HOT.
As a small child, I reached up to touch the stove. To play with fire. Then pulled back in a flash. And spoke my first word.
“Hot.”
I always liked this detail about myself. That I neither cried in pain nor called for mama or dada. I always thought it said something about me, though I’ve been torn about what it said. That I was willing to venture out and take the risk, and report clearly on what I had learned? That’s the perspective I prefer and like to think is true. But on darker days (and there have been plenty of those), I think this early encounter with fire left me deeply hesitant to take risks for fear of pain. As a consequence I’ve always believed that I have something to prove.
Especially to myself.
It’s a terrible thing to think that fear of pain or of failure shadows your entire existence. It’s a worse thing to believe that you must struggle against those fears every day of your life. To prove to yourself and the world that you can do it. You can take risks. You are not afraid and will never be afraid.
I can admit it. I’ve been afraid. I’ve always been afraid. But I’m most afraid I’ll pass up a chance to overcome my fears.
Hence the Army? Not so fast. Nothing is as simple as that. We’ll get there when we get there.
Growing up, my favorite drug was LSD. If you think about it, this makes sense. Marijuana made me groggy and slow-witted. I could never concentrate when I was high. Everything moved in absurd slow motion. People giggled like idiots and acted all profound while making no sense at all. I hated the experience. Who wanted to sound stupid? Not me. So I dropped acid, and it delivered a crystallized sense of lucidity in which my brain spun so quickly and lurched here and there in ways I could barely keep up with. But I did keep up. I always kept up. I don’t recall having the notorious bad trip, only the lukewarm trip—the one that left me unenlightened (but hardly undeterred). But acid always made me think. And I loved (and love) to think.
Life in a combat zone made me think, too. Deployment in Iraq was like this yearlong invitation to think, though a year was probably way too much time. There was the war, but the war (as reported at the time) ended in May 2003. We’d only been in-country for a couple of months. Then came supposed peace. And during the peace, at least until the war began again, there was more time to sit around between missions. You started to go crazy with the thinking and the waiting and the sitting around. And the bullshit. You wondered what life might be like without so much time to think. You thought about how much you were thinking. You thought about thinking about thinking. Like an acid trip without the acid or the trip. Just thoughts. What fun was that?
I can’t explain my attitude toward risk taking. Is it contradictory? There are things I’ve done, and there are things I’d never do. For instance I’ve gone to bars and drunk since I was thirteen. But I refused to get my first tattoo until I was eighteen, when it was legal to do so. (I now have six.) I would not get in a car with a drunk driver. I would never take that risk. But I’ve had lots of unprotected sex over the years. And I’ve let homeless guys I’ve never met before stay over in my house. Those risks I would take.
But before I get too far, let me say a few words about Mom and Dad.
My mom was a Republican with an antiauthoritarian streak, and my dad was a former pot smoker with anger-management problems. Mom had been married twice before; her first ex-husband had custody of her kids, and she didn’t see them much. Dad had been divorced once; his ex-wife was a hippie who had lived on a commune in Washington State. Many years later, long after my folks split up, we all went out to Washington to attend the wedding of his daughter from his first marriage. We stayed with his ex-wife. Everyone got along fine. My mother, my stepmother, and my dad’s first ex-wife liked to joke “There are three Mrs. Williams in the room.”
Dad’s daughter, my half-sister, Yarrow, was the sane one in my family. Kind and loving and generous, she was twelve years older than me. Mom said that when she’d first met Yarrow, she’d immediately thought about my dad: “This guy’s got good genes.” And decided she wanted his child. Years later Dad told me he’d felt used by Mom—tricked by her—and that he had not wanted another child then. I didn’t really want to hear it. But at that point he wanted to come clean and build a better relationship with me.
My parents married, and I was born a couple of years later. And a year or so after that, Mom bundled me into her car and left my dad. Said she wanted to raise this child alone, maybe as recompense for losing her other children to her first husband. Who knows?
