August 26, 1985. It began as an evening of high hopes, grand dreams, towering expectations. It ended in dashed hopes, bitter disappointment, and crushing guilt, on almost every front.

But at least the music was good.

It was the Sting concert at ParkWest ski resort (now called Wolf Mountain) in Park City, Utah. There were four of us in the party: Andy Kilmer, my good friend from junior high and high school; Janet Mulrooney, Andy's girlfriend and the woman he would later marry; yours truly; and my date, the lovely and talented Miss Darla Bond.

Now, I'd had a long-distance crush on Darla for many, many moons. (I guess I'd been mooning for her.) She was descended from Scandinavian stock; she was very fair, and very blonde—but only in coloration, not in the sense of being airheaded. For about three years, maybe more, Darla had been the squeeze of one of my school chums, Jordan Bergstrom. I had always envied Jordan that. When the news hit the street that Jordan and Darla had split up, I didn't feel much sorrow. I felt like the opportunity was ripe.

I pursued Darla for months—while my Catholic friend Connor actually managed to get to first base with her on a couple of occasions. (Darla was a quite strict Mormon girl, of course.) I became friends with her younger brother Dan in the process, and since Dan is still my friend today, I don't count the process as a complete failure by any means.

But at last, with this Sting concert, I was managing to get Darla out on a date—much to Dan's consternation, because he was a much bigger Sting fan than his big sister, but his parents wouldn't let him go to the concert. I was so nervous trying to work up the courage to ask her that I actually called her on the phone and let a synthesized computer voice do the asking for me. (Macintosh as John Alden.) She laughed and said yes, and we were set.

The other exciting thing to me about that concert, besides seeing Sting himself, was the chance to see Sting's backing band, which at the time consisted of the young jazz lions Darryl Jones, Omar Hakim, Kenny Kirkland, and Branford Marsalis. Especially Branford Marsalis. I been listening to Wynton for a while then, but about a month earlier I had picked up Branford's first album as a band leader, Scenes in the City, and I was really blown away by it. And furthermore, the liner notes indicated that Branford has been born on August 26, 1960 . . . which meant that the Sting concert fell on his 25th birthday.

My friend Andy and I were both fans of Branford, so together we created this big long banner printed on fanfold computer paper that read:

25   HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRANFORD!   25

It had a picture of a birthday cake at either end. We were certain that we would hold up the banner at the concert and Branford would see it, recognize that we were True Fans, and invite us backstage for his inevitable birthday party after the show.

Well, the first omens of disaster struck early that night. The four of us piled into the Kilmer family VW Bus and headed for Park City, old Police albums playing on the stereo, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the seats between us. When we arrived at the gates of the ski resort, however, it turned out that I had left my tickets at home.

I didn't have enough money to cover two more general admission tickets, and Kaysville was too far away for me to drive home and grab the tickets. I had to borrow money from Andy, which meant that Andy didn't have enough cash to buy a concert T-shirt that night. I don't think he's ever forgiven me for that.

The concert took place on a big open stage at the bottom of a mountain, with the concertgoers seated on blankets right on the slope. The sun was going behind the mountains as the show got under way, so by the time Branford took the stage, it was too dark for anyone on stage to possibly see our banner. But Andy and I held it aloft anyway, much to the annoyance of the people behind us on the hill, whose views we were blocking. They kept yelling at us, and then a wicked breeze sprang up and rips our banner down the middle. Damn.

And then there was Darla, whose hand I repeatedly attempted to hold, only to have her disentangle herself from it after a few moments. She didn't unhand me quickly enough to make it absolutely clear that she didn't want me holding her hand at all, so I kept on trying. And she kept on disentangling after something of a delay. I got the message eventually, but not quickly enough to keep from embarrassing myself pretty badly.

This last thing is what I remember most vividly about the Sting concert. It's long past the time when I should have forgotten about it, but I still feel guilty and ashamed when I remember how doggedly I ignored the slow signals Darla was sending me. It still colors my adult actions, to the point that it's now difficult for me to take the first steps in a relationship. I have to wait for a clear and unmistakable signal before I do anything. Which means I wait a long time, and then end up with forward, dominant women who are ultimately not good for me.

It's time for that to change. Sorry, Darla, but I'm letting go of your hand now—all on my own this time. Catch you later.

