I Dream of My Own Strange Love

Today, the group I grew up in would be called a cult. They would have told you they were the only ones going to heaven...I had different dreams: Libraries, streams, books and sunlight between them.

Before most of us were born, and American kids dreamed of bombs and learned to crawl under their desks for protection, Stanley Kubrick produced Dr. Strangelove, one of the most famous reflections on the phenomenon of war. The movie was a satire, an antiwar movie starring a Nazi antihero, a story about how masculinity and blind nationalism causes violence.

As a child, I knew nothing of movies, bombs, or war. I was herding sheep in the mountains of New England.

Today, the group I grew up in would be called a cult. Doomsday preppers. They would have told you they were the only ones going to heaven. George Eversfield, an extremist Christian who led our cult, had brought everyone together. Living on a farm. Getting ready for the End of Days.

The adults gave their kids to George to raise. He made sure we knew how to march. March for hours. He taught us the formations: about face, company halt. Marching—such a necessary skill at the end of days. They gave out education in tiny wooden spoons, and then not at all. Mostly, we worked in the fields of the Lord. The splay of children across the long acres till dark, weeding out the corn.

They didn’t tell us we were going to be bombed. We learned a little about war. The Civil War. Cannons. Horses. How the enslaved were freed.

They told us about World War I and II. Big wars were fought with big guns. We heard about a bomb dropped on Japan.

Were there more made after that?

A few. Here and there.

Rather than bombs, what we worried about was the end. The Tribulation. They explained that it was going to be a confusing time because everyone would be coming up to us Christians and trying to get us to put 666 on our foreheads. We would say, “No, no, no. I don’t want to do it. It’s evil.”

I raise my hand, then ask, “Why is it evil? It’s just a number?”

“Get over here, you little rat,” Joyce screams, and I think she might have an aneurism and die. She screams at the top of her lungs.

When I get to her, she starts to hit me about the legs and shoulders with a stick. I’m protecting my face. Finally, she says, “Get out of here, go. You can come back in a couple of days. Why don’t you go practice for the Tribulation?” I grab my sleeping bag and go.

Many years later, I see Dr. Strangelove, and I know that George is Dr. Strange and Love. He ran a cult of many women. Most of the men left. His own wife left him, too. In response, he took on a concubine who had previously been his daughter’s best friend. She was thirty years younger than him. George was always waited on by a bevy of women. Like Dr. Strangelove, he dreamed toward an end of the world that involved many young women and himself.

Out with my sleeping bag, I go back to the woods. I go to sleep with the deer and hope there won’t be a bear.

I wake by a stream to a sound in the trees. It’s a porcupine climbing a tree. I know I will need to find something to eat. People always think you can fish in streams. Yeah, right, and then you just start cooking your catch. Instead, I will find apples and blueberries.

If I go see the drunk man down the way, he might give me Saltines. Last time I was there, he was naked. I was not afraid. In a fight, he’s going down. Besides, he doesn’t want to fight. He needs me to help him. I’m a natural helper to drunk folks. Maybe, I think, when I grow up, I can marry someone who is drunk. I will already know what to do.

Mr. Whipple has his pants on when I arrive. Another sporting day in Paradise.

“Do you think we will ever be asked to put 666 on our forehead?” I ask him.

“I can’t think yet,” he says. “Come on.”

“How many?”

“Six.”

Some mornings, his hands are too arthritic to open a beer. Probably all for the best. He gives me Saltines. I eat twenty of them. What a great breakfast. As I leave, the road stretches from Mr. Whipple’s house down the mountain.

Years later, I hear a New York poet read a poem about walking through a forest and hearing a sound—either a deer or a bear. There’s a difference, I thought, between prey and predator, and in the woods, you would know it, and that’s how you survive the apocalypse or the end times, but you wouldn’t know that coming from New York.

When I do finally run away from the cult, I walk down the road away from Mr. Whipple’s house with my sleeping bag, harmonica, two dollars, and my dog. I find a library. Someone takes me into her attic and gives me a job taking care of her son. She has a spinning wheel, a houseful of books. I eat honey at her house out of the jar. I’d been waiting for honey all my life.

I walked away with no driver’s license or social security number. I found my way to ASU, then California. Were there more drunken men? Reader, I tell you, they were everywhere. They came for me. What other models did I have? I grew up wanting to save. I had children with them. Raised children with them. Margaritas and champagne wash through all my fairytales.

I thought that anytime now, someone might kill me. But they didn’t. I lived.

Dr. Strangelove dreamed of women, of the bomb, of sheltering from the bomb. George dreamed of running his little world and the women in it. Mr. Whipple dreamed of a young girl’s hands opening the beer, morning after morning, until he died.

I had different dreams: Libraries, streams, books and sunlight between them. I dreamed of sitting in that sunlight. I dreamed of being my own strange love.