Everything is Stories · Mike Martinez & Tyler Wray

The Marble Faun - Part 1

December 5, 2023·48 min·4 clips

Jerry knocks on a decaying mansion door and a woman in a shower-curtain cape opens it, touches his hair, and says 'Mother, the marble faun is here.'

An old room opens the story. The guest is back in the Art Students League, in a heavy stone-carving space on West 57th Street, placing himself inside the room and its art history. He wants to free a girl. The line is about more than sculpture, because his memories keep pulling him toward childhood pain, escape, addiction, and the odd fact that a damaged life can still keep growing. The account stays close to the ground. Greenwood Cemetery is where he learned stone carving while young, happy-go-lucky, and surrounded by friends. Then the air shifts. A winter hallway, beach wind, little money, and two women trying to sing and stay alive make the memory darker without making it neat. Edie comes through with care. She is kind and devoted, giving years of her life to protect her mother as the house and their circumstances fall apart around them. The telling does not flatten her into pity. It leaves admiration and alarm in the same room: eccentricity, unsafe conditions, optimism, fear, and responsibility all tangled together in one remembered night. A siren slips in quietly. When a fire truck and ambulance head down Lily Pond Lane toward Mrs. Beale's house, teenage curiosity turns into something heavier than he can understand yet. He follows on his bicycle, watches officials press Edie to let them in, and later sees how much responsibility he had taken for their safety. The voices make it messier. Their words move through the story with affection, judgment, worry, and a strange tenderness toward little Jerry. Nothing lands cleanly. What stays is a person talking his way through stone, memory, old rooms, frightened households, and survival.

As heard by us

A spare, memory-led biography of stone carving, survival, and care.

Built around stories about making a self, this episode tracks a life shaped by stone carving, a rough childhood, running away, and drug addiction before settling back on the old room at the Art Students League and the boyhood freedom of Greenwood Cemetery.

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Why you'd press play

You want a story of stone carving, survival, and the people who keep a house standing.

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