Death Threats
In my last post, I left off at a bit of a cliff hanger...
In summer of 2018, full of grandiose illusions, I launched into what would have been my second book, a long work of investigative journalism about the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history1 only to find my path blocked by death threats.
I’d been threatened before. Once, while writing my first book, the public relations officer at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a woman named Peggy, told me flat out, “I’m going be honest with you and ask you to respect my words. If I find out that information is published that should not be published, we’re going to put a stop to you.” Before that I met a nice girl in graduate school. “If you ever even think of writing about me, I’ll tell everyone about your micropenis.” And there was Christina, too, her continual refrain back in the day. “You just want to render me in fiction.”
“Worse!” I used to call after her bike, never certain if she’d answer my texts again. “Nonfiction!” But as far as I knew, up until the summer of 2018, no one—except for my mother—had ever threatened my life.
The threats, when they started, were both terrifying and titillating and I took them to mean that I was on the right track. Certainly it isn’t every day that you embark on a book about a patch of land owned by a little $122 billion company called Boeing only to find it communicated, in no uncertain terms, that if you continue any further along the road upon which your research is heading you will be killed.
That road, as it turns out, has a name. Woolsey it’s called. Woolsey Canyon Road. And a fair amount of people actually die on it. It isn’t their desire to expose the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history that does them in so much as bad brakes, or booze. Other times it’s the view.
The road rises eight-hundred feet from the far west end of the San Fernando Valley to the top of the Simi Hills, a narrow ribbon of battered asphalt burrowing into the western border wall of LA County, and on a clear day, as the view unfurls behind you—the entirety of the Valley’s 235-square mile gridwork stretched out below like some monolithic printed circuit board, the blinking diodes of its roads, the humming transistors and resistors of its homes, strip malls and hospitals rippling in a haze of heat as the one program our species can never unplug, Growth, runs on unsupervised toward oblivion—it’s hard sometimes, rowing the steering wheel round the bend, not to want to continue straight off the cliff.
But I managed to be a good boy that summer, to stay mostly sane, and stay on the road. It was only in appearance that I’d made the catastrophic mistake of moving to Los Angeles.
In reality, the megatropolis was just an ephemeral little fling, a tryst with dystopia that would yield much bigger things. Not more subdivisions of course, but a contract with a subsidiary of Knopf, and perhaps a long run in Oprah’s Book Club, assuming I could keep it all simple, forget about W.G. Sebald, and give it the old Erin Brockovich rub. Yes, a story about kids fighting the cancer caused by corporate greed. You’d have to work really hard to fuck it all up.
As my one-time Valley Girl, Christina, told me early that summer:
“Your book could be… like… really big…”
I thought it would be nice to have something big attached to me.
But one hot, steamy summer’s day, high above the Valley, something forced me from that simple, straightforward road of common sense, mass market narrative nonfiction.
It was on the way back down Woolsey Canyon that I jerked the wheel, barreled off the pavement, and came skidding to a halt an inch before the cliff. The black SUV humping my bumper whooshed past, its horn roaring on in one interminable and terrifying trumpet blast as my skull snapped back and slammed against the headrest. A trail of dust drifted out over the canyon, knotting and tangling as it twirled, like that twin part of me that had just jumped from my skin, and for a moment, watching it lift beyond the cliff, everything was quiet.
I shut off the car engine. Heard the blood beating in my head.
Then the gravel crunch… The black car at the bottom of the bend. Tires slowly circling as it rolled uphill, in no apparent hurry now, and watching it climb, I remembered suddenly how as a kid, watching crappy movies on cable (many of which, it turns out, were filmed up here among the otherworldly rocks at the head of the Valley, the most terrible among them the The Creeping Terror), there was a kind of divine mercy evident in the monsters and axe murderers lack of urgency. God, I guess, was a good and just game warden. Somewhere he had ordained that if you meant to devour a human being wholesale, to start dicing them alive, you had first to plod after them at a pace no greater than four miles per hour. There was no way, I remember deciding as a child, that you’d ever find me squandering such a cosmic fluke. And yet for some reason, faced with certain ruin, as the black SUV crept back up the hill that day, I felt myself a beautiful brainless blonde woman stranded in a pink bikini.
I simply couldn’t run.
I knew I had a knife in the glove box, though, some cheap multitool I stole from Zion National Park, my revenge against the Mormons. Some teenager in China once earned 8¢ engraving the name ‘George’ on the faux-redwood handle, the moniker that always saved me the inevitable Starbucks litany the one or two times I went there each year. Barren? Brent? Brandt? Come again? Oh… Carrot! But opening the glove box, I saw the knife wouldn’t save me… The ‘02 Honda Civic coupe’s blue doors had long ago been bashed in and nothing locked. One or more of Los Angeles’s 70,000 unhoused citizens had borrowed the knife, the floor carpets, the battery one too many times. Some days I still caught the khaki rugs resting like welcome mats before a tent door, one of the four or five batteries I’d had stolen charging the smartphones the government provided the homeless with to watch porn. People had basic human rights. “Let them consume adult content,” Mary Antoinette once said. I guess that was one way to prevent a revolution. But I just wanted my knife back. Unfortunately it was gone, along with the insurance card, the Civic’s owner manual, and a pack of spicy peanuts I’d been saving for emergencies since 2016, the entire glove compartment gutted, I saw, except for a tiny red golf pencil with the words King Trivia emblazoned in gold along its flank. “Question Number 7: What is the most meaningless way to die?” Albert Camus, the author who first infected me with wanna-be-writer virus, said it was a car wreck. “I know of nothing more absurd than to die in an automobile accident.” A year later, his Facel Vega veered into a tree, killing him instantly.
