previous: Exit 4: Bountiful, Utah
We've got a lot of ground to cover in this section, so keep up and stick close.
It was the middle of January 1978 when we moved the ten or so miles up Interstate 15 from Bountiful to Kaysville. We had a bigger house now, which was nice -- all but for the fact that my bedroom was in the unfinished basement, and I heard a knocking come from the empty room on the other side of the wall one afternoon. Everything was hunky-dory but for that.
Oh, and school. Can't forget school. That wasn't so swell at first, either. In Kaysville, you see, elementary school included only kindergarten through fifth grade, while the sixth through eighth grades attended the junior high. Which meant that I was leaving elementary school in the middle of the year and moving straight into junior high. Do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.
Junior high included all the typical nastiness you might expect for a nerdy bespectacled kid whose father made him carry a briefcase to school instead of a backpack. (This was only after some jerk dumped my huge armload of books in the hall one day, and a fat old gym teacher named Mr. Sedgwick commented on how clumsy I was.) There were the bullies, of course, and there was the locker room, and there were the girls who teased me because of my clothes, and there was Social Studies, which was the first class I ever got a C- in, and on and on. You've been there. You know the drill.
And there was the strange experience of learning to stifle my conscience and obey the social order.
You see, on my very first day at Kaysville Junior, I met Dean Jones. No, not the Disney actor who more recently appeared in Beethoven and Clear and Present Danger, but this chinless, slightly chubby farm boy in faded blue jeans and equally faded red hair. I forget how it happened; we must have sat near each other in the class just before lunch, because I ended up eating with him in the cafeteria that day. And as we sat and ate and talked (about not much of anything, as far as I recall), Dean kept looking up from his tray at me with this big goofy grin of pure pleasure on his face.
It was only after lunch that I figured it out. When some bullies started picking on him. When other kids pointed out to me that the dark stain on the back of Dean's pants meant that he regularly dropped loads in his shorts.
Dean was looking at me with such amazement and pleasure because, for those few minutes at least, he had a friend, someone with whom he was a clean slate, someone who wasn't teasing him or tormenting him but who was sitting down and eating a meal with him and treating him like a human being.
That night, when my father came into my room to ask me how my first day at school had been, I tried to tell him about Dean Jones and how much my heart broke for him. I cried, in fact, and while my father did his best to comfort me, I'm not sure he ever figured out what the matter was.
No matter. That tender heart of mine would be well on its way to hardened within the year.
Because I did meet other people. I did make other friends. And I learned that being friends with outcasts could lead to becoming an outcast oneself.
It was less than a year later, when I was in seventh grade, that I participated in a particularly cruel round of Dean Baiting, a game in which someone would take one of Dean's books or other possessions, then toss it to someone else while Dean chased after it doggedly but without success. At one point in this game, I got down on my hands and knees behind Dean while one of my cohorts gave him a push from the front. He fell, of course, and whacked himself a good one on the asphalt.
Yeah, I had found my place in society.
Not that I didn't have qualms, or twinges of conscience. I knew I wasn't being a good kid. Even as I continued to learn and progress at church, even as I was being praised by my Sunday school teachers and Boy Scout leaders, I was becoming a Bad Kid. Not in the usual ways, true. I didn't drink alcohol or do drugs, and I didn't watch R-rated movies, and I didn't listen to that evil rock-'n'-roll music. But I did pick up some cusswords, and I did participate in the ritual torment of less fortunate kids (as per the Dean Baiting games). I knew that, every day, I was turning my soul a shade closer to black.
Now, you may contend that the things I did really weren't that bad. And I'll respond, "Yes and no." No, because I really wasn't such a bad kid. (What are cusswords, anyway, but sounds some people don't want to hear?) Yes, because I willfully contributed to the destruction of at least one young man who didn't fit in with the crowd. And I'm not talking about Dean Jones, despite the fact that he went on to become a major stoner in high school. I'm talking about Alan Rushforth, although we won't get to the end of that story until Chapter Seven or so.
Now, I may be giving you the idea that I was a popular kid in junior high, but that would be a mistaken impression. I was a geek, no two ways about it. But I wasn't an outcast. I did have friends -- mostly other geeks, but some that actually ran with the fashionable crowds. That's what happens when you're smart and let other kids copy from your tests.
But we were talking about my soul's steady progress from white toward black.
