pam had to work at
Speaker 1: the bank to provide the cash flow necessary to keep
Speaker 1: the bookstore afloat, And while she was at the bank,
Speaker 1: Chet was living her dream in her beloved bookstore, surrounded
Speaker 1: by her beloved books.
Speaker 6: She loved everything about books. She loved the way they smelled,
Speaker 6: the way they felt. She loved organizing them on a bookshelf,
Speaker 6: and I swear sometimes.
Speaker 3: It was a meditation to just hold them.
Speaker 6: Sometimes when she would show them to me, she'd just
Speaker 6: kind of press them for a second before ever describing them.
Speaker 6: Her favorite book is Barbaricing Salver's Poisonwood Bible. She had
Speaker 6: her favorite authors, and of course another roadside attraction. The
Speaker 6: name of the bookstore is an allusion to her her
Speaker 6: favorite author, Tom Robbins.
Speaker 3: I believe yeah her life.
Speaker 1: To the question of why the bookstore had closed so abruptly.
Speaker 1: It seems that in spite of how hard Pam worked,
Speaker 1: she couldn't afford to keep it operating.
Speaker 6: She was immensely proud of it, and it was such
Speaker 6: a painful experience for her to lose.
Speaker 1: It, And that was just the beginning of her losses.
Speaker 1: The store's closing happened among a slew of other tragedies
Speaker 1: in Pam's life.
Speaker 6: It's hard to remember what came first, because it was
Speaker 6: really just a whirlwind of loss for her. Her father
Speaker 6: was very ill, and then pretty soon after that, her
Speaker 6: younger brother, he went in to have an absess looked at,
Speaker 6: and it turned out he had cancer all.
Speaker 3: Over his body. At that point, already.
Speaker 1: Her younger brother died, her father died, and then Pam's
Speaker 1: mom fell very ill.
Speaker 6: And Pam's the only one left to deal with that,
Speaker 6: and she felt helpless and scared and small, and I
Speaker 6: just remember there being a tone in her voice that
Speaker 6: had never heard before.
Speaker 1: And the person who should have been there to support her,
Speaker 1: her husband, Chat, was instead pulling away. Pam related to
Speaker 1: Megan a story about a Thanksgiving dinner from around that time.
Speaker 6: She got drunk on red wine because she was sad
Speaker 6: and drank a little too much red wine, and so
Speaker 6: when she went to go back in to get something,
Speaker 6: with her wine glass in her hands, she ran into
Speaker 6: the sliding glass door and cut her head. She was bleeding,
Speaker 6: and she turned around with an astonished look on her face,
Speaker 6: and one of her friends ran to help her, and
Speaker 6: Chet stood there with what she described as a disgusted
Speaker 6: look on his face, and she said that was.
Speaker 3: The moment she knew that their relationship was over.
Speaker 1: Shortly after that, Chet and Pam divorced, and Chet left town,
Speaker 1: leaving Pam alone. She'd lost chat, her family and her dream.
Speaker 1: She didn't seem to ever recover from that.
Speaker 6: I mean, when I met her, she was sarcastic and
Speaker 6: kind of had a dark sense of humor. But after
Speaker 6: all of the loss that she sustained, it became like
Speaker 6: a deep synicism, you know, and it just got deeper
Speaker 6: and deeper, and she would describe it as the dark,
Speaker 6: slimy hole, with me trying to convince her that everything
Speaker 6: could be okay and her trying to.
Speaker 2: Convince me that it couldn't.
Speaker 3: And that went on for ten years.
Speaker 1: For ten years, Megan tried to be a positive force
Speaker 1: in Pam's life. She was young and in over her head,
Speaker 1: but she'd go over to help fix things around the
Speaker 1: house or to mow the lawn. She'd spend time with Pam,
Speaker 1: watching movies or listening to music with her. Pam tried
Speaker 1: going on a few days. She tried therapy briefly, nothing
Speaker 1: seemed to help.
Speaker 3: I can say that I was frustrated at certain points.
Speaker 6: That my attempts to bring her some kind of peace
Speaker 6: never worked.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't a frustration with her.
