July 1996 Archives

As the summer of '74 wound to its close, the family moved to Bountiful, a picturesque little city about ten minutes north of Salt Lake City, and I plowed right ahead into third grade.

Well, maybe "plowed" isn't exactly the right word. I wasn't exactly thrilled about life for the first few weeks. On my first day at Stoker Elementary School -- that by-now familiar routine in a new city and new classroom -- I was so nervous to raise my hand and ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom that I wet my pants right at my desk. At afternoon recess, the teacher asked me if I didn't want to go out and play, and I shook my head no. When school let out and I stayed at my desk well after the other kids had left, she knew something was up. When I admitted what was wrong, she called my mother, who came to school and helped me get home. Mortifying. But at least none of the other kids knew what had happened.

Of course, there were plenty of other ways for me to be embarrassed. A favorite game at recess was for the boys to chase the girls around the soccer field and push them down into the grass. I was smaller than most everyone else, being at least a year younger, and one of the girls, Katie Cox, discovered quite by accident that I could be knocked over without much effort. "Hey, girls," Katie called out, standing over me like an eight-year-old Amazon, "we can get this one! He's easy!"

Once it became apparent that I was smart, though, things started to change a little. I fell into the fringes of the popular crowd, which seemed to center around the boys and girls who could be somewhat smart and athletic at the same time. My best friends at school were kids named Stefan Rex, Dennis Hoppe, Matt Bush, and Lynn Chaffin, and as I look back I find it a bit startling to realize how their religious affiliations fell out. Two of them were Protestant, and two were Mormon -- though only one of those had a family that was particularly devout.

(As a matter of fact, I've always seemed to have had close friends who weren't L.D.S. I don't know why that strikes me so oddly, but it does. More on the whole subject when we get to high school.)

I remember very well the occasion when I first realized that Stefan Rex was not a Mormon. We were playing marbles at recess with a couple of other kids, when the subject turned to church. Stefan suddenly burst out with a vehement exclamation something like this: "I don't believe I'm going to get burned when Jesus comes back! The Mormons all say everyone else is going to get burned, but that's not true!"

Not only had I not realized before this occasion that Stefan was a non-member, but it was also the first I remember hearing about anything having to do with the Second Coming. I was very embarrassed and upset to realize that Stefan knew more about my beliefs that I did myself. After all, I was always the best student in Sunday School. How could it be that I'd never heard about all the people from other churches getting burned? How could it be that I had friends who were going to get burned? How I could be friends with people who were wicked like that?

This was an important question, because I was seven years old. The next summer I was going to turn eight. That's when I'd be baptized. That's when I had to be perfect -- in repentance, if nothing else -- or else I'd have to pay for my own sins. The pressure was starting to mount.

So what I did was try not to worry about it. All this burning stuff wasn't going to happen for a very long time. Maybe it wouldn't even ever happen. (No, no, wait, what was I thinking, of course it would!) But you've got to have friends, and Stefan and Dennis aren't bad boys, they're smart and they like cool stuff like Matchbox cars and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and they like me, which is worth a lot even if they do say "damn" and "hell" sometimes . . .

It hadn't been all that long since I had discovered swearing, you see. I was at home one evening, repeating to my parents some innocuous conversation I had heard at school, when I said, "And then he told her he was going to beat the hell out of her if she didn't stop--"

Whack!

I didn't understand why I was getting spanked with a belt until later, when I was told there are certain words that are very, very bad and that you just don't say. (Of course, my father had used them before in my hearing, which is probably why I thought nothing of hearing them at school.)

Yes, the pressure on me to be good as I approached that magical age of accountability was immense. I have a little sympathy for what Jesus went through growing up, seeing as how my father always went around calling me his "number-one son" and instructing me in how to act and dress and groom myself. Oh, yes, and beating me if I showed any sign of straying from the straight and narrow.

In those halcyon mid-70's days, I doubt that anyone would have watched any of my punishments and thought that I was being abused. I mean, I wasn't beaten wantonly, only when I had done something wrong. Of course, it was often with a thin leather belt on a bare behind whilst bent over my father's knee. When my father took off his belt, I dissolved into stark terror, begged and pleaded, backed up into the corner, tried to cover my skinny ass, but never to any avail. I remember one time escaping a "spanking" without much pain, and I was so happy that I laughed and said it didn't hurt.

I never made that admission again.

One of the worst things for me -- sexual purity being such a crowning glory on the heads of Mormon children -- was trying not to be caught with an erection. I didn't know why I got erections -- they just seemed to happen every once in a while, without my even doing anything to provoke them. Of course, I know now that a healthy male has five or six a day just as an autonomic matter of course. I only wish that I'd had chapter and verse on that to show to my father back when I was seven, back when I'd be whupped silly for popping a wee little rod.

I had to shower with my father sometimes back then, when I was still small. Nothing prurient about it -- just practicality, I think. I remember getting a boner as I was undressing, feeling a yawning pit of horror inside, trying desperately to will it limp again. I didn't work, and my father was knocking on the door, preparing to come in, so naked I fell over forward onto a pile of dirty laundry lying by the hamper, hoping that my little shame would somehow be overlooked. Faint hope. After I was made to stand up and move my hands, I tried and tried and tried to convince my father that it had happened all by itself, that I hadn't been playing with myself. No dice.

Well, third grade finally ended, and barely a month had gone by before I had a new little brother, named Tim. This was the best news I could possibly have had, since I'd been feeling pretty darned outnumbered what with three sisters and all. (Everyone in the family was overindulgent of Tim, so much so that he didn't learn to talk until he was four. Why did he have to? All he had to do was say "Gah" and all of us were tripping over ourselves to get him what he wanted. I'm pleased to report, though, that Tim grew up unspoiled and has turned into a perfectly fine, upstanding young man.)

