June 1996 Archives

When I was six, my whole world changed. From the giant, polyglot world of Los Angeles, my family moved to what seemed like the tiniest, most isolated backwater conceivable -- Grantsville, Utah. Situated in the desert thirty or forty miles west of Salt Lake City, Grantsville was a town with little or nothing to recommend it to outsiders -- except, perhaps, the opening for an industrial arts teacher at the local high school, and the nearly uniformly Mormon population.

I'm almost certain that my father would have been much happier living the rest of his life in his hometown of Los Angeles. He felt a heavy responsibility to his young family, however, and believed that his children would be much safer -- both physically and spiritually -- living and growing up in the bosom of a small Mormon community. Thus, the move to rural Utah, where he faced a fifty-percent reduction in pay, a loss of tenure on the job, and a rejection of his every application for the administrative positions of which his new doctoral degree made him worthy.

In light of this all this reasoned sacrifice, I find it most interesting and ironic that the first time I was offered a cigarette -- indeed, the only time that I can recall being offered a cigarette -- was in Grantsville. But I'm getting a wee bit ahead of myself.

We moved to Grantsville in late October or early November of 1973, after I'd already gotten in a few weeks of public schooling at Buchanan Street Elementary in Los Angeles. I'm still not exactly clear on why my parents hadn't returned me to Good Shepherd Lutheran at the beginning of first grade -- perhaps they disliked the religious "misinformation" that seemed de rigueur there, or perhaps the tuition had become unmanageable, or perhaps, most likely, the financial outlay seemed silly when they knew the family would shortly be moving.

Whatever the reason, my short stint at Buchanan Street remains among the most pleasant of my grade-school memories. My class there was a giant hodgepodge of first-, second-, and third-graders, with a teacher, Mrs. Saunders, who recognized a modicum of advanced ability in me and let me study math and English with the older kids. It was for Mrs. Saunders that I wrote my first short story -- a horrific little piece called "Rattlesnakes and Cobras" that frightened some of my classmates to tears and got me voted the winner in the Halloween writing contest. When I declared that I wanted to keep writing stories, Mrs. Saunders brought her husband's typewriter from home for me to practice on. I showed such an affinity for astronomy and geology that she offered to let me stay late with the third-graders when they started their science unit later in the year.

Of course, the move to Utah put the kibosh on that.

I still remember being ushered to my new classroom that first morning at Grantsville Elementary School by the principal himself -- after my mother, with a justifiable lack of faith in the educational system, had insisted on enrolling me in the second grade. "Now, Bill," the principal said in his condescending way as we stood outside the classroom door, "we'll let you try this class for today, and if it's too hard you can always go back with the first-graders."

Piffle. I could have handled third grade without straining the synapses, but my parents didn't want me getting too terribly far ahead of my age group.

My teacher, Mrs. Hunsaker, attended church at the same ward as my family -- as did many of my new classmates. (Small as it was, Grantsville contained enough Mormons to populate several congregations.) The church influence was so strong, in fact, that many of the kids found it difficult to remember that "Sister Hunsaker" was supposed to be called "Mrs. Hunsaker" at school.

I was young enough that the transition from big-city to small-town life was fairly painless. I made friends fairly quickly -- though it was something of an embarrassment to me that, while I attended school with older children, I still had to go to the Primary class for my own age group. Being at school made me feel like a big kid; being at church made me feel like a baby.

From the start, though, it was clear that there was something very odd about my second-grade class. A social phenomenon manifested there that I had never before encountered, not at Buchanan Street and certainly not at Good Shepherd Lutheran. In fact, I've never encountered it again, not in all my years of schooling.

The entire class, with only one exception, had paired itself off into boy-girl couples. One could not be accepted as a legitimate member of the second grade at Grantsville Elementary School, without having a significant other among its number.

I suspect that the hyperemphasis on marriage and families in the Mormon Church had somehow spawned this rather bizarre mating dance, but I can't say for certain. I do know that Mrs. Hunsaker did her best to discourage the pairing off, and to prevent the covert ritualized "weddings" that sometimes took place at recess, but it was to no avail.

