July 17, 2025 • 24 mins
In 2019, Reggie and his sister Janine went to a high school reunion. It was going great...until it wasn't. Janine had to pull him off the dance floor when she started to see the paranoia and aggression signaling a bipolar episode.
That’s how it was with Reggie: a few hours of him being happy, calm, collected – followed by a steep slide into paranoia and distrust. That’s when Dark Reggie would emerge. And increasingly, Dark Reggie was running the show.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Reggie Payne was well on his way to regaining control
of his life. After a ten days stint at John
George Psychiatric Hospital, Reggie was prescribed meds for the first
time for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The mets helped steady him.
He was experiencing fewer manic episodes and even landed a
job covering local sports for the San Leandro Times, an
(00:24):
independent community newspaper south of Oakland. Reggie and his family
moved out of the Lockwood Village projects and into a
small home in Sacramento. By all accounts, Reggie was, for
the first time in years ascending. He had so improved
that in the summer of twenty nineteen, his sister Janine
thought to invite him to his high school's thirty year reunion.
(00:45):
You heard about Cassimon High School, where Reggie attended in
an earlier episode. It was a rough place, drugs passing
hands in the schoolyards, fist fights in the hallways, but
Reggie thrived there. He became popular through danceho started referring
to himself as Sexy Sweat, became student body president, and
got accepted to Grambling State University. In the halls of Castlemont.
(01:09):
Reggie was a superstar, so in Janine's mind, the reunion
promised a chance to revisit and perhaps recapture some of
that glory. Ian Janin got dressed up and rented a
room at the Marriott in downtown Oakland for the occasion.
The reunion was held at a place called Godfrey's Inner Circle,
an Oakland jazz club in Catering Hall, and as soon
(01:29):
as they walked in, his former classmates fawned all over Reggie.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
And because he hasn't participated in any reunions or anything,
he looked good.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
He got a room downtown Oakland at the Marriotte, and.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Reggie even hit the dance floor, dusting off some of
the old moves that made him a high flying legend
at Castlemont High. But in its snap, things started to
go south. Reggie began imagining there were people at the
gathering who want to hurt him. He became defensive, aggressive.
(02:04):
Why was everyone looking at him? Why was everyone talking
about him? The walls seemed to have eyes. Who were
these people? What did they want from him? A nervous
energy coursed through Reggie.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
And then all of a sudden, the music was playing
and he'd get on the floor and he just starting.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
To get hype, and you could tell, and I could tell.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
I'm like, you know, rage, Let's just, you know, let's
go get some fresh air because he's sweating.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
At this point too.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Janine managed to pull him from the dance floor, but
outside he challenged the events bouncers to a fight, itching
to get into it with them. Finally, Janine had to
drag Reggie away from their reunion and back to their hotel.
The night was over and it was soul crushing. This
Janine realized in the moment was who her big brother
(02:52):
had become. And that's how it was with Reggie. A
few hours of him being happy, calm collected, followed by
steep slide into paranoia and distrust. That's when Dark Reggie
would emerge, and increasingly Dark Reggie was running the show.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
This is Finding Sexy Sweat a podcast where me, Rick
Jervis and my colleague Jeff Pearlman attempt to retrace the
life of our friend and fellow journalists, Reggie Payne to
try to learn how our life paths differed so sharply
and why Reggie met such an untimely death after being
handcuffed on the living room floor of his parents' home
(03:34):
in Sacramento. This is episode five Voices Travel.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
If you think about it, much of journalism boils down
to discovery, or put differently, we writers are responsible for
discovering stuff, details, nuggets, papers stash to long abandoned filing cabinets.
We're a set of revealing documents passed along by a source.
It keeps a job thrilling. We're reporters and we're investigators.
(04:10):
The problem with all of this, however, is sometimes you
discover something you can't unsee, something that disturbs you to
the core, so much so that all you want to
do is turn back in time and pretend to never
crossed your sightline. For me, it involved as a crime
scene from many, many years ago. I was a young
reporter at the Nashville Tennessee and I was stuck on
(04:32):
the cops beat and one of my editors asked me
to go to a nearby apartment complex where shooting had
taken place. And I show up and there's all this
police tape on the door. But I'm just stupid and naive,
and I noticed that the door handle is unlocked, and
I enter the apartment, and I just see blood everywhere
(04:53):
on the walls, on an overturned couchs, I see bullet holes,
and all these years later, like, I can't unsee that stuff.
And I even imagine it at night sometimes, and it's
through the years it haunted me. I hate that. It's
a regret. I just got reprimanded by my editor who said,
what the hell are you doing? And I was like, yeah, sorry,
I'm dumb.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
First time that I went to Baghdad was in two
thousand and four. I was actually working at the Chicago
Tribune at the time, and we did a feature story
in the Green Zone, which, if you recall, was like
the area like in Baghdad where the US embassy was.