Speaker 6: And then, you know, sometimes there are frustrations involved with
Speaker 6: a person who is very depressed. Sometimes she would speak
Speaker 6: harshly to me, and I remember telling her one time,
Speaker 6: you know, spending time with you can sometimes feel like
Speaker 6: cuddling up porcupine, And she immediately apologized. She knew what
Speaker 6: I was talking about, and I said, I know, you
Speaker 6: don't have to apologize.
Speaker 3: I just need you to know I'm on your team.
Speaker 1: On top of everything else, Pam had lived her whole
Speaker 1: life with a degenerative eye disease, which meant that as
Speaker 1: time went on, her great love reading was becoming increasingly difficult.
Speaker 1: She bought a kindle so as her eyesight worsened, she
Speaker 1: could keep increasing the font size. In the lead up
Speaker 1: to the twenty sixteen election, it was on her kindle
Speaker 1: that Pam read massive amounts of news. It provided her
Speaker 1: with further confirmation of the thing she already knew. The
Speaker 1: world was a terrible place to be. Pam stopped leaving
Speaker 1: the house, spending most of her time shut in a
Speaker 1: warning that from here Pam's story deals very explicitly with
Speaker 1: the topic of suicide. Take care when listening.
Speaker 6: For many years, she wasn't open about her desire to die,
Speaker 6: but there came a time where she felt like she
Speaker 6: couldn't not be honest about it anymore, and she started
Speaker 6: telling her friends.
Speaker 1: There was a progression to the way Pam talked about
Speaker 1: taking her own life. Initially, she spoke of it in
Speaker 1: an abstract.
Speaker 6: Way, I just can't believe the world is the way
Speaker 6: it is. Who wants to live in a world like this?
Speaker 6: And then it was I really don't think I can
Speaker 6: do this much longer. And then it became I'm not
Speaker 6: going to do this anymore. And so for a couple
Speaker 6: of years she worked on getting her affairs in order.
Speaker 3: She figured out how she was going to do it.
Speaker 1: Pam did extensive research online about the best way to
Speaker 1: take her own life. She was methought, inner planning. She
Speaker 1: talked to an attorney, and took care of her banking.
Speaker 1: She didn't want to cause any unnecessary logistical stress after
Speaker 1: she was gone.
Speaker 6: And of course everyone was saying, we love you and
Speaker 6: we want you here, and you just stick around.
Speaker 1: You know, did you feel like she meant it?
Speaker 6: I knew she meant it, But I also knew that
Speaker 6: she was scared, and I thought I was hoping that
Speaker 6: the fear would keep her around long enough for there
Speaker 6: to be something that would come along that would be
Speaker 6: the thing that would pull her out of that hole.
Speaker 3: I think I found the journal here.
Speaker 1: While on the phone with me. Megan had been searching
Speaker 1: the house for a journal Pam was keeping around this time.
Speaker 6: October twenty seventh of twenty fifteen, so this was a
Speaker 6: couple of years before she passed. Like everything else I've
Speaker 6: ever written, this will just be a rambling, incoherent mess.
Speaker 6: But at the urging of a couple friends, I'm going
Speaker 6: to try to put my thoughts during this final time
Speaker 6: to paper. I want to be very clear that this
Speaker 6: is the most well thought out thing I've ever done
Speaker 6: in my life, the most sensible, logical, and rational. There
Speaker 6: are those that will disagree with that. Looking at you, friend,
Speaker 6: I won't say her name. I do not yet have
Speaker 6: an actual exit date set. I kind of want to
Speaker 6: stay through the election just for its epic train rep value.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking roughly a year or so from now.
Speaker 1: Megan reads me another journal entry from roughly a year
Speaker 1: and a half later, on.
Speaker 6: February nineteenth of twenty seventeen. She says, still here, but
Speaker 6: wrapping things up. Still no doubt, but some occasional fear,
Speaker 6: mostly about failing.
Speaker 1: Pam always said that she didn't want to die at
Speaker 1: the house for fear it might scare her dog and cat.
Speaker 1: So on the weekends, in what came to feel like
Speaker 1: a fire drill, she'd ask Megan to come over to
Speaker 1: pet set, and.
Speaker 6: She would kind of make it seem like I needed
Speaker 6: to stay with the animals because maybe she wasn't going
Speaker 6: to be coming back. But then we would just spend
Speaker 6: time together and that weekend would go by and there
Speaker 6: would be other weekends, you know.
