Heartbreak
calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can
remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter
for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the
city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided
it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few
others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of
us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and
being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys
who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.
I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in
cities like New York who would not take shelter when the
alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London
blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find
hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,
and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina
of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of
Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I
was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she
wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof
that there was a different world and in it were different people
than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different
colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences
were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already
made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance
was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter
was mailed from a boat. She was crossing the ocean to
42
The Bomb
Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she
was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part
of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was
against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could
not stay in the United States any more than she could. She
probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that
I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who
said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice
over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but
she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss
Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was
but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what
it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,
and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a
hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.
There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would
phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The
students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired
of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never
was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the
threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we
might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the
grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations
with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and
43
Heartbreak
revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which
we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time
would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and
was now both stockpiling and testing them. My father said
that he would have died if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
because he shortly would have been sent to “the war in the
Pacific” as it was cal ed. When Truman used the nuclear bombs,
he saved my father’s life. I thought my father was pretty selfish
to hold his own life to be more important than so many other
lives. I thought it would be a good idea not to have war
anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even
though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid
picture of people melting. I’ve never got en over it.
44
Cuba 1
There was one day when al my schoolmates and I knew that
we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban
missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day
because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don’t
know which of the thirteen it was, and I don’t know if I’m
col apsing several days into one, but I remember nothing
before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school
bus al the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the
sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren’t. We spoke
with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we
enumerated al that we had not managed to do, the wishes we
had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about
get ing mar ied. Children came up in passing.
The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The
missiles were pointed at the United States, and the range of
the ICBMs was about from Cuba to the school bus - the
northeast corridor of the United States. For probably the first
time, I kept my Che-loving politics to myself. I don’t think
I even had any politics on that day. I don’t remember
the geopolitical blah-blah or the commie-versus-good-guy
45
Heartbreak
rhetoric - except that it existed - or how the United States was
the white hat standing up for the purity of the Americas. I do
remember television, black-and-white, and the images of stil
photographs, a grainy black-and-white, showing the bombs or
the silos. The United States had been untouchable, and now
it could be touched, and we’d feel our own bones melt and in
the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I
wasn’t afraid to die, but sitting stil and waiting for it was not
good. I still feel that way. We al , including me, felt a little
sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known
had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every
street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in
every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and
now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The
school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be
cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my
arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while
my chest was already ash, and there’d be no blood - it would
evaporate before we’d even be dead. Inside the bus the boys
were up front, boisterous, fil ed with bravado. I guess they