I have two or three friends who belong to an organization called The Eulenspiegel Society, or TES. It's the country's oldest and largest sadomasochism organization, dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of said kink among those who gravitate to it.

After much cajoling, my friends finally talked me into attending a meeting. It was quite interesting—the demonstration that night was on fire play—but I've come away with a better idea of where I stand on the ol' S&M issue. Where I stand is, I don't want to hurt anyone or be hurt, and I don't want to clean the bathroom wearing only a dog collar or subject anyone else to the same degradation. All I'm really interested in is a little light bondage. Yup, I want a woman to tie me up and fuck me.

And in one of those blinding moments of insight which seem to be flying around so thick and fast these days, I've figured out why that probably is.

You probably know by now that I grew up Mormon. To Mormons, there are three sins that are worse than all others. The worst sin there is is to deny the Holy Ghost after having received an undeniable witness of the Truth. It is the only sin punishable by banishment to Outer Darkness for all of eternity. It is not one you and I really need to worry about committing, since it involves seeing God. (Pass those mushrooms.)

The next worst sin is, of course, the shedding of innocent blood. I would say that the phrase "shedding of innocent blood" permits rather too much leeway—who is innocent, after all, and how many of us does this give the Danites leave to eighty-six?—but for all practical purposes we're talking about simple murder. In Mormonism, full repentence means restoring what you've taken, and obviously this is not possible in the case of murder. Therefore, it's the second worst sin, though those guilty of it are still able to enter the Telestial Kingdom after a season roasting in hell.

And the third worst sin, next only to murder and denying a personal witness of God, is sexual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage. It's worse than theft or lying, meanness or ignorance. It's worse than cheating on your taxes, or testing poisons on small animals. It's worse than polluting the environment, or watching The Faces of Death. It is the third worst sin you can possibly commit.

And when you're a teenager (and for many years afterward), it's the only thing on your mind.

It was certainly my top obsession as a teen, and many of my most cherished fantasies involved schemes for getting laid without acquiring any soul-coal. Well, really they weren't schemes, because schemes would have implied volition on my part, which would have implied complicity in my own deflowering, which would have meant I had committed the Third Worst Sin You Can Possibly Commit. So really what I had were only wishes, and what I wished was this:

I wished a woman would kidnap me, tie me up, and fuck me.

And that's about it. If I were taken by surprise and forced to perform, then I could hardly be blamed for the loss of my own virginity. Of course, I really wouldn't have much leeway to actually enjoy the act, because that would probably be a sin too, but at least it wouldn't be as bad a sin as willfully throwing away my cherry.

The idea is still damn attractive. Those adolescent fantasies certainly have power. One of these days (probably in The Road to Apostasy), I'll describe how perilously close I came to getting that fantasy fulfilled about three months before I was supposed to leave on my mission, an experience which no doubt helped imprint this primal fantasy even more indelibly on my brain. But for now, if you're female and have a pair of those quick-release handcuffs, well . . . come on over.

I've got a real thing for tunnels. Not a small thing, either. What I have is a great big oversized granddaddy tunnel jones.

I really don't know why that is. All I know is that I've loved tunnels ever since I was small. On long car trips when I was a kid, I would look forward to going through the tunnels along the way almost more than I'd look forward to getting wherever it was we were going. One of the most blissful experiences I've had as an adult was when I was driving by myself west from Denver on I-70 and entered the Eisenhower tunnel—a two-mile bore carved straight through the Colorado Rockies at an elevation of almost 12,000 feet. What a rush! I don't know if it's some weird birth-canal identification or what. I just know that nothing delights me like a tunnel.

My cousin Linda's husband Devin has a strange thing for tunnels, too, but his thing is different from mine. He likes to hold his breath as he drives through tunnels, and he tries to get everyone else in the car to do the same thing. So there you are, tooling around San Francisco in Devin's Blazer, and along comes a tunnel, and Devin says, "Okay, hold your breath!" and everyone starts turning red as the tunnel stretches on and on, and Linda is saying, "Devin, stop it!" and one by one the passengers give up and the breath comes bursting out of them, but Devin is still holding his and turning redder and redder and redder and Linda is slapping him on the arm and we're only thirty yards from the end of the tunnel now and we're all afraid that Devin will pass out right there in the driver's seat and then we're out of the tunnel and Devin let's out his breath and grins and everything is okay, except for Linda who can't believe how childish her husband is. Devin is a corporate attorney.

