A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  I suppose one man’s Evil is another man’s Gold.

  After the bomb was dropped, Project Camel was shut down, and the bomb buildings—my school and neighborhood and the Salt Wells complex—stood as ghostly reminders of the passion of Leslie Groves. Groves had built my whole neighborhood, close to four hundred identical duplexes, and assigned a scientist family to one side and a military family to the other. He wanted them to work well together. Ironically, he never got along with intellectuals or scientists, complaining they were “willing to have other people killed and wounded to protect their own interests but . . . unwilling to participate in the dangerous occupation of a soldier.” In fact, Groves had wanted Kyoto bombed rather than Hiroshima because it was a city of artists and intellectuals. His target committee argued: “From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.” As if its significance were difficult to grasp. Luckily for Kyoto, the secretary of war had spent his honeymoon there and did not want to see it destroyed. Groves tried to keep it on the list but lost the battle. Of course, this was not so lucky for Hiroshima.

  * * *

  —

  Because of Leslie Groves, I ended up with a military “boyfriend” in the fourth grade. If not for Groves, we would not have lived in the same neighborhood. Of course, I did not know that. To me, all that mattered was that Rich had long curly blond hair and wore bell-bottoms and puka shells and his face was freckled and beautiful. He also had a fancy dirt bike, while I had a banana-seat bicycle with flowers on the basket and multicolored tassels on the handlebars. We were perfectly complementary. But to my parents, he was military, one of the “bad guys.”

  My family did not socialize with people in the military because we did not think they were religious, perhaps because my dad was “bad” when he was in the military. So we stayed away from them and assumed they visited prostitutes at the “ranch,” a wild tavern where fights broke out, up the hill. Military men and women also socialized at the O-Club or at the many bars in town. We socialized only at church on Wednesdays and Sundays. So Rich and I were like Romeo and Juliet.

  My parents had picked the Southern Baptist church, Immanuel Baptist, after trying out the First and Second Baptists. The black Baptist church had made me cry, so that one would not do. The pastor had said, “I can tell that someone is suffering in this room. Let it out now.” I thought he was talking about us, since we were the only white people in the room. We sat stiff and upright and polite in our chairs while everyone else looked so relaxed. We clearly needed to cry. After that, we tried the Nazarenes, which our church friends fled to when there were schisms at Immanuel, but the Nazarenes could not guarantee our salvation forever—and nobody wants to become unsaved once they are saved. That would be a nightmare. Then we tried the Lutherans, which attracted other Swedes and Norwegians, but we found them too “hoity-toity.” My mom’s family was Baptist all the way back to the time Baptists were murdered by Lutherans, so she seemed suspicious when we first walked in the door. We even tried Four Square Gospel a few times, which petrified me when people spoke in tongues. I asked my mom why those people were possessed by Satan. So that would not do. The Mormon temple was the biggest one in town, but we were not allowed inside. So we ended up Southern Baptist, even though we all missed the Swedish kind, which had nice old Swedish ladies who made pancakes and cake for coffee klatches. Coffee and sweets is a real religion to a Swede, but no one shared our religion at China Lake. At Christmas, Christine and I would wear St. Lucia candles on our heads to honor the virgin martyr whose eyes were gouged out for refusing to marry a pagan. Every night, we would take turns praying in Swedish: “Goody Good. Val-sing-ya matin. . . .”

  We missed those Swedes.

  Since doctrine mattered more than culture, we really had no choice but to be Baptist. We believed in getting saved, getting dunked, taking communion, and going to Heaven. Most important, in that order. Heaven could be reached through death or through the Rapture, but not both. We also believed in the Three in One (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) and that the Bible was the literal word of God. We followed the Nicene Creed, which states that Jesus is “the only Son of God” who “for our sake was crucified.” Catholics believed the same thing, but they thought the creed’s “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” only meant them, not us. Catholics also worshipped the pope, who we thought might actually be the Antichrist. If the pope was the Antichrist, we would have to fight the Catholics during Armageddon, so we could not get too close to them. But we accepted them for now as Christians.

