This week, both of our storytellers are sharing stories about something that is pretty relatable at the moment — the challenges of leaving the house.
Part 1: As she goes blind due to a progressive eye disease, M. Leona Godin must learn how to navigate the world with a cane.
M. Leona Godin is a writer, performer, educator, and the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural history of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Playboy, O Magazine, Catapult, and other print and online publications. She produced two plays: “The Star of Happiness” about Helen Keller’s time performing in vaudeville, and “The Spectator and the Blind Man,” about the invention of braille. Godin holds a PhD in English, and besides her many years teaching literature and humanities courses at NYU, she has lectured on art, accessibility, technology, and disability at such places as Tandon School of Engineering, Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the American Printing House for the Blind. Her online magazine exploring the arts and sciences of smell and taste, Aromatica Poetica, publishes writing and art from around the world.
Part 2: A frightening encounter with police that leaves teenage Roque Rodriguez traumatized.
Roque (Pronounced: ROW-Keh), the son of Dominican-American immigrants is a 500-hour trained Yoga teacher. Roque is a proud co-founder of Suryaside Yoga in Queens, NY. When he’s not teaching the Suryaside community and mentoring his new teacher trainees, he is dedicated to spreading love and yoga to underserved and under-resourced communities through programs and partnerships such as, Liberation Prison Yoga which provides yoga and meditation to incarcerated people and his I Can Breathe Yoga program which offers teacher training scholarships to BIPOCs who want to bring yoga to their community. He is an advocate for prison abolition and community organizing.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: M. Leona Godin
Here we go.
It is the summer of 2019 and my partner Alabaster and I are living in Denver, Colorado. I'm standing at my apartment door debating whether or not to go out.
Now, there are lots of reasons not to go out. Number one, I'm a writer. I don't need to leave my apartment. I don't even need to leave my desk and my computer if I don't want to.
Number two, I should really do the dishes. Oh, dang. I did the dishes already.
Number three, Alabaster's going to be home really soon and he will take me for a proper walk to the Denver Botanic Gardens.
Number four, who needs independence anyways? It's overrated. It's all about interdependence these days, right? Yes.
So number five, I suck at being blind. This needs to change. I promised myself that I would go out today and practice my cane skills. I'd practice my cane skills and I told myself this and I told my mobility instructor. My mobility instructor had been taking me out on routes like once a week and stuff.
I don't know if you all have ever like taken musical lessons, like tried to learn how to play the guitar or the piano or whatever and you shell out your money and you show up week after week. And you forget the little part about practicing and at some point you quit because you're embarrassed because each lesson is like increasingly more embarrassing and, surprise, surprise, you have not learned how to play the guitar or piano or clarinet. It is the same with cane travel. You got to practice.
So at our last lesson, my mobility instructor said, “Just go around the block. Just around the block. Just as simple as that. Your cane skills are fine. You just got to go around the block, you wuss.”
She didn't actually say ‘you wuss’ but she was totally thinking ‘you wuss’.
M. Leona Godin shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in October 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Though I have not always been blind. I have a progressive eye disease so I've been very slowly going blind throughout my entire life. And when I was a kid, I could see pretty normally. Just at night I had some night vision issues but I refused to use a cane. I absolutely refused to use a cane, that stigmatic white cane. I don't want to look blind. I don't want to look blind so I refuse to use it even when at night sometimes I would get caught outside and I'd rather walk into fire hydrants and get cursed at by pedestrians because I'm smashing into them and stuff. But better than using the stigmatic white cane.
But I was fiercely independent nonetheless as a badass little Punkity-rockity teenager. I think I would have been pretty upset with myself for letting it go so far, letting this all go so far. So I think to myself, “This is it. Today is the day.”
I grab Moses. This is Moses. [Taps her white cane] Named for the way that he parts the red seas of pedestrians. And I check my pocket, make sure I have a gin nip, liquid courage as my dad used to say. And I step outside of my apartment door. Then I stand there for a second and I listen to the echoing sounds of the apartment, some rustlings and shufflings behind all the closed apartment doors.
And I think to myself, “Neighbors, please do not come out. Please, please do not come out. Don't stop me before I even get started here.”
Because the really weird thing about being a blind person is the spectacle of it, you know? It's like everybody sees you and you don't see them and they all think that they know you but you don't know them. It's like being a really boring rock star.
