by Neil Strauss
Maybe it was the housing market crashing, the unemployment rate rising, the stock market slumping, the credit card debt ballooning, the cost of living increasing, the national debt skyrocketing, the public-high-school drop-out rate hitting fifty percent in major cities, and Afghanistan and Iraq showing signs of becoming the longest wars in U.S. history.
Maybe it was the unshakable sense that the worst was still to come.
But I was no longer alone.
It was a hot summer, and pessimism hung thick in the air. Most people I talked to felt as if they were inching closer to some darkness they couldn’t understand, because they’d never experienced it before and didn’t know what it held.
The grimmer the news became, the more I harassed Maxwell in St. Kitts. I began to worry that I’d have to start looking for a second passport from scratch, which wouldn’t be as easy now that the idea of an exodus was starting to spread.
Even Spencer’s housemate Howard, who had once made fun of us for taking precautionary measures, was now looking into Caribbean islands. As it turned out, he would beat all of us there when his company collapsed and he had to hide from possible indictment.
“I’m so glad we started preparing ahead,” Spencer told me over dinner at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying in Los Angeles.
Having struck out with the Swiss, I took Spencer’s advice and opened an account with a Canadian bank that had a branch in St. Kitts. Since both Canada and St. Kitts are part of the British Commonwealth, he’d explained, I would have easy access to my money if anything happened in America. Unfortunately, in the process, I discovered that keeping international accounts secret is now illegal: the IRS requires Americans with over $10,000 in foreign accounts to file an annual report disclosing not just the amount of money and the banks it’s kept in, but the account numbers.
Meanwhile, Spencer was moving forward with his ten-year plan. He started an Internet business in Singapore, enabling him to open a private banking account in the country, which he claimed was fast becoming the new Switzerland. Though he hadn’t gotten his St. Kitts passport yet either, Spencer had done more research into buying an island.
“I’m looking at islands in the north, around Iceland, because no one will think of looking for anyone there,” Spencer said, his thick lips spreading into a self-satisfied smile. “If I can get some other B people to go there with me, we can build underground homes and use geothermal energy.”
“What about your submarine?”
“It’s a great way to move between islands undetected, but we’re running out of time. We need to move faster. This is only the beginning.”
“How bad do you think it’s going to get?” Spencer seemed to understand the economy at a higher level than most people did, perhaps because he knew so many of the people who ran it.
“I don’t think the whole country’s going to collapse, but we’re looking at the worst economic disaster in America since the Great Depression. What I’m also concerned about is the increase in violent crime that’s going to accompany this.”
Everywhere I went that summer, the demon of Just in Case seemed to follow me, growling in my ear louder than it ever had, its jaws terrifyingly close to my jugular. I’d learned so much, changed so much, tested myself so much. It now was time to stop preparing, turn around, and face the demon—and my fears—head on.
And a musician would lead me there.
What I worry about,” Leonard Cohen said as we sat in the spartan living room of his Los Angeles apartment, “is that the spirit will die before the country dies.”
His words were pithy and poignant, like those of his songs.
Though some turn to politicians, priests, or parents when seeking answers to questions about the world, I’d always turned to music. And, more than anyone, Leonard Cohen was politician, priest, and parent to me. The beauty of his words was one of the things that inspired me to write.
A mutual friend, a record executive named David, had taken me to see him after hearing me talk about survival. He thought I’d find a kindred spirit in Cohen. As the economy imploded and the 2008 elections neared, it seemed like most Americans were becoming kindred spirits in anxiety. Except David.
Soft-spoken and reclusive, David spent more time reading spiritual books than newspapers. Unlike Cohen and I, who fell into a class of people known as negativity avoiders, he was a positivity embracer.
“But what about the protests against the Iraq war?” David challenged as we sat in Cohen’s living room. “That was the first time anyone protested a war before it happened. Maybe that’s a good sign of a consciousness awakening.”
“There are forces of evil in this world that are too great,” Cohen responded. His wrinkles were deep-set under gray hair, framing hazel eyes that shone with the vigor of a twenty-year-old student and the intelligence of a hundred-year-old monk. “The war was an inevitability.”
He took an unhurried sip of tea. As for the protests, he continued, “You become what you resist.”
Cohen stood up to put a pot of bean soup on the stove. He was seventy-three, and his manager had recently been convicted of stealing most of his retirement fund, leaving him nearly broke and mired in lawsuits.
Just miles to the south of him, Cohen said when he returned to the living room, were some of the most dangerous gangs in L. A. And when their anger reached critical mass, he worried that they would spill out of their neighborhoods, and the police would be too busy trying to protect their own families to stop them from terrorizing the city.
“My fear,” he concluded, “is the social contract breaking down.”
“The snap?” I asked.
“Yes, the snap.” And right then, I knew he was one of us: a Fliesian.
I told Cohen about the preparations I’d made and the survival skills I’d learned. “Look at me,” he said after I finished. “I’m not made to survive. I could learn to shoot guns, but I don’t have any experience in the street. I’m not a fighter.”