Anyway, so ended the story of Mom and Dad. I certainly continued to see Dad throughout my childhood, and he certainly continued to have his tantrums. When I was still small, he grabbed me by my ponytail and threw me onto my bed so hard I smacked my head. Or the time I got muddy once while we were camping, and he ordered me to strip. So I lay huddled, freezing and naked, in the backseat of our car while he washed my clothes at a Laundromat—all the time berating me for ruining our vacation. I must have been five or six. Though he could be kind sometimes, too. I remember he made me this excellent robot costume for Halloween once, and he made cool snow dragons (instead of snowmen) and sprayed them with green food dye and gave them red tongues. He was always trying to be a good dad, even though it was obvious it didn’t come naturally to him.
Mom was an artist from a well-to-do family, but she seemed intent on having us slide down the social ladder as much as possible. Her life played like Horatio Alger in reverse: riches to rags. Maybe it wasn’t her fault, I don’t know. At first things were good, though the neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, she found for us after she left Dad was so sketchy some of my friends from school were never permitted to visit. But Mom got me into an outstanding private school with all these wealthy kids. So I moved between these two worlds—privileged and poor.
The school was multicultural and had a terrific curriculum. I started French lessons when I was really young, and Mom was so pleased that she somehow managed to take me to France twice so I could improve my language skills. Awesome experiences. So she clearly cared that I become intellectual, and put energy into that. I enjoyed being around all these bright kids during the day, and I did well in school. Meanwhile our finances remained okay for a while. She had solid connections in the gallery and crafts-show scene, and her sculptures and carvings sold.
Everything changed when I was nine or so. A serious financial setback coincided with health problems for my mother, and things got very rough. I remember peering around the doorframe, watching her going through the bills, trying to make her money stretch. Crying that we were three months behind on rent.
Things never got good again after that. We never regained our footing. There was not much money for toys, movies, vacations, treats; no money for new clothes for me at the start of a new school year. Little money for food, even, and eventually we had to collect food stamps so we could eat. Mom—a Republican, remember?—hated that we were living on public assistance. She hated people on public assistance, and now here she was, one of those people. She thought people on public assistance should wear orange jumpsuits and live in workhouses. Still does.
My mom—coming from Oklahoma country—felt it was an obligation for any child of hers to learn how to shoot a gun. Essential life skill, that’s all. So when I was ten years old, the time came for me to learn. She drove me down to some weirdo’s private land, and the people there handed me a .22. The thing felt heavy. Then they gave me a .38, and finally a rifle—but that was too much for me to lift. I never forgot how to handle a weapon. More than a dozen years later, at boot camp, these memories came right back again like déjà vu.
Age twelve: I switched to public school for high school to save money. Suddenly I was this brainy geek, feeling rejected because I was smart. So I rejected everyone instead. And became a punk. A lot of punks I met were the same way.
I got into the punk and alternative scene when I was thirteen. I loved the music. (Still do.) Jane’s Addiction. Violent Femmes. Fugazi. The Dead Kennedys. I began to hang around seventeen-and eighteen-year-old high-school dropouts. Everyone so fucking angry all the time. Ronald Reagan had fueled our collective rage at societal injustice. We got pissed off about racism and classism, but mostly it was about the music. We saw all the shows. I attended the first Lollapalooza back in 1991. And since the punk movement in Columbus was so small, it overlapped with every other marginal scene—Goth, Skater, even neo-Nazi—and we all ended up together at the same shows. So things blurred.
I wore the combat boots. I looked tough. Intimidating. People locked their car doors when I walked by. That was cool. But it also infuriated me. I believed this was prejudice. I developed a sense of kinship with black people. People judged me on my appearance—just like white racism. I didn’t think: Lose the look and I’d be just a good lily-white girl again. I thought: Fuck America! I was thirteen. There were a lot of things I didn’t fully understand.
I did understand that the punk scene got me out of the house. Gave me a community. Like a family. And got me into a few tight situations. Like when I ran away from home for a few weeks the summer I was thirteen.
That was a risk that made sense to me.
As a runaway, I hung with Allison. Allison was fifteen with a Mohawk and braces. Allison was convinced that Missing Persons had photographs of her, and so Allison decided to alter her appearance. I remember the night I watched her untwist her braces—she pried them off with scissors. She was so proud of herself when she got them off. And I looked at her and I laughed. Here’s this fifteen-year-old girl with a fucking Mohawk who somehow thought that undoing her braces was going to help her escape notice.
