previous: Exit 6: Provo, Utah
I returned from my two-week stint at B.Y.U. full of piss and vinegar. At least, that's what my parents seemed to think. As I dove into my senior year of high school, my parents complained to me more and more often -- and more and more bitterly -- about what a difficult and disrespectful young man I was becoming.
I honestly don't remember what I was doing that upset them so much. For difficulty and disrespect, I don't think I ever outdid my sister Seletha -- sorry, sis -- who was never afraid to stand her ground and wrangle furiously with our parents. (Though for all her independence, Seletha was never anything less than faithful in her adherence to gospel principles while we were growing up. I think it would have been easier for my parents to win any moral victories against her if she hadn't been such a straight-arrow.)
I can make some guesses as to what I did, though. I suppose I had won some measure of confidence during my time at B.Y.U., and since I could now legally drive and date, my friends both male and female were taking on a greatly increased importance in my life. As a consequence, I probably stayed out later than my parents would have liked, and I must have defied their warnings or outright bans against some of the friends I hung out with. I probably talked back to them as well.
Let's list some of the things that I wasn't doing at the time, just for a reality check. I wasn't drinking -- didn't have my first drink until I was twenty-eight, in fact. I wasn't smoking -- still haven't tried that particular vice, and have no plans to. I wasn't having sex -- that wouldn't be until I was twenty-four. And I wasn't taking drugs -- never have, probably never will. And here are some things I was doing: going to church every week and getting nearly straight A's in high school, and I was hanging out with friends who were mostly doing and not doing the same things as I.
But the way my parents talked to me, you would have thought I was Charles fucking Manson. Sometimes I copped some attitude, and sometimes I didn't come home at curfew. What an awful little shit that made me.
Trouble was, I tended to believe what my parents said, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously. Once again, the good I was doing just wasn't nearly good enough. If I'd turned water into wine, my father probably would have complained that I'd failed to walk on it first.
I wasn't perfect, of course. But I don't think I was as bad as all that.
Most of my friends tended to be Mormon, of course, though not all of them had parents as strict as mine. But two of my best friends by the time my year senior rolled around were Catholic. One was John Saylor, a thin translucent-skinned fellow of Basque heritage who was as worldly and cynical and sarcastic and funny as they come. Smart as a whip, too. The other was a fellow I'll call Connor Scott, tall and blond and good-looking and intelligent and popular with the ladies.
I recall arguing religion with both John and Connor, but it never became an issue that threatened our friendships. I think they both left our individual tête-à -têtes convinced that I was willfully blinding myself to some of the more egregiously contradictory aspects of my religion, while I left frustrated that such cool guys were going to be excluded from celestial glory simply because of their refusal to accept Mormon truth. I don't know exactly who it was that I was frustrated with, however -- them or God.
I think now that John and Connor really had the more justified reaction. I was willfully blinding myself. In fact, there were times when one of them would attack a point about which I had entertained actual doubts myself -- and my perverse reaction would be to close up and harden myself against their words. It was that age-old human trait in action, the one that says it's okay for you to criticize the things you're close to, but it's not okay for outsiders to make the same criticisms.
Thus did I become adept at maintaining that dualistic state of mind which all Mormon intellectuals must adopt in order to deal with the world of secular ideals and yet retain their faith in Mormon doctrine. I became adept at lying to myself, and at muffling the inconvenient voice of reason inside when it threatened to topple the shaky tower of my faith.
What I find curious about all this is that I actually stayed friends -- close friends -- with both John and Connor. You see, Mormons aren't supposed to have non-Mormon friends. Wait -- I mean, Mormons are supposed to have non-Mormon friends, because they're supposed to be finding people to share the gospel with, but they're not supposed to really get close to those people, because non-Mormons can be bad spiritual influences on good little Mormon boys and girls . . .
Kind of makes your head swim, doesn't it? Forget the conundrum that faced Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This one's a classic case of commandments so contradictory that even Solomon would go mad trying to embrace them both. Don't associate with non-Mormons, but be sure to spread the gospel to them. God, what misery that caused in the hallowed halls of Davis High!