  Unfortunately, Rich was not Catholic, or Baptist, or even anything, which made him especially dangerous. Only General Leslie Groves would have approved. He must have smiled down from Heaven when he saw military and civilians finally getting along at China Lake. For me, having a boyfriend in fourth grade was mainly a status move. It meant holding hands in public, which signified you were a “cool” kid, an adult kid. Like the real adults.

  Rich sat in front of me in class and had nice long hair, so I put a valentine in his box when the teacher said we should for Valentine’s Day. With it, I attached a note that read “Do you like me? Check one: yes or no.” He put his answer back in my box. After that, we started walking home together. It was “yes.”

  Rich lived about three duplexes down from me, closer to the school, but he always walked all the way to my house to pick me up. Sometimes we walked down the side of the paved road, on the dirt edge, and sometimes we walked down the dirt alley behind our houses. One day, he stopped in front of his house and asked me to come in, which is how I discovered that military and civilian houses are very different inside, though they look the same on the outside. His house was full of sheepskin rugs and beads and smoke, and the windows were blacked out so it was dark and cool. Their house seemed designed for survival in the desert and was much more practical than ours. His brother even had a water bed, which I figured was in case he needed extra water—like if a war broke out—or had sunstroke. Maybe a cool water bed helped.

  Rich pulled me through a doorway full of hanging glow-in-the-dark beads, where there was a bong in the corner with his brother’s dog tags hanging near it. “This is my big brother’s room,” he said, leading me to the water bed next to a lava lamp. “He’s in ’Nam. . . .”

  On TV, the helicopters were pulling people out of there. People were standing on rooftops with their arms outstretched, trying to jump onboard precariously overloaded choppers. The babies went first.

  “Come inside and lay down.” He pulled my hand and leaned back on the bed, which squished underneath him. “We’ll listen to the Beatles and space out.” As we sang along with the songs on Abbey Road, the world seemed strange and wonderful and new. “We all live in a yellow submarine,” Rich sang quietly as we rocked on the water bed. I wanted to be inside that Beatles’ song, which was like nothing I had heard at home. We had only gospel music or Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. So I drifted off into the music and the lava lamp and the slow waves of the bed. Suddenly, I noticed Rich’s head touching mine. I opened my eyes and Rich’s giant lips were heading straight for me. My eyes bulged in a giant “No!” and I smartly turned my head before he hit my lips . . . but just barely. He may have touched the corner. I could not be sure. This was terrible.

  Running out the door toward home, I kept trying to wipe his kiss off my cheek. But it would not come off. That was when I remembered what my mother had said at our family Bible hour. We had been reading 2 Samuel 13–14, about a man who “forced” this woman Tamar and “lay with her.” When I asked my mother what that meant, she took me in her bedroom and told me what I knew only from school as fingers going in and out of finger holes. “A man puts his penis inside the vagina,” she said, “when they are laying down in bed. A penis is what your dad has and uses to go to the bathroom. A vagina is where you go to the b
athroom. A hole down there.” I also knew from church that sex was holy in marriage and a sin when it was premarital. I still did not quite understand the penis and vagina part, but I knew I had “lain” with Rich in bed and he had “forced” me. I could never tell my mother. Jesus was supposed to protect us from evildoers like the hippies, Charlie Manson, and the other Charlie, who was a gook.

  But I had been lured in by the lava lights. I had sinned.

  After that, I started to avoid Rich at school, riding my bike home alone. Still, I could not get that Beatles song out of my head. At church, the pastor had talked about the Beatles and whether they were satanic. Apparently, the Beatles said they were better than Jesus. Charles Manson thought they were the four angels of Revelation because of the Bible verse that read, “Their faces were as the faces of men, yet they had hair of women.” That made sense to me, since they did have girl hair, but the pastor said it was blasphemous to think such a thing. It was all very confusing.

