Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  I didn’t learn about the radical underground movement in “America in the Twentieth Century,” at least not in the classes I managed to attend. But the blasts rippled into our psyches. I didn’t learn of the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers, but I absorbed that angry energy, glimpsed it on television and in magazines, that unforgettable powerful image of Patty Hearst wielding a machine gun, a girl who’d joined an underground army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which I thought was trying to liberate some desperate people in a foreign country—the Symbionese, like Lebanese or Sudanese, the underground army’s headquarters actually underground, I imagined, like the Batcave, which was why they were hard to catch. That’s what I gleaned from headlines.

  Two months before Nicky took the gunpowder, in April 1976, a bomb exploded in the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, injuring twenty-two people. The bomb was planted by the United Freedom Front, which aimed to obliterate the parole office and its records tracking thousands of ex-cons. The United Freedom Front was birthed from the prison rights movement, spearheaded by Raymond Levasseur from Maine, a Vietnam veteran who’d been sent to a maximum-security prison on a minor marijuana charge, and Tom Manning, also a Vietnam vet, from a working-class Boston Irish family. After returning from Vietnam, Manning robbed a liquor store and was sent to Walpole Prison for five years, where he was stabbed by another inmate and nearly died. “I spent my last fourteen months in Walpole’s 10 Block, where I read Che, and where all the prisoners—black and brown and white—were united out of necessity,” he wrote. In a letter about the bombing addressed to the Real Paper, Boston’s alternative weekly, the United Freedom Front wrote, “This is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.” They demanded prison reforms, including an “immediate end” to “the 23½ hour a day lockup” at Walpole, enforced on some inmates for nearly two years.

  Bombs exploded inside Walpole Prison, too. In 1972, Stanley Bond, a member of the Weather Underground incarcerated in Walpole for robbing a bank, was killed when a bomb he was making in the prison foundry detonated. And in April 1975 another homemade bomb exploded in the prison, also killing the inmate who’d been holding it.

  Bomb scares weren’t abstract or in cities or behind cement walls. In the town of Walpole, forty-two bomb scares were reported in the local paper in 1976, almost one weekly. (There were only two in 1977, and none for the rest of the decade.) To ring in 1976, on New Year’s Eve three bomb scares were called in to Walpole police, one for the police station itself, two for restaurants downtown. Two weeks later, “an unidentified caller” told police a bomb would go off in Papa Gino’s pizzeria, where I ate twenty-five-cent slices. In February five bomb scares were called in to the police within ten minutes, one for Friendly’s restaurant, the others threatening local factories.

  In the following weeks there were bomb threats to On Luck Chinese restaurant, a mile from my house, and Walpole Bottling Company, where as a kid I went with my father to fill a twenty-four-quart case of soda, picking flavors from the warehouse floor, cream soda and sarsaparilla and lemon-lime. There were so many hoax bomb threats that the police reaction was blasé. There were “no major crises” over the bicentennial weekend in July 1976, according to the police log, just “summer mischief”—a streaker in Bird Park, a sighting of a large red UFO, and two bomb scares, one at Almy’s department store, a favorite shoplifting haunt, and one man warning that a bomb would go off in the town hall. Streakers, UFOs, and bomb threats—strange days.

  The bomb scares in Walpole over the bicentennial were hoaxes, but real bombs exploded that weekend elsewhere in Massachusetts, set by the United Freedom Front, again demanding prison reforms. They detonated bombs at a National Guard armory south of Boston, the Essex County Superior Courthouse north of Boston, under an Eastern Airlines prop jet at Logan Airport, and outside a First National Bank on the North Shore. The plane and buildings were damaged, but nobody was hurt.

  The United Freedom Front, “the last revolutionaries,” continued bombing throughout the decade and into the 1980s, mostly in Massachusetts and New York, until they were caught in April 1985. Then the men who’d been radicalized in prison, who exploded bombs to demand prisoners’ rights, wound up back in prison.

