This American Life; Kindness of Strangers; Part 2

This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme, today's program. The kindness of strangers and where the kindness might lead, our stories in today's show are from the supposedly least kind city in America in New York City, and we have arrived at Act three of our program. And for this act, we figured, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. We figured we would need a change of pace after all this kindness and attempted kindness. And this is a story about the flat out unkindness of strangers and how they could take two people who do not know each other and make them completely obsessed with each other. Our senior editor, Paul Tough reports. Some names in the story have been changed. Helga's neighborhood used to be entirely Ukrainian respectable with an Orthodox church and a community center. And then things changed. Young people started arriving and now the place is full of record stores and cafes and body-piercing parlors. Starlee is one of the newcomers. She moved in two years ago right next door to Helga, and the trouble between them started right away. Starlee says that at first it was just regular New York apartment stuff. She would come and kind of tell me that, like not to, like, make noise in the apartment

and was like I was slippers at night. So like you should we were supposed to and and she'd come and just knock on your door and, you know, she would tell me downstairs in the hall, like, I'd see her in passing. And she was actually really calm about it. And she and she looked like a helpless old woman back then. And I tried to, like, be quieter because of it. And then and I think I even helped her carry I could grow up the stairs once. I think I actually did do it from Starling's point of view. She tried to be quiet. She tried to be nice, but she was a college student at the time and she had a lot of friends and people would drop by late at night. So it was hard to be quiet all the time. From Helga's point of view, Starlee was a terrible neighbor, the worst, and Helga made sure that Starlene knew exactly how she felt, like she would occasionally sit in a hallway and talk to people about us, but would not be anyone out there to talk to. She was kind of like make up conversation and gossip about us, but we'd like open the door and they all want they are nobody is really quick. And she wasn't talking to anyone about us just so we know that she didn't like us. And so what sorts of things was she saying at that point? Just said we were we were allowed bad kids like this.

We were loud and irresponsible. And she didn't know she didn't believe any of us ever went to school. Like she refused to believe that. So she just didn't like I think she didn't like the very young. Pogoing wanted everyone else in the building to see the Starlee that she saw, so she started throwing garbage out into the little landing that they shared, apparently to try to make everyone think that it was people in starlet's apartment number three who were responsible cigaret butts and like this piece of paper and like orange juice cartons like that. And it started off really small and it's got huge. And just like it just became like so much trash and away and people smoke here. So it looked like we were doing it. And also like the type of trash she picked, she, like, try to go away to find like kid trash, like hostess donut wrappers and like candy bar things and just like go with creative garbage you've ever seen. And so then so people at first thought we were doing it and they would come and talk to us and be like, don't put the trash on. Like I'm not put in the trash. Jake Bronstein, stylez roommate at the time, she's had nine roommates, I should say mine,

in the two years she's lived there, Jake decided to do something. Jake wrote a note saying, please don't put trash in the hallway and put it outside in our hallway. We like a little square hallway. And he taped it on the wall. And then we, like, hear her come out. We look through the keyhole and we see that she's put a sign up and we come out and says, well, then please don't sell drugs. And that's the first time we'd ever heard of it. We're just like, whoa, like we can't like we are so out of the blue. We couldn't believe it. Ever since that day more than six months ago, hookers put up at least one note about Starlee every single day, sometimes as many as seven or eight. They're mostly pretty small, maybe two inches by three inches. The notes are written in marker and block letters. Helga puts notes in the front door over the mailboxes, inside on the window, on her own door, on Starling's door. The wording varies, but the message is always the same. Starlee is a big time drug dealer. She's selling drugs out of apartment number three and she should stop or move out. Starlee actually collect the notes that Helga puts up.