“What about love?” David interrupted. “You don’t have to hide from violence or fight against violence. You can embody love.” I envy positivity embracers for the ease with which they glide through life. They die happy dreaming of heaven. We die miserable worrying about hell.
Cohen’s answer came quickly, as if he’d already come up with it decades before, perhaps when he was playing Vietnam War protest concerts. “That’s what the enemy wants, because then it’s easier for them to conquer you. The people who survive persecution do so because they are strong.”
He then quoted a Zen aphorism: “The lotus that blooms in the water withers when it comes near to fire. Yet the lotus that blooms from the midst of flames becomes all the more beautiful and fragrant the nearer the fire rages.”
I had bloomed in the water, as had most Americans raised in the late 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Consequently, as Cohen put it, we were weak. That’s why the events of the last few years had sent me into such a panic. Thanks to Tracker School, Gunsite, and Krav Maga, I was getting stronger. But if I truly wanted the ability to survive, I needed to expose myself to the heat, to harden myself, so I’d be inoculated when the flames started licking my heels.
Perhaps the main reason I was even on this journey was that I didn’t want to take a relatively sheltered life for granted. As a teenager, I’d been subjected to so many books, classes, movies, and comic books about sex and violence that it seemed strange neither of those two things had happened to me yet. Eventually, after a lot of work and anticipation, sex came into my life. But what about violence? Would I be ready for that eventuality? Because, unlike sex, I might only get one chance to face it.
When I tuned back into the conversation, Cohen was discussing a book he’d read about Auschwitz. Some scholars, he was saying, wonder why the Jews didn’t rush forward and try to overpower the handful of machine gunners about to shoot them when they were being led to mass graves.
“Because they knew that, even if they succeeded, they couldn’t escape?” I replied, attemptin
g to contribute.
“It’s because that’s not what they wanted to do,” Cohen replied. “They wanted to reflect on their life and prepare to die.” He paused and slowly picked up his teacup. “And that’s what I’m doing. Preparing to die.”
“How does one prepare for that?” I asked.
Cohen never answered. He stood up to check on his bean soup, then led us to his office to play a song he’d recently written. It was a long list of horrible things that are going to happen, followed by the plea, “Tell me you still love me.”
It was unclear whether he was pleading with a woman or with God.
I drove home from Cohen’s house feeling more anxiety than I had in a long time. I couldn’t get his lotus metaphor out of my head. It pointed to a gaping hole in my survivalist training. Except for being mugged twice, I’d never been through any real disaster, trauma, or emergency. And outside of my Oklahoma City bathroom experience, I’d never had to run or fight or talk or struggle to save my life. I’d never even seen a dead body before. So if I was under stress and my life was in danger, I had no idea whether I’d be able to effectively use the skills I’d learned—or if I’d just panic, freeze, and mess my pants.
I spent the next week thinking about ways to expose myself to stress and danger, considering everything from paintball (not real enough and ultimately harmless) to the military (too real and possibly fatal) to injecting myself with an EpiPen to see if I could handle the adrenaline rush.
“Maybe you should try jumping in front of a train and then jumping away right before it hits you,” Katie suggested when I asked for ideas. “Or what if you walked through Compton without your gun, and you were wearing a shirt that said ‘Bloods’ on it? That would be high-stress.”
“Do you really want me to do those things?” I asked.
“No, I don’t. Because then you’re going to die.”
Low on ideas, I decided to turn to the experts I’d met for advice.
“The best cure for stress is repeated exposure,” Kelly Alwood from urban evasion class suggested when I called. Unlike me, Alwood had a father who was a Green Beret and had been teaching him to toughen up since he was six years old. My father had mostly taught me about jazz.
“So what do you do if you have no exposure, outside of the regular stresses of life?”
“I’m taking an EMT class now. It’s the best emergency medical training you can get. And it’s great for stress inoculation, because as part of the class, you have to ride in ambulances and respond to 911 calls.”
My heart raced as he spoke. There were people in Los Angeles who put themselves in the face of danger every day: firemen, police officers, paramedics, search-and-rescue teams. I needed to seek them out and join their ranks.
Not only would I get the experience I was looking for, not only would I get a uniform and badge that would get me past roadblocks when escaping the city, not only would I get keys to the back fire roads, not only would I be exposed to life-and-death situations, but I’d have the best, strongest network available: the system itself.
Maybe Leonard Cohen was right. You become what you resist.
In the event of amputation of the penile shaft, whether partial or complete, an EMT should “use local pressure with a sterile dressing on the stump.”
If during “particularly active sexual intercourse, the shaft of the penis is fractured or severely angled,” an EMT should immediately transport the patient to a hospital for possible surgical repair.
If the foreskin of the penile shaft is caught in one or two teeth of a zipper, the EMT may attempt to unzip the pants. But “if a longer segment is involved or the patient is agitated, use heavy scissors to cut the zipper out of the pants… Be sure to explain how you are going to use scissors before you begin cutting.”
These valuable life-saving tips come from the book Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured—1,296 densely packed pages detailing nearly every medical and traumatic emergency that could possibly happen to a human being in a civilized country, from strokes to gunshot wounds to zipper mishaps. It was one of the best, most concise, most information-dense survival resources I’d read since FM 3-05.70, the U.S. Army’s survival field manual.