  I didn’t worry about Nicky using the gunpowder for a bomb. He wasn’t violent or aggressive, and I never heard him express political views. He was looking for thrills, rebellious but not angry. He was at heart a nice boy. (He told me once that I should be kinder to my mother; he was close to his.) The gunpowder in someone else’s possession might have been dangerous, but the appeal for Nicky, I imagine, was to hold in his hands the potential for explosive power, like a kid smashing caps on the sidewalk.

  Chucky and Andrea returned to the house in Plainville; they’d just gone to the store for smokes. “Let’s get out of here,” Nicky said. He didn’t want to get caught with the gunpowder. All day Saturday we drove around getting high, Nicky and I leaning into each other in the backseat. Maybe we took a second hit of speed; I don’t remember stopping for food, or eating. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t seem to stop driving and going nowhere, driving and circling and getting high and listening to the car stereo. By the time it grew dark Saturday night, we’d been out for more than twenty-four hours and we were running out of gas and money and drugs. My mother was at work, so we planned to drive to my house, where I had a few dollars and some pot stashed, but first we needed gas.

  Chucky had siphoning equipment in his trunk. He drove down a dark rural road until he saw an unlit house with a car in the driveway close to the road. He gave Nicky instructions, and Nicky disappeared down the street carrying a red jerry can and tubing. He returned five minutes later, gagging and spitting but with a gallon of gasoline, minus the mouthful he’d swallowed, and we drove away in Chucky’s Pinto, the Ford model that tended to ignite when rear-ended, Nicky and me in the backseat, he with gasoline in his mouth, gunpowder in his pocket.

  As we cruised through the center of town, Paula flagged us down. She poked her face in the window. “Where the fuck have you been?” she said. “Everybody is looking for you. You’re screwed.” She nodded at Nicky and me in the backseat. “There’s an APB out for this car.” All points bulletin. How did she know this? Maybe Good Goin’ Gus, the friendly cop, told her. We’d been reported missing, as runaways, by Nicky’s mother when he and Andrea hadn’t come home Friday night. With the stolen gas, we drove to my house and I ran in for the $3 and the pot. On my way out, as I bolted down the stairs, I bumped into Sue in the kitchen. “You’d better stay in,” she said. “Mom knows you didn’t come home last night. She knows you weren’t at Alison’s.” My mother would be home from work soon. I walked past Sue. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. I walked out the door.

  In the car, I told everyone we were in trouble. Nicky vowed never to go home, and I was with him. That option seemed easier—not having a place to live, no money or food or clothes—than facing parents. We’d just do this forever, drive around getting stoned, driving and driving and never arriving. It’s all the same fucking day, man, as Janis Joplin said. She was my hero, the voice of pure anger, desire, defiance. Like Janis, I was hardened, tough—you can’t hurt me because I have nothing left to lose. Bent on self-destruction, I didn’t care about my future because tomorrow never comes.

  We bought gas and smoked the pot and soon again we had an empty tank and an empty pipe. Chucky said he was taking us home. He was Sue’s age, seventeen. He stood to get in more trouble than Nicky or me; maybe he realized this, or maybe he realized that there was nowhere to go, no choices left. When I walked into my house after midnight, my mother was waiting for me, still wearing her nurse’s uniform, pacing in the kitchen. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her. I tried to brush by her, but she grabbed me by the collar and pushed me against the dining room wall. I don’t remember what she said. What could she say? “Let go of me,” I said. She gripped my shirt, her face an inch from mine, though she was shorter by three inches. “Let go or I�
��ll walk back out and never come home.”

  “If you do that, you will never step foot in this house again.” We both threatened the thing we didn’t want to happen.

  “You wouldn’t have missed me if Nicky’s mother didn’t call,” I said.

  This bothered my mother, this accusation of lax parenting. I just wanted to go up to my bedroom and sleep. She probably just wanted that, too. But it was like the Bay of Pigs. She had to assert her power and authority over me, and I couldn’t let her, so instead we threatened annihilation. Finally she released me and I walked upstairs.

  The next day she told me I was grounded. I laughed. She’d lost me; she must have known already. I’d lost myself. I just didn’t know it yet.

