Memos from the Moon

argument  noun  1 obsolete : an outward sign : INDICATION  2 a : a reason given in proof or rebuttal  b : discourse intended to persuade  3 a : the act or process of arguing : ARGUMENTATION  b : a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion  c : QUARREL, DISAGREEMENT  4 : an abstract or summary especially of a literary work {a later editor added an argument to the poem}  5 : the subject matter especially of a literary work

—WWWebster Dictionary

From here on the moon, Earth makes for an impressive sight—a turquoise brooch on a field of black velvet, so huge and perfectly clear that you think you could reach out and touch it.

But that's just an illusion. Of course you can't touch Earth—it's a quarter of a million miles away. And when you look more closely, you begin to see that the clarity itself is an illusion. It's all surface. You can see the clouds on the outside perfectly well, but only occasional glimpses of what's underneath, and not much in the way of detail at all.

Memory is in many ways similar. It may seem as though you can take in its sum total—the current state of your own life—at a glance, but the harder we peer, the more depth and complexity are revealed, and the more the fine details elude your searching eyes.

Every so often, however, those details swim into sharp focus—but they never stay that way for long. You get a sense that if you don't capture them quickly in a photo or a sketch, they'll be gone again soon, maybe gone for good.

Thus Memos from the Moon—an attempt to capture my world of memory in words, one square mile at a time. That planet keeps on turning, so you'll never know which bit I may be gazing at on any given day—a mountain peak, an ocean trench, an orderly city, a roiling storm—but I'll do my best to accurately report whatever swims into focus.

Percival Lowell looked at the bleak deserts of Mars and saw inconceivably long canals irrigating massive agriculture zones. I can sympathize with his misjudgment, but when I see a desert, I'll try to call it a desert. After all, this is a map of my home planet I'm making. If I should someday go back, being able to get around would be nice.

Do you ever have one of those moments where you consider some behavior or predilection of yours—one so deeply innate to your personality that you never thought to question it before—in an entirely new light, and in a sudden flash of insight you understand how it originated and why it persists?

It doesn't happen to me often, but it did happen to me a week or two ago—not uncoincidentally, just as I was coming to the realization that there are at least three distinct (if not yet fully separate) personalities living there in the moist sponge behind my eyes. (But that's another memo for another day.)

Actually, I figured out the reason for two different predilections—quirks which had always seemed unrelated (or would have seemed unrelated had I bothered to give them any thought) but which are in reality very closely linked.

You see, my father liked to go bowling, and when I was small he took me along with him with some regularity. He didn't bowl in a league or with friends, at least not that I knew of—usually on these outings it was just he and I. And the amazing thing was, even when I was three, he didn't just drag me along to watch. He tried to teach me how to bowl so I could play too.

Now, after our outings at the lanes, we would often stop at McDonald's for a burger and fries on the way home. (And how those signs puzzled me when I was small! How could they possibly have served 12 billion when there were only 4 billion on the planet?) My father would get a Big Mac (two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun—and I could say it all backward, just like the people in the commercials), while I would have to be content with one of those flat little cardboardish regular hamburgers with one slice of pickle and a grudging squirt of ketchup.

But then one day when I was still just three or four, a miracle happened. My father and I were bowling at our favorite lanes in Eagle Rock. I stepped up to the line with an eight-pound ball cradled awkwardly in my arms, bent forward, rolled it with all my might, watched it chug down the lane with inexorable momentum . . . and then stood stunned at ball crept almost apologetically into the pocket and the pins toppled one by one. It was a strike! It was the very first strike of my life!

That was great enough, but the day was destined to get better. My father was so proud of me that when we arrived at McDonald's after our game he ordered me not an ordinary hamburger, but that Holy Grail of the fast-food universe—a Big Mac.

And I finished it all. Every bite.

When we got home, I burbled happily to my mother about all of it, and darn if she wasn't impressed with what a big boy I was now. I must have kept talking about it for days and days. Hell, I still tell people that I bowled my first strike when I was three.

So it shouldn't really come as any surprise that as an adult I can't keep away from bowling alleys and Big Macs. But of course, every time I go near them, I'm really seeking to recapture the feeling I had that day when I felt like a man in my father's eyes for the first (and maybe only?) time, and knew that he was proud of me.

Now if only something equally potent could get me hooked on racquetball and health food.

Phys. Ed. was such a traumatic and humiliating experience for me in junior high and high school that there was no way I was going to take any similar courses in college. For me, perhaps the most significant aspect of my high school graduation was fact that it signaled the last time I would be forced to change clothes in a locker room and wear gym shorts.

So I was genuinely distressed when I started attending the University of Utah and realized that there was a P.E. requirement.

My distress was shortlived, however, because it soon became apparent that I still wouldn't have to put on gym shorts if I didn't want to. I could take courses like golf, archery, rock-climbing, or ballroom dancing without ever going near a communal shower.

But it was—what else?—bowling that turned out to be the ticket. You could repeat the class for credit—I ended up taking it during three different quarters in all. But it was the first time I did that I'll never forget.

It was then that I bowled my all-time high game of 201—a line that included a run of five consecutive strikes—but that's not what stands out the most for me. What I remember best is my partner in the class tournament.

You see, in Bowling 101, the first six weeks of class are spent mastering the basic concepts and techniques of bowling, and the last four are spent in a double-elimination partners tournament. That's right—partners.

I was one of the kids who always got picked last when it came time to choose up sides for sports, and I didn't make friends in many of my classes, so I never imagined that someone was going to pick me for his tournament partner. Her tournament partner, really. Because when the time came for the class to divide up into two-person teams, I was approached by a very lovely young blonde woman. Stellar, right?

Well, sure, up to a point. She also happened to be married and pregnant.