We got ourselves into a bad situation toward the end. We stayed at a house we called the Dog Shit House because there were pit bulls everywhere and no one picked up the shit. The place was disgusting. We crashed there until I found a box of literature and began to look through it. It was neo-Nazi propaganda, and I was still a little too naive to be sure what I was reading. I remember here I was with Allison—a Jewish girl—in this neo-Nazi filth palace. Then one of the neo-Nazis found a picture in my bag of an African American friend from my school. “Who the fuck is this?” Then all the guys began to flip out on Allison and me. “Who the fuck is this nigger?” One of them grabbed my bag and set it on fire, while another one got a gun. But no bullets. Ended up throwing the gun at me while they chased me down the street. (Allison stayed at the Dog Shit House, but she had to fuck a guy to do it.) I ran to a house and begged the people to let me in. “I’m being chased by neo-Nazis!” I slept on their couch and returned home the next day. But my mother had changed the locks on me.
A couple of years after that, my mom ended up throwing me out of the house. She’d found evidence I was using drugs and wanted me out immediately.
That’s when I moved to Kentucky to live with my father. But I was already thinking: If this didn’t work out, if my father threw me out of his house, I’d be homeless. And that was not a risk I was willing to take. I knew I couldn’t handle a JDC (juvenile detention center). The very thought freaked me out. Scared me straight, I guess you could say. So I graduated from high school at sixteen and went directly to college.
But I couldn’t see any point to it. I felt overwhelmed, so I dropped out of college after freshman year. Moved back to Columbus, and heroin had hit the streets. Everyone had just seen the film Trainspotting and deemed it exceptionally cool. Shooting heroin was suddenly very cool. A lot of my punk rock friends and acquaintances were using, and here I was trying to hold down a job as a secretary. I was hanging around homeless punks at night and on weekends, many of whom were doing hard drugs, and I was going to an office during the week.
I had vowed I would always support myself. And here were my friends calling me a poser because I worked in an office and dressed in nice clothes. I didn’t know what to say besides, “Fuck off! You’re eating my food. At least someone here has a job.” Around this time, too, I noticed the sexism of the punk rock scene. I’d taken a couple of women’s studies courses that made me think more about issues like feminism and misogyny. And here were these punk rockers treating me like a girl, and I hated it.
“How you gonna dis your bros for just some girl?” they’d say to one another. So that’s all I was to them. Just some girl. That’s all I’d ever been to them. It really pissed me off. That and the fact I was hanging around a guy, Douglas, who was knocking me around, persuaded me to finish college after all. Get out of Columbus. Get a degree. Not end up a loser like these losers.
I graduated from Bowling Green State University when I was twenty. I graduated cum laude with my entering class even though I had missed a year. By the time I was twenty-two, I was employed in Tampa, Florida, by Infinite OutSource, a fundraising collective funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I was raising more than five million dollars a year through direct mail and telemarketing for fifteen television and radio stations nationwide. I owned my first house, and I earned a salary of thirty thousand dollars a year. I was getting job offers in the nonprofit world for twice as much money. But I was also wanting to make a change.
I was feeling as if I had never really challenged myself. I felt I’d never learned how to fail. I’d never lost my fear of failure. I was at a point in my life when I felt that if I didn’t do something drastic, I was going to wake up in a house with a white picket fence and a minivan and kids who hated me.
My love life? Complicated as always.
Before I got my house, I had rented a room in my apartment to a girl who worked as a stripper. She started to date a Saudi. Tariq was a friend of the Saudi guy. That’s how he and I first met.
It’s funny. Meeting a Muslim through a stripper strikes me as funny.
Tariq—everyone called him Rick—came over and we’d talk. We went on a first date. (He forgot his wallet and insisted I wait at the restaurant while he drove home to get it so he could pay for dinner.)
Rick observed Ramadan—kind of. He wouldn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes during the day. But he worked in a liquor store. He would not have sex if the Koran was in the room with us. So we moved it out.