  At the time, the Mansons had recently been arrested just outside China Lake for the murder of Sharon Tate, and the police were still scouring the desert looking for more bodies. The Mansons had been staying at an old miner’s house called Barker Ranch, which they bought with a gold album from the Beach Boys. Since not all of the followers had been arrested, my mother was understandably scared, especially since they had been sneaking onto the base to steal scrap metal for their desert fortress. It was easy to get on the base, which was surrounded by a chicken-wire fence that you could lift up in places. The Mansons even shopped at our 7-Eleven in Ridgecrest, where Christine and I bought our candy. Some people said Manson sold drugs to base kids. In 1972, the Rocketeer reported that China Lake Search and Rescue had found another “hippie commune” at a deserted mining camp nearby. We all assumed it was more Mansons.

  I vaguely knew that Manson was satanic, like Rosemary’s baby or the demons inside the girl in The Exorcist. But when our pastor said he came to the desert to find the “Bottomless Pit,” I was confused. We already knew where the Bottomless Pit was. It was Hell, where you went when you died. It certainly wasn’t in the desert. But then I found out from TV that Charlie’s Bottomless Pit was completely different than ours. Ours was full of worms and fire eating you eternally, while his had golden walls and rivers full of milk and honey. Charlie said his was underground out here, somewhere, and that he was going to wait there for Helter Skelter, which was his version of our Armageddon. The battle at the End of the World.

  “Mom, why is Manson’s Bottomless Pit so different than ours?” I asked.

  “You don’t understand, Karen. Manson’s crazy. That’s not real.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. I knew ours was real.

  “Besides, he kills people,” she said.

  I still did not see how that was different from what we did.

  “Don’t we kill people?” I said.

  Secretly, I decided my mom was wrong and that Charlie’s Bottomless Pit was the real one. I decided that if I did not make it into Heaven, which seemed like a distinct possibility, I would go to his pit instead of ours. In fact, there were lots of things the pastor said that I was starting to not trust. For instance, the pastor said people who died before hearing the Gospel were innocent and would go straight to Heaven. But if that was the case, why did we spend all this money on missionaries? It seemed terribly wasteful when you could just as easily let them die without hearing the Gospel and know they would be fine. Besides, the pastor said, “God is Love.” The Bible said it too. So what was up with this Hell thing, anyway? If God was Love, he would not make Hell. So I decided to dispense with the idea of Hell altogether. I was only nine, but this was the rational thing to do.

  This was the beginning of my heretical life, which I knew I could not tell anyone about since they might try to take my blasphemous ideas away from me. I would not stand for that. Instead, I became good at hiding things, just like the navy, while still somehow worrying that the Beatles had infected my brain. If you played “Revolution 9” backward, after all, you could hear the words “Turn me on, dead man.” The pastor told us that. He said it was because the Beatles wanted us to have sex with corpses. Who was I to say? So when the pastor announced that we should bring in our rock records, tarot cards, or anything else devil worshipping to church the following Sunday, I decided it was a sign.

  The traveling record breaker was coming to town. Just for me.

  * * *

  —

  The traveling record breaker looked so hot in his three-piece suit, but he always wore it when he came to visit from somewhere in the South. First, the record breaker would preach to us about the evils of rock ’n’ roll, then demonstrate how Satan was backmasked into songs. When he shouted, full of condemnation, you could see all the way around his eyeballs, which was kind of scary, and he was as tall as Ichabod Crane. So he always looked down on you.

  I waited patiently through all the yelling and formalities and backmasking, waiting for the time to confess. Finally, we began to sing the same hymn over and over again as the pastor tried to get people to come forward to be saved or renew their faith. I was shy at first and could not take that step. But a woman stepped out into the aisle with a crystal ball that was so pretty. It was the best thing I had ever seen taken to the altar, and she looked so confident in her flowy skirt, holding it close. It ended up being too hard for the preacher to smash with his special smashing rock, so he prayed over it to cleanse it of evil instead. She still did not get it back after it was cleansed, though it should have been fine then.