It was kind of it was sort of protected. It
was barricaded and they had checkpoints everywhere. But we were
(05:36):
inside of the Green Zone doing a feature story like
on the combat hospital there, when we were in the
middle of an interview and this loud bang went off
and the building shook, and it turns out that there
was a suicide bomber who had detonated at this outdoor
market like right next to us, and we all rushed outside.
The doctors included and since we were at the hospital
(05:59):
there they basically were bringing in all of the people
who got injured on this suicide bombing. The sort of
memory that sticks with me was how unnatural war is,
Like it didn't feel natural to mix explosives and steel
with human bodies. And it's just the state of all
(06:19):
these people who were brought in were just not normal
to me, you know, And it's an image that'll probably
stick with me for like the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, I mean, that's a different level than anything I've experienced.
It's funny because when you make a podcast like this,
you expose yourself to different things, and on a surface level,
I don't think anything can match something like that. But
I feel like we've both been sort of tormented by
the things we've come across in regards to Reggie, you know,
regarding the body camp footage and the stories that we've
(06:52):
been told and the things that he's gone through, and
the exposure we've had to the things we've gone through.
And even though it kind of sounds tripe by comparing,
one thing that I haven't been able to get past
and I haven't been able to unsee is Reggie's Facebook page.
Every now and then after someone dies, I'll go back
to their Facebook page because it's as close as we
(07:13):
have to sing an imprint of who they were, not
just you know, in their best days, but at their worst,
and it's kind of this weirdly frozen in time retelling
of their life. Almost everyone you know who's over eighteen
has a Facebook page, and Reggie was no exception. And
when he died five years ago, his feed went completely dark.
(07:35):
There were no more updates, there were no more posts
from friends, and as we were working on this podcast,
I don't know how we missed it, but no one
mentioned it to us, and his name is so common.
I don't know why, but for some reason I missed
Reggie's Facebook page for a long long time. It just
never came up. And then one day I stumbled on
(07:56):
it and I was like, holy shit, how did I
miss this? And in particular, there are just these videos,
dozens and dozens and dozens of Reggie Pain videos. I
think for both of us it was a sad and
stark reminder that the Reggie Pain we knew in our
younger days was pretty much gone. Finally, Reggie had somehow
(08:23):
found his way back to one of his loves journalism.
He was covering sports for the San Leander Times. He'd
spend ten days at a psychiatric hospital, which had helped
him gain control over his mental state. He was taking
meds to steady his moods. Life seemed to be stabilizing.
His mom, Harriet, looks back at that period with genuine positivity.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
He wouldn't have those episodes we spoke of.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
He was just doing so much better.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
But starting in the early two thousands, Reggie's mental health
again began to unravel. Whatever had initially set him off
at Grambling return earned full force. He grew suspicious of
everybody and everything. The voices in his head multiplied and
grew more insistent. Once, after getting a procedure done on
his left ear at an E and T clinic, Reggie
(09:14):
became convinced that the doctor had secretly planted a device
in his ear canal.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And, as strange as it might sound, as some part
of the problem may have stemmed from his diabetes diagnosis.
Studies have shown the peopot diabetes are a greater risk
of having bipolar disorder and vice versa. So as Reggie
took medication to keep his diabetes under control, his brain
chemistry could have actually been altering, exacerbating his bipolar disorder.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Even as Harriet and the rest of Reggie's families did
all the right things to get him help, checking him
into a psych ward, making sure he had the proper meds,
and driving him to therapy sessions when he got out,
the odds were still stacked against Reggie successfully emerging from
his mental struggles.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
In another study published in twenty nineteen in the journal
Health Services Research, the authors found that though black people
tend to have similar or lower rates of mental disorders
than white people, the disorders tend to be more severe, persistent,
and disabling among black people due to a lack of
affordable healthcare and stigmas surrounding mental disorders, among other reasons.
(10:23):
To be clear, Reggie's family was doing all they could
and then some, but the odds were still trending against them.
His sister Crystal would notice the old Reggie struggle with
the new It's.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Like you're locked in there, so a ya.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
I sometimes I see you want to come out, but
you can't.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So I know.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He struggled with like who I am? And he said
that not like I'm a president, man, I'm a writer.
You can't take that for me, like nobody wants to.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
And Reggie's condition was not showing any clear signs of improving. Suddenly,
the Reggie Pain who dreamt of becoming a famous sports writer,
was whittling away hours on the couch or in his room,
trying to gain control of the dual assault on his
body and mind by diabetes and bipolar disorder. He was
also struggling with hypertension and kidney disease.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Good days were followed by bad days, and then more
bad days. He was taking the vein, the antipsychotic medication
used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but the side
effects were brutal dizziness, blurred vision, and restlessness. As he
struggled through the haze of mental illness and the effects
of multiple psychotropic meds, Reggie turned to jotting down his thoughts.
