Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob Weisberg from Pushkin Industries. I am
Speaker 1: really excited to introduce you to Pushkin's newest show, The
Speaker 1: Chronicles of Now short fiction. Inspired by the news. As
Speaker 1: I'm sure you can imagine, it's a fruitful time for material,
Speaker 1: and given the news about Michael Cohen getting sprung from prison,
Speaker 1: we couldn't wait to get the first episode out, So
Speaker 1: here's a sneak preview. More episodes will be coming out
Speaker 1: weekly starting Wednesday, June twenty fourth. Make sure you subscribe
Speaker 1: so you don't miss any of them. Here is the
Speaker 1: Chronicles of Now. Secual counsel Robert Mueller. The FBI has
Speaker 1: executed search warrants at the office of Michael Cohen, the
Speaker 1: President's personal lawyer. In a world gone haywire. Sometimes our
Speaker 1: is the only thing that can make sense of it all.
Speaker 1: He was the President's fixer, the man who once said
Speaker 1: he'd take a bullet for Donald Trump. I will do
Speaker 1: anything to protect mister Trump. This is the Chronicles of
Speaker 1: Now short fiction, torn from today's headlines. I'm Ashley Ford.
Speaker 1: I regret the day I said yes to mister Trump.
Speaker 1: This week a story about that guy there, Michael Cohen
Speaker 1: by this guy here, novelist Jess Walter, We all for
Speaker 1: a moment stopped and rooted for the most ridiculous character
Speaker 1: to finally tell the truth and finally be listened to.
Speaker 1: I regret all the help and support I gave him
Speaker 1: along the way. President's longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen
Speaker 1: heading off the prison for three years. This is him
Speaker 1: leaving his New York Michael Cohen is going to head
Speaker 1: up so now seventy five miles northwest of New York
Speaker 1: City to Otisville, New York, where the prison is Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's a former lawyer, Michael Cohen, will be released early
Speaker 1: from prison because of the coronavirus pandemic. When I saw
Speaker 1: that he was being released from prison, I did like
Speaker 1: a Google search and just saw that according to rumors,
Speaker 1: he's writing a book, oh and that he wants to
Speaker 1: come out before the election. Cohen will serve the rest
Speaker 1: of his time in home confinement. Yeah, it just felt
Speaker 1: like the makings of a great, really short story. Here
Speaker 1: in Notisville, everyone betters himself. Gris LSATs Micelli is studying
Speaker 1: for his real estate license, and me, I've lost thirty
Speaker 1: pounds and started writing. I was popular the minute I arrived.
Speaker 1: Most guys wanted to know if mister Trump was as
Speaker 1: terrible as he seemed. Yes, especially the Black and Spanish guys.
Speaker 1: They hate him. They'd ask, is it true he wears
Speaker 1: adult diapers? No comment? Did he do that thing with
Speaker 1: the Russian hookers? No comment? But duh. Some guys wanted
Speaker 1: legal advice. I had to confess my areas of expertise
Speaker 1: were more taxicab, medallions and foreign policy. My wife was
Speaker 1: worried that prison would be like law and order, but
Speaker 1: I told her everyone here is nice, well almost everyone.
Speaker 1: The fat Man has his fans here too, fox fox
Speaker 1: and psychopaths. Mostly the fox Fox admire him because he
Speaker 1: tells smart people to pound sand. The psychos like him
Speaker 1: because he gets away with everything. Otisville is medium security,
Speaker 1: like a middle school with razor wire. There are tennis
Speaker 1: courts and kosher food. And I was the biggest star here.
Speaker 1: Once Mike the situation from Jersey Shore got released. That's
Speaker 1: when I knew it was going to be okay, that
Speaker 1: life inside wasn't so different from life outside the day
Speaker 1: I saw the situation outside the Rabbi's office, Michael Cohen,
Speaker 1: He said, Sitch, I said, back, we pro hugged. Celebrity
Speaker 1: is the great equalizer. Now that I write that, I
Speaker 1: guess it's the opposite of an equalizer, because it makes
Speaker 1: you unequalm. This is going to be harder than I
Speaker 1: thought writing a book. My lawyer says they'll hire a
Speaker 1: ghost writer, but I kind of want to do it myself,
Speaker 1: more betterment. But the words equalizer, situation, stormy, fixer, rat,
Speaker 1: it really makes you think I have only one enemy
Speaker 1: in here, this gray haired guy doing eight years for fraud.
