Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West To Investigate My Attempted Murder - and Solve the Riddle of Myself - Softcover

Jentz, Terri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312426690 ISBN 13: 9780312426699

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate took a cross-country bike trip. As they lay sleeping in the central Oregon desert, a man in a pickup truck deliberately ran over their tent and proceeded to attack them with an axe. The horrific crime was reported in newspapers across the country, but no one was ever arrested. Fifteen years later, Jentz returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered and makes an extraordinary discovery: the violence of that night is as present for the community as it is for her. Shockingly, many say they know who did it, and he is living freely in their midst.

Powerful, eloquent, and paced like the most riveting of thrillers, Strange Piece of Paradise is a startling profile of a psychopath, a sweeping reflection on violence and the myth of American individualism, and a moving record of Jentz's brave inner journey from violence to hope.

About this title

About the Author

Terri Jentz is a screenwriter and lives in Los Angeles. Strange Piece of Paradise is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Strange Piece of Paradise

A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder---And Solve the Riddle of MyselfBy Terri Jentz

Picador USA

Copyright © 2007 Terri Jentz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312426699

Chapter One

Part One

It has sometimes taken me ten years to understand even a little of some important event that happened to me. Oh, I could have given a perfectly factual account of what happened but I didn't know what it meant until I knew the consequences. -KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

A Dangerous Summer's Night

Poised on that twilight edge between life and death, I felt intimately the part of me that was flesh, and I knew also that I was something more.

I came to that insight early on. I was scarcely twenty.

IT WAS 1977, a drought year in the American West, the driest year in recorded history, although history in those parts went back only a hundred years.

Back then, all of America was in a drought. The fever dream of the sixties had simmered down and the country had lost its way. The national mood was dispirited, in recovery from shocks and traumas, pinched by stagnation and inflation. Fatalism shadowed sunny American optimism.

Gas prices had never been higher. But I didn't care. I was riding a bike.

America was hardly past its two hundredth birthday as I was nearing my twentieth. Its bicentennial year called for celebrations to restore a sense of the nation's magic and promise. Out of that came a bicycle trail, the BikeCentennial, forged from coast to coast through America's most spectacular countryside. My college roommate and I were riding the trail on our summer vacation. Encouraged by the 1970s culture to strive for self-discovery, we were hoping that the song of the open road would enlarge life's meaning.

In the Cascades of the Northwest, drought conditions were melting the glaciers left from the last ice age. The mountain passes cleared unusually early in the summer of '77 and allowed us to scale the highest pass. On the seventh day of our journey, we rode up through green rain forest. At the summit, a field of lava, night-black, surrounded us from every direction, as if a devastating fire had burned through only yesterday. Breathing in the air of the heights, we headed down. Trees abruptly appeared again. Only now they were reddish desert trees.

We set up our tent along a river in a small park in a desert of juniper and sage, and bedded down for the night. It was Wednesday, June 22, the summer solstice. As the earth slowly turned in the dark, Americans in one time zone after the next settled in front of their TVs, safe in their living rooms. They watched the CBS Wednesday-night movie, the world television premiere of a dark and unsettling Western, one of those edgy films made in the seventies that reflected the mood of national cynicism. It was a film complete with psychopaths and moral degeneracy, a new American mythology that turned the romantic version of the Old West on its head.

The sound of screeching tires woke me. It was near midnight, and we had just gone to sleep. A stranger deliberately drove over our tent, then attacked us both with an axe. I saw his torso. He was a meticulous cowboy who looked like he had stepped off a movie set.

My great voyage across America ended abruptly there. And that was how I reached young adulthood, with a certain knowledge of life at its farthest edges.

Its Long Life

I entered young adulthood with a story that cast a spell on me. The details of the attack and of how we managed to survive gave me a dramatic tale to tell. But to make a full accounting of this event and its aftershocks seemed for many years impossible. Could I ever apply meaning to what had long seemed a senseless act, one that happened without pattern or reason? Was there even a "why" to it?

It took fifteen years before I finally realized that a long-ago incident had transformed me, divided my life into a before and an after. My personal history bewildered me, but two questions kept surfacing. The first was elusive: How could I get the recurring dreams to stop, the ones that haunted me through the years-dreams in which I was captive at the age of twenty, unable to progress to another stage of life? What dislocation of spirit had arrested a part of my psyche?

The second question was easier to grasp: Who was the man who emerged that night in a desert park, bent on destruction? This question had but one simple answer: an individual with a name. A man with his own history-a past, a present, and, impossible to imagine, a future. Fifteen years had passed, and the crime had never been solved. Its reckoning was long overdue.

Both questions converged in a flashbulb image that struck deep into my memory: the headless torso of a fit, meticulous young cowboy suspending an axe over my heart. The image conjured for me a villain out of myth and legend.

