previous: Exit 5: Kaysville, Utah
Of course, things would have been much worse for me had lovely Lia actually reciprocated my feelings. But dammit, I had no such luck.
Perhaps we should pause here for a moment or two. I don't think I've really managed yet to communicate the width, depth, and breadth of my yearning for -- and mind-numbing terror of -- female contact. I ached for girls with a desperate passion even at the age of four -- long before I had any clue of what could actually be done with them. I wish I knew why this was -- maybe then I'd have some hope of learning where to find the "off" switch for my libido -- but I don't have the first glimmering of a notion. I just know that one of my earliest memories is of trooping around through the vast, tree-studded backyard of my home in Los Angeles with six or seven of my "imaginary girlfriends" trailing along behind me in single-file. These included not only mental projections of a few of the older girls at church, but also such entirely fictional cartoon constructs as Daphne (of Scooby-Doo), Josie (of Josie and the Pussycats) and Tiger Lily (of Walt Disney's Peter Pan).
Matters weren't helped as I grew older by the fact that my two cousins Steve and Denny were such inveterate ladykillers. When our families got together, the two of them would regale me with tales of all the girls they had recently smooched behind the schoolhouse or in lively games of kissing tag -- and this was the third grade! As the years rolled by (brief "relationship" with Julie Taylor in second grade aside), I began to despair of ever catching a girl's eye, much less of getting bussed on the lips. That the girls in elementary school liked to push me down only made the prospects seem worse.
I had what were probably the usual assortment of unrequited crushes in junior high and high school -- including one embarrassing episode in which I attempted to bluff the object of my affections into paying me notice by sending her a letter to the effect that her love was the one thing that could save me from putting a bullet into my brain that night -- but none of them amounted to more than a sweaty solo hand exercise late at night under the sheets. (And bountiful fountains of gelatinous guilt, of course.) The mere presence of an attractive girl would leave me so damn stupid and tongue-tied that any statement above the level of a diffident grunt was a fucking miracle.
To call me socially stunted at the close of my junior year of high school would have been like calling Hitler a somewhat disagreeable fellow. I was the youngest kid in my grade, I was a crashing nerd who worshipped jazz and was so out of the pop-music scene that he couldn't tell Toto from Kansas, and at a time when most all my friends had been driving and dating for quite a good long stretch, I had not yet reached the age where I could legally or morally engage in either--per Utah state law for the former and firm decrees from Mormon prophets for the latter. (If only I had known that one of the most popular members of the drill team had a secret jones for me back in those days. Ah, but that's a tale for Memos from the Moon . . . )
It was in this condition -- in the summer of 1983, at the tender young age of fifteen years, eleven months and three and a half weeks -- that I embarked on my two-week stint at the B.Y.U. summer computer science workshop. And it was in this condition that I got whacked upside the head by the two-by-four of True Love.
The workshop was designed to give high-school computer whizzes from around the state a jump on those pesky freshman-year C.S. classes by immersing them in two weeks of intensive Pascal training. Oh, and incidentally to introduce them to wonders and delights of the Brigham Young campus, and perhaps to tip the scales in favor of the eventual pursuit of a clean, fresh, Church-sanctioned college education a year or so down the road -- and the eventual extraction of crisp, green tuition dollars from their parents' savings accounts at Zions First National Bank.
(The indoctrination didn't stick, by the way. A year later, I would defect to the University of Utah -- much to the dismay of virtually everyone I knew.)
We fresh young geniuses were housed in a clutch of spartan dormitories called Helaman Halls -- named for a mighty hero from the Book of Mormon who led two thousand "stripling warriors" (Mormonese for "buff boys with swords") into battle without getting a single one killed. We attended class in a huge auditorium in the morning and afternoon, worked on our assignments in the computer lab when we could, took our meals in the Helaman cafeteria, and attended carefully chaperoned social events like dances and firesides two or three nights out of the week so that we wouldn't have much leisure time for getting into non-sanctioned mischief.
B.Y.U., in case you didn't know, excels at these sorts of social events. They are its raison d'être. B.Y.U. exists today, insofar as I can tell, mostly to match eligible young Mormon men with eligible young Mormon women and yoke them together for life. There's even a cheesy little Vegas-style wedding chapel -- oh, wait, sorry, that's a holy temple -- right across from the campus on the other side of 9th East, and acres of married-student housing right next to that. There's a joke which claims the "Mrs." is the most sought-after degree conferred by B.Y.U.
Whatever. Obviously, no one was trying to rush a bunch of high-school kids into marriage. (The boys would have to serve missions before becoming eligible, and although the girls were already marriageable under state law, it really wasn't cool to get them hitched until after graduation.) But B.Y.U. does what it does, so most of our official social activities were engineered to push boys and girls together in carefully controlled circumstances.