But they don't come out and I make it outside to the door. I push the door open and then I'm hit with all these other different sensations. There's like this warm wind. There's the crows are cawing. There's some people talking up the street a little ways. And then there's the traffic heading south on Corona. We live on Corona when Corona was just a nice, refreshing beer.
And I have Moses at a nice angle, about two paces in front of me. His tip is like two paces in front of me and so it hits the top step and it hits the second step and I make a right onto the sidewalk.
As a baby cane user, I would really like to trail something. By that I mean like hitting the right arc of the cane against something and kind of keeping myself straight. It's nice to trail building lines or grass lines or in Denver, because you need to save water, there's lots of rock lines or rock landscaping, but I can't do this on this block because I will surely get sucked up into one of the many driveways that lead up into these big apartment buildings. So I need to keep my shoulders straight kind of squared with the traffic on Corona Street.
About 20 paces along Corona, I meet my first fan. He says to me, “Oh, good afternoon.”
And I say, “Good afternoon.”
And he says, “You are such an inspiration.”
I was like, “Well, thank you. That's very nice.”
And he said, “My father went blind and he was able to work on cars.”
And I was like, “Well, that's very inspirational. Thank you. You have a nice day.”
Then I keep going and then and then there's this nice smell of honeysuckle and I know that I'm getting close to the end of the block. Then I'm at the end of the block. I'm at 10th Avenue and I just kind of stand there for a moment. I promised myself that I did not have to cross 10th Avenue today. I've done it many times with my mobility instructor but I don't have to do it today.
I'm just standing there and I'm just listening to the traffic. There's a signal here so it's very obvious when the cars are either going parallel or perpendicular to me. So if I were to cross the street it would be with the parallel traffic, obviously.
And a woman says to me, “Do you need help crossing the street?”
And I say to her, “Oh, no. Thank you. I'm just practicing.” And I say with a big smile.
And there are times in every blind person's life when quizzical looks are audible. This was definitely one of them. So she doesn't say anything and then the light changes and she says, “Oh… okay.”
Then I make my way. I take my right and I go along 10th Avenue. I know that there's going to be an alleyway. That this alley runs behind the buildings parallel to Corona. And I have to be careful about not getting sucked up into the alleyway. It's kind of a gentle little slope. It's not a very obvious curb. It's just a gentle curve with asphalt and so it feels different under Moses. And I make it past and I'm like, “Yes, I didn't get sucked into the alley!”
I get all the way to Downing Street, and Downing is confusing because Downing actually goes up. It goes north. But I go down Downing, I make my right and it's wonderful. I love downing because I can hit these wonderful landscape little low walls. I can hit these with Moses and it makes this amazing thwack every time I hit them.
And I'm walking along. I'm trailing these little low walls and they're reverberating off of the buildings and it's wonderful. It gives me this shape of the whole street. And I think to myself, “This is echolocation. This is really cool. I'm like a bat.”
I'm like a bat, like what is up with this saying blind as a bat? That doesn't make any sense at all. They're not blind in any kind of practical sense. They zip around. They catch mosquitoes. Like can you catch a mosquito? That's amazing. I'm going to work on this old blind as a bat thing, echolocation.
When I was visually impaired, I used to love to walk during the day and think. It's hard for me to think so hard about walking, but I think I'm in a good place right now. I'm thwhacking my cane. It's reverberating. I'm thinking a little bit, but I'm also getting a little bit cocky.
I kind of get down to 9th Avenue and I make my right and, before you know it, damn, I'm sucked into the alley. I followed the trail of my cane and it led me into the alley. The way that I know this is very strange. You don't necessarily need to be like hitting something for echolocation to happen. There's also passive echolocation, which is basically like a reflected sound.
And for many years before they discovered echolocation in like the ‘40s or something, 1940s, blind people called this facial vision because it kind of feels like it's hitting you in the face. It's a very subtle kind of a thing. I don't know. My hypothesis is that we have like a lot of brain space dedicated to the face, but I'm a writer not a scientist, so I don't know.
But it's a really interesting feeling. It's very obvious to me that I'm headed towards this alley that has the same kind of sonic darkness, I suppose, equivalent to like visual darkness. It kind of sucks the sounds in of the traffic on the other streets. It kind of has this closed-in feeling, this dark‑sounding feeling.