Not a Sunday went by that I didn't resolve to try to be a better person. No more swearing, no more thinking about naked girls, no more failure to study my scriptures like I ought to, no more filching quarters from my brothers' and sisters' piggy banks. Every time I did a bad thing, or failed to do a good thing, I knew that I was one step closer to eternal damnation, and I knew I had one more thing to repent for. But that repentance -- that was a tricky thing. I was taught in Church that, in order to truly repent and be forgiven by God, I had to follow certain steps.
First, I had to recognize that what I had done was wrong. (Hey, that was the all-too-easy part.)
Second, I had to confess the wrong thing to the proper person. This might be the person I had sinned against, or it might be my parents or my bishop, depending on the seriousness of the sin. (This was manifestly more difficult, as I have this lifelong fear of confrontation.)
Third, I had to make restitution for the sin, if appropriate. (This meant restoring the stolen item to its proper owner, or restoring the loss of dignity to its former owner, or whatever. A hell of a lot easier said than done.)
Fourth, I had to ask God for forgiveness. (Okay, pretty easy.)
Fifth, I had to never commit that same sin again, or else my old forgivenesses would be erased and God would re-remember the bad stuff I'd already repented of. (What?!)
Even at the ripe old age of twelve, I recognized that the repentance process was like digging a hole in sand -- the faster you dig, the faster the hole fills back in. In other words, I knew that I could never repent for all my sins. And it was only after this lifelong process of digging a hole in the sand that Christ's atonement would kick in -- only after I'd done all I could on my own.
Uh-uh. No way was I ever going to make it to heaven. It was the Telestial Kingdom for me for sure, after a nice season roasting in Hell. I would be the bad seed who kept our family from dwelling together eternally with God in the Celestial Kingdom. I'd be responsible for tearing our eternal family apart.
Of course, I wasn't yet able to realize that this indicated more of a problem with the things I was being taught than it did a problem with me. I was far from perfect, but I don't think I was on the road to Hell. The road to apostasy, maybe, but not to Hell.
Anyway, this was a hell of a neurosis for a studious pre-teen like me to be dealing with. When combined with all the normal difficult shit that a kid of that age goes through, it turned me (at home, anyway) into a taciturn recluse who spent most of his free time reading books and drawing comics and writing stories and not wanting anyone else in the house to look at the things I was doing.
It was around this age, of course, that my father committed what felt at the time like the ultimate betrayal of our relationship.
You may recall from Chapter Onethat my father used to take me to the planetarium a lot when I was small. If I had to point to one thing and say, "This is what turned me into a fan of science fiction," then those planetarium trips with my father would be the thing. Well, when I discovered all the great SF novels there in the school library -- Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton -- I couldn't keep my hands off them. I was alwaysreading something far-out and mind-bending and weird and wonderful.
One Sunday morning as I was getting ready for church, my father burst into my room waving one of my library books. It was something by Andre Norton -- either Android at Arms or Breed to Come, I don't remember which -- and I had carelessly left it sitting on the stereo in the living room. Oops.
You see, the subject matter of the novel was genetic engineering, tinkering with DNA, cloning. My father had picked up the book, read the flyleaf, and flipped out. (And not in the good way that I would flip out when I read something like that.) When he burst into my room, he was ranting about the evils of playing God and how cloning was a sick sin and all kinds of twisted crap like that. Before he left again, I'd been soundly rebuked, spanked, and forbidden ever to read science fiction again.
This from the man who used to take me to the planetarium and discuss the eventual heat death of the universe with me. That was the beginning of the end for us.
Needless to say, I didn't stop reading science fiction. I didn't even stop reading that particular Andre Norton novel, despite the fact that I'd been ordered to return it to the library. When my father caught me reading it in my room a week later, it was one of the more memorable beatings of my life.
I must concede that he eventually became resigned to the fact that I was going to read science fiction no matter what. In fact, when I got really serious about writing science fiction in high school, he went out and found me a copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine so I could try selling my stories. It was too little too late, though. The damage was already done.
Science fiction wasn't the only thing that was off-limits in our home. Another was rock music. Of course, this didn't bother me much growing up. I was perfectly happy to listen to my father's Forty No. 1 Gold Country Hitsrecord, or to the soundtracks from Disney movies, and when I started learning the piano then classical music was all I ever wanted to listen to on the radio.
