by Karen Piper
They were high school sweethearts, destined for each other like an arranged marriage. Good families, same church, same ideals, same career plans. I could predict the rest of their lives. Doug had been my ticket out of that sameness, the trap of Ridgecrest, but now he had ripped up the ticket. There was no trust fund, only soap, and now he said he wanted me to sell it for him. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, I kept thinking. What had I done? Dream houses? The Department of Defense, which we called the DoD, always taught me to be frugal and nonmaterialistic like Jesus or my Depression-era parents. We were not supposed to waste taxpayer money. Amway wanted the opposite. What was I supposed to do now?
I already had the ring.
Like every teenage couple that year, Doug and I thought we were in Diana Ross’s “Endless Love.” Star-crossed lovers, living in sin, virgin with nonvirgin. In reality, we were on our way to becoming Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Perhaps it was fitting that, at the end of my freshman year, my dorm mates had given me the Most Gullible Award, a framed certificate with a ditzy-looking lion lounging by a pool with a cocktail in the background. I was supposed to be that lion. Only now did I feel I deserved it. I had thought that life would be more authentic, more certain, outside the socially engineered world of China Lake and ICS. I had thought I was finally outside the cage and in the “real” world, but I had merely run straight into another cult. I had felt afloat outside of China Lake, swimming in a sea of senses, and had latched on to a lifeguard to keep me from drowning.
But now he was pulling me down too.
Chapter Sixteen
“Universities Teach Poverty”
Before I knew that Doug was in Amway, I had been ready to give up everything and follow him. I even failed my final exam in sophomore sociology because, as Doug always said, “universities teach poverty.” I did not realize that this was an Amway line. The professor had asked a question about Karl Marx, whom I had refused to read. I knew Marx taught poverty, or communism. He did not have a dream, or money, like Doug. They were trying to brainwash me. “How do you tell a communist?” Reagan had said. “Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin.” Unwilling to succumb to the teachings of the Evil Empire, I simply handed my exam to my professor on the way out the door. I told everyone I was moving to Colorado. Who needed school? I believed in trickle-down, in Reagan.
Doug approved. “Right is right,” he said.
At Doug’s recommendation, I had already gone to work at a Christian dude ranch in Colorado at the end of my freshman year. There, I was supposed to learn how to co-manage the same kind of ranch with Doug outside Grand Junction. That was his dream. I told the dude ranch owner’s wife I was there only to learn how to run a ranch. I would soon be building one, I said, with my fiancé in the Uncompahgre National Forest. “It’s going to be a million acres,” I announced. “What do you recommend I learn first?”
“Well, you need a lot of money first,” she said, looking at me oddly.
“That’s okay,” I replied. “My boyfriend is rich.”
They assigned me to cleaning the toilets.
Now what was I supposed to do? Amway had sabotaged my college career. I had a D in sociology and so had lost my scholarship for the following year. Nevertheless, I stayed with Doug that last semester of my sophomore year and tried to make Amway, and my life, work. I was already engaged, and Amway sounded like “trickle-down” to me. Reagan even spoke at Amway rallies. So I got a job at Ben & Jerry’s scooping ice cream while I tried to learn “the business” and finish the school year.
Ben & Jerry’s was my back-up plan.
Doug immediately inundated me with “motivational tapes” to listen to on the freeway. “You really have to listen to them all the time for them to work,” he explained. I promised I would. On one of them, Amway legend Bill Britt said that all you had to do was “work the numbers” to succeed. In his preacher’s voice, he explained, “I simply showed the plan to twelve hundred people. Nine hundred said ‘No,’ and three hundred signed up. Out of those three hundred, only eighty-five did anything at all. Out of those eighty-five, only thirty-five were serious, and out of those thirty-five, eleven made me a millionaire.”
But as much as I listened, I only got to the number two: my parents bought soap.