Rick was Muslim in the way that most Christians are Christian. Christians believe all kinds of things. “I believe premarital sex is wrong.” But they don’t follow their beliefs. “Yeah, I believe it’s wrong—but I’m still going to do it.”
We never lived together. But eventually he began to stay at my house every single night. We also shared a car for a while, when his car broke down. But he always kept his own apartment. I’d suggest: “We could pool our resources.” But it was important to him to maintain his own space.
Rick’s rich Kuwaiti and Saudi friends had everything. Ahmed’s father bought him a Porsche. The other Ahmed’s father bought him a house to live in for a year even before he started college so he could practice his English. Their families bought them everything. But aside from coming to America to get a fantastic education, these guys were also in the States to sleep with American women. To get it out of their system, so they could go home and marry good Muslim girls. They even admitted it. “Yes. That’s exactly what happens.” They couldn’t fuck around with good Muslim girls back home. So they came to the States. They went to college. They slept with American girls. Then they went home and settled down.
They didn’t think twice about it. Same with most Arabic women. They boarded a plane for the States and changed out of their hijabs in the cramped lavatories—and put on make-up, Chanel dresses, and high heels.
Rick was nothing like his friends. Rick worked two jobs so he could afford community college. I respected him for trying to make his own way in the world.
Rick was gifted at languages. He spoke Arabic, Greek, English, French, and Russian. Born in Jordan, he spent the first five years of his life in Lebanon. His mother told me stories of Beirut during the civil war. She described how her five-and seven-year-old children buried their faces in her lap and wept while bombs fell around them. She said she prayed simply for her family to survive each day. I could not imagine what this would be like for a mother.
She made me think about how we—as Americans—are so willing to bomb other people’s countries.
Rick and I were together for two years. He taught me words in his dialect in Arabic. I shopped for vegetarian products in the neighborhood Middle Eastern stores. I learned to love the cadences of the language. All the people in the shops were so encouraging and helpful. Was I married to a Muslim? Or was I Lebanese myself? Apparently my eyes and skin tone allowed me to pass for Lebanese, which surprised me. “No. I’m not Lebanese.” But they remained just as friendly and kind. Just as eager to help me improve my few Arabic words.
I saw an intimacy to the Arab community in Tampa that I envied. Everyone was so close in a way I never experienced in white America—certainly not at college or growing up in Columbus. You need a new carburetor for your car? Take it to a friend’s garage and get it replaced extra cheap. You need money? Friends lend it to you. The community was like a family, and people respected and trusted one another more than I’d ever experienced. Maybe in small towns it’s like this, or certainly in some other ethnic communities you still see it. And when my older sister, Yarrow, was dying of cancer, I saw how members of her church brought food to her husband and made sure he was doing okay. But in big cities or many other places in America? Forget it.
It wasn’t until I joined the military that I experienced anything like this again. In the military you’d be moving into your barracks, and you’d be having trouble hauling your shit, and someone would immediately drop everything to help you. They don’t know who you are. They don’t give a fuck who you are, but you’re wearing the same uniform and they immediately help you. That’s the way it works in the military.
I came to love Rick’s willingness to share his community with me. I was honored to be a part of it for the two years we were together. It was tough, really tough, to let go.
As our relationship became more serious, we began to look at each other a little differently. I started to ask myself: Could I marry this person? If we’re going to have a committed future together, how do things need to be between us?
I criticized Rick, but if anyone else criticized him or how he treated me, I got defensive. We’d been dating for six months when he picked me up from work. My coworkers knew I was dating a Muslim. And I thought they knew me. The very next day a woman from work said to me: “Oh, he doesn’t look like anything I expected.” At the time Rick had a ponytail and an earring. I snapped at her: “What did you expect? A turban and a camel?” Whether she could admit it or not, that was absolutely what she expected. She thought: Muslim. One word. And instantly she had a picture in her head.
My mom told me: “You shouldn’t marry Rick because your aunt’s husband is Muslim—and that’s been so hard for her.” I said: “They’re still married after thirty years! They’re happy and love each other. You’ve been divorced three times. Do you think I am really going to listen to marriage advice from you?!”
