A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  Then I met Garett, a self-identified Santa Cruz “skateboarder” with a shock of sandy-blond hair over his eyes. He was popular so not really my type, but we had been teamed up in art class and ordered to dig up Westmont’s lawn together in the middle of the night. Our art history professor had long curly hair and wrote letters to the college paper signed “Abbie Hoffman.” Though none of us knew who Abbie Hoffman was—and certainly never suspected he was an anarchist, icon of the anti–Vietnam War movement, and member of the “Chicago Seven”—we followed Abbie’s directions and began to dig a lawn that was succinctly edged and mown once a day. The idea, Abbie said, was to create an “art installation” out of “found objects” and thus a “happening,” though none of us knew what that meant either.

  But digging up a rolled-in lawn is harder than it looks. I could barely get my shovel to break through the layer of sod that clung to the earth. Garett saw me, rested his arm on his shovel handle, and laughed. “Don’t laugh, help me!” I said. Garett’s father worked in construction, so he knew what he was doing. Soon we were both giggling and rolling around heavy rocks, wondering what we were making.

  “I don’t think it matters.” Garett laughed. “Just push.”

  Garett was also in my modern poetry class, and I saw him in chapel once a week, since he was our campus prayer leader. He prayed into the standing microphone with more sincerity than I was used to. I liked that sound. He was also co-leading Westmont’s mission to Mexico, called Potter’s Clay, along with a girlfriend who played volleyball, wore Gucci to class, and talked a lot about her “daddy.”

  She was about to leave him because he was poor, though neither of us knew that at the time.

  Two days after our midnight adventure, Garett and I were sitting around an oak table in a Tudor-style house with picture windows: the English department. I had just finished reading aloud: “‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed. . . .’” “Crushed” felt like ecstasy to me. Just that word. I don’t know why.

  That was when Garett leaned over and said, “Give me a swig.” Busted, I thought. But when I looked sheepishly up at him, he winked. I handed him my paper cup, realizing that the perfectly concealed wine in my cup must have had an odor.

  “Thanks.” Garett winked again and covertly took a sip.

  The fact is that I was still terrified of people, particularly of speaking in public, and in a small class like this, where we went around the room, I knew it was inevitable. I thought wine might help, though it actually only turned my face red and made me more self-conscious. After that class, Garett invited me to continue our poetry reading over another glass of wine downtown. That was when I discovered we were both in love with Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and E. E. Cummings.

  Maddeningly in love. His girlfriend was not a poet.

  After working our way through our favorite poets and going to readings all over town, we turned to Russian literature, immersing ourselves in all-night debates about the relative merits of Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov. In Garett’s attic apartment by the sea, I became Ivan, the intellectual who refuses to believe in a God who would condemn people to Hell. Ivan instead believed in spring, saying, “Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why.” Garett did not agree.

  “Cold fish,” he muttered. “Ivan doesn’t feel, he analyzes.” Garett saw himself as a cross between the mystic Alyosha and the drunken sensualist Dmitri, who said of love, “A thunderstorm struck, a plague broke out, I got infected and am infected even now, and I know that everything is over and there will never be anything else.” Garett added, “Now that’s passion.”

  “Dmitri is irresponsible,” I said.

  “Ivan is paralyzed by his thoughts,” he replied.

  “Impetuous,” I said.

  “Heart of ice,” he replied.

  We argued like this for days and weeks until we found ourselves kissing instead, parked in his white Toyota pickup outside his attic rental in the quiet cove of Summerland. Garett’s roommate, a red-bearded Argentinian who planned to return home as a missionary, lifted his head from his bed behind the stairwell, looked at us, and shuddered when we walked in.

  “Get a room,” he said.

  “This is a room,” Garett replied.