I only tried to sell “the business” once, in Ridgecrest, where Lorinda and a couple of my sister’s friends listened politely, sitting on card table chairs in the piano room. They stared at me as if I were a cute poodle performing tricks. Nevertheless, I did my best to draw circles on Doug’s $200 whiteboard, which you had to buy from Amway. As with Mr. Porter, no one seemed to have a dream, so I started describing my “dream house”—a two-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows on a lake in the Uncompahgre. It would have sixteen rooms. My mom interrupted. “A house that big would be very hard to clean,” she said. “Are you sure you want one that big?”
I ignored her, stating that I would also have a Lamborghini. My mom turned to my dad and said loudly, “No point spending a lot of money on a car if the gas mileage is no good. Remember those gas lines ten years ago?”
“I can hear you, Mom!” I complained.
In the end, no one signed up besides my parents, and only because they felt sorry for me. I knew from the motivational tapes that you had to “believe” or it would not work, and even I did not believe what I was saying. So I quit.
Soon after that, I found out that Doug had only one person “under” him, his roommate, Harold, who was from North Dakota and looked like a farm boy in a dirty magazine. He wanted to be a model or movie star so was always worried about whether his nose was too big or too small rather than about his grades at Cal Baptist. He also thought his hair was too curly and his eyes were too wide, so to compensate, he left his eyes uncovered in the tanning booth to be sure his eyelids got tanned. We had to take him to the emergency room when his eyes started bleeding in the middle of the night.
Though we were all the same age, Doug and I were like his parents, as well as his Amway “sponsors.” When it seemed clear that I was a failure at selling Amway, Doug gave me the job of “motivating” Harold instead, though I was hardly motivated once I found out there were no houses in St. John or ranches in Colorado. Mostly, Harold and I sat on the couch and watched TV. We were the Amway defectors.
One day, Harold sat down next to me, leaned close, and whispered, “You know, you don’t have to get married if you don’t want to.” I looked down at my hands, which began to fidget until I could not control them. I burst out in tears, then sobs, everything collapsing into emptiness.
“How did I get here?” I sputtered. “How, how, how?”
Gently, Harold put his arm around me, pulling me close and leaning his head on mine until, as if suddenly changing his mind, he jumped up off the couch and ran to the kitchen. “I know the cure for this!” he said when he came back, carrying an apple wine cooler like a precious jewel. It twinkled a lovely light greenish blue in the sunlight. I had never tasted alcohol before.
“Now, you have to drink it really fast for it to work,” he explained. I followed his instructions and soon started to feel warm and relaxed. In the background, Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” was playing on the radio. I giggled, singing along, “Baby, I’m hot just like a bla bla bla.” I did not know all the words.
“I want sexual healing,” we both shouted at the chorus. Then Harold stood up, pulling me up to dance, which he was good at because he practiced in front of his mirror. Baptists were not allowed to dance, drink, listen to rock music, or have sex. Yet here I was, breaking the first three rules all at once.
“I can’t dance!” I laughed, pulling back.
“Just hold on to me,” he insisted, and drew me into the living room, closer to the music. “We’ll just slow dance.” So I stood up next to him and swayed, noticing how tall he was�
��more than six feet, taller than Doug.
“Sexual healing, baby,” he sang quietly. Suddenly, I realized I did not want to give up these three things—the rules I had just broken—in order to be “barefoot and pregnant.”
“I’m marrying a cop,” I whispered. “I’m going to have little cop children.”
Harold laughed and leaned close. “You don’t have to get married,” he whispered in my ear. It felt like an opioid to me, as though we were on the verge of a mutiny, losing the wars on drugs. We both knew the trouble this could cause yet stood there with Harold’s legs against mine, pushing rhythmically, pulling me closer. I closed my eyes, giddy with the wine cooler and his soft silk shirt.
We knew Doug would be gone all night.
* * *
—
The next day, Doug must have known something was wrong because he insisted we go to an Amway rally. Harold looked reluctant. “Uh, see, Doug,” he almost stuttered, “I have an audition in Hollywood this weekend.” He never had auditions. Doug looked suspicious, then brightened up.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, babe,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. I knew that according to Amway, you were supposed to go to a rally every three months to stay motivated.