  Then the pastor held out his hands again to us. “And tonight, I want all of you who know something of the devil, something secret that you have been hiding, to come forward and let me destroy it!” He raised his hands in triumph as we began to sing: “Just as I am, without one plea . . .” I was already about to cry, so I finally started walking down the aisle, where you were allowed to do that. The preacher eyed me as though he knew a problem was coming. The carpet was brand-new gold plush and my feet made silvery streaks as the carpet fibers turned down. Behind the altar was a simple wooden cross with the baptistery beneath it where I had been dunked last year. The congregation sang with a rising reverence: “Just as I am, without one plea, / But that Thy blood was shed for me. / And that Thou bid’st me come to Thee / O Lamb of God, I come! I come!” Abbey Road was my dark blot and my soul was carrying it inside me. The downcast eyes along the pews all seemed to sneak a look at me as I passed.

  Crouching at the altar was the preacher, his eyes protruding with the passion of God.

  I knelt down and hid my face in the gold carpet of the altar steps as I told him about Abbey Road and the sex and my love of Charles Manson and lava lamps and how I did not want to waste money on missionaries and did not believe in Hell. He put his hand on my back and said, “Hallelujah!” I had never felt so loved. I began to sob and sob and thought I could not stop. No one but that preacher seemed to understand what I had been through, all the levels of sin and suffering, like the black pastor had before him. I had only wanted to tell someone, anyone.

  “What were you doing?” my mother whispered when I got back. She looked more embarrassed at my outburst than angry at my sin. So that was good.

  I finally said quietly, “I kissed Rich.”

  Surprisingly, she said nothing to me. Instead, she turned to my father and whispered, “Maybe we should think about the church school. Let’s see what they think.” Of course, I immediately agreed.

  So that was how we ended up following the great exodus of civilians leaving the base in the seventies, on to life outside the gates. It was only a mile away, but it was a safer world, a more religious world where we could live two blocks from our church. Groves’s dream of military and civilians, of heathens and God-fearers, living in perfect harmony was starting to crumble, beginning with me and Rich.

  We always knew those enlisted men were trouble.

  Cha
pter Ten

  Spare the Rod, Lose the War

  As my sister remembers it, I was the one who chose to go to the school run by our church, Immanuel Baptist. I believe her since she never lies. Besides, I always considered myself the de facto head of the family. My dad was indecisive to a fault and my mom believed in obeying her husband, so they sort of canceled each other out. Not having anyone around to tell them how to raise children, my parents relied on Dr. Spock, who told them to “follow your child’s lead.” So they did. They followed my lead. Truth be told, Christine beat me because I had the power. I was the head of the family, the baby in charge.

  “I want to go to the Christian school,” I declared, and no one could disagree.

  Our school was called Immanuel Christian School, or ICS, and its curriculum was developed by a Baptist pastor in Texas. The program of study was known as an “Accelerated Christian Education,” or ACE, which was what we would be taught at Ridgecrest’s ICS. Soon that same curriculum would be taught all across America, and today the world. But our school was one of the first.

  Christine later told me she agreed to go to ICS only to protect me. This made my heart grow three sizes, even though when she told me, she was still mad about having to go. She thought it had ruined her career in music, since the base schools had better music programs. How could I explain to her that I had to worry about my own salvation? If I did not go to that school, I thought I might not see her forever in Heaven. Even though the Baptists believe that salvation is forever, I was never quite sure it took with me. As an adult, it made no sense to say this to her.

  All I could say was, “Sorry.”

  Of course, I had been saved as soon as it was allowed, but there were so many things that no one explained clearly. For instance, you were supposed to wait until the “Age of Innocence” was over to be saved, the years when you were too little to understand what Jesus meant. If you died during that time period, you would still go to Heaven. But no one told you when that age ended or if the prayer still worked if you said it too early. These were the things that drove me crazy as a child.