  I fell in love with Dmitri-Garett, and he fell in love with Ivan-Karen. As in the book, we were still not compatible, but our characters had dug down into a whirlwind of emotions that we did not know existed. I know I did not. We felt the horror, together, of hearing Elie Wiesel say, “Never forget,” at a talk he gave at the University of California–Santa Barbara. I thought Elie Wiesel looked like a corpse, a vision that has never left me. We heard Yevtushenko speak of his parents, killed by Stalin, then read his poem together: “It seems to me that I am Anna Frank, / Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April, / And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases, / But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.”

  Garett was the first person I knew intimately who let me play whatever role I wanted, trying new identities on like hats—or characters in books. Garett thought they were all me and liked them all. After a lifetime with only the Bible, my invisible rabbit, and lizards for company, I suddenly had a real human being I could talk to. It was, in truth, too much to take in whole without shattering.

  And then there was the matter of the girlfriend. Because of her, Garett and I seemed eternally poised between friends and lovers, like sister and brother in love for a while. When she left him, like Dmitri had with Gretchen, Garett howled into the night. It was not what I expected. He said he would never love again, even as I thought he loved me.

  Slowly, I retreated into my bookish-Ivan nature and he into his Dmitri-dissolute one until I finally found a new great love: the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote, “Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays, I am ironic. If it is pulled out, I shall die.” I decided he was the only person who really understood me and obsessively read everything he wrote, ignoring Garett when he chased me after class.

  “Dad, I’m in love with a dead man and don’t want to be with anyone else,” I said one weekend at home with my father. “Do you think that’s okay?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “The dead are as real as the living. I don’t see a problem with that.”

  * * *

  —

  “We’ll still visit,” Garett said in the library overlooking the shiny Pacific, between the books that had both separated and created us. We were graduating soon.

  The way I acted next surprised only me. Garett knew all about crying and screaming from his family, so it did not bother him as I sobbed through desperate words about not wanting to part, not wanting to live, until Garett began to hit his head against the metal end of the bookshelf. I stopped and looked at him.

  “Don’t!” I said, but he hit his head again. It made a hollow, hurtful sound.

  “I want to hurt like you,” he said. Bang, bang, bang.

  All I could do was stop crying to make him stop.

  Afterward, we went outside and lay in the grass, holding each other. In the sunlight, the grass turned all kinds of impossible new colors: bluish then yellow and white. Finally, I said, “I am going to live for the color of grass. I’m going to keep living because of that.” I felt as if I were astral projecting into another world as he kissed me on the head, understanding as only he could.

  At my graduation dinner, Garett sat next to me with my sister, mom, and dad. He looked confused and stiff in his white shirt and tie, as if he were shocked at my family’s happiness, our
seeming normalcy. Once again, I had no idea what I would do next, but at least I had made it that far, accompanied by Elie Wiesel, Yevtushenko, Kierkegaard, and Garett. Maybe I would be a secretary forever next.

  But I got to have all this, all the sticky little leaves of spring.

  PART FOUR

  The Cold War at Home

  Missile Guidebook:

  Simulate a missile explosion in your own backyard. Take between $500,000 and $3 million. Throw it on the ground, pour gasoline on it, and burn it. Do this until you are cured of your infatuation.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Less Lethal Encounters

  Careful walking home tonight,” said my office mate, Sam. “Cops out.” He had dreads and smelled of patchouli and a meld of other odors that the patchouli was meant to cover. I let him move into the office when he could no longer pay rent, though I did not know he was going to bring his black Lab too.

  “What about showers?” I had asked, wondering how this would work.

  He laughed in his pretty, white-dreadlocks-boy way, then said, “I don’t believe in them. Capitalism is obsessed with hygiene to make us buy soap products.” He also had a near religious obsession with eating five cloves of garlic a day. “You’ll never get sick,” he argued, and since every rain shower seemed to give me bronchitis, I even tried the cure. I thought I would vomit.

  You may ask how I got here.