For some reason, I didn't trouble myself much about my Catholic friends. Maybe it was because they were both so charismatic that I couldn't consider not liking them. But I like to think it was my better self, the wiser one inside, that was responsible for maintaining and nurturing those friendships. Friends of mine in the science fiction field like to talk about the two Orson Scott Cards -- "Wicked Orson" being the staunch and sometimes frightening Mormon polemicist who inhabits the surface of Card's mind, and "Good Scott" being the wise and compassionate and much more knowledgeable fellow lurking way down underneath, whose more correct and truthful worldview often infuses Card's writing with its amazing power. I like to think that there were two me's back in those days, and that the me underneath recognized the value in John and Connor and so refused to let the me on the surface do anything to jeopardize those friendships.
But a lot of people did trouble themselves about the non-Mormon kids. John and Connor, through the benefit of being either flint-skinned or good-looking or both, didn't suffer from torment the way that other kids did. I remember a twin brother and sister whose family were Jehovah's Witnesses. They were virtual pariahs from polite society. When school reconvened in January after the holiday vacation period, it was considered chic for good Mormon kids to ask the twins what they got for Christmas -- the rub being that Jay Dubs don't celebrate Christmas, or birthdays, or any other holidays for that matter.
Utah -- what an awful place to be a Jehovah's Witness.
A kid named Alan Morris got tortured even more cruelly. I don't think I ever knew what his religion was, just that it was something as weird as, if not weirder than, Jaydubbism. (And isn't it a classic case of pot and kettle when a Mormon for god's sake thinks of anyone else's beliefs as weird . . . )
Morris was kind of a geeky kid, yeah, the kind who liked to mix explosives in his basement, but there were Mormon kids of the same stripe who never took the same kind of heat. I confess to my shame that I was one of the ones who tormented him the worst, by virtue of the fact that, as another geek, I shared so many classes with him. If you're reading this, Alan, I want to apologize. The way I badgered you and ridiculed you and tried to make you look stupid was inexcusable. My only salvation, and it's a thin one, is that you turned out to be tough enough to take it -- though I'm sure you bear the scars.
Not so with Alan Rushforth.
The curious thing about Alan Rushforth is that he was Mormon himself, as far as I know. Maybe there was just such a limited supply of non-Mormon prey in our school that, in order to slake our instinctual bloodlust, the rest of us had to turn on our own kind and cull the sickly and wounded from our herd. I don't know. All I know is that we, as a school, treated Alan Rushforth like dirt.
And you know, I can't honestly tell you what he ever did that was so bad. He was a loner, a little strange, and not very good at defending himself either verbally or physically. For all that, he was a big kid, though oversized and soft, with an egg-shaped face that seemed molded into a perpetual expression of shock and wariness. I really can't tell you why anyone picked on him, outside of the fact that he was only a little different from everyone else. Maybe he was just fun to tease.
Whatever. I teased him only once to my recollection. Actually, it was worse than that. I think I called him an idiot during our computer class one day. I really had no reason to think him an idiot, beyond what I had heard in the halls at school. But I called him that anyway.
A week later, he descended to the basement of his parents' house and put a shotgun barrel in his mouth. His mother found him.
Yeah, we were certainly a student body devoted to the pursuit of the ideals of a Christlike society.
The show of righteous sorrow and indignation the following week was nearly the most sickening part of the whole affair. In seminary classes, you would hear the most heartfelt of platitudes spoken, about how we should have reached out to Alan, been nice to him, included him in our activities. We heard what a tragedy it was. We mourned as a school.
No one ever stood up and said, "It was my fault, at least partially, and I'm sorry."
Well, it was my fault, at least partially, and I'm sorry -- for whatever good that does.