I began an education in such mythic imagery early on, when for my fourth birthday I received a 3-D Viewmaster that came with a package of sample discs. I remember holding the Viewmaster to my eyes and clicking the button on its right side. I clicked my way through 3-D views of beautiful American landscapes and frames of iconic American imagery until I froze at one: a headless torso wearing a costume out of the Old West, a holster slung around his waist, his hand training a revolver on me, the viewer-which, in its startling three-dimensionality, forced me to stare down the gun's cold gray barrel.

The image stayed with me until that summer of '77, when I conflated in my mind what I remembered from my childhood toy, a cowboy torso trying to shoot me, and what I actually saw in the flesh. The memory of my attacker-that cowboy torso trying to axe me-crystallized at the margins of my consciousness as the nocturnal visitation of a villain out of legend.

It was the gripping power of this image that would compel me to set out to solve a crime-one that I hoped could solve me.

IN 1999, I RETURNED to the scene of the incident, a place in the Oregon desert called Cline Falls. The visit turned out to be catalytic. If my vision had before been blinded by the trauma of the attack, now I was keen to see. What was the panorama that surrounded me? What lay across the river and across the highway? Who else happened to be in Cline Falls Park that night? Who lived in the surrounding ranches, and in the town four miles away? Who were the souls of this rugged community of the American West: the courageous ones who rescued us that night? the passive ones who wouldn't speak up?

I took frequent journeys back to the scene of the crime over a period of several years, and the questions continued to unfold. Why did the community still remember an event from long ago as though it happened only yesterday, as if it were an open wound? Why did some tell me that the event had devastated them? Why were others indifferent? And what about the people who, I would discover, claimed they knew the identity of the attacker all those years?

Conversations were seldom journalistic interviews. Often they turned into infused encounters, my story forging an intimacy among strangers. People were, for their own reasons, eager to look through my eyes, and into what might have been my last moments-sometimes it was a far-out symbol of their own worst trauma, which if not life-threatening was at least soul-diminishing. They answered my questions; they made valiant attempts to resurrect the past; they helped me with my investigation, which they understood as my personal mission. When I met someone for the first time, I learned always to begin with the story.

I realized the tale I had to tell wasn't mine alone. The events of that long-ago summer night had driven deep into others in that desert community. Mine was not a solitary, isolated experience in one person's life. It was a collective experience, even for those who hadn't witnessed it. On some subterranean level it was as though they were waiting for me to return, to tap their potent remembrances, and by doing so to bring some kind of integration to a memory that never fit into any narrative they knew.

As I excavated my personal history over many years of returning to Oregon, questions kept arising, still more troubling questions that brought to the surface the violent and extreme in our culture. The first time around, America's dark underside found me. Later, I went looking for it. And it wasn't hard to find. Of all developed nations, America is especially violent. It is violent by habit. My 3-D Viewmaster warned me of this when I was just four years old.

But I also found the other extreme. John Steinbeck said it just right in The Grapes of Wrath, our archetypal tale about lost American dreams: strange things happen to people in America. Some bitterly cruel. And some so beautiful that faith is retired forever.

The First Years

Fifteen long years elapsed between the attack itself and my compulsion to investigate it. It was a period of dormancy -incubation for what was to come later.

At first, I wore my story like an odd appendage, a Siamese twin. It was surely affixed to me, too freaky to ignore, yet not incorporated in any way into the rest of my life. Instead of pursuing its deeper implications, I would trot out the pain in my past for dramatic purposes. The cicatrix that snaked around my left forearm mellowed from scarlet to rose, but it was still strikingly visible when I rolled up my shirtsleeves. "It's a perfect axe cut," I'd say to those bold enough to ask, explaining that the coil around my left forearm was not a surgical incision, but the precise tracing left by an axe-wielding maniac whom I encountered one night. I knew that few people would have an opportunity to view such a thing in their entire lives, and I wanted them to appreciate fully this door into the dark. Then I might be inspired to uncloak the whole collection of hidden scars: ridges in my right shoulder where the truck first struck my body-"tire treads etched into my skin," I would explain-and the knob in the middle of my collarbone where it had broken and healed, subtracting an inch and a half of chest span. Pulling up the bottom of my shirt, I would reveal a line of gentle bumps where the ribs had snapped in half.

There was nothing in my appearance to say "victim." The contrast between my bright, open face without a blemish and the concealed scars made for great mystery. I could keep my picturesque scars hidden. Or raise a curtain on them as I wished. They were great show-and-tell, visual aids for "The Story" of just how they had arrived on my body.

