Take the Cannoli (5 page)

Except that, deep down, I didn't believe I'd live long enough to hear that music, to get out of town. I thought I'd be blown to bits, probably sitting in Mr. Crowley's French class, conjugating verbs in the future tense at the precise moment my future went up in smoke. But I wanted more than anything to do what Kerouac did, to conjugate American verbs and write pretty sentences that stretched on forever, or small, simple ones that said, “Yes, zoom!” I wanted to light out and see the towns of the U.S.A., to notice how the sky looks when the sun goes down over places I'd never been. Elko, Nevada. Flagstaff, Arizona. New Orleans.

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said, “
On the Road.
” He smiled, said, “That was my favorite book when I was sixteen.” At the time, I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a
Gatsby
girl—more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

We all grew up, those of us who took
On the Road
to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise,
a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America, still so lovely, as Kerouac wrote, “at lilac evening.” I have since played the slots at breakfast in Elko, walked in the Flagstaff moonlight, had the hiccups in New Orleans.

If I'm still wistful about
On the Road,
I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre—the poems, the poems!—in horror. Read
Satori in Paris
lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

As political movements go, our antinuclear group was wildly ineffective. Like, we showed a documentary about the effects of nuclear winter one school lunch period and the only person who showed up to watch it was a West German foreign exchange student. We were much better at getting attention for our other, artier exploits, the most famous of which was a performance-art brouhaha we staged before an unsuspecting English class. We all dressed in black, entering the room one at a time, blankly commanding, “Applause. Applause.” (There wasn't any.) Carol Hollier bowed weird whatevers on her cello; I blew into my plastic recorder as hard as I could, pulling it in and out of a bowl of water; Paul Anderson thumped on an African slit drum; Rob Lehrkind recited his poem about how “God is in the drying machine”; and my sister and Nikki Greever flipped a slide projector around to
different surrealist artworks, including Méret Oppenheim's 1936 sculpture
Fur-lined Teacup.

At the time I thought we were, like the Beats and surrealists (and, distant third, nuclear freezers) we so admired, a movement. But now I see that the importance of the group was, for me, that we were friends. I'd had friends before them, but I'd never had a gang, never had a group of people I liked and admired and enjoyed. The antinuke group taught me a lesson which changed my life—how to hang out. For every hour we spent talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles, we spent twelve hours at the 4-B's diner drinking coffee and discussing the glory that was
Eraserhead.
And the first time Matt Brewer, the coolest boy, invited me over to his house and I got there and he and Jimmy Harkin were sitting around listening to Black Sabbath and spray-painting Legos black, I sort of hugged myself—contrary to conventional leftist wisdom—with nuclear arms. I didn't know life could be that fun.

The Berlin Wall falls. The Cold War ends. I start believing I might live long enough to die of something other than a first-strike Soviet attack or refusing the mark of the beast. Goodbye darkness, my old friend. Remember the good old days? When I was a kid, the end of the world really was something—nuclear holocaust, the rapture. But they don't make apocalypses like they used to. Just look at the cheap little cataclysm
they're trying to pass off to unsuspecting futurephobes lately. These kids today and their Y
2
K: Do they know what it's like to think they're not going to grow up? Do they?

I tried to be interested in Y
2
K. The newspaper said I should be.

When I was in San Francisco in late 1998, I heard about a community group there which was organizing for the possible Y
2
K aftermath. And, knowing how the end brings people together, I had to go. But the good people of Bay2K were not the young Silicon Valley computer programmers I'd hoped for. Instead, the group felt very ex-hippie, very New Age, very Marin. One part of the evening ended with a woman chanting a Hopi prayer.

They broke off into small groups to address specific problems, from pragmatic topics like “community preparedness” to—my group—the less tangible “psychological and spiritual issues.” One woman says that if nothing's different when she wakes up on the first day of the new millennium, well, at least she had a good excuse to meet her neighbors and “have a really good dialogue.”

The dialogue seems to be the point. Just like my old church and my old antinuclear group, they were using the end of the world as a means to meet 'n' greet, planning block parties so they can come up with Y
2
K contingency plans in their neighborhoods. They talked about how American culture is unsustainable and out of control, stridently opining that we brought this fall on ourselves. (A guy named Rick spun a very witty analogy comparing Silicon Valley to building a house upon the sand.) They were looking forward to a saner, more
agrarian way of life. One of the men said neighborhoods should get together and buy a tiller, to start community gardens. To them, Y
2
K looks a lot like Y
1
K.

I grew increasingly alarmed at the picture they were painting, a golden picture of neighbor next to neighbor, throwing off the shackles of capitalism to till the soil, at one with the earth. A woman named Leslie said she'd like to help out, but “I'm physically challenged, so I can't even offer my strength. I can't garden. I'd like to but I can't.”

The man sitting next to her told her that she could contribute in other ways—like canning. He said, “Even the know-how of doing it is just as valuable as the manpower or the strength to do it.”