Speaker 3: So then when the weekend of July.
Speaker 6: Thirty first, twenty seventeen came along, it was the same story.
Speaker 3: You know, I need you to come stay with the animals.
Speaker 6: The only difference this time was she wanted to go
Speaker 6: to the store and buy some food and stuff for
Speaker 6: me for the weekend, and while we were there, she
Speaker 6: went down the aisle where the adult diapers and things
Speaker 6: like that are. This is the level of research that
Speaker 6: she had apparently done. She knew what was going to
Speaker 6: happen in the moments after she stopped breathing, and she
Speaker 6: did not want to make any extra work for anybody.
Speaker 3: She didn't say anything to me.
Speaker 6: She just got a big package of adult diapers and
Speaker 6: brought them back over to me, and she kind of
Speaker 6: mumbled to herself, fourteen bucks and.
Speaker 3: I'm only ever going to wear one of them. And
Speaker 3: I had to think.
Speaker 6: Quickly because I knew that I couldn't respond with like
Speaker 6: surprise or like discussed or anything like that, because she
Speaker 6: would It would really upset her. She'd already told me,
Speaker 6: if you go against me on any of this, I
Speaker 6: will take it as a betrayal of our friendship. And
Speaker 6: so I said, well, I guess you could just put
Speaker 6: several of them on at once.
Speaker 5: She laughed.
Speaker 6: She did the kick forward, bend over laugh and I
Speaker 6: almost cried. I had to turn around because I hadn't
Speaker 6: seen her do it in a while.
Speaker 1: After the grocery store, just like usual, they spent the
Speaker 1: evening at Pam's watching movies that night, one of Pam's favorites,
Speaker 1: Night Mother. In it, Sissy's BASIC's character explains to her
Speaker 1: mom why she wants to kill herself and ultimately she does.
Speaker 1: Megan slept over in the next day. Pam hugged her
Speaker 1: goodbye and walked out of the house.
Speaker 6: You know, I was supposed to wait to hear from her,
Speaker 6: and it was the police that I heard from On
Speaker 6: I think it was Sunday afternoon and they asked me,
Speaker 6: do you know why we're here? And I said, is
Speaker 6: Pam dead? And they said yes. She ended up picking
Speaker 6: this hotel called the knights In Hotel.
Speaker 1: Pam chose a ground floor room so that it would
Speaker 1: be easier to carry your body out. She left one
Speaker 1: hundred dollars tip for the hotel staff.
Speaker 6: And I know that the last thing that she did
Speaker 6: from the history on her kindle was watched the Peter
Speaker 6: Gabriel music video for Salisbury Hill, you know, and it
Speaker 6: says They've come to take me home, and my heart
Speaker 6: going boom boom boom.
Speaker 1: Megan received my letter because she's now living in Pam's house.
Speaker 1: Pam left it to her, and along with the house
Speaker 1: came the shoves and shelves of books, inside thousands of
Speaker 1: them with little notes explaining which ones Megan should read
Speaker 1: and why. Among them was the journal. Stuck to the
Speaker 1: cover was a small burned orange postead that read from Megan.
Speaker 1: Megan reads me the final entry.
Speaker 3: On seven nine seventeen.
Speaker 6: She writes, my darling, sweet Megan, I hope this is
Speaker 6: all not too much of a burden for you, and
Speaker 6: I hope this gives you a little financial freedom.
Speaker 3: Try to have some joy and fun.
Speaker 6: Quote Listen, being dead is not worse than being alive.
Speaker 6: It is different, though you could say the view is larger.
Speaker 6: End quote. And that's from the Poison Wood Bible. You've
Speaker 6: been a good friend to me, Megan, maybe the best
Speaker 6: friend I've ever had. I love you, honey. I don't
Speaker 6: have any more words of my own, so I will
Speaker 6: end this with more of Barbara King's solvers quote Liten
Speaker 6: and slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward.
Speaker 3: You are afraid you might forget, but you never will.
Speaker 6: You will forgive, and remember think of the vine that
Speaker 6: curls from the small square plot that was once my heart.
Speaker 6: That is the only marketer you need. Move on, walk
Speaker 6: forward into the light. And then she wrote love Always, Pam.
Speaker 6: And then there's just tons of pages behind that that
Speaker 6: are blank.
