This week we present two stories from people who needed a little luck to get by.
Part 1: Studying Marine Biology in Florida, Philadelphian Kory Evans feels like a fish out of water... while fishing.
Kory Evans is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the development, evolution and ecology of phenotypic diversity. His research integrates developmental biology, biomechanics, phylogenetic comparative methods, and ecology to understand how phenotypes develop, evolve, and interact with their respective environments across multiple time scales and how intrinsic (development) and extrinsic (environment) mechanisms influence patterns of phenotypic diversity.
Part 2: Carla Katz finds out she has a brain aneurysm while getting screened for a kidney transplant.
Carla Katz is a Jersey born and bred storyteller, comic, and actor living in Hoboken. Her solo show, ANGELINA, debuted at the SOLOCOM 2019 Comedy Festival at the Peoples Improv Theater. Her earlier solo show, BODY PARTS, sold out at the SOLOCOM 2017. She is a Moth StorySLAM Champion and has performed widely in New York, including at the Comedy Cellar, the Fat Black Pussycat, Story Collider, The Liar Show, The AWFNH Show at the Kraine Theatre, NYC's Secrets and Lies, Generation Women, and Funny Over Fifty at Caveat-NYC, The Barrow Group Restorative Stories, Sideshow Goshko and a wide a variety of shows at the Magnet Theater and the Tank. She has also performed across New Jersey, including in Hoboken's On The Waterfront Storytelling Series, Word of Mouth Storytelling by the Bucks Country Playhouse in Lambertville, and This Really Happened at the Hopewell Theatre. Carla is co-producer with Adam Wade of the Hoboken-based On the Waterfront Storytelling Series.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Kory Evans
So, the year is 1999. No Scrubs and I Want It That Way are on top of the Billboard charts. And I'm eight years old sitting on the sofa with my brothers and we're watching this VHS tape that we got from a New Jersey flea market. This VHS tape was very special because it came with a box of fishing lures, and the VHS tape was actually an infomercial for the Helicopter Lures Fishing Set. So if any of you guys in the crowd have been fishing in the ‘90s or early 2000s, you might be familiar with the notorious Helicopter Lures. These were terrible lures.
But everyone bought them because the infomercials that came with them were being hawked by this guy. He's basically the Billy Mays of bass fishing. He's Roland Martin. If you've never seen a Roland Martin Fishing Show, this guy just stands on a boat with his buddy, like his doctor, like some dude he met at KFC and they'll just be chatting it up. And within three minutes, boom. Fish! Oh, cool. Trophy fish. Throw it back.
So I'm eight years old and my dad, he used to bring me and my brothers… and I'm from North Philadelphia. So my dad used to bring us out in the outdoors all the time and we never really got to fish.
So I'm watching his infomercial and I'm just hypnotized. I was like, “Man, this guy, Roland Martin, makes fishing look so easy. I need to do that.”
And I remember looking at twin and like, “We need to go fishing,” and my twin was like, “No.”
So I watched that infomercial like four or five more times before my twin actually stashed the VHS. I found it like two years later in the basement. So I watched this VHS a bunch of times and I was like, “All right, I need to learn how to fish.”
And my dad, although he was really big being to the outdoors, didn't really know how to fish. My mom certainly didn't. So I did the next logical thing, which is I ran to the public library where I stayed there for a month reading books about how to fish. The weirdest thing is I didn't have a fishing rod or line so imagine like reading a book about how to tie knots without a fishing line like tie knots.
Kory Evans shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.
So my dad sees this and I guess he takes pity on me. So he hits a Kmart at the time and buys a couple of fishing rods. From that day on, I started fishing. I found a local stream near my house a couple blocks down the street and I was fishing there all the time. I didn't really care what I was catching. I just wanted to be out there fishing.
Side note. I never caught anything on those helicopter lures. Nobody did.
So 10 years pass and along the way I've been fishing very frequently. I got pretty good at it. I was like raiding garage sales and yard sales getting people's old fishing equipment and making like Franken-rods. It was just a blast.
