Raccoon Wars, Lindsay Clancy, NFL Scammers & Past Crimes - Matt McCusker #1149

There is a tour plug to get through first — UK and Ireland, a show built for a live room rather than a podcast with legs, stories saved for the stage, audience confessions, a Q&A — and then Matt McCusker arrives with the actual state of his life: he is at war with raccoons. In his own backyard. He has a nice couch-like thing out there that they sit in, and every single night they come and wreck it. They also decided to tear up one of the two Crocs he had left outside.

Chris suggests they may have done him a fashion favour. McCusker admits he nearly fought the urge to wear Crocs to the studio today, and that he loves them. But the war stands. What demoralises him is the terms of it: he is losing a battle of wits to an animal that survives exclusively on garbage.

The obvious answer is trapping. The problem is what comes after trapping. Get a professional, and the professional traps them and releases them somewhere else — which is fine, nobody has to drown anything.

Chris, for his part, kind of loves raccoons. He was growing watermelon this summer — one big one forming — and woke up one morning to find a raccoon had torn it to shreds. That was his Croc, except he had not had to grow the Croc.

He was pissed. He still likes raccoons. He also could not quite believe Austin permits watermelon growing; he had assumed the climate had to be far more exotic. It does not. The season is short, you have to start early, and this time the plant goes behind the fence.

McCusker keeps picturing the fight itself. They have claws. He would look like a lunatic. He is currently wearing one Croc, because the other one has been taken — a broomstick for self-defence, a man going over the top in the First World War with a bugle and a sandwich.

The neighbour behind his childhood house kept two raccoons in a cage as pets — illegal, apparently — and fed them Urkel cereal. Not his own cereal. Theirs. McCusker, a small boy at the time, filed the fact away and has been deploying it ever since: raccoons love Urkel cereal. That is his go-to raccoon fact.

He is also delighted by the sheer American-ness of it — the compulsion to turn anything into a legitimate commercial opportunity. In 1991 Steve Urkel got his own cereal. Urkel-Os were basically strawberry-and-banana Froot Loops.

Which leads to the real horror of the image: imagine already being in a cage, and then discovering that the rest of your life is Urkel cereal.

Banana-flavoured cereal is grim. Artificial banana is polarising and generally awful. McCusker, however, loved banana Runts — the hard fruit-shaped candy — precisely because everyone else hated them. In a variety pack, he would trade up for every banana in the bag and end up with a pile of them.

He has a story for everything. Ask about banana flavouring and you get banana flavouring. The trade economy was simple: nobody wanted the banana ones, and he did.

Chris wants to return the favour of cultural education. Does McCusker know who Francis Bourgeois is? He does not. Bourgeois is the trainspotting phenomenon who emerged from the shadow of the Grand Tour-era car show — a young man filming himself at the trackside, wearing a camera on his head, narrating the arrival of locomotives with unguarded joy.

The clip is the big one: he has waited his whole life to see 4014 Big Boy in action, the largest steam locomotive in the world, and today is a very important day. Crowds line the tracks. An unexpected arrival comes before the main event.

And then, at the crucial moment, his phone dies and he has to reach for his companion's phone — while wearing a camera on his head. The camera keeps rolling through the crisis.

It was Pennsylvania, and it was brutally hot, and a number of people passed out in the field waiting for Big Boy — fat-legged autistic guys, in McCusker's telling, going down one after another. Francis, somehow, lived the dream.

McCusker's response as a parent is unsentimental: if his kid passed out awaiting a train, he would step over him and leave. He is not doing this. Trainspotting is odd. There is a type of white person that only exists in America, and a type that only exists in England, and Bourgeois is squarely the second kind.

American trainspotters exist too, but they present differently — quieter, standing there watching. Bourgeois is talkative. Which is why McCusker has no fear at all that Francis Bourgeois will become a future school shooter. The American equivalent, Frank Bougie, is the one you keep an eye on.

As for the kids who collapsed: he laughed for ten straight minutes. A field full of children falling over while waiting for a train. Some of them missed Big Boy entirely — they went down, the locomotive went past, and they came to on the other side of it. Chris points out the one advantage: a passed-out child is easy to manage, because you know exactly where they will be. Put a cool pack on them, go and see Big Boy, come back. Tell them they saw it.

Chris offers the second archetype of stereotypical Britishness: Big John, the takeaway reviewer. The clip opens with an order — two pie and mash, please — delivered in a register that makes McCusker tell him not to do that.

There are two colours on that plate. Is he having eels with it? Not today. No eels today. The food of my people.

Then the ritual: turn your pies over. Chilli vinegar, all over the pies, all over the liquor, all over the mash. A dash of salt — apparently a dash of salt.

McCusker loves the idea of eating with only a spoon and a fork, the knife entirely irrelevant. Chris has an English friend who sent him photographs of the classic British breakfast, and his reaction was: ew. Sausage, tomatoes and beans. Bacon, potatoes, eggs — no beans, no tomatoes. It does not look appetising.

Chris will stand on business with the beans. Hard. First thing in the morning? You would be farting all day. McCusker calls that a power move: you have loaded the magazine, and the remainder of the day is yours.

Chris's counter is that the rounds are spent by bedtime. McCusker is the opposite — more of a raccoon in this respect, nocturnal, going all night. It has been four days of it, and he is now at the point of thinking he needs to change something.

Which brings up the sleep-tracking apps that record when you make noise or move. McCusker would love to hear the playback: snoring, rustling, or just straight ripping farts. The app switches the recorder on when the room is silent or ambient, to work out whether you are snoring — or talking in your sleep. He might have to get one, purely to make a compilation.