Speaker 5: Sorry, that just hurts me heart.
Speaker 1: After speaking with Megan, I reached back out to Stephanie
Speaker 1: to relate what I learned.
Speaker 7: I don't even know this woman, and I just feel
Speaker 7: for her deeply, and I feel for.
Speaker 5: Everyone around her.
Speaker 7: It's about it's almost exactly one year of me losing
Speaker 7: someone to suicide.
Speaker 1: Megan isn't in touch with Chet, nor does she know
Speaker 1: anyone who is. She says is split from Pam was
Speaker 1: pretty complete, but she sends me some photos of the
Speaker 1: two of them from around Pam's house. Pam and chat
Speaker 1: on their wedding day, Pam and Shed on vacation in Mexico,
Speaker 1: his arm around her waist. Once I know what Ched
Speaker 1: looks like, I'm able to locate him among the dozens
Speaker 1: of Facebook profiles bearing the same name, and from there
Speaker 1: I find an email address. So I write the stoic
Speaker 1: man behind the bookstore counter, the man Stephanie's been wondering
Speaker 1: about for two decades, and he responds with his own
Speaker 1: version of the story of another roadside Attraction, Chapter three.
Speaker 2: Chet.
Speaker 1: No, Hi, Chet, this is Jonathan Goldstein speaking Nothing.
Speaker 2: Nice to meet you. Finally, how nice to talk to you.
Speaker 1: When I first reached out to Chet by email, I
Speaker 1: mentioned Pam's death. It turned out that my telling him
Speaker 1: was the first he was learning of it. I'm crying
Speaker 1: as I write this. Chet responded, we were married for
Speaker 1: nearly ten years. That news has hit me very hard.
Speaker 1: Give me a few days and I will get back
Speaker 1: to you. It's now been about a week. Chet asks
Speaker 1: me to tell him what I know about the circumstances
Speaker 1: surrounding Pam's death, and so I do, explaining it was
Speaker 1: a suicide. And as I speak, Chet is silent.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen her. I hadn't seen her since I
Speaker 2: left Dripping Springs when I divorced her in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five. SO called her once about a couple of
Speaker 2: months or so after I left, and she wasn't very
Speaker 2: happy with me. So I knew that didn't make any
Speaker 2: sense trying to call her again. I loved them dearly.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't even put in words. I can't
Speaker 2: even put in words how much I love her.
Speaker 1: Like Megan, Check begins the story of another roadside attraction
Speaker 1: with the story of Pam how she first entered his
Speaker 1: life in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: The way Pam and I met was about as happenstance
Speaker 2: as it gets. When I first moved to Austin, I
Speaker 2: wanted to go out check out Sixth Street. Now Sixth
Speaker 2: Street if you don't know anything about it is a
Speaker 2: big place that a lot of the UT students hang
Speaker 2: out at. It's a big college town here again.
Speaker 1: So Check got a beer on Sixth Street and started
Speaker 1: chatting with a guy at the bar. But after a
Speaker 1: while they began to feel out of place, too old
Speaker 1: among the student crowd, and.
Speaker 2: I noticed two women walking across the street, going in
Speaker 2: the opposite direction, so I yelled to them because they
Speaker 2: looked like they were around their age.
Speaker 1: The two women were Pam and a friend of hers.
Speaker 1: It was their first time on Sixth Street. Two the
Speaker 1: group all headed to a club together and Pam and
Speaker 1: Chat got to talking.
Speaker 2: And we wound up talking until the bar closed. We
Speaker 2: wound up going to a hotel room. We wound up
Speaker 2: talking there till about four thirty in the morning. She
Speaker 2: was very easy to talk to you. I didn't feel
Speaker 2: like I had to try to impress her, and she
Speaker 2: didn't feel like she had to do that with me.
Speaker 2: It was really natural.
Speaker 1: Chet called Pam the next day, and very soon after
Speaker 1: that they started dating. Eight months later, he moved to
Speaker 1: Dripping Springs to be with her, and a month after
Speaker 1: that they were married. So it was a bit of
Speaker 1: a whirlwind. Yes, yes, Chet says he knew immediately that
Speaker 1: this relationship with Pam was destined to be different than
Speaker 1: anything he'd experienced before.