This particular one was held in a stadium-sized auditorium with an American flag–covered table on the stage. Amway superstar Dexter Yager’s wife took the stage first to introduce her husband. “When I look at him, I see Jesus,” Birdie said with a gleaming face. “I want you to listen to him—I know that you’ll see Jesus too.” People cheered as Dex walked in, while I wondered how Birdie could get away with saying such a thing when the Beatles could not. All my mother ever remembered about them was that they said they were more popular than Jesus. Dex looked like a Harley rider or Hells Angel to me, with a long graying beard, receding hairline, beer belly, and American flag baseball cap.
I did not see Jesus.
Dex was an “upline,” which meant he was above us in Amway. Only Amway founder Richard “Dick” DeVos was higher than Dex Yager. Dick was one of the wealthiest men in America, a fortune he would pass on to his son, Dick, Jr. His daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, would one day become U.S. Secretary of Education and push for funding schools that use Accelerated Christian Education in order to, as she said, “advance God’s Kingdom.”
On stage, Birdie was saying that being loyal to your upline was like being loyal to your husband, your children, or God. She seemed sure that Jesus was right in that room, but all I could think about at that moment was Marvin Gaye.
“Are you guys tired?” Dex yelled. “Do you want to give up, or are you going to get up? Get up! Get up!”
“Let’s make love tonight,” I sang in a whisper as the crowd of ten thousand cheered, stamping their feet on the bleachers in unison.
“Read the story of Moses,” Dex continued. “God kept saying, ‘You’re my man, pick up the rod.’ And Moses kept saying, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’ I’m telling you today to pick up the rod. Your rod is a Magic Marker . . . and you’re gonna start leading them people into the Promised Land.” He was talking about drawing circles, but I wondered if our whole board would ever get covered in circles. We only had Harold, whom I had just kissed, making the circles a mess.
Dex switched to talking about Jesus, calling him the very first Amway salesman. What about Moses? I thought. I knew enough about metaphors by then to know that they were mixing them.
“There’s one, two thousand years ago, that sponsored twelve,” Dex said. “The first one recorded in the history of the world. Someone said, ‘I don’t want to hear that.’ Well, get a job. You won’t hear it. Be broke, you don’t need to hear it. He sponsored twelve, he discipled twelve. Isn’t that what our business is really all about?” People stood and lifted their hands, grabbing a neighbor’s hand above their heads. Reluctantly, I took the hand next to mine. My hand swayed, crushed inside another, in the air.
“O Lord,” Dex was praying, “let us now renew our commitment to You, to serve the way that we know is Right.”
“Amen, amen,” people in the crowd chanted, becoming more excited.
I could not help thinking of Harold grinding up against me. Doug was straight and commanding and did not believe in dancing. Harold moved in a way that Doug never could, his whole body yielded to mine. His right leg would gently pull back when mine came forward. His arms would pull me closer only if I had moved into him. Every movement I made seemed to make his body move too.
“And Right is Right, we know that, Lord. Remember, that’s how we vote!”
“Amen!” The crowed began whistling and “woo-hoo-ing.” Someone close to me began to cry. I glared at Doug, wanting this to end, but sometimes these meetings went until three in the morning.
There were rumors that Ronald Reagan would be at this rally, since he had been at other Amway rallies during his campaign for governor. I waited for him to come out, wondering what he would say. Sometimes the Amway men sounded a bit like him. They said things like “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” (Reagan said that.) Or “It’s easy for gals to be submissive to a man that’s a man, not a wimp and a whiner.” (Amway said that.) Everyone in Amway thought Reagan was God, but Amway was having the inverse effect on me.
It was making me doubt Reagan.
