It's like the question in that old song, "how
ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Paree?" You
can't. Not me, anyway. You see, I am an escapee. I have been on the lam for
over twenty years. Were I to turn myself in now, I fear I'll be sentenced to
live out the life originally intended for fellas of my ilk. Had I not gone on
the run, had I stayed and done what was expected of me, I would not be writing
this in my little flat in Hyderabad, India (there would not be a monkey with a
staring problem just outside my window); instead, I would now be bellied up to
the bar after a hard day's work at the grain and feed elevator. I would drink
Pabst Blue Ribbon and shots of Old Crow whiskey. I would sport an unseemly large
belt buckle. I would be convinced my president isn't really the president
because he wasn't born in the U.S.-- and I would have seen the proof of this on
the internet. Finally, I would wholeheartedly subscribe to a brand of religion
which allows me to take comfort in hatred and xenophobia, to blame liberals and
Mexicans for falling grain prices, to sneer at those Democrats who are
destroying my America.
But I escaped.
This is part one in a short series about life in Small Town
U.S.A. -- rather, Palin's America.
Part One: Abortion
As the snow mercifully began melting in the spring
of 1984, I didn't yet know that I'd made her pregnant. Around the same time --
maybe the exact same time -- we freshman boys were forced to abandon our
usual fifth-hour period of machine and woodshop class to enroll in one full
quarter of Home Economics. Though this was a requirement to graduate high
school, walking into that classroom with its sewing machines and cooking stoves
was nonetheless humiliating; everyone knew that shop class was for boys, Home
Ec. for girls. The first few weeks of class were as one might expect:
baking pies, sewing patches on our Wranglers, doing household budgets...you
know, girl's work. Then came that week where our good-humored, matronly
teacher told us to sit as she pulled out a large jar from deep in the cooking
apron closet. This wasn't a jar of raspberry preserves or pickled eggs, this
one contained a human fetus floating in amber liquid.
We were fourteen-year-old boys from a rural
community. Most of us lived on farms or had at least worked each summer and
fall in the vast fields and countless barns yards of the North Dakota prairie. I
doubt there was even one among my class of 19 boys and 8 girls who had not at
least helped in delivering a calf or gutting a deer. We'd all seen, at one time
or another, a lamb born with two heads or the gruesome manner in which a feeder
hog is neutered. We were accustomed to such things.
Still, our eyes grew a little wider at the site of
the kid in the jar. Mrs. Olafson said to pass the container around the table,
that each of us should look closely at the thing and decide for ourselves
whether or not the object was indeed a human baby. I inspected it carefully. It
had fingers, thumbs, and toes; eyes, a mouth, and a nose. It was a baby, all
right. After the jar had made its way around the table, the teacher switched
off the lights and clicked on the projector. The film was newly released and it
was titled, "The Silent Scream". We would be quizzed and graded
afterward.
I grew up in two small towns in opposite corners of
North Dakota. A "small town" in my home state isn't fifty or a
hundred thousand residents. Rather, a small town population numbers somewhere
between fifty people and upwards of five thousand -- though until I went to
college in Fargo, I'd personally never experienced life in a town anywhere near
as big as five thousand people. In fact, that was the kind of city we'd drive
to each fall for school shopping.
(Once, after moving to Los Angeles years later, I
was sitting in rush hour traffic on the 405 and suddenly realized there were
more cars on L.A. freeways at that very moment than there were people in the
entire state of North Dakota. I thought of Grandpa Art's oft-repeated reasoning
for why we lived in North Dakota: "Because no one can sneak up on a guy that lives on the prairie." That day, amongst all those honking horns and
all that smog, I had my first anxiety attack.)
In our little corner of the world, there were of
course many endearing, Rockwellesque pictures of small town life painted
throughout the year. There were hayrides at Christmas, ice fishing in February,
and tractor pulls in the summer. We dialed only four digits in order to phone
others in or around town. Folks liked to joke that if you dialed a wrong
number, you'd talk for twenty minutes anyway. Bringing guns to school was
perfectly acceptable simply because our pick-up trucks had gun racks in the
back windows and in gun racks there are guns. We were given three days off
school each November for deer hunting season. We didn't shoot each other (never
on purpose, anyway...I had a minor, Cheney-like accident with a kid named Dwayne
once, but that's another subject entirely). The crime rate was virtually
non-existent; my step-father never locked the front door to our house when we'd
go on holiday. The lone police officer was also the city maintenance man. There
was one traffic light outside of town at the intersection of two county
highways. It flashed yellow in both directions. The only paved road was Main
Street (yes, that's actually the name of the street). Though it's much smaller
now, in 1984, there were six hundred people living in this town of five
churches, three bars, two grocery stores, and one hardware store. It was not
unique as small towns go. Palin's Real America is dotted with thousands of these
one-horse hamlets that openly pride themselves for being populated with regular
folk, nice people, and average Joes. The welcome billboard outside my home town
reads, "Stop in and have a cup of coffee. We're waitin' for
ya!" It's a quaint but simple life. And therein lies the rub.