(11:40):
His memoir, The Harassment of Reginald Paine, is filled with
accounts of his struggles and the voices assaulting his peace.
The Thin Missive was part diary, part memoir, part Reggie
ranting at the void. In its pages, we see that
Reggie believed that someone or something was doing this to him.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Blood my mouth goes as and naturally try to breathe
back and forth in all sincerity. And the crazy part
about it is somebody knows who's doing this, a conspiracist.
Who are you, Reginald Pain? What have you done to
make an entity want to conspire against you? How am
(12:24):
I supposed to believe in America and her dreams when
my own are nightmares? The stuff of Freddy Krueger, A
raspy sounded voice says fuck.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
After moving in with his parents in Sacramento, Reggie hoped
the voices would cease, but they traveled with him. When
we say voices, clearly this means there are multiple. Reggie's
head became a crowded space. There was a female voice
named Jasmine. She pestered him about a Celtic's cap he
was wearing. Another voice, this one male, woke him up
(13:01):
repeatedly by yelling X loudly.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
A few days of peace might follow, but then the
voices inevitably returned. Reggie struggled to separate reality from the
voices in his head. He describes his frustration in chapter
seven of the book, chapter titled Voices Travel.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
No Joy in Mudville. Sadly, the Mighty Casey has struck
out again talking about thanks Reggie. I swear if I
live long enough, I want to meet this person or
person's why why me? What did I do to deserve
this type of harassment?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
It just strikes me as like a special type of hell.
I thought about this. You're him. It's three in the morning,
it's four in the morning, it's five in the morning.
Everyone is sleeping. Everything is dark, and you can't sleep,
which is bad enough, and you have these voices in
your head, but you're not even sure that they're in
your head. You just hear these voices and they sound
as real as if they were coming from the next room,
(14:07):
and they're telling you these crazy things, and you can't
just shut it off. And you can't, you know, most
of us, when we can't sleep all you get up,
you go to the bathroom where you watch TV or
you read a book. But he can't turn it off.
And he's just sitting there in the darkness in his house,
already struggling, his life falling apart, and these voices are
taking him to these really dark and deep places. It's
(14:31):
just an unspeakable place for him to have been in.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
And it's obviously one thing. To have this happen overnight,
during the course of a night, but to have these
voices also spring up during the day. It just has
to sap all of your concentration, all of your focus.
You really can't get anything done.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Besides the book. Reggie's Facebook page Best Documents the Odyssey
Who Is Enduring. If you go to Reggie Payne's Facebook page,
you're greeted by a photograph of Reggie, a green of
Oakland ace cap plopped atop his head. He's wearing yellow
tins glasses, and his look is somewhere between scowl and stare.
His info says he studied journalism and mass communication at
(15:11):
Grambling State University. He's a native of Oakland, and then
he went to Caslemont High Next to that, alongside a
smiley faced emoji crowned by a halo, Reggie wrote, feeling blessed.
Reggie was intent on displaying his darkest moments. He started
his page in twenty seventeen, and through the years he
took selfies, hundreds of selfies. In a few he's smiling,
(15:35):
but usually his expression is serious, sullen. It's almost like
a look of vacant indifference. It's Reggie and a Saint
Louis Rams cap staring straight ahead. It's Reggie wearing a
marijuana leaf bandana, also staring straight ahead. Reggie in a
Portland Chrailblazer's jersey, staring straight ahead. He seems neither happy
(15:55):
nor sad. He's just there, kind of vacant, and.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
What he wrote on Facebook didn't really reveal much about
what was going on. November twenty fourth, twenty nineteen, Happy
Sunday from Sacramento. December twenty fourth, twenty nineteen. What's crazy
is I had more trouble with a car than without
January fifth, twenty twenty, Big ass Feet, January twenty eighth,
twenty twenty, I must be bored. And another one from
(16:22):
twenty eighteen. He wrote simply fuck Twitter on and on
Mundane top of the head stuff. But the videos, yeah,
no kidding. The videos. Between June twenty eighth, twenty seventeen
and January twenty ninth, twenty twenty, Reggie posted thirty four videos.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Calm the fuck down, Calm who the fuck down? Neither
if you don't comb your hands.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Down and think.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Some are of him smoking a blunt while listening to music.
His stepfather Rufus said weed would calm his moods, but
his sisters started amped him up. Either way, he was
self medicating.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
There are videos of him shirtless, nearly all of them
sad and disturbing and haunting. They show in the most
visceral of ways what he was experiencing inside is increasingly
broken and wayward mind.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
For example, here's Reggie on June twenty ninth, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Shit usually Olia ain't crazy, Oldia Ellison.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Grammy in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
And on July fourteenth, twenty seventeen, why are you hate
on me?