  After graduating from Westmont, I spent a year in Santa Barbara working two secretarial jobs: one for a law firm and the other for a structural engineer. But I missed reading books and remembered what a Westmont professor and saxophone player had told me once: “Eugene, Oregon, is utopia.” I imagined tasting wine, listening to jazz, and talking about books while gazing at snow-capped mountains. So I applied to graduate school for the scenery, again. In my application to the University of Oregon, I wrote, “I type letters all day long as a secretary, but live in the margins, dreaming of the books I will read at night. I hope you will give me a chance to jump off the page into those margins, to write my own story and fly.”

  I’m still surprised I got in.

  Eugene, however, was not my utopia. It was a town of “primitivists,” pranksters, and anarchists who wanted the downfall of civilization. There were teenagers and schizos living in the streets and frat boys who threw snow-covered rocks at cop cars when drunk. There was mayhem leading to suicide in a city of one-story buildings sprawled without rhyme or reason, where people either could not afford paint or did not believe in it. There were auto-parts stores, taquerias, tattoo shops, and head shops. And a view was nowhere to be found. The Cascades were more than an hour away, and you could not see them even on a sunny day. Then there were the claustrophobic-making clouds, which constantly hung over the city like a hat. Even the giant trees towering over me made me feel enclosed as they perpetually drooped into my private space. People wore Gore-Tex rather than carrying umbrellas, so were always wet. Mold crept up the walls of my apartment even though it was on the second floor. I felt like I had gone through the looking glass.

  In the desert, water seeped up from the ground in artesian wells and desert springs; but here, there were no underground reservoirs, no secrets. Everything happened aboveground, out in the open. My friends said they would fuck right in front of me if I wanted them to. I was still a virgin and wanted love, not fucking in public. I wanted a mountain resort town like Snowmass. Instead, I hovered like a floating leaf above it all, confused, damp, and feeling slimy in my Gore-Tex.

  Like all English graduate students, I taught Composition 101, which covered my tuition, though I hardly knew what I was doing. I was given an office in the basement of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, a five-story concrete modernist structure with sealed windows, which had the notoriety of being the only place on campus high enough to jump from. To die, I mean. I once passed flowers on the sidewalk where someone had landed and wondered who it was. A woman, someone told me.

  My office was an eight-by-five room with two metal desks and a window looking out over people’s feet walking by. In one half of the office, there was Sam’s futon and a perpetually panting black Labrador. In the other half, I had a desk and chair where I met my students to talk about their grades. Truth be told, I got used to that odd mixture of garlic, patchouli, and Labrador retriever. I got to love seeing that dog.

  Still, I was skeptical when Sam told me to watch out for the cops that night, since I considered the police to be my friends. To me, “cops” meant the cute marine ushers at the base theater, who had helmets and special lightsaber red flashlights, and were there to protect you. Then I remembered my mom, who had warned me not to stop for the highway patrol back in California—or at least to be careful—because one of them was actually the Hillside Strangler. He dressed like a cop, then dragged young women into the hills with him.

  “Why?” I asked Sam, hesitating between versions in my mind.

  “They’re out in force,” he replied. “Just be careful walking home.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. Outside, the fall leaves were sticking to the sidewalk in all their smushed glory. I followed the colors as I walked: bright red, smushed red, bright yellow, smushed yellow, and brown. I was wondering how long it took for the colors to smush out when I heard the sound of a laughing crowd and looked up. A hippie crowd was crammed onto a wooden front porch so tight that a few were spilling out into the alleyway. They looked comfortable and easygoing, arms around one another, men and women, ponytails and torn blue jeans. Talking. I was tempted to merge with the crowd, a rare feeling for someone who was usually running away. They looked like they would give anyone a giant group hug.

  Maybe I was starting to like Eugene after all.

  Then, in a split second, police cars started zooming up, lights flashing.

  “What the heck?” I said aloud, stopping in my tracks. Men in black space-suit-like uniforms jumped out of the cars and quickly lined up, facing the partyers, beating clubs against their hands, and looking ready to swing. Feeling as if I were suddenly in a scary robot movie, I stood there, mesmerized.