Strange as this all seemed to me, I couldn't exactly complain about the results. Back at the schools in Los Angeles, I had ached for a girlfriend in my lonely, desperate six-year-old way -- and lo and behold, I was issued one in practically automatic fashion upon joining my new class.

My arrival was a fortuitous one for Julie Taylor, the one loveless leftover in that classroom of connubial bliss. As the smartest girl in the second grade, she had been passed over in the initial rush to pair up -- which, of course, meant that she and I became a couple, and the class at last achieved a perfect symmetry and balance.

One of the things I liked best about living in Grantsville -- quite aside from the acquisition of a girlfriend -- was the fact that I got to walk to and from school every day. (This, of course, had never been the case in Los Angeles.) On occasion I was even permitted to wander over to the seminary building near the high school -- a small classroom structure where older students were permitted by state law to receive one period of "released time" religious instruction during the school day -- and tag around with the teenaged janitor as he cleaned chalkboards and emptied trashcans.

(One day when I came home late from school, I narrowly avoided a severe whipping after explaining that I'd been helping John load soda-pop machines at the "cemetery" -- the town boneyard being one place I was definitely not permitted to play. It seems ironic to me now that I should ever have confused the two words.)

The high school's athletic field took up two or three blocks in the heart of town, and a narrow winding walkway walled on both sides with chain-link fencing allowed pedestrians to cross this tract with relatively little danger of being trampled by a scrimmaging crush of football players. It was late one afternoon, walking home along this path, that I was offered The Cigarette.

I had just passed from sunshine into shade as the walkway curved between two buildings on the edge of the field. Rounding the curve, I saw two high school kids coming toward me -- large slouching bowlegged brutes in worn jeans and denim jackets. The two of them were just lighting up, and I scrunched myself over to edge of the walkway and tried to make myself invisible as they passed.

I've never been good at that particular trick.

As they drew nearer, I saw them whisper to each other and laugh, and then, when they drew abreast of me . . . the taller of the two whipped The Cigarette out of his pack and held it out to me casually. "Hey, kid," he said in that peculiar drawl common to rural Utah, "wanna smoke?"

Nearly peeing my pants with fright, I shook my head tightly -- then ran the rest of the way home.

When I told my parents about what had happened, my father became almost livid with fury. During the very next fast-and-testimony meeting at church, he set aside a few moments from his regularly scheduled testimony to decry the decline in morality that would permit two irresponsible young miscreants not only to flout the Word of Wisdom on their own accounts, but also to attempt to coerce a young and innocent child of God, not even old enough to be accountable for his own actions, into joining them in their spiritually depraved spiral of vice.

Listening to him speak from the podium, I was filled with a righteous and trembling indignation -- while at the same time feeling somewhat ashamed, as if I had done something wrong by merely wandering into the middle of the the whole ugly scenario. This feeling was only intensified the next day, when a shocked and concerned Mrs. Hunsaker asked me in front of the whole class if I'd really been confronted by two ruffians determined to force nicotine into my virgin lungs. When I allowed that this was true, the rest of the class clucked and cooed over me as worriedly as if I'd been miraculously delivered from the clutches of some fabulous kidnapper.

And the silly thing, as I look back on that walkway through adult eyes, is that the two "ruffians" weren't even serious. They were just having themselves a laugh -- a scary one to a good little boy, sure, but it was all a joke to them. They knew I wasn't about to light up and have a drag.

The Cigarette. I didn't even smoke it, but it got inside me nonetheless. It defined my position in the community -- favored son, shining example, child of God. And it made damn clear that I'd better stay that way.

It was a long time before I really understood what a Mormon was, or that I was one, or even that this meant I was different from most everyone else.

I was the first child born to Donald and Ann Shunn, who had married a scant year earlier after meeting and courting at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah -- which is a good place for meeting and courting and getting married if you happen to be young and Mormon.

