Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 904
January 3, 2016
Here’s how we fix law school: This is the real-world training future lawyers need
The first year of law school, usually so different from the student’s previous educational experiences, is bound to make a lasting, indeed a lifelong, impression.The first-year program at most law schools is demanding, though less than it used to be; current tuition levels tend to induce law schools to treat students more as customers than as plebes. I felt changed after my first year (1959–1960) as a student at the Harvard Law School—I felt that I had become more intelligent.The basic training was in learning how to extract holdings from judicial opinions in common law fields and how to apply those holdings to novel factual situations—in other words how to determine the scope and meaning of a legal doctrine.The courses were very difficult because the legal vocabulary was unfamiliar; the professors asked incessant, difficult questions, usually cold calling; the casebooks had very little explanatory material; and we were told not to waste our time reading secondary materials—and most of us were docile and so obeyed.That first year of Harvard Law School was active learning at its best. We learned to be careful and imaginative readers; we learned that American law is malleable and relatedly that notions of public policy, and sheer common sense, were legitimate and important considerations in interpreting and applying legal doctrines.There were no references to systematic bodies of thought outside law, however, and statutes were rarely encountered and the Constitution never.The canvas broadened in the second and third years. But the courses in those years had much less impact on me, in part because the school tended to stack its best teachers in the first year, in part because a certain freshness had worn off, and in part because I devoted most of my time in my second and third years to the law review, which I found more interesting than most of the second- and third-year courses. But as I think back on those years I realize that another factor was that the common law really is the most commonsensical, intelligible, politically neutral body of American law, compared to which most of constitutional law, and most statutory law, are a muddle. I don’t think the professors who taught the first-year courses when I was a student (or indeed any of the professors) were formalists, in the sense of believing that the meaning and scope of a legal rule or doctrine could be determined without consideration of the real-world consequences of applying it in a given case. But I wouldn’t call them legal realists either, for they were highly respectful of doctrine. Law students are natural formalists—a point I’ll return to—and I think my fellow students and I acquired from our courses an essentially formalist conception of law.The jargon of law was welcome— even the complexity of legal-citation form.The Bluebook was in force then, as it had been since the late 1920s, and though considerably shorter than the current version was already far too long—more than a hundred pages—and like its successors nonsensically complex. But it helped make us students feel in possession of a technical vocabulary that was the gateway to a rigorous analytical logic—feel that each of us was therefore a budding expert, a real professional, like a physician. We had left childish things (as we thought them to be) behind, such as our undergraduate majors (English for me), and had embarked on a serious, demanding, intellectually rigorous career.Yet I was never able to master the Bluebook completely, and toward the end of my first year on the law review was excoriated by the law review’s treasurer (as the managing editor was called) for doing a citecheck riddled with blue-booking errors. That was more than half a century ago and legal education has changed a good deal since, especially at the elite law schools. It is less narrow, in part because of higher faculty-student ratios and correspondingly more varied course offerings, but in larger part because of the growing influence of the social sciences on law and the greater representation in the faculties of the elite law schools of professors who have significant competence in a field other than law.The enormous growth in statutory and constitutional law in the last half-century has resulted in curricular change, notably in the tendency to include constitutional law in the first year.There is also under way a movement to make a course in statutory interpretation mandatory in the first year. (In my student days courses in statutory interpretation were unknown, at least at Harvard, though one encountered issues of statutory interpretation in such courses as tax and securities law.) In addition the average quality of law students at the elite schools has increased, enabling a more intellectually challenging curriculum to be offered. In my time as a law student the professors had, unlike today, tended to identify more closely with the legal profession than with the university professoriate.They thus were far less interdisciplinary for errors in citation form.The legal profession’s obsession with citation form is beyond absurd. Students emerge from law school today about as formalist as their predecessors of a half-century ago, possibly even more so because of the law schools’ greater emphasis on legal theory, which supplies tools that the inventors and suppliers claim can assure correct decisions without any taint of ideology or any need to choose among competing factual claims. I mentioned the movement to make statutory interpretation a mandatory course. As I understand it, considerable emphasis in such courses is placed on the canons.This is perverse, if my criticism of the canons has merit. Other than the small number of substantive canons, such as the rule of lenity or the rule of constitutional avoidance—avoid deciding on constitutional grounds a case that can be decided on nonconstitutional grounds—the canons are at best window dressing, at worst the emperor’s new clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of that name.They are not valid instruments for guiding statutory interpretation. I actually doubt the need for any course on statutory interpretation. Interpretation is a natural human activity; it doesn’t require instruction. What would be useful would be a course on Congress, or the legislative process more generally.The more realistic a judge’s or law clerk’s or litigating lawyer’s understanding of how legislation is produced—the relative role of the legislators, their staffs, executive branch officials, and lobbyists, and of the procedures employed by Congress to enact legislation—the better equipped the judge or his law clerks will be to “legislate” in the interstices left open by the legislative process, when the judge is confronted with an interpretive question. If the professor teaches the canons, even while telling the students that the canons (with the exception of the handful of substantive ones) are window dressing, the lesson the students will take from the course and seek to apply as law clerks or litigators is to dress statutory opinions in canons, much as the sharpies in The Emperor’s New Clothes dressed the emperor in luxurious nonexistent clothing. Another curricular error is the continued emphasis in legal-writing courses on the Bluebook, which has swollen from obese to grotesque size and by reason of its length and complexity has spawned auxiliary book-length treatments of citation form, such as Harvard’s Blackbook, which annotates and extends the Bluebook in an effort to cope with its gaps and contradictions, the result of its great length and its authors’ outsized ambitions.There are alternatives to the Bluebook, some simpler, but they have not caught on. In part this reflects the intellectual conservatism of the legal profession, which students find comforting. But in part the Bluebook’s very complexity is an attraction. Modern students want the same things their predecessors wanted—a good job upon graduation, of course, but also to be the members of a real profession (a guild, even a mystery), “profession” implying esoteric knowledge, a specialized vocabulary, and a technique for generating objectively correct answers to even the most difficult questions that arise in one’s professional field. The consequence is a student legal culture that exists at some remove from that inhabited by the faculty. The professors don’t give a straw for the Bluebook or care how “professional” the law really is; and many of them emphasize to the students the limitations of doctrine as an explanation of judicial outcomes, and the role of policy in those outcomes. But the reaction of many students is that the professors are trying to hide the ball from them.The students are hungry for the doctrine, the jargon.They resist the intellectual approach of a faculty oriented to the social sciences. Few are interested in becoming legal intellectuals.They want to become successful legal professionals. Some think that faculty make what is simple seem difficult in order to challenge the students, and the students don’t like that, because they don’t want to be challenged; they want to be fed technique. As one law professor has explained to me in a private note,“students are natural formalists because formalism is an intellectual crutch and they are in an unfamiliar environment. So they are like aspiring poets who learn, say, the sonnet form and then follow it slavishly without realizing poetry advances by breaking old forms. But this is not something that can be changed through instruction.” Even realist professors often convey their realist insights in a manner that promotes formalism. In discussing a judicial opinion the professor may explain to the class that the judge probably arrived at his or her decision by considering the likely consequences of deciding the case one way or another, but didn’t say so and instead wrapped the decision in a formalist mantle—a judicial opinion that pretended that the decision had been merely an application of “law,” with no addition from realist insights. But the students’ takeaway is not that judges are deficient in candor but that what is difficult and important and professional in law is not deriving a decision from a realistic appraisal of the situation revealed in the litigation (for that’s just common sense); it is making the decision seem the unalloyed product of formalist analysis.The student surmises that the judge’s (and law clerk’s) most challenging duty is thus to conceal the true nature of judicial decision making, and that it is the lawyer’s duty to abet the judge in such obfuscation—to help him encode his decisions in opinions that make the decisions seem compelled by legal logic. Excerpted from DIVERGENT PATHS: THE ACADEMY AND THE JUDICIARY by Richard A. Posner, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Polygamy stunts a woman’s mind”: “The Sound of Gravel” author Ruth Wariner on her fundamentalist Mormon childhood, becoming a feminist and life after leaving the church
Growing up in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, a fundamentalist Mormon colony six hours south of the New Mexico border, Ruth Wariner rarely felt safe. She was 3 months old in 1972 when her father, Joel LeBaron, the head of the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was brutally murdered, assassinated in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil, the leader of a separate sect. They called Ervil LeBaron the Mormon Manson. In the 1970s and '80s, he ordered the deaths of dozens more of his religious rivals. For years, Ruth says, she lived in fear, terrified her uncle would send henchmen to kill her and the rest of her family. “Ervil was the monster of my childhood, this ghostlike, dark figure,” she says. “I never met him, but he was a constant threat.” Sadly, as Ruth details in her gripping new memoir, "The Sound of Gravel" (Jan. 5, Flatiron Books), he wasn’t the only monster in her life. The third of her mother’s 10 children, Ruth suffered hardship after hardship, from neglect to sexual abuse. Somehow, says Ruth, 43, now a Spanish teacher based in Portland, Oregon, “I recovered.” But her journey of healing continues. Recently Anna LeBaron, one of Ervil’s 50-plus children, found Ruth on Twitter and reached out to her. The pair met in early December and now hope to gather their families for a reunion next summer on the Oregon coast. It’s been a symbolic exchange. “Even though there's no way to repair the damage that was done to her family, in my own way, I feel as if I’m doing my part to help right a wrong,” says Anna, 47, who lives in Dallas and is giving Ruth’s book a boost through her GoodReads community. “Knowing her is a gift.” In an exclusive joint interview—their first together, ever—the cousins shared their story with Salon. This is an edited distillation of interviews conducted by phone and via email. You two started talking in November. Tell me about those early conversations. Ruth: I’d never heard Anna’s name before she tweeted at me in November. I was like, Anna LeBaron...she must be related to me. Our first conversation was fascinating and overwhelming. We had so many similar stories. Anna, were you nervous to meet Ruth? You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes, of course—you were a child when it all went down. But did you harbor guilt about what he did to Ruth’s dad? Anna: At first I was just glad she didn’t block me on Twitter! [laughs] But no, once we started talking via email and on the phone, I was not at all afraid to meet her. I have had to overcome a tremendous amount of shame about my father’s atrocities in my life, but “guilt” isn’t an accurate word. What was your first reaction when you met? Ruth: I saw her and thought, Oh my god, she looks like family! She felt like family, like I’ve known her all my life. Anna: We sound alike and have similar features—both of us look like LeBarons. We’re also close in age, so it was a little like seeing myself in the mirror. I gave her a big hug. We kept saying to each other, "Can you believe this?" One of your shared experiences is that both of you grew up without your dads. Ruth: Your mom was your dad’s fifth wife. She was 17 when they married; he was 42. You were only 3 months old when he died, right? Ruth: Right. In LeBaron we were taught that my father was the prophet—people literally worshipped him, so I did too. Some of my earliest memories involve my mom telling me how his brother, Ervil, had him killed, so I always had this mystical idea of him. He was this Christ-like figure who sacrificed his life for his church. Anna, what are your memories of your dad, Ervil? Anna: I was 9 months old when we left Colonia LeBaron, and just 4 years old when my father had Ruth’s dad killed. Throughout my early childhood, he was running from the law. I don’t remember much, except that he was very tall. When he was home, I’d rarely see him; he’d come and go in the night and hole up in the back bedroom, avoiding windows because he didn’t want to be seen. I don’t even recall speaking with him. Ruth: Were you scared of him? Anna: I wasn’t afraid of him because I didn’t know what was happening. We knew to revere him and to be quiet around him, but I was completely unaware that people were dead in his wake. Even when he went to jail, I didn’t know the reason. We were always told we were being persecuted for our beliefs. Did you ever pine for your father, Ruth? Ruth: I’ve been envious of other people who have strong relationships with their fathers, absolutely, but honestly, growing up, I didn’t know what I was missing. The only time I really missed having my father was when I was abused. That’s when I remember getting on my knees and asking God, “Why didn’t you give me a father to protect me?” Your mom married your stepdad not long after your dad died and quickly expanded her brood. He was neglectful and abusive; you and your siblings lived in a shack in Mexico without electricity and often scant access to nutritious food, which upset your grandparents. Ruth: Right. My grandparents were part of the church for years, and my mom’s sisters also ended up in polygamist marriages. My grandfather used to say, “I saw my daughters suffer too much.” The men were hardly ever around and were getting their wives pregnant constantly. My mom was having babies as a teenager with an old man, living on beans and eggs. Malnutrition played a role in at least one of your sibling’s disabilities, right? Ruth: Right. My younger sister Meri had hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain, typically in young children, that can cause brain damage, and my older sister Audrey was never officially diagnosed with autism, but the women who help take care of her now believe she has it. But, yes—my family thinks my brother Luke [who is mentally disabled] may have been born with malnutrition. Your grandparents and aunts left the church. Why did your mom stay? Ruth: I think my mom found a place where she felt like she belonged. She believed the same things they did and felt supported in those beliefs when her family rejected her. And I think marrying my father, the prophet, when she was so young made her felt special. The LeBaron brothers were powerful, charismatic men. You write with such tenderness for her, but you also describe some pretty unconscionable behavior. She’d leave you for days to go on the road with your stepfather when you and your siblings were still small children. That’s tough to rationalize. Ruth: Part of it was just the LeBaron culture: women left their children alone all the time. All the men worked in the States, and the women left their children with babysitters or the eldest daughters. But I think, too, that my mom was severely depressed. It hurt her that she didn’t have a say in her own life. She did the best she could, she was a very loving person, but I don’t think she loved having all these children—three of them disabled on top of it. And she was brainwashed. When you get brainwashed, I think you sort of lose yourself, lose your common sense. Unfortunately the religion became more important to her than other things, and we all paid the price. Anna, does Ruth’s upbringing sound familiar? Anna: Reading Ruth’s book was kind of like reading my own story. The poverty, the lack of supervision. There were times, like Ruth experienced, when my mother would be gone for days, if not weeks, and we were left in the care of older siblings. Sometimes we’d have to look in dumpsters for food. Ruth mentions mush in her book, and mush was part of my childhood as well. Any type of grain that could be ground up and cooked, we ate. As you detail in the book, Ruth, you were sexually abused by your stepfather for four years, starting when you were 8. Was it hard to write those passages? Ruth: It was. There were a lot of tears. I rewrote the scenes several times, and sometimes, as I was writing, I would feel the self-doubt I felt as a little girl creep back in, like Did this really happen? I had to validate myself, tell myself Yeah, this was wrong, this happened and it was not okay. Even now, when I reread those scenes, it’s a little bit hard for me. My heart starts to race a bit. I feel like I left a lot of that pain on the page. The hardest part was what do I tell, and what do I not tell. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about how much detail I should go into. I wanted the book to be palatable, but I also wanted it to be the truth. It was important to me to tell that side of the story, even though it’s hard to read. You told your mom about your abuse on two separate occasions, but she refused to leave your stepdad. She died when you were a teen; after that, you went to live with your grandma in California. When you reflect on that time now, what do you make of your mom’s inaction? Do you resent her for that? Ruth: I was definitely angry at her for not protecting me. After the second time I told her, when I’d found that my stepsisters were being abused too and still decided to stay—that broke my heart. I still feel that raw anger sometimes, still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had years of therapy. How did what happened to you affect your relationships with men as you got older? Ruth: I didn’t trust men, both because of the abuse and because I hadn’t been around them a lot. I could never flirt; I was never the kind of person who could put herself out there. I always had trouble dating, and especially in my early 20s, was always attracted to men who didn’t feel the same way about me. I would date these people that were kind of apathetic; they weren’t mean or abusive, but they weren’t emotionally available. As I grew into my early 30s, I began to recognize that I kept putting myself in the kinds of relationships my mother had been in, where the man kind of cared, but not really. Once I recognized that, I was able to move forward. And as I took better care of myself—got my education, got a job, started making money—the quality of the men in my life improved too. I got married at 36, and that was about when I was ready. I think I had to go through that process to find the right man. With your abuse history, were the physical aspects of being in a romantic relationship difficult? Ruth: Yes, when I was younger. Back then I would have sex with men way too quickly. I think I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t set boundaries. As your healing has evolved, has your relationship with sex changed? Ruth: I’m much more comfortable in my body and in my sexuality now than I was when I was making those choices in my 20s. I definitely enjoy my body more than I ever did when I was an insecure kid, recovering from abuse. Anna, does this echo for you? Were you uncomfortable around men? Anna: “Echo” is a good word for it. We were raised knowing that we were going to become one of multiple wives, so we were taught be subimissive. It’s taken lots of therapy for me to come to know who I am, and to learn self-care. Learning self-care when you’re taught to sacrifice all— Ruth: And not feeling ashamed or guilty about it! Anna: Yes! Understanding that self-care is important—not selfish—was a huge part of my growth process. What do you think a religion like the one you grew up in does to a woman? Ruth: I think polygamy stunts a woman's mind. My mom didn't think about or do anything outside her religion. She always craved love, but Lane didn't give her special attention, and I know she felt neglected. She was also tired all the time. Her body never recovered from having one baby before she would end up pregnant with another. She cried a lot, and suffered with migraines. Polygamy is emotionally and psychologically hard on women and children. Anna? Anna: I think it’s hard for a woman to share a man. Women born into polygamy are taught that avoiding jealousy is a sign of godliness, but nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. A woman in that situation has no choice but to compartmentalize those emotions. What is your relationship to religion like these days? Ruth: In college I took classes to learn about other religions. For me it was freeing to realize that I had a choice to make about God. I was always a prayerful child, and I still believe in God and pray. But I struggle with organized religion, with the idea of a man telling you how to live your life. My dad and a lot of his brothers claimed to be the prophet. There’s a huge ego trip there! When you condition children to believe that boys are more important, that men should always be served first, that everybody needs to be quiet in the presence of the big, mighty man...I’m still pissed about that. I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching myself that I matter, that I have a voice, that when I walk into a room, especially a room of men, I am equal to everyone in it, not less-than. That’s been a big part of my healing. Would you call yourself a feminist? Ruth: I am definitely a feminist! What would you tell young women of LeBaron today? Ruth: I would advise them to get a good education, to travel and see other parts of the world, and to experience other ways of living before deciding to enter into a polygamist relationship. And I'd tell them to start taking birth control. 