So I decided to take my talents to South Florida and pursue a degree in marine biology. I didn't win any championships. So I went down there and I was super amped. I wanted to get down there and I wanted to be a fish biologist.
I touchdown on campus. Touchdown, and I find out I actually can’t take any fish biology classes for like two years. So, now the year is 2011 and now I can take my first fish biology class. I had been super anxious about this the entire time because the first two years of college for me were actually pretty bad. I was floundering in classes and… floundering, no pun intended.
I was floundering in classes and I thought that this fish biology course might turn things around for me. I was wrong again.
So I'm taking this class and like first one-fifth of the course, my grades are sucking again. One of the reasons why is because this class was focused on all saltwater fishes. And in North Philadelphia, I was only exposed to freshwater fish.
For those of you who might not be familiar with fish, it seems like a kind of minor distinction, freshwater versus saltwater. But when I tell you that there are 30,000 species of fish and they basically play by their own set of rules, like this isn't birds or mammals where if you've seen one bird you've seen like all of them, you can catch a fish in a pond and then 500 feet you could walk to the shoreline of an ocean and these fishes are doing very different things, playing their own different game and it's madness.
So it was weird because, for me, I was actually the only black person in my class and everyone else were white South Floridians who had grown up around these animals. So to them, this was like second nature, so I was struggling.
Fortunately, we had our first lab coming up and this class was really cool because it's a very hands‑on class. So this first lab is actually a fishing trip. I was like, “Yes! Something I know how to do.”
I'd never fished in the ocean but I assumed if you throw a line in the water, maybe something will bite it. That's what I was banking on.
We actually end up fishing in the back of this research facility. It's a boat launch. And the professor, he picks a student. We’ll call the student Jessie, he gives the student the assignment of handing out fishing rods to all the people in class.
So Jessie is handing out rods. I'm anxious. I'm waiting. I'm like, “Let's get it.”
Jessie comes up to me and before he hands me the rod he says, “Hey, Kory, sorry we don't have any cane poles for you. You'll have to make do with this regular fishing rod.”
So we're going to pause there. Some of you might not be aware of some of the stereotypes that are associated with how people of color interact with the outdoors. The cane pole stereotype suggests that black people are too poor or otherwise tactless to use a regular fishing rod which might be kind of complex with the reel. So instead, they go to the woods, find a stick, tie a piece of line to it. So this was racist. Mad racist.
Kory Evans shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.
And it's crazy because you know, like I'm from the inner city so I'm aware of institutional racism. I'm aware of redlining in the housing districts and being followed in convenience stores, but I wasn't—this is my first time ever being confronted with this kind of like down south racism.
So it was weird and it's funny because you grew up reading books about the Civil Rights Movement. You're thinking, “Man, if anyone's ever racist to me, this is what I'd do,” and I didn't do any of that. I was like, “Damn,” I was like, “is this a racism?”
This is 2011. Is this a racism? Like, a wild racism just appeared.
So I took the rod. I was like, “Whatever, man.” I took the rod and I knew he didn't know how good a fisherman I was. I knew as long as I had a rod in my hand I kind of had a chance.
So I started casting, and I think by my second cast within a couple of seconds of my line hitting the water, boom. Caught a lane snapper. And maybe every other cast I was bringing in fish it was crazy and it was a blast. I was like, “Whoa, this ocean stuff is pretty easy.”
And I'm looking down the boat launch at Jessie and he's not having as good a time and maybe the racism is slowing him down. I'm not really sure.
But class is winding down now. We're about to pack up. So I actually take my last cast, and if any of you guys are fishermen out there, you know the last cast is sacred. You almost never catch anything on it but you need to do it.
So I took my last cast and I remember casting towards this wooden pylon further than I had cast before off to the left. I let the line sink for about five seconds, I get this huge bite. And I think I've been catching all kinds of fish earlier that day but this bite felt very, very different. So I'm fighting this fish and class is packing up and I'm still fighting this fish.