Speaker 5 (17:50):
Stop heighten there?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Because of that, guys, they go all the bad people.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Got to go to all of the bare people.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
His last ever Facebook video, posted January twenty ninth, twenty twenty,
is the most haunting to me. It's less than a
month before his death, and Reggie, wearing a black shirt
and a Gilligan style bucket hat, whispers into the camera
while lighting up a joint. There's no rhyme or reason
to it. You'd almost chalk it up as an accident.
(18:23):
Only Reggie is staring directly into the camera.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Isn't me?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Or is it too?
Speaker 1 (18:31):
To the quiet?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Whyet in this motherfucker, yo, some high feeling man. Isn't
me worse?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Why this fuck?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
It might be hard to make out the audio, but
Reggie starts at by asking is it me? Or is
it too damn quiet? And then he later asked, someone's
feeling me? Is it me? And there's something really haunting
about that, just really haunting.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
It's a very clear snapshot of who Reggie was post diagnosis.
He's obviously a tortured man, desperate to express himself, but
unsure what to say or how to say it. As
his condition worsened, his family barely recognized him.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I'm like, no, that's not Reggie.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Here's his mother, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I talk to my son every day. You know that's
not him. But like I said, I try to hold out.
We can fix this, but then I see, no.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Something's not right. The long is.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
By twenty eighteen, Reggie was rarely leaving his house. The
majority of his days and nights were spent inside his room,
watching YouTube videos, scanning social media, following his sports teams.
His family members did their best to encourage him and
to support him, to keep him on his meds, hoping
he'd find meaning and joy in life, but it was
(20:19):
hard their son, their brother, Reggie, was broken.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
By twenty twenty, the family fell into a routine with Reggie,
wake up, Hope Reggie got some sleep and was in
a good place, but steal themselves for the very real
possibility that Reggie would be in a bad place, that
dark Reggie would greet them, ranting against an unseen enemy
or cursing the voices in his head. Once he was up,
(20:48):
then Reggie would eat, they'd go to the store, refill
his meds, drive him to dialysis, drive him to therapy.
When someone is consumed by something like bipolar in schizophrenia,
it becomes increasingly hard to remember who they were before
it all spiraled. Reggie as a child, Reggie as a
(21:09):
grambling undergrad. Those memories faded, and what was left was
Reggie approaching fifty, a middle aged man with seemingly little
to look forward to and very little left to lose.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
What do you think were to happen if we actually
met Reggie like you'd been thirty years past, and whatever.
We go to Oakland, or we go to Sacramento, and
we have lunch with the Reggie, but he's not the
Reggie we remember. He's not sexy sweat. He's not dropping
a bank's lyrics, and he's not happy and joyful and
living his life, but he's dark. Reggie, Like, how do
(21:43):
you think that would have impacted you?
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I like to think that
we would have met him and kind of re sparked
all of these old, sort of familiar feelings with him.
And I'm sure that there'd be a part of the
old Reggie which we could recognize in new Reggie. I
feel like we would have sensed his mental anguish. Would
we have then kept in touch? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
I'm gonna be one hundred percent real, and I hate
it even sounding this way because it's gonna make me
sound like a jackass. I could see coming away from
a lunch with Reggie, returning home and being like, what
the hell was that?
Speaker 5 (22:20):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Like, maybe you're better honestly, god Rick, maybe you're a
better person me. I could definitely see returning from lunch
with Reggie in his dark place and being more confused
than empathetic. Again, Now, how can I help this guy?
I don't know. I don't think in my life I
have known anyone. I've probably known people were bipolar but
(22:42):
I don't think I've known people personally up close who
I've dealt with who suffered from bipolar disorder. So I
don't even know if I was sitting with him, if
I recognize what it was, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Would you probably not. I think what likely happened is
that we walk away thinking, man, that's just that's not
the same Reggie which I remember. But we might not
be able to even recognize it, to be honest, as
a mental disorder. The fact is we're never gonna have
lunch with Reggie. Because one day in February of twenty twenty,
(23:16):
Reggie Pain's diabetes flared up. He became hypoglycemic, his blood
sugar dropped rapidly, it crashed, and his mother called nine
one one for help.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Next time I'm finding sexy sweat, I'm calling because my
son is a hilarious I think his blood sugars are wet.
Let me get let me get medical help on the phone.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
But they had him down, handcuffed, legs up, shackle, all
of that.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
No, he burned the available sugar that he had fighting,
so now he just knotted out.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
You're there to help my son, thanking you, But then
I see my son's not moving.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
You're dead. The only reason someone's wailing on your chest
is because your heart no longer is moving, that life
giving fluid of blood through your body, carrying oxygen to yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Finding Sexy Sweat is a production of School of Humans
and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was reported, written and hosted
by Jeff Perrolman and Rick Jervis. It was produced by
Gabby Watts with production support from Etily's Perez Zaron Burnett is.