Of course, I skipped out on as many of these as I could.
It wasn't that I didn't want to meet girls. It was just that I could never do it successfully, even under laboratory conditions, and those failures were so mortifying that I could never bear to deal with them in public.
I did fine for friends, though. My roommate was a tall, thin, friendly fellow named Clifford Morrison who attended Olympus High in Salt Lake City, and several of his friends -- a mixed bag of boy and girl geniuses -- were also attending the workshop. I stuck with Cliff and by default found myself part of a nice, fun, comfortable social group.
We only shared a room for two weeks, but Cliff ended up having a dramatic influence on me in two separate arenas -- one that was immediately apparent, and one that I shrugged off at the time but which reverberated for many years afterward.
First, Cliff was into this weird kind of pop music called "new wave." I'm not a rock historian -- I don't know precisely when new wave began to emerge as an identifiable music genre (1977 or so?), but I do know that the less commercial facets of it (everything not the Police or Elvis Costello) didn't reach Utah until not long before Cliff Morrison introduced them to me. Earlier that summer he had discovered a new (and rather weak) FM station that was playing this cool and unusual stuff, and that's what the radio in our room delivered almost constantly for the next two weeks.
Can I do justice to the perilous thrill I still feel when I hear names like the English Beat, Yaz, Echo & the Bunnymen, Madness, the Smiths, Modern English, Split Enz, Depeche Mode, Haircut 100, the Cure, Romeo Void, Vicious Pink, and Roman Holiday? I doubt it. Nevertheless, this is the sort of exciting and illicit music, innocuous as it may seem today, that would pry my head open over the course of the next year and leave me open to the ravages of the wider world of rock. For that I have Cliff Morrison and his cheap little radio to thank.
Cliff's second profound effect on me stemmed from his religious philosophy. I was shocked enough to discover that my roommate was a firm and confirmed atheist; that he was also a genuinely nice guy was something that required a reordering of the neural pathways in my brain to properly apprehend. I'd had non-Mormon friends before -- in fact, a couple of my best friends from high school, as I'll get to in Chapter Seven, were Catholic -- but this was something else altogether. With friends of other religions, at least we had the common ground of belief in a god. With Cliff, all the common ground we shared was our love of computers, our teenaged boyhood, and our humanity.
Hey, come to think of it, that's plenty.
I didn't go home from that summer workshop any more convinced of the correctness of atheism than I had been when I arrived. But I did go home with a practical understanding of the fact that atheists could be good people too. And I find a delightful irony in the fact that I learned this at B.Y.U.
Strangely enough, I might not have reflected so often on my time with Cliff were it not for something my father said to me the week of my return home. When I reported that my roommate had been an atheist, my father responded vehemently with a statement to this effect: "No, son, it is flatly impossible for someone only sixteen years old to be an atheist!"
My father said this with such certainty and authority that I had no choice but to accept it, at least on a surface level. But somewhere deeper, I don't think I really bought it. How else to explain the fact that I kept returning to that assertion for years and years afterward, turning it over in my mind, examining it from every side, worrying it like a rosary bead?
It's only been within the past couple of years that I could put into words the obvious flaw in that notion -- a flaw which should have been obvious from the get-go. L.D.S. doctrine teaches that a child reaches the age of accountability at eight. This is the age at which Mormon children are expected to know enough about the Restored Gospel that they can make the choice -- of their own free will, no less! -- to accept the solemn lifelong and binding covenant of baptism. This is serious business -- so serious, in fact, that Mormons count it an abomination to baptize children any younger than eight, when there's a sentient being inside that little skull sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to understand what covenant it's undertaking and why. (Thus one of the fundamental tensions between Mormons and those idolatrous heathen Catholics.)
So -- to restate my father's belief in view of what we've just learned -- an eight-year-old child is sufficiently learned and mature to decide first that there is in fact a god, second that Mormonism provides the one correct system for approaching that god in worship, and third that he or she is prepared to swear eternal allegiance to that god through an act of ritual cleansing . . . while a sixteen-year-old nearing adulthood is completely incapable of reasoning out the nonexistence of God to his or her own satisfaction.
There's this bridge down the street from me I'd like to sell you. Answers to the name of Brooklyn.
Okay, that's enough on Cliff. My point is made, and what you're all really interested in is sex. I mean romance.
I mentioned earlier that Cliff was part of a small group of young smarties from Olympus High at the workshop. There were three girls in this group, none of whom I found particularly attractive, but one of them was friends with this gorgeous and fiery Portuguese girl named Lia. And oh my good golly gracious!