Very pregnant, in fact—about eight and a half months' worth. I asked her what in the world she was doing in a bowling class in her condition. "I've been pregnant long enough, and I'm sick of it," she said. "I'm trying to induce labor."

As it happened, we became pretty good friends over the next month, as we bowled our way together into a middle-of-the-pack finish in the tournament. I became quite taken with her, thus lengthening my string of "friend" relationships with attractive women who are involved with other men (a recurring motif in my life story, and one you can be sure we'll revisit it in weeks to come) and inducing in myself adolescent fantasies being there to deliver her baby when her water broke on the boards.

In point of fact, the only thing I ever did that might have affected her pregnancy at all was accidentally letting the bowling ball slip from my sweaty grasp on the backswing of my approach. The ball landed right next to her with a crash, startling her stiff, but if it had gone a foot the other way . . . I don't even want to think about what the result could have been.

But in the end her grand scheme failed. The exertion of bowling didn't do one whit to bring her gravidity to its natural conclusion. The only day of class she missed that quarter, in fact, was the last, but we had been knocked out of the tournament a week before and hadn't bowled since then. So much for the bowling-alley method.

My friend Lynne once attended an Oingo Boingo concert with me when she was eight months pregnant. She says that's why her son Christopher likes rock music so much now. I never saw my bowling partner again after that quarter, but maybe her little boy—because that's how the ultrasound called it—will grow up with an unusual fondness for the sounds and rhythms of bowling alleys.

And if he does, I wonder if he'll ever figure out why.

Sometimes you have a day that's just entirely too symbolic.

Mine came one morning late this past winter, not long after I'd started my new job in the financial district of Manhattan. I don't need to show up at work until ten, so I usually catch the D train from Brooklyn at around nine-thirty, then transfer to the N at DeKalb Avenue.

The trains are still somewhat crowded at that time of the morning, but nothing like the crush you'd see if you rode an hour earlier. This particular morning, however, as I crossed the platform at DeKalb and boarded the N, I was pleased to spy a large empty zone in the train car. Ah, plenty of room to sit down and stretch my legs without worrying about shoehorning myself into the narrow space between two wide-bodied fellow commuters.

It didn't occur to me to question the big empty space—only to enjoy it.

Blissfully I took my seat, extending my legs into the center aisle as far as they would go and withdrawing a paperback book from my shoulder bag, all the while savoring the blessed lack of human encroachment on my personal space.

It was only then, over the top edge of my book, that I noticed what was sitting directly across the train from me—a big steaming pile of human feces, deposited as neatly and unashamedly in the shallow concavity of the plastic orange seat as if the comfortable transportation of raw filth were the sole purpose for which the public transit system of New York City had been designed.

We stared at each other for a timeless moment, the pile of shit and I.

It won. As unobtrusively as I could, but acutely conscious of the averted eyes of my fellow travelers (some of whom, no doubt, had originally taken the very seat I was in the process of vacating), I moved a few yards farther down the car and pretended to be absorbed in my book.

But I couldn't help it. My eyes kept returning to the brazen fecal display, fascinated and repulsed.

It was with great relief that I exited the train at the Whitehall stop in Manhattan and emerged into the relatively fresh air at street level. A cold sea wind blew in from the water, so I tucked my chin down into the collar of my jacket and hurried off down Beaver toward Broad Street and my office. An armored truck was parked by the Burger King Express at the corner of Beaver and New, right where I usually cross, and without thinking I stepped out into the street to get around it.

I looked up just in time to see a neatly stacked pile of at least two hundred silver ingots bearing down on me.

Well, I hustled my fanny straight over to the opposite curb, and the forklift carrying the pallet of silver ingots from the armored truck trundled on by without incident.

Somewhat shaken, I watched that king's ransom in silver recede up the narrow concrete-and-brick canyon of New Street, and I muttered to myself, "Only in New York."

Then I went to work and forgot about it all. Symbolism like that doesn't bear too much thought.

I really have no idea how I got out to the raft in the first place. I must have swum there—I mean, I know I swam, I was there, I did it—but since I really can't swim, you may begin to understand some of my puzzlement.

I don't remember if we were still living with my uncle's family at the time—that would have been the summer of 1973—or if it was later than that, when we were only visiting. I couldn't have been any younger than six, although I might have been as old as ten or eleven. It's hard to remember.

My uncle and aunt and cousins lived in the small town of Liberty, Utah, in the mountains east of Ogden. They didn't have much money, but boy-oh-boy did they have a wealth of fun things for small kids to do. There were woods and streams to explore, horses to ride, fish to catch, and trees to climb. Oh, yes, and there were lots of places to swim, too. We can't forget that.

On this particular summer day, I accompanied my cousins Steve and Denny, along with a handful of their friends, on a trek across hills and fields to a big square-edged pond in the midst of a cleared field. The pond must have been about two hundred feet on a side, and the other kids swore that it was at least a hundred and fifty feet deep, and that no one had ever managed to find the bottom.

Floating in the middle of this pond was a raft—a big platform made of thick planks lashed and nailed together. We all hopped in the water and swam out to the raft, where we spent the afternoon jumping off and climbing back on and generally having a high old time.

Now, I remember being pretty pleased with myself for actually managing to swim out to the raft. You see, I can't swim, at least not very well, and I'm deathly afraid of "big water"—a status for which this swimming hole was definitely big enough to qualify. I had flunked the basic YMCA swimming class twice, and I would rarely venture out of the shallow end of any pool, so I'm actually quite surprised that I was able to get out to the raft to begin with.

Of course, getting out there was not the same thing as getting back.