And as this fish is approaching the dock, I see this really dark silhouette. I was like this doesn't look like anything I've caught earlier today. So we bring it in.
It turns out, nobody really knew what it was. The professor had to actually go get a book, key it out. Turns out it was a black sea bass. We'll return to that.
He looks at me and he says, “Kory, where did you learn how to fish?’
So I looked at him and then I looked at Jessie and I said, “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
What was really crazy about this fish is that it wasn't necessarily supposed to be there. Black sea bass, they ran in the northeast and Mid-Atlantic and it's very, very rare for them to get that far south. So for this area in South Florida, this was actually a range extension.
So we actually preserved that fish and catalogued it in the school collection. And if you visit Nova Southeastern today, you still see the fish and it has my little name on it. I even wrote the little bait I caught it with, squid.
So I was pretty amped about this. To this day, sometimes I think back about—because I'm from the Mid-Atlantic as well, so I think it's just kind of funny that God saw fit to have a black sea bass and a young black man meet, from very similar parts of the country meet in some random boat launch in South Florida.
Part 2: Carla Katz
I grew up in a family of Italian Catholics and English Jews, which means I'm from New Jersey. And I grew up believing that I'm lucky, like really good at those scratch-off lottery tickets and I have awesome parking karma, which in Hoboken where I live is a big fucking deal.
But I wasn't feeling very lucky five years ago when my doctors told me that my kidneys had failed due to a genetic disease called PKD. Getting on the kidney transplant list is a multi‑month event with just tons of tests. EKGs and MRIs and MRAs and, my personal favorite, the colonoscopy. It was all a pain in the ass.
And I wasn't worried. My doctors weren't really worried either. It was just a process. But when it was all done, I went up to the hospital and the transplant coordinator handed me a manila envelope with a DVD with my test and she said, “Everything is great except for one thing. We found a large basilar tip brain aneurysm.” Essentially, a ticking time bomb in my head that, if it burst, I would die.
Carla Katz shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in November 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Then she said, “But good news is that once you get that fixed, you can have the kidney transplant.” And I realized she had a very sad misunderstanding of the concept of good news. Because now, not only were my kidneys trying to kill me but my brain was trying to kill me too.
I walked back to my car just sort of in this terrified stupor and I sat in the car holding the envelope and holding my breath and trying not to move my head. I was trying not to move at all and just staring at the rain coming down on my windshield thinking this cannot be happening to me.
And I grew up believing I was lucky because my mother told me so. My mom whose name is Angelina Josefina Scarlata Arlata is Italian and she's very, very superstitious. So in addition to teaching me how to make a mean lasagna, she taught me the finer things in life, like if you see a crow it's a visit from the dead, never follow an empty hearse or you'llbe in death's wake. I never figured out how I was supposed to figure out whether it was full or empty. Honestly, Italians can be scary people. My childhood was like a dress rehearsal for The Omen.
But my mom is just magical to me. And when I was eight years old, we were sitting on the back porch with my Aunt Dolly drinking lemonade and my mom heard somebody say, “Angie, come help me.”
So she ran next door to our row house to see if the people on either side were okay and everybody was fine. She came back up and she heard it again. “Angie, come help me.”
So she decided to go check on Lena. Lena was an elderly lady that lived a couple blocks up from us that my mother would look in on from time to time. When she got there, she found Lena at the bottom of her basement stairs where she'd fallen.
And when she got to her, Lena touched her on the arm and said, “Did you hear me? I called for you. I said, ‘Angie, come help me’.”
It was stories like Lena's that helped me grow up believing that the impossible was possible. They sort of sourced my own resilience. I mean how fantastic is it that a stranger could sort of magically hear your need and come save you. Now, I had a bomb in my head and I needed someone to come save me.
But I was not looking for spirits or magic or crows. I wanted hard, cold science. I wanted first, second, tenth opinions and I went on this sort of frantic tri-state search to try and find a neurosurgeon that would do the procedure. I felt like I was a contestant in the world's worst game show. Like get a doctor before your brain explodes.