  Another Saturday night, another party at my house, though by 4 a.m. most of the people had crashed or left. Alison and Nicky and I were still awake, so we decided to take Sue’s car for a spin. None of us had our licenses, but there wouldn’t be many cars on the roads. Nicky drove, steering us along back roads where cops were less likely to lurk, and we found ourselves at the golf course where he caddied. The entrance was a narrow road between hedges, like driving through a tunnel, but then the hedgerow opened to moonlit swells of lawn, a parking lot, and in the distance the darkened clubhouse. The place was silent, inert. Nicky knew the landscape from hauling golf bags across eighteen holes, knew that when he suddenly swerved left and gunned the engine that we’d careen over manicured lawn, knew that when he yanked the steering wheel hard to the right that he was routing the fairway, the tires spinning and ripping up turf, gouging the delicate putting green, revenge against the wealthy men whose heavy clubs he lugged for hours on hot days, like a servant, a footman, but who failed to tip him.

  Nicky spun the car, laughing and whooping as he struggled free from ruts, clumps of turf spraying off the back tires. Alison and I were tossed across the vinyl seats as if we’d taken a wave across the bow, Alison in front, me sliding around the back, which might have symbolized my ambivalence about this plan—I was a participant in adventures, a sidekick, not the driver but along for the ride. At least I remember sitting in back, but that could be a trick of memory to assuage my guilt. After all, I’d found the keys, I’d given them to Nicky, I was there. Nicky spun another doughnut, then sped across the lawn. I saw a glow on the horizon like waking from a dream. “Nicky, we have to get out of here. Now!” Employees and caddies and early-bird golfers would arrive soon—any minute, it seemed. Nicky aimed the car out the narrow driveway and we sped away, exhilarated, horrified.

  A couple miles down the road, the engine quit. Nicky coasted to the shoulder and tried to start the car, but the key yielded an unpromising click click click. We realized how close we’d come to the car stalling on the golf course amid our wreckage, how narrow our escape, and Nicky still on probation from the B&E. It must have been 5 a.m. We knocked on the front door of a house and a woman let us inside to call a tow truck. We thanked her, and outside Nicky tried one more time to start the car, and miraculously the engine turned over, so we drove off quickly, passing the wrecker in the opposite lane a half mile down the road. We pulled into my driveway, chunks of sod hanging from the front bumper, a faint burnt odor, the overheated engine ticking.

  Destructive urges in little kids are tests of power—pulling wings off insects or stepping on ants, sweeping a mighty arm across a game board, scattering pieces in a fit of frustration. As teenagers with no direction or oversight, no toys, our destructive urges arose out of malaise, unfettered time, boredom, and no connection to anything—not to school or family, not to the town or clubs or sports, no purpose or aim, just pent-up energy, the need to release that energy, to smash and burn.

  Nov. 10, 1975—Nobody can party up the cemetery anymore. Someone broke the tombstones.

  In 1975, Walpole police were “besieged” with vandalism and a “major rampage of window smashing.” Over four days, more than sixty windows were broken at schools and stores. One quiet night as a group of eight or so kids walked through the deserted center of town, Derek Lowery spontaneously karate-kicked the plate-glass display window of Betro Pharmacy and it shattered, raining glass on the sidewalk, surprising even Derek. We dispersed like startled birds, fleeing to the tracks behind the block of stores, seeking each other afterward, dark figures stepping over railroad ties—Is that you?

  Alarmed by the rise in crime in town, which paralleled a national trend, Walpole hired six more police officers, bought two new cruisers, and deployed an armed security guard with a patrol dog to schools, a favorite target of vandals. The town imposed a curfew on the commons to prevent “rowdyism”—anyone seen in the town center past 9 p.m. was fined. The curfew lasted all summer, though it only drove kids into the shadows, to congregate in woods and abandoned lots, gravel pits.

  If 1975 was the year of smashing windows in Walpole, 1976 was the year of setting fires. In the first three months there were 500 fire alarms, more than typical for an entire year, with “vandals responsible for most of them.” In just one week in April there were 122 fire alarms and 90 fires “of suspicious origin.”