Those unique facets to the small town -- the
hayrides, the gravel roads, the sheer "Northern Exposure-ness" of it
all -- these things were as much to blame for a fetus being passed around by an
anti-abortion teacher in a public school classroom as any definable ideology.
True, those Saturday Evening Post images were commonplace, but we were all too aware
that these things were not "city things." Walter Cronkite
(R.I.P.) had for years been telling us about the evils of the big cities, the
power outages and riots; the robberies, rapes, and murders. Our men who'd
joined the Army came home with amusing but disturbing anecdotes about the
behavior of black people and homosexuals. The seldom spoken but obvious
sequitur to the stories was that we were better than city people; we had
horse sense and they did not. "City people" itself was a term to be
uttered with disdain; names like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City
were used as derogatory adjectives or thinly veiled code words in coffee shop
gossip: "Oh, I wouldn't know if her nephew is a troublemaker or not. He did
go to school out in California." "Oh, okay," was the proper
reply, "gotcha."
"The Silent Scream" opens with an
ultrasound image of a fetus in the womb. The narrator sounded a bit like Rod
Serling or, at least, he should have, "Now we can discern the
chilling silent scream on the face of this child who's now facing imminent
extinction."
The floating fetus in the jar was at the center of
the table. Several of us glanced at the thing throughout the film -- it was
impossible not to. Even in the hyper self-indulgence of the 80s, we could step
out of our Air Jordans for a moment and see that this goddamned abortion thing
was obviously murder, that it was pure evil. A few minutes into the
film, after explaining these new imaging technologies, a grave-faced doctor
speaks to camera, "Now for the first time, we are going to watch a child
being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed, and destroyed by the
unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist." And that is exactly
what followed, replete with slow motion zoom-in on the open mouth -- the silent scream -- of the fetus as it was sucked out of the womb.
We would be quizzed. Home Economics. A requirement
to graduate. I got a perfect score on the quiz. I also wanted to kill the
abortionist who performed the procedure. I doubt I was the only one who felt
that way. My fourteen-year-old mind couldn't comprehend how this horrific act
could be legal. Even President Reagan was saying it was wrong and he was
America personified, a real everyman, a cowboy hero.
Of course, Mrs. Olafson did not follow this with a
film about back alley abortions. No stories were told about coat hangers
employed as medical instruments shoved blindly into a young woman's uterus to
remove a baby put there by her uncle. Mrs. Olafson didn't talk about
impoverished mothers or disparate philosophies on when life begins. And she
most certainly did not talk about a woman's right to make decisions about her
own body. Nineteen boys in their early teens sat in that publicly funded
classroom and had the beliefs we'd already been taught in church reaffirmed by
a woman we knew and trusted. Make a household budget. Bake pies. Sew clothes.
Watch the disarticulation of a fetus.
The pregnancy was an accident. We weren't
like those people in the cities using abortion as birth control. You see, thing
is, in between the ice fishing and tractor pulls, there isn't much to do in a
small town. Our winters were often 20 and 30 degrees below zero, minus 60 with
the wind chill. There was no movie theater to attend on Friday nights, no video
game arcade in which to loiter. Booze, however, was easy to find and because we
got our driver's licenses at the age of fourteen (farmer's permits at twelve),
everyone had a vehicle. By the time we saw "The Silent Scream," most
of us were drinking like sailors and fucking like bunnies...especially me
and Mrs. Olafson's daughter, Lilly. And we had an accident.
Condoms were available at the Cenex gas station, but
Mr. Silbernagel wouldn't have sold a condom to me if my life had depended on it.
Had I somehow, by the grace of God, been sold a box of rubbers, everyone
would've known within an hour or two. Certainly there were a few fathers and
brothers in town who would've gotten wind of my purchase and beat the
ever-living-shit out of me before I could make it to the barn dance with jimmy
in hand. No. I had to rely on the "promise method" of contraception:
promises and swears-to-god that I would pull out and that if
"something" did happen, I would stand by her and marry her. I was 14
years old, she was 15. (We were, perhaps, born far too early; had we had the
benefit of hearing Bristol Palin speak at our school beforehand, I'm just
positive we would have said no to sex and that I would've kept it in my
parachute pants for Jesus.)
