Intro

I asked an AI to calculate my statistical probability of surviving my life. It said: 1 in 8.3 billion.

Essentially impossible.

Childhood sexual abuse. At 5, I attempted to murder my mother's rapist. AIDS epidemic San Francisco. Severe alcoholism. Alcohol. Meth. Coke. Sex. Brother murdered. Strangled twice. 28 deaths witnessed by age 30. 

I shouldn't be here.

But I am. And I've seen some shit.

This 19-episode memoir podcast is about more than survival. It's about what happened when I pressed play on a 35-year-old cassette tape and heard voices I'd never heard before—my own voices, broadcasting love at frequencies I couldn't access until now.

This is about Archaeological DNA. About how your past holds layers of meaning you haven't tuned into yet. About how love can travel backward through time.

This is the excavation of an impossible life.

Content warnings: This podcast contains discussions of childhood sexual abuse, addiction, violence, death, and trauma. It also full of profound love, transformation and hope. Listener discretion advised. 

Transcript

The Archaeologist of My Souls Podcast:

Chapter One: The Blonde Warrior

My mother, Sylvia, landed in Los Angeles in 1962 under the cloak of night, her name handwritten on a placard held by a man in a perfect suit. He didn't smile, didn't chat, just led her to a waiting silver Aston Martin with red leather seats, humming like a promise Hollywood never intended to keep.

The drive into the hills was silent. Neon signs blurred by the windows: Cinerama Dome, Schwab's Pharmacy, The Hollywood Palladium. Diners where dreams went to die. Liquor stores selling liquid courage by the bottle. Drive-ins where girls in tight sweaters hitchhiked along Sunset, hoping the next car would carry them toward something better. The whole city looked like a movie set that had forgotten to call "cut."

Then came the climb. Mulholland Drive curved up through the mountains, narrow and dark. The man gestured at a gated house with tall hedges.

"That's where Marilyn lived," he said, without turning his head. "Three doors down."


Sylvia didn't answer. She was watching the way the streetlights carved shadows across the canyon. Marilyn was already dead, pills scattered like confetti across a nightstand. But her myth lingered in the air like expensive perfume left behind by a ghost.

Sylvia's journey had started twenty-one hours earlier, when she boarded a plane in Stockholm—exhausted, electrified, and terrified. She had never left Sweden. Not like this. Not alone. Not with no safety net except her grandmother's warning ringing in her ears.

Before she could escape, she had to prove herself worthy: physically, morally, and biologically. The United States wanted assurance that she wasn't carrying
tuberculosis, syphilis, or homosexual tendencies. Because apparently, in 1962, all three were considered equally dangerous to American society.

Sylvia stood in line with other girls under fluorescent hospital lights, waiting for a green stamp on her papers like livestock being processed for market. She was x-rayed, tested, prodded, and made to sign a declaration confirming she was not a homosexual.

A nurse asked with flat indifference: "Do you like men?"


She answered: "I fuck them and work for them."


The nurse stamped her papers without blinking.


She lied on her application. Forged her references. Invented her grades. She knew no one would check. She was tall, beautiful, blonde—the kind of girl men didn't question, they just opened doors for. She also paid for her own ticket, every krona saved from working in Stockholm factories. Her grandmother had insisted.

"If someone else pays for you," she'd warned, "they own you."


Sylvia nodded. She already knew what it meant to be owned.


She was born a scandal—the bastard daughter of a young woman chasing husbands like other people chase dreams. Her mother had shipped her off to be raised by her grandparents, tucking the whole messy truth behind a lie that worked better for everyone except Sylvia.

She was loved, in a way. But never claimed. Never introduced as a daughter, always as "the girl we're helping." When her mother finally married the Chief of Police, she revealed Sylvia's existence three days after the wedding, like she was returning a library book she'd forgotten about.

The man never forgave her. Sylvia wasn't allowed to sit at the dinner table with the legitimate family. She ate in the kitchen, like a servant in her own house, listening to
the laughter and conversation that belonged to everyone but her.


By her mid-twenties, she was already a ghost inside her own life. She needed out. She needed oxygen. She needed to see what was out there beyond the forests and fjords that felt more like a cage than a homeland.

So she bet everything on a plane ticket and a forged letterhead.


Her job as an au pair paid $200 a month, which was decent money for 1962. But the children—feral, spoiled, sugar-drenched little monsters—were relentless. Their mother disappeared behind afternoon wine and longer naps. The father, Dore Schary, was a Hollywood legend who was always gone. Former head of MGM. Close to Eleanor Roosevelt. A liberal icon with perfect manners and convenient absences.