But large institutions have a way of recovering and moving on, no matter what the tragedy, and our school was no different. I was one of the two editors of our high school newspaper that year, and my fellow editor Emily Bean and I were putting our rebelliousness into practice by writing controversial editorials that criticized the school's administration far more than they praised. (Hmm. A type of things to come?) I acquired my first girlfriend, a sort of a horse-faced girl whom I'll call Beth, who gave me my first kiss in the front seat of my father's little yellow Toyota Corolla. (Beth, who precipitated the end of one of my longest friendships, was also a girlfriend to about ninety percent of one of my circles of friends during the course of that year.) And, oh yes -- I started listening to rock music that year in a big way.
All right, maybe it wasn't such a bigway, but it was certainly significant, at least to me. Perhaps you recall back in Chapter Five, when I credited jazz music with helping to actualize my eventual apostasy. I still believe that, and I'd like to take a moment to examine the mechanism through which I believe it occurred.
First off, I think the Mormon Church is correct to fear music. (And fear music it does, as I'll get to momentarily.) Music has a great capacity to influence the emotions of human beings, and where the emotions go, the thoughts often follow. Growing up, there were certain types of music to which I was exposed, almost to the exclusion of everything else. These were church hymns, country and western, and show tunes. My piano lessons, which commenced when I was nine, introduced me to classical music in a big way, and later to some of the stricter forms of jazz piano, such as ragtime and stride.
But when I first encountered bebop and cool jazz and fusion, I was forced -- unconsciously, for the most part -- to rethink my conception of music. What first struck me as chaotic and impenetrable eventually began to reveal its own structure and logic after repeated listenings. Perhaps the fact that I didn't simply dismiss that weird jazzy stuff when I first discovered it betrays some sort of innate fascination with it, but I firmly believe that my exposure to jazz changed my thinking in more ways than just musically. I believe it helped me become more open-minded.
It certainly helped bring me to the point where I could defend my listening choices, at least in my own head, to my father. He wasn't thrilled by that weird jazz, as I've said before, but he couldn't make any valid objection to it. So later, when I took the plunge into the world of rock music, I had already laid the critical groundwork for the skills that would enable me to separate the good from the bad or the bland, and to defend my choices if necessary. And it was very necessary -- perhaps to myself more than anyone else.
In Chapter Six I recounted how Cliff Morrison introduced me to "new wave" music. My high school friend Darin Goff, who now practices law and fishes for salmon in Alaska, continued this indoctrination, exposing me to such radical new concepts as "reggae" and "ska." And somewhere along the way I developed such an affinity for this kind of stuff that I was ready to purchase my first rock album.
Can you imagine the sensation of utter abandon and depravity that hovered over me as I piloted that little yellow Toyota down to the Layton Hills Mall, intent on a course of action that I feared somewhere down inside would only seal my eventual consignment to hell? Can you imagine how thrilling and dangerous it felt to walk into a record store, pick out an album the creation of which was surely Satanically influenced, and then go to the counter hand over money for which I had exchanged the sacred sweat of my brow? Can you imagine the stealth and trembling with which I sneaked my new prize into my basement room and put it on, as quietly as possibly, oh so blasphemously quietly?
You would have thought I was shooting up or something.
That first album I bought was the Police masterwork Synchronicity. But even as much as I reveled in it on my first listening, there were bits that distressed me. On the surface, songs like "O My God" and "Murder by Numbers" seemed purely evil to me, the first an accusatory rant against God and the second an open advocacy of homicide. My attraction to the music itself, however, forced me to undertake a more serious examination of the lyrics, whereas a more typical kneejerk Mormon reaction would have been to decry the songs at the merest suggestion of impropriety. On closer inspection, "O My God" struck me as an impassioned plea for God to explain his workings, and "Murder by Numbers" revealed itself to be a bitterly cynical indictment of politicians. Neither song was evil, much as pundits like Boyd K. Packer (Mormon apostle and fearmonger par excellence) would have like to convince me otherwise.
(My second rock purchase that year was Joe Jackson's Night and Day, which turned out to be equally as challenging, what with its explorations of the true meaning of manhood and its nontraditional consideration of the homosexual lifestyle.)
Not that my enjoyment of these albums was completely guilt-free. I built up my justifications for listening as a bulwark against all the societally and parentally induced guilt that was trying to sweep over me and carry me away. I had been told in no uncertain terms over the pulpit that rock music existing solely to tempt young men and women into sexual sin, what with its enticingly heavy rhythmic pulse.