Our story editor jess Niswanger scored and mixed this episode.
George Washington, the Third read the excerpts from the Harassment
(24:39):
of Reginald DPA. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
and Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and
you can follow along with the show on Instagram at
School of Humans
Reggie Payne was well on his way to regaining control
of his life. After a ten days stint at John
George Psychiatric Hospital, Reggie was prescribed meds for the first
time for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The mets helped steady him.
He was experiencing fewer manic episodes and even landed a
job covering local sports for the San Leandro Times, an
(00:24):
independent community newspaper south of Oakland. Reggie and his family
moved out of the Lockwood Village projects and into a
small home in Sacramento. By all accounts, Reggie was, for
the first time in years ascending. He had so improved
that in the summer of twenty nineteen, his sister Janine
thought to invite him to his high school's thirty year reunion.
(00:45):
You heard about Cassimon High School, where Reggie attended in
an earlier episode. It was a rough place, drugs passing
hands in the schoolyards, fist fights in the hallways, but
Reggie thrived there. He became popular through danceho started referring
to himself as Sexy Sweat, became student body president, and
got accepted to Grambling State University. In the halls of Castlemont.
(01:09):
Reggie was a superstar, so in Janine's mind, the reunion
promised a chance to revisit and perhaps recapture some of
that glory. Ian Janin got dressed up and rented a
room at the Marriott in downtown Oakland for the occasion.
The reunion was held at a place called Godfrey's Inner Circle,
an Oakland jazz club in Catering Hall, and as soon
(01:29):
as they walked in, his former classmates fawned all over Reggie.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
And because he hasn't participated in any reunions or anything,
he looked good.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
He got a room downtown Oakland at the Marriotte, and.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Reggie even hit the dance floor, dusting off some of
the old moves that made him a high flying legend
at Castlemont High. But in its snap, things started to
go south. Reggie began imagining there were people at the
gathering who want to hurt him. He became defensive, aggressive.
(02:04):
Why was everyone looking at him? Why was everyone talking
about him? The walls seemed to have eyes. Who were
these people? What did they want from him? A nervous
energy coursed through Reggie.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
And then all of a sudden, the music was playing
and he'd get on the floor and he just starting.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
To get hype, and you could tell, and I could tell.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
I'm like, you know, rage, Let's just, you know, let's
go get some fresh air because he's sweating.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
At this point too.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Janine managed to pull him from the dance floor, but
outside he challenged the events bouncers to a fight, itching
to get into it with them. Finally, Janine had to
drag Reggie away from their reunion and back to their hotel.
The night was over and it was soul crushing. This
Janine realized in the moment was who her big brother
(02:52):
had become. And that's how it was with Reggie. A
few hours of him being happy, calm collected, followed by
steep slide into paranoia and distrust. That's when Dark Reggie
would emerge, and increasingly Dark Reggie was running the show.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
This is Finding Sexy Sweat a podcast where me, Rick
Jervis and my colleague Jeff Pearlman attempt to retrace the
life of our friend and fellow journalists, Reggie Payne to
try to learn how our life paths differed so sharply
and why Reggie met such an untimely death after being
handcuffed on the living room floor of his parents' home
(03:34):
in Sacramento. This is episode five Voices Travel.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
If you think about it, much of journalism boils down
to discovery, or put differently, we writers are responsible for
discovering stuff, details, nuggets, papers stash to long abandoned filing cabinets.
We're a set of revealing documents passed along by a source.
It keeps a job thrilling. We're reporters and we're investigators.
(04:10):
The problem with all of this, however, is sometimes you
discover something you can't unsee, something that disturbs you to
the core, so much so that all you want to
do is turn back in time and pretend to never
crossed your sightline. For me, it involved as a crime
scene from many, many years ago. I was a young
reporter at the Nashville Tennessee and I was stuck on
(04:32):
the cops beat and one of my editors asked me
to go to a nearby apartment complex where shooting had
taken place. And I show up and there's all this
police tape on the door. But I'm just stupid and naive,
and I noticed that the door handle is unlocked, and
I enter the apartment, and I just see blood everywhere
(04:53):
on the walls, on an overturned couchs, I see bullet holes,
and all these years later, like, I can't unsee that stuff.
And I even imagine it at night sometimes, and it's
through the years it haunted me. I hate that. It's
a regret. I just got reprimanded by my editor who said,
what the hell are you doing? And I was like, yeah, sorry,
I'm dumb.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
First time that I went to Baghdad was in two
thousand and four. I was actually working at the Chicago
Tribune at the time, and we did a feature story
in the Green Zone, which, if you recall, was like
the area like in Baghdad where the US embassy was.
It was kind of it was sort of protected. It
was barricaded and they had checkpoints everywhere. But we were
(05:36):
inside of the Green Zone doing a feature story like
on the combat hospital there, when we were in the
middle of an interview and this loud bang went off
and the building shook, and it turns out that there
was a suicide bomber who had detonated at this outdoor
market like right next to us, and we all rushed outside.