Speaker 2: I think we all had this void in our lives
Speaker 2: where we get into relationships and they're really nice, we
Speaker 2: fall in love, but we're always missing something. And I
Speaker 2: was like, well, that person's just not feeling this void.
Speaker 2: And then they go to another relationship. You're no, they
Speaker 2: filled that void, but now they're missing this. Fams seemed
Speaker 2: to come into my life and I came into her
Speaker 2: life at a point where we were able to fill
Speaker 2: that void for each other, the void I've always looked
Speaker 2: to have filled. She did it. She did right in there,
Speaker 2: and it was like a glove. Even though she and
Speaker 2: I were polar opposite in a lot of way. We
Speaker 2: didn't like the same music, didn't like the same foods,
Speaker 2: didn't like the same dress, didn't let me that one
Speaker 2: aspect of our relationship outweighed it all. We had a
Speaker 2: great rapport.
Speaker 1: And an important part of that rapport was their shared
Speaker 1: love of books.
Speaker 2: The title of the book of her favorite book was
Speaker 2: Barbara King Salver's book The Poison Wood Bible, right right,
Speaker 2: and I read that book and I swear to God
Speaker 2: I fell in love and that it now my favorite
Speaker 2: book as well, even though her favorite author was Tom Robbins.
Speaker 1: Right, and isn't the bookstore named after named.
Speaker 2: After the title to his books that was her favorite author.
Speaker 2: Was her idea to come up with a title. I
Speaker 2: thought it was brilliant, Huh. Pam was an avid reader.
Speaker 2: When I say avid reader, I'm talking about three books
Speaker 2: a week, easy, sometimes more. Absolutely love books, and we
Speaker 2: would find ourselves going to the store all the time
Speaker 2: to buy books.
Speaker 1: Unlike Megan, Chet doesn't talk about another roadside attraction as
Speaker 1: a lifelong dream of PAMs so much as a project
Speaker 1: he initiated. He explains it this way. After being deployed
Speaker 1: to Grenada and Beirut with the Marines, Chet returned home
Speaker 1: suffering from PTSD. He'd always worked in restaurants, but his
Speaker 1: doctor told him he needed a break from the stress.
Speaker 1: So when he arrived in Dripping Springs, he was at
Speaker 1: a loss for what to do. At first, he tried
Speaker 1: building a model railroad set.
Speaker 2: After I finished a model train thing, I just I
Speaker 2: got bored, and that's when I threw the idea her. Hey,
Speaker 2: how about if I build you a bookstore. We don't
Speaker 2: have to go out and buy you books anymore. I
Speaker 2: just wanted to do whatever I could do to make
Speaker 2: her happy.
Speaker 1: In Megan's telling, the store was a monument to Pam's
Speaker 1: love of reading. In Chet's telling, it was a monument
Speaker 1: to his love of Pam. Did Pam ever feel frustrated
Speaker 1: that she didn't get to work in the bookstore more?
Speaker 2: No, not really. She was glad that I had something
Speaker 2: to do, and that was more for pamlet the bookstore
Speaker 2: was just a place where she could get any book
Speaker 2: she wants to read when she wants to read.
Speaker 1: Chedd explains how Pam liked working at the bank, liked
Speaker 1: her boss and the customers, and of course she must
Speaker 1: have loved seeing Megan every day because, according to Chad,
Speaker 1: Pam did not need the money. This is a very
Speaker 1: different story than the one Megan presented of a woman
Speaker 1: single handedly trying to keep her living bookstore in the black.
Speaker 2: Her mother was a financial genius, Emily was a millionaire,
Speaker 2: but you wouldn't know it to meet her. I didn't
Speaker 2: know it when I met her.
Speaker 1: Speaking with ched and Megan is like reading two different authors,
Speaker 1: each with their own take on the same beloved main character.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the truth lies somewhere between both their takes.
Speaker 1: Although Pam's dream had been to have her own bookstore,
Speaker 1: maybe that dream evolved over time. Maybe another roadside attraction
Speaker 1: came to be a place she valued for the refuge
Speaker 1: it offered someone she loved. Ched was the one who
Speaker 1: built the bookstore. He added the deck, repaired the termite damage,
Speaker 1: and constructed the shelves encounter. Each day, he opened the
Speaker 1: store at ten in the morning and closed it at
Speaker 1: nine at night. Cheed was there all day every day.
