Talk Therapy, Sufficiently Devastated, Promised Delight

Late in the fall of 2017 I found myself shivering in the cold as I chased one of the strangest stories of my career. I’m from Puerto Rico, and I had traveled to Chicago to follow an autograph collector who was obsessed with getting Axl Rose to sign a napkin.

From Muhammad Ali to Hilary Clinton, Alexis Figueroa has gotten tens of thousands of autographs over the years. Axl Rose was the one who always got away. Guns n’ Roses was touring in the Midwest, and I wanted to capture the Ahab of autograph seekers as he wrestled with his great white whale.

Axl Rose

I was a reporter with Radio Ambulante back then, and my editors were baffled by my insistence in telling this story. I was confused about it myself. Hurricane Maria had devastated Puerto Rico two months before, and I had spent every waking moment covering a crisis in slow motion. I remember a constant string of mainland reporters parachuting in, with their sat phones and generators and all-terrain vehicles all fueled up and ready to go. I teamed up with some of them. It was easier to get around that way on an island where communications had been wiped out and gasoline had become a scarce commodity. But I was tired of sharing a ride and directing other journos to the towns that had been hit, only to see them turn away when they arrived at a place and it didn’t look sufficiently devastated. The electrical grid had been decimated, most of the island remained in the dark. When I finally jumped on a flight to Chicago, simply turning on the lights in the place where I stayed felt like a huge relief.

Alexis’ story promised to be delightful. At the time, that seemed to be just what I needed.

Caption: Alexis Figueroa with Hilary Clinton.

But the story wasn’t coming together. True to form, Axl Rose was hard to pin down. And Alexis wasn’t very open about his autograph fixation. He wouldn’t even give me the backstory of how it started. “It’s just a hobby,” he kept telling me. It clearly wasn’t. I was spending 10 hours a day with him, staking out hotels and waiting outside in the cold for an aging rock star to finally show up. That level of commitment goes well beyond what most people are willing to put into a hobby. Profit wasn’t a factor either. Alexis is a collector, the autographs usually end up in a storage unit.

And I was getting impatient. 

Had I really taken a break from the most important story in the lifetime of most Puerto Ricans I know to follow a tight-lipped character with an unrelatable obsession? Frustration was setting in. Some of it was directed at Alexis, but I was mostly disappointed with my own choices as a Puerto Rican journalist.

And then I went to that year’s Third Coast Audio Conference.

The festival was a blur, but I recall the general vibe. The mood was expansive, almost giddy. The small, insular world of narrative audio was getting bigger. The Daily had become a big hit, and it seemed like every major newsroom in the country was racing to put together its own podcasting unit. 

As an outsider working in Spanish (Radio Ambulante and producer Dennis Maxwell won an award that year for best documentary, non-English), I was overtaken with a sense of cognitive dissonance. 2017 did not feel like the starting point for any kind of boom. 

Amidst the hype, there was one session that still sticks out in my mind, Gregory Warner’s The Tyranny of Good Talkers. In his session, Gregory pointed out that editors will often demand that a character be a “good talker” - but good talkers are made, they don’t just fall, podcast-ready, from the sky. When the talk ended, I thought about my own impulse to axe Alexis’ story. I vowed to give it another try. Alexis wasn’t the kind of character that audio storytellers fantasize about: the regular guy blessed with the gift of gab and the uncanny ability to deliver magical nuggets of epiphany. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a story worth telling. 

So I went back and re-interviewed Alexis, leaning on a more relaxed, probing style. And when I did, it was like a dam had burst open. He mentioned the recent death of his father, something he had not shared with me before. He talked movingly about catching the collecting bug from his old man. 

The story was snapping into focus. This wasn’t just about an arcane obsession. The search for Axl’s autograph was about closure. In the process, I was also discovering what Alexis’ story meant to me. I was struggling with my own sense of loss, and the feeling that I was mourning the end of the island I had known growing up. In Alexis’ case, getting Axl Rose’s signature was a way of closing an open thread with joy. I was glad to tag along for the ride.

We made a last-ditch attempt to get the autograph after the big concert. Axl Rose proved to be as elusive as ever. But we got something else. It turns out that you can’t always get what you want, but when you try sometimes, you’ll get Slash’s signature. That moment became the finale in the Radio Ambulante episode Welcome to the Jungle.  

I’ve been thinking recently about meaningful connections. They’re so fundamental for the work we do in narrative journalism. In the Rough Translation episode, How to Speak Bad English, global consultant Heather Hansen insists that “connection, not perfection” is at the heart of any effective form of communication. 

It’s certainly a beautiful way of thinking about storytelling.