Growing up in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, a fundamentalist Mormon colony six hours south of the New Mexico border, Ruth Wariner rarely felt safe. She was 3 months old in 1972 when her father, Joel LeBaron, the head of the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was brutally murdered, assassinated in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil, the leader of a separate sect. They called Ervil LeBaron the Mormon Manson. In the 1970s and '80s, he ordered the deaths of dozens more of his religious rivals. For years, Ruth says, she lived in fear, terrified her uncle would send henchmen to kill her and the rest of her family. “Ervil was the monster of my childhood, this ghostlike, dark figure,” she says. “I never met him, but he was a constant threat.” Sadly, as Ruth details in her gripping new memoir, "The Sound of Gravel" (Jan. 5, Flatiron Books), he wasn’t the only monster in her life. The third of her mother’s 10 children, Ruth suffered hardship after hardship, from neglect to sexual abuse. Somehow, says Ruth, 43, now a Spanish teacher based in Portland, Oregon, “I recovered.” But her journey of healing continues. Recently Anna LeBaron, one of Ervil’s 50-plus children, found Ruth on Twitter and reached out to her. The pair met in early December and now hope to gather their families for a reunion next summer on the Oregon coast. It’s been a symbolic exchange. “Even though there's no way to repair the damage that was done to her family, in my own way, I feel as if I’m doing my part to help right a wrong,” says Anna, 47, who lives in Dallas and is giving Ruth’s book a boost through her GoodReads community. “Knowing her is a gift.” In an exclusive joint interview—their first together, ever—the cousins shared their story with Salon. This is an edited distillation of interviews conducted by phone and via email. You two started talking in November. Tell me about those early conversations. Ruth: I’d never heard Anna’s name before she tweeted at me in November. I was like, Anna LeBaron...she must be related to me. Our first conversation was fascinating and overwhelming. We had so many similar stories. Anna, were you nervous to meet Ruth? You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes, of course—you were a child when it all went down. But did you harbor guilt about what he did to Ruth’s dad? Anna: At first I was just glad she didn’t block me on Twitter! [laughs] But no, once we started talking via email and on the phone, I was not at all afraid to meet her. I have had to overcome a tremendous amount of shame about my father’s atrocities in my life, but “guilt” isn’t an accurate word. What was your first reaction when you met? Ruth: I saw her and thought, Oh my god, she looks like family! She felt like family, like I’ve known her all my life. Anna: We sound alike and have similar features—both of us look like LeBarons. We’re also close in age, so it was a little like seeing myself in the mirror. I gave her a big hug. We kept saying to each other, "Can you believe this?" One of your shared experiences is that both of you grew up without your dads. Ruth: Your mom was your dad’s fifth wife. She was 17 when they married; he was 42. You were only 3 months old when he died, right? Ruth: Right. In LeBaron we were taught that my father was the prophet—people literally worshipped him, so I did too. Some of my earliest memories involve my mom telling me how his brother, Ervil, had him killed, so I always had this mystical idea of him. He was this Christ-like figure who sacrificed his life for his church. Anna, what are your memories of your dad, Ervil? Anna: I was 9 months old when we left Colonia LeBaron, and just 4 years old when my father had Ruth’s dad killed. Throughout my early childhood, he was running from the law. I don’t remember much, except that he was very tall. When he was home, I’d rarely see him; he’d come and go in the night and hole up in the back bedroom, avoiding windows because he didn’t want to be seen. I don’t even recall speaking with him. Ruth: Were you scared of him? Anna: I wasn’t afraid of him because I didn’t know what was happening. We knew to revere him and to be quiet around him, but I was completely unaware that people were dead in his wake. Even when he went to jail, I didn’t know the reason. We were always told we were being persecuted for our beliefs. Did you ever pine for your father, Ruth? Ruth: I’ve been envious of other people who have strong relationships with their fathers, absolutely, but honestly, growing up, I didn’t know what I was missing. The only time I really missed having my father was when I was abused. That’s when I remember getting on my knees and asking God, “Why didn’t you give me a father to protect me?” Your mom married your stepdad not long after your dad died and quickly expanded her brood. He was neglectful and abusive; you and your siblings lived in a shack in Mexico without electricity and often scant access to nutritious food, which upset your grandparents. Ruth: Right. My grandparents were part of the church for years, and my mom’s sisters also ended up in polygamist marriages. My grandfather used to say, “I saw my daughters suffer too much.” The men were hardly ever around and were getting their wives pregnant constantly. My mom was having babies as a teenager with an old man, living on beans and eggs. Malnutrition played a role in at least one of your sibling’s disabilities, right? Ruth: Right. My younger sister Meri had hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain, typically in young children, that can cause brain damage, and my older sister Audrey was never officially diagnosed with autism, but the women who help take care of her now believe she has it. But, yes—my family thinks my brother Luke [who is mentally disabled] may have been born with malnutrition. Your grandparents and aunts left the church. Why did your mom stay? Ruth: I think my mom found a place where she felt like she belonged. She believed the same things they did and felt supported in those beliefs when her family rejected her. And I think marrying my father, the prophet, when she was so young made her felt special. The LeBaron brothers were powerful, charismatic men. You write with such tenderness for her, but you also describe some pretty unconscionable behavior. She’d leave you for days to go on the road with your stepfather when you and your siblings were still small children. That’s tough to rationalize. Ruth: Part of it was just the LeBaron culture: women left their children alone all the time. All the men worked in the States, and the women left their children with babysitters or the eldest daughters. But I think, too, that my mom was severely depressed. It hurt her that she didn’t have a say in her own life. She did the best she could, she was a very loving person, but I don’t think she loved having all these children—three of them disabled on top of it. And she was brainwashed. When you get brainwashed, I think you sort of lose yourself, lose your common sense. Unfortunately the religion became more important to her than other things, and we all paid the price. Anna, does Ruth’s upbringing sound familiar? Anna: Reading Ruth’s book was kind of like reading my own story. The poverty, the lack of supervision. There were times, like Ruth experienced, when my mother would be gone for days, if not weeks, and we were left in the care of older siblings. Sometimes we’d have to look in dumpsters for food. Ruth mentions mush in her book, and mush was part of my childhood as well. Any type of grain that could be ground up and cooked, we ate. As you detail in the book, Ruth, you were sexually abused by your stepfather for four years, starting when you were 8. Was it hard to write those passages? Ruth: It was. There were a lot of tears. I rewrote the scenes several times, and sometimes, as I was writing, I would feel the self-doubt I felt as a little girl creep back in, like Did this really happen? I had to validate myself, tell myself Yeah, this was wrong, this happened and it was not okay. Even now, when I reread those scenes, it’s a little bit hard for me. My heart starts to race a bit. I feel like I left a lot of that pain on the page. The hardest part was what do I tell, and what do I not tell. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about how much detail I should go into. I wanted the book to be palatable, but I also wanted it to be the truth. It was important to me to tell that side of the story, even though it’s hard to read. You told your mom about your abuse on two separate occasions, but she refused to leave your stepdad. She died when you were a teen; after that, you went to live with your grandma in California. When you reflect on that time now, what do you make of your mom’s inaction? Do you resent her for that? Ruth: I was definitely angry at her for not protecting me. After the second time I told her, when I’d found that my stepsisters were being abused too and still decided to stay—that broke my heart. I still feel that raw anger sometimes, still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had years of therapy. How did what happened to you affect your relationships with men as you got older? Ruth: I didn’t trust men, both because of the abuse and because I hadn’t been around them a lot. I could never flirt; I was never the kind of person who could put herself out there. I always had trouble dating, and especially in my early 20s, was always attracted to men who didn’t feel the same way about me. I would date these people that were kind of apathetic; they weren’t mean or abusive, but they weren’t emotionally available. As I grew into my early 30s, I began to recognize that I kept putting myself in the kinds of relationships my mother had been in, where the man kind of cared, but not really. Once I recognized that, I was able to move forward. And as I took better care of myself—got my education, got a job, started making money—the quality of the men in my life improved too. I got married at 36, and that was about when I was ready. I think I had to go through that process to find the right man. With your abuse history, were the physical aspects of being in a romantic relationship difficult? Ruth: Yes, when I was younger. Back then I would have sex with men way too quickly. I think I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t set boundaries. As your healing has evolved, has your relationship with sex changed? Ruth: I’m much more comfortable in my body and in my sexuality now than I was when I was making those choices in my 20s. I definitely enjoy my body more than I ever did when I was an insecure kid, recovering from abuse. Anna, does this echo for you? Were you uncomfortable around men? Anna: “Echo” is a good word for it. We were raised knowing that we were going to become one of multiple wives, so we were taught be subimissive. It’s taken lots of therapy for me to come to know who I am, and to learn self-care. Learning self-care when you’re taught to sacrifice all— Ruth: And not feeling ashamed or guilty about it! Anna: Yes! Understanding that self-care is important—not selfish—was a huge part of my growth process. What do you think a religion like the one you grew up in does to a woman? Ruth: I think polygamy stunts a woman's mind. My mom didn't think about or do anything outside her religion. She always craved love, but Lane didn't give her special attention, and I know she felt neglected. She was also tired all the time. Her body never recovered from having one baby before she would end up pregnant with another. She cried a lot, and suffered with migraines. Polygamy is emotionally and psychologically hard on women and children. Anna? Anna: I think it’s hard for a woman to share a man. Women born into polygamy are taught that avoiding jealousy is a sign of godliness, but nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. A woman in that situation has no choice but to compartmentalize those emotions. What is your relationship to religion like these days? Ruth: In college I took classes to learn about other religions. For me it was freeing to realize that I had a choice to make about God. I was always a prayerful child, and I still believe in God and pray. But I struggle with organized religion, with the idea of a man telling you how to live your life. My dad and a lot of his brothers claimed to be the prophet. There’s a huge ego trip there! When you condition children to believe that boys are more important, that men should always be served first, that everybody needs to be quiet in the presence of the big, mighty man...I’m still pissed about that. I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching myself that I matter, that I have a voice, that when I walk into a room, especially a room of men, I am equal to everyone in it, not less-than. That’s been a big part of my healing. Would you call yourself a feminist? Ruth: I am definitely a feminist! What would you tell young women of LeBaron today? Ruth: I would advise them to get a good education, to travel and see other parts of the world, and to experience other ways of living before deciding to enter into a polygamist relationship. And I'd tell them to start taking birth control. Growing up in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, a fundamentalist Mormon colony six hours south of the New Mexico border, Ruth Wariner rarely felt safe. She was 3 months old in 1972 when her father, Joel LeBaron, the head of the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was brutally murdered, assassinated in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil, the leader of a separate sect. They called Ervil LeBaron the Mormon Manson. In the 1970s and '80s, he ordered the deaths of dozens more of his religious rivals. For years, Ruth says, she lived in fear, terrified her uncle would send henchmen to kill her and the rest of her family. “Ervil was the monster of my childhood, this ghostlike, dark figure,” she says. “I never met him, but he was a constant threat.” Sadly, as Ruth details in her gripping new memoir, "The Sound of Gravel" (Jan. 5, Flatiron Books), he wasn’t the only monster in her life. The third of her mother’s 10 children, Ruth suffered hardship after hardship, from neglect to sexual abuse. Somehow, says Ruth, 43, now a Spanish teacher based in Portland, Oregon, “I recovered.” But her journey of healing continues. Recently Anna LeBaron, one of Ervil’s 50-plus children, found Ruth on Twitter and reached out to her. The pair met in early December and now hope to gather their families for a reunion next summer on the Oregon coast. It’s been a symbolic exchange. “Even though there's no way to repair the damage that was done to her family, in my own way, I feel as if I’m doing my part to help right a wrong,” says Anna, 47, who lives in Dallas and is giving Ruth’s book a boost through her GoodReads community. “Knowing her is a gift.” In an exclusive joint interview—their first together, ever—the cousins shared their story with Salon. This is an edited distillation of interviews conducted by phone and via email. You two started talking in November. Tell me about those early conversations. Ruth: I’d never heard Anna’s name before she tweeted at me in November. I was like, Anna LeBaron...she must be related to me. Our first conversation was fascinating and overwhelming. We had so many similar stories. Anna, were you nervous to meet Ruth? You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes, of course—you were a child when it all went down. But did you harbor guilt about what he did to Ruth’s dad? Anna: At first I was just glad she didn’t block me on Twitter! [laughs] But no, once we started talking via email and on the phone, I was not at all afraid to meet her. I have had to overcome a tremendous amount of shame about my father’s atrocities in my life, but “guilt” isn’t an accurate word. What was your first reaction when you met? Ruth: I saw her and thought, Oh my god, she looks like family! She felt like family, like I’ve known her all my life. Anna: We sound alike and have similar features—both of us look like LeBarons. We’re also close in age, so it was a little like seeing myself in the mirror. I gave her a big hug. We kept saying to each other, "Can you believe this?" One of your shared experiences is that both of you grew up without your dads. Ruth: Your mom was your dad’s fifth wife. She was 17 when they married; he was 42. You were only 3 months old when he died, right? Ruth: Right. In LeBaron we were taught that my father was the prophet—people literally worshipped him, so I did too. Some of my earliest memories involve my mom telling me how his brother, Ervil, had him killed, so I always had this mystical idea of him. He was this Christ-like figure who sacrificed his life for his church. Anna, what are your memories of your dad, Ervil? Anna: I was 9 months old when we left Colonia LeBaron, and just 4 years old when my father had Ruth’s dad killed. Throughout my early childhood, he was running from the law. I don’t remember much, except that he was very tall. When he was home, I’d rarely see him; he’d come and go in the night and hole up in the back bedroom, avoiding windows because he didn’t want to be seen. I don’t even recall speaking with him. Ruth: Were you scared of him? Anna: I wasn’t afraid of him because I didn’t know what was happening. We knew to revere him and to be quiet around him, but I was completely unaware that people were dead in his wake. Even when he went to jail, I didn’t know the reason. We were always told we were being persecuted for our beliefs. Did you ever pine for your father, Ruth? Ruth: I’ve been envious of other people who have strong relationships with their fathers, absolutely, but honestly, growing up, I didn’t know what I was missing. The only time I really missed having my father was when I was abused. That’s when I remember getting on my knees and asking God, “Why didn’t you give me a father to protect me?” Your mom married your stepdad not long after your dad died and quickly expanded her brood. He was neglectful and abusive; you and your siblings lived in a shack in Mexico without electricity and often scant access to nutritious food, which upset your grandparents. Ruth: Right. My grandparents were part of the church for years, and my mom’s sisters also ended up in polygamist marriages. My grandfather used to say, “I saw my daughters suffer too much.” The men were hardly ever around and were getting their wives pregnant constantly. My mom was having babies as a teenager with an old man, living on beans and eggs. Malnutrition played a role in at least one of your sibling’s disabilities, right? Ruth: Right. My younger sister Meri had hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain, typically in young children, that can cause brain damage, and my older sister Audrey was never officially diagnosed with autism, but the women who help take care of her now believe she has it. But, yes—my family thinks my brother Luke [who is mentally disabled] may have been born with malnutrition. Your grandparents and aunts left the church. Why did your mom stay? Ruth: I think my mom found a place where she felt like she belonged. She believed the same things they did and felt supported in those beliefs when her family rejected her. And I think marrying my father, the prophet, when she was so young made her felt special. The LeBaron brothers were powerful, charismatic men. You write with such tenderness for her, but you also describe some pretty unconscionable behavior. She’d leave you for days to go on the road with your stepfather when you and your siblings were still small children. That’s tough to rationalize. Ruth: Part of it was just the LeBaron culture: women left their children alone all the time. All the men worked in the States, and the women left their children with babysitters or the eldest daughters. But I think, too, that my mom was severely depressed. It hurt her that she didn’t have a say in her own life. She did the best she could, she was a very loving person, but I don’t think she loved having all these children—three of them disabled on top of it. And she was brainwashed. When you get brainwashed, I think you sort of lose yourself, lose your common sense. Unfortunately the religion became more important to her than other things, and we all paid the price. Anna, does Ruth’s upbringing sound familiar? Anna: Reading Ruth’s book was kind of like reading my own story. The poverty, the lack of supervision. There were times, like Ruth experienced, when my mother would be gone for days, if not weeks, and we were left in the care of older siblings. Sometimes we’d have to look in dumpsters for food. Ruth mentions mush in her book, and mush was part of my childhood as well. Any type of grain that could be ground up and cooked, we ate. As you detail in the book, Ruth, you were sexually abused by your stepfather for four years, starting when you were 8. Was it hard to write those passages? Ruth: It was. There were a lot of tears. I rewrote the scenes several times, and sometimes, as I was writing, I would feel the self-doubt I felt as a little girl creep back in, like Did this really happen? I had to validate myself, tell myself Yeah, this was wrong, this happened and it was not okay. Even now, when I reread those scenes, it’s a little bit hard for me. My heart starts to race a bit. I feel like I left a lot of that pain on the page. The hardest part was what do I tell, and what do I not tell. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about how much detail I should go into. I wanted the book to be palatable, but I also wanted it to be the truth. It was important to me to tell that side of the story, even though it’s hard to read. You told your mom about your abuse on two separate occasions, but she refused to leave your stepdad. She died when you were a teen; after that, you went to live with your grandma in California. When you reflect on that time now, what do you make of your mom’s inaction? Do you resent her for that? Ruth: I was definitely angry at her for not protecting me. After the second time I told her, when I’d found that my stepsisters were being abused too and still decided to stay—that broke my heart. I still feel that raw anger sometimes, still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had years of therapy. How did what happened to you affect your relationships with men as you got older? Ruth: I didn’t trust men, both because of the abuse and because I hadn’t been around them a lot. I could never flirt; I was never the kind of person who could put herself out there. I always had trouble dating, and especially in my early 20s, was always attracted to men who didn’t feel the same way about me. I would date these people that were kind of apathetic; they weren’t mean or abusive, but they weren’t emotionally available. As I grew into my early 30s, I began to recognize that I kept putting myself in the kinds of relationships my mother had been in, where the man kind of cared, but not really. Once I recognized that, I was able to move forward. And as I took better care of myself—got my education, got a job, started making money—the quality of the men in my life improved too. I got married at 36, and that was about when I was ready. I think I had to go through that process to find the right man. With your abuse history, were the physical aspects of being in a romantic relationship difficult? Ruth: Yes, when I was younger. Back then I would have sex with men way too quickly. I think I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t set boundaries. As your healing has evolved, has your relationship with sex changed? Ruth: I’m much more comfortable in my body and in my sexuality now than I was when I was making those choices in my 20s. I definitely enjoy my body more than I ever did when I was an insecure kid, recovering from abuse. Anna, does this echo for you? Were you uncomfortable around men? Anna: “Echo” is a good word for it. We were raised knowing that we were going to become one of multiple wives, so we were taught be subimissive. It’s taken lots of therapy for me to come to know who I am, and to learn self-care. Learning self-care when you’re taught to sacrifice all— Ruth: And not feeling ashamed or guilty about it! Anna: Yes! Understanding that self-care is important—not selfish—was a huge part of my growth process. What do you think a religion like the one you grew up in does to a woman? Ruth: I think polygamy stunts a woman's mind. My mom didn't think about or do anything outside her religion. She always craved love, but Lane didn't give her special attention, and I know she felt neglected. She was also tired all the time. Her body never recovered from having one baby before she would end up pregnant with another. She cried a lot, and suffered with migraines. Polygamy is emotionally and psychologically hard on women and children. Anna? Anna: I think it’s hard for a woman to share a man. Women born into polygamy are taught that avoiding jealousy is a sign of godliness, but nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. A woman in that situation has no choice but to compartmentalize those emotions. What is your relationship to religion like these days? Ruth: In college I took classes to learn about other religions. For me it was freeing to realize that I had a choice to make about God. I was always a prayerful child, and I still believe in God and pray. But I struggle with organized religion, with the idea of a man telling you how to live your life. My dad and a lot of his brothers claimed to be the prophet. There’s a huge ego trip there! When you condition children to believe that boys are more important, that men should always be served first, that everybody needs to be quiet in the presence of the big, mighty man...I’m still pissed about that. I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching myself that I matter, that I have a voice, that when I walk into a room, especially a room of men, I am equal to everyone in it, not less-than. That’s been a big part of my healing. Would you call yourself a feminist? Ruth: I am definitely a feminist! What would you tell young women of LeBaron today? Ruth: I would advise them to get a good education, to travel and see other parts of the world, and to experience other ways of living before deciding to enter into a polygamist relationship. And I'd tell them to start taking birth control.