When they married in the Salt Lake temple on June 3, 1966, my father was thirty and my mother was perilously close to turning twenty-one. It was my father's seventh engagement. He once told me -- in the course of warning me away from whatever "unsuitable" girl was currently acting as my sweetheart -- that he held out for a woman like my mother because she was the one, if any of them could, who would get him into heaven.

(And here I was foolish enough to think that people should end up together out of mutual respect, shared interests, compatibility -- oh, yes, and love. Whap.)

My father's past is still not entirely clear to me. I know that he was born and raised in Los Angeles, that he was the fifth of six children, that his father was alcoholic and abusive, that his mother was a Mormon who tried to inculcate some decency in her children, that he played football in high school and college, that he ran with a questionable crowd, that both his parents were dead by the time he was twenty, that he spent some time in the Army in Germany, that he later returned to Germany as a missionary, that he quit that mission early because he saw so much hypocrisy amongst the other elders, that he worked as a cop for a while in L.A., and that perhaps he went to B.Y.U. with the idea that it would transform him from a sinner into a saint.

Because despite his fervor for the Church, it has always been clear to me that my father regards himself as the vilest of sinners, and he makes frequent reference to the fact that he is certain of going to hell. At the same time, it seems clear that he is determined that his children not suffer a similar fate, and so he uses every tool at his disposal to ensure that not one of the eight will go astray.

In my own humble opinion, this is a lethal combination.

My mother, with whom I have better relations, I know even less about, paradoxically. Everything I know says that her childhood was a good one. Her parents, who are still living, seem generous and kind. Both their lines come from early Mormon pioneer stock, and her father served for a time as a bishop. Her father was also an engineer for Bell Telephone, and the family lived in San Francisco, where she was born, New Jersey, and New York City, before settling down for the long haul in the outskirts of Denver. She still has a younger sister and a younger brother, though two other brothers died early in childhood. I don't think there was much question that she would attend college at B.Y.U. after graduating from high school. That's simply what you did.

I think my mother had precious little time to be her own person before being swept into marriage her junior year -- which is the big reason people go to B.Y.U. I think she still has precious little time to be her own person.

I've never been convinced that this is a marriage that would ever have taken place outside of a closed religious culture like Mormonism.

Be that as it may, the marriage happened, my parents moved to Los Angeles where my father began to teach, and then I happened along. Mormonism, of course, was fed to me as the absolute truth from day one. We attended church every Sunday, and one other afternoon during the week I attended Primary, a fun sort of "Sunday school" for kids where there were songs and games and lessons. We had a Family Home Evening every Monday night, with more songs and games and lessons. My mother read to me from a very young age, and among the many things she read me were simplified children's stories from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. My father helped me get through dinner by assigning tags to the number of bites left on my plate and reciting them with me: "Okay, you have twelve bites of potatoes left. That's twelve like the number of Jesus's disciples. Now there are only eleven, like the number of disciples after Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. Okay, that's ten, like the ten Lost Tribes of Israel . . ."

We also had the local missionaries over for dinner with some frequency, and no one ever missed an opportunity to tell me how exciting it would be for me to be a missionary when I was old enough to go. There was even a song about it in Primary:

"I hope they call me on a mission
When I have grown a foot or two.
I hope by then I will be ready
To teach and preach and work
Like missionaries do.

"I hope that I can share the gospel
With those who want to know the truth.
I want to be a missionary
And serve and help the Lord
While I am in my youth."

All this teaching had, I'm certain, its good side effects. By the time I was three, I could read on my own, I could add and subtract, and I was well on my way to figuring out what multiplication was all on my own. I knew all the planets in the solar system. And I also knew that the first four principles and ordinances of the gospel were faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, and the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost. At family gatherings, I would be frequently called on to show off all the amazing things I knew, but it seems to me that the most fervent praise was reserved for the religious platitudes I could recite.

