I have sworn, on numerous occasions in various levels of drunkenness, that I would never come within 100 miles of Los Alamos. Since I do not ski, never seeing Taos strikes me as quite acceptable. Santa Fe is said to be an artist's haven, but those, frankly, are everywhere, and Asheville, North Carolina is just as beautiful, significantly bigger, and much closer to my family. Santa Fe, I've heard, is also a lesbian haven, something I'm occasionally told by angry bisexual women complaining of their ostracization. So if you are a gay female sufficiently desperate for a lifemate that you'd be happy to nurse them through their radiation sickness, go do your thing. I can imagine very few reasons that I'd want to be that close to an institution that's spent 62 years trying to destroy the world. Albuquerque, less than 150 miles south of the labs, is really too close for my comfort, but where else in the Southwest are you going to find Pabst on tap?
Unfortunately, my friend Twain was born on August 6th, 1959, on the 14th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And I'm afraid I totally flubbed his 45th birthday. So for his 46th, I was prepared to loosen my survivalist principles somewhat. August 6th, 2005 was the 60th anniversary of the bombing, and the anti-nuke Los Alamos Study Group, assisted by a host of other anti-nuke and anti-war groups throughout New Mexico and the U.S., put on a huge festival/protest, including lectures, classes, Aztec dancing, poetry reads, folk singers, various symbolic ceremonies, a lecture from a Nagasaki survivor, and keynote speaker former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (who unfortunately did not arrive). I braced myself for a day of fun, punctured by a fear of deadly forces which cannot be measured by human senses.
On Tuesday the 2nd, Twain explained to me the itinerary he had in mind. My mind utterly failed to grasp it, and instead painted over his words with a plan more entertaining. By Wednesday, my self-protection had worn off, and I stormed over to his house to verify I really heard what I heard. It was in the middle of the desert's summer afternoon, I ran stress-inducing errands first, bumped into a local cretin, followed with a hot bus ride, and I was somewhat purple already as he explained to me the plan. At 10:30am on Friday, we would meet a group from Pax Christi in the parking lot of the Reform Temple. We would drive to Santa Fe, where we would all spend the night in sleeping bags in the floor of a church, with Catholics from all over the region, enjoying fellowship. We would then leave for the city of Los Alamos before 7am, and from 8 to 10am we would sit outside the gates of the Los Alamos National Laboratories wearing sackcloth and ashes. We would then make the six-hour drive back home in order to get back to El Paso with plenty of time for the Catholics to get to sleep early on Saturday night.
Although my questions mostly focused around asking him when he lost his fucking mind, they were, in the most literal sense, rhetorical. My real goal was to convince him that if he drove six hours to the location of the most perverse abominations in the history of Earth, he would much rather have some sort of fun while he was there, as long as there was fun to be had. Alas, this was not the case. He argued that the sackcloth-and-ashes bullshit would be a unique experience, and far better to spend his birthday doing something unique than strictly "fun." After all, if he wanted to go to a poetry read, he could do so in El Paso that weekend, but he would have few socially acceptable opportunities to wear sackcloth in Texas. I reminded him that, first off, I was Jewish, and although sackcloth-and-ashes are technically a symbol from the Tanakh1, they still weren't a common symbol of penance for Jews, and since when was Twain either Jewish or Christian? I started to tell him that we were going to feel ridiculous, but then stopped, realizing that wouldn't be an effective argument. I told him that while I had absolutely no problem with being physically uncomfortable for two hours on Saturday morning in order to make an effective statement, what was going to happen on Friday night in that church basement? Was he really prepared to spend untold hours listening to a friar play acoustic guitar while we all sang koom-ba-yah, followed by an early-to-bed sleepover with a room full of odiferous, snoring men? He felt that didn't sound so bad. By way of rebuttal, I broke into song myself, and he said that listening to a gaggle of singing Catholics would at least be better than listening to me sing. I tried switching into complaining about my love life in order to gain sympathy. No dice.
So at about 10:15am on Friday morning (El Paso, unlike the rest of Texas, is on New Mexico time, so thank g-d for that sixty-minute favor), Twain and I pulled into the Temple Mount Sinai parking lot and waited for the Catholics to arrive.
Note:
1The Tanakh is known to Christians as the "Old Testament."