Growing up in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, a fundamentalist Mormon colony six hours south of the New Mexico border, Ruth Wariner rarely felt safe. She was 3 months old in 1972 when her father, Joel LeBaron, the head of the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was brutally murdered, assassinated in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil, the leader of a separate sect. They called Ervil LeBaron the Mormon Manson. In the 1970s and '80s, he ordered the deaths of dozens more of his religious rivals. For years, Ruth says, she lived in fear, terrified her uncle would send henchmen to kill her and the rest of her family. “Ervil was the monster of my childhood, this ghostlike, dark figure,” she says. “I never met him, but he was a constant threat.” Sadly, as Ruth details in her gripping new memoir, "The Sound of Gravel" (Jan. 5, Flatiron Books), he wasn’t the only monster in her life. The third of her mother’s 10 children, Ruth suffered hardship after hardship, from neglect to sexual abuse. Somehow, says Ruth, 43, now a Spanish teacher based in Portland, Oregon, “I recovered.” But her journey of healing continues. Recently Anna LeBaron, one of Ervil’s 50-plus children, found Ruth on Twitter and reached out to her. The pair met in early December and now hope to gather their families for a reunion next summer on the Oregon coast. It’s been a symbolic exchange. “Even though there's no way to repair the damage that was done to her family, in my own way, I feel as if I’m doing my part to help right a wrong,” says Anna, 47, who lives in Dallas and is giving Ruth’s book a boost through her GoodReads community. “Knowing her is a gift.” In an exclusive joint interview—their first together, ever—the cousins shared their story with Salon. This is an edited distillation of interviews conducted by phone and via email. You two started talking in November. Tell me about those early conversations. Ruth: I’d never heard Anna’s name before she tweeted at me in November. I was like, Anna LeBaron...she must be related to me. Our first conversation was fascinating and overwhelming. We had so many similar stories. Anna, were you nervous to meet Ruth? You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes, of course—you were a child when it all went down. But did you harbor guilt about what he did to Ruth’s dad? Anna: At first I was just glad she didn’t block me on Twitter! [laughs] But no, once we started talking via email and on the phone, I was not at all afraid to meet her. I have had to overcome a tremendous amount of shame about my father’s atrocities in my life, but “guilt” isn’t an accurate word. What was your first reaction when you met? Ruth: I saw her and thought, Oh my god, she looks like family! She felt like family, like I’ve known her all my life. Anna: We sound alike and have similar features—both of us look like LeBarons. We’re also close in age, so it was a little like seeing myself in the mirror. I gave her a big hug. We kept saying to each other, "Can you believe this?" One of your shared experiences is that both of you grew up without your dads. Ruth: Your mom was your dad’s fifth wife. She was 17 when they married; he was 42. You were only 3 months old when he died, right? Ruth: Right. In LeBaron we were taught that my father was the prophet—people literally worshipped him, so I did too. Some of my earliest memories involve my mom telling me how his brother, Ervil, had him killed, so I always had this mystical idea of him. He was this Christ-like figure who sacrificed his life for his church. Anna, what are your memories of your dad, Ervil? Anna: I was 9 months old when we left Colonia LeBaron, and just 4 years old when my father had Ruth’s dad killed. Throughout my early childhood, he was running from the law. I don’t remember much, except that he was very tall. When he was home, I’d rarely see him; he’d come and go in the night and hole up in the back bedroom, avoiding windows because he didn’t want to be seen. I don’t even recall speaking with him. Ruth: Were you scared of him? Anna: I wasn’t afraid of him because I didn’t know what was happening. We knew to revere him and to be quiet around him, but I was completely unaware that people were dead in his wake. Even when he went to jail, I didn’t know the reason. We were always told we were being persecuted for our beliefs. Did you ever pine for your father, Ruth? Ruth: I’ve been envious of other people who have strong relationships with their fathers, absolutely, but honestly, growing up, I didn’t know what I was missing. The only time I really missed having my father was when I was abused. That’s when I remember getting on my knees and asking God, “Why didn’t you give me a father to protect me?” Your mom married your stepdad not long after your dad died and quickly expanded her brood. He was neglectful and abusive; you and your siblings lived in a shack in Mexico without electricity and often scant access to nutritious food, which upset your grandparents. Ruth: Right. My grandparents were part of the church for years, and my mom’s sisters also ended up in polygamist marriages. My grandfather used to say, “I saw my daughters suffer too much.” The men were hardly ever around and were getting their wives pregnant constantly. My mom was having babies as a teenager with an old man, living on beans and eggs. Malnutrition played a role in at least one of your sibling’s disabilities, right? Ruth: Right. My younger sister Meri had hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain, typically in young children, that can cause brain damage, and my older sister Audrey was never officially diagnosed with autism, but the women who help take care of her now believe she has it. But, yes—my family thinks my brother Luke [who is mentally disabled] may have been born with malnutrition. Your grandparents and aunts left the church. Why did your mom stay? Ruth: I think my mom found a place where she felt like she belonged. She believed the same things they did and felt supported in those beliefs when her family rejected her. And I think marrying my father, the prophet, when she was so young made her felt special. The LeBaron brothers were powerful, charismatic men. You write with such tenderness for her, but you also describe some pretty unconscionable behavior. She’d leave you for days to go on the road with your stepfather when you and your siblings were still small children. That’s tough to rationalize. Ruth: Part of it was just the LeBaron culture: women left their children alone all the time. All the men worked in the States, and the women left their children with babysitters or the eldest daughters. But I think, too, that my mom was severely depressed. It hurt her that she didn’t have a say in her own life. She did the best she could, she was a very loving person, but I don’t think she loved having all these children—three of them disabled on top of it. And she was brainwashed. When you get brainwashed, I think you sort of lose yourself, lose your common sense. Unfortunately the religion became more important to her than other things, and we all paid the price. Anna, does Ruth’s upbringing sound familiar? Anna: Reading Ruth’s book was kind of like reading my own story. The poverty, the lack of supervision. There were times, like Ruth experienced, when my mother would be gone for days, if not weeks, and we were left in the care of older siblings. Sometimes we’d have to look in dumpsters for food. Ruth mentions mush in her book, and mush was part of my childhood as well. Any type of grain that could be ground up and cooked, we ate. As you detail in the book, Ruth, you were sexually abused by your stepfather for four years, starting when you were 8. Was it hard to write those passages? Ruth: It was. There were a lot of tears. I rewrote the scenes several times, and sometimes, as I was writing, I would feel the self-doubt I felt as a little girl creep back in, like Did this really happen? I had to validate myself, tell myself Yeah, this was wrong, this happened and it was not okay. Even now, when I reread those scenes, it’s a little bit hard for me. My heart starts to race a bit. I feel like I left a lot of that pain on the page. The hardest part was what do I tell, and what do I not tell. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about how much detail I should go into. I wanted the book to be palatable, but I also wanted it to be the truth. It was important to me to tell that side of the story, even though it’s hard to read. You told your mom about your abuse on two separate occasions, but she refused to leave your stepdad. She died when you were a teen; after that, you went to live with your grandma in California. When you reflect on that time now, what do you make of your mom’s inaction? Do you resent her for that? Ruth: I was definitely angry at her for not protecting me. After the second time I told her, when I’d found that my stepsisters were being abused too and still decided to stay—that broke my heart. I still feel that raw anger sometimes, still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had years of therapy. How did what happened to you affect your relationships with men as you got older? Ruth: I didn’t trust men, both because of the abuse and because I hadn’t been around them a lot. I could never flirt; I was never the kind of person who could put herself out there. I always had trouble dating, and especially in my early 20s, was always attracted to men who didn’t feel the same way about me. I would date these people that were kind of apathetic; they weren’t mean or abusive, but they weren’t emotionally available. As I grew into my early 30s, I began to recognize that I kept putting myself in the kinds of relationships my mother had been in, where the man kind of cared, but not really. Once I recognized that, I was able to move forward. And as I took better care of myself—got my education, got a job, started making money—the quality of the men in my life improved too. I got married at 36, and that was about when I was ready. I think I had to go through that process to find the right man. With your abuse history, were the physical aspects of being in a romantic relationship difficult? Ruth: Yes, when I was younger. Back then I would have sex with men way too quickly. I think I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t set boundaries. As your healing has evolved, has your relationship with sex changed? Ruth: I’m much more comfortable in my body and in my sexuality now than I was when I was making those choices in my 20s. I definitely enjoy my body more than I ever did when I was an insecure kid, recovering from abuse. Anna, does this echo for you? Were you uncomfortable around men? Anna: “Echo” is a good word for it. We were raised knowing that we were going to become one of multiple wives, so we were taught be subimissive. It’s taken lots of therapy for me to come to know who I am, and to learn self-care. Learning self-care when you’re taught to sacrifice all— Ruth: And not feeling ashamed or guilty about it! Anna: Yes! Understanding that self-care is important—not selfish—was a huge part of my growth process. What do you think a religion like the one you grew up in does to a woman? Ruth: I think polygamy stunts a woman's mind. My mom didn't think about or do anything outside her religion. She always craved love, but Lane didn't give her special attention, and I know she felt neglected. She was also tired all the time. Her body never recovered from having one baby before she would end up pregnant with another. She cried a lot, and suffered with migraines. Polygamy is emotionally and psychologically hard on women and children. Anna? Anna: I think it’s hard for a woman to share a man. Women born into polygamy are taught that avoiding jealousy is a sign of godliness, but nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. A woman in that situation has no choice but to compartmentalize those emotions. What is your relationship to religion like these days? Ruth: In college I took classes to learn about other religions. For me it was freeing to realize that I had a choice to make about God. I was always a prayerful child, and I still believe in God and pray. But I struggle with organized religion, with the idea of a man telling you how to live your life. My dad and a lot of his brothers claimed to be the prophet. There’s a huge ego trip there! When you condition children to believe that boys are more important, that men should always be served first, that everybody needs to be quiet in the presence of the big, mighty man...I’m still pissed about that. I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching myself that I matter, that I have a voice, that when I walk into a room, especially a room of men, I am equal to everyone in it, not less-than. That’s been a big part of my healing. Would you call yourself a feminist? Ruth: I am definitely a feminist! What would you tell young women of LeBaron today? Ruth: I would advise them to get a good education, to travel and see other parts of the world, and to experience other ways of living before deciding to enter into a polygamist relationship. And I'd tell them to start taking birth control. Growing up in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, a fundamentalist Mormon colony six hours south of the New Mexico border, Ruth Wariner rarely felt safe. She was 3 months old in 1972 when her father, Joel LeBaron, the head of the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was brutally murdered, assassinated in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil, the leader of a separate sect. They called Ervil LeBaron the Mormon Manson. In the 1970s and '80s, he ordered the deaths of dozens more of his religious rivals. For years, Ruth says, she lived in fear, terrified her uncle would send henchmen to kill her and the rest of her family. “Ervil was the monster of my childhood, this ghostlike, dark figure,” she says. “I never met him, but he was a constant threat.” Sadly, as Ruth details in her gripping new memoir, "The Sound of Gravel" (Jan. 5, Flatiron Books), he wasn’t the only monster in her life. The third of her mother’s 10 children, Ruth suffered hardship after hardship, from neglect to sexual abuse. Somehow, says Ruth, 43, now a Spanish teacher based in Portland, Oregon, “I recovered.” But her journey of healing continues. Recently Anna LeBaron, one of Ervil’s 50-plus children, found Ruth on Twitter and reached out to her. The pair met in early December and now hope to gather their families for a reunion next summer on the Oregon coast. It’s been a symbolic exchange. “Even though there's no way to repair the damage that was done to her family, in my own way, I feel as if I’m doing my part to help right a wrong,” says Anna, 47, who lives in Dallas and is giving Ruth’s book a boost through her GoodReads community. “Knowing her is a gift.” In an exclusive joint interview—their first together, ever—the cousins shared their story with Salon. This is an edited distillation of interviews conducted by phone and via email. You two started talking in November. Tell me about those early conversations. Ruth: I’d never heard Anna’s name before she tweeted at me in November. I was like, Anna LeBaron...she must be related to me. Our first conversation was fascinating and overwhelming. We had so many similar stories. Anna, were you nervous to meet Ruth? You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes, of course—you were a child when it all went down. But did you harbor guilt about what he did to Ruth’s dad? Anna: At first I was just glad she didn’t block me on Twitter! [laughs] But no, once we started talking via email and on the phone, I was not at all afraid to meet her. I have had to overcome a tremendous amount of shame about my father’s atrocities in my life, but “guilt” isn’t an accurate word. What was your first reaction when you met? Ruth: I saw her and thought, Oh my god, she looks like family! She felt like family, like I’ve known her all my life. Anna: We sound alike and have similar features—both of us look like LeBarons. We’re also close in age, so it was a little like seeing myself in the mirror. I gave her a big hug. We kept saying to each other, "Can you believe this?" One of your shared experiences is that both of you grew up without your dads. Ruth: Your mom was your dad’s fifth wife. She was 17 when they married; he was 42. You were only 3 months old when he died, right? Ruth: Right. In LeBaron we were taught that my father was the prophet—people literally worshipped him, so I did too. Some of my earliest memories involve my mom telling me how his brother, Ervil, had him killed, so I always had this mystical idea of him. He was this Christ-like figure who sacrificed his life for his church. Anna, what are your memories of your dad, Ervil? Anna: I was 9 months old when we left Colonia LeBaron, and just 4 years old when my father had Ruth’s dad killed. Throughout my early childhood, he was running from the law. I don’t remember much, except that he was very tall. When he was home, I’d rarely see him; he’d come and go in the night and hole up in the back bedroom, avoiding windows because he didn’t want to be seen. I don’t even recall speaking with him. Ruth: Were you scared of him? Anna: I wasn’t afraid of him because I didn’t know what was happening. We knew to revere him and to be quiet around him, but I was completely unaware that people were dead in his wake. Even when he went to jail, I didn’t know the reason. We were always told we were being persecuted for our beliefs. Did you ever pine for your father, Ruth? Ruth: I’ve been envious of other people who have strong relationships with their fathers, absolutely, but honestly, growing up, I didn’t know what I was missing. The only time I really missed having my father was when I was abused. That’s when I remember getting on my knees and asking God, “Why didn’t you give me a father to protect me?” Your mom married your stepdad not long after your dad died and quickly expanded her brood. He was neglectful and abusive; you and your siblings lived in a shack in Mexico without electricity and often scant access to nutritious food, which upset your grandparents. Ruth: Right. My grandparents were part of the church for years, and my mom’s sisters also ended up in polygamist marriages. My grandfather used to say, “I saw my daughters suffer too much.” The men were hardly ever around and were getting their wives pregnant constantly. My mom was having babies as a teenager with an old man, living on beans and eggs. Malnutrition played a role in at least one of your sibling’s disabilities, right? Ruth: Right. My younger sister Meri had hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain, typically in young children, that can cause brain damage, and my older sister Audrey was never officially diagnosed with autism, but the women who help take care of her now believe she has it. But, yes—my family thinks my brother Luke [who is mentally disabled] may have been born with malnutrition. Your grandparents and aunts left the church. Why did your mom stay? Ruth: I think my mom found a place where she felt like she belonged. She believed the same things they did and felt supported in those beliefs when her family rejected her. And I think marrying my father, the prophet, when she was so young made her felt special. The LeBaron brothers were powerful, charismatic men. You write with such tenderness for her, but you also describe some pretty unconscionable behavior. She’d leave you for days to go on the road with your stepfather when you and your siblings were still small children. That’s tough to rationalize. Ruth: Part of it was just the LeBaron culture: women left their children alone all the time. All the men worked in the States, and the women left their children with babysitters or the eldest daughters. But I think, too, that my mom was severely depressed. It hurt her that she didn’t have a say in her own life. She did the best she could, she was a very loving person, but I don’t think she loved having all these children—three of them disabled on top of it. And she was brainwashed. When you get brainwashed, I think you sort of lose yourself, lose your common sense. Unfortunately the religion became more important to her than other things, and we all paid the price. Anna, does Ruth’s upbringing sound familiar? Anna: Reading Ruth’s book was kind of like reading my own story. The poverty, the lack of supervision. There were times, like Ruth experienced, when my mother would be gone for days, if not weeks, and we were left in the care of older siblings. Sometimes we’d have to look in dumpsters for food. Ruth mentions mush in her book, and mush was part of my childhood as well. Any type of grain that could be ground up and cooked, we ate. As you detail in the book, Ruth, you were sexually abused by your stepfather for four years, starting when you were 8. Was it hard to write those passages? Ruth: It was. There were a lot of tears. I rewrote the scenes several times, and sometimes, as I was writing, I would feel the self-doubt I felt as a little girl creep back in, like Did this really happen? I had to validate myself, tell myself Yeah, this was wrong, this happened and it was not okay. Even now, when I reread those scenes, it’s a little bit hard for me. My heart starts to race a bit. I feel like I left a lot of that pain on the page. The hardest part was what do I tell, and what do I not tell. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about how much detail I should go into. I wanted the book to be palatable, but I also wanted it to be the truth. It was important to me to tell that side of the story, even though it’s hard to read. You told your mom about your abuse on two separate occasions, but she refused to leave your stepdad. She died when you were a teen; after that, you went to live with your grandma in California. When you reflect on that time now, what do you make of your mom’s inaction? Do you resent her for that? Ruth: I was definitely angry at her for not protecting me. After the second time I told her, when I’d found that my stepsisters were being abused too and still decided to stay—that broke my heart. I still feel that raw anger sometimes, still have dreams where I’m yelling at her. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had years of therapy. How did what happened to you affect your relationships with men as you got older? Ruth: I didn’t trust men, both because of the abuse and because I hadn’t been around them a lot. I could never flirt; I was never the kind of person who could put herself out there. I always had trouble dating, and especially in my early 20s, was always attracted to men who didn’t feel the same way about me. I would date these people that were kind of apathetic; they weren’t mean or abusive, but they weren’t emotionally available. As I grew into my early 30s, I began to recognize that I kept putting myself in the kinds of relationships my mother had been in, where the man kind of cared, but not really. Once I recognized that, I was able to move forward. And as I took better care of myself—got my education, got a job, started making money—the quality of the men in my life improved too. I got married at 36, and that was about when I was ready. I think I had to go through that process to find the right man. With your abuse history, were the physical aspects of being in a romantic relationship difficult? Ruth: Yes, when I was younger. Back then I would have sex with men way too quickly. I think I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t set boundaries. As your healing has evolved, has your relationship with sex changed? Ruth: I’m much more comfortable in my body and in my sexuality now than I was when I was making those choices in my 20s. I definitely enjoy my body more than I ever did when I was an insecure kid, recovering from abuse. Anna, does this echo for you? Were you uncomfortable around men? Anna: “Echo” is a good word for it. We were raised knowing that we were going to become one of multiple wives, so we were taught be subimissive. It’s taken lots of therapy for me to come to know who I am, and to learn self-care. Learning self-care when you’re taught to sacrifice all— Ruth: And not feeling ashamed or guilty about it! Anna: Yes! Understanding that self-care is important—not selfish—was a huge part of my growth process. What do you think a religion like the one you grew up in does to a woman? Ruth: I think polygamy stunts a woman's mind. My mom didn't think about or do anything outside her religion. She always craved love, but Lane didn't give her special attention, and I know she felt neglected. She was also tired all the time. Her body never recovered from having one baby before she would end up pregnant with another. She cried a lot, and suffered with migraines. Polygamy is emotionally and psychologically hard on women and children. Anna? Anna: I think it’s hard for a woman to share a man. Women born into polygamy are taught that avoiding jealousy is a sign of godliness, but nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. A woman in that situation has no choice but to compartmentalize those emotions. What is your relationship to religion like these days? Ruth: In college I took classes to learn about other religions. For me it was freeing to realize that I had a choice to make about God. I was always a prayerful child, and I still believe in God and pray. But I struggle with organized religion, with the idea of a man telling you how to live your life. My dad and a lot of his brothers claimed to be the prophet. There’s a huge ego trip there! When you condition children to believe that boys are more important, that men should always be served first, that everybody needs to be quiet in the presence of the big, mighty man...I’m still pissed about that. I’ve spent a lot of my life teaching myself that I matter, that I have a voice, that when I walk into a room, especially a room of men, I am equal to everyone in it, not less-than. That’s been a big part of my healing. Would you call yourself a feminist? Ruth: I am definitely a feminist! What would you tell young women of LeBaron today? Ruth: I would advise them to get a good education, to travel and see other parts of the world, and to experience other ways of living before deciding to enter into a polygamist relationship. And I'd tell them to start taking birth control.
2015 in language: “We can get up in each other’s faces so easily”
Every year the national conversation shifts, with certain words dropping out of currency, new words coming in, and some existing terms changing their meanings. This year was one in which a divisive political campaign heated up, gender issues became more explicit, and racial violence dominated the news. How did the American language change, with all this going on? We spoke to Columbia University professor of linguistics John McWhorter – author of numerous books including “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” and “Authentically Black: Essays For the Black Silent Majority.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Were there terms in 2015 that acquired new shades of meaning? In 2015, the term “black body” became more mainstream, more current. It’s been used by academics for decades. But it’s now in journalism and educated conversation in a new way. Its new currency started with discussion of Michael Brown and other unarmed black men who’ve been killed. Then Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it in his book [“Between the World and Me”] and in a lot of interviews. It’s now part of the general discourse on race. There’s something that’s linguistically interesting about it. Most Americans know you can usually hear that a person is black even if you can’t see them and even if they’re not using any slang. I sometimes call it the "blaccent." The blaccent is mostly about the coloring of a few vowels – the "a" in cat and the "o" in hot. It happens that these two vowels are the two in “black bodies.” When a black person says the term, they’ll [usually] use subtle colorations of these vowels. There’s a rhetorical power to it. Even though we’re not conscious of this, it has a powerful effect on our subconscious. I don’t mean some kind of Southern twang or anything we’d associate with quote-unquote “ghetto.” I'm talking about a very slight difference, but it registers. What else happened this year? In 2015 I think it became more acceptable to use the word “they” in the singular. We’re told not to do that. As a linguist who argues against arbitrary policing of language, I’ve found this a tough nut to crack. But today, the conceptions of gender identity are changing so fast, we need a general neutral singular pronoun. The mundane fact is that it’s almost impossible to introduce a brand-new pronoun – it’s much easier to use something that’s already there. Elegant writers have been using they in the singular since the Middle Ages. What about a word or term that’s closer to brand new? The term “manspreading” really took flight in 2015. There was already “mansplaining,” which became popular about five years ago. “Manspreading” is based on that model, so “man” is being used as a new kind of prefix. I would predict that there will be a new term in a few years. It seems like the beginning of a new piece of grammar. Which is not always something you can see close up. What is behind insistence by conservatives that other people use the term “radical Islam”? They seem to want President Obama to use the term constantly. Social media has a lot to do with it: We’re talking at each other. Talk contrasts with writing in a number of ways. Talk is choppy, writing is fluid. Talk is personal, writing is impersonal. Talk is hot, writing is cool. When Republicans urge that we not try to be polite to people who despise us, it’s hard to see what the purpose would be. It would seem what so offends Republicans is that we are not speaking with “balls.” Of what purpose would speaking with balls serve? No radical Islamist is going to run because we use the term. It seems symptomatic of the general heat we have these days. It’s grown men saying, “Go get ‘em!” rather than playing the long game. Was language more “hot” in 2015? I would say that it’s been hotter in 2015 –we’re seen a general 21st century shift. It really started with the 24-hour news cycle – that’s step one. Step two is broadband cable, so you can be online any time and watch videos a lot. YouTube became step 2.5. And then social media is step three. Twitter becomes 3.5 because it allows you to sock away one sentence. That’s called fighting – that’s how people fight. The old world was hardly polite. But now we can get up in each other’s faces so easily.Every year the national conversation shifts, with certain words dropping out of currency, new words coming in, and some existing terms changing their meanings. This year was one in which a divisive political campaign heated up, gender issues became more explicit, and racial violence dominated the news. How did the American language change, with all this going on? We spoke to Columbia University professor of linguistics John McWhorter – author of numerous books including “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” and “Authentically Black: Essays For the Black Silent Majority.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Were there terms in 2015 that acquired new shades of meaning? In 2015, the term “black body” became more mainstream, more current. It’s been used by academics for decades. But it’s now in journalism and educated conversation in a new way. Its new currency started with discussion of Michael Brown and other unarmed black men who’ve been killed. Then Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it in his book [“Between the World and Me”] and in a lot of interviews. It’s now part of the general discourse on race. There’s something that’s linguistically interesting about it. Most Americans know you can usually hear that a person is black even if you can’t see them and even if they’re not using any slang. I sometimes call it the "blaccent." The blaccent is mostly about the coloring of a few vowels – the "a" in cat and the "o" in hot. It happens that these two vowels are the two in “black bodies.” When a black person says the term, they’ll [usually] use subtle colorations of these vowels. There’s a rhetorical power to it. Even though we’re not conscious of this, it has a powerful effect on our subconscious. I don’t mean some kind of Southern twang or anything we’d associate with quote-unquote “ghetto.” I'm talking about a very slight difference, but it registers. What else happened this year? In 2015 I think it became more acceptable to use the word “they” in the singular. We’re told not to do that. As a linguist who argues against arbitrary policing of language, I’ve found this a tough nut to crack. But today, the conceptions of gender identity are changing so fast, we need a general neutral singular pronoun. The mundane fact is that it’s almost impossible to introduce a brand-new pronoun – it’s much easier to use something that’s already there. Elegant writers have been using they in the singular since the Middle Ages. What about a word or term that’s closer to brand new? The term “manspreading” really took flight in 2015. There was already “mansplaining,” which became popular about five years ago. “Manspreading” is based on that model, so “man” is being used as a new kind of prefix. I would predict that there will be a new term in a few years. It seems like the beginning of a new piece of grammar. Which is not always something you can see close up. What is behind insistence by conservatives that other people use the term “radical Islam”? They seem to want President Obama to use the term constantly. Social media has a lot to do with it: We’re talking at each other. Talk contrasts with writing in a number of ways. Talk is choppy, writing is fluid. Talk is personal, writing is impersonal. Talk is hot, writing is cool. When Republicans urge that we not try to be polite to people who despise us, it’s hard to see what the purpose would be. It would seem what so offends Republicans is that we are not speaking with “balls.” Of what purpose would speaking with balls serve? No radical Islamist is going to run because we use the term. It seems symptomatic of the general heat we have these days. It’s grown men saying, “Go get ‘em!” rather than playing the long game. Was language more “hot” in 2015? I would say that it’s been hotter in 2015 –we’re seen a general 21st century shift. It really started with the 24-hour news cycle – that’s step one. Step two is broadband cable, so you can be online any time and watch videos a lot. YouTube became step 2.5. And then social media is step three. Twitter becomes 3.5 because it allows you to sock away one sentence. That’s called fighting – that’s how people fight. The old world was hardly polite. But now we can get up in each other’s faces so easily.