At least I’d avoided that shit, I thought, removing the pencil and sniffing the wood as the black SUV continued past me. Barret 1 - Camus 0, I thought, watching in the side mirror some person experiencing homelessness had recently kicked off and that I’d glued back on the other day with a tube of Barge all purpose cement as the SUV signaled politely, pulled to the shoulder, and flipped a bitch.
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, I read as the SUV crept closer.
It had been further away when I’d first seen it at the top of the hill earlier that day. I’d met a man a friend had put me in touch with in the narrow side lot before the big Boeing guard gate, an LA County Parks and Recs officer named Ron. He’d spread out a series of photographs on the hood of his pickup. They were supposed to contain a mutant two-headed deer, “irrefuta-fuckin’ proof,” Ron said, of the radioactive fallout still haunting these hills. He’d snapped them back in the ‘90s just down the road, at Sage Ranch Park, where it was easy, as a solitary hiker, to get confused some afternoons, not notice the NASA warning signs, and slip beyond their barbed wire into AREA II of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory where the F-1 engines of the Saturn V rocket, which carried man to the moon in 1969, were built and tested by the Nazi SS officer Werner Von Braun after he was smuggled out of Germany in 1945 under a top-secret US government program known as Operation Paper Clip.
“You know them?” Ron asked me, nodding toward the black SUV at the top of the lot. The windshield was opaque black, celebrity style, a permanent fix it ticket of a luxury vehicle, and so too the passenger side window, which lifted then as I squinted into the distance, closing on the face of a woman in dark glasses. I’d been studiously avoiding looking in the vehicle’s direction, preferring instead to focus on the impossibly shitty photos of blurry bay laurel trees Ron had laid out the hood of his F-150. I couldn’t tell him there was a woman up there. A woman who knew my name. She’d been watching me post online. Had found my phone number. And even now, somehow, she texting me. What are you doing, Barret? It sounded totally absurd, crazy, even more preposterous than the possibility of still bagging some mutant venison mystery meat, as Ron claimed he meant to do, even if I wouldn’t join him. Or did it?
“Don’t point,” I said. “There’s a woman. I think she’s following me.”
And now, as the SUV circled back and stopped beside me, as the woman stepped from the passenger side door, as she stood in the dirt of the turnout, I remembered Ron’s words, his laughter. “Who is it, your wife!?”
It seemed a reasonable question, but the answer was no—no she was not my wife.
I watched her cross, my arm cranking at the manual window lever. The adhesive tint had begun to wrinkle and flake off and it jammed in the rubber seal. I could only roll the window down halfway.
I stared out at Christina as she stood there in a pair of buggy sunglasses I didn’t recognize, a Starbucks iced latte in her hand, the name George printed on the plastic side. Behind her, in the driver’s seat, I could see the co-worker whose photos I’d seen on Facebook. She was smiling. Texting me. And I remembered Christina’s words from weeks ago. A fight at the brewery. “Your book could be… like… really big… But it’s not going to be,” she said. “Because if you write about Santa Susana, I’ll kill you.”
“Hi,” I said, sniffing the tip of the King Trivia pencil.
She put her hand on the window and forced it down further. Then she took a step back and flung the coffee into my face. I’d run out of water over an hour ago and the splash of liquid cold helped loosened my vocal chords.
“What are you doing here, babe?” I said.
Her blue eyes were wild.
“I swear to God, Barret. If you write this book, I will cut your dick off and masturbate with it while you bleed to death.”
And with that she turned, the door slammed, and the SUV disappeared down the hill. Sitting in the passenger seat, I stared out over the vast expanse of the San Fernando Valley’s near cosmic growth. It was a view tailor made for Santa Susana, I thought, a laboratory that was not merely the site of the America’s largest nuclear meltdown but for 60 years the largest rocket engine test laboratory in the western hemisphere, a facility where human beings, not content with having colonized and conquered every corner of the globe, first built the technology to convey us to other worlds. Yes, the United States had begun as a shining “city on a hill,” a small community of religious zealots intent on demonstrating they were predestined for heaven, and over three centuries later, at the far corner of the continent, the project continued up on The Hill—“The Hill” being the deceptively mundane phrase employees once applied to the secretive Los Angeles research station now owned by the Boeing Corporation above ‘America’s suburb,’ the San Fernando Valley.
But these were precisely the type of convoluted, interwoven historical threads that the book did not need. Not if it was going to be big.
“Rocket,” I thought, firing the engine on the Honda Civic, “from the Italian rocchetto. The spinning spool around which the weaver’s thread is wound.”
But the engine would not fire. The cheap, used battery I’d bought had drained its last juice. And so the book’s been sitting there until this day. Sitting there at the turnout overlooking Los Angeles. Broken down, stalled, waiting. A real cliff hanger.
NBC News, Experts: 1959 meltdown worse than Three Mile.
“The report by an independent advisory panel estimated it was likely that radiation released during the meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory caused about 260 cases of cancer within a 60-square-mile area around the reactor… The lab’s former owner, Rocketdyne, has said for years that no significant radiation was released. But the independent advisory panel said the incident released nearly 459 times more radiation than a similar one at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979.”