Lia attended Alta High in Sandy. She and her family had only lived in the States for about a year, as I recall. She was born in Portugal, then moved to Brazil when she was about ten, where the family had lived for the five years prior to moving to Utah. (Exotic progression, no?) Her father worked in computers, and Lia had inherited every gram his brilliance.
I knew none of this at first, of course. All I knew was that the café-au-lait-skinned beauty with the black hair and the intoxicating Latin accent who sometimes hung out with Cliff's little group was way out of my league. Hell, forget leagues. I wasn't even playing the same game.
But by the middle of the first week, something miraculous had happened. Lia had started paying attention to me -- addressing comments directly to me instead of to the group, listening raptly while I played the piano in the lobby of the men's dormitory, smiling at me at odd moments. I floated in a cloud of rapture, despite the fact that a good seventy-five percent of me refused to believe that what I saw happening was actually happening. "You must be misinterpreting things," that majority voice would say. "You know she can't possibly be interested in a skinny geek like you."
Late in the week, Cliff and I returned to our room after some group get-together, and he said, "You know, Bill, I'm really getting the idea that Lia likes you."
This outside confirmation of the thing I hoped for so devoutly pleased me to no end, but I tried not to let it show. What I did was pump him for an explanation, to silence that noisy pessimistic clamor in my head. The clues he enumerated matched mine.
Then Friday evening arrived. A special dance had been arranged for the workshop attendees in the Smith Fieldhouse, but I didn't go. I was still so painfully shy that I didn't dare show my face at the dance. Instead, as night fell, I wandered around the campus in a morass of depression, convinced against all evidence that Lia really had no interest in me and that if I went to the Fieldhouse and asked her to dance I'd only wind up soundly rejected and publicly humiliated.
That was when Lia appeared from out of the darkness. I had just ascended the long sloping asphalt walkway that joined the Helaman Halls complex to the upper portion of the campus, and I was headed for the Wilkinson Center to play some video games, shoot some pool, or maybe bowl a line or two . . .
(A brief amusing story about that walkway, if you will permit me a brief digression. It being the height of summer, many of the girls in our extended workshop crew were wont to wander around barefoot -- quite contrary to B.Y.U. dress standards. It again being the height of summer, when the sprinklers adjacent to that walkway turned themselves on, droves of snails were wont to emerge from the surrounding foliage and strew themselves at random across the cool, wet asphalt. One evening after dark, a large group of us were ascending that walkway, on our way to some gathering or another somewhere. The sprinklers had been on, no one could see where they were stepping . . . I won't attempt to describe the multitude of sickening crunches I heard that evening from under the feet of those fortunate enough to be wearing shoes. What are even more memorable to me, however, are the horrified shrieks of the girls who went unshod. I guess aversion therapy is one way to enforce a dress code.)
. . . so as I was saying, I ran into Lia just as I was on my way to the Wilkinson Center. She was heading the other way, but my heart leapt as I assessed the possibilities of getting her to come with me to play some games. But when she asked me why I wasn't at the dance, I could only stammer through some lame explanation of why I wasn't interested. She spent a moment trying to convince me that I should go -- despite that fact that she wasn't going herself -- then left me and disappeared back into the darkness.
I don't know which depressed me more, the fact that I couldn't have danced with her even had I gone to the dance, or the immediate demonstration that she wasn't interested in spending time with me anyway. But it didn't really matter, I guess. I trudged on along on my lonely, solitary way.
But no more than a couple of minutes passed before Lia came rocketing out of the darkness from behind me, seized me by the upper arm, and dragged me along in her wake. "Come on," she said. "You're not going to mope around all by yourself tonight. Let's go eat something."
I was thrilled, I was chilled, I was . . . well, I was lost in swirl of delightful and frightening sensations. The sudden giddy sweetness of the whole affair, however, was overshadowed by worry and guilt over the fact you might say I was having my first date -- and that would have been a sin, since I was still two whole days shy of my sixteenth birthday.
But that didn't stop me from going with the flow. We ordered a couple of burgers at the Cougareat, found ourselves a nice corner booth, and talked into the wee hours. (Well, okay, we talked until curfew which was something like ten-thirty or eleven.) But this was the first time in my life I had sat down and really talked with a girl for any length of time -- excluding my sister Seletha, who doesn't really count -- and let me tell you, it was amazing and revelatory. And I walked away from that evening as thoroughly and completely head over heels in love as I've ever been.
I was too busy being in love even to begin to worry about the fact that we shared neither a race nor a religion.