January 2, 2016
“I’d like it if you’d go back to the hotel with me”: My life as a female cabbie
Would I ever accept money for sex? An avid feminist, I’d never even considered the possibility until my handsome passenger nonchalantly tossed two one-hundred-dollar-bills on the front seat of the cab I was driving and said, “I’d like it if you’d go back to the hotel with me.” I’d been sitting in the taxi line in front of the Brown Palace, Denver’s classiest hotel, in my Yellow Cab numbered 666, or “Sixes” as the dispatcher called it. Interested in numerology, I knew that 666 was a significant number, symbolizing evil, our fall from grace, as well as sex. At 25, I was living in a commune, and wasn’t bothered by the number on my taxi. I was just happy to have the cab at all. Old and run-down as it was, and possibly also due to its enigmatic number, none of the regular drivers wanted it, so it was mine. In 1975, the City and County of Denver issued me an eight-by-six-inch laminated taxicab license emblazoned with a headshot of me sporting long brown hair and granny glasses. Some called me attractive with my olive skin and amiable smile, but I was too insecure to believe them. Still, I was proud of that permit. It represented freedom to make a living on my own schedule. I believed I was helping to forge new territory for women in the work force, being one of five women out of hundreds of drivers employed by the Yellow Cab Company. With my rent at $35 a month, and my diet vegetarian, it was easy to get by. Driving a cab allowed me to earn an income while giving me time to pursue kung fu, pottery making, and camping in the Rocky Mountains. Most importantly, I really liked the job. Given my short stature and petite build, I must have made quite a picture behind the wheel of the iconic Checker cab. Engulfed in its massive chassis, I would coast down 14th Avenue with its synchronized lights, not having to stop for miles, with the glorious Rockies ahead of me, almost surreal in their beauty. Those mountains served as my guidepost. In an age of personal seeking, I always knew which direction was west. Among taxi drivers, the cab was often referred to as a confessional on wheels. People opened up in the privacy and anonymity of the back seat. In Denver at that time, livery cars did not have the Plexiglas partition between driver and passenger. Lacking a physical barrier allowed for a connection between cabbie and rider. Sometimes the cab became psychotherapy on wheels; as I drove, I gave advice or served as a sounding board for passengers' problems. The vehicle afforded me anonymity as well. Passengers didn’t see me as an NYU graduate, counterculture hippie who’d been to Woodstock and spent two days in a Washington D.C. jail for protesting the Vietnam War. I was just their driver taking them where they wanted to go. But on one cool Colorado September evening, in hopped a handsome, smartly dressed man in his mid-thirties, spirited and outgoing. He appeared wholesome, with his blond hair neatly parted on the side and swept across the top of his forehead. He had blue eyes, an engaging smile, and wore preppy chinos, polo shirt and pullover. He looked like a shorter, hunkier Robert Redford, immediately getting more of my attention than I usually gave to the next fare. “Do you know a bar where I can hear a rock band?”he asked with a smile. While we were en route he said he was married and showed me a picture of his two young children. He worked for a Texas oil company and was in town on business for a day. He was so affable and chatty that I told d him a little about myself as well: that I had moved here after college in New York and the activities I was now pursuing in Colorado. Then came his proposition. At first I thought he was joking. Here was someone who was good-looking, wealthy, and would have no problem picking up some classy young woman for a one-night stand. Yet, as plain and unsophisticated as I perceived myself to be, he was offering to pay me to sleep with him. “You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “I’m very serious. You can take the money.” I pulled the cab over to the side of the road and turned around to return his cash. I was struck by how attracted I was to him. His fair, clean-cut appearance formed the yin to the yang of my dark, bohemian, Mediterranean features. “Come on," he said. “Let’s go somewhere.” For a moment, neither of us spoke while I considered. Two hundred dollars was a lot to me. As a cabbie I made $40 a day. It would have taken me a week to earn that much. But being paid cold, hard cash for sex? I should have been insulted. Nevertheless, I found him quite attractive. I was already taken with his personality. His aura of wealth and privilege impressed me as well. I had never stayed at the elegant Brown Palace, and here was an opportunity. Yet he had a wife. Still, I’d come of age during the sexual revolution, and lacked respect for the institution of marriage. Still, I felt certain that I posed no threat to their relationship. And yet, his monetary offer was off-putting. I didn’t really know how to react. What harm would there be in discussing it? I parked the taxi, handed him back the two bills, and with the meter still running (at his insistence), we walked into the bar. I liked hearing that he used to play drums in a rock band at Stanford. I got the feeling he was trying to impress me, prove that he wasn’t the typical Texas oil tycoon, the rich capitalist exploiting the earth’s resources. He was well-educated, but cool because he was once in a band. It was working. He started to drum on the table along with the music. Despite his playful drumming, I saw the disparity between us. He was in his preppy clothes, I was in my cabbie attire: flannel shirt, turtle neck, bell-bottom jeans, Birkenstock shoes, standard hippie uniform. Notwithstanding his attempts to seem hip and to identify with me, he was conspicuously from another world. Besides, I wasn’t supposed to trust anyone over 30. “Ya know, I can guarantee you the Big O,” he blurted. I found this statement a bit crass. This whole situation was a bit crass. I had never heard of an orgasm referred to in that way. Certainly, most of the guys I’d gone out with were more interested in their own Big O than in mine. My last boyfriend had hastened our breakup when he said if I wasn’t having orgasm, that was my problem, not his or ours. I told my fare I would take him back to the hotel, drop off the cab, drive home and call him from my house. Thinking this would give me more time to ruminate, I put Sixes to sleep at the taxi garage, mindful of its portentous number, and headed for the commune. At home I excitedly described to my two best friends what had occurred, sharing my big dilemma about his offering the Big O as part of the deal. These were independent, smart women who, like me, had been involved in women’s groups and marched for female equality through the streets of downtown Denver. I expected them to dismiss this encounter as demeaning and to call the guy a sexist pig. “Call girls can make a lot of money. Ask him if he has some friends. Maybe you can set us all up,” said Lora, who owned a business in Boulder importing and selling African jewelry. She’d cornered the market on beads in Boulder, and during the early 70s that was a very big market. “What’s wrong with it?” asked Eileen, who was studying to be a nurse. “Why not accept his offer? You’ve slept with guys you didn’t really like that much, and you didn’t even get any money out of it. At least you’re attracted to this guy. He’s smart, rich, and he’s offering you something in return.” This argument got right to the heart of “feminist burnout,” that is, my exhaustion with the practice of being self-supporting (but lonely) and going out with men who expected me to make dinner for them and pay my own way (and sometimes theirs), when I was living hand to mouth. Then they wanted sex, while they did very little for me in return. From this perspective, having someone offer me compensation and put me up in a fancy hotel was appealing. As I removed my Birkenstocks to put on fresh clothing for the tryst, I looked down at my socks. Seeing that they had holes in the toes, I got a sinking feeling of inadequacy. I suddenly felt removed from the tycoon’s standard of living. His offer had demeaned me. It objectified me, so that even if I fantasized that he had a real interest, as seen in his attempt to relate to me, I felt that to him I was that anonymous female cabbie. I called him and said no. “Well that’s too bad. It would have been nice. But Liz, you’ve got to stop driving a cab. You’re wasting your life,” he said. Surprisingly, this comment, coming from someone who had just propositioned me and whose values I neither respected nor aspired to, resonated with me more than I would have expected. Perhaps his attractiveness and material success made it impossible to simply dismiss him. His statement planted in me a question that persisted long after the incident: What was I going to do next? Maybe, after all, he did see something in me, something that I didn’t even see in myself –yet. Years later, happily married with three sons and teaching neuroanatomy at a medical school in Manhattan, I still wonder if I should have accepted that proposition. The irony is I would have slept with him – if only he hadn’t offered to pay.
“I tell myself I will quit bingeing when I get diabetes”: Tales of a sugar addict
I awaken after yet another night of debauchery. A bag of Pepperidge Farm chocolate-filled Milano cookies, two sesame bagels with peanut butter, a bag of peanut M&M’s, a pint of mint chocolate chip, and cheese. Lots and lots of cheese. Real cheese, though. Not the fake Velveeta crap. I was raised in a health-food house. I avoid junk food. In the fall of 1978, there’s little talk of eating disorders, but I know something is wrong. Nobody gets that I have a problem because I’m nowhere near fat. I’m also not anorexic. Nor am I bulimic. The only explanation for my thinness is my rocketspeed metabolism, my danceresque physique, and fasting after I binge. Plus I worry. A lot. That must burn a few calories. I clench my jaw, swallowing repeatedly to squelch the wall of nausea that rises up the back of my head. My pupils pulsate, probably from all the fat, sugar, and shit lodged in my gut. I have a cramp in my lower right side, a pocket of pain that gurgles when I press down into it. It started after I left home three and a half years ago, at seventeen, and began sugar bingeing. The family doctor called it irritable bowel. He got that right. My bowels must be pissed off—and stingy, too, considering I only take a crap about once every two weeks. I don’t want to have to crap. It’s so menial. I don’t want to have to pull down my pants and see that subtle but developing roll of womanly gut and those slightly wider thighs that didn’t used to be there. I don’t want to have to sleep. Or breathe. Or chew. A chiropractor told me I was full of shit—literally—and sold me a can of volcanic-ash shake mix for twenty-five bucks. I never tried it. I’ll shit when I’m ready. People always say that people with eating problems have no willpower. I’m the willfullest fucker I know. I tell myself I will quit bingeing when I get diabetes. I heard somewhere that diabetes makes you dizzy, so after a binge I always roll my eyes around inside my head to make myself dizzy so I can make sure it stops. Otherwise it might be diabetes. Of course, my biggest fear is cancer. At this time no one is talking about the cancer/sugar connection, but I have my suspicions. Or maybe I just go to the darkest place. Actually, I don’t just go to the darkest place. I live there. I own real estate. I should be happy. I’m living my dream, rooming in an old farm house and working with a professional mime troupe in a small New England town. Well . . . semi-professional. Everybody knows there’s no money in mime. My parents are supporting me. But I really should be happy. I chose to be here. I’ve already dropped out of two colleges, worked with three performing arts programs, lived in seven different cities, and only just turned twenty-one. For my birthday my mom sent me twenty-five dollars. Cash. I spent every dime on sugar. Before noon. Alone. The only person who gets my problem is my sister Sarah. Fourteen months my elder, Sarah has always been my higher power. My heroine. As my Brooklynese father used to say, “If Sarah jumped owaf the Golden Gate Bridge, Leeser would follow.” It’s true. I would put her in a needle and shoot her into my arm if I could. Instead, I turn to sugar, and then to her to save me from it. “I can’t stop bingeing!” I cry into the phone to my sister. She recently quit sugar under the guidance of a hardcore Japanese healer. He put her on a strict diet of brown rice and some putrid smelling medicinal teas, and her bladder infections disappeared. Not a granule of sugar has crossed her lips since. “The pain in my side won’t go away! I don’t know what to do!” Sarah tells me about a macrobiotic study house in Boston. She suggests that I check myself into sugar rehab so the food nazis can kick my ass and cure me. It will be macrobiotic lockdown. No white flour. No milk products. No animal fat. No caffeine. And no sugar. Those macros know sugar is the devil, even more than booze or cigarettes. It’s the ultimate yin. Meat is the ultimate yang. In the middle of the food scale is brown rice. Brown rice is like their god. Chew your rice, balance your diet, and you can solve any problem, cure any pain. Your lover just dumped you? You’re too yin. Eat root vegetables and red adzuki beans. Got a migraine? Too yang. Try stewed apples with barley malt. Got heartburn? Lost your job? Got a brain tumor? Find your balance. Chew your rice. Chew, chew, chew. As for me, I am yin incarnate. If there was a macrobiotic dictionary and you looked up “yin,” you’d see a picture of my face. A little frosting smeared on my lip. * It is lunchtime when I arrive in Beantown. Thank God. The sooner I get that miraculous macrobiotic food into me, the sooner I will find salvation. I lug my bags from the back of the cab and peer up at the austere, ivy-covered Tudor. Good. This is just what I need. A severe, sober setting where I’ll be forced to get my shit together. Or take a shit, with any luck. I ring the bell and am greeted by Enid, a small, poker-faced gal with mousey-brown hair. She’s as warm as cold rice. “Hi,” I mutter. “I’m, um, Lisa?” “I know that,” she says looking slightly disgusted. “We’re expecting you.” “Oh . . . great!” I say reaching for my bags. She stops me and points to my feet. “Remove your boots first,” she instructs. I learn it’s a house rule, to prevent tracking in dirty snow, along with the bad vibes of the civilian, omnivore world. I remove my boots and follow her through the dark, wood-paneled vestibule that spills into a large, dimly lit dining room. There, about a dozen sallow-faced, scrawny men and several beefier-looking women are seated on floor pillows around a long, low, Japanese-style dining table. There is no conversation. Just the steady sound of chewing, the occasional chopstick gently tapping the side of a bowl, and the sporadic smacking of lips. Enid leads me to the end of the table where her husband, Marty, sits crossed-legged, chewing away. When I called to reserve a space in the house, I told Marty about the sugar and the side pain. He said he was sure macrobiotics could help. I hope he’s more welcoming than the wife. “This is Lisa,” she flatly states, then zombies off. “Welcome!” Marty says and motions for me to sit across from him. “Please! Sit!” He reminds me of a younger version of my dad—only with hair. And enlightened. Taking my seat, I am amused by the juxtaposition of this gruff, frizzy-headed, obviously—I assume—ex-Brooklyn Jew sitting cross-legged, chomping open-mouthed on the allegedly sacred food. He should be eating bagels and lox, wiping cream cheese from his lip with the back of his sleeve. Enid returns to slide an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks before me and Marty gestures to the bountiful spread. “Please! Ga-head!” There are platters of brown rice, dark-red beans, and vegetables. Squash, to be exact. Green and yellow, steamy, watery squash, the gag-worthy legume I always feel pressured to savor as a vegetarian. I loathe squash. In fact, I can’t stand most vegetables. When you’re full of sugar, the last thing you want are vegetables. I wish I wanted to eat them, like my sister Sarah. If I eat like her, I think, maybe I can be like her. When she went vegetarian at age ten, I followed right behind. My mom took a vegetarian cooking class to accommodate us. My dad suffered through multiple lentil-cheddar loaves and carrot-raisin salads. “This health food is killing me!” he loved to say. He never recognized my vegetarianism. Sarah got all the credit. If we went out to dinner, he’d gloat to the waitress, “My dawter’s a vegetarian. It takes great discipline, you know.” I wanted to put my face in his and yell, “I’m a vegetarian too, you know! I have discipline, too! Love me, too!” “What’s that?” I ask Marty, all sweet and innocent, pointing to a bowl of something stringy and black. “That,” he says between lip smacks, “is seaweed. Have some!” I smile politely and fill my bowl with some rice and beans. Then I cautiously add a few chunks of the dreaded squash along with a spoonful of the slimy seaweed for good measure. I chopstick in a mouthful of rice, then immediately dig up another bite. Marty frantically waves his paw at me. “No, no! You gotta chew every bite forty times. Very important. Chewing your rice is everything.” “Oh, okay, thanks.” I nod appreciatively, then take my next bite and start chewing. Folding my hands in my lap like a good macrobiotic girl, I mentally count . . . 1, 2, 3. Chewing steadily, I casually glance down the table, perusing the lineup of munching men for potential lovers . . . 9, 10, 11. It’s always a good motivation to eat healthy if there’s a cute guy to work towards . . . 15, 16, 17. But the men all look sort of feeble, staring down at their bowls, chewing away. Lots of spectacles and unkempt beards. One guy even has some rice stuck to his mustache . . . 23, 24. Fortunately the house has an open-door policy for macrobiotic travelers who are just passing through. My future soulmate could arrive at any moment. By the time I get to 28, there is nothing solid left in my mouth to chew. I usually don’t even chew my food at all. So 28 is pretty darn good. I take another bite of rice, determined to make it to 40, and stick my chopsticks straight down into my food. “No!” Marty objects. “Never leave your sticks like that. The energy from the food will run up through the sticks and out into the universe.” “Oh . . . sorry.” I quickly pluck them out. “Always place your sticks on the table, facing in, towards you, so the energy will continue moving into you.” I must be in bad shape, because this actually makes sense to me. Time to try the beans. I do like beans. Especially baked beans in a can. Yum. But these beans don’t taste like that. These beans taste like dirt. And farts. Like dirty, muddy farts. That’s okay. This food is going to cure me. As I mix up my beans with my rice, Marty nails me again. “Don’t mix up your food. Keep each food separate. Mixed-up food means you have a mixed-up mind.” “Okay.” I’m so glad he doesn’t know I’m already mixed up. * After lunch Enid leads me upstairs, where I meet my roommate, an eccentric seventyish earth mama named Jean with wispy, white locks and a slender, youthful figure. I didn’t see her at lunch. Maybe she’s on a special plan. Or maybe she’s one of those health food freaks who never really eats whole meals. They just nibble on shit all day, like a bird. Jean is seated at the corner of her futon surrounded by troughs of wheat grass. She is gnawing on a crust of bread so dense it could cause a concussion. She proudly holds the bread up for us to behold. “I just found this in the back of my van. It was there for six months. All I had to do was steam it. It’s da-licious.” Jean clearly embraces a healthy existence. She actually wants to live. Good for her. It’s not that I don’t want to live. I mean, that’s why I’m here, right? I just don’t know how to live without chocolate. My roommate is the first guest downstairs when the 5:45 a.m. gonnnnng summons everyone to group meditation. My sister Lauren, the Zen Buddhist, has been trying to get me to meditate to quiet my mind. But it’s five fucking forty-five in the morning. Why should we have to quiet our minds when we just woke up? Isn’t that what sleep is for? But maybe this is good. At this point, twenty-four sugar-free hours are all I have under my belt. Cookies, cake, and candy bounce off the walls of my brain. I sit crosslegged in the very back of the meditation room, in case I nod off. But the scent wafting from the kitchen intrigues me. Ommmmm—what’s that smelllll? Is that what I think it is? Why, it smells like chocolate-chip coooookies. It’s not cookies. In fact, it is oatmeal. The thick, pasty, steel-cut kind that sticks to your ribs. For years. And there’s more squash. Which people actually eat. For breakfast. At least it’s baked pumpkin squash, so it’s less watery. If I stick to the diet and never eat sugar again, I am sure I will learn to love squash, as well as all legumes. Not if. When. As long as I don’t leave the house and venture out into the world of evil yin, I’ll be safe. * Every day after breakfast there is . . . the preparation of lunch! Enid solicits kitchen volunteers. Helping out is part of the deal. I now have three whole sugar-free days. Three days. This is the longest I’ve abstained from sugar since I left home. But I’m getting antsy. I raise my hand to volunteer. It will keep me out of trouble. Besides, I want to be good. And there is so much to learn: Like, you don’t need to refrigerate cooked rice; you can just keep it in a bowl covered with a damp cloth for up to three days! If you cut carrot slices on the diagonal rather than straight across, every slice will have an even mix of yin and yang in every bite! Stewed pears with just a few drops of brown rice syrup will satisfy any sweet tooth! Yeah. Right. Several other eager macro beavers and I watch as Enid picks up a kitchen knife that probably weighs more than her and irately whacks the stems off a bunch of giant green kale. We’re having shrubs for lunch. Excellent. She measures out several cups of brown rice so carefully you’d think it were Tiffany crystal. “One grain, ten thousand grains,” she says. In other words, don’t fuck with the rice. She pours the precious grain into a pressure cooker and hands it to me. “Fill this with water and then we’ll rinse it. Careful.” I am so nervous as I take the pot that my hand slips and I nearly drop the whole thing. She glares up at me like I am the yin devil. It’s amazing how someone half my size can make me feel so small. “Sorry,” I say, grimacing exaggeratedly, then proceed to fill the pot, staring, mesmerized, at the faucet water as it flows over the multitude of treasured grain. I want sugar. Now. Three days of pasty grains, beans, fartinducing cabbage, kale, and other cruciferous crudités have made my gut feel like an atomic bomb factory. If I swallowed a lit match, I’d blast to the moon. I wish I could fart, but I’m so blocked up even the farts can’t fi nd their way out. The only thing that will cut through my wall of gas and shit is sugar. Pure, unadulterated sugar. Maybe a drop of brown rice syrup will do it. It’s worth a try. I’m too afraid of Enid, so I wait until we are done and the kitchen crew disbands. Once I am sure Enid has gone upstairs, I slip into the pantry. If anyone sees me I’ll just tell them I’m making notes on how to set up a proper macrobiotic pantry. In thirty seconds I manage to choke down two heaping tablespoonfuls of disgustingly sweet brown rice syrup. I grab the sesame tahini butter and spoon a big glob into my mouth, followed by another helping of the syrup, trying not to choke to death. The concoction gives me nowhere near the buzz I so desperately seek. I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing? I should be on stage. I need sugar. Real sugar. Just one last big splurge. Then I’ll be ready. No. Don’t do it. You’re three days clean. Yeah, but not really because I’m still overeating. Exercise. Yes. A brisk walk. Great idea. Who cares that it’s a hundred below zero? It’s been three days since I set foot outside. I don’t trust myself. There’s that liquor store at the bottom of the hill. We passed it my fi rst day in the taxi. I picture all the snacks displayed by the register. Why tempt myself? Just walk the other direction. No. I’ll be fine. I haven’t come this far just to blow it all on some cheap liquor store crap. I bundle up and head out into the bitter-cold January afternoon. As I trot down the hill, I dig my hand deep into my pocket, and there it is. Probably about a buck fifty in change. I should have left it behind. But you should never leave home empty-handed, I’ve always thought. Especially in a strange city. What if something happens? Indeed, something is happening. My feet have picked up speed and I am walking briskly down the hill. It’s freezing. Of course I’m walking fast. Four blocks ahead is the liquor store sign. I’ll just pop in to warm up. What if someone from the macro house sees me? Maybe they’ll think I’m an alcoholic. That’s better than being a sugar junkie. Even Michio Kushi, the almighty leader of the macrobiotic community, drinks whiskey and smokes like a chimney. He says if your diet is clean, you can do that. Too bad I’m not a drunk instead. There are going to be Snickers bars. My gait quickens. Slow down, honey. Maybe I could just have one. Like a normal person. I break into a light jog. Am I really doing this? Doing what? I’m just getting some exercise, but I know full well the only thing that can pry off this serpent that is strangling me from within is sugar. As I bite into the milky smooth, chocolate coating, it will crack apart, giving way to a sleek strip of caramel just below the surface. I am running at full speed down the hill. Running to satisfy a raging sugar hard-on before I implode. The liquor store electronic bell dings as I enter. And there they are, lined up neatly on the shelf just below the cash register. Hershey’s . . . Mars . . . Kit Kat . . . open wide for Chunky. Actually, my mother never allowed Chunky’s. Something about a rat hair. Hallelujah. I have enough change for a Snickers and a Milky Way! I procure my goods and rush back out, holding off tearing into a wrapper until I am fully outside so the clerk won’t see me—just in case he knows someone at the macro house. He’d call up there and describe the crazy lady with the big nose and the dark hair who couldn’t even wait to open her candy until she was out the door. My heart flutters. My mouth fills with drool. Rip goes the sleek, brown Milky Way paper. And there it is. All firm. All fine. All mine. My teeth settle into my first bite and at last, I am home. Ahhhhhhhhh . . . how I missed you. Your thick, smooth bed of chocolate, caramel, and pillow-soft nougat. Right here. Right now. This is everything I know and need and want. I could live inside this bite forever. I pull up my green parka hood to conceal my bulging cheeks from the passing cars, just in case any of the drivers are headed to the house. It’s like I’m having sex out in public. Like I’m walking down the street, screwing as I go. By the time I reach the corner, I’ve demolished my Milky Way. I cross the street, head up the hill, and nearly smack into a light post as I look down to tear open my Snickers. This time I will try to chew each bite forty times. Or at least ten. Oh, fuck it. I’m two blocks away. I must demolish my contraband before returning to the house. I wish this joy would last. One last bite. So sad. I wish I had more cash so I could keep going. But I am broke. And freezing. And there is the macro house, just a block away. I lick my lips, wipe away the bits of chocolate, kick off my boots, and tear inside, running into Marty in the vestibule. “Cold out there, huh?” he asks. “Y—yeah . . . it sure is!” I try not to let out any air when I speak so he won’t smell my breath. Try not to let him see my eyes in case they are sanpaku. That’s what the macros call it when somebody is imbalanced, like from drugs or booze or sugar. The eyes have more whites below the irises than above. Macrobiotic teacher George Ohsawa predicted the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy because, he said, they were sanpaku. He said Charles Manson has it, too. Keep your eyeballs even, Lisa. Keep them even. “So, how’s it goin’? How you feelin’?” Marty asks. “Pretty good,” I say. Because, actually, I do. Right now I feel fan-fucking-tastic. “Well, you look good,” he says, nodding his head. I hope he’s not attracted to me. Enid would find out and she’d poison my beans for sure. But Marty repels me with those hairy arms and that angry New York accent. I’m afraid he’s going to start yelling at me, like my dad. I don’t know if it’s the sugar and caffeine from the chocolate kicking in, or if it’s my fear of being taken out by Enid, but a peristaltic wave rises in my gut. Thankfully Marty moves along so I can take legitimate refuge in the john. The eagle has landed. Back in my room, my