My father and I were extraordinarily close during this period. I frequently went with him to the metal shop where he taught industrial arts at South Pasadena Junior High School. He sometimes took me to class with him at U.C.L.A., where he was working on his master's degree, and on occasion he even took me to see star shows at the planetarium. He kept his fast-receding hair cropped extremely short, and on one occasion when my grandfather took me to the barber shop, I asked for a haircut just like my dad's. (My grandfather had to call home to check that this was okay.)

In short, I worshipped my father. In fact, I credit those early planetarium visits, which we used to discuss for what seemed like hours, with planting the seeds that germinated in my love of science fiction.

By the time I was five, I had three younger sisters, Seletha, Tanja, and Greta. It sometimes seems to me that there was never a time in my childhood when my mother wasn't pregnant. My earliest memory, in fact, is of Seletha and me feeling my mother's tummy while Tanja was kicking in the womb. Procreation, though, seems to have been put on a temporary hold by my parents at about the time that I started school.

I was a scrawny, dome-headed kid, far too smart for my age, who had worn big thick glasses since the age of four. I was not in any danger of becoming overly streetwise, which I believe contributed, at least in part, to my parents' desire not to enroll me in a public school. Instead, they settled on the Good Shepherd Lutheran School, which I think was the closest to an affordable and religion-tinged private education they could find for me. It was at Good Shepherd that I began to realize that I was different from other kids.

It wasn't just the matter of being smart that set me apart, though that certainly contributed. No, it was the Mormonism. One day for show-and-tell I brought my father's German edition of the Book of Mormon -- or, Das Buch Mormon. No one seemed quite as impressed as I thought they should be, and my teacher said in what seemed a somewhat derisive way, "Oh, is that one of your Mormon books?"

Other points of friction came during the hour of religious instruction we had each morning. One day in particular, I remember Miss Rasch holding up three pictures. One showed a kindly, bearded old man in a robe and sandals. One showed a sunbeam piercing through a sky of clouds. And one showed a field of stars in outer space.

"Class," said Miss Rasch, "once there were three artists who were asked to paint pictures of God. Each of them had a different idea of what he was like, and these are the pictures they painted. Now, which one of them was right?"

I raised my hand first, as I usually did. This question was easy. After all, Joseph Smith had seen God and told people exactly what he looked like.

"The one that painted the old man," I said after I was called on.

"Wrong," said Miss Rasch. "Someone else?"

Well, I argued and argued, but I could convince no one, least of all my teacher, that calling a picture of a sunbeam God was silly and made no sense.

Slowly it dawned on me that there were people who didn't believe the same way that my family and all the people at church believed -- that there were a lot of them, in fact -- though it would still be some time before I realized that there were people who didn't believe in God at all.

But this all started some fairly disturbing thoughts to percolating through my five-year-old brain.

How in the world could I ever be sure that what my parents had taught me was true? Wait, of course it was true, my parents would never tell me something that wasn't true -- but how could they know, and what if they were just simply wrong?

I used to lie in bed and ponder the concept of infinity until I was frightened out of my wits, but this -- this idea was even bigger and more scary than infinity.

You can be sure I kept my mouth shut about it. I knew that thoughts like those were bad, and so I did my best not to have them.

From my birthplace in Los Angeles to my current home in New York City, the geographical highway of my life has carried me far and wide across the face of North America. It's been a significant journey—but one that pales beside the less easily traced spiritual road that has run nearly parallel to it for these past decades.

Though it may seem so to some, I don't believe that religious faith is either built or destroyed overnight. It's like a mountain that buckles upward over eons, even while being torn down a piece at a time by wind and rain. It's as long and involved a process as a lifetime's journey across a continent, and there are vast parts of it that we have as little control over as a child has over where his parents choose to live.

I was born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1967. In 1995, I abandoned the Church—an act that would have been unthinkable to me for most of the time in between. To most outside observers, I'm sure that my apostasy seemed inexplicable and abrupt. To certain others, I'm certain it seemed inevitable and long overdue. The truth, I think, lies somewhere not in between, but rather in a realm that paradoxically partakes of both extremes.

It lies in the story of the journey from 1967 to 1995, from Los Angeles to New York City—from faith to apostasy...