Speaker 1: It's his second stint to notice Phil. He's like the
Speaker 1: yard ball. He calls me rat, fixer Snitch. Everyone calls
Speaker 1: him the Ponds because he specialized in Ponzi schemes, and
Speaker 1: because of the Ponds from Happy Days. Once we were
Speaker 1: in the activity room watching the news and Giuliani was
Speaker 1: tripping on his own dick, and the Pond said he
Speaker 1: looked like one of those balls he squeezed for stress
Speaker 1: where the eyes pop out. Even you were a better
Speaker 1: lawyer than that, guy, said the Ponds. Thanks, I said,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't a compliment that even words. Then the
Speaker 1: Pond said, you miss it, don't you? Rat I ignored
Speaker 1: the rat part, not at all. I said, I've lost
Speaker 1: thirty pounds, my conscience is free. Come on, he said,
Speaker 1: you miss it. You fucked up by talking. You could
Speaker 1: have gotten a pardon instead. You know what snitches get right.
Speaker 1: That's when I got scared. There aren't actual gangs here,
Speaker 1: no Larassa or Aryan brotherhood. But it doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: don't have to watch your back. For instance, the Ponds
Speaker 1: is in a book club, the wc OG white collar
Speaker 1: original gangsters. To get in, you have to be doing
Speaker 1: at least a nickel for tax evasion, fraud or insider trading.
Speaker 1: They meet in the quad to talk about CEO autobiographies.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they mix in a Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell book,
Speaker 1: but only to trash it. I didn't sleep well after
Speaker 1: the Pond said that was he right? Did I miss it?
Speaker 1: I mean on my phone he was just tea. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you how that felt, the President calling me
Speaker 1: and now would I ever be more than a joke
Speaker 1: to the MSNBC lame streamers but traitorous racked to the
Speaker 1: Fox Fox. I felt so alone. For a while. There
Speaker 1: was a rumor that Martin Screlly was getting transferred to Odisville.
Speaker 1: I imagined roaming the halls with another celeb, showing the
Speaker 1: farmer row around. There's the weight room, and here's the
Speaker 1: basketball courts, and there's the pharmacy. We'd laugh the pharmacy.
Speaker 1: Then the Ponds would see us and I'd say, hey, Ponds,
Speaker 1: you stole millions. This dude stole billions. Suck on that.
Speaker 1: They ended up sending Strelly to a different prison, and
Speaker 1: I was truly alone, the only celebrity on my block.
Speaker 1: One day, I was in the activity room and a
Speaker 1: guy tripped on my laptop chord and unplugged it. I
Speaker 1: looked up. It was one of them, a WCOG book clubber.
Speaker 1: He apologized, but I got the message. I wasn't safe anywhere.
Speaker 1: If this was a TV jail, I'd carve a spoon
Speaker 1: into a knife or fill a pillowcase with soap. But
Speaker 1: here at Otisville, there was nothing to do but tell
Speaker 1: my counselor, and he was a gestalt therapist who tried
Speaker 1: to frame the whole thing as a patterned reaction. I
Speaker 1: have the feelings of rejection. It was my lowest point,
Speaker 1: but that's when the virus arrived and everything changed. No
Speaker 1: more activities, no more book club, and without his boys,
Speaker 1: the Ponds was just another old fraud. Then came even
Speaker 1: better news. They were sending some of us home early,
Speaker 1: and I was one of the lucky ones. Honestly, I
Speaker 1: hadn't wanted to admit how much I missed my family,
Speaker 1: even to my therapist. It hurt too much to think about.
Speaker 1: But this virus, it put everything in perspective life, death.
Speaker 1: What did the Ponds matter now? The virus didn't see you,
Speaker 1: lame streamers and Fox Fox. To the virus, We're all
Speaker 1: just meat. The virus. That is the great equalizer. So
Speaker 1: on the last day of my two week quarantine, before
Speaker 1: I went home, I wrote a note to the Ponds.
Speaker 1: I paid a trustee to deliver it to him, tucked
Speaker 1: inside his National Review, Hey Pons, I wrote, you want
Speaker 1: to know what else snitches get book deals? Motherfucker fixer?