roommate, Jean, is meditating. I lay back on my futon and stare up at the cottage-cheese ceiling, trying not to let my arms touch my body just in case it is finally fat. I grab my journal and quickly record every morsel of food I consumed today. “One bowl of oatmeal, a baked apple, some pumpkin seeds, two pieces of rice bread with tahini, a bowl of miso soup, a bunch of noodles, five rice cakes with tahini, a bunch of brown rice sprinkled with seaweed salt, some cabbage, some carrots, a few big spoonfuls of tahini with brown rice syrup, an S and an M.” (That’s Snickers and Milky Way recorded in code, just in case.) I should write how I hate myself for falling off the wagon, how I hate my body, and how hopeless I feel that I will ever quit sugar. Instead, I write, “In a little while I will have a wonderful healthy dinner and I will attempt to chew my rice 40 times every mouthful. That will bring me back to center. I just want to be balanced and centered. I also want to start a movement theatre company and become famous for my solo theatre pieces and fall in love, but first I must stop eating sugar forever.” There. I’m done. I will never eat sugar again. Again. Excerpted from "My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict" (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.I awaken after yet another night of debauchery. A bag of Pepperidge Farm chocolate-filled Milano cookies, two sesame bagels with peanut butter, a bag of peanut M&M’s, a pint of mint chocolate chip, and cheese. Lots and lots of cheese. Real cheese, though. Not the fake Velveeta crap. I was raised in a health-food house. I avoid junk food. In the fall of 1978, there’s little talk of eating disorders, but I know something is wrong. Nobody gets that I have a problem because I’m nowhere near fat. I’m also not anorexic. Nor am I bulimic. The only explanation for my thinness is my rocketspeed metabolism, my danceresque physique, and fasting after I binge. Plus I worry. A lot. That must burn a few calories. I clench my jaw, swallowing repeatedly to squelch the wall of nausea that rises up the back of my head. My pupils pulsate, probably from all the fat, sugar, and shit lodged in my gut. I have a cramp in my lower right side, a pocket of pain that gurgles when I press down into it. It started after I left home three and a half years ago, at seventeen, and began sugar bingeing. The family doctor called it irritable bowel. He got that right. My bowels must be pissed off—and stingy, too, considering I only take a crap about once every two weeks. I don’t want to have to crap. It’s so menial. I don’t want to have to pull down my pants and see that subtle but developing roll of womanly gut and those slightly wider thighs that didn’t used to be there. I don’t want to have to sleep. Or breathe. Or chew. A chiropractor told me I was full of shit—literally—and sold me a can of volcanic-ash shake mix for twenty-five bucks. I never tried it. I’ll shit when I’m ready. People always say that people with eating problems have no willpower. I’m the willfullest fucker I know. I tell myself I will quit bingeing when I get diabetes. I heard somewhere that diabetes makes you dizzy, so after a binge I always roll my eyes around inside my head to make myself dizzy so I can make sure it stops. Otherwise it might be diabetes. Of course, my biggest fear is cancer. At this time no one is talking about the cancer/sugar connection, but I have my suspicions. Or maybe I just go to the darkest place. Actually, I don’t just go to the darkest place. I live there. I own real estate. I should be happy. I’m living my dream, rooming in an old farm house and working with a professional mime troupe in a small New England town. Well . . . semi-professional. Everybody knows there’s no money in mime. My parents are supporting me. But I really should be happy. I chose to be here. I’ve already dropped out of two colleges, worked with three performing arts programs, lived in seven different cities, and only just turned twenty-one. For my birthday my mom sent me twenty-five dollars. Cash. I spent every dime on sugar. Before noon. Alone. The only person who gets my problem is my sister Sarah. Fourteen months my elder, Sarah has always been my higher power. My heroine. As my Brooklynese father used to say, “If Sarah jumped owaf the Golden Gate Bridge, Leeser would follow.” It’s true. I would put her in a needle and shoot her into my arm if I could. Instead, I turn to sugar, and then to her to save me from it. “I can’t stop bingeing!” I cry into the phone to my sister. She recently quit sugar under the guidance of a hardcore Japanese healer. He put her on a strict diet of brown rice and some putrid smelling medicinal teas, and her bladder infections disappeared. Not a granule of sugar has crossed her lips since. “The pain in my side won’t go away! I don’t know what to do!” Sarah tells me about a macrobiotic study house in Boston. She suggests that I check myself into sugar rehab so the food nazis can kick my ass and cure me. It will be macrobiotic lockdown. No white flour. No milk products. No animal fat. No caffeine. And no sugar. Those macros know sugar is the devil, even more than booze or cigarettes. It’s the ultimate yin. Meat is the ultimate yang. In the middle of the food scale is brown rice. Brown rice is like their god. Chew your rice, balance your diet, and you can solve any problem, cure any pain. Your lover just dumped you? You’re too yin. Eat root vegetables and red adzuki beans. Got a migraine? Too yang. Try stewed apples with barley malt. Got heartburn? Lost your job? Got a brain tumor? Find your balance. Chew your rice. Chew, chew, chew. As for me, I am yin incarnate. If there was a macrobiotic dictionary and you looked up “yin,” you’d see a picture of my face. A little frosting smeared on my lip. * It is lunchtime when I arrive in Beantown. Thank God. The sooner I get that miraculous macrobiotic food into me, the sooner I will find salvation. I lug my bags from the back of the cab and peer up at the austere, ivy-covered Tudor. Good. This is just what I need. A severe, sober setting where I’ll be forced to get my shit together. Or take a shit, with any luck. I ring the bell and am greeted by Enid, a small, poker-faced gal with mousey-brown hair. She’s as warm as cold rice. “Hi,” I mutter. “I’m, um, Lisa?” “I know that,” she says looking slightly disgusted. “We’re expecting you.” “Oh . . . great!” I say reaching for my bags. She stops me and points to my feet. “Remove your boots first,” she instructs. I learn it’s a house rule, to prevent tracking in dirty snow, along with the bad vibes of the civilian, omnivore world. I remove my boots and follow her through the dark, wood-paneled vestibule that spills into a large, dimly lit dining room. There, about a dozen sallow-faced, scrawny men and several beefier-looking women are seated on floor pillows around a long, low, Japanese-style dining table. There is no conversation. Just the steady sound of chewing, the occasional chopstick gently tapping the side of a bowl, and the sporadic smacking of lips. Enid leads me to the end of the table where her husband, Marty, sits crossed-legged, chewing away. When I called to reserve a space in the house, I told Marty about the sugar and the side pain. He said he was sure macrobiotics could help. I hope he’s more welcoming than the wife. “This is Lisa,” she flatly states, then zombies off. “Welcome!” Marty says and motions for me to sit across from him. “Please! Sit!” He reminds me of a younger version of my dad—only with hair. And enlightened. Taking my seat, I am amused by the juxtaposition of this gruff, frizzy-headed, obviously—I assume—ex-Brooklyn Jew sitting cross-legged, chomping open-mouthed on the allegedly sacred food. He should be eating bagels and lox, wiping cream cheese from his lip with the back of his sleeve. Enid returns to slide an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks before me and Marty gestures to the bountiful spread. “Please! Ga-head!” There are platters of brown rice, dark-red beans, and vegetables. Squash, to be exact. Green and yellow, steamy, watery squash, the gag-worthy legume I always feel pressured to savor as a vegetarian. I loathe squash. In fact, I can’t stand most vegetables. When you’re full of sugar, the last thing you want are vegetables. I wish I wanted to eat them, like my sister Sarah. If I eat like her, I think, maybe I can be like her. When she went vegetarian at age ten, I followed right behind. My mom took a vegetarian cooking class to accommodate us. My dad suffered through multiple lentil-cheddar loaves and carrot-raisin salads. “This health food is killing me!” he loved to say. He never recognized my vegetarianism. Sarah got all the credit. If we went out to dinner, he’d gloat to the waitress, “My dawter’s a vegetarian. It takes great discipline, you know.” I wanted to put my face in his and yell, “I’m a vegetarian too, you know! I have discipline, too! Love me, too!” “What’s that?” I ask Marty, all sweet and innocent, pointing to a bowl of something stringy and black. “That,” he says between lip smacks, “is seaweed. Have some!” I smile politely and fill my bowl with some rice and beans. Then I cautiously add a few chunks of the dreaded squash along with a spoonful of the slimy seaweed for good measure. I chopstick in a mouthful of rice, then immediately dig up another bite. Marty frantically waves his paw at me. “No, no! You gotta chew every bite forty times. Very important. Chewing your rice is everything.” “Oh, okay, thanks.” I nod appreciatively, then take my next bite and start chewing. Folding my hands in my lap like a good macrobiotic girl, I mentally count . . . 1, 2, 3. Chewing steadily, I casually glance down the table, perusing the lineup of munching men for potential lovers . . . 9, 10, 11. It’s always a good motivation to eat healthy if there’s a cute guy to work towards . . . 15, 16, 17. But the men all look sort of feeble, staring down at their bowls, chewing away. Lots of spectacles and unkempt beards. One guy even has some rice stuck to his mustache . . . 23, 24. Fortunately the house has an open-door policy for macrobiotic travelers who are just passing through. My future soulmate could arrive at any moment. By the time I get to 28, there is nothing solid left in my mouth to chew. I usually don’t even chew my food at all. So 28 is pretty darn good. I take another bite of rice, determined to make it to 40, and stick my chopsticks straight down into my food. “No!” Marty objects. “Never leave your sticks like that. The energy from the food will run up through the sticks and out into the universe.” “Oh . . . sorry.” I quickly pluck them out. “Always place your sticks on the table, facing in, towards you, so the energy will continue moving into you.” I must be in bad shape, because this actually makes sense to me. Time to try the beans. I do like beans. Especially baked beans in a can. Yum. But these beans don’t taste like that. These beans taste like dirt. And farts. Like dirty, muddy farts. That’s okay. This food is going to cure me. As I mix up my beans with my rice, Marty nails me again. “Don’t mix up your food. Keep each food separate. Mixed-up food means you have a mixed-up mind.” “Okay.” I’m so glad he doesn’t know I’m already mixed up. * After lunch Enid leads me upstairs, where I meet my roommate, an eccentric seventyish earth mama named Jean with wispy, white locks and a slender, youthful figure. I didn’t see her at lunch. Maybe she’s on a special plan. Or maybe she’s one of those health food freaks who never really eats whole meals. They just nibble on shit all day, like a bird. Jean is seated at the corner of her futon surrounded by troughs of wheat grass. She is gnawing on a crust of bread so dense it could cause a concussion. She proudly holds the bread up for us to behold. “I just found this in the back of my van. It was there for six months. All I had to do was steam it. It’s da-licious.” Jean clearly embraces a healthy existence. She actually wants to live. Good for her. It’s not that I don’t want to live. I mean, that’s why I’m here, right? I just don’t know how to live without chocolate. My roommate is the first guest downstairs when the 5:45 a.m. gonnnnng summons everyone to group meditation. My sister Lauren, the Zen Buddhist, has been trying to get me to meditate to quiet my mind. But it’s five fucking forty-five in the morning. Why should we have to quiet our minds when we just woke up? Isn’t that what sleep is for? But maybe this is good. At this point, twenty-four sugar-free hours are all I have under my belt. Cookies, cake, and candy bounce off the walls of my brain. I sit crosslegged in the very back of the meditation room, in case I nod off. But the scent wafting from the kitchen intrigues me. Ommmmm—what’s that smelllll? Is that what I think it is? Why, it smells like chocolate-chip coooookies. It’s not cookies. In fact, it is oatmeal. The thick, pasty, steel-cut kind that sticks to your ribs. For years. And there’s more squash. Which people actually eat. For breakfast. At least it’s baked pumpkin squash, so it’s less watery. If I stick to the diet and never eat sugar again, I am sure I will learn to love squash, as well as all legumes. Not if. When. As long as I don’t leave the house and venture out into the world of evil yin, I’ll be safe. * Every day after breakfast there is . . . the preparation of lunch! Enid solicits kitchen volunteers. Helping out is part of the deal. I now have three whole sugar-free days. Three days. This is the longest I’ve abstained from sugar since I left home. But I’m getting antsy. I raise my hand to volunteer. It will keep me out of trouble. Besides, I want to be good. And there is so much to learn: Like, you don’t need to refrigerate cooked rice; you can just keep it in a bowl covered with a damp cloth for up to three days! If you cut carrot slices on the diagonal rather than straight across, every slice will have an even mix of yin and yang in every bite! Stewed pears with just a few drops of brown rice syrup will satisfy any sweet tooth! Yeah. Right. Several other eager macro beavers and I watch as Enid picks up a kitchen knife that probably weighs more than her and irately whacks the stems off a bunch of giant green kale. We’re having shrubs for lunch. Excellent. She measures out several cups of brown rice so carefully you’d think it were Tiffany crystal. “One grain, ten thousand grains,” she says. In other words, don’t fuck with the rice. She pours the precious grain into a pressure cooker and hands it to me. “Fill this with water and then we’ll rinse it. Careful.” I am so nervous as I take the pot that my hand slips and I nearly drop the whole thing. She glares up at me like I am the yin devil. It’s amazing how someone half my size can make me feel so small. “Sorry,” I say, grimacing exaggeratedly, then proceed to fill the pot, staring, mesmerized, at the faucet water as it flows over the multitude of treasured grain. I want sugar. Now. Three days of pasty grains, beans, fartinducing cabbage, kale, and other cruciferous crudités have made my gut feel like an atomic bomb factory. If I swallowed a lit match, I’d blast to the moon. I wish I could fart, but I’m so blocked up even the farts can’t fi nd their way out. The only thing that will cut through my wall of gas and shit is sugar. Pure, unadulterated sugar. Maybe a drop of brown rice syrup will do it. It’s worth a try. I’m too afraid of Enid, so I wait until we are done and the kitchen crew disbands. Once I am sure Enid has gone upstairs, I slip into the pantry. If anyone sees me I’ll just tell them I’m making notes on how to set up a proper macrobiotic pantry. In thirty seconds I manage to choke down two heaping tablespoonfuls of disgustingly sweet brown rice syrup. I grab the sesame tahini butter and spoon a big glob into my mouth, followed by another helping of the syrup, trying not to choke to death. The concoction gives me nowhere near the buzz I so desperately seek. I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing? I should be on stage. I need sugar. Real sugar. Just one last big splurge. Then I’ll be ready. No. Don’t do it. You’re three days clean. Yeah, but not really because I’m still overeating. Exercise. Yes. A brisk walk. Great idea. Who cares that it’s a hundred below zero? It’s been three days since I set foot outside. I don’t trust myself. There’s that liquor store at the bottom of the hill. We passed it my fi rst day in the taxi. I picture all the snacks displayed by the register. Why tempt myself? Just walk the other direction. No. I’ll be fine. I haven’t come this far just to blow it all on some cheap liquor store crap. I bundle up and head out into the bitter-cold January afternoon. As I trot down the hill, I dig my hand deep into my pocket, and there it is. Probably about a buck fifty in change. I should have left it behind. But you should never leave home empty-handed, I’ve always thought. Especially in a strange city. What if something happens? Indeed, something is happening. My feet have picked up speed and I am walking briskly down the hill. It’s freezing. Of course I’m walking fast. Four blocks ahead is the liquor store sign. I’ll just pop in to warm up. What if someone from the macro house sees me? Maybe they’ll think I’m an alcoholic. That’s better than being a sugar junkie. Even Michio Kushi, the almighty leader of the macrobiotic community, drinks whiskey and smokes like a chimney. He says if your diet is clean, you can do that. Too bad I’m not a drunk instead. There are going to be Snickers bars. My gait quickens. Slow down, honey. Maybe I could just have one. Like a normal person. I break into a light jog. Am I really doing this? Doing what? I’m just getting some exercise, but I know full well the only thing that can pry off this serpent that is strangling me from within is sugar. As I bite into the milky smooth, chocolate coating, it will crack apart, giving way to a sleek strip of caramel just below the surface. I am running at full speed down the hill. Running to satisfy a raging sugar hard-on before I implode. The liquor store electronic bell dings as I enter. And there they are, lined up neatly on the shelf just below the cash register. Hershey’s . . . Mars . . . Kit Kat . . . open wide for Chunky. Actually, my mother never allowed Chunky’s. Something about a rat hair. Hallelujah. I have enough change for a Snickers and a Milky Way! I procure my goods and rush back out, holding off tearing into a wrapper until I am fully outside so the clerk won’t see me—just in case he knows someone at the macro house. He’d call up there and describe the crazy lady with the big nose and the dark hair who couldn’t even wait to open her candy until she was out the door. My heart flutters. My mouth fills with drool. Rip goes the sleek, brown Milky Way paper. And there it is. All firm. All fine. All mine. My teeth settle into my first bite and at last, I am home. Ahhhhhhhhh . . . how I missed you. Your thick, smooth bed of chocolate, caramel, and pillow-soft nougat. Right here. Right now. This is everything I know and need and want. I could live inside this bite forever. I pull up my green parka hood to conceal my bulging cheeks from the passing cars, just in case any of the drivers are headed to the house. It’s like I’m having sex out in public. Like I’m walking down the street, screwing as I go. By the time I reach the corner, I’ve demolished my Milky Way. I cross the street, head up the hill, and nearly smack into a light post as I look down to tear open my Snickers. This time I will try to chew each bite forty times. Or at least ten. Oh, fuck it. I’m two blocks away. I must demolish my contraband before returning to the house. I wish this joy would last. One last bite. So sad. I wish I had more cash so I could keep going. But I am broke. And freezing. And there is the macro house, just a block away. I lick my lips, wipe away the bits of chocolate, kick off my boots, and tear inside, running into Marty in the vestibule. “Cold out there, huh?” he asks. “Y—yeah . . . it sure is!” I try not to let out any air when I speak so he won’t smell my breath. Try not to let him see my eyes in case they are sanpaku. That’s what the macros call it when somebody is imbalanced, like from drugs or booze or sugar. The eyes have more whites below the irises than above. Macrobiotic teacher George Ohsawa predicted the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy because, he said, they were sanpaku. He said Charles Manson has it, too. Keep your eyeballs even, Lisa. Keep them even. “So, how’s it goin’? How you feelin’?” Marty asks. “Pretty good,” I say. Because, actually, I do. Right now I feel fan-fucking-tastic. “Well, you look good,” he says, nodding his head. I hope he’s not attracted to me. Enid would find out and she’d poison my beans for sure. But Marty repels me with those hairy arms and that angry New York accent. I’m afraid he’s going to start yelling at me, like my dad. I don’t know if it’s the sugar and caffeine from the chocolate kicking in, or if it’s my fear of being taken out by Enid, but a peristaltic wave rises in my gut. Thankfully Marty moves along so I can take legitimate refuge in the john. The eagle has landed. Back in my room, my roommate, Jean, is meditating. I lay back on my futon and stare up at the cottage-cheese ceiling, trying not to let my arms touch my body just in case it is finally fat. I grab my journal and quickly record every morsel of food I consumed today. “One bowl of oatmeal, a baked apple, some pumpkin seeds, two pieces of rice bread with tahini, a bowl of miso soup, a bunch of noodles, five rice cakes with tahini, a bunch of brown rice sprinkled with seaweed salt, some cabbage, some carrots, a few big spoonfuls of tahini with brown rice syrup, an S and an M.” (That’s Snickers and Milky Way recorded in code, just in case.) I should write how I hate myself for falling off the wagon, how I hate my body, and how hopeless I feel that I will ever quit sugar. Instead, I write, “In a little while I will have a wonderful healthy dinner and I will attempt to chew my rice 40 times every mouthful. That will bring me back to center. I just want to be balanced and centered. I also want to start a movement theatre company and become famous for my solo theatre pieces and fall in love, but first I must stop eating sugar forever.” There. I’m done. I will never eat sugar again. Again. Excerpted from "My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict" (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
Engagement season panic sets in: Before you plan a big expensive traditional wedding, read this
In the preface to "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman wrote that “There soon will be no more priests. Their work is done…A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women.” For all of his brilliance, Whitman missed the mark by a mile with his prediction. Perhaps, he was unable to see or unwilling to concede that Americans, despite all of their praise of individualism, were firmly in the clutches of organized religion. One hundred and sixty years after the publication of "Leaves of Grass," America is much more secular, but still deeply religious, and quick to conform to the rituals and doctrines of scriptural ideology. While young Americans attend church in far fewer numbers than previous generations, in the loose community of advanced nations, the rate of religious belief among Americans is off the scale. One of the most boring and persistent questions that the religious use to hound the secular is that which inquires into the possibility of meaning in the absence of a deity. In a self-satisfied state of single-minded arrogance, the clerical inquisitor asks, “Without God, or the liturgical devices of the pre-scientific world, how is one to connect with the transcendent, the inspirational, and the sustenance of the spirit in times riddled with catastrophe and chaos?” I recently got married in Whitman’s “church of men and women.” There were no prayers. There were no hymns. There was not a priest. There was not any religious iconography on the walls or hanging from the ceiling. There was no mention or endorsement of a force larger than the love between my wife and me, and all of our family and friends who filled the room. We were married not in what Gore Vidal once called a “charnel house,” but a greenhouse conservatory shining from stark rays of the sun, living in the aroma and visual poetry of flowerbeds, and boasting of botanical beauty. More than sufficient, the ceremony not only enshrined the devotion, commitment and love my wife, Sarah, and I feel for one another, it confirmed the values that helped attune our hearts to a harmonic melody of union. Our aim and aspiration was to make our wedding – the ritual and reception – a tribute to love, and an expression of what we cherish: romance, friendship, literature, music, and the magnificence and mystery of human connection. Sarah and I walked the aisle together in the nature center, while a close friend of ours, a gifted and spirited singer, songwriter and guitarist, Kev Wright, played an instrumental version of Sarah’s favorite love song – “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. Kev would perform a beautiful rendition of the same song, with his own evocative voice, during the reception for our first dance. Instead of Bible verses with little or no relevance to our lives, Sarah and I thought it most resonant to select our favorite passages from literature on love. My friend Tim Hall – a great novelist himself – read my choices. The first was Jim Harrison’s tribute to the elevation a man feels when surrendering his heart to a woman, from the novella “Revenge.” Harrison describes the mysterious power of involuntary movement into a “love trance” – “a state that so ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be. You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and happiness because so much previously unknown energy is released.” Even among the secular there is an acknowledgement that a large degree of life transpires without the endorsement of the self. When one falls in love, one is at the mercy of a mystery. The investment of time, emotion, energy, and labor into the fulfillment of that mystery into intimacy can and should create a fortress. It is a fortress that Ernest Hemingway describes so well in his alternative ending to A Farewell To Arms, my second reading choice, which concludes with a steely delineation of love as alliance against threats from the external world: “We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.” Sarah asked her sister Kathleen to read Mary Oliver’s loving description of difference as a “tonic” in romantic relationships. When two people act as architects in the ongoing project to build a life together out of separate worlds, it can strengthen both the singular individuals and the bond they form. As Oliver writes, “The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.” The ceremony gained energy and rhythm, while remaining consistent to the theme that Sarah and I worked to project, with a performance of a song I wrote with my friend, Brent James. Brent plays guitar and sings lead vocals, as a charismatic and talented frontman in a Southern Rock and Blues band that Sarah and I both love, the Righteous Hillbillies. For my wedding, I wrote the lyrics to an original song, and Brent composed the music. “Remember Memphis” derives from a vacation, full of joy and promise, that Sarah and I took to America’s capital of rock ‘n’ roll. With the aid of Brent’s powerful voice and musical invention, I attempted to communicate to my bride that through life’s inevitable bruises, no matter where we find ourselves, as long as we have one another, we can recapture the feeling of safety and ecstasy we experienced in Memphis: “When it rains too much / Reach out for my touch / And we’ll clear the skies / Remember Memphis.” Before we exchanged vows, and publicly committed to one another, our friend and my former teacher, Roger Sullivan – the officiator of our ceremony – privileged us with a message of inspiration, wisdom, and direction. We asked him to perform the ceremony, because we respect and admire him, but we also cherish his friendship. His presence and participation had much more meaning than whatever service a strange and arbitrary “man of the cloth” could provide. Roger is ordained from the “Universal Life Church,” a popular online ordination service, becoming more in practice as millions of millenials opt for irreligious weddings. In his secular sermon, Roger emphasized sacrifice, conversation, and kindness. In an age when people wonder if young Americans can “rediscover the art of conversation,” Roger joked, “I hope your intercourse is abundant and delightful.” He closed with a poetic explanation and endorsement of the effect love has on those who share it, and those who surround it: “I believe someone can sense a subtle radiance in the presence of two who have kept the love that they have nurtured from the beginning. They don’t need to demonstrate or wear it on their sleeves. Rather, it is the unmistakable grace and harmony of two people quietly caring for each other. In the spirit of dancers, they move to the same rhythm, lightly touching with an occasional glance or smile. Become like this, and the world sees a spark of