One whole wall of her apartment is covered with them. Starlee shows me a few choice ones say she puts should number three selling drugs business as usual. Um, unpassed, I should put shame selling drugs on passing out. She says she's busy planning BROUNSTEIN drug dealers selling your way to the jailhouse. Kind of brumskine drug dealers selling illegal drugs here like parasites. Starlee says that, in fact, she's not selling drugs, she's never sold drugs, no one in her apartment has ever sold drugs. It's all a big lie. I ask her to come in a part and I come and look anywhere you want. Like, honestly, like we'll go to the cops together. I don't mind at all. Helga doesn't just put up signs. She appears at her door. Whenever anyone comes to visit Starlee, she harasses Dali's friends because Starlee in the hallway calls her a liar. And then there's this scene

where inside Charlie's apartment about 1:00 in the morning, Olga is sitting in her apartment right next to the thin wall that separates the two of them. And she's tapping on the floor just to let Starlee know she's there. She's always watching. I look up at the wall for me, it's a very creepy moment. Starling's used to it. It's I got to say, it's the. It's just she is just to get her attention, just to remind us that she's even when she's not been signed up, that she's aware of, of our illegal activities, we were like, watch what I Claudius on PBS. And it was three hours from this first crack. At the last put it, we were able to continue tapping the entire time. She said her door and being Durcan the entire time. And she'll do it. I mean, she does not get tired and that's what he does with her day

sort of eating. She's being tricky. That's kind of sad. It is sad. And I know say it's hard, though. It's hard because it's hard to know what's the right thing to do is and to be confronted by such meanness because like the more like sometimes you'll be like coming home and to be like I just wanted to say that as a woman in a world, you'll pass by her door and get like like feelings of like pity and affection. And then she'll open it and she'll yell at you. And you're like, man, like you can't if she makes it so hard to do the right to be a good person about it. A couple of years ago, there actually was a drug dealer in the building up on the top floor. It was a bad scene, junkies being dragged downstairs and out to the front stoop, people sleeping on the roof and everyone else in the building banded together and went to court and actually got the drug dealers kicked out. Helga was one of the people who testified. And Starlee thinks that that might be connected to what's happening now. Helgi got a lot of attention and support from that campaign. And so now she's trying to do it again with Starlee.

I tried to speak to Helga about all of this to get her side of the story, but it wasn't easy the way Starlee described her. She's suspicious of strangers. She never lets anyone into our apartment. She doesn't answer a buzzer. So I decided that I'd try to speak to her out on the street one night. I waited outside the building for about an hour and finally she came in. If you live in this building, it was a very strange interview, she wasn't what I expected. She seemed completely normal. I told her that I had heard something was going on with apartment number three, and I asked her if she knew what it was. Yes, she told me you're selling drugs. I asked her if she talked to me about it and she said that she would, but she didn't want me to use her voice on the radio. Too dangerous. She said she led me across the street behind a van where she said it would be safer to talk. She was deadly serious, very intense. She clearly felt that she was in a dangerous situation. She was willing to give me a few details, but the rest she told me I'd have to take out

myself. Here's what she said. The building is full of students. The people in Apartment three sell to the students in the building, and they also use the students as couriers to sell drugs in the bars all around the neighborhood. It's a big operation and it's all being run by that short girl, she said, meaning Starlee. If Helga were to hear the story on the radio, she would tell you that I've got it all wrong, that I've been duped, that everything Starlee told me is a lie. And some of what Helga's says makes perfect sense. She says that people are coming and going all the time from Starling's apartment, which is in fact true. She says the phone rings at all hours of the night and it does. For Helga, that points to one thing drugs. For Starlee, it's just that she's a student. She stays up late. She's got a lot of friends. There's no middle ground for Starlee and Helga. They see absolutely everything differently. From starlet's point of view, there was a period at the beginning where this whole thing

was sort of funny, what was just a good story. But as time went on, things changed and Starlee became as serious as hell. I spent a month here without a roommate and that and I was just like it. I was like was like drinking like finals. I was in an apartment all the time and I was also what I was waiting time for. I wanted to catch an act so badly I never could be so quick. And you can never catch a plane to signed up. I want you to open it so badly that just like would you leave reconnoitered be like you guys go ahead to the movie, I'm going to stay here and in this way by the door for a little longer. And it was hard to get away, especially at that at that period where the two of you were sort of, you know. Inextricably linked that she's sitting there waiting in her apartment for you and you're sitting here. Let's put it what it was like me lying in wait of her lying in wait for me. Absolutely. We were the bond was strong. Most of the time, the kindness of strangers is a barely conscious thing, you cut someone off in traffic, you take the last donut, you bump into someone running for a train,