M. Leona Godin shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in October 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
It's very close to my house. I'm just a little ways away from my house. In fact, I could take this alley but the cars travel in the alley and there's no sidewalk and also it's like the back door to our place and we never take the back door so I don't want to go this way. I want to get back to the sidewalk. I cannot find the fucking sidewalk and I'm like, “Damn! I am really embarrassed right now. I do not like this blind thing right now. Not at all.”
And I'm reminded of this time when I was a kid. I was visually impaired. I was a teenager and I was drinking on this rooftop with a bunch of my friends. This roof was very complicated to get up to. It's like a series of roofs and ladders to get up there.
So usually, I went up, obviously. Always, I'd always gone up with my friends, gone down with my friends. This night, my boyfriend dumped me and I said, “I don't need him. I don't need anybody.”
So I was like, “I'm going to go down the roofs by myself.” So I walk to the edge of the roof and I'm kind of sitting there. I'm smoking a cigarette to kind of screw up my courage and I'm crying a couple of little teenagery tears. Then I'm just about to scoot my butt off the edge to the next little roof level when two friends, two guy friends come up and they sit really close to me.
They're like, you know, “Hey, how's it going?”
I'm like, “Hey.” And they made me feel better. They start making me laugh and stuff. I smoke another cigarette and then finally they're like, “So where are you going?”
I was like, “I'm going home.”
They said, “This is not the way.” This is not the way and what was really weird about being visually impaired is that if I knew something, I could sometimes see it better. So suddenly, the roof that I thought was just like a couple feet down under my feet was actually not there and that it would have been like a 60 or 70-foot drop straight down.
Then I could see that quite clearly and I was like, “Oh, my. I might have fallen off into nothingness and killed myself or broken a lot of bones. Man, people would have thought I did it for a boy.” Like I was boy crazy, no doubt, but I was not that boy crazy.
So my friend said, “Oh, well, we'll help you down.” So they helped me down all the roofs and I got back down to the sidewalk and I'm like, “I'm good from here.”
I was really embarrassed. I was so freaking embarrassed and kind of ashamed and stuff, but I think that's what made me think of this. Because I was feeling so embarrassed and so ashamed of being caught between this alley and the sidewalk. It was the most obvious thing in the world but I couldn't figure it out.
And I was like, “But you know what? I'm not in danger. I am not about to fall off of a roof right now. I'm actually totally fine and there's just a little pile of rocks that I need to kind of figure out to get back to the sidewalk. That's all I need to do.”
And I've got Moses. Me and Moses are going to figure this shit out.
So we poke around and we poke around and we finally get back to the sidewalk and I mobility myself back to Corona Street and make the right and then there's the familiar cement wall that I thwack‑thwack on. And then there I am at my front steps and I step up to the door.
I stand at the door and I think, “That wasn't so bad.” I think, “I'm going to be the best blind‑as‑a‑bat person I can possibly be.”
And let me make thing one thing straight. I am not there yet. I am so far from there yet, but it is wonderfully comforting to know that all I need to do to get there is to practice.
Thanks a lot guys.
Part 2: Roque Rodriguez
Thank you so much Manny, Jade and Paula. Thank you, Story Collider. Thank you, everybody who's listening. Hi. And, especially, thank you everybody in the room for giving your energy and support. I feel it and I appreciate it and I need it, so thank you.
So boom, I'm 17 years old. It's the summer before my senior year of high school. I got my first car ever and I am finally feeling like a free person. So I did what any entrepreneurial, industrial pothead kid from Paterson, New Jersey would do with this freedom. I went uptown, like me and my boy, my best friend Christian drove uptown to 145th in Amsterdam and we purchased about $100 worth of weed, which, as it turns out, was worth $200 in New Jersey because that's how the market worked. The bags were like this big in New York and this big in Jersey.
So we saved up our little hundred dollars. We went there as soon as I got, like three days after I got my car, literally. We drove up to the city. We came back to Christian's house. We break down the weed and I swear like this is my Nino Brown moment, right? Like this is my Scarface Tony Montana moment like we're going to be big. Like we're starting small.
But we had so many friends that smoked. We figured like this is so easy. No problem. We're just going to sell this weed. It's going to be awesome.
So I take my half of the weed, which was ten dime bags, ten tiny little dime bags and I put them into a brown paper bag. And I put that brown paper bag into the right-hand big pocket of my cargo shorts. Just as I'm leaving Christian's house it occurs to me. I'm like, “Hey, you know what? Let me just change,” because I'm about to go to work right now. Let me change into my work uniform so that way I don't have to get changed at work.
