ACCOZZAGLIA

i once dreamt of being weightless.

i was raised in Clear Lake City, Texas.

Clear Lake City is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. as in, “Houston, we have a problem.”

on Sunday, 12 April 1981, i woke up at 6am to watch shuttle Columbia launch on live TV for the first time. it was awfully white. and its rockets at liftoff sounded like no other shuttle launch which was to follow.

in 1983, i embraced astronomy as an inspired interest, a hobby, following a unit taught in science class. my grade five teacher, Ms. Patricia Bertelli, drove this red Porsche with the Texas personalised plate, “Y55MPH” and taught the sciences with more passion and clarity than any other teacher i’d known. only Mr. Schlueter a few years later came close.

on my birthday in 1984, a response to that passionate interest, i was given a telescope, which i brought to school a few weeks later on Wednesday, 30th May to show my grade five classmates a first-hand view of the annular eclipse which happened that morning.

my next-door neighbour, Jeff Kouri, worked in JSC’s Mission Control.

having classmates whose parents were astronauts was commonplace. having classmates whose parents worked for McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed-Martin, Rockwell International, Boeing or NASA was status quo. there was nothing special about it. this was the heart of a Cold War economy.

my dad worked for a chemical plant. it had nothing to do with the aerospace industry. in fact, that detail alone made me somewhat an outsider to my peers.

Carolyn Blaha’s dad was an astronaut. Che Bolden’s dad was an astronaut. Laura Coats’ dad was an astronaut. Erin and Allison Smith’s dad was an astronaut. the dad of my best friend from the first grade, Adelle Brandenstein, was an astronaut.

my classmate’s father, Michael Coats, commanded flight 41-D, the first Discovery mission, in summer 1984.

between 1981 and 1991, i’d seen all six Shuttles personally. two piggybacked and in the air (Enterprise and Discovery) and four in person, up close and personal (Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, and Endeavour):

in 1985, my neighbour, Jeff, invited my cousin and i on a private tour inside the Johnson Space Center. i was twelve. i held a heat tile (looks like ceramic, feels like lightweight plastic). i wore a space suit glove. i sat in a functional shuttle cockpit for flight simulations. i pressed a button on Mission Control’s floor out of curiosity. nothing bad happened, but i got a tongue-lashing for it.

in 1985, Laura’s dad and mum gave me a personally signed, matted photo of a Challenger launch, even though the five signatures wishing me best blessings were five of the six from the crew of Discovery 41-D.

Judy Resnik was one of those five. hers, the autograph of a woman who made it to space, was the most important to me. even more important than Michael Coats’ autograph.

Judy’s simple gesture to this kid in the sixth grade moved me in a way that she never could have known. as the second American woman to make it into orbit, I stood there, as a twelve year-old girl, completely in awe. she was living proof that, one day, I could do it, too. at that time, NASA was trying to make missions so commonplace that they would totally need hundreds, even thousands of new astronauts someday.

on 24 January 1986, a Friday, we watched the NASA channel on basic cable. we saw live images downlink slowly on our screen, electronic shots taken by Voyager 2, fed directly to our TV from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. the spacecraft was making its closest pass to Uranus that afternoon. the flat face of the planet, still just black-and-white photos, looked nothing like the bigger gas giants we’d already seen. this was the most entertaining thing on TV.

on 28 January 1986, i was in speech/drama class, taught by Ms. Ogden. it was 11:30am, about ten minutes before the fourth period (and the beginning of my lunch) was to begin.

our principal, Mr. McGlothlin, interrupted classes with the intercom system. about fifty minutes before, he said, the Space Shuttle Challenger, which had launched, didn’t make it.

our school district waited an hour to reveal this news so that they could remove Mike Smith’s kids, Erin and Allison Smith, and Ellison Onizuka’s kids out of their classes before the news went public. they were already at Cape Canaveral, but the delay to tell us was a precaution.

i saw the hour-old news ten minutes later on a specially rolled-in television inside the lunchroom commons.

in that insular little world of Clear Lake City, the only place i’d really known, the air was constantly rife with a smug elitism, an implied superiority complex. in great part, this was due to the high concentration of people involved with the aerospace industry.

blind to social strife and violence anywhere outside of Apartheid-era South Africa (which was on MTV and in the headlines back then), my naïve, innocent view of the world beyond where i lived was shattered to pieces. my dreams for entering university early in hopes to be the best in my class for astrophysics was all but shattered — shattered because it was a hope to grasp onto inside a violent home which had no hope.

i spent weeks, and then months, trying to understand the initial cover-up in the investigation, and how third-party company, Morton-Thiokol, warned about allowing a launch in sub-freezing weather.

i drew composite after composite of the launch with my drawing pad and coloured pencils, trying to highlight the moment when the leak in the solid rocket booster actually doubled as a blowtorch.

despite the recent birth of their first daughter, we didn’t see my next door neighbour, Jeff Kouri, for the next six months. i didn’t see Mike Coats for about six months.

in 1985, Mike Coats had brown hair with a few grey spots showing around the temples. in late 1986, Mike Coats had almost no brown hair left.

