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remembering what it was like to have a Sunday morning purpose, remembering what it was like to have someplace to go, even if it was just hell.
APOCALYPSE 2: THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU
    I’m not exactly proud to admit this, but I owe my life to Ronald Reagan. My family moved from Oklahoma to Montana in 1981, the year Reagan was inaugurated. I was eleven. Away from the Bible Belt, my family was forced to attend a bland, nondenominational church about which my mother said, “Too much teachin’, not enough preachin’.” Religion became an increasingly less urgent part of my life.
    This did not mean that the end of the world faded from the forefront of my psyche. I merely replaced one apocalypse for another. In the early ’80s, President Reagan made so many mortifying announcements about the “evil empire” and his Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, and “We begin bombing in five minutes” jokes that I was utterly convinced I was not going to grow up. By 1983, he’d made the whole country so nervous that there was a prime-time TV movie about nuclear winter called The Day After. I have never seen the movie, however, because my mother decided our family wouldn’t be watchingit as that would be “too disturbing.” I guess talking to six-year-olds about the reign of the Antichrist is fine, but letting teenagers watch Jason Robards stumble through rubble for a couple of hours on TV is unthinkable.
    What with waking up every morning surprised there was still a world to wake up to, I was not a particularly fun-loving high school student. By junior year—1986, Chernobyl—my free time was filled up with doing my homework and writing orchestra music derivative of my then-hero, Philip Glass, repetitive music predicated on the notion that time, perhaps, is going nowhere. Ah, sweet sixteen. But then my more sociable sister, Amy, told me that some kids she knew from art class were starting an antinuclear group. I was immediately excited, impressed.
    I only knew the kids who, like me, took band. I thought the art class students who showed up for the first meeting of what would become Youth for Global Peace were the most glamorous people I’d ever met. They played in rock ’n’ roll bands and wrote poetry and didn’t eat meat. They had spiky hair and smoked cigarettes and debated whether or not William Burroughs’s Junky was better than his Naked Lunch.
    Yeah, yeah, we talked about nukes. We were . . . against them. We’d meet every Saturday night at Greta Montagne’s house and oftentimes some adult from the local chapter of Alliance for a Nuclear Free Future would talk about some nuclear subject. We made antinuke T-shirts and wore them to school. We handed out pie charts of Reagan’s 1986 federal budget (in which defense spending was the biggest slice of pie)at grocery store parking lots. We got up really early one morning and plastered the school walls with xeroxed posters of a mushroom cloud on which we scribbled “This Could Happen to You.” We had a No Nukes banner in the homecoming parade (which I couldn’t walk behind because I was up front playing baritone horn in the marching band). My biggest contribution was probably representing the group in a roundtable discussion on the local public television channel; the adults said a few mundane things about a saner nuclear policy before I started screaming, “You got to grow up! Do you know what it’s like to think you’re not going to grow up? Do you?” Why the station manager didn’t immediately grasp my broadcasting potential then and there based on my nuanced, articulate approach and offer me my own show remains a mystery.
    In retrospect the antinuclear part of the antinuclear group was the least important thing for me. For starters, they introduced me to the Beat Generation. I remember the first time I read Allen Ginsberg’s poem