Missing your own fart while asleep, he says, is like being the child who passed out while waiting for Big Boy: the whole point of eating those beans at night, and you were not even there for it. Your wife got to see it.

Has he ever woken a woman out of sleep by farting in bed? Yes. It is not a good feeling — equal parts shame and pride. Not audio, either: woken by smell. That is devastating. She was in such deep sleep that she forgot, which gave him four days of getting away with it scot-free.

Then the memory came back. He brought it up — you have to remember this, I cannot believe you do not remember this — and she did remember, and said it was gross, and he said yeah, my bad. Chris points out that he confessed to the crime. McCusker says he had to know how she had simply champed it down. In truth he wanted his penance. He could not get away with it. He wanted to atone, but he needed her to remember — and, in part, he wanted her to recognise the power, in case he ever needs to hold it over her.

He turned himself in. It was the behaviour of a man who has killed somebody and cannot live with it — I have to go to the authorities, I have to report it. Chris wants to know what the waking is actually like, from inside: eyes still closed, a groan, groaning into consciousness, a brief oh, and then straight back under. It was the craziest thing he has ever seen. Like arriving in hell and then simply going back to sleep. Genuinely upsetting.

What really got him was the escape. Enormous trouble at the moment of waking, and then up and away scot-free. Days passed. He told everyone, so everyone knew, and finally he had to tell her — he could not carry the fact alone. Though the telling carried a certain pride behind the scenes: look at what I managed to achieve last night.

Chris had assumed he meant by sound, since a sufficiently loud one can wake a room on its own. But this was the slow kind. How many breaths does that take? The first one hits, and then you hope the body will not be hit again on the exhale. A two-breath fart alarm, with a crescendo.

McCusker offers a theory: the amygdala sits close to where smells arrive, so smell and threat are wired together. Which would explain her terror. Woken by a fart alarm and immediately, physiologically, afraid.

From there the conversation swings between the very British and the very American — and nothing is more American than the PBR. Chris went. He saw Shane there. What it is, essentially, is an arena of people hoping somebody gets injured by an animal weighing a few thousand pounds. A very strange sport to watch. Not a massive amount of racial diversity in the audience, and then Nelly played, which offset it somewhat toward the end.

Chris has only ever watched it on television, but he prefers bull riding to bullfighting. Bullfighting seems mean. And it turns out the bulls are pre-stabbed before the fight even begins — shivved before they go out, like that scene in Gladiator. All of them. Poked a couple of times so they are weaker by the time they reach the arena.

The cape is red for a reason nobody tells you. Not because bulls see red and get angry, but to hide the blood as the bull runs past. A white sheet would look horrifying — marked with the stuff. Which makes sense, given the pre-stabbing.

McCusker had believed the red thing his whole life. He has been around bulls a couple of times and always scanned himself first: please let me not be wearing red. Because, in his understanding, they would charge. And in fact one bull lived behind his house.

His father and uncle bought a plot outside Philadelphia when it was still genuinely rural — no sidewalks, nobody out there. Two houses, a bit of land, his cousins next door.

The house behind them was rented to a man with animals: a barn, horses, a raccoon cage, a bull for a while, and — in McCusker's phrase — a great serial-killer collection. The land had been an old apple orchard, but the trees had dried up and only produced crab apples. So he and his cousins would sit up in the branches and shoot the bull with a slingshot, all day long. It got so aggressive that they had to get rid of it. He was nine. They would ping it and it would just shake. Eventually: we have to get rid of that thing. It had PTSD from being hit by crab apples.

Chris reframes it from the bull's side: imagine not understanding physics or gravity, and concluding that the tree is throwing apples at you. That the tree is your mortal enemy, pinging you all day. And these were the good slingshots, the ones with a wrist brace, so you could really rip them back. High-velocity crab apples. Explosion on impact — the bull ended up looking like somebody who had taken a lot of paintballs, marks all over its back.

He is fairly sure they did not simply get rid of it. They taunted it constantly, and it had been good-natured until it wasn't. Which may be why the owner — who, it turns out, was connected to the CEO of the PBR, in the same area — had a bull at all.

At the PBR, McCusker interrogated the CEO relentlessly, in his own description autistically: how does this happen, how are the bulls trained, what is the scoring. He did not know any of it. The man loves bull riding absolutely, and he wrote the rules.

What he had not understood is the pride involved for the owners of the bulls. A bull nobody has ever ridden is a prize — this one is called Ridin' Salty, because you can name them whatever you like. So the sport becomes the best rider in the world against the hardest bull in the world, and they pair them up.

Then there are coaches on the riders' teams who know which way a given bull turns, and put a man who is strong in the clockwise position, or whatever it is — the way you would match fighters, or pick a right-footed player for a flank where the defender is slow to cut in. Squads, training, tactics. McCusker had thought it was a man holding onto a bull. Each city has a team, the home city gets to be in the final, and every rider walks out to his own music.

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McCusker has not done much that is properly Texan, but he did take two-step dance lessons. Chris knows the place. It is run by an old woman, and it takes a lot to astonish McCusker — but she can apparently just grab women's arses. She would call out: come out here and dance with me, young lady.

And then: God, your arse is flatter than cardboard, with a smack. Grabbing and smacking, and any racial material she could throw in to flavour it. Everyone else seemed to find it cute. McCusker sat there feeling transported to the 1950s. There is a level of bigotry that, past a certain age, simply gets a pass.