passion in your hearts. More importantly, you will remind each other of a distant moment in the past which sealed your love.” It is often said that love is not visible in the image of two people looking into each others’ eyes, but two people standing next to each other, looking in the same direction. A wedding should not only give public projection of how and why two people join hands, but also what they make the center of their shared gaze. The music, the literature, the message, and the company allowed for the access of our vision. We involved as many friends as possible, from the photographer to the performers, and we tried to invite our family and friends into our love story for a night. The reception took place at the Chicago St. Pub in Joliet, Illinois – an important place, owned by friends, to Sarah and me, and our getting to know each other. She and her sisters, along with my mother, transformed the bar into a bistro, and we selected our favorite food items – from gourmet appetizers to pulled pork sandwiches – to serve as an ongoing feast throughout the evening. We asked Dave Weld and The Imperial Flames, a favorite Chicago-based blues boogie band, to make sure, when the time was right, that the dance floor was jumping. Before they lit up the crowd, our friends Kev and Brent played short, respective acoustic sets of their own music. Because it is impossible to peer into the future without reflecting on the past, we honored our loved ones – my grandfather and Sarah’s mother – who could not attend the ceremony. We had a memorial candle on a shelf in the bar, and Sarah had a picture of her mother in a locket on her flowers. By the end of the evening, many of our family members and friends told us that it was the most beautiful and enjoyable wedding they have attended. The personalization of the wedding moved people, and Kev explained that he was inspired by it to ask his own wife of many years to have a vow renewal ceremony in similar style. Ceremony and ritual should not only celebrate or mourn. They should guide and inspire. They offer an opportunity for people to join together in communal collaboration to consider the most important ideas and inquiries not subject to scrutiny in the tedium of everyday life, or in the transactions of the market. Sarah and I hoped to elevate our love, and amplify what we value. It seems we were successful, but in the frenzy and agony that accompanies all wedding planning, we struggled against pressure to conform to the social expectations of mainstream Americana. We both come from Christian families, and it is easy to understand why differing speculation about the supernatural creates such deadly conflict throughout history and throughout the world. Even in tight-knit, loving families, apostates are subject to scorn; often having to navigate the spoken pressures of conversion and interrogation, along with the worse form of silent tension that fills the room whenever a topic of dispute rises to eye level. The concept of a secular wedding, when Sarah and I first introduced it to certain family members, resulted in confusion. Religious believers, when confronted with new knowledge or alternative interpretations of old topics, often act as if they have just stumbled onto the surreal, rather than maintaining an open mind, and making an effort to learn. Sarah and I had relatives who were no different. My friend Brent, who is white and was raised in the Chicago suburbs, told me that his family reacted with the same chagrin when he and his wife informed them that their North Dakota wedding would take place according to the Lakota-Sioux ways of Native American spirituality. For a nation of self-proclaimed “individualists,” America is tremendously unimaginative in its insistence on conformity to the mainstream. No one told Sarah and me that we are on a highway to hell, even if some might think it, but some did openly ask how our wedding would meet a standard of seriousness that religion supposedly injects into ceremony. Others wondered how our wedding would have any “meaning” without some invocation of their preferred conception of a creator. I remember a surprisingly honest moment from my eighth grade home room teacher at the Lutheran school where I studied from kindergarten through junior high. He told the class that religious institutions maintain their relevance in people’s lives by monopolizing the “big moments.” They “hatch them, match them, and dispatch them,” he further explained in a rhythmic reference to baptism, marriage, and funerals. Those who find it difficult to imagine meaning without religion are likely victims of their own lack of introspection, and refusal to engage with the world on individuated terms. Meaning, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Rather than encouraging each person to inspect the intellect and interrogate the soul to truly discover what can serve as a source of meaning, religion imposes a one-size-fits all template on top of the person. That template provides comfort and consolation, and the risk of losing that comfort and consolation, only to stumble into the dark alone with one’s own thoughts, is what causes many religious people to react with hurt or hostility when family members reject the faith, or desire a secular ceremony. When I had a conversation with my friend Kev about the temptation to alleviate tension by having some benign religious aspect in the ceremony, he spoke the simple words that Sarah and I maintained as defense until we walked down the aisle: “It is your wedding.” It was our wedding, and it was our responsibility to determine its meaning – not our family’s role, the Pope’s, or anyone else’s. At the risk of sounding boastful, many of our family members, including the religious ones, told us that the ceremony was one of the most beautiful they had ever seen. It is likely they found it so deeply touching not despite its lack of religiosity, but because of it. A wedding is a human event about human emotion and connection. Religion is like static on the phone line. You can hear the human element, but you have to work harder to decipher it over the noise. Cutting out the static makes the human element louder and clearer. There wasn’t much of a battle once Sarah and I decided to make that cut – a few uncomfortable conversations, but no threats to boycott the ceremony, no promises of damnation. People looking to have an unconventional wedding should remember that if their families genuinely love and care for them, they will swallow their pride and offer support. The human element, among family and friends, defeats ideology, and when it loses, those who would rather enforce theological doctrine than demonstrate kindness for a loved one, probably don’t deserve invitations in the first place. The other battlefield Sarah and I had to navigate existed because of a particularly American religion – materialism. The average wedding in America now costs $31,213. The rabid commercialization of American culture, the growth of the wedding industry, and the pressure to conform to materialistic measurements of success have indoctrinated young people to believe it is necessary to spend what could amount to a sizable down payment on a house to get married. Social and familial expectations for weddings now include the standard banquet hall with the boilerplate dinner, lavish décor, and extravagant trappings meant to give the appearance that television cameras are around every corner capturing the event for “reality” programming. Sarah and I share a strong hatred for the wedding industry. Due to our commitment to resist cheap commercialism of a day that is supposed to honor love, and not consumption, along with our own budgetary constraints, we vowed to spend considerably less on our ceremony and reception. Our total costs fell just under $6,000. It raised the eyebrows and ire of members of both our families when we explained that we wanted to have our ceremony at an Irish pub. The pub’s owners are friends, and they have run against the suburban wind by making their business a communal institution for original music, visual art openings, and literary readings. Our friends have engineered a connection between good food, strong booze, and support for the arts. Seeing how Sarah and I are aggressively devoted to the pursuit of all three pleasures, the Chicago St. Pub became a headquarters for the construction of our relationship. We also met many friends inside those walls, including Brent and Kev, and we find it impossible to disassociate our love story from that setting. The labor Sarah, her sisters, and my mother invested into the transformation of the bar into an aesthetic more appropriate for a romantic reception demonstrated the value of sweat equity over transactional promiscuity. The reception had elegance, but it also had authenticity. Materialism in America is about the domination of an image over the internal. Consumer culture convinces people that the image they project is more important than what they think and feel is actually important. The disapproval Sarah and I confronted with our decision to have a simpler ceremony and reception was a result of image insecurity. By the end of the night, after everyone enjoyed the wide variety of food, and danced to the rhythm and blues of Dave Weld and The Imperial Flames, no one seemed stuck on any imagery. The energy in the building was one of palpable, but oddly peaceful ecstasy. The energy emanated from a gathering of genuine people connected only by the voluntary bonds of care, concern, and compassion. It is my hope that everyone could access such joy, beauty, and uplift when they get married. It order to open the channels of access, they must find the courage to engage in the introspection necessary to discover what gives them meaning. If they find that they genuinely feel that it is liturgical, that’s wonderful for them. If it is not, however, they must have the resolve to conduct their wedding according to their desires, not anyone else’s demands. Norman Mailer said that “love is not a virtue. It is a reward for the only virtue – courage.” Courage is the prerequisite for falling in love, and the accompaniment to honoring love. As fewer younger people feel the need to attend church, and as more Americans classify themselves as irreligious, the grapple to define the utility and efficacy of weddings will become more strenuous and onerous. Injuries will likely result, and regardless of who wins in each family, someone will feel wounded. When two people get married, they offer their lives to one another in the belief that their union is not only worthy of protection, but a benefactor of protection to its members. The outside world, full of tragedy and catastrophe, will create disaster and leave piles of wreckage in every life. With the right partner and lover, a person can find the strength and faith to repair and rebuild. The wedding should empower two people with rough hands and hearts swinging hammers and laying bricks to create a sanctuary against the emotional warfare of the indifferent universe. Christopher Lasch called the family a “haven in a heartless world.” In the prioritization of human decision over religious dogma, and intimacy over imagery, it might be most instructive to reimagine the wedding as the ribbon cutting ceremony for that haven. In the preface to "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman wrote that “There soon will be no more priests. Their work is done…A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women.” For all of his brilliance, Whitman missed the mark by a mile with his prediction. Perhaps, he was unable to see or unwilling to concede that Americans, despite all of their praise of individualism, were firmly in the clutches of organized religion. One hundred and sixty years after the publication of "Leaves of Grass," America is much more secular, but still deeply religious, and quick to conform to the rituals and doctrines of scriptural ideology. While young Americans attend church in far fewer numbers than previous generations, in the loose community of advanced nations, the rate of religious belief among Americans is off the scale. One of the most boring and persistent questions that the religious use to hound the secular is that which inquires into the possibility of meaning in the absence of a deity. In a self-satisfied state of single-minded arrogance, the clerical inquisitor asks, “Without God, or the liturgical devices of the pre-scientific world, how is one to connect with the transcendent, the inspirational, and the sustenance of the spirit in times riddled with catastrophe and chaos?” I recently got married in Whitman’s “church of men and women.” There were no prayers. There were no hymns. There was not a priest. There was not any religious iconography on the walls or hanging from the ceiling. There was no mention or endorsement of a force larger than the love between my wife and me, and all of our family and friends who filled the room. We were married not in what Gore Vidal once called a “charnel house,” but a greenhouse conservatory shining from stark rays of the sun, living in the aroma and visual poetry of flowerbeds, and boasting of botanical beauty. More than sufficient, the ceremony not only enshrined the devotion, commitment and love my wife, Sarah, and I feel for one another, it confirmed the values that helped attune our hearts to a harmonic melody of union. Our aim and aspiration was to make our wedding – the ritual and reception – a tribute to love, and an expression of what we cherish: romance, friendship, literature, music, and the magnificence and mystery of human connection. Sarah and I walked the aisle together in the nature center, while a close friend of ours, a gifted and spirited singer, songwriter and guitarist, Kev Wright, played an instrumental version of Sarah’s favorite love song – “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. Kev would perform a beautiful rendition of the same song, with his own evocative voice, during the reception for our first dance. Instead of Bible verses with little or no relevance to our lives, Sarah and I thought it most resonant to select our favorite passages from literature on love. My friend Tim Hall – a great novelist himself – read my choices. The first was Jim Harrison’s tribute to the elevation a man feels when surrendering his heart to a woman, from the novella “Revenge.” Harrison describes the mysterious power of involuntary movement into a “love trance” – “a state that so ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be. You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and happiness because so much previously unknown energy is released.” Even among the secular there is an acknowledgement that a large degree of life transpires without the endorsement of the self. When one falls in love, one is at the mercy of a mystery. The investment of time, emotion, energy, and labor into the fulfillment of that mystery into intimacy can and should create a fortress. It is a fortress that Ernest Hemingway describes so well in his alternative ending to A Farewell To Arms, my second reading choice, which concludes with a steely delineation of love as alliance against threats from the external world: “We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.” Sarah asked her sister Kathleen to read Mary Oliver’s loving description of difference as a “tonic” in romantic relationships. When two people act as architects in the ongoing project to build a life together out of separate worlds, it can strengthen both the singular individuals and the bond they form. As Oliver writes, “The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.” The ceremony gained energy and rhythm, while remaining consistent to the theme that Sarah and I worked to project, with a performance of a song I wrote with my friend, Brent James. Brent plays guitar and sings lead vocals, as a charismatic and talented frontman in a Southern Rock and Blues band that Sarah and I both love, the Righteous Hillbillies. For my wedding, I wrote the lyrics to an original song, and Brent composed the music. “Remember Memphis” derives from a vacation, full of joy and promise, that Sarah and I took to America’s capital of rock ‘n’ roll. With the aid of Brent’s powerful voice and musical invention, I attempted to communicate to my bride that through life’s inevitable bruises, no matter where we find ourselves, as long as we have one another, we can recapture the feeling of safety and ecstasy we experienced in Memphis: “When it rains too much / Reach out for my touch / And we’ll clear the skies / Remember Memphis.” Before we exchanged vows, and publicly committed to one another, our friend and my former teacher, Roger Sullivan – the officiator of our ceremony – privileged us with a message of inspiration, wisdom, and direction. We asked him to perform the ceremony, because we respect and admire him, but we also cherish his friendship. His presence and participation had much more meaning than whatever service a strange and arbitrary “man of the cloth” could provide. Roger is ordained from the “Universal Life Church,” a popular online ordination service, becoming more in practice as millions of millenials opt for irreligious weddings. In his secular sermon, Roger emphasized sacrifice, conversation, and kindness. In an age when people wonder if young Americans can “rediscover the art of conversation,” Roger joked, “I hope your intercourse is abundant and delightful.” He closed with a poetic explanation and endorsement of the effect love has on those who share it, and those who surround it: “I believe someone can sense a subtle radiance in the presence of two who have kept the love that they have nurtured from the beginning. They don’t need to demonstrate or wear it on their sleeves. Rather, it is the unmistakable grace and harmony of two people quietly caring for each other. In the spirit of dancers, they move to the same rhythm, lightly touching with an occasional glance or smile. Become like this, and the world sees a spark of passion in your hearts. More importantly, you will remind each other of a distant moment in the past which sealed your love.” It is often said that love is not visible in the image of two people looking into each others’ eyes, but two people standing next to each other, looking in the same direction. A wedding should not only give public projection of how and why two people join hands, but also what they make the center of their shared gaze. The music, the literature, the message, and the company allowed for the access of our vision. We involved as many friends as possible, from the photographer to the performers, and we tried to invite our family and friends into our love story for a night. The reception took place at the Chicago St. Pub in Joliet, Illinois – an important place, owned by friends, to Sarah and me, and our getting to know each other. She and her sisters, along with my mother, transformed the bar into a bistro, and we selected our favorite food items – from gourmet appetizers to pulled pork sandwiches – to serve as an ongoing feast throughout the evening. We asked Dave Weld and The Imperial Flames, a favorite Chicago-based blues boogie band, to make sure, when the time was right, that the dance floor was jumping. Before they lit up the crowd, our friends Kev and Brent played short, respective acoustic sets of their own music. Because it is impossible to peer into the future without reflecting on the past, we honored our loved ones – my grandfather and Sarah’s mother – who could not attend the ceremony. We had a memorial candle on a shelf in the bar, and Sarah had a picture of her mother in a locket on her flowers. By the end of the evening, many of our family members and friends told us that it was the most beautiful and enjoyable wedding they have attended. The personalization of the wedding moved people, and Kev explained that he was inspired by it to ask his own wife of many years to have a vow renewal ceremony in similar style. Ceremony and ritual should not only celebrate or mourn. They should guide and inspire. They offer an opportunity for people to join together in communal collaboration to consider the most important ideas and inquiries not subject to scrutiny in the tedium of everyday life, or in the transactions of the market. Sarah and I hoped to elevate our love, and amplify what we value. It seems we were successful, but in the frenzy and agony that accompanies all wedding planning, we struggled against pressure to conform to the social expectations of mainstream Americana. We both come from Christian families, and it is easy to understand why differing speculation about the supernatural creates such deadly conflict throughout history and throughout the world. Even in tight-knit, loving families, apostates are subject to scorn; often having to navigate the spoken pressures of conversion and interrogation, along with the worse form of silent tension that fills the room whenever a topic of dispute rises to eye level. The concept of a secular wedding, when Sarah and I first introduced it to certain family members, resulted in confusion. Religious believers, when confronted with new knowledge or alternative interpretations of old topics, often act as if they have just stumbled onto the surreal, rather than maintaining an open mind, and making an effort to learn. Sarah and I had relatives who were no different. My friend Brent, who is white and was raised in the Chicago suburbs, told me that his family reacted with the same chagrin when he and his wife informed them that their North Dakota wedding would take place according to the Lakota-Sioux ways of Native American spirituality. For a nation of self-proclaimed “individualists,” America is tremendously unimaginative in its insistence on conformity to the mainstream. No one told Sarah and me that we are on a highway to hell, even if some might think it, but some did openly ask how our wedding would meet a standard of seriousness that religion supposedly injects into ceremony. Others wondered how our wedding would have any “meaning” without some invocation of their preferred conception of a creator. I remember a surprisingly honest moment from my eighth grade home room teacher at the Lutheran school where I studied from kindergarten through junior high. He told the class that religious institutions maintain their relevance in people’s lives by monopolizing the “big moments.” They “hatch them, match them, and dispatch them,” he further explained in a rhythmic reference to baptism, marriage, and funerals. Those who find it difficult to imagine meaning without religion are likely victims of their own lack of introspection, and refusal to engage with the world on individuated terms. Meaning, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Rather than encouraging each person to inspect the intellect and interrogate the soul to truly discover what can serve as a source of meaning, religion imposes a one-size-fits all template on top of the person. That template provides comfort and consolation, and the risk of losing that comfort and consolation, only to stumble into the dark alone with one’s own thoughts, is what causes many religious people to react with hurt or hostility when family members reject the faith, or desire a secular ceremony. When I had a conversation with my friend Kev about the temptation to alleviate tension by having some benign religious aspect in the ceremony, he spoke the simple words that Sarah and I maintained as defense until we walked down the aisle: “It is your wedding.” It was our wedding, and it was our responsibility to determine its meaning – not our family’s role, the Pope’s, or anyone else’s. At the risk of sounding boastful, many of our family members, including the religious ones, told us that the ceremony was one of the most beautiful they had ever seen. It is likely they found it so deeply touching not despite its lack of religiosity, but because of it. A wedding is a human event about human emotion and connection. Religion is like static on the phone line. You can hear the human element, but you have to work harder to decipher it over the noise. Cutting out the static makes the human element louder and clearer. There wasn’t much of a battle once Sarah and I decided to make that cut – a few uncomfortable conversations, but no threats to boycott the ceremony, no promises of damnation. People looking to have an unconventional wedding should remember that if their families genuinely love and care for them, they will swallow their pride and offer support. The human element, among family and friends, defeats ideology, and when it loses, those who would rather enforce theological doctrine than demonstrate kindness for a loved one, probably don’t deserve invitations in the first place. The other battlefield Sarah and I had to navigate existed because of a particularly American religion – materialism. The average wedding in America now costs $31,213. The rabid commercialization of American culture, the growth of the wedding industry, and the pressure to conform to materialistic measurements of success have indoctrinated young people to believe it is necessary to spend what could amount to a sizable down payment on a house to get married. Social and familial expectations for weddings now include the standard banquet hall with the boilerplate dinner, lavish décor, and extravagant trappings meant to give the appearance that television cameras are around every corner capturing the event for “reality” programming. Sarah and I share a strong hatred for the wedding industry. Due to our commitment to resist cheap commercialism of a day that is supposed to honor love, and not consumption, along with our own budgetary constraints, we vowed to spend considerably less on our ceremony and reception. Our total costs fell just under $6,000. It raised the eyebrows and ire of members of both our families when we explained that we wanted to have our ceremony at an Irish pub. The pub’s owners are friends, and they have run against the suburban wind by making their business a communal institution for original music, visual art openings, and literary readings. Our friends have engineered a connection between good food, strong booze, and support for the arts. Seeing how Sarah and I are aggressively devoted to the pursuit of all three pleasures, the Chicago St. Pub became a headquarters for the construction of our relationship. We also met many friends inside those walls, including Brent and Kev, and we find it impossible to disassociate our love story from that setting. The labor Sarah, her sisters, and my mother invested into the transformation of the bar into an aesthetic more appropriate for a romantic reception demonstrated the value of sweat equity over transactional promiscuity. The reception had elegance, but it also had authenticity. Materialism in America is about the domination of an image over the internal. Consumer culture convinces people that the image they project is more important than what they think and feel is actually important. The disapproval Sarah and I confronted with our decision to have a simpler ceremony and reception was a result of image insecurity. By the end of the night, after everyone enjoyed the wide variety of food, and danced to the rhythm and blues of Dave Weld and The Imperial Flames, no one seemed stuck on any imagery. The energy in the building was one of palpable, but oddly peaceful ecstasy. The energy emanated from a gathering of genuine people connected only by the voluntary bonds of care, concern, and compassion. It is my hope that everyone could access such joy, beauty, and uplift when they get married. It order to open the channels of access, they must find the courage to engage in the introspection necessary to discover what gives them meaning. If they find that they genuinely feel that it is liturgical, that’s wonderful for them. If it is not, however, they must have the resolve to conduct their wedding according to their desires, not anyone else’s demands. Norman Mailer said that “love is not a virtue. It is a reward for the only virtue – courage.” Courage is the prerequisite for falling in love, and the accompaniment to honoring love. As fewer younger people feel the need to attend church, and as more Americans classify themselves as irreligious, the grapple to define the utility and efficacy of weddings will become more strenuous and onerous. Injuries will likely result, and regardless of who wins in each family, someone will feel wounded. When two people get married, they offer their lives to one another in the belief that their union is not only worthy of protection, but a benefactor of protection to its members. The outside world, full of tragedy and catastrophe, will create disaster and leave piles of wreckage in every life. With the right partner and lover, a person can find the strength and faith to repair and rebuild. The wedding should empower two people with rough hands and hearts swinging hammers and laying bricks to create a sanctuary against the emotional warfare of the indifferent universe. Christopher Lasch called the family a “haven in a heartless world.” In the prioritization of human decision over religious dogma, and intimacy over imagery, it might be most instructive to reimagine the wedding as the ribbon cutting ceremony for that haven.