And two months after Tim's birth, after I had turned eight, my father baptized me.

You know, it was pretty cool while it was happening. All the relatives and friends came to the church, I got to dress all in white, and my father and I had to practice this dunking maneuver so we could do it right. Didn't want to have a toe sticking out of the water when total immersion was the rule. Didn't want to have to repeat the ordinance in front of all those people.

I'm not sure that I felt particularly clean when I came out of the water. I do know that, the first time I got in trouble for something the next day, I felt a stab in my guts.

I had been perfect when I came out of the water, sins washed away -- but now I was dirty again, and no chance for a second baptism.

(I've been trying to figure out this thing about eight being the age of accountability. I mean, you don't get to vote until you're eighteen, and you don't get to drink until you're twenty-one (in Utah, anyway), but you're expected to know everything you need to know to be able to make the decision about whether or not you want to make solemn eternity-long covenants with God by the time you're eight years old. It's probably better than being baptized as an infant, I'll grant that, but not by much.)

As the next few years rolled by, I became more and more despondent about the whole repentance thing. Every time I did something wrong, I either had to repent -- confess it, make restitution, and forsake the sin -- or else my soul was stained. And the tiniest little stain would keep me out of heaven. I resolved over and over never to do anything wrong ever again, but never with any success. As the sins piled up behind me, I despaired of ever being able to do enough repenting to ever catch up. It was significantly depressing -- a little kid on the horns of an existential dilemma.

Every once in a while, I'd start to wish that the Church weren't true, so I could climb down off those prickly horns. Then I'd stop wishing it quick, because that right there was another sin.

Some good things happened before we moved away from Bountiful. I started taking piano lessons at the age of nine -- and thereby discovered one of the major loves of my life. I grew closer to my friends at school, even to the point that I started writing little books and illustrating comic stories about us -- skiffy stories in which we saved the world or some such thing. And in the spring of '77, I got another new little brother, Lee. It was getting to point that every time my parents called a family council, we knew that my mother was pregnant again.

(Okay, this paragraph contains some gratuitous name-dropping. My father, who was by now teaching industrial arts at a junior high school in Bountiful, became a member of the bishopric in our ward. The bishop's name was Hal Curtis, and his older brother happened to be Keene Curtis, the Tony-winning Broadway actor. He wasn't an active Mormon, but he did come to church with his brother's family every time he was in town. I knew he was famous back then, but no one could really tell me what for. Oh, and come to think of it, Gordon Jump lived in our ward back when we were still in Los Angeles. It was always exciting to see him playing bit parts on shows like The Rockford Files. From temple film to WKRP in Cincinnati. Quite a career arc. Okay, end of gratuitous name-dropping.)

By sixth grade, life at school was really swell. I was getting good grades, I had lots of friends, my teacher thought I was terrific, and I had a crush on her the size of Wyoming. (I think all the boys in class did. She was smart and good-looking and, well, generously endowed. We were just discovering how interesting that could be.) Besides which, I was one of the kings of the school. I was in sixth grade. There were no older kids. (Well, okay, so technically I was still younger than a lot of the fifth graders. But I wasn't a fifth grader, dammit!) Life was good.

So, of course, the family moved again halfway through the school year.

My father grew disillusioned with Grantsville -- indeed, with Utah as a whole, though I didn't catch on to this for many years -- fairly quickly, if he had ever been "illusioned" at all. So it was that at the end of that school year, we moved away from that rather soporific burg and settled in as temporary refugees at my uncle's house.

My father's younger brother Dennis, with wife Ellen and children who at the time numbered four or five, had fled Los Angeles shortly before my own parents did, and had taken up residence in a town called Liberty -- a rural sprawl that at the time was so sparsely populated as to make Grantsville look like New York City by comparison.

I don't recall many gospel lessons from the summer we spent in Liberty, but I do recall plenty of the stuff of which a mythic, archetypal boyhood is made. I recall catching grasshoppers with my cousins Stephen, who was my age, and Denny, who was a year younger, and using them for trout bait in the stream that ran behind the house. I recall playing baseball in a huge field of alfalfa with piles of horse droppings for bases. I recall the way the ancient, rusting hay baler on the property could serve either as a fort or a weird race car or a spaceship, depending on the needs of the imagination. I recall marveling at my cousins' boasts of how many girls they had kissed, and wishing I could be like them. I recall eating contests in which Steve and I matched each other silver-dollar pancake for silver-dollar pancake (a practice that lasted well past the age when both of us should have known better). I recall the arcane magic of an unfinished basement crammed with my uncle's musty Louis L'Amour and Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. I recall evenings with the whole of both families relaxing in the living room, with fat logs crackling in the fireplace and programs like Grizzly Adams and Little House on the Prairie and Battlestar Galactica on the television -- either that, or a movie like A Man Called Horse, playing on a prototypical VCR the size and shape of a battlestar itself. (I vaguely recall hearing Richard Nixon's resignation speech that summer, too -- and wondering what in the world this "Watergate" thing was that everyone was talking about.)

Lest you think all was sweetness and light, I recall seeing a stillborn foal be delivered, and seeing a sheep get butchered, and seeing chickens run around with their heads cut off. I recall my terror when Denny and I found Aunt Ellen's mare lying dead from delivery complications in the back pasture. Worst of all, I recall the first stirrings of panic at the thought of another school year as the youngest in my class, the freak.

And I recall the lessons I learned that summer, the summer of '74, the summer I turned seven. Not gospel lessons, exactly, but important. The lesson that things can get hurt and die -- and often do, in ugly ways. The lesson that older cousins are free to punish younger cousins when no adults are around. And the lesson that little children -- even consenting little children -- who show their private parts to each other are very, very wicked indeed.

I learned my lessons well.

Baptism minus one year and counting.