Roque Rodriguez shares his story with a limited audience at the Caveat in Manhattan, NY in September 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
My work uniform was a Friendly’s polo shirt and black pants. At the time, I worked as a Friendly’s server. Shout out to all my Friendly’s servers. Shout out to all my restaurant server people, service industry fam. Shout out to… anyway, I get really excited about that.
So I changed my uniform and I get into my car. I got into my car. And, honestly, I just want to pause for a second because I have to tell you like this is the most glorious moment of my life right now. Like me walking from Christian's house to my car. I heard like that ‘70s song, “You could tell the way I walk and my walk…” I could hear that. You know what I'm saying? I feel like swagged out.
So I get into my car. It's a beautiful day. It's sunny. It's the middle of the summer. It's July so it's hot. So I turned the AC on all the way up, put the windows on and I start driving. I start driving and I'm busting, I'm listening to my favorite album at the time. It was Onyx’s Shut ‘Em Down in ’98, which is a couple years old, but yo, this album was so great. And it was so loud. Onyx is the loudest rap group in the history of music.
And if you're not familiar, one of the songs that I kept playing on the loop over and over was Shut ‘Em Down featuring DMX and they went, “Shut ‘em down. Shut ‘em down. Shut ‘em down. What?” With DMX, right? Rest in peace, DMX.
But listen, just imagine that. That's what I'm hearing, right? Over and over again, very, very loud. And I'm driving on my way to work. And on my way to work there's a strip of road that's like 20 minutes straight of just me driving straight. Like you don't have to make a left or right. You don't have to do anything. It's just driving straight.
I found myself on this day on this road driving and there was all green lights. All green lights and nobody in front of me. I'm just like could this be any better. I'm on my way to work right now. I'm going to make twice as much money at work as I normally do on a Saturday because I'm going to sell all this weed to my friends who will have money because they're at work. You know what I'm saying? It's brilliant.
As I'm going down the road, busting to Shut ‘Em Down, I see to my left from the intersection there is a cop car coming with the flashing lights on. I'm like, “Oh, he's going kind of fast. Let me pull over here.” I'm approaching the intersection so let me pull over just in front of the light and let him pass in front of me.
So the cop car is coming to the left, coming from the left, comes to the middle of the intersection it makes a sharp right like into my car and stops just right… almost kissing my bumper. I'm just like, ho, like that's really scary. Maybe he's trying to block me off because there's more cop cars coming or there's, I don't know, a presidential procession or something. I don't know. But like maybe there's a danger that they're trying to protect me from.
Then just a few seconds later I hear, “Freeze! Keep your hands on the wheel.”
I turn to my left and there is this like a 30-year-old white police officer pointing his gun directly at my face. This is my first time being pulled over.
I am completely frozen in this moment. He says freeze and I complied with that. I'm just like stuck.
And he's actually saying more things but it's all just like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't understand what he's saying.
Finally, he says like put the window down. I put the window down.
He says, “Turn that shit off.”
I'm like, “Oh, shit. Like okay.” I turn it off. Because, mind you, the whole time that this is happening, still, “Shut ‘em down. Shut ‘em down. Shut ‘em…” that's still happening. The gun is out, the car is there, all of that. That is still happening throughout all of this.
So I'm frozen like, “Oh, shit.” And then also I'm like, “Oh, shit. Do they know about the weed?”
It's not a rational fear that I had but it is a fear that I had that somehow like they knew I had this weed. They followed me from New York or somebody had called somebody and I'm in trouble now, because I had never done this before.
Roque Rodriguez shares his story with a limited audience at the Caveat in Manhattan, NY in September 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Finally, I come to and this guy's still pointing a gun in my face. He tells me to get out the car and eventually I make my way out of the car into the back of the car where I put my hands in the trunk. He pats me down very aggressively. He pats me down aggressively. Finally, after he sees I have nothing, he's like, “What were you doing?”
And I'm just like, “I'm on my way to work.” I'm just like, “I'm on my way to work. I work at Friendly’s. I go to Don Bosco High. I know people on the football team. Do you know Coach Toll? You can call Coach Toll. He'll tell you I'm a good kid.” Because this is how I was looking at myself right now. I'm a kid who is going to his summer job.
Anyway, I felt like I was a kid and I was a good student and I was an eagle scout and why are you harassing me right now, officer man?