Clear Lake City, an annexed part of Houston, slumped into a depression within a recession. the recession happened to the oil economy, but the Challenger happened inside of that. everyone took it hard, despite the base jokes which leaked their way into a bubble-sealed community which never changed in tune with the real world. this was a gallows way of communal coping. but be it the 7-Up joke, the Head and Shoulders joke, the NASA-acronym joke and so on, i took them personally. the jokes made me angry.

i felt as if i took the loss harder than most of the people i knew at school.

in my little, completely un-socialised mind, i was harassed and beaten to a pulp for being different, just like in the fourth grade, just like when neighbourhood bullies would chase me home. namely, for being the biggest geek in Clear Lake Intermediate, even if in hindsight it was much more than that.

i’d come home each day from school, on bus 8407 (which meant that it was the 7th bus our school district purchased in 1984), to a home with a violent powder keg of a mother waiting to verbally abuse and beat me, just like my signature bully, Eric Pubentz, did every other day on the school grounds.

in late 1986, i was institutionalised for “severe depression”. there was another reason — the reason no adult wanted to admit or had the language to describe — and everyone was keeping conspicuously mum about it. i met other institutionalised teens, most older than me, from communities immediately adjacent to Clear Lake City. be it Dickinson, Kemah, La Porte, Deer Park, Texas City, Friendswood or Pearland, they all alienated me at first because of just how sheltered they saw i was from the kind of everyday world that was “beyond the bubble”. some of the teens were truly damaged. others were the teens their parents hid to preserve their social respectability.

my passion for the space program exceeded passion and into obsession. i was surrounded and enveloped by it. but as the year dragged forward, i began to accept that i would never see space. coupled with facing again just how gender-different i really was, the recurring revelation had all but sealed a fate of being grounded.

i left Clear Lake City in 1989, ten years after my parents moved us there. i ran away from my abusive mother, who was on the verge of inflicting some serious life-threatening harm to my body. it took neighbours to quietly move me out in the middle of the night.

when i left Clear Lake City, i had been taught to believe Clear Lake’s unquestioned and socially conservative premises that being any kind of queer was a sin, that abortion was murder, and that ten percent of my eventual salary was to end up on a platter.

in 1990, at age seventeen, i said, “no more”. at age eighteen, I came out.

today, after being out for twelve years, having slogged through a lawsuit and having lived throughout this continent, i know so much shit that i simply could not have in 1986. but we ought to know more and know better than we did when we were thirteen.

i know that almost as many gender-different folk were murdered last year as the 36 astronauts in all who were killed in the line of duty, including the 17 associated with Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.

dead astronauts are made to be “heroes”.

i have never really met an astronaut like me. that’s because there isn’t one. if you’re (gender-)queer, you have no chance in hell to experience an orbit.

today, i think about every single person who will never have a chance to be a dead astronaut.

because they were feminists in the Middle East.

because they were Kurdistanis in Turkey and Iraq.

because they were Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

because they had a cunt in Afghanistan.

because they practised Falun Gong in China.

because they were Tutsi in Rwanda.

because they were Muslim in Serbia.

because they were damned as queer in America.

because they were given a certificate at birth that was coded to read, “prosperity denied”.

i also think about the individual people killed in lower Manhattan and who were left to either burn or rot in The Pile.

because these are people that i shall never get the chance to know, thanks to this country’s arrogance in its perennial foreign policy. not because the killed were so-called “Patriots”. many of them weren’t even American (lest we forget), and others yet still would have abhorred that firebrand even being associated with their names.

and i especially think about all the people from this country who die slowly and silently in this country, all because they fall prey to a system that only benefits people with Certain Distinctive Characteristics and condemns others who retain anything but.

on Saturday, 1 February 2003, i woke up about four hours after a town (by which a quarter of my ancestry called “home” — the same ancestry peppered with men who fought for the pro-slave Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, much to my eternal disgust — a place called Palestine, TX) heard a thunderous disruption and watched inexplicably unnatural debris rain down onto it.

it took another hour, despite three oblique references in my inbox, for me to scratch my perplexed head and pull up the New York Times.

and this time, i was surprised. but i wasn’t crushed, as i was on Tuesday, the 28th January 1986. i wasn’t nauseated, as i was on Tuesday, the 11th September 2001. i wasn’t left in heaping sobs, as i was on Friday, 25th October 2002.

this time, i am numb. i am jaded. i am cynical. i have seen far too much.

today, i wonder why only Certain Distinctive People — people very human, ordinary and flawed, just like me — can so quickly become “heroes” should they get killed on a high-risk job that could only have been given to them because of those Certain Distinctive Features.

because i am a native Clear Lakenite* (even if long removed from there), astronauts are not special. they are commonplace. they shop at the neighbourhood Kroger’s grocery store where i was once employed. they are no more or less mortal and no more or less special than every persecuted person on this planet who was slaughtered or tossed into an unmarked grave.

rather, astronauts are treated as politically privileged people, standing in the right place at the right time, with the right education, and with the right sexual orientation. sometimes, they have the right parents. and sometimes, they possess the right ethnic mix and religious beliefs.

and these elements make them “more important” to outsiders who otherwise never could have known them.

it is this dysfunctional national ethos that explains to me why privilege wins. and why disadvantage loses.

seventeen years after the soul-breaking grief i felt for the Challenger’s demise, after seeing my earliest role model die, i feel nothing other than this utter, cold emptiness for the Columbia’s deceased. it is an emptiness which is no fault of their own, but for the way they are being lionized as heroes for having the privilege to take on a risk which has now cost them their lives, it is a privilege deprived from so, so many with so much potential.

and there is no going back from that emptiness.

^{* there’s not really a demonym for people from Clear Lake City, but this will do.}