Just the previous year, when I was a junior, I had been indoctrinated against rock in my seminary class at school. Our teacher, a very young, earnest and fresh-scrubbed fellow by the name of Brother Jared Wegkamp, had led into his lesson with the confession that he loved rock-and-roll music and that nothing pained him more than the idea that he had to give it up in order to achieve spiritual security. Then he proceeded to play us all sorts of morally reprehensible rock tunes in support of his thesis. (Are you reminded of politicians like Jesse Helms who feel compelled to share instances of pornography with the rest of the world to demonstrate just how awful they really are?) We heard tunes that day like "Hells Bells" by AC/DC, "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, and even "Only the Good Die Young" by Billy Joel. (Hell, I didn't even figure out what that song was about until a few years later.) The most absurd part of the lesson was when Brother Wegkamp speculated about what the real meaning behind Don McLean's "American Pie" might be, and someone in class volunteered that "levee" pronounced backwards was "evil."
Drove my Chevy to the evil, but the evil was dry. Please.
Brother Rick Tew was my seminary teacher during my senior year. Tew was a jovial, sometimes silly fellow who had an awfully good rapport with teenagers. His class was much more entertaining than any seminary class I'd had before, but no less bizarre for all that. But at least it was a place where harmless absurdity was tolerated. I recall one day when the lesson was about proper dating habits. Brother Tew had just completed an analysis of the dangers of wanton hand-holding between young men and young women. I sat at the back of the room next to my friend Heidi Heath, and after a whispered conference she and I extended our adjacent feet into the aisle so that they were touching. When Brother Tew noticed, he said, without missing a beat, "Of course, there's nothing at all wrong with holding feet, as Bill and Heidi are so helpfully demonstrating."
Brother Tew was a big fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and as the school year drew toward its close he promised that we as a class would make a joint outing to see the soon-to-be-released sequel thereto, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. For me and a few of my friends, however, we couldn't wait for the group outing. The day Temple of Doom opened, we cut class to drive up to the Wilshire Theater in Ogden and buy tickets for that evening's showing. The class I missed was seminary.
Apparently someone snitched on me, because when I went to pick up my seminary report card the next week, there was a note included with mine, in Brother Tew's handwriting, which read: "Who is more important: Indy or Jesus?"
It was one of the few times I had ever been absent from seminary. I guess for me the answer was a resounding "Indy!"
That school year was an important one for me in one last way. The year before, I had finally gotten very serious about my writing, and I had submitted my first couple of stories to magazines for consideration. One story, "Forfeit," was a deal-with-the-devil tale which relied heavily upon Mormon theology for its resolution, in which the protagonist defeats Satan and rescues his own soul through a rigorous application of logic.
A family friend named Lee Christiansen had read this story of mine, and later he forwarded me a photocopy of an ad he had run across in Dialogue. It seemed that a fellow named Benjamin Urrutia was editing an anthology of "Latter-Day Science Fiction," and he sought stories from all walks of Mormondom. Eagerly I mailed him "Forfeit."
Urrutia rejected the story, citing the fact that deal-with-the-devil stories were not part of Mormon folklore, but he said he liked the writing and he encouraged me to send him something more orthodox.
So it was that one morning in the shower at the age of sixteen, I conceived a story about a Mormon astronaut on a space-shuttle mission. Over the next week or so I worked on "Cut Without Hands" and mailed it off to Mr. Urrutia, full of hope.
Miracle of miracles, I heard back from him after a couple of weeks. " 'Cut Without Hands' enthusiastically accepted!" he wrote.
I was about to become a genuinely published writer. Nothing else could have made my senior year of high school more complete.
In celebration, I sat down to write the first draft of my next epic saga -- but this time out my subconscious misgivings about Mormonism were apparently trying to percolate to the surface. Because my next story, "Deus ex Machina," was all about a sentient computer . . . who kills God.
And boy, did writing that story ever alter the course of my life!