As the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, the guys decided it was time to head back home. One by one, they dived off the raft and started stroking for shore—something like a hundred feet of water. I was the last one off, and whatever magic feather it was that had helped me get to the raft in the first place slipped from my fingers as I saw the other boys pulling way ahead, and felt myself growing achingly tired, and began to remember everything I'd been told about just how deep that swimming hole was. I knew I wasn't going to make it back to shore.

Have you ever felt the certainty that you were about to die? The knowledge that if someone from somewhere outside yourself doesn't do something for you, and fast, you're going to sink like a stone into that bottomless black sea of nothingness and the candle of your life will be snuffed out without so much as a by-your-leave from the universe? I have. I felt it that day with my arms and legs turning to lead in the water.

So I hollered for my cousin Steve. Steve is just about four months older than me, and if it requires any sort of physical skill he's always been better at it than I. In later years I would watch him swim a mile at Boy Scout camp in pursuit of his Lifesaving merit badge. He would go on to become a scuba instructor in Southern California. But for right then, all I knew was that Steve could save my life, and that he was the only thing that could save my life.

I really don't know whether or not I could have made it back to shore on my own. I do know that I was right about Steve being able to save my life. He was nearly to shore, but he turned right around, swam back to me, and towed me in to shore. It was a little embarrassing with all the other boys around, but I didn't care. The embarrassment trait always seems to go dormant somehow when it's a matter of life and death.

I don't know if I've ever thanked Steve for what he did for me that day. I should. Hell, I should call him up just for the sake of talking to him at all. He saved my life, and I haven't even talked to him for a year. He's now living on an Army base in Georgia, three thousand miles away from his family, depressed and as lonely as death, and I haven't even gone to the effort of picking up the phone and dialing his number for a year.

Now I'm the one on shore, and Steve's the one out there with his limbs turning to lead in the water. It may not be as big an act as what he did for me, but I think it's time for me to pay back a little of the debt I incurred that day.

I hope I'm strong enough.

Saving my life at the swimming hole isn't all that my cousin Steve did for me. He also taught me how to French kiss. Okay, so he didn't actually demonstrate—he only explained the proper technique. But how many friends do you have that will do even that much?

We were both around eighteen at the time. Steve's family had moved to California years before, but he and I remained very close. Steve had come back to Utah to stay with us for a week or so, as he contemplated attending Weber State College. When Steve was in town, we would do everything together—including the most important activity of all, chasing girls—and we'd have a grand old time at it.

Now, at this time there was a girl I'd been interested in for about two years, by the name of Naomi Osbourne. She and I were pretty good friends. We had met in a community theater group, and we hung out with a larger group of friends that seemed to want to do everything together. She was sixteen, she attended Bountiful High, and she was as sweet as ice cream in July. Cuter than hell, too. And I suspect she knew it.

Anyway, there was a dance at Bountiful High during the week that Steve was in town, so I dragged him off to it. (Actually, I didn't have to do any dragging. Steve has always been ten times smoother with women than I, and he was always on the lookout for ways to meet them.) Naomi was there, along with a nice-looking friend of hers named Tabitha whom I had never met. The four of us ended up spending the bulk of the dance together, talking and laughing and switching partners and so forth. We had such a great time that Steve and I asked Naomi and Tabitha if they would like to go out with us early the next week, on a double date. The girls readily agreed.

As we drove back to Kaysville after the dance, Steve and I began to wonder aloud which of us was actually going to be paired with which girl on the date. Steve knew I had carried a torch for Naomi for a long time, but we were both attracted to her, and we were both attracted to Tabitha, too. Well, we didn't end up worrying about it too much—we just decided to see how things naturally fell out.

When Steve and I went on double dates, we would always split up the driving duties. One of us would drive the car to wherever we were going, and the other one would drive it back. That was so we both got a chance to be in the back seat with our dates. On the night of our date with Naomi and Tabitha, I ended up driving first. And since Naomi lived closer than Tabitha, we ended up picking up Naomi first. And Steve and Naomi just sort of naturally got into the back seat together.

And that was fine with me, really. Tabitha and I ended up having a very nice time that night. In fact, on the way back from whatever it was we did that night—dinner and a movie, I think—I remember snuggling with Tabitha in the back seat while she sucked on my fingers. This was the first time I'd ever had anyone suck on my fingers. I had no idea what it symbolized, but I sure knew I liked it. When we dropped her off at her house, Steve timed my goodnight kiss with her at forty-five seconds. Tabitha and I ended up going steady for the next few months.

But I was still interested in Naomi, too. So when Steve walked her to her front door, and when I saw them up there making out in the shadows on the porch, I felt a little pang of envy. Steve came back to the car, got in the driver's seat, and didn't say anything for a minute. Then he said, "I'm sorry, Bill."

I asked him what he had to be sorry for, and he said, "I know you really like Naomi, and here I am making out with her in front of you."

I told him it wasn't a big deal, that he didn't have to feel bad, because it wasn't like I was hurting for female attention myself.

He was quiet for another minute or so, and then he looked up with a mixture of slyness and guilt on his face. "Do you know how to French kiss?" he asked.

I was a little taken aback. "Um, no, actually."

"Well," he said, "I'd better teach you how, because someday you might end up kissing Naomi, and then you'll have to know how to do it right, because she doesn't."

And then I burst out laughing.

So Steve proceeded to explain all the intricacies of French kissing to me, there in the car in front of Naomi's house, including how you need to do something delicate and sensual with your tongue in the other person's mouth, like running it lightly around their own tongue, instead of just sticking it in and letting it sit there like a big hunk of wet meat—which is what he said Naomi had basically done to him.

I have a great cousin, you'll have to agree. But the rest of the story, including what eventually happened between Naomi and me, and between Tabitha and me, and how and where I finally ended up using what Steve had taught me, will have to wait for other memos on other days. I think I've gone about far enough for now.