The doctors included and since we were at the hospital
(05:59):
there they basically were bringing in all of the people
who got injured on this suicide bombing. The sort of
memory that sticks with me was how unnatural war is,
Like it didn't feel natural to mix explosives and steel
with human bodies. And it's just the state of all
(06:19):
these people who were brought in were just not normal
to me, you know, And it's an image that'll probably
stick with me for like the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, I mean, that's a different level than anything I've experienced.
It's funny because when you make a podcast like this,
you expose yourself to different things, and on a surface level,
I don't think anything can match something like that. But
I feel like we've both been sort of tormented by
the things we've come across in regards to Reggie, you know,
regarding the body camp footage and the stories that we've
(06:52):
been told and the things that he's gone through, and
the exposure we've had to the things we've gone through.
And even though it kind of sounds tripe by comparing,
one thing that I haven't been able to get past
and I haven't been able to unsee is Reggie's Facebook page.
Every now and then after someone dies, I'll go back
to their Facebook page because it's as close as we
(07:13):
have to sing an imprint of who they were, not
just you know, in their best days, but at their worst,
and it's kind of this weirdly frozen in time retelling
of their life. Almost everyone you know who's over eighteen
has a Facebook page, and Reggie was no exception. And
when he died five years ago, his feed went completely dark.
(07:35):
There were no more updates, there were no more posts
from friends, and as we were working on this podcast,
I don't know how we missed it, but no one
mentioned it to us, and his name is so common.
I don't know why, but for some reason I missed
Reggie's Facebook page for a long long time. It just
never came up. And then one day I stumbled on
(07:56):
it and I was like, holy shit, how did I
miss this? And in particular, there are just these videos,
dozens and dozens and dozens of Reggie Pain videos. I
think for both of us it was a sad and
stark reminder that the Reggie Pain we knew in our
younger days was pretty much gone. Finally, Reggie had somehow
(08:23):
found his way back to one of his loves journalism.
He was covering sports for the San Leander Times. He'd
spend ten days at a psychiatric hospital, which had helped
him gain control over his mental state. He was taking
meds to steady his moods. Life seemed to be stabilizing.
His mom, Harriet, looks back at that period with genuine positivity.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
He wouldn't have those episodes we spoke of.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
He was just doing so much better.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
But starting in the early two thousands, Reggie's mental health
again began to unravel. Whatever had initially set him off
at Grambling return earned full force. He grew suspicious of
everybody and everything. The voices in his head multiplied and
grew more insistent. Once, after getting a procedure done on
his left ear at an E and T clinic, Reggie
(09:14):
became convinced that the doctor had secretly planted a device
in his ear canal.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And, as strange as it might sound, as some part
of the problem may have stemmed from his diabetes diagnosis.
Studies have shown the peopot diabetes are a greater risk
of having bipolar disorder and vice versa. So as Reggie
took medication to keep his diabetes under control, his brain
chemistry could have actually been altering, exacerbating his bipolar disorder.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Even as Harriet and the rest of Reggie's families did
all the right things to get him help, checking him
into a psych ward, making sure he had the proper meds,
and driving him to therapy sessions when he got out,
the odds were still stacked against Reggie successfully emerging from
his mental struggles.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
In another study published in twenty nineteen in the journal
Health Services Research, the authors found that though black people
tend to have similar or lower rates of mental disorders
than white people, the disorders tend to be more severe, persistent,
and disabling among black people due to a lack of
affordable healthcare and stigmas surrounding mental disorders, among other reasons.
(10:23):
To be clear, Reggie's family was doing all they could
and then some, but the odds were still trending against them.
His sister Crystal would notice the old Reggie struggle with
the new It's.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Like you're locked in there, so a ya.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
I sometimes I see you want to come out, but
you can't.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So I know.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He struggled with like who I am? And he said
that not like I'm a president, man, I'm a writer.
You can't take that for me, like nobody wants to.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
And Reggie's condition was not showing any clear signs of improving. Suddenly,
the Reggie Pain who dreamt of becoming a famous sports writer,
was whittling away hours on the couch or in his room,
trying to gain control of the dual assault on his
body and mind by diabetes and bipolar disorder. He was
also struggling with hypertension and kidney disease.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Good days were followed by bad days, and then more
bad days. He was taking the vein, the antipsychotic medication
used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but the side
effects were brutal dizziness, blurred vision, and restlessness. As he
struggled through the haze of mental illness and the effects
of multiple psychotropic meds, Reggie turned to jotting down his thoughts.
(11:40):
His memoir, The Harassment of Reginald Paine, is filled with
accounts of his struggles and the voices assaulting his peace.