Speaker 1: He maintained the garden and the fish ponds, and kept
Speaker 1: a recliner behind the counter where he could watch football
Speaker 1: on a little TV when there weren't any customers. Or
Speaker 1: Chet only stepped away from another roadside attraction when his
Speaker 1: marriage to pam ended. Was there anything working against you?
Speaker 1: Guys like that just sort of ended up, you know,
Speaker 1: being destructive or lead to a divorce.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Demila had some vices. That's do well, but these
Speaker 2: vices were becoming dangerous. She drank it off a lot.
Speaker 2: She was a wine drinker, but she drank other things
Speaker 2: as well. There was a like it didn't habit there.
Speaker 2: So initially they weren't a big issue with me. The
Speaker 2: positive in our relationship fore outweighed any of that.
Speaker 1: But Chet says, as Pamela's tragedies stacked up, her vices
Speaker 1: grew worse.
Speaker 2: After the deaths of her family. These things began to increase,
Speaker 2: and that's what it began to get difficult.
Speaker 1: He says that when he tried to talk to Pam
Speaker 1: about cutting back, she refused to engage.
Speaker 2: Demilo was very strong willed. You couldn't get her to
Speaker 2: do anything. She didn't want to do, period, period. And
Speaker 2: it was clear to me at one point that there
Speaker 2: was nothing more I can say or do that was
Speaker 2: going to help this issue, you know. And my fear
Speaker 2: was that I would wake up one day and find
Speaker 2: her lying in bed next to me dead, and that
Speaker 2: there was not trying to blame that on me.
Speaker 1: Why did you think that you would be blamed?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know if you know or not, but
Speaker 2: Pema and I are an interracial couple. I'm black, she's white,
Speaker 2: and Derby Springs is an all white town. There are
Speaker 2: no bide. I was the only blined person that lived there.
Speaker 2: And a lot of the reason why I heard through
Speaker 2: the Great Vie from other regular customers, why we weren't
Speaker 2: getting as much business as we should have because people
Speaker 2: didn't like to come, didn't want to do business with
Speaker 2: us because we were in a racial couple.
Speaker 1: Jess says there had been one other black person in town,
Speaker 1: a woman who worked at the gas station, but she'd
Speaker 1: moved away because you couldn't take the kinds of things
Speaker 1: people would say to her.
Speaker 2: Did. I used to have people come to my storre
Speaker 2: just say to my face. You know, it was insane.
Speaker 1: What would they say to your face?
Speaker 2: Oh? I had a woman come in once. She called me.
Speaker 2: It was in Christmas time. It was just about five
Speaker 2: o'clock in the evening. Some was just going down and
Speaker 2: she called and asked for a certain book and I said, yes,
Speaker 2: we have it. She says, okay, I'll be on my
Speaker 2: way there. And when you open the front order of
Speaker 2: the bookstore, you see the front kind of right there
Speaker 2: to your right. I'm looking right at you, and she
Speaker 2: looks at me, and she didn't even come inside. And
Speaker 2: it was clear to me she was sloppy, drunk. You know,
Speaker 2: her eyes were bloodshot. You can smell the alcohol in
Speaker 2: her breath. She goes, what are you doing here? And
Speaker 2: you can tell by the way she said it what
Speaker 2: she meant. And then she just closes the door and
Speaker 2: walks right back out again.
Speaker 1: All those books carefully wrapped in plastic weren't enough to
Speaker 1: keep the world of dripping springs from encroaching. Moments like
Speaker 1: these were what colored Chets fear, what made him worry
Speaker 1: that he might be the one blamed if Pam died.
Speaker 2: And I can see it easily happened because these sort
Speaker 2: things happen all the time in this country. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: they were just going to say all this white guys
Speaker 2: wanted to take her money because she's a millionaire. I mean,
Speaker 2: there are so many ways they can try to put
Speaker 2: it all together and say I had something to do
Speaker 2: with it. So and I tried to explain that to
Speaker 2: her and those exact words, and it just didn't seem
Speaker 2: to click. I just couldn't watch her kill herself anymore.
Speaker 2: Let's just put it that way. And that's when I realized,
Speaker 2: you know, my life's at risk, my freedom's at risk.