Okay, so yesterday's memo, while interesting, was really just a digression so I didn't have to write about what I'm going to write about today: my happy little dunk in Yellowstone's Firehole River.

It was stupid—I'll admit that right up front. Remember, I can't swim, as I learned the day I lost my magic feather in the middle of the swimming hole and my cousin Steve had to tow me in to shore. But for a few critical minutes I forgot that, and I just about didn't live to regret it.

This was one summer when I was twenty-two, although I don't remember whether it was 1989 or 1990. (I was born in August.) Our stake's Young Adults (the Mormon Church's social organization for unmarried folks between the ages of 18 and 30) had taken a trip to Island Park, a pleasant spot in Idaho where relatives of Shauna Toronto—an exceptionally attractive young woman who served as one of my ward's Young Adults representatives, and about whom we will hear more in a later memo—kept a large cabin. One of our many activities that weekend was to take a daytrip into Yellowstone National Park, the Western entrance of which was not a terribly long drive from Island Park.

We saw a lot of cool things that day—Old Faithful, the Paint Pots, and so forth—though nothing I hadn't seen before. But for most of our motley crew of rambunctious yet painfully straight college kids, the highlight of the day came when we stopped off at the Firehole River to do a little swimming and tubing. I say "we" in the loosest possible sense, of course. Swimming was never my intention.

The Firehole is not much a river, really. It's more of a glorified creek winding through a narrow rocky defile with sides no more than ten or fifteen feet high. What gives it both its name and its popularity, however, is the spot where the defile suddenly widens out into a broad natural pool about fifty feet in diameter and thirty-five to seventy feet deep. The water in the pool is perfectly warm, perfectly clear, and perfectly calm. It a great place to swim, if you're the sort of person who happens to like that kind of thing.

The insidious thing about the Firehole, though, is the fact that the section of creek leading up to the pool is swift and rocky and deep enough to make it fun for floating down on an inner tube. Before my mission, I had floated down Utah's Weber River in an inner tube with a church group and had a grand old time. Even earlier, when I was 13 or 14, I had rafted down the Green River and had the time of my life. I knew how much fun it could be.

But the Weber River was shallow and tame. And on the Green River I had a life jacket. Neither condition held true there at the Firehole. So I determined to watch from the lip of the defile while everyone else tubed and swam, but I refused to participate myself.

Until Shauna Toronto started telling me how easy and safe the tubing was.

I won't detail all the mental and emotional gymnastics I went through trying to keep my resolve. But it looked like such fun, and Shauna thought it was safe, and maybe she and I could ride the river in the same tube . . .

So I agreed to give it a try. Through a quirk of fate, I ended up putting into the river upstream not with Shauna, but rather sharing a large inner tube with my friend Craig Topham, and diminutive fellow with an enthusiasm about twice as big as his body. We were both pretty much fully clothed, shoes and all. The plan was to run the river (a short trip of one or two hundred or so feet), then float lazily across the pool and get out on the far shore.

That was the plan, anyway.

The first half of the river run was great. Then we snagged on a rock, the tube tipped up, and we were both dumped into the torrent. We tumbled ass-over-teakettle down the river, trying to hold onto the tube or each other or the rocks all around, but the current was too swift. It swept us along like leaves. And then the defile widened out, and we were dumped into the pool.

We had lost the tube somewhere along the way. All there was to hold onto now, as the river bottom suddenly disappeared and there was only seventy feet of water beneath my feet, was Craig. Craig, fortunately or unfortunately, kept his head a lot better than I did, and he disentangled himself from me as quickly as he could, then stroked for one of the sides. We were maybe a third of the way across the pool by then, and suddenly I was all alone. There were still sounds, but it was like hearing a television from a different room. It wasn't real. The only thing that was real was the water, my sodden clothing dragging me under, the utter fear that filled my stomach.

I misspoke earlier. The pool doesn't really have a shore to speak of. There are rocky ledges and outcroppings on a couple of the sides, but other than that it's pretty sheer from the surface of the water up the sides to ground level maybe twenty feet higher. I'd have to cross the pool to get to any of those outcroppings. I seemed pretty much fucked.

Of course, the outcroppings were densely populated with the other members of my party. There were a dozen or more of my friends and acquaintances watching as Craig and I tumbled out the mouth of the creek and into the drink. With so many people around, so close but so far away, it seemed natural to fall back on old, old patterns. And what alternative was there, really? So, just like that day at the swimming hole in Liberty when I didn't think I could make it back to shore, I hollered for help. And what do you think happened.

I'll tell you. Not a damn thing.

Oh, everyone watched—a few even stood up and got closer to the edge of the outcropping—but there wasn't a one of them who dived into the water to help. Some of them were asking if I was all right. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick.

So it was up to me. I couldn't seem to make myself swim in any sort of proper fashion—I was far too panicked for that—but I thrashed and kicked and bucked and fought the water for the remainder of those nearly infinite fifty feet to where a wide fist of rock jutted up from the water at the lower end of the pool, shouting for help every time my mouth was out of the water, and several times when it wasn't. As I neared the rock, what seemed like hours later, a different Craig (whose last name I can't remember) reached down and hauled me up onto the warm stone like a fish. I was gasping for air, snot was running down my face, and one of my sneakers was missing. But I was alive, by God. And all I wanted to do was cling to that warm rock and never move again.

But somehow—I don't remember how—I was led from the rock to the larger outcropping and then up to solid ground. A lot of people tried to apologize to me, saying they didn't know whether or not I was really in trouble, or they thought I was kidding around, but I wasn't in much of a talking mood. (Kitty Genovese, had she survived her public stabbing, probably wouldn't have been, either.) In fact, I kept pretty much to myself the rest of the day.