“We come forward now to renew our commitment to building our families, our country, and our business as a place to celebrate You. We thank You for the freedom to do so,” Dex concluded right when Dick DeVos stepped out on the stage. People started screaming. Dick was a Diamond, above even Emeralds and Opals in the Amway chart of wealth. Diamond meant millions, maybe even billions. A band started playing quietly at the back of the stage as Dick took the mike, urging us to come forward. His wife sat proudly behind him, beaming like Jesus.
What was I supposed to confess this time? That I was always broke, running out of gas, and having to hitchhike on the LA freeways? With the Zodiac Killer around? Should I confess that Cheri, Harold, and I had spun out on the freeway just last week, stoned on peach schnapps? Once we realized we were not dead, we got out of the car, knelt in a circle, and prayed. Then we drove on to the male strip club.
I was done confessing.
“Get up, get up, get up, get up,” Dex was saying. At least half the crowd had gone forward while “Sexual Healing” was still playing in my head. Then Doug grabbed my arm and yanked me down the aisle to renew our faith. There were too many men yanking my arms.
I decided I was done.
* * *
—
I told Doug on a hot day in the burned-up backyard as we stood next to Harold’s archery target. “I could keep the ring and wear it on the other hand, as a sign of friendship. To remember us,” I suggested. But I knew he needed the money as much as I did. By then, Harold had skipped out for nonpayment of his rent but had mysteriously left his archery target behind. He had once wrapped his arms around me in front of that target, teaching me how to aim a crossbow. Now he was afraid of Doug and his guns, so the archery target sat there, color upon color inside one another. I wanted to be anywhere but here.
“No, the woman has to give it back if she does the breaking up,” Doug replied. Doug always knew the rules. We both were staring at that golden ring as if we were in some living tableau where neither of us could move. Trapped by the heat and sparkle of that gold, neither of us wanted to turn away to a cold and uncertain future.
I had nowhere to go but back to China Lake.
Chapter Seventeen
The Salt Wells Flood
I started work at the Salt Wells Propulsion Laboratory as a Clerk II in the summer after my sophomore year. This time, I thought I might stay forever. I tried to repair the damage from the bombs I had thrown when I left Ridgecrest, particularly with my old boyfriend, Phil. Instead, I found myself sitting in his brown Toyota Corolla while
, one by one, he threw all the letters I had written to him back in my face. My dating prospects did not look good. At least my parents were surprisingly unruffled by my failed engagement. “It’s for the best,” my mom said. “I always thought Doug acted like a used-car salesman.” I was no closer to knowing what “my destiny” was but was not sure I wanted to get married anymore and definitely did not want to be pregnant. I thought I would try to make a living in the DoD.
At least I liked Salt Wells, built for the atom bomb, though now more famous for its bobcat kittens. Every summer, a mommy bobcat would plop her kittens in a tree near the entrance to my building. Apparently, the facility’s age and isolation guaranteed the best and only cottonwood trees around. The kittens would mew at us every morning as we walked through the front door. At lunchtime, they made soft noises while they slept, like babies breathing. After work, when the whole family was waking up, we would snap photos for the base-wide contest. If we won, our photograph would be printed in a book given to retirees along with a framed picture of bighorn sheep with F-16s flying behind. We watched their kitten fur blowing in the wind while their little perplexed faces stared down at us. Were we friend or foe?
The whole facility had been built in less than four months during World War II and was located thirty miles from Mike Lab in case of a Big Explosion. The first bombs were packed in boxes marked “One Kit, Bomb Assembly.” They included everything from fuses to Quonset huts to steel-frame buildings complete with air-conditioning. The kits were then sent to Iwo Jima to build the bombs for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was a portable nuclear bomb town. We made the bomb boxes, but not the uranium or plutonium.
After those bombs were dropped, Salt Wells switched to making missile warheads, which are the explosives packed into the missile nose, called a “payload.” Sometimes missiles were packed with ammo and then taken to be blown up in the rocket sled, which looked like a roller-coaster rail laid out flat for miles across the desert. It was called SNORT, short for Supersonic Naval Ordnance Research Track, and could launch missiles at Mach 6. Other times they were shot from airplanes or rocket launchers.