So he asked me what do I do. I said I'm going to work. He said like, “Oh, well, you know, I've been following you for ten blocks.” I said I didn't know.
Another older officer, I want to say in his 60s. He had a white mustache, white hair, like shockingly white hair. Like he had seen some things. He walked over, though, and then he asked me, he's like, “Son, what's going on here?”
And I'm just like I told the whole story again. The music was on. The AC was on. I didn't know he was behind me. I had all green lights. I had no reason to pull over.
He pulls the young officer to the side. They talk for a second. They come back.
He said, “Okay. Where's your license and registration?”
And I say in the most clear, this is the clearest I've ever spoken in my whole life. I say, “My license is in the small right-hand pocket of my cargo shorts. Not the big one, the small one.”
Why would I say that? Why would I say that? But I said that. I said not the big one, the small one.
So right now the officer walks away from me and starts to walk towards the passenger seat of the car, opens the door, picks up the shorts and just in this moment I could think about my mother, my grandmother, my whole family actually that was in Dominican Republic and the conversation that they would be having about how Charito moved to DR to raise her kids and now her youngest son who was a prodigy is in jail now.
And that's all I could think about. Like she's going to have to have that conversation and I'm going to have to tell her that she's going to have to have that conversation.
So the cop's walking over to the car and I'm thinking about like the fate of my future. He picks up the shorts. He goes into the small left-hand pocket. Doesn't see anything. Goes into the big cargo left-hand pocket. Doesn't get anything. Goes into the small right-hand pocket and pulls out my license. Has the shorts, looks at them, tosses the shorts back onto the chair.
And I was afraid. Oh, my God. The unbelievable luck of me in this moment I cannot believe it. He starts to walk back to the police car. He runs a check. They come back to me. I'm still here standing at the back of my car, hands on the trunk. They come back to me and they're like, “Okay, you can go. We're going to let you go.”
I was like, “Listen…”
He said, “Do you know I pulled you over?”
I was like, “No. Like why are you going to pull me over?”
He's like, “You had the new, the paper license plate in your back window. After, like you're not allowed to ride around with that. You have to put the license plate on after a certain amount of time.”
And I was like, “Yeah, but it's only I've had the car for three days and I'm trying to get my plates.”
And he's like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just, you know, we'll let you go.”
So had he just run that plate that he saw in the back of my window, it would have come up that I just purchased this car. But he didn't even bother to do that. He was just trying to pull me over which speaks to the fucking bullshit, pardon my French because there's no kids in the room, that black people have to deal with all the time. And that contributes to the deterioration of our mental health.
But anyway, this guy walks away. I'm driving to work and I am bawling. I am crying. I'm crying like a newborn baby. I can't believe it. I am a newborn baby. I'm born again. I'm a born‑again human. I'm going to act right from now on. I didn't. I proceeded to act wrong. But like in that moment I was like, “I'm going to act right. I swear. Jesus, thank you.”
So I get to work. I call Christian. I'm like, “Oh, this is crazy…” whatever.
I move on with my life. I felt so much shame from the fact of that I almost went to jail for intent to distribute and that I almost had to explain it to my whole family. That my mother who had been sacrificing to send us to private school, all three of us by herself, that I was going to have to explain to her that like sorry, I'm going to jail now.
And I had so much shame around that that I never told her about it. I never told my mom about it. Even though I was a 17-year-old kid who had a gun pulled on by the police, I never told her about that. I didn't tell my older brother or sister. I didn't tell anybody that really could have helped me because I just had shame.
Then I went on to get pulled over by the police a few more times in the coming years. And after the third or fourth time that I had like a very disturbing incident with the police, I just stopped driving. I stopped driving 15 years ago and I didn't try to get my license back. It's only over the last ten years through working, through meditation, through yoga and in the last year really through working through therapy that I have come to a new relationship with the fear that I was feeling towards the police.
Because the fear that I was feeling even when I was in the passenger seat or the backseat of a car and a cop would pull behind us, I would tighten up. And the fear that I felt was rational, because the police murder black people for no reason. And that is a thing that I know.
But how do I relate to that fear? What is my relationship with that fear? How much power was I willing to give it over my life? I'm very glad to say that over the last year, I've been changing my relationship with that fear and I'm no longer afraid to interact with the police. I'm no longer afraid to exist. I am aware that bad things could happen to me while I'm doing those things but I am now, for the first time since I was 17 and just got my car, I am now finally starting to feel free.
Thank you.