you don't even think about it. With Helga and Starlee, things are different. They're unkind to each other. They spy on each other. They bicker, they yell at each other in the hallway. But for each of them doesn't. Kinases are part of a bigger picture. They're mean because they have to be starlets trying to clear her name. Helga's trying to clean up the neighborhood. I really I mean, if someone had gone to her first in the year, if you're running a history of this village or history through this building and then someone just interviewed her, it would go down that like to hear a good lady try to get the voters out, she'd be the martyr or whatever. And I guess I could become fat. Then I told you. I mean, I was in fact, sometimes I'm questioning myself sometimes about it. I used to, um. I guess you used to question whether or not you were a drug dealer, but I just. Am I right? If I doing something wrong, is there something is there something wrong I'm doing like that? Is she a little bit right not to have a drug dealer, but I might like to show you a bad neighbor. Yeah, bad neighborhood. Bad person might be using her.

Starlee always thought of herself as a basically good and neighborly person. She never thought she was the kind of person who would do something like yell at an old woman in the hole. And yet she does. And kindness breeds on kindness. Still, Starlee can't help wishing that things could somehow be different. I've been having these dreams where we've become very, very clear dreams, like long epic dreams, I think where she'd come over and we've chatted on the bed and we've been giggling in the dreams. And like I've had dreams where I've made it feel like we've come to terms. A lot of things have explained it. And it's like this summer before this lately I've had only, like, violent or dislike of her funeral. You know, little sad at that point, but I was visiting her in jail. But this time I've had this, like, friendship dreams all summer long. And the really realistic like she's like herself and then like I say, I say like the thing in theater, like I can't figure out when people say I'm awake, I say it.

And also like like like really like logic comes into her eyes and she like, sat down in my bed and we've like dance like giggle. And I just talk about things like make jokes through each other. And what do you mean the thing that you're you're supposed to say that you can't figure out where I'm supposed to be saying whatever I could possibly say to her in real life to make her like, see the light, you know? What do you think? How do you think you feel if they just have the nose just suddenly stopped on that? Um, I don't know. I probably should wait a couple of days and see and I don't know. I can't imagine they would stop, though. So what was the last time you talked to her doctor yesterday and pathological liar? For chairman of the book, the story takes place almost around the corner from Sterling's

apartment building just just a few blocks away. It's about one small act of kindness leading somewhere completely unexpected. A resident of the neighborhood, Blake Blake Eskin, tells the story. About a month ago, I went out one Friday evening with a friend in the East Village where we both live. We had had a few overpriced beers at a stylish modern bar. And then just before midnight, we walked north on First Avenue to a much older bar, a pre gentrification dove specializing in cheap pitchers and shots of polished cherry liquor on the street. We heard Frank Sinatra music blasting loud enough to wake the neighbors. It can happen to you as we reach Fourth Street, I saw 100 people huddled around the stoop of a sixth floor tenement. Most of them were post college, pre childbearing types. Plus, there were some older people probably lived on the block. Everyone seemed to have forgotten where they were headed, whether to a party or to another bar or back to bed.