Twilight of the imperial age: America and China may not have a planet left to rule
For six centuries or more, history was, above all, the story of the great game of empires. From the time the first wooden ships mounted with cannons left Europe’s shores, they began to compete for global power and control. Three, four, even five empires, rising and falling, on an increasingly commandeered and colonized planet. The story, as usually told, is a tale of concentration and of destruction until, in the wake of the second great bloodletting of the twentieth century, there were just two imperial powers left standing: the United States and the Soviet Union. Where the other empires, European and Japanese, had been, little remained but the dead, rubble, refugees, and scenes that today would be associated only with a place like Syria. The result was the ultimate imperial stand-off that we called the Cold War. The two great empires still in existence duked it out for supremacy on “the peripheries” of the planet and “in the shadows.” Because the conflicts being fought were distant indeed, at least from Washington, and because (despite threats) both powers refrained from using nuclear weapons, these were termed “limited wars.” They did not, however, seem limited to the Koreans or Vietnamese whose homes and lives were swept up in them, resulting as they did in more rubble, more refugees, and the deaths of millions. Those two rivals, one a giant, land-based, contiguous imperial entity and the other a distinctly non-traditional empire of military bases, were so enormous and so unlike previous “great powers” -- they were, after all, capable of what had once been left to the gods, quite literally destroying every habitable spot on the planet -- that they were given a new moniker. They were “superpowers.” And then, of course, that six-century process of rivalry and consolidation was over and there was only one: the “sole superpower.” That was 1991 when the Soviet Union suddenly imploded. At age 71, it disappeared from the face of the Earth, and history, at least as some then imagined it, was briefly said to be over. The Shatter Effect There was another story lurking beneath the tale of imperial concentration, and it was a tale of imperial fragmentation. It began, perhaps, with the American Revolution and the armed establishment of a new country free of its British king and colonial overlord. In the twentieth century, the movement to “decolonize” the planet gained remarkable strength. From the Dutch East Indies to French Indochina, the British Raj to European colonies across Africa and the Middle East, “independence” was in the air. Liberation movements were launched or strengthened, guerrillas took up arms, and insurgencies spread across what came to be called the Third World. Imperial power collapsed or ceded control, often after bloody struggles and, for a while, the results looked glorious indeed: the coming of freedom and national independence to nation after nation (even if many of those newly liberated peoples found themselves under the thumbs of autocrats, dictators, or repressive communist regimes). That this was a tale of global fragmentation was not, at first, particularly apparent. It should be by now. After all, those insurgent armies, the tactics of guerrilla warfare, and the urge for “liberation” are today the property not of left-wing national liberation movements but of Islamic terror outfits. Think of them as the armed grandchildren of decolonization and who wouldn’t agree that theirs is a story of the fragmentation of whole regions. It seems, in fact, that they can only thrive in places that have, in some fashion, already been shattered and are failed states, or are on the verge of becoming so. (All of this, naturally, comes with a distinct helping hand from the planet’s last empire). That their global brand is fragmentation should be evident enough now that, in Paris, Libya, Yemen, and other places yet to be named, they’re exporting that product in a big way. In a long-distance fashion, they may, for instance, be helping to turn Europe into a set of splinterlands, aborting the last great attempt at an epic tale of concentration, the turning of the European Union into a United States of Europe. When it comes to fragmentation, the last empire and the first terror caliphate have much in common and may in some sense even be in league with each other. In the twenty-first century, both have proven to be machines for the fracturing of the Greater Middle East and increasingly Africa. And let’s never forget that, without the last empire, the first caliphate of terror would never have been born. Both have extended their power to shake whole societies by wielding advanced technology in forward-looking ways. Two American administrations have employed remote-controlled drones to target terror leaders and their followers across the Greater Middle East and Africa, causing much “collateral damage” and creating a sense of constant fear and terror among those in the backlands of the planet whom drone pilots refer to as potential “bugsplat.” In its robotic manhunting efforts Washington continues to engage in a war on terror that functionally promotes both terror and terror outfits. The Islamic State has similarly used remote-controlled technology -- in their case, social media in its various forms -- to promote terror and stoke fear in distant lands. And of course they have their own low-tech version of Washington’s drones: their suicide bombers and suicidal killers who can be directed at distant individual targets and are engines for collateral damage. In other words, while the U.S. is focused on remote-controlled counterinsurgency, the Islamic State has been promoting a remarkably effective version of remote-controlled insurgency. In tandem, the effect of the two has been devastating. Planet of the Imperial Apocalypse Between those epic tales of concentration and fragmentation lies history as we’ve known it in these last centuries. But it turns out that, unsuspected until relatively recently, a third tale lurked behind the other two, one not yet fully written that could prove to be the actual end of history. Everything else -- the rise and fall of empires, the power to suppress and the urge to revolt, dictatorship and democracy -- remains the normal stuff of history. Prospectively, this is the deal-breaker. It promises a concentration of power of a sort never before imagined and fragmentation of a similarly inconceivable kind. At this moment when the leaders of just about all the nations on Earth have been in Paris working out a deal to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and slow the heating of the planet, what else could I be speaking of than Emperor Weather? Think of his future realm, should it ever come to be, as the planet of the imperial apocalypse. In the last imperial age, the two superpowers made “end times” a human possession for the first time in history. The U.S. and then the USSR took the super power of the atom and built nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the planet several times over. (These days, even a relatively modest exchange of such weapons between India and Pakistan might plunge the world into a version of nuclear winter in which a billion people might die of hunger.) And yet while an instant apocalypse loomed, a slow-motion version of the same, also human-made, was approaching, unrecognized by anyone. That is, of course, what the Paris Summit is all about: what the exploitation of fossil fuels has been doing to this planet. Keep in mind that since the industrial revolution we’ve already warmed the Earth by about 1 degree Celsius. Climate scientists have generally suggested that, if temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius, a potentially devastating set of changes could occur in our environment. Some climate scientists, however, believe that even a 2-degree rise would prove devastating to human life. In either case, even if the Paris pledges from 183 nations to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions are agreed upon and carried out, they would only limit the rise in global temperatures to between an estimated 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius. If no agreement is reached or little of it is actually carried out, the rise could be in the 5-degree range, which would be devastating. Over the coming decades, this could indeed give Emperor Weather his global realm. Of course, his air power -- his bombers, jets, and drones -- would be superstorms; his invading armies would be mega-droughts and mega-floods; and his navy, with the total or partial melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, would be the rising seas of the planet, which would rob humanity of its coastlines and many of its great cities. His forces would occupy not just one or two countries in the Greater Middle East or elsewhere, but the entire planet, lock, stock, and barrel. Emperor Weather’s imperial realms would be global on an awe-inspiring scale and the assaults of his forces would fragment the present planet in ways that could make much of it, in human terms, look like Syria. Moreover, given how long it takes greenhouse gases to leave the atmosphere, his global rule would be guaranteed to last an inhumanly long period of time unchallenged. Heat (think burning Australia today, only far worse) would be the coin of the realm. While humanity will undoubtedly survive in some fashion, whether human civilization as we now know it can similarly survive on a planet that is no longer the welcoming home that it has been these last thousands of years we have no way of knowing. Keep in mind, though, that like history itself, this is a story we are still writing -- even though Emperor Weather couldn't care less about writing, history, or us. If he truly comes to power, history will certainly end in some sense. There will be no hope of democracy under his rule because he won’t care a whit about what we think or do or say, nor of revolt -- that staple of our history -- because (to adapt something Bill McKibben has long pointed out) you can’t revolt against physics. This story is not yet engraved in... well, if not stone, then melting ice. Sooner or later, it may indeed be a tale unfolding in environmental feedback loops that can no longer be stopped or altered. But for the moment, it seems, humanity still has the chance to write its own history in a fashion that would allow for a perhaps less welcoming but still reasonably palatable world for our children and grandchildren to live in. And be glad of that. For that to happen, however, successful negotiations in Paris can only be the start of something far more sweeping when it comes to the forms of energy we use and how we live on this planet. Fortunately, experiments are underway in the world of alternative energy, funding is beginning to appear, and a global environmental movement is expanding and could someday, on a planet growing ever less comfortable, put the heat on governments globally before Emperor Weather can turn up the heat on history.
Kurt Vonnegut’s POW nightmare: Inside the World War II battle that shaped “Slaughterhouse Five”
Private First Class Vonnegut prepared to die. At the bottom of a snowy hollow, he fixed his bayonet and waited, huddled in a group of roughly fifty soldiers. Their unit, the 423rd, had been at battle for three days, since December 16. They’d been lost for most of it. They must be somewhere in Luxembourg, someone said. Now they were surrounded, herded into a small depression in the unfamiliar land. Kurt hunched into his coat—he had a tall man’s habit of hunching—but he couldn’t get warm. That December—1944— was one of the coldest and wettest ever recorded in Europe. The Germans were shouting at them. Kurt and the other soldiers couldn’t see them, but they could hear accented voices telling the Americans to give up. They were surrounded, the Nazis said. It was useless to resist. The men bunched together, pointing their bayonets out the way soldiers do in the movies. Time slowed down. Kurt had always liked being part of a clan, and here, at the end of the line, the soldiers became almost one being, a big porcupine bristling with steel quills. For a few minutes, it was kind of nice. He had waded ashore to the European theater less than a month earlier and ground to the front in a truck buffeted by sleet. He was still somewhat in shock. His mother had died of a drug overdose—was it a suicide? an accident?—just before he shipped out. The sadness hung thick over his departure, complicating and deepening his fear. He longed for the feeling that someone loved him, followed his every move with boundless devotion. He hadn’t realized how much he needed that until his mother was gone. Still, for the first time in his life he felt beyond reproach. No longer a flunking chemistry student or a college dropout, he was where he was supposed to be, a soldier putting his life on the line. He was now the sort of person honored in the grandiose Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at the center of his hometown, Indianapolis. Not even his big brother, Bernard, could say that much. Bernie, the A student, the brilliant scientist, the MIT man like their father. The one who launched the chain of events that landed Kurt here, a pacifist about to be swallowed by war. The Germans fired on the trees above the soldiers’ heads. Branches and splintered steel rained down. A couple of guys were hit. They might be dead. Twenty-five years later, Kurt would introduce a character named Edgar Derby to the world and describe his experience of this very battle. He would call what rained down on him “the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more.” Come out, the Nazis ordered again. The Americans came out. When he saw the Germans, Kurt couldn’t help but note their white snowsuits. That made so much more sense, he thought, than his absurd army drab. The Americans were always in olive, as if wars were never fought in white places, in white weather. * The battle had started three days earlier at 5:30 a.m., before dawn crept over the frozen landscape of Schnee Eifel, or Snow Mountain. They were manning a lightly defended spot along the old Westwall, a reinforcement ridge the Allies called the Siegfried Line. It was quiet: no one expected much to happen on this front. Then out of the predawn darkness came the attack, and it sounded like the sky falling in. For eighty miles along the Westwall, Allied soldiers woke up to German artillery raining down on them: fourteen-inch shells from railroad guns, the hacking cough and plunk of mortars, the high-pitched whistles of what the Americans called “screaming meemies” but the Germans called Nebelwerfer: fog throwers. The forest along the front was leveled as the Germans fired on trees. Even the Nazis were impressed by their own artillery storm. “A hurricane of iron and fire,” one German major called it. For nearly an hour, the onslaught pounded the American troops. Then, suddenly, there was an eerie silence. As the soldiers tried to get their bearings, they heard a clank, and then they were lit like stage actors from the east. Through the dense fog, the Germans were flooding them with searchlights—a new intimidation tactic they called “artificial moonlight.” To the battered Allies, it felt as if the Nazis had commandeered control of nature. Finally, out of the white came snow monsters: German infantry. Something big was happening, but no one knew what. Telephone lines were blasted; whole divisions lost contact with command. Strategists got garbled and patchy reports; some thought the barrage was merely a “spoiling” attack, a futile lashing out by an enemy who knew he was defeated. After all, the war was meant to be winding down. General Eisenhower had a standing bet with the British field marshal Montgomery that Europe would be won by Christmas. It took days before the Allied generals realized that a major offensive was under way and diverted troops to stop it. In retrospect, it was clearly a mistake to man twenty-five miles of front with one Allied division. But the Germans were outnumbered and out-armed. Why would they launch an offensive? They had only one thing on their side: the Allies called it “Hitler’s weather.” In war, soldiers fight more than the enemy. They fight topography. They fight time. Most of all, they fight weather. Kublai Khan might have overrun Japan, but a typhoon destroyed half his ships. The Spanish Armada fell to Britain because of storms on the North Sea. Napoleon was especially unlucky in weather: he lost Waterloo because of a rainstorm, and his march on Russia was beaten back not by war craft but by winter. In World War II, weather mattered more than ever. It was the first war in which airpower would be decisive, and the U.S. Army Air Forces were especially vulnerable to bad weather: cloud cover disrupted bombing runs; snow scrambled radio signals; icing forced planes to land. But weather could waylay the Navy too: the day Kurt woke up to the German attack on the western front, the Third Fleet faced a typhoon in the Pacific. The storm sank three destroyers, wrecked 146 aircraft on carriers, and killed 778 troops, racking up a higher death toll than any Japanese attack. And weather tormented the infantry: rain and snow slowed tanks, troops, and supply lines. Fog could conceal enemy movements. Weather forecasting had been part of most militaries since the early nineteenth century, but when World War II broke out, the generals realized they needed more meteorologists than ever. Colleges were enlisted to train thousands of weather officers for the new Air Weather Service. MIT, America’s leading meteorology school, established a special program, bumping its enrollment from thirty students to around five hundred. The department head, Sverre Petterssen, left MIT to join General Eisenhower’s meteorology team. He played a key role in the war’s most famous weather suspense story. During World War I, a new physics-based school of meteorology had arisen in Norway called air mass analysis. Petterssen was Norwegian and a proponent of this scientifically rigorous new approach. When Ike was poised to invade Normandy, Petterssen told him to wait. The skies looked clear, but the upper air situation was unstable. Petterssen told Eisenhower’s team that the weather was likely to turn bad and scuttle the invasion. He based this forecast not just on what he could observe but on the idea that large wind patterns were battling each other high in the sky, atmospheric echoes of the clash of armies below. Such wind patterns are common knowledge today, but in the 1940s not everyone believed that weather was shaped by the huge, invisible air masses that meteorologists had given a warlike name: fronts. The American meteorologist Irving Krick, who was also on the team, scoffed at Petterssen’s approach. Krick, using the classic forecasting technique—looking at weather maps from the past to determine how the future might shape up—declared that the offensive should go on as planned. The largest invasion in history hung in the balance as the weathermen argued about the winds. Finally, the chief meteorological officer made the call. D-Day was postponed for twenty-four hours, and indeed the weather turned stormy. The next day looked no better, but Petterssen pointed to the changing barometric pressure as a sign that the weather would improve. There would be a window of opportunity before the next bad day. Gambling on Petterssen’s prediction, General Eisenhower launched the attack. Now it was the Germans who were using the weather to their advantage. The attack that would come to be called the Battle of the Bulge was planned for December with good reason. Under cover of heavy cold fog, the Germans had amassed 410,000 troops, 1,400 tanks, and 2,600 artillery weapons for the predawn offensive. The weather had slowed the delivery of Allied troops and supplies to the front, and the bitter cold ensured that the Allied infantry, huddled in foxholes and trenches, was distracted by the need to keep warm. Best of all, the heavy cloud cover would keep British and American planes grounded, depriving the Allies of air support. General Alfred Jodl had foreseen it in the detailed operational plan he drew up for the Reichsführer. He called it Herbstnebel: Autumn Fog. * Kurt’s regiment, the 423rd, got the worst of Autumn Fog. Its troops were far enough forward to be on German ground, and before they even realized what had happened, they were cut off. The men of the 423rd, like the entire 106th Division, were green; they had never seen action. Many, like Kurt, had been pulled out of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP)—a combined college and military program that was meant to lead to a degree and an officer’s commission. It was canceled in 1944 because the Army didn’t need more officers; it needed riflemen. Hitler was going to be defeated not by strategists or engineers but by numbers. College boys like Kurt were plucked from classes on thermodynamics, calculus, and mechanical engineering, given a few months’ hasty training in combat skills, and shipped to Europe. Kurt tried to get assigned to public relations, but his efforts failed. His unit, the 106th, was the last American infantry division to be mobilized in World War II. Two-thirds of its troops were single men under the age of twenty-three. The Schnee Eifel was where these young men were supposed to get “blooded”—to practice their battlefield skills before facing actual combat. Now they were thrust in the middle of the very bloody real thing, and they didn’t know what to do. Kurt’s regiment commander, Colonel Charles Cavender, was told to dig in and hold the Germans back as best he could. He was promised an airdrop of ammunition and supplies. As the Germans moved inexorably forward, the men of the 423rd split into small groups and huddled together like sheep. By nightfall, the sheep were surrounded. For the next two days, they fought as best they could, in small groups or larger ones, while the Germans streamed around them and toward St. Vith. For three long days, the 423rd and its sister regiment, the 424th, tried to hold their ground, like ants clinging to a boulder in a rising flood. By the morning of December 19, hundreds of men from the 106th were dead or wounded. The promised airdrops weren’t coming, and there was no sign of reinforcements either. Colonel Cavender sent six of his men out to reconnoiter. One of them was Kurt. They weren’t looking for the enemy; they were looking for their own artillery. Wandering the snowy hills, the six men found about fifty more Americans. And then the Germans found them. The Americans surrendered as they were taught: they dismantled their weapons and threw them into the snow. Coming out of their gully, they said things like “take it easy” and “don’t shoot.” They wanted to go on living if they possibly could. Kurt knew a little German; his German American parents spoke it, and he’d had two years of it in high school. He tried out a few words. The Germans asked him if he was of German ancestry. He gave them his last name, Vonnegut. “Why are you making war on your brothers?” they asked him. The question made little sense. He was a Hoosier, not a Kraut. But they weren’t completely off base. When he said his own name, he said it, as his father did, in the German way: Kooort. The Germans pointed their guns at the Americans. They told Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to march. * Two years earlier, he had been a relatively carefree undergraduate, writing columns called “Innocents Abroad” and “Well All Right” for The Cornell Daily Sun, buying Old Grand-Dad bourbon for a dance he hoped his sweetheart, Jane, would attend. The war meant this to him: Cokes were being rationed on campus. The university was banning house parties and out-of-town dates. Fraternities were going to be strapped for cash. Kurt devoted a whole column to the looming frat-house financial crunch. “It’s a nasty picture no matter how you look at it,” he wrote in May 1941. “From an abstract point of view it will be interesting to watch, just like bombing.” He’d been sixteen when the war began. He and two friends were wrapping up a summer road trip by spending a few days as the guests of Frank Phillips of Phillips Petroleum. Phillips had a resort in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, called Woolaroc Ranch. Woolaroc was a teenage boy’s fantasy, where Kurt and his pals spent their days riding horses, fishing, and swimming, their evenings drinking beer and smoking twenty-five-cent cigars. They goofed around with the lodge’s player piano and ransacked their host’s library for spicy crime novels and anthropological accounts of the sex lives of primitive tribes while the radio tallied the mounting threat in Europe. It all seemed impossibly far away. The day they drove home, Hitler invaded Poland. As they pounded the road for seven hundred miles, Kurt had looked back on the whole adventure and wondered if he’d ever be that happy again. His family was pacifist; the Vonneguts had always been freethinkers. Kurt clung to his antiwar conviction long after most others had succumbed to patriotic warmongering. In one column for the Sun, he defended the unpopular isolationist sentiments of Charles Lindbergh. In another, he criticized the extreme anti-German bias of the American media. Later, he blasted Wendell Willkie, “political yo-yo from the Hoosier state,” for advocating the opening of a second front. It wasn’t that he was pro-German. He was just antiwar. He came from a long line of Germans, yes; his grandfather had designed the gorgeous Indianapolis social center formerly known as Das Deutsche Haus. After World War I caused a wave of anti-German sentiment, Das Deutsche Haus was renamed the Athenaeum. But in Kurt’s family, ethnicity was less important than ethics, intellect, and wit. He had learned early that the best way for a third child to be heard at the dinner table was to crack a joke. Being funny was the only way he got them to stop interrupting and listen to him. Besides, his brother was brilliant, and his sister was artistic and beautiful. He couldn’t compete on brains or talent or glamour. So he nurtured his penchant for humor, and this served him well at the Sun. His fellow students at Cornell didn’t always agree with his isolationist sentiments, but they liked his snappy writing. In March 1942, he was appointed assistant managing editor of the paper. He bragged about that to Jane Cox. He was always trying to impress her. They’d known each other since they were small children. In a way, she was his best friend. He recognized things in her—imagination, ambition, idealism—that he saw in himself. They were going to get married and live a blissful life together, full of books and music and smart conversation and ultimately kids—seven of them. He knew all of this, felt it somewhere deep inside him, even if Jane, busy acing her classes at Swarthmore and acting in plays and going on dates with a roster of eligible young men, hadn’t come around to it yet. Kurt wrote it over and over in his letters to her. She was alternately encouraging and distant. She was hell to get along with, Jane, but he loved her, and he always would. Nineteen forty-five was the year he had picked for their wedding. He wrote it in one of his columns. Before he left for Europe, they became lovers. At Cornell, he had spent all his time working on the newspaper, to the detriment of everything else. His grades in his major—chemistry— suffered. He was supposed to be earning an officer’s commission in the ROTC, but he got kicked out after writing an irreverent column: “We Impress Life Magazine with Our Efficient Role in National Defense.” In it, he claimed that he and the other ROTC boys had little idea what they were doing, but when a Life photographer visited, they gamely ran around and disassembled a rifle while shouting things like “Flathatcher! Biffleblock!” to seem like crack militiamen. The ROTC was not amused. It wasn’t the first time Kurt had mocked the warlike exertions of the college boys. An earlier column was cast as a letter to the military department from the school’s zoologists, who claimed to be just as ready for service as the chemical engineers and advance drill squads. “Up in the front lines our commanding officer will say ‘Vontegal . . . what the hell kind of butterfly is that,’ and we’ll be the only man in the trench that can tell him. That’s the sort of thing that wins wars!” It was, on some level, a sly crack at his brother, Bernard, who was doing war work. He’d been asked to leave his peacetime job and go back to MIT to work in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service laboratory there. He was exempted from the draft because of it. He couldn’t tell his family what he was working on, but the family was proud of him; they were always proud of Bernard. How could Kurt resist mocking the notion that scientists would win the war? Besides, that was pretty much the only way he ever got a jump on Bernie: he made fun of him. By his