It was also my textbook at the California Institute of Emergency Medical Training, where I was studying to become an EMT.
Alwood had steered me in the right direction. The course was exactly what I needed. In fact, the very first class was about handling stress.
“Are you going to see people die?” Matt Goodman, the small, hyperactive head of the institute yelled at us.
The class listened in silence.
“Yes, it’s actually part of the job. Is this stressful?” He paused and waited for a response. A few students murmured in agreement. I was so out of my element that I had no idea whether my classmates were silent out of shock or boredom. “It’s definitely stressful. The truth is, we see people die. But you don’t have the luxury of screwing up just because you’re under stress. You cannot let it affect you at that time. Family members may lash out at you. Don’t try to win them over or change their minds. Stay calm and let it roll off your back.”
I felt like an imposter. The student on my right wanted to work with the fire department. The girl on my left was applying to medical school. The guy in front of me was part of a local search-and rescue-team. And me? I was practicing for the apocalypse.
Somehow I’d crossed a line in my pursuit of safety. I was no longer taking courses teaching me things to do Just in Case. I was actually going to be doing these things.
In subsequent classes, Goodman drilled us on how to recognize and, when possible, treat everything that can go wrong with the human body: heart attacks, car crash injuries, strokes, allergic reactions, seizures, poisonings, gunshot wounds, broken bones, burns, drowning, hypothermia, heatstroke, drug overdoses, childbirth complications, lung diseases, diabetic emergencies, snake venom absorption, lightning injuries, and scores of other diseases, accidents, and mental disorders.
And, though we were taught how to recognize and deal with symptoms related to nearly every weapon of mass destruction conceivable, we also learned that there were bigger things to be scared about than a jihad-bent teenager in a crop-duster or a gun-toting neighbor with an empty stomach.
Like McDonald’s, for example. Every minute, an American dies from heart disease, Goodman told us, his eyes burning a hole in the Chicken McNuggets I was dipping into hot mustard sauce as a midclass snack. Though I’d spent the last eight years worrying about the outer world, I’d never once thought about the inner world. I’d never considered that eating fried chicken and hamburgers and french fries was the culinary equivalent of walking through Baghdad at night.
Perhaps survivalism, then, is about more than shooting guns and drinking out of toilet tanks. It’s also about physical exercise and a healthy diet. After all, these are more likely to keep me alive than a solar still. Even the survivalist pioneer Mel Tappan, despite all his preparations and heavy artillery, died at age forty-seven of congestive heart failure.
After Goodman led a class on heart disease, I decided to look into what I was up against. I wanted to know exactly what factors posed a threat to my life, and what their chances were of occuring, so I could better prepare myself for them.
According to the most recent census figures, 2,448,017 United States citizens died in 2005. Of these deaths, 652,091 were due to heart disease, 559,312 were from cancer, 143,579 were from a stroke, and 130,933 were from chronic lower respiratory diseases.
The fifth-largest cause of death was the one Katie and I, along with every other negativity avoider on the planet, worried about most: 117,809 Americans died from what the government calls unintentional injuries and EMTs call trauma.
This means that every year, roughly one in every 2,500 Americans is at risk of losing his or her life due to some sort of accident or injury.
According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, nearly 40 perc
ent of those deaths—approximately 45,343—were due to motor vehicles. Being in or around them is probably the most risky behavior we engage in as human beings. Evolution never designed us to withstand impacts faster than the top speed at which we run.
The next-biggest cause of accidental death, surprisingly, was poisoning, which took the lives of 23,618 Americans. This was followed by falling, which claimed 19,656 lives.
Despite the arguments of those both for and against gun control laws, Americans with firearms actually posed more of a danger to themselves than to other people: 12,352 people were murdered by guns, while 17,002 took their own lives with one. Overall, there were 18,124 homicides in 2005, in comparison with 32,637 suicides.
Other causes of traumatic death included burns and fire (6,496 people), suffocation (5,900 people), and drowning (3,582 people). Even though eight hurricanes and tropical storms (including Katrina) and seven earthquakes hit the United States in 2005, the number of people who died due to environmental disasters was a comparatively low 2,462.
Coming in near the bottom, just above overexertion (responsible for eleven deaths), was terrorism. Fifty-six Americans died of terrorism in 2005 (not counting military personnel on active duty), and none of those attacks took place on American soil.
So who was the bigger idiot: me, who had spent the last seven years obsessed with terrorism, economic collapse, and natural disasters, or Katie, who was too scared to drive?
I’d teased her about her fears on an almost daily basis, but she had been right the whole time: the mundane is far more terrifying than the apocalyptic.
Fortunately, thanks to my EMT training, I was now prepared to handle both.
My dick, size of a pumpkin.” The ambulance stereo blasted the Mickey Avalon song through open windows. “Your dick look like Macaulay Culkin.”
Francisco and Rob sat in the front in uniform, shouting along to the lyrics. “If you work with us, you gotta sing,” they yelled back to me. It was my second day running 911 calls as a ride-along for my EMT certification.