You will go to extremes with impossible schemes. A short, dark haired guy in a suit stood at the top of the stoop holding a microphone. At first I thought maybe the guy was lip synching because he sounded exactly like Sinatra. But after a few seconds, I realized he was doing the crooning himself. The guy looked a little like Sinatra and he moved like him too. But this was no run of the mill Sinatra impersonator. It was as if he was possessed by the spirit of Sinatra, channeling the chairman of the board that Frank himself had emerged from retirement, dyed his hair black again and was with us on 34th Street. She gets too hungry for dinner at eight. She adores this theater, but she never arrives late at the bottom of the stoop with someone you would not ordinarily see with Frank Sinatra, an older woman with spiky salt and pepper hair and a leopard print vest was doing a spirited, if slightly awkward tap dance on

a piece of wood she had dragged out onto the sidewalk. She doesn't like crap games with barons and earls. Don't go dress to a party all up and some other girls pearls. She won't be. Where the arrested those girls, and that's why this chick is a. After my initial confusion and my subsequent bliss, my next reaction was to wonder how this was possible. But where were the cops? The ninth precinct is a block away and New Yorkers are quick to complain about noise. And Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has made it a priority for the police to crack down on what he calls quality of life violations, like these noise crowds blocking traffic, drinking in the street. But on Fourth Street, everything was copasetic. And it still is somehow, by some quirk of fate, the show outside 124 East 4th Street has happened five Fridays in a row.

And the singer Nick Krokidas lives on the first floor of the building. And the tap dancer Lorraine Goodman lives on for Gary and Wanda, who run the garden level thrift shop, put their merchandise, the chairs and overstuffed couches on the sidewalk for the audience's comfort. She never bothered. With some that she'd hate, I said, that's why Lorraine is a child, Victor Kiedis and Lorraine Goodman, her neighbors. And like most people who live in the same building, they didn't know much about each other. Lorraine did know, however, that Nick had a big jazz record collection five weeks ago. Lorraine decided she wanted to tap dance in front of the building as a sort of therapy, she says. And she reached out to Nick asking him to play some tunes while she tap dance that weekend. What happened was I was coming home. I'll tell you exactly what happened while I was coming home that Friday evening around nine o'clock, and I forgot her name.

And I'm walking down 34th Street and Second Avenue. I'm like, Oh, there she is tapping and I don't want to do this. I'm tired. I'm like, and then I had to reach for her name and my little in my pocket. My with is the pocket timer. And I'm like, OK, Lorraine. Then I walk down the street and I said, Hi Lorraine, how are you? And she goes, Oh, come on out and can join me, blah, blah, blah. And I think she assumed I'll bring out some music. That was it. I wasn't I don't think she was expecting, you know, a suit and microphone stand and the P.A. to keep the sets. The whole no thanks to Lorraine Goodman. This is the brains behind this wonderful event here. Say good evening, Lorraine. Good evening, Lorraine Niks. Initial gesture of kindness to Lorraine, a near stranger made her into a local celebrity and made himself into an even bigger one. Remember, there are only a handful of people watching Lorraine tap dance. When Nick went outside with his instant Sinatra kit, which includes a few CDs from a series called Pocket Songs, the discs have the full Sinatra arrangements

without a vocalist. The slogan is You sing the hits Nick began with I've Got the World on a String. The crowd built steadily and right away. Nick had the crowd on a string standing on the stoop, had the string around his finger. What a world. Whoa, what a live on it. A song that I sing makes showed me a picture taken when he was 15, he's wearing a tuxedo, his hair parted to the side, standing at a microphone and pointing back at the camera. It is a picture of a 15 year old boy from Poughkeepsie, New York, and Frank Sinatra drag. I am basically what I'm doing right now. I have been into since I was a kid, since I was 10 years old. We've got the world on a string and we're swinging on a rainbow. Nic, trained as a jazz vocalist at Boston's Berklee College of Music, moved to New