Each giving according to his abilities, each taking according to his needs: I'm not sure which idea I reacted to more, this brand of shiny happy Marxism—all expressed as if the history of the twentieth century never happened—or the talk about canning. Just picturing mason jars full of stewed tomatoes, a bomb went off inside me. I suddenly realized what they were proposing—canning, gardening, spending time with your neighbors. This is Oklahoma, minus God, the one thing that gave it all some dignity.

Maybe my problem with working up interest in Y
2
K was that I suffer from apocalypse fatigue. I've outgrown Armageddon. I don't need the end of the world to make friends anymore. Though far be it from me to begrudge anyone his own millennial vision, whatever apocalyptic scenario gives him a reason to leave the house, slap on a name tag, and have a really good dialogue.

While I'm hardly the most optimistic American, I did not share the Y
2
K group's wholly cynical picture of current events. Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was, and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio, saying, “Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell.” And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes. And after these things I will hasten unto a taxicab and to a theater, where a ticket will be given unto me, and lo, it will be a matinee, and a film that doeth great wonders. And when it is finished, the heavens will open, and out will cometh a rain fragrant as myrrh, and yea, I have an umbrella.

T
HERE COMES A TIME HALFWAY
through any halfway decent liberal arts major's college career when she no longer has any idea what she believes. She flies violently through air polluted by conflicting ideas and theories, never stopping at one system of thought long enough to feel at home. All those books, all that talk, and, oh, the self-reflection. Am I an existentialist? A Taoist? A transcendentalist? A modernist, a postmodernist? A relativist-positivist-historicist-dadaist-deconstructionist? Was I Apollonian? Was I Dionysian (or just drunk)? Which was right and which was wrong,
im
pressionism or
ex
pressionism? And while we're at it, is there such a thing as right and wrong?

Until I figured out that the flight between questions is itself a workable system, I craved answers, rules. A code. So by my junior year, I was spending part of every week, sometimes every day, watching
The Godfather
on videotape.

The Godfather
was an addiction. And like all self-respecting addicts, I did not want anyone to find out about my habit. Which was difficult considering that I shared a house with my boyfriend and two other roommates, all of whom probably thought my profound interest in their class schedules had to do with love and friendship. But I needed to know when the house would be empty so I could watch snippets of the film. Sometimes it took weeks to get through the whole thing. If I had a free hour between earth science lab and my work-study job, I'd sneak home and get through the scene where Sonny Corleone is gunned down at the toll booth, his shirt polka-dotted with bullet holes. Or, if I finished writing a paper analyzing American mediocrity according to Alexis de Tocqueville, I'd reward myself with a few minutes of Michael Corleone doing an excellent job of firing a pistol into a police captain's face. But if the phone rang while I was watching, I turned off the sound so that the caller wouldn't guess what I was up to. I thought that if anyone knew how much time I was spending with the Corleones, they would think it was some desperate cry for help. I always pictured the moment I was found out as a scene from a movie, a movie considerably less epic than
The Godfather
: My concerned boyfriend would eject the tape from the VCR with a flourish and flush it down the toilet like so much cocaine. Then my parents would ship me off to some treatment center where I'd be put in group therapy with a bunch of Trekkies.

I would sit on my couch with the blinds drawn, stare at the TV screen, and imagine myself inside it. I wanted to cower in the dark
brown rooms of Don Corleone, kiss his hand on his daughter's wedding day, explain what my troubles were, and let him tell me he'll make everything all right. Of course, I was prepared to accept this gift knowing that someday—and that day may never come—I may be called upon to do a service. But, he would tell me, “Until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding day.”

“Grazie,
Godfather.” It was as simple as that.

Looking back, I wonder why a gangster movie kidnapped my life.
The Godfather
had nothing to do with me. I was a feminist, not Italian, and I went to school at Montana State. I had never set foot in New York, thought ravioli came only in a can, and wasn't blind to the fact that all the women in the film were either virgins, mothers, whores, or Diane Keaton.

I fell for those made-up, sexist, East Coast thugs anyway. Partly it was the clothes; fashionwise, there is nothing less glamorous than snow-blown, backpacking college life in the Rocky Mountain states. But the thing that really attracted me to the film was that it offered a three-hour peep into a world with clear and definable moral guidelines; where you know where you stand and you know who you love; where honor was everything; and the greatest sin wasn't murder but betrayal.

My favorite scene in the film takes place on a deserted highway with the Statue of Liberty off in the distance. The don's henchman Clemenza is on the road with two of his men. He's under orders that only one of them is supposed to make the ride back. Clemenza tells the driver to
pull over. “I gotta take a leak,” he says. As Clemenza empties his bladder, the man in the backseat empties his gun into the driver's skull. There are three shots. The grisly, back-of-the-head murder of a rat fink associate is all in a day's work. But Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”