(It was in junior high, in fact, that I first learned how "uncool" classical music was. For some class, a kid I knew was taking a survey of what radio stations the students listened to most, and what their favorite music groups were. My answers were KBYU and the Utah Symphony -- and it was all around the school in a matter of hours.)
As time wore on, though, the music that attracted me more and more was jazz. I started out with the soft stuff -- Chuck Mangione, which I first encountered as a member of the high school marching band. The first record album I ever owned was Mangione's Feels So Good, for which I still feel a great fondness, even though I recognize that it's more pop than jazz. But then I moved on to the harder stuff -- these unusual, exciting sounds that blew on KUER at night, after the classical-music deejays went home to bed. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea -- these were the guys who taught me what jazz was about.
Okay, that's probably enough of that, because we're here to talk about my apostasy, and not my musical education -- though to some extent the two of them are linked.
Anyway, my father tolerated my forays into this jazz stuff, I think, only because he couldn't come up with any gospel-related objection to it. And if he ever did take me to task for listening to so much of it, I would point out that at least I wasn't listening to rock.
That always sent him off muttering.
Anyway, this -- early in high school -- was around the time that I started making my first pointed observations about the L.D.S. Church -- early criticisms, if you will. Perhaps most seminally, I began to realize that there was a lot of poverty (or near to it) in my ward. I wasn't quite to the point yet where I realized that the Church put a real premium on personal wealth (and why shouldn't it, when it skims ten percent right off the top?), but I did realize that teaching that men and women should marry young and start their families right away was leading to some mighty miserable living right there in my own neighborhood. I would bike down those quiet suburban streets, observing the dumpy and sad-looking women, almost inevitably pregnant, not yet thirty years old but their faces already imprinted with extreme weariness, as they shuffled out into their unkempt yards and tried to shepherd their four or five dirty kids out of the yard and back into the house.
Scenes like that frightened me. And made me mad. And they made me resolve to myself that I would not get married until I was financially stable, and old enough to know what I was doing, no matter how much social pressure the Church tried to exert on me. I was not going to marry a woman only to do that to her.
(Of course, I never really pictured myself ever getting married back then. Girls terrified me. In fact, I was dreading my sixteenth birthday something awful, because that was when my friends and family would expect me to start dating. Aaaagggghhhh!)
Other aspects of the Church absolutely frightened me. People would get up in fast-and-testimony meeting and talk about all the Signs of the Times, and how the Second Coming was on its way, and how they hoped it would hurry up and get here so that life would be all skittles. "Are you kidding?" I would think to myself, horrified. "When Christ shows up, we're all going to be toast! Especially me!" I had no illusions about my own personal worthiness. Hell, I regularly lied to the bishop during our semiannual interviews. I knew for a fact that I'd never survive the damn Second Coming. I hoped it wouldn't happen until long after I was dead.
To a lesser extent, I was afraid of one day being mistaken for a good man and being called as a bishop. Folks in the ward were always putting ideas like that into my head. "Oh, goodness, you're such a fine and smart young man. You're sure to be a bishop someday, or something even more important!" You know, stuff like that.
Well, I was damn sure that I didn't want to be a bishop. That was more responsibility than I cared for. It was hard enough for me to find time to write my little stories, and I was only a teenaged kid in high school. Imagine what it would be like to be holding down a job and caring for a family, and having to do everything a bishop does on top of that! No thanks. Not for me.
On a much lower level, my church membership made me feel guilty about writing science fiction in the first place. After all, how was I ever to justify making a career out of writing stories that took place hundreds, even thousands, of years in the future, when I knew damn well (or was supposed to know damn well, anyway) that Christ was coming to put an end to things before very much longer?
Of course, my solution for this disparity was to tackle it head on, as I'll explain in more detail after a couple more chapters.
Meanwhile, my days passed as though in a dream, and before you know it I was finishing up my junior year of high school, and I was rapidly approaching my sixteenth birthday. (Child prodigy, remember?) My math teacher, Lenzi Nelson (and few finer teachers have I ever known), recommended me for a special summer computer workshop at B.Y.U., and I jumped at the opportunity to go. My parents were quite happy, I think, to send me off to B.Y.U. for two weeks that summer. Of course, I don't think they were so happy to see me come back.
Because B.Y.U. is where I genuinely fell in love for the very first time in my life.
Her name was Lia. She was Portuguese.
And Catholic.
And dark-skinned.
next: Exit 6: Provo, Utah