sophomore May, Kurt’s grades were so bad he was put on academic probation. He made light of his woes in a column titled “The Lost Battalion Undergoes a Severe Shelling.” He was the lost battalion. Why didn’t he just switch his major to English or journalism? He was a newspaperman at heart. In Ithaca, his happiest moments were when he was editing the Sun, just as in Indianapolis they had been when he was editing the Shortridge Echo, the nation’s first high school daily. His experience there convinced him that not only did he like newspaper work, he was good at it. Toward the end of high school, he’d even managed to land a job offer from The Indianapolis Times. He wanted to take it. But becoming a newspaperman wasn’t what his father and Bernie had in mind for him. Sure, Kurt senior and Bernie agreed, young Kurt could write, and he was funny—the family clown, the class clown—but when he graduated from high school, it was time to get serious. At one point, Kurt thought he might like to become an architect, like his father and his grandfather Bernard, who had designed the Athenaeum. The opulent building was still the heart of the Indianapolis German American community, and Kurt had spent many a night there as a kid, admiring the elaborate woodwork and leaded glass windows as the adults talked or danced or listened to music. It must be nice to make something so beautiful. But that was before the Great Depression had ruined his father. The disheartened Kurt senior wouldn’t hear of Kurt following in his footsteps. Be anything, he said bitterly, but an architect. When he was a young man, Kurt’s dreams—shared with Jane—were all about writing. They both fantasized about being news correspondents in Europe. Sometimes, when Jane was playing along, they envisioned the house they might share: a courtyard with an oak tree at its center and a studio out back where they would sit side by side and type out masterpieces. But even Kurt had a hard time imagining writing for a living. He would have to do something else to support those seven kids. Bernie knew what Kurt should do; he should be a scientist, like him. So Bernard and Kurt senior decided that Kurt should study chemistry. That was a useful, practical field. Kurt didn’t necessarily disagree. He believed, as they did, in science. It had more answers to the questions of life, he told Jane, than fields like psychology or philosophy. Science was going to make the world a better place. To be part of the utopian future, he should do as his brother said. The older men didn’t think Kurt junior was MIT material, so they settled on Cornell. When it looked as if Cornell might not take him, Bernard drove Kurt to Harvard, where he was given a provisional acceptance. But then Cornell came through, and Bernard thought he would have a better time there. That, Kurt said later, “was his idea of me, sort of third rate.” So in the fall of 1940, Kurt went off to Cornell to study chemistry. But he wasn’t a born scientist like Bernie. When it came to the actual class work, it just didn’t grab him. Not the way writing did. So he ignored his classes and did what made him happiest—keeping late hours in the offices of the Sun. Even the warning in his sophomore spring didn’t set him straight. By Christmas break of his junior year, he was flunking out. He came down with pneumonia at home and decided not to go back. But his draft number was coming up. In March 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. So now the whole chain of events boiled down to this: Private Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a prisoner of war. * “The war is over for you,” the Germans told the Americans. Kurt joined the long line of Yank soldiers marching east, toward Germany. German cameramen stood filming as the prisoners limped along. This might be the Nazi propagandists’ last chance to convince the weary folk at home that victory was still within reach. Kurt saw them pointing their lenses at the broken men. Twenty-five years later, in Slaughterhouse-Five, he would describe them as having run out of film—a perfect symbol for the empty pointlessness of it all: the propaganda, the offensive, the Nazi war machine, the whole goddamn war. He picked up his tired feet and marched, past dead soldiers unfurling from tanks, past men frozen in snowy fields, arms stretched toward the sky in fruitless supplication. The Germans did have film. In it, the Americans looked dirty, disheartened, and exhausted. Some supported wounded comrades or lugged makeshift pallets. The rest trudged miserably along. They had survived the German offensive, but many would not survive what lay ahead. When they came to the top of a hill, the captured men could see a long line of prisoners, as far forward as the eye could see. Seven thousand Allied soldiers had been bagged by the Germans. It would have been different if the Allies had been able to get their planes in the air. Air support could have nipped Herbstnebel in the bud. But in all that fog, the airplanes failed them. The weather had fought for the other side. As they marched into Germany, some of the prisoners must have known the Germans were wrong about one thing: the war wasn’t over for them. Kurt and the other captured American troops were marching into a strange gray area, a place where they were neither soldiers nor civilians, neither at peace nor at war. The autumn fog swallowed them whole. Excerpted from "The Brothers Vonnegut" by Ginger Strand, published in November 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Ginger Strand. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Private First Class Vonnegut prepared to die. At the bottom of a snowy hollow, he fixed his bayonet and waited, huddled in a group of roughly fifty soldiers. Their unit, the 423rd, had been at battle for three days, since December 16. They’d been lost for most of it. They must be somewhere in Luxembourg, someone said. Now they were surrounded, herded into a small depression in the unfamiliar land. Kurt hunched into his coat—he had a tall man’s habit of hunching—but he couldn’t get warm. That December—1944— was one of the coldest and wettest ever recorded in Europe. The Germans were shouting at them. Kurt and the other soldiers couldn’t see them, but they could hear accented voices telling the Americans to give up. They were surrounded, the Nazis said. It was useless to resist. The men bunched together, pointing their bayonets out the way soldiers do in the movies. Time slowed down. Kurt had always liked being part of a clan, and here, at the end of the line, the soldiers became almost one being, a big porcupine bristling with steel quills. For a few minutes, it was kind of nice. He had waded ashore to the European theater less than a month earlier and ground to the front in a truck buffeted by sleet. He was still somewhat in shock. His mother had died of a drug overdose—was it a suicide? an accident?—just before he shipped out. The sadness hung thick over his departure, complicating and deepening his fear. He longed for the feeling that someone loved him, followed his every move with boundless devotion. He hadn’t realized how much he needed that until his mother was gone. Still, for the first time in his life he felt beyond reproach. No longer a flunking chemistry student or a college dropout, he was where he was supposed to be, a soldier putting his life on the line. He was now the sort of person honored in the grandiose Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at the center of his hometown, Indianapolis. Not even his big brother, Bernard, could say that much. Bernie, the A student, the brilliant scientist, the MIT man like their father. The one who launched the chain of events that landed Kurt here, a pacifist about to be swallowed by war. The Germans fired on the trees above the soldiers’ heads. Branches and splintered steel rained down. A couple of guys were hit. They might be dead. Twenty-five years later, Kurt would introduce a character named Edgar Derby to the world and describe his experience of this very battle. He would call what rained down on him “the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more.” Come out, the Nazis ordered again. The Americans came out. When he saw the Germans, Kurt couldn’t help but note their white snowsuits. That made so much more sense, he thought, than his absurd army drab. The Americans were always in olive, as if wars were never fought in white places, in white weather. * The battle had started three days earlier at 5:30 a.m., before dawn crept over the frozen landscape of Schnee Eifel, or Snow Mountain. They were manning a lightly defended spot along the old Westwall, a reinforcement ridge the Allies called the Siegfried Line. It was quiet: no one expected much to happen on this front. Then out of the predawn darkness came the attack, and it sounded like the sky falling in. For eighty miles along the Westwall, Allied soldiers woke up to German artillery raining down on them: fourteen-inch shells from railroad guns, the hacking cough and plunk of mortars, the high-pitched whistles of what the Americans called “screaming meemies” but the Germans called Nebelwerfer: fog throwers. The forest along the front was leveled as the Germans fired on trees. Even the Nazis were impressed by their own artillery storm. “A hurricane of iron and fire,” one German major called it. For nearly an hour, the onslaught pounded the American troops. Then, suddenly, there was an eerie silence. As the soldiers tried to get their bearings, they heard a clank, and then they were lit like stage actors from the east. Through the dense fog, the Germans were flooding them with searchlights—a new intimidation tactic they called “artificial moonlight.” To the battered Allies, it felt as if the Nazis had commandeered control of nature. Finally, out of the white came snow monsters: German infantry. Something big was happening, but no one knew what. Telephone lines were blasted; whole divisions lost contact with command. Strategists got garbled and patchy reports; some thought the barrage was merely a “spoiling” attack, a futile lashing out by an enemy who knew he was defeated. After all, the war was meant to be winding down. General Eisenhower had a standing bet with the British field marshal Montgomery that Europe would be won by Christmas. It took days before the Allied generals realized that a major offensive was under way and diverted troops to stop it. In retrospect, it was clearly a mistake to man twenty-five miles of front with one Allied division. But the Germans were outnumbered and out-armed. Why would they launch an offensive? They had only one thing on their side: the Allies called it “Hitler’s weather.” In war, soldiers fight more than the enemy. They fight topography. They fight time. Most of all, they fight weather. Kublai Khan might have overrun Japan, but a typhoon destroyed half his ships. The Spanish Armada fell to Britain because of storms on the North Sea. Napoleon was especially unlucky in weather: he lost Waterloo because of a rainstorm, and his march on Russia was beaten back not by war craft but by winter. In World War II, weather mattered more than ever. It was the first war in which airpower would be decisive, and the U.S. Army Air Forces were especially vulnerable to bad weather: cloud cover disrupted bombing runs; snow scrambled radio signals; icing forced planes to land. But weather could waylay the Navy too: the day Kurt woke up to the German attack on the western front, the Third Fleet faced a typhoon in the Pacific. The storm sank three destroyers, wrecked 146 aircraft on carriers, and killed 778 troops, racking up a higher death toll than any Japanese attack. And weather tormented the infantry: rain and snow slowed tanks, troops, and supply lines. Fog could conceal enemy movements. Weather forecasting had been part of most militaries since the early nineteenth century, but when World War II broke out, the generals realized they needed more meteorologists than ever. Colleges were enlisted to train thousands of weather officers for the new Air Weather Service. MIT, America’s leading meteorology school, established a special program, bumping its enrollment from thirty students to around five hundred. The department head, Sverre Petterssen, left MIT to join General Eisenhower’s meteorology team. He played a key role in the war’s most famous weather suspense story. During World War I, a new physics-based school of meteorology had arisen in Norway called air mass analysis. Petterssen was Norwegian and a proponent of this scientifically rigorous new approach. When Ike was poised to invade Normandy, Petterssen told him to wait. The skies looked clear, but the upper air situation was unstable. Petterssen told Eisenhower’s team that the weather was likely to turn bad and scuttle the invasion. He based this forecast not just on what he could observe but on the idea that large wind patterns were battling each other high in the sky, atmospheric echoes of the clash of armies below. Such wind patterns are common knowledge today, but in the 1940s not everyone believed that weather was shaped by the huge, invisible air masses that meteorologists had given a warlike name: fronts. The American meteorologist Irving Krick, who was also on the team, scoffed at Petterssen’s approach. Krick, using the classic forecasting technique—looking at weather maps from the past to determine how the future might shape up—declared that the offensive should go on as planned. The largest invasion in history hung in the balance as the weathermen argued about the winds. Finally, the chief meteorological officer made the call. D-Day was postponed for twenty-four hours, and indeed the weather turned stormy. The next day looked no better, but Petterssen pointed to the changing barometric pressure as a sign that the weather would improve. There would be a window of opportunity before the next bad day. Gambling on Petterssen’s prediction, General Eisenhower launched the attack. Now it was the Germans who were using the weather to their advantage. The attack that would come to be called the Battle of the Bulge was planned for December with good reason. Under cover of heavy cold fog, the Germans had amassed 410,000 troops, 1,400 tanks, and 2,600 artillery weapons for the predawn offensive. The weather had slowed the delivery of Allied troops and supplies to the front, and the bitter cold ensured that the Allied infantry, huddled in foxholes and trenches, was distracted by the need to keep warm. Best of all, the heavy cloud cover would keep British and American planes grounded, depriving the Allies of air support. General Alfred Jodl had foreseen it in the detailed operational plan he drew up for the Reichsführer. He called it Herbstnebel: Autumn Fog. * Kurt’s regiment, the 423rd, got the worst of Autumn Fog. Its troops were far enough forward to be on German ground, and before they even realized what had happened, they were cut off. The men of the 423rd, like the entire 106th Division, were green; they had never seen action. Many, like Kurt, had been pulled out of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP)—a combined college and military program that was meant to lead to a degree and an officer’s commission. It was canceled in 1944 because the Army didn’t need more officers; it needed riflemen. Hitler was going to be defeated not by strategists or engineers but by numbers. College boys like Kurt were plucked from classes on thermodynamics, calculus, and mechanical engineering, given a few months’ hasty training in combat skills, and shipped to Europe. Kurt tried to get assigned to public relations, but his efforts failed. His unit, the 106th, was the last American infantry division to be mobilized in World War II. Two-thirds of its troops were single men under the age of twenty-three. The Schnee Eifel was where these young men were supposed to get “blooded”—to practice their battlefield skills before facing actual combat. Now they were thrust in the middle of the very bloody real thing, and they didn’t know what to do. Kurt’s regiment commander, Colonel Charles Cavender, was told to dig in and hold the Germans back as best he could. He was promised an airdrop of ammunition and supplies. As the Germans moved inexorably forward, the men of the 423rd split into small groups and huddled together like sheep. By nightfall, the sheep were surrounded. For the next two days, they fought as best they could, in small groups or larger ones, while the Germans streamed around them and toward St. Vith. For three long days, the 423rd and its sister regiment, the 424th, tried to hold their ground, like ants clinging to a boulder in a rising flood. By the morning of December 19, hundreds of men from the 106th were dead or wounded. The promised airdrops weren’t coming, and there was no sign of reinforcements either. Colonel Cavender sent six of his men out to reconnoiter. One of them was Kurt. They weren’t looking for the enemy; they were looking for their own artillery. Wandering the snowy hills, the six men found about fifty more Americans. And then the Germans found them. The Americans surrendered as they were taught: they dismantled their weapons and threw them into the snow. Coming out of their gully, they said things like “take it easy” and “don’t shoot.” They wanted to go on living if they possibly could. Kurt knew a little German; his German American parents spoke it, and he’d had two years of it in high school. He tried out a few words. The Germans asked him if he was of German ancestry. He gave them his last name, Vonnegut. “Why are you making war on your brothers?” they asked him. The question made little sense. He was a Hoosier, not a Kraut. But they weren’t completely off base. When he said his own name, he said it, as his father did, in the German way: Kooort. The Germans pointed their guns at the Americans. They told Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to march. * Two years earlier, he had been a relatively carefree undergraduate, writing columns called “Innocents Abroad” and “Well All Right” for The Cornell Daily Sun, buying Old Grand-Dad bourbon for a dance he hoped his sweetheart, Jane, would attend. The war meant this to him: Cokes were being rationed on campus. The university was banning house parties and out-of-town dates. Fraternities were going to be strapped for cash. Kurt devoted a whole column to the looming frat-house financial crunch. “It’s a nasty picture no matter how you look at it,” he wrote in May 1941. “From an abstract point of view it will be interesting to watch, just like bombing.” He’d been sixteen when the war began. He and two friends were wrapping up a summer road trip by spending a few days as the guests of Frank Phillips of Phillips Petroleum. Phillips had a resort in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, called Woolaroc Ranch. Woolaroc was a teenage boy’s fantasy, where Kurt and his pals spent their days riding horses, fishing, and swimming, their evenings drinking beer and smoking twenty-five-cent cigars. They goofed around with the lodge’s player piano and ransacked their host’s library for spicy crime novels and anthropological accounts of the sex lives of primitive tribes while the radio tallied the mounting threat in Europe. It all seemed impossibly far away. The day they drove home, Hitler invaded Poland. As they pounded the road for seven hundred miles, Kurt had looked back on the whole adventure and wondered if he’d ever be that happy again. His family was pacifist; the Vonneguts had always been freethinkers. Kurt clung to his antiwar conviction long after most others had succumbed to patriotic warmongering. In one column for the Sun, he defended the unpopular isolationist sentiments of Charles Lindbergh. In another, he criticized the extreme anti-German bias of the American media. Later, he blasted Wendell Willkie, “political yo-yo from the Hoosier state,” for advocating the opening of a second front. It wasn’t that he was pro-German. He was just antiwar. He came from a long line of Germans, yes; his grandfather had designed the gorgeous Indianapolis social center formerly known as Das Deutsche Haus. After World War I caused a wave of anti-German sentiment, Das Deutsche Haus was renamed the Athenaeum. But in Kurt’s family, ethnicity was less important than ethics, intellect, and wit. He had learned early that the best way for a third child to be heard at the dinner table was to crack a joke. Being funny was the only way he got them to stop interrupting and listen to him. Besides, his brother was brilliant, and his sister was artistic and beautiful. He couldn’t compete on brains or talent or glamour. So he nurtured his penchant for humor, and this served him well at the Sun. His fellow students at Cornell didn’t always agree with his isolationist sentiments, but they liked his snappy writing. In March 1942, he was appointed assistant managing editor of the paper. He bragged about that to Jane Cox. He was always trying to impress her. They’d known each other since they were small children. In a way, she was his best friend. He recognized things in her—imagination, ambition, idealism—that he saw in himself. They were going to get married and live a blissful life together, full of books and music and smart conversation and ultimately kids—seven of them. He knew all of this, felt it somewhere deep inside him, even if Jane, busy acing her classes at Swarthmore and acting in plays and going on dates with a roster of eligible young men, hadn’t come around to it yet. Kurt wrote it over and over in his letters to her. She was alternately encouraging and distant. She was hell to get along with, Jane, but he loved her, and he always would. Nineteen forty-five was the year he had picked for their wedding. He wrote it in one of his columns. Before he left for Europe, they became lovers. At Cornell, he had spent all his time working on the newspaper, to the detriment of everything else. His grades in his major—chemistry— suffered. He was supposed to be earning an officer’s commission in the ROTC, but he got kicked out after writing an irreverent column: “We Impress Life Magazine with Our Efficient Role in National Defense.” In it, he claimed that he and the other ROTC boys had little idea what they were doing, but when a Life photographer visited, they gamely ran around and disassembled a rifle while shouting things like “Flathatcher! Biffleblock!” to seem like crack militiamen. The ROTC was not amused. It wasn’t the first time Kurt had mocked the warlike exertions of the college boys. An earlier column was cast as a letter to the military department from the school’s zoologists, who claimed to be just as ready for service as the chemical engineers and advance drill squads. “Up in the front lines our commanding officer will say ‘Vontegal . . . what the hell kind of butterfly is that,’ and we’ll be the only man in the trench that can tell him. That’s the sort of thing that wins wars!” It was, on some level, a sly crack at his brother, Bernard, who was doing war work. He’d been asked to leave his peacetime job and go back to MIT to work in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service laboratory there. He was exempted from the draft because of it. He couldn’t tell his family what he was working on, but the family was proud of him; they were always proud of Bernard. How could Kurt resist mocking the notion that scientists would win the war? Besides, that was pretty much the only way he ever got a jump on Bernie: he made fun of him. By his sophomore May, Kurt’s grades were so bad he was put on academic probation. He made light of his woes in a column titled “The Lost Battalion Undergoes a Severe Shelling.” He was the lost battalion. Why didn’t he just switch his major to English or journalism? He was a newspaperman at heart. In Ithaca, his happiest moments were when he was editing the Sun, just as in Indianapolis they had been when he was editing the Shortridge Echo, the nation’s first high school daily. His experience there convinced him that not only did he like newspaper work, he was good at it. Toward the end of high school, he’d even managed to land a job offer from The Indianapolis Times. He wanted to take it. But becoming a newspaperman wasn’t what his father and Bernie had in mind for him. Sure, Kurt senior and Bernie agreed, young Kurt could write, and he was funny—the family clown, the class clown—but when he graduated from high school, it was time to get serious. At one point, Kurt thought he might like to become an architect, like his father and his grandfather Bernard, who had designed the Athenaeum. The opulent building was still the heart of the Indianapolis German American community, and Kurt had spent many a night there as a kid, admiring the elaborate woodwork and leaded glass windows as the adults talked or danced or listened to music. It must be nice to make something so beautiful. But that was before the Great Depression had ruined his father. The disheartened Kurt senior wouldn’t hear of Kurt following in his footsteps. Be anything, he said bitterly, but an architect. When he was a young man, Kurt’s dreams—shared with Jane—were all about writing. They both fantasized about being news correspondents in Europe. Sometimes, when Jane was playing along, they envisioned the house they might share: a courtyard with an oak tree at its center and a studio out back where they would sit side by side and type out masterpieces. But even Kurt had a hard time imagining writing for a living. He would have to do something else to support those seven kids. Bernie knew what Kurt should do; he should be a scientist, like him. So Bernard and Kurt senior decided that Kurt should study chemistry. That was a useful, practical field. Kurt didn’t necessarily disagree. He believed, as they did, in science. It had more answers to the questions of life, he told Jane, than fields like psychology or philosophy. Science was going to make the world a better place. To be part of the utopian future, he should do as his brother said. The older men didn’t think Kurt junior was MIT material, so they settled on Cornell. When it looked as if Cornell might not take him, Bernard drove Kurt to Harvard, where he was given a provisional acceptance. But then Cornell came through, and Bernard thought he would have a better time there. That, Kurt said later, “was his idea of me, sort of third rate.” So in the fall of 1940, Kurt went off to Cornell to study chemistry. But he wasn’t a born scientist like Bernie. When it came to the actual class work, it just didn’t grab him. Not the way writing did. So he ignored his classes and did what made him happiest—keeping late hours in the offices of the Sun. Even the warning in his sophomore spring didn’t set him straight. By Christmas break of his junior year, he was flunking out. He came down with pneumonia at home and decided not to go back. But his draft number was coming up. In March 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. So now the whole chain of events boiled down to this: Private Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a prisoner of war. * “The war is over for you,” the Germans told the Americans. Kurt joined the long line of Yank soldiers marching east, toward Germany. German cameramen stood filming as the prisoners limped along. This might be the Nazi propagandists’ last chance to convince the weary folk at home that victory was still within reach. Kurt saw them pointing their lenses at the broken men. Twenty-five years later, in Slaughterhouse-Five, he would describe them as having run out of film—a perfect symbol for the empty pointlessness of it all: the propaganda, the offensive, the Nazi war machine, the whole goddamn war. He picked up his tired feet and marched, past dead soldiers unfurling from tanks, past men frozen in snowy fields, arms stretched toward the sky in fruitless supplication. The Germans did have film. In it, the Americans looked dirty, disheartened, and exhausted. Some supported wounded comrades or lugged makeshift pallets. The rest trudged miserably along. They had survived the German offensive, but many would not survive what lay ahead. When they came to the top of a hill, the captured men could see a long line of prisoners, as far forward as the eye could see. Seven thousand Allied soldiers had been bagged by the Germans. It would have been different if the Allies had been able to get their planes in the air. Air support could have nipped Herbstnebel in the bud. But in all that fog, the airplanes failed them. The weather had fought for the other side. As they marched into Germany, some of the prisoners must have known the Germans were wrong about one thing: the war wasn’t over for them. Kurt and the other captured American troops were marching into a strange gray area, a place where they were neither soldiers nor civilians, neither at peace nor at war. The autumn fog swallowed them whole. Excerpted from "The Brothers Vonnegut" by Ginger Strand, published in November 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Ginger Strand. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
