[from my ongoing memoir]
There was one group we tried not to tangle with, though: our archenemies, the Jehovah's Witlesses—er, Witnesses. If we were dogs, then the Jay-Dubs were cats. If we were water, they were fire. If we were Superman, they were Lex Luthor. We did not get along. I think the antipathy stemmed mostly from the fact that people were always mistaking one of us for the other when we knocked at their doors. In fact, I recall once later on my mission when I had just been transferred to a new area. My new companion and I were walking down a quiet, shady street doing callbacks on a sunny spring day when suddenly he stiffened and went pale.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"See that guy a few houses down, out watering his lawn?" asked my companion.
"Yeah."
"Well, we knocked on his door last week and he came out just screaming at us, telling us to get the hell off his property and leave him alone. I thought he was going to kill us."
We crossed to the far side of the street, walking briskly and hoping to escape the man's notice, but just when we thought we were safe he called out, "Hey! Hey, you guys!"
We turned around. "Uh, us?" my companion called.
"Yeah, you. Come here!"
The guy was a bear, huge and shaggy, with arms the size of trees bulging out of his wifebeater T-shirt. He turned off his hose as we meekly crossed the street. "Hey, are you guys Mormons?" he asked, eyes narrowed in a threatening glare.
"Yes, sir," said my quaking companion.
"I kinda figured." He shook his head and sighed, looking suddenly abashed. "Oh, boy. I have to apologize for yelling at you the way I did before. I thought you were Jehovah's Witnesses."
To the casual observer, the one who doesn't give a shit, it can be tough to distinguish between Mormons and Jay-Dubs. Both groups have strange beliefs. Both go door-to-door thrusting books or pamphlets into people's hands. Both try to tell you they're the only ones who can give you the true religion, and both bristle at being called cults. But beyond that, the two faiths are really nothing alike, and they're about as pleased to be confused with each other as Mexicans are when we gringos can't tell them apart. It's an insult, but one the perpetrator is rarely aware of making.
We and the Jehovah's Witnesses hated each other the way only entities competing for the same ecological niche can. We could never have reasonable conversations with them. If we tracted into a Jay-Dub home the discussion always seemed to devolve into a fruitless argument, with us harping on them for the backward notion that only 144,000 souls would be saved and dwell with God and them twitting us for the evil belief that we could become gods ourselves. No one watching would have understood what we were fighting about, nor would they have cared.
My favorite Jay-Dub encounter came early one day when Snow and I were visiting Van Wagoner and Bishop, the two other elders in our district. It was about eight-thirty, and we had arranged to hold companionship study together that morning as a group. We were just getting started when someone knocked at the door. Elder Van Wagoner, a rangy fellow who had grown up on a ranch in southern Utah, went to see who it was. He was wearing his white dress shirt, but he hadn't put on his tie or black name tag yet.
There were two little old ladies at the door, arms loaded down with copies of The Watchtower and Awake! They asked Van Wagoner if they could come in and share the word of Jehovah's Kingdom. "Surely," he said. "Right this way."
He led the two ladies into the living room, where the rest of us were seated around a small table piled with copies of the Book of Mormon, our name tags as plain as the smiles on our faces. The poor old ladies froze, two rabbits who had just stumbled into a den of hungry jackals, eyes blinking like signal lamps behind their thick glasses.
"Er, actually," said the first, "I believe we have an appointment elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better if we came back another time."
Yeah, like the Second Coming.