  The fire my friends set one day was suspicious, but more accident than arson. Six of us sat in the woods adjacent to the train tracks on a Sunday afternoon, just beyond the town center, three boys and three girls. As we passed bowls of pot, the boys idly tossed lit matches into the dry pine needles. They made a game of it, allowing the two-inch-high ring of flames to eat away at the duff, the patch of scorched earth spreading before they raced to extinguish the fire, until one time they waited too long and the fire caught a breeze and surrounded us, and then we all stomped madly, half panicked, half thrilled, an acrid smell of melting rubber from my work boots, the hem of my jeans singed, the smoke thickening and rising above the trees, prompting someone to call the fire department, the sirens growing closer, louder, as we ran down the tracks, the soles of my shoes smoldering.

  I never tossed a lit match into the dry tinder of a field or woods or weighed the heft of a rock before pitching it at a window, even though I was present with boys who did. Like most teenage girls, my destructive tendencies were aimed inward; we were capable of destroying ourselves. You can’t hurt me, world, because I will hurt myself first and best. Alison scraped lines on the inside of her forearm, in the soft pale flesh that never tanned. In the bathroom or in her bedroom she toyed with razor blades, etching her flesh, summoning pearls of blood, blood turned from blue to red, freed to flow outside instead of in the crazy endless loop in her body. Maybe the cutting was to scarify, to break open a surface, like a medieval bleeding to release bad spirits, a letting to relieve pressure. I tried cutting once to see what it felt like, to understand why she did this, scraping the point of a safety pin along my wrist. I wasn’t serious—I’d used a safety pin. The act felt melodramatic and conspicuous.

  I wanted to not feel, so I smoked angel dust. Alison’s and my behaviors were two sides of the same coin. My self-destruction was less deliberate: not caring about myself, my health, my safety, leaving my fate to others, drinking and taking drugs and riding in cars with people who were so fucked up they could barely walk, let alone drive, getting behind the wheel of a car myself in that condition, tempting fate. Alison was interested in thanatology, she said, the study of death. She wanted to be a thanatologist, if one could be such a thing. I wasn’t sure she knew what a thanatologist did, but it was a defiant word: I am not afraid of death; I will study death; I will master it. It was like when I announced to my friends in junior high that I was an atheist—like saying fuck you to the most powerful entity imaginable then. I don’t believe in you, Mr. God. I don’t need you. Put that in your fucking pipe and smoke it.

  Maybe Alison and I and any of us didn’t know what to do with our energy, our power, the exuberant adolescent rush of hormones, thrill the most alluring drug. Or what to do with our engulfing sadness, our confusion, our anger. I was filling up with rage then, though I barely knew it. Maybe coming close to death was a way to excite life, to live
on the edge, to literalize that edge, cut with an edge, to see your own blood and ask, Am I alive?

  One spring night Alison and I and a few other kids sat behind United Church smoking pot, drinking. The church lawn was encircled by evergreens, and though the police station was just beyond the trees, cops never checked the field. That night after the sun set, Alison whispered that she had to go to the bathroom. She walked toward the middle of the field until blackness swallowed her. She was gone a long while, and we began to wonder. “Maybe she went home,” someone said. Then I heard her call my name, weakly: “Maureen.” Everyone laughed. They thought she was summoning me to help her pee. I stumbled through the darkness and nearly tripped over her lying on the grass.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, crouching beside her.

  She clutched her stomach, rolled to her side. “I’m think I’m dying,” she said.

  My heart pounded. “What did you take?” She’d tried this before, which was why I knew to ask. Pills, she said, stolen from Betro Pharmacy.

  “How many?” I must have been trying to decide if she was just going to throw up, or maybe something worse, but how would I know?

  “The whole bottle.”

  Jesus Christ. I shouted for the others, and when they reached us, someone said, “We better call the police.”

  “No,” Alison moaned. “Please don’t call the police. I can’t let my parents know.”

  We promised Alison we wouldn’t call the police. There were no cell phones; the 911 system was years away. Two of us ran the couple of blocks to a phone booth on Main Street to call Project Face; their flyers offering counseling for teenagers were plastered around town. Someone on the other end of the line told us to call an ambulance. But we can’t let the police know, or Alison will be in trouble. The person said to get Alison to a hospital right away.