The nearest and, to my recollection, only abortion
clinic was in Jamestown, a city of about 16,000 people and a hundred miles away. The plan was to take Lilly out for the day
under the guise of going to a friend's farm for an all-day, junior/senior barbecue. The
previous two and a half months since she'd missed her period -- three since the "accident" -- had been a living
hell for both of us. Neither Lilly or I told a soul. She did her best to hide
the crying and I did my best to act like everything was okay. Fact was, I did
my crying at night when I closed my eyes and thought of that baby being torn
apart, the "silent scream" its mouth made as it happened. I'm not sure which was
scarier for us: the abortion and our probable appointment with hell at some
point in the future, or the chance that we might get caught. If anyone found
out that she were pregnant, it would've ruined the lives of more than just she
and I. My step-father sold crop insurance for a living and there would have
been customers lost. Lilly's mom would've quit the church out of embarrassment,
her dad would've beaten his daughter up and good. And in all seriousness, there
was a strong chance the man would've put a bullet in me for having defiled his
daughter. He was not a kind man.
The clinic in Jamestown was in a suite of offices on
the second floor of the Buffalo Shopping Mall. We hadn't made an appointment
because we didn't know anything about clinics. The only reason we knew the
place existed was because Lilly's mother had told us all about it, how they
murder babies at the shopping mall in Jamestown. I expected a woman like Beulah
Ballbreaker from "Porky's" to greet us at the door, someone real ugly
and mean, someone who enjoyed killing babies. It was a strange sort of guilty
relief when the woman who answered the door was a receptionist in her
mid-twenties, soft-spoken and warm. She put her arm around Lilly's waste in a
fashion that made me think she'd once been through this herself; for a moment,
I judged her harshly for it. After all, our situation was different. Lives
would be ruined if we didn't go through with this. Lilly was not a whore. It was an
accident. We were not city people.
The two of us in that waiting room...I remember it
feeling a little like playing house, like we were pretending to be adults. For
a moment I even felt like I was an adult. In fact, I was a man, goddamnit.
I crossed my legs and began casually flipping through a Family Planning
brochure and nodding my head as if I understood. Then that manly feeling ended.
Too many cross-section drawings of women in various stages of pregnancy; I
felt I'd vomit at any moment. Lilly asked me for the hundredth time if we were
gonna go to hell for what we were doing. I didn't know, I told her, but
probably, yeah.
When Lilly emerged from the doctor's office sometime
later, she was crying and laughing all at the same time. She wasn't pregnant.
The nurse told us it's not uncommon for a teenage girl to go that long without getting
her period. After she gave Lilly a long hug, the woman gave me a quick shot of
the stink-eye, then handed me a box of Trojans. Much to my embarrassment, she
proceeded to pull out a lifelike, rubber cock and showed me how to put the
thing on, how to stretch out the little receptacle at the end. When I couldn't
take it anymore and looked away, she gave me a stern yet friendly talking-to
about the need to do this correctly, about taking responsibility as an adult if
I were going to engage in adult behaviors. Neither Lilly or I had ever been
talked to by an adult this way -- and certainly not about sex. Not once did the
woman say, "now don't you fuck anyone ever again, you godless heathen
boy!" (It would've been easier if she had. I was used to such
admonishments and my replies were practiced.)
I'd like to say my views on abortion changed then
and there, that the kindness and wisdom bestowed upon me by that woman made me
see the light. But that wouldn't be true. Becoming pro-choice was a slow
process of learning by osmosis which didn't begin until my college years. I
came to know many women who confided in me that they'd had an abortion. I was
at first surprised that these women -- some of them, indeed, from big cities --
didn't seem evil or whorish at all. With time, I simply grew up and shed the
remaining vestiges of that small town "horse sense" like a snake does its skin.
It'd been a low-level brainwashing by an entire village and escaping their clutches brought a
lot of inward shame as I came to realize the horrible things I'd once thought
about liberal people (not the least of which my belief that a person could be 'evil' or, for that matter,
a woman a 'whore'). And when it came to abortion, I never again had to worry about
whether or not a girl was pregnant because I knew how to use a condom. A very
smart and understanding woman had taught me early on.
I never again saw Lilly after high school
graduation. I heard she married a farmer from a nearby town. During last year's
election, every time a rally took place in the Upper Midwest, I'd scan the
pictures of the crowds, expecting to see Lilly and her mom waving a
McCain/Palin pennant. I couldn't help but wonder how close I came to waving one
myself.
*Note: names were changed in this
essay