York and after a while he found a job with the Starlight Orchestra, a 16 piece band that performs that high society, weddings and corporate events. The Starlight Orchestra has five vocalists, and Nick is their Sinatra specialist. Each of us in the audience had been lured by the improbability of the situation. But Nick stage presence kept us there. Most street performers in New York go where the tourists go, since most of us natives are too busy to stop and listen. Nick singing from his stoop, however, was a gift to his own neighborhood. Nick really knows how to work a room even when it's not a room. He weaves his neighbors names into the lyrics any time he moves. Let's bring in our lovely neighbor here. Lucky me, I do. Can't you see? Beautiful thing, he plugs Gary in just thrift shop and thanks them for their help. He salutes a couple watching from a nearby fire escape. He dedicates witchcraft to a pretty blond standing in the back row and flirts with

her at the end of the song. Oh, I got a crush on you, too, baby, you're a firework just like Frank would have done. Now it's a safe bet that if Nick and Lorraine had been break dancing or playing conga drums, the police would have shut them down in 20 minutes tops. But the officers of the 9th Precinct fell under the same spell as the rest of us, and they couldn't bring themselves to get out of the patrol car to enforce the mayor's quality of life rules. The first week they would circle around the block, you know, speak to their megaphone. You know, they were going to say, like, you know, people please don't block the streets. You know, please keep the streets clear. And that was it. That was like the first week. The second week. They requested summer wind that they requested some. Yes, the megaphone, the megaphone as they were passing the third week, the third week, the third week the police came and

they stopped their car, held up traffic and they said, OK, summer wind, they want to hear some wind. So I, I finished night and day. I put summer wind on and I went up on the steps. They manipulated their lights on the top and threw a white spotlight on me. And I started singing Summer when the crowd went crazy, you know, they went nuts and they were like, really hit. So it is I mean, it's it it's that whole New York macho Italian police, Irish street it is, man. And like, evidently what I'm doing, they connect with that first summer when it came blowing in from across the sea. And of course, they do it. So do the black men with dreadlocks, the young white guys and Wu Tang Clan t shirts, the teenagers immersed in the swing lounge scene, the pot bellied Italian men of a certain age, smoking cigars and sitting front row

center wearing a party colored mumu. Next next door neighbor Jean, who has lived at 124 East 4th Street for the last forty eight years. For all of them and for me, there is something about Frank Sinatra and something about how Nick Chiquitos interprets Frank Sinatra that bewitches us. That touches us. I said, like, painted kites those days and nights they went flying by the world was new beneath Ron Brown scholars. The guy lives next door and he embraced me, hug me, this old Chinese guy man with the hearing aid, I'm like, I may I touched this guy and I don't know how I did it, but I did it, you know? They autumn when and where to when.

They have come and they. And still, the day is Romilly Day. For any New Yorker to do something as big as this for his neighbors again and again is more than an anomaly. It is as rare and unstable as the elements at the bottom of the periodic table. The key ingredients of this event and neighborliness, generosity, free time, good weather, cooperative police officers are hard to come by in this city and they are nearly impossible to find together in the same place. Week after week, the Nick and Lorraine show has had a longer run than anyone could expect. And something rain or the first frost or the Ninth Precinct for a Friday night gig with Starlight Orchestra will soon bring it to a halt. There's a gossip columnist in the New York Post named Cindy Adams, and it

is tempting to resort to her mantra only in New York, folks, only in New York to explain this phenomenon. But in this case, the wisdom of Cindy Adams does not suffice. This is not the stuff of New York, not of the real New York or even of the New York of a bygone era, but of a mythical movie, New York, a Lower East Side block built on a studio back lot. It is the first reel of an unknown MGM musical from just after the war, and it stars Nick Krokidas. What happens in the rest of the film is anyone's guess. Strangers in the night. Exchanging glances, Blake ASCAN is a writer in New York, Nick Krokidas, things in his own style, not Frank Sinatra's with the Nick crookedest quintet that be performing in October at Manhattan's Match Club. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editor Sarah Vowell, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rochlin. Production help today from Rachel Day, Alex Blumberg and WFYI in Philadelphia.

To buy a cassette of this program, call us at WPEC in Chicago. Three one two eight three two three three zero three one two eight three two three three eight zero. Our email address radio ad Welcome This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Funding for the program isn't provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the listeners of ABC Chicago ABC Management Oversight by U.S. military says No, no, no, no, no. Do it like this. Move it up and bounce slowly bobbing the end of the towel slightly from side to side. I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. Warm, embracing, done so well never since that night. Public Radio International.