None of it mattered to Sylvia. She hated children. Always had. They were loud, sticky, and demanded attention she didn't have to give.

She was allowed one day off per month. Always a Monday. The most useless day in a city that only glittered Thursday through Sunday.

She wandered the streets of Hollywood alone, invisible without a car. There were no sidewalks in the hills, just wide, hot roads designed for other people's engines and other people's dreams.

Then one of the other Swedish girls told her about Scandia.


Scandia wasn't just a restaurant. It was a spectacle, a shrine to Swedish sophistication dropped into the middle of Hollywood Boulevard like a Nordic UFO.

It sat behind ironwork and red leather and white tablecloths so crisp they could cut you. Everyone who mattered ate there: Zsa Zsa Gabor holding court in corner booths, Paul Newman looking like he'd stepped off a movie poster, Angie Dickinson smoking cigarettes like they were medicine, Henry Kissinger discussing world affairs over reindeer steaks.
It was Swedish in cuisine but Hollywood in soul—the first place in America where Sylvia felt like she wasn't crawling on her belly beneath everyone else.

She wore a corseted uniform that pinched her ribs, a high white apron that had to be starched daily, and heels that made her feet throb by hour three. Her hair was teased into a hardened beehive that could survive a hurricane, her lipstick was Revlon's "Cherries in the Snow"—red as blood, bright as promises. Her smile was permanent and professional, painted on like stage makeup.

The hostesses looked like stewardesses from a science fiction film: flawless, pale, untouchable. Nordic ice queens serving champagne to people who owned the dream factory.

The dining room smelled of aquavit, French perfume, steak fat, and Chanel No. 5. Furs hung off the backs of chairs like conquered animals. Cigarette smoke curled through crystal chandeliers. Money sparkled in every glass, every gesture, every whispered conversation about deals that could make or break careers before dessert arrived.

And the men watched.


They watched her walk. Watched her lean over tables to pour wine. Watched her mouth form words in that accent that made them think of ice queens and secret fire.

Hands grazed her waist when she passed tables. Whispers curled into her hair like steam from expensive coffee.

"You ever done film?"


"You got that icy look. Real classy. But I bet you're not."


"You could go places."


One man slipped a hotel key into her apron pocket. She gave it to the dishwasher and kept serving champagne to people who saw her as decoration with legs.
It wasn't dramatic. It was expected. Normal. This was how the game was played in Hollywood—everyone was either hunting or being hunted, and the smart ones learned which role suited them better.

Even among the staff, there was hunger in the air. Girls smoking in the alley lit each other's cigarettes with shaking fingers. Some had bruises hidden under makeup. Others wore pearls that probably cost more than most people's cars. Sylvia said little, kept her cards folded tight. She wasn't like them, and they all knew it.

She belonged here, even if she didn't understand why yet.


But Hollywood demanded more than polish. It demanded perfection. American perfection, which was different from any other kind.

One night, staring in the bathroom mirror after a particularly long shift, she saw what had to go.

Her teeth. Straight enough for Sweden, but not for America. Not for the blinding white required to survive flashbulbs and close-ups, even if she had no intention of acting. Here, appearance was everything, and "everything" had very specific requirements.

She had them all pulled. Every single tooth. Replaced with white, symmetrical, false ones that could blind you in sunlight.

She went to work the next day with a mouth full of perfect American teeth. No one noticed the change, which was exactly the point. In Hollywood, transformation was supposed to look effortless, even when it cost you pieces of yourself.

This was the shining moment before the storm. Before she would meet my father at an Ike & Tina Turner concert and trade all this careful glamour for something that looked like passion but felt like a slow-motion car accident. Before the violence, the broken bones, the bruises in places no one could see.
But for now—she was dazzling. She was everything Hollywood promised girls like her they could become: beautiful, mysterious, untouchable. A Swedish ice queen serving champagne to the people who owned the dream factory, not knowing she was about to throw it all away for a man who would spend the next decade trying to destroy her.

She didn't know she was auditioning for the role of survivor. She thought she was just learning how to shine.

My mother got on a plane alone with sixth-grade English and a forged resume. She didn't call it courage, but that's exactly what it was. She left behind safety and shame in equal measure, flying across the world on a one-way ticket to something she couldn't even name yet.

Not many women do that. Not then. Not ever.


Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is leave. Sometimes a one-way ticket is the beginning of becoming yourself. Even if the world isn't safe. Even if you have no map. Even if the shine turns out to be just light bouncing off a closed door.

She went anyway.


And that's what matters.