I had saved my own life this time, but that didn't exactly comfort me, because I knew what a close thing it had been. But even so, from that day on, I think I stopped believing that anyone else was ever going to help me when I was in a jam—up to and including God, because I can honestly report that I never felt as if The Big Guy gave me a hand out the water, and I was certainly never tempted to relate my experience with streaming eyes in a testimony meeting. I've since learned somewhat differently about relying on certain people, but the basic tendency not to ask anyone for help is still there, pretty deeply ingrained.

So, I made it out of the water that day . . . but the water didn't make it out of me. It would be two or three years before I realized this and finally started to cough it up. More tomorrow.

St. George, Utah—a desert resort town a stone's throw from Arizona—is the last place I ever expected to find myself drowning. Likewise, I'm sure the last thing the patrons of the Valley Discount Book Center expected to see in their midst was a drowning man.

It happened, all the same.

It was 1993—Valentine's Day or thereabouts—and I was weekending in St. George with Roxie, the nineteen-year-old girl I'd been seeing awfully seriously for a year and a half. (That's not her real name, by the way, though it very possibly could have been. Insert your favorite disclaimer here and get used to the idea, because I'll be concealing more identities than just this one in the weeks and months ahead.) Valentine's Day falls exactly six months from my birthday—I'm the yang to love's yin, I guess—so I would have been precisely twenty-five and a half.

Roxie and I were in the middle of a long slow crawl through the local factory outlet mall. Somehow our conversation had turned to the subject of water and swimming, and I'd been explaining why it is that I go out of my way to avoid them both. As we turned into the Valley Discount Book Center (also a made-up name, but in this case it's only because I can't remember the real one), I was relating the story that you read yesterday, of how I took a little dip in the Firehole River and almost didn't come out again.

Now, I'd talked about the incident before this, but never in very much detail—never in detail at all, in fact. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that my conscious mind was avoiding the subject the way a hemophiliac avoids sharp objects. How do I know this? Because of what happened in that quiet little bookstore.

As we strolled down the aisles of books, Roxie and I, and as I told her how the water had closed over my head—well, there's no good way to put it except to say that the water closed over my head. I began to drown all over again, right there in the middle of the store.

It was a panic attack like none I had ever experienced. A dark fear gripped me, I turned cold, and I couldn't breathe. The closest thing to it I had ever felt was in gymnastics class one day at the age of ten when I slipped off the uneven parallel bars, landed flat on my back, and got the wind knocked out of me. On that occasion, it took about ten minutes for me to start breathing normally again—ten minutes of fearing that I might never be able to breathe again. This time, I didn't get my normal rhythm back for over two hours.

My flailing hands, reddening face, and gasping breaths clued Roxie in that something was wrong. She gently tried to calm me down and get me to breathe, but to no avail. She led me out of the store as the other patrons looked on in confusion and embarrassment—and did nothing, of course.

She helped me get settled in her black Trans Am (not her real car), then followed my mostly gestural directions as I guided her to my grandparents' house in the nearby town of Santa Clara. I hadn't told my grandparents that I was in the area (hey, my grandpa is a patriarch in the Mormon Church, and there I was shacked up in a little bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the Temple with a nubile young sexpot), but I couldn't breathe and I thought maybe having familiar people around me—and perhaps a blessing from my grandpa—would help.

Of course, they weren't home.

Next stop was a hospital emergency room near Dixie College. My health-insurance card got us seats in the waiting room, where I wheezed and gasped for an hour and half before I finally calmed down enough to breathe normally again. Ironically enough, that was about when a nurse was finally available to see me, and after a cursory checkup she dismissed me without even filling out a report. There was obviously nothing wrong with me any longer, so the hospital wouldn't even bother issuing me a bill.

Isn't the mind a marvelous and mysterious thing? On the one hand, it can wait years before fully confronting the knowledge that its brief candle was nearly snuffed out by a spring-fed river. On the other hand, it knows right when to stop acting up in order to avoid a hospital bill.

So which do you think scares me more—drowning, or my insurance company?

It must be going on two years ago now that came home to my Brooklyn apartment to find a message waiting on the answering machine. Much to my delight, the message wasn't for me, and I found it entertaining in the extreme. I made a careful transcription of the message before I erased the tape, and since I've just run across that transcription, I thought I'd share it with you.

Imagine the voice of a cultured New York socialite, probably in her early to mid thirties, who is blissfully oblivious to the face that she's dialed the area code for Brooklyn instead of Manhattan—and, indeed, to the fact that the voice on the answering machine belongs to no one she knows:

Hi, Astrid, it's Maria F_____  calling, and, um, this is a thank-you call from me and, uh, Michael, and it is to you and your husband Jim. We had a fabulous, fabulous time at your dinner party, and, um, everything was wonderful. Um, we thoroughly enjoyed your company, and, um, the company of your friends, and, uh, dinner was just delicious, and the conversation was, as you know, hilarious and occasionally, um, um, terrifically satisfying, if you know what I mean, in terms of the content and absolute RANGE, um, of topics, and, um, I don't know, I just, we were blissed upon leaving, and, um, I just, uh, I'm . . . just want to say thank you for your kindness. Um, bye.

I wonder if Maria ever realized that Astrid never received her stilted but effusive flood of thanks. I wonder if their friendship decayed and dried up as a result of this miscommunication. I wonder if Astrid will ever see this page and realize what a stupid fluke it was that drove their two households apart and brought so much pain and misery to the Upper East Side. I wonder . . .

God. I wonder if I'm going to get sued.