When I finally walked into the office of Dr. Howard Riina here at NYU Langone, I knew I found the right person. First of all, he's this sort of big, caring bear of a man that just exudes confidence. But I really love that he told these dumb dad neuroscience jokes, like what is a sleeping brain's favorite rock band? R.E.M.
He also had a sign in his office that said, “’It's only brain surgery,’ said no one ever.”
Two weeks later, I was in this tiny, green, depressing room the night before my surgery, separated by a thin blue curtain from a lady that spent the entire night screaming into her phone. And I'm thinking, “This could be my very last night on earth. And this is some disappointing bullshit.”
When my family and friends left, I was feeling scared and alone. And I did that thing they do in the movies, the slow-month highlight reel of your life. I thought about my kids’ births and their milestones, but mostly I thought about the things I'd miss, like walking them down the aisle or my hypothetical future grandchildren.
And I'm more spiritual than religious, but that night I prayed like a motherfucker. I did not want to be wrong about the whole higher power thing. And while I'm praying, this rabbi just suddenly appeared in my doorway and his name was also Katz, like mine, and he just said, “God told me to tell you that you're going to be just fine.” And then he just disappeared. It was like a Jewish mic drop.
And the next morning as I'm headed into surgery, I just had this one sort of mantra, like a command to myself, “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” and, spoiler alert, obviously I survived.
When I woke up with seven titanium coils in my head and a wicked headache, but I also had the realization that I had fixed one body part but I still had another one trying to murder me.
The way to get a cadaver kidney on the transplant list, on average five years, and I don't have that kind of time so I need to find a living donor. My brother, who also has PKD, had had a transplant five years before that and we had exhausted all potential family donors, so I knew I was down to good friends and dead people.
I had no idea how to find a donor so I did what everybody would do. I Googled ‘how to ask for a kidney’. And when I typed in the words ‘how to ask someone for’, Google came up with ‘for money’, ‘if they are gay’ or ‘for weed’. Those were my top three. And I would have been really thrilled to be wondering about any of those things but the real answer was just to ask.
Carla Katz shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in November 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And I'm really good at asking for things. I'm a labor lawyer. I'm a union negotiator. I ask for things professionally. But this was too big of an ask and I couldn't do it.
But the word got out through friends and, suddenly, angels started to appear. And all 14 amazing, insane friends went and got tested to see if they're a match. I'm wildly humbled but at the same time I'm also aware that the chances of a kidney match with a non-family member are sort of astronomically poor.
A few weeks later, I'm in another doctor's office waiting for more bad news when my phone rings. It was my friend Janine who I met in law school and bonded with over the fact that she liked my hair and I liked her English accent. I pick up and I just hear this ungodly sound that sounds like a goat. She's just like, “Maaa.” It took me a couple seconds to realize with her strong accent, no offense, that she was saying ‘I matched’. I was just absolutely stunned.
And Janine is one of those extraordinary altruistic humans even though she eats that weird Brit food like marmite. I still worried every day as she was going through the process that she would come to her senses and back out, because it's major surgery. People back out all the time. I spent a lot of time looking at my phone waiting for that call.
Then a week before the scheduled surgery, my phone rings. It's Janine, and I brace myself. When I pick up she says, “Is it weird that I'm really excited about this?” And I said, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
The following April, I ran the Rutgers Half Marathon and Janine wanted to jump in for the last half mile so we could run together over the finish line. A cop stopped her and she just said to him, “No, no. You don't understand. She has my kidney and I need to run with it.”
He was just so confused he just said, “Just, just go. Just, just go.” And the two of us, my kidney twin and I, ran across the finish line. Four kidneys and two bodies, one in hers and three in mine, bonded by flesh and blood.
I didn't tell my superstitious psychic mother that I had either surgery until I was well past them, because she had just turned 80 and she had a stroke and I worried that worrying about me would give her another one. But when I finally did tell her, she claimed she already knew. She said she wasn't worried at all because she knows that I'm lucky. Thank you.