If you're like me and Devin and you can't get enough of those fascinating tunnels, and you ever happen to be in New York City, have I got an idea for you. Get on the nearest subway train. It only costs a dollar fifty—and thanks to the generosity of Governor Pataki, if you buy ten fares with your Metro card, you get an eleventh fare for free!

Anyway, what you want to do is go to the very front of the subway train and board the first car. (By the way, this works best very early in the morning, when no one else is on the train, but you can do it most any time of day if you don't care about looking a little silly.) Now that you're on the first car, go all the way to the front of the car where there's a window looking straight out at the track ahead. The engineer's compartment on most subway trains is a little niche tucked off to the side of the car, so there won't be anything in your way as you stand there and watch the tunnel unfurl ahead of you.

You can watch the tunnel rise and dip, watch it twist and curve and straighten out again, watch it widen out and narrow again, try to decipher the arcane mileposts and traffic lights as they screech by, wonder at the side passages and staircases you see half-hidden in the rushing darkness, and watch the bright train stations ahead as they expand like birthing stars and engulf you.

All in all, it's the best entertainment you can get in the city for only twelve bits. There's just one thing that would make it better—watching Devin try to hold his breath on the "F" train.

Teenagers can usually be counted on to do exactly the wrong thing in any given situation, and I was certainly no exception. Take the time I won a gilded sprig of pine needles, for instance.

Now, I used to be obsessed with winning things from radio stations. I had my technique down ("I don't be ticklin' or nothin'"—five points for the reference), and I could dial a whole slew of radio-station contest lines from memory. In high school I used to win stuff from KSL-AM 1160 all the time. In college, I won stuff from Z-93 all the time. When I went to work for WordPerfect, I won stuff from X-96 all the time. I won T-shirts, concert passes, play tickets, free dinners, new CDs, and a whole host of other things. When I worked at the Utah State Tax Commission, my coworker Dallas de Francesco would wait by the radio every day to see if I would manage to get my voice onto the Jon and Dan show on Z-93.

One of my earliest wins from KSL was a rather unusual and striking piece of jewelry—a gilded sprig of pine needles on a thin gold chain. I was able to correctly translate the title of the song "Et Les Oiseaux Sont Chansons" into English—hey, three years of high-school French is good for something—and for my pains I received this interesting little necklace.

That left me only one problem: what to do with it. Oh, what to do!

After the necklace had arrived, I showed it to my sisters. They all oohed and aahed over it, and my sister Seletha, who is only a year and three days younger than I, let it be known how much she would like to have such a necklace.

So what did I do with the necklace? I was teenage boy. It should be obvious.

I left it in the locker of a girl at school named Hope Rayburn on whom I had a serious crush, as a Valentine's Day present.

I faintly remember Hope eventually thanking me for the necklace, but that was all that ever came of that. No dates, no grateful kiss, no pledge of eternal love, nothing like that. I may as well have tossed the damn necklace down the toilet.

I wish I'd been wise enough to give the necklace to my sister, who would actually have appreciated it. It would have meant something then. But like I said, you can always count on teenagers to do the wrong thing.

Okay, we all have dirty little secrets in our pasts that we've never ever told anyone. I'm about to share one with you.

If you're a regular reader of "Memos from the Moon," then you've surely realized by now how long I cling to guilt. I still feel guilty over things I did ten and fifteen years ago. I guess I have my Mormon upbringing to thank for that.

So, I still feel guilty over—heavy sigh—commiting plagiarism in the seventh grade. With any luck, the statute of limitations on that particular crime has run out, and my confession won't lead to my arrest and prosecution. But sadly, for me, the statute of limitations on guilt never runs out.

I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer, and most everyone who knew me knew that. So when we got the assignment in Ms. Easton's English class to write a physical description of a fictional character, I knew that I had to write the best one. Days went by, however, and inspiration failed to strike.

So, the morning the assignment was due, I rifled through one of my Brains Benton mysteries—sort of a low-rent analog to the Hardy Boys series—and cribbed the author's description of the main character. I don't remember most of that description, but one line has stuck with me all these years. It painted Brains Benton as a "long, skinny drink of water."