That was the end of week one. Lia left early the next morning to go home for the weekend, and the next day and half were the longest thirty-six hours of my life. I called my parents in the middle of Sunday afternoon just to check in, and my father jokingly asked me if I'd found a girlfriend yet, it being my sixteenth birthday and all. When I hesitated, he said, "Uh-oh. Come on, out with it. What's her name?"
With reluctance but also a certain pride, I said, "Lia. She's from Portugal. But she's not really my girlfriend. We're just friends, is all."
I kept further details to myself.
As I said, those weekend hours were the longest of my life. But late Sunday evening, I was sitting with Cliff and the gang in the lobby of the men's dorm when someone sneaked up from behind me and dropped a big red envelope in my lap. I turned, and of course it was Lia, looking as dark and alluring and dangerous and intoxicating and mysterious as a pint of Guinness. (Okay, okay, that's probably a bad simile -- certainly one that would never have occurred to me at the time -- but you get the idea. Unless you've always been a straight-arrow Mormon, that is.) "Open it, open it," she said. Inside was a birthday card and a note, but the only salient detail I recall was the closure: "Love, Lia."
There is a branch of mathematics which deals with infinite numbers, and it assures us that you can indeed double infinity -- a certain class of infinity, anyway. But I could have told you that without consulting a book, because I felt infinity double in my heart right there on the spot. That may have been the happiest moment thus far in my short life.
But it was short-lived. Over the subsequent week I tried to see more and more of Lia (in the sense of hanging out with her, so get your minds out of the gutter!), but I succeeded less and less frequently. We started out working together on our assignments in the computer lab, but that had trailed off by mid-week. By the time our mini-graduation ceremony rolled around on Saturday, I hardly saw Lia at all except in class.
What the hell had happened? What had I done? I lay awake at night agonizing over these questions, but no answers came.
My parents drove down from Kaysville for the graduation -- and of course to pick me up and bring me back home. I wore my best suit to the ceremony, and when Lia turned up she was wearing a lacy and almost scandalous white dress that ended just shy of her kneecaps. Looking at her, I couldn't breathe. She was a vision, a bright Catholic angel made flesh in the dark heart of a Mormon stronghold.
I didn't get anywhere near Lia at the graduation ceremony, but there was a short dance scheduled for afterward. I went to the dance while my parents hung out elsewhere -- reminiscing about their own days at the Y, no doubt -- and an hour or so into the shindig I managed to get next to Lia just at the start of a slow song. It took everything I could muster, but I managed to ask her to dance. She began to decline, but I said, "Please?"
She sighed, nodded, took my hand, and led me onto the crowded dance floor. I put my awkward arms around her, and she lay her head against my shoulder, and we rocked in a slow circle for a minute or two to the strains of a song I had always despised -- Journey's "Open Arms" -- but came in the space of a hundred seconds to adore.
But in the middle of the song, she pushed away from me, not meeting my eyes, and murmured, "I'm sorry."
Then she turned and rushed out of the room.
I didn't follow. I couldn't. I was frozen, rooted to the spot. I didn't know what to do, or what to feel.
And that was the end of that. The dance eventually ended, and my parents drove me home. "Was that Lia I saw in the white dress at your graduation?" my mother asked from the front seat. "She was very pretty."
My father said nothing.
That wasn't the last I ever saw of Lia -- it's a small state, after all -- but it was the last contact between us of any real significance. In some ways it's probably good that things ended there. I doubt I was ready to wrangle with my father over a girlfriend both non-Mormon andnon-Caucasian. (My good friend Darin used to say, whenever I was dating a girl of whom my father disapproved, that all I needed to do to put things in perspective for Dear Ol' Dad was to find a nice black girl who would come home with me and pose as my girlfriend for an evening. The only thing wrong with that plan was the abuse to which it would have subjected the girl.) In other ways I'm not so sure. Maybe that sort of a relationship could have hastened my progress down the road to apostasy and spared me some of the more significant pain and heartache to come. I don't know.
I do know that a pattern was established in those two short weeks at B.Y.U. From then on, my nearest, dearest and fiercest female friends -- the women I loved without ever becoming romantically involved -- were almost exclusively non-Mormon, and the one or two who were nominally Mormon were also at severe odds with L.D.S. practice and belief.
(This is not to mention the fact that for months after that summer computer workshop I couldn't look at a white girl without thinking her a pallid substitute for a real woman -- i.e., Lia.)
It also started me on some serious thinking. What in the world would I do if I ever fell in love with a non-Mormon girl -- and she actually reciprocated? It's by no mere whimsy that Mormon youth are strongly discouraged from dating outside the Church. As was drilled into our heads for as far back as I can remember, you marry whom you date. So if it ever came down to that dread choice between love and religion, which way would I fall?
next: Exit 7: Kaysville, Utah