Speaker 1: That was The Ponds by Jess Walter. That is the
Speaker 1: first time I've read anything about Michael Cohen that made
Speaker 1: me laugh a little. Why are you thinking about Michael Cohen?
Speaker 1: Why is he a worthy protagonist for you? Right now?
Speaker 1: I can honestly say I'm usually not thinking about Michael Cohen,
Speaker 1: but there are so many of these Trump characters that
Speaker 1: I wish I'd never heard of. But there's something weird
Speaker 1: and poignant and needy about him, this sort of broken,
Speaker 1: needy guy who, if he hadn't slithered up to Trump's
Speaker 1: ship and attached himself like a barnacle, would still be
Speaker 1: pulling taxicab scams somewhere. And Yeah, when the idea of
Speaker 1: writing stories based on the news popped up, I thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: the only one of these characters that I could possibly
Speaker 1: imagine in fiction is poor, sappy, said, corrupt, awful Michael Cohen.
Speaker 1: And Cohen is famous or infamous like Mike the situation,
Speaker 1: like Martin Schcrelly. What is your story telling us about
Speaker 1: fame in America right now? I mean, we are so
Speaker 1: far down that road from the nineteen sixty presidential debate,
Speaker 1: when you know Nixon lost points for sweating on television
Speaker 1: and now we have an actual horrible reality TV star
Speaker 1: in the White House. Fame is so ingrained in what's
Speaker 1: wrong with America that I don't even really know where
Speaker 1: to start except to let it speak for itself. Let
Speaker 1: you know, Michael Cohen, bro hug the sitch in prison
Speaker 1: and feel alone because he's the only famous person on
Speaker 1: his block. I don't know how else to say it,
Speaker 1: that these marginal characters are famous and are the people
Speaker 1: we talk about and somehow we've decided should run the
Speaker 1: country during the most devastating, you know, moment in the
Speaker 1: last fifty years of our history? Is Michael Cohen a
Speaker 1: better person for having confessed or for taking his chances
Speaker 1: with the courts? Like can the people trust he's actually
Speaker 1: been bettered, as he puts in your story, because he
Speaker 1: dogs about being bettered, and I'm wondering about that. I
Speaker 1: can't say that my fictional Cohen is bettered, and that
Speaker 1: might just be the cynic in me. I mean, the
Speaker 1: vessels of redemption aren't chosen for their seaworthiness, you know,
Speaker 1: you just happen to stumble upon them. And he does
Speaker 1: have an opportunity. You know, we'll see when he when
Speaker 1: he and Rosie O'Donnell finish this book he's working on,
Speaker 1: and we'll see just how redeemed he is. But it's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I find myself drawn to in fiction.
Speaker 1: Do we get a second chance? Who deserves it? Where
Speaker 1: it does everyday kind of heroism rise up. And I
Speaker 1: think it's at best ambiguous at the end of the
Speaker 1: story whether or not Michael Cohen is a changed man.
Speaker 1: But I hope for our sake that if he's not changed,
Speaker 1: he's at least as vindictive as hell. Jess Walter, speaking
Speaker 1: to me from his home in Spokane. Jess Walter is
Speaker 1: the author of six novels, including Beautiful Ruins, which was
Speaker 1: an international bestseller. His new novel, The Cold Millions, about
Speaker 1: the labor activists Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, will be published in October.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to wait. Thanks. Yeah, I just sold one.
Speaker 1: That's like a dollar twenty for me already. Look how
Speaker 1: this day's worked out. You can hear my full interview
Speaker 1: with Jess Walter on our website Chronicles dot Fm, where
Speaker 1: you can also read The Ponds and other short fiction
Speaker 1: torn from today's headlines. Our reader was Oliver Wyman. Our
Speaker 1: sound designer and composer is Bart Warshaw. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Curtis box Tyler. Cabott is the executive producer and founder
Speaker 1: of Chronicles of Now for Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Leetel Milaud and Jacob Weisberg. For the Chronicles of Now podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Ashley Ford. Thanks for listening. It's Jacob Weisberg again.
Speaker 1: That was a preview of the Chronicles of Now from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. New episodes of the podcast will be coming
Speaker 1: out weekly, beginning on Wednesday, June twenty fourth, so please
Speaker 1: subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and let us know
Speaker 1: what you thought of the show on social media, or
Speaker 1: you can write a review in Apple Podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Pushkin Pods.