The story was both my grand disclosure and my secret. I had no qualms about blurting it out to strangers. But I was more secretive with new friends. For them, my narration was an initiation. I withheld it sometimes for months, until new friends turned into good friends-then I'd pop the story on them, suggesting that I was infinitely more complex than they had ever imagined. I formed bonds according to how they reacted. A particular empathy or fascination might mean a lifelong friendship, or even a love affair. I'd form a special rapport-it seemed a predestined friendship-if someone remembered the incident from the media attention it got in 1977, as it was reported in newspapers across the country and broadcast by Walter Cronkite himself, a fact I didn't mind noting. I knew I had a good tale, but I didn't understand precisely what listeners found compelling other than the obvious sensational details, nor did I have the insight to comprehend my nagging compulsion to tell it.

In the early years, I narrated my story with great levity, punctuating the recitation with laughter, a breezy chirp in my voice. I didn't catch on that it was not only the tale itself but also my way of telling it that left my listeners with queer scrutinizing expressions on their faces. As I progressed through the cheerful beats of my narrow escape, I got to the part where I described the condition the axe-man had left me in: I had no movable arms. I described myself, with those silly, useless arms that wouldn't do what I asked them to do, as a "scarecrow." I even would picture Ray Bolger singing and dancing.

IN HINDSIGHT, I can see that the dispassionate way I told the story (and the scarecrow image) was, in the therapeutic idiom, a dissociative numbing similar to how some war veterans I'd heard about would spin their battle stories-but it was also a metaphor offered up from the deep folds of the psyche. I had split into two distinctly separate selves that summer night in June 1977.

There was the official self: the bright and independent woman right out of Yale, an aspiring artist in New York City, coming of age with the rest of her babyboom peers, playing at being hip, trying to develop social poise, personal charm and style, and striving with ambiguous direction to fulfill that singularly twenty-something desire to make something of herself overnight. True, my upper body was torqued, concave; my breathing was fast and shallow from bearing the weight of an invisible truck; my right shoulder curled forward, and my right arm was so stiff I couldn't grasp the loops that hung from the ceilings of the subway cars I took each day. And I would freeze while crossing city streets if a car came on too fast. Still, I fancied myself no different from the rest of my ambitious peers, and I tripped about the metropolis day and night thinking that this shining city, with its canyons of tall buildings that glittered with sun by day and then turned black and mysterious by night, where one had the sense that marvelous life-altering events might happen at any moment, held all the promise befitting my destiny.

But there was also a scarecrow self-an unacknowledged, angry, aggrieved shadow, who lived in a scarecrow body. It was plotting from the beginning to sabotage the other self. That took a long time. But, meanwhile, she was sending messages in a bottle.

The way a psyche tries to make sense of things, the way it tries to stitch itself back together after a violent criminal attack is as unique as a fingerprint or a crystal structure. This other creature spoke an odd language-an encrypted language of unconscious knowledge, calling out to be recognized:

She must be the one who scrawled a mysterious reference in my daily calendar for 1980, on the day of July 24. Murder in the Met, she wrote. Today, I only vaguely remember what this news story referred to. A young ballerina ambushed by a malevolent janitor backstage after hours? It's a strange reference in this calendar, which otherwise is filled with notations of every lunch, brunch, and dinner date, every book read and movie seen, every incident that might possibly be relevant to a young artist in New York City in the early 1980s. But it is surely there: Murder in the Met, scribbled next to the notation about my having taken in the Picasso exhibit at MOMA.

Certainly it was this exiled self who, after I wrote an article for a magazine about the mysterious death of a model who fell from the window of a fashion photographer's loft, decided to enter only one line in my journal about the incident, a quote from the girl's autopsy report: The entire body is covered with a thin film of black dirt. She was also the one who jotted, in the midst of other journal entries about my various attempts at dating, an isolated reference, apparently apropos of nothing: The smell of my blood-encrusted body.

Some motivation from this unknown district of the mind, from the porous unconscious, inspired me to perform the curious ritual of rummaging through the closet of my Brooklyn brownstone apartment looking for a bag stashed there. I would yank the fabric out of the sack until it unfurled on my living room floor: the mummy sleeping bag, the same one that three years before, when the police gave it back to me, I had instructed my father to wash in a Laundromat, so that the surf of pink suds slapping against the round glass porthole of the washing machine might restore it to a usable condition. I'd search the bag's silky interior to find all that was left of the blood-a few dark stains only I could identify. I wished there were more of them, and bigger. What might be repellent to most-were there others who would save the very sleeping bag they were almost murdered in?-was oddly satisfying to me. I wasn't afraid of the blood. I had developed an overnight fearlessness about blood. Reconnecting with it filled me with a contentment I couldn't comprehend then and didn't question. Blood was no longer "gore" to me. It was life itself. I would hold the fabric to my nose and try to recall the singular smell-like copper pennies held in a damp palm.

Continues...

Excerpted from Strange Piece of Paradiseby Terri Jentz Copyright © 2007 by Terri Jentz. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312426690
• ISBN 13: 9780312426699
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 752