The Thin Missive was part diary, part memoir, part Reggie
ranting at the void. In its pages, we see that
Reggie believed that someone or something was doing this to him.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Blood my mouth goes as and naturally try to breathe
back and forth in all sincerity. And the crazy part
about it is somebody knows who's doing this, a conspiracist.
Who are you, Reginald Pain? What have you done to
make an entity want to conspire against you? How am
(12:24):
I supposed to believe in America and her dreams when
my own are nightmares? The stuff of Freddy Krueger, A
raspy sounded voice says fuck.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
After moving in with his parents in Sacramento, Reggie hoped
the voices would cease, but they traveled with him. When
we say voices, clearly this means there are multiple. Reggie's
head became a crowded space. There was a female voice
named Jasmine. She pestered him about a Celtic's cap he
was wearing. Another voice, this one male, woke him up
(13:01):
repeatedly by yelling X loudly.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
A few days of peace might follow, but then the
voices inevitably returned. Reggie struggled to separate reality from the
voices in his head. He describes his frustration in chapter
seven of the book, chapter titled Voices Travel.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
No Joy in Mudville. Sadly, the Mighty Casey has struck
out again talking about thanks Reggie. I swear if I
live long enough, I want to meet this person or
person's why why me? What did I do to deserve
this type of harassment?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
It just strikes me as like a special type of hell.
I thought about this. You're him. It's three in the morning,
it's four in the morning, it's five in the morning.
Everyone is sleeping. Everything is dark, and you can't sleep,
which is bad enough, and you have these voices in
your head, but you're not even sure that they're in
your head. You just hear these voices and they sound
as real as if they were coming from the next room,
(14:07):
and they're telling you these crazy things, and you can't
just shut it off. And you can't, you know, most
of us, when we can't sleep all you get up,
you go to the bathroom where you watch TV or
you read a book. But he can't turn it off.
And he's just sitting there in the darkness in his house,
already struggling, his life falling apart, and these voices are
taking him to these really dark and deep places. It's
(14:31):
just an unspeakable place for him to have been in.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
And it's obviously one thing. To have this happen overnight,
during the course of a night, but to have these
voices also spring up during the day. It just has
to sap all of your concentration, all of your focus.
You really can't get anything done.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Besides the book. Reggie's Facebook page Best Documents the Odyssey
Who Is Enduring. If you go to Reggie Payne's Facebook page,
you're greeted by a photograph of Reggie, a green of
Oakland ace cap plopped atop his head. He's wearing yellow
tins glasses, and his look is somewhere between scowl and stare.
His info says he studied journalism and mass communication at
(15:11):
Grambling State University. He's a native of Oakland, and then
he went to Caslemont High Next to that, alongside a
smiley faced emoji crowned by a halo, Reggie wrote, feeling blessed.
Reggie was intent on displaying his darkest moments. He started
his page in twenty seventeen, and through the years he
took selfies, hundreds of selfies. In a few he's smiling,
(15:35):
but usually his expression is serious, sullen. It's almost like
a look of vacant indifference. It's Reggie and a Saint
Louis Rams cap staring straight ahead. It's Reggie wearing a
marijuana leaf bandana, also staring straight ahead. Reggie in a
Portland Chrailblazer's jersey, staring straight ahead. He seems neither happy
(15:55):
nor sad. He's just there, kind of vacant, and.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
What he wrote on Facebook didn't really reveal much about
what was going on. November twenty fourth, twenty nineteen, Happy
Sunday from Sacramento. December twenty fourth, twenty nineteen. What's crazy
is I had more trouble with a car than without
January fifth, twenty twenty, Big ass Feet, January twenty eighth,
twenty twenty, I must be bored. And another one from
(16:22):
twenty eighteen. He wrote simply fuck Twitter on and on
Mundane top of the head stuff. But the videos, yeah,
no kidding. The videos. Between June twenty eighth, twenty seventeen
and January twenty ninth, twenty twenty, Reggie posted thirty four videos.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Calm the fuck down, Calm who the fuck down? Neither
if you don't comb your hands.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Down and think.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Some are of him smoking a blunt while listening to music.
His stepfather Rufus said weed would calm his moods, but
his sisters started amped him up. Either way, he was
self medicating.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
There are videos of him shirtless, nearly all of them
sad and disturbing and haunting. They show in the most
visceral of ways what he was experiencing inside is increasingly
broken and wayward mind.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
For example, here's Reggie on June twenty ninth, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Shit usually Olia ain't crazy, Oldia Ellison.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Grammy in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
And on July fourteenth, twenty seventeen, why are you hate
on me?
Speaker 5 (17:50):
Stop heighten there?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Because of that, guys, they go all the bad people.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Got to go to all of the bare people.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
His last ever Facebook video, posted January twenty ninth, twenty twenty,
is the most haunting to me. It's less than a
month before his death, and Reggie, wearing a black shirt
and a Gilligan style bucket hat, whispers into the camera
while lighting up a joint. There's no rhyme or reason
to it. You'd almost chalk it up as an accident.