Speaker 2: I can't do this anymore. I have to get out
Speaker 2: of her. It was the hardest decision I ever had
Speaker 2: to make my life, because I promised her that I
Speaker 2: would never leave her. And I still suffer from having
Speaker 2: made that decision, even though I stand by the reasons
Speaker 2: I was forced to make that decision. I wish I
Speaker 2: had made another one. And I say these things because
Speaker 2: I'm trying to come off to saying, is Pam's a
Speaker 2: bad person? She's not. It did nothing bad at all,
Speaker 2: nothing nothing, you know. I just I was forced to
Speaker 2: make a decision that I have to do with my
Speaker 2: freedom versus my love for her, and my freedom won out.
Speaker 1: Hearing all this, I recall the story Megan told me
Speaker 1: about Pam getting drunk on red wine and cutting her face.
Speaker 1: That looked Chat had given her. Maybe it wasn't one
Speaker 1: of disgust, but rather the look of a man realizing
Speaker 1: the impossible situation he was trapped in after the divorce.
Speaker 1: Chat like Pam never had another serious relationship, never anything
Speaker 1: long term, never anything real.
Speaker 2: I've always in my back on my mind, had it
Speaker 2: in me that I was gonna jump up in and
Speaker 2: see if I can find her and talk to her.
Speaker 2: I guess in a way, I was kind of reserving myself,
Speaker 2: saving myself for one day maybe running into her again
Speaker 2: and having things get back together again. And when I
Speaker 2: read that that shit, I felt like, Okay, well that's
Speaker 2: never going to happen. Time to move on.
Speaker 1: At the end of our call, I tell Chet about Stephanie,
Speaker 1: the person who set me off down this path to
Speaker 1: begin with. Chet tells me he remembers her, the teenager
Speaker 1: who came in all the time that summer. Back when
Speaker 1: I spoke with Megan, I told her about Stephanie too.
Speaker 1: She said Pam would have been moved to know what
Speaker 1: the store had meant to her. In spite of Pam's
Speaker 1: passing five years ago, Megan says she still speaks to
Speaker 1: her all the time.
Speaker 6: I talked to her immediately and was like, see, people
Speaker 6: loved you, You made a difference. You really did do
Speaker 6: something that made life better for someone else.
Speaker 5: Should I open it?
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'd ask Megan if there might be something
Speaker 1: in Pam's house she could send to Stephanie a keepsake
Speaker 1: to prove the bookstore had once existed, And so Megan
Speaker 1: mailed Stephanie an envelope male ASMR. Stephanie pulls out an
Speaker 1: old bookmark with maroon lettering. It reads, used, unused and
Speaker 1: unique books. Another roadside attraction. Oh Wow, in a bookstore,
Speaker 1: you'll find page after page, book after book of people
Speaker 1: trying to make meaning, trying to parse through feelings you
Speaker 1: thought were yours. Alone like you, These books tell us
Speaker 1: I too have felt trapped, I too have felt hopeless.
Speaker 1: A bookstore is where you can seek refuge from the world,
Speaker 1: but if you're lucky, it can also offer a way
Speaker 1: into it. Stephanie's writing a solo show while shopping around
Speaker 1: TV scripts in la In a small way, She's carrying
Speaker 1: on the legacy of that strange little bookstore that appeared
Speaker 1: out of nowhere and felt as though it had shown
Speaker 1: up just in time and just for her.
Speaker 8: Now that the Ferniters returned to its goodwill home, now
Speaker 8: that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage
Speaker 8: to Posle, take this moment to do so, if we
Speaker 8: meant it, if we.
Speaker 5: Talk felt around for far too from things that accidentally to.
Speaker 1: This episode of Heavyweight was produced by senior producer Khaleila
Speaker 1: Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with Moheiney Micguger. Our
Speaker 1: Supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Domiano Marquetti.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Emily Condon, Sonia Dosani, Lauren Silverman, Caitlin Kenny,
Speaker 1: Brendan Klinkenberg, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode
Speaker 1: with original music by Chris Dean, Fellows, John K. Sampson,
Speaker 1: Michael Hurst, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be
Speaker 1: found on our website, gimletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our
Speaker 1: theme song is by The Weaker Thans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
Speaker 1: Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at
Speaker 1: Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. We'll be back with a
Speaker 1: new episode after Thanksgiving.