Well, I got my A. And Ms. Easton read my plagiarized paper in front of the whole class. She also read to my father and mother when they came for their parent-teacher conference. I was terrified that someone would realize that I couldn't possibly have written such a fine bit of description—where in the world would I have picked up a phrase like "drink of water"?—but no one ever did. All I ever received was praise for my fine and precocious way with words.

I didn't need to be punished for my plagiarism. I punished myself enough. I felt like a fraud. And I vowed never to plagiarize another piece of writing again in my life.

And I haven't. So will you absolve me now, please? Please?

I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. (If I'd had it earlier, I might have avoided a few psychotic girlfriends . . .)

I guess I was about six—this would have been the summer when my family lived with my uncle in Liberty, Utah, as chronicled in Chapter 3 of The Road to Apostasy—and I was helping in the kitchen as lunch was being prepared. I remember scooping a healthy dollop of Miracle Whip out of the jar with a table knife, spreading it on a thick slice of bread, and then tapping the knife on the rim of the glass jar to remove the excess goop. That was when my uncle Dennis descended in his fury.

"Hey, don't do that!" he cried, snatching the jar and the knife away from me. "You could get little glass fragments in the Miracle Whip! Have you ever heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through his stomach and his intestines, slicing them up along the way? Draw the flat of the blade across the lip of the jar if you want to get stuff off, like this."

My uncle had been an Airborne Ranger in the Army—at least, that's what he said—and he always made himself come across as though he had witnessed every hideous thing that men could possibly do to one another. The image of that screaming man with broken glass in his guts stayed with me for months afterward, haunting my nights, and I've never tapped a knife against a glass jar since.

It's only now that it occurs to me to wonder if my uncle had ever actually heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through this stomach and intestines. I'd put money on not.

Like I said, I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. It meant I was a credulous kid, as you can see from this little incident. But I credit that very lack with helping me to develop a vivid and active imagination. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Whatever. I'll take a little gullibility over the loss of my imagination any day.

So there I was, sitting in the BYU lecture room that served as a chapel for my Young Adult ward in Provo, waiting for sacrament meeting to begin, talking to a girl who sparked a certain interest in me. I have to confess that I don't remember her name anymore—this would have been around the middle of 1994—but since she did have a few brains in her head, we'll call her Minerva.

So there Minerva and I were, chatting before church, when she asked me if I were going to attend choir practice after the regular meetings were over. Now, Minerva had been working on me for weeks, trying to get me to come to choir practice—perhaps sensing that this young backslider needed a certain extracurricular involvement with the ward to keep him from slipping into complete inactivity and apostasy—but she hadn't yet succeeded. I mean, after three solid hours of church meetings, who wants to hang around singing hosannas for another hour?

Most of my excuses were pretty lame, but that particular week I actually had a good one—and a true one, no less. "I can't come to choir practice," quoth I, "because I have to drive my friend Scott up to Salt Lake for a movie audition."

"On a Sunday?" she said.

"That's when they do them," I said.

"Why do you have to drive him?" Minerva asked.

"Because his car doesn't work. I drove him up yesterday, too. They must like him, because he got called back."

"What's the movie?" she asked—perhaps in an attempt to catch me out.

"Halloween 6," I said.

Her face wrinkled in revulsion. "Oh, you're kidding!" she said. "Is he LDS?"

"Yes."

"Well, I hope he doesn't get the part."

I took a deep breath to calm myself. "Look," I said, "my friend Scott works in a nursing home. He has a wife, three kids and one more on the way, and he doesn't make a whole lot of money. But he's also in the Screen Actors Guild, so when he can get a part in a movie or a television show, it means he gets scale, which is about five hundred dollars a day for every day he works. Now, his not getting this part could mean the difference between his children eating or not eating this month."

Then I simply sat back and blinked my eyes, blank-faced.

"Oh," said Minerva. "Well, um, I guess that wouldn't be such a good thing after all . . . "

Oh, those pesky ethical dilemmas! (You try soaking, you try scrubbing . . .) Don't you just love seeing someone full of confidence and self-righteousness, and shoving a big muddy one right in their pious little mug? I sure do.

Hmmm. Maybe that's why the relationship never went anywhere . . .