The big secret in Roxie's family, which no outsiders were supposed to know about, was her oldest sister's boob job. Seems Sis was feeling a little unhappy with the state of her sagging, aged teats, so Mr. Sis ponied up for a bit of silicone reinflation. Roxie was telling me about the time not long after at a family gathering when Mr. Sis gazed longingly at his wife's fresh rack of 38DDs, shook his head with a smile, and said, "Best three thousand dollars I ever spent."

Kind of sad, isn't it?

I just want to put in a good word today for old-fashioned, real-live, flesh-and-blood breasts, sagging or no. Regardless of how well they resist gravity, silicone breasts just don't measure up when it comes to the touch test.

Oh, yes, there's a difference—you know there is. Remember that hilarious scene in L.A. Story when TV weatherman Steve Martin finally gets New Age ditz Sarah Jessica Parker into the sack and he cops a feel? A confused look crosses his face, and he says, "Why do your breasts feel strange?"

And she says, "Because they're real." (Ba-dum!)

So when was it I felt a pair of Fifth Avenue falsies for myself and arrived at my opinion? I'd like to say that I got my hands on Sis's casabas in a back room at one of those frequent family gatherings, but that, more's the pity, would be a lie. No, what happened was I slipped a woman a couple of bills at a peepshow near Times Square sometime last year, and that's when my innocence was lost.

I'd never felt fake breasts before, but it was obvious from the first moment I touched them that that was what they were. Even before that, I knew something was up, because this woman had to be pushing forty, and her 40-DD's were defying gravity as perkily as helium balloons at a carnival. But when I laid hands on them, all doubt fled my mind.

Those suckers (or suck-ees, if you prefer) were as hard as bowling balls.

When I say they were hard, I mean they were hard. No give whatsoever, not one iota. Now, I don't know about you, but I prefer a little softness and give in my breasts—well, not my breasts, but you know what I mean. If I wanted to caress a couple of chunks of marble, then they'd be peeling me off the statues up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a regular basis.

"You know, most men come instantaneously when they get their hands on my breasts," the nice woman said to me (possibly in reaction to the fact that this obviously was not what I was doing).

Uh-huh. And a lot of men would give their left nut to trade places with Tommy Lee for a night with his wife, Plastic Pam, but that's not me. (Hey, even if Pamela didn't come with a tag that reads MADE IN BEVERLY HILLS, I've met Tommy Lee, and while he was a relatively nice guy, he was so dumb that I'd steer clear of any woman who was actually willing to bring two of his get into the world.)

So bring on those all-natural breasts. I don't care if they sag, or if they're small, or if they come in two different sizes. If I like you, then I'm liable to like your breasts, so long as they're 100% organic.

I guess I'm just a ditzy New Age kind of guy.

This is the story of why I'm cautious when I cross the street—though still perhaps not as cautious as I should be. I got off easy, after all.

I was—what?—eight or nine years old? The family was living in Bountiful, Utah. I was in Cub Scouts at the time, and my den had just finished up a rehearsal for a pack meeting that was coming later in the week. My den was going to perform the flag ceremony, and we had to practice to make sure we would get it right.

My den mother was a woman named Joyce Benard, who would become my piano teacher a little later in life. A handful of us were piled into her big station wagon, and she was driving us home from the church where we had been rehearsing.

I was the first stop. Sister Benard pulled the car over to the curb across the street from my house, and I got out on the passenger side. I went around to the front of the car to cross the street. I looked both ways—but apparently I didn't poke my head far enough around the big station wagon, because as soon as I stepped out past it there came a big loud roar and a squeal of brakes, and the world went totally crazy.

I flew through the air, bounced, rolled, and slammed into the pavement. Sister Benard, ashed-faced, exited her car and ran to me, as did the woman who had been driving the car that hit me. My mother, having heard the squealing brakes, came running out of the house across the street.

When it became apparent that I was only stunned and not dead or seriously injured, the women helped me across the street to the lawn in front of my house. Sister Benard went inside to call an ambulance (just in case).

It turned out that the car which had hit me—a brand-new Lincoln Continental—was damaged worse than I was. I had been flung up onto the hood, where I rolled up the slope of the windshield, rolled back down, and hit the pavement. The hood of the car was dented pretty good, the antenna was bent ninety degrees right at the base, and the windshield was starred with cracks.

I, on the other hand, was sore, and I had big bruises on both knees. There was also a mysterious tire print on one of my sneakers, which no one could ever figure out. And that was about it.

Now let's flash over to the nearby fire station, which was only about three blocks away. The firemen and paramedics were all fussing over their brand-new shiny ambulance, which had yet to be taken out on a call. In fact, my father and his boss were there, too. It was summer, and during the summer my father would supplement his teacher's salary with whatever work he could get. This year it was working at a small local sheet-metal company. The head honcho at the sheet-metal company was a member of the bishopric, and he was also a volunteer fireman. Combine this with the fact that the sheet-metal company lived just around the corner from the fire station, and it's not hard to see why my dad and his boss were there, admiring the new ambulance.

But then the call from the dispatcher came in—"Boy hit by car, Second North, Code Three"—and the paramedics scrambled into the ambulance. My father, recognizing the street as the one where he lived, said dryly, "Oh, that's probably my dumb kid."

The ambulance drivers had a great time on their three-block journey. They used every different siren they had. I'm sure they were disappointed that the trip was so short.

When they arrived, they checked me over and pronounced me fine. I didn't even get a trip in the shiny new ambulance, which kind of bummed me out. But hey, there was a story in the local paper the next week about the new ambulance, and since I was the first call the ambulance responded to, I got a mention! My dad showed it to me, proudly.

Unfortunately, I was referred to only as "small boy hit by a car." What a downer! Even at that age, I was bitterly disappointed when my name didn't make it into print. Jeez, if I come that close to being killed, the least I can get out of the deal is a little notoriety, right?

