“Getting banged at the cannons”

“Getting banged at the cannons” is Steering’s local expression for having sex at the old cannons beside the Steering River. The phrase gives a comic, sexual afterlife to Everett Steering’s imagined defense against the British: the fixed iron guns become a conspicuous landmark in the town’s courtship rituals and a recurring point of reference in Garp’s relationship with Cushie Percy.

Place and Local Meaning

The cannons stand at a narrow bend of the Steering River long known as The Gut, where a ship had once been mired. No visible trace of that ship remains; the shore, rather than the water, carries the evidence of history. Everett Steering had imagined obliterating the British at this bend, and his three enormous iron cannon barrels still rest on their concrete mountings. Though the guns once swiveled, later town fathers fixed them permanently in place. A cluster of cannonballs has likewise been set together in cement.

The old military scene has not disappeared so much as been taken over by later uses. The cannonballs are rusted green and red, while beer cans and broken glass litter the platform. The grassy slope to the nearly empty river has been trampled by generations of Steering schoolboys and their dates. Cushie’s choice of the place is unoriginal, Garp thinks, but characteristic of her: the cannons are not a private discovery but a recognized local setting for young couples.

The Expression and Its Usage

At Steering, “getting banged at the cannons” is a pet phrase for sex at the landmark. People use it casually to describe their own encounters or to gossip about someone else’s, as in “I got banged at the cannons last weekend,” and “You should have seen old Fenley blasting away at the cannons.” The wording makes the artillery’s original function part of the joke: sexual activity is described through the vocabulary of cannon fire, turning the site’s martial associations into bawdy local idiom.

The guns themselves bear informal inscriptions that extend the joke beyond speech. Among them are “Paul banged Betty, ’58,” and “M. Overton, ’59, shot his wad here.” The names and dates make the cannon platform a record of successive encounters, while the inscriptions’ mock-military language treats sexual boasting as a kind of public marking of territory. The phrase belongs to a shared local culture in which a historic monument also serves as a familiar, repeatedly annotated rendezvous.

Garp and Cushie at the Cannons

The expression is not merely local color in Garp’s story: the cannons are tied to his history with Cushie Percy. At the riverbank, Cushie asks whether he has been there before. Garp answers that perhaps he came with his mother, though it has been a while; he knows perfectly well what the cannons mean. The scene joins the town’s public euphemism to a particular private attraction, with the rusting guns looming over the couple as Cushie settles among the bushes and lightly bites Garp’s nipples.

Garp hopes to stay in Steering after graduation partly because he wants another chance to see Cushie. He cannot ask his mother, Jenny, to remain in town so that he can keep his appointment with Cushie at the cannons, and he hopes instead to connect with her over graduation weekend. The wet graduation makes that prospect unlikely: rain leaves the ground sodden from Seabrook Stadium to the cannons, fills the upward-tilted barrels with water, and turns the concrete around them into a place of broken glass and slick puddles of old condoms. Garp recognizes that the weather has closed off the rendezvous. Yet the three-pack of condoms crackling in his pocket remains a small, private sign of hope.

That hope moves from the public landmark to a secret setting. After Jenny goes to her bedroom, Garp sneaks Cushie through the tunnel to the main infirmary, to a wing far from his mother’s apartment. There, after he has used all three condoms, Cushie complains that he has run out. The scene carries the cannons’ sexual association into their final encounter: Garp’s connection with Cushie is both an old friendship and a furtive sexual episode, while the public phrase supplies a comic counterpoint to the secrecy and intimacy of the infirmary.

Historical Irony and Narrative Role

The expression compresses Steering’s layered history into a single bawdy joke. At The Gut, the cannons preserve an imagined military triumph, but their immobility and rust make that martial ambition look remote. The graffiti, litter, and worn slope show how ordinary local life has replaced the site’s heroic associations without erasing them. The phrase keeps both meanings in play: a sexual boast sounds like an artillery report, and the cannons’ old threat is converted into a setting for youthful courtship.

For Garp, the idiom also marks the passage from adolescent possibility to departure. He wants to remain in Steering for Helen, because he needs stories that might impress her, and he hopes for one more meeting with Cushie before leaving. Rain frustrates the anticipated rendezvous, while the condoms in his pocket preserve expectation for a time. The cannons thus recur not only as a place and a joke but as a point where sexual desire, youthful memory, and the imminent end of Garp’s life in Steering meet.