At the same time Rick said that if he had kids he didn’t know if he’d want to raise them in America. I understood what he meant. If I had a daughter, I don’t know if I would want to raise her in the circumstances I’d known as a girl. Once Rick and I were in Sears waiting for my alternator to get fixed. A man and a woman and their kid came into the garage office. The girl was about ten years old. Way prepubescent. She wore low-slung tight hip-hugger jeans, a pink skin-tight tank top with little straps, and little strappy sandals. She swayed her hips when she walked. Rick shook his head. Disgusted by the extent to which we sexualize children in our society—and the extent to which we allow children to sexualize themselves.
On other occasions Rick said to me: “You know, you shouldn’t wear that tank top. If you wear that tank top, people will judge you in a certain way. They are not going to listen to what you have to say. And you’re smart. I want people to judge you for what you have to say—not just for how you look.”
Rick acted more like a traditional—or stereotypical—Muslim the longer we were together.
When I was just an American chick he slept with—or whatever—it was no big deal for him. What did he care what I acted like? But as things got more serious and I started to look more like wife material than fucking material, he wanted to control me more.
He’d say: You can’t behave like this…. You can’t do this…. You can’t wear that.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve dated Catholic guys who were far worse.
When a personality conflict with a new female superior got me fired from my job in October 1999, I fell into a bad depression. Rick took care of me. He brought me flowers and orange juice. He mowed my lawn and made sure I was okay. I appreciated how genuine he was—how it was never just words with him. He never gave me a line about how he felt. He told me exactly how he felt, and I could always trust he meant it.
“I’m married.”
When Rick finally told me, it felt like a violation of trust. What if I had gotten pregnant? What if I didn’t want to have a child out of wedlock? I understood why he had hesitated to tell me. How do you explain when you haven’t been dating somebody for very long? I’m married. I don’t even really know the woman I married; we never slept together. It was arranged so I could stay in the States; she’s my old roommate’s girlfriend. And by the way, I just gave you the power to get me deported. But then, once you’ve been dating somebody for a while, and you trust her enough to tell her, how do you explain? By the way, we’ve been dating for a long time, and we’re pretty close, but just so you know, I’m married.
It freaked me out.
On another occasion he said: “In my faith the children take the mother’s religion. But you don’t have a religion. So if we did have children, of course we would raise them Muslim.”
I didn’t appreciate that, either.
And there was another thing. I asked Rick sometimes about Islam. Once he told me about their end-of-time beliefs, which seemed to resemble the Christian notion of apocalypse. In the end of days, Rick said, all Muslims would rise up and kill all nonbelievers.
So I asked: “Would you kill me? Would you rise up and kill me?”
And he said: “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
That was a big deal to me.
“How can you not know?”
He was being honest.
When I enlisted in the Army as a linguist and told him I might be assigned to learn Arabic, he said I was planning to spy on his people. I believed him when he said that if I pursued a military career, there was no way he could be with me.
When I was in fact assigned Arabic, I announced: “Well, we’re breaking up.”
And he said, “No, I don’t want to break up. I still want us to be together. I’m changing my mind.”
During boot camp, whenever I was given permission to use the telephone, I called Rick. My decision to join the military was not just a decision to get away from him. In part it was. I admit that. But certainly not entirely. I hated that we were separated. When I completed basic training, he came to see me graduate. By then he’d grown this really long and wild goatee, and he looked like a cross between some crazy terrorist and a hip college kid. My parents didn’t know what to make of him at all.
Everything got really complicated. In the end, once I moved to California, it was my decision to start dating other people that finally broke us up. After that Rick would never speak to me again.
It’s hard to have someone with whom you’ve spent two years of your life, and cared about, hate you and want nothing to do with you.
But Rick was also a big part of my decision to enlist, because he gave me confidence that I could handle the Army. He had so much confidence in me. He certainly would have wanted me to do something else. Anything else. But the respect he showed me and the confidence he had in me helped me believe that I was capable of doing something I never thought I could do.
I owe him that. Despite how much he hated what I did, I don’t think I could have done it without him.