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 . . .

I have this writer friend. Don't look so surprised—it happens. Particularly when one is a writer oneself. I mean, doctors have doctor friends, lawyers have lawyer friends, Indian chiefs—well, at the very least, they know a lot of Indians. When you hang out where other writers hang out, you're bound to hit it off with someone—unless you're Richard J. Herrnstein or Charles Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, and at least they have each other.

So anyway, I have this writer friend. Let's call him Thayne. Thayne's fourth novel was released a few months ago to a great deal of acclaim and huzzah. Having admired his first three novels immensely, I held the new book reverently and breathlessly when I spied it on the "New Fiction" racks at Barnes & Noble, like a new uncle might handle hold his brother's infant child. But I didn't buy it.

No, since I'm really a cheap bastard at heart, I finally worked up the nerve to ask Thayne if he might have an extra copy lying around that he would mail to me. Thayne allowed as how he did and he would. You may be turned off by my chutzpah, but it really wasn't such an unusual request between denizens of our particular literary ghetto—er, I mean, genre. We merry scribblers are sending one another copies of our stuff all the time, hoping that our fellows might deign to nominate our humble stories or novels for this award or that. It's the Way Things Are Done.

(To be honest, Thayne's first novel was the only book of his that I actually had to buy myself. I recommended it for an award, and the grateful author sent me a copy of his newly published second novel, inscribed and autographed, as his way of saying thank you. And thus our acquaintance was born.)

At last, the book arrived in the mail. I stripped the corrugated cardboard from about its snowy white covers as enthusiastically as a child on Christmas morning, and I turned it every which way, flushed with the excitement that can only come from the acquisition of a New Book. After I had riffled the pages a few times and felt that soft breeze caress my face, inhaled and savored that particular New Book smell, I laid the volume down on my desk until such time as I felt I could devote my full attention to it. And since I was working on a screenplay at the time, not to mention being somewhere in the middle of reading a different novel, I figured that would be a few days.

Before long Thayne had sent me email, inquiring as to whether or not the book had arrived. When I reported that it had, and that I was looking forward to diving in, Thayne wrote back to express his anxiety. He was worried that I might not like it. He, whose book has enthusiastic blurbs from Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson on the cover, was worried about me not liking his book. How charming and very flattering—and how perfectly like a writer.

The requisite few days passed, I finished both my screenplay and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and I finally had time to turn my attention to Thayne's novel. And I got about seven pages into it before I set it aside again, and raced through a Vietnam-era novel by another writer of my acquaintance. And then a book on the playwright's craft. And then a book on why Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.

Conscious that the clock was ticking, and that the pages were dropping from the desk calendar like leaves in autumn, I turned my attention back to Thayne's book. This time I managed to forge all the way to page sixty before setting it aside in favor of a book of conservative essays on government, a book of liberal essays on government, and a staccato-paced noir crime novel of pre-Kennedy era Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, poor Thayne is sitting at home sweating bullets as my verdict on his novel continuously fails to arrive. What a bastard I am.

So what's the problem? Why can't I just sit down and force myself through it? Is the novel really as bad as all that?

No. The problem is that it's really as good as all that. Thayne is a damn fine writer, and his texts are thick with imagery, allegory, symbolism, archetypes, and resonance. His characters and their worlds don't unfold so much as they coalesce, as if from fog, the eventual shape of the whole inherent in each small bit—holographic images that achieve their ultimate sharpness on the final page. His plots rarely follow any predictable narrative path, yet in retrospect it seems they have traversed the only possible route. In short, each of Thayne's novels is a treasure—and this latest promises to be his best effort yet.

Unfortunately, I haven't enough attention to spare at the moment to do this book justice. So many other clamorous thoughts and schemes and worries are crowding the stage of my brain that I simply have not been able to devote to Thayne's novel the sort of intentness and regard that it demands, that it deserves.

But how can tell him that without sounding like an utter phony making pathetic excuses? It's like the time a former girlfriend called me to let me know she was in town for only a day, and I told her with perfect truthfulness that I couldn't come to her hotel because I was doing the laundry. It cut no ice that I had an important job interview the next morning and nothing to wear—her first impression from that conversation, however wrong, was of my pathetic phoniness, and that's the impression that has stuck through the intervening years.

So. I'm stuck waiting for the day that I'm whole enough to appreciate a truly challenging novel, while its poor author is stuck waiting for the other shoe to drop. At least my guilt over this issue can be milked for a few measly column-inches, thereby beating back my guilt over the fact that I've let more than a month since my last piece appeared here. I can only hope that Thayne gets as much mileage out of his anxiety.

Of course, with my luck he'll get a whole novel out of it, and then we'll be right back where we started.

I wonder what ever happened to Butch Harper to make him such a mean bastard. He must have had some pretty serious unhappiness to contend with. Of course, when I was in 7th grade, I didn't care two figs about Butch's unhappiness. I was only concerned with my own—and the fact that the bastard was beating me up and terrorizing me every day in band class.

In Kaysville when I was growing up, grades six through eight attended junior high. When I was midway through sixth grade, my family moved to Kaysville from Bountiful, where sixth graders were the oldest kids in elementary school. This meant that I was catapulted from elementary school into junior high in the middle of the school year, with no friends to help cushion the landing.

I could write a dozen memos about how horrible that experience was (and I probably will), but today we'll stick to exploring how it affected my musical education. You see, I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. If I had started junior high at the time as all the other kids did, that would have meant simply signing up for band at the beginning of sixth grade, getting my parents to shell out for a sax, and showing up for class. Because I came to the game late, though, I wasn't actually able to enter the band until seventh grade, when the other kids already had a year on me.