(18:23):
Only Reggie is staring directly into the camera.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Isn't me?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Or is it too?
Speaker 1 (18:31):
To the quiet?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Whyet in this motherfucker, yo, some high feeling man. Isn't
me worse?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Why this fuck?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
It might be hard to make out the audio, but
Reggie starts at by asking is it me? Or is
it too damn quiet? And then he later asked, someone's
feeling me? Is it me? And there's something really haunting
about that, just really haunting.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
It's a very clear snapshot of who Reggie was post diagnosis.
He's obviously a tortured man, desperate to express himself, but
unsure what to say or how to say it. As
his condition worsened, his family barely recognized him.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I'm like, no, that's not Reggie.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Here's his mother, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
I talk to my son every day. You know that's
not him. But like I said, I try to hold out.
We can fix this, but then I see, no.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Something's not right. The long is.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
By twenty eighteen, Reggie was rarely leaving his house. The
majority of his days and nights were spent inside his room,
watching YouTube videos, scanning social media, following his sports teams.
His family members did their best to encourage him and
to support him, to keep him on his meds, hoping
he'd find meaning and joy in life, but it was
(20:19):
hard their son, their brother, Reggie, was broken.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
By twenty twenty, the family fell into a routine with Reggie,
wake up, Hope Reggie got some sleep and was in
a good place, but steal themselves for the very real
possibility that Reggie would be in a bad place, that
dark Reggie would greet them, ranting against an unseen enemy
or cursing the voices in his head. Once he was up,
(20:48):
then Reggie would eat, they'd go to the store, refill
his meds, drive him to dialysis, drive him to therapy.
When someone is consumed by something like bipolar in schizophrenia,
it becomes increasingly hard to remember who they were before
it all spiraled. Reggie as a child, Reggie as a
(21:09):
grambling undergrad. Those memories faded, and what was left was
Reggie approaching fifty, a middle aged man with seemingly little
to look forward to and very little left to lose.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
What do you think were to happen if we actually
met Reggie like you'd been thirty years past, and whatever.
We go to Oakland, or we go to Sacramento, and
we have lunch with the Reggie, but he's not the
Reggie we remember. He's not sexy sweat. He's not dropping
a bank's lyrics, and he's not happy and joyful and
living his life, but he's dark. Reggie, Like, how do
(21:43):
you think that would have impacted you?
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I like to think that
we would have met him and kind of re sparked
all of these old, sort of familiar feelings with him.
And I'm sure that there'd be a part of the
old Reggie which we could recognize in new Reggie. I
feel like we would have sensed his mental anguish. Would
we have then kept in touch? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
I'm gonna be one hundred percent real, and I hate
it even sounding this way because it's gonna make me
sound like a jackass. I could see coming away from
a lunch with Reggie, returning home and being like, what
the hell was that?
Speaker 5 (22:20):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Like, maybe you're better honestly, god Rick, maybe you're a
better person me. I could definitely see returning from lunch
with Reggie in his dark place and being more confused
than empathetic. Again, Now, how can I help this guy?
I don't know. I don't think in my life I
have known anyone. I've probably known people were bipolar but
(22:42):
I don't think I've known people personally up close who
I've dealt with who suffered from bipolar disorder. So I
don't even know if I was sitting with him, if
I recognize what it was, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Would you probably not. I think what likely happened is
that we walk away thinking, man, that's just that's not
the same Reggie which I remember. But we might not
be able to even recognize it, to be honest, as
a mental disorder. The fact is we're never gonna have
lunch with Reggie. Because one day in February of twenty twenty,
(23:16):
Reggie Pain's diabetes flared up. He became hypoglycemic, his blood
sugar dropped rapidly, it crashed, and his mother called nine
one one for help.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Next time I'm finding sexy sweat, I'm calling because my
son is a hilarious I think his blood sugars are wet.
Let me get let me get medical help on the phone.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
But they had him down, handcuffed, legs up, shackle, all
of that.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
No, he burned the available sugar that he had fighting,
so now he just knotted out.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
You're there to help my son, thanking you, But then
I see my son's not moving.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
You're dead. The only reason someone's wailing on your chest
is because your heart no longer is moving, that life
giving fluid of blood through your body, carrying oxygen to yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Finding Sexy Sweat is a production of School of Humans
and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was reported, written and hosted
by Jeff Perrolman and Rick Jervis. It was produced by
Gabby Watts with production support from Etily's Perez Zaron Burnett is.
Our story editor jess Niswanger scored and mixed this episode.
George Washington, the Third read the excerpts from the Harassment
(24:39):
of Reginald DPA. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
and Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and
you can follow along with the show on Instagram at
School of Humans
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.