  What happened next surprised me even more.

  At first, the partygoers all came out on the lawn, blinded by the cop lights. Then, as if with one mind, they spread out into a single long line, linking arms and facing the cops, stringing themselves across lawns and alleyways like Christmas lights. A few began to sing, tentatively, “My country, ’tis of thee, / Sweet land of liberty . . .” Then everyone was singing, first quietly, then with gusto.

  That was when the tear gas hit. People started running, their faces covered in bandannas. Cops started surging. Seeing me standing there like a deer caught in the headlights, someone shouted, “Go! Go!” and pointed me in the direction to run. So I ran, soon realizing I was hacking like crazy, wishing I had a bandanna. My lungs were burning. I believed in God and Ronald Reagan. How could this happen to me?

  “It’s a party!” I shouted at no one in particular.

  My parents seemed so far away.

  In the morning, I saw the headline of the Register-Guard: “OUT OF CONTROL” PARTY RESULTS IN RIOT, ARRESTS. I was outside Espresso Roma, where a man known as “the Frog” was selling homemade joke books that he kept in a bicycle trailer weighed down with a rubber chicken. Next to him, a large homeless man sat on his flowerpot with his pants hanging down so you could see his butt crack. He sat there for years. My friends said he would shit in that flowerpot, though I never saw it. They said Ronald Reagan was to blame; he had closed down the mental institutions, leaving only flowerpots for toilets.

  Inside, the beige-tiled floors were dirty with mud tracked in on hiking boots while flies buzzed all around. Sitting down at a flimsy card table with my café au lait, I began to worry about my safety for the first time. At China Lake, I would never be tear-gassed. In fact, we had designed tear-gas bombs and grenade launchers, which we lobbed at the Vietnamese to flush them out of th
e jungle. We also made chemical weapons like the Weteye, a bomb packed with sarin gas, and the Bigeye, full of VX nerve agent, similar to the ones Saddam Hussein dropped on Halabja. We made flash-bang weapons, smoke bombs, rubber bullets, Tasers, and “sticky slicky” weapons—sprays that either glued you in place or made you fall down. These were called our “nonlethal” weapons, until the name was changed to “less lethal” because they sometimes killed you. But all those were meant for other people, not me.

  Once again, my world began to spin and turn upside down. In my Native American history class, my teacher, Winona LaDuke, talked about nuclear waste dumped on reservations, Native lands seized for military bases, and the VX nerve agent poisoning Goshute Indian territory in Utah. In my American imperialism class, my teacher taught us about CIA support for coups in South America and elsewhere. It was starting to be confusing, what was true or not true . . . but no one had told me about the riot police.

  I later found out that house parties spilling onto lawns were illegal. You had to stay inside the house. Soon after that episode, I found out it was illegal to sit in trees too. People had occupied the trees in the city park to keep them from being cut down. One man’s shorts were lifted up so the cop could spray his genitals with tear gas, and he still would not get down. Tear-gassing seemed to be a regular occupation for the Eugene police. At Café Anarquista, a sign warned about the intensity of “police occupation.” On some days, the arrow would point to “thoroughly agitated (fight back)” and, on others, “ominously quiet” or “omnipresent (carry rocks).” It was often pointed at ominously quiet, which is how the world began to feel to me. It felt like a riot about to break out.

  And I still did not know who was in the wrong, who was first to start this crazy, local war. Maybe it was the hippies and their stupid, staring dogs. Maybe we had to beat them into changing the way they dressed and talked. Beat them into taking showers. Maybe they were all drug dealers. Who was I to say who was friend and who was foe? Someone else always made those decisions for me. Suddenly, I missed my mom and dad. But then when I walked in my office and saw that trusting Lab face, panting and licking his lips at the sight of me, I had to take it all back. Immediately.