That might have been more bearable had I actually been permitted to study the saxophone, like I wanted. Instead I was saddled with the clarinet. (Don't get me wrong—I have a lot of respect for the clarinet. But it just ain't as sexy as a sax.) You see, my dad, who is a school teacher, consulted with the music teacher at his school as to how to rent a saxophone for cheap. He was apparently told that it would be even cheaper to rent a clarinet, and that it would be easy for a clarinet student to switch to the saxophone later on. Moreover, my father was advised, it's damn tough for a sax player to switch to the clarinet later on.

When my father explained this logic to me, I was both crushed and baffled. "But that doesn't make any sense," I protested. "I don't want to switch from the saxophone to the clarinet later on."

Tough, kid. Here's your new clarinet.

Okay, so the clarinet wasn't all that bad. But the necessity of playing it only became all the more unhappy-making when Butch Harper entered the picture.

Butch was in a situation similar to mine. He was entering the band at the beginning of seventh grade, only his instrument was the bassoon. Butch was a tall, wiry kid with blonde hair and a look of permanent rage burning in the eyes of his otherwise stupid-looking face. Did I mention that he was a mean bastard? Oh, Jesus.

Mr. James Thurman was our band teacher. He was not well-loved by the kids in the band, as I recall, but he was more than competent as a musician and conductor. Still, he had a blind spot big enough to drive a truck through.

In order that Butch and I could catch up with the rest of the students in the class—and not be in everyone else's way—Mr. Thurman would regularly send the two of us off to a little soundproof practice room at the back of the classroom. That was where we were supposed to practice our instruments until we were good enough to be with the rest of the band fulltime.

That was where Butch Harper terrorized me.

For starters, he would usually force me to put his bassoon together for him. If I was lucky, that was all that would happen. If I wasn't, or if I balked from anything he wanted me to do (like setting up his music or turning his pages for him), then he would hit me in the upper arm with his fist or smack me on the back of the head. Sometimes I would cry, and Butch would call me a pussy and hit me again.

I tried to tell Mr. Thurman what was going on, but he pooh-poohed it all. "Just tell him to leave you alone," he said.

"I do," I said. "Don't make me go in there with him any more."

I believe Mr. Thurman once had a few words with Butch. That ended up a pretty bad day for me in the ol' practice room.

After a couple of months of this, I was good enough that I didn't have to go to the practice room anymore, and Butch Harper's tormenting of me ended. Mostly. Every once in a while he would threaten me in the hallway, but I finally put an end to that toward the last days of eighth grade, when he tried pushing me around at a school dance.

I was trying to ask a girl to dance (I don't remember who), when Butch came up and started, well, pushing me around. So I hit him, twice, right in the chest. I still don't know what came over me. The blows were glancing at best, but Butch left me alone after that. At heart, he was just a coward, and pretty pathetic at that.

Mr. Thurman is now a Mormon bishop in Layton, Utah, or he was last time I heard. I've mostly forgiven Butch Harper, but I have a harder time with Mr. Thurman. Maybe he was right to keep sending me back into that practice room to face my demon, and maybe not, but I certainly don't love him for it.

My only hope is that he's not trying the same tactic with the battered wives in his ward.

I rarely walk out of movies. Somewhere deep inside, I suppose I consider the contract between artist and audience so sacred that I can't help but uphold most of my own end even when the artist or artists are failing miserably to live up to their own.

That unspoken contract works like this: I, as the audience, promise to offer my suspended disbelief for ninety minutes or more, while the artists promise to present me with interesting characters who behave more or less like real human beings, who face threatening challenges, who struggle and evolve, and who bring their conflicts to some kind of meaningful resolution, for good or for ill. Not such an unreasonable deal, right?

Well, not everyone lives up to this contract. Lots of times the artists fail in one or more of the areas I listed, and lots of times I withdraw my suspension of disbelief before the movie is over. But I almost never walk out before the end, because I believe there's always something to learn from a movie—even if it's only learning what not to do in your own stories.

In fact, as I think about it, I can only remember one movie that I've walked out of, and that was Fled, and I didn't even walk out of that until about ten minutes before the end of the film. The pointless violence and mayhem that were filling in for an honest climax to the story finally became too much for me. It's not even that it was offensive violence. It was just pointless and dumb—and all the more so, because I had seen it all before in so many other bad flicks, so many other times. But still, I stayed with that movie almost all the way to the end. I stuck it out.

My former flame Roxie walked out of a movie once, though—and I think she was pissed off that I didn't come with her. The movie was Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Roxie walked out because she found the excessive use of profanity offensive. I found that ironic in the extreme, because she certainly wasn't afraid to use the word "fuck" herself if she took a mind to—and she definitely wasn't afraid to act the word out. I think she ended up wandering into another theater and watching The Lion King.

(All of which reminds me of a joke, if you'll indulge me. A panhandler, begging in the street, asks a well-dressed businessman if he can spare a little change. "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,'" says the businessman with his nose in the air. 'William Shakespeare.' Miffed, the panhandler says, "Oh, yeah? Well, 'Fuck you.' David Mamet.")

This wasn't nearly as distressing to me, however, as the time I had acquired tickets to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Pioneer Memorial Theater in Salt Lake City, and took Roxie to see it. By the end of the first act, she was insisting that we leave—and at intermission, that's exactly what we did. Now, if I rarely walk out of movies, I've made a habit of never walking out of a play, but there I was, trailing along behind good ol' Roxie as she fled from a theatrical experience that required her to engage any portion of her heart or her intellect.

This and countless other incidents should have clued me in to the fact that Roxie was entirely wrong for me. But I never walk out until it's too late, until I've seen so many derivative repetitions